Are there any printers that actually live up to the manufacturers' claims, ideally with Linux support?"
Really, folks, you'd think from reading Slashdot that Linux is the only OS geeks run...
It just ain't so - I've gone to BSD for over half my servers (the rest are Linux, but the shift is underway), and will stay with Windows on the desktop, just because it makes my life one heck of a lot easier.
Windows with cygwin or U/Win gives me the best of both worlds. Since this configuration is one of the most popular in the geek world (far more popular than Linux desktops, I'm sure), why should we care or be bothered about trying to get printing to work on Linux anyway. (Seriously, printing has always been significantly problematic in Unix, and I speak as a strong Unix bigot with over 17 years of experience. (When I worked at Chevron ten years ago, well over half our Unix helpdesk calls involved printing!) I stopped having time to fuss with printing in Linux/Unix years ago, and I don't regret it one bit, either...)
Anyway this site is a hoot, and I'm surprised it's still there. This was one of the first sites I remember on the web where someone actually committed to the then-considerable expense of registering a domain name and building a web server just for a joke. I'm glad to see this true relic of the old Internet is still hanging around (and apparently, in its original form, too...)
Another interesting use for the terribly versatile material called pitch is to form the precursor material (PAN) for Carbon (also called Graphite) fibers used in the modern Carbon composites that make everything from tennis rackets and fishing rods to airliners and the leading edge surfaces of the space shuttle.
The fibers produced by this process are very fine - typical "tow" widths are 12,000 fibers (about the diameter of a small string), 6000 fibers, and the fairly fine 3000 fibers.
We'd have a hard time getting by without pitch in today's world...
In the interest of time (mine) I'll just paste in an excerpt from this month's Science Against Evolution (which was not yet posted when this thread started) about the pitiful argument Scientific American tried to use w.r.t. mutations recently. It pretty much summarizes the bankruptcy of the Evolutionist position on this issue. The entire article can be found here in two parts: Part 1, and Part 2.
There are no Creative Mutations
[Sciam says:] --- 10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.
On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism's DNA)--bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example. [Footnote deleted. See Part 2 link above for original source.] ---
--- SciAm quotes this reference:
Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow. These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses. [Footnote deleted. See Part 2 link above for original source.] ---
The genetic mistake did not produce a new complex structure. It just made an existing complex structure appear in a place where it would not work. We want to see a Hox gene make functional legs or wings appear on a worm. Is that a "frustrating request" or "an unreasonable burden"? What makes it unreasonable? It is unreasonable because everybody knows it can't possibly happen. But, for the theory of evolution to be true, it has to happen often. Reptiles had to grow breasts to become mammals, didn't they? Every internal organ of every living creature is a complex structure that had to be produced by a genetic mistake, if the theory of evolution is true.
I would add, that if evolution is true, then such errors (required for speciation) must be rather more common than uncommon (take for example all that evolution of all those different types of eyes.)
The implications of this, if taken to thier logical conclusion, would be rather alarming to the environmental movement: Clearly, extinction is NOT a problem despite the fact that human history has seen countless species vainish and not a single one evolve to fill a vacated niche. Since evolution is true, we need not worry about extiction or endangered species at all - in fact, putting such species under pressure should, by this logic, just grab the natural selection knob and "crank it up a notch" as Emeril Legasse might say. If evolution does work, then new species should certainly arise, and be well-"adapted" to the new conditions.
That this doesn't happen (and more importantly perhaps, that we recognize intuitively that it CANNOT happen) is a significant indicator (clue stick: Whack!) that Evolution is little more than a fairy tale created by those who for thier own personal reasons find it necessary to deny the existence of a Creator and a God.
Interstingly, many Evolutionists even admit as much, when pressed on the issue: Sir Julian Huxley, once the world's leading Evolutionist and head of UNESCO, said he believed that the reason so many scientists, himself included, embraced the idea of evolution was "because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores." Arthur Keith, author of twenty books defending evolution, wrote: "Evolution is unproved and unproveable. We believe it because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable."
Perhaps, to an open and rational mind, it should not be so unthinkable after all...
A long time example was the eye, but that's pretty much been shattered.
Don't be ridiculous, NO ONE has proposed a reasonable explanation for how an eye might even hypothetically develop, even assuming that beneficial mutations that create new genetic information exist, a crucial prerequisite for which there is no evidence at all.
Please explain to me, for instance, how a unique structure like the optic nreve unconnected to either the retina (that's not there yet, because it's still waiting to evolve rods and cones), or the brain (that has no visual cortex for processing any signals it might send) might stand even a snowball's chance in Hell of being selected as a beneficial mutation, and carried along as excess baggage for the geologic eras required for the rest of the mechanism to fall into place. To get around this problem, you need to have thousands of such impossibilities all resolve themselves simultaneously in order to produce an eye that might confer some advantage in natural selection.
You make a brash claim, one that I have yet to see any actual scientist claiming to be an evolutionist want to make in public. That's because it is totally indefensible.
The sad thing about this is that they're betting on the wrong horse - Caldera Linux is a better OS than SCO.
Unfortunately, this is all about the cart pulling the horse - like SGI, SCO just won't die: although they haven't really made money in years, they make enough to keep the campany barely afloat.
