Point is, something existed before the beginning of time in both thoeries, so they both must be false.
If the supposition is correct, it doesn't make them false, it makes them incomplete.
However, there is no necessity for the existence of anything before the big bang. Particles and anti-particles can pop in and out of existence for brief periods of time, just like you can use 1 + -1 in an equation, but it still equals zero.
From a scientific point of view, the existence of God is rather like that 1 + -1. It makes no difference at all in the study of stuff. First, most people who believe in God can't even define what God is. I can ask two Christians from the same church, and get two different answers. But I can guarantee you this: if God exists, He's not like you or any other person imagines. How can he be? Our tiny little minds can't hold a whole program in our head at once, let alone the Creator of the Universe. The simple-minded Christian view of God is comparable to saying that President Bush has been a little bit naughty, or thinking you can fix global warming by leaving your fridge open.
There are certain objective rights and certain objective wrongs. We can know certain things about our world; and one of the things that we know is that life evolved here on earth. Some of the mechanics of evolution are still unknown (though we might have several good, highly-debated ideas), because our knowledge of certain areas is still incomplete.
With this knowledge (and it is not just faith, as much as some people might like to compare science to religion), people who claim we were created through any other mechanism are willfully ignorant. As someone who values knowledge over belief, I beleive willfull ignorance is the worst crime you can inflict on yourself. Worse than suicide.
Now.
I do not deny the existence of God. I do not believe God exists. I believe he is a fantasy we use to delude ourselves that someone other than us is responsible. The existence of God is outside of science, and as such, belief in Him is a personal choice, one you must make on your own without the constant bleating of the publicly-pious. I will not think less of an intelligent person for seeking the divine.
Let your belief interfere with knowledge, though, and I will think less of you. That is not elitism. That is pragmatism. The more we ignore knowledge, the less value we are able to provide to society. As the individuals primarily responsible for the well-being of the planet and our fellow humans, it is our duty and our meaning in life to provide the best we can to as many as we can.
I think putting some restrictive limits on the campaign spend would also be in the nations interest as it would allow self financed candidates to enter and campaign and get a chance to their policies out to the voters without breaking the bank.
I agree there needs to be campaign finance reform. Absolutely. This is a complex issue.
As there is a direct correlation between a successful election and the amount of money spent on a campaign, a self-financed election would allow the rich to get elected, while leaving the middle-class and poor out in the cold (figuratively and literaly). There needs to be a system that allows anyone with popular support to get elected.
Personally, I think the "party" system is broken. If we didn't label someone a "democrat" or "republican," they'd have to run on their ideas and ideals, and not on a built-in group of dupes, suckers, and sheep.
The only problem with that is, it would require the general public to think critically, and (as this article pointed out) that seems about impossible.
4. Your brain considers every item that is compatible with the majority of its information in a given subject area to be correct and every item that is contradictory to its information to be incorrect. As a result, the brain has no internal way to know which items of its information are correct representations of the real world and which are not.
Yes, we do have an internal way to know which items are correct representations of the real world. It's an epistomological philosophy called science, and though it is a slow process requiring rigor and mental discipline, it works quite well. In fact, I would say it is the only way to have any certainty in knowledge.
The fruits of science are still fairly limited. We jave a fairly large pool of knowledge concerning chemistry and physics; we know a little less about biology; and we know almost nothing of sociology and psychology (outside of a few biological facts and a few statistics).
How do I know there is a large congruence between science and the real world? The results of that scientific knowledge are everywhere, in airplanes and longer life and jam and computers and interplanetary exploration and jam (more jam, perhaps) and big fuckoff buildings and psychological manipulation by politicians ("spin").
Granted, the fundamental basis of science is that scientific knowledge is subject to subtle or radical change as new evidence surfaces; but, we do have a fundamental tool for objectively gaining knowledge about our universe.
Uhm... Why do we *need* to use those cycles? What will it give us?
The internet in general is about the movement of information. The web is about the sharing of information. Where are those cycles going to go?
Sure, you could have web-based Quake 4, but what's the point? If you want to waste cycles, why not do that with client-side games that run natively, and can take full advantage of those cycles rather than wasting power on some sandboxed non-native language?
XAML doesn't provide much more tha XUL at the moment. So, in the way, Web 3.0 is already here. But you know what? It's still just the web, it's still just a way of sharing information.
