I am a strict materialist, as you seem to be. Therefore, I agree that organic life has no "animating spirit" that fundamentally distinguishes it from non-life. In that sense, you are correct that life is just "an elaborate pile of goo".
Whoa there, slow down. I never said I believed that. I said life is an elaborate pile of goo. I never said there wasn't an "animating spirit", or whatever. Asside from seeing and speaking the obvious, I also suffer from a deeply rooted spiritualism, which I can't say has any basis in religioun.
On the other hand, human life exhibits some characteristics that are currently beyond all scientific explanation. In particular, I am thinking of free will, conciousness, and self-awareness (which are all probably words for the same underlying phenomenon). No one has the slightest idea how these characteristics arise in a human (and, puzzlingly, don't seem to in any other form of life).
Excepting all the other animals that show the same characteristics. The apes are the obvious, but I have no problem seeing the same behavior in dogs too ( speaking from experience ).
While this doesn't necessarily imply that humans have "souls", it does leave the question very much up in the air. Therefore, it is entirely possible that your personal pile of goo is home to some extremely unusual processes. Some have speculated, for example, that quantum mechanical uncertainity is at the heart of free will. In this sense, the difference between "human" and "a bunch of cells" is an immense one.
Never said it wasn't. In the physical, life is just an elaborate pile of goo. Who knows what it can and can't do? I believe life is more a spiritual thing than physical, but I could just as easily be wrong and it could simply be a weird arrangment of cells that create "life", whatever that's defined by.
I've heard some, when arguing for the right of arbortion, call the very early stages of development a "pile of goo" which always struck me as a derogatory understanding of the life.
You'd best sit down, your ego will thank you: That's all life is. From the first twinkly in your mother's eye to the grave, you are simply an eleborate pile of goo.
People have such a grandios idea of what life is, so dramatic and romatic. The reality is quite simply, you are ( and I saw this on a someone's sig around here ) a bunch of cells deciding to be you for a while. And biological material, more often than not, is gooey.
So come on down from your high estimation of yourself and look around. It's a quite lovely world, albeit a bit messy.
Re:They aren't as dangerous as before
on
Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 1
Click that link at the top of the page that says "Broadband" and choose their, i.e. SpeakEasy's, OneLink service. It works just fine.
Actually, it doesn't. Why? Because my local voice vendor is SBC, and they don't like to play nice with this service.
They could give me dsl service ( for a few bucks extra a month than sbc could. Worth every fucking dime of course ) if I had a voice line already, but they can't when I don't have one. I've already tried.
Re:They aren't as dangerous as before
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I would argue this point: SBC is already a horrendous company to work with. And have you ever tried to get DSL service without phone service?
Do you really believe this will get better as there are fewer and fewer options?
I've had broadband for years and any corporation worth a damn has fibre or something fast.
That must be nice for you. Most of us, however, don't live in an area where fiber is available for anything less than 2grand a month. And the t1 I have out here is flaky, for a t1. Typically, about 1 outage a month.
I thank you for your reply however, as it shows the mentality of an MS exec I was referring to.
They get warm to it, then it goes cold for a while. Then they warm up again.
The reason? Some new exec ( I'm guessing ) dreams up a way of sustainable yearly revenue, only to find that people's network connections aren't good enough yet. Sure, in the redmond area I'm guessing their inet connections are as solid as t1s, but the rest of the country is severely lacking in even enough bandwidth to pull this off, nevermind the reliability of the line.
This is an idea before it's time, and quite frankly, the implementation would appear to leave much to be desired. Not only that, but are still a ton of security considerations to take into account.
but IMHO, that's still a/. problem. I don't really care about my karma (probably since I've noticed nothing important about it) but if it's that important, why should funny posts not be rewarded?
It's a number. And like all numbers, people like to attach more importance to them then they alone are worth. More so here because these numbers are actually related, however minor, to our activities.
For what it's worth, I agree: I think it's a flaw in the code. I think positive mods should be as significant as negative mods. So do many people, which is why they mod it as something other than funny.:)
A mod of funny doesn't give the author any karma, but the negative mods still take away from karma. So the mods, having learned this, will mod someone insightful or interesting when they want to mod the post funny so the author doesn't get any karma hits.
