On the contrary... you are the one adhering to the theory that claims they were all overthrusts,
The theory makes no such claim, not directly.
since that is the only mechanism you have whereby a large relatively flat layer of older rock can end up on top of a large relatively flat layer of newer rock.
I am not a geologist, but this sounds like a large assumption on your part.
It also ignores the fact that fossils are far from the only dating mechanism used to identify a layer of rock. Generally, you have at least two -- radiometric dating and the fossil record -- and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. There are also several kinds of radiometric dating (it's not all carbon). And there's the relation of that layer with respect to other layers.
Now, granted, sometimes one of these is unreliable -- the presence of xenoliths must be taken into account, for example, or you can have new rock that looks much older, and of course there's the cases you're talking about, where the layers are out of order. That's why you take multiple measurements and correlate them, and you generally find perfect agreement. When you have a case like this overthrust, you have all sorts of other ways of verifying both the actual age of the rock and that an overthrust event occurred.
Given all of that, supposing you did find a case where the geological argument was difficult, it would still likely not be very convincing. Startling, yes, but when the evidence matches up perfectly 99% of the time, and indicates something else 1% of the time, what's more likely? (And how would you explain those 99% -- did the floodwaters just happen to settle everything just so?) No, when you have an anomaly, you investigate it, but you don't throw out everything you know overnight because of one anomaly. If you found a man who could levitate, you wouldn't immediately start making assumptions about the theory of gravity -- you'd try to figure out how he was doing it.
All of this is beside the point, however. Tell you what, if it'll make things easier for you, I'll give you Darwinian evolution for the moment, for the sake of argument, because it doesn't matter. You seem to be operating under the assumption that there's a dichotomy -- if Darwin was wrong, creationism must be true. That's simply not the case.
Even if you were successful -- and the fact that even you are now admitting that one of your "illustrations" had serious flaws -- God is hardly the default explanation for anyone with any imagination at all.
I am still waiting for your refutation of justnowism. If you cannot provide such a refutation which doesn't also refute creationism, you'd logically be forced to admit that you simply accept this on faith, that there's no logical, scientific, or philosophical basis for any of it. You are thus, in your own words, a lazy Creationist, because your response, when pressed, is "God did it," and then to ignore the issue and hope it goes away -- which makes you a coward, too.
I gave you a number of illustrations. You cherry-picked one that had flaws and ignored the rest.
What? No, I just picked the first one, because I'm lazy. Are you really claiming that all of the other ones are flawless?
Point out one, specifically, that you think is a slam-dunk case, and we can talk about that. Otherwise, yes, I'm going to pick the first one, or close my eyes and pick one at random, or even cherry-pick the worst ones to make my point, because you are presenting all of them as equally valid.
It's probably because most of my work on dynamically typed languages are when someone DIDN'T properly design, and I get to fix it. Or more commonly, someone did design it properly, but they went on to bigger and better things, and someone else made some changes that seemed to work, until another piece somewhere else came online and....
I see. In other words, the problem wasn't the language, but it was amplified by the language.
"testing" gets pre-empted by "deadlines".
Until you learn it well enough, and can demonstrate to your boss that you're actually saving time. Even schools are teaching this now -- I went back to school, and with my last assignment, the one showstopper, hard-to-reproduce, hell-to-debug problem was a bug in the one class I didn't unit test, because it had looked hard. Yes, it may have taken an hour or two to write tests for it -- instead, I spent the better part of a day (in and out of class) trying to figure out WTF was going on.
It can be a hard sell, but it's generally a good policy (which I've seen in several open source projects) that every change should contain a test which demonstrates what the new feature is (and why it's needed), or demonstrates the bug (to prove it's broken). Exceptions are allowed, but the rule is, even if you don't test-first yourself, you should include tests with your code, and you should see them as necessary.
I wouldn't write a 3d rendering engine in ruby, but it might be the right call for the slower-paced scripting of game events.
I don't know if I'd do it in Ruby, but I'd probably do it in Javascript, IO, Erlang...
The bottleneck in a 3D rendering engine is probably not the CPU -- it's probably the video card. The exceptions to this are likely things like physics engines, which would be the kind of specific thing that you isolate and rewrite in C -- like ImageMagick is to web apps.
Back to dynamic typing - what's a specific thing that you can do (in a well-designed system) with a dynamic type that you can't do with polymorphism or templating?
If you assume a well-designed system, I'm not sure there is a specific thing you can't do -- but if you assume a well-designed system, static types are equally useless.
First, think of every interface you've ever defined in Java, or anything similar you've done in C++ -- like, oh, those giant header files. That's whole files you can just nuke from your source. IIRC, there are some studies which show that errors per LOC are constant across languages, so anything you can do to improve conciseness is helpful. Dynamic typing is going to do that all over the place, but it's most obvious there.
Second, you do generic by default, which is what you want most of the time. The C++ template system is Turing complete, and Java Generics aren't much better, so it seems like there'd be a tendency to avoid generic systems when you can.
Finally, with less code to write and less strictness, prototyping is a lot faster -- it's much easier to play with your class hierarchy, rearrange things -- so it's helpful as a design tool. One possibility is to rapidly-prototype the thing in Ruby, then convert it to Java -- but you've already got an executable version in Ruby, and the biggest change that will happen when you convert it to Java is you'll be surrounding everything with type declarations and boilerplate irritation.
But really, I think it comes down to high-level vs low-level. Yes, you can do pretty much anything, and most likely anything useful, in a statically-typed system. You can also do OO code in PHP4, or write game engines in assembly. The question is, do you really want to?
I've always found that testing was simpler when you could outright reject so many ba
you showed that the evidence might actually support an overthrust in one of the cases.
Yes, because each case I disprove takes effort on my part, and again, you are the one making the claim.
Your theory says cars can’t be orange. My response is that many cars are orange. You just showed me a red car that some people had thought was orange, but you haven’t disproven my claim.
Yet you have yet to, by your analogy, show me an orange car.
Most likely an honest mistake, but feel free to continue to attribute things to malice whenever it is convenient for you to do so.
Yeah, because shooting a photo 200 feet above is an "honest mistake"...
Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical by default here, given the tendency of Creationists to quote Darwin on how the eye seems like it couldn't have evolved, and then ignore the very next sentence where he explains that reason tells him that it must have. That and Kent Hovind's tax fraud, and... You're not exactly an honest crowd.
Does it really matter if we are warming the planet or not?
Yes.
Even if we are how are we going to fix it? Limit CO2 emissions by something like cap and trade? Great concept but India, China etc are not going to play in a game that is detrimental to their growing manufacturing industries.
Depending on how fast the planet is warming, I would think the massive flooding would be detrimental to their growing manufacturing industries.
Or perhaps we create green energy solutions, problem is none of those solutions are cost effective to be self sustaining.
