is support for OSX on vmware. I understand why apple doesn't want third party hardware to run OSX, but the lack of licensing for vmware support mystifies me.
I'm interested in developing OSX software, and I already own vmware (every developer should), but I don't want to shell out for apple hardware. I've paid for apple hardware in the past, and it tends to be over priced, and there isn't much selection (their current line up of laptops in particular kind of suck compared to my thinkpad x61).
Currently I run linux through vmware on top of vista, which I've found to be superior to dual booting in terms of usability. It lets me avoid linux driver and configuration issues (vmware tends to be better supported than native hardware), play windows games natively, waste less harddrive space on a statically sized partition, manage various linux distros more easily, manage complicated development environments and software configurations more easily (since I can easily make copies of the OS images at any point in development and return to the old version later), etc.
If I could run OSX on vmware (in a supported manner) I could develop OSX guis for the various unix software I write (I've used the cocoa libraries and the interface builder in the past, and they are better than anything in the linux world). This would allow me to give support to the mac platform as a developer in a convenient way. However, at the same time virtualization is off the beaten path, and so it avoids taking a chunk out of apple's bottom line in mac sales.
Common laptop hardware, especially stuff that comes with centrino, needs a lot more troubleshooting. A lot of stuff gets autoconfigured improperly.
Also, vmware needs better support as a hardware platform. Changes to the kernel now constantly break the vmware guest os tools and require users to modify kernel module source by hand to fix the issues!
Unfortunately the biggest areas of improvement need to happen in xorg, which I guess doesn't have as many excess coders as the kernel team.
Maybe you are referring to laissez faire economics? To be clear, such a system is not practiced in the US, nor is it anywhere near being practiced here. The US has many socialist policies, and only appears strongly capitalist in comparison with countries like France, which I would argue have gone over the deep end with socialism.
Most of the large companies do have internship programs. However, no one can really afford to give handouts and hire people who aren't capable of doing the work.
I will agree with you that the resistance to paying for schools is ridiculous. Any difficulties that hiring managers have in finding competent employees in the US market can be largely traced to lack of a good education system in this country. Our colleges are pretty good, but the crappy K-12 hurts everyone permanently.
However, you seem to have a theme going about social handouts and how selfish republicans are for not wanting to give them. First of all, I'm not a republican, but I am against welfare and social security. These are nonsense policies that have no place in our country. They are contrary to the basic ideas personal responsibility, personal property, and liberty. Furthermore the policies are wholly unsuccessful.
Taking money from working people and giving that money to non working people just encourages people to not work. Also, that money doesn't just materialize out of thin air, and the poor pay more in taxes proportional to their income when compared to the rich, so if you think that welfare is money coming from the rich to the poor you are kidding yourself. Also, large companies pay *very* little in taxes, so don't think that you're stealing from evil corporations and giving to the poor. You're stealing from the working poor and giving to the out of work poor.
Taking money from working people and giving it to retirees just encourages future retirees to not plan for their retirement. Furthermore, the federal government regularly dips into the money collected for social security and uses it to finance wars. Furthermore, social security is the primary reason that people in lower income brackets pay *more* percentage wise than people in higher income brackets, since people in higher income brackets don't pay proportionally more for social security. Thus social security decreases social mobility by putting a higher tax burden on the poor.
Also, note that social security money is not invested (actually the interest on the national debt is *collected against it*). If you took the money that you give to the government for social security and invested it instead, you would have way more money when it comes time to withdraw it. Given that, and inflation, and that the population isn't increasing enough to support social security (it's a pyramid scheme so you need more people paying into it than cashing out, which isn't happening anymore), it makes no sense to continue that policy.
"This is pretty big, as it's empirical evidence proving the existence of objects that theoretically had to exist but could not be detected previously."
look closely
"empirical evidence proving"
should never occur in any sentence ever. By definition empirical evidence cannot prove anything. Empirical evidence lends support to inductive arguments, which don't concern themselves with proof. Only analytic statements may be proven.
Please, for the love of god remember, there are two forms of logic, inductive which has arguments from experience (physics), and deductive which has arguments from pure reason (mathematics). Only deductive arguments can be proven because you can always argue with the strength of the evidence in inductive claims. It is a fact (supported by inductive evidence and deductive proofs) that inductive claims may be false no matter how strong the evidence for them is. Thus they can never be proven, but you can say "there are strong practical reasons to believe."
People getting basic logic wrong has led to a lot of poor decisions in our society lately, so please do not contribute to the problem by adding to confusion over terms.
and even that article mentions that the study contradicts another study for the same time period.
Apple is a good solid well run company and their market share has been slowly climbing, but the 8 percent number is likely an error as it represents quite a jump over historical values. I suspect they might be at that number in a year or so, but it just seems off for now.
google, or any other web developer can modify GPL code without committing patches back to the community so long as they don't distribute the binaries outside of the company.
