Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
·
· Score: 0
You've apparently seen enough of my posting history that this surprises you, so give me the benefit of the doubt. At least tell me why you think I'm stupid. Where is the flaw in my reasoning here?
However, the monopoly of IE6 is broken. It is no longer considered acceptable for a website to slap a "best viewed with" disclaimer on a site which effectively only works with IE6. In general, it's not even acceptable anymore to have a website which is "best viewed with IE" and doesn't work in Firefox.
That's the important point. It means that the public Internet is no longer tying you down to IE6. It also means that in general, the lowest common denominator is no longer IE6, so it's also considered acceptable to develop a site which requires newer browsers and newer standards, which means standards can actually move forward.
And Firefox did that. So did the users who refused to "just use IE" and complained loudly until people switched -- those people who refused to give up brought Firefox to critical mass. Several critical masses, really, sort of a snowball effect -- as more sites tolerate Firefox, it becomes easier for people to switch.
For what it's worth, I don't really like hamburgers, and most of my family are essentially all-American mutts -- sure, my ancestors immigrated, but from too many places for me to bother trying to count. I'm not convinced Phelps thinks a democratic republic is a good idea, or that he likes it here, though I may be entirely wrong about that.
However, being American, eating hamburgers and apple pie, being the descendant of immigrants, and even liking the idea of a democratic republic are all incidental.
To put it simply, Phelps doesn't claim apple pie hates fags. He claims God hates fags.
I'm beginning to think this is a bad argument, and that you're absolutely right that you personally don't condone him, and that I shouldn't assume that you or anyone else does.
However, there is a sense in which the fact that we have such mainstream tolerance of religion and religious ideas, and the fact that they're seen as off-limits to criticism, leads to exactly the sort of environment in which we can even ask whether or not parents are allowed to deny their children life-saving medical care because they'd rather pray.
If you want to be able to criticize others for their beliefs, you have to open your own to criticism.
So, I withdraw my comment about lending credibility, and I realize I'm actually changing the subject a bit, because what I really (now) want to say is this (watch till about 11:10). I suspect that's much more a point about culture than religion.
Most mainstream Protestant denominations, as well as the Catholic church, fully accept scientific findings like evolution and the 15 billion year age of the universe. I think promoters of "Intelligent Design" and the like are completely wrong.
That's good, though about 40% of the US disagrees with you.
And the Catholic church has its own problems. If I recall, the Pope himself has said that condoms do more harm than good when it comes to preventing AIDS, which is also factually wrong.
"Faith" doesn't really mean what you think it means.
Apparently, it also doesn't mean what almost anyone I talk to thinks it means. Be careful, or you might make it have as little meaning as you claim Christianity does. Nevertheless:
Faith doesn't mean "believing things without evidence".
Let's try to keep this in mind. More specifically, I claim Faith, in the religious sense, means "believing things without sufficient evidence." There are enough eyewitness accounts of alien abductions to count as evidence, but I imagine you don't find that to be sufficient to believe aliens have visited us.
It means recognizing the limitations of one's knowledge (and mankind's knowledge)...
Ok. I recognize my limitations.
What's more, I recognize that there are things humans may never know. That's fine. I'm alright not knowing. It's good to acknowledge what I don't know. I see no need to fill the gaps with a god, no reason to accept anything on faith when I could simply not know.
...and trusting that our lives ultimately have a purpose.
If you mean "purpose" in the universal sense, this is exactly the moment where you are believing something without sufficient evidence. What evidence do you have that our lives ultimately have a purpose?
And if your evidence is sufficient, why do you need faith?
All you've done is restate "Faith" as a more specific sort of thing to believe without evidence. You haven't presented another meaning. This is painful to read, and I apologize for splitting you up by the sentence fragment -- I don't normally do that -- but you keep sounding like you're going to say something good, I agree with everything you say, almost... and then you lose it. For example:
I don't claim to know what will happen to me after my death,
Neither do I. We have some pretty good ideas, but I'm not sure there's enough evidence to say that I know that what I call "me" is entirely physical.
but I accept that I should live my life by the principles taught by Jesus (tolerance, forgiveness, humility, etc)
While Jesus taught a few things I absolutely don't agree with, those three I can accept. Thomas Jefferson would also agree with you, but he was a Deist who found the stories of Jesus' life so unbelievable that he created his own bible which was essentially the story of Jesus and his teachings, with all the miracles taken out.
So far, we're in complete agreement, and indeed, you can find good reasons for these, or you can at least reduce them to matters of opinion. For example, should you live your life according to the teachings of Jesus? How you want to live your life is largely a matter of opinion.
And then...
...and that in the end, God will take care of me.
...now we're back to believing something without sufficient evidence.
one can still buy a commercial operating system and support open source / free software to push the "cause" forward.... Saying that you either support the status quo or are moving forward is disingenuous at best.
I think I may have reacted too harshly here. After all, I own a copy of Windows myself. But if I can find a way to do it outside of Windows, I will. The person I was replying to had not only given up on using Linux, but had done so in order to deal with having to work with MS Office documents -- this is something for which clear open alternatives exist, and for which I don't think it's too much to ask to suggest that an office use open standards instead.
But I didn't mean this as a "with us or against us." I was drawing a clear line here between either using MS Office -- thus creating, manipulating, and consuming content that will work best on MS Office, thus making it harder for the next person to try Linux -- or pushing things forward, which is really the only other alternative if you have to collaborate on documents. The only way to really have a third position is to do what I do, and avoid sharing editable documents in the first place.
just because a person is religious does not mean he or she has turned off critical thinking skills. Start using your own critical thinking skills for you are defining the whole by a very small albeit extreme part.
Using both my critical thinking skills and my observations, I conclude that the vast majority of religious people turn off their critical thinking skills where religion is concerned. One I was talking to today -- a happy, friendly, relatively new Mormon, who didn't seem to be particularly brainwashed or "extreme", someone who shared quite a bit in common with me, in fact -- flat-out admitted that she didn't know how to explain logically why she believes what she does.
Even in politics, people can answer that question, though how well they answer it might vary. Certainly in other areas of our lives, it often becomes a habit. For example, which should I get for a new laptop, solid state or spinning disk? Should I eat cake for lunch, a stir-fry, or a salad? What's the best place to park my car? Should I own a car? Can I afford one? We may have vastly different answers to these questions, and certainly, there's more information needed -- for instance, the fact that I want to lose weight should rule out the cake -- but we generally either analyze these with reasoning skills, or decide we don't care enough (one cake won't kill me.)
And the bigger a decision it is, the more likely we are to use careful reasoning. Which university should I attend? Which job should I take?
Only very occasionally do we turn this off. Do I want to spend the rest of my life with this person? Far too few couples actually apply enough critical thought to ask the right questions, like "Do you want children?"
And of course, religion. If there really is a god who may send you to heaven or hell based on what you believe, and you think there's any chance this god is real, you'd think that would be the most important decision you've ever made! It'd certainly be the most important bit of knowledge you could ever possibly have, so you'd think people would want to be sure they're right.
Instead -- and again, these generalities come from personal experience talking to so many of these people -- they haven't asked the simplest questions, and they don't like being challenged on this issue. Actually, it's worse than that -- they see "faith" (roughly translates to "believing something without good reason") as a virtue.
I don't think that religious people are incapable of critical thought. Instead, I think the better educated ones, the ones who should know better, are just good at compartmentalizing. These are the things you're allowed to question, examine, poke at, chew on, tease apart with logic and see if they make
Contradiction in terms. The only unifying property of atheists is the lack of belief in gods.
...claim religion is the universal problem...
Not even Hitchens claims that.
It's a religion...
While religion is incredibly poorly defined, I don't see how you can have a religion without any dogma or core belief.
The logical flaw is that religion isn't the cause of all human suffering.
So, your logical flaw right here is a strawman. Who claims religion is the cause of all human suffering? If I ever made such a claim, I'll gladly retract it, but please, show me where!
What's more, I know plenty of atheists, and I can't think of a single one which would make that claim you just suggested. Again, not even Hitchens, let alone Dawkins, Dennett, or Harris. None of the atheists I know personally would make that claim. Some of them agree that religion is a cause of suffering in the world, even that it's an exceptional cause -- and not all even agree on this -- but none would say it is the sole cause.
For what it's worth, I've also noticed that outspoken atheists tend to be assumed "fundamentalist", "extremist", or "militant", simply for expressing their lack of belief. Not for "evangelizing", not for picking fights -- many are offended simply that atheists exist.
Notice how few militant atheists attack Buddhism, Taoism, and even Judaism.
