While you go on debating about Genesis, let me remind you there are several other religions, some now extinct, each of which have their own wildly different interpretation of how the world came into being.
What makes the Abrahamic religions' creation story any more valid than the others? Australian aborigines believe the world was dreamed into creation. Native American traditions believe in the Great Spirit who created everything. The Mayas and the ancient Egyptians have their own take on things, as did the Norse legends, the Greeks and the Romans.
Hinduism talks of cycles of creation or Yugas, each lasting billions of years, wherein the universe is destroyed and recreated every 8.1 billion years.
So what makes any one of these stories more valid than the other, and logically how can all of them be true?
The real deal is that the scientific method can never really disprove the existence of God, so there can be no genuine conflict between science and the belief in God
Why should it have to disprove the existence of God? Is the existence of God so obvious? For anything else, the onus of proof lies on the believer, not the disbeliever. Do we go about trying to 'disprove' the existence of UFOs or the Loch Ness monster?
Science relies on observation of phenomena and experimentation, and results. How does one go about setting up an experiment to prove or disprove the existence of God? God is an untestable hypothesis, so the belief in God is no different than the belief in UFOs or fairies or Santa Claus or the FSM.
I was 6 years old when India's then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her own security guards, who were Sikhs associated with the terrorist movement in Punjab. A spate of riots against the Sikh community started, and I recall cowering inside our house with all the doors and windows locked, looking at people running and looting in the streets of New Delhi.
The day it happened, all sorts of rumors were flying, and everyone was crowding around the TV to get the details.
A bare month later, the world's worst industrial disaster happened, and I remember reading the newspaper headlines in all caps. One image that vividly comes to mind is an award winning photograph of a man burying his small son. The kid was wrapped in a shroud, but his face was exposed and i think the eyes were still open.
The only real piece missing from the iPod is the ability to add your own codec of choice (assuming the hardware can support it), beyond the subset of codecs it already handles. You can add vorbis/flac support to iTunes, but not extend it to the iPod/Phone, which is a shame.
Replace your firmware with RockBox. Supports around 20 codecs on all iPods, as well as many other devices.
A game demo is anyway an abridged form of the full game. Divide the game into episodes, give the first one for free and sell the full version separately.Epic Megagames pioneered this form of game distribution, and Doom further popularized it. In Doom, for example, the shareware version did not have the plasma rifle or the BFG.
The full version had new episodes, new monsters and new weapons.
It's been a long while since I played a game demo, but this was the model followed in the early days by the classics- Heretic,Hexen,Quake,Duke 3D and all their sequels
And the original Halflife had a demo level that was not included in the full game (Halflife:Uplink) - useful gimmick!
So why do this? Once you've played the demo, you would anyway have made up your mind whether or not to buy the full game.
What sense does it make in restricting the playability of the demo itself?
A fun post, but here's a quote from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age that just shows how Apple done an about turn from its early days:
A locked gun cabinet and a primaeval Macintosh desktop-publishing system,
green with age, attested to the owner's previous forays into officially
discouraged realms of behavior.
To think that once an Apple product was considered edgy and anti establishment. Now they ARE the establishment. Oh well.
"In the slang of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa, boffins are scientists, medical doctors, engineers, and other people engaged in technical or scientific research.
To you my question:
Is it really worth the hassle? You've made it clear that you don't like the walled garden, handholding and controlled user 'experience' of the iPhone. Why not look to an unlocked handset like oh, so many- which would cost you less in the long term, not require jailbreaking to install apps, have multitasking and a host of other features out of the box?
You clearly are not a n00b who's only interested in a flashy UI and you want full control over the experience. So why buy an iPhone at all? You can get all the mobile SSH clients and multitasking you want with Blackberry/Palm/WinMo/Symbian/Android.
As for Symbian, well..there was this little handset that was the iPhone of its day around 7 years ago- the Nokia 6600.. It had all the features- multitasking, bluetooth (audio as well as file transfer), video recording, copy/paste (:P) and customizable themes.
There weresites with millions of themes, wallpapers, ringtones (MP3/MIDI) and video ringtones and you could customize it to the extreme. (And every S60 handset since then- but this was the first one to start the craze).
I even recall seeing a TV remote control app that used the infrared port on the device! The 6600 was immensely popular here (India) and even today I see a few people carrying it around.
And speaking of contemporary devices, the N900 runs Maemo Linux-infinitely customizable and hackable, and has a decent 5mp camera with Carl Zeiss optics (standard on Nseries devices anyway)
It's interesting that despite the risks of bricking the device or getting locked out, people still prefer to buy a locked down iPhone and go through the hassle of
jailbreaking it rather than look to other devices that offer you the same features without having to resort to hacks.
