Hasn't that discussion taken place a few times already? If you happen to have a motherboard for a Dell, do you expect them to take the trouble to remove the existing motherboard, lower the cost, and sell you the rest of the PC without motherboard? If you buy a new Volvo, and you happen to have a fuel pump for a Volvo lying around at home, do you expect the car company to remove the fuel pump and lower the price on the car accordingly?
To get a low price on almost any product, the producer needs a large quantity of identical items. About any modified item, whether improved or made lighter, will cost more.
Your wish to get a PC without Windows is valid, but so is Dell's wish to make a profit on the machine. Come back to them with two thousand of your best friends, and I'm sure you can get a very good deal - with or without Windows.
You seem to forget that there is a level, beyond which it actually is impossible to hear the difference between analog and digital. Our ears are blunt instruments, and they only perceive a certain resolution. Your current computer screen may have 20" and a resolution 1280x1024 pixels, and you may say that it cannot render curves perfectly, as you can see the pixels. Imagine a resolution of 1280000000 x 1024000000 for 20" and try to claim that you still would be able to see the pixels.
It's the same thing with digital sound. Raise the resolution enough, and it is impossible to tell the difference. No one can do it. If you were to argue that the current digital sound has too low resolution, I would not argue with you. But if you claim that digital sound can never be as good as analog for a human's blunt ears, regardless of sampling frequence, I say you are much mistaken.
In some areas the Britannica is worse than out of date. The entire sections about the Arab world, India, China, Japan and other parts of the world with non-Latin alphabets are written in clumsy, sometimes very un-standard, transcriptions. If you see a reference to a Chinese person in the Britannica, it is fairly likely that you won't ever find out his "real" name, as there are no Chinese characters and no accented pinyin to represent it.
Almost every article I have read in the Wikipedia about China has had correct simplified characters, correct traditional characters and correctly accented pronunciation guides in pinyin.
"I don't want to blame McAfee or Symantec excessively, but you do realize that you are posting to a thread where an update to their products ended up breaking hundreds or thousands of machines."
One bad (ok, catastrophic) update is hardly a statistic proof that McAfee's product is crappy. For all we know any other AV provider could potentially have done the same thing. And we don't know why this happened with McAfee. It could very well be the old case of a disgruntled employee who released something as a bad joke, just before he left.
Could you provide any support for your statement that McAfee and Symantec are crappy? Could you provide any examples of quality "free A/V software" and quality pay for software? Could you provide any information for why you think it is of better quality than McAfee and Symantec? Tests? Benchmarks? User surveys?
However, the vgn u70 and u71 never took off. These Vaios are lovely machines in a lot of ways, but the keyboard is rubbish, and there is no way to place the screen in a comfortable position on a table unless you bring the bulky dock station.
Of course OOo is ten years behind. So is MS Office, which hardly has evolved at all during that time. Excel, Word and PowerPoint - they look and work more or less the same as they did ten, fifteen or almost twenty years ago.
Would you be able to be productive today with 20 year old versions of those programs? (The GUI version of PowerPoint came 1987, Word 1984 and Excel 1985.) Absolutely. The only problem would be that you would have to use a non-mainstream OS, as they all were released for Macintosh.
"Computers don't have a detremental affect on people,"
Computers don't necessarily have a bad effect on people, but they sometimes do. I have seen a fair amount of people spending time with computer games instead of pursuing activities that could have improved their lives long term, and I have seen some failing other more "real" tasks because of an excess of time spent on computers.
If you study Church Slavonic on the internet, and you simply cannot stop reading article after article, clicking link after link, that can improve your academic career. However, it can also ruin your marriage, when you don't show your wife enough affection.
I very much doubt that computers would be worse than television, and I haven't seen any studies that they would be any worse than trainspotting or ornithology, but there is a certain risk that you waste too much time with computers as well.
Either you did that quite some time ago, or you are wrong. My gmail account is 2x5y)hp1 and I tried to greate a new one with 2x.5y)hp1, but gmail wouldn't let me. There is a validation that two users don't get the same account.
For anyone who wants to mail me, my mail address is not 2x5y)hp1 at all, but it could have been. Follow the url to my home page instead.
That there among 100 million East Europeans are different kinds of IT people can hardly be any surprise.
That some of them are unemployed is hardly surprising, considering that there are unemployed people all over the world. That this is the cause for a statistically higher amount of virus production is just a wild guess.
That companies would turn to Eastern European workers only when there are no Indian workers left is blatantly false. There is already outsourcing going on from Western to Eastern Europe. Besides, the Indian market is unlikely to ever run out of workers. They may temporarily run out of workers with the right skills, but as long as the skills are well defined, they have the resources to teach them to millions of new students each year.
