What you don't understand is, it's all the real world.
We are using the phrase more loosly than you have just applied it. And your example is likely to be a failure of parent to protect (you're not the only one who watches nature shows).
The best time to learn that the world is dangerous, is before you have to find out the hard way
True enough, but to do that by exposing them directly to it would seem to be a contradiction.
I wasn't arguing for "really sheltered". As with most things there is a balance to be struck, but just dumping kids in the real world isn't it. What is the role of parents above the pre-requisites of food/shelter if it isn't educating AND protecting? And not just protecting against being run over, but against those more abstract things that make us wish we were dead.
As for copying: kids have no choice but to copy as they have no context, which isn't true of adults. It is a defining feature of the young. Of course adults copy, but they can choose. Kids are liable to copy whatever is put in front of them, unless it causes direct and immediate physical pain.
"I'm not sure where you live buddy but during my public schooling we saw everything,"
Sending kids off to school is a poor example of parents sheltering their children, where they are taught by people they don't really know things that they often don't agree with. And what about peer pressure, bullying etc? Schools are an example, in my opinion, of an unnatural system : effectively an education factory in the service of the great god 'Efficiency'. I think that the best and most loving teachers would likely be the parents themselves, and immediate family (uncles, aunts etc). That is the 'natural' way.
"Think about all those kids "sheltered" by their religious nutcase parents, that kind of sheltering still exists unfortunate as it is."
I happen to know a few of those (not one myself, 'tho) and one argument I've heard from a previously reluctant-to-homeschool father was his eventual observation of how rounded and charming these kids are, and I know what he's talking about. True enough : if the parents are really nutty then their kids may come to harm. But the fact of religiousness, either theistic or atheistic, isn't the issue.
In anycase from my view point normal schooling is much more likely to be harmful. Instead of socialising up and down the age groups like home-schooled kids, they tend to stick to one narrow age group. Further they are subject to extra-ordinary peer pressure which they have no way of escaping. Nor can they escape bullying. And all for the sake of learning subjects which are of no immediate benefit. I doubt there is anything like it in the real world (slavery maybe?).
"Children have to learn that moral values that are thought to them by school and by religion are not absolute."
Is that an absolute? Do you believe in absolutes, like the religious do? You are being dogmatic, after all.
"A lot of things we humans do are very, very unnatural. Like social welfare. That doesn't mean it's wrong."
You are presuming that it isn't wrong, but I reckon the opposite. Instead of looking after each other, as we did in the past, and having meaning in our lives through that, the State has rendered our lives almost purposeless. And so we just play video games all day, and watch TV. In the past we would have looked after our parents until they died. We wouldn't have called them a burden. Now, because of our social welfare mentality, we shove them in to tombs for the living. And that is just a small example of one of the many distortions that social welfare has caused.
Ironically a group of people who have a strong reason to want such an unnatural thing as 'social welfare' are the selfish and unloving.
The opposite is much more likely true : the nature of childhood is to be sheltered. Just as animals shelter their offspring until they are capable of coping with it without being immediately eaten.
Further: the young have a strong 'copy' instinct, which is how they seem to learn the basics. Putting the 'real world' in front of them before they have reached the age of autonomy is asking for trouble.
The "expose them to the real-world dogma" is all nice and progressive and seemingly commonsense, but it is almost certainly unnatural. And anything that is unnatural, like margarine, is bad news, I reckon. (BTW, I am not arguing against the 'artificial', which is a distinct idea from that which is 'unnatural').
They are trying to address the problem of the rights of the copyright holder in this age of the internet. They aren't clueless idiots.
It may be that in the end the internet will bring an effective end to the mini-monopolies that copyright gives the holder, which may even be reflected in law as a recognition of a new reality. And we'll go back to musicians getting paid the same as anyone else.
They are afraid of that and working very hard to stop anyone realising that new reality, particularly law-makers.
