Our Tivo is on a wireless phone jack, and reliability is horrendous. It seemed to work great for about six months, but now every ten days I have to spend all afternoon repeatedly trying to connect until it gets it right and gets new program data.
Of course, it doesn't help that our satellite receiver has decided to become unable to receive certain channels.
Now, on another note, though -- I don't believe that intellectual property (for the most part) legitimately falls into private property -- but that's another matter entirely.
May your tribe increase. (As I grew into a libertarian I started with this belief so ingrained into me that it was a fierce shock when I discovered most libertarians seemed not to feel that way, because they swallow the reasoning behind the term "intellectual property.")
and learn that we, as Christians, need to get out of politics and out of the school administration
I'm a Christian libertarian, and I agree with this point. But, as long as my money is forcibly confiscated to fund the public education system (which I agree is a worthy cause to fund charitably, even though the local elementary school took $10 from us for a recent fundraiser and never delivered the cookie dough we ordered), then I rightfully have a say in what they do. In fact, our school district even says so in their online documents. They make clear that they are accountable to two groups: 1) parents, and 2) taxpayers.
As a taxpayer I rightfully deserve a say, though of course as a Christian even if I did not have that say I am commanded to still pay taxes.
For my part, I do not believe in forcibly confiscating the money of other people to educate my children, and so my children will be homeschooled. They will indeed be exposed to evolution. (Mommy and Daddy love Star Trek, so they'll be hearing about it a lot.)
I suggest that if the state public school system doesn't want my vote in how things are taught, they need to eliminate my means of participation through compulsory funding; i.e., they need to allow me to "secede" or "opt-out" of the program entirely. As it is, the problem really stems from the conflict between two views of how education ought to be: one view is that science (and other appropriate disciplines) rightfully ought to set the standard. The problem is in our democracy we insist that these things be done by a vote, which is also right since we're taking people's money away and they deserve a say in how their money is spent. But submitting things to a vote, which is the right thing to do, is necessarily going to make influence from the appropriate disciplines on the curriculum be secondary, which is a problem for quality of education.
Thus, I will opt-out of sending my children to the public schools so that their education will not be subject to a vote. If I could opt-out of compulsory funding of the system, I could probably use that money to fund my kids travelling in Europe or something to broaden their worldview, and I'd happily yield any interest I have in setting the agenda of the public school system.
I don't understand. Do you want the spectrum to be regulated by a free market (which in your view leads inevitably to undesirable consolidation), or a governmental body (which in your view is doing an awful job)? What, besides these two alternatives, do you propose? Benevolent dictator model?
Yeah... sorry; from comments you made elsewhere, I had reason to believe you were someone I went to school with. I replied here because it was an older thread that I presumed wouldn't attract any attention for us getting off topic.
My intent was to contrast open file formats with just Word, not with both Word and PDF. Unfortunately grammar didn't make my intent clear, and it made it look like I was saying to use an open format instead of PDF. PDF is a great, open format.
My point is those people need to get used to looking at stuff in HTML for cases where complex presentation is not needed. There are certainly cases where PDF is great online, and I never intended to imply otherwise.
I wasn't trying to knock PDF. PDF is a great format and is indeed far better than anything else you mentioned. What I was saying is that the default for the web ought to be HTML and you ought to only use PDF when you actually need that kind of feature. And then I will agree most wholeheartedly with you that if it is needed, I would far rather see it as PDF than as Word or some other junk format.
Unfortunately marketing and HR drones who value style over substance operate in a default mode of thinking they need all the whiz-bang presentation features that are not available in HTML when most of the time they do not. Given that export to HTML is available from Pages as a feature, I think we can see the mindset problem when they mention exporting something to PDF to put it on the web instead of HTML. HTML ought to be the first line solution rather than automatically throwing everything on the web in bloated binary formats when all that is needed is a few paragraphs.
Want to share your documents online? Pages also offers the easiest way to create great looking PDF files.
I realize those two sentences may make perfect sense together to anybody who doesn't understand the web, but to the rest of us, it's a non-sequiter. Want to share your documents online? Please, for crying out loud, write your documents in HTML and make them actually work on the web instead of uploading a bunch of junk in binary file formats. I am so sick of navigating my internal company intranet and seeing that HR has no clue what the web is for so they've given us a bunch of random Word documents to download.
