No disagreement here! I think it'd be foolish to believe in something for very long without some sort of evidence.
Having said that, I'll read between the lines a little here: you're implying that all religious people in the history of the world have had no evidence, correct? If so, are you certain that that is true? If so, how have you reached that certainty?
It's easy to set up straw man arguments based on the assumption that all people with some sort of belief in God are delusional, blindly following some pastor or something - that's a fairly common attitude on/. and elsewhere. I've personally spoken with literally hundreds of people on the topic of their beliefs and while it's certainly true that there *are* quite a few people out there who are probably delusional and are blindly following, there are also a *ton* who have had very real (to them at least) "religious" experiences of some form of another, and for them those experiences constitute the exact type of evidence you and I both believe should exist.
You of course don't have to believe what any of them believe, but at that same time I urge caution in assuming that billions of people have held beliefs with no evidence whatsoever.
Would that statement still stand if we were talking about a tiny invisible unicorn that lives under my fingernail? Would you be arrogant if you said there was a 0% chance of that statement being true?
Yes and yes, of course.
Especially in the context of a discussion about science and religion, I hope that anyone who considers themselves scientifically-minded leaves the door open for possibilities beyond the current understanding, no matter how remotely small the probability appears at the time. For one to cross over into the realm of making unconditional, definitive statements of absolutes shows either a misunderstanding of science and the scientific method or at least an abandonment of it.
You cannot simultaneously truly believe in the scientific method and assert that something is absolutely not possible. Skepticism makes for good scientists. Absolute close-mindedness does not.
That's cute, and I think it's fair to say that atheism is not a "religion" per se (as "religion" means all sorts of things), but I hope you'll at least agree that atheism *is* based on beliefs much in the same way that religion is based on beliefs. There's nothing wrong with that - to each his own - but atheistic vs "religious" is orthogonal to scientific vs not.
Lately after reading C.S.Lewis (his Christian writings), I have had this troubling thought: why after a couple of millenia or so, the vast majority of humanity is still believing in and worshiping a god that was invented by iron age people?
What if he wasn't invented by them? That would be a pretty straightforward explanation for the continued belief. I'm not asking you to believe, just pointing out that that is one explanation for it. There are multiple possible explanations, but if you consider yourself scientifically-minded you should at least include that in your list.
And yet, if we say that there's no possibility of such a creature existing we're are called "arrogant".
Yes, it's the assertion that there's a 0% possibility that makes such statements arrogant. In fact, it's unscientific to make such an assertion. To say you don't believe is fine. To say that you think the probability is very, even remotely low, is fine. But once you begin to assert it's impossible (which is what you do when you say there's "no possibility"), then you've crossed the line because neither science nor logic will support you in that. You not encountering sufficient evidence yet one way or another is not the same thing as proof of non-existence, so it's incorrect (and fairly arrogant) to claim otherwise.
We regret to inform you that Mormons stopped practicing polygamy in the late 1800s. Therefore, your humor is behind the times by over 100 years. Once a joke is more than a century out of date, it loses too much of its zing and backfires (cf. asking a Catholic, "how them Crusades goin'? Har har!") While not keeping up is somewhat of an inalienable right on the internet, we do ask that in the future you make sure that any outdated humor is still below the 100 year threshold.
Sincerely, - The Management
P.S. For your convenience, listed below are some newer-but-outdated memes/jokes to consider. While still behind the times, they are new enough so as to not trigger a warning from the system. Thanks!
Dancing baby! Will it blend? Bert is evil! The Tron guy O RLY? Numa Numa Don't Tase Me, bro! Rick Roll Star Wars kid
Very much agreed. Yes, good coders make mistakes, but it doesn't imply that code reviews are an effective way to find those mistakes. By the time code is ready for a review (such that asking people to review it isn't wasting their time), it's code that has been written, fairly well debugged, and *used*.
Honestly, the most efficient way to find bugs in code is to use the code. Nothing else that I know of comes close in terms of return on investment and in my experience code reviews, while good in principle, are pretty far down the efficiency scale. It's generally way more effective to tell your team, "hey, I just finished feature X. If you guys can collectively find 3 bugs before lunch, I'm buying!"
I agree with all of the arguments in favor of code reviews - at least in principle - and yet we never do them at my company for the exact reason you point out. I started a small company, hired a handful of excellent programmers, and we never do code reviews, and it *is* a cost/benefit thing. Yes, in theory we might uncover some bugs doing code reviews, but we just haven't found the cost of doing them worth it.
Based on experiences at previous companies, doing code reviews "right" takes a lot of work - you have to interrupt people from getting actual work done, and ask them to become familiar with a big chunk of code (because if it's too small a chunk of code, it's not worth the time, and if they don't become familiar enough with it to really grasp how it works intuitively, then at best they'll only find the trivial bugs that were already weeded out previously). Further, effective code reviews really need to be interactive and real-time, which means getting everybody's schedules coordinated and in the same room at the same time. Already the code review must provide some pretty amazing benefit to outweigh these costs.
