Probably, Gautama was an Hindu, and a lot in Buddhism is either taken form Hinduism, or a reaction to it.
I read more about Buddhism because at the time my interrest was in meditation, which is huge in Buddhism, and even somebody who is less interrested in the religious side of things can learn a lot from.
My understanding is that although meditation is a big part of Hinduism, it is not the main subject like in Buddhism - note that according to Fontana all societies and religions in the world do have some form of meditation in their practice, and since that question is bound to arise when studying meditation, you would think that this question will be part of most religions... But in Tibetan Buddhism this is a predominant question, probably more so than in any other religions.
I agree they could have done better with the story in itself, what I meant by original was the concept of the matrix.
I think the metaphore for god is the fact that there is an all-powerfull being above everybody (assuming you live inside the matrix), that controls everything we see, hear and even think to a certain degree. the all-powerfull being can make things happening that would appear super natural to us like make some men flying, make them live even once they've been shot at, etc... a metaphor for miracles ? Couldn't the guys with the sunglasses be the saints or angels sent by the all-powerfull being ? Note that nobody knows or even understand about that being, which is I believe one of the concept of chritianity (the mere mortals cannot understand god and his/her plans).
I agree. I personally do not care for for special effects, but I need a good story, and the Matrix was a very good story. Something very original, not your typical clever, good looking, young lawyer that beats the big bad guy. Not as predictible as the average movie either, and the "standard american set of morales" is not necessarely respected, contrary to 90% of movies coming out of Hollywood.
I have met Christians who saw the matrix as a metaphor for God, I personally think it was a modern version of a lot of the Tibetan Budhism teachings (an no I am not a Budhist, but interrested in the different perception of realities both in eastern and western culture).
In the movie, when the hero (Neo ?) is sitting in an armchair, and wonder if everything is fake, and the other hero asked him "what is reality ? Is it waht your senses tell it is to your brain ?" - this is a very "budhist question" (not only Tibettan, but accross the differnt form of budhism), and definitely a very valid question !!
I am no Microsoft fan, but even when if you were to write the software "right", you have to remember that,to quote Pressman, software deteriorate. Therefore even a perfect piece of software will need to be patched at some point in the future because the environment around the software will change (new OS, new hardware, unforeseen complication (can you say Y2K;-)). Can anybody quote one OS that never needs patching ?
Once you have accepted that you will have to patch, then you do it on a regular basis, on your test box first, then you move the "patch bundle" to the prod boxes. The only problem with this method that has come up recently is the time-sensitivity of security patches, if you want to stay safe you can't really afford the slow cycle of waiting for the patch bundle to come out, let it mature, apply in dev, apply in prod. I have no answer to this one, I'd love to hear other's opinion on it.
There are strategies to reduce patches, like the one that is rarelly mentioned and that I like a lot is de Raadt's idea of code audit , once you found a bug, you know that you have made the same error somewhere else and should go through your code to find it and fix it.
More importantly, the institution would never get into the situation of not being able to switch to a different vendor (or to an oss solution) when and where it makes sense. The biggest problem with some commercial software today is that they design their products in order to make it nearly impossible (or at least very difficult) for you to use another product in the future to do the same function.
I thought we had already discussed this with the bill in Oregon. To me the best comment out of the whole discussion is the one about making open standards mandatory rather than oss. Looks like politicians do not read/. !!
Nobody else seems to be surprised that the worms are still alive. I hope NASA will try to understnad what kept them alive, the locker or the worm anatomy ?
This coul dend up with major consequences on space, and air travel safety (I'll ask for a locker myself next time I take the plane;-).
Don't laugh, there is ongoing research and inovation and airplane safety, like the built-in parachute on the cirrus.
It is not about what make sense but if there is enough of a market. I believe two different individual have already privately paid to be launched in space (and went there), so we now know that there is a market. The next question is can it be made profitable, although since the founder of the company is a dotcommer, he might not know about that rule of economy.
Another example of market versus logic is the tabaco industry... They make millions by selling a product that cause premature death.
But anybody who has ever worked in IT will tell you that the initial cost for the acquisition of the software is peanuts in comparison to the "cost of the software". You need somebody to install, to train the users, to update the software etc...
In a lot of cases oss software will be more cost/effective (say apache vs. anything out-there), but in other cases there is no oss solution for a particular problem, or what exist is so feature-less, or so complicated to install/maintain that a comercial equivalent is more cost-efficient.
