There is one very large fundamental difference. "black" and "white" are socially perceived categories very loosely based on some genetic traits that relate to appearance.
Gender is a legitimate biological difference that has a massive impact biologically, chemically, and socially. It isn't a made up category based on some arbitrary perception of appearance but a real tangible distinction. I am of course not accounting for the oddball chromosomal flukes that sometimes pop up that can't be easily fit in either category.
But even on the race factor. Take out the political winds of today and the social taboo of suggesting a difference. In the US at least african slaves were literally breed for physical performance while the "white" counterparts succeeded in breeding on different standards particularly economic success which loosely correlates to management and leadership ability. The result is that those with african american heritage have a predisposition to a great count of high twitch muscle fibers that give them athletic advantages (it could be argued that since most african american's today actually are mixed to some degree that they may well enjoy the benefits of both breeding systems). This could well be argued to give them an advantage when performing manual labor.
It really is just a matter of time before we recognize that society isn't going to return to the barbaric practices of the past and the subject becomes less taboo and we admit that while races (or more properly genetic lines since our racial perceptions are bogus) and genders may or may not be "equal" by some particular metric they definitely are different and we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge those differences.
Manual labor may not be highly valued in our society at present so skills there might be somehow be perceived as negative but "rule following" and social skills are actually extremely prized and rewarded in some areas. It could be argued that it highly desirable to have this in every level of management short of the CEO. While the highly intelligent/skilled lone wolf males are more suited to being the CEO he is only one executive. In most other cases you'd want them to be the talent that actually wows your clients and works solutions or the lower tiers of management that are effectively working in the same capacity using their minions as tools.
"A base system should not have somebody's favorite scripting language just because they couldn't write their components in C, like real system programmers should."
This is just an old school mentality and I say that as someone who hates the quick adoption of bloat used by today's programmers in their 40 layers of abstraction, object oriented code that by nature reduces your familiarity with the function of underlying components, and adoption of not reinvent to the wheel to the point where everyone assumes that every piece of already written code is more efficient and better tested than their own or worse that efficiency doesn't matter at all.
Perl is implemented in C so Perl implemented correctly, and for tasks well suited to Perl, you get C performance out of it. In fact, used properly you will probably get better performance because few are up to the interpreter coders skill level and even if they are don't have time to dedicate to turning their implementations like those guys do. Properly structured and written Perl is far easier to maintain and less prone to vulnerabilities than C code. And, the 'base system' we are talking about isn't the low level code that qualifies as 'systems' programming. Remember the base system we are talking about isn't actual systems programming it includes daemons, userland, and plenty of shell scripting.
Like I said. These ideas come from the 90's when they were valid. Perl was an upstart back then, it was slow, it was bloated relative to the other tools out there and slower besides. Hardware and Perl have progressed to the point where Perl is one of the most trim things on your system and any 'bloat' potential is on the level of statistical noise, it is as fast or faster than most of the text mangling builtins, and it far far more powerful than even the combined array of pipeline processing utilities found in your traditional userland. Make no mistake, just because the first digit in the release has stayed the same does not mean Perl isn't advancing. Perl is advancing rapidly. If anything keeping that major release the same means the Perl team is doing the right thing and fixing bugs, optimizing, and tuning to a level you wouldn't believe.
There is nothing wrong with including Perl or even Python (not my cup of tea but w/e) or building processes around Perl. Besides, like I said before. It is so tiny that bloat doesn't even enter the equation. I guarantee that there are dozens of utilities included in your BSD environment that you won't ever use and may not even know are there with a bigger footprint than Perl.
A base script interpreter gains a big portion of its value from being runnable everywhere. This is minimized if you don't have at least the most popular ones in the system to run and since their footprints are extremely small there is no reason not to. I have no use personally for Python (in almost every case where you'd use it Perl is a technically superior and more stable solution imho) or even java but I don't object to others using those tools. Mono I do object to.
As for copyleft. My opinion is that it is a feature and not a bug. But that is a religious debate or a fiscal one depending on what aspect of things you take.
pfsense is nicer to work with than iptables. This is why many enterprise firewall solutions use BSD as the base. That won't impact you much because if you have a firewall that needs many adjustments you will likely be using one of those enterprise solutions with it's dedicated ASIC chips for performance reasons and which underlying system is present won't impact you much.
The other thing is ZFS. ZFS is a pretty nice filesystem if you need a distributed FS. Most people using it, don't need it, but it is quite nice if you actually do. If you DON'T need a distributed FS then the Linux solutions are as if not more stable and faster performing.
BSDs do have better solutions for you if are the sort who likes to compile all your own packages as well. It is a religious debate over whether those are better than arch or gentoo but you said CentOS. In a work environment this probably isn't relevant as you won't have time to do this and there is provably little benefit vs using binary packages. At home you might like the flexibility and on older hardware you might squeeze more performance out. Personally, I'd probably go with Arch or gentoo here since in my experience the modern linux kernel is just as stable and secure and generally quite a bit faster than what I see in BSD.
