I don't think that government should mandate open source vs. closed source code purchases. This is unfair. The government should not mandate against valid, legal business models.
I think the government should mandate that output from any software be an open standard format (XML or whatever) and then they choose, based on a competative bid process like they are supposed to do, the software that will do what they want (which may include adding features at some point). If some OSS group wins, so be it. If some proprietary group wins, so be it.
Allowing only OSS is both wrong and bad, IMO, for a number of reasons. 1. It is straight against capitalist economy to require one business/development model. In capitalism, you specify the product and whoever can do it best/cheapest/easiest wins. Only an OSS zealot would think that OSS would always win. 2. The government should not dictate the "right" business model for people to follow. As long as they are legal under the laws (both criminal and financial) of the country, they are valid. The government should not dictate that some valid models are not valid for the government.
Just for reference, my Pentium-M laptop running at 1.4GHz is a touch faster than a Pentium-4M running at 2.2GHz running lame on some.wav files. On integer work, it's even faster. On benchmarks run by different web sites, Pentium-Ms even beat Athlon64s at some (mostly integer) tasks even when running at a little slower clock speeds. In one case, the 2.13GHz Pentium-M was even faster than the Athlon64 3800+. In games it tended to be a little slower because the Pentium-M isn't as strong in FPU.
Re:It's not the business model...
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Yup. UNIX wasn't just a piece of software. If you wanted UNIX, you had to buy the hardware to run it as well most of the time. To get a UNIX workstation, you had to pay a lot of money for the OS itself, then a lot of money for the hardware to run it on, then usually a lot of money for support/license. That's where Sun came in and made their money... offering a UNIX workstation at comparatively low cost.
I remember seeing entry level (lowest cost that a company offered) UNIX workstations at $10k or more.
I also remember seeing (and writing) software that was sold by the "seat". The "seat" included the software product in question, the OS and any associated licensing, and the hardware to run the OS and the software product on. $35k a pop that one was.
OR... you could use the same software on a Windows box that was pretty much generic (you buy it wherever you wanted) and just buy the software for like $10k.
So... either 1 seat on either, but Windows is 1/3 the cost OR 1 seat on UNIX vs. 3 seats on Windows... easy choices to make, depending on your aims.
Re:Consensus vs Choice
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But there are more computer users who care about games than there are of computer enthusiasts and computer users who don't care about games. Lots more.
Re:IBM is NOT a 'Linux' company
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IBM probably has more people working in their cafeterias than RedHat has employees. Does that make IBM a catering company?
And Joe's question will be: "What games can I play on it?" The next response will be a blank stare when you mention "TuxRacer" and then Joe will say "Nevermind." and walk away.
Re:It's not the business model...
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Uh... no... Have you 'been there, done that'? I have. It wasn't until recently that Linux has been 'good enough' to be allowed to run important stuff. Back in the mid-late 1990s, it was the bane of IT's existance. Every dork who wanted folks to think he was cool started installing it on their desktops and it was an IT nightmare dealing with it. First, you had people breaking machines because some video card or something wasn't supported (the installer didn't do the research to see if the machine he was using could run Linux), next the security was abismal. I can't tell you how many time we had to wipe machines because they were used as a stepping-stone to hack into other places. Yes, we even got a few visits by certain 'government agencies' where we had to let them 'look at things'. Having a Linux box was about the same thing as saying 'I give root access to my machine to anyone'. It got to be bad enough to where it was mandated that Linux could only be installed on certain machines and only by the IT folks. These machines were quarantined from everything. You have *got* to be kidding (or simply new to the Linux scene) if you would think that anyone who would pay for a UNIX license would have paid for Linux back then.
As time has gone on, though, it has gotten much better, I'll grant you that.
Also, by oldskool 'hacker' standards, anyone who calls himself a 'hacker' most certainly is not one.
Also, saying Linux is by hackers for hackers is a bit negative and would cause many people to not touch it. 'hacking' has a negative connotation.
Lots of people have been working on auto-parallelizing compilers. The idea is to take existing code that isn't parallel and during compile time (or run time) make those decisions intelligently and speed up processing. So far, there have been zero successes at it without explicit user directives to tell the compilers where good targets for parallelization are and how to do it (specifically creating threads and/or marking loops that can be parallelized).
