Perhaps because it came bundled with the shiny new computer that the non-nerd bought? Don't forget, every time the non-nerds buy a computer from the local Worst Buy or Circuit Shitty, they are buying an OS with it. Just because they aren't billed separate, it doesn't mean that it is not being purchased.
I used to work with a woman who would type an email containing Blackberry activation passwords as follows:
"You're password is v as in victor."
She didn't realize that (besides the obvious misuse of your/you're), while this may be necessary on the phone, the user can see the password as is when it is in an email and that the words only confuse them.
Are participants under the age of 18 able to sign such a waiver? You would have to get a guardian to sign that, which then means you need to be checking ID at the door, too.
You talk specifically about Ubuntu dropping support for features from a previous release and then ignoring the users left out in the cold because of the new-shiny. Could you name an example of that actually happening?
Bullshit. steeviant asked you a series of fairly polite questions (hey, it's all relative, this is Slashdot) pertaining to your post. Rather than answering any of those questions, you threw a temper tantrum and accused him of some unnamed meanness toward you (which I don't see no matter how many times I read that post).
No, he didn't (not polite).
Yes, he did (tantrum).
Care to borrow my glasses?
You talk specifically about Ubuntu dropping support for features from a previous release and then ignoring the users left out in the cold because of the new-shiny. Could you name an example of that actually happening?
Bullshit. steeviant asked you a series of fairly polite questions (hey, it's all relative, this is Slashdot) pertaining to your post. Rather than answering any of those questions, you threw a temper tantrum and accused him of some unnamed meanness toward you (which I don't see no matter how many times I read that post).
Great-grandparent (or something or other like that) does not specifically state that Ubuntu has done this in the past. When I reread, i think the reference to Ubuntu was the equivalent of "Hypothetically, for any linux distribution, insert name here." Thus, I present to you a list of open source devices that shortly after release had vendor support dropped:
Sharp Zaurus (Sure a small community continued development for a few years, but it was very niche and very sparse).
Neuros 442 (Not linux per se, but marketed on the open source and community support aspects).
Greenphone
Although their is a democratic aspect of our republic, that aspect is grounded in the Constitution. Take away some amendments and add a few others, and the government could have little to no democratic principles inherent in it, and it would be as legitimate as it ever was.
However, I have to wonder, if the democratic part is looking weak, does it seem weaker now or when the common person had no vote for the Senate or President? Personally, I feel we would be better off and stronger as a nation going back to those days.
Sadly, any line drawn is arbitrary. However, my personal opinion tends to draw the playing field into 3 types: sports, physical skill challenges, and non-physical skill challenges. My personal definitions of each:
Sports are primarily physical contests of 1 or more players in 2 or more teams (a team of 1 player is still a team) where the athlete of the sport provides the primary physical activity required to win. Additionally, there must be an active offensive and defensive strategy that directly affect the abilities of the other team(s) to effectively execute their corresponding strategy. Examples include football (both kinds), running, horse racing (for the horse at least), swimming (when everyone is in one giant body of water, competing for space)...
Physical skill contests are the remainder of the physical activities, where players are the provide the primary physical skills required to win, but do not actively affect the offensive/defensive execution of opposing players. Examples would be golf, darts, archery, bowling, swimming (when performed in individual lanes)...
Nonphysical skill contests would be ones where the primary physical exertion is performed by something other than the contestant. While I understand that many of these contests do have a physical aspect, the primary skill for winning tends to be mental or reactionary/predictive. Examples would be auto racing, horse racing (for the jockey and breeder), robot fighting...
May I offer a slight modification to your sport criteria?
* To be considered a sport, the athlete must provide the primary physical activity required to winning in the sport.
Therefore, horse racing is a sport... but only for the horse and not the jockey, since the jockey is not supplying the primary physical activity required to win. I guess someone could construe this to mean that auto racing is a sport, but I think that is only valid if the person you are talking to is a car.
Not to disagree with this, but if memory serves the same things were said about Clinton, Bush Sr., and Reagan. I personally doubt we will ever see this within our lifetime, given one exception.
If some third party candidate were to come out of the woodwork and win a presidential election, I believe that whatever party has control over the presidency would not only be able to declare themselves as the supreme power, but also have the full support of both Republicans and Democrats.
Think about it. The republicans and democrats gain a lot more when the population views them as polar opposites. Through the publicity stunts that each party runs and the consistent polar disagreement on issues, the public believes that they are being fought for by someone... and once the side they believe is fighting for them fails to live up to expectation, most people just switch to the other side. Make no mistake, it is my firm belief that this is a charade by those in power to ensure that they are able to maintain power. Afterall, even if they lose an election here or there, both sides know that as long as they are the only two options, they will be back in power soon enough.
