They're things which don't make much difference to the message, but make me think that yes, the bible is not necessarily all infinitely infallible absolute truth. And that's well and good. I could probably stop here, but I'd like to plant a few seeds of doubt and healthy skepticism...
If the entire thing is not infallible absolute truth, then you cannot choose which parts of it are. If you're like I was (for a LONG time), you'll choose to believe whatever resonates most strongly with you. Probably things like the message of love -- love thy neighbor as thyself, to begin with, and we find Jesus doing a lot of forgiving throughout.
The Law does kind of say, explicitly, that this kind of thinking won't save you...
Here is my suggestion: Take what is useful today, what you can use in mundane, everyday life. Love your neighbor as yourself. Donate to charity. Avoid hypocrisy. Be honest, and kind, and everything else a good Christian could be.
And you won't need the Bible for any of that. You won't need faith in God for that -- you'll need faith in yourself, and in men. (And woman, to be fair.)
on the other hand, I do find it very easy to believe that there will be an intelligence and power out there greater than our own, and I don't see why people who believe in evolution for example wouldn't believe that too.. a lot of humans just want to believe that they are in control. Belief in evolution doesn't mean you have to disregard what you've described -- which, by the way, is not Christianity, it's generic Deism, I think.
And before I go, a bit about the paradox of control...
As we begin to understand more about the Universe, whether or not there's an intelligence out there, we find out exactly how small and insignificant we actually are. In fact, if there's no intelligence out there, we're even less important, and less in control, because there's no one to pray to.
At the same time, I find that having given up all religion, I've become that much more in control of my own life. I never stop and pray to God for things to get better -- I just go make them better. I never have to wonder whether God would want me to do a particular thing, or whether it's right with the Bible (or the Torah) -- I only have to ask whether it's right with me.
In general, ethics become simpler -- or at least, it is easier to see their complexity. Certainly, I can't just reflexively say that something is good or bad -- but the hard problems (if you had to kill a child to save a city, could you do it?) were always hard, and the easy problems (Homosexuality is BAD because God says so!... Even if they really love each other... Ok, they can love each other, but they can't get married, it'd cheapen my marriage somehow!) almost become easier (Doesn't matter what they do, if I don't have to watch.)
Sorry, but I couldn't let the rest of your post go unanswered, either.
Linux will now be mandatorily installed in schools instead of Windows Which is bad, sure. But wouldn't you feel the same way if Windows was mandatorily installed? Does it matter which it is?
even military created its own distro Not quite sure how that's bad.
I can't understand though why cybercommunism is that popular in such an individualist country as USA is. I'll treat this as a serious comment, though it really sounds like a troll...
First, it's not the same as communism, and is certainly different than any implementation of communism so far. Everyone doing open source chooses to do so, individually, at least in the US. And everyone gets to choose exactly how they want to contribute, and under what terms. Communism, on the other hand, often starts with a Benevolent Dictator and goes downhill from there.
But more importantly, open source (and Linux) is more empowering to more individuals than proprietary software.
Specifically: Windows gives a lot of power to one group (Microsoft). The same is true of most proprietary software -- the proprietor gets the power.
Linux gives a lot of power to everyone who uses it. I can get the source code, change it, recompile it, redistribute it, do anything I want with it, so long as I leave it open. Some projects go even farther -- sqlite is perhaps the best example in that it is entirely public domain, meaning anyone can use it for anything.
Tell me that's not individualistic -- I, an individual, can do whatever I want with this software, as long as I provide source code.
One more thing: I am glad of real-life "community property" in the strictest sense -- like the town square. What, did you think some individual would own central park? No, it's open to the public -- open to all.
(you may build a site so it becomes easier, but you are going to have to maintain that project for a long time before the time spent setting it up pays off). Just plain disagree, with how easy it is to get a reasonably-priced, reasonably-featured virtual host. Pretty much ready to go out of the box, but with ssh access, it means releases can be done with a shell one-liner, or less than twenty lines of Perl, say.
Many people do not have a static IP Which is why there are services like DynDNS -- which has prices measured by the year. And there are others which do the same thing, for free.
or the knowledge of how to get a domain/sever space/ write the cgi etc to do this, or want to And many people do have that knowledge. For those people, it is easier to do it yourself than to work with SourceForge.
