Actually the more you "think" about it, the less you actually think and the more you listen to everyone else.
If this is intended to mean that the more you pretend to think about it, the more you end up listening to everyone else? If so, I'd have to agree, but that is true of anything.
Personally, I'd rather think for myself, and not listen to everyone else. These conclusions are my own. I encourage you to do the same in your response, if you can.
Study the Bible and you will see that the God of the old testament is pre-covenant.
You're going to have to be more specific than that. God made at least two covenants with Noah (starting on Genesis 6:18, 9:9), and one with Abram/Abraham (Genesis 17:2)... I could go on. A quick shell script (one-liner) I hacked together shows 15 verses in Genesis alone which mention a "covenant".
With the sacrifice of Jesus, a covenant was made that all the actions God had to take prior to Jesus would not be needed anymore.
Speaking of that covenant with Noah, didn't God try making the same kind of promise there? Basically, "I won't destroy the world with a flood anymore, I promise."
Anyway, what was this particular covenant you're talking about? I'm sorry, it's a bit too late at night (early in the morning, too) for me to go re-read the New Testament, so I tried Googling this one. My search for "Jesus covenant" leads me to quite a few pages which, where they do cite the relevant verses, are providing quotes which have no mention of the word "covenant".
I take this to mean the "Jesus died for our sins" myth. I say "myth" because if you accept that Jesus died for our sins, you must reject the idea of an omnipotent God. Or perhaps you can explain to me why God needs a blood sacrifice of ANY kind as a response to sin? Or to absolve us of sin?
For that matter, if God is also omniscient, why did the "pre-covenant" world exist at all? Why didn't God create Jesus first, kill him, and then create Adam?
You have to understand that God saw humans as unredeemable before Jesus made His sacrifice.
Yet again, in that sentence, you disprove God, as we commonly define him. Either you're saying he's not omnipotent -- he couldn't redeem anyone before Jesus made that sacrifice -- or he's not omniscient -- he didn't know humans were redeemable before Jesus made that sacrifice.
Thus the justification for destroying tribes and having plagues etc.
Since when does God need a justification, and a faulty one at that?
The definition of evil is the exact opposite of God. Thus God can never be evil.
See, this really sucks. Imagine for a second that God demands something that we mortals consider atrocious. For instance, suppose God demands baby-raping. By your definition, baby-raping is now good, and letting a child grow up without being molested is bad, because God says so.
Unless you're ready to accept that kind of bullshit, you must reject the above argument. And let's remember, God has already done things we consider atrocious, from genocide to total global annihilation.
Really, think about what you're saying: Genocide is OK, because it's God doing it.
The way you are approaching the idea of good and evil is as if darkness is only black when someone say's it is dark. When in fact the color black is the absence of white light.
That's not a bad analogy, to start with.
The same with God, evil is the absence of God's goodness.
And here we have problems. It works if you say "evil is the absence of good", except that, for all we know, good is the absence of evil. And the problem is, the way your argument is written, unless you have evidence to the contrary, it also works like this:
So far, no one's calling me a troll, or flamebait, or even offtopic. The worst I get is "overrated", which is fine, I think, for a one-liner like that.
Care to tell me what your basis is for judging me "not insightful"?
If I had to define my own insight, it's very simple: There's nothing wrong with creationism. There's nothing wrong with astrology, either. But let's not pretend that either one has any basis in science. If it's in the classroom at all, put it in sociology.
Evolution is not scientific as none of it has EVER been observed
Others have already given you significant observations, but I just thought I'd add something here:
Do you believe in atoms?
Why?
No atom has EVER been observed, has it? Certainly not a proton, or a neutron? Does the Bible say anything about them?
Yet, our modern chemistry is pretty much entirely built around atomic theory, and it seems to work. Because although atoms are a "theory" which has "never been observed", we do have sufficient evidence to support it that it seems insane to be looking for another explanation.
So I'll tell you what: You come up with a more plausible theory with better evidence than our current theories about atoms and quantum mechanics, and I'll believe yours instead. It might even be String Theory (though I doubt it). Until then, I'll believe in atoms.
And the same goes for evolution. You provide something more plausible, with more supporting evidence, and I'll believe that instead.
I'm not entirely sure why I'm responding, though. It's obvious that you're at best misinformed, and probably deluded. WTF is this:
We object to lies. In particular, the one that tells our children that even though nobody has ever observed it (observation = science) life came about on its own.
Evolution doesn't claim that. For all we know, God came down and touched some primordial steaming pool of mud and created the first single-celled organism.
Your evolutionist religion takes more faith to believe in than mine!
I don't see how it would, given that your religion takes exactly as much faith to believe in as Pastafarianism. In fact, the only religion I can think of that would require more faith is P=NP, because that actually requires abandoning logic.
(Christianity, even Fundamentalist Christianity, does not always abandon logic. Sometimes, it uses entirely valid arguments based on unprovable or provably false axioms. Thus, valid, but untrue.)
Others have already pointed out a couple easy-to-refute claims.
But the real reason people don't usually refute these claims is, we don't have the time. It's obvious that "creation science" is as much pseudoscience as the Q-Ray to anyone who pays attention. Real scientists, in general, would much rather go about discovering reality than disproving your biblical fantasy.
It'd be kind of like asking the government to go around disproving every UFO sighting and conspiracy theory. It's a pointless waste of resources.
He's a troll, yes, but he has a point. C != performance.
I mean, sure, it's just about the best tradeoff we've got now. It's that sweet spot between things like Ruby/LISP/Erlang/etc and assembly. But it still sucks, really.
In fact, there are plenty of projects out there for developing faster-than-C stuff. I'd argue that we're quite a bit closer now. Consider garbage collection -- people even write GC libraries for C, because it's getting to the point where whatever performance you might gain out of tweaking your own memory management by hand is no longer worth the chance of a memory leak, buffer overflow, or random segfault. Or bytecode -- because more information is available at runtime with a bytecode, compared to a real binary, it's possible to do certain runtime optimizations that could theoretically make a C# or Java app run faster than C.
Kind of like how C has really obsoleted assembly for the absurdly vast majority of tasks, because whatever performance gain you might get is offset completely by how insanely long it takes to code ANYTHING in assembly, and because even C is inherently more portable than assembly. Pretty much the only people who need assembly are those writing compilers, those forced to work at a low level for obscure reasons (drivers, bootloaders, etc), or those who need to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of a certain chunk of code -- a chunk of code that's usually part of a massive system that is otherwise written in C or C++.
