Yeah, I actually enjoy sharing this, since I'm hoping word will spread and they'll drop this policy. Because apparently this is Apple's policy, and it's not some random tech who's off the reservation. I had the tech escalate to their development department, and contacted another tech at Apple to confirm that this was their official policy. It all came back the same: Apple does not in any way support opening files on a file server.
This is true, but... do we really need channels at all?
Personally, all I'm interested in is shows. There are a handful of shows on TV every season that I want to watch, and I don't care what channel they're on. I don't care what time slot they're on. All I actually care about is, when is it available for on-demand viewing?
No, sorry, I don't think I have official links. I once contacted Apple support because I was having lots of trouble with file sharing. Specifically, I was having a problem where Mac workstations were connecting to an SMB file server, and randomly, when opening files, Finder would crash and would not recover until you rebooted the workstation. It even seemed to happen when using AFP sometimes, but I wasn't able to verify that.
When I talked to Apple support, they explained that the problem was caused by opening files while they were on a file server, and they could not help me because this was normal behavior. I asked how that was an acceptable response, given that file servers have been widely in use for a long time, and are a normal part of business computing. Their response was that their recommended procedure when working on a file server was to copy the file locally, and to work locally, and copy it back to the server when the work is complete. Even with simple/small file types (e.g. a small plain-text file), they do not in any way support opening a file while it's on a file server, and it is within expected behavior for the entire system to crash if you attempt to open a while located on a file server.
I am not exaggerating. That's what Apple support told me. The tech then told me that Apple doesn't recommend the use of file servers for any kind of collaborative work, and if you intended to share documents with others, you should set up a document management system with document check-in, check-out, versioning. etc. He also told me that this was all very normal, and that no computers support working on files while they're on file servers.
The best protection is to pull your backups not push.
Or, it's a bit more expensive, but back up to a NAS/Server, and then back that up to something else. Like I back up to a NAS, which then performs backup to an external hard drive. Sure, a smart virus might figure out how to encrypt my NAS, but I can just restore that from backup. My computer doesn't have direct access to the NAS backups, so it can't encrypt them.
I wasn't thinking so much about "when something blows up" as "when you get hacked/infected". Though, I guess it's fine if you're not connected to the Internet...
You might want to bite the bullet and move up to Windows 7. It's basically as stable as XP at this point, but it's still supported and gets patches.
But honestly, I'm using Mac OSX Yosemite, and I have zero problems with it. I know it still has some problems, since random users that I support encounter those problems, but for most users, it'll be a good OS with good performance, and some new features that are actually useful. Even Windows 8 isn't so bad, once you figure out how to avoid using their modern/metro UI.
Oh, mine was different from that. I figure the guy must have hacked something, or else somehow had lots of accounts with mod points, because pretty much every one of my posts would get modded down pretty much immediately. I don't remember if I was being modded "overrated" or "troll" or what, since it was years ago, but it lasted a couple of weeks, during which I had something like 20 posts modded down for no apparent reason.
I never got an explanation, but the staff of Slashdot fixed it after I provided a long list of posts modded that were affected.
I'm not a professional writer, but I think this age of social networking must have a chilling effect on speech, even if you discount government surveillance. I personally have become very careful about what I say online, and I'm not eager to have my real name associated with anything I do say. I've had someone (who was sort of a friend) pick up on the wording of some random innocuous Facebook post, interpret it in a way that made it sound misogynous, and then harass me and badmouth me on Facebook. I've had stuff like that happen a few times.
It also makes me think of another incident, and I'm just glad I was using an account that was unconnected to any of my personal accounts. I was talking on a public web forum, and voiced an opinion to the effect of, "even child abusers deserve due process." Another anonymous user responded claiming that the only reason I would say something like that is if I were a child molester myself. I didn't think much of it, because who cares, right? By the time 24 hours had passed, I had 50 messages in my Inbox from different people, yelling at me for for being a child molester and threatening to track me down. This was literally based on nothing except a random comment in favor of following the law, which was interpreted as being sympathetic to child abuse.
Now, it might sound like I'm just a complete asshole who says terrible things, and then gets upset when people don't like them. And yeah, every once in a while I do get pretty aggressive in arguments, but I don't think it's too bad. I suppose you can look at my post history and judge for yourself, since I don't censor myself too much on this site. I've had a few people attack me a bit on Slashdot for things that I thought were pretty innocuous posts, but oddly nothing as aggressive and offensive as some of the attacks I've gotten on Facebook from supposed friends, so I'm not very careful here. However, I have had someone get annoyed with me and use some kind of bot to mod down every single post that I made.