A lot of people are surprised by this. What I find more surprising are all the cases where you *are* required to contribute source back, if say you build anything on top of a GPL'd library (of which there are many).
Personally, as a user and a developer I don't find the GPL compelling compared to the BSD style licenses.
It's a good thing then that the US is *not* a democracy, where the majority rules, but a republic, where the *law* rules. Try giving the constitution a read one of these days. Maybe you might even want to find out what that whole war of independence was about. It's more than fireworks and tea!
>Lincoln and FDR both ignored the Constitution (according to strict contructionists) yet >have been hailed as great leaders. People are more willing to follow a leader who shares >their ideas than an old piece of paper.
First off, the constitution is more than a piece of paper. It is our highest law and our most important statement of principles, and if you can't respect our law and our principles, you have no right to call yourself an American.
Lincoln fought a civil war. FDR got the country through the great depression. How can you compare them so favorably to Bush? Lincoln, on the one hand suspended habeus corpus because he was dealing with a heavily armed rebellion of millions and didn't have time to try all of the captured rebels while the war was ongoing. Aside from that he showed a great respect for the constitution. Bush on the other hand suspended habeus corpus out of a blatant power grab and disrespect for the law. The conflict and the men are in totally different categories.
Also, you should be aware that Lincoln was not a Christian (he was a Deist), and that this was somewhat well known in his own lifetime. In the 19th century extremist versions of Christianity were not nearly as powerful of a force in the US as they are today. Prior to the 20th century there were quite a few non Christian presidents. Religiously, the founding fathers especially were a mixed bag. Really, extreme forms of Christianity only came to power in the states during the cold war as a means of distinguishing ourselves ideologically from our communist enemies.
>Yet oddly enough, the liberal free US society was established almost exclusively by >Christians. This is blatantly false, as I have just mentioned. Various forms of Christianity, most vary different from those practiced in America today, have been highly prevalent since colonization; however, until the 20th century many important statesmen were Deist. Christian leaders often try to give the impression that secular power is on the rise and must be combated, but this is historically false as it is extreme forms of Christianity that moved into the foreground and pushed secular ideals out of the way during recent decades.
>It's not about religion, it's about the leaders. Some can downplay their >religion and lead from a fair secular view, others allow religion to completely dictate >their actions.
Generally the first kind are the better sort of leader. Anyone who has studied any history knows that a politician who cannot put practical concerns ahead of religious concerns is headed for a fall. The whole history of Europe is a lesson in why secular leaders (whether they be religious in private or not) are a good thing and leaders who try to let the bible run the country inevitably lead to factional infighting. If you can't make rational arguments about policy, then there is no way to build consensus, and if there is no way to build consensus, you'll inevitably be drawn into a civil war. The remarkable power of a secular leader is the power of compromise, and the ability to accept when they have been proven wrong.
The real world benefits of using flash as a cache layer between the harddrive and the computer, either through hybrid drives, don't seem to have materialized yet.
With my thinkpad there was an optional gig of flash that I ordered. After I downloaded the drivers and got it all set up, I found that there wasn't any noticiable difference in speed, or harddrive usage. However, I did notice that it interacted poorly with the "active protection" feature that stops the harddrive whenever the computer is in motion. Whenever the computer was unplugged, the flash cache was turned on, I could simply shake my computer (thus activating active protection) to get a blue screen.
Furthermore a little research showed that benchmarks on flash caches being sold right now offered no performance benefit whatsoever.
If there's no performance benefit, why are they trying to sell these things to people? I've seen some handwaving over the idea that flash *might* keep the harddrive from spinning most of the time and thus save battery life. However, when using the flash I saw no noticeable benefit.
Having an extra layer of cache in the system architecture seems like a good idea on paper, but in the real world the consumer is buying totally worthless pieces of hardware that do not improve performance one whit, and have never been proven to improve battery use.
a lot of cryptography and security work. I should note that there's absolutely nothing wrong in funding such research, in fact these papers benefit everyone. I don't think this should be confused with torture, as the article seems to do.
All the information I saw linked was pure mathematics research.
However, these papers aside, I have to say that the NSA runs with too little public oversight. The domestic wiretapping, which continues to go on without any kind of meaningful regulation is a good example of no american agency should be allowed to run as a black box to the other two branches of the government. Independents need to be brought in to make sure the NSA doesn't continue to step over ethical and legal boundaries.
Right now, I tend to think that the NSA isn't an evil organization. However, they could easily become destructive in the hands of an administration with the will and ability to politicize the agency. I'm sure the current administration would love to use them to spy on their many political enemies, if they aren't already.
instead of buying existing software... you are planning to hire someone to develop custom software that does the exact same thing. Also, you aren't a software company.
