I see I pissed off the PHP developers. Apologies for the offense guys, but having been one myself I'm fairly familiar with PHP. Taken in aggregate, it's a hack, and was bound to be superseded sometime or another by better languages. It certainly served a noble purpose though, providing a foss alternative to proprietary options like ASP, Java, and Cold Fusion (so did Perl, but PHP was more accessible to noobs, of which there were many in the early web days). And don't fret too much, it probably won't go away in the foreseeable future, as it is still by far the dominant foss web development language.
You know you live in interesting times when the best golfer in the world is black, the best rapper in the world is white, the French are accusing the Americans of being arrogant, Germany is steadfastly refusing to go to war, and Microsoft is standing up for a level playing field and equal access for all internet businesses and users.
All it takes is a golf game between Gates and a few Telco CEO's, and suddenly ThinkFree has really really low bandwidth. Really low.
More likely, Gates offers to pay a large fee for high-speed access to Windows and Office Live, and another fee to slow speeds to smaller, less capitalized startups who can match or exceed MS's innovation but not MS's deep pockets.
what purpose do online only application serve besides easy access?
Presumably, data backup and redundancy, assuming these services have db replication and/or backup in place, that your average home user can't afford. Plus, free word processor, spreadsheet, and other office tools, no more Microsoft tax.
I really don't understand why people vote for politicians who are bought & sold so easily (and cheaply).
About half don't. Voter turnout in the US ranges from 30% - 60% of all eligible voters. Perhaps that's partly a function of the fact that there are no real alternatives.
Re:Is communism bad in theory or only in practice?
on
Google's China Problem
·
· Score: 1
Banking creates real wealth by giving money to people to make business ventures. Stock trading does the same; it produces much value, and is how private sector research and production is usually funded. The need for lawyers is not a structural flaw, just a particular quirk in the current mixed economies that are the norm.
Not exactly. Roughly speaking, real wealth is created by harvesting raw materials and applying work, capital, and ingenuity to them to turn them into a product worth more than the sum of its parts. The difference between the total value of the inputs and the total value of the final product is the wealth that was created. Long ago we took wood and iron and turned it ships and trains, now we take sand, aluminum, and copper, and turn it into microchips, all worth significantly more than the sum of its parts. Banking enables that process by providing the capital, in return for a portion of the wealth created later, via the charging of interest. Stock trading doesn't produce value at all, it's just speculation on the future worth of the company. Selling stock is a way to raise money to enable the wealth creation process, trading shares of ownership for the promise of sharing in the wealth the company expects to create in the future.
Re:Is communism bad in theory or only in practice?
on
Google's China Problem
·
· Score: 1
There is a big structural flaw in capitalism, that it needs lots of expensive lawyers when in communism there is far less need for lawyers.
Lawyers are symptom of a society based on the rule of law. As annoying as they are, I'd much rather live in a society with too many lawyers than in one with none or too few. In the former societies, lawyers are supplanted by the secret police. Take your pick.
Re:Is communism bad in theory or only in practice?
on
Google's China Problem
·
· Score: 1
Maybe someone can clarify to me what exactly is bad about communism. My understanding is that it is an impractical and unachievable ideal
The key word being 'ideal'. In reality, Communism was a grand attempt at mass social manipulation, using a combination of ideas from Marx's critiques of capitalistism and vision of communism, to the brainwashing techniques originated by the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov, to Frederick Hegel's dialecticaltheory of history, to the philosophies of moral and cultural relativism and materialism.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks fit them all together to create a powerful and compelling meme for social change and achieving world Communism. In a nutshell, it went like this: The world is purely material, therefore there is no god, no heaven, no afterlife, and no soul (materialism). There are no absolutes, hence there is no absolute good or evil (relativism). Good and evil are only what each culture and society decide they are, and can only be understood within that culture's historical context. The Communists therefore defined their good in the utilitarian terms of whatever serves to increase the overall happiness of society. Since individual humans have no immortal soul (materialism), then they have no individual value and are only valuable insofar as they contribute to the overall happiness of society. The majority of society are the proletariat (workers), and Communism (joint ownership of the means of production, wealth distributed 'from each according his ability, to each according to his need') is the social state that will achieve the most happiness for these people, hence the most happiness for the most people. The bourgeoisie (capitalists, land & business owners) have enslaved the proletariat, and have been ripping them off (Marx's theory of the surplus value of labor). B/c good is simply that which increases overall social happiness, any means to that end is good (cultural & moral relativism). Since individual humans have no value, then, as diseased livestock are exterminated to protect the health of the herd, so must the bourgeoisie and anyone with bourgeoisie thoughts, leanings, or sympathies be exterminated to serve the happiness of the proletariat.