Well... and they are bad, aren't they? Sometimes they can be used for achieving something, that couldn't be achieved without them, but in general, the less often guns are used, the better. So hunting is bad?
PHP doesn't have any weird syntax like Perl regular expressions---you can do Perl regex, but it is neatly encapsultated into proper strings the way it should be. Regex is never really going to be readable without a separate course learning that. By the time you know regex syntax, a little extra syntax in your language isn't that bad.
There's no having to manually re-indent dozens of lines of code because you needed to add another nesting level and whitespace is part of the language, etc. And there's no need to do so in any modern programming environment, either. Most text editors these days have ways to re-indent code, uncomment/comment keyboard shortcuts, etc.
It's just a really clean, lightweight OO language that's exceptionally easy to learn Easy to learn if you already know HTML, I suppose. But where's my actual, interactive PHP shell that I can play with while I'm learning the language?
OO? Only recently.
Clean? Not even close, not when you've used a real OO language.
and happens to integrate very well with HTML. So does everything else, now. I'd argue Ruby is actually better at this than PHP.
Don't get me wrong, PHP has plenty of weak points when it comes to performance My language of choice right now is Ruby, so I don't really care about that.
availability of modules to do various obscure things Considering the amount of crap built-in to the language, I doubt that's a huge stumbling block, either. I like CPAN, but it does help when the language itself is clean enough that I'll happily write a library of my own. But most that I'd need to do with a C library has bindings everywhere I really want to do it.
mainly because it isn't a kitchen sink like Perl I think Perl has too many built-in functions, available everywhere, completely un-namespaced, compared to Ruby.
But you know what? Perl has a little over two hundred functions in the main namespace. PHP has a little over three thousand, according to this page.
So, it may not have the kitchen sink in the syntax, but it has the kitchen sink, the bathtub, the plumbing, and the neighbor's shower in the core library.
Finally, I call BS on this:
Almost any code written in C (or C++ without templates/exceptions/other icky stuff) can be trivially ported to PHP by replacing the type names with "var" and adding dollar signs in the right places. (I'm exaggerating slightly, but not much.) Is there a language, other than Python, that this isn't true of, for very simple, "Hello World" or "My first HMAC implementation" examples? Sure, the rules would be different, but dropping all the type declarations (swapping for "var") and adding dollar signs is significant.
Oh, and does PHP support structs? What about function pointers? I doubt it's "almost any code". It's easy when you understand both C and PHP, but again, I assert that's true for many languages, particularly popular web scripting languages.
More pointedly: If poorly-indented code is so troublesome that you'd "hate" the offending developer, you should start using a modern IDE. I prefer a modern editor to a modern IDE.
I do want a certain amount of control over the structure of my code, even if a lot of it will be by convention. Having any automated tool try to "fix" someone else's code is likely to screw up things like comments which are cleverly indented and aligned with some code, or similarly interesting code.
And an IDE is overkill in many other ways, yet they still often find ways to miss some functionality I want. That, and I tend to be much more easily able to switch text editors than switch IDEs.
And yes, I'm manually indenting. I vi, therefore I am.... Vim can auto-indent. It shouldn't be too hard to find a command, or a script, to indent/unindent large chunks of text.
I use Kate. Click & drag to select a large chunk of text, then tab/shift+tab to indent/unindent it. Trivial.
In the unlikely event you're not joking, I was referring to the fact that I'd expect someone using a Japanese character set to appreciate Unicode even more.
I imaged my whole Windows partition, in preparation for the horrible instability that would be SP3. I then took a deep breath, and started the download, figuring it would take several hours.
It went reasonably quickly, had exactly one reboot (which brought me fully up to date; no "critical updates" after that), and then ran solidly while I played Portal for another five or six hours.
This post just gushes about VIA. Because VIA just did something awesome -- something we, as a community, have been pushing vendors to do for a long time.
Since when did slashdot become a site for vendors to have their sock puppets write glowing posts for them? Since forever, as long as those vendors are releasing high-quality open source drivers.
"probably makes them the best-supported framebuffers Linux has ever had..." Give me a break That's pretty much factually true, unless Intel drivers are better. Other than those two, just about all Linux video drivers are either reverse engineered -- which works pretty well, most of the time, but often features are missing -- or proprietary, which supports the features they feel like supporting, breaks frequently, and there's nothing we can do when it breaks -- I'm looking at you, nVidia.
