It is your choice to fill your dinner plate at the smorgasbord of philosophical idea, and choose the ones that suit your palate.
Philosophically speaking, there are a number of reasons that evolution is inconsistent with Christianity. If you are interested, I can and will elaborate. If you prefer to do that via email, my address is public.
Let's address the non-philosophical issues, if you will. First, the age of the earth is estimated, based on a number of assumptions which may or may not be valid.
Frankly, our understanding of cosmology is pretty limited because our exposure to planetary systems is pretty limited. Our understanding about planetary formation has been changed because of recent observations of planets in formation. (Look for information about the recent discovery of a solar system with multiple Jupiter-sized planets.)
Our estimation of the time required to form the Grand Canyon is based on many assumptions. After Mt. St. Helens erupted, a mini-version of the grand canyon was formed in a matter of days. Those layers could be layed down (or eroded) over a VERY short period of time.
I'll freely admit that adaptation is undeniable. I would be a fool with my head stuck in the sand to believe that this is untrue. Differentiation in types of moths, types of hares and rabbits, dogs, etc is observable, and repeatable.
For what it's worth, adaptation is consistent with a Christian world view.
Scientifically speaking what is in dispute is really two things: 1. Whether species adapted from one type of creature to another type (Cat to dog, or something equally different.) 2. How the whole thing got started.
WRT #1, there's the issue of the significant dispute within the scientific community about whether it was gradual change or immediate change. Gould's punctuated equilibrium theory was based on his research and his assertion that 'phyletic gradualism' 'was never seen in the rocks' because of the gaps in the fossil record. At best, I'd have to say that major, significant change in creatures happening gradually over time is speculative. However, if you approach your study of the universe and pre-suppose that there is no design, no creator, then you must search for any explanation, no matter how far-fetched it is to fit in with your pre-conceived notions. This kind of bias is exactly what the 'scientist' types accuse 'religious' types of. We are all biased - on every side of this issue.
WRT #2 - If the universe has existed eternally, why didn't the potential, kinetic, and heat energy in the universe equilibrate an eternity ago? We should not exist, and if any matter exists, it should be stopped, and VERY cold.
I've done exactly this. I work for a large company which was preparing to roll out RHEL for an initiative. One department had access to some licenses for RHEL, but would not share.
I needed to develop a process for deployment of patches - including workflow and approvals, etc. My department did not have the budget to buy the licenses I needed to move forward.
As the go-live date approached, I used WBEL to develop and test the process. After we went live, I found that WBEL was binary compatible, down to the bugs with RHEL. It was great.
I was so pleased with this that I switched my test boxes over to WBEL so that I could have a test box with a longer lifecycle on the OS than the Fedora lifecycle.
I didn't attack your character, why must you attack mine?
I end up paying for your choices even if I don't use your insurance company.
You think it costs your company nothing to self-insure? Of course not. Don't you think that your company budgets medical expenses into the costs of the products and services that your company produces?
You may argue that your medical costs are borne only by the consumers of your company's products. They are the primary ones who fund medical care resulting from irresponsible behavior, but anyone in the supply chain using your company's products or services bears a bit of those costs as well.
We really lose perspective when we think in terms of the 'big insurance companies' or 'the big, fat cat employers' bearing the burden of our personal medical care without understanding that WE should pay our own freight, and not expect others to do that for us.
If you're insured, the insurance industry bases it's rates on the average costs in the world. When people make poor choices, it is reflected in the actuarial tables. Those tables are created by looking at what people typically do.
When we as a culture accept irresponsible behavior because we don't want to judge others, we start down a slippery slope.
Your right to be irresponsible stops when you expect someone else to pay for your choices.
Your right to choose whether or not to install and use seatbelts ends where my money pays for your hospital bills.
I don't really care if you drive your car off a cliff and you win a darwin award in the process - particularly if the car is paid for, and the cliff is on property that you own free and clear.
When your Darwin-award attempts fail, and you hurt other people, or you manage to fail to kill yourself quickly,
you go into the hospital, and then I and every other responsible person end up paying for your choices.
Want to build a speedway on a small portion of your huge plot of land and kill yourself in the process of driving whatever homebrewed vehicle you can assemble as fast as you can? I don't care as long as you leave no debts behind.
Want to take that thing on the public roads? Get it safety certified, and while you're at it, wear a seatbelt!
If you're on a motorcycle, wear a helmet!
I don't want to pay for your misplaced sense of machismo.
As some others have pointed out, there are a number of reasons for this. I work for a Fortune 500 company in the US, and we buy branded PCs for the following reasons:
1. Single Sourcing - one number to call to buy 2. Single Support - one company to deal with for support of those purchases - RMAs etc 3. Single Contract - one annual contract to negotiate 4. Consistency in components and drivers - this does not sound like a big deal, but when you are talking about 10s of thousands of boxes to maintain in an enterprise, keeping driver sets and components the same for 9-12 months of procurement makes the support costs SO much lower. In case you don't believe this, try this experiment at home. Install Fedora, Mandrake, Ubuntu, and Debian on 4 separate systems at home. Go through the update cycle on each at least once per month for three months. How easy do you think it would be to keep track of which ones had the updates and which utility you should use on each one? This closely approximates the experience of downloading patches, utilities and applications for the disparate hardware in a diverse hardware environment.