But speaking less about myself, and getting back to the point, I'm worried about the effect these kinds of things have on communication. We've developed a mode of communication where we can talk to each other and publish our thoughts very easily, but meanwhile we've fostered a culture around that communication that's very aggressive. Everyone's picking apart everything you say, looking for a way to be harsh and critical. You have reddit and 4chan lynch mobs trying to find and punish people without having their facts straight. Public figures are being brought to disgrace due to personal communications they thought were private-- which isn't always so bad, but also isn't always productive.
I don't know. I feel it. If you gave everyone free access to all of my communications, I would honestly not be worried about my friends or family or the government reading it, as much as I'd be worried about the masses to stupid people who might take offense to something that isn't a real problem and isn't any of their business. When I post something publicly on purpose, my biggest concern is that someone I barely know will find some meaning in some little throw-away phrase, take it completely out of context, and use it as a basis as some kind of crazy vendetta.
Any enterprise solutions that work already should not see the Apple-method as a viable release path as those two product types have wildly different end users.
I don't think it's an issue of whether the solutions are "enterprise" or what kind of users they have. The point is that Apple is making money from the hardware, and not the software. To some degree, arguing about whether Apple should be releasing major updates annually is a bit like asking whether Sony should be providing major updates to the Playstation annually, or whether Google should be releasing new versions of Android, or whether Cisco should be releasing new firmware for its devices annually. Sort of. Not exactly. But the point is, they're software updates for a hardware product, where the vendor views the product as an integrated solution (hardware + software) rather than selling an OS product to be installed on commodity hardware. That's why the updates are free.
So nobody should attempt this unless they're also really selling an integrated solution, and therefore aren't seeking to make money from software sales. Aside from that, it's largely an issue of marketing. What's the difference between 10.10.10 and 10.11.0? There doesn't need to be one. The same software can be released for either. The difference in version numbers can just be an issue of marketing.
If you ask me, I'm fine with Apple doing an annual release. They should just continually work on improvements, and take all the improvements that are ready to be integrated in time for the release schedule, and call that next year's version. None of that has any connection with whether the "improvements" are actual worthwhile high-quality improvements.
Ok, so I'm a Mac user, as well as being an IT guy who supports Mac, Windows, and Linux. In general, I don't think that I can say I've noticed anything like a "nosedive" in software quality. The quality of Apple's software has, over a long span of time, been relatively consistent. It's pretty solid and stable in most circumstances, doing most of the things that Apple users typically do, with some exceptions. At regular intervals, Apple decides they're going to improve something, and a bunch of things break for a while following a major release, and then most of it settles down and gets fixed. If you want a stable experience, don't upgrade to the newest major release until it's been out for a couple of months. Just like Windows, and a lot of other software.
Then there are random inexplicable things. File sharing, for example. Apple decides they're going to standardize on SMB because it's faster and more widely used, which sounds like good news, right? Yeah, except that it's over a year later, and Apple's file sharing is still buggy. Apple's advice is to not use OSX with file servers. Similarly, they just can't seem to get their Mail application to be reliable. They keep rewriting these things, and every new rewrite has new problems. You wouldn't think email and file sharing would be such strange high-tech features that Apple's software engineers would be unable to handle it. But Apple has kind of always done that kind of thing.
As far as the yearly release cycles, I don't see any reason why this should be a major concern. Having a yearly release cycle shouldn't be impossible to keep up with, as long as the changes for each release are not overly ambitious. For example, Apple could release OSX v10.11 next year, and it can basically be a maintenance release. No new features, just bug fixes and performance improvements. Their OS updates are free these days, so who's going to complain?
It's not even clear to me that editorial pages are supposed to be unbiased. Hopefully they're intelligent, but there's supposed to be a difference between the "news" and "editorial" sides of journalism.
It's not just a business folding to the religious. If you want to spin this as a big problem, it's a respected news paper, now owned by News Corp (i.e. Fox News), pushing to validate religious beliefs. That is, you could push this as evidence that the Wall Street Journal has become a part of Fox News and is no longer reputable.
Or you could point out that newspapers often don't print letters and articles that people submit, and conclude that this isn't a big deal.
Sort of related, but I think it's also noteworthy that the complexity of a lot of devices has increased with the addition of computing. I might be able to fix a lamp, for example, so long as it's a simple electrical device. But if someone makes a fancy new "smart lamp" with a computer built in to do something fancy, and that computing part breaks, then I'll have a much harder time fixing it. On top of that, if there were "smart lamps" all over the place, and my 3 year-old smart-lamp breaks, then I'll probably go looking for a new one with new features, better energy efficiency, and more computing power.
