This is why I tell people that windows is a Hostile Platform. Your home grown apps may be broken by the next service pack, and you can count yourelf doubly lucky if they survive the next release of the windows.
I fail to see how this is much different than Mac, which routinely breaks apps in yearly OS releases, or Linux, where your app may have to be compiled several different times for several different distros or even windowing libraries.
"I love how people love Macs because it's a very closed proprietary system that can then be controlled by a single entity."
I wonder if most of the ranting by/.ers isn't just prompted by the flaws of MS. Linux empowers people to feel like they are actually doing something about the problems that Windows presents - and rightfully so.
But if Macs are beautiful in their industrial design, solid in their BSD and OSS roots, stunning in their eye candy, and can run a moderate amount of OSS, then why not embrace the Mac? Safari, Apache, BSD, Darwin - all speak to the OSS heart of the Linux zealots, and Mac provides that last bit of design that just makes computing pretty.
Is it closed-minded to teach kids in science that Aristotle was wrong? Is it closed-minded in science to teach kids that the world is round rather than flat? Is it closed-minded in science to teach kids that the Earth orbits around the Sun, and that the Ptolemeic model is wrong? No! Because all of those things represent our best understanding today of how the world works, and to teach the kids otherwise would be to trick them with false understanding.
No, it's not wrong to teach those things. But guess what - we DO teach Aristotle's original theories just to teach that they were disproved. We do teach that the earth was once thought flat. We do teach that once people thought the sun revolved around the earth. Teach one word of the idea of creationism or anything that in opposition to evolution, and the ACLU and parents sue the school district. Why is it wrong to teach that some believe in opposing theories?
And by the way, starting your post with "Wrong." just makes you look dogmatic, not open minded.
If by using the word "Wrong" in your opinion made my post instantly dogmatic, then I apologize. I find myself in this debate frustrated by what I see as close-mindedness on the side of evolutionists, and thus probably allow a certain amount of emotion to taint my true intention. I enjoy debate, but dislike the way that Slashdot looks on people who support ID - or even creationism.
In terms of dogma, I certainly do lean towards ID.
If we took this approach we may as well use random guesses to explain things, because a guess is a 'possibility' in the sense that you describe.
I don't think this is necessarily true. It's not like we're supporting 35 different theories of the creation of life. There are two (somewhat) plausible explanations on the table - we are random, or we are created. To ignore one - even if to disprove it (I know - "how do you disprove ID?" - I don't know, ok?) is - IMHO - not appropriate.
As for the 'first instant of life' argument - do you therefore dismiss gravity because you can't explain the 'first instant of gravity'?
Comparing gravity to life is always interesting to me. I don't dismiss either - life or gravity. But fucked if we really know what either is. And so both are questioned. However, in science it is ok to question the current theories on gravity, because it can't be traced in any way to religion. But add the word "religion" - attach it to any argument - and it suddenly becomes wrong to explore. We're at the opposite side of the spectrum from Galileo. Instead of being completely stifled by the Church (or religion in general) any attachment to religion is now evil.
Two, regarding the wider scope of Intellegent Design, why does that necessarily have to conflict with the established theory of evolution?
Interesting. I have a question for/.ers - this is not meant to incite flaiming, trolling, etc. It is simply a question to which I would be interested in recieving intelligent responses.
Where in evolution (I know the same can be asked of ID) is there any place for conciousness, self-awareness, and morality? When in the evolutionary cycle does man become self-aware? Can evolution explain this? Does it ever attempt to?
Based on my experience with very complex systems, such as computer opperating systems, I've come to the conclusion that as intelligent beings design ever more complex systems it becomes increasingly more difficult to design systems that don't have large flaws (bugs) that will keep the systems from working.
I know I'll get troll-moderated for this, but:
- Cancer
- Aids
Intelligent Design or millions upon millions of years of evolution and adaptation - either way, the design of life is far from flawless or without "bugs."