The only interesting thing in the post is the strange definition of Eastern Europe as being former Soviet Block countries and their neighbours. This would inlcude Finland, Germany, Turkey, Afghanistan and China, just to mention a few.
"I'm kinda looking forward to the Mac equivalents of MathCAD, Solidworks, Nastran and ADAMS.
Oh, you didn't mean real software you meant typewriting and pretty pictures. That's nice, dear."
Well, I did write "depending on your line of work". I fully realise that there is plenty of software out there that doesn't run on the Mac, and where there is no Mac equivalent. Just to mention a few in addition to your examples:
They not only had excellent trackballs - everything with them was marvellous. Excellent keyboard - crisp bw screens (none of that blurry grey-scale nonsense), solid case.
I would still have used my PB 170 today, if it only had had a way of comfortably transfer data to modern computers. This was before standard ethernet, firewire, USB and even CD-readers.
I had plenty of space left on that 80M harddrive. I have had seven other iBooks and PowerBooks since then, most of them good, but none of them as groovy.
"I desperately want one. Problem is we're a Windoze shop."
That usually means that you need a Windows laptop for a few odd tasks. If you were to buy a Mac yourself, depending on your line of work I guess you could do 90% - 100% of it on the Mac. It's fun to try to find Mac equivalents to the software your company wants you to use. Quite often the Mac equivalent turns out to be better (i.e. more powerful, more ergonomic or simply more pleasing).
"I see no problem at all in denying a ficticious idea for which believers offer no evidence."
OK. So you think right, but you are talking about something completely different.
If by "deny" you mean "claim the right not to consider a proposition particularly likely", you are right, but I never talked about that, and that is not denying existence in a scientific sense. Neither is it the sense a die hard atheits denies God. It is the way an agnostic uses the word.
If by "deny" you mean "make a scientifically valid statement that something cannot possibly exist", you would be wrong, but it seems that's not what you mean. You do not mean "deny" in the sense "I deny the possibility that there is a black hole hidden in the Empire State building's basement, as a black hole would have swallowed the entire planet". That's the sense I write about, and if you use that you have to be sure what it is you deny the existence of.
Of course we don't have to assume there is a designer! Who said we did? If you're answering someone else's posts, why do you post answers to my entries?
My point is not in any way new or controversial. Already Wittgenstein said "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen." That was more than 80 years ago, and you still haven't understood it.
Your reply seemingly implies that you think that it is a scientific fact that God does not exist.
It also implies that the reason for this fact, is that no one has managed to prove that God does exist.
If this is what you mean, a 17th century scientist could safely claim as a scientific truth that there is no mammal that lays eggs, as no one at the time had proven that there was. (The platypus wasn't discovered until the end of that century.)
This in its turn means that your idea of science is a system which can confirm blatantly false statements.
I hope I'm wrong in my assumption of what you mean, but I cannot see how.
"The burden of proof is on the people who claim existence."
Definitely not. The burden of proof is on people who claim to know something about it. If you claim to know that God doesn't exist, you have to prove that this is the case. If you claim to know that he does exist, you have to prove that. Neither statement has any scientific value.
While I agree that there are plenty of reasonably good arguments against the existence of a god, the thing that really baffles me is when people have a definite opinion, which they try to spread - be it that God exists or that he doesn't.
The statement "God exists" is not supported by any scientific facts, but neither is "God doesn't exist" a falsifiable scientific truth.
The inner nature of God, if he exists, is rarely touched upon by (successful) religions, and that is of course a clever trick. However, it is equally silly, when the die hard atheist denies "God" without defining what he denies.
Do you deny a first mover of the universe? Well, there was a first move, the Big Bang, so there you would go against science.
Do you deny any plan in the universe? Well, it seems pretty structured to me.
Do you deny a conscious thought process behind the universe? I thought so. But how do you define consciousness and thought? And what about an unconscious God, who creates and shapes and leads the universe in spite of a lack of deliberate design? Would you deny him too?
Do you deny heaven and hell? Be my guest, but, please, tell me what kind of experiment you will design to prove that they aren't there.
Do you deny the God that listens to our prayers and gives us comfort, when we need someone to listen to us? Then you go against what is scientifically verifiable. A believer clearly gets comfort from his God, whether that God actually "exists" in any physical way.