All that aside, I wonder if it's really worth considering a 'problem'. The complaint is that people don't fix things as often partially because things work better and aren't breaking as often. That sounds like a good thing. Now, I do see value in trying to recycle and repurpose broken electronics, but I'm not much of a "maker" myself. I don't intend to be, and I don't planning on spending lots of time trying to repair or repurpose my own stuff. I have a job, and other things that keep me busy, and though I find things like 3D printers interesting, I wouldn't know what to do with one.
What I've wondered, and I don't expect to get a satisfying response here, but could the balloon analogy be used to explain why space is expanding between galaxies. Like imagine you had a balloon that wasn't expanding, but was just filled up with a fixed amount of air. Now everywhere that you've drawn a galaxy, you're start pinching the balloon. Like somehow you find a way to squeeze and compress those places where a galaxy is drawn, and you don't let it rebound. You just keep pulling and pinching and squeezing the balloon in and in, which is sort of what gravity does.
If you did that, you'd see the areas of the balloon between the galaxies becoming more and more stretched out. Maybe that's just a weird thought with no scientific basis, but we have space constantly being drawn in and condensing around any gravitational center, and meanwhile expanding between all the gravitational centers. I think if I were a scientist studying these things, I'd be looking for a link.
It does say that the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver is closing in on the Catalyst drivers.
And either way, it is a fairly important issue for open source, since one of the things that prevent people from using Linux at home is games. There are fewer games available for Linux, and what games there are sometimes don't perform well. If Linux were on parity with Windows as a gaming platform, I think you'd see more people using an open source operating system.
This might result in you getting overlooked for promotions, but so be it.
1) Not if everyone figures out "hey, pla actually has a life! I want in on that!" and does the same thing; and,
2) You won't find me putting up with any company that has a "work yourself to death" culture for long enough to get promoted anyway.
I agree with this. Part of the reason I'm ok with trying to set this kind of expectation is, I'm generally not willing to work in a position where I need to be on-call 24/7. If someone wants me to be in that position, I would be willing to do that for a short stint if I were rewarded with a large amount of money. I am even willing to say that in job interviews, because I want no misunderstanding. I don't want to be hired for a job that includes terms that I find unacceptable.
Of course, it helps that I'm in a place in my career where I can confidently say that. However, I also set those expectations for people who work below me-- I tell them that I don't expect them to respond to after-hours emails unless they are on call, and I won't call them or text them after hours unless it's urgent.
I would also a 3rd thing, and I say this both in my capacity as an employee and as a manager:
3) I don't think there's anything wrong with setting limits/expectations, as long as the limits/expectations are reasonable, understood in advance, and everyone sticks to them.
So as a general example, I don't have any problem with someone telling me that they won't check their work email after-hours unless they're on-call. If it's not specifically part of the job description, then that seems reasonable. I might ask for an alternate method to contact them that they will respond to, in case of emergency (e.g. cell phone number). However, if they tell people (me, coworkers, clients) that they will respond to email 24/7 and they set that expectation, then they should be prepared to follow through with that.
I think it's really a problem of culture, and not technology. Even back when we just had landlines, your boss could have been calling you constantly, and required that you stuck close to the phone and made yourself available for phone calls. The problem isn't cell phones and email per se, but the expectation on instant availability that they've helped to foster.
Therefore, we need to break those expectations. I've actually told my boss that if he emails me outside of work hours, I might check my mail and see it, or I might not. I won't respond unless it's actually some kind of emergency. If it's actually an emergency, he should text or call, but I've implied that he shouldn't text or call unless it's an emergency. I've even trained most of my coworkers to expect that, if they email me, I'll probably respond within an hour or two. If it can't wait, they should call/text/IM me, or get up, walk over to me, and get my attention. I am not at the beck and call of every random email. I process email on my own schedule, when I'm ready to do so.
Of course, some of this depends on the nature of your job. If you're in a reactive role where your job is explicitly to respond to email in a timely fashion, you can't do this. If you have a job which requires participating in an on-call rotation, then you'll have to respond to after-hours calls when on-call. I'm stating the obvious here, but I'm saying it to point out that most of us are not explicitly on-call most of the time, and we should foster a culture that allows us to say, "I'm not on-call right now and the current time does not fall within working hours. Therefore I have no responsibility to check my email or to respond."
