Linux. OS X. ReactOS and FreeDOS, if it comes to it.
You can't stay on XP forever - eventually support will go away, patches will stop, fire and blood will rain from the skies...
So you put it in a virtual machine. If you can't lock it down from inside the OS, lock it down from outside the OS.
You could move to the Mac, but then you need all new software and you need to completely retrain your staff. Same thing for Linux.
With Win7 or Vista, you've got to completely retrain your staff on the OS, anyway. With Office 2k7, you probably have to retrain them on applications, too.
So you take the legacy apps you care about, and you run them in Wine and/or Crossover. Maybe you even donate/pay your Windows 7 licenses to the Wine/Codeweavers people (respectively) to get them to support the apps you need.
your shitty ActiveX control laden intranet will work without changes (MS is never, ever, ever, gonna give that shit up if they can help it).
Let's take this as an example. Let's assume I take a copy of XP, with IE and everything (probably IE7) ready to go, and never, ever patch it again.
So I put it in a virtual machine. I take a snapshot of the VM state. I configure it to only have network connectivity via a tun device, which I then firewall such that it can only connect to the other tun device I'm using for the VPN. I configure the VPN server to only allow connections to itself, not between peers, and I lock it down, hard. I set up the ActiveX server there.
I configure each firewall to only allow connections from the VM, to the ActiveX server, on only the ports it needs.
It is now physically impossible for anyone to get at the XP virtual machine unless they crack the host first. Even if something somehow does happen -- maybe some instability, maybe the user makes a mistake -- it's pretty much one button away from a known-good snapshot. And no matter how much work that was to set up, it's pretty much zero maintenance -- that snapshot will be good forever, or until the shitty ActiveX control has to change.
And when the shitty ActiveX control changes, hopefully they'll think twice about relying on a proprietary technology from an unreliable (and untrustworthy) vendor.
from what I've read (and I do read from places other than Slashdot), that Windows 7 stops allowing *some* applications to be written entirely like shit.
Unlikely. There is no operating system, or framework, or magic sauce which will prevent an application from being written like shit.
It is, however, possible for a language or a framework to encourage applications to be written like shit -- IMO, PHP does this. Are you suggesting that XP does as well?
the ones that *require admin rights* and other things won't function well. They are breaking compatibility for those poorly coded apps.
In other words, they're doing exactly what they did in Vista. Which, while a welcome change, the way they enforced it was moronic and irritating -- the app still ultimately requires admin rights, but now I have to click "Yes, I want to give it admin rights" five, ten, sometimes fifteen times.
Other things like Direct X, memory management, caching... I guess those are plusses too.
Gee, I didn't know XP didn't have DirectX, or caching! Oh wait...
On the enterprise end there are *lots* of enhancements and benefits, but since this is Slashdot,
Since this is Slashdot, it would help if you cited even a single enhancement or benefit that isn't already in XP.
Out of interest, how would *you* solve the virus issue?
First, stop making the product so absurdly exploitable. In no way should it be possible to contract malware from simply visiting a website, or leaving a network cable plugged in.
Second, make it obvious what you're doing, but not actually intrusive. It should not be possible to download and execute a program without realizing what you're doing. For an example of how to do this wrong, see VBA -- I should not be able to contract malware from a fucking office document. Nor should I have to memorize a list of dangerous file extensions. Compare with Linux -- until you chmod +x, or unpack the archive, it's not dangerous.
Third, provide known-good channels for obtaining new software. See: Linux package managers and repositories. Tie it in to Microsoft Update. Make it possible for third parties to run their own repositories. No need to host everything yourself, but it should at least be possible to periodically fetch, from a trusted source, a list of updated packages and signatures.
And finally, educate your users. The only computer which is secure from a user's own idiocy is one which doesn't let the user do anything worth protecting. Not limited to Windows, either, though it would help if the OS encouraged more secure, rather than less secure, modes of operation.
But until you've done the other steps, no amount of education will solve the problem. As long as the standard Windows method of installing software is some random EXE downloaded off a website, with at most an unverifiable signature claiming it's from that website, it requires too much effort.
Appropriate (or "take") is still implying the same thing -- the taking of a physical object. It has nothing to do with creating a copy.
In fact, here's a dictionary, to back me up:
Appropriate \Ap*pro"pri*ate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p.
Appropriated; p. pr. & vb. n. Appropriating.]
1. To take to one's self in exclusion of others; to claim or
use as by an exclusive right; as, let no man appropriate
the use of a common benefit.
Creating a copy does not exclude others from creating a copy, so no.
Why can't there be more than one set of cables under our streets?