Constitution of the United States of America
Section 4 - Republican government
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
I grabbed my copy of the Republic for another post and came back to the governmental disorder section of Book VIII. I have the facts wrong in the first paragraph of this reply. Aristocracy erodes to Timocracy to Oligarchy to Democracy to Tyranny. Plato's point was that in modeling the government of the Republic, they needed to ensure that this erosion did not occur. Thus, the Greeks did not feel that the terms were exclusive, but rather that they could be exclusive. Sorry about the misinformation.
Greeks referred to rule by segments of the population as oligarchy or aristocracy, depending on exactly how the line was drawn. My understanding is that democracy was viewed as "mob rules" in ancient Greece and tended to be looked down upon, especially by the citizens who were perpetually in the minority.
I hate to harp on this, but I really think that the wikipedia entry on republics is more a common take the concept of republic. Look back at Plato's Republic, and you will find a government that is deemed a republic (by the originators of the term, nonetheless) yet has no origin from popular choice. In fact, Plato even builds in his eugenics program to keep the ruling class in power (because, of course, "fit to rule" is a trait that is inherently passed through genetics). Again, not that I disagree that most republics of today have an element of public choice, but I disagree that it is inherent in the term.
Plato would disagree. In The Republic, Socrates discusses what form of government the State should be. He states that democracy erodes to oligarchy which turns to aristocracy, which inevitably becomes a dictatorship. Shortly thereafter, he states that the most stable government would be a republic.
The argument being, if you are using Greek etymology as the basis for non-exclusivity, then I would imagine the Greeks should not reflect such a dichotomy in their own writings.
Finally, "... of the people, by the people, and for the people..." is an except from the Gettysburg Address, and is not in any way a declaration of government. Rather, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself are the only documents that define the government of the United States of America. Please let me know exactly where the word "democracy" appears in either of those two documents please.
Completely agreed... and to be perfectly honest, philosophers tend to be the ones who push scientific inquiry in new and exciting directions (Currently, this is afoot in the area of Cognitive Science). I do not mean it as a slight in any way to have the philosophers examine these line of thought prior to having the scientists do so. In fact, philosophers are best apt to determine testing methodologies, result interpretations, and logical extrapolations from the acceptance of such theories. However, I am very had pressed to see any likeliness that ID would be pushed from the philosophical community as a scientific, falsifiable, or even verifiable theory, much less one that in a logical and empirical sense could compete with evolution. In fact, philosophers have been discussing this very topic since Thomas Aquinas's argument of theological creation by complexity (the watch/watchmaker analogy). In that 450 year span, there has been no validation of that line of thought.
Read original post by parent and you will see (assuming you have a 3rd grade literacy level) that he explicitly stated the teaching of these theories in a philosophical context, not a scientific one. These are perfectly valid topics for a philosophy course, as the concept of "theory" in this area of inquiry present much less stringent criteria than science.
IHBT HAND.
Ever taken a philosophy class before? No, I didn't think so. Philosophy classes are not in place to promote scientific viewpoints. Philosophy is a subject where purely abstract arguments can be defined as valid or invalid, sound or unsound. It is a subject that allows you to take ideas and theories and arguments, evaluate the assumptions they are based on, and determine logical conclusions that follow.
Let's look at a few philosophical areas of inquiry:
Ethics
Epistemology
Metaphysics
Mind/Body Issues
Religion
Aesthetics
If you could outline the scientific context that each of these fundamental mainstays of philosophy are rooted in, I would be greatly appreciative.
Virtualized OS is only the first baby step. Virtualization becomes very cool when you see it done at the application layer. Read up on MS Application Virtualization which is a pretty bad ass application. It is essentially an AD integrated method of application deployment to the client without requiring installation. Think about running every version of Excel ever made simultaneously in its own virtual space. I have seen quite a few demos of this, and at the desktop architecture level, this is where virtualization is really headed.
There's a greater question involved in this that the sleeping example does not address: the nature of personal identity. What defines you as you? While there are many failed accounts at defining "youness", one of the major needs in addressing teleportation is the method of moving an object from point A to point B. Are we deconstructing the person to an atomic level and transporting the atoms, only to recreate the person, atom by atom? Are we scanning the person and recreating them from a bucket of atoms on the other side (This one has a great example of a system malfunction where the teletransporter accidentally creates two yous.)? Assuming that in either case the method is relevant to "youness," you could easily have a scenario where the teleportation creates a copy of you rather than an actual transport of you.
