While the embryos all do indeed have the potential to one day live independent lives, one shouldn't deny the fact that at best MOST of them will die, and, possibly ALL of them might die. Many, many, many embryos die for one successful implantation. At least the friend represents an already independent life that will definitely live if you help him. There is no possible way to save a single embryo without being complicit in the murder of many more. This seems like an effort to push the problem of what to do with all these embryos back on pro-lifers. Sorry, but the vast majority of these embryos are doomed because of those who created them outside of the womb, not because of those who objected to this abuse of life from the beginning.
Perhaps, he is counting the pagefile and the hibernation file. When Windows XP first came out, the low-end PCs would have about 128 MB RAM, and Hibernation wasn't touted much. Now PCs have a lot more RAM and Hibernation/ Standby are featured more prominently. If the reviewer has 2 GB RAM, that's 4 gigs combined for the page file and hibernation file.
Dell Dimension 4100 1.1 GHz P3 512 MB 160 GB HDD slot-loading DVD player and red ATARI sticker running Windows Server 2003 - file/ ftp server, remote desktoping, jukebox, backup storage, plaything
Dell Latitude D600 1.3 GHz P-M 512 MB 40 GB HDD running Windows XP Pro - general purpose computer
IBM Thinkpad X40 1.2 GHz P-M 512 MB 40 GB HDD running Windows XP Pro - work-supplied computer
D-Link 4 port wireless-G router
Roommate runs his Gateway desktop and Compaq laptop on network, too.
I haven't spent much on computers yet, although I did invest in a Dell 20.1 inch LCD monitor, so at least it all looks good:-). It's nice because it has four video inputs- I hook the PS2 up to it and just play from my desk. I have a 1/8 inch stereo cable coming up from the desktop, which is hooked up to my 5.1 speakers, so I can hook it up to the laptop or to the PS2/NES/Dreamcast/whatever else is on the desk (w/ an adapter). My laptop will be over 3 years-old at the end of the year, so I'll prolly get a new one if there's money and Vista's out.
My company will be happy to do that once Solaris or OpenBSD run Project, Visio, Minitab, Essbase, SKF Machine Analyst, OrgPlus, Goldmine, and Business Objects.
An administrator worth his or her weight in salt knows to use systems that can actually run the software the business needs, and secure those configurations as best as possible. Not being able to run essential business software for even a day can be a massive burden.
My regular workout includes DDR. It's fun and, on heavy mode at least, it is a rather good cardiovascular workout. It's also low-impact, and I don't have to go outside in the snow in order to play it. Just to make it more interesting, I often throw in pushups or crunchers between songs.
Some of us really aren't that big of fans of OS X, and are extremely productive under Windows, but would like a sexy piece of hardware like a MacBook or iMac.
I'm strongly considering buying a Mac, but I won't do so until I know for sure Windows will run under it with full hardware support (even if I'm waiting till Vista). I've been trying out my girlfriend's iBook, and, while the OS is nice, I haven't found it to be the dreamboat everybody makes it out to be. Yes, Windows doesn't offer as much "WOW!", but the annoyances for me are mostly small and infrequent.
Despite OS X not really impressing me that much, I'm still enamored by the PowerBook/ MacBook. Thus far, I've found no laptop that offers as much of what I want than a MacBook. I want to get one, I want to give OS X a serious try, but I want the chance to switch back and keep that sweet hardware, too.
Needless to say, Windows was designed as a non-networked, single user system. While they have cobbled together multiuser and network features, the history of Windows continues to plague the platform. Anyway you slice it, the optimal choice would have been to sandbox backwards compatibility and rebuild Windows from scratch (or from a solid network/multiuser code base).. sure the transition period might be painful, but I don't think it would have been nearly as painful as the continued security issues of the current code base.
It'd be too painful.
The issues that maintaining backwards compatiblity presents to Windows are not the same as the issues presented to other OSes, by virtue of the markets that Windows is in. So many businesses would be in big trouble if MS did not make compatibility a top priority. For instance, often software for industrial use costs tens of thousands of dollars, and it might interface with equipment that may cost even more tens of thousands of dollars, or even more. And that equipment might have been programmed using that software over thousands of man-hours. Thus, the investment is enormous.