This reasoning allowed the Bolsheviks and later Communists to justify the mast murder of the capitalist class (who in that time and place were quite different from America's modern capitalists where anyone with motivation has a chance to become one - these were the aristocracy who had hoarded and inherited over the years the wealth and means of production of their societies, and used Divine Right of Kings, among ruses, to justify it, and the bogus Noble/Peasant class system construct to lock out most of the rest of society. Not the most sympathetic bunch, the horrors of Communism notwithstanding). The Communists executed anyone they thought was an aristocrat, bourgeoisie, capitalist, land or capital owner. They developed Pavlov's psychological experiments into brainwashing techniques to use on others who might still be useful alive, and created the Communist dogma and 'Party Line' that everyone in society must adhere to on pain of death, then built into that dogma the missionary component of carrying the Communist Revolution to the entire world.
That's the only widescale implementation of Communism ever, anywhere in the world, and look at the results. USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, N. Korea, China before they liberalized and adopted economic capitalizism. It's quite clear the results were disasterous for the people living under that system, and that contrary to Communism's stated goal of increasing the over
With Conroe launching this summer or fall, assuming it lives up to its early hype, Dell just needs to hold out for a little longer. I doubt we'll see AMD in Dell's, not including Alienware, anytime soon.
"One of the most highly-touted features of Windows Vista is glass windows, a part of the Windows Aero user interface. It sounds like a great idea, and heck, let's give Microsoft a bit of credit for the ingenuity of taking the windows metaphor to its logical conclusion. Maybe Apple can add stained glass windows to the next version of Mac OS X in response."
This seems like an terrible waste of taxpayer dollars.
On the contrary, if you care about economic growth and social advancement, much less scientific discovery and the search for knowledge for knowledge's sake, it is the absolute best use of taxpayer money we could ever have.
In a nutshell, logic and reason (the formalization of which is Math) beget scientific discovery, which begets technological innovation, which begets industrialization, commercialization, wealth creation, and, in general, economic growth. Economic growth improves the quality of life for more people, lifting a greater proportion of the human race out of poverty, where they can divert their energies from finding their next meal and basic survival to advancing logic and reason, scientific discovery, technological innovation, industrialization, commercialization, wealth creation, and/or economic growth, improving quality of life and lifting a greater proportion of of the human race... You get the idea.
What is the actual outcome from this research?
Clearly, the further development of complicated tensor calculus, its application to a supremely difficult problem, and the first understanding of how to use a powerful supercomputer to accomplish the former. Now that we know, other scientists and engineers will undoubtedly find ways of applying those same techniques to other problem domains, all contributing to drive scientific discovery, technological innovation, economic growth, social improvement, etc.
Will this help create more energy-efficiency in the world? Will it help us find technology that humanity can actually use to make a better society? Will it increase our safety, or decrease power of madmen and dictators?
While the answer may not be an unqualified 'yes', it is most definitely not a guaranteed 'no', as you seem to imply. The continuing search for truth via scientific method is the only process that guarantees a solution to energy-efficiency, social improvement, and yes, even to decrease the power of madmen and dictators. Truth is anathema to abusers of power, else why do you think every dictatorship and regime in the world that abuses its power attempts to stifle and/or manipulate the free flow of information in society? This one scientific breakthrough may or may not have some downstream positive effect on the issues you mentioned, but the scientific ideals and processes that made it possible most certainly will.
That is why it is absoutely crucial that any and all freedom-loving people continue to support funding of the scientific process, including even experiments that may not have an obvious immediate social, economic, or political benefit.
Why are we still posting this shite? When are we getting article moderating like Digg and Reddit? Why do I care about tagging and/.'s other recent feature experiments when article moderation is the only one that would make a difference to the content quality here? Why am I wasting my time responding to this?
