I personally have heard enough bad things about the filtering companies to not want to use, them, but I propose that everyone with decency BOYCOTT YAHOO! DIRECTLY. Skip the twisted filtering companies.
Here's my deal. Yahoo! is a classic and a mainstay of the Internet, and porn is filthy and degrading. Sure, lots of people sell porn, but if Yahoo! gets a profit off of this nonsense, then that will send a clear message to anyone. This stuff is destructive to personal integrity and demeans human worth. And it should be pretty clear how much this does against true rights for women and so on. It also hurts family responsibility issues and damages children as a result, who will be the adults of tomorrow.
So I say we make a big uproar and boycott them. Send them lots of complaints. Make it cost them. I know many on Slashdot will dislike these comments, but there are people here too will agree with me.
It increases competition, brings down costs, increases availability, etc... The highly competitive PC clone market of the late 80s is what gave Microsoft its current advantage. They were smart (and lucky) and rode the wave.
Linux moves fast because it does for the OS what the IBM PC platform did for the hardware. I don't mind if the masses continue to use Windows. Windows has to improve more because of Linux, too. It's a win-win situation for the masses all around, and with Linux/KDE/GNOME/ReiserFS/etc steady improvement (and the distros making it available it whatever fashion is best for their target audience), many newbie complaints will disappear with time.
Maybe I'm just optimistic, but I think it's a fair analysis. Competition almost always helps things out.
It's just that I belong to a religion that has had a lot of false things said about it. I'm a Latter-day Saint, to be more specific. A more common term is Mormon. Anyway, I don't have any first-hand experience with Scientology, but I automatically distrust bashing. Some people will lie on purpose to get others to be mistrusting.
Without first-hand experience, I'm not willing to automatically condemn. At the same time, I've got my own life. Unless I'm a judge in a legal case, which I don't ever intend to be, I wouldn't have a need to learn whether the anti-Scientology is true or false.
I just think we shouldn't take all the bashing on faith and spread it as if it were our own experience.
It sounds like you are definitely Christian. I would be willing to carry on further dialog, but I need to get back to work at the moment. (I'm trying to work on a computer science MS thesis proposal on robot control architectures, and I've got writers' block.)
I'm not too much of a guru of Hebrew or Greek, but I have read the Bible and studied various religions, Christian and otherwise. My willingness to accept other people to believe what they want stems from that a little. That's sort of what bothers me about all this Scientology bashing.
Anyway, if you want to continue the dialog, I can be reached at tjpalmerATtjpalmerDOTcom (with the usual anti-spam word replacements). I'll try not to be more than a few days delinquent in responding to questions.
Mormons who know the full teachings of their church, and believe them to be accurate, are serious whackjobs.
I appreciate the concern of dfenstrate. I'm going to go out on a limb here myself, though, as someone who fits the above description (minus the "whackjob" from my own point of view, though). I'll be short. Just to say that not everything that everyone says we believe is actually doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I could ascribe some really weird beliefs to any Christian, if I wanted to interpret the Bible however I pleased.
Oh, and, yes, we do believe in the Bible, and we share more in common with other Christians than most people realize. What differences exist are significant but at a simple level. For instance, "We believe that a man must be called of God, by prophecy, and by the laying on of hands by those who are in authority, to preach the Gospel and administer in the ordinances thereof." That makes a big difference.
For more information, try the link that dfenstrate gave to the articles of our faith.
1.4. With XML, the interface for an RPC is defined by an XML Schema Definition...
2. SOAP's actual value (besides XML) is limited...
3. HTTP provides the final value-add...
So I still don't understand what SOAP is for, and yes I have read/skimmed the spec. I think it provides some great suggestions at how to organize schemas for RPC purposes, but that's all. As for the envelope:
It's an envelope for an XML document (which can be used as an RPC call) that says "you should know these schemas in order to understand this message".
Doesn't XML already have ways to do this (via DTD specifications, processing instructions, and namespaces, some of which are used in SOAP anyway)? As for the destination parts of the envelope and so on, I think the handling protocol, such as HTTP, can do just fine. If envelopes in general are good to have at an XML level, I think it should be made as a specific protocol and not put together with RPC.
I just can't see why SOAP matters. Maybe I'm overlooking something. I haven't actually used it. Is SOAP needless complication or is it useful?
