The germ analogy is a good one, but for me too. People claimed to have seen/experienced God before telescopes and microscopes. So, presumably God is not undetectable or invisible like germs were then (because if he was, then, by definition, no-one could have known about him - unless, of course, he was imaginary).
You are getting into the same discussion again. So I ask you: can you disprove it? (just to feed this fire)
Disprove what? I could (given time) list an infinite number of deities, all but one of which (I assume) you don't believe in. I am guessing you aren't going to ask me to disprove God number 23, or God number 99,232,872, or many others. So why should I bother disproving your God?
While I agree they are not the "same thing", I think it's fairly clear there are two sub-categories of atheist, I think I can safely say my comment implies type #1, at the very least the word "know" should have given the reader a strong clue.
This is a good point, and caused all sorts of problems in such discussions. I actually think there are even more sorts of atheism! A third version is a belief that a belief in God is pointless and useless. It is a belief that the idea of a God is irrelevant; effectively putting the matter aside.
I see your insult and raise you a snarky remark about your comprehension skills and Horatio.;)
Heh. If you think that is an insult, you should really see me when I get going:)
I was really not trying to insult - I was trying to point out that some arguments in this area don't achieve anything and lead nowhere.
You can't prove that we evolved by lucky, and I can't prove that God helped the process. That's my point.
Doesn't matter at all. One has to prove the more complex case, not the simpler one. If we can explain it by 'lucky', then it is up to you to explain. The two explanations aren't of equal merit, so your point has no substance.
You see my point again? If you can't disprove someone's beliefs, than you can't bash it (but you can disagree, though). This is tolerance.
There should be no tolerance for beliefs that get in the way of rational decisions. A belief that God was involved in evolution leads to many problematic attitudes. And, to be honest, I am getting fed up with tolerating irrational beliefs that attack science and rationality. We have been tolerant for too long while irrationality has grown in power, and now (even here in the UK) is starting to try and get influence in politics and in the education of our children.
I am also getting fed up with tired and intellectually barren 'well you can't prove God doesn't exist' argument, which almost everyone who uses it thinks is new and clever. It is an argument with no merit, as we all effectively believe that an infinite number of things don't exist, if only because we live our lives as if they don't. It is up to those who want to add a potentially infinitely complex extra factor to the universe - a God - to prove it, not those who express the simpler point of view.
But if you wish to persist in this argument, I claim that evolution is random because the Devil keeps jogging God's hand as he fiddles with life. So, if you want to claim that God intervenes, you are going to have to disprove my Devil hypothesis....
How many particular arrangements would be useful on a deck so large as the one that represents evolution? What are the odds that something alive comes out of these arrangements?
Well, we can get something that is close to living pretty much spontaneously anyway, with RNA in test tubes. We get molecules arising that mutate and evolve spontaneously. So, I would say that the odds are pretty good.
But this is irrelevant, as any good philosopher or theologian will tell you. What are the odds of an immensely complex all-powerful intelligent being arising that could control evolution? The answer is clear - far, far less than the any odds of evolution. To explain something complex using something even more complex is just plain silly.
It's no evidence for denying it either.
Yes, actually, it is. If you look around and don't see something, most rational people would consider that as evidence that nothing is there.
Evidence proving that all this happened by chance?! Please show me the evidence.
I suggest you read books by Charles Darwin. The evidence and reasoning is very clearly (and beautifully) described there. There is a newer version of one of his books by Steve Jones - 'Almost like a Whale' - you might find that helpful.
Please could you provide evidence that an immensely complicated all-powerful being could spontaneously arise?
I cannot prove that God intervenes in evolution, but you can't prove otherwise either.
I don't need to prove otherwise. If, as we are now sure, evolution is a random process of natural selection, there is simply no need for a God to be involved. If there is no need, it is pointless to try and prove he wasn't involved - it is a waste of time, as the idea of a God intervening has no usefulness and explains nothing. We can just forget about it. It is as pointless to even think about it as it would be to imagine that evolution was controlled by, say, fairies. God is excess to requirements in this, so the only intellectually honest thing to do is to forget about the idea.
And even though we know how evolution works, there are plenty of it that had a small chance of happening.
This is irrelevant. It is like shuffling a deck of cards. Any particular arrangement of cards has a small chance of appearing, but some arrangement had to appear.
And if this were not the case, it is no evidence for intervention.
You may well say that was purely by chance, and you are entitled this belief. But it's your feeling (i.e. how you see it) and not a proof.
No, it is not just a feeling. There is overwhelming evidence for it.
Philosophy is more than a bad car analogy my freind.
Put another way it requires faith to "know" god does or does not exist, "I don't know but I believe XYZ" is the only intellectually honest answer anyone can give to the question of god's existance.
This is unclear thinking, and philosophically empty.
