I've always been a little concerned that the campaigners to keep religion and existential philosophy out of schools
Has anyone been saying this, ever?
No one wants to keep this out of schools. We want to keep it out of science class.
you can't actually control what the children are thinking about or the questions they will internally ask.... if you think a policy of "no philosophical or religious discussion allowed" will stop children from thinking and internally asking those religious/existential questions,
You seem to be assuming (mistakenly) that we want children to stop asking these questions.
We don't. There is a time and a place for such questions. A few possible places in school include religion class, philosophy class, or ethics class -- all of which are important, but are not science class.
Suppose a student stood up in math class and asked, "What is knowledge? How can we really say that we know, or have proved, anything?"
That's an important question, and it may even be somewhat relevant to math, but it is inherently not math, it's offtopic, and it's disruptive when the intent is to actually teach math.
So the answer to all of these questions would be, very simply, "That's an interesting question. Why don't you ask that in philosophy?"
A better answer would be to actually explain why that question is outside the domain of science. Carl Sagan's "dragon in my garage" might be a good start.
And if you wish to stop those questions from being discussed in class, then frankly you might as well put up a sign saying "only government pre-approved questions may be asked, and only government pre-approved answers will be given"
Really?
You really can't see a difference between trying to keep things on-topic and a totalitarian government pre-approved list of questions and answers?
The empirical evidence in Europe is that science applications to universities appear to have fallen as society and schools have become more secular. And the empirical evidence in Europe is that it seems to be the religious schools that produce the best science results
Nice evidence. Now, how do you connect it with this conclusion:
and part of that is that they most certainly do make space in their schools (in RE classes) for discussion of what (let's face it) society has always called "the big questions" about the meaning of life.
Really?
How do you know that? Especially given that the person you are replying to claims that this is actually not what happens -- that the religious schools absolutely do keep religion out of the science classroom, and instead tell their students to ask in a more appropriate class?
they expect them to think about everything, not just science.
That's a good idea.
Why don't you think about what you've learned here, if you've been paying attention. Two important things:
First, read the post before replying.
Second, make an effort to understand what your opposition says, rather than creating elaborate strawmen.
It is just a light, quick browser that is light and quick because it doesn't do the truly great things that FireFox can do.
Let's see...
v8, Chrome's Javascript engine, is what started most browsers, including Firefox, improving their Javascript engines by 2, 3, even 10 times. So that's quickness that was actually engineered, that no one did before.
It's also more secure and more robust -- tabs run in separate, sandboxed processes. This allows a single tab to crash without bringing down the browser. This is better than Konqueror, in which a single tab crashing brings down the window, and miles better than Firefox, in which a single tab crashing brings down the entire browser.
it doesn't do the truly great things that FireFox can do.
isn't caused by running familiar apps slowly, it's caused by being forced into inferior and unfamiliar facsimiles.
You could make that case about Bejeweled -- the official web version is deliberately crippled compared to the desktop version. However, the other two are very serious attempts by Microsoft to expose that functionality online. And I haven't covered alternatives -- Meebo and Google Docs come to mind.
How many people actually care about "IE8" vs "The Internet"?
Word, and Excel
Aside from Google Docs, it's possible to configure the system to integrate with Microsoft's online office suite. So yes, Word and Excel do exist.
inability to install Favorite Shareware application foo
Which only lasts as long as it takes them to find Favorite Web Widget Foo to replace it, with the added bonus of not fucking up their computer. That's probably going to be the biggest change here -- you won't be able to fuck up your computer without some serious effort.
I've seen a lot of kids, not particularly technically literate kids, replacing native IM clients with Meebo. I've even seen a few replacing Winamp and iTunes with Pandora.
So, there will be a few Joes who won't upgrade. But I think you underestimate the number of people who pretty much use their computers for Facebook and Youtube.
their documents are all Google documents ("what? what if it's a Microsoft Word document?"...) and you need to type that in the address bar...
Neither of these are required. I just watched a demo in which someone plugged an SD card into a laptop running Chrome OS -- it popped up a filesystem browser. They found an excel document, clicked it, and it opened in the Web version of Microsoft Excel.
So, they're working on it, but there is definitely a model for running applications that happen to be webpages.
No, not those, but benchmarks which measure actual web performance, not merely fibonacci.
Try these. Note that when we actually compare a full framework (Cake vs Rails), Rails is faster, and Merb is much faster. When we try to compare closer to the bare metal (raw PHP), we find that the Merb controller is almost as fast, and the Merb router is much faster.
Also, the page you linked to links to this, which is actually less about PHP and more about your app in general. Ruby may be the bottleneck more often than PHP, but still far less than database design, front-end (HTML/etc) design, and your own stupid mistakes.
I've worked with Ruby for over a year and a half, and I can say with absolute confidence that the language is horrible. You can flame back to this all you want...
That might be an interesting discussion, actually, but:
...the fact remains that it's a slow blob and throwing more hardware at it is a stupid argument.
See, that's a property of the implementation, not the language. You have noticed what's happened to Javascript lately, right? It used to be slower than Ruby. With v8, it's faster than Python.