If I put this down to the fact that people are really crazy about the iPhone- this only proves that if the iPhone were sold over the counter like every other handset at full markup, people would STILL clamor to get it.
Apple has nothing to lose by making their handset more open- it might even increase sales. But pigs may as well fly.
Mod parent up. You articulated my concern better- if locked in devices become more and more common and even those who ought to know better endorse it, we may find the standard open to hack PC and similar products getting increasingly marginalized.
While these new devices are protected (at least in the US) by draconian DMCA laws.
O_O.
I'm speechless! I guess that leaves Symbian as the only solid multitasking OS since its 2002 debut.
It may not look jazzy, but it's robust and proven, millions of Symbian phones have sold since its inception. The only reason Nokia neglected the US market is because they refused to cave in to operators and develop custom crippleware handsets for them, hence they've been unheard of except in the context of the iPhone.
Why on earth won't it support multitasking when the previous versions have done so quite well? That's like asking whether Windows 7 will support these newfangled things called mice.
Multitasking is not even a feature to ask about unless you're coming from the Apple camp. I don't even have to think about the call blocker,chat program, background email checker and GSM cell detector/reminder that I usually run. I can switch between them, run a game that gets paused when I get a call/SMS and resumes afterwards. And I've been able to do this since my first Symbian phone in 2005.
Every mobile OS other than Apple's has supported multitasking right from the start.
Just as how reviewers actually used copy/paste as a parameter to compare the iPhone with other handsets when Apple finally added it as an update!
This is anyway just a preview- we don't yet have fullblown handsets on the market to test scrolling and other features.
And for heaven's sake get over the 'iPhone domination'. Everything doesn't have to be positioned against the bloody iPhone, it is unfortunate that all the major tech news sites are American, and have never seen a smartphone OS before 2007.
He did say this...in 1981. When an entire operating system fit within 1 MB, 5 MB was considered cavernous for a hard drive (if you had one), 180 or 360kb 5.25" disks were the norm..and most applications were not more than a couple of hundred KB if that.
He did not say '640kB should be enough for anybody henceforth, and for all time to come.'
Every time Apple launches a product like this, the geeks/Slashdot crowd (myself included) are quick to point out and rant on the shortcomings-lack of features and vendor lock-in. This despite the fact that we KNOW that we're far from the target audience for such a product. We KNOW that Apple is never going to produce anything that's not tightly locked down and controlled- which also gives a tightly integrated,easy to use and coherent user experience.
I think it's a kind of frustration. "Why is everyone hung up on looks? Can't they see that it's hyped up, overpriced and locked down? I can do so many different things with my competing phone/eReader/desktop OS/media player" etc. To us, it is plain as daylight-devices should be open and flexible, people should just learn to use them (Try a Symbian OS phone for instance, it may not be popular in the US, but is still widely used and considered easy to use in the rest of the world)
To Apple, the choice was easy. Target the Grandma demographic- people who cannot use tech if their life depended on it and will not exercise a single brain cell in learning to use something. The majority of people anywhere are like this, and this attitude has even won a few converts from the technically more competent.
We will never see this much hype around any other company's products, even if we personally would prefer using them. And we can't convince the tech non-savvy about the merits of our choices, so that would cause some degree of frustration.
But unlike say, OpenMoko, you have hardware vendors backing this, not to mention a proper device already on the market (Nokia N900) I think Intel already contributes to Linux, so this isn't new for them.
...
This becomes a huge pain when debugging, if there's an error in a line like the above, it's much harder to sit and step through each function call than if they were properly isolated beforehand.
It's NOT an 'IBM slate'. It's over 5 years since IBM exited the consumer PC/laptop business by selling it off to Lenovo. What you see here is entirely Lenovo's, IBM had nothing to do with it.
I have installed it again on a different PC this time, and the counter says that since Jan 17th, 2008 it has blocked 672,430 ads and saved 5253 MB worth of bandwidth. It's only an approximation I suppose, but a fair enough idea. Given how ads have evolved over the last decade from blinking GIF banners to embedded Flash movies, this software is worth every cent I paid (30 Australian dollars to register). I've become so used to having perfectly clean webpages that it is very jarring when I occasionally surf the net on other people's computers, or in cybercafes. It also has URL redirection and anonymization support among other features.