Honestly, could it be anything else? Oracle + Ubuntu = ridiculous, for reasons already elaborated on by other posters, not the least of which is that Ubuntu is targeted at the DESKTOP. For that matter, FreeBSD would make more sense for Oracle than Ubuntu.
Actually they're a design company, that's their primary competitive advantage and their most distinguishing characteristic. They just happen to apply their industrial design talents to computer software and hardware. Having said that, I doubt they'll officially sell Windows b/c then, as a Windows OEM, they'd be required to support it, which they've already made it clear they won't do. Supporting Windows takes resources (probably a lot), and Apple's progress depends on keeping their focus on their core products.
Uhm, how does this relate to their core business again? Seems like they're going willynilly all over the place, trying to get into anything that can make them marginal revenue to justify their superhigh stock valuations. I thought they said they weren't going to do that, in their stockholder's manual. Motly Fool had a prescient article on them today.
Does they need better EDUCATIONAL and WEALTH DIVISION policies? You can bet it!
With all due respect, they need better EDUCATIONAL and WEALTH CREATION policies, and equal opportunity to participate in the wealth creation process. C'mon world, it's about time we left the welfare state and its class warfare bs behind us. That meme has run its course and shown that all it can achieve is making everyone equally poor, except the few corrupt politicians who control the wealth and production of a country.
It's not that bad, probably a play on the word 'spelunk', cave exploring. Not an inappropriate reference...
they are a very frequent advertiser here on Slashdot which should have been mentioned.
Why? Unless you've been browsing/. with a text reader for the past 6 months, it's obvious.
Plenty of tools do the same thing. Both Open Source and proprietary.
Care to list a few of the better ones? I'm in dire need of just such a tool right now.
Give ExpertsExchange some competition when it comes to IT peer questions and answers.
I second that, though I think this wiki will focus more on cryptic log-file errors rather than any programming/config/admin question you can come up with. At least it will be free, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I see I pissed off the PHP developers. Apologies for the offense guys, but having been one myself I'm fairly familiar with PHP. Taken in aggregate, it's a hack, and was bound to be superseded sometime or another by better languages. It certainly served a noble purpose though, providing a foss alternative to proprietary options like ASP, Java, and Cold Fusion (so did Perl, but PHP was more accessible to noobs, of which there were many in the early web days). And don't fret too much, it probably won't go away in the foreseeable future, as it is still by far the dominant foss web development language.
Perhaps Web 2.0 is tired?
No, PHP is tired. It's now all about Ruby, Python, LISP, and the more obscure but no less interesting Lua, Scala, Qi, OCaml, among others, and various derivatives and frameworks.
They will probably be right on their prediction that MS will need to delay Vista, but wrong on their prediction that MS actually will.
You know you live in interesting times when the best golfer in the world is black, the best rapper in the world is white, the French are accusing the Americans of being arrogant, Germany is steadfastly refusing to go to war, and Microsoft is standing up for a level playing field and equal access for all internet businesses and users.
At Soviet Apple, your screen watches you!
Looks like MS is taking leaf out of the fast food and credit card companies' books:
0 .html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,,1759888,0
All it takes is a golf game between Gates and a few Telco CEO's, and suddenly ThinkFree has really really low bandwidth. Really low.
More likely, Gates offers to pay a large fee for high-speed access to Windows and Office Live, and another fee to slow speeds to smaller, less capitalized startups who can match or exceed MS's innovation but not MS's deep pockets.
what purpose do online only application serve besides easy access?
Presumably, data backup and redundancy, assuming these services have db replication and/or backup in place, that your average home user can't afford. Plus, free word processor, spreadsheet, and other office tools, no more Microsoft tax.
I really don't understand why people vote for politicians who are bought & sold so easily (and cheaply).
About half don't. Voter turnout in the US ranges from 30% - 60% of all eligible voters. Perhaps that's partly a function of the fact that there are no real alternatives.
or, Flatulent Ferret...
Banking creates real wealth by giving money to people to make business ventures. Stock trading does the same; it produces much value, and is how private sector research and production is usually funded. The need for lawyers is not a structural flaw, just a particular quirk in the current mixed economies that are the norm.
