Evolution is a fact. Creationist scientists will usually admit it happens.
The real issue is "evolution as the origin of all life" vs "creation as the origin of all life". That issue is so clouded by arguments "proving" one point or the other.
That issue can never be proven one way or the other. We can "explain" how the universe began back very close to the beginning of this universe but until we can show what happened before the beginning there is nothing to say that the spark that created all life was the finger of God or a lit cigarette falling in a puddle of gasoline in another universe.
We have a limited view of the past and no way of testing to show that the assumptions we have made are true. Perhaps the universe is millions of years old as science seems to show, perhaps thousands of years old as according to historical records, or perhaps less than 100 years old as in "The Matrix".
Just like my toaster doesn't talk to my refrigerator.
You just aren't keeping up with the times. Appliances designed to the OpenAppliance spec communicate freely using tcpip on your home network.
Your toaster can now be configured to do a coil warmup when you pull the toaster strudel from the freezer. If you have installed the RGoldberg interface you can program your kitchen to prepare an entire breakfast at a pre-programmed time of the morning (or afternoon if necessary).
Actually your percentage of 99.999% is inaccurate.
According to a note in this article
there are 7.1 million millionaires in the United States.
The United States has around 250 million people. According to me, since I consider a millionaire rich and powerful, that would mean that 2.8% will become rich and powerful and 97.2% of them will never be rich and powerful.
Other than that I agree with what you said. Except I would substitute "People" for the word "Americans". People are easily programmed and thinking for one's self is one of the most important things someone can learn.
True geeks with money to burn have every computer they ever bought still operational and networked and they have the latest and greatest which they've hacked to be overclocked except that it requires the refrigeration unit from an old frigidaire to keep it cool.
Actually, true geekdom isn't based on what hardware or software you have. It is what you do with it that counts.
I have to disagree with you there. DRM is a Bad Thing(tm) because by its very nature it does stomp on the rights of consumers.
DRM cannot function without restricting the consumers ability to use the program or device of their choice for playback and thus places limits on the ability of the programmers and inventors to innovate.
Well since he has posted to the list before I suspect he attached the documents himself. But I'd prefer to blame Microsoft for it. That damned auto-attachment.
Now based on his other suits he should sue slashdot now. And based on his logic Enron could get back in business by suing for trademark violation the news agencies that profited by publishing headlines featuring the name Enron.
When I set up the these servers I was a new Linux admin. All I knew was that I didn't want any extra services listening on the network. Prior to this I had only installed Linux on VMWare machines and 1 fileserver that also ran for months before we had to take it down to install a hard drive.
As for issues, there is one issue mentioned. The ext2 filesystem. It is a good issue and worth addressing. Although for servers that have uptime of nearly a year it isn't an issue but for a desktop user that shuts down their system nightly it could be. The other items mentioned are simply bashing attempts. Phrases like "badly coded", "low performance", "childish and unprofessional" are just bashing phrases.
Of course this was posted anonymously both on here and on comp.os.linux.advocacy. No reason to take it seriously. It is more than likely posted by some 30 year old with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
At first I didn't think this was a troll but upon further review I am convinced. It is either anti-Linux FUD from Microsoft or a pro-FreeBSD argument.
I am not sure where you get the idea that Linux requires a lot of maintenance. I've found that it just keeps on going and going and going.
I have a couple of servers that have been up for 292 days. Prior to that they were up for about 180 days since I first installed them. They have served my clients quite well and earned us a good reputation with them.
As for "childish and unprofessional messages", anything is better than "unexpected error, quitting" and "Netscape engineers are weenies".
I'm a little uncomfortable with having this implemented at the national level. I would prefer a national list that state legislatures could opt-in to if they so desired.
I do think telemarketers should be prohibited from obscuring their caller id information. Again I think the states should be doing it.
Well I must admit that as a software developer I am kinda slow. I must understand everything that I do but I do have the advantage of being able to understand everything when I go back to it. But as a sysadmin, having full understanding is an asset.
OK. An instance where I modified the code. AOLServer's current version cannot write a binary string back to a request. I rewrote the command so it would.