It's 12 years since I first got onto the net, and 11 of those have been utterly, satisfyingly ad-free. First, here's why I have zero guilt about supposedly leeching off the revenue(?) stream of website operators: 1) Most of the English language websites I visit are American. I am Indian, from India. 2) The products advertised here are also American, or delivered within the US/Canada only. 3) There's no way in hell that I'm going to buy anything advertised here, thanks to lack of a little thing called purchasing power parity when it comes to pricing.(If you charge $20 for a Tshirt, that's about 1k INR, when I can get 5 good tshirts for the same price here, add another 50 dollars for international shipping..you get the idea). I'd rather rip off your design and make my own tshirt elsewhere. 4) Ergo, I am not going to ever click a single ad, and am fully justified in banishing them.
1998-99 - Argh, WTF are these banners doing choking up my already slow dialup line? 1999-2003 - AtGuard Personal Firewall. Awesome URL based adblocking included, it would auto load on detecting a dialup connection and exit when disconnected. Bought over by Symantec and turned into the bloatware called Symantec Personal Firewall. Sadly doesn't run on XP.
2003 to present - Ad Muncher - Socket level filtering, so can filter any program that can make a network connection. 7 GB bandwidth saved, 850,000 ads blocked (according to the built in counter) since then. What Admuncher could not catch, Adblock Plus does, and what slips through that gets routed to 0.0.0.0 by my 15k+ entry hosts file.
You'd buy a Power7 because it comes with 63 other Power7 friends in a single box and runs an operating system specifically designed for the ridiculous number of cores and capable of handling even the most data intensive legacy applications.
And as I mentioned in my earlier comment in this story, you can still get Linux running on this hardware if that suits your needs better.
I work for IBM's Java Technology Center, and we develop IBM JDK for 12 combinations of platform/architecture - 32/64bit each of Windows,Linux* and AIX, z/OS(31/64).....and Linux on p-series(32/64) as well as Linux on System Z (31/64).
* - 64bit Windows/Linux refers to AMD64 not IA64.
I administer a POWER5 dual CPU box used for development that runs RHEL 4. IBM does provide Linux on its own hardware for compatibility/ease of use etc. You can directly download IBM Linux JDKs here, but for Windows and 32bit Linux you have to get it bundled with the Eclipse developer kit, as those platforms are the same as Sun, and licensing forbids us from directly offering it for download on those platforms other than as part of another product.
Slashdot Mirror
While you go on debating about Genesis, let me remind you there are several other religions, some now extinct, each of which have their own wildly different interpretation of how the world came into being. What makes the Abrahamic religions' creation story any more valid than the others? Australian aborigines believe the world was dreamed into creation. Native American traditions believe in the Great Spirit who created everything. The Mayas and the ancient Egyptians have their own take on things, as did the Norse legends, the Greeks and the Romans.
Hinduism talks of cycles of creation or Yugas, each lasting billions of years, wherein the universe is destroyed and recreated every 8.1 billion years.
So what makes any one of these stories more valid than the other, and logically how can all of them be true?
The real deal is that the scientific method can never really disprove the existence of God, so there can be no genuine conflict between science and the belief in God
Why should it have to disprove the existence of God? Is the existence of God so obvious? For anything else, the onus of proof lies on the believer, not the disbeliever. Do we go about trying to 'disprove' the existence of UFOs or the Loch Ness monster? Science relies on observation of phenomena and experimentation, and results. How does one go about setting up an experiment to prove or disprove the existence of God? God is an untestable hypothesis, so the belief in God is no different than the belief in UFOs or fairies or Santa Claus or the FSM.
India implemented this law before they had their terrorist attacks last year and it sure did a lot to prevent those eh?
The terrorists who attacked the Taj Hotel were using satellite phones, not cellphones.
I was 6 years old when India's then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her own security guards, who were Sikhs associated with the terrorist movement in Punjab. A spate of riots against the Sikh community started, and I recall cowering inside our house with all the doors and windows locked, looking at people running and looting in the streets of New Delhi. The day it happened, all sorts of rumors were flying, and everyone was crowding around the TV to get the details. A bare month later, the world's worst industrial disaster happened, and I remember reading the newspaper headlines in all caps. One image that vividly comes to mind is an award winning photograph of a man burying his small son. The kid was wrapped in a shroud, but his face was exposed and i think the eyes were still open.
The only real piece missing from the iPod is the ability to add your own codec of choice (assuming the hardware can support it), beyond the subset of codecs it already handles. You can add vorbis/flac support to iTunes, but not extend it to the iPod/Phone, which is a shame.
Replace your firmware with RockBox. Supports around 20 codecs on all iPods, as well as many other devices.