Also, you fail to address why throwing hardware at it is a stupid argument, and you don't provide any benchmarks that it's slow.
No major VM is going to make it rival the top languages in raw processing power (C/C++/Java even Python).
If you actually looked at benchmarks, you'd notice that if nothing else, Rails beats PHP, consistently, for performance.
And Rails "automagic" combined with Ruby's inability to report exceptions in a meaninful way (the backtrace is 99% rubbish, and often reports the error in a place where it didn't even occur)
It would help if you actually gave an example here, but you don't. In my experience, the backtrace is actually quite helpful, but use of unit tests and specs helps avoid it.
As for Ruby in a browser - there's already projects that do that, and do it fairly well.
Which is one of the things TFA is about. So what's your point?
Some of them use Applets, which is where suddenly everyone has a hissie fit. Yeah, using a proprietary Windows-centric tech like Silverlight is a MUUUUCH better option.
I suspect Silverlight is at least faster to load, but I haven't tried doing either. Javascript does what I want it to do well enough.
Or writing a VM in JavaScript? Talk about MOLASSES!
Again, benchmarks or it didn't happen. Make sure to test it in one of the better Javascript engines, like v8.
If I want to use a quick scripting language with ample flexibility and power, I'll use Groovy, thank you very much. For one thing, Groovy and Grails gives me a LOT more choice as flexibility over RoR any day of the week.
Can you give an example of how? I mean, for one, there only really seems to be Grails, whereas Ruby has more web frameworks than VMs, and that's saying something. Take Sinatra, for example:
get '/' do
'Hello, world!' end
That's right, a REST DSL. What has Groovy got, again?
So, Rubyists, have your little childish flames now.
That's the most literal example of flamebait I've ever seen. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like anyone's really flaming you back. I'm the closest, and I'm just asking for facts.
And don't assume I'm a "n00b" - I've got over 15 years IT experience in more languages that I can list in this comment block.
With all that experience, you couldn't figure out that the comment block seems to allow very, very long comments -- almost certainly longer than the total list of programming languages that exist?
More importantly, you seem to have fallen into the same trap that Jerry Taylor did. I have no idea what your experience is, but it certainly doesn't seem to be reflected here.
I'm sure I'm just a clueless American, ignorant of world affairs, so maybe someone better informed can tell me...
But how does this have anything at all to do with rape? The words "rape", "sex", "fuck", "sodomize", etc, don't appear at all in TFA. It seems to be about violence, not rape.
the average joe wants to play games, take pictures, follow sports, and make their phone look like a lighter or a glass of beer.
If that were true, one has to wonder why they bothered with an iPhone? The Verizon phone that came free with my contract, a crappy little motorola flip-phone, can do all of the above except the lighter and the glass of beer -- are the last two really worth an extra couple hundred dollars?
And once that happens, the developers who were complaining yesterday that their quality apps were being lost among the crap on itunes will complain about the same thing with android. Even more so, since apple's opaque approval process won't be there to weed out the worst.
Or less so, since the store will have an API. (Or if it doesn't, competing stores can easily crop up which will have APIs.) Thus, the store will be able to filter exactly as well as we want it to -- or, again, we'll use the API to make it happen.
One could easily make a store that filters things by their combined ratings on various review sites, for example.
Contrast this to the iPhone store, where we're pretty much limited to whatever Apple gives us as far as filtering the apps. (As far as I know -- I don't have an iPhone. Maybe there really is an app for filtering through all the apps.)
And even with the app store, that doesn't seem to really be filtering on quality, but on sheer randomness.
Regardless, that flood of apps will certainly be no worse than the PC, or the Mac, for that matter.
Paperback... or I could use the phone for that, too, instead of wasting paper, bulk in my backpack, and muscle power lugging it around. Though I suppose that's a more compelling argument for textbooks than paperbacks.
Yes, you have given reasons for believing, which I have disputed, but all our discussions have taken place from your perspective, not from mine. You seem incapable of even tentatively adopting a hypothesis to test its veracity, where that hypothesis counters your core beliefs.
I might not have responded, but there was this:
so you too may become a son of God.
Am I not already, if he does exist? How could I become a son, or not a son, by what I believe? Whether or not I believe I was adopted doesn't change the reality of being my father's son.
I suppose our conversation is over, for now. But, I do hope you will remember some of it in the future. For my part, I have tried to learn what I can.
The real trouble is that most extensions are in javascript and javascript is not a language that emphasises security.
I don't really know of many languages that "emphasize security" -- indeed, Javascript is more sandboxed by default than most languages I know.
The fact that there is no way to perform a "use strict;" (as in Perl) is for starters a way to get access to all the other global variables in other scripts.
And the solution to this is obvious -- if you want to isolate scripts, isolate them at the runtime level, as you do for separate tabs/pages.
also gives access to all the possible extensions that are installed... Because of the lack of strictness in javascript as a language, if a global variable XYZ is in one script, it can be manipulated by any other script as well... Fundamentally it is a problem with Javascript and not with the Mozilla API.
