Erm, the Jews are a race with a traditional religion. You can jump through certain hoops to have yourself declared Jewish (basically pass a load of tests IIRC) but the normal way is to have a Jewish mother.
Hitler cared about race, but you're going at this one from the wrong direction. He was against the Jews (and the gypsies, for that matter) because he thought they were undermining the German race. Seeing as he was very definitely in favour of procreation (witness the provisions on marriage loans or the League of German Mothers) opposition to homosexuality's pretty clear, while he also practised Eugenics - mainly sterilising the mentally ill, though you could be done for 'congenital feeble-mindedness', which could be almost anyone.
My take on this as a Christian who plays plenty of fairly violent games - which, incidentally, I generally regard as humorous or a good way to release tension safely - is just that Jon was saying the game sounds a little cheesy to him (definitely does to me) and that's not good.
TBH, this game stinks to me of someone trying to start up a new market sector. By convincing the parents that this shooter is in some way religious, they're thinking that they're more likely to buy it for their kids than Q3:A (or whatever). So, wait a while and we'll have just about anything marketted as religious, to try and capture this market. Stuff the very tenuous link, there's money to be made. And I'm no fan of anyone trying to make themselves rich on the back of religion, especially with such a weak link.
AmogaOS from 2.04 up can certainly boot without launching the WorkBench(tm)
Er, probably not what he meant. Even if you do boot to a CLI rather than the GUI, how's it running? In a windows, resizable and draggable. VERY nice - character consoles should have died a death years ago and been replaced by proper displays! - but if the OS is running, it's using the GUI.
If anyone wants to try making Linux (or whateer - I've jsut picked that as the only completely open-source option listed) as easy to use and configure and as fast as my old A1200 then they've got my support. But I don't see it.
I've no idea what the technical state of relative operating systems is today so I can't say whether the Amiga's got a wonderful deterministic scheduler with sensible multithreading (to pull terms out of the air) that hasn't been equalled elsewhere. It wouldn't surprise me though and, even if we're not unique, look at the footprint! This thing will run on little more than fresh air in modern terms, for goodness' sakes. I'd love to see an Amiga PDA...
Anyway, getting back to my original point, I've no idea about the technical side of things, but anything as nice to use as my old A1200 gets my vote. That wonderful, easy to use and understand shell and startup-sequence. Commodities. That icon system, especially with NewIcons or MagicWB. That lovely clean, clear, simple GUI. MUI. Directory Opus. OK, so I've just listed two add-ons, but I haven't found them elsewhere and I miss them:( I loved my Amiga (still do!), I loved the ease with which I could tinker with it and the near-impossibility of breaking it. I loved its compact efficiency. I loved the user community, so friendly and with such a strong freely distributable market. I loved the way that almost anyone could pick it up - I mean, my mum was fine on the old Amiga! When we moved to Windows 95 and Word, though, she got confused, she got agitated. She also got a Brother Word Processor.
OK, I'm going on, but they were lovely. And anything even halfway that nice gets my vote and my money.
Greg
Re:Dah! Classic case of marketing rushing technolo
on
Color Palms Announced
·
· Score: 1
Meanwhile, I'll be reading about all of it on my Visor Deluxe....;)
Sorry, just a silly thought here...
D'you think they'll make a visor with a black case like the IBM Workpad c3? And if so,d'you think they might be able to call it the Dark Visor?
This is why they can win even in a review so otherwise ignorant as to give WinCE the edge in every individual category. (If the categories were better reviewed PalmOS would win in more of them.)
Er, I'm not actually sure about. If you read PC Magazine UK, you'll know they don't just rate programs on feature counts. They're getting multiple users to test all sorts of things - usability, productivity, intuitiveness, satisfaction and ergonomics. I've no idea how scientific this is, but it's not just one reviewer left to play with them for a week who then comes back and says he likes the colour WinCE machines as they let him have porn and MP3s in his pocket!
Anyway, this is the page with the charts, while this gives you the front page for the review. And remember, they gave it to the IIIx!
As for completing one course, er, pardon? We're not talking evening classes, we're talking a full, proper BSc (Hons) course here. Dunno about wherever you're from, but over here they're pretty desperate for people in computing so don't tend to require a Masters or Doctorate. I'm not arrogant enough to suppose I can just walk in to a job, but statistics show that a very low percentage of Computer Science graduates are unemployed one year after graduation. I think there's a chance of me finding something and it seems worthwhile sticking a CV online, somehow.
