"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Clear of their intentions? I assume you are talking about word spoken by their leaders, verbatim? If so, I am curious how you got "we want to subjugate the entire world under our faith" from when they said "as long as you are invading our lands in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will kill you". Or do you own a secret jihadist dictionary that none of us hard-lefties aren't privy to? (and if that is the case, I am curious as to how you went about procuring such a text).
And one more question for you. Have you EVER, for even a minute took the time to think what our actions in these nations must look like to the average citizen living there. Put yourself in the average (non-militant) man's shoes - say a shop keeper in Iraq, pre-Desert Strike II. Think about how life has changed for this person since we arrived. If it had been the United States, I would HOPE that your first course of action would be to enlist with the US military to protect your people.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Generally, potty training one of the first more advanced skills a child has to aquire. So if dogs are that much smarter then cats, then why is it that my cats were house trainined within a day, where as my dog still can't even walk himself?
And to anyone who says cats are not social as dogs is comparing apples to oranges. Cats social skills are highly developed and they are geared towards keeping other members of the species off their turf/away from their food. While this is a smaller set of social skills then dogs (which will work together in packs, usually due to need), they seem to be more developed and focused. I would say that again, the advantage goes to the cat, that relies on no other member other then itself to provide for itself and its young.
And lastly, wasn't there a barbaric, outdated practice to judge how smart a person was by the size of their cranium? What happened to that again?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Umm, you are talking about the Christian Science Monitor as if it is an outlet for Scientology (it isn't). While I will agree with you on anything and everything negative you have to say about Scientology, this isn't it.
In fact, the website publication has always made an effort to remain non-sensationalist and publish reliable information, rooted in science and not religion (IE you won't find articles about creationism in there). I wouldn't decry this article either - although it is not very well represented in the summary on this page. But at least check out the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Christian_Science_Monitor.
Sooo, perhaps you'd like to remove that foot from its current location?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
And not being allowed to do something has always prevented people from doing that thing. Yep. I've no examples at all from anywhere or anytime that would prove that statement wrong.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Social engeneering of course. Of course its harder to compromise the servers, not because they are Linux based, but because of their mission-critical nature automatically implies that they are sitting behind hardware firewalls and monitored by techs. Compared to the end users which usually use their kids name and birthday as their login password - assuming they set one at all. So yes, your statement is true, but not at all solely for the reason you presented.
And EVEN with the above in mind, do you really want me to start pulling up all the articles of various user data breaches we've seen over the last few years?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
You don't enter a country you want to bomb and THEN try to board an airplane in that country. If you entered, you leave the bomb in a major intersection (times square). And if you want to use an airplane, you sneak on in a different country from which you fly to your target.
Umm, immoral? I don't believe thats the reason we make murder illegal. I'm pretty sure it is because it is demonstratebly detrimental to society as a whole. Same for theft. And other major crimes. No such argument can be made for ESC research, beyond personal offense taken by some based on their morals. The rights of the few shall not be infringed upon by the wants of the many.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
While your last paragraph may be correct with respect to the reality of the groups you are describing, that same group has picked aweful spokesmen/women who are exactly like the ones Chris Tucker has described. This is as much the pro-lifer group's fault as it is the media, who loves to focus on the extreme members of the pro-life group. Sure, some are moderate, but in the end, it doesn't really matter if the mob mentality dictates the groups voice and direction, instead of logic and reasonable argument, such as the one you yourself presented.
Point being, while you can argue specifics and edge cases of religion, the over-arching trend has been to vilify anything to do with ESC research and use, and the masses have taken up the call. You accuse the OP of over-simplifying the argument, while the pro-life group has been doing the exact same thing - worse really because the argument wasn't just simplified, it was turned into an ultimatum of eternal damnation. And Lo and Behold, we had a president elected by the very same people who did exactly what was expected of him by the masses, not the few like yourself, and the research was severely limited.
Your argument is valid, but such reason is unfortunately an outlier amongst the rest. If you really want a reasonable discussion on the complex topics at hand, you need to look to taking the control of the argument away from the extreme members of the pro-life movement.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
This makes no sense. Why would the Vampires go for the town that only has 30 days of night when there is this gem?
Actually, this is probably their vacation spot and the whole 'wake up light' thing is just a cover-up attempt to distract people from the fact that a Vampire clan has made this their haven.