"But keeping Linux up to date and still functional for the two media PCs at home was becoming a pain. With FreeBSD it's still a pain, but with one exception the stupidity has been my own (not making sure that xbmc 12rc1 actually compiled in poudriere is theirs. But with ports in subversion and a directory specific log... that's been reverted)."
If you are compiling all your packages keeping anything up-to-date is going to be a PITA.
"And then there is firewall maintenance and even Rusty Russell agrees that PF is less of a PITA than iptables."
I don't know who Rusty Russell (somebody in iptables land?) is but I too agree. OTOH how often do you need to do maintenance on your home firewall? Generally you open a port, close a port, it's pretty trivial do that stuff under either system. At work it is pretty much the same on servers. The firewalls that change often are the more central firewalls and the enterprise world generally doesn't run firewalls that would involve you making pf or iptables adjustments directly.
Has it ever occurred to you that despite having done some things wrong the Linux world has developed some very solid technology and BSD might, just might, benefit from pulling it's head out of the sand adopting some of them.
You can't have rational conversations with people who think the word "bloat" belongs in a discussion where the difference is like a meg. Those conversations made sense back in the 90's. People in BSD land still seem to think that the question of whether EMACS is bloated relative to VI is a legitimate discussion rather than a tongue in cheek reference to the old days. Hell last I checked BSD's still come with vi and not vim out of the box.
Is there any legitimate justification for the fact I have a more capable tar out of the box on a Linux system than BSD? Surely nobody can say bloat with a straight face. I would hope nobody is saying security we aren't all plagued with tar worms. And as for stability, I've never had an issue with a lack of stability in any version of tar. I've never known anyone who has. I've never HEARD of anyone who has. Not even a legend of a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.
The Linux world has it's problems and if you use the cutting edge stuff you will have some glitches here and there. But at least it is doing SOMETHING. Those glitches will be worked out. Some things will be discarded in time others will stabilize into solid technology. BSDland is doing a whole lot of nothing and calling it a feature and most of the software running on BSD is developed in projects that are cross platform because it is easy to be but those projects exist and thrive because they run on Linux not because of BSD.
BSD has some nice technology but the only reason it continues to exist and talented people waste effort developing that technology there instead of on Linux (where more people will benefit from it) is because some people who felt l33t running a hard to use Linux in the 90's hated Linux going mainstream and because nostalgic old UNIX admins still perpetrate the myth that it is more stable/secure/somehow betterer because much of it originates from the old UNIX(TM) code base. Of course, thanks to SCO we all know that any of that code that was worth having migrated into Linux a long long time ago.
It's a shame. If there wasn't so much resentment and hate there could be more collaboration between two communities that really should be staunch allies.
Done right in the sense that it is stable but quite frankly a Linux system is pretty rock solid as well. Systems suffer no bitrot, don't crash, don't need rebooted and are easily secured. I generally find that the increased development effort on Linux has resulted in serious speed improvements relative to BSD as well. The "features" missing in BSD land are now old tested technology. CLI utilities are missing basic functionality. Old vi vs vim? What possible justification can there be for this? It saves a few bytes on disk? You can't even get a thumb drive smaller than 2GB now.
The difference is the BSD experience is closer to what I found with Linux is the 90's and hasn't really evolved. The community surrounding it seems to be the kind who hate polish for the sake of hating polish and justify it by claiming it makes them more secure or stable. There certainly were no shortage of Linux users from the 90's with that mentality who jumped ship as Linux became more polished. Polish isn't about being pretty, it doesn't always carry a performance hit, and most importantly it is about reducing administrative overhead. Having to fiddle and tweak to get a configuration that is clearly optimal is educational, but it isn't constructive. In the 90's I had to configure almost everything by hand to get a config that was optimal for almost all users. In BSD I still do.
And yes, do things the way windows does it. Not under the hood but in the user experience. This has nothing to do with being second class or the windows way being optimal. At the end of the day the extra time spent by users re-learning the system is far more serious defect than any particular behavior of an interface. If a user who is fluent in graphics manipulation on the leading platform for that task has to spend hours learning your interface to do work then your interface is NOT better. Any platform I have to spend hours tinkering with is a hobby platform because people with work to do just don't have time to do this.
That said, there are some nasty things happening in user interfaces all over the place and some of them have come to Linux land. I don't really credit BSD for not doing something nasty like Unity though. It wasn't because BSD has something better or made a choice. It was because BSD didn't do anything at all and by chance this time the old stuff is better.
If you NEED pfsense, ZFS, or you are an old UNIX admin who is nostalgic about the archaic way UNIX used to be then BSD is the way to go. Otherwise, you are better off with Linux. Even if you don't need the additional capabilities, the top programming talent in the world, whether they are focused on the server space, distributed computing, embedded computing, they have all been spending their efforts building Linux and not BSD for the past decade so it is going to outperform BSD.
