It touches on free will because if the brain is in fact the mind (which I agree that it is), then it follows the rules of physics. Thus, physics is the cause of all action, not the thinking thing. What becomes amusing is the followup idea that if everything comes down to physics, our words are merely objects of that deep causal chain. Conversations then becomes something called "the clicking game."
I honestly didn't realize that duality was much of an option concerning the mind/body problem. I thought most people too either the type or token physicalist view or took a phenomenological view of this argument. Cartesian duality (and from what I understood most other versions) suffer from issues in causality. By this, if a mind is a purely mental thing, it cannot control the brain, and the other way around.
I think you took me wrong here. What I clearly said was that you cannot have selection on a trait that has never been expressed. The poster I replied to said that if it was advantageous for mothers to have these cells, then everyone would have them. However, evolution doesn't account for how new traits come along or what set of traits exist. So his argument is all wrong from its beginning. That's the problem. If his account of selection were correct, we would have bulletproof exoskeletons and be immortal, as he is claiming that selection causes expression.
Did you understand it that time, or should I try again only using single syllable words?
What you said is not necessarily true either. Evolution occurs on expressed phenotypes. That is, if the trait never expresses it self, there is nothing to select for. Thus, if there are no species that have a genotype to express this phenotype without giving birth, then this trait can in no way evolve. This negates the conclusion that either a or b is the case. Furthermore, the conclusion of a or b being the only possibilities would have to stem from a premise that both the trait and the absence of it are in the gene pool and neither is being selected for.
Really? Are you claiming that a Celly system is less than the low market AMD system? I think that the price structure between comparable speed systems are comparable across platforms. The insinuation that AMD units are the cheapo ones may have been true throughout the K6-2 and original Athlon models, however I really think that Intel and AMD have processors in systems that range all across the price spectrum, thus competing with each other. However, an argument could be put in place that since Dell is the largest seller of Desktop PCs, and Dell is Intel Only... these numbers could easily be put into some question.
Maybe I just don't get it. Tabs are great for web browsing because it allows you to organize sites withing tabs within windows like a heirarchy. Emails are a bit different. I can already dump the actual items into a folder to do the same kind of sorting. Previewing the messages allows me to quickly find what I am looking for without opening multiple items.
The only thing I would like to se (and it is prolly there, but I just haven't looked for it) is heirarchical email display. Instead of showing me messages, show me entire threads as a single entity. Also, clean it up and make it look nice. That would be a greater asset.
Actually, I have used this method several times for platter collisions. When the drive starts making the clicking noise, the freezer is an easy way to retrieve data before discarding the drive. I am not a physicist, but the way it was explained to me is that the platters thermally contract more than the heads and casing of the drives.
One of the things I find interesting about this is that Gates holds the exact opposite paradigm about work that Plato holds in the Republic. But this brings up an interesting question. Do workers need knowledge of the whole system or just what their portion of it is?
In many cases, things fall through the cracks when the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing. However, is that a causal relationship or a correlative one? I think that a strong corporate heirarchy where managers *gasp* are well trained employees that have moved through the system and proved that they are capable of seeing a picture bigger than "insert part A in slot B," is much more likely to not have the same sort of issues that a less well managed company would (assuming of course that the actual workers have very little clue what is going on outside of their area). Again, to bring up Plato, I think he is correct to say that people are happier when they are able to specialize in a specific task and work toward the perfection of said task. This does not mean that they cannot move up, but that the base job is a platform to the next level.
However, Gates is in an itneresting position. Software problems can be directly attributed to having too many programmers working in too small of a scope. When they lack the information to understand exactly how their code is part of the whole, they make mistakes.
But well coded, well documented, libraries, functions, programs, etc. should provide enough information for those who utilize the code to understand exactly how it will work within their project. Again, I think a well informed management that actually does work is a much better structure than building a staff of well informed workers from the ground up.
In the environment where rebooting comes at a high price, I fail to see why a test server wouldn't be built with the proposed updates, tested, and then slipped into the server farm. From there, you can decomission the outdated system with little or no downtime. Obviously this is not feasible in small business environments, but how many small businesses lose $10k/sec of downtime?
