Of course there were plenty of horrible things happening. I never claimed otherwise. But this, specifically, was government action, taken by a judicial system, to impose morality -- it led to the very laws passed to impose morality being used to silence dissenters.
So, yes, there have been plenty of times in history where the imposition of morality led to abuses of power and the decline of liberty. And that was the question under consideration.
Lame.
Sir, I applaud your clear ability for oration and your obvious commitment to acceptable discourse.
Oy. Look. It works. I run businesses. Not "interface appreciation retreats." Functionality is what I'm looking for. An employee of mine comes to me whining about interface appearances, or that the poor baby had to reach for a menu in a different place than usual
Ah, so you're one of those ass-hats that expects every employee, regardless of expertise or experience, to instantly adapt to completely new tools without even a modicum of training.
Either that, or you've missed my point entirely. If you're already asking your staff to learn a new interface (the OS-X one, instead of Windows they're used to, which is what the OP was about), you're just shooting yourself in the foot by trying to also train them to use a new office suite which happens to have a completely different interface system. Most users will be extremely confused.
You've obviously never done any software training or curriculum design, have you?
If I give them a perfectly good hammer, but it is pink, I still expect them to drive the nail, even if they don't like pink. In this case, you gave them a Mac and asked them to use decidedly un-Maclike software. That's like giving someone a perfectly good Allen wrench and expecting them to drive Torx bolts with it. Yeah, it will work, but it'll be really frustrating and lead to otherwise excellent employees quitting.
the Patent Office guys will just paint him as an idealist in the academic world and ignore him. Remember, if patent reform ever happens, a lot of pissed off government employees, including managers, will lose their jobs because we'll need fewer of them and they will do everything they can to prevent that day from happening. Surely you all understand the idea of self-preservation.
Despite your cynical yet accurate view of the situation at the Patent Office, I don't think anyone is seriously considering getting the Patent Office itself to change its mind on software patents. I think most people have already come to the conclusion that patent reform has to come through a combination of legislation and court action.
Yes, Congress will ask the Patent Office for its opinion; no, it won't matter much in the face of significant lobbying pressure.
The single largest resistance to patent reform are the large, monied, and legislatively-active corporations that stand to lose from patent reform. That is, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and so on. Software patent reform is only likely to occur if large, monied organizations start to lobby for it. This happens to some extent, in the form of PubPat and the FSF (among others), but until players with size and funding to challenge the Big 7 (Google comes to mind) choose to enter the fray, it's going to be slow going.
Show me a single moment in history when "curbing rights" started with imposing morality?
Just one? Ok, then: how about the burning of witches in Europe and the British Empire? That all started with laws making it a capital offense to perform "witchcraft", which was basically defined as practicing pagan rites. See, such rites were deemed "immoral" by the Church and government, partly because many were overtly sexual -- the pagan philosophy ties sexuality to health and bounty (harvest, etc.).
All the Church wanted to do impose their idea of morality on the pagan peoples. Result? Anyone who spoke out against the Church was accused and convicted of witchcraft. Most were merely threatened and/or tortured into confession, many were burned alive.
And that, as you asked, is just a single moment in history when a particular right (the right to speak freely, in this case) was curbed by the imposition of morality. There are plenty of other examples.
You can slap Openoffice on there with zero trouble and zero cost
I beg to differ, sir.
I'm a huge fan of OpenOffice; I use it on my Win32 box at work (even though I have the full MS Office suite), and I use it on every one of the 3 Linux boxes I do various tasks with. I refuse to use it on the Mac, because The OS-X port of OpenOffice runs under X11. This means:
Not every little thing works. I understand the font and printing problems have been corrected, but I've still had some little but really annoying thing break with every release I've tried.
The interface is not the same as the rest of the Mac. I don't particularly favor one style of interface or another, but having interfaces be significantly different between two apps on the same machine is maddening.
I do keep OpenOffice installed -- mostly to work with ODF documents. But, in an enterprise environments, it's hard enough to re-train Windows/MS-Office users to use OpenOffice on Windows. I can't imagine trying to train them to use a Mac, and then hand them an application that breaks all of the new interface rules. Ucky.
The NeoOffice project that ports OpenOffice to a native OS-X interface has promise, but the current edition of it is just too damned slow to be of use to the enterprise.
One of the strong arguments for buying Macs in the enterprise is that MS-Office runs just fine on them, and I'd highly recommend that enterprises moving to Mac stick with MS-Office for now. After all, they have to buy those licenses regardless of whether they move to Mac or not. And, to be frank, the OS-X version of Office is tremendously better than the Win32 version anyhow.
SMB was made by Microsoft, and Active Directory uses LDAP.