And I'm just talking about the capabilities of the compiler/runtime. I think the language itself sucks. When you think about it, it's just as hard to imagine an interpreter improving C as it is to imagine a compiler improving Ruby.
And before I'm done, his original point is valid, but I think most of us (including me) misread it at a first reading. Consider: There are a few functional languages which can do things like lazy evaluation and automatic parellism. A program that you write in Haskell, for example, could automatically scale to use as many cores as you have functions -- well, almost, but you get the idea.
C probably does run faster, once you tweak it, but threading in C is hard. In fact, threading period is pretty hard, partly because it's hard to think that way, especially in an imperitive language. But the kind of low-level threading you get in C is just REALLY FUCKING HARD. It's not that I suck at it, it's true, to the point where many people still recommend you take the performance hit and use separate processes just to make sure your program doesn't trip over itself.
So, once again, it's like C vs assembly. Eventually, we're going to switch to a language 90% of the raw speed of C, but takes 5% of the time to develop in. And if you're worried about that 10%, don't be...
Even if we ignore runtime optimizations, there are other reasons to favor the computer (or language, or program, or whateve) doing more work for us -- it may actually do it better. Consider a rules-based spamfilter, like spamassassin, vs a statistical filter, like bogofilter or dspam. The statistical filter, once trained, is going to adapt more quickly to the real world of spam, and is going to come up with ways of identifying spam that you wouldn't have even considered. (A simple example: Any email containing the word "spam" is probably less likely to be spam. Would you rather spend your time writing thousands -- millions -- of these rules? How do you know you even got it right?)
Just like the C-killer will come up with ways of improving performance that you hadn't even considered. Just like a C compiler probably does for assembly.
There, I said it. Go get rid of the fucking GIL. It's 2007 already.
Or better, leave the GIL for third-party extensions, but make the Python core multithreaded when that particular Python app is multithreaded. Otherwise, there's really no point in using OS threads at all -- which is why we love things like Stackless, because if you're not going to support multicore anyway, green threads are the way to go.
Ironically, IPv6 would solve this by making it possible for your IP address to be mobile, as I understand it.
But the problem with a VPN is, it means Apple needs roughly twice the bandwidth you're using, unless you were just going to connect to Apple anyway -- in which case, I don't see why they wouldn't just use 10.x.x.x and let you VPN in to that.
Part of me wants IP addresses to more closely reflect the physical layout. Which is kind of what I do with IPv4 right now -- 10.0 is my office, 10.1 is my home, 10.2 is my brother's LAN party, all tied together with VPNs -- 10.0.10 is the office VPN, 10.1.3 is mine... at the LAN party, 10.2.2 is known good machines, and 10.2.3 is the "ghetto", and they are firewalled from each other (but not from the game server).
And of course, another part of me wants the same IP to always go to my machine, whether it's at home or at the LAN party. I could use hosts, but DNS is too slow to update and hostfiles too annoying.
Maybe we need another layer between those... or maybe IPv6 solves all of this in some way that I just don't know about.
I can see it now, all fucktarded pretendo loving fucktards will be sad since there is no more Zelda that they will earn themselves a Darwin Award and go slit their fucking wrists.
In which case, you have nothing to be afraid of, and no reason to make that post.
Good job wasting time and energy over someone else's obsession, though!
Windows 2000 actually replaced the 95/98/ME line, and was NT-based. XP was just the next version after 2000.
For that matter, 2000 is also NT 5.0, and XP is NT 5.1. And I didn't make that up, though I can't remember where it came from -- that is how Microsoft versions them.
GP's points may be right, but it's really hard to tell, given how wrong their facts seem to be.
His faulty assumption is that the day job is not itself open source.
The simple way to disprove this is to look at the OSDL contributors. My guess is, they're not just contributing to get their name on that list. I'm guessing that rather, many of them contribute because they really do want Linux to succeed, because they have a business model which is pretty fairly committed to it succeeding.
What I see as probably the most important point is the completely random one he throws out there, with nothing to back it up:
How about if you are a user? Your real goal is to drive down the cost per transaction each year. Theoretically you love the idea, but in actuality it scares the crap out of you.
Why does it scare the crap out of you? He doesn't say.
I'll tell you what, proprietary software scares the crap out of me. If I built a business on Windows, and I suddenly needed Windows to do something it couldn't do, I'd be entirely at the mercy of Microsoft. What company in their right mind wants to be so completely at the mercy of a single vendor?
Whereas if I built a business on Linux, even if I was selling proprietary software (like, say, Oracle), I could fix it myself, or pay someone to fix it for me, or contribute to the OSDL and send mail to the LKML and hope they fix it. The difference is, with a proprietary vendor, only the last option is viable, which is why we've seen things like Windows 98 Second Edition -- essentially a service pack for Windows 98, but you have to pay for it. With open source, if one vendor is charging you too much for a bugfix, you can switch to another vendor.
And really, you have this kind of power in all kinds of other markets. I know it's been said before, but why could you possibly be calm and confident when buying a car with the hood welded shut, even if you're not a mechanic?
For example: The Second Life client is open source. The server is proprietary, and there really only are their servers, and really only can be -- there'd be even less point in setting up a competing server than there is in setting up pirate World of Warcraft servers.
But also, it really helps when your entire platform is open except you. If Oracle wanted to ship on Windows, for example, they'd have to either trust Microsoft to maintain Windows, or they'd have to pay an insane fee for "shared source". Since they ship on Linux, they can even roll their own distro -- essentially, they are your OS vendor, and if ANYTHING goes wrong with your Oracle database, on ANY level, they have the source code to it, so they can fix it.
So, I would say the only people who don't benefit from open source are those selling off-the-shelf, proprietary software for which there is a viable, open source alternative.
Even though things might not be in the same place, when you get in a car you know you will have the following: Steering wheel, gas/brake pedal, parking brake, gearshift, signals/lights, climate control. They have doors with locks. They all have a gas tank. While some of details and presentation are different, there are not any fundamental changes to the system.
Define "fundamental".