For one, Buddhism and Taoism can both be atheistic -- neither require a belief in any gods. As for Judaism, note that many of the arguments against Christianity are also valid against Judaism and Islam. The Problem of Evil, for instance, is equally problematic for all Abrahamic religions unless they want to define God in a very, very strange way -- and it seems likely that any answer to that problem would apply equally to all Abrahamic religions as well.
Also, note that the major outspoken atheists are generally British or American, and in both countries, Christianity is the dominant religion. For my part, I live in America, where we not only have a majority of Christians, we also have a pretty sizable percentage of Creationists -- roughly 40% of Americans reject Evolution.
Islamic extremists from countries that aren't very advanced,
Islamic extremists also tend to blow people up, and they do so for explicitly religious reasons. So hell yes, if I can present a compelling argument that convinces a few of them to stop believing or at least not to blow themselves up, that's a Good Thing.
a Hindu caste system that doesn't even really exist anymore.
I don't tend to argue against that except in the company of followers of Transcendental Meditation -- the TM movement seems like it would very much like to bring the caste system back.
What I find especially humorous is that the parent used South Park in some of his citations. I guess he missed the Dawkins episode.
I have, in fact, seen every South Park episode. I found that one hilarious -- also another in which the majority of South Park become atheists at the same time as they find a way to eat by shoving food up their asses, and shit out their mouths -- the punchline being something like, "But when you become an atheist, a bunch of shit starts coming out of your mouth." Remember that?
Yes, I do have a sense of humor, and I am able to laugh at myself, unlike Isaac Hayes. Is that so surprising?
I also understand the difference between humor -- even pointed political humor directed against me -- and an actual argument. For example, "Praise Science!" If someone actually attempted to use that as an argument that atheism is a religion, yes, I'd laugh -- I'd laugh them out of the room!
I don't see how you can have such a thing as an atheist fundie, given that the only unifying property of atheists is the lack of belief in gods. What "fundamentals" would I be trying to get back to?
Here's the thing - we're all gonna die in the end, so all these fights against proprietary formats won't mean jack.
In that case, so is replying. Yet you seem to care enough about justifying your position (perhaps to yourself) to reply, so don't give me this nihilistic bullshit.
In life we pick the battles we can fight. These are potentially important issues, but basically given you're effectively saying about 90% of people are part of the "problem", I don't give a fuck anymore.
When 90% of the people are part of the problem is when I absolutely do care.
Easily 80-90% of the US population is religious, which makes it a safe bet that you are, too -- probably also Christian, probably believe faith is a virtue. If so, merely by supporting the idea that faith is a virtue, you are encouraging yourself and those around you to turn off their critical thinking and skepticism when the situation calls for it. That kind of thinking leads to atrocities. Never mind that merely by calling yourself "Christian", you lend credibility to these fuckwits.
Am I going to win? Not really. I do hope to reinforce separation of church and state, to promote actual science education instead of "Intelligent Design", and to establish some basic rights the religious would deny, like the right to marry. I'd love to see people tolerate less of the extremists. I really doubt I'm going to see the religious become a minority in my lifetime.
But you know what? I'd like to think that when I'm lying on my deathbed, I lived for things that matter. I'd like to think that I'd still be the kind of person who would be ashamed to think I gave up because it was too hard, or because there were too many people who disagreed with me.
Life shouldn't have to be some damn crusade.
You're right, it shouldn't. But this is the world we live in, and there are some issues which tend towards exactly that -- either you're a good little worker propping up the status quo, or you're actually helping to move things forward.
And life should be meaningful -- and it's up to you to find that meaning. Maybe you honestly don't care, but that's not what I'm hearing. What I'm hearing is that you do care, you're just too lazy to do anything about it anymore.
Yet somehow, you're not too lazy to post, and to try to justify how much you don't care. That says a lot.
The nice thing about.zip is that it is, in fact, supported everywhere, out of the box.
It's also nice in that it actually supports directory trees. The legacy lzma, and the newer xz, well, don't. I like tar in principle, and I use these formats for all sorts of things that I don't have to share with others, but there are definitely cases where zip is nice -- where it's nice to be able to effectively "mount" a zipfile, "seek" to an appropriate file within it, and read it, without having to decompress the whole thing. This is why zip is used by tons of games, where they might not even be using compression, but they can't trust most filesystems to handle that many small files properly. It's why it's used by both OpenDocument and MS OOXML -- it's the easiest way imaginable to embed multiple files into a single document, including multiple XML files that are compressed well.
It also depends what your goals are. Zip compresses and decompresses a hell of a lot faster than lzma. These days, I standardize on either lzop for speed or xz for compression ratio, but zip and gzip are nice compromises.
This is why I can never bring myself to move to Linux and cut ties with Windows entirely. It's just too much hassle when you end up having to interact with content produced using Windows-only software and you cannot guarantee perfect parsing of the file formats used.
This is indeed why I keep a Windows partition around, occasionally remote into a Windows terminal server or boot a VM.
But I'm not quiet about it. If they can write docx, that implies they've got a decently new version of Word. Decently new versions of Word natively support odt.
Fortunately, I find I have to do this less and less, both as I have fewer documents I have to read from people period, and as people get the hint and start producing PDFs that everyone can read.
It's time to give up the fight against Microsoft and succumb.
Remember IE6? Remember how fucking long we were stuck with IE6?
Because a few people kept fighting, we have Firefox. Call them crazy, call them zealots, but it worked. In the end, they dragged Microsoft kicking and screaming into this century.
That has to continue. Microsoft has repeatedly shown that they only really do their best work when they actually have competition. Let them completely dominate an area, and you end up with crap like Vista, and the long, long gap between IE6 and IE7.
I'm sorry you've given up. It also means you've become part of the problem -- you're yet another person who might one day decide to email me a docx instead of a pdf, an odf, or even html.
Just for starters, Pascal never intended his wager to be a formal proof of anything.
What did he intend it as, then? I find it interesting
It's not just that it's not a good argument, it's that there really isn't anyone it applies to other than someone who already believes in a particular god.
For enders, it doesn't matter, it's just a conversation starter.
About once a week, I get asked, "What if you're wrong?" This is almost as vacuous as Pascal's own formulation. To someone who doesn't currently hold a belief in a particular god, and knows that there are many gods to choose from, "What if you're wrong?" can just as easily be turned on its head -- what if you're wrong?
The only person who would consider this convincing or even interesting would be someone who already accepts that it's more likely for one god to exist than another, but doesn't accept that this one god exists. I don't know anyone like that. The people who aren't convinced aren't convinced, and the people who believe already don't need Pascal's Wager at all, except as an argument against those who aren't yet convinced.
There's just not anywhere else to go with it. That's pretty much the end of the conversation. So if it's meant as a conversation starter, it's a poor one -- but it is much more often used as either a legitimate question (which I am happy to answer), or an argument.
As for not having faith, then you must be agnostic on the question of whether there is a creator. Fine, that's also a choice.
I am an atheist, which is the simple negation of 'theist' -- I lack belief in any gods, particularly any creator-gods. I am also agnostic, which is to say that I don't know. The terms aren't contradictory.
(It implies various forms of faith, but I won't go there.)
Oh no you don't. If you're going to make a claim, back it up. Otherwise, why say it at all?
What, exactly, am I supposed to have faith in? In particular, are you claiming that there's a certain amount of faith associated with the atheist/agnostic position that isn't also associated with the theist position?
I notice you completely ignore the systems discussion, which was really the thrust of the whole piece...
I saw "formally impossible to determine," and lost interest. But now that you mention it...
The controller of a system must, by definition, have a greater complexity than the system.
I don't see how. Consider a plane on autopilot. It may well be that modern autopilot systems are more complex than the plane itself in order to be effective, but do you see that this isn't necessarily the case? An autopilot which simply held all controls constant would be a bad autopilot, but it would effectively be controlling the system of the plane.
no matter how you define 'creator' in order to argue for or against its existence, there is at least one factor that such a creator must possess that, since it is not in the system, can not be not included in the model.
It seems you're arguing that a creator can't be part of a system if we assume the creator is the cause of the entire system. If you define things that way, that's true, but I also don't see this preventing a sufficient model from being developed within the system to explain a creator's existence or nonexistence.
For instance, I cannot model my parents entirely in my head. While I can probably predict what they're likely to say with some degree of accuracy, it's not practical for me to know everything there possibly is to know about another person. However, to the extent that I can know anything about the physical world, I can know my parents exist. If one or both were dead, I could also know they no longer exist. I don't need to know everything there is to know about them in order to know these things about them.
Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
I hope you're not referring to Gnome though. A quick look at your posting history doesn't show you as stupid.
A quick Google for "gnome registry" shows that it's not exactly a new idea.