Spot on for the first observation, but a wag of my finger for the second, since it shows you didn't read or understand the post to which you replied.
LDAP is a protocol; Active Directory supports it, it's true. Open LDAP, which is what the parent post was talking about, is a product.
The parent's examples were poorly picked, but their point remains quite solid. Comparing the relative track records of Apple and Microsoft, one can see that Apple has been much more supportive of open standards and technologies in recent years. Microsoft has adopted some standards, but has either done very little to contribute back to them, or (worse) has "extended" them in proprietary ways.
Apple, on the other hand, has made community contributions back to code bases (like WebKit), and has generally been a good citizen when it comes to supporting and refining open standards and technology. They aren't perfect, and there are certainly other organizations that do even better (Ubuntu springs to mind). Still, what they do should be rewarded and encouraged, because Apple has demonstrated that it listens to constructive criticism better than most companies.
I'm getting so very sick of this crap. Look, people, mono-cultures are scary, especially in the computing world. The world will not get better by everyone switching over to a single OS, no matter how good. Say it with me: "diversity is good".
I happen to like OS X, and I happen to love Linux. I don't revile Windows, and I don't think OS X or Linux are perfect by any means. Windows is a good fit for a lot of people; for some, not so much. Same deal with OS X and Linux.
Here's a thought: stop advocating so damned zealously! You want to advocate OS X? Great! Do it without telling everyone that you think Vista sucks. A choice of OS should reflect what you want to do with a computer, and how well the metaphors used by the OS designer fit the way you think.
My mom used Windows for years, and liked it well enough. Her employer moved her to OS X, and after some initial "this is different" frustration, she said "hey, this works exactly as I'd expect it to!" Conversely, a young friend of mine grew up on Macs, including OS X, and after getting a job where he used Windows, decided to switch. He gave the same reason "this works more like I think."
And that differential is good. The fan-zealots' major mistake is that they thing everyone works like they do, so clearly everyone should like the OS they like, and it's simply not true.
Yeah, at $0.5M US, it's a steep price to pay just to be free of utility bills, or just to be "green". But please don't forget that it still has value.
This early adopter is proving that you *can* be self-sufficient using solar energy. That's a big deal. And, if a people -- and more importantly, organizations -- start seeing solar energy as having potential, more people will fund research into improving the technology and making it cheaper. At least, that's the hope.
Early adopters help drive the price of technology down, so don't be so quick to judge this guy's choice -- he's helping to make solar power more available to the masses, in his own small way.
Besides, in being the first, he'll probably make back his $500K in promotional considerations and/or the lecture circuit.;-)
There are far too many "he'll never get a woman this way!" comments. Get a clue, folks; firstly, they guy's married and has a kid (RTFA).
Second, just because the guy thought it would be novel to have a home theater that looks vaguely like the Enterprise bridge (note it's not a scale model or anything) doesn't make him an asocial nerd with a Star Trek fetish.
Third, there are lots of women who like geeks. Even those who do stuff as extreme as building scale replicas of sci-fi sets. Look, this guy didn't make his house over into a Death Star, he built a theater in his basement that looks kind of trek-ish. I bet his kid loves it, and I bet his wife either thinks it's fantastic, or thinks he's cute for doing it.
More of my friends are women than men, and I will tell you that of those women, most would find it endearing that a guy built something like that (esp. since it seems to be of decent quality for a home project); some would be actively attracted to him because they're at least that geeky.
All you geeks that made those comments, maybe you don't have a girlfriend because you're a sexist trying to be something you're not. Wise up.
It's been pretty well established, I think, that there's either no significant biologically gender-based aptitude difference, or that it's so small as to be irrelevant to this discussion.
That leaves us with only one answer: social considerations. There are two pieces to this:
First, as several of the comments on this thread make obvious, the science and engineering fields are still very sexist. Any woman who enters these fields has, as a result, a tougher time gaining the respect of her peers. And within science particularly, respect of one's peers is a major motivational force.
Second, women -- whether through biology, socialization, or some combination of the two -- tend to have a greater need for positive social interaction than do men. The general perception of the scientific and engineering fields is that they are inherently anti-social. When people unfamiliar with the fields imagine, say, an engineer, they conjure an image of a guy hunched over a model (or computer, or drawing board, etc.), deep in thought.
If you're a person who values social interaction, that image is likely to turn you away; and if you're technically/mathematically inclined, there are other more "social" careers (like medicine and law) to turn to.
Perhaps if the engineering and science communities want to attract more women to their fields, they should concentrate on putting the collaborative, interactive qualities more into the public consciousness. And maybe, just maybe, that includes actually being more collaborative as well.
You can go to any store in the USA and buy replacement parts or peripherals which will work on Dell PCs. But if you want Apple stuff, you have to go to the Apple store.