Sorry, but that looks to me very much like a fatal flaw in the API. A strict language may allow you to compensate somewhat, but there is no reason a global variable needs to by default be accessible from every script.
allows you to do a lot of things.
So did older versions of Mac OS, which did not have a concept of memory protection -- all programs ran in the same address space. This let you do some interesting things that you can't do as easily on a platform like OS X, but it should be obvious why OS X is more stable and more secure.
Mozilla doesn't have a security model for extensions and Firefox fully trusts the code of the extensions. There are no security boundaries between extensions and, to make things even worse, an extension can silently modify another extension.
Not one of these is true of Chrome extensions -- or at least, it is possible to develop extensions which are not fully trusted.
I don't know what you have against the idea of appeal to authority.
Then you haven't been paying attention. I've made my reasons against appeal to authority quite clear, as well as citing several sources who agree with me.
It isn't really possible to have a rational discussion with someone who relies on appeal to authority, without backing up those claims.
Lee makes this the cornerstone of his work, going from authority to authority on different subjects.
All the less reason for me to waste my time with his work.
In my mind, there is nothing wrong with quoting someone who knows more about the subject, having studied it extensively.
There is nothing wrong with quoting someone, but unless that quote provides their reasons for believing something, it is merely an opinion.
My daughter has a master's degree from Duke University Divinity school.
In other words, she went to seminary.
I'm sorry, was this supposed to answer or address a single point I made, or was it just an excuse to talk about your daughter? And do others you converse with enjoy you deliberately derailing the conversation?
Simon Greenleaf, an expert on evidence disagrees with you.
Appeal to authority.
Other than applying your incomplete logic, you never tell me the reason why you think so.
I didn't say I think one way or another, only that I doubt their existence. You seem to be confusing, again, a lack of belief with a positive assertion.
If by "eyewitnesses", you mean the authors of the gospels themselves, there is considerable doubt that they were eyewitnesses at all. If they were, their accounts vary considerably, so as to cast doubt on any of their claims. Having cast any doubt on their claims, certainly the most fantastical of them can be discarded.
If you mean eyewitnesses who were described in the gospels, our evidence for their existence, let alone their reactions, is as shaky as our evidence for anything else in the gospels. Moreover, it's also hearsay.
Moreover, in what way is my logic incomplete?
Because the supernatural is outside of your senses and understanding, you don't believe it.
Almost. I don't believe things which are outside of my senses and understanding.
I don't believe "supernatural" has much meaning, as I believe that which is "natural" simply means that which we've observed and understood. If levitation is a supernatural phenomenon, and we one day discover a way for humans to levitate unassisted, we would very likely be able to describe that method as natural.
To take your radio analogy, radio would have seemed to be supernatural, but we understand the natural laws which are required for it.
If you deny the existence of the supernatural, you are in effect saying that you only believe your senses.
No, I am not, and I have repeatedly explained why not. I have no desire to explain again, but I'll give you a hint: Why did I bold "understanding" above?
This is also far from the only misunderstanding we've had where you have repeatedly misrepresented my position. This is a logical fallacy, too, one which is common enough to have a name -- the strawman argument. Look it up.
Plausible by your incomplete human logic which does not believe in anything supernatural.
Plausible by my complete human logic (see, I can make arbitrary assertions, too!), and the logical construct which has been informed by observations from my own lifetime and many lifetimes beyond it.
No, that this agreement is the heart of our differences. I believe that Jesus is a real historical person,
Actually, no, it's not. You see, up to this point, I have no problem. I don't know that he was,
Right, and because it seems arbitrary and random, it's often very difficult to develop an app that you can be sure will be approved.
That is, with any platform, you may lose your entire R&D investment by not generating enough sales, or by being buggy and needing too many patches (during which time most users give up)... there are tons of things which can go wrong.
With Apple, even if you do everything else flawlessly, there's one more thing that could go wrong: Your app could be rejected for reasons you couldn't have predicted. That's one thing you don't have to worry about on Android, at least.
One approach might be to take Canonical to the Better Business Bureau for this fraud : it is not allowed to send someone a product, unsolicited, and then ask for payment later.
Citation needed. When I download Ubuntu, that's hardly unsolicited -- if I want, I can look up every single package that's on the install disc. I also see no evidence that any part of Ubuntu is asking for payment later, except the parts that are not enabled unless I deliberately do so. In fact, I only know of one such program, and it's not even in the desktop version of Ubuntu.
it is not allowed to send someone a product, unsolicited, and then ask for payment later. That's what's happening with F-Spot (the M$ competitor to Solang, Digikam), Tomboy (the M$ competitor to Zim, Getting-things-gnome, Knotes and BasKet) or Banshee (the M$ competitor to Amarok, Rhythmbox, Totem and XMMS).
Big gigantic citation needed.
Ok, first of all: I don't use Mono, but the first article you link to is flat-out wrong. Anyone who's used both C# and Java in any serious way will tell you that C# has things Java doesn't. You can debate whether or not they're good and useful things, but they exist, and it is easy to argue that C# is a better language than Java.