If the company declines to produce a version supported on Microsoft's latest OS, or they do, but it only works with their latest version of the equipment, that company has lost perhaps millions in an investment. That is, unless the old software is still compatible with the newest OS anyway.
It'd be nice to upgrade everything when a new version is out, but it simply isn't possible. It is often easier, however, to upgrade the operating system of a computer (to take advantage of security enhancements, at least, if not new features), than it is to upgrade some industrial system. Fortunately, Microsoft has made it often possible to do one without doing the other, even if the company who made the industrial system is not coorperative.
Microsoft is the player in the OS market who has done or is doing this for their customers to this extent, and it's because it is where the money is. Their customers are requesting this sort of compatibility.
A real plus of the modern Windows OSes that you really can have it both ways, though. In a well-managed environment using a select set of well-behaved applications, you can run everybody as Limited users, restrict kernel-mode driver installs, and all sorts of other things. But, when you need to loosen the reigns, you can, and that old, misbehaved app will still work. Windows allows companies to standardize on one desktop platform while maintaining legacy compatibility where they need it.
In general programs that parse more, tend to have greater bugs.
Whoa there, cowboy! How to do you know MS programs have to "parse more"? It's possible to have a bloated, more complicated-looking format that might be just as easy or easier than a simpler-looking format to parse. My guess is that parsing MS formats really isn't that difficult or long for MS's algorithms, given how quickly the average office file loads. Even if Office secretly latches onto the OS somehow for a performance boost, loading that file into memory still requires CPU cycles and hard drive reads to load into memory.
I have sort of a similar question. Yahoo still hasn't provided LAUNCHCast support for Safari/ Macintosh (or even Firefox/ IE users on Mac, for that matter) users. My girlfriend has an iBook, and enjoyed using LaunchCast's free service in the past, but now, of course she can't use it. I set her up with an account on my home server, running Server 2k3, so she could try to listen through RDP, but the quality is pretty bad/ it's choppy. Is there anything easy/ free that I could use to set up an audiostream served from my server, so it'll be buffered, so she'll get at least decent sound quality. Even if it has to stop to buffer occasionally, that's better than it just cracking up.
On the same note, I bet this fella could do the same thing. Have some sort of software that just grabs the audio output from the tuner's software, and streams it over his home network. I just have no clue what software to use.
I have USB white blood cells!
on
The USB Wristband
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I just prick my finger, stick it up to the PC and I'm good to go. Great for downloading virus definitions.
The thing is, we don't know if the exact same logic applies in all existance. We only know it applies in our physical universe. It could be a constraint willingly applied by God as he created the universe.
This doesn't work for the same reason that the whole "can God make a rock so big that he cannot lift it" thing doesn't work. If a being is omnipotent in universe X, there's nothing he can't do in universe X. That doesn't mean he can do absolutely anything which is possible in any universe, just that universe which he is omnipotent over. That's not to say that God isn't omnipotent over any other possible realms other than our own universe, but our's is governed by logic which renders your statement impossible in our universe. There can't be something which all but the one person who can do anything in the universe can do, because to be omnipotent means you can do anything possible in the universe. In the same sense, there can be no rock that God cannot lift in our universe, because God is omnipotent in our universe. That rock isn't even a logically possible configuration of matter, because omnipotence entails that God can lift all rocks.
And, it just so happens, Mr. Turing disproved omniscience with his little halting problem. Don't believe me? Then try this on for size:
Turing proved that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible inputs cannot exist, not that other methods could not solve the halting problem (i.e., being able to tell the future, or knowing all possible inputs and being able to try them out instantly- things omnipotence/ omniscience could allow).
You could also foil a supposedly-omniscient god just by asking it to tell you what you'll do next. Whatever the god tells you, do something else.
This is moot if you never can be afforded the opportunity to ask.
"Skadet of Slashdot made great use of a boring Monday morning by transforming an ordinary blurb on Techeblog into a front-page Slashdot article. He even hacked it to include hyperlinks, with a special add-on link to display the blurb in its original German. Do you remember when you actually had to click the links to really know what the story was about? More Slashdotters should integrate the entire article's text into the summary.