SCO is not a very good product, but is much better after an injection of goat glands from UnixWare.
I'll miss Caldera, though - I think it was probably the Linux distro best suited for enterprise use, and certainly had the best installation and managment tools.
Good question: What does this mean for Lycoris (nee Redmond Linux), since that ecxcellent desktop distro is based on Caldera?
There's no difference between micro and macro. Small changes over time can add up. It takes no imagination at all to understand how that works.
There's all the difference in the world. No creationist denies the validity of selection for genes *within* a kind. That's microevolution - the rearragement (either natural or human-directed) of genes that are *already present*. Dog breeding works this way, as do finch beaks and foot feathers in pigeons.
Macroevolution is another kettle o' fish entirely, because for it to happen you have to somehow use random processes to *create* highly ordered, specific additional genetic information. Mutations do not do this. Evolutionary biologists have calculated the chances against such things happening as effectively zero. We reliably expect the laws of thermo to hold in all areas of life *except* macroevolutionary development? What utter hogwash. No natural process has ever been observed to create excess information. That's not becuaue it's rare, it's because it doesn't happen. We have every scientifically valid reason to know this to be true, it's just that acknowledging that would also tacitly acknowledge that a Creator could exist, something that at least evolutionary science will not allow.
Ultimately it's *all* about worldview, as the starting premise of modern evolutionary scientists is that God must be denied at all costs, even the cost of the truth and logical consistency.
The Behe argument is really nothing more than a complaint that knowledge of biochemical evolution is not well understood so far. A typical "Gaps equal God" argument.
He suggests that because nobody knows what the intermediate (simpler) versions of complex biochemical processes are, that intermediate versions likely are impossible, and thus they must have appeared as-is in their full, complex forms.
This is not at all true, and pretty much proves you've not read what he's written. Behe's entire point is that there *is* such a thing as irreducible complexity, meaning that there cannot be any "intermediate versions" to find, for the simple reason that they cannot exist, since any partial or intermediate state would result in a non-functioning organism that could not survive. Some things simply had to be created all at once, whether you like the worldview implications of that or not...
If we did not have the Flying Squirrel as a living example, the evolution of bat flight might be harder to imagine, for example.
And if this doesn't illustrate the shallowness of evolutionist argument, I don't know what does. I'm pretty darn sure that no evolutionary scientist is willing to stand up and say that bats evolved from flying squirrels. Perhaps they evolved from flying snakes instead?:-)
(Valid question: if evolution is as strong as it must be to support your argument, why would you argue against bats evolving from snakes? The reason is that even evolutionists recognize that the transition from reptile to mammal is effectively impossible, so they take pains to paint it as happening only once. See Stoneage Mutant Mammal Turtles for more on this topic...)
It's not random like flipping a coin at all. Think of how you play the game mastermind - you don't make random plays until you get it, you keep what's good and change what's wrong. A good player can win the game in a very low number of moves.
An argument for intelligent design if I ever heard one...
Spetner is certainly not the only one to do this, alhtough his analysis of 1997 is one of the more recent ones.
Many others have performed the same excercise, including Sir Fred Hoyle, the man who named the Big Bang and with Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe (both atheists, by the way) calculated the chance of life arising spontaneously (even given insamely optimistic assumptions as no better than 1 in 10e40000! That's a number so incredibly large that it's unfathomable. It is a chance that is zero. As Hoyle himself pointed out, the chances of a tornado passing through a junkyard and leaving a perfectly assembled, functioning, and gleamingly polished 747 in its wake are far better than the chances of life arising even once anywhere in a universe of 100 billion galaxies over a 20 billion year period. ( 20 billion years was his outside estimate as to the absolute maximum age of the universe according to his big bang theory.)
Have you noticed that everytime a scientist says somthing like this, he is immediately shouted down as "incompetent" to be performing such analyses, even though he does so for a living and is otherwise well-respected by his peers.
Hoyles'own refusal to accept the simple and obvious implication of his work has led him to propose the asinine and silly idea of panspermia, which conveniently removes the origin of life from its development, making what is manifestly imposssible *seem* possible through shifting the action elsewhere and elsewhen. The fundamental problem remains, though, no matter how much he tries to hide it...
You have got to be kidding. Evolution doesn't try to explain the origin of life?
Nope. Evolution is a theory of how life has changed, not how it formed in the first place. The question of the origin of life is a very different, and much more controversial question.
Evolutionists are increasingly using this tactic to back away from their positoin because they know it is untenable. Evolution as generall regarded and promoted (by Gould, Dawkins, etc.) very definitely *does* attempt to explain the origin of life. It has to, because to do otherwise might be to admit God's toe in the door, and thay can't deal with that. Nice try, but if you can't explain the origin of life, you're not even in the game.
Not to mention that if such an evolutionary supposition were true, it would require that original living thing to posess, but not express, all genes for every living thing that has ever followed, an argument I've not yet heard even the wackiest evolutionist make. If not, you're back to having to explain origins again... Catch 22.
Which has a section "Christianity versus Evolution". That's not science; it's about as believable as the cigarette companies claiming smoking doesn't cause cancer.
