What does that say about our society when a fairly simple re-design of a product garners such attention? Is it really important? Does it make your life better somehow?
If you'd actually bothered to read the article, you'd have noted that the Newsweek article is about the popularity of all the iPods in society, not just this latest incarnation. Is that news? Well, yes; the iPod is a cultural phenomenon, and it furthermore is changing the way that an extremely influential medium (music) is affecting society. You might poo poo this with an egalitarian snobbery, but it's a worthwhile news trend that Newsweek is rightfully trying to get a pulse on.
As for what it says about our society, mmm...it says to me that our society is interested in commercial products, just like every other society in the world. Perhaps you didn't notice?
Are Yugos as safe as Volvos? Do MiG-29s carry as many passengers as 757s? Software is designed, and in any design process you have to make trade-offs. Microsoft has repeatedly shown us what their design priorities are, and the fact that Microsoft products are ubiquitous doesn't mean that some competing OSes are not inherently easier to secure.
I like your analogy; let me extend it. The MS apologetic argument is a non sequitor, and it goes like this:
"I hear that MiG-29s get shot down by missiles. However, I never heard that Boeing 757s get shot down by missiles. However, Boeing 757s fly a lot more hours, and there are more of them flying than MiG-29s. Therefore, the Boeing 757 must be more secure against missiles."
On average, MS and non-MS products seem to receive fairly conterminal security analyses, and yet MS products routinely come up with the short stick in security. As is obvious to anybody who knows file system and OS security, this is by design. But still, we have to put up with absurd logic until then.
This sort of thing may or may not be in vogue on Slashdot, but for a very solid look into the world of Christianity, you can do no finer than Books and Culture. Theology, academics, the modern world and the historical all rolled into one very solid journal. Very much The Economist or the Atlantic Monthly of religious magazines. They also have a weekly weblog which is an excellent aggregator of news you should have read (but probably didn't), both religious and non.
Ugh...another buzzword and acronym-filled article. For instance:
It's the presence of standardized data in web content--whether current standards such as XHTML or some yet-unknown future standards, perhaps based on XUL--guaranteeing that the web will remain a global commons, an information highway, and a free marketplace.
XHTML is a reformulation of HTML in XML; XUL is an XML-based language that describes a computer application's graphical user interface. Not the same thing. But anyway, onto the larger pointof hysteria:
Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web.
Microsoft doesn't hate the Web. The Web has created a huge market for Microsoft in personal computers. Tons of PC sales are rooted in people wanting a computer to examine the "Internet" and "Web" things they've been hearing so much about. PC sales = Windows sales = Office sales. Microsoft doesn't hate the Web.
When Microsoft tempts these organizations and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts. Over here will be the standards-based web, with a gradually shrinking set of web sites.
This statement assumes the basic workflow:
Step 1: Develop Longhorn with Web-tainting features Step 2: Release Longhorn Step 3: ?????? Step 4: Profit! (and dominate Web)
No. First, you have to ensure that people will upgrade. Longhorn will be coming off the longest active life cycle of a Windows product ever; Microsoft will have to demonstrate in spades that Longhorn is worth the upgrade price, elsewise it will take at least 3-4 years of OEMs shipping Longhorn on all new PCs before it starts to attain ubiquity. Given the current ~2006 release date for Longhorn, that's 2009-2010. A lot can happen technologically during that time. Second, this assumes that the Web won't adapt to Longhorn-specific features, which it almost certainly will (and has adapted to hostile technologies every time before, often by marginalizing them). Third, it assumes that the same disparity between IE and all other browsers will remain basically static. Macs continue to sell well. Mozilla/Firefox/Camino continue to grow in popularity. XML continues to grow in popularity (which IE has significant problems with). Etc. Oh, and likely Longhorn-specific Web stuff will require server-side support; not likely to be included in Apache, which is the majority web server by a significant margin.
So I really don't buy the author's arguments here. I have no doubt MS will continue to taint the Web with MS-specific features, and I have no doubt that the Web will shrug it off. That's okay - Microsoft has other businesses. They're not now (and never have) put all their eggs in one basket.
Kilpatrick made a career defending segregation and apartheid. [snip]
Yikes! I don't like these guys any more than you do, but you're stooping to their level: your arguments are textbook examples of the fallacy of poisoning the well and the genetic fallacy.
If you're going to make arguments against these people, at least do so logically.
(I feel I should point out that people who discredit the de Tocqueville Institute's findings because they're funded by Microsoft also commit the genetic fallacy.)
I like the ideas of categories, but not hierarchies per se. I can file a piece under art and politics or art & me for instance. You can't comfortably do that in a hierarchy. That said, I wish Txp let you use more than two categories.
Categories are easy to do in Blosxom; you just create a director for them. Say your blog is at www.foo.com/blog. You create a directory in blog/ for each category you want, and Blosxom takes care of the rest. So you might have www.foo.com/blog/cooking, www.foo.com/blog/art, www.foo.com/blog/politics, etc. And Blosxom allows something to exist in multiple categories through symbolic links. Check this out for some info. HTH.