You ID and Creationism. advocates need to get over this term "just a theory" that you use. It just shows ignorance. You need to realize that the popular use of the word "theory" (to mean "speculation") is extremely different from the scientific use of the word "theory" (to describe an explanation of natural processes which may be extremely well tested and well understood).
I was totally in to your response as creative and well stated until this paragraph. To think that a person that believes in ID or creationism is incapable of understanding basic scientific philosophy or even incapable of being true scientists themselves is ignorant and offensive. Being dismissed as a lunatic for raging against mainstream science has plauged true scientists for centuries. Please accept that those of us who like the idea and hypothesis of ID are not low-IQ neanderthals but are in fact intelligent human beings. (Well, at least some of us.)
Finally, an intelligent response, not one out to have me locked away as a lunatic for playing devil's advocate and supporting the possibility that Intelligent Design could be a viable "theory" (not scientific, just a theory.)
In response to your questions:
Gravity is a fact. What gravity is is still highly unknown and debatable. Do large mass bodies bend space-time? Is gravity between two large objects simply one getting caught in the bend in space-time caused by another? So many unanswered questions. But I place your question akin to the question "Would you view life and conciousness as a theory or fact?" Of course life exists. What it is or how it got here (or if there is an afterlife) is extremely questionable at this time.
Also, in case anyone here reads this far down the post chain, I certainly do not proport that ID is yet a scientific theory. But it's damn sure a hypothesis. Hell, we can't design an entire life form yet, but we can, in a lab, alter DNA and genetic makeup to produce visible, observable changes in animals (Glofish, for instance. Or hypoallergenic cats.) Intelligent design at the feature level is observable and recreatable - one of the requirements for moving a hypothesis to a theory.
"In common parlance the word "evolution" is often used as a shorthand for the modern synthesis of evolution, including the theory that all extant species share a common ancestor." - From Wikipedia entry on Evolution
Intelligent design is not science. It's religion. It doesn't belong in a science class.
Wrong. People love to think that evolution is the complete explanation of life as we know it, and want to teach that as "science" and as fact. However, we still have so little true understanding about the origins of life. Assumptions are made about the first instant of life, but it cannot be recreated in a lab.
Fact is, we will probably never know for sure. However, true science is the scrutiny of all possibilities of that which we do not know. Dismissing Intelligent Design as not being science is the same as dismissing theories of a round world revolving around the sun as heresy. It's base, uninformed, and - wait for it - close minded.
"In other news: The ACLU and 11 parents have successfully sued Slashdot for relating evolution to a theory."
Seriously though - although there are going to be hardcore people who post how wonderful and complete and all-telling evolution is, it is a theory people. Theory. It still has holes, giant unexplainable holes. Intelligent design is simply stating that certain things in life - like DNA - are simply too complex to have been formed by some amino acids randomly millions of years ago. It doesn't necessarily propose a God figure, but SOME intelligence behind our design.
I for one welcome intelligent design as an alternate theory. Evolution has never sat right with me.
This is true I suppose - but most of MS's languages are made with in-house development in mind. (I may get some flaimbait here, but here goes...)
There are very few full-fledged commercial apps that are 100% VB, Delphi, JAVA, etc. Most apps that are are made by the language vendor. For instance, Sun One products (like their LDAP product) has a Java administration application. No surprise there. Certain MS products used VB to develop the front-end. No surprise there.
Almost all commercial apps that you can purchase are still written in C or C++. But those languages have had years and years to take hold. VB eventually got into the market a little heavier after the VB runtime shipped with Windows natively for several years.
New XP installations and Longhorn installations (and Server 2003) ship with the.NET framework pre-installed. However, a majority of users (and business users) run Windows OSes with the VB6 runtime installed but no.NET installed. So give.NET a little more time to get tightly integrated into the OS, and you'll see more apps released commercially (windows forms apps, that is.)