Why should there be?
more than one line can be laid in the same pipe.
And more than one pipe can be laid. As long as we're being inefficient, why have a single pipe? Who pays for it?
I find in my town I still have a choice of two broadband providers: DSL and Cable.
Wow! Two! Really?!
What do you do when both of them screw you over? That's what I meant by "oligopoly".
If cable was your only broadband option, and the monopolist decided to charge you $1000 a month, would you still be on cable?
I'd rather not find out... but wait, when did this become about money?
I'd especially rather not find out when it's still some $50/mo, but not to the Internet, rather to some subset of a shadow of the former Internet, because they've throttled and censored it to hell. And when that happens, will you be able to find ten neighbors who care enough to spend twice as much for a shared DS3, versus their current "Internet" which "works just fine"?
I suppose you could move to a community where people do have better Internet. How will you find such a community? D'you suppose that community paid the premium to be on the right tier of Internet for you to see?
You pays your internet taxes or you don't get internet.
Which is not what's being suggested, here. Government regulation, not purely government-provided Internet.
This is not the only area where this is the case. See: Food industries, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, etc etc... And the opposite is also true; the Post Office is largely beat by free-market alternatives.
I don't disagree that I would rather have a free-market provider, when that is possible. But in this case, regulation absolutely is required, or there will be no free market, and there will be no free (as in speech) Internet.
Now let's look at the oligarchy. If I don't like Microsoft I can go with Apple. Or use Linux or FreeBSD or OpenOffice or Firefox or any number of alternatives.
And if you don't like Comcast, you can pack up and move, or rediscover the wonderful world of dialup.
It's called a physical monopoly -- or, oligopoly. Except this taxation is without representation.
How is that better than the government? A chance of winning the lottery is better than no chance at all. There's also the chance of organizing other people to vote the way you do -- which, again, is a better chance than trying to organize other people to move to an area where there's an ISP which works in their favor.
Even if there is a true monopoly or oligarchy with no competitors, I still have the option of foregoing.
As in, no Internet at all? It doesn't seem likely that this will always be an option.
I feed trolls when I'm bored... Here's a quick rebuttal, since you've obviously pasted this from somewhere.
But, I'd like to tear it apart myself, because I'm bored...
If it can be demonstrated how to properly falsify evolution, regardless if evolution is true or not, only then can evolution ever be proven or disproved.
No, then it could be disproved. No theory can ever be "proved", only disproved.
That is the essence of falsification; if it can be shown that something is not false, it must therefore be true.
Except that to show that something is not false is as impossible as to show it is true.
No, all you can show is that a given method does not suffice to falsify something. Depending on how good the method is, you may gain considerable evidence for a theory in this way, but it doesn't "prove" anything.
If evolution be not true, the only explanation for the appearance of varied life on the planet is intelligent design.
That is a false dichotomy. It could have appeared purely randomly. It could have been the natural result of an equation we do not understand. It could be something else we haven't thought of.
Furthermore, this troll only attempts to disprove Darwinian evolution, which is not the only kind of evolution, any more than Christian Creationism is the only kind of Intelligent Design.
If evolution theory is true, the word kind is a superficial label that does not exist, because beyond our classifications, there would be no clear identifiable division among animals or plants, since all plants and animals would therefore share a common ancestor.
"Common ancestor" is one kind of Evolution theory. And it certainly does not imply that there are no identifiable divisions -- for example, while many believe that life began in the ocean, and later evolved to survive on land, there is a clear distinction between a creature with gills and a creature with lungs, or even a creature with both.
If no such common ancestor can be found and confirmed without bias, and this test is performed between two or more of any plant or animal life without ever finding anything to the contrary, we can confirm with certainty evolution did not happen
Aren't Creationists always the ones claiming that just because you can't see a god, doesn't mean he's not there?
Well, just because we haven't found a common ancestor, doesn't mean there is no common ancestor. Unless you can demonstrate that no such common ancestor ever could have existed, there is no certainty there.
should any two animals or plants within a family (a palm tree and a coconut tree) be proven to not share a common ancestor, or if no provable increase of traits can be demonstrated to be in its beginnings or actively present in the animals and plants living today over their provable ancestry,
Should that be correct, it's possible you've found some problems with evolutionary theory. You haven't done that much.
Even should that be correct, all you've provided is absence of evidence. You've provided no evidence for your own hypothesis of creationism.
Now, there are significant problems with the Bible. There are profound inconsistencies, even in Genesis. There are mistranslations from the original Greek, and between that and the original Hebrew. Even if you can prove Intelligent Design, surely you have more evidence for your own origin story than I do for the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Sorry, I get a little tired of hearing this time and time again. "Oh noes! It's bigger guberment!" is exactly as stupid a slogan as "Think of the children!" and "Terr'rists!"