Funny, I'm pretty familiar with the site, having been reading it for years, and niether I nor Google can find the "section" you mention. There is a standard ratings system employed for all references, so the direction and degree of bias (in either direction) are clear and documented. This should be a good thing in any fair and balanced discussion.
Any competent sceintist or engineer trained in scientific method is more than qulified enough to point out some of the deplorable "science" that's propping up evolutionary theory these days.
For example, take Donald Johanson's ridiculous claims that the Laetoli footprints are those of A. Afaensis ("Lucy") despite the fact that no footbones were found with Lucy, the footprints are miles away, and that in order to keep his argument from being recognized for the fraud it is, he fabricated "a composite foot, made from fossil bones belonging to Homo from nearby Olduvai Gorge combined with Hadar toe bones, has been shown to fit the Laetoli prints." (This is a direct quote from Johanson himself, from his book Ancestors, 1994, Villard Books, pages 66-67.)
This is the sort of "science" that butresses modern evolutionary theory. That's not science, that's bullcrap! And neither I nor Pogge needs to be a biologist, anthropologist, or any other kind of -ist in order to validly point that out.
Evolution is, in fact, losing credibility as people begin to look at it critically. Witness the fac that the journal Natural History, hardly a bastion of creationist thought, recognized the validity of Intelligent Design enough to give three ID proponents (Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Jonathan Wells) an unprecedented page and a half each to present thier arguments in favor of ID in the April 2002 issue.
Intelligent Design is not something that can be written off as lightly as you might like, a tendency, I might add, that's more driven by your worldview and urgency to deny a Creator than it can be by any scientific fact.
Worldview *must* affect everything else. Otherwise it's not a worldview at all. (See Francis Schaeffer if you want to know more.)
I'd like to point out that there are very valid scientific reasons to oppose the "Theory of Evolution" as propounded by Gould, Dawkins, et al.
If you're open-minded enough, you might want to spend a few hours reading about why completely reasonable and rational minds can and do oppose Evolution on purely scientific grounds, without even ever raising religion as an argument. (Which is not to imply that it's not a vaild one...)
The best site I've found on this topic is Science Against Evolution. They approach this strictly from the scientific perspective, pointing out important things like how we cannot know how to conduct radiometric dating without making assumptions that we cannot prove to be either true or reasonable. Utimately, such assumptions are made on the basis of worldview. (The dating issue can be found here in two parts: Part I and Part II. Another excellent article is the one about the insurmountable difficulties of reptilian-to-mammal evolution. If you believe that one happened, I've got a bridge to sell you...)
The index of topics is here, and I would advise reading through this material before you act quite so certain that Evolution must be true.
The Science Against Evolution site is written and managed by "Do-while Jones" a nom de plume for David Pogge, who in 1990 was given the considerable honor of being made a Fellow at the US Naval Weapons Center at China Lake. He is one of the world's most accomplished programmers and is responsible for numerous innovations in missile guidance and control algorithms, so he's certainly no intellectual lightweight. His arguments are well worth reading.
(FWIW, The preponderance of evidence convinces me personally that Creation and a young Earth fit the available facts far better than any Evolutionary alternative, but I encourage you to draw your own conclusion after looking at the facts and the science with an open mind.)
Apple sales would explode if Jobs ported OS X to the Intel platform.
Dead wrong. Steve knows something that his friend Scott Mc Nealy knows, too: Hardware is a far better business bet until someone figures out how to download a new workstation over the net.
It's really just about that simple. That and the fac that *nothing* can work easily or transparently in the hideous world of Intel PC hardware.
The reason Suns, Apples, and the like "just work" is that they don't have to worry about all the poorly designed hardware, firmware, and interfaces consire to guarantee compatibility problems. OS X on x86 would lose most of its strongest attributes - reliability, stability, ease, and predictability.
Sorry, but anyone that has never used Commodore's infamous 1541 disk drives doesn't *even* know what slow is. Quite possibly the slowest rotating disk media ever sold, they required hard sector diskettes (remember those? they used a series of locating holes around the hub to physically determine rotational positoining), and used a serial interface that was P A I N F U L L Y S L O W.
But they were cheap, so we were happy to have them, since they were one reason the Commodore machines were a fraction of the price of the Apples and such, even though they offered equal or better performance in other respects.
That's the kind of experience mac users have come to expect as "the Mac way".
And that's why I'm switching to a Mac when I buy my next computer. My Dad recently got a new G4 Mac with OS 10.1, and I was blown away by both its capabilities and its smoothness.
I've been a Unix user for 20 years (going back to version 7) and OS X is by far the most capable and usable computing environment I've ever seen from a user point of view.
I've liked the Mac way for a long time, and although I know for an absolute fact that Macs save big money in a corporate environment, I've never been completely compelled enough to want to switch to a Mac myself.
Until now.
The new Macs do indeed "just work". Right out of the box, they do things that even most geeks will never be fully successful getting Linux to do.
The environment is not perfect, but it's a darn sight better than anything I've seen this side of the "Starfire" film Bruce Tognazzini put together while he was at Sun. (Cool content, and a very insightful look at the future, but also proof of why Bruce doesn't make a living as a producer/director.)