As for Graffiti, I've never used it in my life so I haven't a clue how long it'd take me to learn. All I was observing was that I've heard many say it's really very poor, substantially inferior to Jot. I'm not sure I've seen any good comments from people who've tried both. I've no doubt that the Palm machines are superior in many ways - though could really do with a proper, full-size screen rather than that cheap and nasty tiny thing with the graffiti pad at the bottom - but if the data input is half way as poor as that, I don't want one. Yet I've heard many good comments about Jot, smARTwriter and Calligrapher, while a recent PC Magazine UK review basically confirmed that the most usable products out there were the WinCE machines. For some daft reason the IIIx won, despite getting universally low scores and so no usability seal of approval, but the scores stand: WinCE (unfortunately) appears to be better in many ways.
Go to http://images.dixons.com/DO/images/promo_991007.gi f (still can't post links!) for a picture of probably the nearest thing you're going to get - though IIRC it's UK retail only, and only 2MB.
That would be nice, but there's a bigger issue out there - Graffiti. It's dreadful, and I for one would much rather see a system with decent recognition on a greyscale sceen than poor recognition in colour. Much as I dislike MS, my current choice would be WinCE simply on these grounds.
If a revolution is to happen, someone is going to have to start observing the consumer.
Wearing my standard publicity hat, have you come across KOSH? OK, we're going a little slower than we did when we started, but we are still doing stuff, honest! And the whole point is that we design around the users then run it basically as a mutual cooperative - that is, developers, retailers and users all have a say and there's no financial institutions holding shares who have to be kept sweet.
If you're interested, please have a look at our website over at http://kosh.convergence.org - sorry, the software isn't letting me post links directly today...
If IE had remained a turkey, I would be typing this on some other kind of machine.
Oh that it were so simple!
The sad fact is that the Wintel platform hit critical mass ages ago and so has the Network Effect keeping it going. Most people buy it simply because they want a computer and there aren't any practical alternatives - or, if you go back 5-10 years, because they haven't heard of the practical alternatives, better though they may be.
In other words, anyone building a new platform (me included, if you check out my URL) needs to remember that to overhaul an existing platform, you need to subvert its network effect. Pull in enough users _somehow_ - this has to be the trick with Linux TBH, as you run it on your existing machine and it keeps the GPL zealots happy - and hope that they can start dragging users off elssewhere by making a more practical alternative.
Sad to say it, but the only way Windows is going to disappear any time soon is if MS do a better job of killing it than they and IBM tried to do of DOS with OS/2. Would a REALLY bad IE have killed it (as I still prefer NS to IE)? No, we'd use Netscape instead, except we'd probably be about a year behind on the version history and more stable due to the more sensible development times that'd have allowed.
Macs came out '84, Amigas late '85. The ST was Atari's in-house effort at an Amiga competitor when they were beaten to buying the Amiga by Commodore. It appears to have come out slightly before the Amiga, mainly through cutting corners right, left and centre to get it finished in time.
Floppy disk drives: there's an internal drive, plus an external port - if you want more than two drives, they daisychain. They're recognised and configured automatically by the system (though can usually be disabled in the event of badly-written programs falling over in their presence). Also, remember that Amiga volumes can be addressed either by drive ID (as in DF0:, DF1: and so on in this case) or volume label (so empty:, documents:, workbench3.0:) so it's nice and flexible there. And what if your program addresses the volume but you want it on your HDD? Easy, as disk identifiers can be aliased so you just type
alias ww5: apps:ww/ww5
and it's all happy again. Remember that can go in the startup-sequence or user-startup files too, to make life even easier. Worried about editing startup files? Don't be. They're as transparent and simple as you could wish for IMO.
Expansion boards? Autoconfig. Nice, simple system where each board identifies itself as it's added to the system and then gets its reqources automatically allocated by the system. So no problems with having to set up DMA channels, know address space or running out of IRQs. It's all automatic.