Then re-install the same distro (I don't care which one) on all of them, and repeat the experience.
The level of effort to keep track of how to maintain (apt-get, up2date, yum, etc) is SO much lower when you're dealing with a single vendor - or a single distro that it shows why we want to do that with hardware, too.
It's true that keeping the same models in the procurement channel shafts users on the front edge of buying because they are paying a premium price for the cutting edge of the hardware cycle, and shafts the ones on the trailing edge because they are getting yesterday's hardware at the premium price. The support cost savings outweigh the opportunity costs.
Most Fortune 500 companies are not in the technology business, so they don't care about having the newest, fastest, or even the absolute cheapest.
I love the idea of Evolution being available on more platforms. It's a nice tool.
It's a non-starter to talk about this being a step toward moving away from Windows desktops because of the licensing agreements entrenched with the Exchange licensing.
It's the exchange CAL that drives the costs. Let's say that you throw Outlook out on its ear. You still get to pay the MS tax as long as you use the MS back end.
You want to get rid of the Windows desktop? Get rid of the Exchange server, then get people weaned from Outlook.
I'm wondering if you might be able to make something work with Tivo?
I use iPhoto on my Mac, and then share my photos with my Tivo over a wireless LAN. One possibility might be to find a way to transfer the photos to iPhoto and then your dad could use the Tivo remote to pick which pictures to see.
Given that the Mac comes with unix utils, I'm thinking that a wget script could be used to pull the photos to the Mac, and then probably an applescript could be used to add new photos automatically to the iphoto collection.
This assumes that the Mac could have intermittent Internet access.
I've never done this, but would be willing to do some research if you're interested. I'm thinking that a Mac mini and a 40 hour tivo, and various LAN components could give you a solution for less than $1,000.
Drop me an email if you want me to look into this.
Look, I got frustrated with the constant upgrade cycle of the consumer redhat products, and the whole fedora morass was what encouraged me to look for alternatives - because ultimately I'm too cheap to pay for software to run at my house.
Professionally I have no issue with paying for things that make me $$, but personally it's not worth a bunch of cash per systems to do the upgrade cycle.
I switched my home boxes to whitebox linux. It's a totally non-redhat affiliated distro - except for the fact that it's built almost entirely from the SRPMS released from redhat. It's designed to be binary compatible with RHES, and in my experience, I've found that it has been - down to the bugs!
I have a feeling that if you want to fix your relationship with redhat, there's an option - get in touch with their marketing team and work out a deal. If you don't, carping to an employee here is obviously not helpful.
From the customer's perspective it doesn't matter whether or not you're right. The corporate direction was not communicated to him in a way that he understood, and it ended up being a significant inconvenience to him.
While I have used redhat sinec 4.2 (on Sparc, no less) I don't remember enough of the history to say whether he's 100% right, or you're 100% right on the details, but it really doesn't matter.
In terms of customer service, being right is really unimportant. The customer's perception IS his reality. I'm sorry that his frustration was turned toward redhat and eventually toward you.
Telling him point by point that he's wrong, and then issuing an ad hominem attack against him does not convince him of your rightness or his alleged wrongness.
That an important part of the licensing cost for Exchange is the Client Access License (CAL) - this means regardless of what you pay for the code that runs on your desktop, you still need to pay Microsoft a non-trivial amount of cash for the privilege.
The fix is to provide a seamless migration to a non-exchange server with a calendar-sharing mechanism.
Now that I think of it, when MS was looking to de-throne NetWare, they created a utility that allowed Windows users to see NetWare shares through a single login account on the NetWare box.
This meant that customers could 'upgrade' to Windows and not need to but any more client licenses for Novell.
I wonder if we should find a way to enable calendar browsing via some sort of mechanism that exploits only a single CAL so that uses of the free server side could see Outlook/Exhange calendars without paying CALs for all of the free server users.
Just like the Microsoft mechanism, this needs to be seamless and transparent - to make migration to free software easy and painless.
Archaeology doesn't proove the correctness of any religion either. We agree on this point. However, you could say that you are a poached egg, and I would know that this is not the case. How? I have some tests that I can use to verify that you are something other than a poached egg.
Not so - religion can't be proven simply because that is the nature of religion. It can't be prooven, it requires faith. If it could be prooven it wouldn't be religion, it would be science and we wouldn't need to take it on faith. Well, it depends what you mean by proven. Science is good - as far as it goes - but it is limited to a description of the universe in purely material terms.
Science offers a model of the universe, but not the universe itself. For example, an accurate news program gives us a 2D, low resolution, visual and audio portrayal of events. This portrayal is accurate and valid, but no one would suggest that seeing something on TV is the same as being there.
Science is a similar limited representation of the human experience. There are many life experiences that move beyond materialism - passion, love, concern, duty, honor, compassion - science offers no model for these things. It can provide a model for the physiological impacts of these things, but cannot model the things themselves.
Materialism is a useful but insufficient explanation of human experience. It is unable to answer the "why" that humanity seeks.
The why question appears to be uniquely human.
Does your world view provide any model for answering questions about the humanity of human kind? We appear to be unique among the animals in our self-awareness and our emotions. It is true that other animals mate for life, and that other animals appear to experience some forms of emotions, but humanity is different in so many ways.
Why is that? Superior evolution? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Why do I mate with one woman and choose to stay with her to raise children? Why did I get out of a cold bed in the middle of the night last night to rock a sick toddler back to sleep? Is there an evolutionary explanation for that?
