The point is not what companies DO use. The GP was making the claim that Exchange is unworkable for a company of that size, and I'm pointing out that it can and does work on that scale, and doesn't seem to be crashing and losing all their email once a week as he was implying. Of course they didn't seriously consider other products... it's good business sense to use your own stuff, that way you feel any user pain firsthand. No serious company should operate otherwise.
Uh... the salary at MS is quite competitive with other tech companies... IBM etc... you just have to look at the leaked salary chart from a couple months back and run it through wagerate.com or whatever to see for yourself.
Right... what I meant was, the fundies will keep spouting "facts" that claim to disprove evolution -- usually because they heard Falwell or O'Reilly or someone equally untrustworthy say it first -- and the evolutionists on this board are by and large not conversant enough on the details of every discovery to point out why what they're saying is incorrect. We know intuitively that it IS incorrect, but we can't point to the exact supporting evidence to shut the fundies up. So we just go around in circles, both sides arguing from partial understanding.
"Open Source" traditionally means more than just that you can read the code. It also implies that you have certain rights, such as the right to modify and recompile the code. Also, with Windows, you can't see ALL the code. You can see a pretty small fraction, as I understand it. You certainly can't get your hands on enough to compile a Windows build yourself.
In the organic soup that covered the planet when life was forming, random chemical reactions were occuring all the time. As soon as one of those reactions created an enzyme that catalysed self-replication, life was formed. We haven't observed exactly that because the statistical probability of such an occurance is pretty low. You need something like a planet covered in amino acids to get it to happen in a reasonable time frame, and that's simply not reproducible in a lab. They can only run experiments on a tiny fraction of the mass that was actually involved.
As for one-celled organisms turning into two-celled (and more)... we already see colony behavior in single celled organisms. Mosses, fungi, coral, etc. And from there, on to specialization, and the rest is history.
Whis is why evolutionary theory has been changed to correspond with new information. But you should know that the basics haven't changed (complex things have simpler ancestors, etc).
I love how creationists use this as a BAD thing. "Look at those wiley evolutionists... every time they find something new that doesn't fit, they up and change their theory!!!"
As if that wasn't exactly how science is supposed to work.
I agree, there are imbiciles on both sides, and some relatively deep thinkers as well. I'm sure you'll find some people who believe evolution "just because", and that's really a shame. Nobody should take that kind of assertion on faith... they should educate themselves about how the world they live in operates.
The problem I have with ID is, the so-called "leaders" of the movement make blatantly false assertions in almost every argument. Anytime you hear an ID proponent say, "well, this evidence disproves evolution, but scientists don't want to admit it", they're inevitably misquoting some piece of data, or misinterpreting it, and won't listen to those pointing out the flaws in their arguments. Even when their entire argument is based on misquoting a research paper and they have the error pointed out to them, they'll continue to propagate the lie because their followers will still buy into it. Scientists are more than willing to admit to the potential flaws in their theories, but not to imaginary ones, especially when these people become so insistant in their mistaken claims.
The fact is, no debate between lay-people is going to resolve this. Discussing it on/. is essentially pointless. Neither side wants to be swayed, and neither side really has the expertise to conclusively end the discussion.
Yeah, it definitely does. The gameplay was so wildly creative, too. It seemed like every puzzle contained custom interaction elements, rather than the reusable stock pieces that even great games like Oddworld and Flashback used. Rolling around in a pipe, swinging a cage to break the cord, watching a guard in the reflection of a chandelier... that kind of variety hasn't happened since.
The funny part is that those who oppose the idea of intelligent design will inevitably be more dogmatic, closed minded, faithful, trusting, less willing to do research, less willing to have an intelligent conversation, etc... than 99 percent of people who do accept the idea of creation. (Silly grammer to make the point)
When pro-creation (anti-evolution) individuals make statements like "put a bunch of car parts in your garage and leave it for a year, then see if it's evolved into a Honda", I tend to doubt your assertions. For my own experience, creationists like to THINK they're being logical, but then accuse evolutionists of being "closed minded" when they point out the ridiculous logical flaws and mistaken assumptions in ID or creationism.
Also, the article forgot to mention anything about how they know these birds actually are evolutionary ancestors of modern birds, only that "they just are".
It's a short, summary article in a non-technical journal. If you want a more technical explanation I'm sure you can find one from a source targeted at that level of discussion. But don't assume that the researchers are making it up, just because a five paragraph summary fails to go into detailed technical explanations.
I actually liked Flashback a bit more, for gameplay and visuals. A little less creative with the user interaction, yes, but longer and more solid overall.
No, because HL2 was an amazing game. Hell I'll still break out Deus Ex from time to time, just because it's an extremely entertaining game despite the dated technology... much more entertaining than almost everything that's come out since. There's more to a fun game than using the latest Shader 2.0 X3 specs in the engine.