Atheism is not a belief. It is absense of belief. It is the default position. We are all atheists about (at least) an infinite number of things. I don't believe in the great god Flang Splut. Neither do you. But we don't believe in him not because you can't prove he exists, but for a better reason... you don't have a belief in him at all. Why? Because you had not even heard of him. This is why atheism is the default position. It is also not philosophically sensible to try and get around this by claiming that as soon as you heard of this new god, you then immediately developed a faith in his absense. That is absurd. You life is not now filled with a new powerful faith; instead, you will simply not bother thinking about him.
What you are confusing is atheism and what we might call 'anti-theism'. The first is absense of a belief, the second is positive belief or faith in an absense. They are certainly not the same thing.
Actually, it's your comment that does not make sense. Your car runs mechanically and you (or at least someone) can prove that.
That is irrelevant. We know how evolution works, and we can explain how it can happen by itself, but that does not stop some people claiming that God intervenes. Same with the car - we know how it works, but that would not stop someone still claiming that magic was involved somewhere.
Generally, educated atheists express the concept of God in terms of a low probability, which can be shown logically.
I think this is just pandering to the religious. There is no sensible or logical way to determine the probability of God anyway.
Conversely, uneducated atheists are, in a way, religious, in that they believe something that flies in the face of common wisdom without having an argument to show whether or not their belief is likely.
No, this is not true. It can be argued that the default position is atheism. Anyway, atheism is not a belief. It the absence of belief.
Atheisim is also a "religion" in the sense that it asserts a negative hypothisis that cannot be tested.
This does not make sense. We are all effectively asserting negative hypotheses all the time. For example, when my car goes wrong, I take it to a garage to be fixed. I am asserting the negative hypothesis that the car runs mechanically and not by magic. Does that make me religious?
I am not implying that current life in general can adapt to impacts. I just thought it was interesting that at least with some bacteria-level organisms, this almost certainly happened, and that life that could not survive massive impacts of the kind that happened close to 4 billion years ago was wiped out.
"But this wouldn't necessarily have an evolutionary impact. For that, we'd need to have the asteroid deflection produce a differential survival rate in the next generation. If the asteroid is deflected entirely, there would be no differential survival rate, and no evolutionary impact."
Well, there would be a differential survival rate in the next generation compared to the asteroid hitting!
"But I wouldn't claim that out intelligence is an adaptation to do such things."
Also, it's not something that the evolutionary process could adapt to, since asteroid impacts are too rare and utterly unpredictable by any genetic mechanism.
Just to make what I think is an interesting point, I believe you are wrong here, for two reasons. First, it looks as if ancestral life forms are extreme thermophiles, which can be possibly explained by these being the only organisms that could survive deep in the hot depths of the Earth's crust during the period of regular asteroid impacts early in the Earth's history. Second, it is likely that humans can adapt to the threat of asteroid impacts by deflecting them. The reason for this is genetically determined high intelligence.
Consider a Ruby implementation on the JVM and multiply inefficiencies! Should be thousands of times slower for those same benchmarks.
There is no justification for this statement. One of the aims of JRuby is to compile to JVM byte code, which can then be translated to highly optimised machine code.
Apparently Sun isn't content to let Microsoft's CLR become the de facto standard bytecode runtime platform.
Do you realise how many instances of the JVM there are right now? Not just on servers, but on mobile devices and phones? There is not the slighest chance of the CLR becoming the de-facto anything.
He is not a scientist - he gave that up decades ago. He is a writer of science fiction containing laughably poor science. He is not qualified to judge the science he is criticising.
When I use a file open dialog box from spring, I cannot open folders because when I press enter to open them, it selects the folder and returns instead. That simple fact makes Swing *completely* useless to me. Swing is was and will ever be a bad idea. It's just horrible to work with as well - WAY to many members in each class, way to many options and it always tries to emulate everything - and does so badly.
Your problem is you have set the wrong selection mode for JFileChooser.
If I do this: JFileChooser fileChooser = new JFileChooser(); fileChooser.setFileSelectionMode(JFileChooser.FILE S_AND_DIRECTORIES);
I can reproduce your problem. But, if I leave out the file selection model setting, or set it to JFileChooser.FILES_ONLY then the open dialog will only return if someone selects a file and presses enter. If they select a directory and press enter, it will go into that directory.
Netbeans is snappy, yes. It's also one of the worst interfaces that I've seen in my *life*
Well, it has won awards for its interface, but I guess this a matter of personal taste.
In the meanwhile, we've still got customers stuck on 1.3, because our "write once, run anywhere" code doesn't run on 1.4, and it's too much effort to puzzle out why because Sun's runtime is just such a mess.