I think he should be modded down on the solid basis of having referred to a Perl requirement as being 'desktop-centric' and 'bloated'. Vim is bigger than Perl. Some people think vim vs plain vi is bloat, those people need to go back to the early 90's where their definition of bloat belongs.
I don't know about you but I don't actually WANT to spend hours fiddling with the system whether it be desktop or server. The only time I should be fiddling is when I want something unusual or custom.
The server oriented versions of the major distributions are enterprise quality and stable.
Yes because perl is such hardcore bloat. I mean it's like 6mb on disk and about the same in ram but only if you use it... which you will be since perl is fast, easy to develop on, powerful, and used by everything and it's dog. FreeBSD may not require perl but you are going to need perl for something if you actually USE FreeBSD. Also, what does perl have to do with being desktop oriented? You use more perl in serverland where it is worth spending the time to craft up perl solutions.
Your company has 30,000 employees, does netfiltering, and doesn't use Bluecoat? Didn't even know there was a competing product worth noting that someone would consider on a large installation.
You use the conventions of a host site. A US site might be exposed to an international audience but they remain guests. It is no different than coming to the US and opening a restaurant and not following US conventions on the menu pricing.
Nobody is stopping you from doing it. But if you do it, bitching about it is fair game.
You realize that this "The way that stereo image viewing works is that your eyes are forced to be used in an alternating pattern. This is not natural, your eyes naturally both work at the same time." Is the only thing you said that wasn't clearly addressed in my post.
Thus, I am forced to conclude you didn't actually read or comprehend it.
Last I checked neurogenesis of any form is literal mind expansion. If you are referring to something else you are going to have to define it. As for memory, there aren't any credible studies I am aware of showing any form of long term mental damage as a result of marijuana use. And don't bother pulling out the DEA's favorite old studies where they asphyxiated primates to cause mental damage and happened to use marijuana smoke to do it. I've shown a benefit and the default is that the substance is harmless so the net ESTABLISHED result is that the substance is beneficial.
Regarding memory, there is evidence that there is a temporary decrease in short term memory capacity on marijuana use but the said impairment is completely reverted upon stopping use. So that does not qualify as long term damage.
Anything you come up with is going to be from addiction clinics which are essentially just profit mills who make serious money pretending marijuana has significant addiction potential. Anything coming from them on the topic is equivalent to listening to the tobacco lobby on the health effects of tobacco. It is biased garbage. More than 30% of the population uses marijuana and addiction research indicates a 30% addiction rate but I've yet to meet a marijuana addict. I have met people who went for treatment for other things who admitted they smoke marijuana and got a checkmark for marijuana addiction on the sheet. I've also known teens whose parents discovered they smoked and admitted them who similarly were listed as marijuana addicts.
I work at a technology firm. I am surrounded by people who mostly have genius level IQ's on a daily basis. Programmers, engineers, scientists, and people in the aerospace industry. Their incidence of smoking marijuana is far far higher than that 30% of the general population. I think I know three guys professionally who don't smoke and dozens if not hundreds who do. There certainly is no evidence of impairment there.
I'm not saying marijuana is harmless. I don't know of much of anything that is. But it is fairly benign as most things go if used in moderation and there is no especially compelling evidence that it damages your brain.
Yes they do. Of course those results from old studies with monkeys where they asphyxiated the monkeys with smoke. Turns out asphyxiation will damage your brain no matter what you use. Go figure.
The study I cited was one of many more modern follow-ups because the methodology used in those studies is known to have been bogus. The DEA likes those old studies too.
The real problem I see with this is that they seem to view psychosis as a binary issue that magically appears fully formed one day and does not exist at all the day before. My mother has psychosis, my grandfather, my uncle, both my aunts, and my great grandmother. You could say I've seen this progress before.
The shrinks would tell you that they developed psychosis in their mid to late twenties in all cases. The reality is that they all had varying degrees of mild psychosis their entire lives (or at least during the time I knew them) and that psychosis wanes and waxes throughout the course of time and it peaked in their mid to late 20's and began to bloom into full blown psychotic episodes but after that point it has continued waxing and waning cycles.
Crazy people, attract other crazy people. I know a gentleman who had mental issues and murdered his wife and married her sister (the police never convicted him). Another who read some phrase about the hand of the devil in the bible and tried to chop his own hand off with an axe to purify himself. I could go on here. These people didn't live their entire lives in these states but as far as I can tell they've had a degree a mental illness their entire lives.
So while I can believe that something can trigger or mitigate a psychotic episode I simply don't believe that any external force will cause the mental illness that causes an individual to be capable of having one. It seems far more likely these individuals are either self medicating or are simply a bit more eccentric and more inclined to utilize substances that help them escape from a world they don't quite sync with.
"I'd be more inclined to listen to pro-drug arguments if they were rational and not based on feelings or false promises."
Because someone who refers to all individuals taking a pro-drug (what does that mean? I've yet to hear a definition of drug that doesn't encompass water) stance as potheads is clearly someone ready for rational debate.
