You are confounding me, mostly because of your archeology/science analogy. I have never thought of archeology, psychology or sociology as sciences precisely because they concern themselves with a system that is not [always] repeatable. By the literal definition of science, I am wrong. This is one of the fundamentals of other "hard" sciences that is unprovable, but assumed in the interests of making progress.
ID as I understand it is the belief that life, the universe or everything was created by some intelligent force(s), I was not aware it needed to be so specific as manking on earth. Beyond that, I am not aware that it is at all scientific. I don't see that proving evolution correct, falsifies ID. Who is to say that some intelligent force did not seed planet earth with a chemical soup whose initial conditions virtually guaranteed the eventual evolution of humanity? To me ID is just an assumption one can make to kickstart the brain, I wouldn't consider it something even as glamorous as a theory.
I don't see why something needs to be called "science" to have some value to someone. It often helps me to solve electrical issues to pretend that electricity is water in a pipe. I find it a useful way to think, but it does not explain everything. It's a helpful abstraction that is easier to follow than electromagnetism. Similarly if it helps people studying evolution to pretend that someone put us all here for a reason, and whatever theories they derive from this belief are provable, is it bad? I think not.
I can agree that in this case the proponents of ID are using one word with perhaps non-antagonistic connotations to mask the introduction of something with very dubious intents.
Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory, or at least, it shouldn't be viewed as one. We are not proving Intelligent Design as a law like F=ma, we are using it to come up with some new law.
At least, before I read the very biased/. link to ID, that is how I thought of the subject. Creationism is the theory that is not helpful but can't be disproved.
I don't understand your comment or maybe I agree completely.
"ID is as much a science as archeology." No, I think archeology is far more of a science. I called ID a philosophy, one definition of which is a creative way of thinking about problems. Creative thinking and proveable fact are separate, one may lead to the other, or to sculptures of half dressed people.
Falsification is a requirement of scientific theory, not thought or creativity. A theory must be falsifiable to be useful, because theories that can't be disproven don't help us understand anything. Science is a tool that is refined by creative people who need inspiration.
As far as morality, that is a tangent. I'm not sure that there is a good reference on the subject .
The/. article pointed to some website with some groups particular take on ID, but it is not really the entire subject. ID is really old. Obviously it predates religion since most religions assume ID.
I like the concept of ID bcause I watched too much Star Trek when I was younger. I of course think it's totally nuts to teach in place of evolution just as I wouldn't teach european history in english literature. I'm in a controversial mood today and want to challenge some/. pseudo-intellectuals who feel superior for rejecting religion but haven't thought out their position very well. There's room for compromise on this subject, ID has a place in school I think, just not in Biology.
I'm not a history buff, but I do remember the class it was taught. Before I posted I read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism in which scholasticism as a principle is explained. It was probably not the entire source of all evil >0AD, but it kept us down quite a while and resulted in many known things being "lost" due to conflict with biblical truth.
If you want to enlighten me, go for it, I'll read.
I think modern science seems to have started in the 14th-15th century ("the past few hundred years", rather than "tens of thousand years of written and derived evidence"). Before that it was mostly accidental, with a few exceptions. Obviously the scientific method evolved, but it's common sense formalized. It is however, not the only way of thinking. Einstein was known to think up experiments in his head "because it must be so", only to have his theories proved out much later. I wouldn't argue his methodology is always a good idea, but with the right background and understanding, why not?
Why could not ID, in theory, be as useful? The only answer of course, is that's patently untrue, which can't be proven. I can't make the leap that anything not falsifiable is thereby wrong or even useless, but it's not guaranteed correct or useful either. Sometimes you have to drive a stake in the sand, and build a house around it just to make progress and wait until it tumbles down around you. "Energy cannot be created or destroyed", can't really prove that can we? But it's deep down in thermodynamics. We assume it's true because we are assuming certain things about our universe, but you don't really know. It's helpful, end of story.
I am losing faith in angry atheists as quickly as angry christians. Both will not take the time to understand the others viewpoint. If in my starting paragraph I said "ID is an interesting philosophy that has no place in a high school biology class" I'd be +5 insightful and have attracted the creationism trolls.
First, I work for a company that without Microsoft, will surely go out of business. We're worse than a start-up SW dev, we're totally, completely dependent on MS. Yet I'm not bothered, I want MS to fail even at my expense. I'll find a new job, perhaps with the competitor, there is no net loss of jobs as long as people still want the product. I don't advocate wholesale piracy, just political piracy.