You read it here first!
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Because this man is not saying anything worth responding to? Obsession with any object will remove you from reality. Be it bookworms, slashdotters, MMO-ers, facebookers, drug addicts, and... wait for it... religious fanatics - whatever your fix, taken to the extreme, WILL take over your life and diminish your connection to 'reality'. It's kind of like, stop the presses, you know?
What is amusing/ironic is that the Pope picks technology *specifically* over all other extremes people can/do adopt - perhaps because technology is the biggest threat to the Catholic market-share over peoples minds. And yes, market share is the most appropriate term as the Vatican is a business first and has been for some time. What is further ironic is to rail against something that removes one from reality while being in charge of a corporation that specializes in JUST that practice.
So A) he is stating the obvious, but slanting it to fit his bias B) he is guilty of progating the very same behavior he is railing against and C) I just don't like the guy.
And even with ALL that said, what is 'reality'? Sure there is the tangible, physical world, but I think its far past time to realize that virtual reality is not separate or lesser, but is simply a subset/extension of the physical - nor is it going away - nor is it going to get smaller/less relevant. To remove yourself from this progress is thus, in itself, removal from reality.
Given that all of the above is, at least to me, self evident, the popes opinion is not even worthy of a debate, since to have a valid debate, the opposing side needs to put forward valid points.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
YEah, it is ur computer. Dual 2GHz here as well, except more like 70GB of music. Sure it takes about 5-10seconds to load up, but once it does, its good to go. Maybe you've got too much other bloatware?
Library has been corrupted a few times, but system auto-saves these corrupted copies and I am able to re-import all myplaylists/ratings both times (only happened twice in 7 years). And I'm pretty sure this has to do with the brown-out shutdowns I used to have at my old place (before buying the UPS)
Now what I hate about iTunes is its inability to deal with an ipod sized less then your music collection. Sure, you can 'uncheck' songs, but that removes them from random play in iTunes as well (stupid). Makes it VERY annoying to manage music.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
I see a rather big barrier to adoption precisely for the reason y ou mentioned - these will replace both ram and storage devices - which means that these, if really pushed by manufacturers, would require a complete redesign of the modern computer system. Chipsets, motherboards, etc would all need to be redisgned with this memory in mind. Which isn't a big deal on its own, but people are still using Pentium 4s with Windows XP on them, and I suspect will be even more loathe to change over to a completely new generation of computing devices.
Enthusiasts of course will jump on this (and 3 years is good time frame since i'm building a new machine this winter, that will be just in time for my subsequent build:D ).
One possible workaround that I see is if the first generation of these were built into a DDR interface so you could drop the sticks in and run your system off what is essentially a RAM drive. I'm not familiar enough with the technical aspects of memory controllers and such to say weather this would be possible or not. anyone?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
..I'd be a lot more excited about this. But as its HP, they'll probably kill the adoption of this tech with their subpar quality control. Thanks a lot of HP, but the best thing you can do is get your hands of this and hand it to someone who takes pride in the quality of their products.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Pardon me for asking, but considering our very own planet orbits the sun every 12 months, 23 months on Mars, and something like 130 or 140 for Jupiter, aren't we only starting to scratch the surface in terms of which ones we've seen and which ones just haven't happened to have passed between us and the star since we started looking. On top of that, would an orbit perpendicular to ours be detectible with this technique - as in, if a star had planets but in an orbit that never took them between us and their star - would not these be missed? Or is there some sort of wobble effect they can measure if the planet is big enough?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Hey Comcast, hope you have someone from your PR dept reading this. Go to hell. Your service sucks. I pay >$100 a month and every single one of your digital channels stutters and gets pixilated, especially during high action parts = useless. Guess what though! I got a Verizon FIOS box in my closet earlier last week. AS soon as they call and tell me I can switch, its/middle finger to you and I hope to NEVER have to deal with your subpar products again. And now I hear you are pulling this crap? Never again Comcast. I'll go with satallite dish before I pay you another penny.
@immakaku
"Kind of off-topic: but I think we're going down a slippery slope when we start screening DNA. It works against the process of evolution. What if there's a new fatal disease that only people with the breast cancer trait are equipped to fight?"