Not exactly. Roughly speaking, real wealth is created by harvesting raw materials and applying work, capital, and ingenuity to them to turn them into a product worth more than the sum of its parts. The difference between the total value of the inputs and the total value of the final product is the wealth that was created. Long ago we took wood and iron and turned it ships and trains, now we take sand, aluminum, and copper, and turn it into microchips, all worth significantly more than the sum of its parts. Banking enables that process by providing the capital, in return for a portion of the wealth created later, via the charging of interest. Stock trading doesn't produce value at all, it's just speculation on the future worth of the company. Selling stock is a way to raise money to enable the wealth creation process, trading shares of ownership for the promise of sharing in the wealth the company expects to create in the future.
There is a big structural flaw in capitalism, that it needs lots of expensive lawyers when in communism there is far less need for lawyers.
Lawyers are symptom of a society based on the rule of law. As annoying as they are, I'd much rather live in a society with too many lawyers than in one with none or too few. In the former societies, lawyers are supplanted by the secret police. Take your pick.
Maybe someone can clarify to me what exactly is bad about communism. My understanding is that it is an impractical and unachievable ideal
The key word being 'ideal'. In reality, Communism was a grand attempt at mass social manipulation, using a combination of ideas from Marx's critiques of capitalistism and vision of communism, to the brainwashing techniques originated by the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov, to Frederick Hegel's dialectical theory of history, to the philosophies of moral and cultural relativism and materialism.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks fit them all together to create a powerful and compelling meme for social change and achieving world Communism. In a nutshell, it went like this: The world is purely material, therefore there is no god, no heaven, no afterlife, and no soul (materialism). There are no absolutes, hence there is no absolute good or evil (relativism). Good and evil are only what each culture and society decide they are, and can only be understood within that culture's historical context. The Communists therefore defined their good in the utilitarian terms of whatever serves to increase the overall happiness of society. Since individual humans have no immortal soul (materialism), then they have no individual value and are only valuable insofar as they contribute to the overall happiness of society. The majority of society are the proletariat (workers), and Communism (joint ownership of the means of production, wealth distributed 'from each according his ability, to each according to his need') is the social state that will achieve the most happiness for these people, hence the most happiness for the most people. The bourgeoisie (capitalists, land & business owners) have enslaved the proletariat, and have been ripping them off (Marx's theory of the surplus value of labor). B/c good is simply that which increases overall social happiness, any means to that end is good (cultural & moral relativism). Since individual humans have no value, then, as diseased livestock are exterminated to protect the health of the herd, so must the bourgeoisie and anyone with bourgeoisie thoughts, leanings, or sympathies be exterminated to serve the happiness of the proletariat.
This reasoning allowed the Bolsheviks and later Communists to justify the mast murder of the capitalist class (who in that time and place were quite different from America's modern capitalists where anyone with motivation has a chance to become one - these were the aristocracy who had hoarded and inherited over the years the wealth and means of production of their societies, and used Divine Right of Kings, among ruses, to justify it, and the bogus Noble/Peasant class system construct to lock out most of the rest of society. Not the most sympathetic bunch, the horrors of Communism notwithstanding). The Communists executed anyone they thought was an aristocrat, bourgeoisie, capitalist, land or capital owner. They developed Pavlov's psychological experiments into brainwashing techniques to use on others who might still be useful alive, and created the Communist dogma and 'Party Line' that everyone in society must adhere to on pain of death, then built into that dogma the missionary component of carrying the Communist Revolution to the entire world.
That's the only widescale implementation of Communism ever, anywhere in the world, and look at the results. USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, N. Korea, China before they liberalized and adopted economic capitalizism. It's quite clear the results were disasterous for the people living under that system, and that contrary to Communism's stated goal of increasing the over
With Conroe launching this summer or fall, assuming it lives up to its early hype, Dell just needs to hold out for a little longer. I doubt we'll see AMD in Dell's, not including Alienware, anytime soon.
"One of the most highly-touted features of Windows Vista is glass windows, a part of the Windows Aero user interface. It sounds like a great idea, and heck, let's give Microsoft a bit of credit for the ingenuity of taking the windows metaphor to its logical conclusion. Maybe Apple can add stained glass windows to the next version of Mac OS X in response."
heh...
This seems like an terrible waste of taxpayer dollars.