And to clarify for the audience: GConf is not the same as the Windows Registry.
I never claimed it was "the same." However, the differences are largely superficial. For instance:
GConf is a method to manage configuration files,
The Windows Registry manages configuration keys. I'm not seeing a significant difference.
and the Gnome configuration is stored in human-readable text.
It's stored as XML, so that's debatable.
The fact that Windows itself stores it in a binary database is an implementation detail -- Wine stores its registry as.reg files, which appear to be the same format that you get when dumping a key from the Windows Registry Editor. That format is at least as human-readable to me as XML, if not more so.
Fundamentally, however, gconf and the Windows Registry serve the same purpose, certainly considering the context of who I replied to -- anyone complaining that Linux lacks a registry could look at gconf.
In fact, the biggest difference seems to be that the Windows registry is abused far more than I imagine GConf is.
I don't hesitate to charge into this argument, banner held high...
So you pays yer money and takes yer choice: Pascal's Wager.
If you think the Anthropic Principle is weak, think about the words "Pascal's Wager" and "False Dichotomy." Give yourself about five seconds to find the flaw.
You can have faith in a creator, or faith that there is not a creator.
Wow, two for two!
I can have faith that there is a creator, or faith that there is not a creator, or I can simply not have faith.
Pascal's wager has a similar problem: Either there is the Abrahamic god, or there isn't... or there's the Hindu gods, or the Greek gods, or any number of interpretations people have of the Abrahamic gods (Allah, anyone?), or the gods we know are made up but can't disprove (Flying Spaghetti Monster), et cetera, et cetera.
It falls apart with this one question: How do you know that any god that exists rewards faith and punishes skepticism? If you can't show me why your god is the right one, then I assert it is equally likely that a god exists which punishes faith and rewards skepticism, and a metaphysics in which only atheists get to heaven. If you can't rule that out, Pascal's Wager is worthless, because for every possible god you define, I can define its opposite, and they would both be equally likely to exist and equally provable.
I was replying to someone who was suggesting that shouldn't be allowed. The idea was that all work should be done on company machines, and personal machines (like personal laptops) shouldn't be allowed.
My point is that if you allow people to take corporate laptops to Starbucks, you've already lost. If you allow them to plug personal laptops in, you've already lost. By "lost" I mean it's time to give up on the idea that the corporate firewall is going to protect you, and start making sure your network is as secure inside as it is outside -- there's no reason a single infected personal laptop should be an issue for anything else on your network.
The open source drivers supposedly developed in tandem with the kernel ARE crap and do often crash.
Citation needed. I've had far fewer issues with them than I have with vendor drivers on Windows, and I provided a few anecdotes. I realize anecdote isn't the singular of data, but simply dismissing it and saying "nuh uh" isn't an argument.
kernel developers cannot possibly test them with all hardware, only a hardware vendor can really do that.
Sorry... how do you make this leap?
It seems to me that kernel developers have historically had better luck with this. Aside from having a diverse enough background themselves, aside from the fact that I can actually fix a problem caused by an open source driver when it affects me, there's the fact that the kernel developers are willing to work with more hardware than the manufacturers are.
Take pretty much any USB device -- would you expect the manufacturer to give you a driver for PS3 Linux? So far as I know, there isn't even a PPC version of Flash on Linux.
Does Linux want to be something for elite geeks or for common users too?
Linux is a thing, it doesn't have wants. If you're asking what the developers want, you have to understand that their main motivation is to make something for them to use.
Then again, something like 70% of the kernel developers are doing this for pay. In that case, their "wants" are aligned with the wants of whichever company they're working for.
A few of those want Linux to be something for "common users". A few of them want it to be something for servers and clusters. A few want it to be something for hobbyists and tinkerers. These aren't mutually exclusive, but to say Linux has "failed" because it doesn't serve your needs is missing the point. It servers mine quite well.
Your attitude is the problem with Linux and why it remains the domain mainly of some elite geeks and unuseable for real people.
The fact that plenty of "real people" use it aside, what about my attitude is problematic here? That I asked for an actual reasoned argument, perhaps based on a bit of evidence?
To make something that is clearly not preferable to Windows...
Not preferable by whom?
I absolutely prefer Linux to Windows, and I find that more often than not, attempts to make Linux more like Windows end up reducing the actual advantages Linux has. If it was exactly like Windows, why not just use Windows?
That's not to say that Windows has no good ideas, but quite often, I hear people suggest things like "improvements" to the package management system to make it behave just like Windows, or just like OS X. In particular, I often hear people complaining that they found some cool new software, and why can't they just click, download an exe, click it, run through the installer clicking next-next-next, and install it, instead of being forced into the oh-so-terribly-difficult task of learning to point and click in a package manager instead?
To be fair, you haven't made that argument, but for the record, a solid package manager is one of the biggest advantages of Linux over other OSes. In fact, some of the biggest reasons people like "App Stores" are features that have been in Linux package managers forever.
Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
Must be why programmers all use "fill-in-the-blank"-style registries. Oh wait...
Before deciding it's only to make people feel "special", you might ask what the advantages actually are. For one, suppose we're configuring a server. Can your registry fit in version control? How easily can you add comments so people know why the hell you configured it the way you did? How many steps is it to clone a config from one machine to another, or back it up? How many tools do you have for working with registries, as opposed to text files?
There are plenty of decent GUIs, many of which I'll use, which deal with textual config files. Still, having those config files has some decided advantages over a registry, especially as fucked-up as the Windows registry is.
Oh, and some Linux desktop environments do have a registry. Guess how much it's helped with the desktop market?
Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
·
· Score: 2
Really?
$ ls ~/.kde/share/config/ | wc -l 200 $ time cat ~/.kde/share/config/* >/dev/null cat:/home/dave/.kde/share/config/colors: Is a directory cat:/home/dave/.kde/share/config/kdm: Is a directory cat:/home/dave/.kde/share/config/kresources: Is a directory cat:/home/dave/.kde/share/config/session: Is a directory
real 0m0.069s user 0m0.020s sys 0m0.000s
I don't know about you, but I can afford to wait 0.069 seconds. Just because some filesystems suck handling small files dosen't mean it's a bad idea. Sure, my KDE login could be faster, but right now it takes less than five seconds.
And if you're saying you can go get coffee, come back, and still be waiting impatiently for those five seconds, I suppose it could be faster, but at least benchmark that it's actually fopen() before making unsubstantiated claims.
Because if the Windows API is implemented indistinguishably from the real thing it won't be a source of bugs.
That's an absurdly big 'if'. Look how long it took Wine to get where it is, and it's still nowhere near complete. Look at how far Mono still has to go.
It also doesn't address the part where Linux has been migrating away from ndiswrapper, which is roughly what you're talking about (except only for networking), and to native drivers.
Either way, if any bugs or performance problems are present the blame lies not with the hardware manufacturer, not with the driver blob, not with Microsoft's driver model but with Linux kernel developers.
Indeed it would -- it would be their fault for listening to you.
And bugs where responsibilities are clear get fixed faster.
The responsibilities are pretty clear in open source, in-kernel drivers, too
Also, can this one benefit really outweigh the absurd amount of work it would take to develop this scheme in the first place, and the additional binary crap from the native Windows drivers? Never mind the interface between those kernel drivers and either a Linux userspace tool, or a Windows one running Wine -- or are you thinking companies would design Linux-only drivers using the Windows driver model?
Introducing a giant new source of bugs, and then claiming a victory because you imagine bugs now get fixed faster, is technological suicide. I really hope you're not in a position to make any sort of decisions which affect the Linux kernel.
Not quite. Unless I spell it BLOB, you need some amount of context to understand I'm talking about a highly-technical definition of blob, as opposed to a generic term for something big, amorphous, and gross, which is also relevant here.
While "Binary blob" may be redundant if I actually spelled out "Binary Large OBject", it does disambiguate.
On Windows you can always install a newer NVIDIA driver if the current is bugged to fix it.
Bullshit.
I've had a laptop where, on Windows, I could only get XP drivers at all by going to the manufacturer's UK site -- they technically weren't available to US residents. A newer one, I not only had to get them from Dell, I had to get them by opening up a chat session with tech support and having them feed me random links from other models for pretty much every single piece of hardware on the system, because the model I had was only supported with Vista and above.
Yes, it Just Works with 7. Guess what? The latest nVidia drivers Just Work with Ubuntu. What's more, I can get them from my distro repositories, which means they come as standard system updates -- on Windows, best-case scenario, Steam informs me that my drivers are out of date, and I then have to download them from the nVidia site. But again, that's only sometimes. Some laptops, nVidia will refuse to provide a driver for, because of some retarded contract they have with the manufacturer whereby I can only get updates via the manufacturer, which may or may not provide up-to-date drivers.