I would respond that the minute humanity developed the printing press and started practicing medicine which sustains people well past their natural point of death, evolution as we know it went out the window. I aggree with your point, but you've LOOONG missed the boat on that one. Any modern medical procedure cheats evolution so by your logic, we should abandon all medicine - again a point I aggree with since overpopulation is responsible for most of the worlds problems - but its not a solution any "sane" society would adopt - short of being faced with extinction as an alternative.
@svendensen
"Personally I don't want some religion to tell me what medical procedures I can/cannot have because they think their holy book would approve/disapprove."
+1 to that buddy
@nasor
"There seems to me to be a difference between "designing" a baby with genetic engineering or some such vs. simply screening a bunch of fertilized eggs and selecting the one you want. But of course, if the media called it "screening" rather than "designing," people wouldn't get nearly as worked up about it - and they know this, so they go with the more provocative language."
A BIG +1 to that.
And finally @Radtastik
You are absolutely right that this will create a class society - that Gattaca movie was nothing short of a prophecy IMO. My counterargument is that if you awnt to make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs. In other words, should the rights of those unable to afford such procedures be put ahead of human progress? Such technology may be expensive at first, but with use will be come stanard with time. Is it proper to deprive our race of a jump in evolution in terms of physical and mental capabilities just in the name of fairness? And if you answered yes to that question, I would ask you what planet you've been living on... life isn't fair. The universe is hostile. Life feeds on life feeds on life. Evolve or die. So on so forth. Like it or not, cybernetics and genetic engeneering IS the next step of human evolution since natural selection has been so weakened by modern medicine.
The question you SHOULD be asking is, are we going to be at the forefront of this next evolutionary step or are we going to let other nations beat us here as well? If they do, you can kiss our world dominance good-bye for good. Students abroad are already healthier and smarter then anything our public school can produce. Do we give up this advantage as well?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
"I understand completely why, in the real world, these decisions are made, but if you look at the situation rationally they are not good investments of time/money over the long-term, and they undermine the very reasons for writing software as a web application in the first place."
Not at all because in the long-term, the platform/tech/software doesn't matter. We could be speaking of different 'long-term' so lets say 10 years. In 10 years, your hardware is old, your software is old, and your web/internal apps are no longer as robust as you likely need them to be (unless your business has reached such a late life-cycle stage that there's little else to do but do the same thing and collect cash - aka cash cow).
What I am saying is that a business may develop an internal app or web app which, if the business is serious about innovation and remaining competitive, will develop another, either upgraded or entirely new, system to better service its current needs. In other words, yes, there may be some lock in to it, but its not permanent by any means. No mater which platform you develop for, even if its cross-platform, the life cycle is roughly the same, and you are still going to develop new stuff down the road.
So the REAL alternatives are not quite as you may see them. Theres A) develop for single platform, reducing current and short-term costs drastically, but sacrificing flexibility and (maybe) usable life-cycle. Or B) develop for cross-platform, incurring the costs associated with this, in the name of flexibility and a slightly improved life-cycle. A basic NPV analysis will tell you that the single platform option is the most cost effective, short and long-term.
And if that platform is Windows/IE, then you don't even need to worry. Everyone uses it and the platform isn't going away. Use the OS license for 10 years or so, then refresh. In the meantime, you've got 10 years of solid, static platform that is bound to be supported by MS. The basic limitation of any app is how long it remains sufficient to do what it was designed to do, not whether its cross-platform or not. The discussion then should not be about what platform to develop FOR, but how to develop in such a way as to make the app robust and upgradeable enough so that you don't need to completely redevelop something when the time comes.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
"There ARE games for Linux: Wine works surprisingly well, but there should be an automatic way of getting the needed libraries for any particular app"
Yea, and England has beaches, but who wants to see them?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
You are very much correct. THe large corps DO have large in-house apps for managing their money. I never said that they did, which you keep saying that I did. What i DID say was that Office, and specifically Access and Excel (the rest is fluff), allows them to A) analyze large amounts of data by directly integrating Office with aforementioned in-house applications 2) communicate and secure this data across the intranet, allowing each dept that needs to touch/alter/view the data have at it with ease 3) automate the before processes to derive some sort of outputs and 4) either aggregate those outputs for management review or 5) use the outputs to enter new data back into the in-house apps, automatically. In other words, Office is a tool for collaboration and automation of data handling. NOT managing money. CERTAINLY not advanced statistics or financial model designs - though it is very capable of handling simple every-day statistics and financial models. I wouldn't use it conduct a risk analysis, but I routinely use it to analyze the entire bond market universe worth of Bloomberg market data for price/rate changes and calculate their potential impacts on my firms holdings. In fact, that feature alone - Anyware RealTime is the name - (Bloomberg terminal integration plug-in) is an Open Office killer. You just can't compete with the business tools that Office has. It has nothing to do with formula functions and only slightly to do with scripting capabilities.