On the contrary, if you care about economic growth and social advancement, much less scientific discovery and the search for knowledge for knowledge's sake, it is the absolute best use of taxpayer money we could ever have.
In a nutshell, logic and reason (the formalization of which is Math) beget scientific discovery, which begets technological innovation, which begets industrialization, commercialization, wealth creation, and, in general, economic growth. Economic growth improves the quality of life for more people, lifting a greater proportion of the human race out of poverty, where they can divert their energies from finding their next meal and basic survival to advancing logic and reason, scientific discovery, technological innovation, industrialization, commercialization, wealth creation, and/or economic growth, improving quality of life and lifting a greater proportion of of the human race... You get the idea.
What is the actual outcome from this research?
Clearly, the further development of complicated tensor calculus, its application to a supremely difficult problem, and the first understanding of how to use a powerful supercomputer to accomplish the former. Now that we know, other scientists and engineers will undoubtedly find ways of applying those same techniques to other problem domains, all contributing to drive scientific discovery, technological innovation, economic growth, social improvement, etc.
Will this help create more energy-efficiency in the world? Will it help us find technology that humanity can actually use to make a better society? Will it increase our safety, or decrease power of madmen and dictators?
While the answer may not be an unqualified 'yes', it is most definitely not a guaranteed 'no', as you seem to imply. The continuing search for truth via scientific method is the only process that guarantees a solution to energy-efficiency, social improvement, and yes, even to decrease the power of madmen and dictators. Truth is anathema to abusers of power, else why do you think every dictatorship and regime in the world that abuses its power attempts to stifle and/or manipulate the free flow of information in society? This one scientific breakthrough may or may not have some downstream positive effect on the issues you mentioned, but the scientific ideals and processes that made it possible most certainly will.
That is why it is absoutely crucial that any and all freedom-loving people continue to support funding of the scientific process, including even experiments that may not have an obvious immediate social, economic, or political benefit.
Why are we still posting this shite? When are we getting article moderating like Digg and Reddit? Why do I care about tagging and /.'s other recent feature experiments when article moderation is the only one that would make a difference to the content quality here? Why am I wasting my time responding to this?
Honestly, could it be anything else? Oracle + Ubuntu = ridiculous, for reasons already elaborated on by other posters, not the least of which is that Ubuntu is targeted at the DESKTOP. For that matter, FreeBSD would make more sense for Oracle than Ubuntu.
Ah, should have named it Xenu. We could have had a great joke at Scientology's expense...
No, even better, they're using quantum physics and special relativity to warp space-time and curve the laser beam around the Earth.
And now also AMD-based PC's... sort of.
Actually they're a design company, that's their primary competitive advantage and their most distinguishing characteristic. They just happen to apply their industrial design talents to computer software and hardware. Having said that, I doubt they'll officially sell Windows b/c then, as a Windows OEM, they'd be required to support it, which they've already made it clear they won't do. Supporting Windows takes resources (probably a lot), and Apple's progress depends on keeping their focus on their core products.
Uhm, how does this relate to their core business again? Seems like they're going willynilly all over the place, trying to get into anything that can make them marginal revenue to justify their superhigh stock valuations. I thought they said they weren't going to do that, in their stockholder's manual. Motly Fool had a prescient article on them today.
Does they need better EDUCATIONAL and WEALTH DIVISION policies? You can bet it!
With all due respect, they need better EDUCATIONAL and WEALTH CREATION policies, and equal opportunity to participate in the wealth creation process. C'mon world, it's about time we left the welfare state and its class warfare bs behind us. That meme has run its course and shown that all it can achieve is making everyone equally poor, except the few corrupt politicians who control the wealth and production of a country.
Not only a bad name,
/. with a text reader for the past 6 months, it's obvious.
It's not that bad, probably a play on the word 'spelunk', cave exploring. Not an inappropriate reference...
they are a very frequent advertiser here on Slashdot which should have been mentioned.
Why? Unless you've been browsing
Plenty of tools do the same thing. Both Open Source and proprietary.
Care to list a few of the better ones? I'm in dire need of just such a tool right now.
Give ExpertsExchange some competition when it comes to IT peer questions and answers.
I second that, though I think this wiki will focus more on cryptic log-file errors rather than any programming/config/admin question you can come up with. At least it will be free, though.