In any case, none of it comes anywhere near the ease of 'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade', or clicking on the little "updates found" icon that pops up every now and then. And guess what? This always works. I may have to choose between "old" and "new" drivers depending on my card, but in general, I can just install the nVidia drivers from the repository, and it won't whine about how I'm only supposed to get them from Dell or Toshiba, it Just Works.
So if you're comparing old OSes to old OSes, XP is a nightmare. If you're comparing new OSes to new OSes, why not just update everything and be good to go?
If your 95% figure is correct then any extra bugginess in Linux NVIDIA drivers is due to the 5% of glue code that's needed to interface with the Linux kernel API.
Likely not so much the kernel API as the system in general. Can I set my resolution from KDE's control panel? If so, there's somewhere that needs to connect to the nVidia driver to make that work, and as far as I can tell, it's got little or nothing to do with the kernel API.
Of course, even if this were true, why on earth would you expect a Windows API layer to be less buggy than nVidia's native Linux glue? All you've changed is that you now have two glue layers -- one between the Linux internals and the Windows API, and one between the Windows API and the cross-platfrom nVidia stuff. That can't be good for either stability or performance.
How many years have Linux kernel developers had to come up with a graphics driver API that's obviously so good that it doesn't need to be messed with on a daily basis?
Citation needed -- a daily basis? Or was that a wee bit of hyperbole? And how do you know the Windows API isn't messed with because it's "so good", rather than because as much as they might want to, MS doesn't want to break everyone's drivers? (Hint: Look at the changes they forced video drivers in particular to make for Vista.)
And why would you ever assume, when you don't have to, that an API is the best it's ever going to be? That there's no possible way you could improve it further?
I say it's finally time to switch to a driver model that has been proven to produce as good as possible drivers in the real world.
You mean bluescreens? Oh, I can't wait.
Notice that pretty much everywhere except video and (occasionally) wifi, the open source Linux drivers are as good as or better than any proprietary counterpart. Remember Broadcom? At first, the only way to get it working was with ndiswrapper, which was buggy, difficult, and confusing. Now, all you need is the firmware, and the open source driver is much better.
nVidia used to ship proprietary Linux drivers for their
Innovative gameplay. Yeah, it's supposed to be fun. If you just wanted a story, there are plenty of JRPGs for you, though you probably could get a better story still (with less work) by watching TV or reading a book.
As for Portal's story, sorry you disagree, but it seems you are very much in the minority.
If by "whizz-bang" you mean "action game", I guess we just have different tastes. But if by "whizz-bang" you mean it relies on pretty graphics and gadgetry, and is entirely devoid of gameplay or story, much like Quake was, I don't think that's true. I enjoyed Quake, but Portal was definitely not "whizz-bang" in that sense.
Linux still refuses to make a stable driver ABI that hardware vendors can count on. Ive heard the arguments before against that they are they dont make sense.
which arguments?
For that matter, what's the argument for a stable driver ABI?
It would allow the user to decide which driver to use,
It's hard to think of a platform on which users truly have that choice. Besides, do you really want to use a driver that isn't tested with your current kernel?
nVidia somehow manages with a relatively small, open source shim. Users have plenty of choice -- if you're the kind of user to want to upgrade your video driver to something your distro doesn't include yet, it shouldn't be too hard to download and compile the nVidia drivers. I don't bother -- my distro ships a kernel and a set of nVidia drivers that are known to work together.
it does not preclude open source drivers,
No one ever suggested it would.
in fact, it would increase deployment of Linux since there would be more users as the Linux hardware support improved.
Can you give examples of hardware vendors who would support Linux if there were a stable ABI? As it is, video is about the only place I've had issues for years -- there are tons of other things which I can just plug into a Linux box and have all the drivers right there.
You also assume that the kernel developers care about increased deployment of Linux. They generally don't care about increased desktop deployment of Linux.
Putting up with a system that has binary drivers that are 4% of the OS,
I don't have a problem with proprietary stuff being 4% of the OS. I have a problem with it being 4% of the kernel, or 4% of the system libraries, such that when my OS crashes, or when a random program crashes, I have no way of knowing where the bug was, since it could always have come from the binary blob.
A lot of what makes Linux so stable, and what makes it different and special in the first place, is the amount of proprietary code it doesn't have in critical system stuff like that. If it provided a stable binary ABI, and if suddenly half my drivers were binary, it would completely erode one of the core advantages Linux (and OS X) have over Windows in terms of stability and reliability.
Many drivers manufacturers have include proprietary code licenced from other sources.
So what? That's their problem.
The Linux developers think they are more important than they really are if hardware vendors will completely rewrite code, or open source code they have had no intention of open sourcing, just to satisfy a group of people that is about 1% of desktop users.
Server hardware developers tend to ensure the Linux kernel has good, solid, open source support for their hardware if they want it to succeed.
And I don't think any Linux developers assume that this will happen. Rather, they phrase it as a simple if-then proposition: If you want to have good Linux drivers, then you're going to have to have open source Linux drivers. How you get there is up to you. If you don't want to have good Linux drivers, or you aren't willing to release source, why should the kernel devs care about you?
The stable ABI would also not require any big change the kernel,
It would require a big change in kernel development, and it would involve maintenance headaches -- for it to be useful, it would have to be maintained. That means whenever the developers want to do something cool, they need to make sure they don't break the existing ABI. It means when they need to do something that would break the existing ABI, they either need to break all drivers, or maintain two ABIs, which is considerably more work, especially when a
And we all know when the games are going to come to Linux, right?
The game in your sig would help. OpenGL, OpenAL, Java, and lwjgl. All four of those are available on Linux, and since it's Java, you wouldn't even have to recompile half that code. But no, Windows and OS X only.
1) Getting tired of the Linux situation. Much of the problems with the bullshit in X and the underlying layers nVidia just avoids by bypassing it all with their drivers.
All very well and good, and nVidia is big enough that if they wanted to promote a new standard, they could. But...
They do things their own way and it works.
For some value of "works" -- and it's also proprietary and in their drivers, not really accessible elsewhere.
I've noticed a similar issue on Windows -- essentially, there's native OS ways I can set up multi-monitors, and they sort of work (better than Linux), but it's still an entirely different and incompatible system. I hear the X.org people telling me that, for instance, I should be able to plug in an HDMI cable and have it Just Work. In reality, the only setup I've been able to get working reliably requires me to restart my X server in order for that to work.
And this wasn't even something particularly controversial. Everyone pretty much agreed that Xinerama was the way to do multi-monitors.
More important than that, though:
They weren't interesting in fucking around with all the politics and BS and waiting around for a reasonable standard to get developed, and just made something that works.
...yet they didn't do anything that would allow the rest of the community to reasonably adopt their "something that works" as a standard. That's the biggest problem -- as soon as the open source stuff all works, it's going to be that entire stack or nVidia, and there's no way nVidia wins that.
The sad thing is, they could've resolved all the "politics and BS" pretty early on by picking the better of the relevant standards and saying "We're doing it this way." That would've helped resolve the BS, and it also would've ensured nVidia's choice would be the choice going forward. Instead, they've created a situation where their solution cannot be a valid choice going forward.
Contrast this to how they handled, say, hardware-accelerated video. I don't know the details, but it looks like their "vdpau" technology could work well. So long as they haven't patented the interface, it could be a valid choice for other hardware-accelerated decoders.
2) Their drivers use code they've licensed that they can't distribute. Various things are patented or licensed in some way and they can't just hand it out.
Now we get to the real reason.
So to do an OSS version would mean to rewrite the drives without it, and generally using programmers that had never worked with it to avoid issues of contamination.
More than that, because they played the patent game, it would likely mean they'd need to either ensure there were no patents, or provide a patent license people were willing to accept.
That is difficult and expensive. Before you claims that can't be the case note that AMD hasn't just opened up their binary drivers. The reason is the same.
The difference is, "difficult and expensive" isn't stopping AMD from trying.
Basically nVidia did what was best for their business,
Probably.
and best for their customers that want to get work done.
Not at all.
Had they kept to mostly open technologies in the beginning, this would've been far less painful. Had they worked to improve the X stack instead of completely routing around it, the situation would've been better overall.
right now I have trouble faulting them. Their shit works where the other's don't. That is really all that matters.
If I bought that "argument", I'd use a Mac.
It's not whether their shit "works", for some value of "works". It's whether it does what I want. Why can't I plug an external monitor into my laptop, tap a key, and have it available immediately w
Slashdot Mirror
You've apparently seen enough of my posting history that this surprises you, so give me the benefit of the doubt. At least tell me why you think I'm stupid. Where is the flaw in my reasoning here?