I know that their time has passed - mainly due to incompetent management dropping every ball they were ever given - but the Amiga really was a lovely machine. Very nearly as idiot-proof as a Mac - hey, in some ways more so! - but as easy to control as a PC and with less ways to kill the box. The computing world would genuinely be a happier place if Amigas had the prominence of either Macs or Windows.
Virtually all the important technologies we use today (GUIs, mice, Ethernet, laser printers, PostScript) were invented at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.
Er, no. I couldn't give you exact details off the top of my head, but both GUIs and mice had been around before. Xerox PARC made the first decent modern one - overlapping windows being an innovation IIRC - but the concept wasn't entirely new.
I'd be fascinated to see what happens here. I'd have to agree with our writer's assemsnet of Billy G - misguided rather than evil - but I'd love to see what would happen if he got some serious questions asked of him - a proper Paxman interview, which that wasn't. Jeremy's normally a pretty aggressive interviewer and that was as gentle as it gets - no really nasty questions, and I can't believe that they either gave Bill question approval or that I was the only one who sumbitted searching questions.
The interesting question, I suppose, is more how he'd react when presented with clear arguments that what he's doing is wrong. Jeremy just didn't know enough about the field, and I'm guessing most MS staff are a little wary of this.
As an aside, he commented at one point (sorry, not an exact quote) that MS people came in every day and produced the very best work they could. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of either their staff or their recruitment office, is it?
I suppose the truly groundbreaking thing here is his writing it on University machines then still managing to sell it, thus saving him development costs;) Oh, and getting Paul Allen to go all the way down south to sell it while he sat in Seattle playing Poker, then give Paul a minority share.
Incidentally, didn't he get someone else to code BASIC anyway? So what DID he do exactly, then?
He's a fair businessman, sure, but I can't see much evidence of his coding abilities.
Yes, The Register can get a trifle tabloid in its presentation. But is it lying? A little unlikely. They're a real company, based in the UK where we _don't_ have freedom of speech legislation so you can easily sue people for even slight possible defamation. If they were that bad, they'd have been off-line for ages by now. And they were still there last time I checked.
Since Microsoft is the most universally hated company amongst the technical community, is it becoming more and more difficult to find employees willing to work for you?
I'm a CS Student in my final year. Based in Reading, UK, same as Microsoft. Memory says I could get to their place in about 20 mins from here by bike. Now, this time next year I'll be hopefully working in IT, and I'd like to stay in this area. Am I even considering applying to MS? No way - I'd be embarrassed to have any of their software on my CV, and embarrased to know that my life was partially payed for by the effective tax on PC use that is Windows.
Erm, science is far from the ideal community you suggest - there's plenty of examples of the scientific othodoxy prevailing and not allowing stuff which breaks the mould and changes established theories to come through. For example: we've accepted his work now, but Gregor Mendel, the guy who theorised about genes, was rubbished at first because it was a huge shift in view and so people wouldn't believe it. Sure, that was some time ago, but the same thing happens elsewhere. And we now _know_ he was right.
This whole argument of Intelligent Design v Evolution gets rather silly sometimes. There's plenty of people who dismiss intelligent design as a posible theory because the Biblical account appears improbable, and plenty of people who throw out evolution because it's not how they read the bible. My take on it (accepting I'm a Computer Scientist, not a Biologist)? Probably Intelligent Design with Natural Selection. Natural selection is provable and demonstrable, which gives it a big advantage over both theories. Pure Darwinian Evolution - common origins and genetic mutation - seems fantastically unlikely, TBH. When did the chemicals swimming around suddenly form life? When did the Amoeba decide that the cells which had split would stick to each other, rather than make two differnt organisms? And when did the ball of cells develop recognisable, identifibale features? If we all started living in the sea, were we breathing as fish, mammals, amphibians? And how did the first creature to leave the sea then breathe in air? Also, I'm told that there's several diferent jaw designs out there. If they all have a common ancestor, this implies there's a common original design which they've all mutated from. Simple mechanics shows (again, as I'm told) that intermediate steps wouldn't have been mobile.
Fundamentally though, where are the Missing Link fossils? We've been searching for them for ages, so why have NONE turned up?
As for biblical creation, it _could_ have happened but I'm not ruling out other possibilities. Hence a general Intelligent Design support.