I never argued that Sony or Nintendo are saints, they are simply unable to compete with MS. You really proved my point. Nintendo sacrifices quality, Sony sacrifices support. Both systems are in trouble and I have not seen signs that this will change. Nintendo is giving up, trying to find profit in its niche market. Sony is burning up cash to fight MS (as you hint, they are not a small company and have cash to burn), but they can't win. There won't be any competition if MS is not fought against.
As for predicting the future, I have no crystal ball. But why on earth do you think MS will behave differently with consoles than the PC? They want this market, they're taking it by force and making their competitors hurt. Embrace, expand, exploit. Seems awful familiar to me.
I never said, or meant to say, it is wrong for your company to write XBOX applications; only exclusive XBOX applications. If you write Windows AND OSX AND Linux, people should not pirate, they should buy your other products.
Sony and Nintendo do not monopolize anything, or control outright the PC market. Another contender in the console biz is great, if it were almost anyone but Microsoft.
Next there is the issue of illegal which you have been harping on. There is illegal and immoral. I only care about immoral. Breaking the law is totally irrelevant. Us Americans have a long history of criminal behavior as a means to an end, a tradition I hope remains ingrained in our culture.
Theft is often wrong from a moral perspective. In the case where it does a greater social good to do something otherwise bad, then it is no longer immoral. I believe that Microsoft is in an unfair position, and they must be reduced to one competitor amongst many in every market they enter. Unfortunately their economic condition prohibits them from ever being on equal footing with competitors. Their console is superior, only because they had a fat wad of cash to burn to buy the market. Once bought we'll be subjected to the same marginal hardware and software we are used to on the PC.
I don't even possess an X-Box much less pirate. I own every PS2 and PC game I have. The point is to hurt Microsoft, and anyone who aids them, intentionally or not.
Theft is very debatable when talking about IP.
What's wrong with market forces pushing back against a bad company and a bad product? The entire value chain must see low profit in pursuing a MS only solution. Not just MS, but their SW Devs, and their distribution chain. On the opposing end, people need to see money in antagonizing them: mod chip companies, warez groups, etc.
Companies that write multi-platform games need to be rewarded, those that go for lockdown need to be punished. If you work for someone that likes exclusivity agreements, shame on you.
So the scientific method is one method to understanding. Rejecting "intelligent design" as a means to understanding on the grounds that it is not the scientific method is equally close minded.
Science has the approach "If I poke/prod X, I expect Y" and then following that up with analysis. It's a tool that has proven useful over oh, the past few hundred years and probably is why we're typing this on an electronic bulletin board from a computer in our corporate office, instead of hand writing on parchment to correspondents who may/dev/null it. It's a method of sounding out ideas, and accepting or rejecting them, it works but is increasingly limited by our ability to verify our predictions.
"Intelligent Design", while not totally new in concept may be helpful. If in fact the universe was designed by an intelligence that humans can understand, perhaps thinking along these lines will help produce new ideas that can then be tested with the scientific method. It's a way of generating ideas, not proving them. If you accept God, or a Wizard as a an intelligence we can understand, and who had total control over the creation of All Things, I think that could help us hone our theorizing. If it were true, I haven't seen evidence of that, but maybe it's there. Like any philosophy however, it's really a thought excersize.
I think however that "intelligent design" in practice is the re-invention of medieval scholasticism. "How do we take views that conflict with christian orthodoxy that are useful, and reconcile them with Biblical Truth". That has no business in public school, and history documents clearly that such dark age thinking held society in place for a thousand years in wretched conditions. We do not want to go back there.
Intelligent Design, as I've heard it explained by less politically motivated people, sounds like as reasonable of a philosophy as any. That does imply that it belongs in a college philosophy class, and not high school biology. I think, hope, that college kids will have attained a level of maturity that allows them to not accept everything Professor says as fact, because this subject aside, quite often that's already not the case.
The real question isn't how much an XBOX 360 costs, so much as how an XBOX 360 mod chip will cost.
This is a Microsoft product, no one on Slashdot is going to actually pay money for it (or at least admit to it). We'll eBay someones box, figure out how to hack it (ostensibly to put Linux or BSD on it) and then get games on the black market. On second thought, some people may buy the XBox 360 thinking MS is losing a load on the HW.
It remains to be seen how much this will cost on this new generation of console. Certainly PS2/XBox are more expensive to hack than the PS1.
Jokes aside, Help Desk is probably the toughest IT assignment. Any dork can hack some perl, it's hard to solve someones problem on the phone. It's totally unrewarding, and a job that pays dick, but it's in my opinion harder than anything else IT people do.