There are two claims there, let me handle them in reverse order. Yes, to buy Apple brand equipment, you must go to an Apple store or one of Apple's approved retailers. Similarly to buy Dell brand equipment, you must buy from Dell or one of their approved retailers. This arrangement is true of pretty much every manufacturer that has a brand. So the second claim is somewhat obvious, and I don't see that it's a problem.
The first claim, by which you seem to be implying that you can't go to any computer store and buy non-Apple equipment that works with Apple computers, is simply factually inaccurate.
If you have a PC-equivalent, and not a more "portable" system (i.e. not a notebook or a Mini), you can use standard PCI cards. The only question is whether either the expansion vendor (or, optionally, Apple) bothered to write drivers. This was true of the G3 and G4 series macs, and I presume it's true for the CoreDuo Macs as well.
If you have a portable system, it's just as bad as it is from other portable vendors -- IBM notebooks are no treat to upgrade, either. However, you can still use standard peripherals (e.g. USB, PCMCIA), just like with other vendors. On the Mini, you can even use standard PC3200 DDR RAM.
I'm no Apple fanboy: they always have early-release problems, and they are commonly somewhat serious (horrendous fan noise on the early MacBook Pro models, e.g.). But this idea that Apple somehow has a monopoly is just foolish.
I'd go further and say that 'good art' also requires the input of emotion, and the stronger the emotion, and the more the viewer feels this emotion, the better the art in many cases. We engineers also produce objects with skill and imagination, but we are not artists.
I've known way too many engineers (and developers) to buy your argument. Most good engineers apply as much emotion -- and intuition -- to their work as they do skill and imagination. The end results are often things that have an incredible amount of artistic value.
If you've never poured your emotion into a design, if you've never had an epiphany that resulted in an elegant solution to a problem, if you've never been in awe (an emotional response) at someone elses design, then I suppose you'd feel that engineering is never an art.
To me, the definition of art is: something that can be expressed and shared, and that results (at least in part) from creative insipiration.
The images created by the Spam Plants program are part of the artistic expression.
Convenient how you ignored this sentence in my OP:
Of course, it's not as easy as "give everyone a gun": people need to be properly trained, required to maintain their training, and a host of other logistical difficulties.
Think about it for a minute. Done? Ok, then. Hopefully you realize, now, that many of your objections are focused on the way things are in the US today -- which pretty much everyone agrees isn't great -- rather than how they could be, which is what we're talking about.
By the way, how often does the scenario you presented happen in, say, the USA? Are criminals so stupid to not even try to threaten people who are alone?
Here's a perfect example: it doesn't happen today, because despite statistics and media attention, there aren't that many people who carry weapons. However, in concealed-carry states, that type of scenario does happen. It usually makes the local news, but "man with gun scares off would-be attacker" doesn't tend to make national headlines. And no, it doesn't happen often: but, if people were properly trained and armed, it might.
And at the same time, it convinces definitely that if criminals want to commit crimes, they have to use guns since most people have them.
Yep, that's true. And since criminals are part of "everybody", they will have been trained to use it. Everything is a tradeoff. The idea isn't to eliminate crime, it's to control and contain. Gun training teaches you in a very visceral way exactly how dangerous and lethal a firearm can be -- most criminals are not violent sociopaths, despite the media circus. Your argument ends up a straw man, for the same reason as the argument against stronger ATM security -- now, people just have to guess/observe your PIN: if you make fingerprint scanners, people will just cut off your finger or threaten you. That argument falls apart because the willingness to steal some money is much more common than the willingness to hurt someone to steal money. And, it's higher risk to use threats to get someone to cooperate. That's why there are fewer muggings than other kinds of theft.
The idea is that a well-trained, armed citizenry is -- to a large extent -- its own police force. You get the same advantages (and the same disadvantages) as having a large number of armed police mingling with the public, which is what so many gun-control advocates cite as the solution to crime.
My point isn't "we should all have guns": it's that an armed populace isn't automatically an unsafe situation, and that trusting only the police to have weapons -- and thus the ability to protect us -- is just plain stupid.
What about the fact that if everyone has a gun, they're much more likely to be tempted to use it in any stressful or intense situation? And don't tell me humans are responsible enough because on those contexts they aren't.
Yep, that will happen more often. Good training mitigates that significantly, but can't stop it. So, there will be people who snap (just like now), and those people are more likely to use a gun when they do. It's a tradeoff. However, I think a lot of people inflate this in their mind: I carry a fairly large (legal length for concealment) knife. There are times when I've been extremely angry or in an intense situation -- but the knife stays in my pocket. The vast majority people are capable of exercising enough self-control to avoid using a knife/gun in anger in the majority of situations. Yes, tradgedies would occur (they do now), and the rate would probably go up -- but it would still be an edge case.