Look, you aren't going to save money. It costs a lot more to develop software than it does to buy it. If there's an existing open source solution, that's great, but if not you don't sound particularly well poised to provide one.
Also, GPL software (especially GPLv3 software) has some restrictions on embedded devices you should familiarize yourself with first if you intend to sell these devices to third parties.
>this in fact is not a call to abandon religion to embrace science, nor is it an assertion >that there is a conflict between religion and science. they merely have nothing to do with >each other.
You evade the problem by being too abstract. There is no conflict between "religion" and "science" but there is clearly a conflict between specific established scientific views and specific established religious views.
Many sects dogmatically proclaim that the world was created in 7 days. You can say that "this is a metaphor, and so not at odds with science," but the problem, the conflict is that the people who say that don't *mean* it as a metaphor. They mean it as a factual statement about the world.
Saying there is no conflict between something abstract like "religion" and "science" is missing there point. There are concrete conflicts between various religious dogmas many specific scientific views.
Furthermore, it is well historically established that societies that accept dogmatic modes of thought are not conducive to scientific development. If scientists must do all of their important research in secret, for fear of public reprisal, they will get little done and their work will not be widely disseminated. This is a historical and ongoing problem in our society.
The problem isn't that "religion is bad," although I think an argument could be made for that, but that certain social institutions, especially some hard line religious sects, do much to harm the advancement of science by establishing dogmatic views that they refuse to accept rational challenges to.
Religion matters a lot. None of the people you mentioned accepted repressive dogmatic religions, many were heretics. Yes, many scientists believe in some kind of god, but really what separates them, and all intelligent people, is that they are willing to challenge
1. Einstein's religion is a matter of some debate, but it is generally acknowledged that the god that he believed in wasn't the Christian god. Many historical quotes that reference "god" do so in the context of a deist god, which has nothing to do with the Christian god. The deist god typically has no free will, for instance. Remember Einstein's quote about "God does not play dice"?
2. Newton and many of his contemporaries were considered heretics in their own time. Newton didn't believe in the trinity for instance, which was a no no at "trinity college" where he went to school.
So it's one thing to have religion, but what *sort* of religion you have matters a lot. If you are the sort of person that just accepts whatever your parents or other authority figures tell you as the truth, you aren't the sort of person who can engage in critical thought and make new scientific discoveries. If you are the sort of person capable of challenging established scientific views, you are the sort of person who will challenge established religious views. Historically there have been few great thinkers who have *not* done so.
it is called open source vs free software, and that rift has been going on for a long time. It's gotten worse and worse as Stallman has tried to make the GPL more restrictive and difficult to use, and as people have analyzed the old GPLv2 more closely and noticed a bunch of ugly restrictive clauses.
Also, as others have mentioned the "any later version" statement doesn't mean that existing software is under GPLv3, but that existing software is *compatible* with GPLv3.
Really though, if Stallman could change the terms of the GPL license at whim, do you really think that would be a good idea? Copyright for an enormous amount of GPL software is already turned over to him as part of FSF rules. I have no idea why some people trust him so much with their property, but I can't say it speaks highly of their intelligence.
I've *always* had a problem with the GPL when compared to other licenses like Apache and BSD. It seems more about advancing Richard Stallman's personal politics than about writing a good license. Just look at how long it is! It feels more like a EULA than an open source license.
The entire point of the open source is to give the user the right to use source however they wish. Stallman's doublespeak will make you think that's what the GPL is all about. It doesn't make any sense though! If I want my users to be free to use my source however I want, why do I make it impossible to use with software licensed under other licenses? There are tons of weird ass restrictions on what sort of linking you can use (none if it's straight up GPL as opposed to LGPL, but LGPL isn't much better!).
The GPL and especially the GPLv3 is like poison to most companies, even pro open source companies like google. Even the LGPL isn't used in a lot of situations because of ambiguities in the license! It has too many restrictions on how the source can be used and too much weasalease and ambiguous wording in the license. From my point of view, that doesn't increase the freedom of the user, it restricts it.
Why should large companies contribute to or use software licensed under GPLv3? It seems like suicide for the open source community to embrace a license that's going to alienate them to the fringes of hobbiests and zealots. Why would I release code under a license like that when I know it's just going to prevent people from using it?
>This "whatever works", "convenience-first" crowd is rather amusing since their success is >pretty much dependant on a far greater number of contributors to their projects who do >subscribe to the GPL ideology.
I really don't buy this argument. It seems like FSF has been riding linux's coattails ever since Linus made the mistake of choosing the GPL over a *good* open source license.
Anyway, last time I checked the parts of "GPL ideology" that weren't contained in open source software were just RMS hero worship and some communist abhorrence towards the idea of making money.