I got an IM with a url for some virus/ worm/ exploit from my girlfriend, and it really almost convinced me. It simply said:
"YES!!!! (link next to it, just like a pasted url)"
She says "yes!!" just like that, so my gut feeling was that she found something cool online. Fortunately, I thought better of it when I saw that it was a.com file.
Another time I actually did click on one of those, due to the fact that I was really quite groggy (computer was right next to bed, and I just had been woken up). I was like "ugh...clicky" and clicked on it and it downloaded, and then I started waking up, going, "oh, crap". Fortunately, Windows Firewall blocked it when it tried to phone home, or, er, somebody else, so it wasn't that bad, although, if it was a rootkit, that would still have sucked. Fortunately, I had scheduled to reformat a short time later anyway, just for the heck of it. And even more fortunately now, the bed is really far away from the computer.
That'd be an interesting study, I think...what sort of exploits could be gotten away with where the point of entry is a sleep or intoxicated or otherwise hindered user.
Yeah, for our basic shop floor operations, we could do it. The primary program they use is just remoting into a unix terminal where they enter part numbers, etc. We do that under Windows because we also give users with NT accounts the ability to log in as themselves if they need to, but that could be Linux.
But what about all the other stuff? I mean, that's great if you have the personell in-house to write code, but our company doesn't have that, and it wouldn't really be that cost-effective to hire people that would. And contracting out that work wouldn't really help, because they'd write it and one day something would change and it would stop working the way we needed it to, and they might not be around to support it, so now we'd need a new program to support our changing needs. That's why it's better for us to go with pre-existing solutions, or to somehow leverage a resource we already have. And it happens that those solutions are developed for Windows, by and large. So, while have to pay licensing, we save on staffing by going with Windows.
Another one: the cost of developing replacement applications in-house (or contracting out) for all those apps your company used to use in Windows.
Everybody seesm to think that as long as you have a mail program, office suite, and a web browser, you can do you job. That's not the case in a lot of industries. I work in a manufacturing environment, and we have dozens of specialized programs for different jobs. We have one for TPM. We have another for putting together and keeping track of the forms for transfering hazardous wastes. We have a time and attendance tracking system. Programs for working with PLCs and monitoring machinery- sometimes very much tailored specifically to our machinery. Programs for keeping in line with government regulations. Applications for working with SOX. Programs for managing confined space monitoring devices. Programs for our security system.
Some of these have linux equivilents. Some don't. For those ones that don't have a suitable equivilent, we're screwed.
Even if Linux has equally-good office applications (I disagree with that), that doesn't mean you can always just switch the two.
Not exactly where you're going, but does anybody else think that the (Dragon Quest|Warrior) series is just so much better? I just love the way the locations (and the little mini-dilemmas within) drive the plot, rather than the character's feelings or some crap like that. I never have to worry about the emotional baggage my character is carrying in that game- just about whatever I need to do to help person X in town Y so he'll give me item Z that I need to get to place V.
Also, while simpler-looking, at least Enix (hopefully Sqeenix keeps this up) never really had to completely reinvent their battle system each game because of massive flaws, or the fact that it was boring. Just gentle refinements over 7 (soon 8) games, most of them accumulating to make each successive game even more full-featured than the last. The system is well-balanced and full of fun surprises, and basically always has been.
Also...
* built-in CD burning
* hiding icons in the system tray
* picture and fax viewer
* photo printing wizard
* scanner wizard
* zero-effort wireless setup (w/ SP2, particularly- but at least XP SP0 finally knew what a wireless network was without extra software).
* fast user switching
In all seriousness, I have tons of respect for the Thinkpad line. At work, we've used them in a very demanding environment for years with stellar results (except when people let them get run over or stolen, of course!). I'd take them in a business/ industrial environment in a second over the Latitude line. But I really, really, really want that windows key back. What gives?
Slashdot Mirror
While the embryos all do indeed have the potential to one day live independent lives, one shouldn't deny the fact that at best MOST of them will die, and, possibly ALL of them might die. Many, many, many embryos die for one successful implantation. At least the friend represents an already independent life that will definitely live if you help him. There is no possible way to save a single embryo without being complicit in the murder of many more. This seems like an effort to push the problem of what to do with all these embryos back on pro-lifers. Sorry, but the vast majority of these embryos are doomed because of those who created them outside of the womb, not because of those who objected to this abuse of life from the beginning.