Portsentry can listen silently on certain ports on my firewall and spawn events if they are hit. As released Portsentry insisted on listening on ports 1-(specified). I put in some code so I could specify the low and high ports to listen on.
I modifed mergelog to both combine web site usage logs from multiple servers and split out the logs based on hostname.
There's more but there's some examples for you. Honestly I consider the source code itself to be documentation enough in most cases if the functions are named nicely. I do appreciate the comments in there though.
Since open source code needs to be read by a lot of different developers, (a project normally consists of developers that may not even meet) the source code must be legible and understandable.
There is nothing wrong with something being easy. I love things that are easy. In my experience, point and click interfaces on servers make things half easy and half impossible.
What's wrong with having an enterprise-class system that when it fails has a huge flashing red light saying 'THIS IS BROKEN' and with two mouse clicks joe blow from marketing can attempt to get your data center back up and running again?
Joe Blow from marketing has no understanding of enterprise class computing. Restarting the server whenever it is broken is not a fix and is certainly not a safe way to handle enterprise class data. People need to think about the importance of that data and who they are trusting it to. Enterprise class computing is not a job for an idiot MCSE from down the street. There are Windows sysadmins that are qualified for the job (They can do the voodoo they need to) that will be able to manage an enterprise class data center but they are working with their hands tied.
If you want your Windows network to run as well as possible you can hire me to maintain it. If you want your network to run as well as possible you can hire me to install Linux on it.
Those are neat features you described. Why I or my clients would need it I have no idea.
You'd lose that wager. I look at source code all the time to solve problems. I haven't had a problem yet that I haven't been able to discover exactly why it happened. If necessary I patch the source code to fix the problem, otherwise I just use my new understanding of the problem to see that it doesn't happen again.
Which is why I made the statement about under-knowledgeable personnel. I can tell you exactly why my server is failing and create a fix for it. The smartest Windows NT/2000 experts still must rely on voodoo. I can fix just about any problem in NT/2000 but a percentage of the time I don't know why I fixed it. (Turning off a setting and then turning it back on fixes some things. Why? Rebooting fixes things. Why?)
I know that everything in Windows is completely scriptable. I heard all about the "I love you" virus/worm/whatever.
Ummm. Why the hell would would you want to run "big iron" and data centers with under-educated and non-knowledgeable personnel using silly point and click interfaces? (The people are non-knowledgeable because, due to the closed nature of their envirenment, they are not free to investigate problems to their lowest level.)
Data centers and "big iron" are not all that complex. They're just a series of simple layers forming a complex arrangement. Look at it layer by layer and it becomes simple. Have it thrown at you as one big closed block and, yes, it is quite complex.
Static http is simple. Dynamic is more complex. Dynamic with database interface even more. Dynamic with multiple databases, remote XML requests, etc even more so. Start adding features and a web site quickly turns into a data center.
1. The first computer programmer, Ada Byron, was female.
2. "Everyone" is not making these jokes. From your attitude I assume you are above such things, which means that, even if all the others are there's still one person who isn't.
3. Sex isn't hostile towards women. Some of them, believe it or not, actually enjoy doing it. Sometimes with immature childish males who spend the rest of their time competing for the nicest car, biggest house, fastest compiler, or, sad to say, the largest comic book collection.
Maybe I live in a bubble but I hear more of that type of talk from the female side than the male side (I'm male). and I don't find it offensive.
I've had to listen to many conversations between women complaining about men. They usually say something like "men are such pigs. oh sorry, except for you." To which I usually say, "No, I"m pretty much a pig too."
a bunch of snot-nosed brats not wanting to pay for other people's labor
You are entirely missing the point. The DMCA and those types of legal efforts treat the average consumer as a criminal whether or not they have done wrong. They assume that because you have a VCR, DVD recorder, hard disk, or whatever device capable of copying copyrighted materials that you are copying and distributing them freely.
If the same logic were applied to policing the subway system, commuters would be handcuffed to their seats during the ride to prevent them from committing crimes against other commuters.
