I do not believe that. Can you name a single successful open source project that was started without competent developers?
Linux is definitely an incredibly good programmer. He may not have been a security specialist, but he would not have made the elementary mistakes the Diaspora people are making.
Any religion or government which can't stand some criticism should be banned./quote.
No, they should simply be firmly told that if they do not like it, its their problem. That's one reason governments need to be reigned in by well designed constitutions.
The OSS model has already proven better in this instance.
If Diaspora had been closed source, we would not have known about the vulnerabilities until AFTER they had been exploited - very exploited on a large scale. Because the code is open, it has been reviewed and the flaws spotted while it is still in alpha.
That said, I will still not use this. I am not a real developer and I would be unlikely to make some of the mistakes that these people are making.
Go through the list and count how many are stable, secure democracies. Not Belarus, not Uzbekistan (where they do charming things like boil people to death - read Murder in Samarkand by former British ambassador Craig Murray,), not most of the rest.
I think some of the proprietary databases have licences that forbid publication of unauthorised performance test results, so that part of the comparison is not possible.
In practice your choice is often going to be constrained enough that you only need to compare two or three (what does your employer/hardware/OS/hosting provider support? What has good tools? Cost? Supported by your choice of language? Risk or project company collapsing? Major required features that allow you to immediately rule stuff out?)
Its no often that you are really going to need to compare, for example, SQLite and DB2.
Access and Postgres are entirely different things.
Access is a GUI front end for Microsoft RDBMSes. Postgres is an RDBMS server.
What you actually want to look at are GUI front ends (Kexi, Open Office Base), and the database APIs that various languages have (for the VB side of it).
As I mostly code for websites I use Python with Django which has a fairly nice ORM bundled with it, which is very easy to use for most things. I have no idea about how well creating a database schema in a GUI works, but what little I have seen of it makes it look harder than writing a few lines of simple code. YMMV.
He presents that caricature to show what it all sounds like to those of us who do not understand to them
.
Corrected that for you. Of course a caricature that is designed to sound ridiculous, sounds ridiculous. What does that prove? Creationists come up with equally good caricatures of evolution.
If you want to attack it, state it in accurate, neutral terms, and then argue rationally against it.
It depends on what you mean by "really becomes". Surely "really becomes" in the way you use it means both substance and accident (to put in in Aristotelian terms), but the Church only teaches that the substances changes, not the accident.
It is not even essential to believe this to be a Catholic. Many Catholic theologians do not.
No. Can you imagine any environment in which a sinless being could evolve? Evil pays in evolutionary terms - examples from our own evolution include rape (good way of spreading your genes) and murder (good way of eliminating competition).
Any imaginable environment has some incentives to evolve evil behaviour, therefore aliens will also be fallen. They might be substantially better or worse than us, but they will no be perfect.
Of course there may be some environment that allows pure goodness to evolve, but I think its very unlikely.
As he attacks creationism, and the creationist version of intelligent design, in particular as "bad theology", he obviously does not believe in a literal sin by Adam and Eve.
Actually, science confirms the Christian belief in original sin. A new born baby looks completely innocent, but Christians always held, and science know confirms, that they have inherited tendencies to both good and evil.
I wonder why they are not working with the Unity Linux people? They could contribute to Unity, and Mageia could be simply the most Mandriva like branch of Unity.
With stuff like Ubuntu, I wonder how hard it would be to port the best bits of Mandriva (Control Centre, network applet, etc.) to Ubuntu?
You do realise that economics is a very mathematical subject these days? Most engineers would struggle with the maths used in postgrad economics or financial economics.
Also, the group of doctors who tried to cause explosions in London and Glasgow with "car bombs" made of gas cylinders with petrol poured over them (by gas I mean an inflammable gaseous substance, probably natural gas!)?
A minimal amount of research would tell you that they way in which gas cylinders fail would mean they would not cause a serious explosion or be likely to kill many people.
Reword what he says and replace "political violence" with "terrorism".
I cannot think of any examples of pure terrorism (planting bombs targeted at civilians, hijacking air-craft, kidnapping hostages etc.) achieving much. It has, for example, served to divert resources from front lines to security (LTTE in Sri Lanka), or by provoking an enemy into hurting themselves (Al-Queada), etc.
I have been considering Arch, but I am put off by the lack of package signing. Yes, I know that nothing has gone wrong with this yet, but leaving a hole like that seems to be asking for trouble.
You are quite right. My recent fresh install of Mint XFCE (an Ubuntu derivative) had several problems, mostly from upstream.
