Yeah I agree, id much rather beleive in a "god" that was invented from suffering and came to rule by suffering. Think about it, before the fall of the roman empire, christianity had a very small foothold. When it fell, people didnt have a perfect life anymore, in face, their lives sucked. The most common tombstone enscription was "i was not, i was, i am not, i have no more desires". Out of this "hell" people decided to believe in an afterlife because their real lives were so terrible. This is when all of these rediculous laws came up: you must go to church on sundays, the whole system of power that came out of the ability to rule people's lives, all you need to do to get into heaven is repent your sins to one of these officials that "god" never appointed.
Nonsense.
Obviously, you know virtually nothing about history and even less about Christianity to say this.
Claim 1: That Christianity didn't gain more than a small foothold until after the fall of the Roman empire. This is simply not true. In fact, Christianity seems to have been a force to reckon with as early as 115 in parts of the empire - witness the letter of Pliny the Younger (in Egypt) asking how to do deal with it. In fact, Starting in the early 300s, Christianity was THE official religion of the empire. However, the Western Empire didn't fall until (generally accepted date) 476CE and the Eastern Empire persisted in one form or another until almost 1500.
Claim 2: That Christians invented their religion in response to suffering, to develop a fantasy afterlife with no suffering. Here, you display a severe lack of Knowledge of the New Testament. In fact, the early Christians were severely persecuted. We know that at least three of the major early leaders were executed by the authorities before 70 (Peter, Paul and James) and we know that the leaders were again and again imprisioned for their faith. We have numerous books that seem to be written by and for people undergoing serious persecution - e.g. Revelation. (Also, consider Matthew 24). And there are about a million side references in Paul to persevering through persecution. In fact, that seems to be one of the major recurring themes of the New Testament. It was not until the end of the third century that being a Christian was even LEGAL - it was largely illegal because worshiping "King Jesus" was seen, across the empire, as a threat to the imperial cult and to the emperor.
Claim 3: that all these "rediculous" (sic) laws came up out of a desire to avoid hell. In fact, the specific "laws" you mention are specifically denied in the New Testament. For example:
Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day.
No responsible theologian would claim that you were required to go to church on Sundays, although most would say that it is a good idea.
Look: You are trying to judge a religious faith - which is ultimately a set of propositions - by the actions of relatively few of its adherents. This is not fair - ultimately the propositions can stand or fall on their own. And the main proposition is the fact of Jesus' resurrection. I have found that, if you actually approach this issue with rigor, you are forced to the conclusion that Jesus did rise from the dead (the best efforts of certain "scholars" notwithstanding.) I was not raised in the church, I came to that conclusion as an adult. Why don't you stop focusing on peripheral issues and instead look at the core of the faith?
I am the father of two one-year-old identical twins. Although they look exactly alike and share many gross, physical characteristics (size, athletic ability, etc.) in many respects they play very differently. Madeline is much more bookish, likes to site and "hang out", and is generally a thinker. Rebecca is an adventurer, likes to wrestle with her brother, jump on the bed, and dance to Jazz music. No, I'm not making any of this up or projecting it - others have observed the same trends.
Even before they were born, these trends were observable. Rebecca would respond (in the womb) to high energy, big band music. Madeline would respond best to classical - she particurly liked Bach. I ran the experiment again and again - Swing and Rebecca would Kick, Bach and Madeline would kick. (Yes, you can tell which is which if you get an ultrasound.)
Although my girls are genetically identical, they have been very different as long as we can determine, and these differences do not seem to be easily attributable to environmental factors (What is really so different about one side of a uterus from another? And, believe me, when you have twins there is not a lot of time for individual attention. Mostly, you are dealing with both of them in the same way at the same time.)
The point is that, although genetics are obviously important, there seems to be more to a human being than just his genetic code and experiences. For lack of a better word, I will call that his "soul." This sounds like cool research, but based on my experiences I think that the most we will get is a smarter computer.
I realize this is all anecdotal - I don't know any way you could make something this fuzzy reproducible - but anecdotal evidence is generally quite convincing to the one telling the anecdote:)
For what it's worth, I've noticed a considerable improvement in filesystem speed from X.1 to X.2. Pop-pop used to take about 5-10 seconds to load up it's data files on my TiBook, now loads in about 2.
I have a friend who works at Jefferson National Labs (I go to church with him) who is some kind of particle physicist. Recently, I talked him into trying OS X on his Mac at home. He's now totally hooked on OS X. In fact, he described it as "a bright spot in an otherwise humdrum life."
Basically, it lets him have his cake and eat it too.
