"Similarly, creationists could, in theory, have God come and demonstrate how he made man, and in this case it would be closer to proof"
You want us to take his word for it after he faked all that fossil evidence? I don't think so.
Science does not prove anything in the lab. It can't and doesn't attempt to. Science attempts to explain evidence and make predictions. The lab is for gathering evidence, and testing predictions. Evidence can be gathered for or against evolution. It can make predictions that can succeed or fail. Evolution is as much a scientific theory as gravity. Hell, we understand more of the sub-mechanisms behind evolution, I might argue it's more well established than gravity.
If Creationism were just a claim of responsibility, I wouldn't have any problem with it. I don't care who you think is responsible, I care about the mechanism. The "Creationism" I have a problem with is the one that claims the mechanism. The one that claims evolution (and almost every other scientific theory) to be wrong. If Creationist want to believe that evolution is how God does things, I've got no problem. We can work together on figuring out the details of how it works, and if they think they are figuring out the details of how God works, well, I'll think the're a little kooky, but hey, who isn't. (If you want to teach my kids about your ideas of God, then I'm going to have a problem)
Creationism isn't a scientific theory because it doesn't explain anything. It is not predictive. A scientist could say to themselves "Based on the theory of evolution, I'd expect the bone structure of marine mammals to show signs that they once lived on land. Then he can go out and chop up a dolphin and find out. If he found a bone structure entirely unlike any other mammals, he'd start questioning the theory of evolution. What could we go check that would contradict the theory that things are the way God made them?
"Dude, believe what you want, but don't treat me like a moron because I believe differently"
Dude, believe whatever you want. But if you call believing whatever you want in the absence of evidence science, you should reasonably be expect to be treated like a moron.
Your question "What caused life to begin?" is a tough one, but it is not what the theory of evolution is about, evolution is about what comes after that. Indeed, the answer to your question, along with any other answer in science, cannot be proven. Luckily, Science does not attempt to prove things (that's Mathematics). Science attempts to explain evidence with theories that can be used to make predictions, and which hence can be disproven (by making wrong ones). "God did it" can not be used to make predictions, so it can never be disproven. It explains nothing, so I would not consider it an explanation at all.
Also note that natural evolution is no more or less random than dog breeding. Both use random variations. In dog breeding, humans pick the dogs with the wrong shaped head to not breed again. In nature, lions pick the slow antelope to not breed again.
"the atheists, evolutionists, and Christian/Jew-haters freak all the way out"
Well, I'm not a "Christian/Jew-hater", and as for "atheist", I prefer "Apatheist". God seems like an unlikely concept to me, but I don't really care. If God does exist, he makes everything look like it has a more rational explanation, which is nice of him, because if "God did it" were the best explanation for things in the world, there'd be no point in actually thinking about stuff. So I don't know if God exists, but I find it comforting to assume he doesn't.
I do have a problem with the term "evolutionist". Evolution is not a religion. It's a theory that fits the evidence better than others. Scientists look at the evidence and come up with a theory to explain it. If another theory comes along that explains the evidence better, they'll change their minds. There will be some friction in this process for major theories; it's hard to change your mind, but in the long run scientific theories are at the mercy of the evidence. Religious beliefs are not at the mercy of the evidence, because they are not founded on evidence.
So in the end I guess you're right, I do freak all the way out. But it's not because of your religious beliefs. I couldn't care less about your religious beliefs. It's because you claim there's no real difference between religious beliefs and scientific theories, so your beliefs should be afforded the same respect as scientific theories. Bullshit. Scientific theories are easily distinguished from religious beliefs, and science deserves more respect. Science proposes an explanation that could be proven wrong, and that makes useful predictions. And it continualy tests itself. Science can be used to actually get stuff done. Religion proposes something that can't be proven wrong, that makes no useful predicitons, and that adds nothing to human knowledge. Which is fine, if that's what you're in to, but then it usually claims that it's right and everyone else is wrong, and that it should be afforded more respect than any other random ramblings.
The Gibson story I most enjoyed was "Johnny Mnemonic". (Don't bother with the lame movie though) I might not have liked it as much if I hadn't already met Molly in Neuromancer.
Besides that there's more good stuff in Burning Chrome if you like short stories. For novels I'd go with the cannonical answer of Neuromancer, Count Zero (2 out of 3 plotlines anyway), and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Actually, I thought he was coasting a bit in Mona, rehashing the same themes and charachters from the previous two, but I didn't really care; Once you've read the first two, pretend the title of Mona is "Molly Kicks Additional Ass" and you'll know if you want to read it.