Sure they are, even on a small scale. You can buy a windmill for your house, and easily calculate how much you'll save selling that energy back to the grid.
If we are warming the planet who is to say it is not actually a positive thing?
That's why we run simulations and such, which tend to show that the amount of water locked away in ice is sufficient to cause massive flooding. That's ignoring predictions of storms and such... I'm not up on the latest developments, but it's clear you aren't, either.
You didn't list a single thing that doesn't work on Desktop Linux.
the quality of an OS is not determined by how "hard coded" its "utility code" is
If you were a programmer, you'd understand that hardcoding generally does determine the quality of an OS -- if not its current capabilities, then its future capabilities. By avoiding things like that, we get flexibility -- and the flexibility of the Linux kernel is why something like Android could be written in the first place.
Many, many instances can be observed where “old” fossils are deposited atop “young” fossils. This should never happen, so evolutionists postulate that geologic faulting and fracturing must have slid the older rock onto the top of the newer rock.
Of the ones I know of, this isn't entirely arbitrary -- multiple measures are used to date rock, everything from the fossils in it to carbon dating to corresponding dating methods used on other areas of rock.
Evolutionists’ response?
Well, let's see if I can't find some:
Contrary to the claim, geologists do find convincing evidence of a thrust fault between the strata (Strahler 1987, chap. 40).
That's just the start. You can read the rest here -- biased source? Maybe, but it's cited. Your task now, if you choose to accept it, is to actually go back to the sources referenced in each argument and see which one makes sense. Unfortunately for you, one of those sources is a creationist -- it just happens to be one with some geology training, who didn't entirely throw out said training when examining this piece of evidence.
But hey, if that wasn't enough:
The photo in Whitcomb and Morris's (1961) book The Genesis Flood showing the "Lewis Overthrust contact line" (Figure 17, p. 190) is not really a photo of the contact line, but of rocks 200 feet above it.
You seem to be taking the attitude that because there are arguments on both sides, you should take the one that makes you feel better, rather than actually investigating the arguments used. Now, I'm not a geologist, but the Talkorigins page does mention one creationist geologist who disagrees with you:
This is true even of young-earth creationists with geology training. For example, Kurt Wise (1986, 136) said that "[a] close examination of the contact between the Cretaceous and Precambrian rocks leaves no doubt that the contact is a fault contact."
There are countless hard limits in appengine, many of which are not documented.
Which aren't documented?
The ones which are aren't truly hard, it just stops being as automatic at that point -- you'd have to contact them and arrange something. This is similar to Amazon EC2 -- in fact, I don't know of any such service which doesn't have some sort of limits.
Furthermore, only two languages are supported in appengine: Python and Java.
And Ruby, and theoretically, anything else that can target the JVM.
And Java performance is really terrible.
Works for me.
Java web apps are killed at random times for "excessive latency" by appengine. It also loads and unloads your apps aggressively, so your users will see very long delays when accessing Java-based web apps.
These two are very closely related. Python apps are also killed for excessive latency if they take excessively long, but I suspect Java apps are more likely to (with a loading request) -- though I remember reading that this shouldn't kill them.
But again -- Ruby, specifically, JRuby. I've never run into the "excessive latency" issue trying to run JRuby apps on Java, and I'd expect it to be slower than vanilla Java. It's slow to start, but that's about it.
Also, loading requests are a relatively small percentage, though I still wish they'd do something about it. If your app is small enough, you could even keep a cron job running to keep at least one server hot.
you’re taking random static on a line and claiming that in a million years it will add up to something significant.
Random static on a line doesn't reproduce, and it doesn't die. You need both of these for evolution.
At least try to understand what you're trying to refute.
I’ve argued with enough evolutionists to know that you wouldn’t accept any evidence if I did offer some.
If you present some evidence that meets basic scientific rigor, sure, I would be forced to accept it. To my knowledge, no creationist has ever possessed such evidence. The closest they've come are various claims like polonium "halos" and the like, which are easily discredited.
In other words, if I post any evidence that I think supports creationism, you’ll explain it according to evolution. If you post any evidence that you think supports evolution, I’ll explain it according to creationism (feel free to try me on that, though). Why bother with that exercise in futility?
Because if we were both capable of sticking to such standards, we would be forced to accept whichever conclusion had better evidence. I assure you, not everyone who accepts evolution wanted to.
The problem is, you lack even a basic, High-school-level understanding of what science is, or what evolution is. Without an understanding of science, you can't possibly begin to offer anything approaching scientific evidence. Without an understanding of evolution, your arguments against it will be necessarily incoherent.
I don't mean to be elitist. Really, I don't. All the information is at your fingertips, and there is nothing stopping you from educating yourself. But you clearly haven't.
That was actually my whole initial point in this discussion: there is absolutely no justification in saying that "Creationism effectively ends discussion where as Darwinism promotes discussion"
Creationism begins with an unproven, unfalsifiable assumption which has already been disproven in just about every way it can be disproven, leaving only the absurd justnowism-like claim that God created the Universe to look old as a possible hypothesis.
So yes, you can have interesting discussions, but none of them have any grounding in reality. It's either going to be an abstract philosophical discussion without much application (well, gee, we could all be brains in vats, and God could be the Architect of The Matrix), or it becomes a shouting match.
Despite your dramatic claims, evolution is verifiable, and has been repeatedly confirmed in laboratory tests -- everything from speciation (macroevolution), to single-celled organisms becoming multi-cellular, to all sorts of computer simulations showing that even the watchmaker argument falls apart, literally -- if you simulate watches which can reproduce and die, they will evolve from basic components into functioning clocks.
You're the one making a radical claim, so you do the work.
On the contrary. You’re the one who believes evolution.
There are fewer scientists who doubt evolution than there are historians who doubt the Holocaust.
So yes, doubting Evolution is a radical claim. It doesn't become less radical because of your own personal intuition.
Even if I accept your premise that evolution can make drastic changes in a lifeform, probability shows that it’s astronomically unlikely
Whoops, another unsubstantiated and incredibly vague claim, and thus another useless assertion. Just how unlikely is "astronomical"?
flawed notion that given enough time, an unlikely event becomes a certainty.
In what way is that flawed?
If you accept my premise “God exists”, however, it’s quite simple to conclude that God created.
Nope, that doesn't necessarily follow. There are all sorts of gods who didn't create. That your particular god is a creator-god doesn't mean it automatically follows.
Since nobody has proved or disproved either of our premises,
Again, you fail at science. Science never proves anything. However, your premise is unfalsifiable, and thus veridically worthless -- mine is easily falsifiable, just find a bunny in the Cambrian and you'll have disproved Evolution.
your claim is much more radical than mine.
Non-sequitur. Dude, at least try to keep it to one fallacy per sentence, alright?