Why do we see an almost universal acceptance that certain things are 'right' and certain things are 'wrong.' Does any other creature experience conscience? Remorse?
All world views have to answer at least three questions: a) where did we come from? b) what went wrong? (if anything) c) what can we do to fix it?
The Christian world view answers those questions in a way that is in harmony with what I observe in the world around me.
Where did we come from? A designer, creator established a phenomenally complex universe which is predictable. This predictability is the foundation for scientific experimentation.
What went wrong? God created man with the ability to choose relationship with Him or not. Man chose to rebel against God - because he wanted to be God.
How do we fix it? God loved mankind so much that He sent His Son Jesus Christ Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
If you're really thoughtfully examining Christianity, how do you explain Jesus Christ? Who was he?
I think that you've set a false dichotomy between faith and the exploration of science.
Does science give a better model for reality? It works - as far as it goes - but as you point out it is insufficient to describe anything more than the material world.
Our life experience is of course substantially material, but comprises a huge number of experiences that are more than material. Duty, honor, love, passion, repentance, forgiveness, joy, shame, peace - all are experiences that are immaterial.
Science is completely unable to describe those things in any terms other than merely biological expression. It can describe what, but cannot describe WHY.
I believe that an ordered universe, created by a designer provides a platform for our ability to reason and study. In my world view, science is possible because of the ordered design.
My faith is not in opposition to science. My faith bolsters exploration and confidence in reason, not the opposite.
In fact, I have to say that while some people find faith to be a mindless comfort, I find that it's far more challenging to live my life in the face of a Holy God who shows mercy, but who will judge sin than it would be to live without that accountability.
Living with no absolute truth would be easy, albeit completely without meaning.
Why do you think that your prophet Sagan lived in the fantasy of finding other intelligent life and comforted his pain in meaninglessness through drug use? He knew that his model was insufficient.
WRT my comment about the 2nd law, I still think I must not be clear. The universe is the system. We may have only seen a small part of it, but we've seen more than enough to observe order and disorder, and to know that all that we observe tends to go from order to disorder. Evolution claims that biology does the reverse, and it seems a bit counter-intuitive to me.
You believe the world was created by someone named God who had a human son named Jesus and so on... I might say I believe the universe was created by someone named Joe who built the most basic sub-atomic particles to obey certain rules, created energy, mixed it all together and let the whole thing go on its own course with no intervention.
Yes, but what evidence do you have that Joe did it? I have history, archaeology, written records and changed lives that speak in concert with my beliefs.
You can't really proove one way or the other. I believe you believe in Christianity (or whatever popular faith you follow) simply because it is popular among those around you and you were raised that way. And I think that you believe in evolution because that is what you have been taught is 'fact.' Most people have not critically examined whether evolution is true or not - they accept it as fact in the same way that they accept that gravity works. The evidence for gravity is compelling. I submit to you that development of different kinds of creatures through mutation and time is not well supported by the evidence, and that many who hold to that view do so because of a prior commitment to the philosphy of naturalism, not because the evidence exists for it.
If you say "there's no way it can be proven" then you're really saying, "I refuse to accept any proof."
These are not the same.
It's intellectually easy to suggest that Christians are lemmings that follow the cultural norms for their family, but that point of view neglects the evidences for the Christian faith and the contributions of intellectual giants who were Christians.
Have you ever thoughtfully, critically examined evolution?
Have you ever thoughtfully, critically examined Christianity?
The earth is not a closed system I was afraid that my point about this was not clear. I was not suggesting otherwise. What I was suggesting is that every natural system tends toward disorder - towards equilibrium. Evolution as explanation for the origin of species depends on life running against the current of the universe. It seems implausible.
the brain is well known to adopt to new sensory inputs Again, I think we're missing each other.
Even if it could, how is it reasonable to suggest that the other components of the eye would have somehow been associated with each other, in the right sequence, and would have worked in any shape or form to begin to send signals down a forming optic nerve?
Talk about lucky!:)
Which explanation is simpler I think that it is simpler to suggest that the consistency and observable patterns in the universe point to a design. Leave a garden alone for a while, and what happens? Does it demonstrate order, or disorder? Does the garden move toward elegance or chaos?
WRT saying that God's existance cannot be verified, what evidence would be sufficient to demonstrate to you that God does exist?
natural theories explaining the cambrian exlosion The point is that the cambrian explosion is.
When animals die, what happens to them? They decompose into...essentially dirt.
What happens if when animals die they are covered in soft, moist dirt? Fossils.
What if there was a worldwide flood a few thousand years ago? Would the evidence from the cambrian era be consistent with what we found?
Of course there is change over time. I'd be a fool to suggest otherwise.
My point is that we can make assumptions about the previous step in the process, but we cannot test the origin. Origins, by definition, cross the boundaries of what is testable within this framework of knowledge. As a result, something apparently supernatural (more than natural, or outside the understood bounds of nature) occurred to establish the universe as we know it.
Science cannot test origins.
WRT the development of species, I have numerous problems: 1. MacroEvolution (change from one type to another - as opposed to adaptation - variation within kind) requires that things move from less ordered to more ordered without something to put them in order. This seems to run contrary to the principle encapsulated within the 2nd law of thermodynamics - that things tend to move from order to disorder. If evolution is true, life moves opposite the natural tendency of the universe.