Sounds like you've already got a solution, but others should really consider Blosxom - it's truly free (not just GPL), and in additoin to being really easy to use, has a bunch of advantages, the bidggest of which is that it understands the concept of using a heirarchical file system to organize posts.
I'll second or third that. Blosxom is a very powerful, very simple tool (the upcoming version 3.0, which has grown significant in size, is a scandalously large 15KiB in size!:-)
Blosxom allows an extension of its features via Plugins, which allows you to get the features you want without also getting loaded up on the ones you don't. I didn't care for MT's CMS with its various logins, complex scripts, etc.
The other feature that I really enjoy in Blosxom is the easy easy easy syndication; all you do is add/index.rss to your blog's URL, and you have an RSS 0.91 feed. And since Blosxom is heirarchical, people can choose to read an RSS feed of only a specific portion of you blog if they want with no additional work on your part.
So yeah, ditch MT and go Blosxom. You won't regret it!
Optical kerning is, as I understand it, a new auto-kerning algorithm in InDesign 3. Rather than kerning based on metrics, it kerns based on actual letter-forms, producing much more pleasing results.
Optical kerning was around at least as of InDesign 2.0. In theory it is a very nice method for kerning; in practice it doesn't seem to make as big of a difference as you might think, at least with fairly typical serif and sans-serif fonts. In the print environment in which I worked, we used optical kerning for our newsprint, with our two dominant fonts being Calisto MT (serif) and Gill Sans (sans-serif); neither of those fonts suffer serious colisions with normal metric kerning, so optical kerning didn't make a night-and-day difference.
Also, optical kerning does add a modicum of additional spacing over the flow of a story or document, as in a 100 line story might end up 102-105 lines after being optically kerned (again, as of InDesign 2).
This article re-illustrates something that serious graphic designers have been pulling their hair out in trying to tell the GIMP community for years: the GIMP - though a nice project - is completely and totally off in a little world of its own.
There are some major beefs that graphic designers and Photoshoppers have with the GIMP: (1) The interface sucks. Nobody likes working with 16 different open windows (2) The interface sucks. Nobody likes menus in different windows and toolbars (3) No 16-bit/channel color support (4) No [good] CMYK support = will never be used in prepress[1] (5) Repeat (1) and (2) (6) [Lack of] Speed (7) Dependencies (GTK+, etc.)
Most importantly, I think, the GIMP community needs once again to have its teeth kicked in for its idiocy in choosing the name 'GIMP.' Yes, we here on Slashdot all know that it stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and we've all heard how it's "just an acronym" and not supposed to mean anything. But for reasons of political correctness, common decency, etc. the program's name will continue to be a major reason that it never sees any serious adoption.
So, GIMP developers, clean up the interface and change the product name, and your program has a decent chance of seeing the light of day in the real world.
[1] In the GIMP developer's defense, most/all of the CMYK process is patent protected.
That's a nice translation of MODERN Greek into MODERN English.
Huh? The parent's Greek citation is directly from (or is identical to) the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece ed. 27, one of the most combed-through and exhaustively footnoted ancient texts in the world. The NovT is based on several hundred ancient texts and textual fragments going back to the first few centuries C.E.
Unfortunatly the passage would have been written in ANCIENT Greek and would be (obviously) unreadable.
Yikes! Try telling that to the hundreds of philosophers that work with original language material from Plato and Aristotle (even earier than the NT Greek texts). The ancient Greek texts are completely readable - you can go to museums and read the manuscript fragments for yourself. The only major difficulty is that spacing and punctuation weren't used in the ancient manuscripts, so it's a bit like doing a word search.
To the parent poster: I checked your text and translation, and they're just fine. I never thought I'd see a parsing of a Greek translation of a New Testament passage modded +5 on Slashdot. The end must be nigh!
Christianity relies on the accuracy of the Bible. If you start doubting certain passages and disregarding others, the entire deck of cards comes crashing down. How can the word of God be inaccurate? If you can ignore certain parts, why not all of it?
It's an incorrect assumption that "doubting certain passages and disregarding others" causes the deck of cards of Christianity to fail. That view seems to implicitly depend on Christianity drawing its truth claims solely from Scripture, which is does not and never has. Orthodox Christianity has always relied on a balance of Scripture, theology, and philosophy to make its truth claims.
It's entirely possible to doubt certain passages while not doubting others. One passage being erroneous doesn't imply at all that any others are erroneous or invalid - that would be a slippery slope. Christianity does not stand on the one leg of the Bible any more than physics stands on the one leg of the laws of thermodynamics.
What people often mean by questions like, "If you can ignore certain parts, why not all of it?" is usually something like, "If you disbelieve that the story of Noah is a historical fact, why should the story of Jesus be any different?" And to answer that question, we turn to a variety of sources in textual criticism, archaeology, ancient history, and so forth, which have demonstrated the validity of the New Testament texts beyond [I think] what is required to meet the criteria of the 'principle of sufficient reason.' (Whew - that's a mouthful!)