Open Office does indeed allow rather extensive programming since it can incorporate not just Basic, but java as well. Wonderful for IT apps, but overkill for non-IT applications. VBA was specifically designed to make every day tasks done with the suite easy and automatic, saving much much time. The fact that you think keeping accounting records in "ledgers" was the one thing that held back the degradation of our financial institutions shows YOUR blissful ignorance of the situation. I've already addressed where you should be laying the blame. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. I will point you once again to http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/.
What you are arguing is a point I actually agree with. Some progress shouldn't be shared because people who don't understand it fully can still use it to harm others, sometimes MANY others. It all started with the printing press and this unrestricted sharing of knowlege with people who didn't develop or deserve it it has led to all of societies problems today. But, it is nothing we can ever do anything about, so while you can make snide remarks about MS causing the world to collapse, recognize it for the easy forum target that it is, not actual reality.
And what, exactly, does it explain? If you are implying that MS office has anything to do with our current economic situation, then there's little hope I have for educating you, but here goes anyway. Instead of FUD, try reading:
http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/
http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/industries/finance/wall-streets-army-quants-controls-mind-money/
And lets not forget all of YOU people, who for years spent frivolously, lived outside your means, got loans when you shouldn't have, and then blamed everyone for giving you the bad loan in the first place. Its just like malware and viruses - most of them spread because people are idiots, yet you immedietly try to lay the blame on MS for having an unsecured OS. F that. Its the sheeple that are to blame, the software just makes it easier to hurt yourself, doesn't do it for you.
Lol, in fact an old lyric just came to my mind typing this: "They say music can alter moods, and talk to you. But can it load a gun for you and cock it too?" Think about it.
"Of course, that doesn't really help those who have already developed a signficant amount of code for VBA, and don't want to have to rewrite it."
You've hit the nail on the head there. It isn't that they don't want to. It's that it doesn't make any sense. I mean look at the financial details of the situation. An MS Office license is maybe $100-$200. That's less then the DAILY salary of someone who is being paid to automate any process with it. The cost of the software package is negligible next to the invested costs of having your people actually create something with it. That money has already been spent. Spending it again, for businesses, would be simply unjustified. It would be like making the same investments twice. Oh except you gotta retrain all of your IT to develop in Open Office, and then re-integrate it with all of your subsystems, and then retrain your employees to use it. No company in their right mind is going to do this.
Someone has never worked in a corporate park, so let me tell you how things work.
Major financial institution gets massive transmission from multiple vendors every day that must be entered into the major financial institution's tracking systems. All is done with proprietary software and has nothing to do with any office application. But when it comes to extracting and dealing with this massive amounts of data on an every day basis, performing yield and variance calculations, performing large-scale data scrubbing (10s of thousands of securities), variable rates, prices, and that doesn't even BEGIN to enumerate all the pieces of data that must be shared across a network thousands of computers large, analyzed by individuals in multiple departments, reported on, transmitted, and then integrated back into proprietary systems tied to the corporate mainframe. When Open Office can do this, then you can come back and talk to me. And this is just one example. The automation capabilities of VBA MAKE the financial industry work. Without it we'd be in the stone ages in terms of the time it takes to do certain tasks - as in, non competitive and out of business stone age... What many people here fail to realize is that very few organizations out there do 'pure' statistics or 'pure' data-basing. They may exist, but they are dwarfed when compared to all the soft inter-mediate companies that need to move and analyze large amounts of data, daily, timely, and across large networks. Open Office isn't even considered an option. It simply cannot integrate with various proprietary systems and enable collaboration like MS Office can. And I'm talking about Office 2003 too, as businesses haven't even migrated to Office 07 on a large scale yet, and that is even more powerful in terms of collaboration. Office is not a professional development platform, I hope you realize. No one is talking about writing major pieces of software. What we ARE talking about is efficiencies that save companies billions annually. Until Open Office can do the same, it is irrelevant in the business world. At home or at school however, like I said, its a perfect solution.