I may be a bit green to the corporate methods of updating a production OS, but I would think that the process would have to be the same. You have to set up a test environmnet, ensure that the updates produce the necessary results. Then you have to test to make suer that no other software/productivity is affected. Then you have to compare baselines. Regardless of the beginning OS, these steps are necessary.
I can see two potential differences between Windows and Linux on this front, though, and they both seem to favor Linux. First, you don't have to buy a second license to run the test server. I would assume you can get away with this in Windows by not activating the product, but I could see some test phases taking over 30 days. Second, since you basically know excatly what you are updating in Linux, and what other packages are dependant on what you are updating, your testing phase can be more focused. This isn't to say that it would take less time, but rather that you know what is prima facie in the testing order.
So corporate sysadmin geeks out here... where is the advantage in this area to using either os?
In regard to the serious part of your post: I believe if you were to reread the parent to my post and my post again, you would find the nature of the discussion strictly contained within the concept of logical possibility and proof of existence.
What always makes me laugh is the ignorance of the general population when it comes to politics. Let's look at the most logical set of events that occurred.
More than likely Microsoft supported the initial bill because it fit within their social agenda and contained provisions that Microsoft either found beneficial for business or found to be "the right thing." In the process of going through the legislature, the bill changed. Perhaps addditional clauses were appended to it, removed from it, or the document otherwise changed into a less beneficial bill. Microsoft removes it's support either ebcause the bill does not have the original impact or because it does them harm in a business sense.
However, the population hears "Pro-Gay Bill" and without reading anything about it or how it has morphed, they instanly support it. They build public pressure for MS to support it in any form or revision. What happens when the enacted law does nothing (like the emancipation proclimation) or has ill effects (like the DMCA)? Guess who will get the bad PR of supporting it. I think MS should have stuck to their guns and been more open about why they felt justified to drop their support for the bill. Just because the world is full of less than informed people, does not mean that the dissenting view is incorrect.
If you will also remember, Russell provided good reasoning as to why existence cannot be proven in a first-order sense.
The only reason I bring this up is because science, or any complex system as Goedel proved, has to assume the existence of certain phenomena. In science, this assumption is that empiricism reports the world as it really is. Not that this is necessarily a bad assumption, but it seems to be the kind that can neither be proved nor disproved.
Anyways, I always find it to be an interesting puzzle. Science is much more pragmatic than religion, but no matter what system of thought you use (not just between these two, but any logically possible system), cannot be proven true.
The vast majority of christians that I know of believe in evolution. The reconcile their beliefs in that and god by claiming that god designed life to adapt to its environment. Not that I believe in god, ID, or science... but word around the campfire is that the vast majority of christians are not these fundamentalist ID types.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. Don't get me wrong. I think that pragmatically you are right, but that doesn't mean that it is normatively right.
Basically, I take issue with the idea that instead of building browsers that rigidly conform to standards, thus forcing the coders to code to standard, we allow sloppy code. It is in fact when browsers are built to try and figure out what you are trying to do that coders are given the ability to write sloppy code.
Why then even create standards? Look at SMTP, specifically standards in how emails are formatted. Imagine what would happen if mail servers did not verify things like CR/LF. Imagine if someone coded a program to hit an SMTP server and expected the server to understand HELLO instead of HELO. Imagine having SMTP servers trying to guess at what you were trying to do instead of forcing you to conform to standards. Chaos would ensue.
I understand the example I gave was very simplified and prolly partially inaccurate because of simplification, but the point is there. I am not saying that a browser's ability to understand real world code is not important, but rather that their prima facie obligation should be to conform to standards.
One of the additional questions that is important to ask is, why are so many web designers are coding improperly? Sadly, I think it is the nature of IT. So many people have historically been "home schooled" in web design and computers and that population has leaked into the tech sector in businesses also. There's a big difference between playing around with HTML and fixing mistakes until your page views the way you want it to and understanding HTML. Companies that write browsers need to take significant steps to ensure that the standards are upheld.
This article is bunk. Not because it has a differing opinion, but rather because it does a poor job supporting its claims. For example: the author states that Beta was not tehcnically superior because he couldn't tell the difference between it and VHS. He goes further to claim that many users were the same way and that soem even felt VHS footage looked better. Let's analogize this. Some users cannot tell the difference between MP3 files encoded at 128bit and 196bit. Some people may even claim that the 128bit encoding sounds better (especially if they cannot see a real difference and make an arbetrary guess. Does this mean that 196bit encoding is not superrior to 128bit? Of course not.
