XHTML strict by itself renders quite nicely in older browsers. It's CSS that causes the problems. If you adhere to the standards and do some positioning, etc. You are likely to encounter problems in almost all browsers other than Mozilla. It is really frustrating to tweak your CSS to do what you want it to do and have it work on all major browsers.
For my own sites I simply don't care about older browsers. I provide alternative CSS files (with basically all layout stripped) that should work in netscape 4 (haven't actually tested this). Aside from that there's only IE6 and mozilla for me. I develop for Mozilla and remove everything that doesn't work as specified in IE6. I refuse to do browser detection or to use CSS hacks to get stuff working. Some people advocate such hacks to trick IE into the right behavior but I refuse to sacrifice elegance and simplicity. That is also the reason I use XHTML strict. XHTML strict is much easier to maintain than HTML dialects that are polluted with formatting and other bullshit.
Giving netscape 4 users a bad experience may actually stimulate them to install something else. If enough sites ignore netscape 4, maybe it will be abandoned by users. On most platforms there are now good alternatives (e.g. opera performs better than netscape 4.x on win32).
Mozblog is a cool app. It's only problem is that it doesn't work. I've tried various versions of it, including the 0.6a version posted on Mike Lee's weblog (he's the main developer of mozblog). The UI works fine but the results of posting are not always what they should be. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I suspect the problem is not Mike Lee's code but the SOAP API provided by blogger. Considering their other technical problems, I'd be surprised if that worked reliably.
You can find 0.6 here: http://www.exitspace.net/mike/blog/archives/2002_0 8_01_mikelee_archive.html#80732377 (hope/. doesn't mess that up). This version is much better than the 0.5 version still on mozdev. There doesn't appear to be much activity on mozdev. The list of bugs essentially hasn't changed in bugs and the mailinglists are only used sparingly. Probably Mike Lee is busy doing other stuff.
Anyway, I hope he keeps up the good work. Once finished, mozblog will joing my small pool of favorite mozilla extensions.
I wasn't linking methodology to the sw. crisis. A lot of misunderstandings exist about these so called lightweight methodologies. Most of these methodologies are actually based on extensive experience with software development. Metrics, testing and other techniques that help you get a grip on the development are a key point of these methodologies. XP is not about total anarchy but about focussing on effective techniques. It's about testing and measuring what you do and adapting to that.
Also you should appreciate that todays software projects are gigantic compared to the type of projects in the sixties and seventies. Software engineering has contributed to this by providing developers with better tools and methodology.
Software Engineering:
(1) The application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software; that is, the application of engineering to software. (2) The study of approaches as in (1).
Quite the opposite of just writing code. In fact people just writing code is has spawned the so-called software crisis which in the nineteen seventies triggered the emergence of the software engineering research field.
CMU has close ties with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). This organization has a very impressive record (just take a look on their homepage) when it comes to software engineering research and attracts a host of top researchers. Sitting close to that never hurts if you have any academic ambitions with respect to software engineering.
No that article was based on a stable situation (i.e. same technology, stable requirements and same methodology for each project). Because of stringent control and heaps of experience, they had perfected the process. With this project they picked new technologies and new methodology, hired a bunch of contracters and ran into the inevitable problem of shifting requirements, more new technology and methodological issues (off the shelf methods always need to be fine tuned and tailored).
The worrying thing is that with their expertise, they could have known that this would happen. The appropriate thing to do would have been pilot projects followed by more ambitious projects. Now they've bet everything on one horse and are left empty handed. What they had before they started was a piece of shit (presumably that was why they wanted to get rid of it), and now they have to face maintaining that piece of shit again.
It may have been an elegant system when it was first designed. However by now it has probably seen countless adaptations, comes with thousands of pages of documented changes (they are control freaks) and probably is very hard to understand and maintain. Likely many of its original designers are deceased or retired by now.
The decision to cancel the project appears to be a panic reaction by management. What they will soon find out is that their old stuff no longer can be modified cost effectively to new requirements. Replacing it will easily take half a decade if you start from scratch and they have just thrown away the efforts of half a decade of development.
That is a matter of exploring options we haven't researched yet. Whether the number of options is finite or not cannot be determined now. That fact however does not in any way warrant drawing the absurd conclusion that there must be something like a god. There simply is not enough to support such a conclusion (in a scientific way).
Also you have to understand that the big bang is merely a theory that helps explain what we see. Theories can falsified, extended and replaced. Theories do not represent truth, they merely form an explanation for what we see. The big bang theory helps us explain certain observable phenomena but it has large holes in it and is far from complete.
You are zooming in on t=0, the start of the big bang. This is a moment we know virtually nothing about. So it is unscientific to even speculate about it.
It appears to be woody with the finishing touch users have been screaming for. It is beyond me why debian developers were unable to do so themselves.
The problem with debian's setup is that it leaves you with a system that requires a lot of manual configuration. If you've done it a couple of times it becomes routine but if you're encountering debian for the first time the installer is not very helpful (to not say very hostile).