In fact, the opinion article was almost completely devoid of information. It says, "Hey, I'm so smart because I'm a scientist, and my hidden book of wonders that is too complicated for you to understand says that evolution is perfectly true."
First, I admit that I use Windows as well as Linux. I've used other operating systems some but not as much. Now and then, Windows compatibility is very handy, but I definitely prefer the Unix environment.
Anyway, the point is that of course using Windows is the obvious choice.
Then again, some people realize that a lack of choice is dangerous. From my personal experience with employers and from reading industry news and watching marketing drivel and nonsense hype, I personally (and I know many others feel the same) don't trust ANY large companies to have much power.
I saw another post on KDE and Pango. If it's not good enough, how will it get the best improvement if no one even tries to use it? A system needs users and people who care to get going.
Especially ground-up movements like open source and free software. The only reason Linux is as good as it is, is because people at the bottom cared until it got better, more money, and so on.
I don't want to sound to cliche but free software has a lot of analogies with traditional political revolutions. The difference is that it's safer, so it takes less commitment. Still, as with any revolution, the people on the bottom have to go to extra effort now to achieve a better future tomorrow. (Not to say that all political revolutions achieve such ends.)
Think about tomorrow instead of just today. Stop being lazy and the "I'll use Microsoft because it's easier" attitude if you want to have a better technological climate in the future.
Technology influences society more and more, and letting one company run everything is a very dangerous predicament to be in. So be willing to sacrifice and try to change something, even by just being one more person who doesn't give in to all of Microsoft's whims.
(Also, I'm a free market advocate, but the real world will not always produce the ideal conditions that simple economic models predict.)
If they make.NET a standard,...
What motivation does MS have to lose control of their market? I don't have links readily available, but all I have heard is of MS planning to take the C# specification to ISO, which has nothing to do with standardizing their whole platform. Even if they did, any takers on rewriting Win32? Ask the WINE people how easy it is.
If they can make sure.NET really is vendor neutral, so shipping the.NET foundation is not like shipping the JVM which is little more than a commercial Sun product.
And.NET won't be a commercial MS product. I have not seen MS even try to claim that anything they produce for.NET won't be owned by them. Read carefully.
Then HECK YEAH, I'll take an open, free, extendible, cross-platform platform any day, especially if it ships with millions of Windows machines...
Aha. Windows machines. That's right..NET is supported on Windows machines. It should make doing Windows network development nicer, with a compact version in various devices acting like embedded Java. MS supports Windows. They make Windows. What motive do they have for changing that? When did they say they were changing that?
I think from a technical perspective the.NET platform...
Try reading the technical documents. Here's one on SOAP. Read it. It's not that exciting. It specifies that you can use normal XML Schemas with a few extra rules and an envelope that mimics HTTP functionality.
You can do little new with SOAP and.NET from a non-Windows computer that you couldn't do with normal HTTP and CGI. SOAP provides almost nothing on top of standard XML. There's nothing new under the sun.
If you want open and exciting, try Linux or FreeBSD. If you want cross-platform software, try something open like C, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, or anything else on the list. They also interoperate just fine. Unix had cross-language interoperation working in the 70s. It's called pipes, and it's at least faster than SOAP.
Documentation can be found via the Gtk+ web site. It provides a lot of what you ask for (fancy data types, etc...). It's clean, nice, and LGPL'd. Use it in whatever commercial code you want. It's even available on Win32.
GLib/Gtk+/GNOME's use of C is actually pretty amazing in my opinion (and yes, I've used C++, Java, Python,... as well, so I'm not ignorant in these issues). It's quite a pretty language when used well.
- Tom
KDE/GNOME war hurts developers...
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
And as a result, it hurts users.
If I develop KDE-specific code, then it doesn't interoperate or look right in GNOME. If I write GNOME-specific code, then it doesn't interoperate or look right in KDE. Because of the war, it makes it hard for me as a developer to want to code for either. Understood?
Now, if I don't take advantage of the fancy features of either, how can users take advantage of them, either? Now, really, I hope that interoperability vapor we heard a while back goes somewhere. Meanwhile, major corporate backing of GNOME is a sudden shift that may woo application developers.
If coding/porting in KDE/Qt is so easy, why don't they just incorporate Bonobo and be done with it? Developers and users both win.