My family owns three, and maybe a fourth if I ever got around to putting some more memory in my 6400.
Okay, so it's not a speed demon, but it will run OS X once you get it to boot.
For what it's worth, Chick-Fil-A has basically grown this way to be a HUGE company. No debt, not publically traded. All those Chick-Fil-A's you see are OWNED by the corporation, not franchisees. Truett Cathy is a very wealthy man, thank you. And all that without having some VC force him to be open on Sundays! Go figure.:)
book at Barnes and Noble. It does a
reasonable job of covering everything
you need to know
to start developing in JSP using PostgreSQL and Tomcat.
(Although Amazon lists it as not yet published, it's
definitely available elsewhere.)It seems like the idea
behind this book is very similar to the idea behind the book reviewed.
I can't really give the book a whole-heartedly positive review since it
spends WAY too much time talking about the theoretical considerations behind
minor components (like the Apache web server used to redirect
requests to the tomcat servers) and WAY too many pages trying
to sell me on the tools this guy likes -- even when they happen
to be the tools I'm already using.
However, this book does one thing that I've had a hard time finding: giving an end-to-end discussion of how to build an app with JSP.
It talks about JSP, JDBC, Java beans (as used in JSP development rather
than as they are used in swing development)
and a little about java in general,
PostgreSQL and so forth.
To my way of thinking, the biggest problem with Java is that information
about the platform is fragmented into so many books that it's hard to
figure out how to use the stuff. This book overcomes that tendency to some degree.
So, take a look. If you -- like me -- are an old perl hacker trying to update your skills and do development "right", it might be a good purchase.
Actually, even this is arguable. With competent administrators, continuing hardware support is probably just a few thousand a year for several servers (replacing hard drives, the occasional memory DIMM, etc.).
The hardware support you seem to be speaking of is the "sucker-grade" support that manufacturers sell with multi-thousand-dollar/year pricetags just for the contingency that something will break.
I'm tempted to ask how long you've been in the industry to say this.
The specific system I had in mind when writing this was an old HP3000 minicomputer from Way Back In The Day. The 500MB disk drives weighed in at over 100lbs. each. HP (this is the old HP, not the new and sucky HP) hated continuing to support it because they no longer made the parts that the system required. On more than one occasion, they had to hire outside consultants (in their sixties) to do the repairs. And often these guys got their parts out of junked 3000's. Needless to say, this came at a high cost. HP was charging us over $100,000/yr to support this beast, yet there was no way we could do it ourselves because we lacked the skills - which were I must tell you quite a bit more than replacing the occasional DIMM - and the parts. In fact, to replace one of these 100 lb. rack-mounted hard drives, the HP techs used a small hand-powered crane that attached to a special mounting bracket on the top of the rack.
No, Virginia, I don't think a small college IS department could have supported this without some serious help from HP. And, lest you think we could have gone Time & Materials, let me point out that if you go T&M the vendor is under no obligation to provide you service for a particular outage if they don't find it convenient. And, did I mention that over 100 people depended on this box to do their jobs daily, and if the box went down they couldn't work? Salary costs alone for outage were in the tens of thousands per day.
We replaced it with a new HP mini for $75,000. Maintenace was only $3000/yr.
I don't care how expensive those old unix systems were (when they were new), replacing them with ANYTHING costs more than simply continuing to use the existing machines that are already owned.
Actually, you're very wrong here.
In Enterprise systems, you have to have hardware support - you can't just assume that the box will keep working or that you will be able to fix it. It is not at all uncommon for the hardware support costs on a very old box to be substantially more than it would cost to replace the box.
This is part of how OEM's encourage people to upgrade - the older the boxes get, the more the support cost, until finally the upgrade is the thing that makes the most sense.
Often, replacing old hardware Just Makes Sense.It's kind of like the point you reach with a car where the repair bills are more than a car payment would be.
I am a Worldcom employee, and here's my question, that I cannot seem to find an answer to anywhere. What does this mean to employees? I find lots about investors, bankers, and bond-holders, but very little about employees.
In the article, they mention another 28% layoff coming. I've managed to survive 4 of these now - how much longer can I last? Has anyone seen more concrete information on this layoff?
If Apple were really with it, they'd port it to x86 and start yanking Windows customers over in droves. Most consumers don't want to pay for Apple's overpriced hardware.
Uh-huh.
Cheap, IDE Hard Drive... $100 CompUSA BareBones System... $400 Monitor... $100 Keyboard, Mouse, etc. $50 Windows NT, 100 User license... $5000
Knowing that your hardware will work with your OS?... Priceless.