Nope, it was cost, simplicity, and marketing.
Cost: Betamax had a fairly significant licensing cost to be utilized. Additionally, Betamax equipment ran significantly higher until VHS began taking market share, at which time Sony began to cut their pricing. At this point it was too late.
Simplicity: You said it yourself. You could only record 1 hour on the compact Betamax cassette.
Marketing: In the mid 80s, do you remember the ratio of VHS to Betamax at your local movie rental store? Usually it was something around 5:1 (by me it was, anyways). Without being able to successfully penetrate that market (which was really the nail in an already closed coffin) there was no chance of selling their equipment to consumers. Now, is it Sony's fault they couldn't penetrate the rental market? No, VHS was already taking over significant marketshare. However, this is still a relevant point because Beta could have been saved if it could have found itself in the rental stores more so than VHS. I know the obvious objection, but if Sony changed its attitude toward licensing and worked with studios to release movies on their product exclusively (or at least in advance of VHS), they would have regained the market.
Yeah, that is exactly what I was getting at. Specifically, from the article:
First, though, to dispel a few myths: Not all de facto standards are the same. Some of them are really good. Some are really bad. Not every de facto standard represents the best possible technical decisions; not every de facto standard represents the tyranny of a proprietary despot dribbling out just enough crumbs of documentation to keep the peasants from revolting. De facto standards can be temporary kluges, or carefully considered and planned designs; they can reflect an individual's vision or a committee's indecision. In short, it is dangerous to treat them as interchangeable.
This is a very important statement. It builds a framework to relate the usage of de facto standards to Kuhn's characterization of science in The Structure of Scientiffic Revolution. In this case, we find that the standard exists merely for the reasons we both outlined (e.g. gross popularity or cost factors) and not necessarily because of its function. This flies in the face of Kuhn, though. What it does, though, is show that while computer science is very science like, there are still major roots of business that factor into its evolution and development.
This article makes several interesting points, however I am stuck on their second example where they discuss "PC Compatible." In this example, they state that PCs share in design from the original IBM PC. As an example it shows how a new PC may have 4GB of memory, but it still uses the 640K of base memory. Then it makes a fairly strong claim. It claims that this became the defacto standard in part because it was better than the standards it replaced. However, this doesn't seem to be true, necessarily or otherwise. The IBM PC became the defacto standard out of popularity more than anything else. One needs to look no further than the battle between VHS and BetaMax. Sure, Beta had better video and audio quality. However, due to cost, simplicity, and marketing, VHS became the standard for magnetic video tapes.
Slashdot Mirror
It touches on free will because if the brain is in fact the mind (which I agree that it is), then it follows the rules of physics. Thus, physics is the cause of all action, not the thinking thing. What becomes amusing is the followup idea that if everything comes down to physics, our words are merely objects of that deep causal chain. Conversations then becomes something called "the clicking game."
I honestly didn't realize that duality was much of an option concerning the mind/body problem. I thought most people too either the type or token physicalist view or took a phenomenological view of this argument. Cartesian duality (and from what I understood most other versions) suffer from issues in causality. By this, if a mind is a purely mental thing, it cannot control the brain, and the other way around.
Did you understand it that time, or should I try again only using single syllable words?
What you said is not necessarily true either. Evolution occurs on expressed phenotypes. That is, if the trait never expresses it self, there is nothing to select for. Thus, if there are no species that have a genotype to express this phenotype without giving birth, then this trait can in no way evolve. This negates the conclusion that either a or b is the case. Furthermore, the conclusion of a or b being the only possibilities would have to stem from a premise that both the trait and the absence of it are in the gene pool and neither is being selected for.
Really? Are you claiming that a Celly system is less than the low market AMD system? I think that the price structure between comparable speed systems are comparable across platforms. The insinuation that AMD units are the cheapo ones may have been true throughout the K6-2 and original Athlon models, however I really think that Intel and AMD have processors in systems that range all across the price spectrum, thus competing with each other. However, an argument could be put in place that since Dell is the largest seller of Desktop PCs, and Dell is Intel Only... these numbers could easily be put into some question.