Microsoft have always put a high priority on backwards compatability, as do almost all of us. So you have to be pretty naive to think that "all new code" is going to mean a total re-write. After all they only need to stick in a few lines of "all new code" to hoodwink the likes of yourself.
Further if you have any idea of what is involved in backwards compatability (ref: Raymond Chen's blog) then you'll understand how reluctant Microsoft may be to change even such a small thing as that.
It's a nice rant you've made there, but incompetent liars they are not. And I mean that in both meanings of the phrase.
You presume upon me. The NY Times are not comparable to the Washington Times, who I am aware are *not* boneheads. Which doesn't mean that I sympathise with their position. Funnily enough the NY Times is a bit like the Times in the UK : 2nd rate, but once great. And definately boneheaded.
I'm not familiar with the others you mention.
"I certainly hope you do not hold any of the major media outlets in any particular significance above any other, they are all equally bad."
...in your opinion. And not in mine: I learned to discriminate.
The NY times are a bunch of bone-heads themselves, so it's a bit rich coming from them. And I'm not just referring to their recent major journalistic scandals. They aren't cold rationlistic businessmen, which is the lense they should use to analyse this situation, rather they have their rather-too-liberal agenda that they push pretty hard.
You have to read their stuff through a special de-warping lense. Take this article with a big pinch of salt.
The context of this discussion is whether Vista is an unstable OS. Obviously I am presuming "all things being equal" - ie the hardware is fine. Otherwise the discussion generates to meaninglessness.
For your satisfaction let me re-phrase : "All things being equal the main cause of OS instability is 3rd party drivers".
If you really want to nit-pick further you could say the drivers are included in "all things being equal", but, unlike hardware, drivers are software (an OS is also software - ie apples for apples) and support for 3rd party drivers is an OS architecture issue (ie NT4's support for ring 0 graphics drivers which contributed to greater OS instability over NT3.5).
And how I hate people who write "Wrong.". It's immature even for a teenager.
Backwards compatability comes at a steep price. Microsoft may be willing to attempt application-level backwards compatability, which is understandable, but driver level compatability, which it has given moderate support to, has a much more profound effect on OS design and performance.
In that regard their tactic is quite reasonable, IMO. In anycase it's at least a debate, and not a reason to trash Vista.
I think Microsoft need a bit of bashing every now and then, particularly as they got away with something close to murder in their anti-trust case. But let it be intelligent.
OS instability is almost always a case of drivers, and in anycase can be expected shortly after a major release. In that context this review is being really quite unfair. He's found himself a nice little excuse to be negative about Vista that really isn't inherent to Vista but to any OS that is open to 3rd party drivers, nor will it be true for more than a little while.
Even if one points to win32 'event' based synchronization objects as a source of instability Microsoft have introduced support for condition variables, effectively addressing that problem. So the longer term looks quite a bit brighter for windows developers: especially server developers. Windows server software could now actually become dangerous to other manufacturers (IBM/Sun etc)
Ironically the only OS that I know of that is genuinely unstable - independent of drivers and 3rd party causes - is Linux 2.6 (at least until recently), and has been for several years. That perhaps explains why webhosts have been so reluctant to upgrade from 2.4 even despite the scalability advantages which should be a big advantage to shared hosts. Even my recent taiwanese adsl-router is based on a 2.4 kernel. And no amount of moaning from the masses seems to have changed that situation possibly indicating a flaw in the open-source model.
Until mozilla sorts out the dire usability bugs under windows any talk of desktops should be stopped, since they will surely fail on windows, and if you fail there then you have really failed.
I've recently returned to IE with the release of 7 because mozilla makes me tear my hair out.
One of the most annoying problems is mozilla's clipboard problems. I've looked it up on their bug lists and these problems have been there for ages, with no one doing anything about them. And don;t tell me to fix it myself: I wouldn't have a clue.
As I said, I can't speak for other GUI toolkits than Delphi or.Net.