The comparison with the struggle for equality might be a poor choice due to the importance of the problem in each case but both were and are fights to be treated as normal law-abiding citizens and to not be pre-judged on one's skin color or on one's ownership of a legitimate device capable of legally copying a copyrighted work that one has legally acquired and does not intend to do anything illegal with.
I didn't become pro-Linux from using Linux products. I became pro-Linux from using Microsoft products. I worked for a number of years with Microsoft products (because of "corporate standards" at my employers) before I was able to break free. My productivity has increased by such huge amounts that I wonder how any company can afford the required number of Windows support personnel when they could have me instead (I'd only want 2 salaries and they could pocket the other 4).
I wouldn't deny that they have good programmers there with some good ideas. But the programmers don't run the show or make the decisions. The programmers rush out bloated code to meet deadlines.
Bloated code, while faster to produce, means it will be more prone to bugs and security problems, slower (yes, I know Microsoft has purchased some studies that say otherwise) and require more expensive hardware.
I doubt that 99% is a scientific figure. If you want to try teaching yourself programming having the source is incredibly valuable. I can start doing worthwhile work the first or second day in a language I've never used before as long as I have a good manual and a bunch of mostly working source code.
There is value to some raw footage. Even big production movies purchase stock footage to reduce some of the shots they need. A library of GPL stock footage could be eminently useful. True, some folks might catch on that the "Bradley Bunch" live in the same house as the folks on "Everybody Loves Rainman" but it could still make for some nice looking programs.
Don't use html email. It serves no useful purpose. Anything that can be said in large font green flashing text can also be said in plain text. If you must use html email use one that doesn't follow outside links for images and such from within a message. (Don't ask me which program does this. I don't use html email.)
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution is a fact. Creationist scientists will usually admit it happens.
The real issue is "evolution as the origin of all life" vs "creation as the origin of all life". That issue is so clouded by arguments "proving" one point or the other.
That issue can never be proven one way or the other. We can "explain" how the universe began back very close to the beginning of this universe but until we can show what happened before the beginning there is nothing to say that the spark that created all life was the finger of God or a lit cigarette falling in a puddle of gasoline in another universe.
We have a limited view of the past and no way of testing to show that the assumptions we have made are true. Perhaps the universe is millions of years old as science seems to show, perhaps thousands of years old as according to historical records, or perhaps less than 100 years old as in "The Matrix".
Just like my toaster doesn't talk to my refrigerator.
You just aren't keeping up with the times. Appliances designed to the OpenAppliance spec communicate freely using tcpip on your home network.
Your toaster can now be configured to do a coil warmup when you pull the toaster strudel from the freezer. If you have installed the RGoldberg interface you can program your kitchen to prepare an entire breakfast at a pre-programmed time of the morning (or afternoon if necessary).
Actually your percentage of 99.999% is inaccurate. According to a note in this article there are 7.1 million millionaires in the United States.
The United States has around 250 million people. According to me, since I consider a millionaire rich and powerful, that would mean that 2.8% will become rich and powerful and 97.2% of them will never be rich and powerful.
Other than that I agree with what you said. Except I would substitute "People" for the word "Americans". People are easily programmed and thinking for one's self is one of the most important things someone can learn.
True geeks with money to burn have every computer they ever bought still operational and networked and they have the latest and greatest which they've hacked to be overclocked except that it requires the refrigeration unit from an old frigidaire to keep it cool.
Actually, true geekdom isn't based on what hardware or software you have. It is what you do with it that counts.
Interestingly enough, it is legal to give sex away for free while selling it is illegal.
Well if you were looking for piracy and porn you probably didn't spend much time looking for semi-intelligent conversation.
Australians don't have an accent in Australia and news agencies aren't biased if they agree with me.
But she said she loved me and that age shouldn't matter.
I have to disagree with you there. DRM is a Bad Thing(tm) because by its very nature it does stomp on the rights of consumers.
DRM cannot function without restricting the consumers ability to use the program or device of their choice for playback and thus places limits on the ability of the programmers and inventors to innovate.