A theory confirmed how many times in practice?
This has been answered so many times! Go do your research, there are plenty of references in this/. story thread alone to get you started. The trend is that places that allow concealed ca
Fighting fire with fire does work. It's called a backfire, and is used to deprive the main fire of suitable fuel.
That's what continues to irritate me about these discussions -- it's about environment and culture, not about individual gun ownership. Yes, if someone sticks a gun to the back of your head, you have no opportunity to draw your own weapon. On the other hand, the three or four people that see the whole thing and are usually too scared to interfere could instead pull their guns out and contain the criminals until the police arrive.
If that scenario were likely, it would be a powerful deterrent to many "common" criminals. By makin it very risky to commit such crimes, the benefit -- that is, the motivation to commit the crime -- erodes. That leads, in theory, to lower crime. Of course, it's not as easy as "give everyone a gun": people need to be properly trained, required to maintain their training, and a host of other logistical difficulties.
It also wouldn't eliminate the most violent breed of criminal, of course. However, reduction in "routine" crime does free up resources to pursue more dangerous criminals. When did we all become such pansies that we choose to rely solely on the police for protection instead of protecting ourselves and each other?
Yeah, I'm sure some kids and sheep buy iPods to "be cool".
The rest of us, though, buy them because of the tight integration with a decent music player. Lots of portable players come with "media center" type tools to sync your collection -- unfortunately, every one of those I've used has completely sucked. iTunes (the software, not to be confused with ITMS, the store) happens to suck considerably less than most.
A lot of portable players suck, too. There are a few that are as good as -- or better than -- the iPod; but, as a Mac user, it's hard to find a good portable player that has quality Mac support. Usually it amounts to "it mounts as a disk, manage it yourself". Screw that.
Dude, it's not hard to "french up" the word "Target" to make it sound like a nicer place to shop. People have been doing that for as long as I can remember.
Frankly, this will continue until doing it the "right" way is almost as easy as doing it the quick hack way
I'm not sure about PHP, but the interface in the GP seems to be very close to Perl's DBI. If that's the case, then the right way can be (for most common, simple cases):
my $sth = $dbh->prepare('SELECT value FROM REGISTRY WHERE name=?'); $sth->execute($name);
The question mark is converted to a binding placeholder, and the value is properly escaped when passed during the execute phase. There are complex cases where one needs to provide hints about data types (e.g. where it won't be clear to DBI how to pass the bound value) -- then you fall back to more complex syntax.
I was sure that the people I heard that line from were Jehovah's Witnesses, but it's possible I was wrong.
It's also possible you were right: I'm sure there are segments of that organization that have even more conservative beliefs than the religion at large. I can only really speak to the doctrinal positions that JWs espouse in their literature.
A fascinating sect to study, actually: for what is, in my opinion, a small and largely harmless group of fundamentalist sectarians, they sure do raise a lot of ire. And produce amazing ranges of misconception. They're misrepresented almost as badly as the Hare Krishnas. Unfortunately, they (JW's) don't scare as easily as the local "we're more conservative than the Missouri Synod" baptists, with whom I have no end of fun with when they see my statue of Kali-ma[0].;-P
I'm glad you actually cared to be informed; most people have their preconcieved ideas about the various fringe religions, and it causes no end of argument.
[0]: Which is, incidentally, purely decorative -- I have yet to decide if those proselytes are more terrified of me before or after I tell them I'm an atheist.;-)
Is it just for the support that they use an "enterprise" linux, or are there other differences?
There are other differences.
Plenty of people have pointed out the different life cycle of the Enterprise editions, so I won't belabor that point. Besides, it's something I consider sort of moot given the stability of Debian's Stable branch.
More importantly, IMO, is that RHEL and SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) include some semi-proprietary or fully-proprietary code that's useful for integration with other systems. Additionally, a lot more time has been invested in creating an environment that allows the sort of point-and-click administration that Windows admins and PHBs are accustomed to using and seeing (respectively). This is actually incredibly nice for organizations that are just beginning to build Linux expertise.
Additionally -- and perhaps most importantly -- you're paying for access to specific update servers that have a guaranteed availability -- something you simply can't get with "lesser" versions of these products. This single point is what keeps my clients buying RHEL and SLES instead of implementing Debian. Of course, one can argue that Debian's extensive world-wide mirror system is probably more stable than the centrally-controlled RHEL and SLES servers, but explaining the advantages of decentralized controls to PHBs can be challenging at best.;-)
Is that like "Bullets don't kill people, bullets travelling 1200 m/s kill people?"