That seems like a little bit of a weird way of going about the argument. I'm not too surprised because it's a very modern way of thinking about things, but still... I don't know what word to use... awkward?
To use "mathematics is the language of nature" as your first premise is, to a large extent, begging the question. If mathematics is the language of nature, it assumes that nature is ordered, structured, and comprehensible. I'm not sure you need more than that to say that there are "patterns" in nature.
But then, I'm not sure exactly what it means to say that there are "patterns" in nature, or what further conclusions we're supposed to draw from the idea that there are patterns. There are patterns, and therefore... God? That would require some additional argumentation.
It seems to me that your argument really boils down to something like:
1) The world is well ordered
2) We have invented symbols to represent that order in a simplified form in an attempt to more easily understand it.
3) If you manipulate those representations into a form that's meaningful to us, we will see that form as being ordered.
4) Therefore: The world is well ordered.
I can't read the first article, but the second goes on way too long getting into the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the universe, and... then says that it doesn't matter, because-- the article asserts-- the outcome of all that reasoning has no bearing on whether you can prove there is a God. I agree, personally, but it simple asserts it without presenting much of an argument, and it makes me wonder what the point was of trying to read any of it.
Instead, the author says that he thinks it's better to have faith in something that can't be proven or disproven. He doesn't bother going into an actual argument regarding the question that was raised, i.e. whether science can prove the existence of God. And then he concludes by saying that faith shouldn't interfere with science, which didn't seem to be the issue he was talking about, but seems to be the conclusion that he's most interested in.
I don't mind his conclusions, but for someone who seems to be arguing in favor of rationality and scientific rigor, you'd think he'd have a more rigorous argument. From my (admittedly superficial) reading, his argument is structured like this:
Premise 1: Someone presented the argument (which has been argued for and against many times by smarter people):
Premise 1: It is unlikely that we should exist
Premise 2: We exist
Conclusion: God exists, and he made us on purpose
Premise 2: Our existence actually is likely. I think. Or maybe not, because I don't really know for sure.
Conclusion: The argument is bad because I don't think faith should should be based on things we don't know for sure, shouldn't be based on science, and we'd all be better off if we didn't allow religious belief to hold back scientific progress.
That is to say, while you might prefer the conclusions of the second article, the method of argument is just as bad. Maybe worse-- I'm not sure, because as I said, I haven't been able to read the first article. He asserts things without support, and allows his unfounded opinions to be substituted in as a conclusion, despite having no relation to the premises.
And it's really shocking to me that whenever this argument comes up (and believe me, it's not new), people keep missing the obvious questions:
1) What is "God"?
2) What does it mean to "exist"?
3) Why should an unlikely occurrence be counted as proof of the "existence" of "God"?
Because really, at least some religious people do not claim that God is a physical entity that has a shape, occupying a particular place at a particular time. When we talk about things existing, we're usually talking about whether those things are physical things which "exist" in an actual location. So it's not actually clear to me at all that religions are claiming that "God" "exists", unless you think "God" is an old man who lives in the sky. (I suppose Christians would argue that Jesus "existed", in that he was a physical man who lived at a certain time, but for that much, many historians would agree)
Whether unlikely events can be taken as proof of "God"... well... it seems to me that it depends on what we're supposed to think you mean by "God". Is he an old man with a long beard who lives in the sky? Or is "God" the force that allows unlikely things to exist? When a person wins the lottery, since it's unlikely that that specific person would win the lottery, is that also proof that God exists?
Sorry for the rant. It's just... this is an argument that has been going on, in some form, for thousands of years. There's a lot of information to draw on, and a lot of arguments that have already been made. I wish people like Ethan Siegel would bother to become the slightest bit informed.
.. is assuming everybody is profit-motivated and is actually driven by "bringing something to market."
I think there's also a broader issue, and one that some people might have trouble really grasping: Google might be motivated by profits and "bringing something to market", but maybe they just understand something about technological development. Because the thing is, science and technology does not simply develop along the lines that you plan. You don't always sit down to make a marketable product, say, "I'm going to spend $X on R&D on that product," and then have everything go according to plan.
For example, many years ago, Microsoft sat down and said, "I'm going to spend a bunch of money to develop a tablet computer." I don't know what their budget was, but they spent a bunch of money, and they came up with crap. Nothing marketable. Apple, meanwhile, spend something close to a decade also trying to develop a tablet computer. Part way through the process, they figured out that what they were developing was better suited to be a phone, and the iPhone was born.