It's a pretty common piece of rhetoric in the OSS community... I didn't feel the need to spell it out once again:-P
Honestly though, the "free software, paid service" model doesn't necessarily apply only to install-based software. It can work equally well with thin clients. Google could sell support for their Calendar application. In fact, while OSS products allow ANYone to sell support for a product, thin clients pretty much block everyone but the developer from selling support, since nobody else has access to the backend.
Not ALL thick clients are irrelevant. You still need development environments, databases, and office apps that won't suddenly be "down for maintanance" in the middle of the day (and have more features than web-based systems can deliver at present). I'll be the first to say, I think the idea of distributed thin-client applications is fantastic, but there ARE problems that need to be solved first. And even then, how many people are going to accept the "pay per month" model that login-based services will almost certainly bring? The market for installable applications is far from dead.
As for "the whole idea of licenses for OS instances and that being a primary product is effectively dead IMHO"... what?? You still need a system on which to run the thin-client apps, even if that's all you use. And yes, some linux distros give it away for free, but that doesn't mean the idea of the OS as a marketable product is suddenly gone.
Then why is Google switching to image-based ads on 3rd party sites? Their entire hook so far has been that they serve up unobtrusive, text-based ads that fit into the page without being (as) annoying. If they're making enough money, why change that? It seems that this whole "advertise on the web" thing may be yet another bubble. It's trendy for now, so people use it in spite of the fact that accounts will get randomly closed for "click fraud" with no recourse, and in spite of the fact that many people have already learned to block out the "google ads" formatted text block. And as more and more companies enter the space, and Google raises the price for some popular words 100-fold...
You may be right, but there's some things they're doing that lead me to believe the market isn't as stable as you think.
That's actually a really good suggestion. Most advanced degrees will involve coding a functional product, at least if you get into a research lab. And while a real job would probably be prohibited by a Non-Compete from your day job, educational coding usually is not, or at least is easier to get an exception for.
Personally, my other suggestion would be: even though you "know" you can't motivate yourself to work on home projects... try. If you always need some external deadline looming over your head to get anything done, you're never going to succeed at anything but code-monkey jobs. Try using this as an opportunity to train yourself to work in a different way, and you may open up more opportunities down the road.
Bullshit. First off, the fact that we NEED the government to step in and do "monopoly busting" is a flaw in the capitalist system.
Secondly, ask the average driver what brand of engine they have in their car. I doubt you'll get a more meaningful response. They don't answer "gateway" because windows is completely ubiquitous, they answer "gateway" because they aren't a technical user, and don't have a reason to know anything about operating systems.
When you've already got Wal-mart and Dell shipping pcs with Linux installed, and Apple selling Intel-based laptops like hotcakes, you do NOT have a monopoly. The reason more people haven't switched is that, for all their bitching about how horrible Windows is, the consumers are lazy, lazy bastards. It would take too much effort to actually understand a new system, so they go with what they're comfortable with. No amount of government intervention is going to change this. Hell, how many people refuse to upgrade from Windows 98, even today? Last I heard, more than 25% of home users were still running it. You can't blame "Microsoft's monopoly" for that.
it does indeed, but "high end hydroponics shit" sells for a shit ton less than it used to as well... perhaps it's not caused directly by the "war on drugs", but that misguided attempt at limiting personal freedom hasn't done anything to prevent the spread of cheap, pure drugs, either.
Unfortunately, this is how capitalism works in general. And as capitalists go, he's one of the best by far. I tend to blame the system, and people who defend the system in the face of obvious flaws, rather than those who figure out how to play the system and then try to do good with what they make from it.
So basically, they finally realized what the OSS/P2P/Hippie/Thief community (yeah yeah, flame on) has been saying for years: that "illegal" downloads are not actually depriving them of any money, since people use it to test out bands they're unsure of, or discover new music, as often as they just download without paying? But even though the rest of us have been trying to stuff this idea into their tiny little skulls, they have to declare moral victory so they don't lose face?
The effectiveness of a heuristic approach declines rapidly when the target is aware of the heuristic, and actively taking steps to defeat it. In fact, between a publicly stated heuristic (search arab people) and an intelligent enemy, random searches would actually have a BETTER chance of succeeding. If all you have to do in order to get a bomb on a plane is have someone who isn't arab carry it, you can trivially achieve a 100% success rate. With random searches, you always have a chance of being discovered no matter who you have carrying it.
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Gates isn't leaving until well after Vista ships, even if they push it back another year. I don't think he's trying to "avoid" anything.
