I actually find myself rather hard-pressed to argue against the point at least in terms of JS's universality and necessity. Javascript has evolved far past its "hey, it'd be neat to add a pointless action/feature to this website" to becoming foundational to the page. The principle for modern web development is HTML is the structure, CSS the style, and JS the behaviour. And there's good reason for that. JS when used correctly greatly improves the user experience. AJAX became important for a reason: now one doesn't have to depend upon a page refresh to await new information. Moreover, Javascript is everywhere, so it's easy to gain access to its features. And to suit its new position, JS has gotten a major facelift thanks to frameworks such as jQuery which make it a pleasure rather than a pain to develop.
With that being said, Javascript is not the end-all, be-all. It has its place, but it takes knowledge of how and when to implement it. One should not attempt to grant it server-side actions. It can never hope to compete (and nor should it) with a compiled or server-side scripting language. JS should never be the intelligence of a website. But when defining behaviour and the way elements should act, it's importance is crystal clear.
Purchasing BEA would greatly strengthen another Oracle acquisition, namely Stellent (now known as Universal Content Management). Although the CMS is a somewhat decent middle-tier system in and of itself (well, that's if ActiveX components, IE-only GUIs, and a highly inefficient, proprietary scripting language by the name of idoc can fall into the scope of "somewhat" or "decent"), many business that implement Stellent run it in conjunction with BEA with the use of a Content Integration Suite component. From a Stellent point of view, owning BEA would not only solidify Oracle's current technology investment such as ditching the above-mentioned "features", but it would also provide a wide, gaping gateway into other companies with BEA setups. Of course, the scope of the deal goes way beyond a CMS, but eliminating idoc would be worth that price tag alone.:D
'We're not going to equip [the PS3 with] a HDD by default, because no matter how much [capacity] we put in it, it won't be enough.
Hmm, by that logic, Sony should have never sold memory cards. But then again, they are an extremely lucrative peripheral, so it makes sense why they aren't going to include the HDD by default.
Thankfully the writer of the article was exposed to only the version of deconstruction that is mainly used for literary criticism. Go for its philosophical tenants and you'll see a harsher world. Though there are several types of postmodern disciplines, the strongest is eliminative deconstructive postmodernism (EDPM). Its main proponents are Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, among others of course. EDPM doesn't just "stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories." It rather seeks to supercede metaphysics completely. And this is exactly why postmodernism is so difficult for traditional philosophers to argue EDPM into the ground. The critics will base all of their argumentation upon the basis of metaphysics, and EDPM will just say, "Hey, there may be an objective world out there, one where Truth with a capital 'T' exists. But how will we ever know of it?" (However, a great rebuttal of postmodernism in general is Alasdir MacIntyre's Beyond Virtue.)
More to the point, postmodernism isn't some fanciful construct created only because bored philosophers were secluded in the ivory tower. It's been in the making since the paradigm of Greek philosophy. Yes, just like the sciences (although it's hard for them to admit:), philosophy undergoes paradigm shifts as well. You had the Greecian thought which proposed (The Clouds or The Republic) that the gods are only the tools of poets. While there is no moral horizon because of the absence of divine retribution, there should still be an imposed moral horizon. In short, in lieu of having something True to believe in, we should make something up in which to believe. Through the centuries we've seen the reaction to this thought: the advent of rationalism and empiricism, the Enlightenment, Kantian ethics and the noumena, Heideggerian analysis of being, and existentialism. Since the advent of Modern Philosophy, not one person has agreed on a theory. Some like phenomenology. Others believe in Continental Philosophy while others support American Pragmatism.
With these centuries of shifting paradigms, philosophy has slowly been making a full circle. It went from believing in a created set of ideas to believing that Truth can be truly known to accepting that maybe some Truth can get to us to EDPM's spotlight: hey, let's live without it! Oh, may my former professors forgive me for so drastically simplifying the history of philosophy.
Honestly, since when did the subjects of ghosts and haunted houses suddenly become "new age drivel?" I grew up in a small Southern town where every family has at least two dozen ghost stories to tell with some going back two hundred years. While I realize that many "psychics" jump on the ghost bandwagon, please don't confuse their profession with the subjects they cover. Ghost stories are as similar to a new age concept as napalm is a food for deer.
Mwave has a nice range of notebooks and PCs available without the M$ tax. Their notebooks don't quite meet the lightweight spec you provided, but they are nice nonetheless.