I agree with much of what you say but it's all applies both ways - you can hit a database directly with a web app as well. Plus your multiple forms example just sounds like bad design/implementation, something I addressed indirectly. The contraints of the webbed world is what solved that problem for you, not the removal of GUI toolkits.
Sure, you can take ten times longer producing a GUI app than a web app.
"Experienced Web developers sometimes find themselves struggling to learn a GUI toolkit when a simple CGI script would serve their needs perfectly well."
But an experienced GUI developer is another matter. I can't really speak for other GUI frameworks but for Delphi and it seems for.Net (same architect - got filched from Borland by MS) dev time is hugely faster than WEB developement. It is totally out of proportion. Businesses that favour WEB dev for in-house work are strealing from themselves UNLESS they only have a developer experienced in WEB programming and not GUI programming in which case they have less choice in the matter.
It is true that with GUI developement there is a temptation to do a slick and clever interface and then dev time starts to slow significantly, and it is easier to produce a non-standard interface that annoys everyone. Sticking to something simple or within the normal confines of the framework and it beats WEB/CGI/PHP etc hands down in every category that I can think of (ie. time and performance, network traffic, user satisfaction etc). Interestingly a slick web interface however is another matter since unlike GUI's there is only the DOM and javascript so toolkits have standardised nicely and dev time isn't significantly slower for a slicker WEB interface (ie. the Prototype library). But a slick WEB interface doesn't really compare to a slick GUI interface (flash is GUI, in my opinion) since GUI's are only limited by the system not the browser (think of flash as a system in itself).
RAILS and Django (ruby, Python respectively) may be real contenders but not for performance. Both have dire performance, and limited concurrency. However both languages may be moving to VMs and may get proper threading as well, even Ruby. Currently Python uses a giant concurrency-crunching lock - but at least it allows non-blocking IO (I believe), and Ruby doesn't support native threads at all - all IO blocks - yikes!!!!!!!.
That's not conspiracy. That's legitimate tactics. Of course they have no interest in seeing incandescents banned, so they do what they should. Our righteous indignation may be stimulated by that, but they should still do it. Their duty isn't to preserve the world - that is ours - it is to give the shareholders what they paid for.
Thanks for that 'other' reply. But, er, who are you trying to deceive by you twisty answer? I'm probably the only person here, so the answer looks like: you.
You have presumed that the "benefits" I mentioned is money/goods that gets trickled down from the rich to the poor. However that is your presumption, and the presumption of many a lefty (the phrase itself is usually used by lefties to mis-characterize rightist economic policy).
I only mentioned "benefits". You have presumed the nature of those benefits. However the benefits I am actually thinking of, and not what you are telling me I am thinking of, are those that encourage the talented to put their talents to economic use, thus benefitting the poor. As for exactly what those benefits are, I left that question open, and you tried to close it. It would be fair to assume that taxes might have something to do with it, but not to presume that upon me, sinc eI may not be thinking of taxes at all, and you can't read my mind even though you seem to think you can.
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We are using the phrase more loosly than you have just applied it. And your example is likely to be a failure of parent to protect (you're not the only one who watches nature shows).
The best time to learn that the world is dangerous, is before you have to find out the hard way
True enough, but to do that by exposing them directly to it would seem to be a contradiction.
As for copying: kids have no choice but to copy as they have no context, which isn't true of adults. It is a defining feature of the young. Of course adults copy, but they can choose. Kids are liable to copy whatever is put in front of them, unless it causes direct and immediate physical pain.
Sending kids off to school is a poor example of parents sheltering their children, where they are taught by people they don't really know things that they often don't agree with. And what about peer pressure, bullying etc? Schools are an example, in my opinion, of an unnatural system : effectively an education factory in the service of the great god 'Efficiency'. I think that the best and most loving teachers would likely be the parents themselves, and immediate family (uncles, aunts etc). That is the 'natural' way.
"Think about all those kids "sheltered" by their religious nutcase parents, that kind of sheltering still exists unfortunate as it is."