No, it's closer to "Guns don't kill people, idiots with guns kill people".
Of course, I can't make this comment without the appropriate Eddie Izzard response to the "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" bumper-stickers: "well, maybe that's true, but I think the gun helps."
Sometimes I think answering your cellphone should shut your car off.
I think I'd rather see a mobile refuse answer when the car is in motion unless you're in headset mode. Visions of "hello?" *stall* *crunch* fly through my head, otherwise.
And yes, I know there are people who can't talk and drive, and that the headset solution wouldn't help them. Unfortunately, these people also tend to be the type who can't drive while talking to a passenger, listening to the radio, or breathing.
Dude, they aren't even talking about bugs in OSS. They're saying that OSS development tools (like CVS, Eclipse, etc.) exist, and that that very existence means that OSS shares blame for all the malware that's out. Because, you know, if it weren't for OSS these coders couldn't get development tools.
Pardon, that last sentence was too sarcastic -- I have to go puke now.
And it just gets worse from there... one has to keep inventing more extravagant and obviously contrived excuses about why we can't possibly find any evidence for the truth while simultaneous suggesting that all the evidence that might contradict their theory is "obviously" planted which just goes to further "prove" the conspiracy.
Not to mention that even if the publicly-shown moon landing videos could be proved as fakes, all that proves is that the footage shown to the public was faked — it doesn't prove that we didn't go.
It's about on par with a Jehovah's Witness trying to say that the geological evidence for an old planet was just put there by God to test our faith.
Wrong fundamentalists: JW's aren't "young earth" theorists, but creationists who believe that the "6 days of creation" are symbolic and that the earth probably is as old as geologists think it is, but also that all species were directly created by Jehovah (an alternate transliteration of 'Yahweh').
The concept of "fossils were put here to test our faith" is credited to Philip Henry Gosse, a contemporary of Darwin, as the young-earthers' response to the mounting evidence of an old earth at that time.
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So, yes, there have been plenty of times in history where the imposition of morality led to abuses of power and the decline of liberty. And that was the question under consideration.
Sir, I applaud your clear ability for oration and your obvious commitment to acceptable discourse.
Ah, so you're one of those ass-hats that expects every employee, regardless of expertise or experience, to instantly adapt to completely new tools without even a modicum of training.
Either that, or you've missed my point entirely. If you're already asking your staff to learn a new interface (the OS-X one, instead of Windows they're used to, which is what the OP was about), you're just shooting yourself in the foot by trying to also train them to use a new office suite which happens to have a completely different interface system. Most users will be extremely confused.
You've obviously never done any software training or curriculum design, have you?
If I give them a perfectly good hammer, but it is pink, I still expect them to drive the nail, even if they don't like pink.
In this case, you gave them a Mac and asked them to use decidedly un-Maclike software. That's like giving someone a perfectly good Allen wrench and expecting them to drive Torx bolts with it. Yeah, it will work, but it'll be really frustrating and lead to otherwise excellent employees quitting.
Despite your cynical yet accurate view of the situation at the Patent Office, I don't think anyone is seriously considering getting the Patent Office itself to change its mind on software patents. I think most people have already come to the conclusion that patent reform has to come through a combination of legislation and court action.
Yes, Congress will ask the Patent Office for its opinion; no, it won't matter much in the face of significant lobbying pressure.
The single largest resistance to patent reform are the large, monied, and legislatively-active corporations that stand to lose from patent reform. That is, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and so on. Software patent reform is only likely to occur if large, monied organizations start to lobby for it. This happens to some extent, in the form of PubPat and the FSF (among others), but until players with size and funding to challenge the Big 7 (Google comes to mind) choose to enter the fray, it's going to be slow going.
Show me a single moment in history when "curbing rights" started with imposing morality?
Just one? Ok, then: how about the burning of witches in Europe and the British Empire? That all started with laws making it a capital offense to perform "witchcraft", which was basically defined as practicing pagan rites. See, such rites were deemed "immoral" by the Church and government, partly because many were overtly sexual -- the pagan philosophy ties sexuality to health and bounty (harvest, etc.).
All the Church wanted to do impose their idea of morality on the pagan peoples. Result? Anyone who spoke out against the Church was accused and convicted of witchcraft. Most were merely threatened and/or tortured into confession, many were burned alive.
And that, as you asked, is just a single moment in history when a particular right (the right to speak freely, in this case) was curbed by the imposition of morality. There are plenty of other examples.
there's no "I" in team. but there's no "we" either!!!
There is, however, a "u" in "suck". {ducks}
I beg to differ, sir.