Put more simply, what I'm getting at is this: Christianity relies on the Truth - not the accuracy - of the Bible. Truth in this context is defined as "the revelation of God to humanity through the Scriptures." Truth so defined includes things like the revelation of Jesus Christ, the revelation of the creation of the world by God (irregardless of the specific method employed for that creation), and so forth. Christianity does depend on that Truth, but thus far (2000 years into in) there have been no silver bullets to disprove Christianity's claims on these points.
What I am suggesting is that I think it's erroneous and fallacious to assert that Christianity's validity is somehow contingent on the accuracy of the Bible. You are, of course, free to disagree.
Now the interesting part is that Christianity is predicated on the assumption that the Bible is the infallible word of God.
No, it isn't; that's a [common] myth. Christianity is predicated on the assumption that the Bible is the inspired Word of God - the Word of God that contains a core of essential, timeless truth (transcendent, objective truth) that is not found anywhere else.
While it's true that there are some groups that do believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God (primarily American Protestant fundamentalists, it seems), that's a pretty tough position to defend, as there are a few notable contradictions, disputes in geneologies and histories, etc. in the text.
What's important to Christianity is not that every word of every page is accurate but rather that the essential claims of the Bible are true - namely that there is a God who created the world (whatever form that creation actually took), that there was a man in first century Palestine named Jesus who was a fully-human, fully-God man who was without sin and was crucified and resurrected, etc. And it is those claims that Christianity asserts that the Bible is correct in. The Bible would be correct in these even if you think (as some modern scholars do) that the stories of Jesus in the Gospels are more of a narrative construction than a historical depiction (as long as you maintain that the narrative constructions still have a historical basis!). N. T. Wright, who is widely regarded as one of the top scholars on the New Testament, has written a number of books on this topic.
There are wildly different ways to read the Bible, and it's not essential to orthodoxy that you accept the Bible as the infallible Word of God. I think that few of the Church Fathers would have held a view of infallibility, and thus I don't think that the truth of Christianity is either predicated on or compromised by the denial of that position.
Why such open hatred for the Judeo-Christian (I'll throw in Islam as well) religions and not Egyptian Mayan or Aztec, or ancient Sumerian?
I'll take a stab at this one; I think it's beyond what you get at.
Why such open hatred for Judeo-Christian religions? Familiarity on one hand, and ignorance on the other.
What's bothersome in discussions like this story is the predictable emergence of posters who want to forge a dichotomy between Christianity (whatever that is) and science (in this story's case, chiefly archaeology). Invariably threads emerge that are "science vs. the Bible" debates.
However, the view that Christianity and empirical science are at odds is an entirely modern idea. It has come to be accepted as fact through the propagation of a few dedicated (and to their credit, very intelligent) secularists. I'd be willing to wager a respectable sum of money that few adherents to either the 'Christian' side or the 'scientific' side could identify the sources or even rough dates of the supposed schism between Christianity and science.
Christianity and science have not been historically at odds. Quite rather, the presence of Christianity enabled quite a bit of the Scientific revolution, and it was under the umbrella of Christian dogmatics that much of the early foundational scientific discoveries were made. Newton, for instance, was a pious Anglican with "deep theological interests and an expert knowledge of the Bible," as recent biographers have noted. More to the point, the synthesis of science and Scripture is affirmed by many Christians, including a good chunk of Calvinists (who were the genesis of what today is American evangelicalism) and many Roman Catholics.
But apart from this, nothing in orthodox Christianity suggested or implied a distrust of natural science or the material realm (orthodox Christianity affirms quite the opposite, actually). The "schism" that many people assume is a much more recent development, one that is chiefly Protestant fundamentalist and chiefly American.
As I mentioned in a separate post elsewhere in this story, there's an unfortunate tendency among religiously less-educated people to generalize American protestant fundamentalism into Christian orthodoxy. In reality, the two have wildly different views on many things, including (relevant for this story) the literal significance or lack thereof of particular Biblical narratives.
The long-winded point here is to say that the open hatred is bred mostly from familiarity and also from a great deal of unfortunate ignorance on the matter. If secularists would take some time to research the history and theology behind the Christian views they are supposedly (I think in straw man form) debunking, we could all be saved a great deal of time and typing. And yes, the inverse is true for the Christian fundamentalist camp, lest you think I'm unfairly ascribing blame to secularists.
It's pretty hard to reconcile the bible with the abundance of archaeoligcal evidence that shows that dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years before the first humans showed up.
These fairy tales don't fly on slashdot because the people here are educated enough to know better.
No, they really aren't; I read views on Christianity and other religions that are chock full of misconceptions or misunderstandings all the time.
There's a major tendency by various posters on Slashdot to overgeneralize American Protestant fundamentalism into Christian orthodoxy. If you don't know the differences between fundamentalism and orthodoxy, realize that your knowledge of Christianity ranks fairly low. (Which is to say that people can't be experts on everything. Even on Slashdot.)
My opinion, having been a Slash reader since the site's infancy, is that there's actually a fairly low level of religious knowledge amongst the learned Slashdot crowd. This tends to [unfortunately] manifest itself in haughty arrogance. QED indeed.