Good call on the overall disk space savings. I wasn't really thinking about the unneeded hard disk space on the client boxes. It is definitely an interesting potential configuration... especially if you could pipe a deduplication engine in front of the disk array. Granted you would take a performance hit, but you could save a great deal of space.
As far as the overall decrease of disk necessity in the enterprise, I'm not so sure I agree. Our email environment is about 3TB local with another 5. - 1.5TB in each of 8 remote offices. Every time we order more shelves for our SAN, the storage is claimed before the hardware comes in. If anything, I think programmers are taking the increase of disk size as a open door to utilize as much of it as possible. Even looking at the consumer end, this holds true. New digital camera shots are easily 10MB each. My old Sony Mavica could store about 10 full res images in a single floppy. Blank Word documents start off around 23K. I think the argument that storage necessity has consistently gone up dramatically over the last 15 years, 10 years, and even 5 years is nothing short of accurate. This is especially true in the enterprise. For instance, our firm received a new case with a bunch of documents to scan into our litigation support database. Between that, PST files, and other information, we utilized over 2TB of disk space. That's 1 case. Hi-res images of case documents, emails, and our financial DB grow exponentially. I've worked on DR plans for several clients throughout the enterprise and they all experience the same thing. Perhaps some areas are slightly decreasing in disk utilization, but the big apps are growing and growing.
Go to a law firm and ask them about their document management systems or their litigation support applications. Go to a bank and ask them about their financial records. What about email archives for compliance? Size up the disk space utilization and I think you will see many application servers that are significantly larger in storage than an MP3 player. Point taken, SANs can be used at the desktop level. But I partially wonder why? Wouldn't it be better to synchronize users' data folders with shares on a server that is diskless to the SAN? Why waste all that 'spensive storage just to make workstations diskless? Unless you are using a Compellant SAN or some SAN that is running a deduplication engine on the fly, you're stuck storing an OS install for each workstation.
Besides this, I've always felt that the big advantage of a SAN is the ability to replicate an entire environment to another site in case of disaster. SANs are really utilized to the max in enterprise environments where these features are necessary for successful business operations.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but he must be running it as root, too. http://www.garyshood.com/root
next, next, next, next, finish
Why would a non-nerd buy an operating system?
Perhaps because it came bundled with the shiny new computer that the non-nerd bought? Don't forget, every time the non-nerds buy a computer from the local Worst Buy or Circuit Shitty, they are buying an OS with it. Just because they aren't billed separate, it doesn't mean that it is not being purchased.
... and I never have mod points when they are worth distributing.
That was so funny, I peed a little.
I used to work with a woman who would type an email containing Blackberry activation passwords as follows:
"You're password is v as in victor."
She didn't realize that (besides the obvious misuse of your/you're), while this may be necessary on the phone, the user can see the password as is when it is in an email and that the words only confuse them.
Are participants under the age of 18 able to sign such a waiver? You would have to get a guardian to sign that, which then means you need to be checking ID at the door, too.
You talk specifically about Ubuntu dropping support for features from a previous release and then ignoring the users left out in the cold because of the new-shiny. Could you name an example of that actually happening?
Bullshit. steeviant asked you a series of fairly polite questions (hey, it's all relative, this is Slashdot) pertaining to your post. Rather than answering any of those questions, you threw a temper tantrum and accused him of some unnamed meanness toward you (which I don't see no matter how many times I read that post).
No, he didn't (not polite).
Yes, he did (tantrum).
Care to borrow my glasses?
You talk specifically about Ubuntu dropping support for features from a previous release and then ignoring the users left out in the cold because of the new-shiny. Could you name an example of that actually happening?
Bullshit. steeviant asked you a series of fairly polite questions (hey, it's all relative, this is Slashdot) pertaining to your post. Rather than answering any of those questions, you threw a temper tantrum and accused him of some unnamed meanness toward you (which I don't see no matter how many times I read that post).
Great-grandparent (or something or other like that) does not specifically state that Ubuntu has done this in the past. When I reread, i think the reference to Ubuntu was the equivalent of "Hypothetically, for any linux distribution, insert name here." Thus, I present to you a list of open source devices that shortly after release had vendor support dropped:
Sharp Zaurus (Sure a small community continued development for a few years, but it was very niche and very sparse).
Neuros 442 (Not linux per se, but marketed on the open source and community support aspects).