Instead of wasting those cycles re-inventing Flash, why don't we use them for client-side information management? Why don't we form communities of trusted computers that sift through all the information (HTML, RSS, whatever) available to find specific relationships?
We don't need to waste resources on "Web x.0". We need to figure out what to do with the information we have.
But that's just my opinion. It's your computer; waste cycles on whatever you like.
"Gaia" is the "goddess earth". It is nothing more than blatant superstitious garbage with an enviro-friendly sheen.
The term "Gaia" was borrowed from the ancient Greek gods, but no more so than Pluto or Mars. The concept is, that as cells make up an organism, and many organisms an ecosystem, many ecosystems make up a still larger system. "Gaia" sounds all new-agey, but in reality, it is nothing more than the extent of all life on earth.
It's not superstitious garbage; it is quite valid to think that destroying the rain forest in Southeast Alaska will have profound effects on New York City, or Moscow for that matter. Then to imagine that the total biosphere can heal itself after a catastrophe is also valid. That is, the environment affects not only the evolution of species, but evolution of species also affects the environment.
Gaia was, perhaps, a poor choice of terms. But "superecosystem" sounds stupid, and isn't as catchy, and doesn't intimate the self-regulating nature of the total biosphere.
The thought that all life on earth is a single organism with conscious thought is a little silly. Not many people truly believe that, though. In my experience, most people believe in some weaker form of the Gaia hypothesis-- that even if we humans fuck up so badly we destroy our environment and kill off tens of thousands of species (including humanity), the earth will go on, heal itself, and new species will crop up to replace the old ones.
Other than that: yeah, I think Sir Lovelock is being a bit extremist in his fears. It's kind of like during the five years leading up to 2000; too damned many people thought civilisation was going to collapse, when most of us in the IT trenches knew everything was going to be fine. The didn't stop Edward Yourdon from shooting off his mouth and selling some books, but there will always be people who expect the worst.
The people who scare me, though, are those who want the worst to happen.
Great! So you are willing to expose your financial and personal life to anyone with an RFID reader-- all for a little convenience. Excellent decision, Waldo.
Personally, I predict men will start carrying RFID-blocking satchels with all their gadgets and cards and whatnot inside. "It's European!"
Having said that, I think that compiling baseball statistics is one of the most silly things to do ever...but that's just my opinion.
Yeah. It's kinda funny-- a large portion of the US male population can tell you the number of World Series in which Reggie White played, but can't tell you who Bob Ney is, or why the President spying on US citizens is a bad thing.
Otherwise-intelligent friends of mine examine sports stats as if they were planning their defence at a murder trial, but are blissfully ignorant of the truly terrifying and important things going on in the world today. To them there's terrorists, and us.
I think we need political trading cards. Maybe that'll raise awareness in current events. "Ooo, I got Arlen Specter! He's the longest-serving senator in Pennsylvania's history!"
Funny you should mention NeXT. It was easy-to-use, powerful, developer-friendly, and by far the best OS for desktop use.
I use the NeXT to illustrate how Microsoft has set the computer industry back. To this day, MS-Windows still doesn't have the power or ease-of-use of the NeXT. It wasn't until Apple picked up the pieces with OS X that an operating system approached the desktop usability of NeXTStep.
Microsoft set the computer industry back over a decade. So when you talk about how Apple just stole a bunch of old code to make OS X, at least they had the smarts to steal the good code. Microsoft doesn't have access to good code, so they just steal from themselves.
As a proprietary software vendor your biggest priority should be to make your customers as happy as possible.
One would think.
There are several problems with this, though. Sometimes what the customer wants is not what your company wants. Sometimes what is good for the customer is not good for the company.
Consider the DR-DOS incident. Microsoft intentionally released a version of MS-Windows that detected DR-DOS, gave some obscure error, and refused to load. This was proven to be intentional: it was the only encrypted code in the release, and changing DR-DOS to report it was really MS-DOS made everything run just fine. (Some reported it ran better on DR-DOS than on MS-DOS.)
What did Microsoft's customers want? They wanted to run MS-Windows on top of DR-DOS. What did Microsoft want? According to memos released during their anti-competitive trials, they wanted to bury DR-DOS.