Intuitively, that makes a bit of sense. All these modern composites and exotic metals can't be clean to work with. Though I suppose it'd be easier for a factory to contain the pollutants.
Correct. Chris King is an ultra-high-end bicycle parts company that runs an extremely clean production facility. Their custom-designed anozidizing process releases absolute NO waste water, which is remarkable if you know anodizing. They've also figured out how to re-use a lot of waste products in their manufacturing lines, thereby saving them money and greatly reducing the environmental impact.
Exotic materials can be polluting, but only if the factories let them be. It's possible to do "new manufacturing" in a very green way.
Come to think of it, maybe we should get them to ban the whole Bible. It's one big piece of hate literature - "You're going to Hell unless you believe in Jesus!" As an atheist, I find this particularly offensive.
You're not a very well informed atheist, then. From a purely literary standpoint (theology aside) the Bible isn't one big piece of hate literature, nor is it all about "You're going to hell unless you believe in Jesus," nor does that statement appear anywhere directly, nor does the inference of that passage appear in the Bible without other contravening passages which open it up to theological debate.
I think agnostics and followers of other religions would agree.
I doubt followers of other religions would agree, as if you were going to ban the Bible it would be reasonable to assume that you'll eventually go after their holy books too.
Why can't AT&T offer you a GSM phone that falls back to TDMA (whatever that is?).
They do. The Siemens S46. Great phones! Major travellers carry them (the editor of a major magazine's international bureau, for one example that I know off the top of my head).
BTW To pick nits, GSM doesn't fall back to TDMA. GSM is a TDMA-based network. TDMA is an architecture, and GSM is a specification.
Ok, you win. This has to be a terminology problem Let's reformulate: There is no GSM network in the US, because according to your specs they would have to provide SIMS, and none of them does. So those AT&T phones we're talking about are not GSMs. End of argument.
You're either incredibly foolish or a troll (my money is on the latter), but I'll reply anyway: YES there ARE GSM networks in the U.S.A. and YES every single one of them sells phones that require SIM (subscriber identity module) cards. As other posters who are actually clued in have noted, it's part of the GSM spec for a phone to have a SIM card.
There were two types of SIM cards: the original, old Type I cards, which looked like a credit card, and the newer Type II cards, which are the thumbnail-sized cards. You can see pretty pictures here. Type I cards haven't been used since the mid-90s. The last Type I-accepting phone I remember seeing was (IIRC) a GSM Motorola StarTac.
The only major GSM carrier in the U.S.A. until 3 or 4 years ago was Voicestream (Western Wireless), which became T-Mobile after the Deutsche Telekom buyout. As part of the upstart of 2.5G services here in the U.S., other companies such as AT&T and BellSouth started building up GSM networks.
You can see the "proof" that they're GSM networks by Googling for "BellSouth GSM" or "AT&T GSM." Other proof that there are GSM phones: I just took the battery off my Sony Ericsson T68i and...suprise! A GSM SIM card! Just like the ones I used to put in the back of every customer's phone back when I was a VoiceStream dealer. Just like the GSM SIM cards inside every single "next generation" AT&T phone, and every single T-Mobile phone. So forth and so on ad nauseum.
In related news, I've blacklisted you for making repeated stupid statements without taking 10 seconds to STFG.
Yeah, we've all heard the "made on the same assembly line yada yada" argument, and indeed that may be perfectly valid in a number cases (or valid to the degree it makes any difference).
It's more valid than I think most people even begin to realize. There are a few manufacturing firms, mostly Asian, that manufacture a huge percentage of the world's consumer goods. A high percentage of all computers, electronics, bicycles, furniture, etc. come out of the same dozen-or-so factories in Asia. ~90% of the world's bicycles are made in one of three factories in Asia, be they Huffys or Specialized. Think Dell, Apple, and HP run separate factories for their products? Nope. The computers (or at least the componentry for them) come from the same factories.
I would really love to see a book in the genre of 'Fast Food Nation' or 'Nickel and Dimed' that investigates brand-name manufacturing and generics. I'd guess more often than not in terms of contents and technology, there's very little difference between a $200 TV and a $400 one, save for the almighty brand name and the perceived worth associated therewith...
It's only a matter of time, perhaps 10 or 20 years, until a grad student or third world scientist will be able to easily engineer his own deadly plague virus.
You forget that by that time a grad student or third world scientist will be able to easily engineer the cure, too. And advanced medicine in a first world country even moreso.
Look, I understand that people want to be all doomsday to knock some sense into people, but really no human invention except the atomic bomb and television has actually had the ability to cause mass casualities that could be considered on a 'doomsday' scale.
Slashdot Mirror
You've an MS in organic chemistry but you work as an Information Systems Coordinator? You must be an awesome chemist. You're a sad fuck man.
Pot meet kettle. Kettle, meet pot.
Speaking of things that are black, you're on the blacklist now.
What does that say about our society when a fairly simple re-design of a product garners such attention? Is it really important? Does it make your life better somehow?