However, the monopoly of IE6 is broken. It is no longer considered acceptable for a website to slap a "best viewed with" disclaimer on a site which effectively only works with IE6. In general, it's not even acceptable anymore to have a website which is "best viewed with IE" and doesn't work in Firefox.
That's the important point. It means that the public Internet is no longer tying you down to IE6. It also means that in general, the lowest common denominator is no longer IE6, so it's also considered acceptable to develop a site which requires newer browsers and newer standards, which means standards can actually move forward.
And Firefox did that. So did the users who refused to "just use IE" and complained loudly until people switched -- those people who refused to give up brought Firefox to critical mass. Several critical masses, really, sort of a snowball effect -- as more sites tolerate Firefox, it becomes easier for people to switch.
For what it's worth, I don't really like hamburgers, and most of my family are essentially all-American mutts -- sure, my ancestors immigrated, but from too many places for me to bother trying to count. I'm not convinced Phelps thinks a democratic republic is a good idea, or that he likes it here, though I may be entirely wrong about that.
However, being American, eating hamburgers and apple pie, being the descendant of immigrants, and even liking the idea of a democratic republic are all incidental.
To put it simply, Phelps doesn't claim apple pie hates fags. He claims God hates fags.
I'm beginning to think this is a bad argument, and that you're absolutely right that you personally don't condone him, and that I shouldn't assume that you or anyone else does.
However, there is a sense in which the fact that we have such mainstream tolerance of religion and religious ideas, and the fact that they're seen as off-limits to criticism, leads to exactly the sort of environment in which we can even ask whether or not parents are allowed to deny their children life-saving medical care because they'd rather pray.
If you want to be able to criticize others for their beliefs, you have to open your own to criticism.
So, I withdraw my comment about lending credibility, and I realize I'm actually changing the subject a bit, because what I really (now) want to say is this (watch till about 11:10). I suspect that's much more a point about culture than religion.
Most mainstream Protestant denominations, as well as the Catholic church, fully accept scientific findings like evolution and the 15 billion year age of the universe. I think promoters of "Intelligent Design" and the like are completely wrong.
That's good, though about 40% of the US disagrees with you.
And the Catholic church has its own problems. If I recall, the Pope himself has said that condoms do more harm than good when it comes to preventing AIDS, which is also factually wrong.
"Faith" doesn't really mean what you think it means.
Apparently, it also doesn't mean what almost anyone I talk to thinks it means. Be careful, or you might make it have as little meaning as you claim Christianity does. Nevertheless:
Faith doesn't mean "believing things without evidence".
Let's try to keep this in mind. More specifically, I claim Faith, in the religious sense, means "believing things without sufficient evidence." There are enough eyewitness accounts of alien abductions to count as evidence, but I imagine you don't find that to be sufficient to believe aliens have visited us.
It means recognizing the limitations of one's knowledge (and mankind's knowledge)...
Ok. I recognize my limitations.
What's more, I recognize that there are things humans may never know. That's fine. I'm alright not knowing. It's good to acknowledge what I don't know. I see no need to fill the gaps with a god, no reason to accept anything on faith when I could simply not know.
...and trusting that our lives ultimately have a purpose.
If you mean "purpose" in the universal sense, this is exactly the moment where you are believing something without sufficient evidence. What evidence do you have that our lives ultimately have a purpose?
And if your evidence is sufficient, why do you need faith?
All you've done is restate "Faith" as a more specific sort of thing to believe without evidence. You haven't presented another meaning. This is painful to read, and I apologize for splitting you up by the sentence fragment -- I don't normally do that -- but you keep sounding like you're going to say something good, I agree with everything you say, almost... and then you lose it. For example:
I don't claim to know what will happen to me after my death,
Neither do I. We have some pretty good ideas, but I'm not sure there's enough evidence to say that I know that what I call "me" is entirely physical.
but I accept that I should live my life by the principles taught by Jesus (tolerance, forgiveness, humility, etc)
While Jesus taught a few things I absolutely don't agree with, those three I can accept. Thomas Jefferson would also agree with you, but he was a Deist who found the stories of Jesus' life so unbelievable that he created his own bible which was essentially the story of Jesus and his teachings, with all the miracles taken out.
So far, we're in complete agreement, and indeed, you can find good reasons for these, or you can at least reduce them to matters of opinion. For example, should you live your life according to the teachings of Jesus? How you want to live your life is largely a matter of opinion.
And then...
...and that in the end, God will take care of me.
...now we're back to believing something without sufficient evidence.
Very good points. Just a few clarifications:
one can still buy a commercial operating system and support open source / free software to push the "cause" forward.... Saying that you either support the status quo or are moving forward is disingenuous at best.
I think I may have reacted too harshly here. After all, I own a copy of Windows myself. But if I can find a way to do it outside of Windows, I will. The person I was replying to had not only given up on using Linux, but had done so in order to deal with having to work with MS Office documents -- this is something for which clear open alternatives exist, and for which I don't think it's too much to ask to suggest that an office use open standards instead.
But I didn't mean this as a "with us or against us." I was drawing a clear line here between either using MS Office -- thus creating, manipulating, and consuming content that will work best on MS Office, thus making it harder for the next person to try Linux -- or pushing things forward, which is really the only other alternative if you have to collaborate on documents. The only way to really have a third position is to do what I do, and avoid sharing editable documents in the first place.
just because a person is religious does not mean he or she has turned off critical thinking skills. Start using your own critical thinking skills for you are defining the whole by a very small albeit extreme part.
Using both my critical thinking skills and my observations, I conclude that the vast majority of religious people turn off their critical thinking skills where religion is concerned. One I was talking to today -- a happy, friendly, relatively new Mormon, who didn't seem to be particularly brainwashed or "extreme", someone who shared quite a bit in common with me, in fact -- flat-out admitted that she didn't know how to explain logically why she believes what she does.
Even in politics, people can answer that question, though how well they answer it might vary. Certainly in other areas of our lives, it often becomes a habit. For example, which should I get for a new laptop, solid state or spinning disk? Should I eat cake for lunch, a stir-fry, or a salad? What's the best place to park my car? Should I own a car? Can I afford one? We may have vastly different answers to these questions, and certainly, there's more information needed -- for instance, the fact that I want to lose weight should rule out the cake -- but we generally either analyze these with reasoning skills, or decide we don't care enough (one cake won't kill me.)
And the bigger a decision it is, the more likely we are to use careful reasoning. Which university should I attend? Which job should I take?
Only very occasionally do we turn this off. Do I want to spend the rest of my life with this person? Far too few couples actually apply enough critical thought to ask the right questions, like "Do you want children?"
And of course, religion. If there really is a god who may send you to heaven or hell based on what you believe, and you think there's any chance this god is real, you'd think that would be the most important decision you've ever made! It'd certainly be the most important bit of knowledge you could ever possibly have, so you'd think people would want to be sure they're right.
Instead -- and again, these generalities come from personal experience talking to so many of these people -- they haven't asked the simplest questions, and they don't like being challenged on this issue. Actually, it's worse than that -- they see "faith" (roughly translates to "believing something without good reason") as a virtue.
I don't think that religious people are incapable of critical thought. Instead, I think the better educated ones, the ones who should know better, are just good at compartmentalizing. These are the things you're allowed to question, examine, poke at, chew on, tease apart with logic and see if they make
Fundamental atheists...
Contradiction in terms. The only unifying property of atheists is the lack of belief in gods.
...claim religion is the universal problem...
Not even Hitchens claims that.
It's a religion...
While religion is incredibly poorly defined, I don't see how you can have a religion without any dogma or core belief.
The logical flaw is that religion isn't the cause of all human suffering.
So, your logical flaw right here is a strawman. Who claims religion is the cause of all human suffering? If I ever made such a claim, I'll gladly retract it, but please, show me where!
What's more, I know plenty of atheists, and I can't think of a single one which would make that claim you just suggested. Again, not even Hitchens, let alone Dawkins, Dennett, or Harris. None of the atheists I know personally would make that claim. Some of them agree that religion is a cause of suffering in the world, even that it's an exceptional cause -- and not all even agree on this -- but none would say it is the sole cause.
For what it's worth, I've also noticed that outspoken atheists tend to be assumed "fundamentalist", "extremist", or "militant", simply for expressing their lack of belief. Not for "evangelizing", not for picking fights -- many are offended simply that atheists exist.
Notice how few militant atheists attack Buddhism, Taoism, and even Judaism.
There's that word again. I don't think it means what you think it means.
