BTW, do you have any doubt that church authorities in this country would condemn this book as "false image of god" and an abomination of some sort (or whatever phrases they usually use in these cases) had they had the opportunity to read it? And probably banned it, if this was a few centuries ago.
Well, the image of Ieshua certainly differs from the Gospel, so we'll be sure to have Christian belevers who dislike it for whatever reason. I wouldn't, however, speak of church "authorities" in this country (by which I presume you mean the U.S.), as there are many denominations, none of which exerts an authority over any other politial or religious entity (in most cases).
I think alternative portrayals of God or Jesus have been condemned in many different historical and social settings, so this certainly won't be anything new. But in this society, everybody is free to express their opinion and convictions, which is generally a Good Thing. So I wouldn't expect any Auto-Da-Fe's, except from extemist freaks, perhaps.
The thing which can possibly cause more mainstream U.S. Christians to form negative opinion of the book is the pagan elements (witchcraft, the symbolism from Faustus, etc.). This is an unfortunate effect of 20th century Christian extremism, and I'm sure Bulgakov himself would have never been able to see it from that point of view. In fact, I don't think the Eastern Orthodox church was engaged in active persecution of "witches" as much as the Catholics were, although it certainly had its moments in 10-12th centuries.
Besides, Bulgakov's portrayal of how things would work is a hell of a lot more realistic than Christian dogma, especially his ending.
As you said yourself, it's just a work of fiction, so how could it be more realistic or less realistic? I do think the ending is a very suitable triumph of divine love, rather appropriate for the themes in the book, but as a whole, I see it only as an alternative viewpoint to the Bible.
I do agree that Emacs is not the same type of application, but I thought it won't be an over-exaggeration to compare them in terms of memory footprint.
I use Emacs fairly intensively -- usually I have 20-30 buffers open, and I keep my Emacs sessions open for days and weeks; according to top, the RSS of my Emacs processes takes anywhere from 10MB up to 20-25 MB. Indeed, I don't know what's the average memory usage of MS Word 97, but I figured 15-20 MB is not a bad guess.
why is it that so many Russian titles just don't carry the same, I don't know, "punch" when translated?
I know how you feel -- it's the same with Bulgarian literature. It just seems to me that, for many years, we were trying to bring Western culture closer to us, but we never thought about going in the opposite direction -- making good translations from Slavic languages to English. I mean, I don't even know if anyone ever attempted to translate Ilf i Petrov -- and when you think about it, a literal translation would sound horrible: "The gas is yours, the ideas -- ours!" Blech. This obviously requires talent.
Something I forgot to include in the previous post -- what do you think of Bulgakov's portrayal of Jesus and his attitude towards religion? I'm just curious how you can appreciate The Master... and be so much against religion. When I first read it, I thought this was one of the most striking literary images of Jesus, and I still think that one of the most important points this book makes is ridiculing the "scientific atheism" attitude of the Communist reality.
Wow. I'm not the only Slashdot junkie who reads Bulgakov. That's pretty cool. You are right that both major English translations of The Master and Margarita (Glenny, 1967 and Pevear, Volokhonsky, 1997) stink, but I actually discovered Bulgakov by reading the Bulgarian translations of Heart of a Dog and The Master..., which I esteem very highly and find to be much better than their English counterparts.
And of course, there are many more Russian authors which I'd like to read in original, not only Bulgakov. Ah, so little time, so many things to do...
Oh and by the way, the word sarcoma (it's a Latin medical term for malignant tumor) does exist in English, so I'd think it would be acceptable to use it here. I can't help you with Binom Newtona, though:-) I really wish Slavic scholars put more effort towards translating 20th century Slavic literature.
Oh yeah, I also use Sawfish as my window manager; the window managers of KDE and Gnome are just way too big, although I sometimes use KDE applications, so I keep the toolkit.
It's interesting to note that three years ago I bought a Packard Hell with PII 266 MHz and 64 MB RAM, which ran Windows and small applications just fine, but really slowed down when I had MS Word 97, Netscape and an MP3 player running at the same time.