If you'd actually bothered to read the article, you'd have noted that the Newsweek article is about the popularity of all the iPods in society, not just this latest incarnation. Is that news? Well, yes; the iPod is a cultural phenomenon, and it furthermore is changing the way that an extremely influential medium (music) is affecting society. You might poo poo this with an egalitarian snobbery, but it's a worthwhile news trend that Newsweek is rightfully trying to get a pulse on.
As for what it says about our society, mmm...it says to me that our society is interested in commercial products, just like every other society in the world. Perhaps you didn't notice?
Are Yugos as safe as Volvos? Do MiG-29s carry as many passengers as 757s? Software is designed, and in any design process you have to make trade-offs. Microsoft has repeatedly shown us what their design priorities are, and the fact that Microsoft products are ubiquitous doesn't mean that some competing OSes are not inherently easier to secure.
I like your analogy; let me extend it. The MS apologetic argument is a non sequitor, and it goes like this:
"I hear that MiG-29s get shot down by missiles. However, I never heard that Boeing 757s get shot down by missiles. However, Boeing 757s fly a lot more hours, and there are more of them flying than MiG-29s. Therefore, the Boeing 757 must be more secure against missiles."
On average, MS and non-MS products seem to receive fairly conterminal security analyses, and yet MS products routinely come up with the short stick in security. As is obvious to anybody who knows file system and OS security, this is by design. But still, we have to put up with absurd logic until then.
This sort of thing may or may not be in vogue on Slashdot, but for a very solid look into the world of Christianity, you can do no finer than Books and Culture. Theology, academics, the modern world and the historical all rolled into one very solid journal. Very much The Economist or the Atlantic Monthly of religious magazines. They also have a weekly weblog which is an excellent aggregator of news you should have read (but probably didn't), both religious and non.
Ugh...another buzzword and acronym-filled article. For instance:
It's the presence of standardized data in web content--whether current standards such as XHTML or some yet-unknown future standards, perhaps based on XUL--guaranteeing that the web will remain a global commons, an information highway, and a free marketplace.
XHTML is a reformulation of HTML in XML; XUL is an XML-based language that describes a computer application's graphical user interface. Not the same thing. But anyway, onto the larger pointof hysteria:
Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web.
Microsoft doesn't hate the Web. The Web has created a huge market for Microsoft in personal computers. Tons of PC sales are rooted in people wanting a computer to examine the "Internet" and "Web" things they've been hearing so much about. PC sales = Windows sales = Office sales. Microsoft doesn't hate the Web.
When Microsoft tempts these organizations and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts. Over here will be the standards-based web, with a gradually shrinking set of web sites.
This statement assumes the basic workflow:
Step 1: Develop Longhorn with Web-tainting features
Step 2: Release Longhorn
Step 3: ??????
Step 4: Profit! (and dominate Web)
No. First, you have to ensure that people will upgrade. Longhorn will be coming off the longest active life cycle of a Windows product ever; Microsoft will have to demonstrate in spades that Longhorn is worth the upgrade price, elsewise it will take at least 3-4 years of OEMs shipping Longhorn on all new PCs before it starts to attain ubiquity. Given the current ~2006 release date for Longhorn, that's 2009-2010. A lot can happen technologically during that time. Second, this assumes that the Web won't adapt to Longhorn-specific features, which it almost certainly will (and has adapted to hostile technologies every time before, often by marginalizing them). Third, it assumes that the same disparity between IE and all other browsers will remain basically static. Macs continue to sell well. Mozilla/Firefox/Camino continue to grow in popularity. XML continues to grow in popularity (which IE has significant problems with). Etc. Oh, and likely Longhorn-specific Web stuff will require server-side support; not likely to be included in Apache, which is the majority web server by a significant margin.
So I really don't buy the author's arguments here. I have no doubt MS will continue to taint the Web with MS-specific features, and I have no doubt that the Web will shrug it off. That's okay - Microsoft has other businesses. They're not now (and never have) put all their eggs in one basket.
Kilpatrick made a career defending segregation and apartheid. [snip]
Yikes! I don't like these guys any more than you do, but you're stooping to their level: your arguments are textbook examples of the fallacy of poisoning the well and the genetic fallacy.
If you're going to make arguments against these people, at least do so logically.
(I feel I should point out that people who discredit the de Tocqueville Institute's findings because they're funded by Microsoft also commit the genetic fallacy.)
I like the ideas of categories, but not hierarchies per se. I can file a piece under art and politics or art & me for instance. You can't comfortably do that in a hierarchy. That said, I wish Txp let you use more than two categories.
Categories are easy to do in Blosxom; you just create a director for them. Say your blog is at www.foo.com/blog. You create a directory in blog/ for each category you want, and Blosxom takes care of the rest. So you might have www.foo.com/blog/cooking, www.foo.com/blog/art, www.foo.com/blog/politics, etc. And Blosxom allows something to exist in multiple categories through symbolic links. Check this out for some info. HTH.