Don't get me wrong here. I don't say that a God necessarily exists - definitely not one that fulfills all a particular religion's doctrines anyhow. But I say that it is up to each of us individually if we choose to believe in him or not - science cannot help us, and neither can the die hard believers in his absence or existence.
No company I have worked with in my 20 years in IT would every consider using gmail, or whatever freebie service this thread was about, for anything "serious".
You never encountered companies with about 10 or less employees who use Hotmail as mail system? You never encountered any company at all using MS Messenger or AIM?
But aside from that, I think you missed my point.
I'm not sure I missed your point. Anyhow, apart from that I agree with every single word you wrote in that last paragraph.
It is not difficult to see that there may be security holes in MacOS X that can be exploited. It is not difficult to see that one should try to protect oneself against exploits.
However, why on earth would one think that Symantec is the solution to the problem? If there is a known problem, Apple will patch it. If it is an unknown problem, Symantec cannot fix it.
Anyone who's using these free email services to send "important" data around such as source or statistcal data is surely not serious.
If you limit your customerbase to serious people, you won't go far.
Aside from that, I imagine (but don't know) that they are using some kind of content management storage system at the back end with hashing on the attachments, so that they only have to store one copy of "funny film with monkeys.wmv" rather than 20,000.
Even if they were using some clever matching algorithm to identify identical big monkey files, the user would not benefit of this directly. If you are allowed 100 M, and you have ten 9M files with monkeys, the provider won't tell you that it doesn't matter as they already have the files elsewhere. You're quota goes down with 90M.
Slashdot Mirror
To get a low price on almost any product, the producer needs a large quantity of identical items. About any modified item, whether improved or made lighter, will cost more.
Your wish to get a PC without Windows is valid, but so is Dell's wish to make a profit on the machine. Come back to them with two thousand of your best friends, and I'm sure you can get a very good deal - with or without Windows.
It's the same thing with digital sound. Raise the resolution enough, and it is impossible to tell the difference. No one can do it. If you were to argue that the current digital sound has too low resolution, I would not argue with you. But if you claim that digital sound can never be as good as analog for a human's blunt ears, regardless of sampling frequence, I say you are much mistaken.
Almost every article I have read in the Wikipedia about China has had correct simplified characters, correct traditional characters and correctly accented pronunciation guides in pinyin.
One bad (ok, catastrophic) update is hardly a statistic proof that McAfee's product is crappy. For all we know any other AV provider could potentially have done the same thing. And we don't know why this happened with McAfee. It could very well be the old case of a disgruntled employee who released something as a bad joke, just before he left.
Thanks for the link to ClamAV, however.
Could you provide any support for your statement that McAfee and Symantec are crappy? Could you provide any examples of quality "free A/V software" and quality pay for software? Could you provide any information for why you think it is of better quality than McAfee and Symantec? Tests? Benchmarks? User surveys?
However, the vgn u70 and u71 never took off. These Vaios are lovely machines in a lot of ways, but the keyboard is rubbish, and there is no way to place the screen in a comfortable position on a table unless you bring the bulky dock station.
Would you be able to be productive today with 20 year old versions of those programs? (The GUI version of PowerPoint came 1987, Word 1984 and Excel 1985.) Absolutely. The only problem would be that you would have to use a non-mainstream OS, as they all were released for Macintosh.
Overhyped or not, it's not just CNet who thinks it was. There is also the ever so well informed Joy of Tech.
Comparing the lists at http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.4. 5.ppc/ and http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.4. 5.x86/ it turns out there are quite a few things that are stil not available for x86.
Computers don't necessarily have a bad effect on people, but they sometimes do. I have seen a fair amount of people spending time with computer games instead of pursuing activities that could have improved their lives long term, and I have seen some failing other more "real" tasks because of an excess of time spent on computers.
If you study Church Slavonic on the internet, and you simply cannot stop reading article after article, clicking link after link, that can improve your academic career. However, it can also ruin your marriage, when you don't show your wife enough affection.
I very much doubt that computers would be worse than television, and I haven't seen any studies that they would be any worse than trainspotting or ornithology, but there is a certain risk that you waste too much time with computers as well.
For anyone who wants to mail me, my mail address is not 2x5y)hp1 at all, but it could have been. Follow the url to my home page instead.
That there among 100 million East Europeans are different kinds of IT people can hardly be any surprise.
That some of them are unemployed is hardly surprising, considering that there are unemployed people all over the world. That this is the cause for a statistically higher amount of virus production is just a wild guess.
That companies would turn to Eastern European workers only when there are no Indian workers left is blatantly false. There is already outsourcing going on from Western to Eastern Europe. Besides, the Indian market is unlikely to ever run out of workers. They may temporarily run out of workers with the right skills, but as long as the skills are well defined, they have the resources to teach them to millions of new students each year.
