The Greek philosophers were not team players, they were each pretty self-centred.
Is that why Plato's Republic is all about improving society as a whole? I'll grant that the "team" of Pythagoras did cut themselves off from society, but that's another team.
Polytheism means that with many Gods you can have many truths
Nope, sorry. There might be many opinions about Aphrodite and Ares, but the "truth" that they had an affair is not up for debate.
All polytheism does is suggest that truth is ultimately independent of the gods -- or at least, of these gods.
Your argument that there is not a scientific "canon" seems pretty shallow to me. At the simplest level, there are journals that a university/RI wants you to publish in and those that they don't. That creates a canon.
No, that creates a university policy. There are other universities, if you really want to publish something in a questionable journal.
What you seem to be missing is that science is, fundamentally, not what we've discovered, but how we go about discovering things.
I can't link to a paper or set of statistics to support it because it's not that kind of information.
Not that kind of source, no. More like...
I'm just a guy on the internet who has done a fair bit of reading and sees these things as coming out of it.
You're asserting this:
That is that the idea of having an external, universal truth that you're searching for as a team; having a "canon" of accepted material documenting that truth; having institutionally-recognised experts who will teach students...
So, if you have any more examples like this -- and you can show that they actually came from religion, and not (as I think I've shown) that they predate monotheism, at the very least -- that would be a lot more interesting than "If you look at the history, you'll find..."
Yes, Firefox did that -- but Safari doesn't set the standard. There's nothing in the standard, at least when I looked into it, to suggest that there was anything wrong with a user-agent doing this:
Accept: */*
And at least one did that, while being capable of interpreting application/xhtml+xml.
You also ignored this point:
there wasn't any way for me to specify my preference on the server side, and there certainly wasn't a good way for a browser to say what it natively supports, what it can open in external programs, and what it can only download and bother the user about.
In other words: What do I do with a browser that has a lower q factor for xml than for html?
A q factor of 1.0 isn't good enough, though, when some browsers have */* at a q factor of 1.0.
So again: It's everyone's fault.
It's the fault of the spec for not defining a way for a user-agent to specify how it can handle a given format.
It's the fault of the browser vendors for getting this wrong, at least when I was doing it.
It's my fault for continuing to encourage this behavior by giving up and either using browser detection or delivering as text/html.
A more recent example: At least last I checked, Konqueror's XMLHttpRequest didn't deliver partial updates, at all, ever, making it useless for things like Comet. There are workarounds using things like hidden iframes, but they suck compared to an actual XMLHttpRequest. I should implement an abstraction layer that uses XHR when it works, and iframes when XHR isn't available (or at least, isn't reliable) -- but how do you suggest I detect that at runtime?
There just isn't a clean solution here. I agree with you in principal, but in practice, it can be difficult to detect a given behavior in a reliable way.
It is? How? They're both cables with single connectors on each end. I fail to see how one is significantly more difficult than the other.
Thumbscrews, and actual, isolated pins -- pins which can be bent. They also usually fit tighter, it's harder (visually and by touch) to figure out which end is up...
All of which is a difference of only a few seconds, at worst tens of seconds, but it adds up. When I leave my desk, I yank four cables out of the left side of my laptop, one out of the right, and maybe detach an ExpressCard. When I sit back down, I reconnect all of that. Anything I can do to make that process faster is a Good Thing.
You cart your laptop around to show movies? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's atypical. Maybe its time to get dad some real AV gear, eh?
When I'm not around, the DVR and DVD player are generally good enough. He got it mostly for sports, which explains the lack of a Blu-Ray player.
You know, something you can slap a thumb drive into? Instead of... [laughing] your whole laptop?
If we know exactly what we're going to watch, and it's something already downloaded, sure, a thumb drive is easier.
If it's something on YouTube, or if we just want to browse the fileserver I've got running in the next room, yeah, a laptop is much easier.
A home theater computer would be much better, and if it was my entertainment center, you can bet I'd have one -- but that's also either a constant power drain or a boot time, and it's something he'd likely never use.
I just don't think there's anything so awful about plugging in three colored RCA cables into the three matching colored jacks... plus an optical cable... plus an ethernet cable... as compared to a single HDMI cable and an ethernet cable.
I think you just made my point for me.
Awful? No. But mildly inconvenient. HDMI isn't earth-shattering for this case, but what's the downside?
What will you do when faced with something complex, like making a sandwich...
If someone hands me a sandwich, I'm not likely to throw it out and make my own.
Again, it's not that HDMI is such a massive improvement. It's that it's an improvement in every way that I actually care about, and I haven't really heard of many cases where it's not, other than analog displays.
It has to do with HDMI vs. component.
And why would you prefer an analog signal?
What do I care what you do? My interest is what you *claim*, because that influences others.
Glad to hear you think so much of me, but...
Nothing wrong with analog (meaning component video) that isn't something done by fiat.
And here's where I disagree -- I'd much rather have a signal which is kept digital, thus essentially noiseless, until it enters the TV (which is itself set to handle digital), than a split from digital to analog and back.
it can easily be spidered out to multiple monitors / switches, etc.
HDMI splitters don't seem hard to find. Is there something wrong with them? (That's not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know...)
It doesn't have an HDCP-capable video card? Is it running FOSS all the way down? No it isn't, or are you actually running gNewSense?
And do you just not watch movies? Or do you make sure to only watch them in theaters? Only theaters which use analog reels, so you can be sure there's no DRM? And of course, your ticket price would be going to MPAA members...
Do you see where this is going? It's not impossible to avoid letting a single cent of your purchase end up with these asshats, but it's pretty damned hard.
In other words, you degrade all content, DRM'd or not, to avoid only having some content degraded? You rebel, you...
