The reason for a draft is that your country needs you. "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." John Stuart Mill (1806-1873
I'd love to continue this conversation, but I'll definitely respect your wish to let the thread end. I'll commend you on being a reasonable fellow to converse with on the subject (ie not resorting to the usual screaming and shouting that accompanies such 'debates'). If you're ever in the mood ping me at their my listed email address in my profile or fishboy(at)grayssupport.com. I'd enjoy an occasional chat on these things if you would. Thanks
Those are excellent questions and questions I would hope any believe would ask themselves because I believe that if you can't bring youself to ask those questions you've got a problem with your faith. Let me try and give a couple of short answers here. I don't claim to be a master theologian or anything, I'm just trying to help.
--How do you know it wasn't just fabricated in the 5th century?
First, we have some very old renderings of Biblical texts including the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as very old Greek texts found around thd Middle East. That makes it pretty reasonable to assume that the text is not something recently invented. Regarding the New Testament we have many letters and documents written by first century Christians (Polycarp,etc) who make strong references to things found in the letters of Paul and the Gospel stories.
How do you know it was translated properly?
Translation is a very important questions. Most modern translations go back to the old texts, not through intermediaries. Most are translated by committe. Now, even then there are texts that have been bent to reflect the views of a particular demomination, and even our old fried the King James Version has some translation errors that have been corrected and some that still persist. However, none of those creates a crack in the overall message of love, mercy and forgiveness. Faith. Yes, at some point it all comes down to faith. However I find that it is not a faith without support. I can take the things we have found here on this Earth and use them as a foundation for what's beyond this world. It's not a blind faith, but a well considered one.
John 20:29 Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
Feel free to ping me at "fishboy(AT)grayssupport.com" or post a reply if I can help further.
Science and Religion can certainly exist together and even compliment each other. Ignorance on both sides is what leads to the disagreements we have. Just remember, *if* God is up there (and yes I believe for sure he's up there) you will have to meet with him one day and make an accounting of what you did down here. Just because a lot of people have screwed up the message and misinterpreted the Bible (and many other religions) doesn't change the nature of God himself. It only further points out the weakness of man himself. You are certainly entitled to your own choice in the life, but I sincerely hope that you have made an informed decision based on the Bible itself and not the sometimes poor interpretation by those who claim to speak on God's behalf. Remember, if you live the good life and there is not a God, you haven't lost anything. But if you don't and there is... you've lost everything. Ping me at fishboy(AT)grayssupport.com if I can help.
I was at MS back in the day when Pro level VB calls were outsourced to Stream. We'd get all the escallations from the stuff they couldn't/wouldn't solve. Some of the "solutions" were insane. There was one group that would get the customer's to delete all *.ocx and *.oca files and a few dlls to try and resolve the issue. The end result was that this trashed VB and half of your windows apps and you had to reinstall. We actually hired some of the Stream guys to come in after their contract was cancelled. They told us great stories like one guy who'd transfer customer's he didn't like to a Chinese restaurant down the street.
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot
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This story is great. Man, there are some serious parallels to what I saw working support at MS. Punting was a really big thing in support there especially amoung the contract guys. We also had the "bullshit" guy who'd curse his customers but could fix anything. I once heard him trying to get a guy to hit his F8 key at the right time to go into safe mode saying "dude, hit the F8 key!! Bang on that sucker like your beating off on a picture of Pamela Anderson". The guy got into safe mode. He got fired about 6 months later when they started recording his calls. They got one of him talking to another guy there about which female managers they'd like to have sex with. Heck of a way to go.
Ok, so an 8-year-old can memorize answers from a brain dump. That's a likely explaination. Heck, I used to work at Microsoft and there were tons of those things being passed around internally.
Ah, an insider who knows the lingo. What if I mention Strike.dll, Icecap, Tomcat, and horror of all horrors: Clarify!! Bwa ha ha ha... they're coming to take me away Ha Ha they're coming to take me away Ho Ho....
>>Anyway what's the point in seeing/having it?
Great point! Building it will be just about impossible, and even if you do get it to build (somehow...) you won't have anything close to an actual microsoft build. You don't have the internal certificates and you certainly don't have the internal build tools.
Windows is built using the latest internal versions of the vc compiler and such and for true release builds there are all kinds of post-build "magic" tools (vulcan,lego,etc) run on that code before it really becomes production. I can definitely understand some desire to look at this "forbidden" code, but when you really think about it, what the heck would you really do with it?