The other option would be for someone to develop an abstraction layer that could allow applications to be compiled to either KDE or GNOME.
Don't get me wrong. I like robots. I program wheeled ones with sonars for my job. They're a lot of fun.
The problem is that I don't trust anyone's programming well enough right now to get anywhere near an active robot with a loaded gun. People think robots will suddenly overtake us in the evolutionary cycle, etc., etc... Well, they'll have to stop being stupid first. AI is really not that advanced yet.
People are still way way way way way smarter than machines.
Okay, so PostgreSQL may be built in to distros, but when I type "pgsql" at a command prompt here in Mandrake, it doesn't know what I'm talking about.
If it is available for instant access, please help me find what I'm doing wrong. I should be able to just start it up and set up a table. (I'm not root, BTW.) If the DBs aren't set up where any user can just go in, then this should be made easier.
The web is the largest set of reusable components in existence. No one bothers to document their CGIs, but people can and do scrape HTML anyway. CGIs (or mod_perl or ASPs or Java servlets, etc...) can be written in any language, and it does not require compromise on the part of the languages to work together. (Unlike Microsoft's.NET platform which makes VB, C++, JScript, and C# all change their feel until it's almost the same language with different syntax anyway.)
Now with a slight change on the coding style to keep output more consistent (and in XML or something else instead of human-consumed HTML), the components could more easily be of general use.
Additionally, an extra port could be reserved for a local web server on each computer, and it could be used as a name server for components (looked up via standard URLs, eg., "http://localhost/spellchecker"), and viola, CGIs could be used as local components also.
I realize that OLE/Bonobo and so on are better for speedier components that need more constant interaction, but CGIs are easily the way to go for more coarse level interaction. As a proof of concept, just use the world wide web.
Microsoft has the time, money, and motivation to develop ideas that otherwise would just be academic projects. Machine learning (a cousin of artificial intelligence) is starting to pick up momentum behind the scenes, and I think it's a shame that only Microsoft seems to be pushing it in a way that it will directly affect consumers.
What happens if in five to ten years, a Windows box can actually understand half the things I tell it with voice recognition, can watch to know if I am enjoying what it's doing and can adapt, etc... And what if all we're doing in Linux is being luddites?
Sure, sure, it can take a lot of processor and memory, but what else is your computer supposed to do while waiting for you to type on your word processor? Computer speed and memory has outdone the needs of the average user, and we all know that. (Except for games and so on, and they could temporarily turn off all the smart system background stuff.)
I don't want to be following in MS's footsteps forever. For those people and companies that have direct influence on Linux development, try not to overlook smart systems. The CMU Sphinx voice recognition system on Source Forge might be a good start.
Maybe it's not urgent, but I think we should not completely ignore such developments.
Everything is faith. Take a course in machine learning, and you'll learn very quickly that without bias, no learning can be accomplished except memorization, and since we can't memorize everything in the universe,...
All empirical evidence still keeps certain assumptions that are simply taken for granted.
If you look around at the world objectively, you'll see as many arguments for creation as for random happenstance.
In other circumstances, I may speak more specifically, but in this case I argue for any religion. God is very real and personal and up close for many people. He is not far away.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my deal. Yahoo! is a classic and a mainstay of the Internet, and porn is filthy and degrading. Sure, lots of people sell porn, but if Yahoo! gets a profit off of this nonsense, then that will send a clear message to anyone. This stuff is destructive to personal integrity and demeans human worth. And it should be pretty clear how much this does against true rights for women and so on. It also hurts family responsibility issues and damages children as a result, who will be the adults of tomorrow.
So I say we make a big uproar and boycott them. Send them lots of complaints. Make it cost them. I know many on Slashdot will dislike these comments, but there are people here too will agree with me.
- Tom
Linux moves fast because it does for the OS what the IBM PC platform did for the hardware. I don't mind if the masses continue to use Windows. Windows has to improve more because of Linux, too. It's a win-win situation for the masses all around, and with Linux/KDE/GNOME/ReiserFS/etc steady improvement (and the distros making it available it whatever fashion is best for their target audience), many newbie complaints will disappear with time.
Maybe I'm just optimistic, but I think it's a fair analysis. Competition almost always helps things out.