No. The DRM applies and degrades (or blocks it entirely) the video signal unless your computer, os, software and monitor are HDCP-approved.
Not true, it can be set to "optional", in which it will be applied if all components support HDCP, and won't if they aren't.
But of course, no one's holding you down and forcing you to buy DRM'd content. I can see not wanting to support the technologies involved, but I find it hard to justify not buying anything that's capable of DRM.
To the first, I almost had to toss the bullshit flag.
The first is true at a hardware level, at least. It's not just that it resembles DVI -- it actually is a DVI signal.
First, by tying the audio into the cable, it really ties my hands with how I want to design my system. Perhaps I want to run the audio to a receiver or processor first instead of to my television?
That should be trivial to change.
And it would be nice if there was a simple box to split these off -- HDMI on one end, with HDMI, audio, and ethernet on the other. That way, you still get the single cable to plug into the actual device you want to use (laptop, console, whatever), but you'd get as much flexibility as before about where they go. (Of course, that assumes only one input/output...)
your video card (NVIDIA in this case) would turn OFF your audio ports except over HDMI, of course, since my card didn't support audio over HDMI, it just output a 0 for the audio signal. I had to hack the drivers and EDID in order to trick my computer into thinking my display couldn't support HDMI audio. Every time I want to update my drivers, I have to edit the driver. This issue has been around for years, was fixed in some driver versions, reverted in others.
Oh. Ew. I do have an nVidia card, and I can say with some certainty that the Linux drivers do not have this issue -- though it's also possible that my laptop doesn't support audio over HDMI.
No, I much preferred DVI (Thumbscrews were great especially if you used a laptop)
Sorry, I just don't get it. Do you also prefer a serial port to USB?
puts a lot of pressure in the wrong places and is easily dislodged.
I don't know about "pressure in the wrong places", but I certainly haven't seen it dislodged.
In any case, I think the point stands -- your complaints all have nothing whatsoever to do with HDCP. I'm not claiming it's perfect, but I really hate when people get the two confused.
That depends how "promptly" you really need, and how much you care about memory usage.
One common performance hack is to use an allocation pool specifically for your own application, so you can malloc/free in large chunks.
But garbage collection does exactly that, it just doesn't require you to manually track memory. It might even be faster at it -- you may shudder at the thought of stopping the world to collect garbage, but consider that while garbage collection is idle, you have very little memory-related code running at all, meaning your code is smaller and faster -- significantly so, when it means fewer cache misses. The garbage collector itself could likely fit into cache while it's running.
There is something garbage collection can't account for, and that's freeing an object as soon as you're done with it -- but people often override malloc/free with some sort of pool management system. I suppose you could make the point that it's useful to free memory back to the system as soon as possible, but then, malloc/free, at the system level, have garbage-collection-like performance characteristics.
About the only reasonable argument I can think of in favor of manual memory management is the same argument that's in favor of assembly language -- programmers are by definition better at deciding what should go into registers than compilers are, in that programmers could, at the very least, take the output of a compiler and hand-optimize it. People do still hand-tune performance-critical bits in assembly, and I think the ones who are doing it right are hand-tuning performance-critical bits in C, as is often the case in Perl, Python, and Ruby.
But so far, I'm only comparing which gives you a faster system, in terms of either memory or CPU. I think GC is close enough, and often faster than manual memory management -- but even if it was a 2x or 4x performance hit, I'd much rather have a program even ten times slower that never segfaults or leaks memory.
Will Perl 6 be good enough, and come with enough supporting software like web frameworks, to steal mindshare back from those communities?
That depends. Do you want it to be?
Ruby was around for quite awhile before Rails. Rails put it on the map, in a world that already had PHP, Python, Perl, Java,.NET... and Ruby, of course.
Now, at the moment, I don't particularly care about Perl6 -- it's on my radar as "interesting", but not really where I want it to be, yet. The same is true of Parrot, and it continues to surprise me that no one cares much about it -- implementations like Cadinal (Ruby on Parrot) seem to have died. Still, a killer app/framework could change my mind.
Generally, the reason I'd post something to somewhere like Github is precisely because I want the public to see it. If you want a private version, it's trivial to create a private branch and never push it to Github, or even push it to somewhere else.
This isn't like Facebook. Leave Github, and you may lose some of the additional tools (like issue tracking, wikis, etc), but you don't lose the code at all -- if you have even a single checkout of your code, you have the entire version history.
Oh, and Github doesn't insist on the GPL, as far as I know.
Define "install". I carry my laptop to class, but I have a monitor in my dorm. HDMI is a hell of a lot easier to connect than DVI. If I could get it to do gigabit ethernet, that'd be even better, but I doubt my laptop supports that.
My father has something like a 60" plasma screen, and it's just as easy to connect to that -- but I'm sure as hell not "installing" my laptop into his entertainment center. I'm taking it with me when we're done watching the movie I brought.
In addition, people seem to carry around game consoles more than you'd think -- take the above TV example. If I owned a console, I'd likely play it on a monitor or a small-ish TV, but I certainly wouldn't mind picking it up and carrying it to plug into a bigger TV for a few hours, say, for a party.
So...
It's *really* not a problem
Yes, it really is. It's not a big problem, it's not a problem most people care about. But it's enough of a problem that I can't think of a rational reason not to spend $5 on a cable. (Yes, I know they're $80-100 in Best Buy. They're $5-20 on Newegg.)
HDCP, on the other hand, is REALLY a problem
Maybe, but WTF does it have to do with HDMI? It works just as well over DVI, and HDMI doesn't require it. In fact, the video component of HDMI is DVI, essentially, just in a more convenient form factor. DisplayPort supports HDCP as well as its own DRM, DPCP.