Take a moment and actually think about this.
Which do you trust more with this decision? An oligopoly (not a free market) of corrupt businesses, whose best interests run directly counter to yours? Or a government, dysfunctional as it may be, that you at least have some hand in electing and keeping in check?
Maybe it's similar to the kind of push we get here -- porn is seen as immoral, and is a natural scapegoat, so no one minds censoring it. From there, it's easy to justify censoring whatever you want -- after all, it does say "other 'harmful' items..."
Now, granted, the US is at least only censoring child porn, so far, which we can all agree on, right? And swear words, now, in South Carolina, if that bill passes -- which we can all agree on, right? See how slippery the slope is?
And I agree, not all anime is better. Some of it, I can't necessarily tell -- I like Patrick Stewart as much as anyone else, but I thought subtitle'd Nausicaa was fine.
But there's also a lot of it that's horrible. Some of it is actually bad acting. Some of it is just the fact that you have the same exact set of voice actors working on so many of these shows -- no matter how good the portrayal of Shinji is, I can't get over the fact that he sounds so much like Goku.
On top of all that, there's the odd bit like a Sailor Moon movie in which some sexual innuendo was completely cut from the dub, but not the subs. Apparently, lesbians are only allowed to exist in subtitles.
Off the top of my head, other atrocities: Dragonball Z, Naruto, Trigun...
So, anyway, the Japanese version of Bebop did have him pretty flat.
I would like to agree with you, but the fact is, 90% of anime is better with subtitles, an additional 9.9% you can't tell the difference, and the other 0.1%, I'm probably never going to discover because I'm not going to watch every anime twice just to find out. On top of which, the dub is always a second interpretation, so it's worth watching it in the original language (with subs if you need them) for the same reason that it's worth watching a director's cut.
Except she got one specifically designed for Ubuntu. If she's got real hardware issues, well, it's Dell, they'll send someone to her house to replace the defective part. But she doesn't have driver issues.
And this is a machine suposedly designed for Ubuntu Installation (though I had the Windoze version due to a sale)
There are significant differences. For example, this laptop clearly states "n-series", and with Vista, comes with an 802.11n card. With Ubuntu, it doesn't, because that card isn't supported. There are some other, very strange inconsistencies -- with Vista, you can get it with 3 gigs or 4 gigs of RAM; with Ubuntu, you get 4 gigs, no choice.
So, sorry to hear about your microphone, but I'm guessing if you actually ordered it with Ubuntu, it would have Just Worked -- you'd both have hardware known to be supported (not just probably supported), and you'd have all the appropriate drivers preinstalled.
there is no difference in the fundamental logical problem of shared state and data.
I beg to differ. Some of the same problems exist, but it's like the Goto problem.
Yes, you can have the same problems Goto suggests. You can write spaghetti code out of functions, or methods and objects. You can also write code which calls one function, and then later change what the function does -- like GOTO-ing some line and later moving that line around.
However, no one would argue that procedural code isn't worth doing, or is too hard, or that spaghetti code is inevitable. And certainly, few today would argue that Goto is a good thing, compared to proper program structure.
Similarly, using processes and message passing to avoid shared state is a good thing, is not too hard, and does make the easy concurrent problems easier. The hard ones are still hard, but most of what we'd have to do is not a hard problem.
For example: It could be a very hard problem to make video compression and decompression inherently multithreaded. So, we do two things: First, we make sure that video playback never blocks anything else, so I can run other programs, even other video programs, simultaneously on another core. And second, we do the h.264 hack -- split the video down the middle, into two halves, and encode each half separately, for a slight loss in quality/compression ratio.
Now, if you've got a problem like writing threaded h.264, as I described above, would you rather be doing that in threads, where forgetting to lock something in the correct order could deadlock you for no good reason? Or would you rather do it in processes, where you probably don't have to think about concurrency very hard?
The limitation of the iPhone is that you have to crack it to distribute any app that you haven't put through the App Store. Furthermore, there are rules like not being allowed to run interpreted languages.
Android, if you're willing to stay within that VM, you can do pretty much whatever you want. And the reason for staying within the VM is more portability, I think, than anything else...
As an example, if I were to port Python/Jython, or Ruby/JRuby, to Google's VM, I could write Python or Ruby apps. It might be easier to recompile those for the iPhone, but then every user would have to jailbreak their iPhone, because Apple forbids interpreted languages.