- Tom
Without first-hand experience, I'm not willing to automatically condemn. At the same time, I've got my own life. Unless I'm a judge in a legal case, which I don't ever intend to be, I wouldn't have a need to learn whether the anti-Scientology is true or false.
I just think we shouldn't take all the bashing on faith and spread it as if it were our own experience.
- Tom
I'm not too much of a guru of Hebrew or Greek, but I have read the Bible and studied various religions, Christian and otherwise. My willingness to accept other people to believe what they want stems from that a little. That's sort of what bothers me about all this Scientology bashing.
Anyway, if you want to continue the dialog, I can be reached at tjpalmerATtjpalmerDOTcom (with the usual anti-spam word replacements). I'll try not to be more than a few days delinquent in responding to questions.
- Tom
I appreciate the concern of dfenstrate. I'm going to go out on a limb here myself, though, as someone who fits the above description (minus the "whackjob" from my own point of view, though). I'll be short. Just to say that not everything that everyone says we believe is actually doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I could ascribe some really weird beliefs to any Christian, if I wanted to interpret the Bible however I pleased.
Oh, and, yes, we do believe in the Bible, and we share more in common with other Christians than most people realize. What differences exist are significant but at a simple level. For instance, "We believe that a man must be called of God, by prophecy, and by the laying on of hands by those who are in authority, to preach the Gospel and administer in the ordinances thereof." That makes a big difference.
For more information, try the link that dfenstrate gave to the articles of our faith.
- Tom
Or is it that I have the wrong opinion?
- Tom
- Tom
2. SOAP's actual value (besides XML) is limited...
3. HTTP provides the final value-add...
So I still don't understand what SOAP is for, and yes I have read/skimmed the spec. I think it provides some great suggestions at how to organize schemas for RPC purposes, but that's all. As for the envelope:
It's an envelope for an XML document (which can be used as an RPC call) that says "you should know these schemas in order to understand this message".
Doesn't XML already have ways to do this (via DTD specifications, processing instructions, and namespaces, some of which are used in SOAP anyway)? As for the destination parts of the envelope and so on, I think the handling protocol, such as HTTP, can do just fine. If envelopes in general are good to have at an XML level, I think it should be made as a specific protocol and not put together with RPC.
I just can't see why SOAP matters. Maybe I'm overlooking something. I haven't actually used it. Is SOAP needless complication or is it useful?
- Tom
Talk about religion.
- Tom
Anyway, the point is that of course using Windows is the obvious choice.
Then again, some people realize that a lack of choice is dangerous. From my personal experience with employers and from reading industry news and watching marketing drivel and nonsense hype, I personally (and I know many others feel the same) don't trust ANY large companies to have much power.
I saw another post on KDE and Pango. If it's not good enough, how will it get the best improvement if no one even tries to use it? A system needs users and people who care to get going.
Especially ground-up movements like open source and free software. The only reason Linux is as good as it is, is because people at the bottom cared until it got better, more money, and so on.
I don't want to sound to cliche but free software has a lot of analogies with traditional political revolutions. The difference is that it's safer, so it takes less commitment. Still, as with any revolution, the people on the bottom have to go to extra effort now to achieve a better future tomorrow. (Not to say that all political revolutions achieve such ends.)
Think about tomorrow instead of just today. Stop being lazy and the "I'll use Microsoft because it's easier" attitude if you want to have a better technological climate in the future.
Technology influences society more and more, and letting one company run everything is a very dangerous predicament to be in. So be willing to sacrifice and try to change something, even by just being one more person who doesn't give in to all of Microsoft's whims.
(Also, I'm a free market advocate, but the real world will not always produce the ideal conditions that simple economic models predict.)
- Tom
If Microsoft can deliver on a *cross-platform* solution.
If .NET handles the 30 odd languages they claim to support, with easy extendability for more.
See Microsoft's use of future tense and this list of JVM languages.
If they make .NET a standard, ...
What motivation does MS have to lose control of their market? I don't have links readily available, but all I have heard is of MS planning to take the C# specification to ISO, which has nothing to do with standardizing their whole platform. Even if they did, any takers on rewriting Win32? Ask the WINE people how easy it is.
If they can make sure .NET really is vendor neutral, so shipping the .NET foundation is not like shipping the JVM which is little more than a commercial Sun product.