You were trying to say that both of our claims were equally unproven and unprovable, and then went on to claim that yours wins because they're both equally unproven? Sorry, that doesn't follow.
Talkorigins isn’t unbiased either.
And I haven't linked to Talkorigins, either. However, if you really want to take this to the mat, I will go to places like, oh, Nature, or even National Geographic.
he’s trying to trick us. No, he isn’t. He told us exactly what he did.
In one book, thousands of years old, with no verifiable evidence today for any of its claims.
"Hi, I’m God, and you know this universe that some nuts are going to claim evolved over millions of years? Created it. Yeah, it took me 6 days."
See, the problem is showing that he actually said this.
Even if he did, though, you're again talking about a God who created everything to look as though it had evolved, everything from vestigial organs (and genes) to viruses in our DNA to the fossil record to the speed of light and everything we see in the night sky. Why would he do that?
And again, what evidence do you have against justnowism?
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork.
So he couldn't think of any way to show his handiwork without placing photons in transit to make us think there really are galaxies, when obviously, there aren't?
As far as I know, every civilization and culture has believed in God, or god, or gods... something higher than ourselves.
Except, oh, China. And Japan. And several Communist states.
As the Proverbs say... you’d have to be a fool to look at them and conclude that there is no God.
Yeah, because the Proverbs are such an unbiased source, filled with logic and reason...
I have to wonder what you think of those who believe in God, yet are capable of accepting the realities of cosmology and evolution.
Yes, that is the potential insecurity, and it's also why this is configurable.
However, I would think the same applies to the Windows security model -- either it prompts for a password every time (and is thus annoying), or it doesn't (and is thus insecure).
...about as well as abstinence-only sex education. Look up some statistics, and you might revise your definition of "most folks".
As for safety, that very much depends. Caffeine could be extremely dangerous, given a high enough concentration, yet it's legal for anyone. Alcohol is dangerous if you drink and drive, but it's legal above a certain age, certainly once they realize that trying to ban it was causing more harm than the substance itself. Contrast to marijuana...
Or better yet, try Coca. That's right, the main ingredient for Cocaine, illegal to possess in the US, but Coca leaves make very good tea, and at that concentration, it's a mild stimulant -- less stimulating and less addicting than coffee, but very good for dealing with high altitudes.
Or you could just take the kneejerk reaction of "All drugs are bad!" or maybe "All illegal drugs are bad!" Which makes you sound about as intelligent and informed as "Fire bad!"
In fact, let's take this to an extreme. Suppose we actually legalized marijuana. Would you rather your kid be buying the stuff at the store, in regulated doses with the THC content explicitly labeled? Or would you rather them buy it from a drug dealer, laced with who knows what, in much higher concentrations?
I'd say, legalize it all, regulate it, and tax it. It's going to happen whether you allow it or not, and the societal costs of prohibition are much higher than the drugs themselves.
By the way: I don't drink, or do drugs, aside from caffeine. I never have, aside from coca tea, and I likely never will.
Linked Lists is kind of the point, though. I get rusty, languages move on, and I forget what I know about a given language. I don't forget what I know about how to program.
But of course, you can't expect me to take you seriously, if you're not even willing to put that much effort in. You're the one making a radical claim, so you do the work.
A ten-second search on google for creation and tree rings. Feel free to try it for yourself.
First result is definitely not what I was talking about. Specifically, I was talking about tree rings from relatively younger trees, matched up with somewhat older trees. Also, first result isn't exactly from an unbiased source.
As far as the speed of light is concerned... your argument is flawed to begin with. God didn’t create things that looked like they’d just been created. He created full-grown people, animals, plants, etc... what’s the problem with saying he also created a universe with stars that already looked old?
The problem is that this is too easy to take ad-absurdum. Congratulations, you've just invented justnowism. You've simultaneously invalidated all forms of inductive reasoning, and assumed that any particular observed fact inconsistent with your religion is God trying to trick us. Even Descartes, who tried to define God into existence starting from such basic premises as "I think, therefore I am," didn't go that far -- he insisted that "God is no deceiver."
That would also allow you to instantly discard any evidence contrary to your beliefs. God put the fossils in the ground. God precisely set every isotope to look as though it had decayed for however many millions (billions?) of years. God sent us images, travelling at the speed of light, of events which, if they happened, would have happened billions of years ago, so if we accept creation, the vast majority of what we see in the night sky has never existed or occurred. God placed the continents in precisely the positions we would expect if they had been drifting slowly over the millennia.
All this, and for what? So only the most gullible, who are willing to question hundreds of years of research, but not a two-thousand-year-old fable, will believe in him? Why, exactly, would he set it up so those who pour their heart and soul into actually understanding the universe, using the best tools we have, and the best we've ever had, will be led deliberately astray by him? Does your god enjoy sending people to Hell?
All of this certainly seems absurd to at least a few creationists. When I've seen them attack this problem, they generally try to come up with some crazy physics answer, like wormholes. (It doesn't work, by the way.)
Instead of running specific processes as a more privileged user, it allows an Administrator to run processes as a LESS privileged user, with varying privilege levels.
That's not significantly different. On a Unix system, init is run as root, and it then spawns other processes as varying users, with varying privilege levels. The "sudo" part is remarkably similar on both systems -- you're at a lower privilege than the process that started you, and now you want a higher privilege, so you have to get permission from the user in some way, and a higher-privileged program (like sudo or the UAC window) is going to do that for you.
UAC also allows programs such as IE and Chrome to run at below-standard privilege levels ("protected mode" or "sandbox" mode),
Sudo (or just setuid programs) also allows this, albeit in a somewhat kludgier fashion -- Chrome does sandbox processes on Unix. As far as I can tell, it does so at least with chroot, then drop permissions. There's talk of SELinux support, also.
I can't say much other than, works for me. Chrome 5 Beta, latest Ubuntu, dual 2.5 ghz, 4 gigs of Ram, and 10mbit dorm Internet, or 100 mbit Internet at home.
I really never have seen it take longer to preview than it otherwise would. Takes about half a second here, and doesn't require a page refresh.
It might be useful to look for where the bottleneck is. Does it only happen with huge pages? In that case, I'd look at your browser.
First of all, that's not Microsoft's fault, that's the fault of that installer. I'm not sure exactly what would cause that,
So you don't know, but you're sure it's not Microsoft? What kind of argument is that?
I'd wager that it could happen if the installer runs a bunch of different programs to take care of sub-tasks-- usually Windows handles this seamlessly, though, which means that it must be doing it in a funky way.
And how, exactly, could it be doing this in a way which would escape Windows' notice?
Now, this doesn't happen much anymore, but I'd bet Microsoft was the one patching it -- even if they had to resort to the same kind of brutal hacks they have in the past to ensure backwards compatibility.
Who reboots their OS?
I do, every kernel upgrade. I'm sure you do when Windows Update tells you to.
