Well, sure -- but it's not necessarily unique in that regard. Joe Sales Guy doesn't need to know how his system's IP stack is configured, he just needs to know how to double-click to open a document, or how to run a print job. These things are essentially the same on any modern desktop.
We looked at Dell, IBM and HP, and ended up buying Colfax International. For our specs, they came out to be considerably cheaper than Dell (at least after negotiating them down -- our director of ops is good at that), and they were willing to give us more options on the hardware (ie. using 3ware controllers), and generally give a damn about us as a customer, even though we're not doing particularly large orders yet. Through their online configurator I haven't been able to beat your above specs and price from Dell -- but I'd expect that they could come up with something comparable or better if we actually called and worked with them on it. Also, we're in Austin, literally in town with Dell, and they're in California -- but their shipping's way cheaper. Go figure.
Why would you buy RHES, btw? SLES9 is better, cheaper, and Novell has vastly better customer [and pre-sales] support than Red Hat. (Novell gave us free access to one of their local engineers while porting over to their platform; Red Hat never gave us anything more than 90-day you're-just-a-number installation support -- and Novell sent folks by with T-shirts and plush Ximian monkeys. Being away from the California Bay Area, one just doesn't get convention toys often -- and ya just can't beat the monkeys).
I agree with what you're saying. Just a comment on one piece...
It can be unfortunate that the latter group of people tend to find grunt work pretty dull, because grunt work goes with the territory.
Speaking for myself, I've found that having a reasonably talented student as protege makes things much more enjoyable, even when there's a substantial amount of grunt work on one's plate. This is useful for a few reasons:
Teaching is fun, particularly when the student is motivated (still free of external commitments and excited about their career).
As an intern, they're cheap. As junior staff, they're still cheap. This makes management easy to convince wrt hiring them.
Doing the grunt work yourself is more interesting if there's someone watching over your shoulder and asking questions -- and if you do mess up, there's another pair of eyes.
Helping someone else do the grunt work is more interesting than doing it oneself.
It's amusing in this field to work with someone who avoided getting jaded in the bust, or by a deathmarch at some previous job, or <...>.
BTW, the 95% thing was an off-the-cuff guess. My present employer, a fairly small startup, has had at least two wizards both hired and departed (the pay here's not so good, and one of them came to find the work uninteresting -- not in my department) and two continuously on staff (not including myself, as it seems the sort of thing tht should be determined through 3rd-party evaluation). Given the size of our tech staff, this leads to substantially better than 1-in-20, but I'm not convinced that this is typical:
Working for a company that promises cool work [and a chance to make it big] rather than a market-rate paycheck arguably has less attraction for those whose focus is on the paycheck, but more for those who like what they do and are confident enough (and financially able) to take risks.
Our lead architect [a specialist rather than a generalist, but capable of vastly larger quantities of code with far fewer bugs than anyone else on staff] was responsible for two of the wizards on staff via personal contacts, and I was responsible for a 3rd [someone I'd worked with in the past on both personal and professional projects]. I'm thus inclined to suspect that those who have wizards on staff in the first place are better able to get more later -- in addition to the personal-contacts role, one of the things that attracted me to this job despite the pay was the quality of the engineering team, and I'm inclined to think this motivation is generally applicable.
In a world where 95% of all software developers know only the world on top of all the abstractions they work through, the one who knows what's underneath is king.
Certainly, most of the work that most developers do most of the time doesn't require understanding how a JVM works or how to determine the big-O complexity of an algorithm or how memory management works under the hood or how to diagnose and fix a DSDT bug that's causing IRQ routing to be set up wrong -- but if it's known that you're the person on staff who does know all this stuff (or just the person on staff who can debug issues that stump everyone else, which is pretty much the same thing), you're vastly more valuable than the folks who know only the abstractions.
Your personal experience is all well and good, but this friend of yours is not statistically significant.
Alas not. That said, this is true of the population in general, not only of religious adherents.
[F]rankly, aren't we as a society a little old for fairy tales?