Also, the modification pressure is *very* real - because we're investing all this time, people feel like they need to find something to comment on or fix, and so even though something might not be buggy there is feedback given to change it to improve the style or efficiency or whatever. All of those things are great, but if they aren't currently actual problems, then at best you're wasting time providing no net benefit, and at worst you're risking introducing new bugs by your refactoring.
Code reviews are one of those things that/can/ have benefits, but in practice we've found that the benefits generally don't outweigh the costs. The people advocating them generally overstate the benefits and/or understate the costs IMO. If people want to do them at their company, that's great, but us deciding not to do them is less about arrogance and more about pragmatism.
Yup - as an American visiting the UK, I found the roundabouts very easy to navigate because they were clearly marked, and some of them were very complex (5 or more roads feeding into one roundabout). I had more trouble just understanding the unfamiliar types of traffic signs in London, and that was just my own ignorance.:)
Banning free email services is dumb, but requiring an email address of some sort makes a lot of sense - it's a great unique identifier, you automatically establish a mechanism for password recovery and, if you don't abuse it, it gives you an out of band channel for contacting your users in the event of a major outage or some such event.
Please don't take this as being rude, but... are you a software developer? Doing what you ask isn't easy at all - it requires a ton of work. And then to on top of that support not only multiple operating systems, but really old versions of said operating systems is a huge, huge chunk of work.
Shouldn't be too tough. Just don't use api's like.net etc. If you write something in straight C or MAYBE c++ (or better, java and have it run on any platform) then it's usually pretty easy to get the thing working on many windows os's..
At the end of the day, it boils down to avoiding using newer features and improvements only because you're trying to support something really old. If the business doesn't demand that you do that (e.g. because of market share or support requirements or whatever), then it's perfectly valid to make the decision to drop support for old OS versions.
Please don't take this as being rude, but... are you a software developer? Doing what you ask isn't easy at all - it requires a ton of work. And then to on top of that support not only multiple operating systems, but really old versions of said operating systems is a huge, huge chunk of work.
No it isn't. The point is not to support any operating systems, but to support an API.
Your're misunderstanding I think - supporting an API has nothing to do with whether or not Apple is supporting Windows XP. What Apple is saying is that they wrote a client for iCloud that runs on Windows. It's a program, a piece of software. That program has to be written to work on specific versions of specific operating systems. They have chosen to include Windows in the list of operating systems they support. Of the versions of Windows they have chosen to support, XP is not one of them. Whether or not they provide an API for *other* people to write software for is completely independent of this.
I don't think anybody said that the whole point of "the cloud" is to be independent of specific desktop software - that's something you added.
It's the best definition of "the cloud" that I've come across so far. Otherwise, what kind of meaning does that word have, beyond "something on the internet"?
Even if it is the best definition (and I'm not saying it is), it doesn't really make sense to call out a company for not adhering to your definition of something, right?:)
As far as good definitions of 'cloud', it's definitely reached buzzword status, but there are broader definitions than yours that are just as valid if not more so. The "cloud" can refer to off-site, widely-available, redundant, reliable storage or effectively limitless, on-demand computing. It can be supremely valuable even if it does depend on specific software to interact with it. In fact, the less you have specific software to interact with it, the less useful it becomes - it becomes dumbed down remote storage (which isn't bad, don't get me wrong, it's just far less than what Apple is trying to do).
Your question about an open API is beside the point - some bit of software running on the user's computer has to call the APIs, and that bit of software has to be written for the operating system it's running on,
But anyone can do that. At least, if it's open enough to not be completely useless.
Right, but *somebody* has to do it, and that's my point. Complaining that Apple isn't doing it is just complaining that they aren't that somebody, but it doesn't necessarily preclude somebody else from doing it.
Well, it doesn't force anybody to do anything. It's actually more of an exchange - *if* you want latest features (and, granted, bug fixes and the like), *then* you have to be willing to move forward.
I'm surprised more software developers aren't chiming in here because it is really, really hard to support older and older versions of stuff/and/ still try to keep adding new features. You can end up spending very large percentages of your time not really innovating at all, just trying to work around old bugs that have long since been fixed, or in aging hardware that just really isn't up to snuff anymore. That stuff kills innovation - from a developer's perspective, it's just not fun. It sucks your creativity.
People want to have their cake and eat it too, but really there's a tradeoff - if you want a device and a feature set then buy it and stick with it. If you want to be always up to date, latest fixes and latest features, then be prepared for some instability and also for change. If you want to ride the wave of innovation and always get all the latest bells and whistles, then you have to keep buying the latest and greatest hardware because the hardware and the software are interconnected - newer hardware enables more bells and whistles in the software.