Unfortunately, the only customers corporations try to please are investors and traders. And we know what investors and traders are: greedy motherfucking cockroaches.
The facts speak for themselves. Corporations tend to give their customers only what is also good for the corporation. And if they can, they fuck over their customer for a little profit.
Fortunately, software isn't like an energy monopoly. Now we're mad as hell, and we aren't going to take it anymore.
If the rumors of Vista are true and it is an efficient and secure operating system that can function in plain jane deterministic manners, then I want it dual booting with Linux and nothing more... ever.
Those rumours have preceded every version of MS-Windows since NT 3.51 (the most secure and stable version of MS-Windows to date, in my experience). I've stopped waiting for MS to produce an exceptional operating system. There are much, much better alternatives out there -- OS X, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. What's the point of waiting for MS to play catch-up?
I'm interested in seeing Vista in action. I'll probably take a look when someone at work here picks it up. I don't hold out a lot of hope that it will beat the stability of Solaris, the ease-of-use and consistency of OS X, or the openness and general all-over chocolatey goodness of Linux and *BSD.
Let's see if they still group programs by vendor, and not by function.
I can't imagine a forced migration to OS X Server would please sysadmins, even if they get to keep their SPARC-based servers.
It wouldn't just not please sysadmins; it would alienate them. Solaris is good. It's solid, scalable, and flexible. OS X is decent, to be sure; but it is still at heart a desktop OS, BSD roots notwithstanding. Sun makes great hardware and damned good software. It's their business that sucks.
Apple's best bet would be to buy Sun and keep Solaris on their high-end servers, and make some fan-fucking-tastic mid-range servers / high-end workstations based on Solaris + ( OS X - Darwin ).
Problem is, Apple is currently a consumer electronics company. Their computers are enjoying a renaissance mostly because of the dominance and hip-factor of the iPod, and not because of the superior quality of their hardware and OS -- if people wanted quality, Budweiser would not be the King of Beers.
I'm not sure what Apple could really bring to the Sun Server market, other than a certain amount of glamour that is currently missing. Although I think if Sun servers had some great case designs, they'd sell more.
. . . but if you are serious about maintainability then, to my mind, language enforced coding standards and a certain amount of "one right way to do it" has real value.
Perhaps for you.
"Maintainability" is undefined for this problem set. I can't maintain Python code because I fucking despise the language, for the same reason I don't like anal uptight bastards in three-piece suits -- it's inflexible. There's only one way of doing things, and often it is not be best way in specific situations.
For me, it always comes back to blocking. Whitespace-as-blocking is a straightjacket, chosen for aesthetics, and not for any practical reason. This design philosophy permeates Python, making it one of the ugliest languages I know.
It's like music. Any number of corporate-whore bands create smooth, aesthetic music that is bland and boring. I like my music hard, with sharp edges and dangerous points. For me, Python has always been the N*Sync of the programming world (VB is like New Kids On The Block, fwiw). Perl is more like the Pixies. LISP is like the Beatles. C is like the Stones. FORTH is like Gus' first album. Assembly is like the Black Keys. Java is like Abba.
Huh. This is kinda fun.
Now you can tell me about how programming is engineering, and not art. Go on, I know you want to.
In Perl, it is easy to make legible code, and it is easy to make illegible code.
In Python, it is easy to make legible code, but it is difficult to make illegible code.
That's because Perl is versatile, flexible. Python forces you to do things The Python Way(tm). I've tried Python a couple of times, and I keep going back to Perl. Maybe I'm just a rebel, but I don't like a language telling *me* what to do (queue "In Soviet Russia..." joke here).
And, yes, I mostly just hate the whitespace-as-blocking braindamage. It's like Guido loved LISP, but hated the braces, so he re-invented LISP, poorly. But that's why I love programming-- everybody gets to choose their favorite poison.
If we weren't detaining people, tapping their phones, and beating information out of someone, I'd be pissed. I'm paying the government to protect me.
If what's going on now is protection, count me out. I try to live a moral life. If the government does something in my name, it damned well better be done in a moral fashion, and not the immoral and illegal current activities.
The "war on terror" is a strawman, to start with. The US was attacked by a single group, with known leaders. It was with them we have issues, not some undefined group of "terrorists," but a very well-defined group originally trained up by the US to fight in Afghanistan in the '80s. We know who the enemy is; we just aren't fighting him very effectively.