Sure, eventually the phone morphed into a tablet in the form of the iPad, but the point is, a lot of times you spend money on R&D with the intention of building one thing, and you build another. You want to build a marketable product, and you end up building junk. Or you want to build a marketable product, and you end up building a different marketable product. You're working on radar and you invent the microwave. You're working on better padding for airline passengers in a crash, and you end up inventing a bed mattress. You're trying to develop a new blood pressure medication, and you end up with a treatment for baldness.
The point is, you don't know where things are going to lead. If you want to be an innovative company, you should be devoting some portion of your R&D budget developing cool things, even if there isn't a market yet, and even if there isn't an obvious application yet. That's kind of the nature of R&D.
Because you can regret causing someone discomfort or pain, even if it wasn't intentional.
Offense, hurt feelings, and any kind of emotional pain or discomfort are arguably always the "personal problem" of the person experiencing them. And many times we cause those things without intending to or wanting to. It's pretty much impossible to live your life without somehow being the cause of those feelings for people. I guess that if you're a childish asshole or a psychopath, you don't care about hurting people's feelings or causing other people discomfort, but even a psychopath might apologize, since it doesn't really cost you anything to say, "I don't think I did anything wrong, and I won't take it back, but I'm sorry you were offended."
I sort of agree, in that I think his response should have been something more like, "Sorry if anyone was offended. It was intended to be all in good fun."
I don't think anyone should have been terribly offended by the original tweet. It didn't say anything bad about Jesus or dispute any religious beliefs. It was a mildly funny joke that did not seem particularly aimed at offending anyone or changing minds, or presenting any argument.
I think the problem is, he's an outspoken atheist, and I am not surprised that some religious people took this as a poke in the eye. I could imagine that if I were religious, if I saw his tweet, I might roll my eyes and think, "Give it a rest."
I don't think it's particularly offensive and I don't think that he should have taken it down. But in my opinion, when he goes out of his way to antagonize and belittle people who don't share his personal beliefs, he comes off the worse.
Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
So I would think that if the dominant "form of life" in the universe were robots, it seems like a reasonable guess that they'd have learned to self-replicate. If they're really so smart and able to dominate the universe, one might suppose that they would accomplish this through master of nanoscale engineering, creating robots that are able to grow copies of itself. It'd seem likely that such a process would include having a machine made up of organic molecules, able to take in and absorb matter, both for the material and for energy.
Little by little, imagining the scenario based on what we know of science, it becomes increasingly likely that these "robots" would be life pretty much as we know it. Maybe not quite the chemical bonds that we're used to, and maybe not in the shape of things that we're used to, but something that eats "food", excretes waste, is made of chemicals comparable to proteins, DNA, and whatever else. Able to "get pregnant" and "have children". Perhaps as different from us as we are from exotic deep-sea fish, perhaps even more different, but still recognizably "life".
So I guess what I'm wondering is, what do we mean if we say that the dominant life form In the cosmos are "robots"? I we imagining something with microchips, circuit boards, and metallic gears? I could think that super-intelligent machines would be less crude.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I actually enjoy sharing this, since I'm hoping word will spread and they'll drop this policy. Because apparently this is Apple's policy, and it's not some random tech who's off the reservation. I had the tech escalate to their development department, and contacted another tech at Apple to confirm that this was their official policy. It all came back the same: Apple does not in any way support opening files on a file server.
This is true, but... do we really need channels at all?
Personally, all I'm interested in is shows. There are a handful of shows on TV every season that I want to watch, and I don't care what channel they're on. I don't care what time slot they're on. All I actually care about is, when is it available for on-demand viewing?
No, sorry, I don't think I have official links. I once contacted Apple support because I was having lots of trouble with file sharing. Specifically, I was having a problem where Mac workstations were connecting to an SMB file server, and randomly, when opening files, Finder would crash and would not recover until you rebooted the workstation. It even seemed to happen when using AFP sometimes, but I wasn't able to verify that.
When I talked to Apple support, they explained that the problem was caused by opening files while they were on a file server, and they could not help me because this was normal behavior. I asked how that was an acceptable response, given that file servers have been widely in use for a long time, and are a normal part of business computing. Their response was that their recommended procedure when working on a file server was to copy the file locally, and to work locally, and copy it back to the server when the work is complete. Even with simple/small file types (e.g. a small plain-text file), they do not in any way support opening a file while it's on a file server, and it is within expected behavior for the entire system to crash if you attempt to open a while located on a file server.
I am not exaggerating. That's what Apple support told me. The tech then told me that Apple doesn't recommend the use of file servers for any kind of collaborative work, and if you intended to share documents with others, you should set up a document management system with document check-in, check-out, versioning. etc. He also told me that this was all very normal, and that no computers support working on files while they're on file servers.