The point is not what companies DO use. The GP was making the claim that Exchange is unworkable for a company of that size, and I'm pointing out that it can and does work on that scale, and doesn't seem to be crashing and losing all their email once a week as he was implying. Of course they didn't seriously consider other products... it's good business sense to use your own stuff, that way you feel any user pain firsthand. No serious company should operate otherwise.
Uh... the salary at MS is quite competitive with other tech companies... IBM etc... you just have to look at the leaked salary chart from a couple months back and run it through wagerate.com or whatever to see for yourself.
Uh... Microsoft uses Exchange for something like 60,000 employees, and it seems to be working fine for them...
Right... what I meant was, the fundies will keep spouting "facts" that claim to disprove evolution -- usually because they heard Falwell or O'Reilly or someone equally untrustworthy say it first -- and the evolutionists on this board are by and large not conversant enough on the details of every discovery to point out why what they're saying is incorrect. We know intuitively that it IS incorrect, but we can't point to the exact supporting evidence to shut the fundies up. So we just go around in circles, both sides arguing from partial understanding.
"Open Source" traditionally means more than just that you can read the code. It also implies that you have certain rights, such as the right to modify and recompile the code. Also, with Windows, you can't see ALL the code. You can see a pretty small fraction, as I understand it. You certainly can't get your hands on enough to compile a Windows build yourself.
In the organic soup that covered the planet when life was forming, random chemical reactions were occuring all the time. As soon as one of those reactions created an enzyme that catalysed self-replication, life was formed. We haven't observed exactly that because the statistical probability of such an occurance is pretty low. You need something like a planet covered in amino acids to get it to happen in a reasonable time frame, and that's simply not reproducible in a lab. They can only run experiments on a tiny fraction of the mass that was actually involved.
As for one-celled organisms turning into two-celled (and more)... we already see colony behavior in single celled organisms. Mosses, fungi, coral, etc. And from there, on to specialization, and the rest is history.
Whis is why evolutionary theory has been changed to correspond with new information. But you should know that the basics haven't changed (complex things have simpler ancestors, etc).
I love how creationists use this as a BAD thing. "Look at those wiley evolutionists... every time they find something new that doesn't fit, they up and change their theory!!!"
As if that wasn't exactly how science is supposed to work.
I agree, there are imbiciles on both sides, and some relatively deep thinkers as well. I'm sure you'll find some people who believe evolution "just because", and that's really a shame. Nobody should take that kind of assertion on faith... they should educate themselves about how the world they live in operates.
/. is essentially pointless. Neither side wants to be swayed, and neither side really has the expertise to conclusively end the discussion.
The problem I have with ID is, the so-called "leaders" of the movement make blatantly false assertions in almost every argument. Anytime you hear an ID proponent say, "well, this evidence disproves evolution, but scientists don't want to admit it", they're inevitably misquoting some piece of data, or misinterpreting it, and won't listen to those pointing out the flaws in their arguments. Even when their entire argument is based on misquoting a research paper and they have the error pointed out to them, they'll continue to propagate the lie because their followers will still buy into it. Scientists are more than willing to admit to the potential flaws in their theories, but not to imaginary ones, especially when these people become so insistant in their mistaken claims.
The fact is, no debate between lay-people is going to resolve this. Discussing it on
Yeah, it definitely does. The gameplay was so wildly creative, too. It seemed like every puzzle contained custom interaction elements, rather than the reusable stock pieces that even great games like Oddworld and Flashback used. Rolling around in a pipe, swinging a cage to break the cord, watching a guard in the reflection of a chandelier... that kind of variety hasn't happened since.
The funny part is that those who oppose the idea of intelligent design will inevitably be more dogmatic, closed minded, faithful, trusting, less willing to do research, less willing to have an intelligent conversation, etc... than 99 percent of people who do accept the idea of creation. (Silly grammer to make the point)
When pro-creation (anti-evolution) individuals make statements like "put a bunch of car parts in your garage and leave it for a year, then see if it's evolved into a Honda", I tend to doubt your assertions. For my own experience, creationists like to THINK they're being logical, but then accuse evolutionists of being "closed minded" when they point out the ridiculous logical flaws and mistaken assumptions in ID or creationism.
Also, the article forgot to mention anything about how they know these birds actually are evolutionary ancestors of modern birds, only that "they just are".
It's a short, summary article in a non-technical journal. If you want a more technical explanation I'm sure you can find one from a source targeted at that level of discussion. But don't assume that the researchers are making it up, just because a five paragraph summary fails to go into detailed technical explanations.
I actually liked Flashback a bit more, for gameplay and visuals. A little less creative with the user interaction, yes, but longer and more solid overall.
I always found the Oddworld games to be visually stunning. Abe's Exodus beats every game on their list except Yoshi's Island, for me.