If you don't think these are the best-supported framebuffers Linux has ever had, provide a counterargument.
I was assuming that VIA would release most code under some license other then the GPL (such as the BSD license) that would allow use in proprietary products. Pointless for two reasons.
First, the incompatibility goes both ways -- BSD code cannot be GPL'd, because BSD includes an advertising clause that the GPL doesn't. The few times drivers have made it across, it's been because the original, sole author gave permission.
Which brings us to the second reason: If VIA wants to use their driver in proprietary software, there's nothing stopping them, because they have copyright. They can release it under as many licenses as they want, so long as the license doesn't require them to give up copyright. MANY open source projects are "dual-licensed" -- there's a commercial version, which comes with support, under a different license, and costs money, and then there's the GPL'd version, for which the project generally only accepts contributions which give them copyright.
But you see, if this code gets integrated into the kernel -- where it most likely belongs -- then it's GPLv2, period. VIA can't take it back and make it proprietary. They still own all the code that they wrote, but now people will be contributing to the kernel fork, which will most likely pull ahead -- and VIA won't really be able to do anything but sit back and watch, and sell hardware.
And that, to me, is the most important point -- VIA is a hardware company. Honestly, they should public-domain their drivers, so that we can relicense them however we want -- as there's really no reason they should care about anyone "stealing" their software. Stolen software equals more hardware sales for them.
The Windows and Linux markets are a bit different. Which codec library should VIA target? It almost doesn't matter. Pick one, even start your own. People will write wrappers for the others. I'd probably start with GStreamer, but really, whatever.
And why would you expect random software to know about and make calls to VIA's API? H.264 decoding isn't exactly a DirectX function as far as I know. You know, it's really funny when people make statements like that, qualified with "as far as I know", and then turn out to be precisely as wrong as you could possibly be.
No, it's not h.264-specific, but it is a generic way to provide any codec. So all they have to do is provide their own DirectShow h.264 codec, and every app that uses DirectShow codecs will have hardware-accelerated h.264.
At that point, if, say, Flash isn't using DirectShow (I don't know either way), then that will be their fault. But it looks like VIA didn't even try.
It's up to cryptography library writers/PMs to determine whether they want to fold VIA encryption acceleration into THEIR libraries. Assuming they're supporting Linux, there are kernel drivers for various crypto algorithms, and I believe some can optionally use hardware acceleration where it's available. It would be trivial for them to at least enable that much.
In software, most crypto seems to be done by openssl or gpg, both of which have fairly centralized, well-established libraries.
So it's pretty clear what you'd have to do to get the crypto stuff supported by pretty much every Linux app that isn't statically linked.
For one thing, H.264 is patented. I'm not sure entirely how this affects us. We wouldn't be implementing H.264 so much as calling the existing (patented) hardware implementation, right?
Unless, of course, they exaggerated how much hardware help they had.
In addition, Windows Vista 64-bit requires that all drivers that include a kernel-mode component be published by an established company, or the operating system will display unhideable "Test mode" banners in the four corners of the screen. Is this something that it's impossible for the user to override? In other words, is the set of certificates or CAs hardcoded, or is it user-modifiable?
Regardless, I don't see how this affects us, either. These are drivers for Linux, so it's good that they're open. It means they can't be GPLv3, but neither can Linux itself. And it means we can't then port them to Vista 64-bit -- seems like a small loss to me.
Well, studies have repeatedly shown that a single developer only adds about 20 correct lines of code per day. Assuming this is high quality code that has been well-tested, those 16K lines of code are nothing to scoff at. That's exactly why I'd be skeptical of it.
I mean, I'm not suggesting every app needs to be an exercise in golfing, but remember, 20 correct lines -- and I bet that's irrespective of language, which is why I prefer concise, high-level languages.
In general, which is more likely -- that there are 16k of high-quality, well-tested code? Code that's as simple as it can possibly be, but no simpler? (Apologies to Einstein.)
But often, it's 16k of absolutely horrible, untested spaghetti code, written by too small of a team on too short a deadline -- that of course got pushed back, because rushing meant, in some cases, code that was actually too buggy to use.
I really hope it's good stuff, but 16k by itself doesn't say much one way or the other, aside from how big the download will be.