Now, how far should the government's protection go? Since the number of people who die in auto accidents is orders of magnitude greater than the deaths in the US due to terrorist activities, should we spend orders of magnitude more money patrolling the roads, just to protect you from a potential accident? Or maybe we should just give up cars entirely. That way, we couldn't die due to accidents on the road.
You are more likely to die from the flu than a terrorist attack. Shouldn't the government spend more money on flu vaccines? You are more likely to be shot by someone you know than shot by a terrorist. Shouldn't the government protect you by taking away all firearms?
Finally, the US government's current actions are increasing the likelihood of dying at the hands of terrorists, not decreasing the risk. If the US government had not betrayed us (and I mean everyone in the world, not just US citizens), if they had behaved morally instead of selfishly and evilly, we would be less likely to suffer a terrorist attack.
Instead, they chose the route to US military dominance and empirialism in the Middle East, no matter the cost. The economic and social and moral fallout from this little adventure will follow the US for many, many years.
The road warrior will appreciate the Mogo MouseBT.
Yes. Yes he will. Whether fighting for fuel, or just hangin' out in the Thunderdome, the Road Warrior will certainly love this. If only it came with a sawed-off shotgun option, or a recharge-with-pigshit option, it'd be perfect.
What's that? You're talking about regular people who travel with a laptop?
They aren't fucking road warriors! They don't kill, they don't fight; fuck, they don't even do anything FUCKING INTERESTING! They are generally the most pretentious, most boring people in the fucking world! They are not road warriors! If they wanna call themselves a "road warrior," they can meet me in the Thunderdome. Chainsaws, baby, mono-a-mono.
Any article that refers to assholes with laptops as "road warriors" automatically rates the roundfile.
Uhm... usually, an individual vote is not contested-- it's the aggregate vote that is contested. So, this process would only work if you could get everyone who voted to release their vote.
The *only* way to do this is with a paper trail. Use electronic voting to generate the paper, and give instant results. If the vote is contested, count the paper ballots, just as we do now.
I see no other acceptable solution; anything beyond this is excessively complex, anything less is intrinisically untrustworthy.
I can see how a "networked everything" might be nice-- where a resource (CPU, hard drive, memory, etc) appears exactly the same whether it's a local resource or a networked resource. We're a long way from the from the management tools needed to make all this easy enough for the computer barely-literate, and even farther from the security model that'll make it all workable.
I think the problem will be this: Linux and MS-Windows and Mac OS X are all "good enough." For the forseeable future, there's little incentive to create a consumer edition of a Plan 9 knock-off. Hell, it's hard enough to get Linux into widespread use, and Linux is pretty much just like MS-Windows (vis-a-vis some hypothetical advanced networked-everything OS).
Oh, *that's* a fucking great idea. Let's talk about the band-aid, and not the wound.
A secure system would not require a firewall. Nor are firewalls really all that great; they don't catch trojans, for instance. They only stop some worms, some DoS, and some manual attacks. And you'll need a virus scanner to protect you from viruses.
His assessment is correct. MS-Windows is so freakishly insecure because of all the little-used "convenience" features, like automatically-running scripts in documents and email. (Remember, before Microsoft "embraced" the web, Good Times was a joke.) His focus on one of those misfeatures is representative, not comprehensive.
I don't run a firewall at home. I don't need to. My system is secure to start with.
So, you're saying Microsoft is the McDonald's of computing? I'd have to say you are right. It's're everywhere, the most-used, not very good for you, give syou diarrhea, and really doesn't taste that good. But, it's everywhere, and people (who are afraid of change), choose to use it because it has familiar icons.
I always considered Microsoft Windows the Budweiser of operating systems, but being the McDonald's is about the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Point is, something existed before the beginning of time in both thoeries, so they both must be false.
If the supposition is correct, it doesn't make them false, it makes them incomplete.
However, there is no necessity for the existence of anything before the big bang. Particles and anti-particles can pop in and out of existence for brief periods of time, just like you can use 1 + -1 in an equation, but it still equals zero.