No, we aren't -- and I, for one, am grateful for that. The masses being led around by charismatic charlatans using religion as their mantle -- that I'll be glad to be rid of. On the other hand, there are considerable unexplained phoenominae (I myself have experienced what is frequently referred to as being "slain in the spirit", which was at the time being reliably induced in a number of people by a touch on the forehead by a traveling minister, and some other occurances which may safely be described as "religious experiences"), such that I'm not willing to take it as given that there is in fact nothing there. Further, I've encountered others who have confided similar experiences, despite otherwise fully appearing to be rational and skeptical individuals.
Perhaps when our understanding of biology can provide a complete and convincing explanation for such events[1], we might be old enough to abandon our fairy tales -- presuming, of course, they don't hold to them some truth.
[1] - Some of these symptoms associated with these events are not entirely unlike those associated with some kinds of temporal lobe siezures -- but induced by a 3rd party without the use of probes or electromagnetic fields, and experienced near-exclusively by individuals with religious or spiritual leanings? It's also notable, perhaps, that these experiences caused a shift in my personality which was, in hindsight, substantially for the better.
---
Frankly, this discussion has become substantially more personal than I prefer to have in public. Perhaps you should email me if you want to continue the thread.
I consider changing "days" to mean "millions of years" to be rewriting
I disagree. In the context of creation, there exists no such thing as a day until the prerequisites ("the heavens and the earth", or at minimum light) exist already. Consequently, even on its face, with no input from science beyond simple common sense the strict "literal days" interpretation falls flat.
I didn't say it meant "millions of years", either. Who's to say that $DEITY is bound by our time dimension? It's a whole lot easier to exhibit Godlike powers if you're outside the set of dimensions you're manipulating looking in, after all. If $DEITY has its own time dimension, and has free movement over our dimension of "time"... *shrug*.
Remember the context here: We're talking about an omnipotent deity. Assuming that such a deity is bound by time in the same manner we are... well, it's a rather silly assumption to make.
If you decide that some of the words in your religious text don't mean what they usually mean because of something revealed through science, you are modifying your religion to accomodate science.
Modifying your interpretation of your religion and modifying the firmaments of that religion are two entirely different things. Modifying interpretation is an entirely reasonable thing to do, and it's done all the time by religious scholars even without the influence of science and like outside forces: To presume otherwise is to venerate not $HOLY_TEXT, but some particular group of peoples' interpretations of that text. Most Protestants don't (or will, if asked, claim not to) worship the Vatican, or Martin Luther, or the other individuals or groups responsible for the presently widespread interpretations; rather, they claim to worship $DEITY, and follow $HOLY_TEXT. "Following $HOLY_TEXT", however, is a rather subjective thing: How does one interpret the ambiguities? Valid interpretative differences exist not only between subsects but between individuals, and deciding that everyone with a different interpretation of any minor point is following a rewritten religion is thus simply untenable.
So, what's rewriting? I posit that rewriting is adding to or discarding from $HOLY_TEXT -- but even so, there are cases where it may be acceptable. Onesuch is exercising a reasonable challenge to the decisions made by (obviously fallable) humans as to which content legitimately belongs there. To take an example, the set of books included in the Bible was very much open to debate for a time, and there are some texts written documenting Jesus's life (which historical evidence supports as legitimately being reasonably direct accounts) which were rejected when the single collection now known as "The Bible" was being put together. Arguably, these rejections were illegitimate (and notably, some of the rejected content is such that the early Church may have found disapproval in line with their own interests), and incorporating the content from the rejected texts into one's personal beliefs is not an inherently untenable decision.
The reason why science and religion are usually at odds with one another is that science seeks the truth and (most) religion claims to be the truth.
The truths exposed via religion and the truths exposed via science are not necessarily incompatible.
Think of it this way: You've got one set of facts, observed via experimental observation. You have a second set of items you're taking as facts, read from the literal text of your religious book of choice. If these facts conflict, it's not necessarily that your observations are wrong or your religious book is wrong: It could simply be that your interpretations of either or both are incorrect. Burying your head in the sand and denying observed facts is obviously wrong, and giving up your religion because freshly observed facts conflict with your previous interpretation of that religion is arguably wrong as well. (Reasonable folks don't throw out all of science when they make a single observation contrary to their current theories, no? Theories are to science as interpretations are to religion; science shouldn't be thrown out when some theories are shown to be wrong, and neither should religion necessarily be thrown out when some interpretations are shown to be wrong).