Reality check, Linux-boy. Do you have any idea how much corporations pay for Compaq servers? Or even slow, frankly crappy Suns? (Yeah, they've got IO bandwidth, but there's no question that Sun has fallen behind the technology curve.) Frankly, the Xserve is pretty competitive.
Currently, my church is almost entirely a PC shop (although I have snuck a mac os X server in.) However, the availability of tools like iMovie is making it increasingly atractive to move to Mac. One thing we've long wanted to do was real time web casting of our service... well, guess what - if we can get the software free for the mac, and the mac has built-in firewire, and everything works out of the box for the mac, we'll buy a mac to do it.
And, unlike OS9, Mac OS X is really superior to Windows. Once Macs get in the door, they stand a real chance of taking over. So, where's the profit in giving away Windows software again?
I can't confirm, but I believe that this 150 million was actually the result of the settlement of a lawsuit. In other words, calling it an "investment" instead of a settlement was just a way of letting Microsoft treat the expense as a capital investment instead of an expense. Sound like Worldcom?
Think about it. Microsoft has the most expensive console hardware in the business, which they try to make up for with game revenues. If these become cheap linux boxes, that means many get sold at a loss and no games get sold with them. Short form: this could drive Xbox out of business.
Sony, because of the nature of their hardware, is much less vulnerable than microsoft here. (It might also be nintendo.)
It appears that the producer actually makes reference to Cage in the credits - in fact, gives him credit for the track. In that light, this would seem to be at least somewhat derivative. Still absurd, but not quite as absurd as it would seem otherwise.
This shoulda been asked already, but I don't see it. What's next? Google has consistently added more and better "convenience" features than any other search engine. What's the next big thing? Are there any fundamental technological changes coming?
They probably don't even have to have an office there.. it's probably enough for them to have ever sent a salesperson to Iowa for the products in question (thus transacting business in IA.) They have also presumably purchsed advertising on IA TV stations etc.
Second, piracy nurtures organised crime. Very often the money that is
paid for pirate CDs will be channelled into the drugs trade, money
laundering or other forms of serious organised criminal activity.
Let's think this through for a second... why does organized crime import drugs? BECAUSE THEY CAN MAKE A LOT OF MONEY AT IT. They don't need to seel pirated software to make money, they are already making money selling drugs. How on earth could you argue that pirated CD's would pay for furthering the drug trade? I mean, is IFPI seriously proposing that there is some kind of global conspiracy trying to addict our citizens to drugs at their own expense?
And... isn't money laundering something that makes money on its own too? In fact, the only relationship between money laundering and CD IP theft seems to be that, if there were no copyright, there would be no need to launder the money made.
In fact, wouldn't the best way to cut off the legs of organized crime in this area be legalization, or, heaven forfend, reasonable prices from the recording industry?
If these are the best arguments against piracy, I think I'll go steal some music now.
Of course, you need to have computers first. Then you need to have electrical power. Then, to get reliable electrical power, you need a way to get equipment and fossil fuels or whatever to the place. And, oh yeah, you have to have an industrial plant to build and fund all this stuff.
They don't call it the "developing world" for nothing dude.
The article makes an assumption that I don't think is very good - specifically, it assumes that a government should pick one OS and stick with it. In fact, that's the WORST thing a government can do. If one picks a single OS/Office combo, then you're stuck with it and you create an environment of increasing incompatibility with the rest of the world.
What we need is not a better monoculture, but a polyculture (is that a word?) In a polyculture, one company (MS) can't create a format that's impossible for anyone else to implement properly and expect it to be widely used, because users will EXPECT interoperability. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot. By the same token, in a polyculture you have many different products that foster true innovation. I mean... as much as office sucks, some parts of it have been truly innovative (some parts of Outlook, Excel.)
Hell, in a monoculture half the time software isn't compatible with its previous version (think Office 95 vs. office 97.)
I wouldn't want any government to mandate *one* operating system. Instead, I think that governments should mandate operating system diversity. That's the way to get true, robust reliability and ultimately save money.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, you know virtually nothing about history and even less about Christianity to say this.
Claim 1: That Christianity didn't gain more than a small foothold until after the fall of the Roman empire. This is simply not true. In fact, Christianity seems to have been a force to reckon with as early as 115 in parts of the empire - witness the letter of Pliny the Younger (in Egypt) asking how to do deal with it. In fact, Starting in the early 300s, Christianity was THE official religion of the empire. However, the Western Empire didn't fall until (generally accepted date) 476CE and the Eastern Empire persisted in one form or another until almost 1500.