If you (or anyone) can solve this problem well, you'd be famous and wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice (assuming you patent it and license it out:))
I know a few folks who work at Intel (some are CPU designers). If you ask any of them, they will repeat the mantra: Intel sells chips. They don't care to who or for what purpose (this was before 9/11). If it is to someone who is going to run Linux or to someone who will run Windows, it doesn't matter because they sold that person some chips.
There are places where you can't bring a camera, either still or movie. Granted, the number of folks who have to worry about that is relatively small, but some of us will be hurt.
Well, hyperthreading is a hack to increase the performance of inefficient code, same as the branch prediction and other crap, well optimized code actually runs faster if you turn hyperthreading off.. All of these problems are caused by closed source binary software, if you had the sourcecode you could rebuild the code with a newer compiler to take advantage of the new cpu and not stall the pipeline etc. The original alpha chips had no branch prediction or such, they required good code otherwise you stalled the pipeline, but they were massively faster than anything else available at the time and the architecture was always very clean.
I wouldn't call it a "hack". It's actually pretty smart. Intel wasn't the first to use it. It's called SMT in non-Intelspeak. Both Sun and IBM use it in their SPARC and Power architectures, respectfully. The need for these is hardly because of closed source binary software. Branch prediction is needed for high penalty dynamic branches *period*. Many branches are determined during runtime, not compile time. Plus, you have lots of software compiled with compilers like GCC (which isn't that optimizing) where the runtime OOOE and such make up for the somewhat poor scheduling of instructions.
The original Alphas were pretty neat, but their speed depended on what you were doing with it. For computational code, they were fast, but try running a parser or something on it and you'd see it tank. It wasn't until the 21164 and later(with the branch prediction and OOOE) until they were the complete package.
I think that they may be taking the wrong approach by putting 2 whole processor cores on the same die...
We have SMT (HyperThreading in Intelese) which in my opinion is a pretty decent idea... just a crying shame about how they set about doing it. They sacrificed the silicon used by the original P4's integrated RamBus memory controller and put in the necessary silicon for their HT technology. The idea of getting an extra CPU for 'free' in the current HT processors doesn't work because in a demanding application, most of the execution units will be busy anyways.
No P4 has ever had an integrated memory controller. The original Williamette cores interfaced to RDRAM through the i850 chipset. In fact, there were a number of Williamette machines that had PC-133 memory (slow as Christmas, but they existed). I owned an RDRAM one and I worked on a PC133 memory one at a job site.
Because of this, many old RamBus P4 machines can outperform their newer P4 siblings - mostly because the newer P4 do not have an integrated memory controller and have to go through the IO originally for peripherals. (ok, they are fixing this with the much higher pincount chips than the 1st gen P4 which did not need all that IO due to integrated RDRAM controller)
I've never seen a Williamette outperform any later Pentium4 core and again, P4s haven't had IMCs.
Instead, I believe that they need to design a processor with the original intent to be hyperthreaded (instead of the P4's original intent, to use RDRAM). What this means, is perhaps provide many execution units, maybe 50% more than what a single processor requires, and then make it look like 2 CPUs. Or perhaps double or triple the number of units and make it look like 4 CPUs to the software.
Eventually, if you provide 2x the number of execution units that are "needed", what difference do you have from a dual core processor? Some units would be shared - fetch, decode, memory stages, etc, but you'd be getting close anyway because of the added interconnect logic for more execution units (it's an n-squared problem with the number of execution units for data forwarding and data hazard detection/resolution).
So... What they need for the consumer is a high-pincount device which is truely designed for hyperthreading (ie, has enough execution units available to be able to perform nearly as good as having a whole 2nd CPU) And for the server market, bring back the integrated RamBus controller, still have plenty of pins so that the server can have perhaps 4 or more RDRAM channels to keep the data flowing fast enough to keep the 4 SMT logical processors occupied. (IIRC, the original P4 has 2 RDRAM 800 channels)
You also have to remember that RDRAM isn't as wide as DDR, for example. It's fairly narrow in the scheme of things. Having two channels can make is wider just like dual channel DDR memory.