My desktop is always on, and my laptop is always sleeping.
The fact that my laptop boots in about 20-30 seconds means I will actually shut it down at night, rather than sleeping it. It's also useful when I dual-boot -- I boot Linux most of the time, so the fact that I can reboot into Windows to play some games in maybe one minute instead of ten is a definite plus.
Netbooks are also worth considering, here. If you've got a minimalistic UI which can save state easily -- like a web browser saving tabs (hint: Chrome OS) -- and you've got an OS that boots in seven seconds (and they're working on reducing that), why would you care about sleep? Hibernate is nice, but that kind of quick booting is going to be faster and lighter on disk usage.
I've always thought boot time was a stupid measure of... anything.
Boot time is the most obvious measure, because it's the one where I get a new Vista machine to work on, and it takes anywhere from 5-10 minutes to reboot, thus stretching maybe 20 minutes of Windows Updates and driver installs into an hour or more.
I suppose I could talk instead about how much it was thrashing the disk, but that experience (plus the UAC irritations, which wasn't constrained to that one program) is why I stayed away.
Contrast to Win7 -- boot time is fast, UAC is unobtrusive. I don't know what they changed, but it worked.
You can insulate yourself from App Engine lock-in by developing your app for Django, which is then portable to a standard server if App Engine turns out to be a problem.
That works, to a point. Similarly, you can develop your app in Ruby, for Datamapper, with the dm-appengine plugin -- and yes, it'll even run Rails.
But ultimately, you're going to want to use some Appengine-specific features. But even then, people have made Appengine-compatible APIs for Hadoop.
their urlfetch service was returning odd results,
That would be interesting to know about.
database operations were failing multiple times per day.
That's actually normal, and by design, which is part of why it'd be hard to develop something truly portable.
See, appengine uses optimistic locking. That means if two instances try to simultaneously update the same entity (or entity-group), the first one to finish will succeed, and the other one will fail. The normal approach is to try again, something like 3-5 times, and your transactions should be small and idempotent.
All of those are desirable qualities for the kind of webapps I want to build, but they aren't a good fit for everything.
It probably doesn't apply to either of your projects, but if you're starting from scratch, Google App Engine might be a good candidate. Advantages: Starts out free, and it's by Google, so yes, it scales. When you have to start paying, it's pay-as-you-go like Amazon, but only for the cycles you actually use, since it's an entirely managed solution.
Like I said -- probably doesn't apply. It won't run PHP (that I know of), and mrstrano didn't specify what his shiny new app is being developed in. But if it's early enough, and if you're willing to trust Google...
most userland open-source software is released as alpha-quality.
Possible, but unlikely, considering most userland open source software isn't at 1.0 yet. That's why KDE4 was such an embarrassment -- you don't release that abortion as a dot-oh.
And a lot of kernel-space drivers.
Most likely the ones marked "EXPERIMENTAL", or third-party, proprietary drivers. Or do you have some specific examples?
OpenOffice, GIMP, all media players, X.org, most wireless drivers... you name it, they all have major issues
I'd again have to ask you for specifics, especially comparing these to the released Vista. As bad as OpenOffice may be, I can't remember it crashing at all in recent history. I've never had issues with my wireless drivers, though the GUI sometimes seems off.
First of all, Windows has had "sudo"-equivalent features for a long time-- since Windows 2000, I believe.
Vista forced everyone to actually use them, or something similar.
Secondly, how did they screw it up? It works fine for me.
It's possible it's been fixed by now, both from Microsoft's side and from the developers' side.
I definitely remember getting five or six separate UAC prompts during the installation of a single piece of software.
The problem was that the OS was release-quality, but the drivers from various third-parties was beta-quality for a good year after the OS was released.
If you can do that, I can claim that Linux has excellent video and wireless support, it's just those lazy driver writers. If Linux gets blamed for these things, Windows does, too.
But it's also not the drivers that made it take far longer to boot than XP, while Win7 took less time than XP. Little, measurable performance hits like that is a big part of why I didn't upgrade.
Vista was never designed to run on Netbooks, which was a market Microsoft didn't anticipate while they were developing it.
Linux was never "designed" to run on Netbooks either, it's just flexible enough that it doesn't matter.
Vista was mostly looked badly because they introduced new security features.
Nope, it was how they did it.
Features that linux zealots always yell about, like proper admin/multiple user control, securing files and directories and so on.
Yep, not only did they rip off sudo (which would've been fine), they managed to screw it up.
It's a lot better than Linux's su and sudo alternatives.
I'm sure you'll tell me how...
With su you give full control over the root account,
Yep, just like UAC.
with sudo you need to write it every time you require root account.
WTF do you mean by "write it"? Did you mean, edit the sudoers file? Yeah, you could do it that way, I suppose. Or did you mean, enter your password? Nope, sudo will cache it for a certain length of time.
UAC is actually a lot better than what there is available for linux, in desktop use...
Yet you haven't explained how it's different than the above.
Win7 is more popular now because people have got used to these features.
Nope, it's because Microsoft finally got it to work, and polished performance to where Win7 is faster than XP, whereas Vista was slower than XP.
I never claimed, and I don't think anyone claimed, that all the design decisions in Vista were bad. No, the issue is that the Vista release, like most Microsoft products, was at best beta quality, more like alpha quality. So Vista was Microsoft's way of, yet again, using their consumers as beta-testers, while collecting some revenue to justify finishing the product and releasing it as Win7.
That was just off a quick Google search, I doubt it's the only one. I don't have a citation for the malware/spyware scans, but I'm not sure I need one -- Apple actually seems to discourage them, and one of the Mac-vs-PS ads even emphasized that Macs don't get viruses.
The way many companies roll out new upgrades is to replace the hardware and software and apps all at once.
Sorry, this still makes no sense. Ok, I can see the advantages to the OS upgrades, but you're already rolling out Windows Updates at least weekly, if not nightly. What would be the issue with pushing a new IE?
Do you know any slashdotters who are actually happy about "new slashdot?"
I'm not entirely happy, but I do like it, yes.
it never used to take 30 seconds to wait for my post go to to "preview" mode before I could post it.
And it still doesn't, for me. Never has. WTF is wrong with your connection/browser/OS/box?
why do I need a "paste this to facebook" button on every story?
I don't use Facebook at all. It's a small enough button that I really don't care. I never needed the daily polls, either, and those were there before this "2.0" version.
As the other poster says, I do like the inline post expansion. I like being able to actually see the entire thread on the same page as I'm replying. I like that when I need to slow down, it actually gives me a countdown timer. And I like that it lets me disable ads.
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On the contrary... you are the one adhering to the theory that claims they were all overthrusts,
The theory makes no such claim, not directly.
since that is the only mechanism you have whereby a large relatively flat layer of older rock can end up on top of a large relatively flat layer of newer rock.