>>Open Office is quaint, but users still want MS >A matter of branding rather than suer needs. This is a problem to be solvedby marketing. >I have no idea what you mean by "quaint". Open Office does its job perfectly well.
Pretending that open office is as good as office is intellectually dishonest. Open office is *not* a good piece of software, and repeating it over and over again fanboyishly (is that what you meant by marketing?) won't make it so.
Open office is "quaint" because it is a joke. It tries to clone office (which is a good idea) and fails miserably. It's bloated and slow to start up. It crashes. It doesn't support 90% of office's features. It sucks at what it tries to do on every level.
Frankly, the reason why office is so widespread, even more widespread than windows is (it runs on osx, and is the singly most widely used application on osx) is because it is the best office suite that has ever been written. Pretending that because it comes microsoft, it *must* be bad is intellectually dishonest.
Microsoft has lockin on windows, but they *don't* on office. There's plenty of programs that can read doc files. Office is universally used because *it is that good*. Open office isn't used outside of linux because *it is that bad*.
> Actually, the big language culprits would be those with auto-garbage collection, > etc. as they tend to have lazier programmers
Actually, it isn't lazier programmers. The problem is that existing garbage collection implementations have horrible memory profile.
If you look at the memory usage of a java program, it's about as bad as a c program that does nothing but leak memory. Practically speaking, java does little to free memory until it has *run out of memory*. Then when it does run out of memory and it needs to clean things up, things get slow as hell.
>The real answer is doing your job right, and using the right tool - which is not necessarily >the easiest tool to use either.
Yes! Unfortunately, academics and many novice programmers (who just got finished being trained by academics) are unfamiliar with the powerful tools available like C++. Going to school can give you the mistaken impression that garbage collection is *a good thing* because everyone uses it there. The truth is that C++ is a very complicated language with a steep learning curve, but that many times it is simply the only tool that is suitable for the job.
If your program is IO bound, like a web application front end, you are in a great position, because essentially *any* tool will do the job, even if the performance is abysmal. You can use java, ruby, or whatever. And you should, becuase those languages don't present you with the complexity of c++.
Unfortunately, many programs *are not IO bound* and the performance and memory profile of the underlying tool are very important. This is most true of interactive non parializable programs. So, a good example would be bittorrent programs. Consider utorrent vs azureas, one in c++ and one in java. utorrent is fairly light weight and easy to use because of its performance characteristics. Azureus is a powerful and well engineered program, but it sure as hell is slow and chews up memory.
should not serve jail time. Also, I have no comprehension of why owning mod chips should be illegal.
That said, he did break the law when he pirated games, and it is entirely just that he should be brought up on charges. However, the punishment should fit the crime.
>don't buy that it's more of a problem than illegal drug trade). At the very least, it is >a crime on a lesser level because no one is placed in danger of physical harm through it's effects.
That is faulty reasoning. You are thinking that dealing drugs is worse than theft because the "damage done" is worse (at least with harder drugs like cocaine and heroin). However, you aren't considering *responsibility*.
If a free person does something to harm themselves, it is no crime. It is just foolish and being a fool can be no crime, or the president and all of congress would be made felons. The state has no business protecting people from themselves. If someone steals from a free person, that is a crime because they are harming someone else. The state does have a responsibility to keep people from harming each other, although it seems to execute this poorly.
A free adult who purchases and abuses dangerous substances of his own free will bears total responsibility for his own actions. The drug seller cannot be held liable for damages done to the purchaser, unless the seller misled the purchaser into believing that there were no dangerous side effects to his products.
To say that this doesn't reflect the law, is to merely say that we don't live in a very free or just society, which should be news to no one.
>Having to get "support" for a new product means that that product is broken. Here here! I don't know how linux distros get away with shipping with so many bugs. With all the problems that windows vista has, if it had *nearly* as many bugs and broken software as your average linux distro, microsoft would go out of business immediately.
Also, I'm sad to say that support on Ubuntu forums has really degraded since ubuntu became more popular. You used to be able to get help from competent people for your problems, but these days the forums are so crowded with idiots who don't know anything *about* linux, but who nevertheless feel compelled to comment on your questions, that it has become a frustrating waste of time.
The last few times I've asked about how to fix a software or hardware problem, some *genius* has suggested that I use some other piece of software instead... or get a different graphics card... Here's an idea? How about I stop using your shitty operating system *entirely*.
Slashdot Mirror
is support for OSX on vmware. I understand why apple doesn't want third party hardware to run OSX, but the lack of licensing for vmware support mystifies me.
I'm interested in developing OSX software, and I already own vmware (every developer should), but I don't want to shell out for apple hardware. I've paid for apple hardware in the past, and it tends to be over priced, and there isn't much selection (their current line up of laptops in particular kind of suck compared to my thinkpad x61).