Sounds like you've already got a solution, but others should really consider Blosxom - it's truly free (not just GPL), and in additoin to being really easy to use, has a bunch of advantages, the bidggest of which is that it understands the concept of using a heirarchical file system to organize posts.
:-)
/index.rss to your blog's URL, and you have an RSS 0.91 feed. And since Blosxom is heirarchical, people can choose to read an RSS feed of only a specific portion of you blog if they want with no additional work on your part.
I'll second or third that. Blosxom is a very powerful, very simple tool (the upcoming version 3.0, which has grown significant in size, is a scandalously large 15KiB in size!
Blosxom allows an extension of its features via Plugins, which allows you to get the features you want without also getting loaded up on the ones you don't. I didn't care for MT's CMS with its various logins, complex scripts, etc.
The other feature that I really enjoy in Blosxom is the easy easy easy syndication; all you do is add
So yeah, ditch MT and go Blosxom. You won't regret it!
*cough* GSM?
Cracked.
Optical kerning is, as I understand it, a new auto-kerning algorithm in InDesign 3. Rather than kerning based on metrics, it kerns based on actual letter-forms, producing much more pleasing results.
Optical kerning was around at least as of InDesign 2.0. In theory it is a very nice method for kerning; in practice it doesn't seem to make as big of a difference as you might think, at least with fairly typical serif and sans-serif fonts. In the print environment in which I worked, we used optical kerning for our newsprint, with our two dominant fonts being Calisto MT (serif) and Gill Sans (sans-serif); neither of those fonts suffer serious colisions with normal metric kerning, so optical kerning didn't make a night-and-day difference.
Also, optical kerning does add a modicum of additional spacing over the flow of a story or document, as in a 100 line story might end up 102-105 lines after being optically kerned (again, as of InDesign 2).
This article re-illustrates something that serious graphic designers have been pulling their hair out in trying to tell the GIMP community for years: the GIMP - though a nice project - is completely and totally off in a little world of its own.
There are some major beefs that graphic designers and Photoshoppers have with the GIMP:
(1) The interface sucks. Nobody likes working with 16 different open windows
(2) The interface sucks. Nobody likes menus in different windows and toolbars
(3) No 16-bit/channel color support
(4) No [good] CMYK support = will never be used in prepress[1]
(5) Repeat (1) and (2)
(6) [Lack of] Speed
(7) Dependencies (GTK+, etc.)
Most importantly, I think, the GIMP community needs once again to have its teeth kicked in for its idiocy in choosing the name 'GIMP.' Yes, we here on Slashdot all know that it stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and we've all heard how it's "just an acronym" and not supposed to mean anything. But for reasons of political correctness, common decency, etc. the program's name will continue to be a major reason that it never sees any serious adoption.
So, GIMP developers, clean up the interface and change the product name, and your program has a decent chance of seeing the light of day in the real world.
[1] In the GIMP developer's defense, most/all of the CMYK process is patent protected.
That's a nice translation of MODERN Greek into MODERN English.
Huh? The parent's Greek citation is directly from (or is identical to) the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece ed. 27, one of the most combed-through and exhaustively footnoted ancient texts in the world. The NovT is based on several hundred ancient texts and textual fragments going back to the first few centuries C.E.
Unfortunatly the passage would have been written in ANCIENT Greek and would be (obviously) unreadable.
Yikes! Try telling that to the hundreds of philosophers that work with original language material from Plato and Aristotle (even earier than the NT Greek texts). The ancient Greek texts are completely readable - you can go to museums and read the manuscript fragments for yourself. The only major difficulty is that spacing and punctuation weren't used in the ancient manuscripts, so it's a bit like doing a word search.
To the parent poster: I checked your text and translation, and they're just fine. I never thought I'd see a parsing of a Greek translation of a New Testament passage modded +5 on Slashdot. The end must be nigh!
Christianity relies on the accuracy of the Bible. If you start doubting certain passages and disregarding others, the entire deck of cards comes crashing down. How can the word of God be inaccurate? If you can ignore certain parts, why not all of it?
It's an incorrect assumption that "doubting certain passages and disregarding others" causes the deck of cards of Christianity to fail. That view seems to implicitly depend on Christianity drawing its truth claims solely from Scripture, which is does not and never has. Orthodox Christianity has always relied on a balance of Scripture, theology, and philosophy to make its truth claims.
It's entirely possible to doubt certain passages while not doubting others. One passage being erroneous doesn't imply at all that any others are erroneous or invalid - that would be a slippery slope. Christianity does not stand on the one leg of the Bible any more than physics stands on the one leg of the laws of thermodynamics.
What people often mean by questions like, "If you can ignore certain parts, why not all of it?" is usually something like, "If you disbelieve that the story of Noah is a historical fact, why should the story of Jesus be any different?" And to answer that question, we turn to a variety of sources in textual criticism, archaeology, ancient history, and so forth, which have demonstrated the validity of the New Testament texts beyond [I think] what is required to meet the criteria of the 'principle of sufficient reason.' (Whew - that's a mouthful!)