Perhaps, he is counting the pagefile and the hibernation file. When Windows XP first came out, the low-end PCs would have about 128 MB RAM, and Hibernation wasn't touted much. Now PCs have a lot more RAM and Hibernation/ Standby are featured more prominently. If the reviewer has 2 GB RAM, that's 4 gigs combined for the page file and hibernation file.
Dude, I'll take the huge pile of manure any day. I can avoid the big pile; but I'd keep stepping on the little turds and messing up my shoes.
This post is soooooo Dylan Knight Rogers.
Dell Dimension 4100 1.1 GHz P3 512 MB 160 GB HDD slot-loading DVD player and red ATARI sticker running Windows Server 2003 - file/ ftp server, remote desktoping, jukebox, backup storage, plaything
:-). It's nice because it has four video inputs- I hook the PS2 up to it and just play from my desk. I have a 1/8 inch stereo cable coming up from the desktop, which is hooked up to my 5.1 speakers, so I can hook it up to the laptop or to the PS2/NES/Dreamcast/whatever else is on the desk (w/ an adapter). My laptop will be over 3 years-old at the end of the year, so I'll prolly get a new one if there's money and Vista's out.
Dell Latitude D600 1.3 GHz P-M 512 MB 40 GB HDD running Windows XP Pro - general purpose computer
IBM Thinkpad X40 1.2 GHz P-M 512 MB 40 GB HDD running Windows XP Pro - work-supplied computer
D-Link 4 port wireless-G router
Roommate runs his Gateway desktop and Compaq laptop on network, too.
I haven't spent much on computers yet, although I did invest in a Dell 20.1 inch LCD monitor, so at least it all looks good
My company will be happy to do that once Solaris or OpenBSD run Project, Visio, Minitab, Essbase, SKF Machine Analyst, OrgPlus, Goldmine, and Business Objects.
An administrator worth his or her weight in salt knows to use systems that can actually run the software the business needs, and secure those configurations as best as possible. Not being able to run essential business software for even a day can be a massive burden.
It's really funny/ sad, too, because Big Bang theory is perfectly compatible with ID.
My regular workout includes DDR. It's fun and, on heavy mode at least, it is a rather good cardiovascular workout. It's also low-impact, and I don't have to go outside in the snow in order to play it. Just to make it more interesting, I often throw in pushups or crunchers between songs.
Some of us really aren't that big of fans of OS X, and are extremely productive under Windows, but would like a sexy piece of hardware like a MacBook or iMac.
I'm strongly considering buying a Mac, but I won't do so until I know for sure Windows will run under it with full hardware support (even if I'm waiting till Vista). I've been trying out my girlfriend's iBook, and, while the OS is nice, I haven't found it to be the dreamboat everybody makes it out to be. Yes, Windows doesn't offer as much "WOW!", but the annoyances for me are mostly small and infrequent.
Despite OS X not really impressing me that much, I'm still enamored by the PowerBook/ MacBook. Thus far, I've found no laptop that offers as much of what I want than a MacBook. I want to get one, I want to give OS X a serious try, but I want the chance to switch back and keep that sweet hardware, too.
Needless to say, Windows was designed as a non-networked, single user system. While they have cobbled together multiuser and network features, the history of Windows continues to plague the platform. Anyway you slice it, the optimal choice would have been to sandbox backwards compatibility and rebuild Windows from scratch (or from a solid network/multiuser code base).. sure the transition period might be painful, but I don't think it would have been nearly as painful as the continued security issues of the current code base.
It'd be too painful.
The issues that maintaining backwards compatiblity presents to Windows are not the same as the issues presented to other OSes, by virtue of the markets that Windows is in. So many businesses would be in big trouble if MS did not make compatibility a top priority. For instance, often software for industrial use costs tens of thousands of dollars, and it might interface with equipment that may cost even more tens of thousands of dollars, or even more. And that equipment might have been programmed using that software over thousands of man-hours. Thus, the investment is enormous.