The point that some people seem not to realise is that pure Darwinian evolution is just a theory, and frankly a rather shanky one. It's not impossible, but much of the evidence could simply be taken as natural selection rather than genetic mutation from a common origin. It's not provable either as it can't be observed, so teaching it as scientific fact is crazy. Teach it as a likely theory by all means, but teaching it as fact is plain wrong.
Equally, basing everything on radio-carbon decay dating and rock dating is a little odd to say the least, as both of them are untestable theories which (I'm told) can be argued just as conclusively against as for. And you can't use Charles Lyall's uniformitarianism either, as rock layering isn't one layer per year. Mount St. Helens erupting showed that very conclusively, laying down many distinct layers in very short periods of time.
Incidentally, whoever moderated the original post of this thread up to 5, Informative? The author? It's badly written and shows a lack of basic knowledge.
My preference is set to -1, but I suspect there are others whose preference is set to 1. All I was observing was that rating posts from logged in users higer than anonymous users _automatically_ is a dangerous precedent and really ought to be reversed.
But also sad - the only reason they're appearing is that there's very often an irrational hate for Billy G and his company's works, and an equally irrational love for their competitors - and just to clarify, I'm a long-term Amiga lover so no real fan of them.
I don't like them either, nor do I think Windows CE is perfect - it's amused me from the start that they didn't seem to notice that the conventional abbreviation used for Windows products means they released something by the name of wince. Nonetheless, by all accounts it's rather better than some of us will give it credit for, and continually flaming it only serves to harm the community by making us appear vastly less intelligent or neutral. Which, as I've said above, is exactly what we want to do to kill the golden goose that is the Slashdot community.
Moderators, please grow up and start tolerating these opinions. Yes, it was a little crudley put and mildly offensive, but no way worth -1 and Flamebait / Troll.
Oops, didn't actually know that change has been made.
Can we therefore have a change in moderation policy? Dismissing comments as near-irrelevant just because the poster chose to hide their identity is a trifle totalitarian...
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, the Jews are a race with a traditional religion. You can jump through certain hoops to have yourself declared Jewish (basically pass a load of tests IIRC) but the normal way is to have a Jewish mother.
:)
Hitler cared about race, but you're going at this one from the wrong direction. He was against the Jews (and the gypsies, for that matter) because he thought they were undermining the German race. Seeing as he was very definitely in favour of procreation (witness the provisions on marriage loans or the League of German Mothers) opposition to homosexuality's pretty clear, while he also practised Eugenics - mainly sterilising the mentally ill, though you could be done for 'congenital feeble-mindedness', which could be almost anyone.
Yes, I'm aware of Godwin's Law...
Greg
I'm British, but I'm quite happy to get very worked up about people not being mellow enough!
:)
Meet one of the world's very few autoritarian liberals
Greg
My take on this as a Christian who plays plenty of fairly violent games - which, incidentally, I generally regard as humorous or a good way to release tension safely - is just that Jon was saying the game sounds a little cheesy to him (definitely does to me) and that's not good.
TBH, this game stinks to me of someone trying to start up a new market sector. By convincing the parents that this shooter is in some way religious, they're thinking that they're more likely to buy it for their kids than Q3:A (or whatever). So, wait a while and we'll have just about anything marketted as religious, to try and capture this market. Stuff the very tenuous link, there's money to be made. And I'm no fan of anyone trying to make themselves rich on the back of religion, especially with such a weak link.
Greg
AmogaOS from 2.04 up can certainly boot without launching the WorkBench(tm)
Er, probably not what he meant. Even if you do boot to a CLI rather than the GUI, how's it running? In a windows, resizable and draggable. VERY nice - character consoles should have died a death years ago and been replaced by proper displays! - but if the OS is running, it's using the GUI.
Greg
If anyone wants to try making Linux (or whateer - I've jsut picked that as the only completely open-source option listed) as easy to use and configure and as fast as my old A1200 then they've got my support. But I don't see it.
:( I loved my Amiga (still do!), I loved the ease with which I could tinker with it and the near-impossibility of breaking it. I loved its compact efficiency. I loved the user community, so friendly and with such a strong freely distributable market. I loved the way that almost anyone could pick it up - I mean, my mum was fine on the old Amiga! When we moved to Windows 95 and Word, though, she got confused, she got agitated. She also got a Brother Word Processor.