Greenphone
Although their is a democratic aspect of our republic, that aspect is grounded in the Constitution. Take away some amendments and add a few others, and the government could have little to no democratic principles inherent in it, and it would be as legitimate as it ever was.
However, I have to wonder, if the democratic part is looking weak, does it seem weaker now or when the common person had no vote for the Senate or President? Personally, I feel we would be better off and stronger as a nation going back to those days.
Sports are primarily physical contests of 1 or more players in 2 or more teams (a team of 1 player is still a team) where the athlete of the sport provides the primary physical activity required to win. Additionally, there must be an active offensive and defensive strategy that directly affect the abilities of the other team(s) to effectively execute their corresponding strategy. Examples include football (both kinds), running, horse racing (for the horse at least), swimming (when everyone is in one giant body of water, competing for space)...
Physical skill contests are the remainder of the physical activities, where players are the provide the primary physical skills required to win, but do not actively affect the offensive/defensive execution of opposing players. Examples would be golf, darts, archery, bowling, swimming (when performed in individual lanes)...
Nonphysical skill contests would be ones where the primary physical exertion is performed by something other than the contestant. While I understand that many of these contests do have a physical aspect, the primary skill for winning tends to be mental or reactionary/predictive. Examples would be auto racing, horse racing (for the jockey and breeder), robot fighting...
May I offer a slight modification to your sport criteria?
* To be considered a sport, the athlete must provide the primary physical activity required to winning in the sport.
Therefore, horse racing is a sport... but only for the horse and not the jockey, since the jockey is not supplying the primary physical activity required to win. I guess someone could construe this to mean that auto racing is a sport, but I think that is only valid if the person you are talking to is a car.
Not to disagree with this, but if memory serves the same things were said about Clinton, Bush Sr., and Reagan. I personally doubt we will ever see this within our lifetime, given one exception.
If some third party candidate were to come out of the woodwork and win a presidential election, I believe that whatever party has control over the presidency would not only be able to declare themselves as the supreme power, but also have the full support of both Republicans and Democrats.
Think about it. The republicans and democrats gain a lot more when the population views them as polar opposites. Through the publicity stunts that each party runs and the consistent polar disagreement on issues, the public believes that they are being fought for by someone... and once the side they believe is fighting for them fails to live up to expectation, most people just switch to the other side. Make no mistake, it is my firm belief that this is a charade by those in power to ensure that they are able to maintain power. Afterall, even if they lose an election here or there, both sides know that as long as they are the only two options, they will be back in power soon enough.
Constitution of the United States of America
Section 4 - Republican government
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
I grabbed my copy of the Republic for another post and came back to the governmental disorder section of Book VIII. I have the facts wrong in the first paragraph of this reply. Aristocracy erodes to Timocracy to Oligarchy to Democracy to Tyranny. Plato's point was that in modeling the government of the Republic, they needed to ensure that this erosion did not occur. Thus, the Greeks did not feel that the terms were exclusive, but rather that they could be exclusive. Sorry about the misinformation.
Greeks referred to rule by segments of the population as oligarchy or aristocracy, depending on exactly how the line was drawn. My understanding is that democracy was viewed as "mob rules" in ancient Greece and tended to be looked down upon, especially by the citizens who were perpetually in the minority.
I hate to harp on this, but I really think that the wikipedia entry on republics is more a common take the concept of republic. Look back at Plato's Republic, and you will find a government that is deemed a republic (by the originators of the term, nonetheless) yet has no origin from popular choice. In fact, Plato even builds in his eugenics program to keep the ruling class in power (because, of course, "fit to rule" is a trait that is inherently passed through genetics). Again, not that I disagree that most republics of today have an element of public choice, but I disagree that it is inherent in the term.
Plato would disagree. In The Republic, Socrates discusses what form of government the State should be. He states that democracy erodes to oligarchy which turns to aristocracy, which inevitably becomes a dictatorship. Shortly thereafter, he states that the most stable government would be a republic.
The argument being, if you are using Greek etymology as the basis for non-exclusivity, then I would imagine the Greeks should not reflect such a dichotomy in their own writings.
Finally, "... of the people, by the people, and for the people..." is an except from the Gettysburg Address, and is not in any way a declaration of government. Rather, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself are the only documents that define the government of the United States of America. Please let me know exactly where the word "democracy" appears in either of those two documents please.