So, what, should I go back to analog to avoid the DRM?
No, that'd be just as moronic as avoiding a DVD burner and black DVD media because you don't like DVD CSS.
Hell, as far as I recall, HDMI was the one that locked down everything with DRM and would no longer work with older devices.
Please, please stop spreading this bullshit, and start correcting people when they repeat it.
How hard is it to tell the difference between HDMI and HDCP?
HDMI -- DVI plus audio, maybe plus ethernet, in a neater form factor. HDCP -- encrypted video signal, which works over DVI just as well as over HDMI.
If you're currently using DVI instead of HDMI because you're afraid of the DRM, you're a moron. Again: It's just DVI which is easier to plug in. It doesn't do DRM unless your video card, OS, and monitor all agree to do so.
I'm sorry if I'm overreacting, but EVERY FUCKING SLASHDOT ARTICLE that mentions HDMI, there's at least two people who confuse it with HDCP. That's like refusing to buy a DVD burner for backup because you're afraid of DRM on DVDs.
Depends what you mean by "work" -- for example, I want my HDMI cables to support 1080p, even if I only use it for a 1080i signal right now. I don't want to have to take it back years later, when I try to plug it into a different source.
Or maybe just someone who actually knows what HDMI is?
Hint: It's got nothing to do with HDCP, which is what you're bitching about. HDCP is DRM on the video signal, and it works just as well over plain old DVI as HDMI.
So when I plug my laptop (with a FOSS OS and a decent p2p setup) into my external monitor, why should I deal with all the extra pins and thumb screws and sheer bulkiness of a DVI cable, compared with the convenience of HDMI? For me, HDMI is basically DVI in a better form factor.
1. OpenJDK is GPL'd, so I don't know where you get that. And both Sun and openjdk are available via Ubuntu's package manager.
2. So what?
3. You clearly don't understand why Oracle cares about Java. It's not about the compiler any more than Microsoft Visual Studio is about the compiler. It's about all the other shit Oracle has that runs on Java -- here's an example. I don't particularly like these products (having been forced to work with Oracle ADF over the summer), but they all cost large amounts of money, and they all run on Java.
Given that, Oracle needs Java to work. And given that, open source or not, they need key Java people.
It's true, you shouldn't detect browsers based on user-agent.
But then, the other ways aren't terribly reliable. I remember, once upon a time, trying to find "The Right Way" to deliver XHTML with an XML mime type for browsers capable of it, and as HTML for everyone else.
There isn't a right way.
The closest I got was the Accept header. The problem here is that every single browser out there sends a */*, because every browser can accept downloads. At the time, I remember one browser (can't remember which, maybe Safari) sent a */* and nothing else -- while others sent a string explicitly mentioning a few and assigning priorities to them.
The problem was, there wasn't any way for me to specify my preference on the server side, and there certainly wasn't a good way for a browser to say what it natively supports, what it can open in external programs, and what it can only download and bother the user about. All I could do is follow the browser's own preferences, and feed it whatever it ranked highest -- and even then, I'd have to prefer text/html (even though I really prefer application/xhtml+xml) for those browsers which don't specify preferring html to */*, but really don't support xhtml...
At the end of the day, my options were pretty much to either stop caring about the standards, or interpret them in a very non-standard way, or use User-Agent detection, or just give up and serve it as text/html.
And that's just getting the thing to render. It only gets messier from there...
So yes, it's my fault, as a web developer, that I might fall back on user-agent detection -- and, in particular, I'm likely to detect IE so I can work around some of its many deficiencies. It's also the fault of the standards for not defining clearer ways to negotiate capabilities. It's also the fault of browsers for not following what standards do exist.
I certainly try to avoid browser detection and focus on feature detection, as you suggest. But your blanket statement, like many blanket statements, is just wrong.
Religious thought has the genesis of the idea that there are things worth searching for that are objective, independent of human regard...
I would guess it's quite the other way around -- religious thought is a reaction to thoughts about things worth searching for which are objective and independent of human regard.
But I don't know that, so if you have some evidence for this, I'd love to hear it...
That you might sacrifice base hedonism for a lifestyle that works towards some sort of external goal.
This, too, doesn't seem to need or much benefit from religion. While I don't know if I agree that it was a good cause, this movie presents a story of several people, some opposed, all intensely passionate about their cause. The true story highlights some of the same themes...
While there is a mention of "heaven", the "all under heaven" is just a literal reading, which could be translated as "our land." And again, I don't know if I agree with the cause, and I don't particularly like the result, but none of those people were working either out of a religious motivation, or out of "pure hedonism." You don't build an empire because you personally want to live in comfort and debauchery, you build an empire because, for whatever reason, you care about what happens after you die.
Beowulf is probably a better example, though as far as we know, entirely fictional -- the entire purpose of Beowulf's quest was to become a legend -- to do so much good, or at least kill so many monsters, that people would be singing songs of him for generations. And while I don't know if there was a real Beowulf, it's kind of interesting that we still study his story -- so, real or not, he won.
The monotheistic bit is the organising under a shared set of values - and spreading them imperially. It (forcibly) focused society into a machine.
Not a particularly well-functioning one, though -- there's a reason we call it "The Dark Ages." And the people who led the way out of that were very often people who didn't fit the machine at all -- Newton was the original absentminded professor.
And again, you can force society into a machine without the dogmatic baggage, if you really think it's a good idea -- see the King of Qin above.
the idea of having an external, universal truth that you're searching for as a team; having a "canon" of accepted material documenting that truth; having institutionally-recognised experts who will teach students - these all come from monotheism.