I mean, really. Some cars respond to voice commands. Some cars can be started remotely. Some cars use traditional keys, some use USB sticks. Some use manual gearshifts, and some are automatic. And so on.
CRM software is fundamentally the same: Contact Relationship Management. You know it's going to have a way to store a bunch of contacts, and some appointments relating to those contacts, and sort them into groups, and so on. Beyond that, most of what's happening with CRM systems really does seem to be no more or less superficial than interface changes from car to car.
Basically, even if there is a standard user interface, it hasn't been around long enough to become as common knowledge as a car.
Let me put it this way: I'm 20. I started learning to drive at 14 or 15, and had my full license (and all my current skills) at arount 17.
As far as any one user is concerned, spending three years with something really should be enough to pick up the things which are common knowledge. I mean, sure, I wouldn't expect to know how to drive a car from sitting on my ass, watching racing movies or something. Or even from sitting in the passenger seat while someone else drives. And, similarly, I wouldn't expect to know how to use a computer just from watching Mac commercials and screaming at the tech to do my job for me.
In 50 years, using a piece of software will be akin to driving a car. But right now it's not a fair comparison.
I'd say the primary difference is, in 50 years, people will accept that using a piece of software is akin to driving a car, whereas right now, nobody thinks it's a fair comparison. As strange and innaccurate as automotive analogies can be, I think this one is somewhat accurate.
But I'd like to point out that I can still hijack your own post Madlibs-style.
You're missing the point. There ARE ADHD Sales types out there, though not all Salespeople have short attention spans. I'm responding to the notion that ALL IT and IS people are bereft of the usual social skills. They aren't. But you have to know, as I do, that when normal IT people have run-ins with particularly clueless/belligerant business guys, that it can poison their notion of management as a culture. Why? Because it happens WAY too often, and it's a small subset of the world in the first place. I'd guess that the percentage of attention deficit, tech-issues-unaware sales/management people is MUCH higher than the percentage of emotionally non-functional IT people that need a video-game interface to their fellow co-workers in order to communicate politely enough to do the work and solve the problems that actually earn them a paycheck.
I actually don't agree with a video-game interface at all. But I would suggest that part of the reason you think IT is toxic is, you're probably missing a lot of what happens, especially if you're the sales type. For example, we could both look at an identical incident, and you could see a tech being uncooperative, condescending, and downright mean to a fellow employee, while I could see the employee being stubborn and unwilling/unable to learn, and the IT person being as patient as they possibly could before they got snarky.
And such incidents go both ways. The IT person probably couldn't communicate very well, and the salesperson probably wasn't as attentive as they could be. The IT person might walk away from it with a "people are stupid" attitude, and the salesperson might walk away with an "IT is rude" attitude. And these attitudes will color future incidents, even if ultimately, no one in particular is at fault.
It's not too hard to go from that to imagining the wrong person getting blamed. One ancedotal example (not mine, can't remember exactly where it's from) -- user calls up, claims their keyboard was stolen, asks if tech took it. Tech says no, it wasn't, but he can bring over a new keyboard soon (kind of doing critical work on the mailserver right now). User is furious, calls tech's boss, who calls tech and demands he go fix the problem right now. Tech carries keyboard over, opens the user's keyboard tray/drawer/thing to put it in, and finds the user's original keyboard there, ready to be used. User is a bit surprised that the thing slides out, but almost instantly goes back to being enraged that no one told them it did that, and demanding the tech do something about it...
The simple fact is, there are fewer IT people and more management/sales/business people, and the management people are (obviously) in charge. My best guess is this is somewhat like, say, post-world-war-1 Germany. There are more Christians than Jews, although Jews provide a needed service (banking), and the Christians are in charge (if there is such a thing), so when you need someone to blame, blame the Jews!
Your Google searches alone don't really prove much, because I can do the same thing. If you'd link to some specific complaints, it would help a lot, because then we could actually have a debate. (I doubt you want that, though, or why are you Anonymous? Coward.)
And yeah, OpenOffice is bloated. However, it's getting better, it's really not unusably bloated, and there are other alternatives (I mostly use Koffice).
or Access-like database with the level of integration MS Office provides.
Base isn't good enough? What about Kexi? (Or Knoda/Rekall/Glom) I'm not going into detail here because I honestly don't know (having not used MS Access), but define "level of integration".
And yes, if DOS was the dominant OS, I'd be using it, because a) It's good job security
Interesting, because there are at least a few jobs I've had where a primary requirement is something like "Knowing Linux, at all." I've also never had to stick to Windows for my job. If anything, I have to talk to Windows, but I still do the bulk of my work comfortably from OS X and Linux. Yes, I said "comfortably" -- I don't spend anywhere near a significant amount of my time scrounging for software.
But in the case of DOS, you're dead wrong. You seem to be forgetting that it WAS the dominant OS, and it lost, badly, to Mac and Windows. So for all the BS you're spouting about "job security", I dare you to try and find a job working exclusively with DOS. They do exist, but I somehow doubt any of them feels a particular sense of security.
So DOS was once dominant, and no longer is. Are you so confident of the current Windows regime?
b) I don't like scrounging for software released later, slower, and with less quality than the dominant OS's counterpart.
Last I checked, most open source projects actually release sooner and more often than their closed counterparts. Whether they're better quality is a hit or miss, but that's true of any software.
It's also hard to believe that DOS could even come close to competing with software on a modern OS. Sure, in a few niche places, DOS will win -- and there are still people who still carry around old DOS programs. But the very concepts of multitasking in any form means there would be plenty of things for which there's no DOS equivalent, and... hell, just look at the sheer amount of stuff a modern OS does for you. If DOS was still the dominant OS, people would be migrating to Linux in swarms, because even the laziest Linux coder would have a v2.0 out while a whole team working on the DOS equivalent would still worrying about drivers and interrupts.
Ok, I exaggerated that a little bit, but I do believe that, while Linux isn't there yet (and may never be), if a platform does manage to get sufficiently better than its competitors, you WILL be switching, because one immediate consequence of such a system would be several orders of magnitude faster development. If something like that came out right now, give it a year or two to gain some decent apps, and then it will snatch away some 15-30% of Windows' market share while Microsoft is still holding weekly meetings to discuss the arrangement of features in the Windows shutdown menu (still conveniently but ironically located in the Start menu).
In fact, this has already happened. Just look at Firefox.