It has no hardware detection, the default settings for X are inadequate in almost any case, you need to update all sorts of packages to more recent versions (which are not in stable) and most likely you also need to update the kernel. Not only is the network card not detected but you also need to manually configure other plug & play stuff such as sound cards, printers, scanners etc. Doing so is not easy in a bare bones linux installation and requires manually editing dozens of text based configuration files and running several non trivial commands (for plug and play devices that other linux distros configure automatically).
For some people that is the charm of debian. It gives you the feeling that you are in control and that you are a skilled sysadmin if you manage to get it all working.
We don't know whether there is a god or not so we cannot assume it to be true in a scientific proof. Atheism leaves room for the assumption to be true but at the same time improves the quality of scientific proof by removing that unnecessery assumption (which can neither be falsified nor proven correct). It turns out that so far there are no phenomena that require the presence of the assumption in order to be scientifically explained therefore it would be unscientific to assume it anyway.
So it is scientific to say that we have no proof for what is an absurd conclusion and that in addition we have not encountered phenomena that require the presence of such an absurd assumption either. This concludes the matter scientifically. Assuming the presence of a god is both unnecessary and absurd from a scientific point of view. You ask for the proof that a certain absurd assumption is false however that is indeed a request that cannot possibly be fulfilled. I do not need to test for the validity of something when I can fully explain something in the absence of that something.
My belief in science rests on one principle, namely that what I perceive, witness and see is correct. Disprove this and everything falls apart.
As a scientist assuming something that I cannot perceive, witness or see exists contradicts with my drive to base my conclusions on things scientifically proven and observable. Therefore I will not assume this. IMHO this makes any true scientist also an atheist. Atheism is the very core of science.
It is really quite simple. To accept science as a truth is to adopt a certain line of reasoning. This line of reasoning contradicts with drawing absurd conclusions (e.g. there is a god, elvis lives, jesus rose from the grave).
Either you adopt a scientific line of reasoning in which there is no room for absurd conclusions or you chose to build your own sets of beliefs build on absurdities. You chose to do the latter and that doesn't exclude the first (i'll come to that later). I chose to do the first and that definitely excludes the latter.
The example you use actually works against you since the line of reasoning is that the only way jesus could have risen from the grave is by the hand of god. The scientific approach to proving this right would be trying to come up with an alternative theory (i.e. falsifying the thesis). Such theories are easy to formulate (given current knowledge of medicine) even when you assume the historical records to be correct (mostly consist of biblical texts written to convince people that they are).
You believe in jesus despite the fact that what you believe cannot be proven scientifically. Any scientific reasoning has to start from the assumption that there is no god. If we included such an absurdity as the first assumption in our proof, anything could be proven to be the work of god. Also any such proof would be negated by proving the assumption wrong (impossible). Therein lies the contradiction of science and religion.
You put religion first and then accept science as a part of that religion. By treating absurd conclusions such as "there is a god" as matters of fact this actually forms a consistent line of reasoning. The only problem is that science does not allow for doing so. Your sand castle, built on the assumption that there is a god, allows for the conclusion that some guy named jesus died and walked away. Kick that assumption aside and you have a nice heap of sand.
I haven't read the book you mentioned. However, the only thing it can convincingly prove to me after 2000 years is that it is likely that there was a person named Jesus who was brutally murdered by the romans and had a loyal following of various persons who wrote various things about this character. So what? I think the bible is a nice mix of fact and fiction. A mix that even today is popular among authors to communicate points of view and philisophical matters. As an intellectual I can actually appreciate much of its content.
Exactly. There is no evidence and if someone claims there is you should indeed look closer to examine the evidence. Exact science is actually about proving hypothesis wrong, not proving them right. So far there is no evidence for the existence of a god that has not been dismissed decisively (other than eye witness reports by peasants, discovery channel and various other unreliable sources).
You can of course belief that there is proof of god anyway. However, you cannot prove it (which is why you need to believe). Between believing there is a god and accepting the contents of the bible/koran/lotr as 100% truth, there is a gliding scale of selectively believing stuff and not believing other stuff. However, all of this is fundamentally in conflict with a scientific point of view.
Believing there is a god in the absence of any proof is unscientific no matter what your point of view is (you can of course chose to believe science is bullshit). The contradiction in a relegious scientist must obviously be that on one hand he/she believes that all conclusions must be scientifically motivated and at the same time beliefs something holds true in the absence of such motivation.
Neither the existence nor absence of a god like entity can be proven. However there is no scientific evidence motivating the assumption that there is a god (quite the opposite actually).
As a scientist it is my position that there is absolutely no reason to jump to the absurd conclusion (and paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes that would be only warranted if you had explored all other options) that there is a god like entity. Apart from the difficulty in defining what that is exactly (a mandatory step of any scientific proof), I am not aware of any phenomena that require the presence of a god like entity to be explained. I am aware that there are phenomena that are not (yet) fully explained. However, that is because we haven't explored all options yet. Any conclusion that a god like entity would be at work is premature and unscientific.