A game demo is anyway an abridged form of the full game. Divide the game into episodes, give the first one for free and sell the full version separately.Epic Megagames pioneered this form of game distribution, and Doom further popularized it. In Doom, for example, the shareware version did not have the plasma rifle or the BFG. The full version had new episodes, new monsters and new weapons. It's been a long while since I played a game demo, but this was the model followed in the early days by the classics- Heretic,Hexen,Quake,Duke 3D and all their sequels And the original Halflife had a demo level that was not included in the full game (Halflife:Uplink) - useful gimmick! So why do this? Once you've played the demo, you would anyway have made up your mind whether or not to buy the full game. What sense does it make in restricting the playability of the demo itself?
A locked gun cabinet and a primaeval Macintosh desktop-publishing system, green with age, attested to the owner's previous forays into officially discouraged realms of behavior.
To think that once an Apple product was considered edgy and anti establishment. Now they ARE the establishment. Oh well.
"In the slang of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa, boffins are scientists, medical doctors, engineers, and other people engaged in technical or scientific research.
India?? No one uses that term here!
To you my question: Is it really worth the hassle? You've made it clear that you don't like the walled garden, handholding and controlled user 'experience' of the iPhone. Why not look to an unlocked handset like oh, so many- which would cost you less in the long term, not require jailbreaking to install apps, have multitasking and a host of other features out of the box? You clearly are not a n00b who's only interested in a flashy UI and you want full control over the experience. So why buy an iPhone at all? You can get all the mobile SSH clients and multitasking you want with Blackberry/Palm/WinMo/Symbian/Android.
As for Symbian, well..there was this little handset that was the iPhone of its day around 7 years ago- the Nokia 6600.. It had all the features- multitasking, bluetooth (audio as well as file transfer), video recording, copy/paste (:P) and customizable themes. There were sites with millions of themes, wallpapers, ringtones (MP3/MIDI) and video ringtones and you could customize it to the extreme. (And every S60 handset since then- but this was the first one to start the craze).
I even recall seeing a TV remote control app that used the infrared port on the device! The 6600 was immensely popular here (India) and even today I see a few people carrying it around.
And speaking of contemporary devices, the N900 runs Maemo Linux-infinitely customizable and hackable, and has a decent 5mp camera with Carl Zeiss optics (standard on Nseries devices anyway)
It's interesting that despite the risks of bricking the device or getting locked out, people still prefer to buy a locked down iPhone and go through the hassle of jailbreaking it rather than look to other devices that offer you the same features without having to resort to hacks. If I put this down to the fact that people are really crazy about the iPhone- this only proves that if the iPhone were sold over the counter like every other handset at full markup, people would STILL clamor to get it. Apple has nothing to lose by making their handset more open- it might even increase sales. But pigs may as well fly.
Mod parent up. You articulated my concern better- if locked in devices become more and more common and even those who ought to know better endorse it, we may find the standard open to hack PC and similar products getting increasingly marginalized. While these new devices are protected (at least in the US) by draconian DMCA laws.
O_O. I'm speechless! I guess that leaves Symbian as the only solid multitasking OS since its 2002 debut. It may not look jazzy, but it's robust and proven, millions of Symbian phones have sold since its inception. The only reason Nokia neglected the US market is because they refused to cave in to operators and develop custom crippleware handsets for them, hence they've been unheard of except in the context of the iPhone.
Why on earth won't it support multitasking when the previous versions have done so quite well? That's like asking whether Windows 7 will support these newfangled things called mice. Multitasking is not even a feature to ask about unless you're coming from the Apple camp. I don't even have to think about the call blocker,chat program, background email checker and GSM cell detector/reminder that I usually run. I can switch between them, run a game that gets paused when I get a call/SMS and resumes afterwards. And I've been able to do this since my first Symbian phone in 2005. Every mobile OS other than Apple's has supported multitasking right from the start. Just as how reviewers actually used copy/paste as a parameter to compare the iPhone with other handsets when Apple finally added it as an update! This is anyway just a preview- we don't yet have fullblown handsets on the market to test scrolling and other features. And for heaven's sake get over the 'iPhone domination'. Everything doesn't have to be positioned against the bloody iPhone, it is unfortunate that all the major tech news sites are American, and have never seen a smartphone OS before 2007.
He did say this...in 1981. When an entire operating system fit within 1 MB, 5 MB was considered cavernous for a hard drive (if you had one), 180 or 360kb 5.25" disks were the norm..and most applications were not more than a couple of hundred KB if that. He did not say '640kB should be enough for anybody henceforth, and for all time to come.'
Every time Apple launches a product like this, the geeks/Slashdot crowd (myself included) are quick to point out and rant on the shortcomings-lack of features and vendor lock-in. This despite the fact that we KNOW that we're far from the target audience for such a product. We KNOW that Apple is never going to produce anything that's not tightly locked down and controlled- which also gives a tightly integrated,easy to use and coherent user experience. I think it's a kind of frustration.