For the past 2.5 years, I've been running Linux on this machine, and I had to upgrade to 128MB this summer, when I decided to finally switch to XFree 4. Before that, the main applications I'm running -- Emacs, Netscape 4.7x, XMMS could co-exist peacefully under XFree 3.3.6 and Linux 2.2.x. So I don't think Windows has a smaller memory footprint than any of the big Linux distributions, contrary to what the astroturfers claim.
' But this is the question that disturbs me--if there is no God, then who, one wonders, rules the life of man and keeps the world in order? '
' Man rules himself,' said Bezdomny angrily in answer to such an obviously absurd question.
' I beg your pardon,' retorted the stranger quietly,' but to rule one must have a precise plan worked out for some reasonable period ahead. Allow me to enquire how man can control his own affairs when he is not only incapable of compiling a plan for some laughably short term, such as, say, a thousand years, but cannot even predict what will happen to him tomorrow? '
' In fact,' here the stranger turned to Berlioz, ' imagine what would happen if you, for instance, were to start organising others and yourself, and you developed a taste for it--then suddenly you got. . . he, he... a slight heart attack . . . ' at this the foreigner smiled sweetly, as though the thought of a heart attack gave him pleasure. . . . ' Yes, a heart attack,' he repeated the word sonorously, grinning like a cat, ' and that's the end of you as an organiser! No one's fate except your own interests you any longer. Your relations start lying to you. Sensing that something is amiss you rush to a specialist, then to a charlatan, and even perhaps to a fortune-teller. Each of them is as useless as the other, as you know
perfectly well. And it all ends in tragedy: the man who thought he was in charge is suddenly reduced to lying prone and motionless in a wooden box and his fellow men, realising that there is no more sense to be had of him, incinerate him.
' Sometimes it can be even worse : a man decides to go to Kislovodsk,'--here the stranger stared at Berlioz--' a trivial matter you may think, but he cannot because for no good reason he suddenly jumps up and falls under a tram! You're not going to tell me that he arranged to do that himself? Wouldn't it be nearer the truth to say that someone quite different was directing his fate?' The stranger gave an eerie peal of laughter.
QNX and NT/CE embedded are competitive in size when a final build is ready.
Huh? Embedded NT was 48 MB, as of January 1999. I don't see how you could possibly compare it a hard real-time, microkernel-based OS like QNX.
The handy QNX demo-disk has a GUI, web server, web browser, dial-up connection program, text editor, and numerous device drivers -- that's already more than Microsoft can offer in of their "desktop" operating system products.
System requirements
500MHz Processor
Minimum of 128 MB ram if using tools OR database, minimum 256MB ram if using both.
200MB disk space for tools, 2.5 GB disk space for database.
Sigh... And to think that I'm currently designing an embedded device with 2MB of Flash, 512KB SRAM and a 20MHz Dragonball. I should've asked the Great Wise Microsoft how to do it right.
Anyone remember Embedded NT?
on
Windows XP Embedded
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So is this like the embedded Windows NT from about four years ago, which required 48MB(!) of ROM or disk space, and an x86 processor? I don't know how anyone could think of embedded devices with such a monster running on them.
The judge, in the case Adobe vs Softman heard in the Central District of California, has ruled that consumers can resell bundled software, no matter what the EULA, or End User License Agreement, stipulates.
So, if this ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court, does that mean that Ebay users, harassed by Microsoft and others for reselling software, would be able to (1) Resell their software and (2) Sue the software publisher for not allowing them to resell?
My point was that, unlike what the original poster was saying, teaching Darwin's theory (note that I do not say biology or evolution) is not going to make anyone suddenly acquire critical thinking skills. I believe that it is the principles laid out by Karl Popper that need to be taught in order to achieve this objective.
Mind you, this is all in respect to critical thinking itself; I'm not proposing anything in regards to the biology curriculum. Hope that clears things out.