All I know is petrol goes in one hole, oil in another, water in a third - and that all need to be present. Turn the key, put it in gear, hit the accelerator and you've got forward motion.
Certainly. But if that was all you knew about cars, I'd have an equal amount of disdain for you.
Because really, it isn't. You know, for example, how to use the windshield wipers, turn signals, hazard lights, headlights, parking lights, high beams, parking brakes, mirrors, the doors, the windows, not to mention the steering wheel and the brakes. You also know all kinds of rules of the road -- most of which you probably had to prove you know in some sort of test to get your driver's license. And then there's driver's education...
It's a matter of degree. I don't expect them to understand their exhaust, but I do expect them to be able to handle a turn signal -- and if they're too hot or too cold, it'd be kind of nice if they knew how to adjust the heat and AC without me.
With cars, all cars are fairly similar in terms of how you drive them. Sure, the more you spend the more refined things become, but that's as far as it goes. That's certainly not true of either computer interfaces or of people.
Cars are certainly more uniform, but they're not identical.
For example: My very first car was a Lincoln Town Car. That was like driving a boat -- big, slow to turn, slow to start, slow to stop. It also had the gearshift on the steering wheel, a parking brake as a sort of third or fourth pedal, a yellow button in the glove compartment to open the trunk. In order to open the gas tank, you had to get out and go to the side, where you'd simply lift a steel flap, then unscrew the cap that was there.
My next one was a Nissan Maxima. Much smaller and faster -- this was a sexy little sports car. It could turn sharper, it idled faster. It had a keychain with a remote control for the car's locks, complete with panic button, I assume (the labels are mostly worn off). The gearshift was set between the driver's and passenger seat, along with the parking brake. In order to get to the gas, you had to pull a lever on the floor just left of the driver's seat to pop open the little metal flap. If there was a button in the glove compartment, it certainly wasn't yellow.
I've also occasionally borrowed my mother's van, a Honda Odessey. It's huge, with a decent engine -- not as fun as the Maxima, but not as bad as the Lincoln. It's also got the gearshift on the steering wheel, parking brake on the floor, but it does require the lever to be pulled to pop open the gas tank -- which you really should only do if the sliding door on the driver's side is closed.
I've never driven a stick, except in the driving simulation, so I sort of know how to drive one, but I'd probably stall it every few hundred feet. I've also never driven a tractor.
I'd argue the problem is, indeed, human-human interfaces, but it's got a lot to do with a sort of caste system within the company -- an "us vs them" mentality. But in any case, the result is: People are insanely less flexible when it comes to computers than they are when it comes to cars, especially in the corporate world. I can probably learn to drive just about any car in at most ten minutes (unless it's a stick shift), and so can you. But I can also learn how to drive just about any GUI program in maybe 20 minutes, just by poking at menus.
Note how you can take any kid off a Windows PC, put them on a Mac, give them 10 minutes and they'll have figured out most of what they need. They may bitch about the lack of games, but they certainly know how to use it. Also note -- they mention video games? Fine, but what kind of interface do most games have in common? Not even WASD, and certainly not on consoles. But most kids don't bother with manuals these days -- just start the game and see what happens. You might not be good at a game in ten minutes, but you'll likely at least be able to play it.
And one IT guy who's more interested in finding a machine to burn down so he can install some new distro than he is in making sure that the sales guy's CRM database doesn't puke while he's on the road and needs it the most... that can kill the cash cow that allows IT to exist at all.
Yes. True.
Basically: snotty IT types that describe all sales/management people in such patronizing terms are just illustrating exactly why sales/management types so often roll their eyes whenever they have to deal with IT.
Not true.
Here's how it works: I realize that, as an IT person, I don't have a lot of people skills. I don't like calling people I don't know, and even when calling people I do know, I almost instantly hang up when I hit an answering machine. I also have a fairly short attention span when it comes to money -- I really can't talk about 401ks and 1031 exchanges and such for very long.
That's why I'm in IT in the first place. I have a much longer attention span when it comes to tech, because I'm interested in that.
However, like everyone, I have to use money, so I have to at least have the attention span for the basics, like balancing a checkbook. This is needlessly complicated -- for one thing, why are we still using paper checks? But I learn enough to get by, so that I don't have to call my financial advisor everytime I get a bank statement or a credit card offer in the mail.
Now, I've worked with some very competent, open-minded sales people, but I've also worked with the people who essentially say things like "It's not my job to think, that's what we pay you for." Look, I'll do my best to make sure your CRM database works by the time you're going on the road -- but once you're on the road, unless you're paying to bring me with you, there's probably at least a couple of things you need to learn to do on your own.
And frankly, your comment about "snotty IT types" is just as condescending as TFA's comment about "short attention spans".
(2) users now cannot access via their Internet Browser and must use an e-mail client which may not filter spam as well (or sometimes at all)
In what way is this worse than accessing it via a browser, where you rely on PlusNet's own spam filtering, which is proven not to work well (or at all)?
I can always install Thunderbird and use its built-in filtering. Or I can even setup my own mailserver (I like bogofilter and IMAP) and use fetchmail to collect my email. But I cannot do anything about the shitty or nonexistant filtering that PlusNet themselves are doing.
I would much rather have email working only via standards designed for email (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) than only via webmail.
It doesn't matter how little or how much. It doesn't matter if my stuff was even affected.
If I'm trusting you with my data, that means I've decided you'll probably be at least as careful with it as I would be, and it will probably save me some time from having to do my own backups and such. In the case of email, it would mean that I'm sick of running my own mailserver, worrying about whether I'm online or not, etc etc...
If your service goes down for a bit, I might be able to understand, especially if it's a one-time thing. But if you lose data, that means you're far less competent than -- oh -- my 16-year-old brother. And it means that the second I hear about it, I'll already be signing up with someone else, or building my own competing service.
I understand GNOME can do a bar across the top, that has menus. I have not yet seen them be at all like OS X's menus (as in, a Firefox window which has no menus, but the bar across the top of the screen has Firefox menus)...
it already runs well on Windows, there are some big software packages that run on Windows using Gtk+
Great... That's also true of the Win32 API.
and its architecture (Cairo, etc.) makes it easy to port to new platforms.
So where's the OS X port?