There could be several reasons why Java 1.3 code won't run on 1.4. One is if you use sun.* or com.sun.* packages directly, which is funcamentally against portability guidelines. Another could be real incompatibilities. There are very few incompatibilities between 1.3 and 1.4. They are listed here: http://java.sun.com/javase/compatibility_j2se1.4.h tml
If you keeping customers from using Java 5.0 or Java 6.0 because you can't sort this out, you are keeping them from major performance and functional improvements.
It seems like./ eds or submitters making up crap to spice up headlines again.
Actually, IBM's JVMs have always had a reputation for very good performance. Years ago, I found IBM's Java 1.3 routinely beat equivalent code in gcc for many numeric algorithm benchmarsks.
At this point I am afraid give up! I have given you ample opportunity to get up to date. I have given you references you can read to try and understand this. You have refused to. You are so sure of your 70s attitude to persistence that you simply can't be bothered to find out anything new. Well, good luck to you.
Ignoring the personal views, which seem immune to debate, and you hand-waving away decades of computer science research you don't happen to like...
One can make a procedure or view that can bring in related stuff also as already discussed. And it is often not wise to automatically bring in a bunch of crap that may not be related to the task at hand.
No, you can't, not TRANSPARENTLY. And why are you bringing up the straw man argument about 'bringing in a bunch of crap'? For goodness sake, why don't you actually research before posting? If you did, you would know that persistence approaches like JDO allow the use of both lazy loading (only bring in what is needed, when it is needed) or fetch groups (define what is automatically loaded for optimisation).
I see nothing that cannot be done procedurally or by views. They are called "functions". Show me something that functions and relational CANNOT do or do poorly. You claimed OO is objectively better than p/r. I don't care if OO walks your dog if other things can also walk your dog just as well. It runs, but so does assembler.
You are completely missing the whole point. Let me try one last time.
I use a method call, and IN THE BACKGROUND, WITHOUT ME HAVING TO ADD A LINE OF CODE, this is transformed into a query.
This means I can apply persistence even to legacy code, or to code written by others who don't want to have to consider persistence.
And the advantage of OOP is that this capability is inheritable - it is automatically applied to subclasses.
You simply can't do this transparent persistence procedurally - it requires OOP specific features, including transparent proxy generation (production of automatic subclasses).
It is this transparency that makes this objectively better than a procedural approach.
Even if you are going to do nothing but code in a procedural way, it is worth wrapping code in class to get this power.
So IS-A is back in style again? I'll avoid OO until you guys get it right. Should I keep my disco pants around in case?
IS-A is absolutely back in style. If you kept up to date, you would realise that it is the foundation of some of the most exciting new systems, like Rails, Hibernate, JPA, Spring.
Because OO is f8cked up. Nobody agrees on exactly what it is and how to tell good OO design from bad OO design. People slap classes together with no guiding or verifiable principles. OO produces e-shanty towns.
Only when people who haven't a clue use it. There are far too many of those in IT. Relational and procedural approaches can be equally f_cked up - I have seen that so many times.
You seem like an extremely experienced and skilled person, but I don't think you are doing yourself any favours by not keeping up with things. At least find out about transparent persistence - your comments show you haven't any idea how it works. If you are going to reject something, you need to understand it.
And also, you never answered my question - how long would it take YOU to transfer a several hundred thousand line project with hundreds of tables between different vendors RDMBSes?
I see the predictions of the catastrophic effects of anthropogenic global warming as being the current paradigm, and the tweaking of models and selective interpretation of data as being the "mopping up" operations of which Kuhn speaks, skepticism being the revolutionary, or at least novel, component.
All models need tweaking and interpretation - if they didn't, they would not be models.
You are plain historically wrong - skepticism is the traditional view - the old paradigm, which has been replaced by the new paradigm - anthropogenic global warming.
This easy to demonstrate, as the number of skeptics (the old paradigm) has steadily descreased over decades. This is what happens when old paradigms die out.
Even Michael Shermer, of The Skeptic Magazine, who was until recently appropriately and vocally skeptical about man-made global warming now says that skepticism is no longer a sensible point of view. He changed his position last June - he said that the data was now so strong he could do nothing else.
I accept that we simply have different views, and neither of us is likely to be convinced by the other. At least it keeps life interesting.
If people like you can't be convinced, then we have a problem. That Shermer has changed his mind gives me some hope.
However one thing that really makes me skeptical is the religious zeal with which it is pushed. In most science it seems to be that when you have a theory you know is right and plenty of proof, you've no need to shout down your skeptics.
It isn't religious zeal, it is just that many scientists are simply fed up that they aren't being listened to. There is a need to shout down skeptics when they are simply ignoring the proof. In the field of climate science, agreement that global warming is happening and that mankind is contributing significantly towards it is almost unanimous, and yet the media persist with the illusion that there is major disagreement.
The more times the tests don't come out false, the more sure we are the theory is right. That's the whole doctrine of falsifiability and it's the cornerstone of modern empiricism.
And this is exactly what has been happening with global warming, and yet the myth of controversy persists.