And while I am in my Intel rant mood, I'll criticise the Itanic... Surely with the EPIC architecture, all that branch-prediction and other crud they have in the processor is unnecessary... They need to cut away 2/3rds of the silicon, and get people to write compilers which really do work for them. IIRC, the whole point of all that extra cruft is to make it perform ok for brain-dead compilers. Either they get decent compilers out there (perhaps, open-source their Itanic compiler optimiser) or admit that EPIC was "another nice idea, pity it doesn't work in practice".
Branch prediction is hardly "crud". If your CPU is capable of performing dynamic branching (branches based on the results of an operation as opposed to a hard static branch such as BRA (branch always)) and has a penalty with pipeline flushes on branching, then you probably can benefit from branch prediction). Also, EPIC *hardly* performs "OK" with brain-dead compilers. You have to have a decent compiler to get the performance out of it. A brain-dead compiler won't get 25% out of the CPU's max performance
muscle... I've met some weak males and strong females. It's a matter of picking up some weights I've met some small [short and small frame] males and tall females. It's a matter of genetics.... [etc]...
Again... whom you have or have not met doesn't count. The *propensity* is that males have more muscular mass (basically because testosterone promotes this and males tend to have much higher testosterone levels in their systems than females). Women have the propensity to lactate more than men. I've seen on the news (recently even) of a male in Sri Lanka who was lactating but that doesn't mean that the propensity for males and females to lactate are the same.
And... as far as your last statement... Men are men and women are women because of differences in genetics and that entails a fair variety of differences between the two. So, yes, it is *all* a matter of genetics.
Don't get me wrong. I ***DO*** think there are physical causes and limits to minds of matter and thought [e.g. chemical makeup making for less intelligence or less muscle, etc...]. I just don't think they're strictly gender based.
I think some are societal based and some are gender based (due to things like the chemicals that are produced in higher quantities). There are measurable effects based on the levels of certain chemicals in a body (muscle mass being just one). We can measure differences in the brain activity patterns between males and females when doing certain tasks. It seems only logical to me that different activity patterns in the brain for certain activities means that something is going on in there different between the two sexes. If something different is going on, that means that the brains are processing differently and possibly more or less efficiently somehow. It doesn't mean that one gender cannot be good at that task either naturally or by working harder at it.
You say you're not good at doing economics work. Maybe that's because you haven't studied it. Or if you did study it maybe you didn't try hard, do the assignments, pay attention. Maybe you do lack the mental faculties to perform the math, etc. Is that because you're a male?
Maybe it is because I'm male, maybe it isn't. I honestly don't care. The *fact* is that I'm not good at it regardless of the reason why. Maybe if I had tried harder in class I would have gotten better grades but that still doesn't mean anything about a propensity for the subject. I might have devoted my life to economics like a religion and became the foremost expert in economics of all time, but it would require me to become an economics monk. Maybe a female with the norm for females could have done the same thing by sleeping through class because of a natural propensity for economics.
Somehow, though, when you venture into mental measures, no one wants to touch that with a 10-foot pole because it might offend someone. I'd have no problem if someone told me that I, as a male, has the propensity to be stupid in economics. So what, it doesn't take anything away from me (I know I'm already stupid in economics). Even if someone told me that, as a male, I had the propensity to be stupid in something that I'm actually good at. That's the bit about statistics... You can't use a single example and assume that it is the norm, no matter which side of the statistic it falls on (the sample size is too small).
Just like on/. there is a strong belief that someone shouldn't get a college degree because Joe, over here, didn't get a college degree and he is super successful. The *norm* is that persons with college degrees make more money than persons without college degrees. Joe is an exception to the norm. It's the 'I have a dog. My dog is brown. Therefore, all dogs are brown.' logical fallacy.
I wouldn't be surprised (or offended) if some group actually did prove that women have the propensity to be 'smarter' at some things than men and men 'smarter' than women at other things. Men and women aren't the same no matter how hard you try to make them the same. We can have the same rights, the same ambitions, the same ideals, but there is nothing wrong with being different and/or having the propensity to be more enabled to do one thing or another than the opposite gender.