Also probably the one that qualifies people for management the best. If you can keep your temper when dealing with the dumbest of dumb on the phone, you're probably ready to politic with your peers successfully. Sadly, that's about all that qualifies people for management these days.
I thought it was a remake of the ancient greek "Pyramus & Thisbe" (Ovid Metamorphses, Book 4). I believe he also took "Othello" from one of those, but I never read them all. To this day I resent the wasted semester in that lit class.
Then why even bother to draft it? This seems like an awful waste of time and energy if you know the bill could cripple the search engine industry and that's not what you want.
The same reason people buy lottery tickets, you just never know....
Not all big companies are Evil(tm). Big companies are when they become so dominant their customers have no choices. They can't help it, they may not even WANT to be Evil, but they will become Evil if given the chance. Companies in self-regulating markets will go out of business if they become Evil, but the computer business is not one of those, yet. Microsoft is Evil and dangerous. Apple has been Evil in the past. IBM is simply not good at being Evil, but it's not for lack of trying.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, if any of these companies subdue their competitors they WILL become Evil. It is a guarantee. They are all in a position to do this because Microsoft has dropped the ball and there is a vacuum that needs filling.
Fundamentally the world still lacks applications that are truly platform agnostic, such that we, the consumer, can pick and choose platforms, operating systems & applications without "lock-in". If anyone is successful at dethroning Microsoft until this is solved, they will then become the new Microsoft.
Yeah I don't get it./.'ers angry at Apple, supporting IBM, looking forward to seeing the PC knocked down a rung. WTF!? BLASPHEMY!
IBM is every bit as Evil as Apple and Microsoft, they're just on our side temporarily. Let the big shots duke it out. What we want is deadlock, no party ending up with a significant advantage over each other, but seeing profit in code portability.
Nerds don't use computers, they sculpt them like artwork. The current generation has warts.
So right now there are 3 reasons why Mac's are more expensive than PCs:
-> Use of components with far less volume
-> Authoritarian system test in which each component certified by Apple must be exhaustively tested by Apple
-> The Monopoly Tax
After they switch to Intel hardware:
-> Authoritarian system test in which each component certified by Apple must be exhaustively tested by Apple
-> The Monopoly Tax (which I think will be greatly reduced initially to lure in PC users) (and actually I still think there will be a FEW components that Apple uses that are not common elsewhere, but let's ignore this for now.)
Think about what so many people post on/. They claim Apple hardware is "rock solid". Are their engineers smarter? Nope, chances are those people go back and forth between Apple/IBM/Dell/HP etc every five years to fix their paycheck. Are their components inherently more reliable? Not really. What's different? The answer is the combinations of components in every Apple sold, and the components you are allowed to put in your Mac and still receive support.
The bigger PC vendors (IBM/Dell/HP) exhaustively test every component that THEY put in their PCs. This sounds beautiful, but it's not. And it's horribly expensive already. If you go to one of Dell's (or IBM or HP) configurators, you'll see a machine with one processor, and one memory option, one OS option and 2 video card options and 3 hard drive options etc. You can be sure any combination of stuff on that page has been exhaustively tested with each other and every known bug resolved. What is not tested is any software not pre-installed, any OS not pre-installed, any driver not pre-installed, any expansion card, USB device, mouse, keyboard, etc. I don't even believe they test against "real" standards (i.e. the kind that comes in writing), they tend to adopt the "if it works for us, it's standard" attitude. All this test effort is almost ten times more than the R&D cost of the designs themselves, and never ends during the product lifetime. You, the customer, pay for this (but don't know it so much because it's divided into such a huge volume). However for the PC market this is an OK practice, because there's no central authority dictating what it means to be a PC. In fact IBM tried this once, a long time back, and people laughed at them and went with ad-hoc approaches intentionally circumventing IBMs effort (in their defense, IBM went out of it's way to piss everyone off).
Apple on the other hand takes the opposite approach. Anything that runs on their machine (or receives their logo), pre-installed or otherwise, must be tested to their satisfaction. That means of course far fewer options, but also far fewer bugs from a customer experience standpoint. You can buy hardware for your Apple and it'll just work. You can also call Apple, and they'll fix your problem, one way or another. This is why people think Apple hardware is better, but hopefully you can see it will always cost more.