The FCC really doesn't have a definition of "Common Carrier" but they'll know it when they see it.
The only thing I would like to se (and it is prolly there, but I just haven't looked for it) is heirarchical email display. Instead of showing me messages, show me entire threads as a single entity. Also, clean it up and make it look nice. That would be a greater asset.
Horrible flashbacks to Excel namerange lookups.
And there is infact legal precidence for this. I believe the term is "respondant superrior"
Please mark links that are not work appropriate as such.
Actually, I have used this method several times for platter collisions. When the drive starts making the clicking noise, the freezer is an easy way to retrieve data before discarding the drive. I am not a physicist, but the way it was explained to me is that the platters thermally contract more than the heads and casing of the drives.
Just wanted to say that the mod of "flamebait" is bullshit and I just had the pleasure of metamoding it.
One of the things I find interesting about this is that Gates holds the exact opposite paradigm about work that Plato holds in the Republic. But this brings up an interesting question. Do workers need knowledge of the whole system or just what their portion of it is?
In many cases, things fall through the cracks when the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing. However, is that a causal relationship or a correlative one? I think that a strong corporate heirarchy where managers *gasp* are well trained employees that have moved through the system and proved that they are capable of seeing a picture bigger than "insert part A in slot B," is much more likely to not have the same sort of issues that a less well managed company would (assuming of course that the actual workers have very little clue what is going on outside of their area). Again, to bring up Plato, I think he is correct to say that people are happier when they are able to specialize in a specific task and work toward the perfection of said task. This does not mean that they cannot move up, but that the base job is a platform to the next level.
However, Gates is in an itneresting position. Software problems can be directly attributed to having too many programmers working in too small of a scope. When they lack the information to understand exactly how their code is part of the whole, they make mistakes.
But well coded, well documented, libraries, functions, programs, etc. should provide enough information for those who utilize the code to understand exactly how it will work within their project. Again, I think a well informed management that actually does work is a much better structure than building a staff of well informed workers from the ground up.
In the environment where rebooting comes at a high price, I fail to see why a test server wouldn't be built with the proposed updates, tested, and then slipped into the server farm. From there, you can decomission the outdated system with little or no downtime. Obviously this is not feasible in small business environments, but how many small businesses lose $10k/sec of downtime?
I may be a bit green to the corporate methods of updating a production OS, but I would think that the process would have to be the same. You have to set up a test environmnet, ensure that the updates produce the necessary results. Then you have to test to make suer that no other software/productivity is affected. Then you have to compare baselines. Regardless of the beginning OS, these steps are necessary.
I can see two potential differences between Windows and Linux on this front, though, and they both seem to favor Linux. First, you don't have to buy a second license to run the test server. I would assume you can get away with this in Windows by not activating the product, but I could see some test phases taking over 30 days. Second, since you basically know excatly what you are updating in Linux, and what other packages are dependant on what you are updating, your testing phase can be more focused. This isn't to say that it would take less time, but rather that you know what is prima facie in the testing order.
So corporate sysadmin geeks out here... where is the advantage in this area to using either os?
In regard to the serious part of your post: I believe if you were to reread the parent to my post and my post again, you would find the nature of the discussion strictly contained within the concept of logical possibility and proof of existence.
In regard to the humorous part of your post: hehe
What always makes me laugh is the ignorance of the general population when it comes to politics. Let's look at the most logical set of events that occurred.
More than likely Microsoft supported the initial bill because it fit within their social agenda and contained provisions that Microsoft either found beneficial for business or found to be "the right thing." In the process of going through the legislature, the bill changed. Perhaps addditional clauses were appended to it, removed from it, or the document otherwise changed into a less beneficial bill. Microsoft removes it's support either ebcause the bill does not have the original impact or because it does them harm in a business sense.
However, the population hears "Pro-Gay Bill" and without reading anything about it or how it has morphed, they instanly support it. They build public pressure for MS to support it in any form or revision. What happens when the enacted law does nothing (like the emancipation proclimation) or has ill effects (like the DMCA)? Guess who will get the bad PR of supporting it. I think MS should have stuck to their guns and been more open about why they felt justified to drop their support for the bill. Just because the world is full of less than informed people, does not mean that the dissenting view is incorrect.