Eveything after Mona I'd skip. It's very deep and thoughtful, and I'm sure I'd have found it brilliant if I could have consumed enough coffee to stay awake through it.
Actually I was thinking the mean temperature of cosmic background radiation.
The standard model is certainly not perfect or complete. There are various bits of evidence that are problematic for it, and a wide variety of add on theories to explain them, some of which are a bit too contorted IMHO. People are more reluctant than I think they should be to attempt full-scale alternatives to the standard model, but this is simply because it works for such a preponderance of evidence.
The standard model has some problems, yes. But my point wasn't that the Standard Model is perfect, right, or even good. My point was that it is science. Creationist "theory" is not capable of having problems, so it is not science, it is unverifiable conjecture.
The Standard Model (Big Bang) has been used to make a variety of testable predictions, which have panned out. Ditto for evolution. This is the essence of the scientific method: Observe a phenomenon. Formulate a theory to explain it. Use this theory to predict things you don't know. Check these things out to see if your theory holds up. Repeat. Real Scientists are very reluctant to say "This is the truth", rather they will say, "this theory has repeatedly demonstrated good predictive ability across many observattions".
Creation "science" predicts nothing. No matter what you observe, the theory "God did it that way. He can do anything." can never be disproven. A theory that explains any evidence is useless, and it is not science.
I'll treat creationists ideas with respect as soon as they agree that my creationist theory is as valid as theirs: "Joe the giant turtle barfed up the universe last week. He can vomit anything."
I could invent theories like this all day, but it wouldn't be science.
I live in a world where secretaries (or other similarly technical people) are the only ones who call tech support, and they call with questions like "How do I print?" or "My email always bounces". More complex issues are resolved by technically competent people who research the problem on the net. So by the standard you say linux support is "free", so is windows support. You think linux has a monopoly on newsgroups?
"So the web server management, user account managment service startup, firewall managment, hardware configuration and the like can all be configured in Win2K using PERL and other commandline utilities?"
Yeah, no problem. I generally find it easier to use the gui, but you can stick to the command lines if that's what you like, and obviously you need to go that way for scripting.
Oh, I see, you meant that as a rhetorical question because you "know" the answer is no. In that case, I'll just quote the AC: "In short, thanks, but no thanks for the FUD. You are not helping the Linux movement by offering such ignorant statements. It makes us all look stupid."
But if you're, for example, a secretary, without any technical background, then the support process is:
1) Use google to search the web for keywords on your question. This give you access to info in howtos, FAQ's, and basic documentation. Your problem may or may not be solved here, but you won't have any idea, because all this info will be utterly incomprehensible to you, so proceed to step 2.
2) Call the IT guy, just like you would in the Windows world. But wait! This is the FREE support process, so you can't very well be paying an IT guy. Proceed to step 3.
3) You're f*cked.
Don't even get me started on how much the ability to "download the source and start hacking" is worth to a non-technical office worker.
Technical support (for Linux, Windows, or anything technical at all) is only free if the time of a technically competent person is free. If that person is you, or your dutiful son in law, you might well consider their time free. In a business environment, this is unlikely to work out so well.
"programmers will be needed only until we get to the point that computers are capable of programming themselves"
Computers are capable of programming themselves; self-modifying code/ macros/ compilers have been around for a long time. If you're talking about computers replacing programmers though, I'd say that will happen right about when they replace novelists, sculptors, musicians, theoretical physicists, etc.
"...comes down to someone else (the government) deciding how others (the people)..."
"The government" is not someone else. It is the people, exercising their collective will. You can argue about whether it uses the right methods to determine that will, or how effective it is at exercising it, and I'll either debate you or agree with you. But your assertion that the govenrment imposed by some entirely external force (space aliens perhaps?) is just the typical, tired straw man of those who want to assume that they speak for "the people".
On a tangent, you seem to really believe that if had decided you wanted to be president, you would have had similar chances to G. W. Bush. Given that, I guess I'd better clarify: I was joking about the space aliens.
"The physical fields were fixed size, but you just made them as big as necessary... and you can do pretty much the same with field delimiters. Different tuple types are so simple too."
Make them as big as necessary - that's not necessarily a finite value, so you're specifying some artificial limit on fields that could otherwise be as big as you want, and wasting all that space whenever the data is smaller. You can use field delimeters, and various sorts of tuples, but you have to specify all that markup, and everyone gets to write a parser. It's not that XML is the ultimate, best possible generalized markup system. It's that it's the standard one. We could invent better ones for specific tasks all day. We might even invent a better completely generalized one. But when a client calls me tommorow and wants to use my web service, is he going to have a parser for our new system already up and running? XML is verbose; it makes no bones about it. But I think a big reason it has gained such wide acceptance is because it realizes that for many tasks, ease of human readability is worth the bytes. I can't count the number of formats I've dealt with that make the data impossible to decipher without a specialized parser/viewer just to save a trivial amount of space. Particularly if you consider how small the XML gets when run through standard compression formats (many http clients/servers will do this automatically), I'll take the readability.