I happen to know a few of those (not one myself, 'tho) and one argument I've heard from a previously reluctant-to-homeschool father was his eventual observation of how rounded and charming these kids are, and I know what he's talking about. True enough : if the parents are really nutty then their kids may come to harm. But the fact of religiousness, either theistic or atheistic, isn't the issue.
In anycase from my view point normal schooling is much more likely to be harmful. Instead of socialising up and down the age groups like home-schooled kids, they tend to stick to one narrow age group. Further they are subject to extra-ordinary peer pressure which they have no way of escaping. Nor can they escape bullying. And all for the sake of learning subjects which are of no immediate benefit. I doubt there is anything like it in the real world (slavery maybe?).
Is that an absolute? Do you believe in absolutes, like the religious do? You are being dogmatic, after all.
"A lot of things we humans do are very, very unnatural. Like social welfare. That doesn't mean it's wrong."
You are presuming that it isn't wrong, but I reckon the opposite. Instead of looking after each other, as we did in the past, and having meaning in our lives through that, the State has rendered our lives almost purposeless. And so we just play video games all day, and watch TV. In the past we would have looked after our parents until they died. We wouldn't have called them a burden. Now, because of our social welfare mentality, we shove them in to tombs for the living. And that is just a small example of one of the many distortions that social welfare has caused.
Ironically a group of people who have a strong reason to want such an unnatural thing as 'social welfare' are the selfish and unloving.
The opposite is much more likely true : the nature of childhood is to be sheltered. Just as animals shelter their offspring until they are capable of coping with it without being immediately eaten.
Further: the young have a strong 'copy' instinct, which is how they seem to learn the basics. Putting the 'real world' in front of them before they have reached the age of autonomy is asking for trouble.
The "expose them to the real-world dogma" is all nice and progressive and seemingly commonsense, but it is almost certainly unnatural. And anything that is unnatural, like margarine, is bad news, I reckon. (BTW, I am not arguing against the 'artificial', which is a distinct idea from that which is 'unnatural').
It may be that in the end the internet will bring an effective end to the mini-monopolies that copyright gives the holder, which may even be reflected in law as a recognition of a new reality. And we'll go back to musicians getting paid the same as anyone else.
They are afraid of that and working very hard to stop anyone realising that new reality, particularly law-makers.
Further if you have any idea of what is involved in backwards compatability (ref: Raymond Chen's blog) then you'll understand how reluctant Microsoft may be to change even such a small thing as that.
It's a nice rant you've made there, but incompetent liars they are not. And I mean that in both meanings of the phrase.
I'm not familiar with the others you mention.
"I certainly hope you do not hold any of the major media outlets in any particular significance above any other, they are all equally bad."
You have to read their stuff through a special de-warping lense. Take this article with a big pinch of salt.
That's all very platitudinous, but you haven't actually addressed the guy's argument.
For your satisfaction let me re-phrase : "All things being equal the main cause of OS instability is 3rd party drivers".
If you really want to nit-pick further you could say the drivers are included in "all things being equal", but, unlike hardware, drivers are software (an OS is also software - ie apples for apples) and support for 3rd party drivers is an OS architecture issue (ie NT4's support for ring 0 graphics drivers which contributed to greater OS instability over NT3.5).
And how I hate people who write "Wrong.". It's immature even for a teenager.
In that regard their tactic is quite reasonable, IMO. In anycase it's at least a debate, and not a reason to trash Vista.
OS instability is almost always a case of drivers, and in anycase can be expected shortly after a major release. In that context this review is being really quite unfair. He's found himself a nice little excuse to be negative about Vista that really isn't inherent to Vista but to any OS that is open to 3rd party drivers, nor will it be true for more than a little while.