Currently I run linux through vmware on top of vista, which I've found to be superior to dual booting in terms of usability. It lets me avoid linux driver and configuration issues (vmware tends to be better supported than native hardware), play windows games natively, waste less harddrive space on a statically sized partition, manage various linux distros more easily, manage complicated development environments and software configurations more easily (since I can easily make copies of the OS images at any point in development and return to the old version later), etc.
If I could run OSX on vmware (in a supported manner) I could develop OSX guis for the various unix software I write (I've used the cocoa libraries and the interface builder in the past, and they are better than anything in the linux world). This would allow me to give support to the mac platform as a developer in a convenient way. However, at the same time virtualization is off the beaten path, and so it avoids taking a chunk out of apple's bottom line in mac sales.
Common laptop hardware, especially stuff that comes with centrino, needs a lot more troubleshooting. A lot of stuff gets autoconfigured improperly.
Also, vmware needs better support as a hardware platform. Changes to the kernel now constantly break the vmware guest os tools and require users to modify kernel module source by hand to fix the issues!
Unfortunately the biggest areas of improvement need to happen in xorg, which I guess doesn't have as many excess coders as the kernel team.
Maybe you are referring to laissez faire economics? To be clear, such a system is not practiced in the US, nor is it anywhere near being practiced here. The US has many socialist policies, and only appears strongly capitalist in comparison with countries like France, which I would argue have gone over the deep end with socialism.
Most of the large companies do have internship programs. However, no one can really afford to give handouts and hire people who aren't capable of doing the work.
I will agree with you that the resistance to paying for schools is ridiculous. Any difficulties that hiring managers have in finding competent employees in the US market can be largely traced to lack of a good education system in this country. Our colleges are pretty good, but the crappy K-12 hurts everyone permanently.
However, you seem to have a theme going about social handouts and how selfish republicans are for not wanting to give them. First of all, I'm not a republican, but I am against welfare and social security. These are nonsense policies that have no place in our country. They are contrary to the basic ideas personal responsibility, personal property, and liberty. Furthermore the policies are wholly unsuccessful.
Taking money from working people and giving that money to non working people just encourages people to not work. Also, that money doesn't just materialize out of thin air, and the poor pay more in taxes proportional to their income when compared to the rich, so if you think that welfare is money coming from the rich to the poor you are kidding yourself. Also, large companies pay *very* little in taxes, so don't think that you're stealing from evil corporations and giving to the poor. You're stealing from the working poor and giving to the out of work poor.
Taking money from working people and giving it to retirees just encourages future retirees to not plan for their retirement. Furthermore, the federal government regularly dips into the money collected for social security and uses it to finance wars. Furthermore, social security is the primary reason that people in lower income brackets pay *more* percentage wise than people in higher income brackets, since people in higher income brackets don't pay proportionally more for social security. Thus social security decreases social mobility by putting a higher tax burden on the poor.
Also, note that social security money is not invested (actually the interest on the national debt is *collected against it*). If you took the money that you give to the government for social security and invested it instead, you would have way more money when it comes time to withdraw it. Given that, and inflation, and that the population isn't increasing enough to support social security (it's a pyramid scheme so you need more people paying into it than cashing out, which isn't happening anymore), it makes no sense to continue that policy.
"This is pretty big, as it's empirical evidence proving the existence of objects that theoretically had to exist but could not be detected previously."
look closely
"empirical evidence proving"
should never occur in any sentence ever. By definition empirical evidence cannot prove anything. Empirical evidence lends support to inductive arguments, which don't concern themselves with proof. Only analytic statements may be proven.
Please, for the love of god remember, there are two forms of logic, inductive which has arguments from experience (physics), and deductive which has arguments from pure reason (mathematics). Only deductive arguments can be proven because you can always argue with the strength of the evidence in inductive claims. It is a fact (supported by inductive evidence and deductive proofs) that inductive claims may be false no matter how strong the evidence for them is. Thus they can never be proven, but you can say "there are strong practical reasons to believe."
People getting basic logic wrong has led to a lot of poor decisions in our society lately, so please do not contribute to the problem by adding to confusion over terms.
for hunting
Most of the studies online put apple's market share at around 6%. I could find only one article putting apple in the 8% range http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/17/apples_u_s_mac_market_share_rises_to_8_1_percent_in_q3.html
and even that article mentions that the study contradicts another study for the same time period.
Apple is a good solid well run company and their market share has been slowly climbing, but the 8 percent number is likely an error as it represents quite a jump over historical values. I suspect they might be at that number in a year or so, but it just seems off for now.
yes
google, or any other web developer can modify GPL code without committing patches back to the community so long as they don't distribute the binaries outside of the company.
A lot of people are surprised by this. What I find more surprising are all the cases where you *are* required to contribute source back, if say you build anything on top of a GPL'd library (of which there are many).