I realize there are cases when useful information can be better presented in specialized formats like PDF and Word (or better still some competing open file format like OO.o ). I'm not talking about those cases. I'm talking about when all you have is a few paragraphs of text to share. Just slap <p> tags around them and upload them; don't pretty them up in a word processor and export to a honking huge file format!
If the supposedly mistaken notion that people hold is indeed true, then it represents an error in the Bible.
I don't get where you see the Bible presenting that notion. My point is that it isn't in the Bible, and an examination of a number of passages shows that to be the case.
This time around I wasn't defending a Biblical inaccuracy or contradiction. I was demonstrating that a notion people often say is found in the source documents of Christianity actually isn't.
Thanks for the positive comment. Hard to get those responses when you post something like I did.:)
There's a lot of stuff that gets repeated and repeated until everyone believes it's true. Simple example: where in Scripture are the "three" wise men recorded? They're not.:) (You might or might not have known that one.)
Here's a study on the last days that might interest you. Popular religious culture (i.e., "Left Behind") nowadays obscures the fact that there are three or four major interpretations of endtimes events from history. The one presented by Left Behind actually only became so dominant in the 20th century, and really not that long ago.
Amazingly, some people enjoy learning about the culture, lifestyles, and thought processes of people different from themselves. Just that not very many people like this are on slashdot.
While popular religion often presents the idea that early Christians all believed the coming of Christ would be immediate, this is actually explicitly refuted in the Bible in II Thessalonians 2:1-3.
Jesus did state that the kingdom of heaven would come "in this generation" (his generation, not ours) (Mark 9:1, Matthew 24:34), but He also taught that the kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36) and was "within you" (Luke 17:20-21). Since the Bible later identifies the kingdom as the church, refers to Christians already being a part of the kingdom in the past tense rather than future (Colossians 1:13), describes Christ as presently serving as King rather than serving as King in the future (Acts 2:33, Hebrews 12:2), and describes Christ as returning the Kingdom to the Father at His second coming rather than establishing the Kingdom at that time (I Corinthians 15:24), it seems that the prophecy of Christ of the coming of the kingdom referred to the establishment of the church, rather than to His coming at the end of time.
Finally, both Christ (Mark 13:32) and His apostles (I Thessalonians 5:2) stated that noone knew the time of His coming and that it would be without warning, like a thief in the night. Thus, while I and II Thessalonians indicate that many early Christians may have misunderstood, a properly educated 1st century C.E. Christian holding to the doctrine of the second coming as taught by Christ and His apostles would have recognized that the day might or might not come in the immediate future.
That said, you did get a laugh out of me.;) Hope you found the Bible info informative and that addressing a serious response to a joke doesn't bug you. (That's how I learned everything in high school physics; the teacher addressed serious responses to my jokes.)
is this just a case of someone just trying to cash in on Apple's success
I just hate it when people overuse the word "just" or put it in strange places in a sentence. The word "just" means "only." To test to see if your use of the word "just" is correct, substitute the word "only" and see if your sentence makes sence.
As I said the other day, Stallman himself is the perfect example of using free software on proprietary OS'es. That's how the GNU project started, and today they still make reasonable efforts to keep their software portable.
A lot of people dismiss and mock RMS, but he already asked and answered a lot of these questions himself many years ago. Maybe it would help some people to periodically read through some of his writings. (I know reading things you don't agree with or like is unpopular with many around here.) RMS has made intelligent decisions on a lot of these issues.
Another thing that comes up all the time around here is selling free software, which seems to confuse a lot of people but was handled by RMS a long time ago, too.
That makes sense to me. I think a lot of people missed the boat on what I was trying to say. All of these are potentially valid reasons for people. My problem is that they should be stated up front on the first page of the Apache website that mentions the two latest and stable versions. When I'm staring at that page that offers me a choice between 2.0 and 1.x, it should state why I might want to use one or the other.
A long time ago when I first heard about the 2.0 series, I'm pretty sure I read that it was still in development and we shouldn't rely on it for production work but use 1.x instead. That's a bit unusual for many open software projects in that usually you don't release an x.0 version until it is "ready." (They'd call it 1.99 or 2.0-PR or something.) So every time I download Apache I look for an announcement that the 2.0 branch is now preferred, and I've never seen it. All I see is the front page which still offers a choice of versions, and I think, "When is 2.0 going to be ready?"