Or perhaps you would like to look at the massive amount of work that has gone into emulating the.NET framework with the Mono project? No,.NET is completely unsuccessful (BTW, I wrote and run an ecommerce application for my company of employ on.NET that does over $20k/day in business. Sounds like production quality to me.)
This is downright stupid. How long, exactly, has JAVA been in existance? YEARS. It should never have taken such a mainstream language so many many years to have such basic features in the UI package. We're supposed to ooh and aah over this like it's exciting, breaking, important news. This is JAVA catching up to 10 years of simply horrible UI design (and other features.)
While I love GMail's functionality, I think it could probably use a UI overhaul if they are going to start adding content blocks or make GMail a portal of any sort.
That said, how cool would it be to have a full AJAX client in Gmail that returned search results from the web/images/video, maintained my open inbox, let me read RSS, watch video clips, IM or IRC... a man can dream...
I've gotta tell you - on my nokia 8300 series phone, web works fine, but text messaging is way easier. Finding addresses and phone numbers is awesome. It takes less time to type:
ikea philadelphia pa
or
pizza princeton nj
and text it to 46645 then it is to boot the browser, wait for the rediculously slow dl times, and then type in my search in two separate text boxes. usually the text message back with search results is also faster than results on my onboard web browser.
google text messaging rules! i use it all the time and wish i could thank them for all the time they've saved me.
"The difficulty with the folks who do not accept evolutionary ideas is that they tend to be extremely narrow in their perspective and logic is simply not part of their thought process."
WRONG. Faith does not make someone close minded you dolt. Faith is belief in that which is unprovable - for or against. People chose to believe that we are not an accident cause by some random act of life creation billions of years ago and some random set of "evolutionary steps" which at some point in time turned into conciousness, self awareness, and IQ.
"Add to that the notion that your neighbour's sins affect you as well and the current situation is easy to understand."
What the FUCK!? Aside from having nothing to do with any argument for or against evolution, this statement is the most base statement of (making up a word here) uninformatism that I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Who believes that their neighbour's sins affect them? I'm Roman Catholic, and I don't. No one I know does, aside from the fallout that may be caused by that sin (people caught in another's lies, or victims of crime.)
"Likely not to happen while Christian Conservatives still hold popular sway in politics, nor until science figures out how to convey its teachings to the lowest common denominator."
Congratulations. You have managed to insult approximately 2.8 billion Christians across the world at once. I congratulate you up there on your pedestal of progressiveness and your incredible insight. I bow to your superior intellect and apologize for being the lowest common denominator that people of your stature must constantly struggle against.
People can't accept that there are those of us in the world that simply like to believe that there is a divine plan in life. We like to believe that there is a greater power that devised life as we know it. We like to believe that conciousness and self-awareness, along with free-will, are divine gifts and not accidental mutations which proved to be better suited than those beings without such mutations.
Finally, we like to believe that life and DNA is so incredibly complex and diverse, that chance is not a plausible explanation for the current state and diversity of life. But being uninformed, lowest denominator automatons of Christian zealots who look to unseat the very laws of biology (oh wait, evolution is a theory, not a law - way to go, oh wise one) I humbly apologize for believing in Intelligent Design and perhaps even Creationism.
I will be honest - yes. I disagree. The fact is people have not stopped downloading music. As a matter of a fact, shortly after killing Napster, the number of people downloading and sharing eclipsed Napster's all time high (from a 2001 Wired article)
It's not closing Napster which helped the record industry (which many independent agencies determined HELPED the record industry sales) but about providing viable alternatives. Why is P2P slowing? Because of iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster 2.0, etc. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
just wanted to say thanks - that's a great explanation and something to think about, not being someone who understands financial markets that well.
This is why I tell people that windows is a Hostile Platform. Your home grown apps may be broken by the next service pack, and you can count yourelf doubly lucky if they survive the next release of the windows.
I fail to see how this is much different than Mac, which routinely breaks apps in yearly OS releases, or Linux, where your app may have to be compiled several different times for several different distros or even windowing libraries.