The D-Tuner is the greatest thing. Makes life a lot easier when you're on stage and in a hurry. The tuning device is really cool as well. Of course if I had a nickle for every punk kid that can't tune his guitar without an electronic tuner...
It depends on the recording. There are a lot of releases where a large amount is sequenced and just a very small amount of live musicians ever get on the recording.
>>Ohh, and who on their right mind would actually accept hungarian as something useful?
Try the Excel team. I had an opportunity to see some of the Excel source as part of a debug session. Total Hungarian hell!! The variable names were huge and looked like alphabet soup!
Based on what I had seen in my time, the oldest code (ie the low level base stuff that Cutler was directly involved with and the 'base' stuff) is still fairly clean. There's a middle layer in there that gets pretty grungy. It's not all bad code, but commenting practices sure did change over the years. There's a lot with only comments in the top of the file about updates/etc. They made some more rigid standards about 99-2000 that made it better. It also depended on the group. The guys out of MS Israel (MSMQ, Proxy/ISA) wrote some really nice clean stuff. A lot of the Inet/IE stuff is really messy. The cluster code was really nice as I recall (bud of mine was cluster support). It all really depended on the group. Windows is broken down into a LOT of subpieces handled by specialized groups.
You'd probably be surprised. Some of it is really, really clean and some of it is a mess. It all depends on which part you look at. As far as searching for curse words and such (as referred to in a reply later in this thread) there actually was a concerted effort at MS a couple of years ago to actively 'clean' the code of offensive comments. There were actually bugs submitted against a whole slew of "WTF" and "hack" and "shit" comments back then. The code varies greatly in style and how it's put together. The MSMQ code where I spent most of my time when I worked at MS support is just friggin brilliant and a real joy to debug. I can't say that about everything (IE....).
He's correct. The tree is forked as needed for future versions. Heck, you can search through the asm files and still find ones with David Cutler's name in them that haven't been changed since he wrote them.
Someone's probably already said this, but the problem is I can't find most of what I'm looking for locally. Trust me, finding jazz guitar instructional books in eastern NC is just about impossible much less old Chet Atkins CDs.
I have an early 70's Fender Champ. 3 tubes, a handful of resistors and capacitors all with point to point wiring. Three knobs. Simplicity incarnate. Just turn the the three knobs to 10 and play.
There was a time when many MS products were going to target multiple platforms. If you find an older version of Access you can see some "Not available on Mac" comments that were left in the help by accident while the mac version was still in progress (never shipped). Likewise Visual Basic was going to be ported to the Mac as well and was at least partially done (mostly VBA stuff).
>>No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
ROFLMAO !!! Ok, I gotta wonder how many people get that. I doubt it's all that often that the slashdot crowd and the new yankee crowd intersect.:-)
When I used to work at Microsoft one of the guys from my team moved over to the Security Response team (yea, he was busy as hell). He would give classes to FBI and other gov't type guys on computers and security. He had these hillarious stories about having to teach some of the guys to use a mouse and giving them the 5'th grade definition of "internet" so they'd understand it. And yes the gov't has leveraged Microsoft guys to help investigate hacks and such.
Perhaps I should have worded it better with something like "it can give you other options when the CSCI degree fails". Biology came to mind becuase I live in an area with a major research hospital and medical school that is always clamoring for people with bio and chem degrees for labwork.
The trouble with a C/S degree now is the way the industry looks at it. They want very current skills and even if you have a C/S degree you basically end up retraining every 2 years or so. The stuff you learn is very important, but until C/S is a true practice like engineering you don't really get to build on what you've learned before as much as someone like a structural engineer or a doctor. This whole industry is just really, really screwey right now. If you are getting a CS degree try to get a minor in something pure like Math, Biology, Chemistry, etc that is more portable than you C/S degree should things get sour.
You might want to check your facts before you spew. While the ground system is heavy on Linux according to the article you referenced, the actual OS on the rover itself is VxWorks from Wind River. http://www.windriver.com/news/press/20040105.html
Back in the early 80's I worked on tobacco farms picking tobacco by hand, a process known as "priming". 95-100 degree heat, nicotine soaking in through your skin and making you woozy and keeping an eye out for snakes around the bottom of the plans made for a sucky day. Even then once you were through picking you had to go up to a tall metal barn, climb up on the poles there and start hanging the tobacco up in the barn so it could be fired an dried. It was rough work but at 13 years old you could make close to 200 bucks a week for about 6 weeks. Of course now it's all handled by automatic harvesters and such.