More than any of the actual skeptical papers, this makes me wonder about the GW argument. If your position is so tenuous that it must be defended with ad hominem attacks and threats, I have to wonder about how correct it really can be.
But then this opens up the ability for any small group to make you personally wonder about anything. Supposing that some fanatical flat Earthers with political influence ranted against physicists until one or two of them got nasty back - would that justify you doubting that the Earth was round?
Also, global warming scientists are doing what people have wanted scientists to do - they are considering the consequences of their research for humanity. Yet, when they do this, they are ranted against. Is it any wonder some of them rant back?
* Please note: Don't bother posting some diatribe trying to convince me on GW.
This not a diatribe against you, it is against the media, and it is an attempt to explain why climate scientists are so fed up.
Ironically, relational fans (such as I) tend to think that polymorphism and inheritance are usually poor modeling techniques and way over used. Many OO fans have agreed even, recommending composition instead of inheritance. IS-A is out out out of style in OO circles.
You can keep using the phrase 'many OO fans', but that does not stop these features being of real use. Inheritance and polymorphism are fundamentally different ideas. Inheritance is overused, polymorphism underused.
The best GUI system would be mostly declarative because that would allow *multiple* languages to use the same GUI engine.
Multiple languages can already use the same GUI engine on the JVM.
OOP has not figured out a way to do that because each OO language is too different from each other.
No, see below.
If you can prove otherwise, you will be an OO hero instead of wrong. Declarative is more cross-sharable. Declarative == Sharable.
Then I am an OO hero, as I can easily prove you wrong. Here are some examples of multiple languages using the same GUI engine (Swing on the JVM):
All the work of Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg and so on.
Again, that is a query language syntax issue, not an OOP issue. (Some dialects support "natural joins" that do just that.) I would like to rework SQL myself, but that is another issue. If you are using a special magic query language that is better than SQL, fine, but that is not an OO victory even if true.
Yes, it is, because it is a query language that allows for inheritance, polymorphism and re-use. I can query for, say, a Contact, and I will automatically get subclasses. This allows for transparent extensibility.
Also, as I said, but you keep ignoring, what you retrieve are instances of classes that have been proxied and advised with additional code to allow transparent persistence. That is an OOP matter.
That is outright bad biz modeling.
Sorry, but I can't take you seriously. You are doing nothing more that claiming that anyone who takes a different approach from you is wrong!
You don't subclass Contact, you reference it. A customer, client, etc, may have multiple contacts. For example, a given company may have a billing contact, a sales contact, and a general (front desk) contact. Even Amazon has multiple contact options per customer. This is what happens when you think in trees instead of sets. I rest my case.
You haven't made any case. You can certainly model by referencing, but it depends on the complexity. In a situation where you don't have multiple contacts, inheritance is far simpler.
Dr. Codd and Charles Bachman faught navigational-versus-relational battles in the 70's and relational is generally considered to have won. That is until OO fans tried to resurrect navigational concepts. Navigational is modern-day GOTO's.
You had better tell CERN that - they use navigational models for the vast majority of their data collection, as relational systems are neither fast enough or flexible enough.
Again, a good many OO fans have lots of complaints and grumbles about OO/relational mappers.
That is true, but I am talking about modern mappers, not the way they were years
That is a good reply. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics involves far more than simple randomness. What I am about to say may sound weird and even mystical, but it is solid physics. We really haven't the faintest idea what conciousness is, or what its role is in terms of quantum mechanics. We are trying to describe the production of conciousness involving what, at the lowest level, is quantum mechanical systems - this is a confusing mess. There is even good evidence that quantum mechanical systems are correlated in time as well as space, and how does that relate to conciousness? If you want to get even more confused by this, just read a few recent books by Paul Davies or Roger Penrose.
I must confess that years ago, I was a believer in hard AI - I assumed that minds could be simply simulated, but the more I have found out about quantum mechanics, the less I am sure.
The collapse doesn't produce randomness. If it did, then the wave function itself would not be deterministic, but it is.
Of course the collapse produces randomness. The great mystery of quantum mechanics is how the derministic wave function collapses randomly.
If you don't believe the collapse produces randomness, perhaps you could point me to an equation that describes how we can predict where the result of a collapse (such as the precise location of a diffracted electron) will appear.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you spell "GERMS"? :-)
:)
Can you spell "MICROSCOPE"?
Even with a microscope, we don't see God.
The germ analogy is a good one, but for me too. People claimed to have seen/experienced God before telescopes and microscopes. So, presumably God is not undetectable or invisible like germs were then (because if he was, then, by definition, no-one could have known about him - unless, of course, he was imaginary).
You are getting into the same discussion again. So I ask you: can you disprove it? (just to feed this fire)
Disprove what? I could (given time) list an infinite number of deities, all but one of which (I assume) you don't believe in. I am guessing you aren't going to ask me to disprove God number 23, or God number 99,232,872, or many others. So why should I bother disproving your God?