Completely agreed... and to be perfectly honest, philosophers tend to be the ones who push scientific inquiry in new and exciting directions (Currently, this is afoot in the area of Cognitive Science). I do not mean it as a slight in any way to have the philosophers examine these line of thought prior to having the scientists do so. In fact, philosophers are best apt to determine testing methodologies, result interpretations, and logical extrapolations from the acceptance of such theories. However, I am very had pressed to see any likeliness that ID would be pushed from the philosophical community as a scientific, falsifiable, or even verifiable theory, much less one that in a logical and empirical sense could compete with evolution. In fact, philosophers have been discussing this very topic since Thomas Aquinas's argument of theological creation by complexity (the watch/watchmaker analogy). In that 450 year span, there has been no validation of that line of thought.
Read original post by parent and you will see (assuming you have a 3rd grade literacy level) that he explicitly stated the teaching of these theories in a philosophical context, not a scientific one. These are perfectly valid topics for a philosophy course, as the concept of "theory" in this area of inquiry present much less stringent criteria than science. IHBT HAND.
Ever taken a philosophy class before? No, I didn't think so. Philosophy classes are not in place to promote scientific viewpoints. Philosophy is a subject where purely abstract arguments can be defined as valid or invalid, sound or unsound. It is a subject that allows you to take ideas and theories and arguments, evaluate the assumptions they are based on, and determine logical conclusions that follow.
Let's look at a few philosophical areas of inquiry:
- Ethics
- Epistemology
- Metaphysics
- Mind/Body Issues
- Religion
- Aesthetics
If you could outline the scientific context that each of these fundamental mainstays of philosophy are rooted in, I would be greatly appreciative.Virtualized OS is only the first baby step. Virtualization becomes very cool when you see it done at the application layer. Read up on MS Application Virtualization which is a pretty bad ass application. It is essentially an AD integrated method of application deployment to the client without requiring installation. Think about running every version of Excel ever made simultaneously in its own virtual space. I have seen quite a few demos of this, and at the desktop architecture level, this is where virtualization is really headed.
There's a greater question involved in this that the sleeping example does not address: the nature of personal identity. What defines you as you? While there are many failed accounts at defining "youness", one of the major needs in addressing teleportation is the method of moving an object from point A to point B. Are we deconstructing the person to an atomic level and transporting the atoms, only to recreate the person, atom by atom? Are we scanning the person and recreating them from a bucket of atoms on the other side (This one has a great example of a system malfunction where the teletransporter accidentally creates two yous.)? Assuming that in either case the method is relevant to "youness," you could easily have a scenario where the teleportation creates a copy of you rather than an actual transport of you.
I think so Brain, but me and Pipi Longstocking, I mean, what would the children look like?
Good call on the overall disk space savings. I wasn't really thinking about the unneeded hard disk space on the client boxes. It is definitely an interesting potential configuration... especially if you could pipe a deduplication engine in front of the disk array. Granted you would take a performance hit, but you could save a great deal of space.
As far as the overall decrease of disk necessity in the enterprise, I'm not so sure I agree. Our email environment is about 3TB local with another 5. - 1.5TB in each of 8 remote offices. Every time we order more shelves for our SAN, the storage is claimed before the hardware comes in. If anything, I think programmers are taking the increase of disk size as a open door to utilize as much of it as possible. Even looking at the consumer end, this holds true. New digital camera shots are easily 10MB each. My old Sony Mavica could store about 10 full res images in a single floppy. Blank Word documents start off around 23K. I think the argument that storage necessity has consistently gone up dramatically over the last 15 years, 10 years, and even 5 years is nothing short of accurate. This is especially true in the enterprise. For instance, our firm received a new case with a bunch of documents to scan into our litigation support database. Between that, PST files, and other information, we utilized over 2TB of disk space. That's 1 case. Hi-res images of case documents, emails, and our financial DB grow exponentially. I've worked on DR plans for several clients throughout the enterprise and they all experience the same thing. Perhaps some areas are slightly decreasing in disk utilization, but the big apps are growing and growing.
Go to a law firm and ask them about their document management systems or their litigation support applications. Go to a bank and ask them about their financial records. What about email archives for compliance? Size up the disk space utilization and I think you will see many application servers that are significantly larger in storage than an MP3 player. Point taken, SANs can be used at the desktop level. But I partially wonder why? Wouldn't it be better to synchronize users' data folders with shares on a server that is diskless to the SAN? Why waste all that 'spensive storage just to make workstations diskless? Unless you are using a Compellant SAN or some SAN that is running a deduplication engine on the fly, you're stuck storing an OS install for each workstation.
Besides this, I've always felt that the big advantage of a SAN is the ability to replicate an entire environment to another site in case of disaster. SANs are really utilized to the max in enterprise environments where these features are necessary for successful business operations.