For one, Buddhism and Taoism can both be atheistic -- neither require a belief in any gods. As for Judaism, note that many of the arguments against Christianity are also valid against Judaism and Islam. The Problem of Evil, for instance, is equally problematic for all Abrahamic religions unless they want to define God in a very, very strange way -- and it seems likely that any answer to that problem would apply equally to all Abrahamic religions as well.
Also, note that the major outspoken atheists are generally British or American, and in both countries, Christianity is the dominant religion. For my part, I live in America, where we not only have a majority of Christians, we also have a pretty sizable percentage of Creationists -- roughly 40% of Americans reject Evolution.
Islamic extremists from countries that aren't very advanced,
Islamic extremists also tend to blow people up, and they do so for explicitly religious reasons. So hell yes, if I can present a compelling argument that convinces a few of them to stop believing or at least not to blow themselves up, that's a Good Thing.
a Hindu caste system that doesn't even really exist anymore.
I don't tend to argue against that except in the company of followers of Transcendental Meditation -- the TM movement seems like it would very much like to bring the caste system back.
What I find especially humorous is that the parent used South Park in some of his citations. I guess he missed the Dawkins episode.
I have, in fact, seen every South Park episode. I found that one hilarious -- also another in which the majority of South Park become atheists at the same time as they find a way to eat by shoving food up their asses, and shit out their mouths -- the punchline being something like, "But when you become an atheist, a bunch of shit starts coming out of your mouth." Remember that?
Yes, I do have a sense of humor, and I am able to laugh at myself, unlike Isaac Hayes. Is that so surprising?
I also understand the difference between humor -- even pointed political humor directed against me -- and an actual argument. For example, "Praise Science!" If someone actually attempted to use that as an argument that atheism is a religion, yes, I'd laugh -- I'd laugh them out of the room!
I don't see how you can have such a thing as an atheist fundie, given that the only unifying property of atheists is the lack of belief in gods. What "fundamentals" would I be trying to get back to?
Here's the thing - we're all gonna die in the end, so all these fights against proprietary formats won't mean jack.
In that case, so is replying. Yet you seem to care enough about justifying your position (perhaps to yourself) to reply, so don't give me this nihilistic bullshit.
In life we pick the battles we can fight. These are potentially important issues, but basically given you're effectively saying about 90% of people are part of the "problem", I don't give a fuck anymore.
When 90% of the people are part of the problem is when I absolutely do care.
Take another battle I've picked: Religion. There's a small minority which does some really crazy shit. And they get away with it in the name of "religious tolerange", because a majority of the world believes enough crazy shit of their own that it takes a lot to make us as a culture say, no, you can't let your child die because you'd rather fucking pray than get help.
Easily 80-90% of the US population is religious, which makes it a safe bet that you are, too -- probably also Christian, probably believe faith is a virtue. If so, merely by supporting the idea that faith is a virtue, you are encouraging yourself and those around you to turn off their critical thinking and skepticism when the situation calls for it. That kind of thinking leads to atrocities. Never mind that merely by calling yourself "Christian", you lend credibility to these fuckwits.
Am I going to win? Not really. I do hope to reinforce separation of church and state, to promote actual science education instead of "Intelligent Design", and to establish some basic rights the religious would deny, like the right to marry. I'd love to see people tolerate less of the extremists. I really doubt I'm going to see the religious become a minority in my lifetime.
But you know what? I'd like to think that when I'm lying on my deathbed, I lived for things that matter. I'd like to think that I'd still be the kind of person who would be ashamed to think I gave up because it was too hard, or because there were too many people who disagreed with me.
Life shouldn't have to be some damn crusade.
You're right, it shouldn't. But this is the world we live in, and there are some issues which tend towards exactly that -- either you're a good little worker propping up the status quo, or you're actually helping to move things forward.
And life should be meaningful -- and it's up to you to find that meaning. Maybe you honestly don't care, but that's not what I'm hearing. What I'm hearing is that you do care, you're just too lazy to do anything about it anymore.
Yet somehow, you're not too lazy to post, and to try to justify how much you don't care. That says a lot.
The nice thing about .zip is that it is, in fact, supported everywhere, out of the box.
It's also nice in that it actually supports directory trees. The legacy lzma, and the newer xz, well, don't. I like tar in principle, and I use these formats for all sorts of things that I don't have to share with others, but there are definitely cases where zip is nice -- where it's nice to be able to effectively "mount" a zipfile, "seek" to an appropriate file within it, and read it, without having to decompress the whole thing. This is why zip is used by tons of games, where they might not even be using compression, but they can't trust most filesystems to handle that many small files properly. It's why it's used by both OpenDocument and MS OOXML -- it's the easiest way imaginable to embed multiple files into a single document, including multiple XML files that are compressed well.
It also depends what your goals are. Zip compresses and decompresses a hell of a lot faster than lzma. These days, I standardize on either lzop for speed or xz for compression ratio, but zip and gzip are nice compromises.
This is why I can never bring myself to move to Linux and cut ties with Windows entirely. It's just too much hassle when you end up having to interact with content produced using Windows-only software and you cannot guarantee perfect parsing of the file formats used.
This is indeed why I keep a Windows partition around, occasionally remote into a Windows terminal server or boot a VM.
But I'm not quiet about it. If they can write docx, that implies they've got a decently new version of Word. Decently new versions of Word natively support odt.
Fortunately, I find I have to do this less and less, both as I have fewer documents I have to read from people period, and as people get the hint and start producing PDFs that everyone can read.
It's time to give up the fight against Microsoft and succumb.
Remember IE6? Remember how fucking long we were stuck with IE6?
Because a few people kept fighting, we have Firefox. Call them crazy, call them zealots, but it worked. In the end, they dragged Microsoft kicking and screaming into this century.
That has to continue. Microsoft has repeatedly shown that they only really do their best work when they actually have competition. Let them completely dominate an area, and you end up with crap like Vista, and the long, long gap between IE6 and IE7.
I'm sorry you've given up. It also means you've become part of the problem -- you're yet another person who might one day decide to email me a docx instead of a pdf, an odf, or even html.
Just for starters, Pascal never intended his wager to be a formal proof of anything.
What did he intend it as, then? I find it interesting
It's not just that it's not a good argument, it's that there really isn't anyone it applies to other than someone who already believes in a particular god.
For enders, it doesn't matter, it's just a conversation starter.
About once a week, I get asked, "What if you're wrong?" This is almost as vacuous as Pascal's own formulation. To someone who doesn't currently hold a belief in a particular god, and knows that there are many gods to choose from, "What if you're wrong?" can just as easily be turned on its head -- what if you're wrong?
The only person who would consider this convincing or even interesting would be someone who already accepts that it's more likely for one god to exist than another, but doesn't accept that this one god exists. I don't know anyone like that. The people who aren't convinced aren't convinced, and the people who believe already don't need Pascal's Wager at all, except as an argument against those who aren't yet convinced.
There's just not anywhere else to go with it. That's pretty much the end of the conversation. So if it's meant as a conversation starter, it's a poor one -- but it is much more often used as either a legitimate question (which I am happy to answer), or an argument.
As for not having faith, then you must be agnostic on the question of whether there is a creator. Fine, that's also a choice.
I am an atheist, which is the simple negation of 'theist' -- I lack belief in any gods, particularly any creator-gods. I am also agnostic, which is to say that I don't know. The terms aren't contradictory.
(It implies various forms of faith, but I won't go there.)
Oh no you don't. If you're going to make a claim, back it up. Otherwise, why say it at all?
What, exactly, am I supposed to have faith in? In particular, are you claiming that there's a certain amount of faith associated with the atheist/agnostic position that isn't also associated with the theist position?
I notice you completely ignore the systems discussion, which was really the thrust of the whole piece...
I saw "formally impossible to determine," and lost interest. But now that you mention it...
The controller of a system must, by definition, have a greater complexity than the system.
I don't see how. Consider a plane on autopilot. It may well be that modern autopilot systems are more complex than the plane itself in order to be effective, but do you see that this isn't necessarily the case? An autopilot which simply held all controls constant would be a bad autopilot, but it would effectively be controlling the system of the plane.
no matter how you define 'creator' in order to argue for or against its existence, there is at least one factor that such a creator must possess that, since it is not in the system, can not be not included in the model.
It seems you're arguing that a creator can't be part of a system if we assume the creator is the cause of the entire system. If you define things that way, that's true, but I also don't see this preventing a sufficient model from being developed within the system to explain a creator's existence or nonexistence.
For instance, I cannot model my parents entirely in my head. While I can probably predict what they're likely to say with some degree of accuracy, it's not practical for me to know everything there possibly is to know about another person. However, to the extent that I can know anything about the physical world, I can know my parents exist. If one or both were dead, I could also know they no longer exist. I don't need to know everything there is to know about them in order to know these things about them.