What? Really? Please, cite sources if you can, because that'd be really interesting -- because this seems to fall apart with armchair analysis:
external, universal truth
That's hardly a new idea -- indeed, that's how humans function, whatever religion they have or don't. Please explain what worldview existed before monotheism in which there was no such truth -- in which there might be many truths. In particular...
external, universal truth that you're searching for as a team
The Greek philosophers definitely did that.
having a "canon" of accepted material documenting that truth
Here, you're wrong on both counts -- the Greeks had the Iliad and the Odyssey, but science actually doesn't have any sort of "canon" in the sense you describe. For example, the Discovery Institute has their own "peer-reviewed" journal, it's just that the vast majority of scientists know better than to give it any credibility -- but there's nothing top-down about that decision.
There's no one central committee that decides what is and is not science, there's as many as there are peer-reviewed journals (legitimate or not), and likely a good deal more, each with their own ideas about what is and is not good science.
You could still draw a line between this and the fact that there are thousands of individual denominations of Christianity, each with their own idea of what is and is not true -- except that peer-review isn't about deciding any sort of absolute truth. Instead, it's all about ensuring that a paper is consistent, well-supported by evidence, that the evidence was collected properly (with proper controls), and so on -- and any conclusion is subject to further evidence.
having institutionally-recognised experts who will teach students
I think the Platonic Academy is an example of this, and it's hardly the first. I assume that these institutions of higher learning would have, by definition, "institutionally-recognized experts."
Oh, and you're doing it wrong:
Well, I guess my stated source was "the history of science", and you could look at it yourself and see.
I did. Do you have any actual sources?
Now, I don't mean to say that religious institutions never had a role in any kind of science, but every singular thing you mentioned, I've found either a secular or, at best, polytheistic origin. So again, I'd be really curious where you're drawing the connection.
(Atheists often think that Christian == fundamentalist, which simply isn't true.)
As an atheist and a skeptic, I doubt that.
I have many Christian friends, and they aren't fundamentalist. However, I've noticed two things:
First, even the "non-fundamentalist" ones, when they're willing to talk about religion, tend to range from not being able to put forward a coherent opinion, to outright insulting. You've been a great example of both.
Second, the more liberal Christians just strike me as less true to their religion. I can understand the Bible being partly metaphor, but then, where do you draw the line? How do you know what's metaphor and what's not? Even if something is metaphor, under what context is Detueronomy 22:23-29 moral, and exactly what is 2 Kings 2:23-24 supposed to be a metaphor of? If you're going to just selectively pick out the parts you like and agree with, why not be more honest about it and do what Jefferson did?
Of course, you dropped a strawman right here...
I'm not sure it's more logical to say that the universe created itself than it was created by someone, but to each his own, I guess.
False dichotomy, too. I don't know that anyone claims the universe created itself, and your only alternative is "someone"? Not even just "something", but "someone"?
Yeah, I'm an atheist but atheism is developing its own dogmatism
As an atheist and a skeptic, I have to ask, what's your evidence for that?
In fact, atheism, by definition, cannot be a dogma. You're an example of this -- atheists can't even all agree on what to call themselves, though the word itself is simple and unambiguous.
getting in people's faces about their religion is as bad as when religious folks get in ours about our lack of belief.
But let's get real -- we're not doing this. It's more like this. I have honestly never seen an atheist be militant in the sense that believers are every day.
If we show more respect for one another,maybe,just maybe most folks will chill.
I can respect you as a person, but I will ridicule your ridiculous ideas.
That goes for most people, but unfortunately, most people are incapable of seeing the difference.
Here's the funny part -- you probably agree with most of what I just said. In fact, you probably agree with the GP -- you agree that religion is a delusion, you just don't want to say it like that, because you don't want to offend people.
I'd recommend reading Peter Kreeft's list of arguments on both sides.
I saw him live. It was pretty fantastically disappointing. He's a philosopher, but he brings up Pascal? Really?
Islamic thinkers used pure reason to derive the fact that our universe had to have an origin, and thus that the universe tended to show evidence of God...
You know, I could provide a trivial refutation of Kalam, as so many here has, and as even part of that Wikipedia page does, but I think I'm going to have to stop you right here, because you have done something fairly stupid right off the bat.
It's a syllogism with two premises and a conclusion. Here are the two premises:
Whatever began to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist.
So I'm sorry, you cannot use that as "pure reason to derive the fact that our universe had to have an origin" -- it uses that as a premise. If it sought to establish that, it'd be inherently circular.
Scientists, especially atheist scientists, used their "faith" that God doesn't exist...
Do you even know what it is you're arguing against?
Atheism is the lack of belief in a god, not the positive belief that there is no God. I have no "faith" in this, and indeed, if you can show me evidence, I will believe, to the extent warranted by that evidence.
But be aware that Kalam, even if it were true, says nothing about the cause, only that there had to be one. And read the article you linked -- even William Lane Craig admits that the first premise is mere intuition, and our intuitions tend to break down at cosmological time scales. Is it intuitively obvious that even time should be relative to the speed of light?
I'm sure these arguments don't fit into the pretty little preconstructed world you've built for yourself,
You mean the one I discovered by examining what was actually out there? There was a "preconstructed world" handed to me by my parents, and I rejected that.
Slashdot Mirror
The Greek philosophers were not team players, they were each pretty self-centred.
Is that why Plato's Republic is all about improving society as a whole? I'll grant that the "team" of Pythagoras did cut themselves off from society, but that's another team.
Polytheism means that with many Gods you can have many truths
Nope, sorry. There might be many opinions about Aphrodite and Ares, but the "truth" that they had an affair is not up for debate.
All polytheism does is suggest that truth is ultimately independent of the gods -- or at least, of these gods.