Of course if Apple somehow gets PC volumes behind it, this will not be so expensive. On the other hand, if Apple gets PC market share, the monopoly tax goes way up too (see the 1980s). There's no winner here until we can figure out how to commoditize computing hardware and the OS layer. Surprisingly (to some, not me) it seems applications are being commoditized faster than the hardware/OS.
I believe Apple's higher end workstations are going to stay PPC for a while. No need to go blue just yet.
Second, why are you tied to a hardware architecture? Is it because you truly believe it is vastly superior enough that you are willing to tolerate vendor lock-in? Or is it because you hate Intel?
If it's the former, educate me. What about the apple architecture is so superior that it's worth locking in to? Why is the IBM architecture, although not as ideal, still so preferable as to want to lock-in?
If it's just hating Intel, I'd suggest that is the wrong attitude. We can distrust Intel, but tolerate them as long as there is AMD. We ought to similarly distrust IBM, but tolerate them as long as there is Motorola(Freescale?). Locking in everything to one vendor is in all cases the wrong thing to do, unless whatever that vendor offers is so incredibly superior, that it's just impractical to consider anyone else.
I have seen no evidence that the Apple architecture is supremely better. It is better from a customer support standpoint, and always will be. It is inferior from a price standpoint, and for the same reason, always will be. I don't see the Apple architecture suffering even one bit from using a Pentium instead of a PowerPC.
No, the larger the volumes you have, the lower the prices you can get. There's no unit step at a certain volume although if you are the single largest consumer you can probably get an even bigger cut. Either way they'll get lower prices on Pentium devices than on PPCs, and lower prices on PC components than traditional Apple/PPC components. The simplest reason is that the PPC volumes are low enough that R&D & other NRE expenses are a significant portion of the per device cost. On a mainstream Intel processor, those costs are divided amongst every consumer, it's almost invisible.
High end PPCs are used in a lot of places, but not in significant volume (when compared to a Pentium).
I don't see why anyone cares what hardware is under the hood in an apple, no one uses an Apple because it has a PPC. They use it because Apple owns & supports the entire system and the OS is good.
You're absolutely right of course, I was on the wrong side of their policies. As another less polite poster pointed out, I'm being the asshole that blockbuster may be suffering economic loss from my holding on to a movie a few extra days (I highly doubt it personally).
The question is whether that $8.00 in late fees is worth losing me as a customer forever. I strongly suspect they would have made more money by not being greedy.
Wired is pulling the same stunt, betting that the number of people who cower and pay will outweigh the almost certain lost business of those who do not.
It used to be if a business gave you bad service, or irritated you that you could go to the manager and he'd just GIVE you free stuff to make you happy. At least back when not everything was a national change. These days it's the other way around, give them business or they'll come after YOU.
Let's distill your comment into "Americans (or any sane people) will not buy this until fuel cell cars are cheaper to buy and operate than their existing vehicles".
What big-ass SUVs, Americans (not especially known for frugality), taxes or legislation necessarily have to do with this is beyond me. It just makes you seem spiteful.
While I do not understand the SUV craze, I understand mini-vans, station wagons and pick-up trucks (well most of them). Most of those don't get optimal fuel efficiency but have practical value.
The only things that are discouraging people from considering some high efficiency vehicle for our next purchase are a) They're more expensive for the class of car b) It's unclear how maintainable they are and c) They only come in "the commuter coupe". Commuter cars are fine for the work commute, but not to haul around a pack of kids and the dog to school/ballet/soccer/baseball/taekwankungfu/etc. The roads are filled with soccer moms and contractors, they put more miles in their car than your average commuter. A commuter coupe won't work for either of those people.
Making gas more expensive is not going to endear you to people either. Unlike Europe, most of the US is designed such that you MUST drive a car to live life. Sure, some older places can be navigated without a car, but the vast majority of places in the country REQUIRE a car. Here in Austin my grocery store is 12 miles away, on a major (>65mph road). I'm not walking or biking there, not only because of the huge inconvenience, I'll be dead within a week. And I live in a quasi-dense suburb for this area. It was like this in NJ, Virginia, California, Florida, North Carolina and Maryland.
I like the idea of giving big tax breaks for fuel efficient cars. I'd like to see greenpeace or some other environmental motor mouths get off their soap box and spend some money evangelizing these thing and pushing this to the public at large. Maybe then we'll get some movement in Washington. Instead all I hear is complaints, nature worship and America bashing. Imagine why no one pays attention.
