When I think about evolution vs human-made things, I think about computer AI.
AI composed with an evolution algorithm will take a lot longer to mature, and it will most-likely be a lot more flexible to its environment and robust than hard-coded AI written by a 'designer'/programmer. Hard-coded AI will achieve its functionality immediately, but it not be able to handle unknown cases.
Yes, evolution is amazing... but when I see it work within the confines of a tiny computer in a matter of hours, I can understand how working within the confines of the universe over billions of years results in such complexity.
On a side note, I don't understand why it's so freakin' hard for people to grasp evolution. It's a perpetual guess-and-check mechanism where you only get to answer incorrectly so many times until your population is extinct. Other populations' guesses cause your answers to change and vis versa. It can be applied to anything. I have 8 paper cups on my desk, but none of them are making any guesses that will prevent me from tossing them in the garbage, so the population of paper cups on my desk is going extinct.
Making it executable typically adds to the size... what world are you from?
They usually use a self-extracting zip executable, so the question is, why make it a self-extracting zip executable when Windows has had built in zip support for awhile now?
I buy CDs because I can afford them, and because I can tell the difference between an mp3 and a CD. Yes, my ears are spoiled by high quality ogg and who rips in that but me?
Anyway, the crap the music industry is making is targetted at people with no money.
Mommy and daddy's money only goes so far, and for a minimum wage worker a CD is a couple hours of work.
Now for a software developer such as myself... a CD is a fraction of an hour of work.
So, hey, why don't they make music that appeals to intelligent music conniseurs with money, rather than target the teenie bopper demographic? They should either put out good stuff that reaches people with money, or lower the price on the shitty stuff. Welcome to economics 101 - one price for all demographics doesn't maximize profits.
VB never was a good beginner's language. I'm sure there are 1,000 posts by now outlining the bad habits that VB creates, so I will give you an anecdote.
When I started VB, I didn't know what types were, I didn't know what strings were, I didn't know what arrays were.
I didn't know that.Text was the default property on textboxes.
Now, with that in mind, imagine a fairly complicated program written using textboxes as strings, and in order to hide the textboxes, I would make the form really big and then make it smaller to hide them.
Once I figured out the existence of strings, I would parse strings to death instead of use arrays.
But then I became fairly proficient in VB, and I started C++. I tried mapping the VB paradigm of thinking onto C++, and that failed miserably.
So, it took me a year or two to unlearn VB habits, and then it took me a year or two to learn good programming habbits. This is inefficient. Learn things correctly the first time.
You see, in other languages, if you do something the 'wrong way', it is much harder to hack your way into making things work. In VB, if you do something the wrong way, you can just add more and more horrible monsterous ass-backwards code and eventually get things working.
The problem with VB is that it wants to be like C++, but at the same time it wants stupid stuff like variants and default properties, 'on error goto', etc. This doesn't help anyone.
And as for VB.net, it is just C# with horrible, horrible, awful keywords and semantics. Just learn C#.
I think computer viruses and computers aren't quite a good analogy. But computer viruses and early computer programs probably were. Say you have a binary that dynamically compiles code in memory and executes it. That's not far from having a binary that modifies other applications' memory to do what it wants.
But nevermind computers.
Sure you can argue semantics, but really: what if a virus were capable of reproducing, not by infecting cells, but by destroying or utilizing other 'non-living' things? To us, it would most closely resemble a modern virus: an arrangement of molecules capable of reproducing itself.
So yes, early organisms would look like simplistic viruses.
Isn't it just common sense that non-living packages of DNA/RNA came before cells? Oh sure, they may not have infected anything, but they replicated. Then, some adapted to be more complex and some adapted to infect the complex ones.
From TFA: "A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth"
Wait... who actually thought viruses came later? Isn't it pretty obvious they came first? They've got DNA... but they aren't "alive". Isn't it a no-brainer that they came before cells?
Yeah, that's why every Windows computer in the CAE was being used, but every Unix machine was not... and how the Linux labs never hit their maximum capacity...
