Well, thanks for not wanting me to be off topic. This is just to address a practical element of the discussion involving "fundamental nature of reality as we know it." A discussion like that is bound to include philosophical/theological/cosmological/whatever elements as a matter of course.
In my case, I capitalized the word God because it's common to do so when talking about this singular concept of the basis or origin of the natural material world and its behavior/characteristics. I'm not Christian; I can just as easily refer to this thing as Brahman or Tao. I guess there really isn't a word that's entirely appropriate--I definitely wasn't talking about a man in the sky.
Even if you're not very religious, if you sat down and tried to imagine what God could possibly be, or what function He/She/It could possibly have, I think this one would be rather high on the list.
I can't imagine that an actual Unix programmer would prefer assembly. Unix is a painful platform for assembly, although it depends on which incarnations you are using. In case you haven't noticed, we're all about C.
Mystery? Gives me a break. If you don't know or understand your partner, it's time to find a new partner. You wouldn't sign a contract without reading it first, would you? Well, you probably would, but you know it's wrong.
It's like saying, "We scientists have figured out what attracts people to good contractual agreements... mystery. Who knows what hidden terms are going to pop out and make your day." What it's all really about is satisfying mutual interest.
It reminds me of that first Star Trek movie with the Voyager craft.
When I considered active SETI, I thought, "Oh, we'll probably send something out, and have it come back to us later, possibly corrupted or altered in some way." That would spark some kind of hysteria about discovering extra terrestrial life until we realize that what we detected was ourselves.
Remember that episode of the Outer Limits where the American astronauts end up back on Earth except tiny and this lady thinks they are invading her home? It's like that.
Master story-tellers know which elements of their story help their audience understand the point of the story. Hacks simply describe things.
What you're describing is valid in a way, but I think you are overly broad and dismissive. Examine the works of JRR Tolkien, for example. The Lord of the Rings was basically the parent of the entire fantasy genre as we know it; most of our fantasy concept sticks close to his original vision.
The Lord of the Rings is interest because it acts as a depiction of his vision of a fantasy world. The novels have almost an entirely definitive value. Could the story have been better? Sure... Could the characters have been greater, more developed? You bet. Tolkien was not about producing that kind of literary effect... he was rolling out a definition, and arguably an important one at that.
We are so inundated with Tolkienesque fantasy that we basically take it for granted. That's what spawns rants like yours about how you're sick of people exposing the same subjects over and over again. You're familiar with the old, so you are upset that the new is strikingly similar to it.
Rampant exposition is characteristic of the fantasy genre. It may be because the authors and their readers are nostalgic for those days of Tolkien where everything is explained as if it were new to the reader (and seriously, if you are in love with the genre, as many passionate devotees are, you never really get sick of hearing these types of things repeated). It could also be because that's simply what fantasy is all about--describing a world of make-believe to other people, hoping that they'll see what you saw and enjoy it just as much.
People take as given that self-sacrifice is good, self-interest is bad, "spirituality" is superior to "materialism", etc.
Most of us learn these truths as children--not because an authority figure told us, but we figured these things out on our own by interacting with our environment. Naturally, society sanctions what is good for society, and if we don't support what is good for society, society fails. We depend on society, so when society fails, we fail and die.
This is just plain offensive. I don't see any parks opening up where robots can go to interact with humans and test new robot products. It just makes me sick, you know... what do they think robots are, anyway? Our Slaves? Ugh.
I'm not going to defend Google from the position of a fan, but only to say how I would feel if I were in that same position.
If I had to design logos for my company based on holiday themes, what do you think I would do when I came across Veteran's Day? I can't think of any appropriate way to symbolize veterans without displaying something explicitly national or military. The holiday doesn't really have any symbols other than American flags and stuff, and that's not too great for public relations as I'm showcasing a particular country's role in a major war. War means killing people. Lots of people. Lots of people whose dead relatives and ancestors (on the other side of the conflict) are now customers of mine.
Personally, I'd want to sweep this one under the rug. Google couldn't do that because of all the bad press it was getting, so they finally drew some army helmets. Sure, it's military equipment, but at least helmets save lives and rarely (if ever) end them. Also, the green little helmet doesn't have to identify any single nation, even though it's an American holiday.
Are these nations known for their defense of liberty? Are their citizens free?
Yes, and no. The concept of society in general is, at its most basic level, the relinquishment of individual freedom in exchange for human gain. To a certain extent, freedom harms a society, just as a certain extent of control would be just as harmful. All of the nations you've listed have prided themselves as being the best nations ever (most free, best society). The USA is no exception among these.