If, in fact, someone shows measureable differences between genders at some things, my advice would be do embrace the differences instead of denying them. Explore yourself to see if you follow the norm or are an exception. Such research could be used as a good starting place for you to explore yourself to see where your own strong areas are and exploit your strengths in life.
Now, if you get into the area where laws and/or mandates based on these propensities are passed, then that is a different story (however, there are many biased laws based on gender already).
I'm sure that's why a lot of stuff is in the bible, such as the part about not eating pigs and bats. So why do people insist that these were decreed by some supreme being instead of just admitting that primitive people thousands of years ago wrote these down as "scripture" in order to convince others to follow them for their own good? Aren't we advanced enough now that we can follow guidelines for our own good (and change them when necessary), rather than needing to believe that they were "divinely inspired"?
Heh... oddly enough, it was probably easier to get people to do these things by telling them that God told them to rather than try to convince them of the obvious/measurable benefits. Kind of like the "because I said so" reason, puts an end to the rationalization.
Praying is not "religious ceremony", at least if it's done individually.
I guess this is a matter of opinion. I think it is a ceremony.
Like most Christians, you seem to be equating Christianity with "religion", as if there were no other.
I guess you assume that I'm a Christian.
There's no specific "state and religion shall be separate" phrase in the Constitution, but there is a clause that the government shall not sanction any particular religion.
I know... but the phrase that most people say is what I quoted, quite intentionally called out.
How is the 10 Commandments anything but a sanctioning of Christianity? The Hindus don't recognize them. The Buddhists don't.
Arguably, but even some atheists that I know say that the 10 Commandments isn't that bad of a set of rules to live by. In all actually, my belief is that these rules were given as religious doctrine because they simply are good rules for a community to live by and not necessarily because they were decreed by some supreme being as a way to holiness. If you look at them, they list out things that can quickly tear a community apart. Living by those rules isn't necessarily a 'bad thing'.
As for the Pledge, that only had "Under God" added in the 1950's. Again, if the state isn't supposed to endorse a specific religion, why does it seem to be endorsing monotheistic religions here?
Well... techincally, you can interpret "under God" to mean whatever god you want;) I don't see it explicitly saying "under the Christian God".
It's simple: you can't avoid having a state-endorsed religion and still have official Government references to a specific religion.
I agree. However, I also think that even the Founding Fathers didn't hold to this point as evidenced by some of the documents they wrote. They say that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". They didn't say that religion couldn't be practiced by government bodies. For example, I believe that there should not be a law that mandates prayer or any religious ceremony in any public school. However, I also believe that Congress cannot pass a law that prohibits anyone from exercising their religious beliefs in public school as long as they don't interfere or harm anyone else. If the religious students want to get together before school starts and have some ceremony without subjecting anyone else who doesn't want to be there to the ceremony, I think that is OK.
OK, back to the original point... religion (of some kind, even if not necessarily Christian) has been a part of the USA government since its creation. The "seperation of church and state" phrase that some folks tend to use in an effort to strike out all religious references (of any kind) from governmental things, such as the Pledge of Allegiance and removal of the 10 Commandments from judicial buildings, is somewhat faulty. The separation of church and state is about not having an official state supported religion. Having religious ceremony (regardless of belief system) has long been a part of the USA government and is even present in the founding documents.
I guess your definition of "mission critical" and mine are different then. I never claimed Windows was "mission critical" either (in fact, I said it wasn't either). Not all criticism against Linux automatically means that the critic is a Windows fanboi. I happen to think both platforms are kind of weak in a number of areas. While I would more likely use Linux in a 'mission critical' environment than Windows, it would only be because of a lack of something better suited.
Perhaps you could list a few innovative things in Linux that you use on production systems?
Yeah... 984 current signatures... If every one of those folks would just pay $500 per game, EA might be able to recover the porting costs from their Windows source.
You've got to put together more money than 1000 x $50 = $50,000 to get their attention.... try about 10x that amount.
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I don't think that government should mandate open source vs. closed source code purchases. This is unfair. The government should not mandate against valid, legal business models.
I think the government should mandate that output from any software be an open standard format (XML or whatever) and then they choose, based on a competative bid process like they are supposed to do, the software that will do what they want (which may include adding features at some point). If some OSS group wins, so be it. If some proprietary group wins, so be it.