2. Irreduceable complexity - How can complex biological structures have been developed when individual components would not have been beneficial? Even if a human-type eye developed, it would have had to develop at the same time that the optic nerve and brain components that receive and interpret those signals. It seems unlikely to me.
3. Occam's razor tells me that if I find a watch on the beach, the most likely explanation is that there was a designer, manufacturer, and some cause for the manufactured item to be transported to that location, rather than the parts appearing by chance, and they fell into the correct order by chance.
4. The cambrian explosion shows a huge number of distinct species all at the same time - and no clear transitions - this was so compelling that Stephen Jay Gould developed the punctuated equilibrium theory. As he said, speaking of the fossil record: "Phyletic gradualism was never seen in the rocks"
evolution and the big bang are how the universe actually began
The scientific method cannot be used to demonstrate origins. Since it is not observable, nor repeatable, we cannot postulate and test those postulates about origins.
We collect evidence and develop theories about the meaning of the collected evidence, but then both the naturalistic scientist and the creationist are on the same footing.
So-called scientific theories about origins are not testable, nor falsifiable. Should they be taught as 'truth' in the classroom?
I don't think so. Our culture's elevation of science to the position of arbiter of absolute truth is quite bothersome to me.
Don't misunderstand. Science is good, and valuable in its place. Where we go wrong is when we extend what we can know about the universe through good science to what we think we can know through science. When science oversteps its boundaries, it should not be taught in schools as fact.
With all due respect, while your points about configuring a print queue under CUPS are true, I've had LOTS of trouble with printing using Linux as my print server. Perhaps it's my ignorance, but my experience with Linux/CUPS has not made printing trivial....
For example, when I want to kill a print job that is sending garbage to my printer, where's the admin gui that lets me browse queues, select the errant job, and kill it? I rely on lpq for that today.
Also, I had large challenges getting lpr to work from my Mac. One day, apparently magically, the CUPS queues appeared, and started to work. My powerbook ONLY sees the queues that are produced from CUPS. Something that I cannot seem to pick is the print quality. Print jobs from my Mac always come out high quality - photo quality - and slowly from the printer.
Don't even get me started on making sure that OO.org print drivers are installed and configured properly for the application to print to a CUPS shared print queue......
CUPS is a BIG improvement over previous tools, but printing is still no panacea.
When I talk in terms of production, I'm looking at 'business problems solved' not 'lines of code written.'
The top producers tend to think differently about the nature of problems than the low producers.
They also write more effective code, and do a better job of unit testing than the low producers. They have more creative ideas that can be easily implemented than do the low producers.
So that guy doesn't make 100x what our worst producers do, but here's what does happen: 1. He makes ~2-2.5x what the low producer does
2. He gets selected for the interesting problems (And gets to say - I don't want to work on that project.)
3. He is highly regarded by his peers for being sharp - in many cases that's worth more than money. (At least to geeks it can be.)
4. Management gives much greater latitude in terms of work hours - because they know that they can count on that person when the chips are down.
Finally, it's important to note that many times our techies are led down the primrose path of believing that technical prowess is the most important measure of achievement.
As a result I know a couple of really sharp developers in our organization who are treated scornfully by management. These people are brilliant, but their attitude and approach make them distasteful to everyone else who "doesn't get it" because they are "stupid" and management people are "idiots."
People skills are critical to success, unless you're a genius on the order of John Carmack. People skills are directly related to compensation - far more than technical skills - this is why people think that their bosses are morons and all management types are idiots. The world measures on a different scale than geeks do. Unions won't fix that.
Thanks for inviting me to post more on slashdot!:)
Don't get me wrong - companies *do* abuse people when the company has sufficient power. Unions do provide protection to those workers, but it's not a panacea.
In the software development realm, some programmers are 100x more productive than others. Many times there are more than 2x productivity differences between workers.
When you move to unionized protection for the workforce, you are essentially mandating compensation for producers to be normalized. Even though you might be 5x more productive than your cube neighbor, your compensation will not reflect that value difference.
When you're talking about manual production activities - assembly line manufacturing, product delivery (bread suppliers) etc - it makes perfect sense because each breaed delivery person has a maximum capacity that he can accomplish, and the variance in production can easily be normalized and compensation level can more easily be established.
In this industry, do you really want to have collective bargaining where the people who are the most productive derive the least benefit from exercising their talents? If you can accomplish more in 2 hours than your coworkers, should you need to put in a full workday to be compensated the same as they are?
I'm not convinced that the traditional model of collective bargaining is a great solution to this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
It is your choice to fill your dinner plate at the smorgasbord of philosophical idea, and choose the ones that suit your palate.
Philosophically speaking, there are a number of reasons that evolution is inconsistent with Christianity. If you are interested, I can and will elaborate. If you prefer to do that via email, my address is public.
Let's address the non-philosophical issues, if you will. First, the age of the earth is estimated, based on a number of assumptions which may or may not be valid.
Frankly, our understanding of cosmology is pretty limited because our exposure to planetary systems is pretty limited. Our understanding about planetary formation has been changed because of recent observations of planets in formation. (Look for information about the recent discovery of a solar system with multiple Jupiter-sized planets.)
Our estimation of the time required to form the Grand Canyon is based on many assumptions. After Mt. St. Helens erupted, a mini-version of the grand canyon was formed in a matter of days. Those layers could be layed down (or eroded) over a VERY short period of time.