The theory of evolution is so important to our lives now, and if it is properly taught, biology/evolution can form the nucleus of a healthy skeptical and scientific thinking process.
Any agreement of a conclusion with an actual observation does not itself prove the correctness of the hypothesis from which the conclusion is derived; it simply renders the hypothesis that much more plausible. The scientific process begins when observations clash with existing theories or conjectures; then a new theory is proposed and the logical consequences of the theory (hypotheses) are subjected to rigorous empirical tests. The objective of testing is the refutation of the hypothesis.
According to Karl Popper:
Every 'good' scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it.
An important characteristic of a scientific theory or hypothesis is that it must be falsifiable. This means that there must be some
experiment or possible discovery that could refute the theory. When a theory's predictions are falsified, new hypotheses are devised and tested until a new theory emerges. Those theories that survive falsification are said to be corroborated and are tentatively accepted.
I believe the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that schools should not present Darwin's theory as more valid or less valid than Newton's laws of physics, for example.
From a scientific perspective that makes perfect sense, because every scientific theory needs to be refutable -- you invalidate this principle if you reject the possiblity that Darwin's theory is incorrect. According to Karl Popper, a theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific.
In other words, people who fervently believe that Darwin's theory is correct, are mistaking science with religion, which is just as ignorant and short-sighted as confusing religion with science.
Well, didn't Richard Stallman start the free software movement before Microsoft became really big? Although you are right, the poor quality of MS's monolithware was the reason why many people sought alternatives.
But I think Stallman's point is to eliminate all proprietary software, as it doesn't make sense from a cultural and scientific perspective -- closed source is nearly the same as closed i.e. proprietary math theorems.
While I do agree with you that reality is not in a book, I feel compelled to point out that Orwell wrote 1984 based upon his experiences in the Spanish civil war, where he could observe two oppressive regimes (Fascist and Communist) fighting each other, claiming fundamental ideological differences, while in reality they were using the exact same methods to crush opposition and assure their rule.
The reason why 1984 struck me, was that despite the fact George Orwell has never lived in my country, part of the Soviet Bloc for many years, he described the daily reality of my grandparents, parents and myself in unimaginably vivid colors -- he felt just the way we did.
So yes, it was the insight he had that makes him such an important author to read. How else would you describe a state of dictatorship to someone who has never lived in one, if not through the viewpoint of 1984, Animal Farm and the Gulag Archipelago?
Maybe this story was "metaphorical." Perhaps in the future, budding authors should surround their metaphorical musings with a disclaimer: CAUTION! CAUTION! CAUTION! METAPHORS AHEAD!
I have forgotten how to do the Netscape blink tags. Oh well.
Let's not forget that the regime in GDR was more relaxed compared with the Soviet Union, or certain Balkan countries. Culturally, Germany remained one nation, and thus the citizens of East Germany had liberties which would have been unthinkable in other parts of the Soviet Bloc, even throughout the 1980s.
This is a good reminder that there are good, forward thinking, open minded people everywhere. You can oppress them but you can't destroy them.
Interestingly, for a long time I had similar beliefs. In fact, there was a line in the Old Man and the Sea which I found particularly inspirational: But a man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Then I read 1984 and its depressing hopelessness made me realize that sometimes, human cruelty and oppression can crush even the most daring and free spirit. But I'm glad those poor devils in Afghanistan are finally the center of all attention, so maybe things will turn good for them.
...by Section I, Article 9 of the US Constitution, which says:
No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
but then it goes on to
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties
on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing
its inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts,
laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury
of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision
and Controul of the Congress.
ISA is an x86-specific bus, meaning that it was designed around the pinout scheme of the 8086; you'd need some kind of glue logic to interface non-x86 CPUs to ISA. With PCI, you'd most likely have to design your own PCI chipset, and it seems like that would be more complicated than interfacing to ISA.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, do you have any doubt that church authorities in this country would condemn this book as "false image of god" and an abomination of some sort (or whatever phrases they usually use in these cases) had they had the opportunity to read it? And probably banned it, if this was a few centuries ago.