So, if we observe physical evidence that the amount of carbon in various strata of the Earth implies that it's been around for a particularly long time, but $HOLY_BOOK says 7 days -- well, neither of those is necessarily wrong, so long as we appreciate that "days" in the context of $HOLY_BOOK's account of creation doesn't necessarily mean 24 hours. If we observe physical evidence of previous lifeforms which, over time, change until they're more like current ones, and $HOLY_BOOK says that current lifeforms were created intentionally -- well, neither of those is necessarily wrong, if the mechanism of that creation involved species which changed over time. None of these involve denying either scientific truths nor items from $HOLY_BOOK which one decides to accept as truth; it's simply a matter of tuning one's theories to match both sets of items accepted as facts.
No rewriting involved -- just reinterpretations, and ones minor enough that one accepting those interpretations can do useful work on the scientific side and write papers which they honestly believe to be factual which need not mention the interpretations used to clarify the interactions between the two sets of accepted truth.
Just as an aside: My own personal beliefs are just that -- personal -- and are not necessarily reflected in this post.
One of the most brilliant people I know is a religious man. He's also a medical doctor, and enjoys sitting down for a multi-hour conversation on not just his religion itself, but its interactions with philosophy and ethics -- and physics, statistics and biology; and alternate mechanisms by which his observations might be explained [ie. many-universes theory]. In addition to all this, he's one of the most honest and humble people I've met, and does more honor to his beliefs than most professional sermonizers. There are people whose religious faith is anything but blind, and who by no means allow that faith to curtail their interest in and knowledge of even things that might seem contradictory to that faith. Don't blame the religion -- blame the people who use it as an excuse not to think, or those who use it as a tool to manipulate others not to think.
I grew up going to a church which had a wide variety of regular speakers from substantially different subsects; it was left to us, the audiance, to figure out whose interpretation was the correct one. (We had a designated preacher, but anyone could get up and give a sermon provided the Board of Elders -- themselves a relatively diverse bunch -- approved). A few years ago I attended church with a friend, and was astonished: The preacher was spouting obvious falsities in trying to ratify his own religious views with severely oversimplified versions of the relevant scientific facts, and the people ate it up. I was waiting on the ride home for my friend or his family to object, but heard only comments on how good the sermon was that day.
I didn't just say "default media player", I said "default media player on the desktop". An OEM can't replace Microsoft's default desktop icons with their own (though they can add additional ones). See, the "on the desktop" bit is where the legal impediments take place, whereas the economic impediments are related to the need to implicitly pay for the (bundled) MS player (to make it harder to justify paying for a second player such as the Pro version of Real, since they already have a player whose cost was rolled in to the cost of Windows).
Shouldn't it cost more for the stripped down version? According to the EU bureaucrats, it's better.
You're being deliberately obtuse -- no?
The point of the stripped down version was to remedy the anticompetitive effects of bundling Microsoft's media player with a monopoly product (Windows), preventing OEMs from shipping systems with other media players in its place. As long as the OEM is still forced to pay for Microsoft's media player even if they aren't receiving it, however, there's an economic disincentive against 3rd party media players being bundled by OEMs -- defeating the whole point of the EU's action.
There's no belief on anyone's part that having no media player is better than the MS media player; rather, the ill-served intent is to allow an opening for competitors such as Real to get their players to ship on new machines in place of Microsoft's.
Let's fantasize about a world in which OS X and Linux are on par with Windows in terms of distribution. Would you believe that the vast majority would prefer to 'buy' a product that is merely an operating system ? Or would you believe that what most people buy is not an operating system per se, but rather an operating system and desktop productivity suite? If the latter, could you explain why any commercial company would make the economically unsound decision to offer everything separately ?
An OEM shipping Red Hat Linux (or SuSE Linux, or whichever) can ship Real Player, or VLC, or some Windows media player running in through Crossover -- and Red Hat won't put anything in their contract (or technical impediments in place) to stop them from doing that. An OEM shipping Windows is prevented by technical, legal and financial measures from shipping with a default media player other than Microsoft's on the desktop.
The issue, then, isn't asking the user to mix-and-match the components they want -- users don't want that, they want (by and large) something that Just Works. Rather, the core issue is allowing (and removing disincentives towards) OEM customization of the systems they ship. Not that I think the EU's actions are actually going to do any good in that area.