Some of my (very smart) colleagues are religious and society tells me that is their right. However, society can't convince me that it is in any way consistent with a scientific point of view. It is either science or religion. There is no middle way. Anyone claiming there is takes two points of view that are in contradiction (hence either one or both assumptions are false). In addition, a possible third assumption would also be absurd so that leaves us no other rational choice but to accept that science is the right assumption until proven otherwise. However, once you decide to assume the absurd (which again is unscientific) it is entirely consistent to assume more absurd things, including that science is consistent with your other (absurd) assumptions. Claiming to be a scientist and to believe in god is absurd.
I don't understand why it is necessary to tunnel a low level protocol like scsi over ethernet (other than to trick legacy software into remote storage). There are protocols for remote storage, why not use these?
Just last week I received a box of photocopies of an article I published in one of Elsevier's journals in March. Apart from the fact that its nearly half a year late, what the hell should I do with 25 crappy photocopies of laser printer output of one of my own articles? We do have printers and copiers at our office.
The whole process from beginning to end is so obsolete. I initiated contact with the journal editor more than a year ago by sending him a pdf of my article. He mailed back to thank me for my interest and asked me to send him three doublespaced paper copies to his office in the US (BTW reading doublespaced copies sucks IMHO). I did this, then I heard nothing for a long time. Finally I got a request to review a paper for the journal (this is quite common, most reviewers are also submitters). Finally after about half a year the paper was conditionally accepted (Yay!). This required an editing round and another submission of three paper copies. And several months later I was notified that my paper was accepted.
I submitted a final version (by paper and electronically). That was the last I heard from them (a letter/email would have been nice) until I received the box full of photocopies. By monitoring the site I found out which in which issue of the journal my article was to be published.
The editor of this journal is probably receiving a small fee for his efforts, which mostly consist of allocating reviewers to papers and putting stamps on envelopes. The actual technical editing is done by a bunch of latex monkeys provided by Elsevier. All communication is done by snail mail, communicating by email confuses both editors and elsevier staff (even though it would save loads of time).
The worst thing of all is that their journal is far too expensive for individuals to subscribe to. Hence the only subscriptions go to university libraries who mostly store packs of unread dead trees in their archives. In my country, a significant portion of government research funds is used for this purpose (i.e. money intended for fundamental research is flowing directly to the pockets of publishers) which I think is outrageous. I'm pretty sure the situation is the same elsewhere.
Now back to the role of the publisher. The publisher wastes everybodies time with a stupid editing process and by producing dead trees nobody reads anyway. It pays the editor a small fee and thats it. Apart from wasting everybodies time and funding the editor they do not actually contribute anything else. It is the editor who handles the peer review (100% volunteers as far as I know), it is the authors who deliver the content (100% volunteers). Taking the publisher out of the loop would save enormous amounts of money. Public funds could be used to fund editors and electronic hosting of journals for a fraction of the money currently flowing to publishers. This would not hurt the peer review process since it already depends on volunteers anyway.
I have no other choice than to either comply with this obsolete process or pursue another career. The productivity of my university is measured in terms of number of articles published. One of the parties involved in annually creating a list of acceptable journals and a nr. of publications per dutch university is.... Elsevier. Natuarally their own journals are on this list.
I'm sure that there are jabber servers which have been running for some time. I'm also pretty sure that none of these servers is prepared to host millions of users. The whole point of jabber is not to have such central points of failure. For developers/early adopters, it is great that you can host your profile at jabber.org, jabber.com or whatever for a while. However, jabber.com sells servers and jabber.org is a non profit organization primarily interested in stimulating development of jabber servers/clients. Neither organization is interested in the long term hosting of millions of jabber accounts.
ICQ, AOL and MSN are propietary networks, if they would go offline that would literally seriously piss off millions of their customers, that's a pretty good reason to assume that that is unlikely to happen (other than by accident).
Unlike propietary networks like icq or msn, jabber is a distributed network of multiple jabber servers pretty much like email. Users have a profile hosted by a server and are identified as user@jabberhost in a similar way to email. This is both its strength (anyone can set up a server) and its weakness (you need someone to host a server). Endusers without the ability to run servers themselves and without a provider offering a jabber server have to rely on one of the public jabber servers. Unlike with the big messaging networks, however, there are no central servers where you can permanently host your jabber profile. There are plenty of public testing servers but these may go offline at any time.
Because of this, many people download a jabber client, figure out that they need a server and are told by the jabber faq that they might try this or that server without any guarantees that it will still work next week. Not very convincing.
For people to adopt jabber as an alternative to current propietary messaging clients, a reliable, available server that will host profiles for free is needed. As long as servers are lacking, jabber will remain an interesting technology that is mostly used in corporate intranets.
If a good public server was available, I would have been running jabber years ago.
Even though MS willingly and knowingly dealt a blow to Java by shipping an incompatible JVM for almost five years now, it is really SUN that killed Java.
Java is a technology that could be useful to endusers. They only need to be convinced of it. There's two techniques for doing so: provide compelling applications that users want to run and marketing.
Despite the fact that applets have been around since late 1995 it is very hard to find useful ones. It is even harder to find applets based on java 1.2.2. Why would an enduser bother to download a JVM if there are not nice applets to run on them? Because of SUN's inability to provide end users with a compelling reason to update their JVMs, users stopped caring about Java.