While I agree they are not the "same thing", I think it's fairly clear there are two sub-categories of atheist, I think I can safely say my comment implies type #1, at the very least the word "know" should have given the reader a strong clue.
;)
:)
This is a good point, and caused all sorts of problems in such discussions. I actually think there are even more sorts of atheism! A third version is a belief that a belief in God is pointless and useless. It is a belief that the idea of a God is irrelevant; effectively putting the matter aside.
I see your insult and raise you a snarky remark about your comprehension skills and Horatio.
Heh. If you think that is an insult, you should really see me when I get going
I was really not trying to insult - I was trying to point out that some arguments in this area don't achieve anything and lead nowhere.
I think we could argue forever and will never settle on one or another position.
:)
I believe there is hope
I don't have to disprove your "Devil hypothesis" because I don't contest it, even though I don't believe in it. It's tolerance again.
Ah, but if you believe that a God has influence over evolution, you do have to contest it, surely?
You can't prove that we evolved by lucky, and I can't prove that God helped the process. That's my point.
Doesn't matter at all. One has to prove the more complex case, not the simpler one. If we can explain it by 'lucky', then it is up to you to explain. The two explanations aren't of equal merit, so your point has no substance.
You see my point again? If you can't disprove someone's beliefs, than you can't bash it (but you can disagree, though). This is tolerance.
There should be no tolerance for beliefs that get in the way of rational decisions. A belief that God was involved in evolution leads to many problematic attitudes. And, to be honest, I am getting fed up with tolerating irrational beliefs that attack science and rationality. We have been tolerant for too long while irrationality has grown in power, and now (even here in the UK) is starting to try and get influence in politics and in the education of our children.
I am also getting fed up with tired and intellectually barren 'well you can't prove God doesn't exist' argument, which almost everyone who uses it thinks is new and clever. It is an argument with no merit, as we all effectively believe that an infinite number of things don't exist, if only because we live our lives as if they don't. It is up to those who want to add a potentially infinitely complex extra factor to the universe - a God - to prove it, not those who express the simpler point of view.
But if you wish to persist in this argument, I claim that evolution is random because the Devil keeps jogging God's hand as he fiddles with life. So, if you want to claim that God intervenes, you are going to have to disprove my Devil hypothesis....
How many particular arrangements would be useful on a deck so large as the one that represents evolution? What are the odds that something alive comes out of these arrangements?
Well, we can get something that is close to living pretty much spontaneously anyway, with RNA in test tubes. We get molecules arising that mutate and evolve spontaneously. So, I would say that the odds are pretty good.
But this is irrelevant, as any good philosopher or theologian will tell you. What are the odds of an immensely complex all-powerful intelligent being arising that could control evolution? The answer is clear - far, far less than the any odds of evolution. To explain something complex using something even more complex is just plain silly.
It's no evidence for denying it either.
Yes, actually, it is. If you look around and don't see something, most rational people would consider that as evidence that nothing is there.
Evidence proving that all this happened by chance?! Please show me the evidence.
I suggest you read books by Charles Darwin. The evidence and reasoning is very clearly (and beautifully) described there. There is a newer version of one of his books by Steve Jones - 'Almost like a Whale' - you might find that helpful.
Please could you provide evidence that an immensely complicated all-powerful being could spontaneously arise?
I cannot prove that God intervenes in evolution, but you can't prove otherwise either.
I don't need to prove otherwise. If, as we are now sure, evolution is a random process of natural selection, there is simply no need for a God to be involved. If there is no need, it is pointless to try and prove he wasn't involved - it is a waste of time, as the idea of a God intervening has no usefulness and explains nothing. We can just forget about it. It is as pointless to even think about it as it would be to imagine that evolution was controlled by, say, fairies. God is excess to requirements in this, so the only intellectually honest thing to do is to forget about the idea.
And even though we know how evolution works, there are plenty of it that had a small chance of happening.
This is irrelevant. It is like shuffling a deck of cards. Any particular arrangement of cards has a small chance of appearing, but some arrangement had to appear.
And if this were not the case, it is no evidence for intervention.
You may well say that was purely by chance, and you are entitled this belief. But it's your feeling (i.e. how you see it) and not a proof.
No, it is not just a feeling. There is overwhelming evidence for it.
Philosophy is more than a bad car analogy my freind.
Put another way it requires faith to "know" god does or does not exist, "I don't know but I believe XYZ" is the only intellectually honest answer anyone can give to the question of god's existance.
This is unclear thinking, and philosophically empty.