Well, the image of Ieshua certainly differs from the Gospel, so we'll be sure to have Christian belevers who dislike it for whatever reason. I wouldn't, however, speak of church "authorities" in this country (by which I presume you mean the U.S.), as there are many denominations, none of which exerts an authority over any other politial or religious entity (in most cases).
I think alternative portrayals of God or Jesus have been condemned in many different historical and social settings, so this certainly won't be anything new. But in this society, everybody is free to express their opinion and convictions, which is generally a Good Thing. So I wouldn't expect any Auto-Da-Fe's, except from extemist freaks, perhaps.
The thing which can possibly cause more mainstream U.S. Christians to form negative opinion of the book is the pagan elements (witchcraft, the symbolism from Faustus, etc.). This is an unfortunate effect of 20th century Christian extremism, and I'm sure Bulgakov himself would have never been able to see it from that point of view. In fact, I don't think the Eastern Orthodox church was engaged in active persecution of "witches" as much as the Catholics were, although it certainly had its moments in 10-12th centuries.
Besides, Bulgakov's portrayal of how things would work is a hell of a lot more realistic than Christian dogma, especially his ending.
As you said yourself, it's just a work of fiction, so how could it be more realistic or less realistic? I do think the ending is a very suitable triumph of divine love, rather appropriate for the themes in the book, but as a whole, I see it only as an alternative viewpoint to the Bible.
I do agree that Emacs is not the same type of application, but I thought it won't be an over-exaggeration to compare them in terms of memory footprint.
I use Emacs fairly intensively -- usually I have 20-30 buffers open, and I keep my Emacs sessions open for days and weeks; according to top, the RSS of my Emacs processes takes anywhere from 10MB up to 20-25 MB. Indeed, I don't know what's the average memory usage of MS Word 97, but I figured 15-20 MB is not a bad guess.
why is it that so many Russian titles just don't carry the same, I don't know, "punch" when translated?
I know how you feel -- it's the same with Bulgarian literature. It just seems to me that, for many years, we were trying to bring Western culture closer to us, but we never thought about going in the opposite direction -- making good translations from Slavic languages to English. I mean, I don't even know if anyone ever attempted to translate Ilf i Petrov -- and when you think about it, a literal translation would sound horrible: "The gas is yours, the ideas -- ours!" Blech. This obviously requires talent.
Something I forgot to include in the previous post -- what do you think of Bulgakov's portrayal of Jesus and his attitude towards religion? I'm just curious how you can appreciate The Master... and be so much against religion. When I first read it, I thought this was one of the most striking literary images of Jesus, and I still think that one of the most important points this book makes is ridiculing the "scientific atheism" attitude of the Communist reality.
Wow. I'm not the only Slashdot junkie who reads Bulgakov. That's pretty cool. You are right that both major English translations of The Master and Margarita (Glenny, 1967 and Pevear, Volokhonsky, 1997) stink, but I actually discovered Bulgakov by reading the Bulgarian translations of Heart of a Dog and The Master..., which I esteem very highly and find to be much better than their English counterparts.
:-) I really wish Slavic scholars put more effort towards translating 20th century Slavic literature.
And of course, there are many more Russian authors which I'd like to read in original, not only Bulgakov. Ah, so little time, so many things to do...
Oh and by the way, the word sarcoma (it's a Latin medical term for malignant tumor) does exist in English, so I'd think it would be acceptable to use it here. I can't help you with Binom Newtona, though
Oh yeah, I also use Sawfish as my window manager; the window managers of KDE and Gnome are just way too big, although I sometimes use KDE applications, so I keep the toolkit.
It's interesting to note that three years ago I bought a Packard Hell with PII 266 MHz and 64 MB RAM, which ran Windows and small applications just fine, but really slowed down when I had MS Word 97, Netscape and an MP3 player running at the same time.