Marketing is SUNs second problem. Only recently they have made an attempt to make their download site more userfriendly (even some developers got lost on it). Basically java.sun.com has always been a developers site. Despite all the hype coming from SUN, for years their primary Java site has been a mess and they have failed to offer compelling examples of Java applets and applications.
History is repeating itself with webstart. Webstart is a pretty cool piece of technology that allows you to download, install and launch applications by clicking on a link. All you need is java 1.4.0 and it will work. Sun is sitting back and waiting for people to start using it.
If you install jdk1.4.0 there's a total of four webstart links preprogrammed. None of them are likely to impress an enduser. Compelling webstart examples are totally lacking. There's a few very stupid games, some demos and a lot of tools for developers. However, there's no killer application compelling enough that end users download and install jre1.4.0.
Jre1.4.0 has support for fullscreen graphics. So, where's the applications that use this feature? I haven't encountered a single fullscreen application since I installed jdk1.4.0 five months ago.
In a JVM the data is all loaded classes, their on the fly compilations and many other resources that can and should be shared by java applications. Much of the overhead of starting a java application actually comes from loading and compiling classes. If you can share JVMs the classes have to be loaded only once.
Due to the fact that the java classloader happens to be one of its cool features it is actually dead easy to implement this feature safely. Many java application launchers exist already that can let you share a jvm with multiple applications. I used several of them and was amazed at the difference in performance.
An alternative theory might be that the port is going to rely on Java for some of the platform specific stuff. Java is well integrated into Mac OS X and OOo needs stuff like printing, file dialogs, fonts, etc. OOo already has a Java API so using Java to implement some of the platform specific stuff seems not a bad idea. This way sun can also avoid the duplicate effort of implementing platform specific stuff again since this already has been done for the Java port.
However, I'm theorizing here. Maybe someone from Open Office could post something about this.
In it self this is not a bad idea. However, the reason why there are very few actual products is the difference in format. The area of a film that is normally exposed to light is much larger than the chips used in digital camera's. A chip that would go in a conventional camera would of course be the same size and such chips are more expensive and (as far as I know) not available. Even if there are any such products, you are probably better off with a professional digital camera.
For the same reason the quality of digital camera's is lagging behind normal camera's. You can't just take the components of a normal camera and throw in a few chips. The lenses and other components all need to be adjusted to the new format. Develeping such components takes time and requires massive investment in R&D. The few good professional digicams that are available are very expensive.
I can second that. I was on a conference in Hawaii in Januari. It was a nice 30 degrees celsius outside. The conference hotel basically had it's doors and windows wide open (so people could walk in and out) and still managed to chill the rooms to a shivering 18 degrees celsius. Everybody was dressed for the nice 30 degrees (shorts & shirts) but I saw a lot of people putting on sweaters inside!!
http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_jbmm.htm l
It's a 20 GB mp3 player with support for firewire, usb 2.0. Drooling yet? Well it also has extension modules for turning it in a camcorder and a pvr and compact flash reader (to copy photos to the hd). Pretty cool price too:-). If it works as advertised, I might want one.
It was a weapon race that brought down the soviet communist system and it will be a weapon race on the internet that will bring down the communist system in China.
Forced by economic circumstances, (they have over a billion mouths to feed), they have been changing their economic system. The changes include reducing government influence in some area, allowing for private companies and reducing corruption. However it also means connecting to the internet. If you want to do business with the west you need to be able to send and receive email, shop using ecommerce sites, etc. That implies adopting a massive network infrastructure and using it. China is doing that. However, that also means opening the door to uninvited internet activity: free speech.
China tries to block, the technology evolves, china tries to block harder,.... The end is predictable & inevitable (resistance is futile...:-), China will face the choice to either disconnect or lighten up. The sooner they make that choice the better it is for them. As long as they don't make the choice they are falling behind. That will hurt them economically.
I can second this, I just came home and saw this on slashdot. Slashdotting a p2p network pretty much counts as the ultimate stresstest. There's only four channels right now but they work! Nuff said.
The UI is a bit counter intuitive: from the list with channels you first have to 'get' one. It then appears in a second list called 'available channels' from which you can pick one to listen to. Apparently you can connect to (and thus share) more than one stream. Once you get it isn't hard.
It would be nice if this idea were extended to video. The show stopper for streamed video so-far was available bandwidth, that problem now appears to have been solved (until the freeloading clients appear of course).
I fully agree with the last statement but not with the first (in fact I think it is a rather arrogant statement). I'm sure Photoshop Elements is a fine program and I'm pretty sure the real deal is better (in terms of features). One of the fun things about photoshop is actually learning to use it properly (i.e. including the so-called professional features).
The fact that I'm not a professional user does not mean that I want a dumbed down program full of wizards. Most knowledgeable users probably appreciate the feature set offered by photoshop and enjoy messing about with their holliday pics in it. However that does not exactly justify a 600$ pricetag and I doubt many users would actually pay 600$ for some occasional playing around.
For that kind of users a warezed copy is tempting to say the least. Arguably this style of copying is what actually mada adobe succesfull since a lot of their paying users probably started messing about with illegal versions when they were students.