Just one example: Code blocks. Not just anonymous functions -- Java has an incredibly cumbersome way to do this, by wrapping the function in an anonymous class and ending up with something even more verbose than Javascript -- but something even more lightweight, with some language syntax explicitly designed for, "take this chunk of code and pass it as a value."
It's one of the things I love about Ruby, and I'm not about to abandon Ruby for C#, but at first glance, C# seems to do it better.
But moreover, you've got a list of things here which you've adorned with "M$", which at first glance seem to be serious open-source projects with no ties to Microsoft, and no evidence at all of ever planning to charge money.
In particular, you're suggesting Digikam and Amarok as potential replacements. Digikam may be small enough, but still depends on KDE -- and it is included by default in Kubuntu. Amarok was once included by default in Kubuntu, and still might be, but its KDE4 release was a huge regression in functionality and stability, and it's also kind of huge -- and also heavily tied to KDE libs and Qt.
So while they would work, for performance reasons alone, I'd lean towards Gnome/Gtk applications by default, rather than KDE/Qt, if I were building a Gnome distro.
The M$applications aren't built with reliable technologies.
Again, citation needed. When I've used Mono applications, I haven't experienced nearly the instability you're hinting at.
Mono, to name one of the problems, has a paper trail back to Microsoft via Novell and years of payments from Novell to Microsoft for said products.
Except I don't see Canonical paying Novell, nor do I see Novell (or Microsoft) paying Canonical. So this conspiracy you've woven has no money, has no teeth.
I see a few other problems with this:
First, you seem to believe that Mono is this evil thing that seduces developers into using it instead of Java. After all, you must either believe this, or you must believe that most developers working on Mono projects are deliberately trying to undermine Linux.
That, or a third option -- maybe Mono is actually better?
But you also seem to believe that by using Mono, these programs are bigger, slower, and less reliable.
I don't get it -- if Mono really is bigger, slower, and less reliable, how can it also be shiny and seducing new developers?
You're also suggesting that Canonical and Ubuntu are using these technologies because they want users to be forced to pay eventually, or be forced to move back to Windows eventually. Yet Kubuntu and Xubuntu seem suspiciousl
the fugly colour schemes, the stupid naming schemes
Matters of preference. Besides, if a stupid naming scheme was enough, why are you using something called Linux in the first place?
the artificial restrictions on root
How is root restricted? I seem to be able to sudo anything I want.
not including the toolchain for building the system by default
And how many ordinary users want/need such a toolchain? I realize many applications are only distributed as source, but why should the average desktop user waste disk space and bandwidth on it?
Windows doesn't include a compiler by default. OS X even includes Ruby on Rails, but doesn't include XCode by default, last I checked. Yet people can and do choose OS X over Linux for development.
even on xubuntu, etc.,
Yeah, there's a brilliant idea -- let's put the least-used packages by default on the lightest version. People thought they were installing Xubuntu to save resources and rescue old hardware, but little did they know, tomhudson needed gcc, so they're going to be burning disk space on things they'll never use...
If they want it to be so dumbed down, why don't they just pull a lindows/linspire?
It's not a question of "dumbed-down" -- indeed, you seem to be the one who's wanting "dumbed-down", a system that has everything a developer needs installed by default, including build-essential.
From your other post:
Why should I have to?
Because you're the developer, genius.
The kind of user Ubuntu is targeted at is a user who wants to plug in a digital camera and have everything Just Work, and not have to learn The Gimp just to remove some red-eye.
The kind of user who's actually a software developer should be well-informed enough, and intelligent enough, to be able to find the software needed (build-essential and whateverineeded-dev) without having their hand held through the process.
I'm highly skeptical of this claim:
it takes longer to go through all the menus and download/install everything than it does to just wipe down the machine and install openSuse,
Firstly, if you've been using the distro for any length of time, you've probably got a list. So it's not a matter of going through the menus, it's a matter of:
And second, is it that your Internet connection just sucks? I honestly don't remember any OS installing quicker than the time it takes to install a set of packages.
For that matter, this is why you have a package manager in the first place -- to keep the software up-to-date, and to install things that weren't in the base install.
If OpenSuse works for you, more power to you, but if "everything's included" as you suggest, all the more reason for me to recommend Ubuntu over it, especially to non-developers.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always been a little concerned that the campaigners to keep religion and existential philosophy out of schools
Has anyone been saying this, ever?
No one wants to keep this out of schools. We want to keep it out of science class.
you can't actually control what the children are thinking about or the questions they will internally ask.... if you think a policy of "no philosophical or religious discussion allowed" will stop children from thinking and internally asking those religious/existential questions,
You seem to be assuming (mistakenly) that we want children to stop asking these questions.
We don't. There is a time and a place for such questions. A few possible places in school include religion class, philosophy class, or ethics class -- all of which are important, but are not science class.
Suppose a student stood up in math class and asked, "What is knowledge? How can we really say that we know, or have proved, anything?"
