"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973)
Your statement says it's reasonable to assume a 3-4 year old window system should be faster than a current window system.
Try installing Windows 3.11 onto a 2 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM sometime. Watch it scream. That's what the guy meant. On today's hardware, older OSes and WMs run faster, since they were build for slower hardware back in their day.
I know some think that type of post is stupid crap, but I'm actually part of post-backlash-"hate the RIAA/MPAA" posts. They're kind of kitsch and retro.
Yeah, well *I'm* part of the post-post-backlash-"love the 'hate the RIAA/MPAA' posts". They reek of kitschness and retrosity to the point of putrescence. That makes me much cooler than the people that just hate the RIAA posts, and a bit cooler than you, who just love those posts. People who like or hate things just to put themselves beyond the cutting edge of the cuttingest edgest stuff, really rock, which I'm sure was your point. But since I took it one step further, it's my point now. No tagbacks, double stamp it.
Sorry, I was unclear. I said he "put forth" the monks as a serious alternative. By that I meant that he included it in the cost analysis alongside the other (more realistic) proposals, not that he took it seriously himself. The point was that he didn't think his boss would read the proposal carefully. He thought that, like all other projects, that his boss would pass his eyes cursorily over the proposal, and then say, "I agree with your recommendation, go ahead and do it." The cost analysis concluded that DLT was the best solution, and that's what ended up being purchased. No mention of the monks from the PHB.
Oh, and why monks? We're a little Catholic liberal arts school.
Etched stone seems to have a staying power of approximately 10,000 years...
This reminds me of a formal budget proposal submitted by my predecessor many years ago (I run the IT dept. at a small college). He gave a very detailed cost breakdown of several means of replacing our then-current backup and recovery method for our file server's RAID array (we were very small way back then). He had costs for hardware, time, and manpower for just about every option available at the time.
His last option, put forth just as seriously and fully as the rest, included the cost of having a team of monks write out the data by hand onto reams of paper, bit-by-bit. Then for recovery, the monks would re-enter the data back into the computer, bit-by-bit. On the pro side he argued that monks work cheap and are very dedicated to what they do. But the con was the time involved for this method was somewhat prohibitive.;)
But how many of todays popular culture addicts would sit down with a copy of Plato's works and read through it?
Well, maybe none would, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't or even couldn't. Here's what C.S. Lewis had to say about it in "On the Reading of Old Books":
There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus have I found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about 'isms' and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said....
Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.... If you join at eleven o'clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why -- the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed 'at' some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance....
This is one of the most true things I've ever read about reading. As a former "pop culture addict" and current engineering geek, I can attest to what Lewis says firsthand. I've sat down with many of these texts over the past five or six years, and read them with diligence and intent. It helps to have a mentor or tutor who has gone before you to help you select the texts and with whom to discuss them. The old philosophers are remarkably accessible to those simply willing to take up and read.
"The Mozilla press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!
"They're not even [within] 100 miles [of a new browser]. There is not any new browser. They hold no place in Redmond. This is an illusion... they are trying to sell to the others an illusion.
"I can assure you that those villains will recognize, will discover in appropriate time in the future how stupid they are and how they are pretending things which have never taken place.
"Let the Open Source infidels bask in their illusion!"
whoa, i'd been lucky if it was ~/ and not / i typed before hitting enter...
Yeah, the example I gave originally was a relatively harmless one. But say you need to wipe out your local apache directory because you forgot to compile it with all the right variables. So you need to be root, and the command you want is:
rm -rf/usr/local/apache
but you only get this far before your pinky slips onto the ENTER key:
rm -rf/
OOPS. Now you need to re-install and restore local-specific data from backups (best case), or you've lost all your local-specific data for good (worst case), or somewhere in between.
But if you had instead planned to type
rm/usr/local/apache -rf
and you accidentally hit ENTER after the first slash, well, you're not in too much trouble. Especially so if your distro (or local settings) has an alias of "rm" to "rm -i".