Mac hardware is now competitive with other name brands, especially if you factor in Apple's generally superior quality. (Seriously folks, comparing Apple hardware to Taiwanese white boxes is like comapring them to (dare I say it?) oranges.)
I think the thing that struck me most about OS X is that it's a no-compromise environment. In addition to the hassle-free "just works" nature that is so refreshing compared to all alternatives, it's also real Unix, with all the power that power users want and expect. Apple did a terrific job - my only gripe is that 10.1 is still too buggy, and although I would not normall object to paid upgrade, this one smells a bit of shipping buggy code and then charging to fix it. Still it's a great package - enough better that unless Microsoft actually gets its act together with Longhorn, I'll be posting from a Mac next year. (I'm opposed to MS in general, but Lohnghorn is a truly impressive concept, and if they can pull it off, they will leap over even Apple in usability and more important, usefulness. Now that Apple has once again proven there is a market that wants better usability, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see MS try to capture it.)
FWIW, I use an E-machines box (E-monster 600) as my primary computer. It's dead-solid reliable, reasonably well built, and completely compatible with every goofy OS I've loaded on it, which is the real advantage of buying a generic Taiwanese white box over a name-brand PC. (FWIW, I've tried various versions of Caldera, RedHat, Mandrake, Corel, and more recently, NetBSD and FreeBSD, which is now my open source environment of choice.)
Kinda hard to beat cheap and good in my book.
A lot of people seem to slam E-machines, but my experience has been very good - good enough that I'll definitely consider them when it's time to upgrade. I'd buy E-machines over Dell or Compaq any day, and either keep the money left over or use it to buy all the stuff I wouldn't be able to afford if I went with their proprietary hardware.
P.S.: Performance is decent, too - I did some early iSCSI testing using this machine as a client, and although it wasn't able to run wire speed, it did far better than I expected, with a good high-performance NIC like a SysKonnect or the Tigon2-based 3Coms.
Maybe it's just one of the few advantages of being in the middle of the dot-com bust, but used PC stores here in Austin are awash in very decent used brand-name 15" and 17" monitors, most around $50. Most are OEM-brands (Dell, Compaq, and IBM) but there are a good number of Nokias, ViewSonics, and NECs, too.
If you're strapped for cash and don't mind a few more cosmetic blemishes or a small amount of phosphor burn, you can easily talk your way down to the $20 range.
Ahh, the advantages of a market glut. Just don't expect good deals on LCDs just yet. Maybe next cycle...
Not at all true. Bill Joy is on record as saying that System V was the more mature and scalable branch of Unix at that time, as BSD had fallen fairly badly behind, and in particular, the internals of BSD were not up to doing the large-scale multiprocessing that Sun had in its sights.
To a large degree, this is still true: although both have improved tremendously recently (to the point where they no longer totally embarass themselves), niether BSD nor Linux are capable of serious SMP scaling. Solaris, onthe other hand, scales darn near linearly with processor count for threaded apps.
BSD today is hardly comparable with BSD then, but Solaris is still in a class of its own w.r.t. SMP scalability. Of course, Moore's law makes such scalability less important all the time, except for the really high-end stuff...
I agree that XUL is the big news here, but it's unclear to me how much of the app integration in OEone is taking place in XUL. (Although I intend to buy their CD and find out...)
XUL(and XPCOM)could (and perhaps should) become common and prominent in cross-platform GUI applications, since there are version of Mozilla/Netscape that run on most platforms.
Few people (even propellerheads) realize that Mozilla should be viewed as *much* more than a browser. It is that, and a mail/calendar/HTML compositoin tool/etc., but more importantly, it comes with its own framework that enables the creation of cross-platform GUI applications.
So far as I know the only largest "third party" (non-Mozilla)XUL applications so far are this (OEone), and ActiveState's products like VisualPython, VisualPerl, VisualTcl, and such that are built on thier Komodo engine. (Although if AOL is smart, they're using a lot of XUL for thier next-gen stuff...)
Does anyone have a list or rundown of XUL-based apps that they'd care to post?
P.S.: FWIW, I would *love* to see an embedded wireless web tablet running OEone. If built properly (i.e., cost engineeered for volume production and consequent low price), with appropriate low-power, mid-range performing CPUs, there's no reason this couldn't be the basis of an "all-purpose" web-pad type device that would have resonable battery life and not even require a hard disk. The problem with most webpads to date is they were too far ahead of hte 802.11 curve, and they were designed around either regular x86 PC technology (way to expensive, both power and $$) or were locked in the CE straightjacket and couldn't be made useful.
No flames, please. The simple fact is that science cannot tell us conclusively about the origin of the universe or humanity.
There are some good scientific reasons to doubt current big-bang/evolutionary theory: check out the Science Against Evolution site, by noted Naval Weapons Center hacker "Do-While" Jones, for a good look at some of them. Pay particular attention to the articles on radioactive dating, and how it requires both unwarranted assumptions and the tossing out of data to fit the "expected" age of the object being tested.
That aside, there is no proof that the speed of light is constant, and fitting a curve to measurements over the past several centuries shows a small but marked downward trend, so it could well be that something that we don't understand is at work here. I'm open-minded enough to admit that.