From a scientific point of view, the existence of God is rather like that 1 + -1. It makes no difference at all in the study of stuff. First, most people who believe in God can't even define what God is. I can ask two Christians from the same church, and get two different answers. But I can guarantee you this: if God exists, He's not like you or any other person imagines. How can he be? Our tiny little minds can't hold a whole program in our head at once, let alone the Creator of the Universe. The simple-minded Christian view of God is comparable to saying that President Bush has been a little bit naughty, or thinking you can fix global warming by leaving your fridge open.
There are certain objective rights and certain objective wrongs. We can know certain things about our world; and one of the things that we know is that life evolved here on earth. Some of the mechanics of evolution are still unknown (though we might have several good, highly-debated ideas), because our knowledge of certain areas is still incomplete.
With this knowledge (and it is not just faith, as much as some people might like to compare science to religion), people who claim we were created through any other mechanism are willfully ignorant. As someone who values knowledge over belief, I beleive willfull ignorance is the worst crime you can inflict on yourself. Worse than suicide.
Now.
I do not deny the existence of God. I do not believe God exists. I believe he is a fantasy we use to delude ourselves that someone other than us is responsible. The existence of God is outside of science, and as such, belief in Him is a personal choice, one you must make on your own without the constant bleating of the publicly-pious. I will not think less of an intelligent person for seeking the divine.
Let your belief interfere with knowledge, though, and I will think less of you. That is not elitism. That is pragmatism. The more we ignore knowledge, the less value we are able to provide to society. As the individuals primarily responsible for the well-being of the planet and our fellow humans, it is our duty and our meaning in life to provide the best we can to as many as we can.
Sorry. I'll get off the soapbox now.
I think putting some restrictive limits on the campaign spend would also be in the nations interest as it would allow self financed candidates to enter and campaign and get a chance to their policies out to the voters without breaking the bank.
I agree there needs to be campaign finance reform. Absolutely. This is a complex issue.
As there is a direct correlation between a successful election and the amount of money spent on a campaign, a self-financed election would allow the rich to get elected, while leaving the middle-class and poor out in the cold (figuratively and literaly). There needs to be a system that allows anyone with popular support to get elected.
Personally, I think the "party" system is broken. If we didn't label someone a "democrat" or "republican," they'd have to run on their ideas and ideals, and not on a built-in group of dupes, suckers, and sheep.
The only problem with that is, it would require the general public to think critically, and (as this article pointed out) that seems about impossible.
4. Your brain considers every item that is compatible with the majority of its information in a given subject area to be correct and every item that is contradictory to its information to be incorrect. As a result, the brain has no internal way to know which items of its information are correct representations of the real world and which are not.
Yes, we do have an internal way to know which items are correct representations of the real world. It's an epistomological philosophy called science, and though it is a slow process requiring rigor and mental discipline, it works quite well. In fact, I would say it is the only way to have any certainty in knowledge.
The fruits of science are still fairly limited. We jave a fairly large pool of knowledge concerning chemistry and physics; we know a little less about biology; and we know almost nothing of sociology and psychology (outside of a few biological facts and a few statistics).
How do I know there is a large congruence between science and the real world? The results of that scientific knowledge are everywhere, in airplanes and longer life and jam and computers and interplanetary exploration and jam (more jam, perhaps) and big fuckoff buildings and psychological manipulation by politicians ("spin").
Granted, the fundamental basis of science is that scientific knowledge is subject to subtle or radical change as new evidence surfaces; but, we do have a fundamental tool for objectively gaining knowledge about our universe.
Uhm... Why do we *need* to use those cycles? What will it give us?
The internet in general is about the movement of information. The web is about the sharing of information. Where are those cycles going to go?
Sure, you could have web-based Quake 4, but what's the point? If you want to waste cycles, why not do that with client-side games that run natively, and can take full advantage of those cycles rather than wasting power on some sandboxed non-native language?
XAML doesn't provide much more tha XUL at the moment. So, in the way, Web 3.0 is already here. But you know what? It's still just the web, it's still just a way of sharing information.
Instead of wasting those cycles re-inventing Flash, why don't we use them for client-side information management? Why don't we form communities of trusted computers that sift through all the information (HTML, RSS, whatever) available to find specific relationships?
We don't need to waste resources on "Web x.0". We need to figure out what to do with the information we have.