I've found that in general I am much more at peace if I put the "-rf" part of that command after the directory, so that the command given above, for example, becomes
rm ~/.wine/wineserver* -rf
That way, you're protected against the (admittedly rather remote) possibility that you might somehow hit the ENTER key right after you've typed only part of the command, say,
rm -rf ~/
which would be something of a disaster, or at least an inconvenience (backup recovery time, etc.). Of course you can do tricks like aliasing the "rf" command to include a switch that prompts you before removal, like many distros do, but that sort of defeats the power of the "-f" switch for recursive removal.
Apple.com's products pages are a perfect example of successful static pages, with short, rememberable URLs. Their support site dynamic, but the URLs are still short. When all you need is a simple brochure, static is often the way to go.
In case you need it in other words notation is the set of symbols that are used. Using one notation over another is what you describe.
Okay. If that's what you mean, then the rest of what you've said makes sense. I still don't agree, but at least it makes sense.
For starters your example is bogus lines and numbers aren't real things.
You say this because you think that by "things", I mean "substances". Of course quantities and qualities are not "things" in that sense, but they certainly have *some* being. Their being differs from that of substances. Their being relies on the being of substances.
For example, there can be no "red" unless there is some red "thing", i.e., substance. That doesn't mean that "red" doesn't exist at all, it means that its being depends upon the being of some substance. This is all just straightforward greek philosophy, and I happen to think in this case that it's true.
It is an abstract science dealing with the manipulation of symbols regardless of their application.
I understand that that's your claim. I disagree. I've made a brief case for my position, and I can make a much longer case for it if you'd like. But you just keep asserting yours as if it's manifestly true.
Maybe slashdot isn't the place to continue this discussion. I'm happy to continue it elsewhere, or to recommend some books on the philosophy of science for you to read.
That is all subject to debate. I contend that everything is symbols. You have no way of relating to the world except through symbols, therefore you can't prove that there is any reality apart from them. Additionaly there is no real thing that is 5, or red.
Yes, it's subject to debate. But its a debate that I've had literally hundreds of times, and I'm convinced that over the course of time that I've developed an understanding of its nuances. Oversimplifying things: modern philosophers (beginning with Locke, et al.) have departed from the ancient and medieval understanding that there is an underlying reality. I happen to side with the ancients and against the moderns here. Not everything is a mere product of our minds. There *is* objective reality apart from our own understanding.
With that understanding, I say that there most certainly is a real "thing" that is five or red. However these are not "things" the same way dogs and doughnuts are things. To use Aristotle's language, dogs and doughnuts are "substances" which exist of themselves, five and red are "accidents" which exist only in substances. Substances and accidents both have real being apart from our minds, though in different ways.
You're still using symbols when you mean notation.
I asked you two posts ago to tell me what you thought the difference was. Care to let me in on it?
Words are symbols, numbers are symbols. Everything is symbols.
I agree wholeheartedly with the first two. I did not mean to imply that Apollonius *wasn't* using symbols, I just meant that he was using a different method of signifying.
However, I disagree with the third. Everything is not symbols. The things signified by symbols, are not themselves symbols. When I say "five" or "cinco" I signify something that is not itself a symbol. When I say "parabola" or "y=x^2", I signify something that is not itself a symbol.
Just like when I say "red" or "rose", those words are signs of my thoughts or ideas, which in turn, are signs of (i.e., pointers to) real things. Those real things, are not, in turn, signs of anything else.
My point is that there is a reality that underlies our mathematical symbology or notation that is completely independent of how we choose to signify it. So, my advice to the original poster was this: begin your study of mathematics by understanding the reality, not by trying to decipher the symbols. The symbols are there to *aid* understanding and signification. If they don't help, don't use them.
i.e. symbols. Everything is about symbols. Everything you do, know, and learn. I think you meant "Math is not about notation"
Oh, no, I didn't mean that at all. When I say that math is not *about* symbols, I simply mean that the symbols themselves are not essential to the science of mathematics. In other words, take the symbols away, and you can still have mathematics. Read Apollonius' On Conic Sections, for example. He gives the definition of a parabola in a very long paragraph of words only, not modern mathematical symbols. But he's talking about the very same parabola that might be signified by algebra as y=x^2.