No, I know it's there. I mean the native one? Because last time I downloaded the Gimp for OS X, it was ultimately an X app, meaning I had to start up X11 (on top of OSX's windowing system) in order to run it. And for crying out loud, GTK stands for "Gimp ToolKit", so yes, I expect the Gimp to be a decent example of a GTK+ app.
I'll admit, there are worse choices than GTK+, but I'd say there are also better ones -- I'd point to wxwindows and QT. And also, with GTK+, I imagine you'd be taking a step backwards -- note how the Gimp doesn't (and can't) use OS X's own menu bar system, whereas Firefox on OS X does do that, and also uses native widgets in at least a few places.
As far as I'm concerned, a cross-platform app shouldn't feel like an app ported from its developers' favorite platform. It should just feel native. Being able to skin GTK+ to look like native Windows, for example, isn't what I want -- I want it to actually use whatever skin Windows is using at the moment, to the extent that I can change that.
Disclaimer: Considering how little sleep I've had lately, there's a fair chance half of what I've written here is wrong or made up...
Cracking DVDs is easy, and it helps fair use (playback on Linux, etc).
Cracking most of this stuff is, I'd imagine, significantly harder -- after all, it is possible for Apache to be secure, whereas it's not even close to possible for DVDs to be uncrackable.
That's ignoring the economics of it -- $15 per DVD? Fine, you just need to sell 1,067 copies and you've made $16k. That's assuming money was ever the point.
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If this is intended to mean that the more you pretend to think about it, the more you end up listening to everyone else? If so, I'd have to agree, but that is true of anything.
Personally, I'd rather think for myself, and not listen to everyone else. These conclusions are my own. I encourage you to do the same in your response, if you can.
You're going to have to be more specific than that. God made at least two covenants with Noah (starting on Genesis 6:18, 9:9), and one with Abram/Abraham (Genesis 17:2)... I could go on. A quick shell script (one-liner) I hacked together shows 15 verses in Genesis alone which mention a "covenant".
Speaking of that covenant with Noah, didn't God try making the same kind of promise there? Basically, "I won't destroy the world with a flood anymore, I promise."
Anyway, what was this particular covenant you're talking about? I'm sorry, it's a bit too late at night (early in the morning, too) for me to go re-read the New Testament, so I tried Googling this one. My search for "Jesus covenant" leads me to quite a few pages which, where they do cite the relevant verses, are providing quotes which have no mention of the word "covenant".
I take this to mean the "Jesus died for our sins" myth. I say "myth" because if you accept that Jesus died for our sins, you must reject the idea of an omnipotent God. Or perhaps you can explain to me why God needs a blood sacrifice of ANY kind as a response to sin? Or to absolve us of sin?
For that matter, if God is also omniscient, why did the "pre-covenant" world exist at all? Why didn't God create Jesus first, kill him, and then create Adam?
Yet again, in that sentence, you disprove God, as we commonly define him. Either you're saying he's not omnipotent -- he couldn't redeem anyone before Jesus made that sacrifice -- or he's not omniscient -- he didn't know humans were redeemable before Jesus made that sacrifice.
Since when does God need a justification, and a faulty one at that?
See, this really sucks. Imagine for a second that God demands something that we mortals consider atrocious. For instance, suppose God demands baby-raping. By your definition, baby-raping is now good, and letting a child grow up without being molested is bad, because God says so.
Unless you're ready to accept that kind of bullshit, you must reject the above argument. And let's remember, God has already done things we consider atrocious, from genocide to total global annihilation.
Really, think about what you're saying: Genocide is OK, because it's God doing it.
That's not a bad analogy, to start with.
And here we have problems. It works if you say "evil is the absence of good", except that, for all we know, good is the absence of evil. And the problem is, the way your argument is written, unless you have evidence to the contrary, it also works like this:
50% Insightful
20% Interesting
20% Overrated
So far, no one's calling me a troll, or flamebait, or even offtopic. The worst I get is "overrated", which is fine, I think, for a one-liner like that.
Care to tell me what your basis is for judging me "not insightful"?
If I had to define my own insight, it's very simple: There's nothing wrong with creationism. There's nothing wrong with astrology, either. But let's not pretend that either one has any basis in science. If it's in the classroom at all, put it in sociology.
Others have already given you significant observations, but I just thought I'd add something here:
Do you believe in atoms?
Why?
No atom has EVER been observed, has it? Certainly not a proton, or a neutron? Does the Bible say anything about them?
Yet, our modern chemistry is pretty much entirely built around atomic theory, and it seems to work. Because although atoms are a "theory" which has "never been observed", we do have sufficient evidence to support it that it seems insane to be looking for another explanation.
So I'll tell you what: You come up with a more plausible theory with better evidence than our current theories about atoms and quantum mechanics, and I'll believe yours instead. It might even be String Theory (though I doubt it). Until then, I'll believe in atoms.
And the same goes for evolution. You provide something more plausible, with more supporting evidence, and I'll believe that instead.
I'm not entirely sure why I'm responding, though. It's obvious that you're at best misinformed, and probably deluded. WTF is this:
Evolution doesn't claim that. For all we know, God came down and touched some primordial steaming pool of mud and created the first single-celled organism.
I don't see how it would, given that your religion takes exactly as much faith to believe in as Pastafarianism. In fact, the only religion I can think of that would require more faith is P=NP, because that actually requires abandoning logic.
(Christianity, even Fundamentalist Christianity, does not always abandon logic. Sometimes, it uses entirely valid arguments based on unprovable or provably false axioms. Thus, valid, but untrue.)
Others have already pointed out a couple easy-to-refute claims.
But the real reason people don't usually refute these claims is, we don't have the time. It's obvious that "creation science" is as much pseudoscience as the Q-Ray to anyone who pays attention. Real scientists, in general, would much rather go about discovering reality than disproving your biblical fantasy.
It'd be kind of like asking the government to go around disproving every UFO sighting and conspiracy theory. It's a pointless waste of resources.
Newton's gravitation was "just a theory". Now we have a better one, called Relativity.
But even here, the old, disproved theory of Newtonian physics is still incredibly useful 99% of the time.
I have no fscking idea what you're talking about.
America is too divided... for what? Let the middle states continue to... separate? Is that what they're doing?
And what the hell is a "middle state"? I live in Iowa, and we don't have this bullshit here. It really only seems to be Kansas...