Slashdot Mirror
XHTML strict by itself renders quite nicely in older browsers. It's CSS that causes the problems. If you adhere to the standards and do some positioning, etc. You are likely to encounter problems in almost all browsers other than Mozilla. It is really frustrating to tweak your CSS to do what you want it to do and have it work on all major browsers.
For my own sites I simply don't care about older browsers. I provide alternative CSS files (with basically all layout stripped) that should work in netscape 4 (haven't actually tested this). Aside from that there's only IE6 and mozilla for me. I develop for Mozilla and remove everything that doesn't work as specified in IE6. I refuse to do browser detection or to use CSS hacks to get stuff working. Some people advocate such hacks to trick IE into the right behavior but I refuse to sacrifice elegance and simplicity. That is also the reason I use XHTML strict. XHTML strict is much easier to maintain than HTML dialects that are polluted with formatting and other bullshit.
Giving netscape 4 users a bad experience may actually stimulate them to install something else. If enough sites ignore netscape 4, maybe it will be abandoned by users. On most platforms there are now good alternatives (e.g. opera performs better than netscape 4.x on win32).
Mozblog is a cool app. It's only problem is that it doesn't work. I've tried various versions of it, including the 0.6a version posted on Mike Lee's weblog (he's the main developer of mozblog). The UI works fine but the results of posting are not always what they should be. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I suspect the problem is not Mike Lee's code but the SOAP API provided by blogger. Considering their other technical problems, I'd be surprised if that worked reliably.
0 8_01_mikelee_archive.html#80732377 (hope /. doesn't mess that up). This version is much better than the 0.5 version still on mozdev. There doesn't appear to be much activity on mozdev. The list of bugs essentially hasn't changed in bugs and the mailinglists are only used sparingly. Probably Mike Lee is busy doing other stuff.
You can find 0.6 here: http://www.exitspace.net/mike/blog/archives/2002_
Anyway, I hope he keeps up the good work. Once finished, mozblog will joing my small pool of favorite mozilla extensions.
I wasn't linking methodology to the sw. crisis. A lot of misunderstandings exist about these so called lightweight methodologies. Most of these methodologies are actually based on extensive experience with software development. Metrics, testing and other techniques that help you get a grip on the development are a key point of these methodologies. XP is not about total anarchy but about focussing on effective techniques. It's about testing and measuring what you do and adapting to that.
Also you should appreciate that todays software projects are gigantic compared to the type of projects in the sixties and seventies. Software engineering has contributed to this by providing developers with better tools and methodology.
As defined in IEEE Standard 610.12:
Software Engineering:
(1) The application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software; that is, the application of engineering to software.
(2) The study of approaches as in (1).
Quite the opposite of just writing code. In fact people just writing code is has spawned the so-called software crisis which in the nineteen seventies triggered the emergence of the software engineering research field.
CMU has close ties with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). This organization has a very impressive record (just take a look on their homepage) when it comes to software engineering research and attracts a host of top researchers. Sitting close to that never hurts if you have any academic ambitions with respect to software engineering.
No that article was based on a stable situation (i.e. same technology, stable requirements and same methodology for each project). Because of stringent control and heaps of experience, they had perfected the process. With this project they picked new technologies and new methodology, hired a bunch of contracters and ran into the inevitable problem of shifting requirements, more new technology and methodological issues (off the shelf methods always need to be fine tuned and tailored).
The worrying thing is that with their expertise, they could have known that this would happen. The appropriate thing to do would have been pilot projects followed by more ambitious projects. Now they've bet everything on one horse and are left empty handed. What they had before they started was a piece of shit (presumably that was why they wanted to get rid of it), and now they have to face maintaining that piece of shit again.
It may have been an elegant system when it was first designed. However by now it has probably seen countless adaptations, comes with thousands of pages of documented changes (they are control freaks) and probably is very hard to understand and maintain. Likely many of its original designers are deceased or retired by now.
The decision to cancel the project appears to be a panic reaction by management. What they will soon find out is that their old stuff no longer can be modified cost effectively to new requirements. Replacing it will easily take half a decade if you start from scratch and they have just thrown away the efforts of half a decade of development.
That is a matter of exploring options we haven't researched yet. Whether the number of options is finite or not cannot be determined now. That fact however does not in any way warrant drawing the absurd conclusion that there must be something like a god. There simply is not enough to support such a conclusion (in a scientific way).
Also you have to understand that the big bang is merely a theory that helps explain what we see. Theories can falsified, extended and replaced. Theories do not represent truth, they merely form an explanation for what we see. The big bang theory helps us explain certain observable phenomena but it has large holes in it and is far from complete.
You are zooming in on t=0, the start of the big bang. This is a moment we know virtually nothing about. So it is unscientific to even speculate about it.
It appears to be woody with the finishing touch users have been screaming for. It is beyond me why debian developers were unable to do so themselves.
The problem with debian's setup is that it leaves you with a system that requires a lot of manual configuration. If you've done it a couple of times it becomes routine but if you're encountering debian for the first time the installer is not very helpful (to not say very hostile).