You can write your own apps for iPhone, ignore those sucky "guideline/rules", and share your apps with others independent of Apple Store.
Right, you just have to force all your users to jailbreak it.
You shouldn't go to the Apple Store unless you want to make money out of it, which means it's no longer FOSS.
You don't know what FOSS is. Hint: It's got nothing to do with money.
To be fair, TFA mentions that in order to run Debian on Android, you have to use modded firmware to gain root access
Granted. But if you're willing to develop inside Google's VM, there are no restrictions there. I'm guessing there will be JRuby and Jython ports, too.
What I've read suggests that the iPhone will continue iPod playback in the background, but not other apps.
That fits what I've heard, which is basically that these rules are for you, not for Apple. After all, a web browser does download and interpret code on the fly (Javascript), but you're not allowed to do that, so Safari will be its only browser.
So, you can play iTunes in the background, but probably not Pandora.
His voice lacks the gravely, emotional sarcasm that Spike is portrayed as having. His near monotone delivery will kill the character and reduce him to a mere shell of the original.
Maybe I'll have to go back and watch the original, because I remember the original Spike being very much monotone, the sarcasm very much in the dialog, not the delivery.
I'm not sure how easy it is on WM, but consider if it was desktop Windows vs the iPhone OS. Worst case, just replace explorer.exe with your own shell, use a layer like Cygwin or Services for Unix, and it's hard to tell it's actually Windows under there.
On the other hand, if you like the iPhone, it's great, but if you don't, or you want to change it in some interesting way, you're pretty much boned.
Actually, I don't know much about Windows Mobile, other than that development for it was more like development for a desktop OS. That is, you got some APIs, but ultimately, you could compile actually native code (unlike Android), and do pretty much anything within the constraints of the OS, possibly even hack the OS a bit (unlike the iPhone -- no farts until recently).
I do know, for example, that there was some sort of VLC port, among others.
So, I don't actually know, and I haven't tried. But I suspect that you wouldn't need anything more than you need to develop for a desktop OS. For practical reasons, you might have to buy a Microsoft product, just as you probably should buy Windows and some form of Visual Studio to develop Windows apps. But I think, like Windows apps, what you build with that SDK is pretty much up to you.
Keep in mind, ultimately, it could lead to just what you're describing -- a sort of mobile MinGW, and cross-compile from Linux. Or, ports of interpreted languages -- I think they had Python already -- or something like Java, or just libraries like wxwidgets, Qt, etc, and you could develop on any OS and port relatively easily.
1. Before there wasn't a performance need to be multi-threaded, in many ways it was a performance hit.
Depends on the kind of application. There was hyperthreading for awhile, and there is also the fact that a multithreaded app is more responsive.
Sure, you could argue for an event-based model, but it's still not going to be quite as responsive as a threaded model -- and the evented model is probably easily portable to a threaded model, unless you've done something stupid.
2. Developing Multi-threaded apps take more considerations.
Not really. If you do threads, maybe, because you're dealing with shared state. So avoid shared state, and it works out well.
Yes, multithreaded apps are really hard to debug, if you operate at, say, the pthread level, or the Java thread level. So are sequential apps, if you use GOTO. Work at a higher level.
3. Languages don't have good methods for multi-threading.
Erlang does, and it's decades old. Other languages almost certainly have some sort of actor library.
Even before things become natively threaded, we already have the advantage of being able to run more single-threaded apps, without having them run into each other. For the first time in a long time, I don't even bother to run top most of the time, except out of curiosity -- I often don't even notice something using 100% CPU, because it's only using the one core.
If you've got shared state, you're probably Doing It Wrong. Use processes -- either OS processes or language-level processes, even thread-based actors.
And while there are computing jobs which are inherently not parallel, certainly most desktop applications do not fall into that category. Not all are embarrassingly parallel -- rendering a webpage takes as long as it takes. But you have a lot of those tasks -- why do you need every open web page (every tab) running in the same process? Why even every plugin object?
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft will not keep updating it and application and hardware vendors will also stop supporting it.
As long as it's still supported by VirtualBox, Parallels, and VMWare, it will continue to support whatever new hardware I tell it to support.
What alternative is there?
Linux. OS X. ReactOS and FreeDOS, if it comes to it.
You can't stay on XP forever - eventually support will go away, patches will stop, fire and blood will rain from the skies...
So you put it in a virtual machine. If you can't lock it down from inside the OS, lock it down from outside the OS.
You could move to the Mac, but then you need all new software and you need to completely retrain your staff. Same thing for Linux.