Your argument that there is not a scientific "canon" seems pretty shallow to me. At the simplest level, there are journals that a university/RI wants you to publish in and those that they don't. That creates a canon.
No, that creates a university policy. There are other universities, if you really want to publish something in a questionable journal.
What you seem to be missing is that science is, fundamentally, not what we've discovered, but how we go about discovering things.
I can't link to a paper or set of statistics to support it because it's not that kind of information.
Not that kind of source, no. More like...
I'm just a guy on the internet who has done a fair bit of reading and sees these things as coming out of it.
You're asserting this:
That is that the idea of having an external, universal truth that you're searching for as a team; having a "canon" of accepted material documenting that truth; having institutionally-recognised experts who will teach students...
So, if you have any more examples like this -- and you can show that they actually came from religion, and not (as I think I've shown) that they predate monotheism, at the very least -- that would be a lot more interesting than "If you look at the history, you'll find..."
Yes, Firefox did that -- but Safari doesn't set the standard. There's nothing in the standard, at least when I looked into it, to suggest that there was anything wrong with a user-agent doing this:
Accept: */*
And at least one did that, while being capable of interpreting application/xhtml+xml.
You also ignored this point:
there wasn't any way for me to specify my preference on the server side, and there certainly wasn't a good way for a browser to say what it natively supports, what it can open in external programs, and what it can only download and bother the user about.
In other words: What do I do with a browser that has a lower q factor for xml than for html?
A q factor of 1.0 isn't good enough, though, when some browsers have */* at a q factor of 1.0.
So again: It's everyone's fault.
It's the fault of the spec for not defining a way for a user-agent to specify how it can handle a given format.
It's the fault of the browser vendors for getting this wrong, at least when I was doing it.
It's my fault for continuing to encourage this behavior by giving up and either using browser detection or delivering as text/html.
A more recent example: At least last I checked, Konqueror's XMLHttpRequest didn't deliver partial updates, at all, ever, making it useless for things like Comet. There are workarounds using things like hidden iframes, but they suck compared to an actual XMLHttpRequest. I should implement an abstraction layer that uses XHR when it works, and iframes when XHR isn't available (or at least, isn't reliable) -- but how do you suggest I detect that at runtime?
There just isn't a clean solution here. I agree with you in principal, but in practice, it can be difficult to detect a given behavior in a reliable way.
It is? How? They're both cables with single connectors on each end. I fail to see how one is significantly more difficult than the other.
Thumbscrews, and actual, isolated pins -- pins which can be bent. They also usually fit tighter, it's harder (visually and by touch) to figure out which end is up...
All of which is a difference of only a few seconds, at worst tens of seconds, but it adds up. When I leave my desk, I yank four cables out of the left side of my laptop, one out of the right, and maybe detach an ExpressCard. When I sit back down, I reconnect all of that. Anything I can do to make that process faster is a Good Thing.
You cart your laptop around to show movies? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's atypical. Maybe its time to get dad some real AV gear, eh?
When I'm not around, the DVR and DVD player are generally good enough. He got it mostly for sports, which explains the lack of a Blu-Ray player.
You know, something you can slap a thumb drive into? Instead of... [laughing] your whole laptop?
If we know exactly what we're going to watch, and it's something already downloaded, sure, a thumb drive is easier.
If it's something on YouTube, or if we just want to browse the fileserver I've got running in the next room, yeah, a laptop is much easier.
A home theater computer would be much better, and if it was my entertainment center, you can bet I'd have one -- but that's also either a constant power drain or a boot time, and it's something he'd likely never use.
I just don't think there's anything so awful about plugging in three colored RCA cables into the three matching colored jacks... plus an optical cable... plus an ethernet cable... as compared to a single HDMI cable and an ethernet cable.
I think you just made my point for me.
Awful? No. But mildly inconvenient. HDMI isn't earth-shattering for this case, but what's the downside?
What will you do when faced with something complex, like making a sandwich...
If someone hands me a sandwich, I'm not likely to throw it out and make my own.
Again, it's not that HDMI is such a massive improvement. It's that it's an improvement in every way that I actually care about, and I haven't really heard of many cases where it's not, other than analog displays.
It has to do with HDMI vs. component.
And why would you prefer an analog signal?
What do I care what you do? My interest is what you *claim*, because that influences others.
Glad to hear you think so much of me, but...
Nothing wrong with analog (meaning component video) that isn't something done by fiat.
And here's where I disagree -- I'd much rather have a signal which is kept digital, thus essentially noiseless, until it enters the TV (which is itself set to handle digital), than a split from digital to analog and back.
it can easily be spidered out to multiple monitors / switches, etc.
HDMI splitters don't seem hard to find. Is there something wrong with them? (That's not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know...)
Fine, it's just DVI-D with a different connector.
Does that actually matter?
If you're avoiding HDMI because you wanted an analog signal, isn't VGA good enough? And that's still got nothing whatsoever to do with HDCP.
So, the computer that you're posting this from...
It doesn't have an HDCP-capable video card? Is it running FOSS all the way down? No it isn't, or are you actually running gNewSense?
And do you just not watch movies? Or do you make sure to only watch them in theaters? Only theaters which use analog reels, so you can be sure there's no DRM? And of course, your ticket price would be going to MPAA members...
Do you see where this is going? It's not impossible to avoid letting a single cent of your purchase end up with these asshats, but it's pretty damned hard.
I use genuine VGA to avoid this DRM crap :)
In other words, you degrade all content, DRM'd or not, to avoid only having some content degraded? You rebel, you...
No. The DRM applies and degrades (or blocks it entirely) the video signal unless your computer, os, software and monitor are HDCP-approved.