No, because HL2 was an amazing game. Hell I'll still break out Deus Ex from time to time, just because it's an extremely entertaining game despite the dated technology... much more entertaining than almost everything that's come out since. There's more to a fun game than using the latest Shader 2.0 X3 specs in the engine.
It's a pretty common piece of rhetoric in the OSS community... I didn't feel the need to spell it out once again :-P
Honestly though, the "free software, paid service" model doesn't necessarily apply only to install-based software. It can work equally well with thin clients. Google could sell support for their Calendar application. In fact, while OSS products allow ANYone to sell support for a product, thin clients pretty much block everyone but the developer from selling support, since nobody else has access to the backend.
Not ALL thick clients are irrelevant. You still need development environments, databases, and office apps that won't suddenly be "down for maintanance" in the middle of the day (and have more features than web-based systems can deliver at present). I'll be the first to say, I think the idea of distributed thin-client applications is fantastic, but there ARE problems that need to be solved first. And even then, how many people are going to accept the "pay per month" model that login-based services will almost certainly bring? The market for installable applications is far from dead.
As for "the whole idea of licenses for OS instances and that being a primary product is effectively dead IMHO"... what?? You still need a system on which to run the thin-client apps, even if that's all you use. And yes, some linux distros give it away for free, but that doesn't mean the idea of the OS as a marketable product is suddenly gone.
Then why is Google switching to image-based ads on 3rd party sites? Their entire hook so far has been that they serve up unobtrusive, text-based ads that fit into the page without being (as) annoying. If they're making enough money, why change that? It seems that this whole "advertise on the web" thing may be yet another bubble. It's trendy for now, so people use it in spite of the fact that accounts will get randomly closed for "click fraud" with no recourse, and in spite of the fact that many people have already learned to block out the "google ads" formatted text block. And as more and more companies enter the space, and Google raises the price for some popular words 100-fold...
You may be right, but there's some things they're doing that lead me to believe the market isn't as stable as you think.
That's actually a really good suggestion. Most advanced degrees will involve coding a functional product, at least if you get into a research lab. And while a real job would probably be prohibited by a Non-Compete from your day job, educational coding usually is not, or at least is easier to get an exception for.
Personally, my other suggestion would be: even though you "know" you can't motivate yourself to work on home projects... try. If you always need some external deadline looming over your head to get anything done, you're never going to succeed at anything but code-monkey jobs. Try using this as an opportunity to train yourself to work in a different way, and you may open up more opportunities down the road.
Bullshit. First off, the fact that we NEED the government to step in and do "monopoly busting" is a flaw in the capitalist system.
Secondly, ask the average driver what brand of engine they have in their car. I doubt you'll get a more meaningful response. They don't answer "gateway" because windows is completely ubiquitous, they answer "gateway" because they aren't a technical user, and don't have a reason to know anything about operating systems.
When you've already got Wal-mart and Dell shipping pcs with Linux installed, and Apple selling Intel-based laptops like hotcakes, you do NOT have a monopoly. The reason more people haven't switched is that, for all their bitching about how horrible Windows is, the consumers are lazy, lazy bastards. It would take too much effort to actually understand a new system, so they go with what they're comfortable with. No amount of government intervention is going to change this. Hell, how many people refuse to upgrade from Windows 98, even today? Last I heard, more than 25% of home users were still running it. You can't blame "Microsoft's monopoly" for that.
it does indeed, but "high end hydroponics shit" sells for a shit ton less than it used to as well... perhaps it's not caused directly by the "war on drugs", but that misguided attempt at limiting personal freedom hasn't done anything to prevent the spread of cheap, pure drugs, either.
Why can't it be both? You gave no reasons whatsoever...
Unfortunately, this is how capitalism works in general. And as capitalists go, he's one of the best by far. I tend to blame the system, and people who defend the system in the face of obvious flaws, rather than those who figure out how to play the system and then try to do good with what they make from it.
If you can only find expensive drugs cut with who knows what, you just aren't buying from the right people...
So basically, they finally realized what the OSS/P2P/Hippie/Thief community (yeah yeah, flame on) has been saying for years: that "illegal" downloads are not actually depriving them of any money, since people use it to test out bands they're unsure of, or discover new music, as often as they just download without paying? But even though the rest of us have been trying to stuff this idea into their tiny little skulls, they have to declare moral victory so they don't lose face?
The effectiveness of a heuristic approach declines rapidly when the target is aware of the heuristic, and actively taking steps to defeat it. In fact, between a publicly stated heuristic (search arab people) and an intelligent enemy, random searches would actually have a BETTER chance of succeeding. If all you have to do in order to get a bomb on a plane is have someone who isn't arab carry it, you can trivially achieve a 100% success rate. With random searches, you always have a chance of being discovered no matter who you have carrying it.