Progress means shit breaks. It's life.
"I love how people love Macs because it's a very closed proprietary system that can then be controlled by a single entity."
/.ers isn't just prompted by the flaws of MS. Linux empowers people to feel like they are actually doing something about the problems that Windows presents - and rightfully so.
I wonder if most of the ranting by
But if Macs are beautiful in their industrial design, solid in their BSD and OSS roots, stunning in their eye candy, and can run a moderate amount of OSS, then why not embrace the Mac? Safari, Apache, BSD, Darwin - all speak to the OSS heart of the Linux zealots, and Mac provides that last bit of design that just makes computing pretty.
Is it closed-minded to teach kids in science that Aristotle was wrong? Is it closed-minded in science to teach kids that the world is round rather than flat? Is it closed-minded in science to teach kids that the Earth orbits around the Sun, and that the Ptolemeic model is wrong? No! Because all of those things represent our best understanding today of how the world works, and to teach the kids otherwise would be to trick them with false understanding.
No, it's not wrong to teach those things. But guess what - we DO teach Aristotle's original theories just to teach that they were disproved. We do teach that the earth was once thought flat. We do teach that once people thought the sun revolved around the earth. Teach one word of the idea of creationism or anything that in opposition to evolution, and the ACLU and parents sue the school district. Why is it wrong to teach that some believe in opposing theories?
And by the way, starting your post with "Wrong." just makes you look dogmatic, not open minded.
If by using the word "Wrong" in your opinion made my post instantly dogmatic, then I apologize. I find myself in this debate frustrated by what I see as close-mindedness on the side of evolutionists, and thus probably allow a certain amount of emotion to taint my true intention. I enjoy debate, but dislike the way that Slashdot looks on people who support ID - or even creationism.
In terms of dogma, I certainly do lean towards ID.
If we took this approach we may as well use random guesses to explain things, because a guess is a 'possibility' in the sense that you describe.
I don't think this is necessarily true. It's not like we're supporting 35 different theories of the creation of life. There are two (somewhat) plausible explanations on the table - we are random, or we are created. To ignore one - even if to disprove it (I know - "how do you disprove ID?" - I don't know, ok?) is - IMHO - not appropriate.
As for the 'first instant of life' argument - do you therefore dismiss gravity because you can't explain the 'first instant of gravity'?
Comparing gravity to life is always interesting to me. I don't dismiss either - life or gravity. But fucked if we really know what either is. And so both are questioned. However, in science it is ok to question the current theories on gravity, because it can't be traced in any way to religion. But add the word "religion" - attach it to any argument - and it suddenly becomes wrong to explore. We're at the opposite side of the spectrum from Galileo. Instead of being completely stifled by the Church (or religion in general) any attachment to religion is now evil.
Two, regarding the wider scope of Intellegent Design, why does that necessarily have to conflict with the established theory of evolution?
/.ers - this is not meant to incite flaiming, trolling, etc. It is simply a question to which I would be interested in recieving intelligent responses.
Interesting. I have a question for
Where in evolution (I know the same can be asked of ID) is there any place for conciousness, self-awareness, and morality? When in the evolutionary cycle does man become self-aware? Can evolution explain this? Does it ever attempt to?
Based on my experience with very complex systems, such as computer opperating systems, I've come to the conclusion that as intelligent beings design ever more complex systems it becomes increasingly more difficult to design systems that don't have large flaws (bugs) that will keep the systems from working.
I know I'll get troll-moderated for this, but:
- Cancer - Aids
Intelligent Design or millions upon millions of years of evolution and adaptation - either way, the design of life is far from flawless or without "bugs."
It continues to fool even the most intelligent people today. How you can believe such utter nonsense and still post to Slashdot I'll never know.
This is where the obligitory "You must be new here" response comes in.