Here in the US we tend to do as we like without regard to any treaties we may or may not have been a party to. Cannabis was outlawed in the US mostly because it was incorrectly equated to heroin and opium use and grouped in with these substances. These substances were in turn negatively associated with the Chinese and Mexican immigrants. At least these were the justifications, the ones who pushed them were those with financial interests served by the outlawing of cannabis which had quite a few potential industrial uses that conflicted with those of the oil industry.
Henry Ford had developed a car body that combined corn plastic and hemp fiber to make a very strong composite. There is an old video of him smacking a car with such a body with a sledge hammer. This was a serious threat to the oil and plastics industry.
I cite the NIH who says that in the case of Cannabis you are mistaken. It causes neurogenesis. You literally are less intelligent for not having used it.
Perhaps he is referring to the fact that smoking cannabis and then stopping causes neurogenesis and thus an literal increase in mental capacity?
Ah but wait. That is NORML the hippy pot smoker site (nevermind the couple dozen independent sources cited correctly) so maybe we should see what the NIH says about it http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1253627/. Yup, turns out the moron burnout you knew growing up was a moron to begin with and avoiding reality by staying baked out of his mind because Cannabis actually increases brainpower rather than decreasing it.
Stereo vision is nothing more than two 2D frames from an offset perspective combined to give a 3D perspective. You have two eyes that are spaced apart and collect reflected photons and assemble their offset 3D perspectives into a simulated 3D perspective. That is a stereo vision mechansim. That is how you naturally do 3D. So yes, stereo vision is perfectly normal because it is how we see. Focus doesn't really have anything to do with range, it has to do with light diffusion, the muscles move however far is needed to make the diffuse light no longer be diffuse. They stop when the image is in focus, no matter how far away the photons came from. Just like you stop focusing your camera when the picture is in focus, no matter how close or far.
The eyes are advanced optics but they are still just optics. Their is nothing magical about them. They aren't vegan, they don't prefer organic, and they don't care if the light they are observing is from a natural or simulated source. They really really don't care if something is 'a manipulation of the mind.' They do care if that something causes them to see something alien they aren't designed to cope with like a flickering or breaks their focusing mechanism like a 3D image with an unfocusable blurry object in it not because it is a simulation or a manipulation but because is is incompatible with how the machinery in your eye works.
What you can sense, perceive, and measure may not be truth, but it is all of the truth that matters. If you are getting a headache the problem isn't that you are in a simulation or mind manipulation but that there is a problem with the simulation. Adjust a frame rate, refresh rate, or frame focus and you might fix the flaw and continue improving the simulation just like you would a model or a theory, you don't just toss it out and say oops not natural, to hell with it.
Viewing goes back 30+ years but today's technology does not. Many old studies might have unaccounted for factors that weren't possible in the day or observed correct phenomenon but drawn incorrect conclusions. Studies are not gospel and the conclusions drawn from them even less so. For instance having no out of focus elements in the video might not have been possible then. In the analog age the kind of higher speed equipment needed for high frame rates likely was too expensive to be in common use (or more expensive and therefore not used in any case). If the image is "in" focus there is no reason for the eye muscles to strain in the first place.
Give the eyes the same kind of light in the same way and it won't matter where it actually comes from. If your eye perceives light as coming from a particular distance, and the light focuses in a way that matches how light would focus from that distance, it shouldn't be any more stressful on the eye than if the light really were from that far away. It is the same eye muscle, moving the same amount, to focus light with the same level of diffusion through the same lens. The eye doesn't have some sort of six sense telling it the light didn't really come from that far away. There is just some manipulating of the light that isn't being performed correctly in the flickering and headache inducing 3D.
Sort of like modern Switzerland. The place with the lowest crime rate in the world and that the globe conquering Nazi's decided to go around. Note they didn't blink at attacking the UK, the US, or Russia the supposed greatest powers in the world. But the Swiss who were holding on to no small portion of the entire world's potentially army funding wealth, they went around.
Having your citizens armed might not make your government more secure (far less so, the government has a tangible reason to be concerned with public opinion) but it makes successful armed invasion of your nation a hell of a lot less likely. What good is winning the war if your troops, officials, and police are going to be shot on every street and at every corner? Just look at Iraq, the armed and militant force was a tiny minority within their population and the whole place was essentially a war zone right up until we finally bugged out imagine what it would have been like if there were arms in every home?
We need to relax gun control not the other way around. There is absolutely no reason civilians should have select fire arms. Let an invader, and that includes an internal invasion from politicians illegally seizing power at home, worry about automatic or burst fire coming out of every curtain of every home.
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There is one very large fundamental difference. "black" and "white" are socially perceived categories very loosely based on some genetic traits that relate to appearance.
Gender is a legitimate biological difference that has a massive impact biologically, chemically, and socially. It isn't a made up category based on some arbitrary perception of appearance but a real tangible distinction. I am of course not accounting for the oddball chromosomal flukes that sometimes pop up that can't be easily fit in either category.