Put more simply, what I'm getting at is this: Christianity relies on the Truth - not the accuracy - of the Bible. Truth in this context is defined as "the revelation of God to humanity through the Scriptures." Truth so defined includes things like the revelation of Jesus Christ, the revelation of the creation of the world by God (irregardless of the specific method employed for that creation), and so forth. Christianity does depend on that Truth, but thus far (2000 years into in) there have been no silver bullets to disprove Christianity's claims on these points.
What I am suggesting is that I think it's erroneous and fallacious to assert that Christianity's validity is somehow contingent on the accuracy of the Bible. You are, of course, free to disagree.
Now the interesting part is that Christianity is predicated on the assumption that the Bible is the infallible word of God.
No, it isn't; that's a [common] myth. Christianity is predicated on the assumption that the Bible is the inspired Word of God - the Word of God that contains a core of essential, timeless truth (transcendent, objective truth) that is not found anywhere else.
While it's true that there are some groups that do believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God (primarily American Protestant fundamentalists, it seems), that's a pretty tough position to defend, as there are a few notable contradictions, disputes in geneologies and histories, etc. in the text.
What's important to Christianity is not that every word of every page is accurate but rather that the essential claims of the Bible are true - namely that there is a God who created the world (whatever form that creation actually took), that there was a man in first century Palestine named Jesus who was a fully-human, fully-God man who was without sin and was crucified and resurrected, etc. And it is those claims that Christianity asserts that the Bible is correct in. The Bible would be correct in these even if you think (as some modern scholars do) that the stories of Jesus in the Gospels are more of a narrative construction than a historical depiction (as long as you maintain that the narrative constructions still have a historical basis!). N. T. Wright, who is widely regarded as one of the top scholars on the New Testament, has written a number of books on this topic.
There are wildly different ways to read the Bible, and it's not essential to orthodoxy that you accept the Bible as the infallible Word of God. I think that few of the Church Fathers would have held a view of infallibility, and thus I don't think that the truth of Christianity is either predicated on or compromised by the denial of that position.
Why such open hatred for the Judeo-Christian (I'll throw in Islam as well) religions and not Egyptian Mayan or Aztec, or ancient Sumerian?
I'll take a stab at this one; I think it's beyond what you get at.
Why such open hatred for Judeo-Christian religions? Familiarity on one hand, and ignorance on the other.
What's bothersome in discussions like this story is the predictable emergence of posters who want to forge a dichotomy between Christianity (whatever that is) and science (in this story's case, chiefly archaeology). Invariably threads emerge that are "science vs. the Bible" debates.
However, the view that Christianity and empirical science are at odds is an entirely modern idea. It has come to be accepted as fact through the propagation of a few dedicated (and to their credit, very intelligent) secularists. I'd be willing to wager a respectable sum of money that few adherents to either the 'Christian' side or the 'scientific' side could identify the sources or even rough dates of the supposed schism between Christianity and science.
Christianity and science have not been historically at odds. Quite rather, the presence of Christianity enabled quite a bit of the Scientific revolution, and it was under the umbrella of Christian dogmatics that much of the early foundational scientific discoveries were made. Newton, for instance, was a pious Anglican with "deep theological interests and an expert knowledge of the Bible," as recent biographers have noted. More to the point, the synthesis of science and Scripture is affirmed by many Christians, including a good chunk of Calvinists (who were the genesis of what today is American evangelicalism) and many Roman Catholics.
But apart from this, nothing in orthodox Christianity suggested or implied a distrust of natural science or the material realm (orthodox Christianity affirms quite the opposite, actually). The "schism" that many people assume is a much more recent development, one that is chiefly Protestant fundamentalist and chiefly American.
As I mentioned in a separate post elsewhere in this story, there's an unfortunate tendency among religiously less-educated people to generalize American protestant fundamentalism into Christian orthodoxy. In reality, the two have wildly different views on many things, including (relevant for this story) the literal significance or lack thereof of particular Biblical narratives.
The long-winded point here is to say that the open hatred is bred mostly from familiarity and also from a great deal of unfortunate ignorance on the matter. If secularists would take some time to research the history and theology behind the Christian views they are supposedly (I think in straw man form) debunking, we could all be saved a great deal of time and typing. And yes, the inverse is true for the Christian fundamentalist camp, lest you think I'm unfairly ascribing blame to secularists.
*sigh*
It's pretty hard to reconcile the bible with the abundance of archaeoligcal evidence that shows that dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years before the first humans showed up.
Reading and believing in the Bible doesn't require the reader to take it literally. Some random and eclectic examples of people who don't read the Bible literally.
These fairy tales don't fly on slashdot because the people here are educated enough to know better.
No, they really aren't; I read views on Christianity and other religions that are chock full of misconceptions or misunderstandings all the time.
There's a major tendency by various posters on Slashdot to overgeneralize American Protestant fundamentalism into Christian orthodoxy. If you don't know the differences between fundamentalism and orthodoxy, realize that your knowledge of Christianity ranks fairly low. (Which is to say that people can't be experts on everything. Even on Slashdot.)