I'll freely admit that adaptation is undeniable. I would be a fool with my head stuck in the sand to believe that this is untrue. Differentiation in types of moths, types of hares and rabbits, dogs, etc is observable, and repeatable.
For what it's worth, adaptation is consistent with a Christian world view.
Scientifically speaking what is in dispute is really two things:
1. Whether species adapted from one type of creature to another type (Cat to dog, or something equally different.)
2. How the whole thing got started.
WRT #1, there's the issue of the significant dispute within the scientific community about whether it was gradual change or immediate change. Gould's punctuated equilibrium theory was based on his research and his assertion that 'phyletic gradualism' 'was never seen in the rocks' because of the gaps in the fossil record. At best, I'd have to say that major, significant change in creatures happening gradually over time is speculative. However, if you approach your study of the universe and pre-suppose that there is no design, no creator, then you must search for any explanation, no matter how far-fetched it is to fit in with your pre-conceived notions. This kind of bias is exactly what the 'scientist' types accuse 'religious' types of. We are all biased - on every side of this issue.
WRT #2 - If the universe has existed eternally, why didn't the potential, kinetic, and heat energy in the universe equilibrate an eternity ago? We should not exist, and if any matter exists, it should be stopped, and VERY cold.
I've done exactly this. I work for a large company which was preparing to roll out RHEL for an initiative. One department had access to some licenses for RHEL, but would not share.
I needed to develop a process for deployment of patches - including workflow and approvals, etc. My department did not have the budget to buy the licenses I needed to move forward.
As the go-live date approached, I used WBEL to develop and test the process. After we went live, I found that WBEL was binary compatible, down to the bugs with RHEL. It was great.
I was so pleased with this that I switched my test boxes over to WBEL so that I could have a test box with a longer lifecycle on the OS than the Fedora lifecycle.
I didn't attack your character, why must you attack mine?
I end up paying for your choices even if I don't use your insurance company.
You think it costs your company nothing to self-insure? Of course not. Don't you think that your company budgets medical expenses into the costs of the products and services that your company produces?
You may argue that your medical costs are borne only by the consumers of your company's products. They are the primary ones who fund medical care resulting from irresponsible behavior, but anyone in the supply chain using your company's products or services bears a bit of those costs as well.
We really lose perspective when we think in terms of the 'big insurance companies' or 'the big, fat cat employers' bearing the burden of our personal medical care without understanding that WE should pay our own freight, and not expect others to do that for us.
If you're insured, the insurance industry bases it's rates on the average costs in the world. When people make poor choices, it is reflected in the actuarial tables. Those tables are created by looking at what people typically do.
When we as a culture accept irresponsible behavior because we don't want to judge others, we start down a slippery slope.
Your right to be irresponsible stops when you expect someone else to pay for your choices.
Your right to choose whether or not to install and use seatbelts ends where my money pays for your hospital bills.
I don't really care if you drive your car off a cliff and you win a darwin award in the process - particularly if the car is paid for, and the cliff is on property that you own free and clear.
When your Darwin-award attempts fail, and
you hurt other people, or
you manage to fail to kill yourself quickly,
you go into the hospital, and then I and every other responsible person end up paying for your choices.
Want to build a speedway on a small portion of your huge plot of land and kill yourself in the process of driving whatever homebrewed vehicle you can assemble as fast as you can? I don't care as long as you leave no debts behind.
Want to take that thing on the public roads? Get it safety certified, and while you're at it, wear a seatbelt!
If you're on a motorcycle, wear a helmet!
I don't want to pay for your misplaced sense of machismo.
As some others have pointed out, there are a number of reasons for this. I work for a Fortune 500 company in the US, and we buy branded PCs for the following reasons:
1. Single Sourcing - one number to call to buy
2. Single Support - one company to deal with for support of those purchases - RMAs etc
3. Single Contract - one annual contract to negotiate
4. Consistency in components and drivers - this does not sound like a big deal, but when you are talking about 10s of thousands of boxes to maintain in an enterprise, keeping driver sets and components the same for 9-12 months of procurement makes the support costs SO much lower. In case you don't believe this, try this experiment at home. Install Fedora, Mandrake, Ubuntu, and Debian on 4 separate systems at home. Go through the update cycle on each at least once per month for three months. How easy do you think it would be to keep track of which ones had the updates and which utility you should use on each one? This closely approximates the experience of downloading patches, utilities and applications for the disparate hardware in a diverse hardware environment.
Then re-install the same distro (I don't care which one) on all of them, and repeat the experience.
The level of effort to keep track of how to maintain (apt-get, up2date, yum, etc) is SO much lower when you're dealing with a single vendor - or a single distro that it shows why we want to do that with hardware, too.
It's true that keeping the same models in the procurement channel shafts users on the front edge of buying because they are paying a premium price for the cutting edge of the hardware cycle, and shafts the ones on the trailing edge because they are getting yesterday's hardware at the premium price. The support cost savings outweigh the opportunity costs.
Most Fortune 500 companies are not in the technology business, so they don't care about having the newest, fastest, or even the absolute cheapest.