For the past 2.5 years, I've been running Linux on this machine, and I had to upgrade to 128MB this summer, when I decided to finally switch to XFree 4. Before that, the main applications I'm running -- Emacs, Netscape 4.7x, XMMS could co-exist peacefully under XFree 3.3.6 and Linux 2.2.x. So I don't think Windows has a smaller memory footprint than any of the big Linux distributions, contrary to what the astroturfers claim.
' But this is the question that disturbs me--if there is no God, then who, one wonders, rules the life of man and keeps the world in order? '
... a slight heart attack . . . ' at this the foreigner smiled sweetly, as though the thought of a heart attack gave him pleasure. . . . ' Yes, a heart attack,' he repeated the word sonorously, grinning like a cat, ' and that's the end of you as an organiser! No one's fate except your own interests you any longer. Your relations start lying to you. Sensing that something is amiss you rush to a specialist, then to a charlatan, and even perhaps to a fortune-teller. Each of them is as useless as the other, as you know
perfectly well. And it all ends in tragedy: the man who thought he was in charge is suddenly reduced to lying prone and motionless in a wooden box and his fellow men, realising that there is no more sense to be had of him, incinerate him.
' Man rules himself,' said Bezdomny angrily in answer to such an obviously absurd question.
' I beg your pardon,' retorted the stranger quietly,' but to rule one must have a precise plan worked out for some reasonable period ahead. Allow me to enquire how man can control his own affairs when he is not only incapable of compiling a plan for some laughably short term, such as, say, a thousand years, but cannot even predict what will happen to him tomorrow? '
' In fact,' here the stranger turned to Berlioz, ' imagine what would happen if you, for instance, were to start organising others and yourself, and you developed a taste for it--then suddenly you got. . . he, he
' Sometimes it can be even worse : a man decides to go to Kislovodsk,'--here the stranger stared at Berlioz--' a trivial matter you may think, but he cannot because for no good reason he suddenly jumps up and falls under a tram! You're not going to tell me that he arranged to do that himself? Wouldn't it be nearer the truth to say that someone quite different was directing his fate?' The stranger gave an eerie peal of laughter.
QNX and NT/CE embedded are competitive in size when a final build is ready.
Huh? Embedded NT was 48 MB, as of January 1999. I don't see how you could possibly compare it a hard real-time, microkernel-based OS like QNX.
The handy QNX demo-disk has a GUI, web server, web browser, dial-up connection program, text editor, and numerous device drivers -- that's already more than Microsoft can offer in of their "desktop" operating system products.
System requirements
500MHz Processor
Minimum of 128 MB ram if using tools OR database, minimum 256MB ram if using both.
200MB disk space for tools, 2.5 GB disk space for database.
Sigh... And to think that I'm currently designing an embedded device with 2MB of Flash, 512KB SRAM and a 20MHz Dragonball. I should've asked the Great Wise Microsoft how to do it right.
So is this like the embedded Windows NT from about four years ago, which required 48MB(!) of ROM or disk space, and an x86 processor? I don't know how anyone could think of embedded devices with such a monster running on them.
From the Register article:
The judge, in the case Adobe vs Softman heard in the Central District of California, has ruled that consumers can resell bundled software, no matter what the EULA, or End User License Agreement, stipulates.
So, if this ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court, does that mean that Ebay users, harassed by Microsoft and others for reselling software, would be able to (1) Resell their software and (2) Sue the software publisher for not allowing them to resell?
My point was that, unlike what the original poster was saying, teaching Darwin's theory (note that I do not say biology or evolution) is not going to make anyone suddenly acquire critical thinking skills. I believe that it is the principles laid out by Karl Popper that need to be taught in order to achieve this objective.
Mind you, this is all in respect to critical thinking itself; I'm not proposing anything in regards to the biology curriculum. Hope that clears things out.