Oh, I forgot to mention - there are decent instructions on the site above telling you how to build your own - they're quite easy, if you want to experiment, although some commercial ones aren't all that expensive, either, but then you'd miss the fun of building your own...
Slashdot Mirror
Are there any printers that actually live up to the manufacturers' claims, ideally with Linux support?"
Really, folks, you'd think from reading Slashdot that Linux is the only OS geeks run...
It just ain't so - I've gone to BSD for over half my servers (the rest are Linux, but the shift is underway), and will stay with Windows on the desktop, just because it makes my life one heck of a lot easier.
Windows with cygwin or U/Win gives me the best of both worlds. Since this configuration is one of the most popular in the geek world (far more popular than Linux desktops, I'm sure), why should we care or be bothered about trying to get printing to work on Linux anyway. (Seriously, printing has always been significantly problematic in Unix, and I speak as a strong Unix bigot with over 17 years of experience. (When I worked at Chevron ten years ago, well over half our Unix helpdesk calls involved printing!) I stopped having time to fuss with printing in Linux/Unix years ago, and I don't regret it one bit, either...)
It can be both or either. Especially interesting is the high-pressure cheeze delivery system developed by the world snak cheeze experts at Fertnel.
Anyway this site is a hoot, and I'm surprised it's still there. This was one of the first sites I remember on the web where someone actually committed to the then-considerable expense of registering a domain name and building a web server just for a joke. I'm glad to see this true relic of the old Internet is still hanging around (and apparently, in its original form, too...)
Another interesting use for the terribly versatile material called pitch is to form the precursor material (PAN) for Carbon (also called Graphite) fibers used in the modern Carbon composites that make everything from tennis rackets and fishing rods to airliners and the leading edge surfaces of the space shuttle.
The fibers produced by this process are very fine - typical "tow" widths are 12,000 fibers (about the diameter of a small string), 6000 fibers, and the fairly fine 3000 fibers.
We'd have a hard time getting by without pitch in today's world...
I would add, that if evolution is true, then such errors (required for speciation) must be rather more common than uncommon (take for example all that evolution of all those different types of eyes.)
The implications of this, if taken to thier logical conclusion, would be rather alarming to the environmental movement: Clearly, extinction is NOT a problem despite the fact that human history has seen countless species vainish and not a single one evolve to fill a vacated niche. Since evolution is true, we need not worry about extiction or endangered species at all - in fact, putting such species under pressure should, by this logic, just grab the natural selection knob and "crank it up a notch" as Emeril Legasse might say. If evolution does work, then new species should certainly arise, and be well-"adapted" to the new conditions.
That this doesn't happen (and more importantly perhaps, that we recognize intuitively that it CANNOT happen) is a significant indicator (clue stick: Whack!) that Evolution is little more than a fairy tale created by those who for thier own personal reasons find it necessary to deny the existence of a Creator and a God.
Interstingly, many Evolutionists even admit as much, when pressed on the issue: Sir Julian Huxley, once the world's leading Evolutionist and head of UNESCO, said he believed that the reason so many scientists, himself included, embraced the idea of evolution was "because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores." Arthur Keith, author of twenty books defending evolution, wrote: "Evolution is unproved and unproveable. We believe it because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable."
Perhaps, to an open and rational mind, it should not be so unthinkable after all...
A long time example was the eye, but that's pretty much been shattered.
Don't be ridiculous, NO ONE has proposed a reasonable explanation for how an eye might even hypothetically develop, even assuming that beneficial mutations that create new genetic information exist, a crucial prerequisite for which there is no evidence at all.
Please explain to me, for instance, how a unique structure like the optic nreve unconnected to either the retina (that's not there yet, because it's still waiting to evolve rods and cones), or the brain (that has no visual cortex for processing any signals it might send) might stand even a snowball's chance in Hell of being selected as a beneficial mutation, and carried along as excess baggage for the geologic eras required for the rest of the mechanism to fall into place. To get around this problem, you need to have thousands of such impossibilities all resolve themselves simultaneously in order to produce an eye that might confer some advantage in natural selection.
You make a brash claim, one that I have yet to see any actual scientist claiming to be an evolutionist want to make in public. That's because it is totally indefensible.
The sad thing about this is that they're betting on the wrong horse - Caldera Linux is a better OS than SCO.
Unfortunately, this is all about the cart pulling the horse - like SGI, SCO just won't die: although they haven't really made money in years, they make enough to keep the campany barely afloat.
SCO is not a very good product, but is much better after an injection of goat glands from UnixWare.
I'll miss Caldera, though - I think it was probably the Linux distro best suited for enterprise use, and certainly had the best installation and managment tools.
Good question: What does this mean for Lycoris (nee Redmond Linux), since that ecxcellent desktop distro is based on Caldera?
There's no difference between micro and macro. Small changes over time can add up. It takes no imagination at all to understand how that works.
There's all the difference in the world. No creationist denies the validity of selection for genes *within* a kind. That's microevolution - the rearragement (either natural or human-directed) of genes that are *already present*. Dog breeding works this way, as do finch beaks and foot feathers in pigeons.