Hope this helps.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
1. You didn't reference the verse, or the version correctly! It's verse 19, and KJV.
2. More contemporary versions accurately use the pronoun 'they' where you've quoted 'he.'
3. In the KJV, if it really meant God, it would have said He, not he.
But you a) don't care, and b) just wanted to sound smart, didn't you?
For future reference, the Bible can be found on line in many translations, searchable at http://bible.gospelcom.net/
I love the idea of Evolution being available on more platforms. It's a nice tool.
It's a non-starter to talk about this being a step toward moving away from Windows desktops because of the licensing agreements entrenched with the Exchange licensing.
It's the exchange CAL that drives the costs. Let's say that you throw Outlook out on its ear. You still get to pay the MS tax as long as you use the MS back end.
You want to get rid of the Windows desktop? Get rid of the Exchange server, then get people weaned from Outlook.
I'm wondering if you might be able to make something work with Tivo?
I use iPhoto on my Mac, and then share my photos with my Tivo over a wireless LAN. One possibility might be to find a way to transfer the photos to iPhoto and then your dad could use the Tivo remote to pick which pictures to see.
Given that the Mac comes with unix utils, I'm thinking that a wget script could be used to pull the photos to the Mac, and then probably an applescript could be used to add new photos automatically to the iphoto collection.
This assumes that the Mac could have intermittent Internet access.
I've never done this, but would be willing to do some research if you're interested. I'm thinking that a Mac mini and a 40 hour tivo, and various LAN components could give you a solution for less than $1,000.
Drop me an email if you want me to look into this.
Just a thought.
Anomaly
Look, I got frustrated with the constant upgrade cycle of the consumer redhat products, and the whole fedora morass was what encouraged me to look for alternatives - because ultimately I'm too cheap to pay for software to run at my house.
Professionally I have no issue with paying for things that make me $$, but personally it's not worth a bunch of cash per systems to do the upgrade cycle.
I switched my home boxes to whitebox linux. It's a totally non-redhat affiliated distro - except for the fact that it's built almost entirely from the SRPMS released from redhat. It's designed to be binary compatible with RHES, and in my experience, I've found that it has been - down to the bugs!
I have a feeling that if you want to fix your relationship with redhat, there's an option - get in touch with their marketing team and work out a deal. If you don't, carping to an employee here is obviously not helpful.
I'm sorry that you're frustrated.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
From the customer's perspective it doesn't matter whether or not you're right. The corporate direction was not communicated to him in a way that he understood, and it ended up being a significant inconvenience to him.
.
While I have used redhat sinec 4.2 (on Sparc, no less) I don't remember enough of the history to say whether he's 100% right, or you're 100% right on the details, but it really doesn't matter.
In terms of customer service, being right is really unimportant. The customer's perception IS his reality. I'm sorry that his frustration was turned toward redhat and eventually toward you.
Telling him point by point that he's wrong, and then issuing an ad hominem attack against him does not convince him of your rightness or his alleged wrongness
I'd highly recommend that you peruse This book
You may find that application of the enclosed principles are extremely helpful in your life path.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
FWIW - we're light users at home, but I've been extremely impressed with NeoOffice.
Even in beta it works quite well for us.
(Too cheap to pay for MSOffice, and happy with the improvement that NeoOffice provides over OOo/X on OS X)
I do exactly that - only I don't publish the cgi for enabling and disabling my lights, and I don't have a webcam.
:)
I use a cron job.
It's easier to use X10 through cron than it is to bend over and unplug the cable twice a day.
Kudos to Alek for his hard work, and ingenuity.
That an important part of the licensing cost for Exchange is the Client Access License (CAL) - this means regardless of what you pay for the code that runs on your desktop, you still need to pay Microsoft a non-trivial amount of cash for the privilege.
The fix is to provide a seamless migration to a non-exchange server with a calendar-sharing mechanism.
Now that I think of it, when MS was looking to de-throne NetWare, they created a utility that allowed Windows users to see NetWare shares through a single login account on the NetWare box.
This meant that customers could 'upgrade' to Windows and not need to but any more client licenses for Novell.
I wonder if we should find a way to enable calendar browsing via some sort of mechanism that exploits only a single CAL so that uses of the free server side could see Outlook/Exhange calendars without paying CALs for all of the free server users.
Just like the Microsoft mechanism, this needs to be seamless and transparent - to make migration to free software easy and painless.
Archaeology doesn't proove the correctness of any religion either.
We agree on this point. However, you could say that you are a poached egg, and I would know that this is not the case. How? I have some tests that I can use to verify that you are something other than a poached egg.
Not so - religion can't be proven simply because that is the nature of religion. It can't be prooven, it requires faith. If it could be prooven it wouldn't be religion, it would be science and we wouldn't need to take it on faith.
Well, it depends what you mean by proven. Science is good - as far as it goes - but it is limited to a description of the universe in purely material terms.
Science offers a model of the universe, but not the universe itself. For example, an accurate news program gives us a 2D, low resolution, visual and audio portrayal of events. This portrayal is accurate and valid, but no one would suggest that seeing something on TV is the same as being there.
Science is a similar limited representation of the human experience. There are many life experiences that move beyond materialism - passion, love, concern, duty, honor, compassion - science offers no model for these things. It can provide a model for the physiological impacts of these things, but cannot model the things themselves.
Materialism is a useful but insufficient explanation of human experience. It is unable to answer the "why" that humanity seeks.
The why question appears to be uniquely human.