So a browser that hates you enough to try to kill you, or failing that, your computer at every turn? One that does it's own thing, regardless of what you tell it to do, and when you finally manage to get it to do what you want, it does it half assed?
So yeah, I'm guilty as sin. But who am I really hurting, since I have the cash in my pocket and am willing to exchange it for something that just doesn't exist yet? And which I 100% guaranteed *will* buy when it does?
You are justifying what you already know is wrong. If you wanted to read the book, drop the damn cash for it. It's 20 bucks at most borders, hardly enough to break you, and it's not like R Jordan doesn't deserve it.
And the book is awsome, btw. Well worth the money.
And how much of this did we already hear about last year? And the year before that?
Vista is so slow coming out the gates, I expect it to ship with Nukem. No one cares about MSN search because we have google. As most admins, I associate hotmail with spam. A new windows media player is nothing to celebrate: Why would we? It's like they achieved all the functionality you might need at about 6, and from there on out it's been all about adding bloat. IE: It's starting to play feature catchup with firefox, hardly news.
So none of this is really news, and most of it is old garbage.
Overall, cross platform support is a small niche market.
If that's true, you have to wonder why. Let's take, for example, the dental industry. There are a number of practice managers out there ( and pretty much all of them suck once you get beyond a single small practice...but I digress ), but they are all window based.
Now, let's make one built on qt. Is approximate in features to the others ( not that hard, believe me ).
So we have a new dentist opening his doors. He is going to be a single office, but he wants to go chartless from the get-go ( big deal in the dental field ). So he's going to have 4 ops ( 1 hyg, 3 for dr production. Triple booking ), 2 front desk people, an insurance person, and his+office manager. That's 8 systems out the gate. 9 if you want to give him an xray room computer ( and with chartless, he'll need it for digital xrays ). And due to the number of systems, let's toss in a server. One server to bind them all, and all that.
So, we have 10 systems that won't need the windows tax, that's a savings of about 2000 ( 9 pro, 1 server license ) right out the gate. Now, what would a practice be without letters? Because we built ours to be OS independant, we couldn't count on MS Office being installed, so we opted for open office instead. So that's 9 office standard licenses we didn't have to fork over cash for either. Let's say that's 4,000. Now, let's take a moment about actual software costs: Most practice managers today are moving to a centralized sql solution. I've seen ones for pervasive, oracle and mssql. Just imagine for a moment *those* licensing costs.
So, we just saved our Dr at least $6,000 is start up fees. What does this mean to us, the software developer? Our offer doesn't suffer from the hidden costs our competitors do. Further, this creates more busines opportunities for us. We could prebuild a linux system to run our software, prebuild his whole network, in the course of a day.
And let's talk about those hidden fees. Because we chose qt, we were obviously smart enough to go with postgres ( data integrity is critical, not speed ). Nothing in our setup require the end user to worry about the number of licenses they have to pay for, excepting support ( which I will touch on in a moment ). So once the Dr drops the cash for the system, he's done. He can be sure that he won't grow beyond some mystical number and suddenly he won't be allowed to log in anymore.
Now: Support. Who here has supported a full linux network? Those of you who have never had the pleasure, let me tell you something: It's pure bliss. I don't care how many systems you throw on your network, with linux, once you have something setup, it's setup. Minimal maintence. Shit doesn't "just break" for no reason. More so if you've built it. So our Dr's support bill could be considerably lower than our competitors.
At the end of the day, our Dr may pay more for our system than the competitors, but not by much, and he gets a ton more in the bargin. Further, he gets reliable systems that don't need constant tweaking, so his productivity is quite a bit higher. Add to that the fact that we can lock down our linux systems tight as drum, and they are still functional, and we can assume a higher degree of security. Which means the ditz he hires for the front desk won't be able to install the latest and greatest spyware.
The business opportunities for cross-platform development astound me when I sit here thinking about it. I'm just shocked no one else has picked up on this yet.
And if you think that you can present those kinds of considerations to justify $2000 in a real business, you haven't encountered real-world corporate budgeting. Depends on the real world. To me this seems a slam dunk: For $2,000, I get an app that will run on multiple OSes, considerably broadening my potential customer base. And it'll only add a few bucks to the end product.
Only a PHB would deny that kind of request, and they wouldn't even do that if you dropped the words, "Mac OSX".