What do you take to be the difference between symbols and notation?
My point was this: abstracted quantities (the subject of the science of mathematics) are not the same as symbols. For a very simple example, the quantity signified by the word "five" (as abstracted from five elephants or five apples or five inches) can be given symbolically as "5" "five" "cinco" "go" "....." "-----" or any number of different ways.
But all of those symbols signify one and the same mathematical object, that discrete quantity which comes after four and before six.
I meant what I said: math is not *about* symbols, though it uses symbols to express the things that it *is* about, namely abstracted quantites and their operations.
Does anyone have a good reference sheet of commonly used symbols in advanced math texts. I've been trying to learn stuff on my own but it is hard when you can't even verbalize what you are reading.
My answer probably isn't what you'll want to hear: Don't do math this way. It's backwards.
Math is not at all about symbols. Math is about quantities abstracted from real things (e.g., numbers and lines). Symbols may make it easier to represent these numbers and lines in a systematic, structured, and complex way, but the symbols are not the "stuff" of Math.
So my advice is: don't start with symbols. Start with the real stuff. Read Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes. Read Descartes for a wonderful insight into how early algebraic notation (i.e., symbols) developed from geometry. Read the early mathematicians, and don't move to the later ones until you understand what came before.
Unfortunately, that takes time, discipline, structure, and often, a good teacher. But that's the approach that I suggest to every student of Math.
Wait, I thought what was stopping Linux was the lack of a proper email/calendaring/contacts solution (server and client side, nicely integrated) that actually works.
Samsung Contact. It works. Server runs on Unix variants or Linux (currently RH and SuSE). You can use their PC client, their Linux client, their web client, or Outlook 98/2k/XP (with the Samsung MAPI drivers). I've been using it on linux since it was HP Openmail. Back then, there were some issues with MAPI driver functionality, but it worked pretty well. Since Samsung has gotten their hands on it, it is fantastic, no reservations whatsoever.
No, it's not free (beer/speech). Until someone is able to do this under some sort of OSS license, I'll gladly pay for Samsung Contact.
Yep. I've even got a 486 with 32 MB RAM serving up email to over 200 users. About a third of them use pine via SSH sessions, the rest IMAP in via webmail (the httpd side is running on a different server, of course, but it connects to this little box with IMAP connections generated with PHP scripts). None of the users are technical enough to do anything else with their accounts. They all have shells accessible via SSH, but if anyone has run any command besides pine, passwd, or quota, I'd be surprised.
It's been in use for about five years now. I never intended it to serve so many users...in fact it was first installed as a proof-of-concept machine. But the concept took hold, and it's been sailing along ever since. Only three reboots in those five years, and those because of extended (and planned) power outages. It was even moved from one building to another during one of those outages.
It's up to Debian Potato (2.2) now, and that's prolly where it will stay until the hardware hits the wall. The hardware is an old IBM PS/2 desktop machine, so it's been very stable all these years.
The surest way to avoid overpopulation is industrialization. Historically it's the only method that works.
That's as false as false can be. Historically, population has controlled itself. The world's population for several millennia, up until about 1000 AD, was a pretty constant 450,000,000, give or take a plague here or there. As medicine got gradually (very gradually!) better, more people survived childhood, and lifespans increased.
Bad medicine keeps populations in check. But neither you nor I will suggest that we just let sick people die to keep population down, will we?
In any event, we won't have to. The Western world's obsession with living like 20-year-olds for their whole lives will keep populations down until there is a workforce crisis.
Look at Italy. Birthrate, 1.2 children per woman of childbearing age. Give them two generations to have a serious problem with too many seniors and not enough young people to take care of them AND run the country. It's funny: domestic cultures used to welcome children by the bucketload to assure themselves of a sufficient workforce, and now, those that reject domestic and family life are going to have that very problem.