The fact that there are *any* upgrades at all by any device vendor is remarkable to me. I think we're actually pretty spoiled. Back in the olden days you'd buy an appliance or a device and that was it - it never changed. If it had quirks, that was part of what you got. As newer features came out, they were available only in the newer models of the device or appliance. Nowadays you can buy e.g. a phone or a TV and even after you buy it, the manufacturer can come along and add new value and fix problems. That's incredible! But it's also incredible how much complaining people do when this value adding doesn't happen indefinitely, especially in the realm of computers where the life spans are traditionally very short.
*Is* it a bad decision on their part? Have you done some sort of cost vs benefits analysis? There are hard costs associated with developing, testing, and supporting each version of each OS.
It doesn't take a ton of imagination to come up with scenarios where it makes sense to drop XP support. Some factors they might take into consideration:
- How much of their focus is on Mac users
- How much of their Windows user base will be in corporate envrionments
- The creator of XP is aggressively trying to stop support for XP (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycle)
- The creator of XP has already come up with 2 major versions after it (Vista and 7), and is starting to leak info on a third (Windows 8)
- No matter how large the XP user base is now, it is in decline and probably in a rapid decline
- Supporting XP means not being able to use newer features and APIs in Vista or 7
- Supporting XP means dealing with bugs that have been fixed in newer versions of Windows
- Supporting XP means significantly more testing
- Supporting XP means higher support costs
I don't think supporting XP is necessarily a no-brainer like you imply. I'm no Apple fanboy, but I think they deserve at least a little credit: they are releasing a new service/product that is obviously tightly integrated with their own operating system and family of products, but they have gone ahead and opted to support not only their competitor's operating system, but the previous major release of it as well, so do they really deserve that much flak for not supporting an old version of their competitor's OS?
Please don't take this as being rude, but... are you a software developer? Doing what you ask isn't easy at all - it requires a ton of work. And then to on top of that support not only multiple operating systems, but really old versions of said operating systems is a huge, huge chunk of work. And then you have to test it and support it as well. Ditching support for a 10 year old version of an OS is hardly news.
I don't think anybody said that the whole point of "the cloud" is to be independent of specific desktop software - that's something you added.
Your question about an open API is beside the point - some bit of software running on the user's computer has to call the APIs, and that bit of software has to be written for the operating system it's running on, and some versions of that operating system will be deemed too old to support.
As for what you can do in a browser and its sandboxed environment, there probably are some iCloud things that could be made to work, but those things will be a subset of a much larger set of things iCloud (or something simular) supports.
One of the things I love about Python is that whitespace is significant, and for the very reason that the other poster mentioned - even in languages where you do have block delimiters, it's pretty much universally accepted that "good" style dictates that you use indentation as well - indentation expresses block structure in C, Java, etc., etc. It just makes code more readable. In any open source project or any professional setting it's the same - if you write code that isn't well-formatted (with your blocks properly indented), the code is considered bad, ugly, unprofessional.
Given that this is the case - that indenting your code is expected and good form, what purpose do the curly braces in C actually serve? They may add to readability perhaps (though in terms of readability they are much less important than the indentation itself), but in reality they exist for the parser, for the tool, and not so much for the humans reading and writing the source code. To me, this is the first indication that something is less than ideal - you're required to do something all over the place in your source code but it's not primarily for your benefit, but for the benefit of the tool you're using. Maybe this doesn't bother you, but I hope you at least appreciate in principle why it would bother some people.
The second and related problem here is that there exists the potential for errors: when a human scanning the code visually, the whitespace is a stronger indicator of the structure of the program than the curly braces are, but for the parser, it's irrelevant, only the braces matter. That's why you can get errors like:
if (i < 5);
i++;
or
if (i < 5)
i++;
j++;
These are silly examples, and yet they are ones I've encountered in real code (both mine and other's). I don't know how common they are, but they sure have driven me crazy, and they demonstrate the point I'm trying to make. What I find even more telling is how some companies with coding standards deal with it: they mandate that/all/ blocks have the curlies. It's not bad per se, but again it's just mandating that things be done a certain way, not for the benefit of the folks doing the coding, but for the benefit of the tool.
Anyway, that's why I like Python: there is never ever a disconnect between my intent and the actual block structure of the program - the human and the tool are/always/ on the same page.
Two anecdotes you are free to ignore:
- All the people I've ever encountered who have persisted in objecting to Python's use of whitespace have been people who haven't actually used Python very much. Similarly, all the people I've ever encountered who have used Python for any program of substantial size, including those who initially objected to it, pretty quickly stop considering it an issue, and nearly all of them eventually come to admit that they really like it. I'm not saying this is a universal experience - but it's been interesting to observe.
- The theoretical problems that can arise (mixing editors, copying and pasting code) don't seem to happen very much in practice. I've used Python for well over a decade and off the top of my head can't think of *any* cases where it's happened to me. I'm assuming it has happened at some point, just because it's unlikely for it to never have occurred, and yet I honestly can't think of any time it actually/has/ occurred. Maybe I'm just extraordinarily lucky, or maybe it's just not something that occurs that often in practice.