But even on the race factor. Take out the political winds of today and the social taboo of suggesting a difference. In the US at least african slaves were literally breed for physical performance while the "white" counterparts succeeded in breeding on different standards particularly economic success which loosely correlates to management and leadership ability. The result is that those with african american heritage have a predisposition to a great count of high twitch muscle fibers that give them athletic advantages (it could be argued that since most african american's today actually are mixed to some degree that they may well enjoy the benefits of both breeding systems). This could well be argued to give them an advantage when performing manual labor.
It really is just a matter of time before we recognize that society isn't going to return to the barbaric practices of the past and the subject becomes less taboo and we admit that while races (or more properly genetic lines since our racial perceptions are bogus) and genders may or may not be "equal" by some particular metric they definitely are different and we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge those differences.
Manual labor may not be highly valued in our society at present so skills there might be somehow be perceived as negative but "rule following" and social skills are actually extremely prized and rewarded in some areas. It could be argued that it highly desirable to have this in every level of management short of the CEO. While the highly intelligent/skilled lone wolf males are more suited to being the CEO he is only one executive. In most other cases you'd want them to be the talent that actually wows your clients and works solutions or the lower tiers of management that are effectively working in the same capacity using their minions as tools.
"A base system should not have somebody's favorite scripting language just because they couldn't write their components in C, like real system programmers should."
This is just an old school mentality and I say that as someone who hates the quick adoption of bloat used by today's programmers in their 40 layers of abstraction, object oriented code that by nature reduces your familiarity with the function of underlying components, and adoption of not reinvent to the wheel to the point where everyone assumes that every piece of already written code is more efficient and better tested than their own or worse that efficiency doesn't matter at all.
Perl is implemented in C so Perl implemented correctly, and for tasks well suited to Perl, you get C performance out of it. In fact, used properly you will probably get better performance because few are up to the interpreter coders skill level and even if they are don't have time to dedicate to turning their implementations like those guys do. Properly structured and written Perl is far easier to maintain and less prone to vulnerabilities than C code. And, the 'base system' we are talking about isn't the low level code that qualifies as 'systems' programming. Remember the base system we are talking about isn't actual systems programming it includes daemons, userland, and plenty of shell scripting.
Like I said. These ideas come from the 90's when they were valid. Perl was an upstart back then, it was slow, it was bloated relative to the other tools out there and slower besides. Hardware and Perl have progressed to the point where Perl is one of the most trim things on your system and any 'bloat' potential is on the level of statistical noise, it is as fast or faster than most of the text mangling builtins, and it far far more powerful than even the combined array of pipeline processing utilities found in your traditional userland. Make no mistake, just because the first digit in the release has stayed the same does not mean Perl isn't advancing. Perl is advancing rapidly. If anything keeping that major release the same means the Perl team is doing the right thing and fixing bugs, optimizing, and tuning to a level you wouldn't believe.
There is nothing wrong with including Perl or even Python (not my cup of tea but w/e) or building processes around Perl. Besides, like I said before. It is so tiny that bloat doesn't even enter the equation. I guarantee that there are dozens of utilities included in your BSD environment that you won't ever use and may not even know are there with a bigger footprint than Perl.
A base script interpreter gains a big portion of its value from being runnable everywhere. This is minimized if you don't have at least the most popular ones in the system to run and since their footprints are extremely small there is no reason not to. I have no use personally for Python (in almost every case where you'd use it Perl is a technically superior and more stable solution imho) or even java but I don't object to others using those tools. Mono I do object to.
As for copyleft. My opinion is that it is a feature and not a bug. But that is a religious debate or a fiscal one depending on what aspect of things you take.
P.S. Why post AC when your sig gives your name?
You should tell them. Give them a stern warning about the consequences of giving their project less thought than a Slashdot AC again!
I'm sure this was tongue in cheek but Java is rubbish. Unfortunately it is very popular rubbish.
pfsense is nicer to work with than iptables. This is why many enterprise firewall solutions use BSD as the base. That won't impact you much because if you have a firewall that needs many adjustments you will likely be using one of those enterprise solutions with it's dedicated ASIC chips for performance reasons and which underlying system is present won't impact you much.
The other thing is ZFS. ZFS is a pretty nice filesystem if you need a distributed FS. Most people using it, don't need it, but it is quite nice if you actually do. If you DON'T need a distributed FS then the Linux solutions are as if not more stable and faster performing.
BSDs do have better solutions for you if are the sort who likes to compile all your own packages as well. It is a religious debate over whether those are better than arch or gentoo but you said CentOS. In a work environment this probably isn't relevant as you won't have time to do this and there is provably little benefit vs using binary packages. At home you might like the flexibility and on older hardware you might squeeze more performance out. Personally, I'd probably go with Arch or gentoo here since in my experience the modern linux kernel is just as stable and secure and generally quite a bit faster than what I see in BSD.