If you will also remember, Russell provided good reasoning as to why existence cannot be proven in a first-order sense.
The only reason I bring this up is because science, or any complex system as Goedel proved, has to assume the existence of certain phenomena. In science, this assumption is that empiricism reports the world as it really is. Not that this is necessarily a bad assumption, but it seems to be the kind that can neither be proved nor disproved.
Anyways, I always find it to be an interesting puzzle. Science is much more pragmatic than religion, but no matter what system of thought you use (not just between these two, but any logically possible system), cannot be proven true.
The vast majority of christians that I know of believe in evolution. The reconcile their beliefs in that and god by claiming that god designed life to adapt to its environment. Not that I believe in god, ID, or science... but word around the campfire is that the vast majority of christians are not these fundamentalist ID types.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. Don't get me wrong. I think that pragmatically you are right, but that doesn't mean that it is normatively right.
Basically, I take issue with the idea that instead of building browsers that rigidly conform to standards, thus forcing the coders to code to standard, we allow sloppy code. It is in fact when browsers are built to try and figure out what you are trying to do that coders are given the ability to write sloppy code.
Why then even create standards? Look at SMTP, specifically standards in how emails are formatted. Imagine what would happen if mail servers did not verify things like CR/LF. Imagine if someone coded a program to hit an SMTP server and expected the server to understand HELLO instead of HELO. Imagine having SMTP servers trying to guess at what you were trying to do instead of forcing you to conform to standards. Chaos would ensue.
I understand the example I gave was very simplified and prolly partially inaccurate because of simplification, but the point is there. I am not saying that a browser's ability to understand real world code is not important, but rather that their prima facie obligation should be to conform to standards.
One of the additional questions that is important to ask is, why are so many web designers are coding improperly? Sadly, I think it is the nature of IT. So many people have historically been "home schooled" in web design and computers and that population has leaked into the tech sector in businesses also. There's a big difference between playing around with HTML and fixing mistakes until your page views the way you want it to and understanding HTML. Companies that write browsers need to take significant steps to ensure that the standards are upheld.
This article is bunk. Not because it has a differing opinion, but rather because it does a poor job supporting its claims. For example: the author states that Beta was not tehcnically superior because he couldn't tell the difference between it and VHS. He goes further to claim that many users were the same way and that soem even felt VHS footage looked better. Let's analogize this. Some users cannot tell the difference between MP3 files encoded at 128bit and 196bit. Some people may even claim that the 128bit encoding sounds better (especially if they cannot see a real difference and make an arbetrary guess. Does this mean that 196bit encoding is not superrior to 128bit? Of course not.
Nope, it was cost, simplicity, and marketing.
Cost: Betamax had a fairly significant licensing cost to be utilized. Additionally, Betamax equipment ran significantly higher until VHS began taking market share, at which time Sony began to cut their pricing. At this point it was too late.
Simplicity: You said it yourself. You could only record 1 hour on the compact Betamax cassette.
Marketing: In the mid 80s, do you remember the ratio of VHS to Betamax at your local movie rental store? Usually it was something around 5:1 (by me it was, anyways). Without being able to successfully penetrate that market (which was really the nail in an already closed coffin) there was no chance of selling their equipment to consumers. Now, is it Sony's fault they couldn't penetrate the rental market? No, VHS was already taking over significant marketshare. However, this is still a relevant point because Beta could have been saved if it could have found itself in the rental stores more so than VHS. I know the obvious objection, but if Sony changed its attitude toward licensing and worked with studios to release movies on their product exclusively (or at least in advance of VHS), they would have regained the market.
This article makes several interesting points, however I am stuck on their second example where they discuss "PC Compatible." In this example, they state that PCs share in design from the original IBM PC. As an example it shows how a new PC may have 4GB of memory, but it still uses the 640K of base memory. Then it makes a fairly strong claim. It claims that this became the defacto standard in part because it was better than the standards it replaced. However, this doesn't seem to be true, necessarily or otherwise. The IBM PC became the defacto standard out of popularity more than anything else. One needs to look no further than the battle between VHS and BetaMax. Sure, Beta had better video and audio quality. However, due to cost, simplicity, and marketing, VHS became the standard for magnetic video tapes.