I have no problem with that policy at all. But there is nothing at all on the front page to answer the question "Which Apache version should I use?" Even if the answer is not a simple "Use 2.0" or "Use 1.x," there needs to be answers to "Why would I want to use 2.0" and "Why would I want to use 1.x."
I have been interpreting the continued maintenance of the 1.x line for years as a statement that 2.0 was not ready for prime time. I'm pretty sure this was the case at one time. The website needs to just come right out and say, "If you are starting with Apache for the first time, please use 2.0. The 1.x branch continues to be maintained for existing users who need to remain with an older version." Couldn't that at least make it to the FAQ?
Can anyone point me to a succint explanation of why there have been an Apache 1.x line and an Apache 2.0 line for years? This to me has always seemed like an implicit statement from the Apache people that I should not yet move to 2.0.
I checked the front page of Apache and there were release announcements for the latest version of both lines. Neither announcement carried a statement indicating when you should use it over the other. The front page does not appear to link to anything addressing the issue, and the FAQ does not appear to handle it, either.
And the silly thing is that the date and time coding problem is trivial to solve: solve it once, stick it in a module or library, and then use that forever. And hey, look! It's already been solved for most languages!
In Perl I've been using Matt Sergeant's excellent Time::Piece module for years now, but am planning a switch to the new DateTime module which looks slated to become a Perl standard. Unfortunately it's always the bad coders who try to do everything themselves and reinvent the wheel. They will write their own date handling code and saddle me with the responsibility of fixing it years from now (what, you mean 2008 is a leap year?). I'm still mad at some highly paid consultants who didn't bother to read the docs to see what kind of year value they got out of some code I had to fix on Dec. 31, 1999. All they had to do was read the docs! And it's not like they didn't have any knowledge that year-handling was ever a problem...
Meanwhile most of the languages I've been learning lately seem to have built-in date literals. (Nothing new; I had that in dBase IV an eon ago.)
Simple solution: use one library everywhere and fix the library if it ever has problems. Instead we get inexperienced coders who reinvent the wheel and then tell us all we need to change our calendar to make it easier for them to continue manufacturing redundant wheels.
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Our Tivo is on a wireless phone jack, and reliability is horrendous. It seemed to work great for about six months, but now every ten days I have to spend all afternoon repeatedly trying to connect until it gets it right and gets new program data.
Of course, it doesn't help that our satellite receiver has decided to become unable to receive certain channels.
Now, on another note, though -- I don't believe that intellectual property (for the most part) legitimately falls into private property -- but that's another matter entirely.
May your tribe increase. (As I grew into a libertarian I started with this belief so ingrained into me that it was a fierce shock when I discovered most libertarians seemed not to feel that way, because they swallow the reasoning behind the term "intellectual property.")
The machine is probably designed well, but being operated in an environment which exceeds several of the specifications.
and learn that we, as Christians, need to get out of politics and out of the school administration
I'm a Christian libertarian, and I agree with this point. But, as long as my money is forcibly confiscated to fund the public education system (which I agree is a worthy cause to fund charitably, even though the local elementary school took $10 from us for a recent fundraiser and never delivered the cookie dough we ordered), then I rightfully have a say in what they do. In fact, our school district even says so in their online documents. They make clear that they are accountable to two groups: 1) parents, and 2) taxpayers.
As a taxpayer I rightfully deserve a say, though of course as a Christian even if I did not have that say I am commanded to still pay taxes.
For my part, I do not believe in forcibly confiscating the money of other people to educate my children, and so my children will be homeschooled. They will indeed be exposed to evolution. (Mommy and Daddy love Star Trek, so they'll be hearing about it a lot.)
I suggest that if the state public school system doesn't want my vote in how things are taught, they need to eliminate my means of participation through compulsory funding; i.e., they need to allow me to "secede" or "opt-out" of the program entirely. As it is, the problem really stems from the conflict between two views of how education ought to be: one view is that science (and other appropriate disciplines) rightfully ought to set the standard. The problem is in our democracy we insist that these things be done by a vote, which is also right since we're taking people's money away and they deserve a say in how their money is spent. But submitting things to a vote, which is the right thing to do, is necessarily going to make influence from the appropriate disciplines on the curriculum be secondary, which is a problem for quality of education.