The only interesting thing in the post is the strange definition of Eastern Europe as being former Soviet Block countries and their neighbours. This would inlcude Finland, Germany, Turkey, Afghanistan and China, just to mention a few.
http://www.versiontracker.com/macos/cat/mathscient ific
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/math_science /
http://www.apple.com/science/
http://www.hmug.org/Sci.php
Oh, you didn't mean real software you meant typewriting and pretty pictures. That's nice, dear."
Well, I did write "depending on your line of work". I fully realise that there is plenty of software out there that doesn't run on the Mac, and where there is no Mac equivalent. Just to mention a few in addition to your examples:
W32.Beagle.CQ@mm W32.Secefa.A Trojan.Lodear.D Win32.Glieder.{CF, CG, CH, CI, CJ} , Bagle.{EO, EP, ES}, W32/Bagle.gen!7B14EBCA , Mitglieder.GB , Troj/BagleDl-{AF, AH, AK} , TROJ_BAGLE.AH Backdoor.Spymon Trojan.Anserin Win32.Anserin.C , Troj/Torpig-k W32.Mytob.ME@mm W32/Mytob-FS , WORM_MYTOB.MV W32.Mytob.MC@mm W97M.Toler Trojan.Danmec W32.Mogi Bloodhound.Exploit.54 SymbOS.Pbstealer.A Pbstealer.A Trojan.Goldun.H Bloodhound.Exploit.53 W32.Mytob.LZ@mm Net-Worm.Win32.Mytob.dm , W32/Mytob.gen@MM W32.Sober.X@mm CME-681, WORM_SOBER.AG , W32/Sober-{X, Z} , Win32.Sober.W , Sober.Y, W32/Sober@MM!M681 , W32/Sober.AA@mm ELF_LUPPER.C Backdoor.Naninf.B ALS.Bursted.B Backdoor.Foobot Backdoor.Tuckist W32.Sober.S@mm W32.Sober.W@mm Win32.Sober.T , W32/Sober.s@MM W32.Sober.T@mm Sober.W, W32/Sober.v@MM , WORM_SOBER.AD Backdoor.Danrit W32.Sober.V@mm CME-157, Win32.Sober.Q , W32/Sober.t@MM Trojan.Muquest SymbOS.Cardtrp.F Cardtrap.F SymbOS.Cardtrp.G Cardtrap.G Bloodhound.Exploit.52 Backdoor.Ryknos.B Troj/Stinx-F , BKDR_BREPLIBOT.D , Breplibot.C Backdoor.Ryknos CME-589, Win32.OutsBot.U , W32/Ryknos.A , Troj/Stinx-E , Ryknos.A , BKDR_BREPLIOBOT.C Trojan.Kondeli SymbOS.Doomboot.N SYMBOS_DOOMED.I SymbOS.Doomboot.M SYMBOS_DOOMED.H Trojan.Heoms Trojan.Totmau Backdoor.Haxdoor.G Trojan.Lodav.B WORM_BAGLE.BQ Trojan.Tracker Backdoor.Zagaban Trojan.Lodear.C Win32.Glieder.CE Trojan.Bankem W32.Beagle.CN@mm Bagle.EK, Email-Worm.Win32.Bagle.ek , W32/Bagle.gen , Bagle.FN , Win32.Bagle.{CW, CX, CY, CZ, DA} , WORM_BAGLE.BS , W32/Bagle-{AR, BS} W32.Monikey@mm Trojan.Lodear.B Bagle.{EB, EI, EK}, Email-Worm.Win32.Bagle.{eb, ei} , Troj/Bagle{Dl-Y, Dl-AB} , Win32.Glieder.{CC, CD} , Mitglieder.FL W32.Mytob.LO@mm W32/Mytob-FH Backdoor.Toob.A Backdoor.Ranky.V Trojan.Lodav.A Mitglieder.{FN, FM} , Troj/BagleDl-AA , Win32.Fantibag.H Trojan.Lodear W32.Lodear.A@mm, Win32.Glieder.{BZ, CA, CB} , Bagle.{EE-EG}, Email-Worm.Win32.Bagle.{ee-eg} , W32/Bagle.{dk-dm} , Mitglieder.FK , Troj/BagleDl-W , TROJ_BAGLE.AB , Email-Worm.Win32.Bagle.{ef-eg} W32.Spybot.ZIF WORM_RBOT.CMR W32.Magflag.B TROJ_DLOADER.AMC W32.Vig.C W32.Loxbot.B WORM_OPANKI.AC W32.Mytob.LM@mm WORM_MYTOB.KQ KIX.Ixlam.A Backdoor.Civcat Backdoor.Sedepex Trojan.Goldun.G,
I would still have used my PB 170 today, if it only had had a way of comfortably transfer data to modern computers. This was before standard ethernet, firewire, USB and even CD-readers.