How tasteless would it have been to make light of planes hitting buildings six months after September 11th, 2001?
That depends on the joke, and the listener. I wouldn't describe all such jokes within that time range as automatically in poor taste, though. Laughing about something is, to many, an effective way to numb the pain.
Ya know, there do exist Americans who think that folks who get up in arms over jokes about (say) the Twin Towers are largely uptight assholes. Quite a few of us, actually (though I'd avoid such jokes were I visiting New York, just to avoid offending local sensibilities).
Don't judge the group by the vocal (readily offended) minority. There are plenty of Americans who don't mind jokes about our own tragedies -- what better way to get it behind than with humor?
The BSA spokesperson claims the numbers are not inflated; the Economist says they are.
That sounds like dispute to me.
It sounds like dispute, but it isn't dispute. She didn't say that the numbers weren't inflated -- she just said they didn't need to be, and by doing so avoided any actually substantive discussion. It's called "weasel words", and it's something PR flacks are quite good at.
[S]urely you can concede that there are times at which it would be nice to have your computer working at its full potential and not restricted somewhat arbitrarily.
Of course.
If I were a video production house and have a rendering farm set up, I wouldn't gonna care if the machines are usable; I'd want them to be working at full load.
No doubt. But even then, you wouldn't need your software to be able to split the load of rendering a single pixel, or even a single row of pixels, over the four CPUs -- rather, you could run four separate instances, each working on a different frame or set of rows, with another process to recombine the results; this provides the desired benefit, without the need for multithreading.
I vaguely recall POV having such functionality years ago.
That's not such a bad thing. It's quite nice still having your system be actually usable while you have a big, CPU-intensive task running in the background. Likewise, [real-world example] when Oracle screws up on one of the servers at work and starts using 100% CPU, it's rather nice that it doesn't bring the whole system to its knees (and incite the customer to call support rather than support noticing it first in their server-monitoring tool).
IPsec isn't meant for this kind of problem, and just adding crypto (without a protocol redesign) won't do any good either. It prevents a man-in-the-middle from sniffing or modifying content, but it isn't going to stop the remote peer from ratting out their partners.
Yes, Tomcat is used in production sometimes. That's not to say that the folks using it in production (like my employer) don't know it's slow. We know it's slow, and we use it anyhow (for the moment), because our customers have more money for buying good hardware than we have developer-hours to decouple ourselves from it. There certainly are faster alternatives, though.
That said, performance has improved substantially over the last several versions (ie. between 4.1 and 5.5), so the "Tomcat is reeeally slow" meme is less accurate than it used to be.
I've got to disagree with his claim that real-world deployments almost never use Tomcat -- my present employer isn't the first place I've seen that does (the last site I was at using Tomcat didn't buy it directly -- it was wrapped up in a tens-of-K$ "solution" they purchased and then regretted).
So how much Linux software supports the Indonesian alphabet ?
Probably more Linux software does than Windows software. You're actually bringing up one of Linux's strengths: Availability of translations is substantially higher than on Windows because 3rd parties can write them and submit them to the developer. Compare this to closed software for Windows where Microsoft (or whomever) needs to pay to write the translation -- so for smaller markets they typically don't. This is part of the reason for Linux's success in India, for instance.
They can't afford to lose money on importing Linux programmers that can do all that.
Which is why it makes sense for them to do it in-house. Writing a gettext translation file is easy -- you don't need a programmer, you just need someone who can type and knows both languages. It looks like this: "Hello = Hola" where on the left you have the lines like they appear in the program's default translation, and on the right you have the localized version.
Since there are no, and I absolutely mean: no, women out there willing to "court" a man
Not so -- I've been the target of onesuch (a geek, and easy on the eyes to boot)! She was a lab monitor for the computer science department at CSU Chico. After an evening during which pretty much nobody was in the labs (which we spent largely laughing at webcomics), she asked me if I wanted a ride home -- by which, I found [after observing that she hadn't asked me where I lived, and was heading in a rather different direction] she meant her place. (Her: "You aren't an axe murderer, right?" Me: "No, only on Thursdays").