Look at it this way: 2,000 is nothing in the long run. If you are developing a commercial app, most likely you are shooting for, let's say low end, 1000 customers. That means an extra 2 bucks per customer for you to develop this for them.
If your potential customer base is less, typically that means a specialized field, in which case the cost for your software is going to be so high anyway, an extra 2000 isn't going to make any difference.
And trolltech has every right to make money off of their work. I support them fully in that regard. They make a software library that allows you to make your app look the same across three of the primary OSes out there ( win32, Mac OSX, and linux-stuff ). This is a non-trivial thing to do, and they do it very well.
Seriously, this guy needs something else to worry about.
As I see it, the founders didn't decree anything: There are rules to any contest. And given how much backend work el founders probably wanted to do ( ie: none. If it ain't borked, don't fix it ), this makes perfect sense.
Not that I have a particular love of conspiracies, but...
Ok, 400 million of these things are purchased. Giving the benefit of the doubt, let's say 25% paid in cash. Everything else is trackable. So now imagine an entity who has full rights to any database. Not that much of a leap. Suddenly, it's not so unlikely that I could get a printed document and track it back to an individual person.
And note, for large purchases like this, it's very unlikely that someone would use cash. More likely credit cards. Which makes it that much easier.
Indeed. It wasn't until I found myself 5 pages into a web app that I realized I was using vim, and I was moving faster than my traditional windows based ide.
Let the *AA legislate themselves into irrelevancy. Meanwhile, go outside and see the sun. It's quite pretty ( after it's burned the flesh from your bones ). Play with your kids, talk to your parents ( in shortly timed bursts to maintain sanity ), go to the park and play with a frisbee.
I haven't had a TV in years and I do not miss it. So let them keep passing these laws and essentially screwing themselves over.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a strict materialist, as you seem to be. Therefore, I agree that organic life has no "animating spirit" that fundamentally distinguishes it from non-life. In that sense, you are correct that life is just "an elaborate pile of goo".
Whoa there, slow down. I never said I believed that. I said life is an elaborate pile of goo. I never said there wasn't an "animating spirit", or whatever. Asside from seeing and speaking the obvious, I also suffer from a deeply rooted spiritualism, which I can't say has any basis in religioun.
On the other hand, human life exhibits some characteristics that are currently beyond all scientific explanation. In particular, I am thinking of free will, conciousness, and self-awareness (which are all probably words for the same underlying phenomenon). No one has the slightest idea how these characteristics arise in a human (and, puzzlingly, don't seem to in any other form of life).
Excepting all the other animals that show the same characteristics. The apes are the obvious, but I have no problem seeing the same behavior in dogs too ( speaking from experience ).
While this doesn't necessarily imply that humans have "souls", it does leave the question very much up in the air. Therefore, it is entirely possible that your personal pile of goo is home to some extremely unusual processes. Some have speculated, for example, that quantum mechanical uncertainity is at the heart of free will. In this sense, the difference between "human" and "a bunch of cells" is an immense one.
Never said it wasn't. In the physical, life is just an elaborate pile of goo. Who knows what it can and can't do? I believe life is more a spiritual thing than physical, but I could just as easily be wrong and it could simply be a weird arrangment of cells that create "life", whatever that's defined by.
I've heard some, when arguing for the right of arbortion, call the very early stages of development a "pile of goo" which always struck me as a derogatory understanding of the life.
You'd best sit down, your ego will thank you: That's all life is. From the first twinkly in your mother's eye to the grave, you are simply an eleborate pile of goo.
People have such a grandios idea of what life is, so dramatic and romatic. The reality is quite simply, you are ( and I saw this on a someone's sig around here ) a bunch of cells deciding to be you for a while. And biological material, more often than not, is gooey.
So come on down from your high estimation of yourself and look around. It's a quite lovely world, albeit a bit messy.
Click that link at the top of the page that says "Broadband" and choose their, i.e. SpeakEasy's, OneLink service. It works just fine.
Actually, it doesn't. Why? Because my local voice vendor is SBC, and they don't like to play nice with this service.
They could give me dsl service ( for a few bucks extra a month than sbc could. Worth every fucking dime of course ) if I had a voice line already, but they can't when I don't have one. I've already tried.
I would argue this point: SBC is already a horrendous company to work with. And have you ever tried to get DSL service without phone service?