Not true, it can be set to "optional", in which it will be applied if all components support HDCP, and won't if they aren't.
But of course, no one's holding you down and forcing you to buy DRM'd content. I can see not wanting to support the technologies involved, but I find it hard to justify not buying anything that's capable of DRM.
To the first, I almost had to toss the bullshit flag.
The first is true at a hardware level, at least. It's not just that it resembles DVI -- it actually is a DVI signal.
First, by tying the audio into the cable, it really ties my hands with how I want to design my system. Perhaps I want to run the audio to a receiver or processor first instead of to my television?
That should be trivial to change.
And it would be nice if there was a simple box to split these off -- HDMI on one end, with HDMI, audio, and ethernet on the other. That way, you still get the single cable to plug into the actual device you want to use (laptop, console, whatever), but you'd get as much flexibility as before about where they go. (Of course, that assumes only one input/output...)
your video card (NVIDIA in this case) would turn OFF your audio ports except over HDMI, of course, since my card didn't support audio over HDMI, it just output a 0 for the audio signal. I had to hack the drivers and EDID in order to trick my computer into thinking my display couldn't support HDMI audio. Every time I want to update my drivers, I have to edit the driver. This issue has been around for years, was fixed in some driver versions, reverted in others.
Oh. Ew. I do have an nVidia card, and I can say with some certainty that the Linux drivers do not have this issue -- though it's also possible that my laptop doesn't support audio over HDMI.
No, I much preferred DVI (Thumbscrews were great especially if you used a laptop)
Sorry, I just don't get it. Do you also prefer a serial port to USB?
puts a lot of pressure in the wrong places and is easily dislodged.
I don't know about "pressure in the wrong places", but I certainly haven't seen it dislodged.
In any case, I think the point stands -- your complaints all have nothing whatsoever to do with HDCP. I'm not claiming it's perfect, but I really hate when people get the two confused.
That depends how "promptly" you really need, and how much you care about memory usage.
One common performance hack is to use an allocation pool specifically for your own application, so you can malloc/free in large chunks.
But garbage collection does exactly that, it just doesn't require you to manually track memory. It might even be faster at it -- you may shudder at the thought of stopping the world to collect garbage, but consider that while garbage collection is idle, you have very little memory-related code running at all, meaning your code is smaller and faster -- significantly so, when it means fewer cache misses. The garbage collector itself could likely fit into cache while it's running.
There is something garbage collection can't account for, and that's freeing an object as soon as you're done with it -- but people often override malloc/free with some sort of pool management system. I suppose you could make the point that it's useful to free memory back to the system as soon as possible, but then, malloc/free, at the system level, have garbage-collection-like performance characteristics.
About the only reasonable argument I can think of in favor of manual memory management is the same argument that's in favor of assembly language -- programmers are by definition better at deciding what should go into registers than compilers are, in that programmers could, at the very least, take the output of a compiler and hand-optimize it. People do still hand-tune performance-critical bits in assembly, and I think the ones who are doing it right are hand-tuning performance-critical bits in C, as is often the case in Perl, Python, and Ruby.
But so far, I'm only comparing which gives you a faster system, in terms of either memory or CPU. I think GC is close enough, and often faster than manual memory management -- but even if it was a 2x or 4x performance hit, I'd much rather have a program even ten times slower that never segfaults or leaks memory.
You know, that would be great if it was actually executable, and I've seen worse-looking intentionally-obfuscated Perl.
Unfortunately, it isn't actually executable, at least as far as I can tell.
Will Perl 6 be good enough, and come with enough supporting software like web frameworks, to steal mindshare back from those communities?
That depends. Do you want it to be?
Ruby was around for quite awhile before Rails. Rails put it on the map, in a world that already had PHP, Python, Perl, Java, .NET... and Ruby, of course.
Now, at the moment, I don't particularly care about Perl6 -- it's on my radar as "interesting", but not really where I want it to be, yet. The same is true of Parrot, and it continues to surprise me that no one cares much about it -- implementations like Cadinal (Ruby on Parrot) seem to have died. Still, a killer app/framework could change my mind.
Generally, the reason I'd post something to somewhere like Github is precisely because I want the public to see it. If you want a private version, it's trivial to create a private branch and never push it to Github, or even push it to somewhere else.
This isn't like Facebook. Leave Github, and you may lose some of the additional tools (like issue tracking, wikis, etc), but you don't lose the code at all -- if you have even a single checkout of your code, you have the entire version history.
Oh, and Github doesn't insist on the GPL, as far as I know.
You only fool with them at install time
Define "install". I carry my laptop to class, but I have a monitor in my dorm. HDMI is a hell of a lot easier to connect than DVI. If I could get it to do gigabit ethernet, that'd be even better, but I doubt my laptop supports that.
My father has something like a 60" plasma screen, and it's just as easy to connect to that -- but I'm sure as hell not "installing" my laptop into his entertainment center. I'm taking it with me when we're done watching the movie I brought.
In addition, people seem to carry around game consoles more than you'd think -- take the above TV example. If I owned a console, I'd likely play it on a monitor or a small-ish TV, but I certainly wouldn't mind picking it up and carrying it to plug into a bigger TV for a few hours, say, for a party.
So...
It's *really* not a problem
Yes, it really is. It's not a big problem, it's not a problem most people care about. But it's enough of a problem that I can't think of a rational reason not to spend $5 on a cable. (Yes, I know they're $80-100 in Best Buy. They're $5-20 on Newegg.)
HDCP, on the other hand, is REALLY a problem
Maybe, but WTF does it have to do with HDMI? It works just as well over DVI, and HDMI doesn't require it. In fact, the video component of HDMI is DVI, essentially, just in a more convenient form factor. DisplayPort supports HDCP as well as its own DRM, DPCP.