One problem I have with Mandriva is that XFCE is not very well setup.
Other distros that interest me have either repos that are missing a lot of stuff or have small communities.
Unity Linux look interesting, but is not there yet AFAIK.
As I said in another comment, Ubuntu's GUI configuration tools are not particularly good (apart from software installation - and you can get Synaptic with other Debian based distros).
I really do not see what is so special about Ubuntu. As far as having a user friendly desktop is concerned, Mandriva is better and Mepis and others at least as good.
I like Ubuntu derived distros largely as an easier way to get those big Debian repos - but that is not going to matter much to the average user.
There are other distros with equally good installer that are more user friendly in some ways, which still manage to contribute code as well.
Consider Mandriva. Much less well funded than Canonical. Better installer. Better config (I find myself needing to edit config files in Ubuntu for stuff I can use the Control Centre GUI in Mandriva). Mandriva all time contributions to Gnome 's are about half of Canonical's, and they have contributed significantly to KDE, and are still doing quite a lot of other stuff http://www.mandriva.com/enterprise/en/company/r-d
I suspect you need small, hungry companies (or at least the threat of them) for competition to help here.
Basic economics. IN markets with a large number of competitors, none can influence prices, and prices drop to the level at which none can make a profit greater than a normal market return on their investment.
In markets with few competitors prices either tend to change slowly or by plain too high.
I am simplifying a lot (if you want more, read a micro-econ text book), but its broadly right.
Actually, they are rather useless. I tried several searches on the "Christian" one and it is useless.
1) It cannot find the Vatican web site. It is probably excluded because it is not conservative enough to conform to their definition of Christianity 2) It produced more relevant results for "eye of the needle" than Google, but Google produced better results for "jesus eye of the needle". 3) Its unreliable 4) It runs on Windows and.NET, definitely unchristian:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I do not believe that. Can you name a single successful open source project that was started without competent developers?
Linux is definitely an incredibly good programmer. He may not have been a security specialist, but he would not have made the elementary mistakes the Diaspora people are making.
Any religion or government which can't stand some criticism should be banned./quote.
No, they should simply be firmly told that if they do not like it, its their problem. That's one reason governments need to be reigned in by well designed constitutions.
The OSS model has already proven better in this instance.
If Diaspora had been closed source, we would not have known about the vulnerabilities until AFTER they had been exploited - very exploited on a large scale. Because the code is open, it has been reviewed and the flaws spotted while it is still in alpha.
That said, I will still not use this. I am not a real developer and I would be unlikely to make some of the mistakes that these people are making.
Go through the list and count how many are stable, secure democracies. Not Belarus, not Uzbekistan (where they do charming things like boil people to death - read Murder in Samarkand by former British ambassador Craig Murray,), not most of the rest.
I think some of the proprietary databases have licences that forbid publication of unauthorised performance test results, so that part of the comparison is not possible.
In practice your choice is often going to be constrained enough that you only need to compare two or three (what does your employer/hardware/OS/hosting provider support? What has good tools? Cost? Supported by your choice of language? Risk or project company collapsing? Major required features that allow you to immediately rule stuff out?)
Its no often that you are really going to need to compare, for example, SQLite and DB2.
Access and Postgres are entirely different things.
Access is a GUI front end for Microsoft RDBMSes. Postgres is an RDBMS server.
What you actually want to look at are GUI front ends (Kexi, Open Office Base), and the database APIs that various languages have (for the VB side of it).
As I mostly code for websites I use Python with Django which has a fairly nice ORM bundled with it, which is very easy to use for most things. I have no idea about how well creating a database schema in a GUI works, but what little I have seen of it makes it look harder than writing a few lines of simple code. YMMV.
He presents that caricature to show what it all sounds like to those of us who do not understand to them
.
Corrected that for you. Of course a caricature that is designed to sound ridiculous, sounds ridiculous. What does that prove? Creationists come up with equally good caricatures of evolution.
If you want to attack it, state it in accurate, neutral terms, and then argue rationally against it.
It depends on what you mean by "really becomes". Surely "really becomes" in the way you use it means both substance and accident (to put in in Aristotelian terms), but the Church only teaches that the substances changes, not the accident.
It is not even essential to believe this to be a Catholic. Many Catholic theologians do not.
All Slashdot religion stories are either outright flamebait, or designed to cater to the atheist prejudices of Slashdotters.
No. Can you imagine any environment in which a sinless being could evolve? Evil pays in evolutionary terms - examples from our own evolution include rape (good way of spreading your genes) and murder (good way of eliminating competition).