That's an important question, and it may even be somewhat relevant to math, but it is inherently not math, it's offtopic, and it's disruptive when the intent is to actually teach math.
So the answer to all of these questions would be, very simply, "That's an interesting question. Why don't you ask that in philosophy?"
A better answer would be to actually explain why that question is outside the domain of science. Carl Sagan's "dragon in my garage" might be a good start.
And if you wish to stop those questions from being discussed in class, then frankly you might as well put up a sign saying "only government pre-approved questions may be asked, and only government pre-approved answers will be given"
Really?
You really can't see a difference between trying to keep things on-topic and a totalitarian government pre-approved list of questions and answers?
The empirical evidence in Europe is that science applications to universities appear to have fallen as society and schools have become more secular. And the empirical evidence in Europe is that it seems to be the religious schools that produce the best science results
Nice evidence. Now, how do you connect it with this conclusion:
and part of that is that they most certainly do make space in their schools (in RE classes) for discussion of what (let's face it) society has always called "the big questions" about the meaning of life.
Really?
How do you know that? Especially given that the person you are replying to claims that this is actually not what happens -- that the religious schools absolutely do keep religion out of the science classroom, and instead tell their students to ask in a more appropriate class?
they expect them to think about everything, not just science.
That's a good idea.
Why don't you think about what you've learned here, if you've been paying attention. Two important things:
First, read the post before replying.
Second, make an effort to understand what your opposition says, rather than creating elaborate strawmen.
It is just a light, quick browser that is light and quick because it doesn't do the truly great things that FireFox can do.
Let's see...
v8, Chrome's Javascript engine, is what started most browsers, including Firefox, improving their Javascript engines by 2, 3, even 10 times. So that's quickness that was actually engineered, that no one did before.
It's also more secure and more robust -- tabs run in separate, sandboxed processes. This allows a single tab to crash without bringing down the browser. This is better than Konqueror, in which a single tab crashing brings down the window, and miles better than Firefox, in which a single tab crashing brings down the entire browser.
it doesn't do the truly great things that FireFox can do.
What does Firefox do that Chrome doesn't?
Bejeweled. MS Word. MSN Messenger.
isn't caused by running familiar apps slowly, it's caused by being forced into inferior and unfamiliar facsimiles.
You could make that case about Bejeweled -- the official web version is deliberately crippled compared to the desktop version. However, the other two are very serious attempts by Microsoft to expose that functionality online. And I haven't covered alternatives -- Meebo and Google Docs come to mind.
IE8,
How many people actually care about "IE8" vs "The Internet"?
Word, and Excel
Aside from Google Docs, it's possible to configure the system to integrate with Microsoft's online office suite. So yes, Word and Excel do exist.
inability to install Favorite Shareware application foo
Which only lasts as long as it takes them to find Favorite Web Widget Foo to replace it, with the added bonus of not fucking up their computer. That's probably going to be the biggest change here -- you won't be able to fuck up your computer without some serious effort.
I've seen a lot of kids, not particularly technically literate kids, replacing native IM clients with Meebo. I've even seen a few replacing Winamp and iTunes with Pandora.
So, there will be a few Joes who won't upgrade. But I think you underestimate the number of people who pretty much use their computers for Facebook and Youtube.
their documents are all Google documents ("what? what if it's a Microsoft Word document?" ...) and you need to type that in the address bar...
Neither of these are required. I just watched a demo in which someone plugged an SD card into a laptop running Chrome OS -- it popped up a filesystem browser. They found an excel document, clicked it, and it opened in the Web version of Microsoft Excel.
So, they're working on it, but there is definitely a model for running applications that happen to be webpages.
I guess Gears works at any rate, but that strikes me as a hack.
Gears is attempting to converge with the HTML5 offline stuff. It's a good idea for web apps in general, and it happens to be usable for the Chrome OS.
For example, you can't attach something to an e-mail in gmail's offline mode.
That strikes me as a limitation of Gmail, not Gears.
No, not those, but benchmarks which measure actual web performance, not merely fibonacci.
Try these. Note that when we actually compare a full framework (Cake vs Rails), Rails is faster, and Merb is much faster. When we try to compare closer to the bare metal (raw PHP), we find that the Merb controller is almost as fast, and the Merb router is much faster.
Also, the page you linked to links to this, which is actually less about PHP and more about your app in general. Ruby may be the bottleneck more often than PHP, but still far less than database design, front-end (HTML/etc) design, and your own stupid mistakes.
I've worked with Ruby for over a year and a half, and I can say with absolute confidence that the language is horrible. You can flame back to this all you want...
That might be an interesting discussion, actually, but:
...the fact remains that it's a slow blob and throwing more hardware at it is a stupid argument.
See, that's a property of the implementation, not the language. You have noticed what's happened to Javascript lately, right? It used to be slower than Ruby. With v8, it's faster than Python.
Also, you fail to address why throwing hardware at it is a stupid argument, and you don't provide any benchmarks that it's slow.
No major VM is going to make it rival the top languages in raw processing power (C/C++/Java even Python).