If the company declines to produce a version supported on Microsoft's latest OS, or they do, but it only works with their latest version of the equipment, that company has lost perhaps millions in an investment. That is, unless the old software is still compatible with the newest OS anyway.
It'd be nice to upgrade everything when a new version is out, but it simply isn't possible. It is often easier, however, to upgrade the operating system of a computer (to take advantage of security enhancements, at least, if not new features), than it is to upgrade some industrial system. Fortunately, Microsoft has made it often possible to do one without doing the other, even if the company who made the industrial system is not coorperative.
Microsoft is the player in the OS market who has done or is doing this for their customers to this extent, and it's because it is where the money is. Their customers are requesting this sort of compatibility.
A real plus of the modern Windows OSes that you really can have it both ways, though. In a well-managed environment using a select set of well-behaved applications, you can run everybody as Limited users, restrict kernel-mode driver installs, and all sorts of other things. But, when you need to loosen the reigns, you can, and that old, misbehaved app will still work. Windows allows companies to standardize on one desktop platform while maintaining legacy compatibility where they need it.
In general programs that parse more, tend to have greater bugs.
Whoa there, cowboy! How to do you know MS programs have to "parse more"? It's possible to have a bloated, more complicated-looking format that might be just as easy or easier than a simpler-looking format to parse. My guess is that parsing MS formats really isn't that difficult or long for MS's algorithms, given how quickly the average office file loads. Even if Office secretly latches onto the OS somehow for a performance boost, loading that file into memory still requires CPU cycles and hard drive reads to load into memory.
I have sort of a similar question. Yahoo still hasn't provided LAUNCHCast support for Safari/ Macintosh (or even Firefox/ IE users on Mac, for that matter) users. My girlfriend has an iBook, and enjoyed using LaunchCast's free service in the past, but now, of course she can't use it. I set her up with an account on my home server, running Server 2k3, so she could try to listen through RDP, but the quality is pretty bad/ it's choppy. Is there anything easy/ free that I could use to set up an audiostream served from my server, so it'll be buffered, so she'll get at least decent sound quality. Even if it has to stop to buffer occasionally, that's better than it just cracking up.
On the same note, I bet this fella could do the same thing. Have some sort of software that just grabs the audio output from the tuner's software, and streams it over his home network. I just have no clue what software to use.
I just prick my finger, stick it up to the PC and I'm good to go. Great for downloading virus definitions.
The thing is, we don't know if the exact same logic applies in all existance. We only know it applies in our physical universe. It could be a constraint willingly applied by God as he created the universe.
As for a proof against omnipotence, here's one:
All but God can prove this sentence true.
This doesn't work for the same reason that the whole "can God make a rock so big that he cannot lift it" thing doesn't work. If a being is omnipotent in universe X, there's nothing he can't do in universe X. That doesn't mean he can do absolutely anything which is possible in any universe, just that universe which he is omnipotent over. That's not to say that God isn't omnipotent over any other possible realms other than our own universe, but our's is governed by logic which renders your statement impossible in our universe. There can't be something which all but the one person who can do anything in the universe can do, because to be omnipotent means you can do anything possible in the universe. In the same sense, there can be no rock that God cannot lift in our universe, because God is omnipotent in our universe. That rock isn't even a logically possible configuration of matter, because omnipotence entails that God can lift all rocks.
And, it just so happens, Mr. Turing disproved omniscience with his little halting problem. Don't believe me? Then try this on for size:
Turing proved that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible inputs cannot exist, not that other methods could not solve the halting problem (i.e., being able to tell the future, or knowing all possible inputs and being able to try them out instantly- things omnipotence/ omniscience could allow).
You could also foil a supposedly-omniscient god just by asking it to tell you what you'll do next. Whatever the god tells you, do something else.
This is moot if you never can be afforded the opportunity to ask.
"Skadet of Slashdot made great use of a boring Monday morning by transforming an ordinary blurb on Techeblog into a front-page Slashdot article. He even hacked it to include hyperlinks, with a special add-on link to display the blurb in its original German. Do you remember when you actually had to click the links to really know what the story was about? More Slashdotters should integrate the entire article's text into the summary.