I've no idea what the technical state of relative operating systems is today so I can't say whether the Amiga's got a wonderful deterministic scheduler with sensible multithreading (to pull terms out of the air) that hasn't been equalled elsewhere. It wouldn't surprise me though and, even if we're not unique, look at the footprint! This thing will run on little more than fresh air in modern terms, for goodness' sakes. I'd love to see an Amiga PDA...
Anyway, getting back to my original point, I've no idea about the technical side of things, but anything as nice to use as my old A1200 gets my vote. That wonderful, easy to use and understand shell and startup-sequence. Commodities. That icon system, especially with NewIcons or MagicWB. That lovely clean, clear, simple GUI. MUI. Directory Opus. OK, so I've just listed two add-ons, but I haven't found them elsewhere and I miss them
OK, I'm going on, but they were lovely. And anything even halfway that nice gets my vote and my money.
Greg
Meanwhile, I'll be reading about all of it on my Visor Deluxe.... ;)
Sorry, just a silly thought here...
D'you think they'll make a visor with a black case like the IBM Workpad c3? And if so,d'you think they might be able to call it the Dark Visor?
Sorry...
Greg
This is why they can win even in a review so otherwise ignorant as to give WinCE the edge in every individual category. (If the categories were better reviewed PalmOS would win in more of them.)
Er, I'm not actually sure about. If you read PC Magazine UK, you'll know they don't just rate programs on feature counts. They're getting multiple users to test all sorts of things - usability, productivity, intuitiveness, satisfaction and ergonomics. I've no idea how scientific this is, but it's not just one reviewer left to play with them for a week who then comes back and says he likes the colour WinCE machines as they let him have porn and MP3s in his pocket!
Anyway, this is the page with the charts, while this gives you the front page for the review. And remember, they gave it to the IIIx!
Greg
Er, slightly disjopinted and off-topic post...
As for completing one course, er, pardon? We're not talking evening classes, we're talking a full, proper BSc (Hons) course here. Dunno about wherever you're from, but over here they're pretty desperate for people in computing so don't tend to require a Masters or Doctorate. I'm not arrogant enough to suppose I can just walk in to a job, but statistics show that a very low percentage of Computer Science graduates are unemployed one year after graduation. I think there's a chance of me finding something and it seems worthwhile sticking a CV online, somehow.
As for Graffiti, I've never used it in my life so I haven't a clue how long it'd take me to learn. All I was observing was that I've heard many say it's really very poor, substantially inferior to Jot. I'm not sure I've seen any good comments from people who've tried both. I've no doubt that the Palm machines are superior in many ways - though could really do with a proper, full-size screen rather than that cheap and nasty tiny thing with the graffiti pad at the bottom - but if the data input is half way as poor as that, I don't want one. Yet I've heard many good comments about Jot, smARTwriter and Calligrapher, while a recent PC Magazine UK review basically confirmed that the most usable products out there were the WinCE machines. For some daft reason the IIIx won, despite getting universally low scores and so no usability seal of approval, but the scores stand: WinCE (unfortunately) appears to be better in many ways.
Greg
Go to http://images.dixons.com/DO/images/promo_991007.gi f (still can't post links!) for a picture of probably the nearest thing you're going to get - though IIRC it's UK retail only, and only 2MB.
Greg
That would be nice, but there's a bigger issue out there - Graffiti. It's dreadful, and I for one would much rather see a system with decent recognition on a greyscale sceen than poor recognition in colour. Much as I dislike MS, my current choice would be WinCE simply on these grounds.
Greg - first?
Wearing my standard publicity hat, have you come across KOSH? OK, we're going a little slower than we did when we started, but we are still doing stuff, honest! And the whole point is that we design around the users then run it basically as a mutual cooperative - that is, developers, retailers and users all have a say and there's no financial institutions holding shares who have to be kept sweet.
If you're interested, please have a look at our website over at http://kosh.convergence.org - sorry, the software isn't letting me post links directly today...
Greg
If IE had remained a turkey, I would be typing this on some other kind of machine.
Oh that it were so simple!
The sad fact is that the Wintel platform hit critical mass ages ago and so has the Network Effect keeping it going. Most people buy it simply because they want a computer and there aren't any practical alternatives - or, if you go back 5-10 years, because they haven't heard of the practical alternatives, better though they may be.