My opinion, having been a Slash reader since the site's infancy, is that there's actually a fairly low level of religious knowledge amongst the learned Slashdot crowd. This tends to [unfortunately] manifest itself in haughty arrogance. QED indeed.
Intuitively, that makes a bit of sense. All these modern composites and exotic metals can't be clean to work with. Though I suppose it'd be easier for a factory to contain the pollutants.
Correct. Chris King is an ultra-high-end bicycle parts company that runs an extremely clean production facility. Their custom-designed anozidizing process releases absolute NO waste water, which is remarkable if you know anodizing. They've also figured out how to re-use a lot of waste products in their manufacturing lines, thereby saving them money and greatly reducing the environmental impact.
Exotic materials can be polluting, but only if the factories let them be. It's possible to do "new manufacturing" in a very green way.
Come to think of it, maybe we should get them to ban the whole Bible. It's one big piece of hate literature - "You're going to Hell unless you believe in Jesus!" As an atheist, I find this particularly offensive.
You're not a very well informed atheist, then. From a purely literary standpoint (theology aside) the Bible isn't one big piece of hate literature, nor is it all about "You're going to hell unless you believe in Jesus," nor does that statement appear anywhere directly, nor does the inference of that passage appear in the Bible without other contravening passages which open it up to theological debate.
I think agnostics and followers of other religions would agree.
I doubt followers of other religions would agree, as if you were going to ban the Bible it would be reasonable to assume that you'll eventually go after their holy books too.
Why can't AT&T offer you a GSM phone that falls back to TDMA (whatever that is?).
They do. The Siemens S46. Great phones! Major travellers carry them (the editor of a major magazine's international bureau, for one example that I know off the top of my head).
BTW To pick nits, GSM doesn't fall back to TDMA. GSM is a TDMA-based network. TDMA is an architecture, and GSM is a specification.
Ok, you win. This has to be a terminology problem Let's reformulate: There is no GSM network in the US, because according to your specs they would have to provide SIMS, and none of them does. So those AT&T phones we're talking about are not GSMs. End of argument.
You're either incredibly foolish or a troll (my money is on the latter), but I'll reply anyway: YES there ARE GSM networks in the U.S.A. and YES every single one of them sells phones that require SIM (subscriber identity module) cards. As other posters who are actually clued in have noted, it's part of the GSM spec for a phone to have a SIM card.
There were two types of SIM cards: the original, old Type I cards, which looked like a credit card, and the newer Type II cards, which are the thumbnail-sized cards. You can see pretty pictures here. Type I cards haven't been used since the mid-90s. The last Type I-accepting phone I remember seeing was (IIRC) a GSM Motorola StarTac.
The only major GSM carrier in the U.S.A. until 3 or 4 years ago was Voicestream (Western Wireless), which became T-Mobile after the Deutsche Telekom buyout. As part of the upstart of 2.5G services here in the U.S., other companies such as AT&T and BellSouth started building up GSM networks.
You can see the "proof" that they're GSM networks by Googling for "BellSouth GSM" or "AT&T GSM." Other proof that there are GSM phones: I just took the battery off my Sony Ericsson T68i and...suprise! A GSM SIM card! Just like the ones I used to put in the back of every customer's phone back when I was a VoiceStream dealer. Just like the GSM SIM cards inside every single "next generation" AT&T phone, and every single T-Mobile phone. So forth and so on ad nauseum.
In related news, I've blacklisted you for making repeated stupid statements without taking 10 seconds to STFG.
Yeah, we've all heard the "made on the same assembly line yada yada" argument, and indeed that may be perfectly valid in a number cases (or valid to the degree it makes any difference).
It's more valid than I think most people even begin to realize. There are a few manufacturing firms, mostly Asian, that manufacture a huge percentage of the world's consumer goods. A high percentage of all computers, electronics, bicycles, furniture, etc. come out of the same dozen-or-so factories in Asia. ~90% of the world's bicycles are made in one of three factories in Asia, be they Huffys or Specialized. Think Dell, Apple, and HP run separate factories for their products? Nope. The computers (or at least the componentry for them) come from the same factories.
I would really love to see a book in the genre of 'Fast Food Nation' or 'Nickel and Dimed' that investigates brand-name manufacturing and generics. I'd guess more often than not in terms of contents and technology, there's very little difference between a $200 TV and a $400 one, save for the almighty brand name and the perceived worth associated therewith...
I just use Google Groups to rec.food.recipes when I'm looking for something different. It's turned up many good recipes, and my wife rates it A+!
Wow, Taco, about 7 Slashdot readers will even get that. +1, Obscure!
That was a pretty funny book, actually.
Except that it was also a movie that more than a few people have seen. Not really that obscure.
It's only a matter of time, perhaps 10 or 20 years, until a grad student or third world scientist will be able to easily engineer his own deadly plague virus.
You forget that by that time a grad student or third world scientist will be able to easily engineer the cure, too. And advanced medicine in a first world country even moreso.
Look, I understand that people want to be all doomsday to knock some sense into people, but really no human invention except the atomic bomb and television has actually had the ability to cause mass casualities that could be considered on a 'doomsday' scale.