So, what, should I go back to analog to avoid the DRM?
No, that'd be just as moronic as avoiding a DVD burner and black DVD media because you don't like DVD CSS.
Hell, as far as I recall, HDMI was the one that locked down everything with DRM and would no longer work with older devices.
Please, please stop spreading this bullshit, and start correcting people when they repeat it.
How hard is it to tell the difference between HDMI and HDCP?
HDMI -- DVI plus audio, maybe plus ethernet, in a neater form factor.
HDCP -- encrypted video signal, which works over DVI just as well as over HDMI.
If you're currently using DVI instead of HDMI because you're afraid of the DRM, you're a moron. Again: It's just DVI which is easier to plug in. It doesn't do DRM unless your video card, OS, and monitor all agree to do so.
I'm sorry if I'm overreacting, but EVERY FUCKING SLASHDOT ARTICLE that mentions HDMI, there's at least two people who confuse it with HDCP. That's like refusing to buy a DVD burner for backup because you're afraid of DRM on DVDs.
Depends what you mean by "work" -- for example, I want my HDMI cables to support 1080p, even if I only use it for a 1080i signal right now. I don't want to have to take it back years later, when I try to plug it into a different source.
Or maybe just someone who actually knows what HDMI is?
Hint: It's got nothing to do with HDCP, which is what you're bitching about. HDCP is DRM on the video signal, and it works just as well over plain old DVI as HDMI.
So when I plug my laptop (with a FOSS OS and a decent p2p setup) into my external monitor, why should I deal with all the extra pins and thumb screws and sheer bulkiness of a DVI cable, compared with the convenience of HDMI? For me, HDMI is basically DVI in a better form factor.
1. OpenJDK is GPL'd, so I don't know where you get that. And both Sun and openjdk are available via Ubuntu's package manager.
2. So what?
3. You clearly don't understand why Oracle cares about Java. It's not about the compiler any more than Microsoft Visual Studio is about the compiler. It's about all the other shit Oracle has that runs on Java -- here's an example. I don't particularly like these products (having been forced to work with Oracle ADF over the summer), but they all cost large amounts of money, and they all run on Java.
Given that, Oracle needs Java to work. And given that, open source or not, they need key Java people.
Sorry, what's "proper" about manual garbage collection? Is that like blaming C for forgoing proper registry management?
It's true, you shouldn't detect browsers based on user-agent.
But then, the other ways aren't terribly reliable. I remember, once upon a time, trying to find "The Right Way" to deliver XHTML with an XML mime type for browsers capable of it, and as HTML for everyone else.
There isn't a right way.
The closest I got was the Accept header. The problem here is that every single browser out there sends a */*, because every browser can accept downloads. At the time, I remember one browser (can't remember which, maybe Safari) sent a */* and nothing else -- while others sent a string explicitly mentioning a few and assigning priorities to them.
The problem was, there wasn't any way for me to specify my preference on the server side, and there certainly wasn't a good way for a browser to say what it natively supports, what it can open in external programs, and what it can only download and bother the user about. All I could do is follow the browser's own preferences, and feed it whatever it ranked highest -- and even then, I'd have to prefer text/html (even though I really prefer application/xhtml+xml) for those browsers which don't specify preferring html to */*, but really don't support xhtml...
At the end of the day, my options were pretty much to either stop caring about the standards, or interpret them in a very non-standard way, or use User-Agent detection, or just give up and serve it as text/html.
And that's just getting the thing to render. It only gets messier from there...
So yes, it's my fault, as a web developer, that I might fall back on user-agent detection -- and, in particular, I'm likely to detect IE so I can work around some of its many deficiencies. It's also the fault of the standards for not defining clearer ways to negotiate capabilities. It's also the fault of browsers for not following what standards do exist.
I certainly try to avoid browser detection and focus on feature detection, as you suggest. But your blanket statement, like many blanket statements, is just wrong.
Religious thought has the genesis of the idea that there are things worth searching for that are objective, independent of human regard...
I would guess it's quite the other way around -- religious thought is a reaction to thoughts about things worth searching for which are objective and independent of human regard.
But I don't know that, so if you have some evidence for this, I'd love to hear it...
That you might sacrifice base hedonism for a lifestyle that works towards some sort of external goal.
This, too, doesn't seem to need or much benefit from religion. While I don't know if I agree that it was a good cause, this movie presents a story of several people, some opposed, all intensely passionate about their cause. The true story highlights some of the same themes...
While there is a mention of "heaven", the "all under heaven" is just a literal reading, which could be translated as "our land." And again, I don't know if I agree with the cause, and I don't particularly like the result, but none of those people were working either out of a religious motivation, or out of "pure hedonism." You don't build an empire because you personally want to live in comfort and debauchery, you build an empire because, for whatever reason, you care about what happens after you die.
Beowulf is probably a better example, though as far as we know, entirely fictional -- the entire purpose of Beowulf's quest was to become a legend -- to do so much good, or at least kill so many monsters, that people would be singing songs of him for generations. And while I don't know if there was a real Beowulf, it's kind of interesting that we still study his story -- so, real or not, he won.
The monotheistic bit is the organising under a shared set of values - and spreading them imperially. It (forcibly) focused society into a machine.
Not a particularly well-functioning one, though -- there's a reason we call it "The Dark Ages." And the people who led the way out of that were very often people who didn't fit the machine at all -- Newton was the original absentminded professor.
And again, you can force society into a machine without the dogmatic baggage, if you really think it's a good idea -- see the King of Qin above.
the idea of having an external, universal truth that you're searching for as a team; having a "canon" of accepted material documenting that truth; having institutionally-recognised experts who will teach students - these all come from monotheism.