I do appreciate that some people object to the significant whitespace approach - some people have real concerns, others it just rubs them the wrong way. To them I'd say (1) don't knock it until you've really tried it and (2) at least recognize that the curly braces are you serving the tool, and not the tool serving you, since you undoubtedly also use indentation to express block structure of your program.
I don't think that word means what you think it means. (I actually did find out what it meant before my original response.:) )
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evidence
I think you're latching on to one of several meanings of the word and asserting that all the others aren't correct.
But 'evidence to them' is most definitely sensical - that's why we peer review scientific work, for example. One guy observes something in his lab that is evidence of a chemical reaction that was previously thought not possible. Based on this he begins to have a pretty strong conviction that some previous ways of thinking about things are wrong. He's experienced it and observed it, and what he's experienced is evidence to him that our present thinking is wrong - what he experiences in his labs forms the grounds for his beliefs. But people don't just rewrite textbooks because of it. No, instead other people attempt to recreate the experiments so that they too can witness the evidence. After awhile, enough people have direct experience with the phenomenon that it becomes generally accepted as true - i.e. enough people in the scientific community have directly experienced the evidence such that it's assumed a safe thing to believe in, so everybody else doesn't need to directly reproduce the results - instead they use as their evidence (their grounds for belief) the witness of lots of other scientists.
It's a great system, really, and it's what allows us to build on others' knowledge and experience, but at any time a scientist can choose to not rely on the word of other scientists and go reproduce the original experiment themselves and witness, first hand, the empirical evidence.
Key points here are: (1) evidence is what leads people to believe things, (2) evidence experienced by one person is tested by others instead of just accepted outright (3) at times we rely on directly-experienced evidence and other times we take a shortcut and rely on other people's experiences (i.e. our ground for believe boils down to "lots of other people believe this", and (4) if we doubt that second-hand experience, we often have the option of pursuing direct, first-hand evidence - it just takes more time and effort.
The above principles should apply whether we're talking about scientific discovery or religious topics - i.e. it'd be foolish to believe either solely because somebody said that's the way something is. Either way there needs to be evidence of some sort.
No, what I describe is 'evidence'. Seriously, go look it up. For example:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evidence
'Evidence' can mean proof, it can also mean grounds for belief.
My use of the word evidence is clearly not incorrect based on the dictionary definition; I think we're splitting hairs here though.:)
That's lumping convincing yourself and convincing others into the same bucket. If a person experiences something that affects them (even something non-religious), it's evidence to them, regardless of whether or not they can share it with others or use it to prove something to someone else.
Evidence is just something that leads you to a conviction about something, whether or not you can share it with someone else doesn't make it not evidence. If I'm walking in the woods and see a new species of bird, that's evidence that that bird exists. The fact that I didn't have a camera with me and didn't capture it doesn't mean my sighting of it wasn't evidence. IOW the fact that you haven't yet had the same experience is completely independent of what I experienced.
1. If you believe in god, why would the existence of aliens prove that god doesn't exist?
Read Genesis. God created the heavens, the Earth, Man and assorted other critters and varmints. God creating aliens is never mentioned.
So? In my religion (Mormonism) we believe that God created (and still creates) worlds without end, with all kinds of variety. Just because the Bible doesn't mention it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist or didn't happen (which should go without saying, but I guess not).
And the Bible is infallible
Pfft.. you're creating a strawman argument. Many religious folk recognize that the Bible is a compilation of prophetic writings that has been passed down thousands of years and translated many times, and is therefore not infallible. It's a miracle that it's in as good shape as it is, but it's not a perfect nor a complete record.
so UFOs with an alien crew would put theologists in a bit of a bind.
Not in the least.
And in the part about Noah's Ark, it is never mentioned that Noah rounded up two aliens.
What?
2. Why would you deny evidence in front of you?
Unfortunately, religion is not about evidence, it's about faith
Not quite - faith, to have any strength, is based on some amount of evidence, because true faith leads to action of some sort (such as living a certain way). Mere belief might have no foundation, but the faith that motivates people to act has to be based on something stronger. In some cases it is based on evidence witnessed through one of the normal physical senses (e.g. somebody sees a miracle, and that helps build their faith), but the strongest evidence comes through spiritual impressions. If you've experienced this before, you know that this produces a witness that can be much stronger than a conviction gained through other senses.
. Which is why religion has caused humanity so much suffering over the milleniums.
Nah, that's like saying TV or money or politics are evil - they aren't, they're inherently neither good nor bad, but are just tools that can be used in good or bad ways. The fact that various people throughout the ages have used religion as a vehicle to do bad things doesn't mean that religion caused it. Just like TV and money and politics, a lot of good has come from religion as well. Take, for example, any recent natural disaster, and usually the first relief organizations on the scene have been religious in nature - and they haven't been there to proselyte or to ask for donations. While governments mobilize, these organizations are already there, just helping out.