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I actually find myself rather hard-pressed to argue against the point at least in terms of JS's universality and necessity. Javascript has evolved far past its "hey, it'd be neat to add a pointless action/feature to this website" to becoming foundational to the page. The principle for modern web development is HTML is the structure, CSS the style, and JS the behaviour. And there's good reason for that. JS when used correctly greatly improves the user experience. AJAX became important for a reason: now one doesn't have to depend upon a page refresh to await new information. Moreover, Javascript is everywhere, so it's easy to gain access to its features. And to suit its new position, JS has gotten a major facelift thanks to frameworks such as jQuery which make it a pleasure rather than a pain to develop. With that being said, Javascript is not the end-all, be-all. It has its place, but it takes knowledge of how and when to implement it. One should not attempt to grant it server-side actions. It can never hope to compete (and nor should it) with a compiled or server-side scripting language. JS should never be the intelligence of a website. But when defining behaviour and the way elements should act, it's importance is crystal clear.
Purchasing BEA would greatly strengthen another Oracle acquisition, namely Stellent (now known as Universal Content Management). Although the CMS is a somewhat decent middle-tier system in and of itself (well, that's if ActiveX components, IE-only GUIs, and a highly inefficient, proprietary scripting language by the name of idoc can fall into the scope of "somewhat" or "decent"), many business that implement Stellent run it in conjunction with BEA with the use of a Content Integration Suite component. From a Stellent point of view, owning BEA would not only solidify Oracle's current technology investment such as ditching the above-mentioned "features", but it would also provide a wide, gaping gateway into other companies with BEA setups. Of course, the scope of the deal goes way beyond a CMS, but eliminating idoc would be worth that price tag alone. :D
'We're not going to equip [the PS3 with] a HDD by default, because no matter how much [capacity] we put in it, it won't be enough.
Hmm, by that logic, Sony should have never sold memory cards . But then again, they are an extremely lucrative peripheral, so it makes sense why they aren't going to include the HDD by default.Thankfully the writer of the article was exposed to only the version of deconstruction that is mainly used for literary criticism. Go for its philosophical tenants and you'll see a harsher world. Though there are several types of postmodern disciplines, the strongest is eliminative deconstructive postmodernism (EDPM). Its main proponents are Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, among others of course. EDPM doesn't just "stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories." It rather seeks to supercede metaphysics completely. And this is exactly why postmodernism is so difficult for traditional philosophers to argue EDPM into the ground. The critics will base all of their argumentation upon the basis of metaphysics, and EDPM will just say, "Hey, there may be an objective world out there, one where Truth with a capital 'T' exists. But how will we ever know of it?" (However, a great rebuttal of postmodernism in general is Alasdir MacIntyre's Beyond Virtue.)
More to the point, postmodernism isn't some fanciful construct created only because bored philosophers were secluded in the ivory tower. It's been in the making since the paradigm of Greek philosophy. Yes, just like the sciences (although it's hard for them to admit:), philosophy undergoes paradigm shifts as well. You had the Greecian thought which proposed (The Clouds or The Republic) that the gods are only the tools of poets. While there is no moral horizon because of the absence of divine retribution, there should still be an imposed moral horizon. In short, in lieu of having something True to believe in, we should make something up in which to believe. Through the centuries we've seen the reaction to this thought: the advent of rationalism and empiricism, the Enlightenment, Kantian ethics and the noumena, Heideggerian analysis of being, and existentialism. Since the advent of Modern Philosophy, not one person has agreed on a theory. Some like phenomenology. Others believe in Continental Philosophy while others support American Pragmatism.
With these centuries of shifting paradigms, philosophy has slowly been making a full circle. It went from believing in a created set of ideas to believing that Truth can be truly known to accepting that maybe some Truth can get to us to EDPM's spotlight: hey, let's live without it! Oh, may my former professors forgive me for so drastically simplifying the history of philosophy.
Honestly, since when did the subjects of ghosts and haunted houses suddenly become "new age drivel?" I grew up in a small Southern town where every family has at least two dozen ghost stories to tell with some going back two hundred years. While I realize that many "psychics" jump on the ghost bandwagon, please don't confuse their profession with the subjects they cover. Ghost stories are as similar to a new age concept as napalm is a food for deer.
Mwave has a nice range of notebooks and PCs available without the M$ tax. Their notebooks don't quite meet the lightweight spec you provided, but they are nice nonetheless.