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You are confounding me, mostly because of your archeology/science analogy. I have never thought of archeology, psychology or sociology as sciences precisely because they concern themselves with a system that is not [always] repeatable. By the literal definition of science, I am wrong. This is one of the fundamentals of other "hard" sciences that is unprovable, but assumed in the interests of making progress.
ID as I understand it is the belief that life, the universe or everything was created by some intelligent force(s), I was not aware it needed to be so specific as manking on earth. Beyond that, I am not aware that it is at all scientific. I don't see that proving evolution correct, falsifies ID. Who is to say that some intelligent force did not seed planet earth with a chemical soup whose initial conditions virtually guaranteed the eventual evolution of humanity? To me ID is just an assumption one can make to kickstart the brain, I wouldn't consider it something even as glamorous as a theory.
I don't see why something needs to be called "science" to have some value to someone. It often helps me to solve electrical issues to pretend that electricity is water in a pipe. I find it a useful way to think, but it does not explain everything. It's a helpful abstraction that is easier to follow than electromagnetism. Similarly if it helps people studying evolution to pretend that someone put us all here for a reason, and whatever theories they derive from this belief are provable, is it bad? I think not.
I can agree that in this case the proponents of ID are using one word with perhaps non-antagonistic connotations to mask the introduction of something with very dubious intents.
Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory, or at least, it shouldn't be viewed as one. We are not proving Intelligent Design as a law like F=ma, we are using it to come up with some new law. At least, before I read the very biased /. link to ID, that is how I thought of the subject. Creationism is the theory that is not helpful but can't be disproved.
I don't understand your comment or maybe I agree completely.
/. article pointed to some website with some groups particular take on ID, but it is not really the entire subject. ID is really old. Obviously it predates religion since most religions assume ID.
/. pseudo-intellectuals who feel superior for rejecting religion but haven't thought out their position very well. There's room for compromise on this subject, ID has a place in school I think, just not in Biology.
"ID is as much a science as archeology." No, I think archeology is far more of a science. I called ID a philosophy, one definition of which is a creative way of thinking about problems. Creative thinking and proveable fact are separate, one may lead to the other, or to sculptures of half dressed people.
Falsification is a requirement of scientific theory, not thought or creativity. A theory must be falsifiable to be useful, because theories that can't be disproven don't help us understand anything. Science is a tool that is refined by creative people who need inspiration.
As far as morality, that is a tangent. I'm not sure that there is a good reference on the subject .
The
I like the concept of ID bcause I watched too much Star Trek when I was younger. I of course think it's totally nuts to teach in place of evolution just as I wouldn't teach european history in english literature. I'm in a controversial mood today and want to challenge some
I'm not a history buff, but I do remember the class it was taught. Before I posted I read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism in which scholasticism as a principle is explained. It was probably not the entire source of all evil >0AD, but it kept us down quite a while and resulted in many known things being "lost" due to conflict with biblical truth.
If you want to enlighten me, go for it, I'll read.
I think modern science seems to have started in the 14th-15th century ("the past few hundred years", rather than "tens of thousand years of written and derived evidence"). Before that it was mostly accidental, with a few exceptions. Obviously the scientific method evolved, but it's common sense formalized. It is however, not the only way of thinking. Einstein was known to think up experiments in his head "because it must be so", only to have his theories proved out much later. I wouldn't argue his methodology is always a good idea, but with the right background and understanding, why not?
Why could not ID, in theory, be as useful? The only answer of course, is that's patently untrue, which can't be proven. I can't make the leap that anything not falsifiable is thereby wrong or even useless, but it's not guaranteed correct or useful either. Sometimes you have to drive a stake in the sand, and build a house around it just to make progress and wait until it tumbles down around you. "Energy cannot be created or destroyed", can't really prove that can we? But it's deep down in thermodynamics. We assume it's true because we are assuming certain things about our universe, but you don't really know. It's helpful, end of story.
I am losing faith in angry atheists as quickly as angry christians. Both will not take the time to understand the others viewpoint. If in my starting paragraph I said "ID is an interesting philosophy that has no place in a high school biology class" I'd be +5 insightful and have attracted the creationism trolls.
First, I work for a company that without Microsoft, will surely go out of business. We're worse than a start-up SW dev, we're totally, completely dependent on MS. Yet I'm not bothered, I want MS to fail even at my expense. I'll find a new job, perhaps with the competitor, there is no net loss of jobs as long as people still want the product. I don't advocate wholesale piracy, just political piracy.