Personally, as a user and a developer I don't find the GPL compelling compared to the BSD style licenses.
>Democracy sucks when you are in the minority.
It's a good thing then that the US is *not* a democracy, where the majority rules, but a republic, where the *law* rules. Try giving the constitution a read one of these days. Maybe you might even want to find out what that whole war of independence was about. It's more than fireworks and tea!
>Lincoln and FDR both ignored the Constitution (according to strict contructionists) yet
>have been hailed as great leaders. People are more willing to follow a leader who shares
>their ideas than an old piece of paper.
First off, the constitution is more than a piece of paper. It is our highest law and our most important statement of principles, and if you can't respect our law and our principles, you have no right to call yourself an American.
Lincoln fought a civil war. FDR got the country through the great depression. How can you compare them so favorably to Bush? Lincoln, on the one hand suspended habeus corpus because he was dealing with a heavily armed rebellion of millions and didn't have time to try all of the captured rebels while the war was ongoing. Aside from that he showed a great respect for the constitution. Bush on the other hand suspended habeus corpus out of a blatant power grab and disrespect for the law. The conflict and the men are in totally different categories.
Also, you should be aware that Lincoln was not a Christian (he was a Deist), and that this was somewhat well known in his own lifetime. In the 19th century extremist versions of Christianity were not nearly as powerful of a force in the US as they are today. Prior to the 20th century there were quite a few non Christian presidents. Religiously, the founding fathers especially were a mixed bag. Really, extreme forms of Christianity only came to power in the states during the cold war as a means of distinguishing ourselves ideologically from our communist enemies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Deists
>Yet oddly enough, the liberal free US society was established almost exclusively by
>Christians.
This is blatantly false, as I have just mentioned. Various forms of Christianity, most vary different from those practiced in America today, have been highly prevalent since colonization; however, until the 20th century many important statesmen were Deist. Christian leaders often try to give the impression that secular power is on the rise and must be combated, but this is historically false as it is extreme forms of Christianity that moved into the foreground and pushed secular ideals out of the way during recent decades.
>It's not about religion, it's about the leaders. Some can downplay their
>religion and lead from a fair secular view, others allow religion to completely dictate
>their actions.
Generally the first kind are the better sort of leader. Anyone who has studied any history knows that a politician who cannot put practical concerns ahead of religious concerns is headed for a fall. The whole history of Europe is a lesson in why secular leaders (whether they be religious in private or not) are a good thing and leaders who try to let the bible run the country inevitably lead to factional infighting. If you can't make rational arguments about policy, then there is no way to build consensus, and if there is no way to build consensus, you'll inevitably be drawn into a civil war. The remarkable power of a secular leader is the power of compromise, and the ability to accept when they have been proven wrong.
in this context? It seems to be defined as "the AI we named neurotic."
This article fails to convey any meaningful information...
The real world benefits of using flash as a cache layer between the harddrive and the computer, either through hybrid drives, don't seem to have materialized yet.
With my thinkpad there was an optional gig of flash that I ordered. After I downloaded the drivers and got it all set up, I found that there wasn't any noticiable difference in speed, or harddrive usage. However, I did notice that it interacted poorly with the "active protection" feature that stops the harddrive whenever the computer is in motion. Whenever the computer was unplugged, the flash cache was turned on, I could simply shake my computer (thus activating active protection) to get a blue screen.
Furthermore a little research showed that benchmarks on flash caches being sold right now offered no performance benefit whatsoever.
If there's no performance benefit, why are they trying to sell these things to people? I've seen some handwaving over the idea that flash *might* keep the harddrive from spinning most of the time and thus save battery life. However, when using the flash I saw no noticeable benefit.
Having an extra layer of cache in the system architecture seems like a good idea on paper, but in the real world the consumer is buying totally worthless pieces of hardware that do not improve performance one whit, and have never been proven to improve battery use.
a lot of cryptography and security work. I should note that there's absolutely nothing wrong in funding such research, in fact these papers benefit everyone. I don't think this should be confused with torture, as the article seems to do.
All the information I saw linked was pure mathematics research.
However, these papers aside, I have to say that the NSA runs with too little public oversight. The domestic wiretapping, which continues to go on without any kind of meaningful regulation is a good example of no american agency should be allowed to run as a black box to the other two branches of the government. Independents need to be brought in to make sure the NSA doesn't continue to step over ethical and legal boundaries.
Right now, I tend to think that the NSA isn't an evil organization. However, they could easily become destructive in the hands of an administration with the will and ability to politicize the agency. I'm sure the current administration would love to use them to spy on their many political enemies, if they aren't already.
instead of buying existing software... you are planning to hire someone to develop custom software that does the exact same thing. Also, you aren't a software company.