Atheism is not a belief. It is absense of belief. It is the default position. We are all atheists about (at least) an infinite number of things. I don't believe in the great god Flang Splut. Neither do you. But we don't believe in him not because you can't prove he exists, but for a better reason... you don't have a belief in him at all. Why? Because you had not even heard of him. This is why atheism is the default position. It is also not philosophically sensible to try and get around this by claiming that as soon as you heard of this new god, you then immediately developed a faith in his absense. That is absurd. You life is not now filled with a new powerful faith; instead, you will simply not bother thinking about him.
What you are confusing is atheism and what we might call 'anti-theism'. The first is absense of a belief, the second is positive belief or faith in an absense. They are certainly not the same thing.
Actually, it's your comment that does not make sense. Your car runs mechanically and you (or at least someone) can prove that.
That is irrelevant. We know how evolution works, and we can explain how it can happen by itself, but that does not stop some people claiming that God intervenes. Same with the car - we know how it works, but that would not stop someone still claiming that magic was involved somewhere.
Generally, educated atheists express the concept of God in terms of a low probability, which can be shown logically.
I think this is just pandering to the religious. There is no sensible or logical way to determine the probability of God anyway.
Conversely, uneducated atheists are, in a way, religious, in that they believe something that flies in the face of common wisdom without having an argument to show whether or not their belief is likely.
No, this is not true. It can be argued that the default position is atheism. Anyway, atheism is not a belief. It the absence of belief.
Atheisim is also a "religion" in the sense that it asserts a negative hypothisis that cannot be tested.
This does not make sense. We are all effectively asserting negative hypotheses all the time. For example, when my car goes wrong, I take it to a garage to be fixed. I am asserting the negative hypothesis that the car runs mechanically and not by magic. Does that make me religious?
I guess I'm out of the loop, because I have no idea what "ze frank" is.
But that doesn't seem to stop you making a lot of assumptions. He is actually a funny and witty guy. It is worth looking him up.
I am not implying that current life in general can adapt to impacts. I just thought it was interesting that at least with some bacteria-level organisms, this almost certainly happened, and that life that could not survive massive impacts of the kind that happened close to 4 billion years ago was wiped out.
"But this wouldn't necessarily have an evolutionary impact. For that, we'd need to have the asteroid deflection produce a differential survival rate in the next generation. If the asteroid is deflected entirely, there would be no differential survival rate, and no evolutionary impact."
Well, there would be a differential survival rate in the next generation compared to the asteroid hitting!
"But I wouldn't claim that out intelligence is an adaptation to do such things."
I agree.
Also, it's not something that the evolutionary process could adapt to, since asteroid impacts are too rare and utterly unpredictable by any genetic mechanism.
Just to make what I think is an interesting point, I believe you are wrong here, for two reasons. First, it looks as if ancestral life forms are extreme thermophiles, which can be possibly explained by these being the only organisms that could survive deep in the hot depths of the Earth's crust during the period of regular asteroid impacts early in the Earth's history. Second, it is likely that humans can adapt to the threat of asteroid impacts by deflecting them. The reason for this is genetically determined high intelligence.
Consider a Ruby implementation on the JVM and multiply inefficiencies! Should be thousands of times slower for those same benchmarks.
There is no justification for this statement. One of the aims of JRuby is to compile to JVM byte code, which can then be translated to highly optimised machine code.
Apparently Sun isn't content to let Microsoft's CLR become the de facto standard bytecode runtime platform.
Do you realise how many instances of the JVM there are right now? Not just on servers, but on mobile devices and phones? There is not the slighest chance of the CLR becoming the de-facto anything.
He is not a scientist - he gave that up decades ago. He is a writer of science fiction containing laughably poor science. He is not qualified to judge the science he is criticising.
Do you have any evidence for that?
When I use a file open dialog box from spring, I cannot open folders because when I press enter to open them, it selects the folder and returns instead. That simple fact makes Swing *completely* useless to me. Swing is was and will ever be a bad idea. It's just horrible to work with as well - WAY to many members in each class, way to many options and it always tries to emulate everything - and does so badly.
E S_AND_DIRECTORIES);
Your problem is you have set the wrong selection mode for JFileChooser.
If I do this:
JFileChooser fileChooser = new JFileChooser();
fileChooser.setFileSelectionMode(JFileChooser.FIL
I can reproduce your problem. But, if I leave out the file selection model setting, or set it to
JFileChooser.FILES_ONLY
then the open dialog will only return if someone selects a file and presses enter. If they select a directory and press enter, it will go into that directory.
Netbeans is snappy, yes. It's also one of the worst interfaces that I've seen in my *life*
Well, it has won awards for its interface, but I guess this a matter of personal taste.
In the meanwhile, we've still got customers stuck on 1.3, because our "write once, run anywhere" code doesn't run on 1.4, and it's too much effort to puzzle out why because Sun's runtime is just such a mess.
h tml
There could be several reasons why Java 1.3 code won't run on 1.4. One is if you use sun.* or com.sun.* packages directly, which is funcamentally against portability guidelines. Another could be real incompatibilities. There are very few incompatibilities between 1.3 and 1.4. They are listed here:
http://java.sun.com/javase/compatibility_j2se1.4.