Claim 2: That Christians invented their religion in response to suffering, to develop a fantasy afterlife with no suffering. Here, you display a severe lack of Knowledge of the New Testament. In fact, the early Christians were severely persecuted. We know that at least three of the major early leaders were executed by the authorities before 70 (Peter, Paul and James) and we know that the leaders were again and again imprisioned for their faith. We have numerous books that seem to be written by and for people undergoing serious persecution - e.g. Revelation. (Also, consider Matthew 24). And there are about a million side references in Paul to persevering through persecution. In fact, that seems to be one of the major recurring themes of the New Testament. It was not until the end of the third century that being a Christian was even LEGAL - it was largely illegal because worshiping "King Jesus" was seen, across the empire, as a threat to the imperial cult and to the emperor.
Claim 3: that all these "rediculous" (sic) laws came up out of a desire to avoid hell. In fact, the specific "laws" you mention are specifically denied in the New Testament. For example:
No responsible theologian would claim that you were required to go to church on Sundays, although most would say that it is a good idea.Look: You are trying to judge a religious faith - which is ultimately a set of propositions - by the actions of relatively few of its adherents. This is not fair - ultimately the propositions can stand or fall on their own. And the main proposition is the fact of Jesus' resurrection. I have found that, if you actually approach this issue with rigor, you are forced to the conclusion that Jesus did rise from the dead (the best efforts of certain "scholars" notwithstanding.) I was not raised in the church, I came to that conclusion as an adult. Why don't you stop focusing on peripheral issues and instead look at the core of the faith?
I am the father of two one-year-old identical twins. Although they look exactly alike and share many gross, physical characteristics (size, athletic ability, etc.) in many respects they play very differently. Madeline is much more bookish, likes to site and "hang out", and is generally a thinker. Rebecca is an adventurer, likes to wrestle with her brother, jump on the bed, and dance to Jazz music. No, I'm not making any of this up or projecting it - others have observed the same trends.
Even before they were born, these trends were observable. Rebecca would respond (in the womb) to high energy, big band music. Madeline would respond best to classical - she particurly liked Bach. I ran the experiment again and again - Swing and Rebecca would Kick, Bach and Madeline would kick. (Yes, you can tell which is which if you get an ultrasound.)
Although my girls are genetically identical, they have been very different as long as we can determine, and these differences do not seem to be easily attributable to environmental factors (What is really so different about one side of a uterus from another? And, believe me, when you have twins there is not a lot of time for individual attention. Mostly, you are dealing with both of them in the same way at the same time.)
The point is that, although genetics are obviously important, there seems to be more to a human being than just his genetic code and experiences. For lack of a better word, I will call that his "soul." This sounds like cool research, but based on my experiences I think that the most we will get is a smarter computer.
I realize this is all anecdotal - I don't know any way you could make something this fuzzy reproducible - but anecdotal evidence is generally quite convincing to the one telling the anecdote :)
For what it's worth, I've noticed a considerable improvement in filesystem speed from X.1 to X.2. Pop-pop used to take about 5-10 seconds to load up it's data files on my TiBook, now loads in about 2.
Basically, it lets him have his cake and eat it too.
The features of OS X would be great for INTERFACING to a phone. We don't need to assume the author is a dweeb.
My family owns three, and maybe a fourth if I ever got around to putting some more memory in my 6400. Okay, so it's not a speed demon, but it will run OS X once you get it to boot.
For what it's worth, Chick-Fil-A has basically grown this way to be a HUGE company. No debt, not publically traded. All those Chick-Fil-A's you see are OWNED by the corporation, not franchisees. Truett Cathy is a very wealthy man, thank you. And all that without having some VC force him to be open on Sundays! Go figure. :)
I can't really give the book a whole-heartedly positive review since it spends WAY too much time talking about the theoretical considerations behind minor components (like the Apache web server used to redirect requests to the tomcat servers) and WAY too many pages trying to sell me on the tools this guy likes -- even when they happen to be the tools I'm already using.
However, this book does one thing that I've had a hard time finding: giving an end-to-end discussion of how to build an app with JSP. It talks about JSP, JDBC, Java beans (as used in JSP development rather than as they are used in swing development) and a little about java in general, PostgreSQL and so forth. To my way of thinking, the biggest problem with Java is that information about the platform is fragmented into so many books that it's hard to figure out how to use the stuff. This book overcomes that tendency to some degree.
So, take a look. If you -- like me -- are an old perl hacker trying to update your skills and do development "right", it might be a good purchase.