Ever thought about it ? I hit the problem about 14 months ago when I bought a bigger disk and my computer wouldn't recognise it. Asus web site offered me to download flash.exe and a data file. After scratching my head a little bit I downloaded freedos from their website, dd'ed it to a diskette, added the files from Asus, rebooted, flashed the new BIOS, and voila !!
There is an assumption out there that everybody does have a copy of DOS somewhere. And to be honest, I prefer this assumption, than hardware manufacturers starting to distribute MS-Windows utilities... you won't install MS-Windows on one diskette !!!
In my opinion SUN should stop thinking of themselves as a hardware company only. I think they should split the company in two, one hardware one software.
The the software one, the one producing Solaris should make it as easy as possible for software developer to release their software on both SPARC and Intel, and then force them to sell both versions.
I love linux, been using it for 9 years, but there is no real word application for it, and software shop are very slow to port to it. On top of that companies are afraid of it.
If today companies could buy all the software they can buy for Solaris on SPARC for Intel boxes running Solaris, I know that they would.
This would be the best thing happening to UNIX in a long time, as all those companies trying to cut cost going to NT (or whatever it's called now), would have a very viable alternative: Going to Solaris (that they already use) on cheap hardware.
I guess the best parade to that we could do would be to write a really good, free (as in beer and libre) NFS client that would be really easy to install on windows even for the most clue-less user.
Then we can have everybody using NFS instead of CIFS.....
I think the best way is to stay simple for the machine names, for example aix001, sun001 etc...
But then get fancy for services: If a machine is a database server then give it DNS aliases named after the database names, or the service it provides (nisslv01, dnssrv01, etc...). The problem will be that it can be messy to administrate the aliases themselves if you are not carefull
The pay off is twofold: Everybody knows what physical machine you are talking about when you say aix127 or sun255 or hpux001 AND it becomes really easy to move a service from one physical machine to another.
Another advice, keep machines names under 8 chars, we've seen apps that do not like > 8 chars.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably, Gautama was an Hindu, and a lot in Buddhism is either taken form Hinduism, or a reaction to it.
I read more about Buddhism because at the time my interrest was in meditation, which is huge in Buddhism, and even somebody who is less interrested in the religious side of things can learn a lot from.
My understanding is that although meditation is a big part of Hinduism, it is not the main subject like in Buddhism - note that according to Fontana all societies and religions in the world do have some form of meditation in their practice, and since that question is bound to arise when studying meditation, you would think that this question will be part of most religions... But in Tibetan Buddhism this is a predominant question, probably more so than in any other religions.
Only the ones who are attached (hung up) to things, people and concept such as spelling...
I agree they could have done better with the story in itself, what I meant by original was the concept of the matrix.
I think the metaphore for god is the fact that there is an all-powerfull being above everybody (assuming you live inside the matrix), that controls everything we see, hear and even think to a certain degree. the all-powerfull being can make things happening that would appear super natural to us like make some men flying, make them live even once they've been shot at, etc... a metaphor for miracles ? Couldn't the guys with the sunglasses be the saints or angels sent by the all-powerfull being ? Note that nobody knows or even understand about that being, which is I believe one of the concept of chritianity (the mere mortals cannot understand god and his/her plans).
Didn't see any of those, I marking them down for my next visit to the video store - Thanks.
I agree. I personally do not care for for special effects, but I need a good story, and the Matrix was a very good story. Something very original, not your typical clever, good looking, young lawyer that beats the big bad guy. Not as predictible as the average movie either, and the "standard american set of morales" is not necessarely respected, contrary to 90% of movies coming out of Hollywood.
I have met Christians who saw the matrix as a metaphor for God, I personally think it was a modern version of a lot of the Tibetan Budhism teachings (an no I am not a Budhist, but interrested in the different perception of realities both in eastern and western culture).
In the movie, when the hero (Neo ?) is sitting in an armchair, and wonder if everything is fake, and the other hero asked him "what is reality ? Is it waht your senses tell it is to your brain ?" - this is a very "budhist question" (not only Tibettan, but accross the differnt form of budhism), and definitely a very valid question !!
... during the dot com boom. You should know that profit is an overater concept !!
I am no Microsoft fan, but even when if you were to write the software "right", you have to remember that,to quote Pressman, software deteriorate. Therefore even a perfect piece of software will need to be patched at some point in the future because the environment around the software will change (new OS, new hardware, unforeseen complication (can you say Y2K ;-)). Can anybody quote one OS that never needs patching ?