Or in other words: I really don't care about this "museum", but get the fuck out of our public education!
He's a troll, yes, but he has a point. C != performance.
I mean, sure, it's just about the best tradeoff we've got now. It's that sweet spot between things like Ruby/LISP/Erlang/etc and assembly. But it still sucks, really.
In fact, there are plenty of projects out there for developing faster-than-C stuff. I'd argue that we're quite a bit closer now. Consider garbage collection -- people even write GC libraries for C, because it's getting to the point where whatever performance you might gain out of tweaking your own memory management by hand is no longer worth the chance of a memory leak, buffer overflow, or random segfault. Or bytecode -- because more information is available at runtime with a bytecode, compared to a real binary, it's possible to do certain runtime optimizations that could theoretically make a C# or Java app run faster than C.
Kind of like how C has really obsoleted assembly for the absurdly vast majority of tasks, because whatever performance gain you might get is offset completely by how insanely long it takes to code ANYTHING in assembly, and because even C is inherently more portable than assembly. Pretty much the only people who need assembly are those writing compilers, those forced to work at a low level for obscure reasons (drivers, bootloaders, etc), or those who need to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of a certain chunk of code -- a chunk of code that's usually part of a massive system that is otherwise written in C or C++.
And I'm just talking about the capabilities of the compiler/runtime. I think the language itself sucks. When you think about it, it's just as hard to imagine an interpreter improving C as it is to imagine a compiler improving Ruby.
And before I'm done, his original point is valid, but I think most of us (including me) misread it at a first reading. Consider: There are a few functional languages which can do things like lazy evaluation and automatic parellism. A program that you write in Haskell, for example, could automatically scale to use as many cores as you have functions -- well, almost, but you get the idea.
C probably does run faster, once you tweak it, but threading in C is hard. In fact, threading period is pretty hard, partly because it's hard to think that way, especially in an imperitive language. But the kind of low-level threading you get in C is just REALLY FUCKING HARD. It's not that I suck at it, it's true, to the point where many people still recommend you take the performance hit and use separate processes just to make sure your program doesn't trip over itself.
So, once again, it's like C vs assembly. Eventually, we're going to switch to a language 90% of the raw speed of C, but takes 5% of the time to develop in. And if you're worried about that 10%, don't be...
Even if we ignore runtime optimizations, there are other reasons to favor the computer (or language, or program, or whateve) doing more work for us -- it may actually do it better. Consider a rules-based spamfilter, like spamassassin, vs a statistical filter, like bogofilter or dspam. The statistical filter, once trained, is going to adapt more quickly to the real world of spam, and is going to come up with ways of identifying spam that you wouldn't have even considered. (A simple example: Any email containing the word "spam" is probably less likely to be spam. Would you rather spend your time writing thousands -- millions -- of these rules? How do you know you even got it right?)
Just like the C-killer will come up with ways of improving performance that you hadn't even considered. Just like a C compiler probably does for assembly.
There, I said it. Go get rid of the fucking GIL. It's 2007 already.
Or better, leave the GIL for third-party extensions, but make the Python core multithreaded when that particular Python app is multithreaded. Otherwise, there's really no point in using OS threads at all -- which is why we love things like Stackless, because if you're not going to support multicore anyway, green threads are the way to go.
Ironically, IPv6 would solve this by making it possible for your IP address to be mobile, as I understand it.
But the problem with a VPN is, it means Apple needs roughly twice the bandwidth you're using, unless you were just going to connect to Apple anyway -- in which case, I don't see why they wouldn't just use 10.x.x.x and let you VPN in to that.
Part of me wants IP addresses to more closely reflect the physical layout. Which is kind of what I do with IPv4 right now -- 10.0 is my office, 10.1 is my home, 10.2 is my brother's LAN party, all tied together with VPNs -- 10.0.10 is the office VPN, 10.1.3 is mine... at the LAN party, 10.2.2 is known good machines, and 10.2.3 is the "ghetto", and they are firewalled from each other (but not from the game server).
And of course, another part of me wants the same IP to always go to my machine, whether it's at home or at the LAN party. I could use hosts, but DNS is too slow to update and hostfiles too annoying.
Maybe we need another layer between those... or maybe IPv6 solves all of this in some way that I just don't know about.
In which case, you have nothing to be afraid of, and no reason to make that post.
Good job wasting time and energy over someone else's obsession, though!
Windows 2000 actually replaced the 95/98/ME line, and was NT-based. XP was just the next version after 2000.
For that matter, 2000 is also NT 5.0, and XP is NT 5.1. And I didn't make that up, though I can't remember where it came from -- that is how Microsoft versions them.
GP's points may be right, but it's really hard to tell, given how wrong their facts seem to be.
His faulty assumption is that the day job is not itself open source.
The simple way to disprove this is to look at the OSDL contributors. My guess is, they're not just contributing to get their name on that list. I'm guessing that rather, many of them contribute because they really do want Linux to succeed, because they have a business model which is pretty fairly committed to it succeeding.
What I see as probably the most important point is the completely random one he throws out there, with nothing to back it up:
Why does it scare the crap out of you? He doesn't say.
I'll tell you what, proprietary software scares the crap out of me. If I built a business on Windows, and I suddenly needed Windows to do something it couldn't do, I'd be entirely at the mercy of Microsoft. What company in their right mind wants to be so completely at the mercy of a single vendor?
Whereas if I built a business on Linux, even if I was selling proprietary software (like, say, Oracle), I could fix it myself, or pay someone to fix it for me, or contribute to the OSDL and send mail to the LKML and hope they fix it. The difference is, with a proprietary vendor, only the last option is viable, which is why we've seen things like Windows 98 Second Edition -- essentially a service pack for Windows 98, but you have to pay for it. With open source, if one vendor is charging you too much for a bugfix, you can switch to another vendor.
And really, you have this kind of power in all kinds of other markets. I know it's been said before, but why could you possibly be calm and confident when buying a car with the hood welded shut, even if you're not a mechanic?
For example: The Second Life client is open source. The server is proprietary, and there really only are their servers, and really only can be -- there'd be even less point in setting up a competing server than there is in setting up pirate World of Warcraft servers.