"You have all kinds of simple dbs, from GNU dbm to PostgreSQL; and I find/etc simple commented name/value pars much more useful than XML configuration files."
One of my requirements was that it be editable by an arbitrary users favorite text editor, which rules out the DBs, which are overkill in any case. Sometimes XML is overkill, and there I'll go for name value pairs. But there's a big area of middle ground where shoehorning stuff into name/value becomes overly cumbersome, and XML lets me get more complex structure, while staying in a readable, easily editable text file.
"I did the same think with simple, fixed-size fields sequential files"
But in my case the fields aren't fixed size, not all the records have the same fields, etc. Flat files are just not as expressive as XML without specifying a bunch of parsing logic.
A simple COBOL file copy is just as good? So I can send it down the wire, not knowing what language, OS, or whatever the other end is using, and everyone will be able to use it?
Show me a format I can reasonably expect pretty much anyone to be able to parse without their having to write any code (i.e. ask me questions about it) and I'll be interested. But I'll probably still want to sacrifice some efficiency in exchange for being human-readable.
"dealing with data as data, as opposed to as documents"
If I split off a chunk of data to send some one, it is a document.
I find XML fabulous for passing data around. I also use it for storing configuration information when I want the format to be understandable by anyone and editable by their favorite text editor. Since it's main competitor in that arena is the ini file, XMLs expressive power wins hands down.
"That said, XML does impose some structure... still it's not worth the price in going back to a hierarchical mindset and in waste"
It's not going back if people weren't that far along in the first place. XML is quickly replacing the previous paradigm of "everybody makes up their own new serialization format for every new problem and writes yet another parser; most of them are more compact than XML, but almost all of them suck in some way, particularly when they need to be expanded to handle new tasks". In a huge number of cases, the waste just isn't a problem. My 1K file is now 2K. But the format is readable, it's expandable, I can take my pick of several pre-exisitng parsers, and so can people on systems/languages I've never even heard of. If you've got some huge chunk of data, you'll want to store it in a compact and or nicely queryable format. When I give you a query with which to break off some small corner of it and send it to me, XML would be nice. When you're actually interchanging huge chunks of data, you'll want to do something different (compressed XML would be nice:-)
I too want people to be educated, but I don't want to have to educate them. I use XML for APIs because I can tell people "send in some XML that looks like this example, and you'll get some back that looks like this example" and they say "OK". End of conversation.
I use XML a bunch of other places too, and none of them are text markup or data storage. A relational model is great for data storage, but I can't say it's great for data interchange, because I don't even have a clear idea what that would mean.
In short, you want us all to use the same database schema definition system, because then we can create a data exchange format that's more consise than XML, and get everyone to standardise on that. Sounds great. Let me know when everyone agrees and you've got it running. Until then I guess I'll have to stick with XML. XML is pretty good for a huge number of things. For any one of these things, something else is better. I'd rather have 1 pretty good thing than a huge number of better ones.
I don't think you appreciate the wide usefulness of XML. None of the things I use it for are spoken to by your solutions.
Re:You can have filenames as long as you like
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Because people want to name files what they want to name them, and not think about the filesystem.
True story: Back in my days of tech support for DOS-based academics, I was trying to help a user recover some files after a crash. The file naming scheme seemed really weird, so I asked her about it. She explained she was really frustrated by only getting 8 + 3 charachters for a filename, and then she discovered you could make filenames as long as you wanted, you just had to put a back-slash afer every eight charachters. I did not attempt to explain directories.
It suported the only standard I cared about at the time (S/N barcodes on the laptops i had to keep track of), and I considered the "keyboard-wedge" interface a feature. I was having to type in piles of S/Ns a day into a couple programs, both of which expected keyboard input, and any typos caused major headaches. So keyboard wedge was ideal. YMMV
No, it should read as he has it. Go read the parent again. You are correct that barcode != binary. That's what the parent is saying. He is further saying barcode == gray code, which he has supplied the correct table for.
"I admire the progress of the WWW and don't deny that it's more useful than it was 15 years ago"
Since the WWW did not exist 15 years ago, that's undoubtably true. Anyway, I was on usenet back then, and I don't have fond memories. The trolls and flamers were there. While there weren't as many of them, there also wasn't nearly as much good stuff, and there definitely weren't as many good tools for sifting out the crap. 15 years ago the internet was cool, but mostly as a neato toy.