Slashdot Mirror
No disagreement here! I think it'd be foolish to believe in something for very long without some sort of evidence.
Having said that, I'll read between the lines a little here: you're implying that all religious people in the history of the world have had no evidence, correct? If so, are you certain that that is true? If so, how have you reached that certainty?
It's easy to set up straw man arguments based on the assumption that all people with some sort of belief in God are delusional, blindly following some pastor or something - that's a fairly common attitude on /. and elsewhere. I've personally spoken with literally hundreds of people on the topic of their beliefs and while it's certainly true that there *are* quite a few people out there who are probably delusional and are blindly following, there are also a *ton* who have had very real (to them at least) "religious" experiences of some form of another, and for them those experiences constitute the exact type of evidence you and I both believe should exist.
You of course don't have to believe what any of them believe, but at that same time I urge caution in assuming that billions of people have held beliefs with no evidence whatsoever.
Would that statement still stand if we were talking about a tiny invisible unicorn that lives under my fingernail? Would you be arrogant if you said there was a 0% chance of that statement being true?
Yes and yes, of course.
Especially in the context of a discussion about science and religion, I hope that anyone who considers themselves scientifically-minded leaves the door open for possibilities beyond the current understanding, no matter how remotely small the probability appears at the time. For one to cross over into the realm of making unconditional, definitive statements of absolutes shows either a misunderstanding of science and the scientific method or at least an abandonment of it.
You cannot simultaneously truly believe in the scientific method and assert that something is absolutely not possible. Skepticism makes for good scientists. Absolute close-mindedness does not.
That's cute, and I think it's fair to say that atheism is not a "religion" per se (as "religion" means all sorts of things), but I hope you'll at least agree that atheism *is* based on beliefs much in the same way that religion is based on beliefs. There's nothing wrong with that - to each his own - but atheistic vs "religious" is orthogonal to scientific vs not.
Lately after reading C.S.Lewis (his Christian writings), I have had this troubling thought: why after a couple of millenia or so, the vast majority of humanity is still believing in and worshiping a god that was invented by iron age people?
What if he wasn't invented by them? That would be a pretty straightforward explanation for the continued belief. I'm not asking you to believe, just pointing out that that is one explanation for it. There are multiple possible explanations, but if you consider yourself scientifically-minded you should at least include that in your list.
And yet, if we say that there's no possibility of such a creature existing we're are called "arrogant".
Yes, it's the assertion that there's a 0% possibility that makes such statements arrogant. In fact, it's unscientific to make such an assertion. To say you don't believe is fine. To say that you think the probability is very, even remotely low, is fine. But once you begin to assert it's impossible (which is what you do when you say there's "no possibility"), then you've crossed the line because neither science nor logic will support you in that. You not encountering sufficient evidence yet one way or another is not the same thing as proof of non-existence, so it's incorrect (and fairly arrogant) to claim otherwise.
Dear user 894406,
We regret to inform you that Mormons stopped practicing polygamy in the late 1800s. Therefore, your humor is behind the times by over 100 years. Once a joke is more than a century out of date, it loses too much of its zing and backfires (cf. asking a Catholic, "how them Crusades goin'? Har har!") While not keeping up is somewhat of an inalienable right on the internet, we do ask that in the future you make sure that any outdated humor is still below the 100 year threshold.
Sincerely,
- The Management
P.S. For your convenience, listed below are some newer-but-outdated memes/jokes to consider. While still behind the times, they are new enough so as to not trigger a warning from the system. Thanks!
Dancing baby!
Will it blend?
Bert is evil!
The Tron guy
O RLY?
Numa Numa
Don't Tase Me, bro!
Rick Roll
Star Wars kid
Very much agreed. Yes, good coders make mistakes, but it doesn't imply that code reviews are an effective way to find those mistakes. By the time code is ready for a review (such that asking people to review it isn't wasting their time), it's code that has been written, fairly well debugged, and *used*.
Honestly, the most efficient way to find bugs in code is to use the code. Nothing else that I know of comes close in terms of return on investment and in my experience code reviews, while good in principle, are pretty far down the efficiency scale. It's generally way more effective to tell your team, "hey, I just finished feature X. If you guys can collectively find 3 bugs before lunch, I'm buying!"
I agree with all of the arguments in favor of code reviews - at least in principle - and yet we never do them at my company for the exact reason you point out. I started a small company, hired a handful of excellent programmers, and we never do code reviews, and it *is* a cost/benefit thing. Yes, in theory we might uncover some bugs doing code reviews, but we just haven't found the cost of doing them worth it.
Based on experiences at previous companies, doing code reviews "right" takes a lot of work - you have to interrupt people from getting actual work done, and ask them to become familiar with a big chunk of code (because if it's too small a chunk of code, it's not worth the time, and if they don't become familiar enough with it to really grasp how it works intuitively, then at best they'll only find the trivial bugs that were already weeded out previously). Further, effective code reviews really need to be interactive and real-time, which means getting everybody's schedules coordinated and in the same room at the same time. Already the code review must provide some pretty amazing benefit to outweigh these costs.