But also, it really helps when your entire platform is open except you. If Oracle wanted to ship on Windows, for example, they'd have to either trust Microsoft to maintain Windows, or they'd have to pay an insane fee for "shared source". Since they ship on Linux, they can even roll their own distro -- essentially, they are your OS vendor, and if ANYTHING goes wrong with your Oracle database, on ANY level, they have the source code to it, so they can fix it.
So, I would say the only people who don't benefit from open source are those selling off-the-shelf, proprietary software for which there is a viable, open source alternative.
Define "fundamental".
I mean, really. Some cars respond to voice commands. Some cars can be started remotely. Some cars use traditional keys, some use USB sticks. Some use manual gearshifts, and some are automatic. And so on.
CRM software is fundamentally the same: Contact Relationship Management. You know it's going to have a way to store a bunch of contacts, and some appointments relating to those contacts, and sort them into groups, and so on. Beyond that, most of what's happening with CRM systems really does seem to be no more or less superficial than interface changes from car to car.
Let me put it this way: I'm 20. I started learning to drive at 14 or 15, and had my full license (and all my current skills) at arount 17.
As far as any one user is concerned, spending three years with something really should be enough to pick up the things which are common knowledge. I mean, sure, I wouldn't expect to know how to drive a car from sitting on my ass, watching racing movies or something. Or even from sitting in the passenger seat while someone else drives. And, similarly, I wouldn't expect to know how to use a computer just from watching Mac commercials and screaming at the tech to do my job for me.
I'd say the primary difference is, in 50 years, people will accept that using a piece of software is akin to driving a car, whereas right now, nobody thinks it's a fair comparison. As strange and innaccurate as automotive analogies can be, I think this one is somewhat accurate.
But I'd like to point out that I can still hijack your own post Madlibs-style.
I actually don't agree with a video-game interface at all. But I would suggest that part of the reason you think IT is toxic is, you're probably missing a lot of what happens, especially if you're the sales type. For example, we could both look at an identical incident, and you could see a tech being uncooperative, condescending, and downright mean to a fellow employee, while I could see the employee being stubborn and unwilling/unable to learn, and the IT person being as patient as they possibly could before they got snarky.
And such incidents go both ways. The IT person probably couldn't communicate very well, and the salesperson probably wasn't as attentive as they could be. The IT person might walk away from it with a "people are stupid" attitude, and the salesperson might walk away with an "IT is rude" attitude. And these attitudes will color future incidents, even if ultimately, no one in particular is at fault.
It's not too hard to go from that to imagining the wrong person getting blamed. One ancedotal example (not mine, can't remember exactly where it's from) -- user calls up, claims their keyboard was stolen, asks if tech took it. Tech says no, it wasn't, but he can bring over a new keyboard soon (kind of doing critical work on the mailserver right now). User is furious, calls tech's boss, who calls tech and demands he go fix the problem right now. Tech carries keyboard over, opens the user's keyboard tray/drawer/thing to put it in, and finds the user's original keyboard there, ready to be used. User is a bit surprised that the thing slides out, but almost instantly goes back to being enraged that no one told them it did that, and demanding the tech do something about it...
The simple fact is, there are fewer IT people and more management/sales/business people, and the management people are (obviously) in charge. My best guess is this is somewhat like, say, post-world-war-1 Germany. There are more Christians than Jews, although Jews provide a needed service (banking), and the Christians are in charge (if there is such a thing), so when you need someone to blame, blame the Jews!
Your Google searches alone don't really prove much, because I can do the same thing. If you'd link to some specific complaints, it would help a lot, because then we could actually have a debate. (I doubt you want that, though, or why are you Anonymous? Coward.)
And yeah, OpenOffice is bloated. However, it's getting better, it's really not unusably bloated, and there are other alternatives (I mostly use Koffice).
Base isn't good enough? What about Kexi? (Or Knoda/Rekall/Glom) I'm not going into detail here because I honestly don't know (having not used MS Access), but define "level of integration".
Interesting, because there are at least a few jobs I've had where a primary requirement is something like "Knowing Linux, at all." I've also never had to stick to Windows for my job. If anything, I have to talk to Windows, but I still do the bulk of my work comfortably from OS X and Linux. Yes, I said "comfortably" -- I don't spend anywhere near a significant amount of my time scrounging for software.
But in the case of DOS, you're dead wrong. You seem to be forgetting that it WAS the dominant OS, and it lost, badly, to Mac and Windows. So for all the BS you're spouting about "job security", I dare you to try and find a job working exclusively with DOS. They do exist, but I somehow doubt any of them feels a particular sense of security.
So DOS was once dominant, and no longer is. Are you so confident of the current Windows regime?
Last I checked, most open source projects actually release sooner and more often than their closed counterparts. Whether they're better quality is a hit or miss, but that's true of any software.
It's also hard to believe that DOS could even come close to competing with software on a modern OS. Sure, in a few niche places, DOS will win -- and there are still people who still carry around old DOS programs. But the very concepts of multitasking in any form means there would be plenty of things for which there's no DOS equivalent, and... hell, just look at the sheer amount of stuff a modern OS does for you. If DOS was still the dominant OS, people would be migrating to Linux in swarms, because even the laziest Linux coder would have a v2.0 out while a whole team working on the DOS equivalent would still worrying about drivers and interrupts.
Ok, I exaggerated that a little bit, but I do believe that, while Linux isn't there yet (and may never be), if a platform does manage to get sufficiently better than its competitors, you WILL be switching, because one immediate consequence of such a system would be several orders of magnitude faster development. If something like that came out right now, give it a year or two to gain some decent apps, and then it will snatch away some 15-30% of Windows' market share while Microsoft is still holding weekly meetings to discuss the arrangement of features in the Windows shutdown menu (still conveniently but ironically located in the Start menu).
In fact, this has already happened. Just look at Firefox.
Certainly. But if that was all you knew about cars, I'd have an equal amount of disdain for you.
Because really, it isn't. You know, for example, how to use the windshield wipers, turn signals, hazard lights, headlights, parking lights, high beams, parking brakes, mirrors, the doors, the windows, not to mention the steering wheel and the brakes. You also know all kinds of rules of the road -- most of which you probably had to prove you know in some sort of test to get your driver's license. And then there's driver's education...
It's a matter of degree. I don't expect them to understand their exhaust, but I do expect them to be able to handle a turn signal -- and if they're too hot or too cold, it'd be kind of nice if they knew how to adjust the heat and AC without me.