They fail to see the problems that are going unsolved during their day, and puting that into the equasion of the future. And I'm sorry, a HUGE population is in our future.
I'm sorry, why do you think that? Let me ask you this: how many women (of childbearing age) do you know that have more than two children? How many women do you know that have less than two children? What is the average number of children per woman that you know? What if you limit it to women under 30 or 35? Because if it's less than two (across the board), population is eventually going to go DOWN, not up.
Did you know that the current birthrate in many Western European countries is less than 2.0? That means that babies aren't being made (in those countries) fast enough to replace people that are dying. There will of course be a lag of a few generations to make up for the fact that such a dramatic change in birthing behavior has come so recently. But change is certainly coming.
In the U.S., it's a slightly different picture, but not much. The only reason we have a birthrate of more than 2.0 per woman is because of immigration and the family practices of many American ethnic and religious groups. For example, ethnic minorities (especially Eastern European and Latino Catholics) often have larger families. Mormons also have larger families. But American families in general (of all races and religions) tend to have smaller familes, or none at all. Most of my friends from college are in their 30s now, and most of them don't have any kids. That's very common.
Now, in non-Western cultures, there isn't the no-child or few-child culture as there is in the West, so much of what I've said doesn't apply there. But it's coming. The growth rate (worldwide) peaked around 1970, when the annual rate of growth was 2.1%. By 1995 it was down to 1.5%. It's still dropping steadily.
In 1992, the World Bank predicted an excess of 10 billion people in the world by 2050. Just four years later, they changed their prediction to 9 billion. Wanna bet that their next estimate will be lower still?
Overpopulation is a scare tactic more appropriate to bad 19th century economics than to clear-thinking 21st century thought.
Slashdot Mirror
History is written by the victors, remember.
Yes, and revisionist history is written by whomever the hell wants to make up their own version of the truth.
Belloc
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973)
Belloc
Your statement says it's reasonable to assume a 3-4 year old window system should be faster than a current window system.
Try installing Windows 3.11 onto a 2 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM sometime. Watch it scream. That's what the guy meant. On today's hardware, older OSes and WMs run faster, since they were build for slower hardware back in their day.
Belloc
This article makes it appear to be a lot of work to avoid...work.
Reminds me of that Strong Bad Short: "Awww...we need to figure out how to get some drinks...like...without having to actually get some drinks."
Belloc
I know some think that type of post is stupid crap, but I'm actually part of post-backlash-"hate the RIAA/MPAA" posts. They're kind of kitsch and retro.
Yeah, well *I'm* part of the post-post-backlash-"love the 'hate the RIAA/MPAA' posts". They reek of kitschness and retrosity to the point of putrescence. That makes me much cooler than the people that just hate the RIAA posts, and a bit cooler than you, who just love those posts. People who like or hate things just to put themselves beyond the cutting edge of the cuttingest edgest stuff, really rock, which I'm sure was your point. But since I took it one step further, it's my point now. No tagbacks, double stamp it.
Belloc
This story is a bit unbelievable...
Sorry, I was unclear. I said he "put forth" the monks as a serious alternative. By that I meant that he included it in the cost analysis alongside the other (more realistic) proposals, not that he took it seriously himself. The point was that he didn't think his boss would read the proposal carefully. He thought that, like all other projects, that his boss would pass his eyes cursorily over the proposal, and then say, "I agree with your recommendation, go ahead and do it." The cost analysis concluded that DLT was the best solution, and that's what ended up being purchased. No mention of the monks from the PHB.
Oh, and why monks? We're a little Catholic liberal arts school.
Belloc
Etched stone seems to have a staying power of approximately 10,000 years...
;)
This reminds me of a formal budget proposal submitted by my predecessor many years ago (I run the IT dept. at a small college). He gave a very detailed cost breakdown of several means of replacing our then-current backup and recovery method for our file server's RAID array (we were very small way back then). He had costs for hardware, time, and manpower for just about every option available at the time.