Macroevolution is another kettle o' fish entirely, because for it to happen you have to somehow use random processes to *create* highly ordered, specific additional genetic information. Mutations do not do this. Evolutionary biologists have calculated the chances against such things happening as effectively zero. We reliably expect the laws of thermo to hold in all areas of life *except* macroevolutionary development? What utter hogwash. No natural process has ever been observed to create excess information. That's not becuaue it's rare, it's because it doesn't happen. We have every scientifically valid reason to know this to be true, it's just that acknowledging that would also tacitly acknowledge that a Creator could exist, something that at least evolutionary science will not allow.
Ultimately it's *all* about worldview, as the starting premise of modern evolutionary scientists is that God must be denied at all costs, even the cost of the truth and logical consistency.
The Behe argument is really nothing more than a complaint that knowledge of biochemical evolution is not well understood so far. A typical "Gaps equal God" argument.
:-)
He suggests that because nobody knows what the intermediate (simpler) versions of complex biochemical processes are, that intermediate versions likely are impossible, and thus they must have appeared as-is in their full, complex forms.
This is not at all true, and pretty much proves you've not read what he's written. Behe's entire point is that there *is* such a thing as irreducible complexity, meaning that there cannot be any "intermediate versions" to find, for the simple reason that they cannot exist, since any partial or intermediate state would result in a non-functioning organism that could not survive. Some things simply had to be created all at once, whether you like the worldview implications of that or not...
If we did not have the Flying Squirrel as a living example, the evolution of bat flight might be harder to imagine, for example.
And if this doesn't illustrate the shallowness of evolutionist argument, I don't know what does. I'm pretty darn sure that no evolutionary scientist is willing to stand up and say that bats evolved from flying squirrels. Perhaps they evolved from flying snakes instead?
(Valid question: if evolution is as strong as it must be to support your argument, why would you argue against bats evolving from snakes? The reason is that even evolutionists recognize that the transition from reptile to mammal is effectively impossible, so they take pains to paint it as happening only once. See Stoneage Mutant Mammal Turtles for more on this topic...)
It's not random like flipping a coin at all. Think of how you play the game mastermind - you don't make random plays until you get it, you keep what's good and change what's wrong. A good player can win the game in a very low number of moves.
An argument for intelligent design if I ever heard one...
Spetner is certainly not the only one to do this, alhtough his analysis of 1997 is one of the more recent ones.
Many others have performed the same excercise, including Sir Fred Hoyle, the man who named the Big Bang and with Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe (both atheists, by the way) calculated the chance of life arising spontaneously (even given insamely optimistic assumptions as no better than 1 in 10e40000! That's a number so incredibly large that it's unfathomable. It is a chance that is zero. As Hoyle himself pointed out, the chances of a tornado passing through a junkyard and leaving a perfectly assembled, functioning, and gleamingly polished 747 in its wake are far better than the chances of life arising even once anywhere in a universe of 100 billion galaxies over a 20 billion year period. ( 20 billion years was his outside estimate as to the absolute maximum age of the universe according to his big bang theory.)
Have you noticed that everytime a scientist says somthing like this, he is immediately shouted down as "incompetent" to be performing such analyses, even though he does so for a living and is otherwise well-respected by his peers.
Hoyles'own refusal to accept the simple and obvious implication of his work has led him to propose the asinine and silly idea of panspermia, which conveniently removes the origin of life from its development, making what is manifestly imposssible *seem* possible through shifting the action elsewhere and elsewhen. The fundamental problem remains, though, no matter how much he tries to hide it...
You have got to be kidding. Evolution doesn't try to explain the origin of life?
Nope. Evolution is a theory of how life has changed, not how it formed in the first place. The question of the origin of life is a very different, and much more controversial question.
Evolutionists are increasingly using this tactic to back away from their positoin because they know it is untenable. Evolution as generall regarded and promoted (by Gould, Dawkins, etc.) very definitely *does* attempt to explain the origin of life. It has to, because to do otherwise might be to admit God's toe in the door, and thay can't deal with that. Nice try, but if you can't explain the origin of life, you're not even in the game.
Not to mention that if such an evolutionary supposition were true, it would require that original living thing to posess, but not express, all genes for every living thing that has ever followed, an argument I've not yet heard even the wackiest evolutionist make. If not, you're back to having to explain origins again... Catch 22.
Which has a section "Christianity versus Evolution". That's not science; it's about as believable as the cigarette companies claiming smoking doesn't cause cancer.
Funny, I'm pretty familiar with the site, having been reading it for years, and niether I nor Google can find the "section" you mention. There is a standard ratings system employed for all references, so the direction and degree of bias (in either direction) are clear and documented. This should be a good thing in any fair and balanced discussion.
Any competent sceintist or engineer trained in scientific method is more than qulified enough to point out some of the deplorable "science" that's propping up evolutionary theory these days.
For example, take Donald Johanson's ridiculous claims that the Laetoli footprints are those of A. Afaensis ("Lucy") despite the fact that no footbones were found with Lucy, the footprints are miles away, and that in order to keep his argument from being recognized for the fraud it is, he fabricated "a composite foot, made from fossil bones belonging to Homo from nearby Olduvai Gorge combined with Hadar toe bones, has been shown to fit the Laetoli prints." (This is a direct quote from Johanson himself, from his book Ancestors, 1994, Villard Books, pages 66-67.)