I never argued that Sony or Nintendo are saints, they are simply unable to compete with MS. You really proved my point. Nintendo sacrifices quality, Sony sacrifices support. Both systems are in trouble and I have not seen signs that this will change. Nintendo is giving up, trying to find profit in its niche market. Sony is burning up cash to fight MS (as you hint, they are not a small company and have cash to burn), but they can't win. There won't be any competition if MS is not fought against.
As for predicting the future, I have no crystal ball. But why on earth do you think MS will behave differently with consoles than the PC? They want this market, they're taking it by force and making their competitors hurt. Embrace, expand, exploit. Seems awful familiar to me.
I never said, or meant to say, it is wrong for your company to write XBOX applications; only exclusive XBOX applications. If you write Windows AND OSX AND Linux, people should not pirate, they should buy your other products.
Sony and Nintendo do not monopolize anything, or control outright the PC market. Another contender in the console biz is great, if it were almost anyone but Microsoft.
Next there is the issue of illegal which you have been harping on. There is illegal and immoral. I only care about immoral. Breaking the law is totally irrelevant. Us Americans have a long history of criminal behavior as a means to an end, a tradition I hope remains ingrained in our culture.
Theft is often wrong from a moral perspective. In the case where it does a greater social good to do something otherwise bad, then it is no longer immoral. I believe that Microsoft is in an unfair position, and they must be reduced to one competitor amongst many in every market they enter. Unfortunately their economic condition prohibits them from ever being on equal footing with competitors. Their console is superior, only because they had a fat wad of cash to burn to buy the market. Once bought we'll be subjected to the same marginal hardware and software we are used to on the PC.
I don't even possess an X-Box much less pirate. I own every PS2 and PC game I have. The point is to hurt Microsoft, and anyone who aids them, intentionally or not. Theft is very debatable when talking about IP.
What's wrong with market forces pushing back against a bad company and a bad product? The entire value chain must see low profit in pursuing a MS only solution. Not just MS, but their SW Devs, and their distribution chain. On the opposing end, people need to see money in antagonizing them: mod chip companies, warez groups, etc.
Companies that write multi-platform games need to be rewarded, those that go for lockdown need to be punished. If you work for someone that likes exclusivity agreements, shame on you.
So the scientific method is one method to understanding. Rejecting "intelligent design" as a means to understanding on the grounds that it is not the scientific method is equally close minded.
/dev/null it. It's a method of sounding out ideas, and accepting or rejecting them, it works but is increasingly limited by our ability to verify our predictions.
Science has the approach "If I poke/prod X, I expect Y" and then following that up with analysis. It's a tool that has proven useful over oh, the past few hundred years and probably is why we're typing this on an electronic bulletin board from a computer in our corporate office, instead of hand writing on parchment to correspondents who may
"Intelligent Design", while not totally new in concept may be helpful. If in fact the universe was designed by an intelligence that humans can understand, perhaps thinking along these lines will help produce new ideas that can then be tested with the scientific method. It's a way of generating ideas, not proving them. If you accept God, or a Wizard as a an intelligence we can understand, and who had total control over the creation of All Things, I think that could help us hone our theorizing. If it were true, I haven't seen evidence of that, but maybe it's there. Like any philosophy however, it's really a thought excersize.
I think however that "intelligent design" in practice is the re-invention of medieval scholasticism. "How do we take views that conflict with christian orthodoxy that are useful, and reconcile them with Biblical Truth". That has no business in public school, and history documents clearly that such dark age thinking held society in place for a thousand years in wretched conditions. We do not want to go back there.
Intelligent Design, as I've heard it explained by less politically motivated people, sounds like as reasonable of a philosophy as any. That does imply that it belongs in a college philosophy class, and not high school biology. I think, hope, that college kids will have attained a level of maturity that allows them to not accept everything Professor says as fact, because this subject aside, quite often that's already not the case.
Don't let your company sign exclusivity agreements with Evil. You're welcome.
No, clearly we see who it's hurting.
The real question isn't how much an XBOX 360 costs, so much as how an XBOX 360 mod chip will cost.
This is a Microsoft product, no one on Slashdot is going to actually pay money for it (or at least admit to it). We'll eBay someones box, figure out how to hack it (ostensibly to put Linux or BSD on it) and then get games on the black market. On second thought, some people may buy the XBox 360 thinking MS is losing a load on the HW.
It remains to be seen how much this will cost on this new generation of console. Certainly PS2/XBox are more expensive to hack than the PS1.
Jokes aside, Help Desk is probably the toughest IT assignment. Any dork can hack some perl, it's hard to solve someones problem on the phone. It's totally unrewarding, and a job that pays dick, but it's in my opinion harder than anything else IT people do.