If you actually looked at benchmarks, you'd notice that if nothing else, Rails beats PHP, consistently, for performance.
And Rails "automagic" combined with Ruby's inability to report exceptions in a meaninful way (the backtrace is 99% rubbish, and often reports the error in a place where it didn't even occur)
It would help if you actually gave an example here, but you don't. In my experience, the backtrace is actually quite helpful, but use of unit tests and specs helps avoid it.
As for Ruby in a browser - there's already projects that do that, and do it fairly well.
Which is one of the things TFA is about. So what's your point?
Some of them use Applets, which is where suddenly everyone has a hissie fit. Yeah, using a proprietary Windows-centric tech like Silverlight is a MUUUUCH better option.
I suspect Silverlight is at least faster to load, but I haven't tried doing either. Javascript does what I want it to do well enough.
Or writing a VM in JavaScript? Talk about MOLASSES!
Again, benchmarks or it didn't happen. Make sure to test it in one of the better Javascript engines, like v8.
If I want to use a quick scripting language with ample flexibility and power, I'll use Groovy, thank you very much. For one thing, Groovy and Grails gives me a LOT more choice as flexibility over RoR any day of the week.
Can you give an example of how? I mean, for one, there only really seems to be Grails, whereas Ruby has more web frameworks than VMs, and that's saying something. Take Sinatra, for example:
That's right, a REST DSL. What has Groovy got, again?
So, Rubyists, have your little childish flames now.
That's the most literal example of flamebait I've ever seen. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like anyone's really flaming you back. I'm the closest, and I'm just asking for facts.
And don't assume I'm a "n00b" - I've got over 15 years IT experience in more languages that I can list in this comment block.
With all that experience, you couldn't figure out that the comment block seems to allow very, very long comments -- almost certainly longer than the total list of programming languages that exist?
More importantly, you seem to have fallen into the same trap that Jerry Taylor did. I have no idea what your experience is, but it certainly doesn't seem to be reflected here.
I'm sure I'm just a clueless American, ignorant of world affairs, so maybe someone better informed can tell me...
But how does this have anything at all to do with rape? The words "rape", "sex", "fuck", "sodomize", etc, don't appear at all in TFA. It seems to be about violence, not rape.
the average joe wants to play games, take pictures, follow sports, and make their phone look like a lighter or a glass of beer.
If that were true, one has to wonder why they bothered with an iPhone? The Verizon phone that came free with my contract, a crappy little motorola flip-phone, can do all of the above except the lighter and the glass of beer -- are the last two really worth an extra couple hundred dollars?
And once that happens, the developers who were complaining yesterday that their quality apps were being lost among the crap on itunes will complain about the same thing with android. Even more so, since apple's opaque approval process won't be there to weed out the worst.
Or less so, since the store will have an API. (Or if it doesn't, competing stores can easily crop up which will have APIs.) Thus, the store will be able to filter exactly as well as we want it to -- or, again, we'll use the API to make it happen.
One could easily make a store that filters things by their combined ratings on various review sites, for example.
Contrast this to the iPhone store, where we're pretty much limited to whatever Apple gives us as far as filtering the apps. (As far as I know -- I don't have an iPhone. Maybe there really is an app for filtering through all the apps.)
And even with the app store, that doesn't seem to really be filtering on quality, but on sheer randomness.
Regardless, that flood of apps will certainly be no worse than the PC, or the Mac, for that matter.
Paperback... or I could use the phone for that, too, instead of wasting paper, bulk in my backpack, and muscle power lugging it around. Though I suppose that's a more compelling argument for textbooks than paperbacks.
Go ahead, ask the question.
Disappointing.
Yes, you have given reasons for believing, which I have disputed, but all our discussions have taken place from your perspective, not from mine. You seem incapable of even tentatively adopting a hypothesis to test its veracity, where that hypothesis counters your core beliefs.
I might not have responded, but there was this:
so you too may become a son of God.
Am I not already, if he does exist? How could I become a son, or not a son, by what I believe? Whether or not I believe I was adopted doesn't change the reality of being my father's son.
I suppose our conversation is over, for now. But, I do hope you will remember some of it in the future. For my part, I have tried to learn what I can.
A world facing app like a web-browser should make use of it.
Chrome does. Yes, for its extensions.
The real trouble is that most extensions are in javascript and javascript is not a language that emphasises security.
I don't really know of many languages that "emphasize security" -- indeed, Javascript is more sandboxed by default than most languages I know.
The fact that there is no way to perform a "use strict;" (as in Perl) is for starters a way to get access to all the other global variables in other scripts.
And the solution to this is obvious -- if you want to isolate scripts, isolate them at the runtime level, as you do for separate tabs/pages.
also gives access to all the possible extensions that are installed... Because of the lack of strictness in javascript as a language, if a global variable XYZ is in one script, it can be manipulated by any other script as well... Fundamentally it is a problem with Javascript and not with the Mozilla API.
Sorry, but that looks to me very much like a fatal flaw in the API. A strict language may allow you to compensate somewhat, but there is no reason a global variable needs to by default be accessible from every script.
allows you to do a lot of things.