Any imaginable environment has some incentives to evolve evil behaviour, therefore aliens will also be fallen. They might be substantially better or worse than us, but they will no be perfect.
Of course there may be some environment that allows pure goodness to evolve, but I think its very unlikely.
As he attacks creationism, and the creationist version of intelligent design, in particular as "bad theology", he obviously does not believe in a literal sin by Adam and Eve.
Actually, science confirms the Christian belief in original sin. A new born baby looks completely innocent, but Christians always held, and science know confirms, that they have inherited tendencies to both good and evil.
I wonder why they are not working with the Unity Linux people? They could contribute to Unity, and Mageia could be simply the most Mandriva like branch of Unity.
With stuff like Ubuntu, I wonder how hard it would be to port the best bits of Mandriva (Control Centre, network applet, etc.) to Ubuntu?
Madnriva is faster, feels more polished, and has a very good control centre, and a better network applet.
The only thing that is better on Kubuntu is software installation, especially through the GUI.
You do realise that economics is a very mathematical subject these days? Most engineers would struggle with the maths used in postgrad economics or financial economics.
You could have suggested "Oracle Open Office" which is (I think) cheaper than MS Office, works exactly like Open Office, but is not free.
Also, the group of doctors who tried to cause explosions in London and Glasgow with "car bombs" made of gas cylinders with petrol poured over them (by gas I mean an inflammable gaseous substance, probably natural gas!)?
A minimal amount of research would tell you that they way in which gas cylinders fail would mean they would not cause a serious explosion or be likely to kill many people.
Reword what he says and replace "political violence" with "terrorism".
I cannot think of any examples of pure terrorism (planting bombs targeted at civilians, hijacking air-craft, kidnapping hostages etc.) achieving much. It has, for example, served to divert resources from front lines to security (LTTE in Sri Lanka), or by provoking an enemy into hurting themselves (Al-Queada), etc.
There is very little that is not in the Ubuntu repos.
This leads to downloading arcane file types that need to be installed by typing a cryptic command into a terminal.
Download a debian package or a binary installer and double click on it in the file manager.
If that fails download the binary and click on it and it runs (Skype for those versions of Linux for which a package is not provided, for example)
The remaining stuff that needs to be compiled is usually aimed at geeks anyway.
Not only to kids usually know the abuser, the abuser is usually a member of their family.
I have been considering Arch, but I am put off by the lack of package signing. Yes, I know that nothing has gone wrong with this yet, but leaving a hole like that seems to be asking for trouble.
You are quite right. My recent fresh install of Mint XFCE (an Ubuntu derivative) had several problems, mostly from upstream.
One problem I have with Mandriva is that XFCE is not very well setup.
Other distros that interest me have either repos that are missing a lot of stuff or have small communities.
Unity Linux look interesting, but is not there yet AFAIK.
As I said in another comment, Ubuntu's GUI configuration tools are not particularly good (apart from software installation - and you can get Synaptic with other Debian based distros).
I really do not see what is so special about Ubuntu. As far as having a user friendly desktop is concerned, Mandriva is better and Mepis and others at least as good.
I like Ubuntu derived distros largely as an easier way to get those big Debian repos - but that is not going to matter much to the average user.
There are other distros with equally good installer that are more user friendly in some ways, which still manage to contribute code as well.
Consider Mandriva. Much less well funded than Canonical. Better installer. Better config (I find myself needing to edit config files in Ubuntu for stuff I can use the Control Centre GUI in Mandriva). Mandriva all time contributions to Gnome 's are about half of Canonical's, and they have contributed significantly to KDE, and are still doing quite a lot of other stuff http://www.mandriva.com/enterprise/en/company/r-d
I suspect you need small, hungry companies (or at least the threat of them) for competition to help here.
Basic economics. IN markets with a large number of competitors, none can influence prices, and prices drop to the level at which none can make a profit greater than a normal market return on their investment.
In markets with few competitors prices either tend to change slowly or by plain too high.
I am simplifying a lot (if you want more, read a micro-econ text book), but its broadly right.
Fine, so try to devise an experiment for the hypothesis "God exists, and God's nature is in accordance with core Christian beliefs".
Actually, they are rather useless. I tried several searches on the "Christian" one and it is useless.
1) It cannot find the Vatican web site. It is probably excluded because it is not conservative enough to conform to their definition of Christianity .NET, definitely unchristian :-)
2) It produced more relevant results for "eye of the needle" than Google, but Google produced better results for "jesus eye of the needle".
3) Its unreliable
4) It runs on Windows and