You ID and Creationism. advocates need to get over this term "just a theory" that you use. It just shows ignorance. You need to realize that the popular use of the word "theory" (to mean "speculation") is extremely different from the scientific use of the word "theory" (to describe an explanation of natural processes which may be extremely well tested and well understood).
I was totally in to your response as creative and well stated until this paragraph. To think that a person that believes in ID or creationism is incapable of understanding basic scientific philosophy or even incapable of being true scientists themselves is ignorant and offensive. Being dismissed as a lunatic for raging against mainstream science has plauged true scientists for centuries. Please accept that those of us who like the idea and hypothesis of ID are not low-IQ neanderthals but are in fact intelligent human beings. (Well, at least some of us.)
Finally, an intelligent response, not one out to have me locked away as a lunatic for playing devil's advocate and supporting the possibility that Intelligent Design could be a viable "theory" (not scientific, just a theory.)
In response to your questions:
Gravity is a fact. What gravity is is still highly unknown and debatable. Do large mass bodies bend space-time? Is gravity between two large objects simply one getting caught in the bend in space-time caused by another? So many unanswered questions. But I place your question akin to the question "Would you view life and conciousness as a theory or fact?" Of course life exists. What it is or how it got here (or if there is an afterlife) is extremely questionable at this time.
Also, in case anyone here reads this far down the post chain, I certainly do not proport that ID is yet a scientific theory. But it's damn sure a hypothesis. Hell, we can't design an entire life form yet, but we can, in a lab, alter DNA and genetic makeup to produce visible, observable changes in animals (Glofish, for instance. Or hypoallergenic cats.) Intelligent design at the feature level is observable and recreatable - one of the requirements for moving a hypothesis to a theory.
But these are just my two cents.
Dumbass:
"In common parlance the word "evolution" is often used as a shorthand for the modern synthesis of evolution, including the theory that all extant species share a common ancestor." - From Wikipedia entry on Evolution
Evolution IS, and has always BEEN a theory.
Wrong. People love to think that evolution is the complete explanation of life as we know it, and want to teach that as "science" and as fact. However, we still have so little true understanding about the origins of life. Assumptions are made about the first instant of life, but it cannot be recreated in a lab.
Fact is, we will probably never know for sure. However, true science is the scrutiny of all possibilities of that which we do not know. Dismissing Intelligent Design as not being science is the same as dismissing theories of a round world revolving around the sun as heresy. It's base, uninformed, and - wait for it - close minded.
"In other news: The ACLU and 11 parents have successfully sued Slashdot for relating evolution to a theory."
Seriously though - although there are going to be hardcore people who post how wonderful and complete and all-telling evolution is, it is a theory people. Theory. It still has holes, giant unexplainable holes. Intelligent design is simply stating that certain things in life - like DNA - are simply too complex to have been formed by some amino acids randomly millions of years ago. It doesn't necessarily propose a God figure, but SOME intelligence behind our design.
I for one welcome intelligent design as an alternate theory. Evolution has never sat right with me.
This is true I suppose - but most of MS's languages are made with in-house development in mind. (I may get some flaimbait here, but here goes...)
.NET framework pre-installed. However, a majority of users (and business users) run Windows OSes with the VB6 runtime installed but no .NET installed. So give .NET a little more time to get tightly integrated into the OS, and you'll see more apps released commercially (windows forms apps, that is.)
There are very few full-fledged commercial apps that are 100% VB, Delphi, JAVA, etc. Most apps that are are made by the language vendor. For instance, Sun One products (like their LDAP product) has a Java administration application. No surprise there. Certain MS products used VB to develop the front-end. No surprise there.
Almost all commercial apps that you can purchase are still written in C or C++. But those languages have had years and years to take hold. VB eventually got into the market a little heavier after the VB runtime shipped with Windows natively for several years.
New XP installations and Longhorn installations (and Server 2003) ship with the
DotNet does not work as advertised (EG: have you seen any commercial apps in it?)