But still useless for any professional setting or high-level business education. Staistical and financial plug-ins are vastly inferior to MS Office. No VBA for business applications. These two alone make a hobby app for basic home uses, nothing game changing and certainly still not a real competitor to MS Office. That's not even mentioning the online collaboration tools of MS Office as well as Live Workspace.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Slashdot Mirror
The belief that evolution requires "belief" to be factual is in itself a measure of science literacy.
"I don't want to live on this planet anymore."
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Clear of their intentions? I assume you are talking about word spoken by their leaders, verbatim? If so, I am curious how you got "we want to subjugate the entire world under our faith" from when they said "as long as you are invading our lands in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will kill you". Or do you own a secret jihadist dictionary that none of us hard-lefties aren't privy to? (and if that is the case, I am curious as to how you went about procuring such a text).
And one more question for you. Have you EVER, for even a minute took the time to think what our actions in these nations must look like to the average citizen living there. Put yourself in the average (non-militant) man's shoes - say a shop keeper in Iraq, pre-Desert Strike II. Think about how life has changed for this person since we arrived. If it had been the United States, I would HOPE that your first course of action would be to enlist with the US military to protect your people.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Generally, potty training one of the first more advanced skills a child has to aquire. So if dogs are that much smarter then cats, then why is it that my cats were house trainined within a day, where as my dog still can't even walk himself?
And to anyone who says cats are not social as dogs is comparing apples to oranges. Cats social skills are highly developed and they are geared towards keeping other members of the species off their turf/away from their food. While this is a smaller set of social skills then dogs (which will work together in packs, usually due to need), they seem to be more developed and focused. I would say that again, the advantage goes to the cat, that relies on no other member other then itself to provide for itself and its young.
And lastly, wasn't there a barbaric, outdated practice to judge how smart a person was by the size of their cranium? What happened to that again?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Umm, you are talking about the Christian Science Monitor as if it is an outlet for Scientology (it isn't). While I will agree with you on anything and everything negative you have to say about Scientology, this isn't it.
In fact, the website publication has always made an effort to remain non-sensationalist and publish reliable information, rooted in science and not religion (IE you won't find articles about creationism in there). I wouldn't decry this article either - although it is not very well represented in the summary on this page. But at least check out the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Christian_Science_Monitor.
Sooo, perhaps you'd like to remove that foot from its current location?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
And not being allowed to do something has always prevented people from doing that thing. Yep. I've no examples at all from anywhere or anytime that would prove that statement wrong.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Social engeneering of course. Of course its harder to compromise the servers, not because they are Linux based, but because of their mission-critical nature automatically implies that they are sitting behind hardware firewalls and monitored by techs. Compared to the end users which usually use their kids name and birthday as their login password - assuming they set one at all. So yes, your statement is true, but not at all solely for the reason you presented.
And EVEN with the above in mind, do you really want me to start pulling up all the articles of various user data breaches we've seen over the last few years?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
You don't enter a country you want to bomb and THEN try to board an airplane in that country. If you entered, you leave the bomb in a major intersection (times square). And if you want to use an airplane, you sneak on in a different country from which you fly to your target.
Think 2 steps ahead before you post? Fail.
Umm, immoral? I don't believe thats the reason we make murder illegal. I'm pretty sure it is because it is demonstratebly detrimental to society as a whole. Same for theft. And other major crimes. No such argument can be made for ESC research, beyond personal offense taken by some based on their morals. The rights of the few shall not be infringed upon by the wants of the many.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
While your last paragraph may be correct with respect to the reality of the groups you are describing, that same group has picked aweful spokesmen/women who are exactly like the ones Chris Tucker has described. This is as much the pro-lifer group's fault as it is the media, who loves to focus on the extreme members of the pro-life group. Sure, some are moderate, but in the end, it doesn't really matter if the mob mentality dictates the groups voice and direction, instead of logic and reasonable argument, such as the one you yourself presented.