So did older versions of Mac OS, which did not have a concept of memory protection -- all programs ran in the same address space. This let you do some interesting things that you can't do as easily on a platform like OS X, but it should be obvious why OS X is more stable and more secure.
Actually, not even the license, really. Just use Chromium, if you care.
From TFS:
Mozilla doesn't have a security model for extensions and Firefox fully trusts the code of the extensions. There are no security boundaries between extensions and, to make things even worse, an extension can silently modify another extension.
Not one of these is true of Chrome extensions -- or at least, it is possible to develop extensions which are not fully trusted.
just ditch the games altogether and find something better to do.
That is, however, not an acceptable solution to a Windows gamer attempting to migrate.
I mean, I agree, I spend way less time gaming once I started doing other things, but it's still fun when I have time.
I don't know what you have against the idea of appeal to authority.
Then you haven't been paying attention. I've made my reasons against appeal to authority quite clear, as well as citing several sources who agree with me.
It isn't really possible to have a rational discussion with someone who relies on appeal to authority, without backing up those claims.
Lee makes this the cornerstone of his work, going from authority to authority on different subjects.
All the less reason for me to waste my time with his work.
In my mind, there is nothing wrong with quoting someone who knows more about the subject, having studied it extensively.
There is nothing wrong with quoting someone, but unless that quote provides their reasons for believing something, it is merely an opinion.
My daughter has a master's degree from Duke University Divinity school.
In other words, she went to seminary.
I'm sorry, was this supposed to answer or address a single point I made, or was it just an excuse to talk about your daughter? And do others you converse with enjoy you deliberately derailing the conversation?
Simon Greenleaf, an expert on evidence disagrees with you.
Appeal to authority.
Other than applying your incomplete logic, you never tell me the reason why you think so.
I didn't say I think one way or another, only that I doubt their existence. You seem to be confusing, again, a lack of belief with a positive assertion.
If by "eyewitnesses", you mean the authors of the gospels themselves, there is considerable doubt that they were eyewitnesses at all. If they were, their accounts vary considerably, so as to cast doubt on any of their claims. Having cast any doubt on their claims, certainly the most fantastical of them can be discarded.
If you mean eyewitnesses who were described in the gospels, our evidence for their existence, let alone their reactions, is as shaky as our evidence for anything else in the gospels. Moreover, it's also hearsay.
Moreover, in what way is my logic incomplete?
Because the supernatural is outside of your senses and understanding, you don't believe it.
Almost. I don't believe things which are outside of my senses and understanding.
I don't believe "supernatural" has much meaning, as I believe that which is "natural" simply means that which we've observed and understood. If levitation is a supernatural phenomenon, and we one day discover a way for humans to levitate unassisted, we would very likely be able to describe that method as natural.
To take your radio analogy, radio would have seemed to be supernatural, but we understand the natural laws which are required for it.
If you deny the existence of the supernatural, you are in effect saying that you only believe your senses.
No, I am not, and I have repeatedly explained why not. I have no desire to explain again, but I'll give you a hint: Why did I bold "understanding" above?
This is also far from the only misunderstanding we've had where you have repeatedly misrepresented my position. This is a logical fallacy, too, one which is common enough to have a name -- the strawman argument. Look it up.
Plausible by your incomplete human logic which does not believe in anything supernatural.
Plausible by my complete human logic (see, I can make arbitrary assertions, too!), and the logical construct which has been informed by observations from my own lifetime and many lifetimes beyond it.
No, that this agreement is the heart of our differences. I believe that Jesus is a real historical person,
Actually, no, it's not. You see, up to this point, I have no problem. I don't know that he was,
Right, and because it seems arbitrary and random, it's often very difficult to develop an app that you can be sure will be approved.
That is, with any platform, you may lose your entire R&D investment by not generating enough sales, or by being buggy and needing too many patches (during which time most users give up)... there are tons of things which can go wrong.
With Apple, even if you do everything else flawlessly, there's one more thing that could go wrong: Your app could be rejected for reasons you couldn't have predicted. That's one thing you don't have to worry about on Android, at least.
A rejected-app-of-the-day app, or an Android-app-of-the-day app, so iPhone users can see what they're missing.
I was going to attempt an insightful and informed response...
But I am an early fan, and see the potential of paragraphs.
I've never seen an image viewer that compares with irfanview used on Mac or Linux.
Really? I mean, Gwenview seems to work well for me.
Games.
Far better to reboot to Windows only to play games than to try to maintain Windows for everything.
Wow, you seem a bit paranoid.
One approach might be to take Canonical to the Better Business Bureau for this fraud : it is not allowed to send someone a product, unsolicited, and then ask for payment later.