The best protection is to pull your backups not push.
Or, it's a bit more expensive, but back up to a NAS/Server, and then back that up to something else. Like I back up to a NAS, which then performs backup to an external hard drive. Sure, a smart virus might figure out how to encrypt my NAS, but I can just restore that from backup. My computer doesn't have direct access to the NAS backups, so it can't encrypt them.
I wasn't thinking so much about "when something blows up" as "when you get hacked/infected". Though, I guess it's fine if you're not connected to the Internet...
You might want to bite the bullet and move up to Windows 7. It's basically as stable as XP at this point, but it's still supported and gets patches.
But honestly, I'm using Mac OSX Yosemite, and I have zero problems with it. I know it still has some problems, since random users that I support encounter those problems, but for most users, it'll be a good OS with good performance, and some new features that are actually useful. Even Windows 8 isn't so bad, once you figure out how to avoid using their modern/metro UI.
Oh, mine was different from that. I figure the guy must have hacked something, or else somehow had lots of accounts with mod points, because pretty much every one of my posts would get modded down pretty much immediately. I don't remember if I was being modded "overrated" or "troll" or what, since it was years ago, but it lasted a couple of weeks, during which I had something like 20 posts modded down for no apparent reason.
I never got an explanation, but the staff of Slashdot fixed it after I provided a long list of posts modded that were affected.
Also, Soylent is taking the route of getting rid of the overrated mod, a mod bomber favorite.
I don't know what this means. In my case, I contacted Slashdot and asked them to look into it, and then the modding stopped.
I'm not a professional writer, but I think this age of social networking must have a chilling effect on speech, even if you discount government surveillance. I personally have become very careful about what I say online, and I'm not eager to have my real name associated with anything I do say. I've had someone (who was sort of a friend) pick up on the wording of some random innocuous Facebook post, interpret it in a way that made it sound misogynous, and then harass me and badmouth me on Facebook. I've had stuff like that happen a few times.
It also makes me think of another incident, and I'm just glad I was using an account that was unconnected to any of my personal accounts. I was talking on a public web forum, and voiced an opinion to the effect of, "even child abusers deserve due process." Another anonymous user responded claiming that the only reason I would say something like that is if I were a child molester myself. I didn't think much of it, because who cares, right? By the time 24 hours had passed, I had 50 messages in my Inbox from different people, yelling at me for for being a child molester and threatening to track me down. This was literally based on nothing except a random comment in favor of following the law, which was interpreted as being sympathetic to child abuse.
Now, it might sound like I'm just a complete asshole who says terrible things, and then gets upset when people don't like them. And yeah, every once in a while I do get pretty aggressive in arguments, but I don't think it's too bad. I suppose you can look at my post history and judge for yourself, since I don't censor myself too much on this site. I've had a few people attack me a bit on Slashdot for things that I thought were pretty innocuous posts, but oddly nothing as aggressive and offensive as some of the attacks I've gotten on Facebook from supposed friends, so I'm not very careful here. However, I have had someone get annoyed with me and use some kind of bot to mod down every single post that I made.
But speaking less about myself, and getting back to the point, I'm worried about the effect these kinds of things have on communication. We've developed a mode of communication where we can talk to each other and publish our thoughts very easily, but meanwhile we've fostered a culture around that communication that's very aggressive. Everyone's picking apart everything you say, looking for a way to be harsh and critical. You have reddit and 4chan lynch mobs trying to find and punish people without having their facts straight. Public figures are being brought to disgrace due to personal communications they thought were private-- which isn't always so bad, but also isn't always productive.
I don't know. I feel it. If you gave everyone free access to all of my communications, I would honestly not be worried about my friends or family or the government reading it, as much as I'd be worried about the masses to stupid people who might take offense to something that isn't a real problem and isn't any of their business. When I post something publicly on purpose, my biggest concern is that someone I barely know will find some meaning in some little throw-away phrase, take it completely out of context, and use it as a basis as some kind of crazy vendetta.
Any enterprise solutions that work already should not see the Apple-method as a viable release path as those two product types have wildly different end users.
I don't think it's an issue of whether the solutions are "enterprise" or what kind of users they have. The point is that Apple is making money from the hardware, and not the software. To some degree, arguing about whether Apple should be releasing major updates annually is a bit like asking whether Sony should be providing major updates to the Playstation annually, or whether Google should be releasing new versions of Android, or whether Cisco should be releasing new firmware for its devices annually. Sort of. Not exactly. But the point is, they're software updates for a hardware product, where the vendor views the product as an integrated solution (hardware + software) rather than selling an OS product to be installed on commodity hardware. That's why the updates are free.