His last option, put forth just as seriously and fully as the rest, included the cost of having a team of monks write out the data by hand onto reams of paper, bit-by-bit. Then for recovery, the monks would re-enter the data back into the computer, bit-by-bit. On the pro side he argued that monks work cheap and are very dedicated to what they do. But the con was the time involved for this method was somewhat prohibitive.
Belloc
Well, maybe none would, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't or even couldn't. Here's what C.S. Lewis had to say about it in "On the Reading of Old Books":
This is one of the most true things I've ever read about reading. As a former "pop culture addict" and current engineering geek, I can attest to what Lewis says firsthand. I've sat down with many of these texts over the past five or six years, and read them with diligence and intent. It helps to have a mentor or tutor who has gone before you to help you select the texts and with whom to discuss them. The old philosophers are remarkably accessible to those simply willing to take up and read.
Belloc
Official media response from Redmond:
... they are trying to sell to the others an illusion.
"The Mozilla press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!
"They're not even [within] 100 miles [of a new browser]. There is not any new browser. They hold no place in Redmond. This is an illusion
"I can assure you that those villains will recognize, will discover in appropriate time in the future how stupid they are and how they are pretending things which have never taken place.
"Let the Open Source infidels bask in their illusion!"
Belloc
Yeah, the example I gave originally was a relatively harmless one. But say you need to wipe out your local apache directory because you forgot to compile it with all the right variables. So you need to be root, and the command you want is:but you only get this far before your pinky slips onto the ENTER key:OOPS. Now you need to re-install and restore local-specific data from backups (best case), or you've lost all your local-specific data for good (worst case), or somewhere in between.
But if you had instead planned to typeand you accidentally hit ENTER after the first slash, well, you're not in too much trouble. Especially so if your distro (or local settings) has an alias of "rm" to "rm -i".
Belloc
If it helps only one person...
Belloc
Apple.com's products pages are a perfect example of successful static pages, with short, rememberable URLs. Their support site dynamic, but the URLs are still short. When all you need is a simple brochure, static is often the way to go.
Belloc
Man, if the "I Didn't Do It" boy wasn't right on, I don't know what was...
In case you need it in other words notation is the set of symbols that are used. Using one notation over another is what you describe.
Okay. If that's what you mean, then the rest of what you've said makes sense. I still don't agree, but at least it makes sense.
For starters your example is bogus lines and numbers aren't real things.
You say this because you think that by "things", I mean "substances". Of course quantities and qualities are not "things" in that sense, but they certainly have *some* being. Their being differs from that of substances. Their being relies on the being of substances.
For example, there can be no "red" unless there is some red "thing", i.e., substance. That doesn't mean that "red" doesn't exist at all, it means that its being depends upon the being of some substance. This is all just straightforward greek philosophy, and I happen to think in this case that it's true.
It is an abstract science dealing with the manipulation of symbols regardless of their application.
I understand that that's your claim. I disagree. I've made a brief case for my position, and I can make a much longer case for it if you'd like. But you just keep asserting yours as if it's manifestly true.
Maybe slashdot isn't the place to continue this discussion. I'm happy to continue it elsewhere, or to recommend some books on the philosophy of science for you to read.
Belloc
That is all subject to debate. I contend that everything is symbols. You have no way of relating to the world except through symbols, therefore you can't prove that there is any reality apart from them. Additionaly there is no real thing that is 5, or red.
Yes, it's subject to debate. But its a debate that I've had literally hundreds of times, and I'm convinced that over the course of time that I've developed an understanding of its nuances. Oversimplifying things: modern philosophers (beginning with Locke, et al.) have departed from the ancient and medieval understanding that there is an underlying reality. I happen to side with the ancients and against the moderns here. Not everything is a mere product of our minds. There *is* objective reality apart from our own understanding.