Look, you aren't going to save money. It costs a lot more to develop software than it does to buy it. If there's an existing open source solution, that's great, but if not you don't sound particularly well poised to provide one.
Also, GPL software (especially GPLv3 software) has some restrictions on embedded devices you should familiarize yourself with first if you intend to sell these devices to third parties.
I remember trying out suse 10.1, and a fresh install was full of bugs. Various suse utilities seemed to break immediately after running update.
Have they made much progress towards more stable releases (marketing blurb aside)? Is it worth checking out?
>this in fact is not a call to abandon religion to embrace science, nor is it an assertion
>that there is a conflict between religion and science. they merely have nothing to do with
>each other.
You evade the problem by being too abstract. There is no conflict between "religion" and "science" but there is clearly a conflict between specific established scientific views and specific established religious views.
Many sects dogmatically proclaim that the world was created in 7 days. You can say that "this is a metaphor, and so not at odds with science," but the problem, the conflict is that the people who say that don't *mean* it as a metaphor. They mean it as a factual statement about the world.
Saying there is no conflict between something abstract like "religion" and "science" is missing there point. There are concrete conflicts between various religious dogmas many specific scientific views.
Furthermore, it is well historically established that societies that accept dogmatic modes of thought are not conducive to scientific development. If scientists must do all of their important research in secret, for fear of public reprisal, they will get little done and their work will not be widely disseminated. This is a historical and ongoing problem in our society.
The problem isn't that "religion is bad," although I think an argument could be made for that, but that certain social institutions, especially some hard line religious sects, do much to harm the advancement of science by establishing dogmatic views that they refuse to accept rational challenges to.
Religion matters a lot. None of the people you mentioned accepted repressive dogmatic religions, many were heretics. Yes, many scientists believe in some kind of god, but really what separates them, and all intelligent people, is that they are willing to challenge
1. Einstein's religion is a matter of some debate, but it is generally acknowledged that the god that he believed in wasn't the Christian god. Many historical quotes that reference "god" do so in the context of a deist god, which has nothing to do with the Christian god. The deist god typically has no free will, for instance. Remember Einstein's quote about "God does not play dice"?
2. Newton and many of his contemporaries were considered heretics in their own time. Newton didn't believe in the trinity for instance, which was a no no at "trinity college" where he went to school.
So it's one thing to have religion, but what *sort* of religion you have matters a lot. If you are the sort of person that just accepts whatever your parents or other authority figures tell you as the truth, you aren't the sort of person who can engage in critical thought and make new scientific discoveries. If you are the sort of person capable of challenging established scientific views, you are the sort of person who will challenge established religious views. Historically there have been few great thinkers who have *not* done so.
it is called open source vs free software, and that rift has been going on for a long time. It's gotten worse and worse as Stallman has tried to make the GPL more restrictive and difficult to use, and as people have analyzed the old GPLv2 more closely and noticed a bunch of ugly restrictive clauses.
Also, as others have mentioned the "any later version" statement doesn't mean that existing software is under GPLv3, but that existing software is *compatible* with GPLv3.
Really though, if Stallman could change the terms of the GPL license at whim, do you really think that would be a good idea? Copyright for an enormous amount of GPL software is already turned over to him as part of FSF rules. I have no idea why some people trust him so much with their property, but I can't say it speaks highly of their intelligence.
it's because the GPLv3 is *a bad license*?
I've *always* had a problem with the GPL when compared to other licenses like Apache and BSD. It seems more about advancing Richard Stallman's personal politics than about writing a good license. Just look at how long it is! It feels more like a EULA than an open source license.
The entire point of the open source is to give the user the right to use source however they wish. Stallman's doublespeak will make you think that's what the GPL is all about. It doesn't make any sense though! If I want my users to be free to use my source however I want, why do I make it impossible to use with software licensed under other licenses? There are tons of weird ass restrictions on what sort of linking you can use (none if it's straight up GPL as opposed to LGPL, but LGPL isn't much better!).
The GPL and especially the GPLv3 is like poison to most companies, even pro open source companies like google. Even the LGPL isn't used in a lot of situations because of ambiguities in the license! It has too many restrictions on how the source can be used and too much weasalease and ambiguous wording in the license. From my point of view, that doesn't increase the freedom of the user, it restricts it.
Why should large companies contribute to or use software licensed under GPLv3? It seems like suicide for the open source community to embrace a license that's going to alienate them to the fringes of hobbiests and zealots. Why would I release code under a license like that when I know it's just going to prevent people from using it?
>This "whatever works", "convenience-first" crowd is rather amusing since their success is
>pretty much dependant on a far greater number of contributors to their projects who do
>subscribe to the GPL ideology.
I really don't buy this argument. It seems like FSF has been riding linux's coattails ever since Linus made the mistake of choosing the GPL over a *good* open source license.