I had plenty of space left on that 80M harddrive. I have had seven other iBooks and PowerBooks since then, most of them good, but none of them as groovy.
That usually means that you need a Windows laptop for a few odd tasks. If you were to buy a Mac yourself, depending on your line of work I guess you could do 90% - 100% of it on the Mac. It's fun to try to find Mac equivalents to the software your company wants you to use. Quite often the Mac equivalent turns out to be better (i.e. more powerful, more ergonomic or simply more pleasing).
So you are an atheist, who thinks it is possible that there is a god?
I think the discussion should end there.
OK. So you think right, but you are talking about something completely different.
If by "deny" you mean "claim the right not to consider a proposition particularly likely", you are right, but I never talked about that, and that is not denying existence in a scientific sense. Neither is it the sense a die hard atheits denies God. It is the way an agnostic uses the word.
If by "deny" you mean "make a scientifically valid statement that something cannot possibly exist", you would be wrong, but it seems that's not what you mean. You do not mean "deny" in the sense "I deny the possibility that there is a black hole hidden in the Empire State building's basement, as a black hole would have swallowed the entire planet". That's the sense I write about, and if you use that you have to be sure what it is you deny the existence of.
My point is not in any way new or controversial. Already Wittgenstein said "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen." That was more than 80 years ago, and you still haven't understood it.
It also implies that the reason for this fact, is that no one has managed to prove that God does exist.
If this is what you mean, a 17th century scientist could safely claim as a scientific truth that there is no mammal that lays eggs, as no one at the time had proven that there was. (The platypus wasn't discovered until the end of that century.)
This in its turn means that your idea of science is a system which can confirm blatantly false statements.
I hope I'm wrong in my assumption of what you mean, but I cannot see how.
Definitely not. The burden of proof is on people who claim to know something about it. If you claim to know that God doesn't exist, you have to prove that this is the case. If you claim to know that he does exist, you have to prove that. Neither statement has any scientific value.
The statement "God exists" is not supported by any scientific facts, but neither is "God doesn't exist" a falsifiable scientific truth.
The inner nature of God, if he exists, is rarely touched upon by (successful) religions, and that is of course a clever trick. However, it is equally silly, when the die hard atheist denies "God" without defining what he denies.
Do you deny a first mover of the universe? Well, there was a first move, the Big Bang, so there you would go against science.
Do you deny any plan in the universe? Well, it seems pretty structured to me.
Do you deny a conscious thought process behind the universe? I thought so. But how do you define consciousness and thought? And what about an unconscious God, who creates and shapes and leads the universe in spite of a lack of deliberate design? Would you deny him too?
Do you deny heaven and hell? Be my guest, but, please, tell me what kind of experiment you will design to prove that they aren't there.
Do you deny the God that listens to our prayers and gives us comfort, when we need someone to listen to us? Then you go against what is scientifically verifiable. A believer clearly gets comfort from his God, whether that God actually "exists" in any physical way.
Don't get me wrong here. I don't say that a God necessarily exists - definitely not one that fulfills all a particular religion's doctrines anyhow. But I say that it is up to each of us individually if we choose to believe in him or not - science cannot help us, and neither can the die hard believers in his absence or existence.
You never encountered companies with about 10 or less employees who use Hotmail as mail system? You never encountered any company at all using MS Messenger or AIM?
But aside from that, I think you missed my point.
I'm not sure I missed your point. Anyhow, apart from that I agree with every single word you wrote in that last paragraph.
However, why on earth would one think that Symantec is the solution to the problem? If there is a known problem, Apple will patch it. If it is an unknown problem, Symantec cannot fix it.
If you limit your customerbase to serious people, you won't go far.
Aside from that, I imagine (but don't know) that they are using some kind of content management storage system at the back end with hashing on the attachments, so that they only have to store one copy of "funny film with monkeys.wmv" rather than 20,000.
Even if they were using some clever matching algorithm to identify identical big monkey files, the user would not benefit of this directly. If you are allowed 100 M, and you have ten 9M files with monkeys, the provider won't tell you that it doesn't matter as they already have the files elsewhere. You're quota goes down with 90M.