Just my experiences. YMMV.
"But keeping Linux up to date and still functional for the two media PCs at home was becoming a pain. With FreeBSD it's still a pain, but with one exception the stupidity has been my own (not making sure that xbmc 12rc1 actually compiled in poudriere is theirs. But with ports in subversion and a directory specific log... that's been reverted)."
If you are compiling all your packages keeping anything up-to-date is going to be a PITA.
"And then there is firewall maintenance and even Rusty Russell agrees that PF is less of a PITA than iptables."
I don't know who Rusty Russell (somebody in iptables land?) is but I too agree. OTOH how often do you need to do maintenance on your home firewall? Generally you open a port, close a port, it's pretty trivial do that stuff under either system. At work it is pretty much the same on servers. The firewalls that change often are the more central firewalls and the enterprise world generally doesn't run firewalls that would involve you making pf or iptables adjustments directly.
Has it ever occurred to you that despite having done some things wrong the Linux world has developed some very solid technology and BSD might, just might, benefit from pulling it's head out of the sand adopting some of them.
You can't have rational conversations with people who think the word "bloat" belongs in a discussion where the difference is like a meg. Those conversations made sense back in the 90's. People in BSD land still seem to think that the question of whether EMACS is bloated relative to VI is a legitimate discussion rather than a tongue in cheek reference to the old days. Hell last I checked BSD's still come with vi and not vim out of the box.
Is there any legitimate justification for the fact I have a more capable tar out of the box on a Linux system than BSD? Surely nobody can say bloat with a straight face. I would hope nobody is saying security we aren't all plagued with tar worms. And as for stability, I've never had an issue with a lack of stability in any version of tar. I've never known anyone who has. I've never HEARD of anyone who has. Not even a legend of a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.
The Linux world has it's problems and if you use the cutting edge stuff you will have some glitches here and there. But at least it is doing SOMETHING. Those glitches will be worked out. Some things will be discarded in time others will stabilize into solid technology. BSDland is doing a whole lot of nothing and calling it a feature and most of the software running on BSD is developed in projects that are cross platform because it is easy to be but those projects exist and thrive because they run on Linux not because of BSD.
BSD has some nice technology but the only reason it continues to exist and talented people waste effort developing that technology there instead of on Linux (where more people will benefit from it) is because some people who felt l33t running a hard to use Linux in the 90's hated Linux going mainstream and because nostalgic old UNIX admins still perpetrate the myth that it is more stable/secure/somehow betterer because much of it originates from the old UNIX(TM) code base. Of course, thanks to SCO we all know that any of that code that was worth having migrated into Linux a long long time ago.
It's a shame. If there wasn't so much resentment and hate there could be more collaboration between two communities that really should be staunch allies.
Done right in the sense that it is stable but quite frankly a Linux system is pretty rock solid as well. Systems suffer no bitrot, don't crash, don't need rebooted and are easily secured. I generally find that the increased development effort on Linux has resulted in serious speed improvements relative to BSD as well. The "features" missing in BSD land are now old tested technology. CLI utilities are missing basic functionality. Old vi vs vim? What possible justification can there be for this? It saves a few bytes on disk? You can't even get a thumb drive smaller than 2GB now.
The difference is the BSD experience is closer to what I found with Linux is the 90's and hasn't really evolved. The community surrounding it seems to be the kind who hate polish for the sake of hating polish and justify it by claiming it makes them more secure or stable. There certainly were no shortage of Linux users from the 90's with that mentality who jumped ship as Linux became more polished. Polish isn't about being pretty, it doesn't always carry a performance hit, and most importantly it is about reducing administrative overhead. Having to fiddle and tweak to get a configuration that is clearly optimal is educational, but it isn't constructive. In the 90's I had to configure almost everything by hand to get a config that was optimal for almost all users. In BSD I still do.
And yes, do things the way windows does it. Not under the hood but in the user experience. This has nothing to do with being second class or the windows way being optimal. At the end of the day the extra time spent by users re-learning the system is far more serious defect than any particular behavior of an interface. If a user who is fluent in graphics manipulation on the leading platform for that task has to spend hours learning your interface to do work then your interface is NOT better. Any platform I have to spend hours tinkering with is a hobby platform because people with work to do just don't have time to do this.
That said, there are some nasty things happening in user interfaces all over the place and some of them have come to Linux land. I don't really credit BSD for not doing something nasty like Unity though. It wasn't because BSD has something better or made a choice. It was because BSD didn't do anything at all and by chance this time the old stuff is better.
If you NEED pfsense, ZFS, or you are an old UNIX admin who is nostalgic about the archaic way UNIX used to be then BSD is the way to go. Otherwise, you are better off with Linux. Even if you don't need the additional capabilities, the top programming talent in the world, whether they are focused on the server space, distributed computing, embedded computing, they have all been spending their efforts building Linux and not BSD for the past decade so it is going to outperform BSD.