Anyway, last time I checked the parts of "GPL ideology" that weren't contained in open source software were just RMS hero worship and some communist abhorrence towards the idea of making money.
Viva la open source!
>>Open Office is quaint, but users still want MS
>A matter of branding rather than suer needs. This is a problem to be solvedby marketing.
>I have no idea what you mean by "quaint". Open Office does its job perfectly well.
Pretending that open office is as good as office is intellectually dishonest. Open office is *not* a good piece of software, and repeating it over and over again fanboyishly (is that what you meant by marketing?) won't make it so.
Open office is "quaint" because it is a joke. It tries to clone office (which is a good idea) and fails miserably. It's bloated and slow to start up. It crashes. It doesn't support 90% of office's features. It sucks at what it tries to do on every level.
Frankly, the reason why office is so widespread, even more widespread than windows is (it runs on osx, and is the singly most widely used application on osx) is because it is the best office suite that has ever been written. Pretending that because it comes microsoft, it *must* be bad is intellectually dishonest.
Microsoft has lockin on windows, but they *don't* on office. There's plenty of programs that can read doc files. Office is universally used because *it is that good*. Open office isn't used outside of linux because *it is that bad*.
Deal with it.
> Actually, the big language culprits would be those with auto-garbage collection,
> etc. as they tend to have lazier programmers
Actually, it isn't lazier programmers. The problem is that existing garbage collection implementations have horrible memory profile.
If you look at the memory usage of a java program, it's about as bad as a c program that does nothing but leak memory. Practically speaking, java does little to free memory until it has *run out of memory*. Then when it does run out of memory and it needs to clean things up, things get slow as hell.
>The real answer is doing your job right, and using the right tool - which is not necessarily
>the easiest tool to use either.
Yes! Unfortunately, academics and many novice programmers (who just got finished being trained by academics) are unfamiliar with the powerful tools available like C++. Going to school can give you the mistaken impression that garbage collection is *a good thing* because everyone uses it there. The truth is that C++ is a very complicated language with a steep learning curve, but that many times it is simply the only tool that is suitable for the job.
If your program is IO bound, like a web application front end, you are in a great position, because essentially *any* tool will do the job, even if the performance is abysmal. You can use java, ruby, or whatever. And you should, becuase those languages don't present you with the complexity of c++.
Unfortunately, many programs *are not IO bound* and the performance and memory profile of the underlying tool are very important. This is most true of interactive non parializable programs. So, a good example would be bittorrent programs. Consider utorrent vs azureas, one in c++ and one in java. utorrent is fairly light weight and easy to use because of its performance characteristics. Azureus is a powerful and well engineered program, but it sure as hell is slow and chews up memory.
should not serve jail time. Also, I have no comprehension of why owning mod chips should be illegal.
That said, he did break the law when he pirated games, and it is entirely just that he should be brought up on charges. However, the punishment should fit the crime.
if you RTFA *referenced* by TFA, you go on to find out that the company was *founded* by a kid, but no longer run by one. Very deceptive!
>don't buy that it's more of a problem than illegal drug trade). At the very least, it is
>a crime on a lesser level because no one is placed in danger of physical harm through it's effects.
That is faulty reasoning. You are thinking that dealing drugs is worse than theft because the "damage done" is worse (at least with harder drugs like cocaine and heroin). However, you aren't considering *responsibility*.
If a free person does something to harm themselves, it is no crime. It is just foolish and being a fool can be no crime, or the president and all of congress would be made felons. The state has no business protecting people from themselves. If someone steals from a free person, that is a crime because they are harming someone else. The state does have a responsibility to keep people from harming each other, although it seems to execute this poorly.
A free adult who purchases and abuses dangerous substances of his own free will bears total responsibility for his own actions. The drug seller cannot be held liable for damages done to the purchaser, unless the seller misled the purchaser into believing that there were no dangerous side effects to his products.
To say that this doesn't reflect the law, is to merely say that we don't live in a very free or just society, which should be news to no one.
>Having to get "support" for a new product means that that product is broken.
Here here! I don't know how linux distros get away with shipping with so many bugs. With all the problems that windows vista has, if it had *nearly* as many bugs and broken software as your average linux distro, microsoft would go out of business immediately.
Also, I'm sad to say that support on Ubuntu forums has really degraded since ubuntu became more popular. You used to be able to get help from competent people for your problems, but these days the forums are so crowded with idiots who don't know anything *about* linux, but who nevertheless feel compelled to comment on your questions, that it has become a frustrating waste of time.
The last few times I've asked about how to fix a software or hardware problem, some *genius* has suggested that I use some other piece of software instead... or get a different graphics card... Here's an idea? How about I stop using your shitty operating system *entirely*.