That said, I'm also going to seriously look at VIA the next time I build a MythTV box. You're never going to escape criticism, no matter what you do -- but VIA absolutely did the right thing there, and I applaud them for that.
Thank you, VIA. Looks like some genuine competition for Intel as the "most well-supported Linux video cards."
I can think of a dozen things off the top of my head that would make PHP a better language, or at least make it suck less.
And this is what you came up with?
Even of all the syntax tweaks -- and there's so much more that's wrong with PHP than syntax -- I can think of so many more useful things to do than that. In fact, having concatenation be different than addition is a feature, not a bug -- if you add 2 and 2, you always get 4. If you concatenate 2 and 2, you always get 22. With + meaning both, you have to know a lot more than that you're '+'-ing 2 and 2; you have to know things like types.
Suggesting that XML can replace MySQL is like suggesting that power steering can replace fossil fuels. Power steering may be good, and fossil fuels may be bad, but they're also completely orthogonal.
Now, if you were talking about an XML database, or a document-oriented database, your comment might make a bit more sense. But for a single machine, MySQL probably beats both of those -- it's only really going to be a benefit if you start scaling to large clusters.
I don't know, I think Ruby is even worse -- given that it was invented by a Japanese guy, so you'd think it'd be the first to have Unicode out of the box.
Better example: Anything after OS X. We're up to 10.5 now, but everyone's drooling over it. Why? No numbers at all -- it's just "Leopard."
If they called it "PHP 5.5 -- the version that doesn't suck" or "PHP 5.5 (Quail)" or... put any kind of marketing spin on it at all... it might have as much or more impact than simply calling it 6.0.
Slashdot Mirror
If the entire thing is not infallible absolute truth, then you cannot choose which parts of it are. If you're like I was (for a LONG time), you'll choose to believe whatever resonates most strongly with you. Probably things like the message of love -- love thy neighbor as thyself, to begin with, and we find Jesus doing a lot of forgiving throughout.
The Law does kind of say, explicitly, that this kind of thinking won't save you...
Here is my suggestion: Take what is useful today, what you can use in mundane, everyday life. Love your neighbor as yourself. Donate to charity. Avoid hypocrisy. Be honest, and kind, and everything else a good Christian could be.
And you won't need the Bible for any of that. You won't need faith in God for that -- you'll need faith in yourself, and in men. (And woman, to be fair.) on the other hand, I do find it very easy to believe that there will be an intelligence and power out there greater than our own, and I don't see why people who believe in evolution for example wouldn't believe that too.. a lot of humans just want to believe that they are in control. Belief in evolution doesn't mean you have to disregard what you've described -- which, by the way, is not Christianity, it's generic Deism, I think.
And before I go, a bit about the paradox of control...
As we begin to understand more about the Universe, whether or not there's an intelligence out there, we find out exactly how small and insignificant we actually are. In fact, if there's no intelligence out there, we're even less important, and less in control, because there's no one to pray to.
At the same time, I find that having given up all religion, I've become that much more in control of my own life. I never stop and pray to God for things to get better -- I just go make them better. I never have to wonder whether God would want me to do a particular thing, or whether it's right with the Bible (or the Torah) -- I only have to ask whether it's right with me.
In general, ethics become simpler -- or at least, it is easier to see their complexity. Certainly, I can't just reflexively say that something is good or bad -- but the hard problems (if you had to kill a child to save a city, could you do it?) were always hard, and the easy problems (Homosexuality is BAD because God says so!... Even if they really love each other... Ok, they can love each other, but they can't get married, it'd cheapen my marriage somehow!) almost become easier (Doesn't matter what they do, if I don't have to watch.)
First, it's not the same as communism, and is certainly different than any implementation of communism so far. Everyone doing open source chooses to do so, individually, at least in the US. And everyone gets to choose exactly how they want to contribute, and under what terms. Communism, on the other hand, often starts with a Benevolent Dictator and goes downhill from there.
But more importantly, open source (and Linux) is more empowering to more individuals than proprietary software.
Specifically: Windows gives a lot of power to one group (Microsoft). The same is true of most proprietary software -- the proprietor gets the power.