In other words, anyone building a new platform (me included, if you check out my URL) needs to remember that to overhaul an existing platform, you need to subvert its network effect. Pull in enough users _somehow_ - this has to be the trick with Linux TBH, as you run it on your existing machine and it keeps the GPL zealots happy - and hope that they can start dragging users off elssewhere by making a more practical alternative.
Sad to say it, but the only way Windows is going to disappear any time soon is if MS do a better job of killing it than they and IBM tried to do of DOS with OS/2. Would a REALLY bad IE have killed it (as I still prefer NS to IE)? No, we'd use Netscape instead, except we'd probably be about a year behind on the version history and more stable due to the more sensible development times that'd have allowed.
Greg
Macs came out '84, Amigas late '85. The ST was Atari's in-house effort at an Amiga competitor when they were beaten to buying the Amiga by Commodore. It appears to have come out slightly before the Amiga, mainly through cutting corners right, left and centre to get it finished in time.
Greg
Not an Amiga user, are you? :)
Floppy disk drives: there's an internal drive, plus an external port - if you want more than two drives, they daisychain. They're recognised and configured automatically by the system (though can usually be disabled in the event of badly-written programs falling over in their presence). Also, remember that Amiga volumes can be addressed either by drive ID (as in DF0:, DF1: and so on in this case) or volume label (so empty:, documents:, workbench3.0:) so it's nice and flexible there. And what if your program addresses the volume but you want it on your HDD? Easy, as disk identifiers can be aliased so you just type
alias ww5: apps:ww/ww5
and it's all happy again. Remember that can go in the startup-sequence or user-startup files too, to make life even easier. Worried about editing startup files? Don't be. They're as transparent and simple as you could wish for IMO.
Expansion boards? Autoconfig. Nice, simple system where each board identifies itself as it's added to the system and then gets its reqources automatically allocated by the system. So no problems with having to set up DMA channels, know address space or running out of IRQs. It's all automatic.
I know that their time has passed - mainly due to incompetent management dropping every ball they were ever given - but the Amiga really was a lovely machine. Very nearly as idiot-proof as a Mac - hey, in some ways more so! - but as easy to control as a PC and with less ways to kill the box. The computing world would genuinely be a happier place if Amigas had the prominence of either Macs or Windows.
Greg
Virtually all the important technologies we use today (GUIs, mice, Ethernet, laser printers, PostScript) were invented at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.
Er, no. I couldn't give you exact details off the top of my head, but both GUIs and mice had been around before. Xerox PARC made the first decent modern one - overlapping windows being an innovation IIRC - but the concept wasn't entirely new.
Greg
... was the Lisa, which (IIRC) was later rebranded the Macintosh XL.
Greg
I'd be fascinated to see what happens here. I'd have to agree with our writer's assemsnet of Billy G - misguided rather than evil - but I'd love to see what would happen if he got some serious questions asked of him - a proper Paxman interview, which that wasn't. Jeremy's normally a pretty aggressive interviewer and that was as gentle as it gets - no really nasty questions, and I can't believe that they either gave Bill question approval or that I was the only one who sumbitted searching questions.
The interesting question, I suppose, is more how he'd react when presented with clear arguments that what he's doing is wrong. Jeremy just didn't know enough about the field, and I'm guessing most MS staff are a little wary of this.
As an aside, he commented at one point (sorry, not an exact quote) that MS people came in every day and produced the very best work they could. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of either their staff or their recruitment office, is it?
Greg
I suppose the truly groundbreaking thing here is his writing it on University machines then still managing to sell it, thus saving him development costs ;) Oh, and getting Paul Allen to go all the way down south to sell it while he sat in Seattle playing Poker, then give Paul a minority share.
Incidentally, didn't he get someone else to code BASIC anyway? So what DID he do exactly, then?
He's a fair businessman, sure, but I can't see much evidence of his coding abilities.
My, someone's in a bad mood today!
Yes, The Register can get a trifle tabloid in its presentation. But is it lying? A little unlikely. They're a real company, based in the UK where we _don't_ have freedom of speech legislation so you can easily sue people for even slight possible defamation. If they were that bad, they'd have been off-line for ages by now. And they were still there last time I checked.
Greg
Hmm, this one's getting sent to the Beeb...