If all the computers used Linux, there wouldn't be so many idiots using them for AIM and other teenage nonsense. Then the students who have projects to do will get to do them in a timely fashion during normal hours!
Being a former college student, I am all for this. Less exploitation, less jerking off, more getting work done... and if the kids learn to jerk off in Linux, more power to them.
It took me a couple years of dealing with WinXP crap to realize that Win2k really is the way to go. Well, for the few times I actually need to use windows. (music production) When the hell is linux going to get good music production software?
But back to the topic at hand: old hardware. The hardware you mentioned isn't that old.
I have made routers out of Pentium 133mhz machines with 16mb of ram, using linux. That's where the real value in old hardware is - simple tasks. The nice thing about those older machines is that they don't need fans as much as newer hardware, so you can make quite the silent router/compile machine/whatnot.
Let's be real- old hardware isn't really worth anything unless you have very little money, and if you have very little money, well, then linux is a good choice. For example, students. It's a good learning project to network your house with a linux server/router.
Little subtle things. Different windowing behavior, functions throwing exceptions on conditions they never used to...
This was for PocketPC. I had to add some.BringToFront hacks to make the app work like it used to. Also, I had to remove some.Prepare statements for SqlServerCe commands when they were of a specific type, otherwise they threw exceptions. Granted, this could have been prevented if the original app were programmed correctly, but it wasn't and I had no control over that.
At work we're currently in the midst of migrating our app to.net 2.0. As trivial as it should have been, a *lot* went wrong - a lot of functionality is different, and it's not even documented. It may compile, and it may run, but not for long.
All I can say is... 1. get it compiling, 2. get it (apparently) working with some shallow QAing, and 3. pass it off to QAers, because they know what to test better than you do. Only after should you even consider utilizing features of.net 2.0 and enhancing the product.
People like Alice don't know what to do when they actually ARE challenged. I certainly didn't. Thank god I glided through college with minimal turbulance. But there were times when I thought, "this is hopeless," rather than, "well, if I study, I can do this."
I can't set my own goals. I let others set goals for me, and then I achieve them or fail them, but I never struggle as hard as anyone else. If I set my own goals, I let them slide.
All in school, I would (unconsciously, almost naturally) detect how much work a course needed within a couple weeks. Then, I would set cruise control to that altitude which satisfied my academic success.
People who aren't naturally intelligent learn to set goals, to complete tasks through hard, annoying work... you'd have to restructure the school system so that each student gave their maximum potential.
The question is - do we want a society where everyone is constantly working harder and harder, until everyone has either burned out or given up?
I think over-achievers are a necessary evil, otherwise nothing would get done in a timely fashion. And under-achievers are necessary as well, for they keep everyone chill and don't end up setting the bar too high.
Or something like that. Just thinking out loud and nobody will read this post.
Hopefully Flash has enough energy to strike a lethal blow to Sparkle as it breathes its dying breath. Kindof like one of those dramatic movies where there's an intense fight and both people kill each other.
I used to go to all that hassle of moving those folders to different drives. I got my Windows partition down to less than 1GB after lots of tweaking. In fact, I think I got it down to around 700MB after a lot of compressing and deleting useless files and such.
But recovery applications then couldn't find those folders.
And every couple years, you need to redo the whole thing anyway. That's just life.
And stupid applications still install into C:\WINDOWS and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
So, I decided that it was easier to simply install linux, since it isn't a pain in the ass to partition the system the way I want.
Or if you have to purchase it, go to a used CD store. The RIAA can't get paid twice for the same item. As long as you don't need bleeding-edge pop music, everything will work out. Go get some Nirvana.
See, what I don't understand about PETA is this: humans are animals. Well, gee, what animal doesn't utilize its prey as resources. Just cause we think we're smart doesn't mean we're not animals, too.
PETA only further drives a wedge between species by excluding humans from the natural ecosystem we belong to. By differentiating between 'animal' and 'human', we only further increase the perceived divide.
4. They switched from windows for a reason 5. They don't like all their applications starting with K (especially when it comes to command line launching) 6. They don't like the overbloated dependency
I use Gnome because it is simple, and it makes use of, or aids in the creation of, standard libraries that don't all depend on each other. Each library, from my experience, is very componentized and free of large dependencies.