Linux gives a lot of power to everyone who uses it. I can get the source code, change it, recompile it, redistribute it, do anything I want with it, so long as I leave it open. Some projects go even farther -- sqlite is perhaps the best example in that it is entirely public domain, meaning anyone can use it for anything.
Tell me that's not individualistic -- I, an individual, can do whatever I want with this software, as long as I provide source code.
One more thing: I am glad of real-life "community property" in the strictest sense -- like the town square. What, did you think some individual would own central park? No, it's open to the public -- open to all.
At least put them in the "idle" category, which we know to avoid as the new Myspace/Digg bastard child.
Also, where'd my d2 go? No more AJAX comments?
I didn't have a point.
I got modded "funny" anyway. Cool!
I meant "loose", as the verb.
As in, to loose a Spore upon the world.
Not as in, to lose a Spore in a field of pollen.
OO? Only recently.
Clean? Not even close, not when you've used a real OO language. and happens to integrate very well with HTML. So does everything else, now. I'd argue Ruby is actually better at this than PHP. Don't get me wrong, PHP has plenty of weak points when it comes to performance My language of choice right now is Ruby, so I don't really care about that. availability of modules to do various obscure things Considering the amount of crap built-in to the language, I doubt that's a huge stumbling block, either. I like CPAN, but it does help when the language itself is clean enough that I'll happily write a library of my own. But most that I'd need to do with a C library has bindings everywhere I really want to do it. mainly because it isn't a kitchen sink like Perl I think Perl has too many built-in functions, available everywhere, completely un-namespaced, compared to Ruby.
But you know what? Perl has a little over two hundred functions in the main namespace. PHP has a little over three thousand, according to this page.
So, it may not have the kitchen sink in the syntax, but it has the kitchen sink, the bathtub, the plumbing, and the neighbor's shower in the core library.
Finally, I call BS on this: Almost any code written in C (or C++ without templates/exceptions/other icky stuff) can be trivially ported to PHP by replacing the type names with "var" and adding dollar signs in the right places. (I'm exaggerating slightly, but not much.) Is there a language, other than Python, that this isn't true of, for very simple, "Hello World" or "My first HMAC implementation" examples? Sure, the rules would be different, but dropping all the type declarations (swapping for "var") and adding dollar signs is significant.
Oh, and does PHP support structs? What about function pointers? I doubt it's "almost any code". It's easy when you understand both C and PHP, but again, I assert that's true for many languages, particularly popular web scripting languages.
Actually, I don't care, as long as you're not writing spambots in that language.
I do want a certain amount of control over the structure of my code, even if a lot of it will be by convention. Having any automated tool try to "fix" someone else's code is likely to screw up things like comments which are cleverly indented and aligned with some code, or similarly interesting code.
And an IDE is overkill in many other ways, yet they still often find ways to miss some functionality I want. That, and I tend to be much more easily able to switch text editors than switch IDEs.
Disclaimer: I'm not GP, and I use Ruby.
I use Kate. Click & drag to select a large chunk of text, then tab/shift+tab to indent/unindent it. Trivial.
In the unlikely event you're not joking, I was referring to the fact that I'd expect someone using a Japanese character set to appreciate Unicode even more.
I imaged my whole Windows partition, in preparation for the horrible instability that would be SP3. I then took a deep breath, and started the download, figuring it would take several hours.
It went reasonably quickly, had exactly one reboot (which brought me fully up to date; no "critical updates" after that), and then ran solidly while I played Portal for another five or six hours.
I was almost disappointed.
It was an Intel machine, though.
If you don't think these are the best-supported framebuffers Linux has ever had, provide a counterargument.
First, the incompatibility goes both ways -- BSD code cannot be GPL'd, because BSD includes an advertising clause that the GPL doesn't. The few times drivers have made it across, it's been because the original, sole author gave permission.
Which brings us to the second reason: If VIA wants to use their driver in proprietary software, there's nothing stopping them, because they have copyright. They can release it under as many licenses as they want, so long as the license doesn't require them to give up copyright. MANY open source projects are "dual-licensed" -- there's a commercial version, which comes with support, under a different license, and costs money, and then there's the GPL'd version, for which the project generally only accepts contributions which give them copyright.
But you see, if this code gets integrated into the kernel -- where it most likely belongs -- then it's GPLv2, period. VIA can't take it back and make it proprietary. They still own all the code that they wrote, but now people will be contributing to the kernel fork, which will most likely pull ahead -- and VIA won't really be able to do anything but sit back and watch, and sell hardware.