"the freedom to express useful, new, creative ideas" pretty much requires "the freedom to make a complete ass of yourself in front of millions of people"
"You look at all the shit that's gone horribly wrong with the WWW and how fundamentally worse it is compared to 10 years ago"
The web is "fundamentally worse" than 10 years ago!?! What a ludicrous statement. Let's see, 10 years ago I used the WWW to look at the card catalogs of libraries (but not the ones I could check books out of), find documentation on the WWW itself, see if there was coffee available in a room across the ocean, and that's about it. Today it is my information portal of first (and generally last) resort for pretty much everything. In the last few years I have not used a prited newspaper or reference book for any purpose but nostalgia. Is there a lot more excrement on the web these days? Sure, there's a lot more of everything. A higher percentage? I have no idea. Simply put, I do not "look at all the shit that's gone horribly wrong with the WWW". I look at the stuff that's gone right. These days I find USENET is only usable at all because someone (google) put a nice web-based front end and search engine on top of it.
Do you seriously measure the worth of the web based on the worst sites you can find? Try measuring by the best sites you can find, and how easily you can find them.
We do have the beans to spend on healthcare! We are spending them! The US (talking the whole economy here, not just the government) spends 10 times as much per capita as Canada on healthcare. We just do it in what is possibly the stupidest most inefficient way anyone could dream up. We know the cost of providing a certain level of care for a certain number of people is X dollars. So we add a couple layers of organizations whose purpose is charge those people more than that and take the money. And we make sure their motivation is to try to charge more money and skimp on the care, preferably in slimy, underhanded ways that make it look like they're not skimping. And we set it up so if their risk doesn't pan out, and they're in danger of taking a loss, they can just drop patients. And we put these organizations basically in charge of the whole system, setting it up to ensure that above all, they make money.
We've got the money. We're spending it. And not one person I know is happy with the healthcare system. Not patients. Not doctors.
I guess the Insurance Companies should like it, because that's how we're spending the money. We're just giving it to them.
Brutal? Losing you drivers license for driving recklessly is brutal and unfair? Hell, I even said it should be on the second offense.
People accept societies where they cut off your hand for stealing, which is certainly (IMO)disproportionate and brutal. You don't think they can accept a society where speed limit signs are meaningful? It's unfair to have repercussions for breaking the law? The current system is unfair. Speeders are ticketed so infrequently, it's chalked up as random misfortune, and whether you get ticketed is mostly about how good you are at talking your way out of it. You can't very well expect people to have respect for law in general when nobody takes certain laws seriously. Speed limits should be abolished or enforced; the current system is like some parents I know who continualy tell their child "don't do that" but make no real effor to stop them, and there are no repercussions. The child quite reasonably ignores everything they say.
If every teenager expected their hand would be cut off for shoplifting, they probably wouldn't shoplift. Why do lot's of people flaunt certain laws (speed limits, jaywalking)? Because they are not enforced.
I've been to a country where they cut off your hand for stealing. I didn't notice any amputees. But my father accidentally left his wallet behind in plain view on a busy street. It was still there the next day.
I'm not arguing for amputation justice, but if there was a hefty fine for speeding and loss of license on say the second offense, and cops pulled over speeders at every oportunity, would we all be walking? No. We just wouldn't be speeding.
I can't see any way to do this without the whole create-a-shortcut-and-change-the-command-line-with in -the-shortcut proceedure in Windows (which is just using a command line anyway!)... but I'm probably wrong here. Is there an equivalent way of running
foo --some_options --input=some_file --output=some_other_file?
Well, you're thinking in command line, so it seems hard to do in a gui, but your problem is wanting to specify everything all at once, up front: In a gui, you start program foo; open some_file; pick some_options; write to some_other_file. Which sounds like more steps. And it is if you know program foo by heart; Otherwise, it's that some_options step that's crucial. All the possiblities are listed! (speaking of GOOD guis form here out...) You can try them and see what results, picking an entirely wrong (but intersting for future reference) combination before settling on what you want and clicking save. If you do know foo by heart, you drag the some_file icon to program foo, a couple KB shortcuts, done; not much different (typing wise) than CLI. If your program is doing anything besides manipulating text files (Yes, unix hackers, it is possible) you probably need more interface than CLI can handle in any case. If the program is particularly sweet, it will give you a way to save all your options so they can be executed as a single CLIish step.