I am not a geologist, but this sounds like a large assumption on your part.
It also ignores the fact that fossils are far from the only dating mechanism used to identify a layer of rock. Generally, you have at least two -- radiometric dating and the fossil record -- and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. There are also several kinds of radiometric dating (it's not all carbon). And there's the relation of that layer with respect to other layers.
Now, granted, sometimes one of these is unreliable -- the presence of xenoliths must be taken into account, for example, or you can have new rock that looks much older, and of course there's the cases you're talking about, where the layers are out of order. That's why you take multiple measurements and correlate them, and you generally find perfect agreement. When you have a case like this overthrust, you have all sorts of other ways of verifying both the actual age of the rock and that an overthrust event occurred.
Given all of that, supposing you did find a case where the geological argument was difficult, it would still likely not be very convincing. Startling, yes, but when the evidence matches up perfectly 99% of the time, and indicates something else 1% of the time, what's more likely? (And how would you explain those 99% -- did the floodwaters just happen to settle everything just so?) No, when you have an anomaly, you investigate it, but you don't throw out everything you know overnight because of one anomaly. If you found a man who could levitate, you wouldn't immediately start making assumptions about the theory of gravity -- you'd try to figure out how he was doing it.
All of this is beside the point, however. Tell you what, if it'll make things easier for you, I'll give you Darwinian evolution for the moment, for the sake of argument, because it doesn't matter. You seem to be operating under the assumption that there's a dichotomy -- if Darwin was wrong, creationism must be true. That's simply not the case.
Even if you were successful -- and the fact that even you are now admitting that one of your "illustrations" had serious flaws -- God is hardly the default explanation for anyone with any imagination at all.
I am still waiting for your refutation of justnowism. If you cannot provide such a refutation which doesn't also refute creationism, you'd logically be forced to admit that you simply accept this on faith, that there's no logical, scientific, or philosophical basis for any of it. You are thus, in your own words, a lazy Creationist, because your response, when pressed, is "God did it," and then to ignore the issue and hope it goes away -- which makes you a coward, too.
I gave you a number of illustrations. You cherry-picked one that had flaws and ignored the rest.
What? No, I just picked the first one, because I'm lazy. Are you really claiming that all of the other ones are flawless?
Point out one, specifically, that you think is a slam-dunk case, and we can talk about that. Otherwise, yes, I'm going to pick the first one, or close my eyes and pick one at random, or even cherry-pick the worst ones to make my point, because you are presenting all of them as equally valid.
I'm surprised they didn't use the faster method and throtlle it.
Is sendmail.cf considered turing complete? :)
I don't want to know! :O
It's probably because most of my work on dynamically typed languages are when someone DIDN'T properly design, and I get to fix it. Or more commonly, someone did design it properly, but they went on to bigger and better things, and someone else made some changes that seemed to work, until another piece somewhere else came online and....
I see. In other words, the problem wasn't the language, but it was amplified by the language.
"testing" gets pre-empted by "deadlines".
Until you learn it well enough, and can demonstrate to your boss that you're actually saving time. Even schools are teaching this now -- I went back to school, and with my last assignment, the one showstopper, hard-to-reproduce, hell-to-debug problem was a bug in the one class I didn't unit test, because it had looked hard. Yes, it may have taken an hour or two to write tests for it -- instead, I spent the better part of a day (in and out of class) trying to figure out WTF was going on.
It can be a hard sell, but it's generally a good policy (which I've seen in several open source projects) that every change should contain a test which demonstrates what the new feature is (and why it's needed), or demonstrates the bug (to prove it's broken). Exceptions are allowed, but the rule is, even if you don't test-first yourself, you should include tests with your code, and you should see them as necessary.
I wouldn't write a 3d rendering engine in ruby, but it might be the right call for the slower-paced scripting of game events.
I don't know if I'd do it in Ruby, but I'd probably do it in Javascript, IO, Erlang...
The bottleneck in a 3D rendering engine is probably not the CPU -- it's probably the video card. The exceptions to this are likely things like physics engines, which would be the kind of specific thing that you isolate and rewrite in C -- like ImageMagick is to web apps.
Back to dynamic typing - what's a specific thing that you can do (in a well-designed system) with a dynamic type that you can't do with polymorphism or templating?
If you assume a well-designed system, I'm not sure there is a specific thing you can't do -- but if you assume a well-designed system, static types are equally useless.
First, think of every interface you've ever defined in Java, or anything similar you've done in C++ -- like, oh, those giant header files. That's whole files you can just nuke from your source. IIRC, there are some studies which show that errors per LOC are constant across languages, so anything you can do to improve conciseness is helpful. Dynamic typing is going to do that all over the place, but it's most obvious there.
Second, you do generic by default, which is what you want most of the time. The C++ template system is Turing complete, and Java Generics aren't much better, so it seems like there'd be a tendency to avoid generic systems when you can.
Finally, with less code to write and less strictness, prototyping is a lot faster -- it's much easier to play with your class hierarchy, rearrange things -- so it's helpful as a design tool. One possibility is to rapidly-prototype the thing in Ruby, then convert it to Java -- but you've already got an executable version in Ruby, and the biggest change that will happen when you convert it to Java is you'll be surrounding everything with type declarations and boilerplate irritation.
But really, I think it comes down to high-level vs low-level. Yes, you can do pretty much anything, and most likely anything useful, in a statically-typed system. You can also do OO code in PHP4, or write game engines in assembly. The question is, do you really want to?
I've always found that testing was simpler when you could outright reject so many ba
you showed that the evidence might actually support an overthrust in one of the cases.
Yes, because each case I disprove takes effort on my part, and again, you are the one making the claim.
Your theory says cars can’t be orange. My response is that many cars are orange. You just showed me a red car that some people had thought was orange, but you haven’t disproven my claim.
Yet you have yet to, by your analogy, show me an orange car.
Most likely an honest mistake, but feel free to continue to attribute things to malice whenever it is convenient for you to do so.
Yeah, because shooting a photo 200 feet above is an "honest mistake"...
Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical by default here, given the tendency of Creationists to quote Darwin on how the eye seems like it couldn't have evolved, and then ignore the very next sentence where he explains that reason tells him that it must have. That and Kent Hovind's tax fraud, and... You're not exactly an honest crowd.
Does it really matter if we are warming the planet or not?
Yes.
Even if we are how are we going to fix it? Limit CO2 emissions by something like cap and trade? Great concept but India, China etc are not going to play in
a game that is detrimental to their growing manufacturing industries.
Depending on how fast the planet is warming, I would think the massive flooding would be detrimental to their growing manufacturing industries.
Or perhaps we create green energy solutions, problem is none of those solutions are cost effective to be self sustaining.
Sure they are, even on a small scale. You can buy a windmill for your house, and easily calculate how much you'll save selling that energy back to the grid.