The reason for a draft is that your country needs you.
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873
I'd love to continue this conversation, but I'll definitely respect your wish to let the thread end. I'll commend you on being a reasonable fellow to converse with on the subject (ie not resorting to the usual screaming and shouting that accompanies such 'debates'). If you're ever in the mood ping me at their my listed email address in my profile or fishboy(at)grayssupport.com. I'd enjoy an occasional chat on these things if you would.
Thanks
Let me try and give a couple of short answers here. I don't claim to be a master theologian or anything, I'm just trying to help.
First, we have some very old renderings of Biblical texts including the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as very old Greek texts found around thd Middle East. That makes it pretty reasonable to assume that the text is not something recently invented.
Regarding the New Testament we have many letters and documents written by first century Christians (Polycarp,etc) who make strong references to things found in the letters of Paul and the Gospel stories.
Translation is a very important questions. Most modern translations go back to the old texts, not through intermediaries. Most are translated by committe. Now, even then there are texts that have been bent to reflect the views of a particular demomination, and even our old fried the King James Version has some translation errors that have been corrected and some that still persist. However, none of those creates a crack in the overall message of love, mercy and forgiveness.
Faith. Yes, at some point it all comes down to faith. However I find that it is not a faith without support. I can take the things we have found here on this Earth and use them as a foundation for what's beyond this world. It's not a blind faith, but a well considered one.
Feel free to ping me at "fishboy(AT)grayssupport.com" or post a reply if I can help further.
Science and Religion can certainly exist together and even compliment each other. Ignorance on both sides is what leads to the disagreements we have. ... you've lost everything.
Just remember, *if* God is up there (and yes I believe for sure he's up there) you will have to meet with him one day and make an accounting of what you did down here. Just because a lot of people have screwed up the message and misinterpreted the Bible (and many other religions) doesn't change the nature of God himself. It only further points out the weakness of man himself.
You are certainly entitled to your own choice in the life, but I sincerely hope that you have made an informed decision based on the Bible itself and not the sometimes poor interpretation by those who claim to speak on God's behalf. Remember, if you live the good life and there is not a God, you haven't lost anything. But if you don't and there is
Ping me at fishboy(AT)grayssupport.com if I can help.
Hey man, I'm an ex-ms'r as well. Just curious as to which group and site you were in.
I was at MS back in the day when Pro level VB calls were outsourced to Stream. We'd get all the escallations from the stuff they couldn't/wouldn't solve. Some of the "solutions" were insane. There was one group that would get the customer's to delete all *.ocx and *.oca files and a few dlls to try and resolve the issue. The end result was that this trashed VB and half of your windows apps and you had to reinstall.
We actually hired some of the Stream guys to come in after their contract was cancelled. They told us great stories like one guy who'd transfer customer's he didn't like to a Chinese restaurant down the street.
This story is great. Man, there are some serious parallels to what I saw working support at MS. Punting was a really big thing in support there especially amoung the contract guys.
We also had the "bullshit" guy who'd curse his customers but could fix anything. I once heard him trying to get a guy to hit his F8 key at the right time to go into safe mode saying "dude, hit the F8 key!! Bang on that sucker like your beating off on a picture of Pamela Anderson". The guy got into safe mode.
He got fired about 6 months later when they started recording his calls. They got one of him talking to another guy there about which female managers they'd like to have sex with. Heck of a way to go.
Ok, so an 8-year-old can memorize answers from a brain dump. That's a likely explaination. Heck, I used to work at Microsoft and there were tons of those things being passed around internally.
Ah, an insider who knows the lingo. What if I mention Strike.dll, Icecap, Tomcat, and horror of all horrors: Clarify!! ... they're coming to take me away Ha Ha they're coming to take me away Ho Ho ....
Bwa ha ha ha
>>Anyway what's the point in seeing/having it? ...) you won't have anything close to an actual microsoft build. You don't have the internal certificates and you certainly don't have the internal build tools.
Great point! Building it will be just about impossible, and even if you do get it to build (somehow
Windows is built using the latest internal versions of the vc compiler and such and for true release builds there are all kinds of post-build "magic" tools (vulcan,lego,etc) run on that code before it really becomes production.
I can definitely understand some desire to look at this "forbidden" code, but when you really think about it, what the heck would you really do with it?
The D-Tuner is the greatest thing. Makes life a lot easier when you're on stage and in a hurry. ...