No, I didn't get into bed with her that night, or ever -- she was setting me up "on backup" for the event that her long-distance SO didn't make good on his promise to move into town -- but I had a great deal of fun, made a few friends (some of her friends were themselves quite interesting people), and gained the ability to quite positively refute your claim that no woman will ever court a man.
And BTW, you're conflating geeks with nerds. A geek quite certainly can court or flirt without being anything else -- I'm engaged to be married, and most of the other high-level geeks I know are themselves in some variety of long-term relationship.
What you point out has nothing to do with the university scene; it has to do with the fact that non-techies hire techies.
However, in most fields, folks have technical managers as a layer between the techies and the non-techies. Thus, the techies are shielded by a set of mgmt folks responsible for doing all the more annoying things (getting funding, explaining to upper mgmt exactly why an idea is nonfeasible, padding schedules such that the techies' optimism doesn't result in broken promises) and the techies get to do... well, tech.
The only companies where I've not been under a layer of technical management have been the mom-and-pop shops in nontechnical fields; even the small tech startups have seen fit to have technical management (and even though they can't completely prevent the CEO from walking in and making unreasonable requests that disrupt the department schedule, they can repair much of the damage afterwards).
I didn't say it was DOS, and neither did the grandparent. The assertion is that folks calling it "DOS" isn't entirely wrongheaded because it looks so much like that other, late, belated OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows is easy for the common people to grasp.
Well, sure -- but it's not necessarily unique in that regard. Joe Sales Guy doesn't need to know how his system's IP stack is configured, he just needs to know how to double-click to open a document, or how to run a print job. These things are essentially the same on any modern desktop.
We looked at Dell, IBM and HP, and ended up buying Colfax International. For our specs, they came out to be considerably cheaper than Dell (at least after negotiating them down -- our director of ops is good at that), and they were willing to give us more options on the hardware (ie. using 3ware controllers), and generally give a damn about us as a customer, even though we're not doing particularly large orders yet. Through their online configurator I haven't been able to beat your above specs and price from Dell -- but I'd expect that they could come up with something comparable or better if we actually called and worked with them on it. Also, we're in Austin, literally in town with Dell, and they're in California -- but their shipping's way cheaper. Go figure.
Why would you buy RHES, btw? SLES9 is better, cheaper, and Novell has vastly better customer [and pre-sales] support than Red Hat. (Novell gave us free access to one of their local engineers while porting over to their platform; Red Hat never gave us anything more than 90-day you're-just-a-number installation support -- and Novell sent folks by with T-shirts and plush Ximian monkeys. Being away from the California Bay Area, one just doesn't get convention toys often -- and ya just can't beat the monkeys).
- Teaching is fun, particularly when the student is motivated (still free of external commitments and excited about their career).
- As an intern, they're cheap. As junior staff, they're still cheap. This makes management easy to convince wrt hiring them.
- Doing the grunt work yourself is more interesting if there's someone watching over your shoulder and asking questions -- and if you do mess up, there's another pair of eyes.
- Helping someone else do the grunt work is more interesting than doing it oneself.
- It's amusing in this field to work with someone who avoided getting jaded in the bust, or by a deathmarch at some previous job, or <...>.
BTW, the 95% thing was an off-the-cuff guess. My present employer, a fairly small startup, has had at least two wizards both hired and departed (the pay here's not so good, and one of them came to find the work uninteresting -- not in my department) and two continuously on staff (not including myself, as it seems the sort of thing tht should be determined through 3rd-party evaluation). Given the size of our tech staff, this leads to substantially better than 1-in-20, but I'm not convinced that this is typical:You have a valid point, but there's a flip side:
In a world where 95% of all software developers know only the world on top of all the abstractions they work through, the one who knows what's underneath is king.
Certainly, most of the work that most developers do most of the time doesn't require understanding how a JVM works or how to determine the big-O complexity of an algorithm or how memory management works under the hood or how to diagnose and fix a DSDT bug that's causing IRQ routing to be set up wrong -- but if it's known that you're the person on staff who does know all this stuff (or just the person on staff who can debug issues that stump everyone else, which is pretty much the same thing), you're vastly more valuable than the folks who know only the abstractions.
Perhaps when our understanding of biology can provide a complete and convincing explanation for such events[1], we might be old enough to abandon our fairy tales -- presuming, of course, they don't hold to them some truth.