I'm a huge fan of OpenOffice; I use it on my Win32 box at work (even though I have the full MS Office suite), and I use it on every one of the 3 Linux boxes I do various tasks with. I refuse to use it on the Mac, because The OS-X port of OpenOffice runs under X11. This means:
I do keep OpenOffice installed -- mostly to work with ODF documents. But, in an enterprise environments, it's hard enough to re-train Windows/MS-Office users to use OpenOffice on Windows. I can't imagine trying to train them to use a Mac, and then hand them an application that breaks all of the new interface rules. Ucky.
The NeoOffice project that ports OpenOffice to a native OS-X interface has promise, but the current edition of it is just too damned slow to be of use to the enterprise.
One of the strong arguments for buying Macs in the enterprise is that MS-Office runs just fine on them, and I'd highly recommend that enterprises moving to Mac stick with MS-Office for now. After all, they have to buy those licenses regardless of whether they move to Mac or not. And, to be frank, the OS-X version of Office is tremendously better than the Win32 version anyhow.
No, the irony is not lost on me...
Spot on for the first observation, but a wag of my finger for the second, since it shows you didn't read or understand the post to which you replied.
LDAP is a protocol; Active Directory supports it, it's true. Open LDAP, which is what the parent post was talking about, is a product.
The parent's examples were poorly picked, but their point remains quite solid. Comparing the relative track records of Apple and Microsoft, one can see that Apple has been much more supportive of open standards and technologies in recent years. Microsoft has adopted some standards, but has either done very little to contribute back to them, or (worse) has "extended" them in proprietary ways.
Apple, on the other hand, has made community contributions back to code bases (like WebKit), and has generally been a good citizen when it comes to supporting and refining open standards and technology. They aren't perfect, and there are certainly other organizations that do even better (Ubuntu springs to mind). Still, what they do should be rewarded and encouraged, because Apple has demonstrated that it listens to constructive criticism better than most companies.
I'm getting so very sick of this crap. Look, people, mono-cultures are scary, especially in the computing world. The world will not get better by everyone switching over to a single OS, no matter how good. Say it with me: "diversity is good".
I happen to like OS X, and I happen to love Linux. I don't revile Windows, and I don't think OS X or Linux are perfect by any means. Windows is a good fit for a lot of people; for some, not so much. Same deal with OS X and Linux.
Here's a thought: stop advocating so damned zealously! You want to advocate OS X? Great! Do it without telling everyone that you think Vista sucks. A choice of OS should reflect what you want to do with a computer, and how well the metaphors used by the OS designer fit the way you think.
My mom used Windows for years, and liked it well enough. Her employer moved her to OS X, and after some initial "this is different" frustration, she said "hey, this works exactly as I'd expect it to!" Conversely, a young friend of mine grew up on Macs, including OS X, and after getting a job where he used Windows, decided to switch. He gave the same reason "this works more like I think."
And that differential is good. The fan-zealots' major mistake is that they thing everyone works like they do, so clearly everyone should like the OS they like, and it's simply not true.
</rant>
Yeah, at $0.5M US, it's a steep price to pay just to be free of utility bills, or just to be "green". But please don't forget that it still has value.
;-)
This early adopter is proving that you *can* be self-sufficient using solar energy. That's a big deal. And, if a people -- and more importantly, organizations -- start seeing solar energy as having potential, more people will fund research into improving the technology and making it cheaper. At least, that's the hope.
Early adopters help drive the price of technology down, so don't be so quick to judge this guy's choice -- he's helping to make solar power more available to the masses, in his own small way.
Besides, in being the first, he'll probably make back his $500K in promotional considerations and/or the lecture circuit.
There are far too many "he'll never get a woman this way!" comments. Get a clue, folks; firstly, they guy's married and has a kid (RTFA).
Second, just because the guy thought it would be novel to have a home theater that looks vaguely like the Enterprise bridge (note it's not a scale model or anything) doesn't make him an asocial nerd with a Star Trek fetish.
Third, there are lots of women who like geeks. Even those who do stuff as extreme as building scale replicas of sci-fi sets. Look, this guy didn't make his house over into a Death Star, he built a theater in his basement that looks kind of trek-ish. I bet his kid loves it, and I bet his wife either thinks it's fantastic, or thinks he's cute for doing it.
More of my friends are women than men, and I will tell you that of those women, most would find it endearing that a guy built something like that (esp. since it seems to be of decent quality for a home project); some would be actively attracted to him because they're at least that geeky.
All you geeks that made those comments, maybe you don't have a girlfriend because you're a sexist trying to be something you're not. Wise up.
It's been pretty well established, I think, that there's either no significant biologically gender-based aptitude difference, or that it's so small as to be irrelevant to this discussion.