I hope you're not referring to Gnome though. A quick look at your posting history doesn't show you as stupid.
A quick Google for "gnome registry" shows that it's not exactly a new idea.
And to clarify for the audience: GConf is not the same as the Windows Registry.
I never claimed it was "the same." However, the differences are largely superficial. For instance:
GConf is a method to manage configuration files,
The Windows Registry manages configuration keys. I'm not seeing a significant difference.
and the Gnome configuration is stored in human-readable text.
It's stored as XML, so that's debatable.
The fact that Windows itself stores it in a binary database is an implementation detail -- Wine stores its registry as .reg files, which appear to be the same format that you get when dumping a key from the Windows Registry Editor. That format is at least as human-readable to me as XML, if not more so.
Fundamentally, however, gconf and the Windows Registry serve the same purpose, certainly considering the context of who I replied to -- anyone complaining that Linux lacks a registry could look at gconf.
In fact, the biggest difference seems to be that the Windows registry is abused far more than I imagine GConf is.
I don't hesitate to charge into this argument, banner held high...
So you pays yer money and takes yer choice: Pascal's Wager.
If you think the Anthropic Principle is weak, think about the words "Pascal's Wager" and "False Dichotomy." Give yourself about five seconds to find the flaw.
You can have faith in a creator, or faith that there is not a creator.
Wow, two for two!
I can have faith that there is a creator, or faith that there is not a creator, or I can simply not have faith.
Pascal's wager has a similar problem: Either there is the Abrahamic god, or there isn't... or there's the Hindu gods, or the Greek gods, or any number of interpretations people have of the Abrahamic gods (Allah, anyone?), or the gods we know are made up but can't disprove (Flying Spaghetti Monster), et cetera, et cetera.
It falls apart with this one question: How do you know that any god that exists rewards faith and punishes skepticism? If you can't show me why your god is the right one, then I assert it is equally likely that a god exists which punishes faith and rewards skepticism, and a metaphysics in which only atheists get to heaven. If you can't rule that out, Pascal's Wager is worthless, because for every possible god you define, I can define its opposite, and they would both be equally likely to exist and equally provable.
I was replying to someone who was suggesting that shouldn't be allowed. The idea was that all work should be done on company machines, and personal machines (like personal laptops) shouldn't be allowed.
My point is that if you allow people to take corporate laptops to Starbucks, you've already lost. If you allow them to plug personal laptops in, you've already lost. By "lost" I mean it's time to give up on the idea that the corporate firewall is going to protect you, and start making sure your network is as secure inside as it is outside -- there's no reason a single infected personal laptop should be an issue for anything else on your network.
The open source drivers supposedly developed in tandem with the kernel ARE crap and do often crash.
Citation needed. I've had far fewer issues with them than I have with vendor drivers on Windows, and I provided a few anecdotes. I realize anecdote isn't the singular of data, but simply dismissing it and saying "nuh uh" isn't an argument.
kernel developers cannot possibly test them with all hardware, only a hardware vendor can really do that.
Sorry... how do you make this leap?
It seems to me that kernel developers have historically had better luck with this. Aside from having a diverse enough background themselves, aside from the fact that I can actually fix a problem caused by an open source driver when it affects me, there's the fact that the kernel developers are willing to work with more hardware than the manufacturers are.
Take pretty much any USB device -- would you expect the manufacturer to give you a driver for PS3 Linux? So far as I know, there isn't even a PPC version of Flash on Linux.
Does Linux want to be something for elite geeks or for common users too?
Linux is a thing, it doesn't have wants. If you're asking what the developers want, you have to understand that their main motivation is to make something for them to use.
Then again, something like 70% of the kernel developers are doing this for pay. In that case, their "wants" are aligned with the wants of whichever company they're working for.
A few of those want Linux to be something for "common users". A few of them want it to be something for servers and clusters. A few want it to be something for hobbyists and tinkerers. These aren't mutually exclusive, but to say Linux has "failed" because it doesn't serve your needs is missing the point. It servers mine quite well.
Your attitude is the problem with Linux and why it remains the domain mainly of some elite geeks and unuseable for real people.
The fact that plenty of "real people" use it aside, what about my attitude is problematic here? That I asked for an actual reasoned argument, perhaps based on a bit of evidence?
To make something that is clearly not preferable to Windows...
Not preferable by whom?
I absolutely prefer Linux to Windows, and I find that more often than not, attempts to make Linux more like Windows end up reducing the actual advantages Linux has. If it was exactly like Windows, why not just use Windows?
That's not to say that Windows has no good ideas, but quite often, I hear people suggest things like "improvements" to the package management system to make it behave just like Windows, or just like OS X. In particular, I often hear people complaining that they found some cool new software, and why can't they just click, download an exe, click it, run through the installer clicking next-next-next, and install it, instead of being forced into the oh-so-terribly-difficult task of learning to point and click in a package manager instead?
To be fair, you haven't made that argument, but for the record, a solid package manager is one of the biggest advantages of Linux over other OSes. In fact, some of the biggest reasons people like "App Stores" are features that have been in Linux package managers forever.
Must be why programmers all use "fill-in-the-blank"-style registries. Oh wait...
Before deciding it's only to make people feel "special", you might ask what the advantages actually are. For one, suppose we're configuring a server. Can your registry fit in version control? How easily can you add comments so people know why the hell you configured it the way you did? How many steps is it to clone a config from one machine to another, or back it up? How many tools do you have for working with registries, as opposed to text files?
There are plenty of decent GUIs, many of which I'll use, which deal with textual config files. Still, having those config files has some decided advantages over a registry, especially as fucked-up as the Windows registry is.
Oh, and some Linux desktop environments do have a registry. Guess how much it's helped with the desktop market?
Really?
I don't know about you, but I can afford to wait 0.069 seconds. Just because some filesystems suck handling small files dosen't mean it's a bad idea. Sure, my KDE login could be faster, but right now it takes less than five seconds.
And if you're saying you can go get coffee, come back, and still be waiting impatiently for those five seconds, I suppose it could be faster, but at least benchmark that it's actually fopen() before making unsubstantiated claims.
This is what he said:
just implement the Windows driver model in Linux, so that Windows graphics drivers simply work in Linux as is.
That seems pretty unambiguous. He wants to be able to download a Windows driver and have it work on Linux.
In any case, I think I presented a decent case for why it doesn't matter so much even now.
Because if the Windows API is implemented indistinguishably from the real thing it won't be a source of bugs.
That's an absurdly big 'if'. Look how long it took Wine to get where it is, and it's still nowhere near complete. Look at how far Mono still has to go.
It also doesn't address the part where Linux has been migrating away from ndiswrapper, which is roughly what you're talking about (except only for networking), and to native drivers.
Either way, if any bugs or performance problems are present the blame lies not with the hardware manufacturer, not with the driver blob, not with Microsoft's driver model but with Linux kernel developers.
Indeed it would -- it would be their fault for listening to you.
And bugs where responsibilities are clear get fixed faster.
The responsibilities are pretty clear in open source, in-kernel drivers, too
Also, can this one benefit really outweigh the absurd amount of work it would take to develop this scheme in the first place, and the additional binary crap from the native Windows drivers? Never mind the interface between those kernel drivers and either a Linux userspace tool, or a Windows one running Wine -- or are you thinking companies would design Linux-only drivers using the Windows driver model?
Introducing a giant new source of bugs, and then claiming a victory because you imagine bugs now get fixed faster, is technological suicide. I really hope you're not in a position to make any sort of decisions which affect the Linux kernel.
Not quite. Unless I spell it BLOB, you need some amount of context to understand I'm talking about a highly-technical definition of blob, as opposed to a generic term for something big, amorphous, and gross, which is also relevant here.
While "Binary blob" may be redundant if I actually spelled out "Binary Large OBject", it does disambiguate.
Thanks anyway.
On Windows you can always install a newer NVIDIA driver if the current is bugged to fix it.
Bullshit.
I've had a laptop where, on Windows, I could only get XP drivers at all by going to the manufacturer's UK site -- they technically weren't available to US residents. A newer one, I not only had to get them from Dell, I had to get them by opening up a chat session with tech support and having them feed me random links from other models for pretty much every single piece of hardware on the system, because the model I had was only supported with Vista and above.
Yes, it Just Works with 7. Guess what? The latest nVidia drivers Just Work with Ubuntu. What's more, I can get them from my distro repositories, which means they come as standard system updates -- on Windows, best-case scenario, Steam informs me that my drivers are out of date, and I then have to download them from the nVidia site. But again, that's only sometimes. Some laptops, nVidia will refuse to provide a driver for, because of some retarded contract they have with the manufacturer whereby I can only get updates via the manufacturer, which may or may not provide up-to-date drivers.