Point being, while you can argue specifics and edge cases of religion, the over-arching trend has been to vilify anything to do with ESC research and use, and the masses have taken up the call. You accuse the OP of over-simplifying the argument, while the pro-life group has been doing the exact same thing - worse really because the argument wasn't just simplified, it was turned into an ultimatum of eternal damnation. And Lo and Behold, we had a president elected by the very same people who did exactly what was expected of him by the masses, not the few like yourself, and the research was severely limited.
Your argument is valid, but such reason is unfortunately an outlier amongst the rest. If you really want a reasonable discussion on the complex topics at hand, you need to look to taking the control of the argument away from the extreme members of the pro-life movement.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
This makes no sense. Why would the Vampires go for the town that only has 30 days of night when there is this gem?
Actually, this is probably their vacation spot and the whole 'wake up light' thing is just a cover-up attempt to distract people from the fact that a Vampire clan has made this their haven.
You read it here first!
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Because this man is not saying anything worth responding to? Obsession with any object will remove you from reality. Be it bookworms, slashdotters, MMO-ers, facebookers, drug addicts, and... wait for it... religious fanatics - whatever your fix, taken to the extreme, WILL take over your life and diminish your connection to 'reality'. It's kind of like, stop the presses, you know?
What is amusing/ironic is that the Pope picks technology *specifically* over all other extremes people can/do adopt - perhaps because technology is the biggest threat to the Catholic market-share over peoples minds. And yes, market share is the most appropriate term as the Vatican is a business first and has been for some time. What is further ironic is to rail against something that removes one from reality while being in charge of a corporation that specializes in JUST that practice.
So A) he is stating the obvious, but slanting it to fit his bias B) he is guilty of progating the very same behavior he is railing against and C) I just don't like the guy.
And even with ALL that said, what is 'reality'? Sure there is the tangible, physical world, but I think its far past time to realize that virtual reality is not separate or lesser, but is simply a subset/extension of the physical - nor is it going away - nor is it going to get smaller/less relevant. To remove yourself from this progress is thus, in itself, removal from reality.
Given that all of the above is, at least to me, self evident, the popes opinion is not even worthy of a debate, since to have a valid debate, the opposing side needs to put forward valid points.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Now what I hate about iTunes is its inability to deal with an ipod sized less then your music collection. Sure, you can 'uncheck' songs, but that removes them from random play in iTunes as well (stupid). Makes it VERY annoying to manage music.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Enthusiasts of course will jump on this (and 3 years is good time frame since i'm building a new machine this winter, that will be just in time for my subsequent build :D ).
One possible workaround that I see is if the first generation of these were built into a DDR interface so you could drop the sticks in and run your system off what is essentially a RAM drive. I'm not familiar enough with the technical aspects of memory controllers and such to say weather this would be possible or not. anyone?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
..I'd be a lot more excited about this. But as its HP, they'll probably kill the adoption of this tech with their subpar quality control. Thanks a lot of HP, but the best thing you can do is get your hands of this and hand it to someone who takes pride in the quality of their products. "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Hey Comcast, hope you have someone from your PR dept reading this. Go to hell. Your service sucks. I pay >$100 a month and every single one of your digital channels stutters and gets pixilated, especially during high action parts = useless. Guess what though! I got a Verizon FIOS box in my closet earlier last week. AS soon as they call and tell me I can switch, its /middle finger to you and I hope to NEVER have to deal with your subpar products again. And now I hear you are pulling this crap? Never again Comcast. I'll go with satallite dish before I pay you another penny.
"Kind of off-topic: but I think we're going down a slippery slope when we start screening DNA. It works against the process of evolution. What if there's a new fatal disease that only people with the breast cancer trait are equipped to fight?"
I would respond that the minute humanity developed the printing press and started practicing medicine which sustains people well past their natural point of death, evolution as we know it went out the window. I aggree with your point, but you've LOOONG missed the boat on that one. Any modern medical procedure cheats evolution so by your logic, we should abandon all medicine - again a point I aggree with since overpopulation is responsible for most of the worlds problems - but its not a solution any "sane" society would adopt - short of being faced with extinction as an alternative.
@svendensen
"Personally I don't want some religion to tell me what medical procedures I can/cannot have because they think their holy book would approve/disapprove."