A freeBSD binary doesn't prove that the site is currently hosted on FreeBSD.
If they tarred up the whole site to copy it to Win2k they could easily include some extra binaries by mistake.
Well since he has posted to the list before I suspect he attached the documents himself. But I'd prefer to blame Microsoft for it. That damned auto-attachment.
Now based on his other suits he should sue slashdot now. And based on his logic Enron could get back in business by suing for trademark violation the news agencies that profited by publishing headlines featuring the name Enron.
Well he did attack Linux's professionalism.
When I set up the these servers I was a new Linux admin. All I knew was that I didn't want any extra services listening on the network. Prior to this I had only installed Linux on VMWare machines and 1 fileserver that also ran for months before we had to take it down to install a hard drive.
As for issues, there is one issue mentioned. The ext2 filesystem. It is a good issue and worth addressing. Although for servers that have uptime of nearly a year it isn't an issue but for a desktop user that shuts down their system nightly it could be. The other items mentioned are simply bashing attempts. Phrases like "badly coded", "low performance", "childish and unprofessional" are just bashing phrases.
Of course this was posted anonymously both on here and on comp.os.linux.advocacy. No reason to take it seriously. It is more than likely posted by some 30 year old with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
At first I didn't think this was a troll but upon further review I am convinced. It is either anti-Linux FUD from Microsoft or a pro-FreeBSD argument.
I am not sure where you get the idea that Linux requires a lot of maintenance. I've found that it just keeps on going and going and going.
I have a couple of servers that have been up for 292 days. Prior to that they were up for about 180 days since I first installed them. They have served my clients quite well and earned us a good reputation with them.
As for "childish and unprofessional messages", anything is better than "unexpected error, quitting" and "Netscape engineers are weenies".
I'm a little uncomfortable with having this implemented at the national level. I would prefer a national list that state legislatures could opt-in to if they so desired.
I do think telemarketers should be prohibited from obscuring their caller id information. Again I think the states should be doing it.
For the $25 million they're supposedly spending on the campaign, handling the slashdot effect should be a breeze.
Well I must admit that as a software developer I am kinda slow. I must understand everything that I do but I do have the advantage of being able to understand everything when I go back to it. But as a sysadmin, having full understanding is an asset.
OK. An instance where I modified the code. AOLServer's current version cannot write a binary string back to a request. I rewrote the command so it would.
Portsentry can listen silently on certain ports on my firewall and spawn events if they are hit. As released Portsentry insisted on listening on ports 1-(specified). I put in some code so I could specify the low and high ports to listen on.
I modifed mergelog to both combine web site usage logs from multiple servers and split out the logs based on hostname.
There's more but there's some examples for you. Honestly I consider the source code itself to be documentation enough in most cases if the functions are named nicely. I do appreciate the comments in there though.
Since open source code needs to be read by a lot of different developers, (a project normally consists of developers that may not even meet) the source code must be legible and understandable.
Could be. I don't know a lot of Solaris experts.
There is nothing wrong with something being easy. I love things that are easy. In my experience, point and click interfaces on servers make things half easy and half impossible.
What's wrong with having an enterprise-class system that when it fails has a huge flashing red light saying 'THIS IS BROKEN' and with two mouse clicks joe blow from marketing can attempt to get your data center back up and running again?
Joe Blow from marketing has no understanding of enterprise class computing. Restarting the server whenever it is broken is not a fix and is certainly not a safe way to handle enterprise class data. People need to think about the importance of that data and who they are trusting it to. Enterprise class computing is not a job for an idiot MCSE from down the street. There are Windows sysadmins that are qualified for the job (They can do the voodoo they need to) that will be able to manage an enterprise class data center but they are working with their hands tied.
If you want your Windows network to run as well as possible you can hire me to maintain it. If you want your network to run as well as possible you can hire me to install Linux on it.
Those are neat features you described. Why I or my clients would need it I have no idea.
You'd lose that wager. I look at source code all the time to solve problems. I haven't had a problem yet that I haven't been able to discover exactly why it happened. If necessary I patch the source code to fix the problem, otherwise I just use my new understanding of the problem to see that it doesn't happen again.