This is the sort of "science" that butresses modern evolutionary theory. That's not science, that's bullcrap! And neither I nor Pogge needs to be a biologist, anthropologist, or any other kind of -ist in order to validly point that out.
Evolution is, in fact, losing credibility as people begin to look at it critically. Witness the fac that the journal Natural History, hardly a bastion of creationist thought, recognized the validity of Intelligent Design enough to give three ID proponents (Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Jonathan Wells) an unprecedented page and a half each to present thier arguments in favor of ID in the April 2002 issue.
Intelligent Design is not something that can be written off as lightly as you might like, a tendency, I might add, that's more driven by your worldview and urgency to deny a Creator than it can be by any scientific fact.
The Earth-moon system problem has not been conclusively solved, despite what some people claim.
A good, basic introduction to the problem can be found here, and an equations page showing the math behind the argument here.
For more science-based reasons why believing in Evolution is not valid, check out Science Against Evolution.
Worldview *must* affect everything else. Otherwise it's not a worldview at all. (See Francis Schaeffer if you want to know more.)
I'd like to point out that there are very valid scientific reasons to oppose the "Theory of Evolution" as propounded by Gould, Dawkins, et al.
If you're open-minded enough, you might want to spend a few hours reading about why completely reasonable and rational minds can and do oppose Evolution on purely scientific grounds, without even ever raising religion as an argument. (Which is not to imply that it's not a vaild one...)
The best site I've found on this topic is Science Against Evolution. They approach this strictly from the scientific perspective, pointing out important things like how we cannot know how to conduct radiometric dating without making assumptions that we cannot prove to be either true or reasonable. Utimately, such assumptions are made on the basis of worldview. (The dating issue can be found here in two parts: Part I and Part II . Another excellent article is the one about the insurmountable difficulties of reptilian-to-mammal evolution . If you believe that one happened, I've got a bridge to sell you...)
The index of topics is here, and I would advise reading through this material before you act quite so certain that Evolution must be true.
The Science Against Evolution site is written and managed by "Do-while Jones" a nom de plume for David Pogge, who in 1990 was given the considerable honor of being made a Fellow at the US Naval Weapons Center at China Lake. He is one of the world's most accomplished programmers and is responsible for numerous innovations in missile guidance and control algorithms, so he's certainly no intellectual lightweight. His arguments are well worth reading.
(FWIW, The preponderance of evidence convinces me personally that Creation and a young Earth fit the available facts far better than any Evolutionary alternative, but I encourage you to draw your own conclusion after looking at the facts and the science with an open mind.)
Apple sales would explode if Jobs ported OS X to the Intel platform.
Dead wrong. Steve knows something that his friend Scott Mc Nealy knows, too: Hardware is a far better business bet until someone figures out how to download a new workstation over the net.
It's really just about that simple. That and the fac that *nothing* can work easily or transparently in the hideous world of Intel PC hardware.
The reason Suns, Apples, and the like "just work" is that they don't have to worry about all the poorly designed hardware, firmware, and interfaces consire to guarantee compatibility problems. OS X on x86 would lose most of its strongest attributes - reliability, stability, ease, and predictability.
Sorry, but anyone that has never used Commodore's infamous 1541 disk drives doesn't *even* know what slow is. Quite possibly the slowest rotating disk media ever sold, they required hard sector diskettes (remember those? they used a series of locating holes around the hub to physically determine rotational positoining), and used a serial interface that was P A I N F U L L Y S L O W.
But they were cheap, so we were happy to have them, since they were one reason the Commodore machines were a fraction of the price of the Apples and such, even though they offered equal or better performance in other respects.
That's the kind of experience mac users have come to expect as "the Mac way".
And that's why I'm switching to a Mac when I buy my next computer. My Dad recently got a new G4 Mac with OS 10.1, and I was blown away by both its capabilities and its smoothness.
I've been a Unix user for 20 years (going back to version 7) and OS X is by far the most capable and usable computing environment I've ever seen from a user point of view.
I've liked the Mac way for a long time, and although I know for an absolute fact that Macs save big money in a corporate environment, I've never been completely compelled enough to want to switch to a Mac myself.
Until now.
The new Macs do indeed "just work". Right out of the box, they do things that even most geeks will never be fully successful getting Linux to do.
The environment is not perfect, but it's a darn sight better than anything I've seen this side of the "Starfire" film Bruce Tognazzini put together while he was at Sun. (Cool content, and a very insightful look at the future, but also proof of why Bruce doesn't make a living as a producer/director.)
Mac hardware is now competitive with other name brands, especially if you factor in Apple's generally superior quality. (Seriously folks, comparing Apple hardware to Taiwanese white boxes is like comapring them to (dare I say it?) oranges.)