It has no hardware detection, the default settings for X are inadequate in almost any case, you need to update all sorts of packages to more recent versions (which are not in stable) and most likely you also need to update the kernel. Not only is the network card not detected but you also need to manually configure other plug & play stuff such as sound cards, printers, scanners etc. Doing so is not easy in a bare bones linux installation and requires manually editing dozens of text based configuration files and running several non trivial commands (for plug and play devices that other linux distros configure automatically).
For some people that is the charm of debian. It gives you the feeling that you are in control and that you are a skilled sysadmin if you manage to get it all working.
We don't know whether there is a god or not so we cannot assume it to be true in a scientific proof. Atheism leaves room for the assumption to be true but at the same time improves the quality of scientific proof by removing that unnecessery assumption (which can neither be falsified nor proven correct). It turns out that so far there are no phenomena that require the presence of the assumption in order to be scientifically explained therefore it would be unscientific to assume it anyway.
So it is scientific to say that we have no proof for what is an absurd conclusion and that in addition we have not encountered phenomena that require the presence of such an absurd assumption either. This concludes the matter scientifically. Assuming the presence of a god is both unnecessary and absurd from a scientific point of view. You ask for the proof that a certain absurd assumption is false however that is indeed a request that cannot possibly be fulfilled. I do not need to test for the validity of something when I can fully explain something in the absence of that something.
My belief in science rests on one principle, namely that what I perceive, witness and see is correct. Disprove this and everything falls apart.
As a scientist assuming something that I cannot perceive, witness or see exists contradicts with my drive to base my conclusions on things scientifically proven and observable. Therefore I will not assume this. IMHO this makes any true scientist also an atheist. Atheism is the very core of science.
It is really quite simple. To accept science as a truth is to adopt a certain line of reasoning. This line of reasoning contradicts with drawing absurd conclusions (e.g. there is a god, elvis lives, jesus rose from the grave).
Either you adopt a scientific line of reasoning in which there is no room for absurd conclusions or you chose to build your own sets of beliefs build on absurdities. You chose to do the latter and that doesn't exclude the first (i'll come to that later). I chose to do the first and that definitely excludes the latter.
The example you use actually works against you since the line of reasoning is that the only way jesus could have risen from the grave is by the hand of god. The scientific approach to proving this right would be trying to come up with an alternative theory (i.e. falsifying the thesis). Such theories are easy to formulate (given current knowledge of medicine) even when you assume the historical records to be correct (mostly consist of biblical texts written to convince people that they are).
You believe in jesus despite the fact that what you believe cannot be proven scientifically. Any scientific reasoning has to start from the assumption that there is no god. If we included such an absurdity as the first assumption in our proof, anything could be proven to be the work of god. Also any such proof would be negated by proving the assumption wrong (impossible). Therein lies the contradiction of science and religion.
You put religion first and then accept science as a part of that religion. By treating absurd conclusions such as "there is a god" as matters of fact this actually forms a consistent line of reasoning. The only problem is that science does not allow for doing so. Your sand castle, built on the assumption that there is a god, allows for the conclusion that some guy named jesus died and walked away. Kick that assumption aside and you have a nice heap of sand.
I haven't read the book you mentioned. However, the only thing it can convincingly prove to me after 2000 years is that it is likely that there was a person named Jesus who was brutally murdered by the romans and had a loyal following of various persons who wrote various things about this character. So what? I think the bible is a nice mix of fact and fiction. A mix that even today is popular among authors to communicate points of view and philisophical matters. As an intellectual I can actually appreciate much of its content.
Exactly. There is no evidence and if someone claims there is you should indeed look closer to examine the evidence. Exact science is actually about proving hypothesis wrong, not proving them right. So far there is no evidence for the existence of a god that has not been dismissed decisively (other than eye witness reports by peasants, discovery channel and various other unreliable sources).
You can of course belief that there is proof of god anyway. However, you cannot prove it (which is why you need to believe). Between believing there is a god and accepting the contents of the bible/koran/lotr as 100% truth, there is a gliding scale of selectively believing stuff and not believing other stuff. However, all of this is fundamentally in conflict with a scientific point of view.
Believing there is a god in the absence of any proof is unscientific no matter what your point of view is (you can of course chose to believe science is bullshit). The contradiction in a relegious scientist must obviously be that on one hand he/she believes that all conclusions must be scientifically motivated and at the same time beliefs something holds true in the absence of such motivation.
Neither the existence nor absence of a god like entity can be proven. However there is no scientific evidence motivating the assumption that there is a god (quite the opposite actually).
As a scientist it is my position that there is absolutely no reason to jump to the absurd conclusion (and paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes that would be only warranted if you had explored all other options) that there is a god like entity. Apart from the difficulty in defining what that is exactly (a mandatory step of any scientific proof), I am not aware of any phenomena that require the presence of a god like entity to be explained. I am aware that there are phenomena that are not (yet) fully explained. However, that is because we haven't explored all options yet. Any conclusion that a god like entity would be at work is premature and unscientific.