I just normally program in perl (for which I do use the CLI to debug)
Well, that's OK. If you can handle perl, you can be forgiven for straying from the one true path of C++...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
"Similarly, creationists could, in theory, have God come and demonstrate how he made man, and in this case it would be closer to proof"
You want us to take his word for it after he faked all that fossil evidence? I don't think so.
Science does not prove anything in the lab. It can't and doesn't attempt to. Science attempts to explain evidence and make predictions. The lab is for gathering evidence, and testing predictions. Evidence can be gathered for or against evolution. It can make predictions that can succeed or fail. Evolution is as much a scientific theory as gravity. Hell, we understand more of the sub-mechanisms behind evolution, I might argue it's more well established than gravity.
If Creationism were just a claim of responsibility, I wouldn't have any problem with it. I don't care who you think is responsible, I care about the mechanism. The "Creationism" I have a problem with is the one that claims the mechanism. The one that claims evolution (and almost every other scientific theory) to be wrong. If Creationist want to believe that evolution is how God does things, I've got no problem. We can work together on figuring out the details of how it works, and if they think they are figuring out the details of how God works, well, I'll think the're a little kooky, but hey, who isn't. (If you want to teach my kids about your ideas of God, then I'm going to have a problem)
Creationism isn't a scientific theory because it doesn't explain anything. It is not predictive. A scientist could say to themselves "Based on the theory of evolution, I'd expect the bone structure of marine mammals to show signs that they once lived on land. Then he can go out and chop up a dolphin and find out. If he found a bone structure entirely unlike any other mammals, he'd start questioning the theory of evolution. What could we go check that would contradict the theory that things are the way God made them?
"Dude, believe what you want, but don't treat me like a moron because I believe differently"
Dude, believe whatever you want. But if you call believing whatever you want in the absence of evidence science, you should reasonably be expect to be treated like a moron.
Your question "What caused life to begin?" is a tough one, but it is not what the theory of evolution is about, evolution is about what comes after that. Indeed, the answer to your question, along with any other answer in science, cannot be proven. Luckily, Science does not attempt to prove things (that's Mathematics). Science attempts to explain evidence with theories that can be used to make predictions, and which hence can be disproven (by making wrong ones). "God did it" can not be used to make predictions, so it can never be disproven. It explains nothing, so I would not consider it an explanation at all.
Also note that natural evolution is no more or less random than dog breeding. Both use random variations. In dog breeding, humans pick the dogs with the wrong shaped head to not breed again. In nature, lions pick the slow antelope to not breed again.
"the atheists, evolutionists, and Christian/Jew-haters freak all the way out"
Well, I'm not a "Christian/Jew-hater", and as for "atheist", I prefer "Apatheist". God seems like an unlikely concept to me, but I don't really care. If God does exist, he makes everything look like it has a more rational explanation, which is nice of him, because if "God did it" were the best explanation for things in the world, there'd be no point in actually thinking about stuff. So I don't know if God exists, but I find it comforting to assume he doesn't.
I do have a problem with the term "evolutionist". Evolution is not a religion. It's a theory that fits the evidence better than others. Scientists look at the evidence and come up with a theory to explain it. If another theory comes along that explains the evidence better, they'll change their minds. There will be some friction in this process for major theories; it's hard to change your mind, but in the long run scientific theories are at the mercy of the evidence. Religious beliefs are not at the mercy of the evidence, because they are not founded on evidence.
So in the end I guess you're right, I do freak all the way out. But it's not because of your religious beliefs. I couldn't care less about your religious beliefs. It's because you claim there's no real difference between religious beliefs and scientific theories, so your beliefs should be afforded the same respect as scientific theories. Bullshit. Scientific theories are easily distinguished from religious beliefs, and science deserves more respect. Science proposes an explanation that could be proven wrong, and that makes useful predictions. And it continualy tests itself. Science can be used to actually get stuff done. Religion proposes something that can't be proven wrong, that makes no useful predicitons, and that adds nothing to human knowledge. Which is fine, if that's what you're in to, but then it usually claims that it's right and everyone else is wrong, and that it should be afforded more respect than any other random ramblings.
What the hell, my 2 cents:
The Gibson story I most enjoyed was "Johnny Mnemonic". (Don't bother with the lame movie though) I might not have liked it as much if I hadn't already met Molly in Neuromancer.
Besides that there's more good stuff in Burning Chrome if you like short stories. For novels I'd go with the cannonical answer of Neuromancer, Count Zero (2 out of 3 plotlines anyway), and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Actually, I thought he was coasting a bit in Mona, rehashing the same themes and charachters from the previous two, but I didn't really care; Once you've read the first two, pretend the title of Mona is "Molly Kicks Additional Ass" and you'll know if you want to read it.