I think the thing that struck me most about OS X is that it's a no-compromise environment. In addition to the hassle-free "just works" nature that is so refreshing compared to all alternatives, it's also real Unix, with all the power that power users want and expect. Apple did a terrific job - my only gripe is that 10.1 is still too buggy, and although I would not normall object to paid upgrade, this one smells a bit of shipping buggy code and then charging to fix it. Still it's a great package - enough better that unless Microsoft actually gets its act together with Longhorn, I'll be posting from a Mac next year. (I'm opposed to MS in general, but Lohnghorn is a truly impressive concept, and if they can pull it off, they will leap over even Apple in usability and more important, usefulness. Now that Apple has once again proven there is a market that wants better usability, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see MS try to capture it.)
FWIW, I use an E-machines box (E-monster 600) as my primary computer. It's dead-solid reliable, reasonably well built, and completely compatible with every goofy OS I've loaded on it, which is the real advantage of buying a generic Taiwanese white box over a name-brand PC. (FWIW, I've tried various versions of Caldera, RedHat, Mandrake, Corel, and more recently, NetBSD and FreeBSD, which is now my open source environment of choice.)
Kinda hard to beat cheap and good in my book.
A lot of people seem to slam E-machines, but my experience has been very good - good enough that I'll definitely consider them when it's time to upgrade. I'd buy E-machines over Dell or Compaq any day, and either keep the money left over or use it to buy all the stuff I wouldn't be able to afford if I went with their proprietary hardware.
P.S.: Performance is decent, too - I did some early iSCSI testing using this machine as a client, and although it wasn't able to run wire speed, it did far better than I expected, with a good high-performance NIC like a SysKonnect or the Tigon2-based 3Coms.
Maybe it's just one of the few advantages of being in the middle of the dot-com bust, but used PC stores here in Austin are awash in very decent used brand-name 15" and 17" monitors, most around $50. Most are OEM-brands (Dell, Compaq, and IBM) but there are a good number of Nokias, ViewSonics, and NECs, too.
If you're strapped for cash and don't mind a few more cosmetic blemishes or a small amount of phosphor burn, you can easily talk your way down to the $20 range.
Ahh, the advantages of a market glut. Just don't expect good deals on LCDs just yet. Maybe next cycle...
Not at all true. Bill Joy is on record as saying that System V was the more mature and scalable branch of Unix at that time, as BSD had fallen fairly badly behind, and in particular, the internals of BSD were not up to doing the large-scale multiprocessing that Sun had in its sights.
To a large degree, this is still true: although both have improved tremendously recently (to the point where they no longer totally embarass themselves), niether BSD nor Linux are capable of serious SMP scaling. Solaris, onthe other hand, scales darn near linearly with processor count for threaded apps.
BSD today is hardly comparable with BSD then, but Solaris is still in a class of its own w.r.t. SMP scalability. Of course, Moore's law makes such scalability less important all the time, except for the really high-end stuff...
I agree that XUL is the big news here, but it's unclear to me how much of the app integration in OEone is taking place in XUL. (Although I intend to buy their CD and find out...)
XUL(and XPCOM)could (and perhaps should) become common and prominent in cross-platform GUI applications, since there are version of Mozilla/Netscape that run on most platforms.
Few people (even propellerheads) realize that Mozilla should be viewed as *much* more than a browser. It is that, and a mail/calendar/HTML compositoin tool/etc., but more importantly, it comes with its own framework that enables the creation of cross-platform GUI applications.
So far as I know the only largest "third party" (non-Mozilla)XUL applications so far are this (OEone), and ActiveState's products like VisualPython, VisualPerl, VisualTcl, and such that are built on thier Komodo engine. (Although if AOL is smart, they're using a lot of XUL for thier next-gen stuff...)
Does anyone have a list or rundown of XUL-based apps that they'd care to post?
P.S.: FWIW, I would *love* to see an embedded wireless web tablet running OEone. If built properly (i.e., cost engineeered for volume production and consequent low price), with appropriate low-power, mid-range performing CPUs, there's no reason this couldn't be the basis of an "all-purpose" web-pad type device that would have resonable battery life and not even require a hard disk. The problem with most webpads to date is they were too far ahead of hte 802.11 curve, and they were designed around either regular x86 PC technology (way to expensive, both power and $$) or were locked in the CE straightjacket and couldn't be made useful.
Also works flawlessly with Netscape 7.0beta1, which is based on older Mozilla code.
I've only found a few sites that won't work with Netscape 7. Some of them are at Microsoft. Wow, imagine that...
No flames, please. The simple fact is that science cannot tell us conclusively about the origin of the universe or humanity.
There are some good scientific reasons to doubt current big-bang/evolutionary theory: check out the Science Against Evolution site, by noted Naval Weapons Center hacker "Do-While" Jones, for a good look at some of them. Pay particular attention to the articles on radioactive dating, and how it requires both unwarranted assumptions and the tossing out of data to fit the "expected" age of the object being tested.
That aside, there is no proof that the speed of light is constant, and fitting a curve to measurements over the past several centuries shows a small but marked downward trend, so it could well be that something that we don't understand is at work here. I'm open-minded enough to admit that.
Oh, I forgot to mention - there are decent instructions on the site above telling you how to build your own - they're quite easy, if you want to experiment, although some commercial ones aren't all that expensive, either, but then you'd miss the fun of building your own...