If we are warming the planet who is to say it is not actually a positive thing?
That's why we run simulations and such, which tend to show that the amount of water locked away in ice is sufficient to cause massive flooding. That's ignoring predictions of storms and such... I'm not up on the latest developments, but it's clear you aren't, either.
the following things actually work in Android
You didn't list a single thing that doesn't work on Desktop Linux.
the quality of an OS is not determined by how "hard coded" its "utility code" is
If you were a programmer, you'd understand that hardcoding generally does determine the quality of an OS -- if not its current capabilities, then its future capabilities. By avoiding things like that, we get flexibility -- and the flexibility of the Linux kernel is why something like Android could be written in the first place.
Many, many instances can be observed where “old” fossils are deposited atop “young” fossils. This should never happen, so evolutionists postulate that geologic faulting and fracturing must have slid the older rock onto the top of the newer rock.
Of the ones I know of, this isn't entirely arbitrary -- multiple measures are used to date rock, everything from the fossils in it to carbon dating to corresponding dating methods used on other areas of rock.
Evolutionists’ response?
Well, let's see if I can't find some:
Contrary to the claim, geologists do find convincing evidence of a thrust fault between the strata (Strahler 1987, chap. 40).
That's just the start. You can read the rest here -- biased source? Maybe, but it's cited. Your task now, if you choose to accept it, is to actually go back to the sources referenced in each argument and see which one makes sense. Unfortunately for you, one of those sources is a creationist -- it just happens to be one with some geology training, who didn't entirely throw out said training when examining this piece of evidence.
But hey, if that wasn't enough:
The photo in Whitcomb and Morris's (1961) book The Genesis Flood showing the "Lewis Overthrust contact line" (Figure 17, p. 190) is not really a photo of the contact line, but of rocks 200 feet above it.
Tell me that's not dishonest.
Want something not from talkorigins? Here's one.
You seem to be taking the attitude that because there are arguments on both sides, you should take the one that makes you feel better, rather than actually investigating the arguments used. Now, I'm not a geologist, but the Talkorigins page does mention one creationist geologist who disagrees with you:
This is true even of young-earth creationists with geology training. For example, Kurt Wise (1986, 136) said that "[a] close examination of the contact between the Cretaceous and Precambrian rocks leaves no doubt that the contact is a fault contact."
Tell me that's a biased source.
Still waiting for your refutation of justnowism.
There are countless hard limits in appengine, many of which are not documented.
Which aren't documented?
The ones which are aren't truly hard, it just stops being as automatic at that point -- you'd have to contact them and arrange something. This is similar to Amazon EC2 -- in fact, I don't know of any such service which doesn't have some sort of limits.
Furthermore, only two languages are supported in appengine: Python and Java.
And Ruby, and theoretically, anything else that can target the JVM.
And Java performance is really terrible.
Works for me.
Java web apps are killed at random times for "excessive latency" by appengine. It also loads and unloads your apps aggressively, so your users will see very long delays when accessing Java-based web apps.
These two are very closely related. Python apps are also killed for excessive latency if they take excessively long, but I suspect Java apps are more likely to (with a loading request) -- though I remember reading that this shouldn't kill them.
But again -- Ruby, specifically, JRuby. I've never run into the "excessive latency" issue trying to run JRuby apps on Java, and I'd expect it to be slower than vanilla Java. It's slow to start, but that's about it.
Also, loading requests are a relatively small percentage, though I still wish they'd do something about it. If your app is small enough, you could even keep a cron job running to keep at least one server hot.
you’re taking random static on a line and claiming that in a million years it will add up to something significant.
Random static on a line doesn't reproduce, and it doesn't die. You need both of these for evolution.
At least try to understand what you're trying to refute.
I’ve argued with enough evolutionists to know that you wouldn’t accept any evidence if I did offer some.
If you present some evidence that meets basic scientific rigor, sure, I would be forced to accept it. To my knowledge, no creationist has ever possessed such evidence. The closest they've come are various claims like polonium "halos" and the like, which are easily discredited.
In other words, if I post any evidence that I think supports creationism, you’ll explain it according to evolution. If you post any evidence that you think supports evolution, I’ll explain it according to creationism (feel free to try me on that, though). Why bother with that exercise in futility?
Because if we were both capable of sticking to such standards, we would be forced to accept whichever conclusion had better evidence. I assure you, not everyone who accepts evolution wanted to.
The problem is, you lack even a basic, High-school-level understanding of what science is, or what evolution is. Without an understanding of science, you can't possibly begin to offer anything approaching scientific evidence. Without an understanding of evolution, your arguments against it will be necessarily incoherent.
I don't mean to be elitist. Really, I don't. All the information is at your fingertips, and there is nothing stopping you from educating yourself. But you clearly haven't.
That was actually my whole initial point in this discussion: there is absolutely no justification in saying that "Creationism effectively ends discussion where as Darwinism promotes discussion"
Creationism begins with an unproven, unfalsifiable assumption which has already been disproven in just about every way it can be disproven, leaving only the absurd justnowism-like claim that God created the Universe to look old as a possible hypothesis.
So yes, you can have interesting discussions, but none of them have any grounding in reality. It's either going to be an abstract philosophical discussion without much application (well, gee, we could all be brains in vats, and God could be the Architect of The Matrix), or it becomes a shouting match.
Despite your dramatic claims, evolution is verifiable, and has been repeatedly confirmed in laboratory tests -- everything from speciation (macroevolution), to single-celled organisms becoming multi-cellular, to all sorts of computer simulations showing that even the watchmaker argument falls apart, literally -- if you simulate watches which can reproduce and die, they will evolve from basic components into functioning clocks.
You're the one making a radical claim, so you do the work.
On the contrary. You’re the one who believes evolution.
There are fewer scientists who doubt evolution than there are historians who doubt the Holocaust.
So yes, doubting Evolution is a radical claim. It doesn't become less radical because of your own personal intuition.
Even if I accept your premise that evolution can make drastic changes in a lifeform, probability shows that it’s astronomically unlikely
Whoops, another unsubstantiated and incredibly vague claim, and thus another useless assertion. Just how unlikely is "astronomical"?
flawed notion that given enough time, an unlikely event becomes a certainty.
In what way is that flawed?
If you accept my premise “God exists”, however, it’s quite simple to conclude that God created.
Nope, that doesn't necessarily follow. There are all sorts of gods who didn't create. That your particular god is a creator-god doesn't mean it automatically follows.
Since nobody has proved or disproved either of our premises,
Again, you fail at science. Science never proves anything. However, your premise is unfalsifiable, and thus veridically worthless -- mine is easily falsifiable, just find a bunny in the Cambrian and you'll have disproved Evolution.
your claim is much more radical than mine.
Non-sequitur. Dude, at least try to keep it to one fallacy per sentence, alright?