The specific system I had in mind when writing this was an old HP3000 minicomputer from Way Back In The Day. The 500MB disk drives weighed in at over 100lbs. each. HP (this is the old HP, not the new and sucky HP) hated continuing to support it because they no longer made the parts that the system required. On more than one occasion, they had to hire outside consultants (in their sixties) to do the repairs. And often these guys got their parts out of junked 3000's. Needless to say, this came at a high cost. HP was charging us over $100,000/yr to support this beast, yet there was no way we could do it ourselves because we lacked the skills - which were I must tell you quite a bit more than replacing the occasional DIMM - and the parts. In fact, to replace one of these 100 lb. rack-mounted hard drives, the HP techs used a small hand-powered crane that attached to a special mounting bracket on the top of the rack.
No, Virginia, I don't think a small college IS department could have supported this without some serious help from HP. And, lest you think we could have gone Time & Materials, let me point out that if you go T&M the vendor is under no obligation to provide you service for a particular outage if they don't find it convenient. And, did I mention that over 100 people depended on this box to do their jobs daily, and if the box went down they couldn't work? Salary costs alone for outage were in the tens of thousands per day.
We replaced it with a new HP mini for $75,000. Maintenace was only $3000/yr.
Welcome to enterprise computing. Doesn't it suck?
In Enterprise systems, you have to have hardware support - you can't just assume that the box will keep working or that you will be able to fix it. It is not at all uncommon for the hardware support costs on a very old box to be substantially more than it would cost to replace the box. This is part of how OEM's encourage people to upgrade - the older the boxes get, the more the support cost, until finally the upgrade is the thing that makes the most sense.
Often, replacing old hardware Just Makes Sense.It's kind of like the point you reach with a car where the repair bills are more than a car payment would be.
Actually, according to this story, the talks for a debt equity swap fell through. One might still be negotiated in Bankruptcy though.
I do work for UUNET ... of course, Worldcom has been steadily assimilating UUNet, so who knows...
I am a Worldcom employee, and here's my question, that I cannot seem to find an answer to anywhere. What does this mean to employees? I find lots about investors, bankers, and bond-holders, but very little about employees.
In the article, they mention another 28% layoff coming. I've managed to survive 4 of these now - how much longer can I last? Has anyone seen more concrete information on this layoff?
Reality check, Linux-boy. Do you have any idea how much corporations pay for Compaq servers? Or even slow, frankly crappy Suns? (Yeah, they've got IO bandwidth, but there's no question that Sun has fallen behind the technology curve.) Frankly, the Xserve is pretty competitive.
And, unlike OS9, Mac OS X is really superior to Windows. Once Macs get in the door, they stand a real chance of taking over. So, where's the profit in giving away Windows software again?
I can't confirm, but I believe that this 150 million was actually the result of the settlement of a lawsuit. In other words, calling it an "investment" instead of a settlement was just a way of letting Microsoft treat the expense as a capital investment instead of an expense. Sound like Worldcom?
Sony, because of the nature of their hardware, is much less vulnerable than microsoft here. (It might also be nintendo.)
It appears that the producer actually makes reference to Cage in the credits - in fact, gives him credit for the track. In that light, this would seem to be at least somewhat derivative. Still absurd, but not quite as absurd as it would seem otherwise.
This shoulda been asked already, but I don't see it. What's next? Google has consistently added more and better "convenience" features than any other search engine. What's the next big thing? Are there any fundamental technological changes coming?
They probably don't even have to have an office there .. it's probably enough for them to have ever sent a salesperson to Iowa for the products in question (thus transacting business in IA.) They have also presumably purchsed advertising on IA TV stations etc.
Would that statute be binding? The requirement for full credence is constitutional - can a congressional law controvert it?
And ... isn't money laundering something that makes money on its own too? In fact, the only relationship between money laundering and CD IP theft seems to be that, if there were no copyright, there would be no need to launder the money made.
In fact, wouldn't the best way to cut off the legs of organized crime in this area be legalization, or, heaven forfend, reasonable prices from the recording industry?
If these are the best arguments against piracy, I think I'll go steal some music now.
They don't call it the "developing world" for nothing dude.
What we need is not a better monoculture, but a polyculture (is that a word?) In a polyculture, one company (MS) can't create a format that's impossible for anyone else to implement properly and expect it to be widely used, because users will EXPECT interoperability. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot. By the same token, in a polyculture you have many different products that foster true innovation. I mean ... as much as office sucks, some parts of it have been truly innovative (some parts of Outlook, Excel.)
Hell, in a monoculture half the time software isn't compatible with its previous version (think Office 95 vs. office 97.)
I wouldn't want any government to mandate *one* operating system. Instead, I think that governments should mandate operating system diversity. That's the way to get true, robust reliability and ultimately save money.