In any case, none of it comes anywhere near the ease of 'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade', or clicking on the little "updates found" icon that pops up every now and then. And guess what? This always works. I may have to choose between "old" and "new" drivers depending on my card, but in general, I can just install the nVidia drivers from the repository, and it won't whine about how I'm only supposed to get them from Dell or Toshiba, it Just Works.
So if you're comparing old OSes to old OSes, XP is a nightmare. If you're comparing new OSes to new OSes, why not just update everything and be good to go?
If your 95% figure is correct then any extra bugginess in Linux NVIDIA drivers is due to the 5% of glue code that's needed to interface with the Linux kernel API.
Likely not so much the kernel API as the system in general. Can I set my resolution from KDE's control panel? If so, there's somewhere that needs to connect to the nVidia driver to make that work, and as far as I can tell, it's got little or nothing to do with the kernel API.
Of course, even if this were true, why on earth would you expect a Windows API layer to be less buggy than nVidia's native Linux glue? All you've changed is that you now have two glue layers -- one between the Linux internals and the Windows API, and one between the Windows API and the cross-platfrom nVidia stuff. That can't be good for either stability or performance.
How many years have Linux kernel developers had to come up with a graphics driver API that's obviously so good that it doesn't need to be messed with on a daily basis?
Citation needed -- a daily basis? Or was that a wee bit of hyperbole? And how do you know the Windows API isn't messed with because it's "so good", rather than because as much as they might want to, MS doesn't want to break everyone's drivers? (Hint: Look at the changes they forced video drivers in particular to make for Vista.)
And why would you ever assume, when you don't have to, that an API is the best it's ever going to be? That there's no possible way you could improve it further?
I say it's finally time to switch to a driver model that has been proven to produce as good as possible drivers in the real world.
You mean bluescreens? Oh, I can't wait.
Notice that pretty much everywhere except video and (occasionally) wifi, the open source Linux drivers are as good as or better than any proprietary counterpart. Remember Broadcom? At first, the only way to get it working was with ndiswrapper, which was buggy, difficult, and confusing. Now, all you need is the firmware, and the open source driver is much better.
nVidia used to ship proprietary Linux drivers for their
Let's see...
Innovative gameplay. Yeah, it's supposed to be fun. If you just wanted a story, there are plenty of JRPGs for you, though you probably could get a better story still (with less work) by watching TV or reading a book.
As for Portal's story, sorry you disagree, but it seems you are very much in the minority.
If by "whizz-bang" you mean "action game", I guess we just have different tastes. But if by "whizz-bang" you mean it relies on pretty graphics and gadgetry, and is entirely devoid of gameplay or story, much like Quake was, I don't think that's true. I enjoyed Quake, but Portal was definitely not "whizz-bang" in that sense.
Well, that's interesting...
Linux still refuses to make a stable driver ABI that hardware vendors can count on. Ive heard the arguments before against that they are they dont make sense.
which arguments?
For that matter, what's the argument for a stable driver ABI?
It would allow the user to decide which driver to use,
It's hard to think of a platform on which users truly have that choice. Besides, do you really want to use a driver that isn't tested with your current kernel?
nVidia somehow manages with a relatively small, open source shim. Users have plenty of choice -- if you're the kind of user to want to upgrade your video driver to something your distro doesn't include yet, it shouldn't be too hard to download and compile the nVidia drivers. I don't bother -- my distro ships a kernel and a set of nVidia drivers that are known to work together.
it does not preclude open source drivers,
No one ever suggested it would.
in fact, it would increase deployment of Linux since there would be more users as the Linux hardware support improved.
Can you give examples of hardware vendors who would support Linux if there were a stable ABI? As it is, video is about the only place I've had issues for years -- there are tons of other things which I can just plug into a Linux box and have all the drivers right there.
You also assume that the kernel developers care about increased deployment of Linux. They generally don't care about increased desktop deployment of Linux.
Putting up with a system that has binary drivers that are 4% of the OS,
I don't have a problem with proprietary stuff being 4% of the OS. I have a problem with it being 4% of the kernel, or 4% of the system libraries, such that when my OS crashes, or when a random program crashes, I have no way of knowing where the bug was, since it could always have come from the binary blob.
A lot of what makes Linux so stable, and what makes it different and special in the first place, is the amount of proprietary code it doesn't have in critical system stuff like that. If it provided a stable binary ABI, and if suddenly half my drivers were binary, it would completely erode one of the core advantages Linux (and OS X) have over Windows in terms of stability and reliability.
Many drivers manufacturers have include proprietary code licenced from other sources.
So what? That's their problem.
The Linux developers think they are more important than they really are if hardware vendors will completely rewrite code, or open source code they have had no intention of open sourcing, just to satisfy a group of people that is about 1% of desktop users.
Server hardware developers tend to ensure the Linux kernel has good, solid, open source support for their hardware if they want it to succeed.
And I don't think any Linux developers assume that this will happen. Rather, they phrase it as a simple if-then proposition: If you want to have good Linux drivers, then you're going to have to have open source Linux drivers. How you get there is up to you. If you don't want to have good Linux drivers, or you aren't willing to release source, why should the kernel devs care about you?
The stable ABI would also not require any big change the kernel,
It would require a big change in kernel development, and it would involve maintenance headaches -- for it to be useful, it would have to be maintained. That means whenever the developers want to do something cool, they need to make sure they don't break the existing ABI. It means when they need to do something that would break the existing ABI, they either need to break all drivers, or maintain two ABIs, which is considerably more work, especially when a
And we all know when the games are going to come to Linux, right?
The game in your sig would help. OpenGL, OpenAL, Java, and lwjgl. All four of those are available on Linux, and since it's Java, you wouldn't even have to recompile half that code. But no, Windows and OS X only.
1) Getting tired of the Linux situation. Much of the problems with the bullshit in X and the underlying layers nVidia just avoids by bypassing it all with their drivers.
All very well and good, and nVidia is big enough that if they wanted to promote a new standard, they could. But...
They do things their own way and it works.
For some value of "works" -- and it's also proprietary and in their drivers, not really accessible elsewhere.
I've noticed a similar issue on Windows -- essentially, there's native OS ways I can set up multi-monitors, and they sort of work (better than Linux), but it's still an entirely different and incompatible system. I hear the X.org people telling me that, for instance, I should be able to plug in an HDMI cable and have it Just Work. In reality, the only setup I've been able to get working reliably requires me to restart my X server in order for that to work.
And this wasn't even something particularly controversial. Everyone pretty much agreed that Xinerama was the way to do multi-monitors.
More important than that, though:
They weren't interesting in fucking around with all the politics and BS and waiting around for a reasonable standard to get developed, and just made something that works.
...yet they didn't do anything that would allow the rest of the community to reasonably adopt their "something that works" as a standard. That's the biggest problem -- as soon as the open source stuff all works, it's going to be that entire stack or nVidia, and there's no way nVidia wins that.
The sad thing is, they could've resolved all the "politics and BS" pretty early on by picking the better of the relevant standards and saying "We're doing it this way." That would've helped resolve the BS, and it also would've ensured nVidia's choice would be the choice going forward. Instead, they've created a situation where their solution cannot be a valid choice going forward.
Contrast this to how they handled, say, hardware-accelerated video. I don't know the details, but it looks like their "vdpau" technology could work well. So long as they haven't patented the interface, it could be a valid choice for other hardware-accelerated decoders.
2) Their drivers use code they've licensed that they can't distribute. Various things are patented or licensed in some way and they can't just hand it out.
Now we get to the real reason.
So to do an OSS version would mean to rewrite the drives without it, and generally using programmers that had never worked with it to avoid issues of contamination.
More than that, because they played the patent game, it would likely mean they'd need to either ensure there were no patents, or provide a patent license people were willing to accept.
That is difficult and expensive. Before you claims that can't be the case note that AMD hasn't just opened up their binary drivers. The reason is the same.
The difference is, "difficult and expensive" isn't stopping AMD from trying.
Basically nVidia did what was best for their business,
Probably.
and best for their customers that want to get work done.
Not at all.
Had they kept to mostly open technologies in the beginning, this would've been far less painful. Had they worked to improve the X stack instead of completely routing around it, the situation would've been better overall.
right now I have trouble faulting them. Their shit works where the other's don't. That is really all that matters.
If I bought that "argument", I'd use a Mac.
It's not whether their shit "works", for some value of "works". It's whether it does what I want. Why can't I plug an external monitor into my laptop, tap a key, and have it available immediately w