But that's just my opinion. It's your computer; waste cycles on whatever you like.
Your comments are, for the most part, spot-on.
"Gaia" is the "goddess earth". It is nothing more than blatant superstitious garbage with an enviro-friendly sheen.
The term "Gaia" was borrowed from the ancient Greek gods, but no more so than Pluto or Mars. The concept is, that as cells make up an organism, and many organisms an ecosystem, many ecosystems make up a still larger system. "Gaia" sounds all new-agey, but in reality, it is nothing more than the extent of all life on earth.
It's not superstitious garbage; it is quite valid to think that destroying the rain forest in Southeast Alaska will have profound effects on New York City, or Moscow for that matter. Then to imagine that the total biosphere can heal itself after a catastrophe is also valid. That is, the environment affects not only the evolution of species, but evolution of species also affects the environment.
Gaia was, perhaps, a poor choice of terms. But "superecosystem" sounds stupid, and isn't as catchy, and doesn't intimate the self-regulating nature of the total biosphere.
The thought that all life on earth is a single organism with conscious thought is a little silly. Not many people truly believe that, though. In my experience, most people believe in some weaker form of the Gaia hypothesis-- that even if we humans fuck up so badly we destroy our environment and kill off tens of thousands of species (including humanity), the earth will go on, heal itself, and new species will crop up to replace the old ones.
Other than that: yeah, I think Sir Lovelock is being a bit extremist in his fears. It's kind of like during the five years leading up to 2000; too damned many people thought civilisation was going to collapse, when most of us in the IT trenches knew everything was going to be fine. The didn't stop Edward Yourdon from shooting off his mouth and selling some books, but there will always be people who expect the worst.
The people who scare me, though, are those who want the worst to happen.
Great! So you are willing to expose your financial and personal life to anyone with an RFID reader-- all for a little convenience. Excellent decision, Waldo.
Personally, I predict men will start carrying RFID-blocking satchels with all their gadgets and cards and whatnot inside. "It's European!"
Having said that, I think that compiling baseball statistics is one of the most silly things to do ever...but that's just my opinion.
Yeah. It's kinda funny-- a large portion of the US male population can tell you the number of World Series in which Reggie White played, but can't tell you who Bob Ney is, or why the President spying on US citizens is a bad thing.
Otherwise-intelligent friends of mine examine sports stats as if they were planning their defence at a murder trial, but are blissfully ignorant of the truly terrifying and important things going on in the world today. To them there's terrorists, and us.
I think we need political trading cards. Maybe that'll raise awareness in current events. "Ooo, I got Arlen Specter! He's the longest-serving senator in Pennsylvania's history!"
Apple bought an abandoned OS from the 1980s . . .
Funny you should mention NeXT. It was easy-to-use, powerful, developer-friendly, and by far the best OS for desktop use.
I use the NeXT to illustrate how Microsoft has set the computer industry back. To this day, MS-Windows still doesn't have the power or ease-of-use of the NeXT. It wasn't until Apple picked up the pieces with OS X that an operating system approached the desktop usability of NeXTStep.
Microsoft set the computer industry back over a decade. So when you talk about how Apple just stole a bunch of old code to make OS X, at least they had the smarts to steal the good code. Microsoft doesn't have access to good code, so they just steal from themselves.
Microsoft: it's like corporate masturbation!
But going forward MS is going a whole new outlook on security.
That's funny. Outlook was one of Microsoft's first major security problems.
As a proprietary software vendor your biggest priority should be to make your customers as happy as possible.
One would think.
There are several problems with this, though. Sometimes what the customer wants is not what your company wants. Sometimes what is good for the customer is not good for the company.
Consider the DR-DOS incident. Microsoft intentionally released a version of MS-Windows that detected DR-DOS, gave some obscure error, and refused to load. This was proven to be intentional: it was the only encrypted code in the release, and changing DR-DOS to report it was really MS-DOS made everything run just fine. (Some reported it ran better on DR-DOS than on MS-DOS.)
What did Microsoft's customers want? They wanted to run MS-Windows on top of DR-DOS. What did Microsoft want? According to memos released during their anti-competitive trials, they wanted to bury DR-DOS.
Unfortunately, the only customers corporations try to please are investors and traders. And we know what investors and traders are: greedy motherfucking cockroaches.