To put it differently, you believe that the USA is "known" for defense of liberty because that's precisely what you were taught to know, and people in your social group have been taught to know the same thing. That doesn't mean that the USA had not done great things for freedom in the past, but it always happens that these examples are affirmed constantly while whatever evil your nation has done goes unmentioned or put in the best light possible. For example, if you were from Iran, you'd probably know Iran as being the birthplace of human rights.
thousands of people have their own private copies of the same damn file.
An obvious problem with a trivial solution. I sincerely believe that Google has figured this one out long ago.
That being said, the real problem isn't redundancy in the data, and your proposed solution of creating a separate website doesn't really change a thing; either the file goes into Gmail or it goes into another web service owned by Google. The front end is different, but on the back end the data all goes to the same place--Google's servers.
On the other hand, the "special website for storing files" option could allow you to trick your users into being satisfied with the use of lossy compression of all their media (eg downgrading image resolution on Flickr). If you tried to do that to e-mail attachments people would have a screaming fit.
"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex." -Aldous Huxley
Apparently people are smarter than I thought. Seriously, God forbid anyone chooses to forgo sex or social interaction leading to sex for something they find more interesting. Say, information and knowledge...
First, fair use will only occur if original works are created and original works will only be created if people have some chance of earning a living from them.
Wrong, try again. Motivation for profit is not what makes people do everything all the time, thank God.
It seems to be that by giving someone the license, even the copyright holder has entered a legal agreement, at least to the person who is holding that license. Perhaps the law doesn't support suing the copyright holder for this reason, but it's immoral at the very least.
Unfortunately for you, that's not the case. The GPL specifies that the source code must be distributed along with the binary or must be made publicly available otherwise. Having access to the source code is one of the four essential software freedoms that the GPL was designed to ensure.
I, for lack of better wording, dated my wife for 3 years via instant messaging. I never physically saw her for the first 3 years we knew each other. I took a lot of crap from a lot of people. We met after 3 years and got married a month after that. We've now been married for just over a year and just had a child. Just because you haven't "seen" a person doesn't make it "fantasy". I know quite a few other people just like me who met their spouse online. Most don't go 3 years before meeting though;)
I've heard a good friend of mine claim that it's the most honest and dignified way of finding a partner: interact with them intellectually and get to know their personality while limiting physical involvement with the person. This kind of goes back to the old principle of "don't have sex before marriage," I guess, but not meeting in person kind of eliminates the temptation to have sex (you can't) and alleviates preoccupations with physical closeness, which can cloud your judgment and convince you to choose the wrong partner.
Every time you want to do something in webmail you have to get a new page, wait, choose, wait, and so forth. With an e-mail client I don't have to wait at all, it's instantaneous.
Hardly. Let's use Gmail as the default example. Of course it takes more time to pull down some XML or what have you from Google's HTTP servers than it does to have your PC fetch the data from your hard drive, but that's disk access time in addition to downloading all your mail. Suppose you only read an e-mail once in its entire life? On Gmail you could have read it and deleted it without ever once having to dump it onto your hard drive, typically in the form of a ridiculous/large mbox file and cough it up back then.
Mail client: Process request -> receive data -> write to disk storage -> read from disk storage (not just your letter, but the whole mailbox needs to be processed by your client) -> wait to render
Gmail: Process request -> receive data -> wait to render
Firefox may take longer to render than your mail client, but that's not the bottleneck here. If your mailbox is sufficiently large, processing the metadata and handling your e-mail can take some time. Google's computers are faster at this than your PC will ever be, so what is it to wait a second or two to download the data?
Or how about adding attachments in webmail? That's even more clumsy.
Gmail. The attachments can upload WHILE you're writing the e-mail too. Let's see your mail program upload attachments before sending the e-mail. They have to get uploaded either way, and the interface isn't any better on either platform.
A bonus feature is that I can have my e-mail client open in the background, periodically checking e-mail, and it will alert me when I have received one or more of them.
Except mail clients typically need to request new mail from the server--aka polling. I would guess that Gmail pushes new mail into your open mailbox, or at least the polling is much more efficient (eg doesn't require authentication every time). You want mail alerts? Take your pick. Leave Firefox open, you're covered, connect to Google Talk, you're covered (Pidgin or the official client alike), download Gmail (official or unofficial versions) notifier, you're covered. Plus you can bet your bonnet that Gmail notifier isn't expending nearly as many system resources as your mail client while idle.