Eveything after Mona I'd skip. It's very deep and thoughtful, and I'm sure I'd have found it brilliant if I could have consumed enough coffee to stay awake through it.
Actually I was thinking the mean temperature of cosmic background radiation.
The standard model is certainly not perfect or complete. There are various bits of evidence that are problematic for it, and a wide variety of add on theories to explain them, some of which are a bit too contorted IMHO. People are more reluctant than I think they should be to attempt full-scale alternatives to the standard model, but this is simply because it works for such a preponderance of evidence.
The standard model has some problems, yes. But my point wasn't that the Standard Model is perfect, right, or even good. My point was that it is science. Creationist "theory" is not capable of having problems, so it is not science, it is unverifiable conjecture.
Bullshit.
The Standard Model (Big Bang) has been used to make a variety of testable predictions, which have panned out. Ditto for evolution. This is the essence of the scientific method: Observe a phenomenon. Formulate a theory to explain it. Use this theory to predict things you don't know. Check these things out to see if your theory holds up. Repeat. Real Scientists are very reluctant to say "This is the truth", rather they will say, "this theory has repeatedly demonstrated good predictive ability across many observattions".
Creation "science" predicts nothing. No matter what you observe, the theory "God did it that way. He can do anything." can never be disproven. A theory that explains any evidence is useless, and it is not science.
I'll treat creationists ideas with respect as soon as they agree that my creationist theory is as valid as theirs:
"Joe the giant turtle barfed up the universe last week. He can vomit anything."
I could invent theories like this all day, but it wouldn't be science.
I live in a world where secretaries (or other similarly technical people) are the only ones who call tech support, and they call with questions like "How do I print?" or "My email always bounces".
More complex issues are resolved by technically competent people who research the problem on the net. So by the standard you say linux support is "free", so is windows support. You think linux has a monopoly on newsgroups?
"So the web server management, user account managment service startup, firewall managment, hardware configuration and the like can all be configured in Win2K using PERL and other commandline utilities?"
Yeah, no problem. I generally find it easier to use the gui, but you can stick to the command lines if that's what you like, and obviously you need to go that way for scripting.
Oh, I see, you meant that as a rhetorical question because you "know" the answer is no. In that case, I'll just quote the AC: "In short, thanks, but no thanks for the FUD. You are not helping the Linux movement by offering such ignorant statements. It makes us all look stupid."
But if you're, for example, a secretary, without any technical background, then the support process is:
1) Use google to search the web for keywords on your question. This give you access to info in howtos, FAQ's, and basic documentation. Your problem may or may not be solved here, but you won't have any idea, because all this info will be utterly incomprehensible to you, so proceed to step 2.
2) Call the IT guy, just like you would in the Windows world. But wait! This is the FREE support process, so you can't very well be paying an IT guy. Proceed to step 3.
3) You're f*cked.
Don't even get me started on how much the ability to "download the source and start hacking" is worth to a non-technical office worker.
Technical support (for Linux, Windows, or anything technical at all) is only free if the time of a technically competent person is free. If that person is you, or your dutiful son in law, you might well consider their time free. In a business environment, this is unlikely to work out so well.
"programmers will be needed only until we get to the point that computers are capable of programming themselves"
Computers are capable of programming themselves; self-modifying code/ macros/ compilers have been around for a long time. If you're talking about computers replacing programmers though, I'd say that will happen right about when they replace novelists, sculptors, musicians, theoretical physicists, etc.
"...comes down to someone else (the government) deciding how others (the people)..."
"The government" is not someone else. It is the people, exercising their collective will. You can argue about whether it uses the right methods to determine that will, or how effective it is at exercising it, and I'll either debate you or agree with you. But your assertion that the govenrment imposed by some entirely external force (space aliens perhaps?) is just the typical, tired straw man of those who want to assume that they speak for "the people".
On a tangent, you seem to really believe that if had decided you wanted to be president, you would have had similar chances to G. W. Bush. Given that, I guess I'd better clarify: I was joking about the space aliens.
"The physical fields were fixed size, but you just made them as big as necessary... and you can do pretty much the same with field delimiters. Different tuple types are so simple too."
/etc simple commented name/value pars much more useful than XML configuration files."