Some of my (very smart) colleagues are religious and society tells me that is their right. However, society can't convince me that it is in any way consistent with a scientific point of view. It is either science or religion. There is no middle way. Anyone claiming there is takes two points of view that are in contradiction (hence either one or both assumptions are false). In addition, a possible third assumption would also be absurd so that leaves us no other rational choice but to accept that science is the right assumption until proven otherwise. However, once you decide to assume the absurd (which again is unscientific) it is entirely consistent to assume more absurd things, including that science is consistent with your other (absurd) assumptions. Claiming to be a scientist and to believe in god is absurd.
I don't understand why it is necessary to tunnel a low level protocol like scsi over ethernet (other than to trick legacy software into remote storage). There are protocols for remote storage, why not use these?
Just last week I received a box of photocopies of an article I published in one of Elsevier's journals in March. Apart from the fact that its nearly half a year late, what the hell should I do with 25 crappy photocopies of laser printer output of one of my own articles? We do have printers and copiers at our office.
.... Elsevier. Natuarally their own journals are on this list.
The whole process from beginning to end is so obsolete. I initiated contact with the journal editor more than a year ago by sending him a pdf of my article. He mailed back to thank me for my interest and asked me to send him three doublespaced paper copies to his office in the US (BTW reading doublespaced copies sucks IMHO). I did this, then I heard nothing for a long time. Finally I got a request to review a paper for the journal (this is quite common, most reviewers are also submitters). Finally after about half a year the paper was conditionally accepted (Yay!). This required an editing round and another submission of three paper copies. And several months later I was notified that my paper was accepted.
I submitted a final version (by paper and electronically). That was the last I heard from them (a letter/email would have been nice) until I received the box full of photocopies. By monitoring the site I found out which in which issue of the journal my article was to be published.
The editor of this journal is probably receiving a small fee for his efforts, which mostly consist of allocating reviewers to papers and putting stamps on envelopes. The actual technical editing is done by a bunch of latex monkeys provided by Elsevier. All communication is done by snail mail, communicating by email confuses both editors and elsevier staff (even though it would save loads of time).
The worst thing of all is that their journal is far too expensive for individuals to subscribe to. Hence the only subscriptions go to university libraries who mostly store packs of unread dead trees in their archives. In my country, a significant portion of government research funds is used for this purpose (i.e. money intended for fundamental research is flowing directly to the pockets of publishers) which I think is outrageous. I'm pretty sure the situation is the same elsewhere.
Now back to the role of the publisher. The publisher wastes everybodies time with a stupid editing process and by producing dead trees nobody reads anyway. It pays the editor a small fee and thats it. Apart from wasting everybodies time and funding the editor they do not actually contribute anything else. It is the editor who handles the peer review (100% volunteers as far as I know), it is the authors who deliver the content (100% volunteers). Taking the publisher out of the loop would save enormous amounts of money. Public funds could be used to fund editors and electronic hosting of journals for a fraction of the money currently flowing to publishers. This would not hurt the peer review process since it already depends on volunteers anyway.
I have no other choice than to either comply with this obsolete process or pursue another career. The productivity of my university is measured in terms of number of articles published. One of the parties involved in annually creating a list of acceptable journals and a nr. of publications per dutch university is
I'm sure that there are jabber servers which have been running for some time. I'm also pretty sure that none of these servers is prepared to host millions of users. The whole point of jabber is not to have such central points of failure. For developers/early adopters, it is great that you can host your profile at jabber.org, jabber.com or whatever for a while. However, jabber.com sells servers and jabber.org is a non profit organization primarily interested in stimulating development of jabber servers/clients. Neither organization is interested in the long term hosting of millions of jabber accounts.
ICQ, AOL and MSN are propietary networks, if they would go offline that would literally seriously piss off millions of their customers, that's a pretty good reason to assume that that is unlikely to happen (other than by accident).
Unlike propietary networks like icq or msn, jabber is a distributed network of multiple jabber servers pretty much like email. Users have a profile hosted by a server and are identified as user@jabberhost in a similar way to email. This is both its strength (anyone can set up a server) and its weakness (you need someone to host a server). Endusers without the ability to run servers themselves and without a provider offering a jabber server have to rely on one of the public jabber servers. Unlike with the big messaging networks, however, there are no central servers where you can permanently host your jabber profile. There are plenty of public testing servers but these may go offline at any time.
Because of this, many people download a jabber client, figure out that they need a server and are told by the jabber faq that they might try this or that server without any guarantees that it will still work next week. Not very convincing.
For people to adopt jabber as an alternative to current propietary messaging clients, a reliable, available server that will host profiles for free is needed. As long as servers are lacking, jabber will remain an interesting technology that is mostly used in corporate intranets.
If a good public server was available, I would have been running jabber years ago.
Even though MS willingly and knowingly dealt a blow to Java by shipping an incompatible JVM for almost five years now, it is really SUN that killed Java.
Java is a technology that could be useful to endusers. They only need to be convinced of it. There's two techniques for doing so: provide compelling applications that users want to run and marketing.
Despite the fact that applets have been around since late 1995 it is very hard to find useful ones. It is even harder to find applets based on java 1.2.2. Why would an enduser bother to download a JVM if there are not nice applets to run on them? Because of SUN's inability to provide end users with a compelling reason to update their JVMs, users stopped caring about Java.