The facts speak for themselves. Corporations tend to give their customers only what is also good for the corporation. And if they can, they fuck over their customer for a little profit.
Fortunately, software isn't like an energy monopoly. Now we're mad as hell, and we aren't going to take it anymore.
If the rumors of Vista are true and it is an efficient and secure operating system that can function in plain jane deterministic manners, then I want it dual booting with Linux and nothing more ... ever.
Those rumours have preceded every version of MS-Windows since NT 3.51 (the most secure and stable version of MS-Windows to date, in my experience). I've stopped waiting for MS to produce an exceptional operating system. There are much, much better alternatives out there -- OS X, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. What's the point of waiting for MS to play catch-up?
I'm interested in seeing Vista in action. I'll probably take a look when someone at work here picks it up. I don't hold out a lot of hope that it will beat the stability of Solaris, the ease-of-use and consistency of OS X, or the openness and general all-over chocolatey goodness of Linux and *BSD.
Let's see if they still group programs by vendor, and not by function.
Windows on Intel Macs - Yes or No?
Not only no, but hell no. What on God's green earth for?
Fucking funniest post in a bajillion years. You feel lucky.
You mean like this?
I can't imagine a forced migration to OS X Server would please sysadmins, even if they get to keep their SPARC-based servers.
It wouldn't just not please sysadmins; it would alienate them. Solaris is good. It's solid, scalable, and flexible. OS X is decent, to be sure; but it is still at heart a desktop OS, BSD roots notwithstanding. Sun makes great hardware and damned good software. It's their business that sucks.
Apple's best bet would be to buy Sun and keep Solaris on their high-end servers, and make some fan-fucking-tastic mid-range servers / high-end workstations based on Solaris + ( OS X - Darwin ).
Problem is, Apple is currently a consumer electronics company. Their computers are enjoying a renaissance mostly because of the dominance and hip-factor of the iPod, and not because of the superior quality of their hardware and OS -- if people wanted quality, Budweiser would not be the King of Beers.
I'm not sure what Apple could really bring to the Sun Server market, other than a certain amount of glamour that is currently missing. Although I think if Sun servers had some great case designs, they'd sell more.
. . . but if you are serious about maintainability then, to my mind, language enforced coding standards and a certain amount of "one right way to do it" has real value.
Perhaps for you.
"Maintainability" is undefined for this problem set. I can't maintain Python code because I fucking despise the language, for the same reason I don't like anal uptight bastards in three-piece suits -- it's inflexible. There's only one way of doing things, and often it is not be best way in specific situations.
For me, it always comes back to blocking. Whitespace-as-blocking is a straightjacket, chosen for aesthetics, and not for any practical reason. This design philosophy permeates Python, making it one of the ugliest languages I know.
It's like music. Any number of corporate-whore bands create smooth, aesthetic music that is bland and boring. I like my music hard, with sharp edges and dangerous points. For me, Python has always been the N*Sync of the programming world (VB is like New Kids On The Block, fwiw). Perl is more like the Pixies. LISP is like the Beatles. C is like the Stones. FORTH is like Gus' first album. Assembly is like the Black Keys. Java is like Abba.
Huh. This is kinda fun.
Now you can tell me about how programming is engineering, and not art. Go on, I know you want to.
In Perl, it is easy to make legible code, and it is easy to make illegible code.
In Python, it is easy to make legible code, but it is difficult to make illegible code.
That's because Perl is versatile, flexible. Python forces you to do things The Python Way(tm). I've tried Python a couple of times, and I keep going back to Perl. Maybe I'm just a rebel, but I don't like a language telling *me* what to do (queue "In Soviet Russia..." joke here).
And, yes, I mostly just hate the whitespace-as-blocking braindamage. It's like Guido loved LISP, but hated the braces, so he re-invented LISP, poorly. But that's why I love programming-- everybody gets to choose their favorite poison.
If we weren't detaining people, tapping their phones, and beating information out of someone, I'd be pissed. I'm paying the government to protect me.
If what's going on now is protection, count me out. I try to live a moral life. If the government does something in my name, it damned well better be done in a moral fashion, and not the immoral and illegal current activities.