Make them as big as necessary - that's not necessarily a finite value, so you're specifying some artificial limit on fields that could otherwise be as big as you want, and wasting all that space whenever the data is smaller. You can use field delimeters, and various sorts of tuples, but you have to specify all that markup, and everyone gets to write a parser. It's not that XML is the ultimate, best possible generalized markup system. It's that it's the standard one. We could invent better ones for specific tasks all day. We might even invent a better completely generalized one. But when a client calls me tommorow and wants to use my web service, is he going to have a parser for our new system already up and running? XML is verbose; it makes no bones about it. But I think a big reason it has gained such wide acceptance is because it realizes that for many tasks, ease of human readability is worth the bytes. I can't count the number of formats I've dealt with that make the data impossible to decipher without a specialized parser/viewer just to save a trivial amount of space. Particularly if you consider how small the XML gets when run through standard compression formats (many http clients/servers will do this automatically), I'll take the readability.
"You have all kinds of simple dbs, from GNU dbm to PostgreSQL; and I find
One of my requirements was that it be editable by an arbitrary users favorite text editor, which rules out the DBs, which are overkill in any case. Sometimes XML is overkill, and there I'll go for name value pairs. But there's a big area of middle ground where shoehorning stuff into name/value becomes overly cumbersome, and XML lets me get more complex structure, while staying in a readable, easily editable text file.
"I did the same think with simple, fixed-size fields sequential files"
:-)
But in my case the fields aren't fixed size, not all the records have the same fields, etc. Flat files are just not as expressive as XML without specifying a bunch of parsing logic.
A simple COBOL file copy is just as good? So I can send it down the wire, not knowing what language, OS, or whatever the other end is using, and everyone will be able to use it?
Show me a format I can reasonably expect pretty much anyone to be able to parse without their having to write any code (i.e. ask me questions about it) and I'll be interested. But I'll probably still want to sacrifice some efficiency in exchange for being human-readable.
"dealing with data as data, as opposed to as documents"
If I split off a chunk of data to send some one, it is a document.
I find XML fabulous for passing data around. I also use it for storing configuration information when I want the format to be understandable by anyone and editable by their favorite text editor. Since it's main competitor in that arena is the ini file, XMLs expressive power wins hands down.
"That said, XML does impose some structure... still it's not worth the price in going back to a hierarchical mindset and in waste"
It's not going back if people weren't that far along in the first place. XML is quickly replacing the previous paradigm of "everybody makes up their own new serialization format for every new problem and writes yet another parser; most of them are more compact than XML, but almost all of them suck in some way, particularly when they need to be expanded to handle new tasks". In a huge number of cases, the waste just isn't a problem. My 1K file is now 2K. But the format is readable, it's expandable, I can take my pick of several pre-exisitng parsers, and so can people on systems/languages I've never even heard of. If you've got some huge chunk of data, you'll want to store it in a compact and or nicely queryable format. When I give you a query with which to break off some small corner of it and send it to me, XML would be nice. When you're actually interchanging huge chunks of data, you'll want to do something different (compressed XML would be nice
I too want people to be educated, but I don't want to have to educate them. I use XML for APIs because I can tell people "send in some XML that looks like this example, and you'll get some back that looks like this example" and they say "OK". End of conversation.
I use XML a bunch of other places too, and none of them are text markup or data storage. A relational model is great for data storage, but I can't say it's great for data interchange, because I don't even have a clear idea what that would mean.
In short, you want us all to use the same database schema definition system, because then we can create a data exchange format that's more consise than XML, and get everyone to standardise on that. Sounds great. Let me know when everyone agrees and you've got it running. Until then I guess I'll have to stick with XML. XML is pretty good for a huge number of things. For any one of these things, something else is better. I'd rather have 1 pretty good thing than a huge number of better ones.
I don't think you appreciate the wide usefulness of XML. None of the things I use it for are spoken to by your solutions.
Because people want to name files what they want to name them, and not think about the filesystem.
True story:
Back in my days of tech support for DOS-based academics, I was trying to help a user recover some files after a crash. The file naming scheme seemed really weird, so I asked her about it. She explained she was really frustrated by only getting 8 + 3 charachters for a filename, and then she discovered you could make filenames as long as you wanted, you just had to put a back-slash afer every eight charachters. I did not attempt to explain directories.
It suported the only standard I cared about at the time (S/N barcodes on the laptops i had to keep track of), and I considered the "keyboard-wedge" interface a feature. I was having to type in piles of S/Ns a day into a couple programs, both of which expected keyboard input, and any typos caused major headaches. So keyboard wedge was ideal. YMMV
BUT!!... optical scanners are expenive ($250 and up).
WTF are you talking about? I bought mine for $29.95. That was a few years back, but still...
No, it should read as he has it. Go read the parent again. You are correct that barcode != binary. That's what the parent is saying. He is further saying barcode == gray code, which he has supplied the correct table for.
"I admire the progress of the WWW and don't deny that it's more useful than it was 15 years ago"
Since the WWW did not exist 15 years ago, that's undoubtably true.