Marketing is SUNs second problem. Only recently they have made an attempt to make their download site more userfriendly (even some developers got lost on it). Basically java.sun.com has always been a developers site. Despite all the hype coming from SUN, for years their primary Java site has been a mess and they have failed to offer compelling examples of Java applets and applications.
History is repeating itself with webstart. Webstart is a pretty cool piece of technology that allows you to download, install and launch applications by clicking on a link. All you need is java 1.4.0 and it will work. Sun is sitting back and waiting for people to start using it.
If you install jdk1.4.0 there's a total of four webstart links preprogrammed. None of them are likely to impress an enduser. Compelling webstart examples are totally lacking. There's a few very stupid games, some demos and a lot of tools for developers. However, there's no killer application compelling enough that end users download and install jre1.4.0.
Jre1.4.0 has support for fullscreen graphics. So, where's the applications that use this feature? I haven't encountered a single fullscreen application since I installed jdk1.4.0 five months ago.
In a JVM the data is all loaded classes, their on the fly compilations and many other resources that can and should be shared by java applications. Much of the overhead of starting a java application actually comes from loading and compiling classes. If you can share JVMs the classes have to be loaded only once.
Due to the fact that the java classloader happens to be one of its cool features it is actually dead easy to implement this feature safely. Many java application launchers exist already that can let you share a jvm with multiple applications. I used several of them and was amazed at the difference in performance.
An alternative theory might be that the port is going to rely on Java for some of the platform specific stuff. Java is well integrated into Mac OS X and OOo needs stuff like printing, file dialogs, fonts, etc. OOo already has a Java API so using Java to implement some of the platform specific stuff seems not a bad idea. This way sun can also avoid the duplicate effort of implementing platform specific stuff again since this already has been done for the Java port.
However, I'm theorizing here. Maybe someone from Open Office could post something about this.
In it self this is not a bad idea. However, the reason why there are very few actual products is the difference in format. The area of a film that is normally exposed to light is much larger than the chips used in digital camera's. A chip that would go in a conventional camera would of course be the same size and such chips are more expensive and (as far as I know) not available. Even if there are any such products, you are probably better off with a professional digital camera.
For the same reason the quality of digital camera's is lagging behind normal camera's. You can't just take the components of a normal camera and throw in a few chips. The lenses and other components all need to be adjusted to the new format. Develeping such components takes time and requires massive investment in R&D. The few good professional digicams that are available are very expensive.
I can second that. I was on a conference in Hawaii in Januari. It was a nice 30 degrees celsius outside. The conference hotel basically had it's doors and windows wide open (so people could walk in and out) and still managed to chill the rooms to a shivering 18 degrees celsius. Everybody was dressed for the nice 30 degrees (shorts & shirts) but I saw a lot of people putting on sweaters inside!!
http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_jbmm.htm l
:-). If it works as advertised, I might want one.
It's a 20 GB mp3 player with support for firewire, usb 2.0. Drooling yet? Well it also has extension modules for turning it in a camcorder and a pvr and compact flash reader (to copy photos to the hd). Pretty cool price too
It was a weapon race that brought down the soviet communist system and it will be a weapon race on the internet that will bring down the communist system in China.
.... The end is predictable & inevitable (resistance is futile ... :-), China will face the choice to either disconnect or lighten up. The sooner they make that choice the better it is for them. As long as they don't make the choice they are falling behind. That will hurt them economically.
Forced by economic circumstances, (they have over a billion mouths to feed), they have been changing their economic system. The changes include reducing government influence in some area, allowing for private companies and reducing corruption. However it also means connecting to the internet. If you want to do business with the west you need to be able to send and receive email, shop using ecommerce sites, etc. That implies adopting a massive network infrastructure and using it. China is doing that. However, that also means opening the door to uninvited internet activity: free speech.
China tries to block, the technology evolves, china tries to block harder,
I can second this, I just came home and saw this on slashdot. Slashdotting a p2p network pretty much counts as the ultimate stresstest. There's only four channels right now but they work! Nuff said.
The UI is a bit counter intuitive: from the list with channels you first have to 'get' one. It then appears in a second list called 'available channels' from which you can pick one to listen to. Apparently you can connect to (and thus share) more than one stream. Once you get it isn't hard.
It would be nice if this idea were extended to video. The show stopper for streamed video so-far was available bandwidth, that problem now appears to have been solved (until the freeloading clients appear of course).
I fully agree with the last statement but not with the first (in fact I think it is a rather arrogant statement). I'm sure Photoshop Elements is a fine program and I'm pretty sure the real deal is better (in terms of features). One of the fun things about photoshop is actually learning to use it properly (i.e. including the so-called professional features).
The fact that I'm not a professional user does not mean that I want a dumbed down program full of wizards. Most knowledgeable users probably appreciate the feature set offered by photoshop and enjoy messing about with their holliday pics in it. However that does not exactly justify a 600$ pricetag and I doubt many users would actually pay 600$ for some occasional playing around.
For that kind of users a warezed copy is tempting to say the least. Arguably this style of copying is what actually mada adobe succesfull since a lot of their paying users probably started messing about with illegal versions when they were students.