Do you really believe this will get better as there are fewer and fewer options?
I've had broadband for years and any corporation worth a damn has fibre or something fast.
That must be nice for you. Most of us, however, don't live in an area where fiber is available for anything less than 2grand a month. And the t1 I have out here is flaky, for a t1. Typically, about 1 outage a month.
I thank you for your reply however, as it shows the mentality of an MS exec I was referring to.
So we're going to have more people getting VC for ideas that won't last more than a few months.
Well, I guess that's an improvement over the last bubble: Those guys didn't have a plan beyond getting the VC.
They get warm to it, then it goes cold for a while. Then they warm up again.
The reason? Some new exec ( I'm guessing ) dreams up a way of sustainable yearly revenue, only to find that people's network connections aren't good enough yet. Sure, in the redmond area I'm guessing their inet connections are as solid as t1s, but the rest of the country is severely lacking in even enough bandwidth to pull this off, nevermind the reliability of the line.
This is an idea before it's time, and quite frankly, the implementation would appear to leave much to be desired. Not only that, but are still a ton of security considerations to take into account.
but IMHO, that's still a /. problem. I don't really care about my karma (probably since I've noticed nothing important about it) but if it's that important, why should funny posts not be rewarded?
:)
It's a number. And like all numbers, people like to attach more importance to them then they alone are worth. More so here because these numbers are actually related, however minor, to our activities.
For what it's worth, I agree: I think it's a flaw in the code. I think positive mods should be as significant as negative mods. So do many people, which is why they mod it as something other than funny.
(sorry, someone had to do it)
:)
No, no I don't think anybody had to do it.
A mod of funny doesn't give the author any karma, but the negative mods still take away from karma. So the mods, having learned this, will mod someone insightful or interesting when they want to mod the post funny so the author doesn't get any karma hits.
What? The two do different things.
Good point: One's a language for writing dynamic websites, where as the other is a language for writing dynamic websites.
...is an anti-social browser.
So a browser that hates you enough to try to kill you, or failing that, your computer at every turn? One that does it's own thing, regardless of what you tell it to do, and when you finally manage to get it to do what you want, it does it half assed?
Wait...I think I just described IE.
So yeah, I'm guilty as sin. But who am I really hurting, since I have the cash in my pocket and am willing to exchange it for something that just doesn't exist yet? And which I 100% guaranteed *will* buy when it does?
You are justifying what you already know is wrong. If you wanted to read the book, drop the damn cash for it. It's 20 bucks at most borders, hardly enough to break you, and it's not like R Jordan doesn't deserve it.
And the book is awsome, btw. Well worth the money.
And how much of this did we already hear about last year? And the year before that?
Vista is so slow coming out the gates, I expect it to ship with Nukem. No one cares about MSN search because we have google. As most admins, I associate hotmail with spam. A new windows media player is nothing to celebrate: Why would we? It's like they achieved all the functionality you might need at about 6, and from there on out it's been all about adding bloat. IE: It's starting to play feature catchup with firefox, hardly news.
So none of this is really news, and most of it is old garbage.
Overall, cross platform support is a small niche market.
If that's true, you have to wonder why. Let's take, for example, the dental industry. There are a number of practice managers out there ( and pretty much all of them suck once you get beyond a single small practice...but I digress ), but they are all window based.
Now, let's make one built on qt. Is approximate in features to the others ( not that hard, believe me ).
So we have a new dentist opening his doors. He is going to be a single office, but he wants to go chartless from the get-go ( big deal in the dental field ). So he's going to have 4 ops ( 1 hyg, 3 for dr production. Triple booking ), 2 front desk people, an insurance person, and his+office manager. That's 8 systems out the gate. 9 if you want to give him an xray room computer ( and with chartless, he'll need it for digital xrays ). And due to the number of systems, let's toss in a server. One server to bind them all, and all that.
So, we have 10 systems that won't need the windows tax, that's a savings of about 2000 ( 9 pro, 1 server license ) right out the gate. Now, what would a practice be without letters? Because we built ours to be OS independant, we couldn't count on MS Office being installed, so we opted for open office instead. So that's 9 office standard licenses we didn't have to fork over cash for either. Let's say that's 4,000. Now, let's take a moment about actual software costs: Most practice managers today are moving to a centralized sql solution. I've seen ones for pervasive, oracle and mssql. Just imagine for a moment *those* licensing costs.