Anyway, I was on usenet back then, and I don't have fond memories. The trolls and flamers were there. While there weren't as many of them, there also wasn't nearly as much good stuff, and there definitely weren't as many good tools for sifting out the crap. 15 years ago the internet was cool, but mostly as a neato toy.
"the freedom to express useful, new, creative ideas"
pretty much requires
"the freedom to make a complete ass of yourself in front of millions of people"
"You look at all the shit that's gone horribly wrong with the WWW and how fundamentally worse it is compared to 10 years ago"
The web is "fundamentally worse" than 10 years ago!?! What a ludicrous statement. Let's see, 10 years ago I used the WWW to look at the card catalogs of libraries (but not the ones I could check books out of), find documentation on the WWW itself, see if there was coffee available in a room across the ocean, and that's about it. Today it is my information portal of first (and generally last) resort for pretty much everything. In the last few years I have not used a prited newspaper or reference book for any purpose but nostalgia. Is there a lot more excrement on the web these days? Sure, there's a lot more of everything. A higher percentage? I have no idea. Simply put, I do not "look at all the shit that's gone horribly wrong with the WWW". I look at the stuff that's gone right. These days I find USENET is only usable at all because someone (google) put a nice web-based front end and search engine on top of it.
Do you seriously measure the worth of the web based on the worst sites you can find? Try measuring by the best sites you can find, and how easily you can find them.
We do have the beans to spend on healthcare! We are spending them! The US (talking the whole economy here, not just the government) spends 10 times as much per capita as Canada on healthcare . We just do it in what is possibly the stupidest most inefficient way anyone could dream up. We know the cost of providing a certain level of care for a certain number of people is X dollars. So we add a couple layers of organizations whose purpose is charge those people more than that and take the money. And we make sure their motivation is to try to charge more money and skimp on the care, preferably in slimy, underhanded ways that make it look like they're not skimping. And we set it up so if their risk doesn't pan out, and they're in danger of taking a loss, they can just drop patients. And we put these organizations basically in charge of the whole system, setting it up to ensure that above all, they make money. We've got the money. We're spending it. And not one person I know is happy with the healthcare system. Not patients. Not doctors. I guess the Insurance Companies should like it, because that's how we're spending the money. We're just giving it to them.
Brutal? Losing you drivers license for driving recklessly is brutal and unfair? Hell, I even said it should be on the second offense.
People accept societies where they cut off your hand for stealing, which is certainly (IMO)disproportionate and brutal. You don't think they can accept a society where speed limit signs are meaningful? It's unfair to have repercussions for breaking the law? The current system is unfair. Speeders are ticketed so infrequently, it's chalked up as random misfortune, and whether you get ticketed is mostly about how good you are at talking your way out of it. You can't very well expect people to have respect for law in general when nobody takes certain laws seriously. Speed limits should be abolished or enforced; the current system is like some parents I know who continualy tell their child "don't do that" but make no real effor to stop them, and there are no repercussions. The child quite reasonably ignores everything they say.
Yeah, I'll bet. Because I read the article.
If every teenager expected their hand would be cut off for shoplifting, they probably wouldn't shoplift. Why do lot's of people flaunt certain laws (speed limits, jaywalking)? Because they are not enforced.
I've been to a country where they cut off your hand for stealing. I didn't notice any amputees. But my father accidentally left his wallet behind in plain view on a busy street. It was still there the next day.
I'm not arguing for amputation justice, but if there was a hefty fine for speeding and loss of license on say the second offense, and cops pulled over speeders at every oportunity, would we all be walking? No. We just wouldn't be speeding.
Well, you're thinking in command line, so it seems hard to do in a gui, but your problem is wanting to specify everything all at once, up front: In a gui, you start program foo; open some_file; pick some_options; write to some_other_file. Which sounds like more steps. And it is if you know program foo by heart; Otherwise, it's that some_options step that's crucial. All the possiblities are listed! (speaking of GOOD guis form here out...) You can try them and see what results, picking an entirely wrong (but intersting for future reference) combination before settling on what you want and clicking save. If you do know foo by heart, you drag the some_file icon to program foo, a couple KB shortcuts, done; not much different (typing wise) than CLI. If your program is doing anything besides manipulating text files (Yes, unix hackers, it is possible) you probably need more interface than CLI can handle in any case. If the program is particularly sweet, it will give you a way to save all your options so they can be executed as a single CLIish step.
I just normally program in perl (for which I do use the CLI to debug)
Well, that's OK. If you can handle perl, you can be forgiven for straying from the one true path of C++... :-)