If you keeping customers from using Java 5.0 or Java 6.0 because you can't sort this out, you are keeping them from major performance and functional improvements.
It seems like ./ eds or submitters making up crap to spice up headlines again.
Actually, IBM's JVMs have always had a reputation for very good performance. Years ago, I found IBM's Java 1.3 routinely beat equivalent code in gcc for many numeric algorithm benchmarsks.
What do you mean by "transparently"?
Why don't you bother to research before posting?
At this point I am afraid give up! I have given you ample opportunity to get up to date. I have given you references you can read to try and understand this. You have refused to. You are so sure of your 70s attitude to persistence that you simply can't be bothered to find out anything new. Well, good luck to you.
Ignoring the personal views, which seem immune to debate, and you hand-waving away decades of computer science research you don't happen to like...
One can make a procedure or view that can bring in related stuff also as already discussed. And it is often not wise to automatically bring in a bunch of crap that may not be related to the task at hand.
No, you can't, not TRANSPARENTLY. And why are you bringing up the straw man argument about 'bringing in a bunch of crap'? For goodness sake, why don't you actually research before posting? If you did, you would know that persistence approaches like JDO allow the use of both lazy loading (only bring in what is needed, when it is needed) or fetch groups (define what is automatically loaded for optimisation).
I see nothing that cannot be done procedurally or by views. They are called "functions". Show me something that functions and relational CANNOT do or do poorly. You claimed OO is objectively better than p/r. I don't care if OO walks your dog if other things can also walk your dog just as well. It runs, but so does assembler.
You are completely missing the whole point. Let me try one last time.
I use a method call, and IN THE BACKGROUND, WITHOUT ME HAVING TO ADD A LINE OF CODE, this is transformed into a query.
This means I can apply persistence even to legacy code, or to code written by others who don't want to have to consider persistence.
And the advantage of OOP is that this capability is inheritable - it is automatically applied to subclasses.
You simply can't do this transparent persistence procedurally - it requires OOP specific features, including transparent proxy generation (production of automatic subclasses).
It is this transparency that makes this objectively better than a procedural approach.
Even if you are going to do nothing but code in a procedural way, it is worth wrapping code in class to get this power.
So IS-A is back in style again? I'll avoid OO until you guys get it right. Should I keep my disco pants around in case?
IS-A is absolutely back in style. If you kept up to date, you would realise that it is the foundation of some of the most exciting new systems, like Rails, Hibernate, JPA, Spring.
Because OO is f8cked up. Nobody agrees on exactly what it is and how to tell good OO design from bad OO design. People slap classes together with no guiding or verifiable principles. OO produces e-shanty towns.
Only when people who haven't a clue use it. There are far too many of those in IT. Relational and procedural approaches can be equally f_cked up - I have seen that so many times.
You seem like an extremely experienced and skilled person, but I don't think you are doing yourself any favours by not keeping up with things. At least find out about transparent persistence - your comments show you haven't any idea how it works. If you are going to reject something, you need to understand it.
And also, you never answered my question - how long would it take YOU to transfer a several hundred thousand line project with hundreds of tables between different vendors RDMBSes?
I see the predictions of the catastrophic effects of anthropogenic global warming as being the current paradigm, and the tweaking of models and selective interpretation of data as being the "mopping up" operations of which Kuhn speaks, skepticism being the revolutionary, or at least novel, component.
All models need tweaking and interpretation - if they didn't, they would not be models.
You are plain historically wrong - skepticism is the traditional view - the old paradigm, which has been replaced by the new paradigm - anthropogenic global warming.
This easy to demonstrate, as the number of skeptics (the old paradigm) has steadily descreased over decades. This is what happens when old paradigms die out.
Even Michael Shermer, of The Skeptic Magazine, who was until recently appropriately and vocally skeptical about man-made global warming now says that skepticism is no longer a sensible point of view. He changed his position last June - he said that the data was now so strong he could do nothing else.
I accept that we simply have different views, and neither of us is likely to be convinced by the other. At least it keeps life interesting.
If people like you can't be convinced, then we have a problem. That Shermer has changed his mind gives me some hope.
However one thing that really makes me skeptical is the religious zeal with which it is pushed. In most science it seems to be that when you have a theory you know is right and plenty of proof, you've no need to shout down your skeptics.
It isn't religious zeal, it is just that many scientists are simply fed up that they aren't being listened to. There is a need to shout down skeptics when they are simply ignoring the proof. In the field of climate science, agreement that global warming is happening and that mankind is contributing significantly towards it is almost unanimous, and yet the media persist with the illusion that there is major disagreement.