Any agreement of a conclusion with an actual observation does not itself prove the correctness of the hypothesis from which the conclusion is derived; it simply renders the hypothesis that much more plausible. The scientific process begins when observations clash with existing theories or conjectures; then a new theory is proposed and the logical consequences of the theory (hypotheses) are subjected to rigorous empirical tests. The objective of testing is the refutation of the hypothesis.
According to Karl Popper:
- Every 'good' scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
- A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
- Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it.
An important characteristic of a scientific theory or hypothesis is that it must be falsifiable. This means that there must be some experiment or possible discovery that could refute the theory. When a theory's predictions are falsified, new hypotheses are devised and tested until a new theory emerges. Those theories that survive falsification are said to be corroborated and are tentatively accepted.I believe the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that schools should not present Darwin's theory as more valid or less valid than Newton's laws of physics, for example.
From a scientific perspective that makes perfect sense, because every scientific theory needs to be refutable -- you invalidate this principle if you reject the possiblity that Darwin's theory is incorrect. According to Karl Popper, a theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific.
In other words, people who fervently believe that Darwin's theory is correct, are mistaking science with religion, which is just as ignorant and short-sighted as confusing religion with science.
Well, didn't Richard Stallman start the free software movement before Microsoft became really big? Although you are right, the poor quality of MS's monolithware was the reason why many people sought alternatives.
But I think Stallman's point is to eliminate all proprietary software, as it doesn't make sense from a cultural and scientific perspective -- closed source is nearly the same as closed i.e. proprietary math theorems.
While I do agree with you that reality is not in a book, I feel compelled to point out that Orwell wrote 1984 based upon his experiences in the Spanish civil war, where he could observe two oppressive regimes (Fascist and Communist) fighting each other, claiming fundamental ideological differences, while in reality they were using the exact same methods to crush opposition and assure their rule.
The reason why 1984 struck me, was that despite the fact George Orwell has never lived in my country, part of the Soviet Bloc for many years, he described the daily reality of my grandparents, parents and myself in unimaginably vivid colors -- he felt just the way we did.
So yes, it was the insight he had that makes him such an important author to read. How else would you describe a state of dictatorship to someone who has never lived in one, if not through the viewpoint of 1984, Animal Farm and the Gulag Archipelago?
Maybe this story was "metaphorical." Perhaps in the future, budding authors should surround their metaphorical musings with a disclaimer: CAUTION! CAUTION! CAUTION! METAPHORS AHEAD!
I have forgotten how to do the Netscape blink tags. Oh well.
Let's not forget that the regime in GDR was more relaxed compared with the Soviet Union, or certain Balkan countries. Culturally, Germany remained one nation, and thus the citizens of East Germany had liberties which would have been unthinkable in other parts of the Soviet Bloc, even throughout the 1980s.
This is a good reminder that there are good, forward thinking, open minded people everywhere. You can oppress them but you can't destroy them.
Interestingly, for a long time I had similar beliefs. In fact, there was a line in the Old Man and the Sea which I found particularly inspirational: But a man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Then I read 1984 and its depressing hopelessness made me realize that sometimes, human cruelty and oppression can crush even the most daring and free spirit. But I'm glad those poor devils in Afghanistan are finally the center of all attention, so maybe things will turn good for them.
Time is not seriously believed to be a 4th dimension.
Wasn't it Einstein who first proposed that concept in the Special Relativity Theory? The time-space continuum?
C-x C-u 100 all-hail-emacs
...by Section I, Article 9 of the US Constitution, which says:
No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
but then it goes on to
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing its inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.
Anyone knowledgable care to explain?
It runs Linux? Oh man, imagine a B... nevermind.
And Python... And Common Lisp... And...
ISA is an x86-specific bus, meaning that it was designed around the pinout scheme of the 8086; you'd need some kind of glue logic to interface non-x86 CPUs to ISA. With PCI, you'd most likely have to design your own PCI chipset, and it seems like that would be more complicated than interfacing to ISA.