Even if one points to win32 'event' based synchronization objects as a source of instability Microsoft have introduced support for condition variables, effectively addressing that problem. So the longer term looks quite a bit brighter for windows developers: especially server developers. Windows server software could now actually become dangerous to other manufacturers (IBM/Sun etc)
Ironically the only OS that I know of that is genuinely unstable - independent of drivers and 3rd party causes - is Linux 2.6 (at least until recently), and has been for several years. That perhaps explains why webhosts have been so reluctant to upgrade from 2.4 even despite the scalability advantages which should be a big advantage to shared hosts. Even my recent taiwanese adsl-router is based on a 2.4 kernel. And no amount of moaning from the masses seems to have changed that situation possibly indicating a flaw in the open-source model.
I'm so desperate to find an alternative to the badly documented chaos that is Ruby on Rails that I got excited....until I saw the omgponies.
The problem isn't the argument: it's the alternative.
I've recently returned to IE with the release of 7 because mozilla makes me tear my hair out.
One of the most annoying problems is mozilla's clipboard problems. I've looked it up on their bug lists and these problems have been there for ages, with no one doing anything about them. And don;t tell me to fix it myself: I wouldn't have a clue.
So much for the merits of Open Source.
I agree with much of what you say but it's all applies both ways - you can hit a database directly with a web app as well. Plus your multiple forms example just sounds like bad design/implementation, something I addressed indirectly. The contraints of the webbed world is what solved that problem for you, not the removal of GUI toolkits.
Sure, you can take ten times longer producing a GUI app than a web app.
But an experienced GUI developer is another matter. I can't really speak for other GUI frameworks but for Delphi and it seems for .Net (same architect - got filched from Borland by MS) dev time is hugely faster than WEB developement. It is totally out of proportion. Businesses that favour WEB dev for in-house work are strealing from themselves UNLESS they only have a developer experienced in WEB programming and not GUI programming in which case they have less choice in the matter.
It is true that with GUI developement there is a temptation to do a slick and clever interface and then dev time starts to slow significantly, and it is easier to produce a non-standard interface that annoys everyone. Sticking to something simple or within the normal confines of the framework and it beats WEB/CGI/PHP etc hands down in every category that I can think of (ie. time and performance, network traffic, user satisfaction etc). Interestingly a slick web interface however is another matter since unlike GUI's there is only the DOM and javascript so toolkits have standardised nicely and dev time isn't significantly slower for a slicker WEB interface (ie. the Prototype library). But a slick WEB interface doesn't really compare to a slick GUI interface (flash is GUI, in my opinion) since GUI's are only limited by the system not the browser (think of flash as a system in itself).
RAILS and Django (ruby, Python respectively) may be real contenders but not for performance. Both have dire performance, and limited concurrency. However both languages may be moving to VMs and may get proper threading as well, even Ruby. Currently Python uses a giant concurrency-crunching lock - but at least it allows non-blocking IO (I believe), and Ruby doesn't support native threads at all - all IO blocks - yikes!!!!!!!.
It seems they got paid for what they were asked to do.
That's not conspiracy. That's legitimate tactics. Of course they have no interest in seeing incandescents banned, so they do what they should. Our righteous indignation may be stimulated by that, but they should still do it. Their duty isn't to preserve the world - that is ours - it is to give the shareholders what they paid for.
There's no way I am goign to be using those phrases/words in the presence of another techie.
Thanks for that 'other' reply. But, er, who are you trying to deceive by you twisty answer? I'm probably the only person here, so the answer looks like: you.
I only mentioned "benefits". You have presumed the nature of those benefits. However the benefits I am actually thinking of, and not what you are telling me I am thinking of, are those that encourage the talented to put their talents to economic use, thus benefitting the poor. As for exactly what those benefits are, I left that question open, and you tried to close it. It would be fair to assume that taxes might have something to do with it, but not to presume that upon me, sinc eI may not be thinking of taxes at all, and you can't read my mind even though you seem to think you can.
But you aren't addressing what I wrote, you simply presume the rich are nasty and evil. Which many are, but is that a reason to decapitate them all?
No it isn't. Re-read what I wrote.