The reason the evidence seems sketchy is that it is, kind of. But there is A LOT of it. Think about fossils. Today, a cow lies down in a field and dies. Does it leave a fossil? No.
So the fact that people can find fossils of transitional forms is amazing in and of itself. But here's where the non-rationals jump in. You have a prior form. And a descendant form. There is a gap, a missing link. The "creation scientists" attack the fact that we don't have a videotape of all stages of evolution as it progressed.
So one day, a paleontologist working in some terrible dusty hot place finds a skull and a legbone, never before seen. Wow! A missing link between A and B. The creation science whoops up "Well now you have TWO gaps. Explain that."
Or they say, "Thermodynamics says that things progress from order to disorder. Ergo evolution is impossible." Except it's entropy they mean, and the earth isn't a closed system (we have a sun) so that rule is completely wrong to apply.
It's moronic, and it's really what they argue. They are proven wrong again and again.
So can we take the continued existence of the earth as a refutation of Nostradamus' predictions in general? Can we have a "celebrate rational thought and the fruits of science" day?
Of course not, as we'll be told: the continued existence of the world only proves that Nostradamus didn't say it would end.
The millennial-insanity stuff is just getting started.
I am reading a lot of comments about microsoft being 64-bit clueless. I am not sure that's exactly true. Don't they have a neglected version of NT for alpha processors. Isn't alpha 64 bit?
I know alpha and merced are wildly different. I think maybe we need to watch MS a little more carefully.
As an intermediate Tcl/Tk programmer with this book, I would tend to agree with parts of the original review. The core of Tcl/Tk is 136 pages. The rest of the 438 page book details stuff I really didn't use, but might want to someday. For example, I liked the 19 pages on expect, the 76 pages on tix, and 74 pages on using BLT.
Another point: CowboyNeal wrote ...makes no attempts to give an introduction to Tcl or Tk. Well, to be fair this isn't what a Nutshell book is for. However, chapter 15 is exactly what he was looking for.
A rundown on what I, a non-reviewer, liked.
Tcl/Tk core language : 136 pages - Essential. This is what I bought it for. I can never remember if it's -bg or -fill, so I really like this section. The C interface : 37 pages - I doubt I will ever use this. But hey, it's nice to have. Expect : 19 pages - I have used this already. Expect rocks. [Incr Tcl] : 11 pages - I will never use this. Tix : 96 pages - I like this section, but wish there were pictures to go with the examples. This is a minor gripe. TclX : 33 pages - I will never use this. BLT : 74 pages - I like this section. I got stuck trying to install BLT one time, and gave up on it. Now I will give it another try. Oratcl : 8 pages Subtcl : 7 pages Tclodbc : 8 pages - I am not a database guy. "Hints and Tips for the Tcl Programmer" : 16 pages - Great section. Much of the material came from comp.lang.tcl FAQ's, but it is still great to have. Should it be up front?
There is also a pocket ref for Tcl/Tk, at 90 pages, which is written by Paul Raines, one of the authors of the nutshell book.
Final advice: it is usually cheaper to buy these books online. I bought this book online for $16.50, as opposed to the $24.95 list price.
Well tell me then, why giving 30,000+ people their livelyhood, making a quarter of them millionaries is bad?
I don't care how many people BG employs. He imposes an involuntary tax from a far greater number. Are you offering the extreme wealth of Microsoft as proof that they are not evil? Hey, I got some tobacco stocks for you man.
You bash for bashing's sake
You honestly don't have a clue why people dislike Microsoft? Honestly?
Let me paraphrase your post:
This News for Nerds site is hard on Microsoft. I really like Microsoft, and therefore all you other nerds are wrong. I don't think they're evil. As evidence, they are very rich. This in itself proves they are wonderful. Also, open source people are not very rich. So this community must not be very useful.
Finally, you say
Tell me how many mouth had the open source community feed?
Well, there are a lot of people saving money by not using Microsoft. I guess the savings could be converted into foodstuffs, or be spun back into the economy to do useful work. As opposed to fattening some multimillionaires in Redmond.
The neat thing about CSIS is that no one knows/anything/ about them.
Actually, stuff comes out in the papers every couple of months. It often makes them look inept, such as them being sued in court by disgruntled former employees. Just because they are usually silent doesn't make them omnipotent. On what grounds do you equate CSIS with the massively-funded, spooky supercomputers-out-the-yazoo NSA?
I love how everything needs a disclaimer now. Something to do with that Lowest-common-denominator medium, TV. This is but one of my favorite Homer quotes:
TV: Is there any cure for Superbowl fever? Take two tickets and call me in the morning. WARNING: TICKETS NOT TO BE TAKEN INTERNALLY.