You were trying to say that both of our claims were equally unproven and unprovable, and then went on to claim that yours wins because they're both equally unproven? Sorry, that doesn't follow.
Talkorigins isn’t unbiased either.
And I haven't linked to Talkorigins, either. However, if you really want to take this to the mat, I will go to places like, oh, Nature, or even National Geographic.
he’s trying to trick us. No, he isn’t. He told us exactly what he did.
In one book, thousands of years old, with no verifiable evidence today for any of its claims.
"Hi, I’m God, and you know this universe that some nuts are going to claim evolved over millions of years? Created it. Yeah, it took me 6 days."
See, the problem is showing that he actually said this.
Even if he did, though, you're again talking about a God who created everything to look as though it had evolved, everything from vestigial organs (and genes) to viruses in our DNA to the fossil record to the speed of light and everything we see in the night sky. Why would he do that?
And again, what evidence do you have against justnowism?
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork.
So he couldn't think of any way to show his handiwork without placing photons in transit to make us think there really are galaxies, when obviously, there aren't?
As far as I know, every civilization and culture has believed in God, or god, or gods... something higher than ourselves.
Except, oh, China. And Japan. And several Communist states.
As the Proverbs say... you’d have to be a fool to look at them and conclude that there is no God.
Yeah, because the Proverbs are such an unbiased source, filled with logic and reason...
I have to wonder what you think of those who believe in God, yet are capable of accepting the realities of cosmology and evolution.
But you know what? If I'm a fool, I'm in good company.
What?! What problem are yo
Yes, that is the potential insecurity, and it's also why this is configurable.
However, I would think the same applies to the Windows security model -- either it prompts for a password every time (and is thus annoying), or it doesn't (and is thus insecure).
...about as well as abstinence-only sex education. Look up some statistics, and you might revise your definition of "most folks".
As for safety, that very much depends. Caffeine could be extremely dangerous, given a high enough concentration, yet it's legal for anyone. Alcohol is dangerous if you drink and drive, but it's legal above a certain age, certainly once they realize that trying to ban it was causing more harm than the substance itself. Contrast to marijuana...
Or better yet, try Coca. That's right, the main ingredient for Cocaine, illegal to possess in the US, but Coca leaves make very good tea, and at that concentration, it's a mild stimulant -- less stimulating and less addicting than coffee, but very good for dealing with high altitudes.
Or you could just take the kneejerk reaction of "All drugs are bad!" or maybe "All illegal drugs are bad!" Which makes you sound about as intelligent and informed as "Fire bad!"
In fact, let's take this to an extreme. Suppose we actually legalized marijuana. Would you rather your kid be buying the stuff at the store, in regulated doses with the THC content explicitly labeled? Or would you rather them buy it from a drug dealer, laced with who knows what, in much higher concentrations?
I'd say, legalize it all, regulate it, and tax it. It's going to happen whether you allow it or not, and the societal costs of prohibition are much higher than the drugs themselves.
By the way: I don't drink, or do drugs, aside from caffeine. I never have, aside from coca tea, and I likely never will.
Linked Lists is kind of the point, though. I get rusty, languages move on, and I forget what I know about a given language. I don't forget what I know about how to program.
No, because it’s not worth my time or effort.
But of course, you can't expect me to take you seriously, if you're not even willing to put that much effort in. You're the one making a radical claim, so you do the work.
A ten-second search on google for creation and tree rings. Feel free to try it for yourself.
First result is definitely not what I was talking about. Specifically, I was talking about tree rings from relatively younger trees, matched up with somewhat older trees. Also, first result isn't exactly from an unbiased source.
As far as the speed of light is concerned... your argument is flawed to begin with. God didn’t create things that looked like they’d just been created. He created full-grown people, animals, plants, etc... what’s the problem with saying he also created a universe with stars that already looked old?
The problem is that this is too easy to take ad-absurdum. Congratulations, you've just invented justnowism. You've simultaneously invalidated all forms of inductive reasoning, and assumed that any particular observed fact inconsistent with your religion is God trying to trick us. Even Descartes, who tried to define God into existence starting from such basic premises as "I think, therefore I am," didn't go that far -- he insisted that "God is no deceiver."
That would also allow you to instantly discard any evidence contrary to your beliefs. God put the fossils in the ground. God precisely set every isotope to look as though it had decayed for however many millions (billions?) of years. God sent us images, travelling at the speed of light, of events which, if they happened, would have happened billions of years ago, so if we accept creation, the vast majority of what we see in the night sky has never existed or occurred. God placed the continents in precisely the positions we would expect if they had been drifting slowly over the millennia.
All this, and for what? So only the most gullible, who are willing to question hundreds of years of research, but not a two-thousand-year-old fable, will believe in him? Why, exactly, would he set it up so those who pour their heart and soul into actually understanding the universe, using the best tools we have, and the best we've ever had, will be led deliberately astray by him? Does your god enjoy sending people to Hell?
All of this certainly seems absurd to at least a few creationists. When I've seen them attack this problem, they generally try to come up with some crazy physics answer, like wormholes. (It doesn't work, by the way.)
Instead of running specific processes as a more privileged user, it allows an Administrator to run processes as a LESS privileged user, with varying privilege levels.
That's not significantly different. On a Unix system, init is run as root, and it then spawns other processes as varying users, with varying privilege levels. The "sudo" part is remarkably similar on both systems -- you're at a lower privilege than the process that started you, and now you want a higher privilege, so you have to get permission from the user in some way, and a higher-privileged program (like sudo or the UAC window) is going to do that for you.
UAC also allows programs such as IE and Chrome to run at below-standard privilege levels ("protected mode" or "sandbox" mode),
Sudo (or just setuid programs) also allows this, albeit in a somewhat kludgier fashion -- Chrome does sandbox processes on Unix. As far as I can tell, it does so at least with chroot, then drop permissions. There's talk of SELinux support, also.
I can't say much other than, works for me. Chrome 5 Beta, latest Ubuntu, dual 2.5 ghz, 4 gigs of Ram, and 10mbit dorm Internet, or 100 mbit Internet at home.
I really never have seen it take longer to preview than it otherwise would. Takes about half a second here, and doesn't require a page refresh.
It might be useful to look for where the bottleneck is. Does it only happen with huge pages? In that case, I'd look at your browser.
First of all, that's not Microsoft's fault, that's the fault of that installer. I'm not sure exactly what would cause that,
So you don't know, but you're sure it's not Microsoft? What kind of argument is that?
I'd wager that it could happen if the installer runs a bunch of different programs to take care of sub-tasks-- usually Windows handles this seamlessly, though, which means that it must be doing it in a funky way.
And how, exactly, could it be doing this in a way which would escape Windows' notice?
Now, this doesn't happen much anymore, but I'd bet Microsoft was the one patching it -- even if they had to resort to the same kind of brutal hacks they have in the past to ensure backwards compatibility.