Also, the modification pressure is *very* real - because we're investing all this time, people feel like they need to find something to comment on or fix, and so even though something might not be buggy there is feedback given to change it to improve the style or efficiency or whatever. All of those things are great, but if they aren't currently actual problems, then at best you're wasting time providing no net benefit, and at worst you're risking introducing new bugs by your refactoring.
Code reviews are one of those things that /can/ have benefits, but in practice we've found that the benefits generally don't outweigh the costs. The people advocating them generally overstate the benefits and/or understate the costs IMO. If people want to do them at their company, that's great, but us deciding not to do them is less about arrogance and more about pragmatism.
Yup - as an American visiting the UK, I found the roundabouts very easy to navigate because they were clearly marked, and some of them were very complex (5 or more roads feeding into one roundabout). I had more trouble just understanding the unfamiliar types of traffic signs in London, and that was just my own ignorance. :)
Banning free email services is dumb, but requiring an email address of some sort makes a lot of sense - it's a great unique identifier, you automatically establish a mechanism for password recovery and, if you don't abuse it, it gives you an out of band channel for contacting your users in the event of a major outage or some such event.
Please don't take this as being rude, but... are you a software developer? Doing what you ask isn't easy at all - it requires a ton of work. And then to on top of that support not only multiple operating systems, but really old versions of said operating systems is a huge, huge chunk of work.
Shouldn't be too tough. Just don't use api's like .net etc. If you write something in straight C or MAYBE c++ (or better, java and have it run on any platform) then it's usually pretty easy to get the thing working on many windows os's. .
At the end of the day, it boils down to avoiding using newer features and improvements only because you're trying to support something really old. If the business doesn't demand that you do that (e.g. because of market share or support requirements or whatever), then it's perfectly valid to make the decision to drop support for old OS versions.
Please don't take this as being rude, but... are you a software developer? Doing what you ask isn't easy at all - it requires a ton of work. And then to on top of that support not only multiple operating systems, but really old versions of said operating systems is a huge, huge chunk of work.
No it isn't. The point is not to support any operating systems, but to support an API.
Your're misunderstanding I think - supporting an API has nothing to do with whether or not Apple is supporting Windows XP. What Apple is saying is that they wrote a client for iCloud that runs on Windows. It's a program, a piece of software. That program has to be written to work on specific versions of specific operating systems. They have chosen to include Windows in the list of operating systems they support. Of the versions of Windows they have chosen to support, XP is not one of them. Whether or not they provide an API for *other* people to write software for is completely independent of this.
I don't think anybody said that the whole point of "the cloud" is to be independent of specific desktop software - that's something you added.
It's the best definition of "the cloud" that I've come across so far. Otherwise, what kind of meaning does that word have, beyond "something on the internet"?
Even if it is the best definition (and I'm not saying it is), it doesn't really make sense to call out a company for not adhering to your definition of something, right? :)
As far as good definitions of 'cloud', it's definitely reached buzzword status, but there are broader definitions than yours that are just as valid if not more so. The "cloud" can refer to off-site, widely-available, redundant, reliable storage or effectively limitless, on-demand computing. It can be supremely valuable even if it does depend on specific software to interact with it. In fact, the less you have specific software to interact with it, the less useful it becomes - it becomes dumbed down remote storage (which isn't bad, don't get me wrong, it's just far less than what Apple is trying to do).
Your question about an open API is beside the point - some bit of software running on the user's computer has to call the APIs, and that bit of software has to be written for the operating system it's running on,
But anyone can do that. At least, if it's open enough to not be completely useless.
Right, but *somebody* has to do it, and that's my point. Complaining that Apple isn't doing it is just complaining that they aren't that somebody, but it doesn't necessarily preclude somebody else from doing it.
Well, it doesn't force anybody to do anything. It's actually more of an exchange - *if* you want latest features (and, granted, bug fixes and the like), *then* you have to be willing to move forward.
I'm surprised more software developers aren't chiming in here because it is really, really hard to support older and older versions of stuff /and/ still try to keep adding new features. You can end up spending very large percentages of your time not really innovating at all, just trying to work around old bugs that have long since been fixed, or in aging hardware that just really isn't up to snuff anymore. That stuff kills innovation - from a developer's perspective, it's just not fun. It sucks your creativity.
People want to have their cake and eat it too, but really there's a tradeoff - if you want a device and a feature set then buy it and stick with it. If you want to be always up to date, latest fixes and latest features, then be prepared for some instability and also for change. If you want to ride the wave of innovation and always get all the latest bells and whistles, then you have to keep buying the latest and greatest hardware because the hardware and the software are interconnected - newer hardware enables more bells and whistles in the software.