That leaves us with only one answer: social considerations. There are two pieces to this:
First, as several of the comments on this thread make obvious, the science and engineering fields are still very sexist. Any woman who enters these fields has, as a result, a tougher time gaining the respect of her peers. And within science particularly, respect of one's peers is a major motivational force.
Second, women -- whether through biology, socialization, or some combination of the two -- tend to have a greater need for positive social interaction than do men. The general perception of the scientific and engineering fields is that they are inherently anti-social. When people unfamiliar with the fields imagine, say, an engineer, they conjure an image of a guy hunched over a model (or computer, or drawing board, etc.), deep in thought.
If you're a person who values social interaction, that image is likely to turn you away; and if you're technically/mathematically inclined, there are other more "social" careers (like medicine and law) to turn to.
Perhaps if the engineering and science communities want to attract more women to their fields, they should concentrate on putting the collaborative, interactive qualities more into the public consciousness. And maybe, just maybe, that includes actually being more collaborative as well.
There are two claims there, let me handle them in reverse order. Yes, to buy Apple brand equipment, you must go to an Apple store or one of Apple's approved retailers. Similarly to buy Dell brand equipment, you must buy from Dell or one of their approved retailers. This arrangement is true of pretty much every manufacturer that has a brand. So the second claim is somewhat obvious, and I don't see that it's a problem.
The first claim, by which you seem to be implying that you can't go to any computer store and buy non-Apple equipment that works with Apple computers, is simply factually inaccurate.
If you have a PC-equivalent, and not a more "portable" system (i.e. not a notebook or a Mini), you can use standard PCI cards. The only question is whether either the expansion vendor (or, optionally, Apple) bothered to write drivers. This was true of the G3 and G4 series macs, and I presume it's true for the CoreDuo Macs as well.
If you have a portable system, it's just as bad as it is from other portable vendors -- IBM notebooks are no treat to upgrade, either. However, you can still use standard peripherals (e.g. USB, PCMCIA), just like with other vendors. On the Mini, you can even use standard PC3200 DDR RAM.
I'm no Apple fanboy: they always have early-release problems, and they are commonly somewhat serious (horrendous fan noise on the early MacBook Pro models, e.g.). But this idea that Apple somehow has a monopoly is just foolish.
I've known way too many engineers (and developers) to buy your argument. Most good engineers apply as much emotion -- and intuition -- to their work as they do skill and imagination. The end results are often things that have an incredible amount of artistic value.
If you've never poured your emotion into a design, if you've never had an epiphany that resulted in an elegant solution to a problem, if you've never been in awe (an emotional response) at someone elses design, then I suppose you'd feel that engineering is never an art.
To me, the definition of art is: something that can be expressed and shared, and that results (at least in part) from creative insipiration.
The images created by the Spam Plants program are part of the artistic expression.
Think about it for a minute. Done? Ok, then. Hopefully you realize, now, that many of your objections are focused on the way things are in the US today -- which pretty much everyone agrees isn't great -- rather than how they could be, which is what we're talking about.
Here's a perfect example: it doesn't happen today, because despite statistics and media attention, there aren't that many people who carry weapons. However, in concealed-carry states, that type of scenario does happen. It usually makes the local news, but "man with gun scares off would-be attacker" doesn't tend to make national headlines. And no, it doesn't happen often: but, if people were properly trained and armed, it might.
Yep, that's true. And since criminals are part of "everybody", they will have been trained to use it. Everything is a tradeoff. The idea isn't to eliminate crime, it's to control and contain. Gun training teaches you in a very visceral way exactly how dangerous and lethal a firearm can be -- most criminals are not violent sociopaths, despite the media circus. Your argument ends up a straw man, for the same reason as the argument against stronger ATM security -- now, people just have to guess/observe your PIN: if you make fingerprint scanners, people will just cut off your finger or threaten you. That argument falls apart because the willingness to steal some money is much more common than the willingness to hurt someone to steal money. And, it's higher risk to use threats to get someone to cooperate. That's why there are fewer muggings than other kinds of theft.
The idea is that a well-trained, armed citizenry is -- to a large extent -- its own police force. You get the same advantages (and the same disadvantages) as having a large number of armed police mingling with the public, which is what so many gun-control advocates cite as the solution to crime.
My point isn't "we should all have guns": it's that an armed populace isn't automatically an unsafe situation, and that trusting only the police to have weapons -- and thus the ability to protect us -- is just plain stupid.
Yep, that will happen more often. Good training mitigates that significantly, but can't stop it. So, there will be people who snap (just like now), and those people are more likely to use a gun when they do. It's a tradeoff. However, I think a lot of people inflate this in their mind: I carry a fairly large (legal length for concealment) knife. There are times when I've been extremely angry or in an intense situation -- but the knife stays in my pocket. The vast majority people are capable of exercising enough self-control to avoid using a knife/gun in anger in the majority of situations. Yes, tradgedies would occur (they do now), and the rate would probably go up -- but it would still be an edge case.