With Win7 or Vista, you've got to completely retrain your staff on the OS, anyway. With Office 2k7, you probably have to retrain them on applications, too.
So you take the legacy apps you care about, and you run them in Wine and/or Crossover. Maybe you even donate/pay your Windows 7 licenses to the Wine/Codeweavers people (respectively) to get them to support the apps you need.
your shitty ActiveX control laden intranet will work without changes (MS is never, ever, ever, gonna give that shit up if they can help it).
Let's take this as an example. Let's assume I take a copy of XP, with IE and everything (probably IE7) ready to go, and never, ever patch it again.
So I put it in a virtual machine. I take a snapshot of the VM state. I configure it to only have network connectivity via a tun device, which I then firewall such that it can only connect to the other tun device I'm using for the VPN. I configure the VPN server to only allow connections to itself, not between peers, and I lock it down, hard. I set up the ActiveX server there.
I configure each firewall to only allow connections from the VM, to the ActiveX server, on only the ports it needs.
It is now physically impossible for anyone to get at the XP virtual machine unless they crack the host first. Even if something somehow does happen -- maybe some instability, maybe the user makes a mistake -- it's pretty much one button away from a known-good snapshot. And no matter how much work that was to set up, it's pretty much zero maintenance -- that snapshot will be good forever, or until the shitty ActiveX control has to change.
And when the shitty ActiveX control changes, hopefully they'll think twice about relying on a proprietary technology from an unreliable (and untrustworthy) vendor.
Newer version of Direct X.
Most games run fine with DirectX 9. Others have backported DirectX 10 to XP.
Most games, I'd rather run on Linux, either natively or through Wine. For the ones that don't, I haven't had problems with XP.
If this ever stops being the case, I'll buy a console and be done with it.
from what I've read (and I do read from places other than Slashdot), that Windows 7 stops allowing *some* applications to be written entirely like shit.
Unlikely. There is no operating system, or framework, or magic sauce which will prevent an application from being written like shit.
It is, however, possible for a language or a framework to encourage applications to be written like shit -- IMO, PHP does this. Are you suggesting that XP does as well?
the ones that *require admin rights* and other things won't function well. They are breaking compatibility for those poorly coded apps.
In other words, they're doing exactly what they did in Vista. Which, while a welcome change, the way they enforced it was moronic and irritating -- the app still ultimately requires admin rights, but now I have to click "Yes, I want to give it admin rights" five, ten, sometimes fifteen times.
Other things like Direct X, memory management, caching... I guess those are plusses too.
Gee, I didn't know XP didn't have DirectX, or caching! Oh wait...
On the enterprise end there are *lots* of enhancements and benefits, but since this is Slashdot,
Since this is Slashdot, it would help if you cited even a single enhancement or benefit that isn't already in XP.
Out of interest, how would *you* solve the virus issue?
First, stop making the product so absurdly exploitable. In no way should it be possible to contract malware from simply visiting a website, or leaving a network cable plugged in.
Second, make it obvious what you're doing, but not actually intrusive. It should not be possible to download and execute a program without realizing what you're doing. For an example of how to do this wrong, see VBA -- I should not be able to contract malware from a fucking office document. Nor should I have to memorize a list of dangerous file extensions. Compare with Linux -- until you chmod +x, or unpack the archive, it's not dangerous.
Third, provide known-good channels for obtaining new software. See: Linux package managers and repositories. Tie it in to Microsoft Update. Make it possible for third parties to run their own repositories. No need to host everything yourself, but it should at least be possible to periodically fetch, from a trusted source, a list of updated packages and signatures.
And finally, educate your users. The only computer which is secure from a user's own idiocy is one which doesn't let the user do anything worth protecting. Not limited to Windows, either, though it would help if the OS encouraged more secure, rather than less secure, modes of operation.
But until you've done the other steps, no amount of education will solve the problem. As long as the standard Windows method of installing software is some random EXE downloaded off a website, with at most an unverifiable signature claiming it's from that website, it requires too much effort.
Except that the firewall is both very real protection against very real threats, and possible to turn off.
Compare to antivirus, which is not very good protection against threats that don't matter if you know what you're doing. Requiring it is just moronic.
Appropriate (or "take") is still implying the same thing -- the taking of a physical object. It has nothing to do with creating a copy.
In fact, here's a dictionary, to back me up:
Appropriate \Ap*pro"pri*ate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p.
Appropriated; p. pr. & vb. n. Appropriating.]
1. To take to one's self in exclusion of others; to claim or
use as by an exclusive right; as, let no man appropriate
the use of a common benefit.
Creating a copy does not exclude others from creating a copy, so no.