+1 to that buddy
@nasor
"There seems to me to be a difference between "designing" a baby with genetic engineering or some such vs. simply screening a bunch of fertilized eggs and selecting the one you want. But of course, if the media called it "screening" rather than "designing," people wouldn't get nearly as worked up about it - and they know this, so they go with the more provocative language."
A BIG +1 to that.
And finally @Radtastik
You are absolutely right that this will create a class society - that Gattaca movie was nothing short of a prophecy IMO. My counterargument is that if you awnt to make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs. In other words, should the rights of those unable to afford such procedures be put ahead of human progress? Such technology may be expensive at first, but with use will be come stanard with time. Is it proper to deprive our race of a jump in evolution in terms of physical and mental capabilities just in the name of fairness? And if you answered yes to that question, I would ask you what planet you've been living on... life isn't fair. The universe is hostile. Life feeds on life feeds on life. Evolve or die. So on so forth. Like it or not, cybernetics and genetic engeneering IS the next step of human evolution since natural selection has been so weakened by modern medicine.
The question you SHOULD be asking is, are we going to be at the forefront of this next evolutionary step or are we going to let other nations beat us here as well? If they do, you can kiss our world dominance good-bye for good. Students abroad are already healthier and smarter then anything our public school can produce. Do we give up this advantage as well?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Not at all because in the long-term, the platform/tech/software doesn't matter. We could be speaking of different 'long-term' so lets say 10 years. In 10 years, your hardware is old, your software is old, and your web/internal apps are no longer as robust as you likely need them to be (unless your business has reached such a late life-cycle stage that there's little else to do but do the same thing and collect cash - aka cash cow).
What I am saying is that a business may develop an internal app or web app which, if the business is serious about innovation and remaining competitive, will develop another, either upgraded or entirely new, system to better service its current needs. In other words, yes, there may be some lock in to it, but its not permanent by any means. No mater which platform you develop for, even if its cross-platform, the life cycle is roughly the same, and you are still going to develop new stuff down the road.
So the REAL alternatives are not quite as you may see them. Theres A) develop for single platform, reducing current and short-term costs drastically, but sacrificing flexibility and (maybe) usable life-cycle. Or B) develop for cross-platform, incurring the costs associated with this, in the name of flexibility and a slightly improved life-cycle. A basic NPV analysis will tell you that the single platform option is the most cost effective, short and long-term.
And if that platform is Windows/IE, then you don't even need to worry. Everyone uses it and the platform isn't going away. Use the OS license for 10 years or so, then refresh. In the meantime, you've got 10 years of solid, static platform that is bound to be supported by MS. The basic limitation of any app is how long it remains sufficient to do what it was designed to do, not whether its cross-platform or not. The discussion then should not be about what platform to develop FOR, but how to develop in such a way as to make the app robust and upgradeable enough so that you don't need to completely redevelop something when the time comes.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
"There ARE games for Linux: Wine works surprisingly well, but there should be an automatic way of getting the needed libraries for any particular app"
Yea, and England has beaches, but who wants to see them?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
You are very much correct. THe large corps DO have large in-house apps for managing their money. I never said that they did, which you keep saying that I did. What i DID say was that Office, and specifically Access and Excel (the rest is fluff), allows them to A) analyze large amounts of data by directly integrating Office with aforementioned in-house applications 2) communicate and secure this data across the intranet, allowing each dept that needs to touch/alter/view the data have at it with ease 3) automate the before processes to derive some sort of outputs and 4) either aggregate those outputs for management review or 5) use the outputs to enter new data back into the in-house apps, automatically. In other words, Office is a tool for collaboration and automation of data handling. NOT managing money. CERTAINLY not advanced statistics or financial model designs - though it is very capable of handling simple every-day statistics and financial models. I wouldn't use it conduct a risk analysis, but I routinely use it to analyze the entire bond market universe worth of Bloomberg market data for price/rate changes and calculate their potential impacts on my firms holdings. In fact, that feature alone - Anyware RealTime is the name - (Bloomberg terminal integration plug-in) is an Open Office killer. You just can't compete with the business tools that Office has. It has nothing to do with formula functions and only slightly to do with scripting capabilities. Open Office does indeed allow rather extensive programming since it can incorporate not just Basic, but java as well. Wonderful for IT apps, but overkill for non-IT applications. VBA was specifically designed to make every day tasks done with the suite easy and automatic, saving much much time. The fact that you think keeping accounting records in "ledgers" was the one thing that held back the degradation of our financial institutions shows YOUR blissful ignorance of the situation. I've already addressed where you should be laying the blame. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. I will point you once again to http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/. What you are arguing is a point I actually agree with. Some progress shouldn't be shared because people who don't understand it fully can still use it to harm others, sometimes MANY others. It all started with the printing press and this unrestricted sharing of knowlege with people who didn't develop or deserve it it has led to all of societies problems today. But, it is nothing we can ever do anything about, so while you can make snide remarks about MS causing the world to collapse, recognize it for the easy forum target that it is, not actual reality.