Does your world view provide any model for answering questions about the humanity of human kind? We appear to be unique among the animals in our self-awareness and our emotions. It is true that other animals mate for life, and that other animals appear to experience some forms of emotions, but humanity is different in so many ways.
Why is that? Superior evolution? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Why do I mate with one woman and choose to stay with her to raise children? Why did I get out of a cold bed in the middle of the night last night to rock a sick toddler back to sleep? Is there an evolutionary explanation for that?
Why do we see an almost universal acceptance that certain things are 'right' and certain things are 'wrong.' Does any other creature experience conscience? Remorse?
All world views have to answer at least three questions:
a) where did we come from?
b) what went wrong? (if anything)
c) what can we do to fix it?
The Christian world view answers those questions in a way that is in harmony with what I observe in the world around me.
Where did we come from? A designer, creator established a phenomenally complex universe which is predictable. This predictability is the foundation for scientific experimentation.
What went wrong? God created man with the ability to choose relationship with Him or not. Man chose to rebel against God - because he wanted to be God.
How do we fix it? God loved mankind so much that He sent His Son Jesus Christ Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
If you're really thoughtfully examining Christianity, how do you explain Jesus Christ? Who was he?
I think that you've set a false dichotomy between faith and the exploration of science.
Does science give a better model for reality? It works - as far as it goes - but as you point out it is insufficient to describe anything more than the material world.
Our life experience is of course substantially material, but comprises a huge number of experiences that are more than material. Duty, honor, love, passion, repentance, forgiveness, joy, shame, peace - all are experiences that are immaterial.
Science is completely unable to describe those things in any terms other than merely biological expression. It can describe what, but cannot describe WHY.
I believe that an ordered universe, created by a designer provides a platform for our ability to reason and study. In my world view, science is possible because of the ordered design.
My faith is not in opposition to science. My faith bolsters exploration and confidence in reason, not the opposite.
In fact, I have to say that while some people find faith to be a mindless comfort, I find that it's far more challenging to live my life in the face of a Holy God who shows mercy, but who will judge sin than it would be to live without that accountability.
Living with no absolute truth would be easy, albeit completely without meaning.
Why do you think that your prophet Sagan lived in the fantasy of finding other intelligent life and comforted his pain in meaninglessness through drug use? He knew that his model was insufficient.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
WRT my comment about the 2nd law, I still think I must not be clear. The universe is the system. We may have only seen a small part of it, but we've seen more than enough to observe order and disorder, and to know that all that we observe tends to go from order to disorder. Evolution claims that biology does the reverse, and it seems a bit counter-intuitive to me.
You believe the world was created by someone named God who had a human son named Jesus and so on...
I might say I believe the universe was created by someone named Joe who built the most basic sub-atomic particles to obey certain rules, created energy, mixed it all together and let the whole thing go on its own course with no intervention.
Yes, but what evidence do you have that Joe did it? I have history, archaeology, written records and changed lives that speak in concert with my beliefs.
You can't really proove one way or the other. I believe you believe in Christianity (or whatever popular faith you follow) simply because it is popular among those around you and you were raised that way.
And I think that you believe in evolution because that is what you have been taught is 'fact.' Most people have not critically examined whether evolution is true or not - they accept it as fact in the same way that they accept that gravity works. The evidence for gravity is compelling. I submit to you that development of different kinds of creatures through mutation and time is not well supported by the evidence, and that many who hold to that view do so because of a prior commitment to the philosphy of naturalism, not because the evidence exists for it.
If you say "there's no way it can be proven" then you're really saying, "I refuse to accept any proof."
These are not the same.
It's intellectually easy to suggest that Christians are lemmings that follow the cultural norms for their family, but that point of view neglects the evidences for the Christian faith and the contributions of intellectual giants who were Christians.
Have you ever thoughtfully, critically examined evolution?
Have you ever thoughtfully, critically examined Christianity?
Respectfully,
Anomaly
The earth is not a closed system
:)
I was afraid that my point about this was not clear. I was not suggesting otherwise. What I was suggesting is that every natural system tends toward disorder - towards equilibrium. Evolution as explanation for the origin of species depends on life running against the current of the universe. It seems implausible.
the brain is well known to adopt to new sensory inputs
Again, I think we're missing each other.
Even if it could, how is it reasonable to suggest that the other components of the eye would have somehow been associated with each other, in the right sequence, and would have worked in any shape or form to begin to send signals down a forming optic nerve?
Talk about lucky!
Which explanation is simpler
I think that it is simpler to suggest that the consistency and observable patterns in the universe point to a design. Leave a garden alone for a while, and what happens? Does it demonstrate order, or disorder? Does the garden move toward elegance or chaos?
WRT saying that God's existance cannot be verified, what evidence would be sufficient to demonstrate to you that God does exist?
natural theories explaining the cambrian exlosion
The point is that the cambrian explosion is.
When animals die, what happens to them? They decompose into...essentially dirt.
What happens if when animals die they are covered in soft, moist dirt? Fossils.
What if there was a worldwide flood a few thousand years ago? Would the evidence from the cambrian era be consistent with what we found?
Respectfully,
Anomaly
Of course there is change over time. I'd be a fool to suggest otherwise.
My point is that we can make assumptions about the previous step in the process, but we cannot test the origin. Origins, by definition, cross the boundaries of what is testable within this framework of knowledge. As a result, something apparently supernatural (more than natural, or outside the understood bounds of nature) occurred to establish the universe as we know it.