Also probably the one that qualifies people for management the best. If you can keep your temper when dealing with the dumbest of dumb on the phone, you're probably ready to politic with your peers successfully. Sadly, that's about all that qualifies people for management these days.
I thought it was a remake of the ancient greek "Pyramus & Thisbe" (Ovid Metamorphses, Book 4). I believe he also took "Othello" from one of those, but I never read them all. To this day I resent the wasted semester in that lit class.
I don't think anyone involved is interested in what is best for Canada.
The same reason people buy lottery tickets, you just never know....
Not all big companies are Evil(tm). Big companies are when they become so dominant their customers have no choices. They can't help it, they may not even WANT to be Evil, but they will become Evil if given the chance. Companies in self-regulating markets will go out of business if they become Evil, but the computer business is not one of those, yet. Microsoft is Evil and dangerous. Apple has been Evil in the past. IBM is simply not good at being Evil, but it's not for lack of trying.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, if any of these companies subdue their competitors they WILL become Evil. It is a guarantee. They are all in a position to do this because Microsoft has dropped the ball and there is a vacuum that needs filling.
Fundamentally the world still lacks applications that are truly platform agnostic, such that we, the consumer, can pick and choose platforms, operating systems & applications without "lock-in". If anyone is successful at dethroning Microsoft until this is solved, they will then become the new Microsoft.
Yeah I don't get it. /.'ers angry at Apple, supporting IBM, looking forward to seeing the PC knocked down a rung. WTF!? BLASPHEMY!
IBM is every bit as Evil as Apple and Microsoft, they're just on our side temporarily. Let the big shots duke it out. What we want is deadlock, no party ending up with a significant advantage over each other, but seeing profit in code portability.
Nerds don't use computers, they sculpt them like artwork. The current generation has warts.
So right now there are 3 reasons why Mac's are more expensive than PCs:
/. They claim Apple hardware is "rock solid". Are their engineers smarter? Nope, chances are those people go back and forth between Apple/IBM/Dell/HP etc every five years to fix their paycheck. Are their components inherently more reliable? Not really. What's different? The answer is the combinations of components in every Apple sold, and the components you are allowed to put in your Mac and still receive support.
-> Use of components with far less volume
-> Authoritarian system test in which each component certified by Apple must be exhaustively tested by Apple
-> The Monopoly Tax
After they switch to Intel hardware:
-> Authoritarian system test in which each component certified by Apple must be exhaustively tested by Apple
-> The Monopoly Tax (which I think will be greatly reduced initially to lure in PC users)
(and actually I still think there will be a FEW components that Apple uses that are not common elsewhere, but let's ignore this for now.)
Think about what so many people post on
The bigger PC vendors (IBM/Dell/HP) exhaustively test every component that THEY put in their PCs. This sounds beautiful, but it's not. And it's horribly expensive already. If you go to one of Dell's (or IBM or HP) configurators, you'll see a machine with one processor, and one memory option, one OS option and 2 video card options and 3 hard drive options etc. You can be sure any combination of stuff on that page has been exhaustively tested with each other and every known bug resolved. What is not tested is any software not pre-installed, any OS not pre-installed, any driver not pre-installed, any expansion card, USB device, mouse, keyboard, etc. I don't even believe they test against "real" standards (i.e. the kind that comes in writing), they tend to adopt the "if it works for us, it's standard" attitude. All this test effort is almost ten times more than the R&D cost of the designs themselves, and never ends during the product lifetime. You, the customer, pay for this (but don't know it so much because it's divided into such a huge volume). However for the PC market this is an OK practice, because there's no central authority dictating what it means to be a PC. In fact IBM tried this once, a long time back, and people laughed at them and went with ad-hoc approaches intentionally circumventing IBMs effort (in their defense, IBM went out of it's way to piss everyone off).
Apple on the other hand takes the opposite approach. Anything that runs on their machine (or receives their logo), pre-installed or otherwise, must be tested to their satisfaction. That means of course far fewer options, but also far fewer bugs from a customer experience standpoint. You can buy hardware for your Apple and it'll just work. You can also call Apple, and they'll fix your problem, one way or another. This is why people think Apple hardware is better, but hopefully you can see it will always cost more.
Of course if Apple somehow gets PC volumes behind it, this will not be so expensive. On the other hand, if Apple gets PC market share, the monopoly tax goes way up too (see the 1980s). There's no winner here until we can figure out how to commoditize computing hardware and the OS layer. Surprisingly (to some, not me) it seems applications are being commoditized faster than the hardware/OS.