I think he should be modded down on the solid basis of having referred to a Perl requirement as being 'desktop-centric' and 'bloated'. Vim is bigger than Perl. Some people think vim vs plain vi is bloat, those people need to go back to the early 90's where their definition of bloat belongs.
I don't know about you but I don't actually WANT to spend hours fiddling with the system whether it be desktop or server. The only time I should be fiddling is when I want something unusual or custom.
The server oriented versions of the major distributions are enterprise quality and stable.
Yes because perl is such hardcore bloat. I mean it's like 6mb on disk and about the same in ram but only if you use it... which you will be since perl is fast, easy to develop on, powerful, and used by everything and it's dog. FreeBSD may not require perl but you are going to need perl for something if you actually USE FreeBSD. Also, what does perl have to do with being desktop oriented? You use more perl in serverland where it is worth spending the time to craft up perl solutions.
Your company has 30,000 employees, does netfiltering, and doesn't use Bluecoat? Didn't even know there was a competing product worth noting that someone would consider on a large installation.
You use the conventions of a host site. A US site might be exposed to an international audience but they remain guests. It is no different than coming to the US and opening a restaurant and not following US conventions on the menu pricing.
Nobody is stopping you from doing it. But if you do it, bitching about it is fair game.
First the value was given in dollars. Second, he posted to a US website and should use the conventions of the host country, not those of his locale.
You realize that this "The way that stereo image viewing works is that your eyes are forced to be used in an alternating pattern. This is not natural, your eyes naturally both work at the same time." Is the only thing you said that wasn't clearly addressed in my post.
Thus, I am forced to conclude you didn't actually read or comprehend it.
Last I checked neurogenesis of any form is literal mind expansion. If you are referring to something else you are going to have to define it. As for memory, there aren't any credible studies I am aware of showing any form of long term mental damage as a result of marijuana use. And don't bother pulling out the DEA's favorite old studies where they asphyxiated primates to cause mental damage and happened to use marijuana smoke to do it. I've shown a benefit and the default is that the substance is harmless so the net ESTABLISHED result is that the substance is beneficial.
Regarding memory, there is evidence that there is a temporary decrease in short term memory capacity on marijuana use but the said impairment is completely reverted upon stopping use. So that does not qualify as long term damage.
Anything you come up with is going to be from addiction clinics which are essentially just profit mills who make serious money pretending marijuana has significant addiction potential. Anything coming from them on the topic is equivalent to listening to the tobacco lobby on the health effects of tobacco. It is biased garbage. More than 30% of the population uses marijuana and addiction research indicates a 30% addiction rate but I've yet to meet a marijuana addict. I have met people who went for treatment for other things who admitted they smoke marijuana and got a checkmark for marijuana addiction on the sheet. I've also known teens whose parents discovered they smoked and admitted them who similarly were listed as marijuana addicts.
I work at a technology firm. I am surrounded by people who mostly have genius level IQ's on a daily basis. Programmers, engineers, scientists, and people in the aerospace industry. Their incidence of smoking marijuana is far far higher than that 30% of the general population. I think I know three guys professionally who don't smoke and dozens if not hundreds who do. There certainly is no evidence of impairment there.
I'm not saying marijuana is harmless. I don't know of much of anything that is. But it is fairly benign as most things go if used in moderation and there is no especially compelling evidence that it damages your brain.
You are missing the portion of the test where he stops smoking for a month and all his scores revert to the same or higher levels across the board.
Yes they do. Of course those results from old studies with monkeys where they asphyxiated the monkeys with smoke. Turns out asphyxiation will damage your brain no matter what you use. Go figure.
The study I cited was one of many more modern follow-ups because the methodology used in those studies is known to have been bogus. The DEA likes those old studies too.
The real problem I see with this is that they seem to view psychosis as a binary issue that magically appears fully formed one day and does not exist at all the day before. My mother has psychosis, my grandfather, my uncle, both my aunts, and my great grandmother. You could say I've seen this progress before.
The shrinks would tell you that they developed psychosis in their mid to late twenties in all cases. The reality is that they all had varying degrees of mild psychosis their entire lives (or at least during the time I knew them) and that psychosis wanes and waxes throughout the course of time and it peaked in their mid to late 20's and began to bloom into full blown psychotic episodes but after that point it has continued waxing and waning cycles.
Crazy people, attract other crazy people. I know a gentleman who had mental issues and murdered his wife and married her sister (the police never convicted him). Another who read some phrase about the hand of the devil in the bible and tried to chop his own hand off with an axe to purify himself. I could go on here. These people didn't live their entire lives in these states but as far as I can tell they've had a degree a mental illness their entire lives.
So while I can believe that something can trigger or mitigate a psychotic episode I simply don't believe that any external force will cause the mental illness that causes an individual to be capable of having one. It seems far more likely these individuals are either self medicating or are simply a bit more eccentric and more inclined to utilize substances that help them escape from a world they don't quite sync with.
"I'd be more inclined to listen to pro-drug arguments if they were rational and not based on feelings or false promises."