A Windows user boots Ubuntu on a new laptop, say, and gets a low-res 'safe mode' telling them that there's no specific support for their video hardware ("Ubuntu failed to start the windowing system because it was unable to properly configure your hardware").
Out of the box Xorg supports more video cards than Windows does. It also supports the use of generic drivers for standards compliant cards, such as VESA.
They can't download a driver package and update.
Of course they can. ATI and nVidia, the two biggest graphics card vendors provide Linux driver packages you can download. In fact, Ubuntu has a utility that will do this automatically for you.
They can't use a driver off a CD that came with the machine, because there aren't any.
Generally it's the same with Windows. My last computer, a Compaq, didn't come with any CD. The only option was to create a "restore" CD/DVD which amounted to little more than a disk image. Say I want to install a different version of Windows than what the machine was imaged with, where are the drivers?
None of your arguments against X hold water, and of course if you actually put some thought into it, you'd be able to come up with some simple reasons why failsafe mode is useful. What if your X has the right drivers, but the auto detect failed or something you did borked the configuration? With failsafe mode you can revert back to a correct driver setting and recover your desktop rather quickly and painlessly.
You cite Windows as "the superior way," but don't you even realize that Windows has a graphics safe mode for exactly the same reason as Ubuntu has now? If anything Ubuntu is mimicking something Windows has done for over a decade. If the feature were as useless as you claim, why hasn't Microsoft removed that feature by now, and why do I have so much first hand experience utilizing it at home and work?
I hate PC Magazine. I got a free subscription once from some kind of promotion, and I thought it might have been an interesting read for PC users, but actually the entire magazine is only about promoting Windows. Seriously, they should just call it "Windows Magazine" so that people will know what it is.
Java could have been everything on Linux. Total domination, but licensing being the issue, lots of Java-friendly projects found happy homes among the ranks of Python, Mono, Ruby, Perl, what-have-you. Java is here to stay, but it's not an essential part of GNU, Windows, Mac OS, or anything like that. That means it may not actually live forever. It might get crowded out by better tools. Maybe.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, thanks for not wanting me to be off topic. This is just to address a practical element of the discussion involving "fundamental nature of reality as we know it." A discussion like that is bound to include philosophical/theological/cosmological/whatever elements as a matter of course.
In my case, I capitalized the word God because it's common to do so when talking about this singular concept of the basis or origin of the natural material world and its behavior/characteristics. I'm not Christian; I can just as easily refer to this thing as Brahman or Tao. I guess there really isn't a word that's entirely appropriate--I definitely wasn't talking about a man in the sky.
Even if you're not very religious, if you sat down and tried to imagine what God could possibly be, or what function He/She/It could possibly have, I think this one would be rather high on the list.
I can't imagine that an actual Unix programmer would prefer assembly. Unix is a painful platform for assembly, although it depends on which incarnations you are using. In case you haven't noticed, we're all about C.
Mystery? Gives me a break. If you don't know or understand your partner, it's time to find a new partner. You wouldn't sign a contract without reading it first, would you? Well, you probably would, but you know it's wrong.
It's like saying, "We scientists have figured out what attracts people to good contractual agreements... mystery. Who knows what hidden terms are going to pop out and make your day." What it's all really about is satisfying mutual interest.
It reminds me of that first Star Trek movie with the Voyager craft.
When I considered active SETI, I thought, "Oh, we'll probably send something out, and have it come back to us later, possibly corrupted or altered in some way." That would spark some kind of hysteria about discovering extra terrestrial life until we realize that what we detected was ourselves.
Remember that episode of the Outer Limits where the American astronauts end up back on Earth except tiny and this lady thinks they are invading her home? It's like that.
Master story-tellers know which elements of their story help their audience understand the point of the story. Hacks simply describe things.
What you're describing is valid in a way, but I think you are overly broad and dismissive. Examine the works of JRR Tolkien, for example. The Lord of the Rings was basically the parent of the entire fantasy genre as we know it; most of our fantasy concept sticks close to his original vision.
The Lord of the Rings is interest because it acts as a depiction of his vision of a fantasy world. The novels have almost an entirely definitive value. Could the story have been better? Sure... Could the characters have been greater, more developed? You bet. Tolkien was not about producing that kind of literary effect... he was rolling out a definition, and arguably an important one at that.
We are so inundated with Tolkienesque fantasy that we basically take it for granted. That's what spawns rants like yours about how you're sick of people exposing the same subjects over and over again. You're familiar with the old, so you are upset that the new is strikingly similar to it.