Homer: See Lisa, because of me, they have a warning!
Other countries can award legal expenses to wrongly-sued parties. This has a great effect on limiting frivolous lawsuits. Where I live (Canada) the lawyers are also prohibited from taking a share of the outcome as payment. They are also, by custom, prohibited from advertising. Does anybody like those lawyer ads on tv?
Sure, the 9500-processor Intel monster at Sandia is the fastest, but there is an alpha linux cluster on the top 500 supercomputer list. As of 4-Aug-1999 it was ranked 129/500, and consisted of 150 Alpha processors. Read more about it at the Sandia Web Page. Note -- it is NOT a Beowulf. I don't know enough about the MPI implementation on either, but I think your comment about it being slow is dead-on. Those foreign baddies will have to go for more coffee breaks.
The point is that any standard would be much easier to work with than ms-office's secret formats. Why? Standards are documented, which would mean that microsoft could indeed use it. Why exactly would this be exclusionary?
I think European connectivity is not as cheap/common as it is in North America. Remember SuSE is from Europe. There are lots of nasty telco monopolies charging for net connectivity by the minute. So downloading stuff may end up being really expensive in comparison to getting it all on one CD.
I explicitly got a Non-Rogers solution when I wanted Cable. Nobody can say that Rogers is a warm and fuzzy company, as they have a lot in common with fellow monopolist Microsoft. Remember negative-option billing? For Americans, this was a greedy monopolistic money grab that provoked a national uproar against the cable moguls.
I am really not excited about the fact that ADSL is not available in my area, too. Still using 56k for now.
I remember hearing a CBC radio program about the Cosmonauts unlucky enough to die slowly in space. These radio waves were picked up by HAM radio operators, who I guess used to listen in regularly. On the CBC program they played one of these recordings, a russian voice. It was incredibly creepy to listen to the recordings of someone dying in space. I am thinking NASA knew all about how well something like this would play with THEIR astronauts.
While the idea of having stupid, annoying ads pushed onto my computer provokes a kneejerk "How dare they!" response, I would welcome a simple routine to flash in a random gif (like, say, a penguin) when the computer starts up. I bet lots of corporations would like their logo, etc at startup, too.
You just know that Linux will support this in the cool way (i.e., ads disabled). Other operating systems will provide the annoy-o-pipe, and might even speed adoption of ad-less operating systems. Besides, how many times do you reboot on a given day? Zero for me.
While this is a neat idea, it isn't too practical. Rob might instead just put a disclaimer, like:
While Metcalfe has said some snarky flamebait bits, mindlessley counterflaming him is counterproductive. Be pursuasive, not a thug, if you're going to write to him directly.
I should clarify: Albert Einstein was not a poor student, contrary to common belief.
This belief arose because historians misinterpreted his report cards. His school used a weird grading scheme, and as a result some researcher deduced that Einstein's grades must have meant that he was a poor student. He was not.
Another common belief about Albert Einstein is that he never spoke until age four. There is absolutely no proof whatsoever to this assertion.
I too learned on an Apple II+, with the language card, but have since forgotten the opcodes to poke in a music player at location 768. Man, the nostalgia. It's been a long time since I typed in 100 pages of hex digits to code up a proper assembler. Anybody remember the Beagle Brothers Two-Liners?
Anyway -
About the clustering thing -- I did this one time using another 6502 machine, the PETs. Our school had a lab with one printer, one floppy disk, and I was in charge of the school's dating program. (You know, you fill out a questionnaire, everybody gets matched, and then blah blah blah, you get a list of the opposite sex...)
Problem was, my program was too slow. The results had to be out before a dance. I was going to be in deep trouble. Anyway, I got ten machines running in parallel, using FOR and STEP commands... the project finished in time. It was cool.
Efficent clusters can make good use of multiple nodes with multiple CPUs.
Linus talks sense. I've always wondered why people get so upset about defining "scalability" by SMP arguments. Sure, I'd kill to have an SMP box. But SMP is a waste of money past some magic number of processors (two? four? eight?), getting the same performance is much cheaper using clustering, a la the IBM SP2 or Beowulf, or clusters of SMP's (Convex?).
Slashdot Mirror
The reason the evidence seems sketchy is that it is, kind of. But there is A LOT of it. Think about fossils. Today, a cow lies down in a field and dies. Does it leave a fossil? No.
So the fact that people can find fossils of transitional forms is amazing in and of itself. But here's where the non-rationals jump in. You have a prior form. And a descendant form. There is a gap, a missing link. The "creation scientists" attack the fact that we don't have a videotape of all stages of evolution as it progressed.