If you want to use a, largely, Gnome app like Gaim, you need libgtk... if you want to use Kopete you need the kitchen sink.
1. Put a guitarist, bassist, and drummer in one room with the song. 2. Put a guitarist, bassist, and drummer in another room without the song. 3. Have the first group describe completely the song without writing a single musical notation. 4. Have the second group reconstruct the song in musical notation. 5. Put it online. 6. Don't get sued. 7. ??? 8. Profit!
In all reality, this is ridiculous. I would guess most people use music tabulation because they're lazy and don't want to figure it out themselves. If it really came down to it, they would figure it out rather than paying for it. My god, claiming that it's illegal to tabulate music is like saying you can't try to spell out new words (or company names, or products, etc) that you heard pronounced.
I had a guitar teacher who would write out song tabs for me to learn, rather than having me buy the books, should he be sued?
Not to mention, the music these companies are protecting is usually so simplistic that the tabs aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Play these chords! G A B D G A B D G A B D
There are companies that sell musical notation of Mozart and other long-since public domain works, and they somehow make money. Sometimes it makes sense to buy music... like when it's far too complicated to sit at your computer with your web browser open.
And lyrics? Like many have already said, lyrics are used for finding that song you heard on the radio BECAUSE THE RADIO NEVER TELLS YOU WHAT SONG JUST PLAYED.
Sometimes I wonder how people with these grand ideas remember how to breath, because obviously they don't have the mental capacity to do much else.
The huge price tags in those countries are probably to combat piracy losses, or force them to piracy. If developing nations just pirate Windows, then when they're developed they're going to pay for Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
When I think about evolution vs human-made things, I think about computer AI.
AI composed with an evolution algorithm will take a lot longer to mature, and it will most-likely be a lot more flexible to its environment and robust than hard-coded AI written by a 'designer'/programmer. Hard-coded AI will achieve its functionality immediately, but it not be able to handle unknown cases.
Yes, evolution is amazing... but when I see it work within the confines of a tiny computer in a matter of hours, I can understand how working within the confines of the universe over billions of years results in such complexity.
On a side note, I don't understand why it's so freakin' hard for people to grasp evolution. It's a perpetual guess-and-check mechanism where you only get to answer incorrectly so many times until your population is extinct. Other populations' guesses cause your answers to change and vis versa. It can be applied to anything. I have 8 paper cups on my desk, but none of them are making any guesses that will prevent me from tossing them in the garbage, so the population of paper cups on my desk is going extinct.
Making it executable typically adds to the size... what world are you from?
They usually use a self-extracting zip executable, so the question is, why make it a self-extracting zip executable when Windows has had built in zip support for awhile now?
I buy CDs because I can afford them, and because I can tell the difference between an mp3 and a CD. Yes, my ears are spoiled by high quality ogg and who rips in that but me?
Anyway, the crap the music industry is making is targetted at people with no money.
Mommy and daddy's money only goes so far, and for a minimum wage worker a CD is a couple hours of work.
Now for a software developer such as myself... a CD is a fraction of an hour of work.
So, hey, why don't they make music that appeals to intelligent music conniseurs with money, rather than target the teenie bopper demographic? They should either put out good stuff that reaches people with money, or lower the price on the shitty stuff. Welcome to economics 101 - one price for all demographics doesn't maximize profits.
I use the google search box so much... Even when I don't have to, I accidentally use it just by habit. I must be making them billions!
VB never was a good beginner's language. I'm sure there are 1,000 posts by now outlining the bad habits that VB creates, so I will give you an anecdote.
.Text was the default property on textboxes.
When I started VB, I didn't know what types were, I didn't know what strings were, I didn't know what arrays were.
I didn't know that
Now, with that in mind, imagine a fairly complicated program written using textboxes as strings, and in order to hide the textboxes, I would make the form really big and then make it smaller to hide them.
Once I figured out the existence of strings, I would parse strings to death instead of use arrays.