The fact that there are *any* upgrades at all by any device vendor is remarkable to me. I think we're actually pretty spoiled. Back in the olden days you'd buy an appliance or a device and that was it - it never changed. If it had quirks, that was part of what you got. As newer features came out, they were available only in the newer models of the device or appliance. Nowadays you can buy e.g. a phone or a TV and even after you buy it, the manufacturer can come along and add new value and fix problems. That's incredible! But it's also incredible how much complaining people do when this value adding doesn't happen indefinitely, especially in the realm of computers where the life spans are traditionally very short.
*Is* it a bad decision on their part? Have you done some sort of cost vs benefits analysis? There are hard costs associated with developing, testing, and supporting each version of each OS.
It doesn't take a ton of imagination to come up with scenarios where it makes sense to drop XP support. Some factors they might take into consideration:
- How much of their focus is on Mac users
- How much of their Windows user base will be in corporate envrionments
- The creator of XP is aggressively trying to stop support for XP (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycle)
- The creator of XP has already come up with 2 major versions after it (Vista and 7), and is starting to leak info on a third (Windows 8)
- No matter how large the XP user base is now, it is in decline and probably in a rapid decline
- Supporting XP means not being able to use newer features and APIs in Vista or 7
- Supporting XP means dealing with bugs that have been fixed in newer versions of Windows
- Supporting XP means significantly more testing
- Supporting XP means higher support costs
I don't think supporting XP is necessarily a no-brainer like you imply. I'm no Apple fanboy, but I think they deserve at least a little credit: they are releasing a new service/product that is obviously tightly integrated with their own operating system and family of products, but they have gone ahead and opted to support not only their competitor's operating system, but the previous major release of it as well, so do they really deserve that much flak for not supporting an old version of their competitor's OS?
Please don't take this as being rude, but... are you a software developer? Doing what you ask isn't easy at all - it requires a ton of work. And then to on top of that support not only multiple operating systems, but really old versions of said operating systems is a huge, huge chunk of work. And then you have to test it and support it as well. Ditching support for a 10 year old version of an OS is hardly news.
I don't think anybody said that the whole point of "the cloud" is to be independent of specific desktop software - that's something you added.
Your question about an open API is beside the point - some bit of software running on the user's computer has to call the APIs, and that bit of software has to be written for the operating system it's running on, and some versions of that operating system will be deemed too old to support.
As for what you can do in a browser and its sandboxed environment, there probably are some iCloud things that could be made to work, but those things will be a subset of a much larger set of things iCloud (or something simular) supports.
It's software and that's how it works.
One of the things I love about Python is that whitespace is significant, and for the very reason that the other poster mentioned - even in languages where you do have block delimiters, it's pretty much universally accepted that "good" style dictates that you use indentation as well - indentation expresses block structure in C, Java, etc., etc. It just makes code more readable. In any open source project or any professional setting it's the same - if you write code that isn't well-formatted (with your blocks properly indented), the code is considered bad, ugly, unprofessional.
Given that this is the case - that indenting your code is expected and good form, what purpose do the curly braces in C actually serve? They may add to readability perhaps (though in terms of readability they are much less important than the indentation itself), but in reality they exist for the parser, for the tool, and not so much for the humans reading and writing the source code. To me, this is the first indication that something is less than ideal - you're required to do something all over the place in your source code but it's not primarily for your benefit, but for the benefit of the tool you're using. Maybe this doesn't bother you, but I hope you at least appreciate in principle why it would bother some people.
The second and related problem here is that there exists the potential for errors: when a human scanning the code visually, the whitespace is a stronger indicator of the structure of the program than the curly braces are, but for the parser, it's irrelevant, only the braces matter. That's why you can get errors like:
if (i < 5);
i++;
or
if (i < 5)
i++;
j++;
These are silly examples, and yet they are ones I've encountered in real code (both mine and other's). I don't know how common they are, but they sure have driven me crazy, and they demonstrate the point I'm trying to make. What I find even more telling is how some companies with coding standards deal with it: they mandate that /all/ blocks have the curlies. It's not bad per se, but again it's just mandating that things be done a certain way, not for the benefit of the folks doing the coding, but for the benefit of the tool.
Anyway, that's why I like Python: there is never ever a disconnect between my intent and the actual block structure of the program - the human and the tool are /always/ on the same page.
Two anecdotes you are free to ignore:
- All the people I've ever encountered who have persisted in objecting to Python's use of whitespace have been people who haven't actually used Python very much. Similarly, all the people I've ever encountered who have used Python for any program of substantial size, including those who initially objected to it, pretty quickly stop considering it an issue, and nearly all of them eventually come to admit that they really like it. I'm not saying this is a universal experience - but it's been interesting to observe.
- The theoretical problems that can arise (mixing editors, copying and pasting code) don't seem to happen very much in practice. I've used Python for well over a decade and off the top of my head can't think of *any* cases where it's happened to me. I'm assuming it has happened at some point, just because it's unlikely for it to never have occurred, and yet I honestly can't think of any time it actually /has/ occurred. Maybe I'm just extraordinarily lucky, or maybe it's just not something that occurs that often in practice.