Science cannot test origins.
WRT the development of species, I have numerous problems:
1. MacroEvolution (change from one type to another - as opposed to adaptation - variation within kind) requires that things move from less ordered to more ordered without something to put them in order. This seems to run contrary to the principle encapsulated within the 2nd law of thermodynamics - that things tend to move from order to disorder. If evolution is true, life moves opposite the natural tendency of the universe.
2. Irreduceable complexity - How can complex biological structures have been developed when individual components would not have been beneficial? Even if a human-type eye developed, it would have had to develop at the same time that the optic nerve and brain components that receive and interpret those signals. It seems unlikely to me.
3. Occam's razor tells me that if I find a watch on the beach, the most likely explanation is that there was a designer, manufacturer, and some cause for the manufactured item to be transported to that location, rather than the parts appearing by chance, and they fell into the correct order by chance.
4. The cambrian explosion shows a huge number of distinct species all at the same time - and no clear transitions - this was so compelling that Stephen Jay Gould developed the punctuated equilibrium theory. As he said, speaking of the fossil record: "Phyletic gradualism was never seen in the rocks"
Respectfully,
Anomaly
evolution and the big bang are how the universe actually began
The scientific method cannot be used to demonstrate origins. Since it is not observable, nor repeatable, we cannot postulate and test those postulates about origins.
We collect evidence and develop theories about the meaning of the collected evidence, but then both the naturalistic scientist and the creationist are on the same footing.
So-called scientific theories about origins are not testable, nor falsifiable. Should they be taught as 'truth' in the classroom?
I don't think so. Our culture's elevation of science to the position of arbiter of absolute truth is quite bothersome to me.
Don't misunderstand. Science is good, and valuable in its place. Where we go wrong is when we extend what we can know about the universe through good science to what we think we can know through science. When science oversteps its boundaries, it should not be taught in schools as fact.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
And if we're at the top of the evolutionary chain, that matters why?
Personally I don't buy into macroevolution - a dog doesn't become anything other than a dog - but people are free to believe whatever they want.
With all due respect, while your points about configuring a print queue under CUPS are true, I've had LOTS of trouble with printing using Linux as my print server. Perhaps it's my ignorance, but my experience with Linux/CUPS has not made printing trivial....
For example, when I want to kill a print job that is sending garbage to my printer, where's the admin gui that lets me browse queues, select the errant job, and kill it? I rely on lpq for that today.
Also, I had large challenges getting lpr to work from my Mac. One day, apparently magically, the CUPS queues appeared, and started to work. My powerbook ONLY sees the queues that are produced from CUPS. Something that I cannot seem to pick is the print quality. Print jobs from my Mac always come out high quality - photo quality - and slowly from the printer.
Don't even get me started on making sure that OO.org print drivers are installed and configured properly for the application to print to a CUPS shared print queue......
CUPS is a BIG improvement over previous tools, but printing is still no panacea.
When I talk in terms of production, I'm looking at 'business problems solved' not 'lines of code written.'
The top producers tend to think differently about the nature of problems than the low producers.
They also write more effective code, and do a better job of unit testing than the low producers. They have more creative ideas that can be easily implemented than do the low producers.
So that guy doesn't make 100x what our worst producers do, but here's what does happen:
:)
1. He makes ~2-2.5x what the low producer does
2. He gets selected for the interesting problems (And gets to say - I don't want to work on that project.)
3. He is highly regarded by his peers for being sharp - in many cases that's worth more than money. (At least to geeks it can be.)
4. Management gives much greater latitude in terms of work hours - because they know that they can count on that person when the chips are down.
Finally, it's important to note that many times our techies are led down the primrose path of believing that technical prowess is the most important measure of achievement.
As a result I know a couple of really sharp developers in our organization who are treated scornfully by management. These people are brilliant, but their attitude and approach make them distasteful to everyone else who "doesn't get it" because they are "stupid" and management people are "idiots."
People skills are critical to success, unless you're a genius on the order of John Carmack. People skills are directly related to compensation - far more than technical skills - this is why people think that their bosses are morons and all management types are idiots. The world measures on a different scale than geeks do. Unions won't fix that.
Thanks for inviting me to post more on slashdot!
Respectfully,
Anomaly
Don't get me wrong - companies *do* abuse people when the company has sufficient power. Unions do provide protection to those workers, but it's not a panacea.
In the software development realm, some programmers are 100x more productive than others. Many times there are more than 2x productivity differences between workers.
When you move to unionized protection for the workforce, you are essentially mandating compensation for producers to be normalized. Even though you might be 5x more productive than your cube neighbor, your compensation will not reflect that value difference.
When you're talking about manual production activities - assembly line manufacturing, product delivery (bread suppliers) etc - it makes perfect sense because each breaed delivery person has a maximum capacity that he can accomplish, and the variance in production can easily be normalized and compensation level can more easily be established.
In this industry, do you really want to have collective bargaining where the people who are the most productive derive the least benefit from exercising their talents? If you can accomplish more in 2 hours than your coworkers, should you need to put in a full workday to be compensated the same as they are?
I'm not convinced that the traditional model of collective bargaining is a great solution to this problem.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
I had a similar experience with that vendor. I'm curious to know about which product, but don't want to discuss it on slashdot.