Allowing only OSS is both wrong and bad, IMO, for a number of reasons.
1. It is straight against capitalist economy to require one business/development model. In capitalism, you specify the product and whoever can do it best/cheapest/easiest wins. Only an OSS zealot would think that OSS would always win.
2. The government should not dictate the "right" business model for people to follow. As long as they are legal under the laws (both criminal and financial) of the country, they are valid. The government should not dictate that some valid models are not valid for the government.
Just for reference, my Pentium-M laptop running at 1.4GHz is a touch faster than a Pentium-4M running at 2.2GHz running lame on some .wav files. On integer work, it's even faster. On benchmarks run by different web sites, Pentium-Ms even beat Athlon64s at some (mostly integer) tasks even when running at a little slower clock speeds. In one case, the 2.13GHz Pentium-M was even faster than the Athlon64 3800+. In games it tended to be a little slower because the Pentium-M isn't as strong in FPU.
Yup. UNIX wasn't just a piece of software. If you wanted UNIX, you had to buy the hardware to run it as well most of the time. To get a UNIX workstation, you had to pay a lot of money for the OS itself, then a lot of money for the hardware to run it on, then usually a lot of money for support/license. That's where Sun came in and made their money... offering a UNIX workstation at comparatively low cost.
I remember seeing entry level (lowest cost that a company offered) UNIX workstations at $10k or more.
I also remember seeing (and writing) software that was sold by the "seat". The "seat" included the software product in question, the OS and any associated licensing, and the hardware to run the OS and the software product on. $35k a pop that one was.
OR... you could use the same software on a Windows box that was pretty much generic (you buy it wherever you wanted) and just buy the software for like $10k.
So... either 1 seat on either, but Windows is 1/3 the cost OR 1 seat on UNIX vs. 3 seats on Windows... easy choices to make, depending on your aims.
I would give you a mod up if I had points.
But there are more computer users who care about games than there are of computer enthusiasts and computer users who don't care about games. Lots more.
IBM probably has more people working in their cafeterias than RedHat has employees. Does that make IBM a catering company?
And Joe's question will be: "What games can I play on it?" The next response will be a blank stare when you mention "TuxRacer" and then Joe will say "Nevermind." and walk away.
Uh... no... Have you 'been there, done that'? I have. It wasn't until recently that Linux has been 'good enough' to be allowed to run important stuff. Back in the mid-late 1990s, it was the bane of IT's existance. Every dork who wanted folks to think he was cool started installing it on their desktops and it was an IT nightmare dealing with it. First, you had people breaking machines because some video card or something wasn't supported (the installer didn't do the research to see if the machine he was using could run Linux), next the security was abismal. I can't tell you how many time we had to wipe machines because they were used as a stepping-stone to hack into other places. Yes, we even got a few visits by certain 'government agencies' where we had to let them 'look at things'. Having a Linux box was about the same thing as saying 'I give root access to my machine to anyone'. It got to be bad enough to where it was mandated that Linux could only be installed on certain machines and only by the IT folks. These machines were quarantined from everything. You have *got* to be kidding (or simply new to the Linux scene) if you would think that anyone who would pay for a UNIX license would have paid for Linux back then.
As time has gone on, though, it has gotten much better, I'll grant you that.
Also, by oldskool 'hacker' standards, anyone who calls himself a 'hacker' most certainly is not one.
Also, saying Linux is by hackers for hackers is a bit negative and would cause many people to not touch it. 'hacking' has a negative connotation.
Lots of people have been working on auto-parallelizing compilers. The idea is to take existing code that isn't parallel and during compile time (or run time) make those decisions intelligently and speed up processing. So far, there have been zero successes at it without explicit user directives to tell the compilers where good targets for parallelization are and how to do it (specifically creating threads and/or marking loops that can be parallelized).
:))
If you (or anyone) can solve this problem well, you'd be famous and wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice (assuming you patent it and license it out
I know a few folks who work at Intel (some are CPU designers). If you ask any of them, they will repeat the mantra: Intel sells chips. They don't care to who or for what purpose (this was before 9/11). If it is to someone who is going to run Linux or to someone who will run Windows, it doesn't matter because they sold that person some chips.