So one day, a paleontologist working in some terrible dusty hot place finds a skull and a legbone, never before seen. Wow! A missing link between A and B. The creation science whoops up "Well now you have TWO gaps. Explain that."
Or they say, "Thermodynamics says that things progress from order to disorder. Ergo evolution is impossible." Except it's entropy they mean, and the earth isn't a closed system (we have a sun) so that rule is completely wrong to apply.
It's moronic, and it's really what they argue. They are proven wrong again and again.
If you really want a good book on this mindset, read the aptly-titled Why people believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer.
Moondog - halo around moon
Sundog - halo around sun
So can we take the continued existence of the earth as a refutation of Nostradamus' predictions in general? Can we have a "celebrate rational thought and the fruits of science" day?
Of course not, as we'll be told: the continued existence of the world only proves that Nostradamus didn't say it would end.
The millennial-insanity stuff is just getting started.
I am reading a lot of comments about microsoft being 64-bit clueless. I am not sure that's exactly true. Don't they have a neglected version of NT for alpha processors. Isn't alpha 64 bit?
I know alpha and merced are wildly different. I think maybe we need to watch MS a little more carefully.
Amazon isn't the cheapest.
http://www.addall.com;
results:
A1BOOKS: $16.25 + $3.95 s/h = $20.20
BOOKPOOL: $16.50 + $3.80 s/h = $20.30
FATBRAIN: $19.95 + $4.95 s/h = $24.90
AMAZON: $19.96 + $7.95 s/h = $27.91
As an intermediate Tcl/Tk programmer with this book, I would tend to agree with parts of the original review. The core of Tcl/Tk is 136 pages. The rest of the 438 page book details stuff I really didn't use, but might want to someday. For example, I liked the 19 pages on expect, the 76 pages on tix, and 74 pages on using BLT.
...makes no attempts to give an introduction to Tcl or Tk.
Another point: CowboyNeal wrote
Well, to be fair this isn't what a Nutshell book is for. However, chapter 15 is exactly what he was looking for.
A rundown on what I, a non-reviewer, liked.
Tcl/Tk core language : 136 pages
- Essential. This is what I bought it for. I can never remember if it's -bg or -fill, so I really like this section.
The C interface : 37 pages
- I doubt I will ever use this. But hey, it's nice to have.
Expect : 19 pages
- I have used this already. Expect rocks.
[Incr Tcl] : 11 pages
- I will never use this.
Tix : 96 pages
- I like this section, but wish there were pictures to go with the examples. This is a minor gripe.
TclX : 33 pages
- I will never use this.
BLT : 74 pages
- I like this section. I got stuck trying to install BLT one time, and gave up on it. Now I will give it another try.
Oratcl : 8 pages
Subtcl : 7 pages
Tclodbc : 8 pages
- I am not a database guy.
"Hints and Tips for the Tcl Programmer" : 16 pages
- Great section. Much of the material came from comp.lang.tcl FAQ's, but it is still great to have. Should it be up front?
There is also a pocket ref for Tcl/Tk, at 90 pages, which is written by Paul Raines, one of the authors of the nutshell book.
Final advice: it is usually cheaper to buy these books online. I bought this book online for $16.50, as opposed to the $24.95 list price.
I don't know. I really like PERL. I also really like Tcl/Tk, mainly because of Tk. But I don't like PERL/Tk. So for me at least, Tcl still lives.
Well tell me then, why giving 30,000+ people their livelyhood, making a quarter of them millionaries is bad?
I don't care how many people BG employs. He imposes an involuntary tax from a far greater number. Are you offering the extreme wealth of Microsoft as proof that they are not evil? Hey, I got some tobacco stocks for you man.
You bash for bashing's sake
You honestly don't have a clue why people dislike Microsoft? Honestly?
Let me paraphrase your post:
Finally, you say
Tell me how many mouth had the open source community feed?
Well, there are a lot of people saving money by not using Microsoft. I guess the savings could be converted into foodstuffs, or be spun back into the economy to do useful work. As opposed to fattening some multimillionaires in Redmond.
The neat thing about CSIS is that no one knows /anything/ about them.
Actually, stuff comes out in the papers every couple of months. It often makes them look inept, such as them being sued in court by disgruntled former employees. Just because they are usually silent doesn't make them omnipotent. On what grounds do you equate CSIS with the massively-funded, spooky supercomputers-out-the-yazoo NSA?
I love how everything needs a disclaimer now. Something to do with that Lowest-common-denominator medium, TV.
This is but one of my favorite Homer quotes:
TV: Is there any cure for Superbowl fever? Take two tickets and call me in the morning.