Rampant exposition is characteristic of the fantasy genre. It may be because the authors and their readers are nostalgic for those days of Tolkien where everything is explained as if it were new to the reader (and seriously, if you are in love with the genre, as many passionate devotees are, you never really get sick of hearing these types of things repeated). It could also be because that's simply what fantasy is all about--describing a world of make-believe to other people, hoping that they'll see what you saw and enjoy it just as much.
People take as given that self-sacrifice is good, self-interest is bad, "spirituality" is superior to "materialism", etc.
Most of us learn these truths as children--not because an authority figure told us, but we figured these things out on our own by interacting with our environment. Naturally, society sanctions what is good for society, and if we don't support what is good for society, society fails. We depend on society, so when society fails, we fail and die.
The whole target market for these cpus is phone/handhelds/MIDs and very basic systems that need x86 instruction set
I'm sorry, but embedded systems don't need x86. It's kind of silly and sad that this kind of instruction set is getting pushed into that market.
This is just plain offensive. I don't see any parks opening up where robots can go to interact with humans and test new robot products. It just makes me sick, you know... what do they think robots are, anyway? Our Slaves? Ugh.
I'm not going to defend Google from the position of a fan, but only to say how I would feel if I were in that same position.
If I had to design logos for my company based on holiday themes, what do you think I would do when I came across Veteran's Day? I can't think of any appropriate way to symbolize veterans without displaying something explicitly national or military. The holiday doesn't really have any symbols other than American flags and stuff, and that's not too great for public relations as I'm showcasing a particular country's role in a major war. War means killing people. Lots of people. Lots of people whose dead relatives and ancestors (on the other side of the conflict) are now customers of mine.
Personally, I'd want to sweep this one under the rug. Google couldn't do that because of all the bad press it was getting, so they finally drew some army helmets. Sure, it's military equipment, but at least helmets save lives and rarely (if ever) end them. Also, the green little helmet doesn't have to identify any single nation, even though it's an American holiday.
Are these nations known for their defense of liberty? Are their citizens free?
Yes, and no. The concept of society in general is, at its most basic level, the relinquishment of individual freedom in exchange for human gain. To a certain extent, freedom harms a society, just as a certain extent of control would be just as harmful. All of the nations you've listed have prided themselves as being the best nations ever (most free, best society). The USA is no exception among these.
To put it differently, you believe that the USA is "known" for defense of liberty because that's precisely what you were taught to know, and people in your social group have been taught to know the same thing. That doesn't mean that the USA had not done great things for freedom in the past, but it always happens that these examples are affirmed constantly while whatever evil your nation has done goes unmentioned or put in the best light possible. For example, if you were from Iran, you'd probably know Iran as being the birthplace of human rights.
As long as we are using the family analogy, wouldn't Minix be more like an uncle to Linux?
thousands of people have their own private copies of the same damn file.
An obvious problem with a trivial solution. I sincerely believe that Google has figured this one out long ago.
That being said, the real problem isn't redundancy in the data, and your proposed solution of creating a separate website doesn't really change a thing; either the file goes into Gmail or it goes into another web service owned by Google. The front end is different, but on the back end the data all goes to the same place--Google's servers.
On the other hand, the "special website for storing files" option could allow you to trick your users into being satisfied with the use of lossy compression of all their media (eg downgrading image resolution on Flickr). If you tried to do that to e-mail attachments people would have a screaming fit.
sex without social interaction or intelectual interest has a great future.
You read Brave New World? ;)
"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex." -Aldous Huxley
Apparently people are smarter than I thought. Seriously, God forbid anyone chooses to forgo sex or social interaction leading to sex for something they find more interesting. Say, information and knowledge...
I'm sure Phoenix Office is already taken. We're talking lighter, faster, less corporate control. ;]
First, fair use will only occur if original works are created and original works will only be created if people have some chance of earning a living from them.
Wrong, try again. Motivation for profit is not what makes people do everything all the time, thank God.
It seems to be that by giving someone the license, even the copyright holder has entered a legal agreement, at least to the person who is holding that license. Perhaps the law doesn't support suing the copyright holder for this reason, but it's immoral at the very least.
Unfortunately for you, that's not the case. The GPL specifies that the source code must be distributed along with the binary or must be made publicly available otherwise. Having access to the source code is one of the four essential software freedoms that the GPL was designed to ensure.