Who reboots their OS?
I do, every kernel upgrade. I'm sure you do when Windows Update tells you to.
My desktop is always on, and my laptop is always sleeping.
The fact that my laptop boots in about 20-30 seconds means I will actually shut it down at night, rather than sleeping it. It's also useful when I dual-boot -- I boot Linux most of the time, so the fact that I can reboot into Windows to play some games in maybe one minute instead of ten is a definite plus.
Netbooks are also worth considering, here. If you've got a minimalistic UI which can save state easily -- like a web browser saving tabs (hint: Chrome OS) -- and you've got an OS that boots in seven seconds (and they're working on reducing that), why would you care about sleep? Hibernate is nice, but that kind of quick booting is going to be faster and lighter on disk usage.
I've always thought boot time was a stupid measure of... anything.
Boot time is the most obvious measure, because it's the one where I get a new Vista machine to work on, and it takes anywhere from 5-10 minutes to reboot, thus stretching maybe 20 minutes of Windows Updates and driver installs into an hour or more.
I suppose I could talk instead about how much it was thrashing the disk, but that experience (plus the UAC irritations, which wasn't constrained to that one program) is why I stayed away.
Contrast to Win7 -- boot time is fast, UAC is unobtrusive. I don't know what they changed, but it worked.
So is Windows, what's your point?
XP, apparently, not Vista.
You can insulate yourself from App Engine lock-in by developing your app for Django, which is then portable to a standard server if App Engine turns out to be a problem.
That works, to a point. Similarly, you can develop your app in Ruby, for Datamapper, with the dm-appengine plugin -- and yes, it'll even run Rails.
But ultimately, you're going to want to use some Appengine-specific features. But even then, people have made Appengine-compatible APIs for Hadoop.
their urlfetch service was returning odd results,
That would be interesting to know about.
database operations were failing multiple times per day.
That's actually normal, and by design, which is part of why it'd be hard to develop something truly portable.
See, appengine uses optimistic locking. That means if two instances try to simultaneously update the same entity (or entity-group), the first one to finish will succeed, and the other one will fail. The normal approach is to try again, something like 3-5 times, and your transactions should be small and idempotent.
All of those are desirable qualities for the kind of webapps I want to build, but they aren't a good fit for everything.
It probably doesn't apply to either of your projects, but if you're starting from scratch, Google App Engine might be a good candidate. Advantages: Starts out free, and it's by Google, so yes, it scales. When you have to start paying, it's pay-as-you-go like Amazon, but only for the cycles you actually use, since it's an entirely managed solution.
Like I said -- probably doesn't apply. It won't run PHP (that I know of), and mrstrano didn't specify what his shiny new app is being developed in. But if it's early enough, and if you're willing to trust Google...
most userland open-source software is released as alpha-quality.
Possible, but unlikely, considering most userland open source software isn't at 1.0 yet. That's why KDE4 was such an embarrassment -- you don't release that abortion as a dot-oh.
And a lot of kernel-space drivers.
Most likely the ones marked "EXPERIMENTAL", or third-party, proprietary drivers. Or do you have some specific examples?
OpenOffice, GIMP, all media players, X.org, most wireless drivers... you name it, they all have major issues
I'd again have to ask you for specifics, especially comparing these to the released Vista. As bad as OpenOffice may be, I can't remember it crashing at all in recent history. I've never had issues with my wireless drivers, though the GUI sometimes seems off.
First of all, Windows has had "sudo"-equivalent features for a long time-- since Windows 2000, I believe.
Vista forced everyone to actually use them, or something similar.
Secondly, how did they screw it up? It works fine for me.
It's possible it's been fixed by now, both from Microsoft's side and from the developers' side.
I definitely remember getting five or six separate UAC prompts during the installation of a single piece of software.
The problem was that the OS was release-quality, but the drivers from various third-parties was beta-quality for a good year after the OS was released.
If you can do that, I can claim that Linux has excellent video and wireless support, it's just those lazy driver writers. If Linux gets blamed for these things, Windows does, too.
But it's also not the drivers that made it take far longer to boot than XP, while Win7 took less time than XP. Little, measurable performance hits like that is a big part of why I didn't upgrade.
Vista was never designed to run on Netbooks, which was a market Microsoft didn't anticipate while they were developing it.
Linux was never "designed" to run on Netbooks either, it's just flexible enough that it doesn't matter.
Vista was mostly looked badly because they introduced new security features.
Nope, it was how they did it.
Features that linux zealots always yell about, like proper admin/multiple user control, securing files and directories and so on.
Yep, not only did they rip off sudo (which would've been fine), they managed to screw it up.
It's a lot better than Linux's su and sudo alternatives.
I'm sure you'll tell me how...
With su you give full control over the root account,
Yep, just like UAC.
with sudo you need to write it every time you require root account.
WTF do you mean by "write it"? Did you mean, edit the sudoers file? Yeah, you could do it that way, I suppose. Or did you mean, enter your password? Nope, sudo will cache it for a certain length of time.
UAC is actually a lot better than what there is available for linux, in desktop use...
Yet you haven't explained how it's different than the above.
Win7 is more popular now because people have got used to these features.
Nope, it's because Microsoft finally got it to work, and polished performance to where Win7 is faster than XP, whereas Vista was slower than XP.
I never claimed, and I don't think anyone claimed, that all the design decisions in Vista were bad. No, the issue is that the Vista release, like most Microsoft products, was at best beta quality, more like alpha quality. So Vista was Microsoft's way of, yet again, using their consumers as beta-testers, while collecting some revenue to justify finishing the product and releasing it as Win7.
citation.
That was just off a quick Google search, I doubt it's the only one. I don't have a citation for the malware/spyware scans, but I'm not sure I need one -- Apple actually seems to discourage them, and one of the Mac-vs-PS ads even emphasized that Macs don't get viruses.
The way many companies roll out new upgrades is to replace the hardware and software and apps all at once.
Sorry, this still makes no sense. Ok, I can see the advantages to the OS upgrades, but you're already rolling out Windows Updates at least weekly, if not nightly. What would be the issue with pushing a new IE?
Do you know any slashdotters who are actually happy about "new slashdot?"
I'm not entirely happy, but I do like it, yes.
it never used to take 30 seconds to wait for my post go to to "preview" mode before I could post it.
And it still doesn't, for me. Never has. WTF is wrong with your connection/browser/OS/box?
why do I need a "paste this to facebook" button on every story?
I don't use Facebook at all. It's a small enough button that I really don't care. I never needed the daily polls, either, and those were there before this "2.0" version.
As the other poster says, I do like the inline post expansion. I like being able to actually see the entire thread on the same page as I'm replying. I like that when I need to slow down, it actually gives me a countdown timer. And I like that it lets me disable ads.