With that understanding, I say that there most certainly is a real "thing" that is five or red. However these are not "things" the same way dogs and doughnuts are things. To use Aristotle's language, dogs and doughnuts are "substances" which exist of themselves, five and red are "accidents" which exist only in substances. Substances and accidents both have real being apart from our minds, though in different ways.
You're still using symbols when you mean notation.
I asked you two posts ago to tell me what you thought the difference was. Care to let me in on it?
Belloc
Words are symbols, numbers are symbols. Everything is symbols.
I agree wholeheartedly with the first two. I did not mean to imply that Apollonius *wasn't* using symbols, I just meant that he was using a different method of signifying.
However, I disagree with the third. Everything is not symbols. The things signified by symbols, are not themselves symbols. When I say "five" or "cinco" I signify something that is not itself a symbol. When I say "parabola" or "y=x^2", I signify something that is not itself a symbol.
Just like when I say "red" or "rose", those words are signs of my thoughts or ideas, which in turn, are signs of (i.e., pointers to) real things. Those real things, are not, in turn, signs of anything else.
My point is that there is a reality that underlies our mathematical symbology or notation that is completely independent of how we choose to signify it. So, my advice to the original poster was this: begin your study of mathematics by understanding the reality, not by trying to decipher the symbols. The symbols are there to *aid* understanding and signification. If they don't help, don't use them.
Belloc
i.e. symbols. Everything is about symbols. Everything you do, know, and learn. I think you meant "Math is not about notation"
Oh, no, I didn't mean that at all. When I say that math is not *about* symbols, I simply mean that the symbols themselves are not essential to the science of mathematics. In other words, take the symbols away, and you can still have mathematics. Read Apollonius' On Conic Sections, for example. He gives the definition of a parabola in a very long paragraph of words only, not modern mathematical symbols. But he's talking about the very same parabola that might be signified by algebra as y=x^2.
What do you take to be the difference between symbols and notation?
My point was this: abstracted quantities (the subject of the science of mathematics) are not the same as symbols. For a very simple example, the quantity signified by the word "five" (as abstracted from five elephants or five apples or five inches) can be given symbolically as "5" "five" "cinco" "go" "....." "-----" or any number of different ways.
But all of those symbols signify one and the same mathematical object, that discrete quantity which comes after four and before six.
I meant what I said: math is not *about* symbols, though it uses symbols to express the things that it *is* about, namely abstracted quantites and their operations.
Belloc
Does anyone have a good reference sheet of commonly used symbols in advanced math texts. I've been trying to learn stuff on my own but it is hard when you can't even verbalize what you are reading.
My answer probably isn't what you'll want to hear: Don't do math this way. It's backwards.
Math is not at all about symbols. Math is about quantities abstracted from real things (e.g., numbers and lines). Symbols may make it easier to represent these numbers and lines in a systematic, structured, and complex way, but the symbols are not the "stuff" of Math.
So my advice is: don't start with symbols. Start with the real stuff. Read Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes. Read Descartes for a wonderful insight into how early algebraic notation (i.e., symbols) developed from geometry. Read the early mathematicians, and don't move to the later ones until you understand what came before.
Unfortunately, that takes time, discipline, structure, and often, a good teacher. But that's the approach that I suggest to every student of Math.
Belloc
SIMPLICITY. Google just seems to "get it". They took a simple idea and kept it simple, yet making it extremely powerful.
Put another way:
Q: Why is everyone so obsessed about Google?
A: Google is the ultimate paradox. On the one hand they don't give a crap, but on the other hand, Google is very careful and precise.
Jeez, he's 50 already? That last pictures I saw of him made him look relatively young.
No, you're thinking of ESR. No, wait....
Belloc
Wait, I thought what was stopping Linux was the lack of a proper email/calendaring/contacts solution (server and client side, nicely integrated) that actually works.