Thus, I will opt-out of sending my children to the public schools so that their education will not be subject to a vote. If I could opt-out of compulsory funding of the system, I could probably use that money to fund my kids travelling in Europe or something to broaden their worldview, and I'd happily yield any interest I have in setting the agenda of the public school system.
I don't understand. Do you want the spectrum to be regulated by a free market (which in your view leads inevitably to undesirable consolidation), or a governmental body (which in your view is doing an awful job)? What, besides these two alternatives, do you propose? Benevolent dictator model?
Actually, believe it or not, The Thing is Jewish. (Another article.)
Yeah ... sorry; from comments you made elsewhere, I had reason to believe you were someone I went to school with. I replied here because it was an older thread that I presumed wouldn't attract any attention for us getting off topic.
Never mind; and thanks for your time.
Are you from Texas, by any chance?
I wasn't trying to knock PDF. PDF is a great format and is indeed far better than anything else you mentioned. What I was saying is that the default for the web ought to be HTML and you ought to only use PDF when you actually need that kind of feature. And then I will agree most wholeheartedly with you that if it is needed, I would far rather see it as PDF than as Word or some other junk format.
Unfortunately marketing and HR drones who value style over substance operate in a default mode of thinking they need all the whiz-bang presentation features that are not available in HTML when most of the time they do not. Given that export to HTML is available from Pages as a feature, I think we can see the mindset problem when they mention exporting something to PDF to put it on the web instead of HTML. HTML ought to be the first line solution rather than automatically throwing everything on the web in bloated binary formats when all that is needed is a few paragraphs.
Want to share your documents online? Pages also offers the easiest way to create great looking PDF files.
I realize those two sentences may make perfect sense together to anybody who doesn't understand the web, but to the rest of us, it's a non-sequiter. Want to share your documents online? Please, for crying out loud, write your documents in HTML and make them actually work on the web instead of uploading a bunch of junk in binary file formats. I am so sick of navigating my internal company intranet and seeing that HR has no clue what the web is for so they've given us a bunch of random Word documents to download.
I realize there are cases when useful information can be better presented in specialized formats like PDF and Word (or better still some competing open file format like OO.o ). I'm not talking about those cases. I'm talking about when all you have is a few paragraphs of text to share. Just slap <p> tags around them and upload them; don't pretty them up in a word processor and export to a honking huge file format!
If the supposedly mistaken notion that people hold is indeed true, then it represents an error in the Bible.
I don't get where you see the Bible presenting that notion. My point is that it isn't in the Bible, and an examination of a number of passages shows that to be the case.
This time around I wasn't defending a Biblical inaccuracy or contradiction. I was demonstrating that a notion people often say is found in the source documents of Christianity actually isn't.
Thanks for the positive comment. Hard to get those responses when you post something like I did. :)
There's a lot of stuff that gets repeated and repeated until everyone believes it's true. Simple example: where in Scripture are the "three" wise men recorded? They're not. :) (You might or might not have known that one.)
Here's a study on the last days that might interest you. Popular religious culture (i.e., "Left Behind") nowadays obscures the fact that there are three or four major interpretations of endtimes events from history. The one presented by Left Behind actually only became so dominant in the 20th century, and really not that long ago.
Amazingly, some people enjoy learning about the culture, lifestyles, and thought processes of people different from themselves. Just that not very many people like this are on slashdot.
While popular religion often presents the idea that early Christians all believed the coming of Christ would be immediate, this is actually explicitly refuted in the Bible in II Thessalonians 2:1-3.
Jesus did state that the kingdom of heaven would come "in this generation" (his generation, not ours) (Mark 9:1, Matthew 24:34), but He also taught that the kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36) and was "within you" (Luke 17:20-21). Since the Bible later identifies the kingdom as the church, refers to Christians already being a part of the kingdom in the past tense rather than future (Colossians 1:13), describes Christ as presently serving as King rather than serving as King in the future (Acts 2:33, Hebrews 12:2), and describes Christ as returning the Kingdom to the Father at His second coming rather than establishing the Kingdom at that time (I Corinthians 15:24), it seems that the prophecy of Christ of the coming of the kingdom referred to the establishment of the church, rather than to His coming at the end of time.
Finally, both Christ (Mark 13:32) and His apostles (I Thessalonians 5:2) stated that noone knew the time of His coming and that it would be without warning, like a thief in the night. Thus, while I and II Thessalonians indicate that many early Christians may have misunderstood, a properly educated 1st century C.E. Christian holding to the doctrine of the second coming as taught by Christ and His apostles would have recognized that the day might or might not come in the immediate future.