The "war on terror" is a strawman, to start with. The US was attacked by a single group, with known leaders. It was with them we have issues, not some undefined group of "terrorists," but a very well-defined group originally trained up by the US to fight in Afghanistan in the '80s. We know who the enemy is; we just aren't fighting him very effectively.
Now, how far should the government's protection go? Since the number of people who die in auto accidents is orders of magnitude greater than the deaths in the US due to terrorist activities, should we spend orders of magnitude more money patrolling the roads, just to protect you from a potential accident? Or maybe we should just give up cars entirely. That way, we couldn't die due to accidents on the road.
You are more likely to die from the flu than a terrorist attack. Shouldn't the government spend more money on flu vaccines? You are more likely to be shot by someone you know than shot by a terrorist. Shouldn't the government protect you by taking away all firearms?
Finally, the US government's current actions are increasing the likelihood of dying at the hands of terrorists, not decreasing the risk. If the US government had not betrayed us (and I mean everyone in the world, not just US citizens), if they had behaved morally instead of selfishly and evilly, we would be less likely to suffer a terrorist attack.
Instead, they chose the route to US military dominance and empirialism in the Middle East, no matter the cost. The economic and social and moral fallout from this little adventure will follow the US for many, many years.
. . . PLUS taxing corps up the wazoo . . .
The hell they do.
Corps do *not* get taxed out the wazoo. The tax burden has been shifting to the individual since the advent of federal income tax.
Groklaw has the skinny, and a comprehensive history.
What it means for the commonwealth of Massachusetts: sovereingity.
The road warrior will appreciate the Mogo MouseBT.
Yes. Yes he will. Whether fighting for fuel, or just hangin' out in the Thunderdome, the Road Warrior will certainly love this. If only it came with a sawed-off shotgun option, or a recharge-with-pigshit option, it'd be perfect.
What's that? You're talking about regular people who travel with a laptop?
They aren't fucking road warriors! They don't kill, they don't fight; fuck, they don't even do anything FUCKING INTERESTING! They are generally the most pretentious, most boring people in the fucking world! They are not road warriors! If they wanna call themselves a "road warrior," they can meet me in the Thunderdome. Chainsaws, baby, mono-a-mono.
Any article that refers to assholes with laptops as "road warriors" automatically rates the roundfile.
Jeez.
Now, where's my lithium?
Uhm... usually, an individual vote is not contested-- it's the aggregate vote that is contested. So, this process would only work if you could get everyone who voted to release their vote.
The *only* way to do this is with a paper trail. Use electronic voting to generate the paper, and give instant results. If the vote is contested, count the paper ballots, just as we do now.
I see no other acceptable solution; anything beyond this is excessively complex, anything less is intrinisically untrustworthy.
I can see how a "networked everything" might be nice-- where a resource (CPU, hard drive, memory, etc) appears exactly the same whether it's a local resource or a networked resource. We're a long way from the from the management tools needed to make all this easy enough for the computer barely-literate, and even farther from the security model that'll make it all workable.
I think the problem will be this: Linux and MS-Windows and Mac OS X are all "good enough." For the forseeable future, there's little incentive to create a consumer edition of a Plan 9 knock-off. Hell, it's hard enough to get Linux into widespread use, and Linux is pretty much just like MS-Windows (vis-a-vis some hypothetical advanced networked-everything OS).
It'd be a lot of fun to develop, though.
Oh, *that's* a fucking great idea. Let's talk about the band-aid, and not the wound.
A secure system would not require a firewall. Nor are firewalls really all that great; they don't catch trojans, for instance. They only stop some worms, some DoS, and some manual attacks. And you'll need a virus scanner to protect you from viruses.
His assessment is correct. MS-Windows is so freakishly insecure because of all the little-used "convenience" features, like automatically-running scripts in documents and email. (Remember, before Microsoft "embraced" the web, Good Times was a joke.) His focus on one of those misfeatures is representative, not comprehensive.
I don't run a firewall at home. I don't need to. My system is secure to start with.
So, you're saying Microsoft is the McDonald's of computing? I'd have to say you are right. It's're everywhere, the most-used, not very good for you, give syou diarrhea, and really doesn't taste that good. But, it's everywhere, and people (who are afraid of change), choose to use it because it has familiar icons.
I always considered Microsoft Windows the Budweiser of operating systems, but being the McDonald's is about the same.