Why can't there be more than one set of cables under our streets?
Why should there be?
more than one line can be laid in the same pipe.
And more than one pipe can be laid. As long as we're being inefficient, why have a single pipe? Who pays for it?
I find in my town I still have a choice of two broadband providers: DSL and Cable.
Wow! Two! Really?!
What do you do when both of them screw you over? That's what I meant by "oligopoly".
If cable was your only broadband option, and the monopolist decided to charge you $1000 a month, would you still be on cable?
I'd rather not find out... but wait, when did this become about money?
I'd especially rather not find out when it's still some $50/mo, but not to the Internet, rather to some subset of a shadow of the former Internet, because they've throttled and censored it to hell. And when that happens, will you be able to find ten neighbors who care enough to spend twice as much for a shared DS3, versus their current "Internet" which "works just fine"?
I suppose you could move to a community where people do have better Internet. How will you find such a community? D'you suppose that community paid the premium to be on the right tier of Internet for you to see?
You pays your internet taxes or you don't get internet.
Which is not what's being suggested, here. Government regulation, not purely government-provided Internet.
This is not the only area where this is the case. See: Food industries, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, etc etc... And the opposite is also true; the Post Office is largely beat by free-market alternatives.
I don't disagree that I would rather have a free-market provider, when that is possible. But in this case, regulation absolutely is required, or there will be no free market, and there will be no free (as in speech) Internet.
Now let's look at the oligarchy. If I don't like Microsoft I can go with Apple. Or use Linux or FreeBSD or OpenOffice or Firefox or any number of alternatives.
And if you don't like Comcast, you can pack up and move, or rediscover the wonderful world of dialup.
It's called a physical monopoly -- or, oligopoly. Except this taxation is without representation.
How is that better than the government? A chance of winning the lottery is better than no chance at all. There's also the chance of organizing other people to vote the way you do -- which, again, is a better chance than trying to organize other people to move to an area where there's an ISP which works in their favor.
Even if there is a true monopoly or oligarchy with no competitors, I still have the option of foregoing.
As in, no Internet at all? It doesn't seem likely that this will always be an option.
As of right now, we, the programmers, are pretty much in control.
Erm, no. A bunch of MBAs with little to no understanding of programming, or of Internet culture, are in control.
Or are you under the delusion that programmers run Comcast?
I say fuck that, at least the government has some premise of accountability. Corporations only have to be accountable to their stockholders.
I feed trolls when I'm bored... Here's a quick rebuttal, since you've obviously pasted this from somewhere.
But, I'd like to tear it apart myself, because I'm bored...
If it can be demonstrated how to properly falsify evolution, regardless if evolution is true or not, only then can evolution ever be proven or disproved.
No, then it could be disproved. No theory can ever be "proved", only disproved.
That is the essence of falsification; if it can be shown that something is not false, it must therefore be true.
Except that to show that something is not false is as impossible as to show it is true.
No, all you can show is that a given method does not suffice to falsify something. Depending on how good the method is, you may gain considerable evidence for a theory in this way, but it doesn't "prove" anything.
If evolution be not true, the only explanation for the appearance of varied life on the planet is intelligent design.
That is a false dichotomy. It could have appeared purely randomly. It could have been the natural result of an equation we do not understand. It could be something else we haven't thought of.
Furthermore, this troll only attempts to disprove Darwinian evolution, which is not the only kind of evolution, any more than Christian Creationism is the only kind of Intelligent Design.
If evolution theory is true, the word kind is a superficial label that does not exist, because beyond our classifications, there would be no clear identifiable division among animals or plants, since all plants and animals would therefore share a common ancestor.
"Common ancestor" is one kind of Evolution theory. And it certainly does not imply that there are no identifiable divisions -- for example, while many believe that life began in the ocean, and later evolved to survive on land, there is a clear distinction between a creature with gills and a creature with lungs, or even a creature with both.
If no such common ancestor can be found and confirmed without bias, and this test is performed between two or more of any plant or animal life without ever finding anything to the contrary, we can confirm with certainty evolution did not happen
Aren't Creationists always the ones claiming that just because you can't see a god, doesn't mean he's not there?
Well, just because we haven't found a common ancestor, doesn't mean there is no common ancestor. Unless you can demonstrate that no such common ancestor ever could have existed, there is no certainty there.
should any two animals or plants within a family (a palm tree and a coconut tree) be proven to not share a common ancestor, or if no provable increase of traits can be demonstrated to be in its beginnings or actively present in the animals and plants living today over their provable ancestry,
Should that be correct, it's possible you've found some problems with evolutionary theory. You haven't done that much.