I believe Apple's higher end workstations are going to stay PPC for a while. No need to go blue just yet.
Second, why are you tied to a hardware architecture? Is it because you truly believe it is vastly superior enough that you are willing to tolerate vendor lock-in? Or is it because you hate Intel?
If it's the former, educate me. What about the apple architecture is so superior that it's worth locking in to? Why is the IBM architecture, although not as ideal, still so preferable as to want to lock-in?
If it's just hating Intel, I'd suggest that is the wrong attitude. We can distrust Intel, but tolerate them as long as there is AMD. We ought to similarly distrust IBM, but tolerate them as long as there is Motorola(Freescale?). Locking in everything to one vendor is in all cases the wrong thing to do, unless whatever that vendor offers is so incredibly superior, that it's just impractical to consider anyone else.
I have seen no evidence that the Apple architecture is supremely better. It is better from a customer support standpoint, and always will be. It is inferior from a price standpoint, and for the same reason, always will be. I don't see the Apple architecture suffering even one bit from using a Pentium instead of a PowerPC.
No, the larger the volumes you have, the lower the prices you can get. There's no unit step at a certain volume although if you are the single largest consumer you can probably get an even bigger cut. Either way they'll get lower prices on Pentium devices than on PPCs, and lower prices on PC components than traditional Apple/PPC components. The simplest reason is that the PPC volumes are low enough that R&D & other NRE expenses are a significant portion of the per device cost. On a mainstream Intel processor, those costs are divided amongst every consumer, it's almost invisible.
High end PPCs are used in a lot of places, but not in significant volume (when compared to a Pentium).
I don't see why anyone cares what hardware is under the hood in an apple, no one uses an Apple because it has a PPC. They use it because Apple owns & supports the entire system and the OS is good.
I'll agree to the boat pulling part (on some SUVs), but a minivan can haul more people.
SUVs have always seemed to be more feminine to me, to quote my father "That f***ing car [SUV] is too f***ing pretty to go off-road, you're crazy."
You're absolutely right of course, I was on the wrong side of their policies. As another less polite poster pointed out, I'm being the asshole that blockbuster may be suffering economic loss from my holding on to a movie a few extra days (I highly doubt it personally).
The question is whether that $8.00 in late fees is worth losing me as a customer forever. I strongly suspect they would have made more money by not being greedy.
Wired is pulling the same stunt, betting that the number of people who cower and pay will outweigh the almost certain lost business of those who do not.
It used to be if a business gave you bad service, or irritated you that you could go to the manager and he'd just GIVE you free stuff to make you happy. At least back when not everything was a national change. These days it's the other way around, give them business or they'll come after YOU.
Let's distill your comment into "Americans (or any sane people) will not buy this until fuel cell cars are cheaper to buy and operate than their existing vehicles".
What big-ass SUVs, Americans (not especially known for frugality), taxes or legislation necessarily have to do with this is beyond me. It just makes you seem spiteful.
While I do not understand the SUV craze, I understand mini-vans, station wagons and pick-up trucks (well most of them). Most of those don't get optimal fuel efficiency but have practical value.
The only things that are discouraging people from considering some high efficiency vehicle for our next purchase are a) They're more expensive for the class of car b) It's unclear how maintainable they are and c) They only come in "the commuter coupe". Commuter cars are fine for the work commute, but not to haul around a pack of kids and the dog to school/ballet/soccer/baseball/taekwankungfu/etc. The roads are filled with soccer moms and contractors, they put more miles in their car than your average commuter. A commuter coupe won't work for either of those people.
Making gas more expensive is not going to endear you to people either. Unlike Europe, most of the US is designed such that you MUST drive a car to live life. Sure, some older places can be navigated without a car, but the vast majority of places in the country REQUIRE a car. Here in Austin my grocery store is 12 miles away, on a major (>65mph road). I'm not walking or biking there, not only because of the huge inconvenience, I'll be dead within a week. And I live in a quasi-dense suburb for this area. It was like this in NJ, Virginia, California, Florida, North Carolina and Maryland.
I like the idea of giving big tax breaks for fuel efficient cars. I'd like to see greenpeace or some other environmental motor mouths get off their soap box and spend some money evangelizing these thing and pushing this to the public at large. Maybe then we'll get some movement in Washington. Instead all I hear is complaints, nature worship and America bashing. Imagine why no one pays attention.