That said, you did get a laugh out of me. ;) Hope you found the Bible info informative and that addressing a serious response to a joke doesn't bug you. (That's how I learned everything in high school physics; the teacher addressed serious responses to my jokes.)
All Indians don't work for US outsourcing tech companies.
I think what you actually mean is "not all Indians work for US outsourcing tech companies."
Right. Which is why I complained about overuse of the word, and not use of the word.
is this just a case of someone just trying to cash in on Apple's success
I just hate it when people overuse the word "just" or put it in strange places in a sentence. The word "just" means "only." To test to see if your use of the word "just" is correct, substitute the word "only" and see if your sentence makes sence.
As I said the other day, Stallman himself is the perfect example of using free software on proprietary OS'es. That's how the GNU project started, and today they still make reasonable efforts to keep their software portable.
A lot of people dismiss and mock RMS, but he already asked and answered a lot of these questions himself many years ago. Maybe it would help some people to periodically read through some of his writings. (I know reading things you don't agree with or like is unpopular with many around here.) RMS has made intelligent decisions on a lot of these issues.
Another thing that comes up all the time around here is selling free software, which seems to confuse a lot of people but was handled by RMS a long time ago, too.
That makes sense to me. I think a lot of people missed the boat on what I was trying to say. All of these are potentially valid reasons for people. My problem is that they should be stated up front on the first page of the Apache website that mentions the two latest and stable versions. When I'm staring at that page that offers me a choice between 2.0 and 1.x, it should state why I might want to use one or the other.
A long time ago when I first heard about the 2.0 series, I'm pretty sure I read that it was still in development and we shouldn't rely on it for production work but use 1.x instead. That's a bit unusual for many open software projects in that usually you don't release an x.0 version until it is "ready." (They'd call it 1.99 or 2.0-PR or something.) So every time I download Apache I look for an announcement that the 2.0 branch is now preferred, and I've never seen it. All I see is the front page which still offers a choice of versions, and I think, "When is 2.0 going to be ready?"
That's a good idea. They should say that. If they are already saying that, they should say it more prominently.
I have no problem with that policy at all. But there is nothing at all on the front page to answer the question "Which Apache version should I use?" Even if the answer is not a simple "Use 2.0" or "Use 1.x," there needs to be answers to "Why would I want to use 2.0" and "Why would I want to use 1.x."
I have been interpreting the continued maintenance of the 1.x line for years as a statement that 2.0 was not ready for prime time. I'm pretty sure this was the case at one time. The website needs to just come right out and say, "If you are starting with Apache for the first time, please use 2.0. The 1.x branch continues to be maintained for existing users who need to remain with an older version." Couldn't that at least make it to the FAQ?
Can anyone point me to a succint explanation of why there have been an Apache 1.x line and an Apache 2.0 line for years? This to me has always seemed like an implicit statement from the Apache people that I should not yet move to 2.0.
I checked the front page of Apache and there were release announcements for the latest version of both lines. Neither announcement carried a statement indicating when you should use it over the other. The front page does not appear to link to anything addressing the issue, and the FAQ does not appear to handle it, either.
And the silly thing is that the date and time coding problem is trivial to solve: solve it once, stick it in a module or library, and then use that forever. And hey, look! It's already been solved for most languages!
In Perl I've been using Matt Sergeant's excellent Time::Piece module for years now, but am planning a switch to the new DateTime module which looks slated to become a Perl standard. Unfortunately it's always the bad coders who try to do everything themselves and reinvent the wheel. They will write their own date handling code and saddle me with the responsibility of fixing it years from now (what, you mean 2008 is a leap year?). I'm still mad at some highly paid consultants who didn't bother to read the docs to see what kind of year value they got out of some code I had to fix on Dec. 31, 1999. All they had to do was read the docs! And it's not like they didn't have any knowledge that year-handling was ever a problem...
Meanwhile most of the languages I've been learning lately seem to have built-in date literals. (Nothing new; I had that in dBase IV an eon ago.)
Simple solution: use one library everywhere and fix the library if it ever has problems. Instead we get inexperienced coders who reinvent the wheel and then tell us all we need to change our calendar to make it easier for them to continue manufacturing redundant wheels.