There are places where you can't bring a camera, either still or movie. Granted, the number of folks who have to worry about that is relatively small, but some of us will be hurt.
Well, hyperthreading is a hack to increase the performance of inefficient code, same as the branch prediction and other crap, well optimized code actually runs faster if you turn hyperthreading off..
All of these problems are caused by closed source binary software, if you had the sourcecode you could rebuild the code with a newer compiler to take advantage of the new cpu and not stall the pipeline etc. The original alpha chips had no branch prediction or such, they required good code otherwise you stalled the pipeline, but they were massively faster than anything else available at the time and the architecture was always very clean.
I wouldn't call it a "hack". It's actually pretty smart. Intel wasn't the first to use it. It's called SMT in non-Intelspeak. Both Sun and IBM use it in their SPARC and Power architectures, respectfully. The need for these is hardly because of closed source binary software. Branch prediction is needed for high penalty dynamic branches *period*. Many branches are determined during runtime, not compile time. Plus, you have lots of software compiled with compilers like GCC (which isn't that optimizing) where the runtime OOOE and such make up for the somewhat poor scheduling of instructions.
The original Alphas were pretty neat, but their speed depended on what you were doing with it. For computational code, they were fast, but try running a parser or something on it and you'd see it tank. It wasn't until the 21164 and later(with the branch prediction and OOOE) until they were the complete package.
atcurtis:
I think that they may be taking the wrong approach by putting 2 whole processor cores on the same die...
We have SMT (HyperThreading in Intelese) which in my opinion is a pretty decent idea... just a crying shame about how they set about doing it. They sacrificed the silicon used by the original P4's integrated RamBus memory controller and put in the necessary silicon for their HT technology. The idea of getting an extra CPU for 'free' in the current HT processors doesn't work because in a demanding application, most of the execution units will be busy anyways.
No P4 has ever had an integrated memory controller. The original Williamette cores interfaced to RDRAM through the i850 chipset. In fact, there were a number of Williamette machines that had PC-133 memory (slow as Christmas, but they existed). I owned an RDRAM one and I worked on a PC133 memory one at a job site.
Because of this, many old RamBus P4 machines can outperform their newer P4 siblings - mostly because the newer P4 do not have an integrated memory controller and have to go through the IO originally for peripherals. (ok, they are fixing this with the much higher pincount chips than the 1st gen P4 which did not need all that IO due to integrated RDRAM controller)
I've never seen a Williamette outperform any later Pentium4 core and again, P4s haven't had IMCs.
Instead, I believe that they need to design a processor with the original intent to be hyperthreaded (instead of the P4's original intent, to use RDRAM). What this means, is perhaps provide many execution units, maybe 50% more than what a single processor requires, and then make it look like 2 CPUs. Or perhaps double or triple the number of units and make it look like 4 CPUs to the software.
Eventually, if you provide 2x the number of execution units that are "needed", what difference do you have from a dual core processor? Some units would be shared - fetch, decode, memory stages, etc, but you'd be getting close anyway because of the added interconnect logic for more execution units (it's an n-squared problem with the number of execution units for data forwarding and data hazard detection/resolution).
So... What they need for the consumer is a high-pincount device which is truely designed for hyperthreading (ie, has enough execution units available to be able to perform nearly as good as having a whole 2nd CPU)
And for the server market, bring back the integrated RamBus controller, still have plenty of pins so that the server can have perhaps 4 or more RDRAM channels to keep the data flowing fast enough to keep the 4 SMT logical processors occupied. (IIRC, the original P4 has 2 RDRAM 800 channels)
You also have to remember that RDRAM isn't as wide as DDR, for example. It's fairly narrow in the scheme of things. Having two channels can make is wider just like dual channel DDR memory.
And while I am in my Intel rant mood, I'll criticise the Itanic... Surely with the EPIC architecture, all that branch-prediction and other crud they have in the processor is unnecessary... They need to cut away 2/3rds of the silicon, and get people to write compilers which really do work for them. IIRC, the whole point of all that extra cruft is to make it perform ok for brain-dead compilers. Either they get decent compilers out there (perhaps, open-source their Itanic compiler optimiser) or admit that EPIC was "another nice idea, pity it doesn't work in practice".