"Why is everyone hung up on looks? Can't they see that it's hyped up, overpriced and locked down? I can do so many different things with my competing phone/eReader/desktop OS/media player" etc.
To us, it is plain as daylight-devices should be open and flexible, people should just learn to use them (Try a Symbian OS phone for instance, it may not be popular in the US, but is still widely used and considered easy to use in the rest of the world) To Apple, the choice was easy. Target the Grandma demographic- people who cannot use tech if their life depended on it and will not exercise a single brain cell in learning to use something. The majority of people anywhere are like this, and this attitude has even won a few converts from the technically more competent. We will never see this much hype around any other company's products, even if we personally would prefer using them. And we can't convince the tech non-savvy about the merits of our choices, so that would cause some degree of frustration.
But unlike say, OpenMoko, you have hardware vendors backing this, not to mention a proper device already on the market (Nokia N900) I think Intel already contributes to Linux, so this isn't new for them.
More like a Mi-Go
if(Class1.getSomething().toString().indexOf(Class2.getSomethingElse().toString) == -1) {
... This becomes a huge pain when debugging, if there's an error in a line like the above, it's much harder to sit and step through each function call than if they were properly isolated beforehand.
The fact that above post is modded 'Informative' scares me.
It's NOT an 'IBM slate'. It's over 5 years since IBM exited the consumer PC/laptop business by selling it off to Lenovo. What you see here is entirely Lenovo's, IBM had nothing to do with it.
I have installed it again on a different PC this time, and the counter says that since Jan 17th, 2008 it has blocked 672,430 ads and saved 5253 MB worth of bandwidth. It's only an approximation I suppose, but a fair enough idea. Given how ads have evolved over the last decade from blinking GIF banners to embedded Flash movies, this software is worth every cent I paid (30 Australian dollars to register).
I've become so used to having perfectly clean webpages that it is very jarring when I occasionally surf the net on other people's computers, or in cybercafes. It also has URL redirection and anonymization support among other features.
It's 12 years since I first got onto the net, and 11 of those have been utterly, satisfyingly ad-free. First, here's why I have zero guilt about supposedly leeching off the revenue(?) stream of website operators:
1) Most of the English language websites I visit are American. I am Indian, from India.
2) The products advertised here are also American, or delivered within the US/Canada only.
3) There's no way in hell that I'm going to buy anything advertised here, thanks to lack of a little thing called purchasing power parity when it comes to pricing.(If you charge $20 for a Tshirt, that's about 1k INR, when I can get 5 good tshirts for the same price here, add another 50 dollars for international shipping..you get the idea). I'd rather rip off your design and make my own tshirt elsewhere.
4) Ergo, I am not going to ever click a single ad, and am fully justified in banishing them.
1998-99 - Argh, WTF are these banners doing choking up my already slow dialup line?
1999-2003 - AtGuard Personal Firewall. Awesome URL based adblocking included, it would auto load on detecting a dialup connection and exit when disconnected. Bought over by Symantec and turned into the bloatware called Symantec Personal Firewall. Sadly doesn't run on XP.
2003 to present - Ad Muncher - Socket level filtering, so can filter any program that can make a network connection. 7 GB bandwidth saved, 850,000 ads blocked (according to the built in counter) since then.
What Admuncher could not catch, Adblock Plus does, and what slips through that gets routed to 0.0.0.0 by my 15k+ entry hosts file.
The End.
You'd buy a Power7 because it comes with 63 other Power7 friends in a single box and runs an operating system specifically designed for the ridiculous number of cores and capable of handling even the most data intensive legacy applications.
And as I mentioned in my earlier comment in this story, you can still get Linux running on this hardware if that suits your needs better.
Power series is hardly aimed at the consumer desktop market anyway.
I work for IBM's Java Technology Center, and we develop IBM JDK for 12 combinations of platform/architecture - 32/64bit each of Windows,Linux* and AIX, z/OS(31/64).....and Linux on p-series(32/64) as well as Linux on System Z (31/64).
* - 64bit Windows/Linux refers to AMD64 not IA64.
I administer a POWER5 dual CPU box used for development that runs RHEL 4. IBM does provide Linux on its own hardware for compatibility/ease of use etc.
You can directly download IBM Linux JDKs here, but for Windows and 32bit Linux you have to get it bundled with the Eclipse developer kit, as those platforms are the same as Sun, and licensing forbids us from directly offering it for download on those platforms other than as part of another product.