WARNING: TICKETS NOT TO BE TAKEN INTERNALLY.
Homer: See Lisa, because of me, they have a warning!
Other countries can award legal expenses to wrongly-sued parties. This has a great effect on limiting frivolous lawsuits. Where I live (Canada) the lawyers are also prohibited from taking a share of the outcome as payment. They are also, by custom, prohibited from advertising. Does anybody like those lawyer ads on tv?
Sure, the 9500-processor Intel monster at Sandia is the fastest, but there is an alpha linux cluster on the top 500 supercomputer list. As of 4-Aug-1999 it was ranked 129/500, and consisted of 150 Alpha processors. Read more about it at the Sandia Web Page. Note -- it is NOT a Beowulf. I don't know enough about the MPI implementation on either, but I think your comment about it being slow is dead-on. Those foreign baddies will have to go for more coffee breaks.
The point is that any standard would be much easier to work with than ms-office's secret formats. Why? Standards are documented, which would mean that microsoft could indeed use it. Why exactly would this be exclusionary?
I think European connectivity is not as cheap/common as it is in North America. Remember SuSE is from Europe. There are lots of nasty telco monopolies charging for net connectivity by the minute. So downloading stuff may end up being really expensive in comparison to getting it all on one CD.
governments don't give rights, they only take them away
Without government, the strong crush the weak. Without government, we have anarchy, where the concept of rights is a farce.
I explicitly got a Non-Rogers solution when I wanted Cable. Nobody can say that Rogers is a warm and fuzzy company, as they have a lot in common with fellow monopolist Microsoft. Remember negative-option billing? For Americans, this was a greedy monopolistic money grab that provoked a national uproar against the cable moguls.
I am really not excited about the fact that ADSL is not available in my area, too. Still using 56k for now.
I remember hearing a CBC radio program about the Cosmonauts unlucky enough to die slowly in space. These radio waves were picked up by HAM radio operators, who I guess used to listen in regularly. On the CBC program they played one of these recordings, a russian voice. It was incredibly creepy to listen to the recordings of someone dying in space. I am thinking NASA knew all about how well something like this would play with THEIR astronauts.
It's simple to avoid AC's: just browse at +1 or +2
While the idea of having stupid, annoying ads pushed onto my computer provokes a kneejerk "How dare they!" response, I would welcome a simple routine to flash in a random gif (like, say, a penguin) when the computer starts up. I bet lots of corporations would like their logo, etc at startup, too.
You just know that Linux will support this in the cool way (i.e., ads disabled). Other operating systems will provide the annoy-o-pipe, and might even speed adoption of ad-less operating systems. Besides, how many times do you reboot on a given day? Zero for me.
While this is a neat idea, it isn't too practical. Rob might instead just put a disclaimer, like:
While Metcalfe has said some snarky flamebait bits, mindlessley counterflaming him is counterproductive. Be pursuasive, not a thug, if you're going to write to him directly.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
I should clarify: Albert Einstein was not a poor student, contrary to common belief.
This belief arose because historians misinterpreted his report cards. His school used a weird grading scheme, and as a result some researcher deduced that Einstein's grades must have meant that he was a poor student. He was not.
Another common belief about Albert Einstein is that he never spoke until age four. There is absolutely no proof whatsoever to this assertion.
The 10% thing is untrue; it is an urban legend. Check it out here.
Just like that story about Albert Einstein being stupid as a child. Fact: he was always smart.
Yeah, the only thing they used was the title. Wasn't the lawnmower man a satyr or something?
I too learned on an Apple II+, with the language card, but have since forgotten the opcodes to poke in a music player at location 768. Man, the nostalgia. It's been a long time since I typed in 100 pages of hex digits to code up a proper assembler. Anybody remember the Beagle Brothers Two-Liners?
... the project finished in time. It was cool.
Anyway -
About the clustering thing -- I did this one time using another 6502 machine, the PETs. Our school had a lab with one printer, one floppy disk, and I was in charge of the school's dating program. (You know, you fill out a questionnaire, everybody gets matched, and then blah blah blah, you get a list of the opposite sex...)
Problem was, my program was too slow. The results had to be out before a dance. I was going to be in deep trouble. Anyway, I got ten machines running in parallel, using FOR and STEP commands
Efficent clusters can make good use of multiple nodes with multiple CPUs.
Linus talks sense. I've always wondered why people get so upset about defining "scalability" by SMP arguments. Sure, I'd kill to have an SMP box. But SMP is a waste of money past some magic number of processors (two? four? eight?), getting the same performance is much cheaper using clustering, a la the IBM SP2 or Beowulf, or clusters of SMP's (Convex?).