Branch prediction is hardly "crud". If your CPU is capable of performing dynamic branching (branches based on the results of an operation as opposed to a hard static branch such as BRA (branch always)) and has a penalty with pipeline flushes on branching, then you probably can benefit from branch prediction). Also, EPIC *hardly* performs "OK" with brain-dead compilers. You have to have a decent compiler to get the performance out of it. A brain-dead compiler won't get 25% out of the CPU's max performance
C++ can be as fast as C. You just have to know to avoid common pitfalls that slow it down.
muscle... I've met some weak males and strong females. It's a matter of picking up some weights ... [etc] ...
I've met some small [short and small frame] males and tall females. It's a matter of genetics.
Again... whom you have or have not met doesn't count. The *propensity* is that males have more muscular mass (basically because testosterone promotes this and males tend to have much higher testosterone levels in their systems than females). Women have the propensity to lactate more than men. I've seen on the news (recently even) of a male in Sri Lanka who was lactating but that doesn't mean that the propensity for males and females to lactate are the same.
And... as far as your last statement... Men are men and women are women because of differences in genetics and that entails a fair variety of differences between the two. So, yes, it is *all* a matter of genetics.
Don't get me wrong. I ***DO*** think there are physical causes and limits to minds of matter and thought [e.g. chemical makeup making for less intelligence or less muscle, etc...]. I just don't think they're strictly gender based.
I think some are societal based and some are gender based (due to things like the chemicals that are produced in higher quantities). There are measurable effects based on the levels of certain chemicals in a body (muscle mass being just one). We can measure differences in the brain activity patterns between males and females when doing certain tasks. It seems only logical to me that different activity patterns in the brain for certain activities means that something is going on in there different between the two sexes. If something different is going on, that means that the brains are processing differently and possibly more or less efficiently somehow. It doesn't mean that one gender cannot be good at that task either naturally or by working harder at it.
You say you're not good at doing economics work. Maybe that's because you haven't studied it. Or if you did study it maybe you didn't try hard, do the assignments, pay attention. Maybe you do lack the mental faculties to perform the math, etc. Is that because you're a male?
Maybe it is because I'm male, maybe it isn't. I honestly don't care. The *fact* is that I'm not good at it regardless of the reason why. Maybe if I had tried harder in class I would have gotten better grades but that still doesn't mean anything about a propensity for the subject. I might have devoted my life to economics like a religion and became the foremost expert in economics of all time, but it would require me to become an economics monk. Maybe a female with the norm for females could have done the same thing by sleeping through class because of a natural propensity for economics.
Any links to the rumors about Dell's installed spyware? I just got a Dell laptop and need to check it.
Well... there *are* known propensity for differences based on gender. Some of which are:
/. there is a strong belief that someone shouldn't get a college degree because Joe, over here, didn't get a college degree and he is super successful. The *norm* is that persons with college degrees make more money than persons without college degrees. Joe is an exception to the norm. It's the 'I have a dog. My dog is brown. Therefore, all dogs are brown.' logical fallacy.
- Muscular strength (advantage males)
- Dexterity (advantage females)
- Constitution (advantage females)
- Spatial analysis (advantage males)
- Multitasking (advantage females)
- Lifespan (advantage females)
These are all measurable.
Somehow, though, when you venture into mental measures, no one wants to touch that with a 10-foot pole because it might offend someone. I'd have no problem if someone told me that I, as a male, has the propensity to be stupid in economics. So what, it doesn't take anything away from me (I know I'm already stupid in economics). Even if someone told me that, as a male, I had the propensity to be stupid in something that I'm actually good at. That's the bit about statistics... You can't use a single example and assume that it is the norm, no matter which side of the statistic it falls on (the sample size is too small).
Just like on
I wouldn't be surprised (or offended) if some group actually did prove that women have the propensity to be 'smarter' at some things than men and men 'smarter' than women at other things. Men and women aren't the same no matter how hard you try to make them the same. We can have the same rights, the same ambitions, the same ideals, but there is nothing wrong with being different and/or having the propensity to be more enabled to do one thing or another than the opposite gender.