I, for lack of better wording, dated my wife for 3 years via instant messaging. I never physically saw her for the first 3 years we knew each other. I took a lot of crap from a lot of people. We met after 3 years and got married a month after that. We've now been married for just over a year and just had a child. Just because you haven't "seen" a person doesn't make it "fantasy". I know quite a few other people just like me who met their spouse online. Most don't go 3 years before meeting though ;)
I've heard a good friend of mine claim that it's the most honest and dignified way of finding a partner: interact with them intellectually and get to know their personality while limiting physical involvement with the person. This kind of goes back to the old principle of "don't have sex before marriage," I guess, but not meeting in person kind of eliminates the temptation to have sex (you can't) and alleviates preoccupations with physical closeness, which can cloud your judgment and convince you to choose the wrong partner.
Every time you want to do something in webmail you have to get a new page, wait, choose, wait, and so forth. With an e-mail client I don't have to wait at all, it's instantaneous.
Hardly. Let's use Gmail as the default example. Of course it takes more time to pull down some XML or what have you from Google's HTTP servers than it does to have your PC fetch the data from your hard drive, but that's disk access time in addition to downloading all your mail. Suppose you only read an e-mail once in its entire life? On Gmail you could have read it and deleted it without ever once having to dump it onto your hard drive, typically in the form of a ridiculous/large mbox file and cough it up back then.
Mail client: Process request -> receive data -> write to disk storage -> read from disk storage (not just your letter, but the whole mailbox needs to be processed by your client) -> wait to render
Gmail: Process request -> receive data -> wait to render
Firefox may take longer to render than your mail client, but that's not the bottleneck here. If your mailbox is sufficiently large, processing the metadata and handling your e-mail can take some time. Google's computers are faster at this than your PC will ever be, so what is it to wait a second or two to download the data?
Or how about adding attachments in webmail? That's even more clumsy.
Gmail. The attachments can upload WHILE you're writing the e-mail too. Let's see your mail program upload attachments before sending the e-mail. They have to get uploaded either way, and the interface isn't any better on either platform.
A bonus feature is that I can have my e-mail client open in the background, periodically checking e-mail, and it will alert me when I have received one or more of them.
Except mail clients typically need to request new mail from the server--aka polling. I would guess that Gmail pushes new mail into your open mailbox, or at least the polling is much more efficient (eg doesn't require authentication every time). You want mail alerts? Take your pick. Leave Firefox open, you're covered, connect to Google Talk, you're covered (Pidgin or the official client alike), download Gmail (official or unofficial versions) notifier, you're covered. Plus you can bet your bonnet that Gmail notifier isn't expending nearly as many system resources as your mail client while idle.
A Windows user boots Ubuntu on a new laptop, say, and gets a low-res 'safe mode' telling them that there's no specific support for their video hardware ("Ubuntu failed to start the windowing system because it was unable to properly configure your hardware").
Out of the box Xorg supports more video cards than Windows does. It also supports the use of generic drivers for standards compliant cards, such as VESA.
They can't download a driver package and update.
Of course they can. ATI and nVidia, the two biggest graphics card vendors provide Linux driver packages you can download. In fact, Ubuntu has a utility that will do this automatically for you.
They can't use a driver off a CD that came with the machine, because there aren't any.
Generally it's the same with Windows. My last computer, a Compaq, didn't come with any CD. The only option was to create a "restore" CD/DVD which amounted to little more than a disk image. Say I want to install a different version of Windows than what the machine was imaged with, where are the drivers?
None of your arguments against X hold water, and of course if you actually put some thought into it, you'd be able to come up with some simple reasons why failsafe mode is useful. What if your X has the right drivers, but the auto detect failed or something you did borked the configuration? With failsafe mode you can revert back to a correct driver setting and recover your desktop rather quickly and painlessly.
You cite Windows as "the superior way," but don't you even realize that Windows has a graphics safe mode for exactly the same reason as Ubuntu has now? If anything Ubuntu is mimicking something Windows has done for over a decade. If the feature were as useless as you claim, why hasn't Microsoft removed that feature by now, and why do I have so much first hand experience utilizing it at home and work?
I hate PC Magazine. I got a free subscription once from some kind of promotion, and I thought it might have been an interesting read for PC users, but actually the entire magazine is only about promoting Windows. Seriously, they should just call it "Windows Magazine" so that people will know what it is.
Java could have been everything on Linux. Total domination, but licensing being the issue, lots of Java-friendly projects found happy homes among the ranks of Python, Mono, Ruby, Perl, what-have-you. Java is here to stay, but it's not an essential part of GNU, Windows, Mac OS, or anything like that. That means it may not actually live forever. It might get crowded out by better tools. Maybe.
Its actually Ashwin Navin not Ashwin Narvin.
I have a feeling that both names are about to become equally obscure.