And what, exactly, does it explain? If you are implying that MS office has anything to do with our current economic situation, then there's little hope I have for educating you, but here goes anyway. Instead of FUD, try reading:
http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/
http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/industries/finance/wall-streets-army-quants-controls-mind-money/
And lets not forget all of YOU people, who for years spent frivolously, lived outside your means, got loans when you shouldn't have, and then blamed everyone for giving you the bad loan in the first place. Its just like malware and viruses - most of them spread because people are idiots, yet you immedietly try to lay the blame on MS for having an unsecured OS. F that. Its the sheeple that are to blame, the software just makes it easier to hurt yourself, doesn't do it for you.
Lol, in fact an old lyric just came to my mind typing this: "They say music can alter moods, and talk to you. But can it load a gun for you and cock it too?" Think about it.
"Of course, that doesn't really help those who have already developed a signficant amount of code for VBA, and don't want to have to rewrite it." You've hit the nail on the head there. It isn't that they don't want to. It's that it doesn't make any sense. I mean look at the financial details of the situation. An MS Office license is maybe $100-$200. That's less then the DAILY salary of someone who is being paid to automate any process with it. The cost of the software package is negligible next to the invested costs of having your people actually create something with it. That money has already been spent. Spending it again, for businesses, would be simply unjustified. It would be like making the same investments twice. Oh except you gotta retrain all of your IT to develop in Open Office, and then re-integrate it with all of your subsystems, and then retrain your employees to use it. No company in their right mind is going to do this.
Someone has never worked in a corporate park, so let me tell you how things work. Major financial institution gets massive transmission from multiple vendors every day that must be entered into the major financial institution's tracking systems. All is done with proprietary software and has nothing to do with any office application. But when it comes to extracting and dealing with this massive amounts of data on an every day basis, performing yield and variance calculations, performing large-scale data scrubbing (10s of thousands of securities), variable rates, prices, and that doesn't even BEGIN to enumerate all the pieces of data that must be shared across a network thousands of computers large, analyzed by individuals in multiple departments, reported on, transmitted, and then integrated back into proprietary systems tied to the corporate mainframe. When Open Office can do this, then you can come back and talk to me. And this is just one example. The automation capabilities of VBA MAKE the financial industry work. Without it we'd be in the stone ages in terms of the time it takes to do certain tasks - as in, non competitive and out of business stone age... What many people here fail to realize is that very few organizations out there do 'pure' statistics or 'pure' data-basing. They may exist, but they are dwarfed when compared to all the soft inter-mediate companies that need to move and analyze large amounts of data, daily, timely, and across large networks. Open Office isn't even considered an option. It simply cannot integrate with various proprietary systems and enable collaboration like MS Office can. And I'm talking about Office 2003 too, as businesses haven't even migrated to Office 07 on a large scale yet, and that is even more powerful in terms of collaboration. Office is not a professional development platform, I hope you realize. No one is talking about writing major pieces of software. What we ARE talking about is efficiencies that save companies billions annually. Until Open Office can do the same, it is irrelevant in the business world. At home or at school however, like I said, its a perfect solution.
But still useless for any professional setting or high-level business education. Staistical and financial plug-ins are vastly inferior to MS Office. No VBA for business applications. These two alone make a hobby app for basic home uses, nothing game changing and certainly still not a real competitor to MS Office. That's not even mentioning the online collaboration tools of MS Office as well as Live Workspace. "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."