[1] - Some of these symptoms associated with these events are not entirely unlike those associated with some kinds of temporal lobe siezures -- but induced by a 3rd party without the use of probes or electromagnetic fields, and experienced near-exclusively by individuals with religious or spiritual leanings? It's also notable, perhaps, that these experiences caused a shift in my personality which was, in hindsight, substantially for the better.
---
Frankly, this discussion has become substantially more personal than I prefer to have in public. Perhaps you should email me if you want to continue the thread.
I didn't say it meant "millions of years", either. Who's to say that $DEITY is bound by our time dimension? It's a whole lot easier to exhibit Godlike powers if you're outside the set of dimensions you're manipulating looking in, after all. If $DEITY has its own time dimension, and has free movement over our dimension of "time"... *shrug*.
Remember the context here: We're talking about an omnipotent deity. Assuming that such a deity is bound by time in the same manner we are... well, it's a rather silly assumption to make.Modifying your interpretation of your religion and modifying the firmaments of that religion are two entirely different things. Modifying interpretation is an entirely reasonable thing to do, and it's done all the time by religious scholars even without the influence of science and like outside forces: To presume otherwise is to venerate not $HOLY_TEXT, but some particular group of peoples' interpretations of that text. Most Protestants don't (or will, if asked, claim not to) worship the Vatican, or Martin Luther, or the other individuals or groups responsible for the presently widespread interpretations; rather, they claim to worship $DEITY, and follow $HOLY_TEXT. "Following $HOLY_TEXT", however, is a rather subjective thing: How does one interpret the ambiguities? Valid interpretative differences exist not only between subsects but between individuals, and deciding that everyone with a different interpretation of any minor point is following a rewritten religion is thus simply untenable.
So, what's rewriting? I posit that rewriting is adding to or discarding from $HOLY_TEXT -- but even so, there are cases where it may be acceptable. Onesuch is exercising a reasonable challenge to the decisions made by (obviously fallable) humans as to which content legitimately belongs there. To take an example, the set of books included in the Bible was very much open to debate for a time, and there are some texts written documenting Jesus's life (which historical evidence supports as legitimately being reasonably direct accounts) which were rejected when the single collection now known as "The Bible" was being put together. Arguably, these rejections were illegitimate (and notably, some of the rejected content is such that the early Church may have found disapproval in line with their own interests), and incorporating the content from the rejected texts into one's personal beliefs is not an inherently untenable decision.
The reason why science and religion are usually at odds with one another is that science seeks the truth and (most) religion claims to be the truth.
The truths exposed via religion and the truths exposed via science are not necessarily incompatible.
Think of it this way: You've got one set of facts, observed via experimental observation. You have a second set of items you're taking as facts, read from the literal text of your religious book of choice. If these facts conflict, it's not necessarily that your observations are wrong or your religious book is wrong: It could simply be that your interpretations of either or both are incorrect. Burying your head in the sand and denying observed facts is obviously wrong, and giving up your religion because freshly observed facts conflict with your previous interpretation of that religion is arguably wrong as well. (Reasonable folks don't throw out all of science when they make a single observation contrary to their current theories, no? Theories are to science as interpretations are to religion; science shouldn't be thrown out when some theories are shown to be wrong, and neither should religion necessarily be thrown out when some interpretations are shown to be wrong).
So, if we observe physical evidence that the amount of carbon in various strata of the Earth implies that it's been around for a particularly long time, but $HOLY_BOOK says 7 days -- well, neither of those is necessarily wrong, so long as we appreciate that "days" in the context of $HOLY_BOOK's account of creation doesn't necessarily mean 24 hours. If we observe physical evidence of previous lifeforms which, over time, change until they're more like current ones, and $HOLY_BOOK says that current lifeforms were created intentionally -- well, neither of those is necessarily wrong, if the mechanism of that creation involved species which changed over time. None of these involve denying either scientific truths nor items from $HOLY_BOOK which one decides to accept as truth; it's simply a matter of tuning one's theories to match both sets of items accepted as facts.
No rewriting involved -- just reinterpretations, and ones minor enough that one accepting those interpretations can do useful work on the scientific side and write papers which they honestly believe to be factual which need not mention the interpretations used to clarify the interactions between the two sets of accepted truth.