Cars are certainly more uniform, but they're not identical.
For example: My very first car was a Lincoln Town Car. That was like driving a boat -- big, slow to turn, slow to start, slow to stop. It also had the gearshift on the steering wheel, a parking brake as a sort of third or fourth pedal, a yellow button in the glove compartment to open the trunk. In order to open the gas tank, you had to get out and go to the side, where you'd simply lift a steel flap, then unscrew the cap that was there.
My next one was a Nissan Maxima. Much smaller and faster -- this was a sexy little sports car. It could turn sharper, it idled faster. It had a keychain with a remote control for the car's locks, complete with panic button, I assume (the labels are mostly worn off). The gearshift was set between the driver's and passenger seat, along with the parking brake. In order to get to the gas, you had to pull a lever on the floor just left of the driver's seat to pop open the little metal flap. If there was a button in the glove compartment, it certainly wasn't yellow.
I've also occasionally borrowed my mother's van, a Honda Odessey. It's huge, with a decent engine -- not as fun as the Maxima, but not as bad as the Lincoln. It's also got the gearshift on the steering wheel, parking brake on the floor, but it does require the lever to be pulled to pop open the gas tank -- which you really should only do if the sliding door on the driver's side is closed.
I've never driven a stick, except in the driving simulation, so I sort of know how to drive one, but I'd probably stall it every few hundred feet. I've also never driven a tractor.
I'd argue the problem is, indeed, human-human interfaces, but it's got a lot to do with a sort of caste system within the company -- an "us vs them" mentality. But in any case, the result is: People are insanely less flexible when it comes to computers than they are when it comes to cars, especially in the corporate world. I can probably learn to drive just about any car in at most ten minutes (unless it's a stick shift), and so can you. But I can also learn how to drive just about any GUI program in maybe 20 minutes, just by poking at menus.
Note how you can take any kid off a Windows PC, put them on a Mac, give them 10 minutes and they'll have figured out most of what they need. They may bitch about the lack of games, but they certainly know how to use it. Also note -- they mention video games? Fine, but what kind of interface do most games have in common? Not even WASD, and certainly not on consoles. But most kids don't bother with manuals these days -- just start the game and see what happens. You might not be good at a game in ten minutes, but you'll likely at least be able to play it.
Yes. True.
Not true.
Here's how it works: I realize that, as an IT person, I don't have a lot of people skills. I don't like calling people I don't know, and even when calling people I do know, I almost instantly hang up when I hit an answering machine. I also have a fairly short attention span when it comes to money -- I really can't talk about 401ks and 1031 exchanges and such for very long.
That's why I'm in IT in the first place. I have a much longer attention span when it comes to tech, because I'm interested in that.
However, like everyone, I have to use money, so I have to at least have the attention span for the basics, like balancing a checkbook. This is needlessly complicated -- for one thing, why are we still using paper checks? But I learn enough to get by, so that I don't have to call my financial advisor everytime I get a bank statement or a credit card offer in the mail.
Now, I've worked with some very competent, open-minded sales people, but I've also worked with the people who essentially say things like "It's not my job to think, that's what we pay you for." Look, I'll do my best to make sure your CRM database works by the time you're going on the road -- but once you're on the road, unless you're paying to bring me with you, there's probably at least a couple of things you need to learn to do on your own.
And frankly, your comment about "snotty IT types" is just as condescending as TFA's comment about "short attention spans".
Great cross-platform browser support, guys... I'm seeing mostly-grey-on-white ranging to totally-white-on-white, using Konqueror.
Anyone else seeing strange things on non-IE browsers?
In what way is this worse than accessing it via a browser, where you rely on PlusNet's own spam filtering, which is proven not to work well (or at all)?
I can always install Thunderbird and use its built-in filtering. Or I can even setup my own mailserver (I like bogofilter and IMAP) and use fetchmail to collect my email. But I cannot do anything about the shitty or nonexistant filtering that PlusNet themselves are doing.
I would much rather have email working only via standards designed for email (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) than only via webmail.
It doesn't matter how little or how much. It doesn't matter if my stuff was even affected.
If I'm trusting you with my data, that means I've decided you'll probably be at least as careful with it as I would be, and it will probably save me some time from having to do my own backups and such. In the case of email, it would mean that I'm sick of running my own mailserver, worrying about whether I'm online or not, etc etc...
If your service goes down for a bit, I might be able to understand, especially if it's a one-time thing. But if you lose data, that means you're far less competent than -- oh -- my 16-year-old brother. And it means that the second I hear about it, I'll already be signing up with someone else, or building my own competing service.
How?
I understand GNOME can do a bar across the top, that has menus. I have not yet seen them be at all like OS X's menus (as in, a Firefox window which has no menus, but the bar across the top of the screen has Firefox menus)...
Great... That's also true of the Win32 API.
So where's the OS X port?
No, I know it's there. I mean the native one? Because last time I downloaded the Gimp for OS X, it was ultimately an X app, meaning I had to start up X11 (on top of OSX's windowing system) in order to run it. And for crying out loud, GTK stands for "Gimp ToolKit", so yes, I expect the Gimp to be a decent example of a GTK+ app.
I'll admit, there are worse choices than GTK+, but I'd say there are also better ones -- I'd point to wxwindows and QT. And also, with GTK+, I imagine you'd be taking a step backwards -- note how the Gimp doesn't (and can't) use OS X's own menu bar system, whereas Firefox on OS X does do that, and also uses native widgets in at least a few places.
As far as I'm concerned, a cross-platform app shouldn't feel like an app ported from its developers' favorite platform. It should just feel native. Being able to skin GTK+ to look like native Windows, for example, isn't what I want -- I want it to actually use whatever skin Windows is using at the moment, to the extent that I can change that.
Disclaimer: Considering how little sleep I've had lately, there's a fair chance half of what I've written here is wrong or made up...
Cracking DVDs is easy, and it helps fair use (playback on Linux, etc).
Cracking most of this stuff is, I'd imagine, significantly harder -- after all, it is possible for Apache to be secure, whereas it's not even close to possible for DVDs to be uncrackable.
That's ignoring the economics of it -- $15 per DVD? Fine, you just need to sell 1,067 copies and you've made $16k. That's assuming money was ever the point.