But then I became fairly proficient in VB, and I started C++. I tried mapping the VB paradigm of thinking onto C++, and that failed miserably.
So, it took me a year or two to unlearn VB habits, and then it took me a year or two to learn good programming habbits. This is inefficient. Learn things correctly the first time.
You see, in other languages, if you do something the 'wrong way', it is much harder to hack your way into making things work. In VB, if you do something the wrong way, you can just add more and more horrible monsterous ass-backwards code and eventually get things working.
The problem with VB is that it wants to be like C++, but at the same time it wants stupid stuff like variants and default properties, 'on error goto', etc. This doesn't help anyone.
And as for VB.net, it is just C# with horrible, horrible, awful keywords and semantics. Just learn C#.
I think computer viruses and computers aren't quite a good analogy. But computer viruses and early computer programs probably were. Say you have a binary that dynamically compiles code in memory and executes it. That's not far from having a binary that modifies other applications' memory to do what it wants.
But nevermind computers.
Sure you can argue semantics, but really: what if a virus were capable of reproducing, not by infecting cells, but by destroying or utilizing other 'non-living' things? To us, it would most closely resemble a modern virus: an arrangement of molecules capable of reproducing itself.
So yes, early organisms would look like simplistic viruses.
Isn't it just common sense that non-living packages of DNA/RNA came before cells? Oh sure, they may not have infected anything, but they replicated. Then, some adapted to be more complex and some adapted to infect the complex ones.
From TFA: "A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth"
Wait... who actually thought viruses came later? Isn't it pretty obvious they came first? They've got DNA... but they aren't "alive". Isn't it a no-brainer that they came before cells?
Yeah, that's why every Windows computer in the CAE was being used, but every Unix machine was not... and how the Linux labs never hit their maximum capacity...
You'd be surprised at how easily idiots give up.
If all the computers used Linux, there wouldn't be so many idiots using them for AIM and other teenage nonsense. Then the students who have projects to do will get to do them in a timely fashion during normal hours!
Being a former college student, I am all for this. Less exploitation, less jerking off, more getting work done... and if the kids learn to jerk off in Linux, more power to them.
It took me a couple years of dealing with WinXP crap to realize that Win2k really is the way to go. Well, for the few times I actually need to use windows. (music production) When the hell is linux going to get good music production software?
But back to the topic at hand: old hardware. The hardware you mentioned isn't that old.
I have made routers out of Pentium 133mhz machines with 16mb of ram, using linux. That's where the real value in old hardware is - simple tasks. The nice thing about those older machines is that they don't need fans as much as newer hardware, so you can make quite the silent router/compile machine/whatnot.
Let's be real- old hardware isn't really worth anything unless you have very little money, and if you have very little money, well, then linux is a good choice. For example, students. It's a good learning project to network your house with a linux server/router.
Little subtle things. Different windowing behavior, functions throwing exceptions on conditions they never used to...
.BringToFront hacks to make the app work like it used to. Also, I had to remove some .Prepare statements for SqlServerCe commands when they were of a specific type, otherwise they threw exceptions. Granted, this could have been prevented if the original app were programmed correctly, but it wasn't and I had no control over that.
This was for PocketPC. I had to add some
At work we're currently in the midst of migrating our app to .net 2.0. As trivial as it should have been, a *lot* went wrong - a lot of functionality is different, and it's not even documented. It may compile, and it may run, but not for long.
.net 2.0 and enhancing the product.
All I can say is... 1. get it compiling, 2. get it (apparently) working with some shallow QAing, and 3. pass it off to QAers, because they know what to test better than you do. Only after should you even consider utilizing features of
People like Alice don't know what to do when they actually ARE challenged. I certainly didn't. Thank god I glided through college with minimal turbulance. But there were times when I thought, "this is hopeless," rather than, "well, if I study, I can do this."
I can't set my own goals. I let others set goals for me, and then I achieve them or fail them, but I never struggle as hard as anyone else. If I set my own goals, I let them slide.