Samsung Contact. It works. Server runs on Unix variants or Linux (currently RH and SuSE). You can use their PC client, their Linux client, their web client, or Outlook 98/2k/XP (with the Samsung MAPI drivers). I've been using it on linux since it was HP Openmail. Back then, there were some issues with MAPI driver functionality, but it worked pretty well. Since Samsung has gotten their hands on it, it is fantastic, no reservations whatsoever.
No, it's not free (beer/speech). Until someone is able to do this under some sort of OSS license, I'll gladly pay for Samsung Contact.
Yep. I've even got a 486 with 32 MB RAM serving up email to over 200 users. About a third of them use pine via SSH sessions, the rest IMAP in via webmail (the httpd side is running on a different server, of course, but it connects to this little box with IMAP connections generated with PHP scripts). None of the users are technical enough to do anything else with their accounts. They all have shells accessible via SSH, but if anyone has run any command besides pine, passwd, or quota, I'd be surprised.
It's been in use for about five years now. I never intended it to serve so many users...in fact it was first installed as a proof-of-concept machine. But the concept took hold, and it's been sailing along ever since. Only three reboots in those five years, and those because of extended (and planned) power outages. It was even moved from one building to another during one of those outages.
It's up to Debian Potato (2.2) now, and that's prolly where it will stay until the hardware hits the wall. The hardware is an old IBM PS/2 desktop machine, so it's been very stable all these years.
Belloc
Hey, it's open source. You need no longer lament.
Belloc
The surest way to avoid overpopulation is industrialization. Historically it's the only method that works.
That's as false as false can be. Historically, population has controlled itself. The world's population for several millennia, up until about 1000 AD, was a pretty constant 450,000,000, give or take a plague here or there. As medicine got gradually (very gradually!) better, more people survived childhood, and lifespans increased.
Bad medicine keeps populations in check. But neither you nor I will suggest that we just let sick people die to keep population down, will we?
In any event, we won't have to. The Western world's obsession with living like 20-year-olds for their whole lives will keep populations down until there is a workforce crisis.
Look at Italy. Birthrate, 1.2 children per woman of childbearing age. Give them two generations to have a serious problem with too many seniors and not enough young people to take care of them AND run the country. It's funny: domestic cultures used to welcome children by the bucketload to assure themselves of a sufficient workforce, and now, those that reject domestic and family life are going to have that very problem.
Belloc
They fail to see the problems that are going unsolved during their day, and puting that into the equasion of the future. And I'm sorry, a HUGE population is in our future.
I'm sorry, why do you think that? Let me ask you this: how many women (of childbearing age) do you know that have more than two children? How many women do you know that have less than two children? What is the average number of children per woman that you know? What if you limit it to women under 30 or 35? Because if it's less than two (across the board), population is eventually going to go DOWN, not up.
Did you know that the current birthrate in many Western European countries is less than 2.0? That means that babies aren't being made (in those countries) fast enough to replace people that are dying. There will of course be a lag of a few generations to make up for the fact that such a dramatic change in birthing behavior has come so recently. But change is certainly coming.
In the U.S., it's a slightly different picture, but not much. The only reason we have a birthrate of more than 2.0 per woman is because of immigration and the family practices of many American ethnic and religious groups. For example, ethnic minorities (especially Eastern European and Latino Catholics) often have larger families. Mormons also have larger families. But American families in general (of all races and religions) tend to have smaller familes, or none at all. Most of my friends from college are in their 30s now, and most of them don't have any kids. That's very common.
Now, in non-Western cultures, there isn't the no-child or few-child culture as there is in the West, so much of what I've said doesn't apply there. But it's coming. The growth rate (worldwide) peaked around 1970, when the annual rate of growth was 2.1%. By 1995 it was down to 1.5%. It's still dropping steadily.
In 1992, the World Bank predicted an excess of 10 billion people in the world by 2050. Just four years later, they changed their prediction to 9 billion. Wanna bet that their next estimate will be lower still?
Overpopulation is a scare tactic more appropriate to bad 19th century economics than to clear-thinking 21st century thought.
Belloc