The more times the tests don't come out false, the more sure we are the theory is right. That's the whole doctrine of falsifiability and it's the cornerstone of modern empiricism.
And this is exactly what has been happening with global warming, and yet the myth of controversy persists.
More than any of the actual skeptical papers, this makes me wonder about the GW argument. If your position is so tenuous that it must be defended with ad hominem attacks and threats, I have to wonder about how correct it really can be.
But then this opens up the ability for any small group to make you personally wonder about anything. Supposing that some fanatical flat Earthers with political influence ranted against physicists until one or two of them got nasty back - would that justify you doubting that the Earth was round?
Also, global warming scientists are doing what people have wanted scientists to do - they are considering the consequences of their research for humanity. Yet, when they do this, they are ranted against. Is it any wonder some of them rant back?
* Please note: Don't bother posting some diatribe trying to convince me on GW.
This not a diatribe against you, it is against the media, and it is an attempt to explain why climate scientists are so fed up.
Ironically, relational fans (such as I) tend to think that polymorphism and inheritance are usually poor modeling techniques and way over used. Many OO fans have agreed even, recommending composition instead of inheritance. IS-A is out out out of style in OO circles.
/j-alj09084/
You can keep using the phrase 'many OO fans', but that does not stop these features being of real use. Inheritance and polymorphism are fundamentally different ideas. Inheritance is overused, polymorphism underused.
The best GUI system would be mostly declarative because that would allow *multiple* languages to use the same GUI engine.
Multiple languages can already use the same GUI engine on the JVM.
OOP has not figured out a way to do that because each OO language is too different from each other.
No, see below.
If you can prove otherwise, you will be an OO hero instead of wrong. Declarative is more cross-sharable. Declarative == Sharable.
Then I am an OO hero, as I can easily prove you wrong. Here are some examples of multiple languages using the same GUI engine (Swing on the JVM):
Java (well, no examples needed there).
Groovy: http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2004/10/gdgr oovy_basic_swingbuilder.html
JRuby:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library
Jython:
http://www.uselesspython.com/Jython_Swing_Basics.h tml
Scala:
http://scala.sygneca.com/code/scalagui
I can provide many more if you wish.
Research? Where?
All the work of Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg and so on.
Again, that is a query language syntax issue, not an OOP issue. (Some dialects support "natural joins" that do just that.) I would like to rework SQL myself, but that is another issue. If you are using a special magic query language that is better than SQL, fine, but that is not an OO victory even if true.
Yes, it is, because it is a query language that allows for inheritance, polymorphism and re-use. I can query for, say, a Contact, and I will automatically get subclasses. This allows for transparent extensibility.
Also, as I said, but you keep ignoring, what you retrieve are instances of classes that have been proxied and advised with additional code to allow transparent persistence. That is an OOP matter.
That is outright bad biz modeling.
Sorry, but I can't take you seriously. You are doing nothing more that claiming that anyone who takes a different approach from you is wrong!
You don't subclass Contact, you reference it. A customer, client, etc, may have multiple contacts. For example, a given company may have a billing contact, a sales contact, and a general (front desk) contact. Even Amazon has multiple contact options per customer. This is what happens when you think in trees instead of sets. I rest my case.
You haven't made any case. You can certainly model by referencing, but it depends on the complexity. In a situation where you don't have multiple contacts, inheritance is far simpler.
Dr. Codd and Charles Bachman faught navigational-versus-relational battles in the 70's and relational is generally considered to have won. That is until OO fans tried to resurrect navigational concepts. Navigational is modern-day GOTO's.
You had better tell CERN that - they use navigational models for the vast majority of their data collection, as relational systems are neither fast enough or flexible enough.
Again, a good many OO fans have lots of complaints and grumbles about OO/relational mappers.
That is true, but I am talking about modern mappers, not the way they were years
That is a good reply. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics involves far more than simple randomness. What I am about to say may sound weird and even mystical, but it is solid physics. We really haven't the faintest idea what conciousness is, or what its role is in terms of quantum mechanics. We are trying to describe the production of conciousness involving what, at the lowest level, is quantum mechanical systems - this is a confusing mess. There is even good evidence that quantum mechanical systems are correlated in time as well as space, and how does that relate to conciousness? If you want to get even more confused by this, just read a few recent books by Paul Davies or Roger Penrose.
I must confess that years ago, I was a believer in hard AI - I assumed that minds could be simply simulated, but the more I have found out about quantum mechanics, the less I am sure.
The collapse doesn't produce randomness. If it did, then the wave function itself would not be deterministic, but it is.
Of course the collapse produces randomness. The great mystery of quantum mechanics is how the derministic wave function collapses randomly.
If you don't believe the collapse produces randomness, perhaps you could point me to an equation that describes how we can predict where the result of a collapse (such as the precise location of a diffracted electron) will appear.