Once you have accepted that you will have to patch, then you do it on a regular basis, on your test box first, then you move the "patch bundle" to the prod boxes. The only problem with this method that has come up recently is the time-sensitivity of security patches, if you want to stay safe you can't really afford the slow cycle of waiting for the patch bundle to come out, let it mature, apply in dev, apply in prod. I have no answer to this one, I'd love to hear other's opinion on it.
There are strategies to reduce patches, like the one that is rarelly mentioned and that I like a lot is de Raadt's idea of code audit , once you found a bug, you know that you have made the same error somewhere else and should go through your code to find it and fix it.
apt-get moo
I have to do it once in a while, I always get a good laugh !!
More importantly, the institution would never get into the situation of not being able to switch to a different vendor (or to an oss solution) when and where it makes sense. The biggest problem with some commercial software today is that they design their products in order to make it nearly impossible (or at least very difficult) for you to use another product in the future to do the same function.
I thought we had already discussed this with the bill in Oregon. To me the best comment out of the whole discussion is the one about making open standards mandatory rather than oss. Looks like politicians do not read /. !!
Nobody else seems to be surprised that the worms are still alive. I hope NASA will try to understnad what kept them alive, the locker or the worm anatomy ?
;-).
This coul dend up with major consequences on space, and air travel safety (I'll ask for a locker myself next time I take the plane
Don't laugh, there is ongoing research and inovation and airplane safety, like the built-in parachute on the cirrus.
It is not about what make sense but if there is enough of a market. I believe two different individual have already privately paid to be launched in space (and went there), so we now know that there is a market. The next question is can it be made profitable, although since the founder of the company is a dotcommer, he might not know about that rule of economy.
Another example of market versus logic is the tabaco industry... They make millions by selling a product that cause premature death.
But anybody who has ever worked in IT will tell you that the initial cost for the acquisition of the software is peanuts in comparison to the "cost of the software". You need somebody to install, to train the users, to update the software etc...
In a lot of cases oss software will be more cost/effective (say apache vs. anything out-there), but in other cases there is no oss solution for a particular problem, or what exist is so feature-less, or so complicated to install/maintain that a comercial equivalent is more cost-efficient.
Here are a few more links:
For a bit older:
The power of 10
For the younger crowd: boowakwala
How do you upgrade your BIOS ??
Ever thought about it ? I hit the problem about 14 months ago when I bought a bigger disk and my computer wouldn't recognise it. Asus web site offered me to download flash.exe and a data file. After scratching my head a little bit I downloaded freedos from their website, dd'ed it to a diskette, added the files from Asus, rebooted, flashed the new BIOS, and voila !!
There is an assumption out there that everybody does have a copy of DOS somewhere. And to be honest, I prefer this assumption, than hardware manufacturers starting to distribute MS-Windows utilities... you won't install MS-Windows on one diskette !!!
Yves.
In my opinion SUN should stop thinking of themselves as a hardware company only. I think they should split the company in two, one hardware one software.
The the software one, the one producing Solaris should make it as easy as possible for software developer to release their software on both SPARC and Intel, and then force them to sell both versions.
I love linux, been using it for 9 years, but there is no real word application for it, and software shop are very slow to port to it. On top of that companies are afraid of it.
If today companies could buy all the software they can buy for Solaris on SPARC for Intel boxes running Solaris, I know that they would.
This would be the best thing happening to UNIX in a long time, as all those companies trying to cut cost going to NT (or whatever it's called now), would have a very viable alternative: Going to Solaris (that they already use) on cheap hardware.
Yves.
I guess the best parade to that we could do would be to write a really good, free (as in beer and libre) NFS client that would be really easy to install on windows even for the most clue-less user.
Then we can have everybody using NFS instead of CIFS.....
I think the best way is to stay simple for the machine names, for example aix001, sun001 etc...
But then get fancy for services: If a machine is a database server then give it DNS aliases named after the database names, or the service it provides (nisslv01, dnssrv01, etc...). The problem will be that it can be messy to administrate the aliases themselves if you are not carefull
The pay off is twofold: Everybody knows what physical machine you are talking about when you say aix127 or sun255 or hpux001 AND it becomes really easy to move a service from one physical machine to another.
Another advice, keep machines names under 8 chars, we've seen apps that do not like > 8 chars.
Yves.