Just as an aside: My own personal beliefs are just that -- personal -- and are not necessarily reflected in this post.
One of the most brilliant people I know is a religious man. He's also a medical doctor, and enjoys sitting down for a multi-hour conversation on not just his religion itself, but its interactions with philosophy and ethics -- and physics, statistics and biology; and alternate mechanisms by which his observations might be explained [ie. many-universes theory]. In addition to all this, he's one of the most honest and humble people I've met, and does more honor to his beliefs than most professional sermonizers. There are people whose religious faith is anything but blind, and who by no means allow that faith to curtail their interest in and knowledge of even things that might seem contradictory to that faith. Don't blame the religion -- blame the people who use it as an excuse not to think, or those who use it as a tool to manipulate others not to think.
I grew up going to a church which had a wide variety of regular speakers from substantially different subsects; it was left to us, the audiance, to figure out whose interpretation was the correct one. (We had a designated preacher, but anyone could get up and give a sermon provided the Board of Elders -- themselves a relatively diverse bunch -- approved). A few years ago I attended church with a friend, and was astonished: The preacher was spouting obvious falsities in trying to ratify his own religious views with severely oversimplified versions of the relevant scientific facts, and the people ate it up. I was waiting on the ride home for my friend or his family to object, but heard only comments on how good the sermon was that day.
*sigh*.
HP bundles iTunes as the default audio player
I didn't just say "default media player", I said "default media player on the desktop". An OEM can't replace Microsoft's default desktop icons with their own (though they can add additional ones). See, the "on the desktop" bit is where the legal impediments take place, whereas the economic impediments are related to the need to implicitly pay for the (bundled) MS player (to make it harder to justify paying for a second player such as the Pro version of Real, since they already have a player whose cost was rolled in to the cost of Windows).
Have some crow.
Shouldn't it cost more for the stripped down version? According to the EU bureaucrats, it's better.
You're being deliberately obtuse -- no?
The point of the stripped down version was to remedy the anticompetitive effects of bundling Microsoft's media player with a monopoly product (Windows), preventing OEMs from shipping systems with other media players in its place. As long as the OEM is still forced to pay for Microsoft's media player even if they aren't receiving it, however, there's an economic disincentive against 3rd party media players being bundled by OEMs -- defeating the whole point of the EU's action.
There's no belief on anyone's part that having no media player is better than the MS media player; rather, the ill-served intent is to allow an opening for competitors such as Real to get their players to ship on new machines in place of Microsoft's.
Let's fantasize about a world in which OS X and Linux are on par with Windows in terms of distribution. Would you believe that the vast majority would prefer to 'buy' a product that is merely an operating system ? Or would you believe that what most people buy is not an operating system per se, but rather an operating system and desktop productivity suite? If the latter, could you explain why any commercial company would make the economically unsound decision to offer everything separately ?
An OEM shipping Red Hat Linux (or SuSE Linux, or whichever) can ship Real Player, or VLC, or some Windows media player running in through Crossover -- and Red Hat won't put anything in their contract (or technical impediments in place) to stop them from doing that. An OEM shipping Windows is prevented by technical, legal and financial measures from shipping with a default media player other than Microsoft's on the desktop.
The issue, then, isn't asking the user to mix-and-match the components they want -- users don't want that, they want (by and large) something that Just Works. Rather, the core issue is allowing (and removing disincentives towards) OEM customization of the systems they ship. Not that I think the EU's actions are actually going to do any good in that area.
How tasteless would it have been to make light of planes hitting buildings six months after September 11th, 2001?
That depends on the joke, and the listener. I wouldn't describe all such jokes within that time range as automatically in poor taste, though. Laughing about something is, to many, an effective way to numb the pain.
Ya know, there do exist Americans who think that folks who get up in arms over jokes about (say) the Twin Towers are largely uptight assholes. Quite a few of us, actually (though I'd avoid such jokes were I visiting New York, just to avoid offending local sensibilities).
Don't judge the group by the vocal (readily offended) minority. There are plenty of Americans who don't mind jokes about our own tragedies -- what better way to get it behind than with humor?
[S]urely you can concede that there are times at which it would be nice to have your computer working at its full potential and not restricted somewhat arbitrarily.