And that, to me, is the most important point -- VIA is a hardware company. Honestly, they should public-domain their drivers, so that we can relicense them however we want -- as there's really no reason they should care about anyone "stealing" their software. Stolen software equals more hardware sales for them.
And even then, I still can't use the h.264 acceleration.
If Fluendo can figure it out, so can VIA.
No, it's not h.264-specific, but it is a generic way to provide any codec. So all they have to do is provide their own DirectShow h.264 codec, and every app that uses DirectShow codecs will have hardware-accelerated h.264.
At that point, if, say, Flash isn't using DirectShow (I don't know either way), then that will be their fault. But it looks like VIA didn't even try. It's up to cryptography library writers/PMs to determine whether they want to fold VIA encryption acceleration into THEIR libraries. Assuming they're supporting Linux, there are kernel drivers for various crypto algorithms, and I believe some can optionally use hardware acceleration where it's available. It would be trivial for them to at least enable that much.
In software, most crypto seems to be done by openssl or gpg, both of which have fairly centralized, well-established libraries.
So it's pretty clear what you'd have to do to get the crypto stuff supported by pretty much every Linux app that isn't statically linked.
Unless, of course, they exaggerated how much hardware help they had. In addition, Windows Vista 64-bit requires that all drivers that include a kernel-mode component be published by an established company, or the operating system will display unhideable "Test mode" banners in the four corners of the screen. Is this something that it's impossible for the user to override? In other words, is the set of certificates or CAs hardcoded, or is it user-modifiable?
Regardless, I don't see how this affects us, either. These are drivers for Linux, so it's good that they're open. It means they can't be GPLv3, but neither can Linux itself. And it means we can't then port them to Vista 64-bit -- seems like a small loss to me.
I mean, I'm not suggesting every app needs to be an exercise in golfing, but remember, 20 correct lines -- and I bet that's irrespective of language, which is why I prefer concise, high-level languages.
In general, which is more likely -- that there are 16k of high-quality, well-tested code? Code that's as simple as it can possibly be, but no simpler? (Apologies to Einstein.)
But often, it's 16k of absolutely horrible, untested spaghetti code, written by too small of a team on too short a deadline -- that of course got pushed back, because rushing meant, in some cases, code that was actually too buggy to use.
I really hope it's good stuff, but 16k by itself doesn't say much one way or the other, aside from how big the download will be.
I think they're legitimate criticisms.
That said, I'm also going to seriously look at VIA the next time I build a MythTV box. You're never going to escape criticism, no matter what you do -- but VIA absolutely did the right thing there, and I applaud them for that.
Thank you, VIA. Looks like some genuine competition for Intel as the "most well-supported Linux video cards."
...Wow.
I can think of a dozen things off the top of my head that would make PHP a better language, or at least make it suck less.
And this is what you came up with?
Even of all the syntax tweaks -- and there's so much more that's wrong with PHP than syntax -- I can think of so many more useful things to do than that. In fact, having concatenation be different than addition is a feature, not a bug -- if you add 2 and 2, you always get 4. If you concatenate 2 and 2, you always get 22. With + meaning both, you have to know a lot more than that you're '+'-ing 2 and 2; you have to know things like types.
XML is not a database. MySQL is not a format.
Suggesting that XML can replace MySQL is like suggesting that power steering can replace fossil fuels. Power steering may be good, and fossil fuels may be bad, but they're also completely orthogonal.
Now, if you were talking about an XML database, or a document-oriented database, your comment might make a bit more sense. But for a single machine, MySQL probably beats both of those -- it's only really going to be a benefit if you start scaling to large clusters.
I don't know, I think Ruby is even worse -- given that it was invented by a Japanese guy, so you'd think it'd be the first to have Unicode out of the box.
Depends.
Linux 2.4 -> 2.6.
Better example: Anything after OS X. We're up to 10.5 now, but everyone's drooling over it. Why? No numbers at all -- it's just "Leopard."
If they called it "PHP 5.5 -- the version that doesn't suck" or "PHP 5.5 (Quail)" or... put any kind of marketing spin on it at all... it might have as much or more impact than simply calling it 6.0.