Because someone who refers to all individuals taking a pro-drug (what does that mean? I've yet to hear a definition of drug that doesn't encompass water) stance as potheads is clearly someone ready for rational debate.
Here in the US we tend to do as we like without regard to any treaties we may or may not have been a party to. Cannabis was outlawed in the US mostly because it was incorrectly equated to heroin and opium use and grouped in with these substances. These substances were in turn negatively associated with the Chinese and Mexican immigrants. At least these were the justifications, the ones who pushed them were those with financial interests served by the outlawing of cannabis which had quite a few potential industrial uses that conflicted with those of the oil industry.
Henry Ford had developed a car body that combined corn plastic and hemp fiber to make a very strong composite. There is an old video of him smacking a car with such a body with a sledge hammer. This was a serious threat to the oil and plastics industry.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1253627/
I cite the NIH who says that in the case of Cannabis you are mistaken. It causes neurogenesis. You literally are less intelligent for not having used it.
How the random anecdotal evidence of a poster gets modded up I have no idea.
http://norml.org/component/zoo/category/cannabis-and-the-brain-a-user-s-guide
Perhaps he is referring to the fact that smoking cannabis and then stopping causes neurogenesis and thus an literal increase in mental capacity?
Ah but wait. That is NORML the hippy pot smoker site (nevermind the couple dozen independent sources cited correctly) so maybe we should see what the NIH says about it http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1253627/. Yup, turns out the moron burnout you knew growing up was a moron to begin with and avoiding reality by staying baked out of his mind because Cannabis actually increases brainpower rather than decreasing it.
Stereo vision is nothing more than two 2D frames from an offset perspective combined to give a 3D perspective. You have two eyes that are spaced apart and collect reflected photons and assemble their offset 3D perspectives into a simulated 3D perspective. That is a stereo vision mechansim. That is how you naturally do 3D. So yes, stereo vision is perfectly normal because it is how we see. Focus doesn't really have anything to do with range, it has to do with light diffusion, the muscles move however far is needed to make the diffuse light no longer be diffuse. They stop when the image is in focus, no matter how far away the photons came from. Just like you stop focusing your camera when the picture is in focus, no matter how close or far.
The eyes are advanced optics but they are still just optics. Their is nothing magical about them. They aren't vegan, they don't prefer organic, and they don't care if the light they are observing is from a natural or simulated source. They really really don't care if something is 'a manipulation of the mind.' They do care if that something causes them to see something alien they aren't designed to cope with like a flickering or breaks their focusing mechanism like a 3D image with an unfocusable blurry object in it not because it is a simulation or a manipulation but because is is incompatible with how the machinery in your eye works.
What you can sense, perceive, and measure may not be truth, but it is all of the truth that matters. If you are getting a headache the problem isn't that you are in a simulation or mind manipulation but that there is a problem with the simulation. Adjust a frame rate, refresh rate, or frame focus and you might fix the flaw and continue improving the simulation just like you would a model or a theory, you don't just toss it out and say oops not natural, to hell with it.
Viewing goes back 30+ years but today's technology does not. Many old studies might have unaccounted for factors that weren't possible in the day or observed correct phenomenon but drawn incorrect conclusions. Studies are not gospel and the conclusions drawn from them even less so. For instance having no out of focus elements in the video might not have been possible then. In the analog age the kind of higher speed equipment needed for high frame rates likely was too expensive to be in common use (or more expensive and therefore not used in any case). If the image is "in" focus there is no reason for the eye muscles to strain in the first place.
Give the eyes the same kind of light in the same way and it won't matter where it actually comes from. If your eye perceives light as coming from a particular distance, and the light focuses in a way that matches how light would focus from that distance, it shouldn't be any more stressful on the eye than if the light really were from that far away. It is the same eye muscle, moving the same amount, to focus light with the same level of diffusion through the same lens. The eye doesn't have some sort of six sense telling it the light didn't really come from that far away. There is just some manipulating of the light that isn't being performed correctly in the flickering and headache inducing 3D.
Sort of like modern Switzerland. The place with the lowest crime rate in the world and that the globe conquering Nazi's decided to go around. Note they didn't blink at attacking the UK, the US, or Russia the supposed greatest powers in the world. But the Swiss who were holding on to no small portion of the entire world's potentially army funding wealth, they went around.
Having your citizens armed might not make your government more secure (far less so, the government has a tangible reason to be concerned with public opinion) but it makes successful armed invasion of your nation a hell of a lot less likely. What good is winning the war if your troops, officials, and police are going to be shot on every street and at every corner? Just look at Iraq, the armed and militant force was a tiny minority within their population and the whole place was essentially a war zone right up until we finally bugged out imagine what it would have been like if there were arms in every home?
We need to relax gun control not the other way around. There is absolutely no reason civilians should have select fire arms. Let an invader, and that includes an internal invasion from politicians illegally seizing power at home, worry about automatic or burst fire coming out of every curtain of every home.