If, in fact, someone shows measureable differences between genders at some things, my advice would be do embrace the differences instead of denying them. Explore yourself to see if you follow the norm or are an exception.
Such research could be used as a good starting place for you to explore yourself to see where your own strong areas are and exploit your strengths in life.
Now, if you get into the area where laws and/or mandates based on these propensities are passed, then that is a different story (however, there are many biased laws based on gender already).
I guess he's gonna be mega pissed when someone who went to the Fandango site a day before the movie comes out gets a ticket before he does...
I'm sure that's why a lot of stuff is in the bible, such as the part about not eating pigs and bats. So why do people insist that these were decreed by some supreme being instead of just admitting that primitive people thousands of years ago wrote these down as "scripture" in order to convince others to follow them for their own good? Aren't we advanced enough now that we can follow guidelines for our own good (and change them when necessary), rather than needing to believe that they were "divinely inspired"?
Heh... oddly enough, it was probably easier to get people to do these things by telling them that God told them to rather than try to convince them of the obvious/measurable benefits. Kind of like the "because I said so" reason, puts an end to the rationalization.
...but you'd live in France.
Praying is not "religious ceremony", at least if it's done individually.
;) I don't see it explicitly saying "under the Christian God".
I guess this is a matter of opinion. I think it is a ceremony.
Like most Christians, you seem to be equating Christianity with "religion", as if there were no other.
I guess you assume that I'm a Christian.
There's no specific "state and religion shall be separate" phrase in the Constitution, but there is a clause that the government shall not sanction any particular religion.
I know... but the phrase that most people say is what I quoted, quite intentionally called out.
How is the 10 Commandments anything but a sanctioning of Christianity? The Hindus don't recognize them. The Buddhists don't.
Arguably, but even some atheists that I know say that the 10 Commandments isn't that bad of a set of rules to live by. In all actually, my belief is that these rules were given as religious doctrine because they simply are good rules for a community to live by and not necessarily because they were decreed by some supreme being as a way to holiness. If you look at them, they list out things that can quickly tear a community apart. Living by those rules isn't necessarily a 'bad thing'.
As for the Pledge, that only had "Under God" added in the 1950's. Again, if the state isn't supposed to endorse a specific religion, why does it seem to be endorsing monotheistic religions here?
Well... techincally, you can interpret "under God" to mean whatever god you want
It's simple: you can't avoid having a state-endorsed religion and still have official Government references to a specific religion.
I agree. However, I also think that even the Founding Fathers didn't hold to this point as evidenced by some of the documents they wrote. They say that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". They didn't say that religion couldn't be practiced by government bodies. For example, I believe that there should not be a law that mandates prayer or any religious ceremony in any public school. However, I also believe that Congress cannot pass a law that prohibits anyone from exercising their religious beliefs in public school as long as they don't interfere or harm anyone else. If the religious students want to get together before school starts and have some ceremony without subjecting anyone else who doesn't want to be there to the ceremony, I think that is OK.
OK, back to the original point... religion (of some kind, even if not necessarily Christian) has been a part of the USA government since its creation. The "seperation of church and state" phrase that some folks tend to use in an effort to strike out all religious references (of any kind) from governmental things, such as the Pledge of Allegiance and removal of the 10 Commandments from judicial buildings, is somewhat faulty. The separation of church and state is about not having an official state supported religion. Having religious ceremony (regardless of belief system) has long been a part of the USA government and is even present in the founding documents.
...and you think that any of those you just listed are innovative?
I guess your definition of "mission critical" and mine are different then. I never claimed Windows was "mission critical" either (in fact, I said it wasn't either). Not all criticism against Linux automatically means that the critic is a Windows fanboi. I happen to think both platforms are kind of weak in a number of areas. While I would more likely use Linux in a 'mission critical' environment than Windows, it would only be because of a lack of something better suited.
Perhaps you could list a few innovative things in Linux that you use on production systems?
Yeah... 984 current signatures... If every one of those folks would just pay $500 per game, EA might be able to recover the porting costs from their Windows source.
You've got to put together more money than 1000 x $50 = $50,000 to get their attention.... try about 10x that amount.