I do appreciate that some people object to the significant whitespace approach - some people have real concerns, others it just rubs them the wrong way. To them I'd say (1) don't knock it until you've really tried it and (2) at least recognize that the curly braces are you serving the tool, and not the tool serving you, since you undoubtedly also use indentation to express block structure of your program.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evidence
I think you're latching on to one of several meanings of the word and asserting that all the others aren't correct.
But 'evidence to them' is most definitely sensical - that's why we peer review scientific work, for example. One guy observes something in his lab that is evidence of a chemical reaction that was previously thought not possible. Based on this he begins to have a pretty strong conviction that some previous ways of thinking about things are wrong. He's experienced it and observed it, and what he's experienced is evidence to him that our present thinking is wrong - what he experiences in his labs forms the grounds for his beliefs. But people don't just rewrite textbooks because of it. No, instead other people attempt to recreate the experiments so that they too can witness the evidence. After awhile, enough people have direct experience with the phenomenon that it becomes generally accepted as true - i.e. enough people in the scientific community have directly experienced the evidence such that it's assumed a safe thing to believe in, so everybody else doesn't need to directly reproduce the results - instead they use as their evidence (their grounds for belief) the witness of lots of other scientists.
It's a great system, really, and it's what allows us to build on others' knowledge and experience, but at any time a scientist can choose to not rely on the word of other scientists and go reproduce the original experiment themselves and witness, first hand, the empirical evidence.
Key points here are: (1) evidence is what leads people to believe things, (2) evidence experienced by one person is tested by others instead of just accepted outright (3) at times we rely on directly-experienced evidence and other times we take a shortcut and rely on other people's experiences (i.e. our ground for believe boils down to "lots of other people believe this", and (4) if we doubt that second-hand experience, we often have the option of pursuing direct, first-hand evidence - it just takes more time and effort.
The above principles should apply whether we're talking about scientific discovery or religious topics - i.e. it'd be foolish to believe either solely because somebody said that's the way something is. Either way there needs to be evidence of some sort.
No, what I describe is 'evidence'. Seriously, go look it up. For example: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evidence 'Evidence' can mean proof, it can also mean grounds for belief. My use of the word evidence is clearly not incorrect based on the dictionary definition; I think we're splitting hairs here though. :)
That's lumping convincing yourself and convincing others into the same bucket. If a person experiences something that affects them (even something non-religious), it's evidence to them, regardless of whether or not they can share it with others or use it to prove something to someone else. Evidence is just something that leads you to a conviction about something, whether or not you can share it with someone else doesn't make it not evidence. If I'm walking in the woods and see a new species of bird, that's evidence that that bird exists. The fact that I didn't have a camera with me and didn't capture it doesn't mean my sighting of it wasn't evidence. IOW the fact that you haven't yet had the same experience is completely independent of what I experienced.
1. If you believe in god, why would the existence of aliens prove that god doesn't exist?
Read Genesis. God created the heavens, the Earth, Man and assorted other critters and varmints. God creating aliens is never mentioned.
So? In my religion (Mormonism) we believe that God created (and still creates) worlds without end, with all kinds of variety. Just because the Bible doesn't mention it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist or didn't happen (which should go without saying, but I guess not).
And the Bible is infallible
Pfft.. you're creating a strawman argument. Many religious folk recognize that the Bible is a compilation of prophetic writings that has been passed down thousands of years and translated many times, and is therefore not infallible. It's a miracle that it's in as good shape as it is, but it's not a perfect nor a complete record.
so UFOs with an alien crew would put theologists in a bit of a bind.
Not in the least.
And in the part about Noah's Ark, it is never mentioned that Noah rounded up two aliens.
What?
2. Why would you deny evidence in front of you?
Unfortunately, religion is not about evidence, it's about faith
Not quite - faith, to have any strength, is based on some amount of evidence, because true faith leads to action of some sort (such as living a certain way). Mere belief might have no foundation, but the faith that motivates people to act has to be based on something stronger. In some cases it is based on evidence witnessed through one of the normal physical senses (e.g. somebody sees a miracle, and that helps build their faith), but the strongest evidence comes through spiritual impressions. If you've experienced this before, you know that this produces a witness that can be much stronger than a conviction gained through other senses.
. Which is why religion has caused humanity so much suffering over the milleniums.
Nah, that's like saying TV or money or politics are evil - they aren't, they're inherently neither good nor bad, but are just tools that can be used in good or bad ways. The fact that various people throughout the ages have used religion as a vehicle to do bad things doesn't mean that religion caused it. Just like TV and money and politics, a lot of good has come from religion as well. Take, for example, any recent natural disaster, and usually the first relief organizations on the scene have been religious in nature - and they haven't been there to proselyte or to ask for donations. While governments mobilize, these organizations are already there, just helping out.