All in school, I would (unconsciously, almost naturally) detect how much work a course needed within a couple weeks. Then, I would set cruise control to that altitude which satisfied my academic success.
People who aren't naturally intelligent learn to set goals, to complete tasks through hard, annoying work... you'd have to restructure the school system so that each student gave their maximum potential.
The question is - do we want a society where everyone is constantly working harder and harder, until everyone has either burned out or given up?
I think over-achievers are a necessary evil, otherwise nothing would get done in a timely fashion. And under-achievers are necessary as well, for they keep everyone chill and don't end up setting the bar too high.
Or something like that. Just thinking out loud and nobody will read this post.
Good point. Scary.
Maybe we should unbury the Constitution and start acting like it exists (adding, modifying, removing). Just like the good ol' days.
Hopefully Flash has enough energy to strike a lethal blow to Sparkle as it breathes its dying breath. Kindof like one of those dramatic movies where there's an intense fight and both people kill each other.
Azureus has a UPnP plugin. "allows the automatic mapping of ports on UPnP enabled routers"
True dat. When I was in college and had all my ports blocked, the best way to download (and keep my share ratio up) was to use my server back home.
Although, I used Azureus's console front-end and screen.
I used to go to all that hassle of moving those folders to different drives. I got my Windows partition down to less than 1GB after lots of tweaking. In fact, I think I got it down to around 700MB after a lot of compressing and deleting useless files and such.
But recovery applications then couldn't find those folders.
And every couple years, you need to redo the whole thing anyway. That's just life.
And stupid applications still install into C:\WINDOWS and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
So, I decided that it was easier to simply install linux, since it isn't a pain in the ass to partition the system the way I want.
Or if you have to purchase it, go to a used CD store.
The RIAA can't get paid twice for the same item.
As long as you don't need bleeding-edge pop music, everything will work out. Go get some Nirvana.
Hey, Zeus!
See, what I don't understand about PETA is this: humans are animals.
Well, gee, what animal doesn't utilize its prey as resources. Just cause we think we're smart doesn't mean we're not animals, too.
PETA only further drives a wedge between species by excluding humans from the natural ecosystem we belong to. By differentiating between 'animal' and 'human', we only further increase the perceived divide.
4. They switched from windows for a reason
5. They don't like all their applications starting with K (especially when it comes to command line launching)
6. They don't like the overbloated dependency
I use Gnome because it is simple, and it makes use of, or aids in the creation of, standard libraries that don't all depend on each other. Each library, from my experience, is very componentized and free of large dependencies.
If you want to use a, largely, Gnome app like Gaim, you need libgtk... if you want to use Kopete you need the kitchen sink.
1. Put a guitarist, bassist, and drummer in one room with the song.
2. Put a guitarist, bassist, and drummer in another room without the song.
3. Have the first group describe completely the song without writing a single musical notation.
4. Have the second group reconstruct the song in musical notation.
5. Put it online.
6. Don't get sued.
7. ???
8. Profit!
In all reality, this is ridiculous. I would guess most people use music tabulation because they're lazy and don't want to figure it out themselves. If it really came down to it, they would figure it out rather than paying for it. My god, claiming that it's illegal to tabulate music is like saying you can't try to spell out new words (or company names, or products, etc) that you heard pronounced.
I had a guitar teacher who would write out song tabs for me to learn, rather than having me buy the books, should he be sued?
Not to mention, the music these companies are protecting is usually so simplistic that the tabs aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Play these chords! G A B D G A B D G A B D
There are companies that sell musical notation of Mozart and other long-since public domain works, and they somehow make money. Sometimes it makes sense to buy music... like when it's far too complicated to sit at your computer with your web browser open.
And lyrics? Like many have already said, lyrics are used for finding that song you heard on the radio BECAUSE THE RADIO NEVER TELLS YOU WHAT SONG JUST PLAYED.
Sometimes I wonder how people with these grand ideas remember how to breath, because obviously they don't have the mental capacity to do much else.
The huge price tags in those countries are probably to combat piracy losses, or force them to piracy. If developing nations just pirate Windows, then when they're developed they're going to pay for Windows.