.NET connected directory
.NET framework with the Mono project? No, .NET is completely unsuccessful (BTW, I wrote and run an ecommerce application for my company of employ on .NET that does over $20k/day in business. Sounds like production quality to me.)
- Dell's Website
- MIT's iLab and ShuttleTrak services
- T-Mobile's customer portal
- Infragistics website and software solutions
- Any one of the items listed in Microsoft's
Or perhaps you would like to look at the massive amount of work that has gone into emulating the
This is downright stupid. How long, exactly, has JAVA been in existance? YEARS. It should never have taken such a mainstream language so many many years to have such basic features in the UI package. We're supposed to ooh and aah over this like it's exciting, breaking, important news. This is JAVA catching up to 10 years of simply horrible UI design (and other features.)
Worked well for MAC clones.
yeah yeah... funny. i'm writing this from firefox, of course.
While I love GMail's functionality, I think it could probably use a UI overhaul if they are going to start adding content blocks or make GMail a portal of any sort.
That said, how cool would it be to have a full AJAX client in Gmail that returned search results from the web/images/video, maintained my open inbox, let me read RSS, watch video clips, IM or IRC... a man can dream...
Funny?! Mod parent insightful! Self-driving cars would mean a nice little 45 minute nap at 7:30 am and at 5:00 pm every day. Now that's living.
Now a Bender Kegerator - THAT's more true to the Bender character I know...
As long as it burped fire after it filled my red plastic cup with cheap beer.
I don't like the thought of i2 as a "research network." It's our future network, and the sooner it gets rolled into the mainstream the better.
Also, RIAA sucks.
google text messaging rules! i use it all the time and wish i could thank them for all the time they've saved me.
What the F***?!
"The difficulty with the folks who do not accept evolutionary ideas is that they tend to be extremely narrow in their perspective and logic is simply not part of their thought process."
WRONG. Faith does not make someone close minded you dolt. Faith is belief in that which is unprovable - for or against. People chose to believe that we are not an accident cause by some random act of life creation billions of years ago and some random set of "evolutionary steps" which at some point in time turned into conciousness, self awareness, and IQ.
"Add to that the notion that your neighbour's sins affect you as well and the current situation is easy to understand."
What the FUCK!? Aside from having nothing to do with any argument for or against evolution, this statement is the most base statement of (making up a word here) uninformatism that I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Who believes that their neighbour's sins affect them? I'm Roman Catholic, and I don't. No one I know does, aside from the fallout that may be caused by that sin (people caught in another's lies, or victims of crime.)
"Likely not to happen while Christian Conservatives still hold popular sway in politics, nor until science figures out how to convey its teachings to the lowest common denominator."
Congratulations. You have managed to insult approximately 2.8 billion Christians across the world at once. I congratulate you up there on your pedestal of progressiveness and your incredible insight. I bow to your superior intellect and apologize for being the lowest common denominator that people of your stature must constantly struggle against.
People can't accept that there are those of us in the world that simply like to believe that there is a divine plan in life. We like to believe that there is a greater power that devised life as we know it. We like to believe that conciousness and self-awareness, along with free-will, are divine gifts and not accidental mutations which proved to be better suited than those beings without such mutations.
Finally, we like to believe that life and DNA is so incredibly complex and diverse, that chance is not a plausible explanation for the current state and diversity of life. But being uninformed, lowest denominator automatons of Christian zealots who look to unseat the very laws of biology (oh wait, evolution is a theory, not a law - way to go, oh wise one) I humbly apologize for believing in Intelligent Design and perhaps even Creationism.
Pompous Asshole.
I will be honest - yes. I disagree. The fact is people have not stopped downloading music. As a matter of a fact, shortly after killing Napster, the number of people downloading and sharing eclipsed Napster's all time high (from a 2001 Wired article)
It's not closing Napster which helped the record industry (which many independent agencies determined HELPED the record industry sales) but about providing viable alternatives. Why is P2P slowing? Because of iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster 2.0, etc. etc.