So nobody should attempt this unless they're also really selling an integrated solution, and therefore aren't seeking to make money from software sales. Aside from that, it's largely an issue of marketing. What's the difference between 10.10.10 and 10.11.0? There doesn't need to be one. The same software can be released for either. The difference in version numbers can just be an issue of marketing.
If you ask me, I'm fine with Apple doing an annual release. They should just continually work on improvements, and take all the improvements that are ready to be integrated in time for the release schedule, and call that next year's version. None of that has any connection with whether the "improvements" are actual worthwhile high-quality improvements.
Ok, so I'm a Mac user, as well as being an IT guy who supports Mac, Windows, and Linux. In general, I don't think that I can say I've noticed anything like a "nosedive" in software quality. The quality of Apple's software has, over a long span of time, been relatively consistent. It's pretty solid and stable in most circumstances, doing most of the things that Apple users typically do, with some exceptions. At regular intervals, Apple decides they're going to improve something, and a bunch of things break for a while following a major release, and then most of it settles down and gets fixed. If you want a stable experience, don't upgrade to the newest major release until it's been out for a couple of months. Just like Windows, and a lot of other software.
Then there are random inexplicable things. File sharing, for example. Apple decides they're going to standardize on SMB because it's faster and more widely used, which sounds like good news, right? Yeah, except that it's over a year later, and Apple's file sharing is still buggy. Apple's advice is to not use OSX with file servers. Similarly, they just can't seem to get their Mail application to be reliable. They keep rewriting these things, and every new rewrite has new problems. You wouldn't think email and file sharing would be such strange high-tech features that Apple's software engineers would be unable to handle it. But Apple has kind of always done that kind of thing.
As far as the yearly release cycles, I don't see any reason why this should be a major concern. Having a yearly release cycle shouldn't be impossible to keep up with, as long as the changes for each release are not overly ambitious. For example, Apple could release OSX v10.11 next year, and it can basically be a maintenance release. No new features, just bug fixes and performance improvements. Their OS updates are free these days, so who's going to complain?
It's not even clear to me that editorial pages are supposed to be unbiased. Hopefully they're intelligent, but there's supposed to be a difference between the "news" and "editorial" sides of journalism.
It's not just a business folding to the religious. If you want to spin this as a big problem, it's a respected news paper, now owned by News Corp (i.e. Fox News), pushing to validate religious beliefs. That is, you could push this as evidence that the Wall Street Journal has become a part of Fox News and is no longer reputable.
Or you could point out that newspapers often don't print letters and articles that people submit, and conclude that this isn't a big deal.
Sort of related, but I think it's also noteworthy that the complexity of a lot of devices has increased with the addition of computing. I might be able to fix a lamp, for example, so long as it's a simple electrical device. But if someone makes a fancy new "smart lamp" with a computer built in to do something fancy, and that computing part breaks, then I'll have a much harder time fixing it. On top of that, if there were "smart lamps" all over the place, and my 3 year-old smart-lamp breaks, then I'll probably go looking for a new one with new features, better energy efficiency, and more computing power.
All that aside, I wonder if it's really worth considering a 'problem'. The complaint is that people don't fix things as often partially because things work better and aren't breaking as often. That sounds like a good thing. Now, I do see value in trying to recycle and repurpose broken electronics, but I'm not much of a "maker" myself. I don't intend to be, and I don't planning on spending lots of time trying to repair or repurpose my own stuff. I have a job, and other things that keep me busy, and though I find things like 3D printers interesting, I wouldn't know what to do with one.
What I've wondered, and I don't expect to get a satisfying response here, but could the balloon analogy be used to explain why space is expanding between galaxies. Like imagine you had a balloon that wasn't expanding, but was just filled up with a fixed amount of air. Now everywhere that you've drawn a galaxy, you're start pinching the balloon. Like somehow you find a way to squeeze and compress those places where a galaxy is drawn, and you don't let it rebound. You just keep pulling and pinching and squeezing the balloon in and in, which is sort of what gravity does.
If you did that, you'd see the areas of the balloon between the galaxies becoming more and more stretched out. Maybe that's just a weird thought with no scientific basis, but we have space constantly being drawn in and condensing around any gravitational center, and meanwhile expanding between all the gravitational centers. I think if I were a scientist studying these things, I'd be looking for a link.
this story isn't about open source
It does say that the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver is closing in on the Catalyst drivers.