Even should that be correct, all you've provided is absence of evidence. You've provided no evidence for your own hypothesis of creationism.
Now, there are significant problems with the Bible. There are profound inconsistencies, even in Genesis. There are mistranslations from the original Greek, and between that and the original Hebrew. Even if you can prove Intelligent Design, surely you have more evidence for your own origin story than I do for the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Sorry, I get a little tired of hearing this time and time again. "Oh noes! It's bigger guberment!" is exactly as stupid a slogan as "Think of the children!" and "Terr'rists!"
Take a moment and actually think about this.
Which do you trust more with this decision? An oligopoly (not a free market) of corrupt businesses, whose best interests run directly counter to yours? Or a government, dysfunctional as it may be, that you at least have some hand in electing and keeping in check?
This is the third or fourth time I've seen this troll. At what point can it just be added to the lameness filter and be done with it?
Maybe it's similar to the kind of push we get here -- porn is seen as immoral, and is a natural scapegoat, so no one minds censoring it. From there, it's easy to justify censoring whatever you want -- after all, it does say "other 'harmful' items..."
Now, granted, the US is at least only censoring child porn, so far, which we can all agree on, right? And swear words, now, in South Carolina, if that bill passes -- which we can all agree on, right? See how slippery the slope is?
I say again: You have no idea what you're talking about. Free as in speech, not beer. Libre, not gratis.
Go read.
I did watch it with subtitles.
And I agree, not all anime is better. Some of it, I can't necessarily tell -- I like Patrick Stewart as much as anyone else, but I thought subtitle'd Nausicaa was fine.
But there's also a lot of it that's horrible. Some of it is actually bad acting. Some of it is just the fact that you have the same exact set of voice actors working on so many of these shows -- no matter how good the portrayal of Shinji is, I can't get over the fact that he sounds so much like Goku.
On top of all that, there's the odd bit like a Sailor Moon movie in which some sexual innuendo was completely cut from the dub, but not the subs. Apparently, lesbians are only allowed to exist in subtitles.
Off the top of my head, other atrocities: Dragonball Z, Naruto, Trigun...
So, anyway, the Japanese version of Bebop did have him pretty flat.
I would like to agree with you, but the fact is, 90% of anime is better with subtitles, an additional 9.9% you can't tell the difference, and the other 0.1%, I'm probably never going to discover because I'm not going to watch every anime twice just to find out. On top of which, the dub is always a second interpretation, so it's worth watching it in the original language (with subs if you need them) for the same reason that it's worth watching a director's cut.
It is hard sometimes if you have hardware issues
Except she got one specifically designed for Ubuntu. If she's got real hardware issues, well, it's Dell, they'll send someone to her house to replace the defective part. But she doesn't have driver issues.
And this is a machine suposedly designed for Ubuntu Installation (though I had the Windoze version due to a sale)
There are significant differences. For example, this laptop clearly states "n-series", and with Vista, comes with an 802.11n card. With Ubuntu, it doesn't, because that card isn't supported. There are some other, very strange inconsistencies -- with Vista, you can get it with 3 gigs or 4 gigs of RAM; with Ubuntu, you get 4 gigs, no choice.
So, sorry to hear about your microphone, but I'm guessing if you actually ordered it with Ubuntu, it would have Just Worked -- you'd both have hardware known to be supported (not just probably supported), and you'd have all the appropriate drivers preinstalled.
there is no difference in the fundamental logical problem of shared state and data.
I beg to differ. Some of the same problems exist, but it's like the Goto problem.
Yes, you can have the same problems Goto suggests. You can write spaghetti code out of functions, or methods and objects. You can also write code which calls one function, and then later change what the function does -- like GOTO-ing some line and later moving that line around.
However, no one would argue that procedural code isn't worth doing, or is too hard, or that spaghetti code is inevitable. And certainly, few today would argue that Goto is a good thing, compared to proper program structure.
Similarly, using processes and message passing to avoid shared state is a good thing, is not too hard, and does make the easy concurrent problems easier. The hard ones are still hard, but most of what we'd have to do is not a hard problem.
For example: It could be a very hard problem to make video compression and decompression inherently multithreaded. So, we do two things: First, we make sure that video playback never blocks anything else, so I can run other programs, even other video programs, simultaneously on another core. And second, we do the h.264 hack -- split the video down the middle, into two halves, and encode each half separately, for a slight loss in quality/compression ratio.
Now, if you've got a problem like writing threaded h.264, as I described above, would you rather be doing that in threads, where forgetting to lock something in the correct order could deadlock you for no good reason? Or would you rather do it in processes, where you probably don't have to think about concurrency very hard?