The tuning device is really cool as well.
Of course if I had a nickle for every punk kid that can't tune his guitar without an electronic tuner
It depends on the recording. There are a lot of releases where a large amount is sequenced and just a very small amount of live musicians ever get on the recording.
>>Ohh, and who on their right mind would actually accept hungarian as something useful?
Try the Excel team. I had an opportunity to see some of the Excel source as part of a debug session. Total Hungarian hell!! The variable names were huge and looked like alphabet soup!
Based on what I had seen in my time, the oldest code (ie the low level base stuff that Cutler was directly involved with and the 'base' stuff) is still fairly clean. There's a middle layer in there that gets pretty grungy. It's not all bad code, but commenting practices sure did change over the years. There's a lot with only comments in the top of the file about updates/etc. They made some more rigid standards about 99-2000 that made it better. It also depended on the group. The guys out of MS Israel (MSMQ, Proxy/ISA) wrote some really nice clean stuff. A lot of the Inet/IE stuff is really messy. The cluster code was really nice as I recall (bud of mine was cluster support). It all really depended on the group. Windows is broken down into a LOT of subpieces handled by specialized groups.
You'd probably be surprised. Some of it is really, really clean and some of it is a mess. It all depends on which part you look at. As far as searching for curse words and such (as referred to in a reply later in this thread) there actually was a concerted effort at MS a couple of years ago to actively 'clean' the code of offensive comments. There were actually bugs submitted against a whole slew of "WTF" and "hack" and "shit" comments back then. ....).
The code varies greatly in style and how it's put together. The MSMQ code where I spent most of my time when I worked at MS support is just friggin brilliant and a real joy to debug. I can't say that about everything (IE
He's correct. The tree is forked as needed for future versions. Heck, you can search through the asm files and still find ones with David Cutler's name in them that haven't been changed since he wrote them.
Someone's probably already said this, but the problem is I can't find most of what I'm looking for locally. Trust me, finding jazz guitar instructional books in eastern NC is just about impossible much less old Chet Atkins CDs.
I have an early 70's Fender Champ. 3 tubes, a handful of resistors and capacitors all with point to point wiring. Three knobs. Simplicity incarnate. Just turn the the three knobs to 10 and play.
There was a time when many MS products were going to target multiple platforms. If you find an older version of Access you can see some "Not available on Mac" comments that were left in the help by accident while the mac version was still in progress (never shipped). Likewise Visual Basic was going to be ported to the Mac as well and was at least partially done (mostly VBA stuff).
>>No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks... ROFLMAO !!! :-)
Ok, I gotta wonder how many people get that. I doubt it's all that often that the slashdot crowd and the new yankee crowd intersect.
When I used to work at Microsoft one of the guys from my team moved over to the Security Response team (yea, he was busy as hell). He would give classes to FBI and other gov't type guys on computers and security. He had these hillarious stories about having to teach some of the guys to use a mouse and giving them the 5'th grade definition of "internet" so they'd understand it.
And yes the gov't has leveraged Microsoft guys to help investigate hacks and such.
Perhaps I should have worded it better with something like "it can give you other options when the CSCI degree fails". Biology came to mind becuase I live in an area with a major research hospital and medical school that is always clamoring for people with bio and chem degrees for labwork.
The trouble with a C/S degree now is the way the industry looks at it. They want very current skills and even if you have a C/S degree you basically end up retraining every 2 years or so. The stuff you learn is very important, but until C/S is a true practice like engineering you don't really get to build on what you've learned before as much as someone like a structural engineer or a doctor.
This whole industry is just really, really screwey right now. If you are getting a CS degree try to get a minor in something pure like Math, Biology, Chemistry, etc that is more portable than you C/S degree should things get sour.
You might want to check your facts before you spew. While the ground system is heavy on Linux according to the article you referenced, the actual OS on the rover itself is VxWorks from Wind River.
http://www.windriver.com/news/press/20040105.html
Back in the early 80's I worked on tobacco farms picking tobacco by hand, a process known as "priming". 95-100 degree heat, nicotine soaking in through your skin and making you woozy and keeping an eye out for snakes around the bottom of the plans made for a sucky day. Even then once you were through picking you had to go up to a tall metal barn, climb up on the poles there and start hanging the tobacco up in the barn so it could be fired an dried. It was rough work but at 13 years old you could make close to 200 bucks a week for about 6 weeks. Of course now it's all handled by automatic harvesters and such.