Greg
Since Microsoft is the most universally hated company amongst the technical community, is it becoming more and more difficult to find employees willing to work for you?
I'm a CS Student in my final year. Based in Reading, UK, same as Microsoft. Memory says I could get to their place in about 20 mins from here by bike. Now, this time next year I'll be hopefully working in IT, and I'd like to stay in this area. Am I even considering applying to MS? No way - I'd be embarrassed to have any of their software on my CV, and embarrased to know that my life was partially payed for by the effective tax on PC use that is Windows.
Do they really think no-one agrees with me?
Greg
Erm, science is far from the ideal community you suggest - there's plenty of examples of the scientific othodoxy prevailing and not allowing stuff which breaks the mould and changes established theories to come through. For example: we've accepted his work now, but Gregor Mendel, the guy who theorised about genes, was rubbished at first because it was a huge shift in view and so people wouldn't believe it. Sure, that was some time ago, but the same thing happens elsewhere. And we now _know_ he was right.
This whole argument of Intelligent Design v Evolution gets rather silly sometimes. There's plenty of people who dismiss intelligent design as a posible theory because the Biblical account appears improbable, and plenty of people who throw out evolution because it's not how they read the bible. My take on it (accepting I'm a Computer Scientist, not a Biologist)? Probably Intelligent Design with Natural Selection. Natural selection is provable and demonstrable, which gives it a big advantage over both theories. Pure Darwinian Evolution - common origins and genetic mutation - seems fantastically unlikely, TBH. When did the chemicals swimming around suddenly form life? When did the Amoeba decide that the cells which had split would stick to each other, rather than make two differnt organisms? And when did the ball of cells develop recognisable, identifibale features? If we all started living in the sea, were we breathing as fish, mammals, amphibians? And how did the first creature to leave the sea then breathe in air? Also, I'm told that there's several diferent jaw designs out there. If they all have a common ancestor, this implies there's a common original design which they've all mutated from. Simple mechanics shows (again, as I'm told) that intermediate steps wouldn't have been mobile.
Fundamentally though, where are the Missing Link fossils? We've been searching for them for ages, so why have NONE turned up?
As for biblical creation, it _could_ have happened but I'm not ruling out other possibilities. Hence a general Intelligent Design support.
The point that some people seem not to realise is that pure Darwinian evolution is just a theory, and frankly a rather shanky one. It's not impossible, but much of the evidence could simply be taken as natural selection rather than genetic mutation from a common origin. It's not provable either as it can't be observed, so teaching it as scientific fact is crazy. Teach it as a likely theory by all means, but teaching it as fact is plain wrong.
Equally, basing everything on radio-carbon decay dating and rock dating is a little odd to say the least, as both of them are untestable theories which (I'm told) can be argued just as conclusively against as for. And you can't use Charles Lyall's uniformitarianism either, as rock layering isn't one layer per year. Mount St. Helens erupting showed that very conclusively, laying down many distinct layers in very short periods of time.
Incidentally, whoever moderated the original post of this thread up to 5, Informative? The author? It's badly written and shows a lack of basic knowledge.
Er, actually...
My preference is set to -1, but I suspect there are others whose preference is set to 1. All I was observing was that rating posts from logged in users higer than anonymous users _automatically_ is a dangerous precedent and really ought to be reversed.
But also sad - the only reason they're appearing is that there's very often an irrational hate for Billy G and his company's works, and an equally irrational love for their competitors - and just to clarify, I'm a long-term Amiga lover so no real fan of them.
I don't like them either, nor do I think Windows CE is perfect - it's amused me from the start that they didn't seem to notice that the conventional abbreviation used for Windows products means they released something by the name of wince. Nonetheless, by all accounts it's rather better than some of us will give it credit for, and continually flaming it only serves to harm the community by making us appear vastly less intelligent or neutral. Which, as I've said above, is exactly what we want to do to kill the golden goose that is the Slashdot community.
Moderators, please grow up and start tolerating these opinions. Yes, it was a little crudley put and mildly offensive, but no way worth -1 and Flamebait / Troll.
Greg
Oops, didn't actually know that change has been made.
Can we therefore have a change in moderation policy? Dismissing comments as near-irrelevant just because the poster chose to hide their identity is a trifle totalitarian...
Greg