Let's see...
The limitation of the iPhone is that you have to crack it to distribute any app that you haven't put through the App Store. Furthermore, there are rules like not being allowed to run interpreted languages.
Android, if you're willing to stay within that VM, you can do pretty much whatever you want. And the reason for staying within the VM is more portability, I think, than anything else...
As an example, if I were to port Python/Jython, or Ruby/JRuby, to Google's VM, I could write Python or Ruby apps. It might be easier to recompile those for the iPhone, but then every user would have to jailbreak their iPhone, because Apple forbids interpreted languages.
You can write your own apps for iPhone, ignore those sucky "guideline/rules", and share your apps with others independent of Apple Store.
Right, you just have to force all your users to jailbreak it.
You shouldn't go to the Apple Store unless you want to make money out of it, which means it's no longer FOSS.
You don't know what FOSS is. Hint: It's got nothing to do with money.
To be fair, TFA mentions that in order to run Debian on Android, you have to use modded firmware to gain root access
Granted. But if you're willing to develop inside Google's VM, there are no restrictions there. I'm guessing there will be JRuby and Jython ports, too.
What I've read suggests that the iPhone will continue iPod playback in the background, but not other apps.
That fits what I've heard, which is basically that these rules are for you, not for Apple. After all, a web browser does download and interpret code on the fly (Javascript), but you're not allowed to do that, so Safari will be its only browser.
So, you can play iTunes in the background, but probably not Pandora.
His voice lacks the gravely, emotional sarcasm that Spike is portrayed as having. His near monotone delivery will kill the character and reduce him to a mere shell of the original.
Maybe I'll have to go back and watch the original, because I remember the original Spike being very much monotone, the sarcasm very much in the dialog, not the delivery.
Point is, you can work around the OS.
I'm not sure how easy it is on WM, but consider if it was desktop Windows vs the iPhone OS. Worst case, just replace explorer.exe with your own shell, use a layer like Cygwin or Services for Unix, and it's hard to tell it's actually Windows under there.
On the other hand, if you like the iPhone, it's great, but if you don't, or you want to change it in some interesting way, you're pretty much boned.
Actually, I don't know much about Windows Mobile, other than that development for it was more like development for a desktop OS. That is, you got some APIs, but ultimately, you could compile actually native code (unlike Android), and do pretty much anything within the constraints of the OS, possibly even hack the OS a bit (unlike the iPhone -- no farts until recently).
I do know, for example, that there was some sort of VLC port, among others.
So, I don't actually know, and I haven't tried. But I suspect that you wouldn't need anything more than you need to develop for a desktop OS. For practical reasons, you might have to buy a Microsoft product, just as you probably should buy Windows and some form of Visual Studio to develop Windows apps. But I think, like Windows apps, what you build with that SDK is pretty much up to you.
Keep in mind, ultimately, it could lead to just what you're describing -- a sort of mobile MinGW, and cross-compile from Linux. Or, ports of interpreted languages -- I think they had Python already -- or something like Java, or just libraries like wxwidgets, Qt, etc, and you could develop on any OS and port relatively easily.
1. Before there wasn't a performance need to be multi-threaded, in many ways it was a performance hit.
Depends on the kind of application. There was hyperthreading for awhile, and there is also the fact that a multithreaded app is more responsive.
Sure, you could argue for an event-based model, but it's still not going to be quite as responsive as a threaded model -- and the evented model is probably easily portable to a threaded model, unless you've done something stupid.
2. Developing Multi-threaded apps take more considerations.
Not really. If you do threads, maybe, because you're dealing with shared state. So avoid shared state, and it works out well.
Yes, multithreaded apps are really hard to debug, if you operate at, say, the pthread level, or the Java thread level. So are sequential apps, if you use GOTO. Work at a higher level.
3. Languages don't have good methods for multi-threading.
Erlang does, and it's decades old. Other languages almost certainly have some sort of actor library.
Even before things become natively threaded, we already have the advantage of being able to run more single-threaded apps, without having them run into each other. For the first time in a long time, I don't even bother to run top most of the time, except out of curiosity -- I often don't even notice something using 100% CPU, because it's only using the one core.
If you've got shared state, you're probably Doing It Wrong. Use processes -- either OS processes or language-level processes, even thread-based actors.
And while there are computing jobs which are inherently not parallel, certainly most desktop applications do not fall into that category. Not all are embarrassingly parallel -- rendering a webpage takes as long as it takes. But you have a lot of those tasks -- why do you need every open web page (every tab) running in the same process? Why even every plugin object?