Which is why I made the statement about under-knowledgeable personnel. I can tell you exactly why my server is failing and create a fix for it. The smartest Windows NT/2000 experts still must rely on voodoo. I can fix just about any problem in NT/2000 but a percentage of the time I don't know why I fixed it. (Turning off a setting and then turning it back on fixes some things. Why? Rebooting fixes things. Why?)
I know that everything in Windows is completely scriptable. I heard all about the "I love you" virus/worm/whatever.
Ummm. Why the hell would would you want to run "big iron" and data centers with under-educated and non-knowledgeable personnel using silly point and click interfaces? (The people are non-knowledgeable because, due to the closed nature of their envirenment, they are not free to investigate problems to their lowest level.)
Data centers and "big iron" are not all that complex. They're just a series of simple layers forming a complex arrangement. Look at it layer by layer and it becomes simple. Have it thrown at you as one big closed block and, yes, it is quite complex.
Static http is simple. Dynamic is more complex. Dynamic with database interface even more. Dynamic with multiple databases, remote XML requests, etc even more so. Start adding features and a web site quickly turns into a data center.
1. The first computer programmer, Ada Byron, was female.
2. "Everyone" is not making these jokes. From your attitude I assume you are above such things, which means that, even if all the others are there's still one person who isn't.
3. Sex isn't hostile towards women. Some of them, believe it or not, actually enjoy doing it. Sometimes with immature childish males who spend the rest of their time competing for the nicest car, biggest house, fastest compiler, or, sad to say, the largest comic book collection.
Maybe I live in a bubble but I hear more of that type of talk from the female side than the male side (I'm male). and I don't find it offensive.
I've had to listen to many conversations between women complaining about men. They usually say something like "men are such pigs. oh sorry, except for you." To which I usually say, "No, I"m pretty much a pig too."
a bunch of snot-nosed brats not wanting to pay for other people's labor
You are entirely missing the point. The DMCA and those types of legal efforts treat the average consumer as a criminal whether or not they have done wrong. They assume that because you have a VCR, DVD recorder, hard disk, or whatever device capable of copying copyrighted materials that you are copying and distributing them freely.
If the same logic were applied to policing the subway system, commuters would be handcuffed to their seats during the ride to prevent them from committing crimes against other commuters.
The comparison with the struggle for equality might be a poor choice due to the importance of the problem in each case but both were and are fights to be treated as normal law-abiding citizens and to not be pre-judged on one's skin color or on one's ownership of a legitimate device capable of legally copying a copyrighted work that one has legally acquired and does not intend to do anything illegal with.
I didn't become pro-Linux from using Linux products. I became pro-Linux from using Microsoft products. I worked for a number of years with Microsoft products (because of "corporate standards" at my employers) before I was able to break free. My productivity has increased by such huge amounts that I wonder how any company can afford the required number of Windows support personnel when they could have me instead (I'd only want 2 salaries and they could pocket the other 4).
I wouldn't deny that they have good programmers there with some good ideas. But the programmers don't run the show or make the decisions. The programmers rush out bloated code to meet deadlines.
Bloated code, while faster to produce, means it will be more prone to bugs and security problems, slower (yes, I know Microsoft has purchased some studies that say otherwise) and require more expensive hardware.
I doubt that 99% is a scientific figure. If you want to try teaching yourself programming having the source is incredibly valuable. I can start doing worthwhile work the first or second day in a language I've never used before as long as I have a good manual and a bunch of mostly working source code.
There is value to some raw footage. Even big production movies purchase stock footage to reduce some of the shots they need. A library of GPL stock footage could be eminently useful. True, some folks might catch on that the "Bradley Bunch" live in the same house as the folks on "Everybody Loves Rainman" but it could still make for some nice looking programs.
Don't use html email. It serves no useful purpose. Anything that can be said in large font green flashing text can also be said in plain text.
If you must use html email use one that doesn't follow outside links for images and such from within a message. (Don't ask me which program does this. I don't use html email.)