So, we just saved our Dr at least $6,000 is start up fees. What does this mean to us, the software developer? Our offer doesn't suffer from the hidden costs our competitors do. Further, this creates more busines opportunities for us. We could prebuild a linux system to run our software, prebuild his whole network, in the course of a day.
And let's talk about those hidden fees. Because we chose qt, we were obviously smart enough to go with postgres ( data integrity is critical, not speed ). Nothing in our setup require the end user to worry about the number of licenses they have to pay for, excepting support ( which I will touch on in a moment ). So once the Dr drops the cash for the system, he's done. He can be sure that he won't grow beyond some mystical number and suddenly he won't be allowed to log in anymore.
Now: Support. Who here has supported a full linux network? Those of you who have never had the pleasure, let me tell you something: It's pure bliss. I don't care how many systems you throw on your network, with linux, once you have something setup, it's setup. Minimal maintence. Shit doesn't "just break" for no reason. More so if you've built it. So our Dr's support bill could be considerably lower than our competitors.
At the end of the day, our Dr may pay more for our system than the competitors, but not by much, and he gets a ton more in the bargin. Further, he gets reliable systems that don't need constant tweaking, so his productivity is quite a bit higher. Add to that the fact that we can lock down our linux systems tight as drum, and they are still functional, and we can assume a higher degree of security. Which means the ditz he hires for the front desk won't be able to install the latest and greatest spyware.
The business opportunities for cross-platform development astound me when I sit here thinking about it. I'm just shocked no one else has picked up on this yet.
And if you think that you can present those kinds of considerations to justify $2000 in a real business, you haven't encountered real-world corporate budgeting.
Depends on the real world. To me this seems a slam dunk: For $2,000, I get an app that will run on multiple OSes, considerably broadening my potential customer base. And it'll only add a few bucks to the end product.
Only a PHB would deny that kind of request, and they wouldn't even do that if you dropped the words, "Mac OSX".
Look at it this way: 2,000 is nothing in the long run. If you are developing a commercial app, most likely you are shooting for, let's say low end, 1000 customers. That means an extra 2 bucks per customer for you to develop this for them.
If your potential customer base is less, typically that means a specialized field, in which case the cost for your software is going to be so high anyway, an extra 2000 isn't going to make any difference.
And trolltech has every right to make money off of their work. I support them fully in that regard. They make a software library that allows you to make your app look the same across three of the primary OSes out there ( win32, Mac OSX, and linux-stuff ). This is a non-trivial thing to do, and they do it very well.
So wait, your biggest problem with trolltech is they don't have a price point for you?
It's their software, right? They have the right to make money off of their own work, right? And license it however they choose?
Seriously, this guy needs something else to worry about.
As I see it, the founders didn't decree anything: There are rules to any contest. And given how much backend work el founders probably wanted to do ( ie: none. If it ain't borked, don't fix it ), this makes perfect sense.
Not that I have a particular love of conspiracies, but...
Ok, 400 million of these things are purchased. Giving the benefit of the doubt, let's say 25% paid in cash. Everything else is trackable. So now imagine an entity who has full rights to any database. Not that much of a leap. Suddenly, it's not so unlikely that I could get a printed document and track it back to an individual person.
And note, for large purchases like this, it's very unlikely that someone would use cash. More likely credit cards. Which makes it that much easier.
Indeed. It wasn't until I found myself 5 pages into a web app that I realized I was using vim, and I was moving faster than my traditional windows based ide.
They deserve a huge pat on the back.
...unless they shot him.
Same people that drop 50grand into speaker wire because it sounds better. Or 10k for gold leads, because they sound "warmer".
In other words, pretentious assholes. Correction, pretentious RICH assholes.
Let the *AA legislate themselves into irrelevancy. Meanwhile, go outside and see the sun. It's quite pretty ( after it's burned the flesh from your bones ). Play with your kids, talk to your parents ( in shortly timed bursts to maintain sanity ), go to the park and play with a frisbee.
I haven't had a TV in years and I do not miss it. So let them keep passing these laws and essentially screwing themselves over.
and I thought I had been clear on this already when I said 'No'--we have no plans at this time to build Office on Linux,' Nick McGrath
I say we keep asking him. Every chance we get.