I got an IM with a url for some virus/ worm/ exploit from my girlfriend, and it really almost convinced me. It simply said:
.com file.
"YES!!!! (link next to it, just like a pasted url)"
She says "yes!!" just like that, so my gut feeling was that she found something cool online. Fortunately, I thought better of it when I saw that it was a
Another time I actually did click on one of those, due to the fact that I was really quite groggy (computer was right next to bed, and I just had been woken up). I was like "ugh...clicky" and clicked on it and it downloaded, and then I started waking up, going, "oh, crap". Fortunately, Windows Firewall blocked it when it tried to phone home, or, er, somebody else, so it wasn't that bad, although, if it was a rootkit, that would still have sucked. Fortunately, I had scheduled to reformat a short time later anyway, just for the heck of it. And even more fortunately now, the bed is really far away from the computer.
That'd be an interesting study, I think...what sort of exploits could be gotten away with where the point of entry is a sleep or intoxicated or otherwise hindered user.
Except those for whom utopia is an environment free of virtualization :-).
Yeah, for our basic shop floor operations, we could do it. The primary program they use is just remoting into a unix terminal where they enter part numbers, etc. We do that under Windows because we also give users with NT accounts the ability to log in as themselves if they need to, but that could be Linux.
But what about all the other stuff? I mean, that's great if you have the personell in-house to write code, but our company doesn't have that, and it wouldn't really be that cost-effective to hire people that would. And contracting out that work wouldn't really help, because they'd write it and one day something would change and it would stop working the way we needed it to, and they might not be around to support it, so now we'd need a new program to support our changing needs. That's why it's better for us to go with pre-existing solutions, or to somehow leverage a resource we already have. And it happens that those solutions are developed for Windows, by and large. So, while have to pay licensing, we save on staffing by going with Windows.
Another one: the cost of developing replacement applications in-house (or contracting out) for all those apps your company used to use in Windows.
Everybody seesm to think that as long as you have a mail program, office suite, and a web browser, you can do you job. That's not the case in a lot of industries. I work in a manufacturing environment, and we have dozens of specialized programs for different jobs. We have one for TPM. We have another for putting together and keeping track of the forms for transfering hazardous wastes. We have a time and attendance tracking system. Programs for working with PLCs and monitoring machinery- sometimes very much tailored specifically to our machinery. Programs for keeping in line with government regulations. Applications for working with SOX. Programs for managing confined space monitoring devices. Programs for our security system.
Some of these have linux equivilents. Some don't. For those ones that don't have a suitable equivilent, we're screwed.
Even if Linux has equally-good office applications (I disagree with that), that doesn't mean you can always just switch the two.
Not exactly where you're going, but does anybody else think that the (Dragon Quest|Warrior) series is just so much better? I just love the way the locations (and the little mini-dilemmas within) drive the plot, rather than the character's feelings or some crap like that. I never have to worry about the emotional baggage my character is carrying in that game- just about whatever I need to do to help person X in town Y so he'll give me item Z that I need to get to place V.
Also, while simpler-looking, at least Enix (hopefully Sqeenix keeps this up) never really had to completely reinvent their battle system each game because of massive flaws, or the fact that it was boring. Just gentle refinements over 7 (soon 8) games, most of them accumulating to make each successive game even more full-featured than the last. The system is well-balanced and full of fun surprises, and basically always has been.
Is that you, Solid Snake?
Also...
* built-in CD burning
* hiding icons in the system tray
* picture and fax viewer
* photo printing wizard
* scanner wizard
* zero-effort wireless setup (w/ SP2, particularly- but at least XP SP0 finally knew what a wireless network was without extra software).
* fast user switching
Windows Key + D = show desktop
...and those are just the ones I use a billion times a day.
Windows Key + L = lock computer
Windows key + E = open an explorer window
Windows key + R = bring up the Run... dialog
Oh, yeah? Where's your Windows key? :-P
In all seriousness, I have tons of respect for the Thinkpad line. At work, we've used them in a very demanding environment for years with stellar results (except when people let them get run over or stolen, of course!). I'd take them in a business/ industrial environment in a second over the Latitude line. But I really, really, really want that windows key back. What gives?