What? Really? Please, cite sources if you can, because that'd be really interesting -- because this seems to fall apart with armchair analysis:
external, universal truth
That's hardly a new idea -- indeed, that's how humans function, whatever religion they have or don't. Please explain what worldview existed before monotheism in which there was no such truth -- in which there might be many truths. In particular...
external, universal truth that you're searching for as a team
The Greek philosophers definitely did that.
having a "canon" of accepted material documenting that truth
Here, you're wrong on both counts -- the Greeks had the Iliad and the Odyssey, but science actually doesn't have any sort of "canon" in the sense you describe. For example, the Discovery Institute has their own "peer-reviewed" journal, it's just that the vast majority of scientists know better than to give it any credibility -- but there's nothing top-down about that decision.
There's no one central committee that decides what is and is not science, there's as many as there are peer-reviewed journals (legitimate or not), and likely a good deal more, each with their own ideas about what is and is not good science.
You could still draw a line between this and the fact that there are thousands of individual denominations of Christianity, each with their own idea of what is and is not true -- except that peer-review isn't about deciding any sort of absolute truth. Instead, it's all about ensuring that a paper is consistent, well-supported by evidence, that the evidence was collected properly (with proper controls), and so on -- and any conclusion is subject to further evidence.
having institutionally-recognised experts who will teach students
I think the Platonic Academy is an example of this, and it's hardly the first. I assume that these institutions of higher learning would have, by definition, "institutionally-recognized experts."
Oh, and you're doing it wrong:
Well, I guess my stated source was "the history of science", and you could look at it yourself and see.
I did. Do you have any actual sources?
Now, I don't mean to say that religious institutions never had a role in any kind of science, but every singular thing you mentioned, I've found either a secular or, at best, polytheistic origin. So again, I'd be really curious where you're drawing the connection.
(Atheists often think that Christian == fundamentalist, which simply isn't true.)
As an atheist and a skeptic, I doubt that.
I have many Christian friends, and they aren't fundamentalist. However, I've noticed two things:
First, even the "non-fundamentalist" ones, when they're willing to talk about religion, tend to range from not being able to put forward a coherent opinion, to outright insulting. You've been a great example of both.
Second, the more liberal Christians just strike me as less true to their religion. I can understand the Bible being partly metaphor, but then, where do you draw the line? How do you know what's metaphor and what's not? Even if something is metaphor, under what context is Detueronomy 22:23-29 moral, and exactly what is 2 Kings 2:23-24 supposed to be a metaphor of? If you're going to just selectively pick out the parts you like and agree with, why not be more honest about it and do what Jefferson did?
Of course, you dropped a strawman right here...
I'm not sure it's more logical to say that the universe created itself than it was created by someone, but to each his own, I guess.
False dichotomy, too. I don't know that anyone claims the universe created itself, and your only alternative is "someone"? Not even just "something", but "someone"?
I've got to ask...
What do you mean by "agnostic"? And what do you think "fundamentalist atheism" looks like?
And how do you know that this god is outside of time? If it's outside of time and outside of causality, how would it initiate a causal event?
Yeah, I'm an atheist but atheism is developing its own dogmatism
As an atheist and a skeptic, I have to ask, what's your evidence for that?
In fact, atheism, by definition, cannot be a dogma. You're an example of this -- atheists can't even all agree on what to call themselves, though the word itself is simple and unambiguous.
getting in people's faces about their religion is as bad as when religious folks get in ours about our lack of belief.
The problem is, there's really no way to avoid getting in their faces. Many are offended that we even exist.
But let's get real -- we're not doing this. It's more like this. I have honestly never seen an atheist be militant in the sense that believers are every day.
If we show more respect for one another,maybe,just maybe most folks will chill.
I can respect you as a person, but I will ridicule your ridiculous ideas.
That goes for most people, but unfortunately, most people are incapable of seeing the difference.
Here's the funny part -- you probably agree with most of what I just said. In fact, you probably agree with the GP -- you agree that religion is a delusion, you just don't want to say it like that, because you don't want to offend people.
Oh, wow...
I'd recommend reading Peter Kreeft's list of arguments on both sides.
I saw him live. It was pretty fantastically disappointing. He's a philosopher, but he brings up Pascal? Really?
Islamic thinkers used pure reason to derive the fact that our universe had to have an origin, and thus that the universe tended to show evidence of God...
You know, I could provide a trivial refutation of Kalam, as so many here has, and as even part of that Wikipedia page does, but I think I'm going to have to stop you right here, because you have done something fairly stupid right off the bat.
It's a syllogism with two premises and a conclusion. Here are the two premises:
Whatever began to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
So I'm sorry, you cannot use that as "pure reason to derive the fact that our universe had to have an origin" -- it uses that as a premise. If it sought to establish that, it'd be inherently circular.
Scientists, especially atheist scientists, used their "faith" that God doesn't exist...
Do you even know what it is you're arguing against?
Atheism is the lack of belief in a god, not the positive belief that there is no God. I have no "faith" in this, and indeed, if you can show me evidence, I will believe, to the extent warranted by that evidence.
But be aware that Kalam, even if it were true, says nothing about the cause, only that there had to be one. And read the article you linked -- even William Lane Craig admits that the first premise is mere intuition, and our intuitions tend to break down at cosmological time scales. Is it intuitively obvious that even time should be relative to the speed of light?
I'm sure these arguments don't fit into the pretty little preconstructed world you've built for yourself,
You mean the one I discovered by examining what was actually out there? There was a "preconstructed world" handed to me by my parents, and I rejected that.
That is blatant projection.