Of course.
If I were a video production house and have a rendering farm set up, I wouldn't gonna care if the machines are usable; I'd want them to be working at full load.
No doubt. But even then, you wouldn't need your software to be able to split the load of rendering a single pixel, or even a single row of pixels, over the four CPUs -- rather, you could run four separate instances, each working on a different frame or set of rows, with another process to recombine the results; this provides the desired benefit, without the need for multithreading.
I vaguely recall POV having such functionality years ago.
That's not such a bad thing. It's quite nice still having your system be actually usable while you have a big, CPU-intensive task running in the background. Likewise, [real-world example] when Oracle screws up on one of the servers at work and starts using 100% CPU, it's rather nice that it doesn't bring the whole system to its knees (and incite the customer to call support rather than support noticing it first in their server-monitoring tool).
IPsec isn't meant for this kind of problem, and just adding crypto (without a protocol redesign) won't do any good either. It prevents a man-in-the-middle from sniffing or modifying content, but it isn't going to stop the remote peer from ratting out their partners.
Because some applications are cooperating although they're not supposed to.
Yes, Tomcat is used in production sometimes. That's not to say that the folks using it in production (like my employer) don't know it's slow. We know it's slow, and we use it anyhow (for the moment), because our customers have more money for buying good hardware than we have developer-hours to decouple ourselves from it. There certainly are faster alternatives, though.
That said, performance has improved substantially over the last several versions (ie. between 4.1 and 5.5), so the "Tomcat is reeeally slow" meme is less accurate than it used to be.
I've got to disagree with his claim that real-world deployments almost never use Tomcat -- my present employer isn't the first place I've seen that does (the last site I was at using Tomcat didn't buy it directly -- it was wrapped up in a tens-of-K$ "solution" they purchased and then regretted).
So how much Linux software supports the Indonesian alphabet ?
Probably more Linux software does than Windows software. You're actually bringing up one of Linux's strengths: Availability of translations is substantially higher than on Windows because 3rd parties can write them and submit them to the developer. Compare this to closed software for Windows where Microsoft (or whomever) needs to pay to write the translation -- so for smaller markets they typically don't. This is part of the reason for Linux's success in India, for instance.
They can't afford to lose money on importing Linux programmers that can do all that.
Which is why it makes sense for them to do it in-house. Writing a gettext translation file is easy -- you don't need a programmer, you just need someone who can type and knows both languages. It looks like this: "Hello = Hola" where on the left you have the lines like they appear in the program's default translation, and on the right you have the localized version.
The cost of converting 50,000 desktops from Windows to Linux would be somewhat more than $0. Not to mention re-training all those users.
To be sure -- but those are labor costs. They're easier to afford when you're in a location where labor is inexpensive compared to foreign goods.
Since there are no, and I absolutely mean: no, women out there willing to "court" a man
Not so -- I've been the target of onesuch (a geek, and easy on the eyes to boot)! She was a lab monitor for the computer science department at CSU Chico. After an evening during which pretty much nobody was in the labs (which we spent largely laughing at webcomics), she asked me if I wanted a ride home -- by which, I found [after observing that she hadn't asked me where I lived, and was heading in a rather different direction] she meant her place. (Her: "You aren't an axe murderer, right?" Me: "No, only on Thursdays").
No, I didn't get into bed with her that night, or ever -- she was setting me up "on backup" for the event that her long-distance SO didn't make good on his promise to move into town -- but I had a great deal of fun, made a few friends (some of her friends were themselves quite interesting people), and gained the ability to quite positively refute your claim that no woman will ever court a man.
And BTW, you're conflating geeks with nerds. A geek quite certainly can court or flirt without being anything else -- I'm engaged to be married, and most of the other high-level geeks I know are themselves in some variety of long-term relationship.
The only companies where I've not been under a layer of technical management have been the mom-and-pop shops in nontechnical fields; even the small tech startups have seen fit to have technical management (and even though they can't completely prevent the CEO from walking in and making unreasonable requests that disrupt the department schedule, they can repair much of the damage afterwards).
I didn't say it was DOS, and neither did the grandparent. The assertion is that folks calling it "DOS" isn't entirely wrongheaded because it looks so much like that other, late, belated OS.