This has been answered so many times! Go do your research, there are plenty of references in this /. story thread alone to get you started. The trend is that places that allow concealed ca
Niggle: champing at the bit.
Fighting fire with fire does work. It's called a backfire, and is used to deprive the main fire of suitable fuel.
That's what continues to irritate me about these discussions -- it's about environment and culture, not about individual gun ownership. Yes, if someone sticks a gun to the back of your head, you have no opportunity to draw your own weapon. On the other hand, the three or four people that see the whole thing and are usually too scared to interfere could instead pull their guns out and contain the criminals until the police arrive.
If that scenario were likely, it would be a powerful deterrent to many "common" criminals. By makin it very risky to commit such crimes, the benefit -- that is, the motivation to commit the crime -- erodes. That leads, in theory, to lower crime. Of course, it's not as easy as "give everyone a gun": people need to be properly trained, required to maintain their training, and a host of other logistical difficulties.
It also wouldn't eliminate the most violent breed of criminal, of course. However, reduction in "routine" crime does free up resources to pursue more dangerous criminals. When did we all become such pansies that we choose to rely solely on the police for protection instead of protecting ourselves and each other?
The rest of us, though, buy them because of the tight integration with a decent music player. Lots of portable players come with "media center" type tools to sync your collection -- unfortunately, every one of those I've used has completely sucked. iTunes (the software, not to be confused with ITMS, the store) happens to suck considerably less than most.
A lot of portable players suck, too. There are a few that are as good as -- or better than -- the iPod; but, as a Mac user, it's hard to find a good portable player that has quality Mac support. Usually it amounts to "it mounts as a disk, manage it yourself". Screw that.
Dude, it's not hard to "french up" the word "Target" to make it sound like a nicer place to shop. People have been doing that for as long as I can remember.
A fascinating sect to study, actually: for what is, in my opinion, a small and largely harmless group of fundamentalist sectarians, they sure do raise a lot of ire. And produce amazing ranges of misconception. They're misrepresented almost as badly as the Hare Krishnas. Unfortunately, they (JW's) don't scare as easily as the local "we're more conservative than the Missouri Synod" baptists, with whom I have no end of fun with when they see my statue of Kali-ma[0].
I'm glad you actually cared to be informed; most people have their preconcieved ideas about the various fringe religions, and it causes no end of argument.
[0]: Which is, incidentally, purely decorative -- I have yet to decide if those proselytes are more terrified of me before or after I tell them I'm an atheist.
Plenty of people have pointed out the different life cycle of the Enterprise editions, so I won't belabor that point. Besides, it's something I consider sort of moot given the stability of Debian's Stable branch.
More importantly, IMO, is that RHEL and SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) include some semi-proprietary or fully-proprietary code that's useful for integration with other systems. Additionally, a lot more time has been invested in creating an environment that allows the sort of point-and-click administration that Windows admins and PHBs are accustomed to using and seeing (respectively). This is actually incredibly nice for organizations that are just beginning to build Linux expertise.
Additionally -- and perhaps most importantly -- you're paying for access to specific update servers that have a guaranteed availability -- something you simply can't get with "lesser" versions of these products. This single point is what keeps my clients buying RHEL and SLES instead of implementing Debian. Of course, one can argue that Debian's extensive world-wide mirror system is probably more stable than the centrally-controlled RHEL and SLES servers, but explaining the advantages of decentralized controls to PHBs can be challenging at best.
Of course, I can't make this comment without the appropriate Eddie Izzard response to the "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" bumper-stickers: "well, maybe that's true, but I think the gun helps."
And yes, I know there are people who can't talk and drive, and that the headset solution wouldn't help them. Unfortunately, these people also tend to be the type who can't drive while talking to a passenger, listening to the radio, or breathing.
Dude, they aren't even talking about bugs in OSS. They're saying that OSS development tools (like CVS, Eclipse, etc.) exist, and that that very existence means that OSS shares blame for all the malware that's out. Because, you know, if it weren't for OSS these coders couldn't get development tools.
Pardon, that last sentence was too sarcastic -- I have to go puke now.
Wrong fundamentalists: JW's aren't "young earth" theorists, but creationists who believe that the "6 days of creation" are symbolic and that the earth probably is as old as geologists think it is, but also that all species were directly created by Jehovah (an alternate transliteration of 'Yahweh').
The concept of "fossils were put here to test our faith" is credited to Philip Henry Gosse, a contemporary of Darwin, as the young-earthers' response to the mounting evidence of an old earth at that time.
Just in case you care.