Citation needed. When I download Ubuntu, that's hardly unsolicited -- if I want, I can look up every single package that's on the install disc. I also see no evidence that any part of Ubuntu is asking for payment later, except the parts that are not enabled unless I deliberately do so. In fact, I only know of one such program, and it's not even in the desktop version of Ubuntu.
it is not allowed to send someone a product, unsolicited, and then ask for payment later. That's what's happening with F-Spot (the M$ competitor to Solang, Digikam), Tomboy (the M$ competitor to Zim, Getting-things-gnome, Knotes and BasKet) or Banshee (the M$ competitor to Amarok, Rhythmbox, Totem and XMMS).
Big gigantic citation needed.
Ok, first of all: I don't use Mono, but the first article you link to is flat-out wrong. Anyone who's used both C# and Java in any serious way will tell you that C# has things Java doesn't. You can debate whether or not they're good and useful things, but they exist, and it is easy to argue that C# is a better language than Java.
Just one example: Code blocks. Not just anonymous functions -- Java has an incredibly cumbersome way to do this, by wrapping the function in an anonymous class and ending up with something even more verbose than Javascript -- but something even more lightweight, with some language syntax explicitly designed for, "take this chunk of code and pass it as a value."
It's one of the things I love about Ruby, and I'm not about to abandon Ruby for C#, but at first glance, C# seems to do it better.
But moreover, you've got a list of things here which you've adorned with "M$", which at first glance seem to be serious open-source projects with no ties to Microsoft, and no evidence at all of ever planning to charge money.
In particular, you're suggesting Digikam and Amarok as potential replacements. Digikam may be small enough, but still depends on KDE -- and it is included by default in Kubuntu. Amarok was once included by default in Kubuntu, and still might be, but its KDE4 release was a huge regression in functionality and stability, and it's also kind of huge -- and also heavily tied to KDE libs and Qt.
So while they would work, for performance reasons alone, I'd lean towards Gnome/Gtk applications by default, rather than KDE/Qt, if I were building a Gnome distro.
The M$applications aren't built with reliable technologies.
Again, citation needed. When I've used Mono applications, I haven't experienced nearly the instability you're hinting at.
Mono, to name one of the problems, has a paper trail back to Microsoft via Novell and years of payments from Novell to Microsoft for said products.
Except I don't see Canonical paying Novell, nor do I see Novell (or Microsoft) paying Canonical. So this conspiracy you've woven has no money, has no teeth.
I see a few other problems with this:
First, you seem to believe that Mono is this evil thing that seduces developers into using it instead of Java. After all, you must either believe this, or you must believe that most developers working on Mono projects are deliberately trying to undermine Linux.
That, or a third option -- maybe Mono is actually better?
But you also seem to believe that by using Mono, these programs are bigger, slower, and less reliable.
I don't get it -- if Mono really is bigger, slower, and less reliable, how can it also be shiny and seducing new developers?
You're also suggesting that Canonical and Ubuntu are using these technologies because they want users to be forced to pay eventually, or be forced to move back to Windows eventually. Yet Kubuntu and Xubuntu seem suspiciousl
That's right, it is a flame.
the fugly colour schemes, the stupid naming schemes
Matters of preference. Besides, if a stupid naming scheme was enough, why are you using something called Linux in the first place?
the artificial restrictions on root
How is root restricted? I seem to be able to sudo anything I want.
not including the toolchain for building the system by default
And how many ordinary users want/need such a toolchain? I realize many applications are only distributed as source, but why should the average desktop user waste disk space and bandwidth on it?
Windows doesn't include a compiler by default. OS X even includes Ruby on Rails, but doesn't include XCode by default, last I checked. Yet people can and do choose OS X over Linux for development.
even on xubuntu, etc.,
Yeah, there's a brilliant idea -- let's put the least-used packages by default on the lightest version. People thought they were installing Xubuntu to save resources and rescue old hardware, but little did they know, tomhudson needed gcc, so they're going to be burning disk space on things they'll never use...
If they want it to be so dumbed down, why don't they just pull a lindows/linspire?
It's not a question of "dumbed-down" -- indeed, you seem to be the one who's wanting "dumbed-down", a system that has everything a developer needs installed by default, including build-essential.
From your other post:
Why should I have to?
Because you're the developer, genius.
The kind of user Ubuntu is targeted at is a user who wants to plug in a digital camera and have everything Just Work, and not have to learn The Gimp just to remove some red-eye.
The kind of user who's actually a software developer should be well-informed enough, and intelligent enough, to be able to find the software needed (build-essential and whateverineeded-dev) without having their hand held through the process.
I'm highly skeptical of this claim:
it takes longer to go through all the menus and download/install everything than it does to just wipe down the machine and install openSuse,
Firstly, if you've been using the distro for any length of time, you've probably got a list. So it's not a matter of going through the menus, it's a matter of:
sudo apt-get install eclipse build-essential libfoo-dev libbar-dev...
And second, is it that your Internet connection just sucks? I honestly don't remember any OS installing quicker than the time it takes to install a set of packages.
For that matter, this is why you have a package manager in the first place -- to keep the software up-to-date, and to install things that weren't in the base install.
If OpenSuse works for you, more power to you, but if "everything's included" as you suggest, all the more reason for me to recommend Ubuntu over it, especially to non-developers.