And .NET won't be a commercial MS product. I have not seen MS even try to claim that anything they produce for .NET won't be owned by them. Read carefully.
Then HECK YEAH, I'll take an open, free, extendible, cross-platform platform any day, especially if it ships with millions of Windows machines...
Aha. Windows machines. That's right. .NET is supported on Windows machines. It should make doing Windows network development nicer, with a compact version in various devices acting like embedded Java. MS supports Windows. They make Windows. What motive do they have for changing that? When did they say they were changing that?
I think from a technical perspective the .NET platform...
Try reading the technical documents. Here's one on SOAP. Read it. It's not that exciting. It specifies that you can use normal XML Schemas with a few extra rules and an envelope that mimics HTTP functionality.
You can do little new with SOAP and .NET from a non-Windows computer that you couldn't do with normal HTTP and CGI. SOAP provides almost nothing on top of standard XML. There's nothing new under the sun.
If you want open and exciting, try Linux or FreeBSD. If you want cross-platform software, try something open like C, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, or anything else on the list. They also interoperate just fine. Unix had cross-language interoperation working in the 70s. It's called pipes, and it's at least faster than SOAP.
- Tom
GLib/Gtk+/GNOME's use of C is actually pretty amazing in my opinion (and yes, I've used C++, Java, Python, ... as well, so I'm not ignorant in these issues). It's quite a pretty language when used well.
- Tom
If I develop KDE-specific code, then it doesn't interoperate or look right in GNOME. If I write GNOME-specific code, then it doesn't interoperate or look right in KDE. Because of the war, it makes it hard for me as a developer to want to code for either. Understood?
Now, if I don't take advantage of the fancy features of either, how can users take advantage of them, either? Now, really, I hope that interoperability vapor we heard a while back goes somewhere. Meanwhile, major corporate backing of GNOME is a sudden shift that may woo application developers.
If coding/porting in KDE/Qt is so easy, why don't they just incorporate Bonobo and be done with it? Developers and users both win.
The other option would be for someone to develop an abstraction layer that could allow applications to be compiled to either KDE or GNOME.
- Tom
The problem is that I don't trust anyone's programming well enough right now to get anywhere near an active robot with a loaded gun. People think robots will suddenly overtake us in the evolutionary cycle, etc., etc... Well, they'll have to stop being stupid first. AI is really not that advanced yet.
People are still way way way way way smarter than machines.
- Tom
If it is available for instant access, please help me find what I'm doing wrong. I should be able to just start it up and set up a table. (I'm not root, BTW.) If the DBs aren't set up where any user can just go in, then this should be made easier.
- Tom
I think it would be a great step forward in OSs to be able to take an RDBMS for granted.
- Tom
Now with a slight change on the coding style to keep output more consistent (and in XML or something else instead of human-consumed HTML), the components could more easily be of general use.
Additionally, an extra port could be reserved for a local web server on each computer, and it could be used as a name server for components (looked up via standard URLs, eg., "http://localhost/spellchecker"), and viola, CGIs could be used as local components also.
I realize that OLE/Bonobo and so on are better for speedier components that need more constant interaction, but CGIs are easily the way to go for more coarse level interaction. As a proof of concept, just use the world wide web.
- Tom
What happens if in five to ten years, a Windows box can actually understand half the things I tell it with voice recognition, can watch to know if I am enjoying what it's doing and can adapt, etc... And what if all we're doing in Linux is being luddites?
Sure, sure, it can take a lot of processor and memory, but what else is your computer supposed to do while waiting for you to type on your word processor? Computer speed and memory has outdone the needs of the average user, and we all know that. (Except for games and so on, and they could temporarily turn off all the smart system background stuff.)
I don't want to be following in MS's footsteps forever. For those people and companies that have direct influence on Linux development, try not to overlook smart systems. The CMU Sphinx voice recognition system on Source Forge might be a good start.
Maybe it's not urgent, but I think we should not completely ignore such developments.
- Tom
- Tom
All empirical evidence still keeps certain assumptions that are simply taken for granted.
If you look around at the world objectively, you'll see as many arguments for creation as for random happenstance.
In other circumstances, I may speak more specifically, but in this case I argue for any religion. God is very real and personal and up close for many people. He is not far away.
- Tom