And either way, it is a fairly important issue for open source, since one of the things that prevent people from using Linux at home is games. There are fewer games available for Linux, and what games there are sometimes don't perform well. If Linux were on parity with Windows as a gaming platform, I think you'd see more people using an open source operating system.
This might result in you getting overlooked for promotions, but so be it.
1) Not if everyone figures out "hey, pla actually has a life! I want in on that!" and does the same thing; and,
2) You won't find me putting up with any company that has a "work yourself to death" culture for long enough to get promoted anyway.
I agree with this. Part of the reason I'm ok with trying to set this kind of expectation is, I'm generally not willing to work in a position where I need to be on-call 24/7. If someone wants me to be in that position, I would be willing to do that for a short stint if I were rewarded with a large amount of money. I am even willing to say that in job interviews, because I want no misunderstanding. I don't want to be hired for a job that includes terms that I find unacceptable.
Of course, it helps that I'm in a place in my career where I can confidently say that. However, I also set those expectations for people who work below me-- I tell them that I don't expect them to respond to after-hours emails unless they are on call, and I won't call them or text them after hours unless it's urgent.
I would also a 3rd thing, and I say this both in my capacity as an employee and as a manager:
3) I don't think there's anything wrong with setting limits/expectations, as long as the limits/expectations are reasonable, understood in advance, and everyone sticks to them.
So as a general example, I don't have any problem with someone telling me that they won't check their work email after-hours unless they're on-call. If it's not specifically part of the job description, then that seems reasonable. I might ask for an alternate method to contact them that they will respond to, in case of emergency (e.g. cell phone number). However, if they tell people (me, coworkers, clients) that they will respond to email 24/7 and they set that expectation, then they should be prepared to follow through with that.
I think it's really a problem of culture, and not technology. Even back when we just had landlines, your boss could have been calling you constantly, and required that you stuck close to the phone and made yourself available for phone calls. The problem isn't cell phones and email per se, but the expectation on instant availability that they've helped to foster.
Therefore, we need to break those expectations. I've actually told my boss that if he emails me outside of work hours, I might check my mail and see it, or I might not. I won't respond unless it's actually some kind of emergency. If it's actually an emergency, he should text or call, but I've implied that he shouldn't text or call unless it's an emergency. I've even trained most of my coworkers to expect that, if they email me, I'll probably respond within an hour or two. If it can't wait, they should call/text/IM me, or get up, walk over to me, and get my attention. I am not at the beck and call of every random email. I process email on my own schedule, when I'm ready to do so.
Of course, some of this depends on the nature of your job. If you're in a reactive role where your job is explicitly to respond to email in a timely fashion, you can't do this. If you have a job which requires participating in an on-call rotation, then you'll have to respond to after-hours calls when on-call. I'm stating the obvious here, but I'm saying it to point out that most of us are not explicitly on-call most of the time, and we should foster a culture that allows us to say, "I'm not on-call right now and the current time does not fall within working hours. Therefore I have no responsibility to check my email or to respond."
I've seen it, and I do like it a lot. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, no less. I just didn't recognize the quote. I haven't seen it in a few years.
That seems like a little bit of a weird way of going about the argument. I'm not too surprised because it's a very modern way of thinking about things, but still... I don't know what word to use... awkward?
To use "mathematics is the language of nature" as your first premise is, to a large extent, begging the question. If mathematics is the language of nature, it assumes that nature is ordered, structured, and comprehensible. I'm not sure you need more than that to say that there are "patterns" in nature.
But then, I'm not sure exactly what it means to say that there are "patterns" in nature, or what further conclusions we're supposed to draw from the idea that there are patterns. There are patterns, and therefore... God? That would require some additional argumentation.
It seems to me that your argument really boils down to something like:
1) The world is well ordered
2) We have invented symbols to represent that order in a simplified form in an attempt to more easily understand it.
3) If you manipulate those representations into a form that's meaningful to us, we will see that form as being ordered.
4) Therefore: The world is well ordered.
I can't read the first article, but the second goes on way too long getting into the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the universe, and... then says that it doesn't matter, because-- the article asserts-- the outcome of all that reasoning has no bearing on whether you can prove there is a God. I agree, personally, but it simple asserts it without presenting much of an argument, and it makes me wonder what the point was of trying to read any of it.
Instead, the author says that he thinks it's better to have faith in something that can't be proven or disproven. He doesn't bother going into an actual argument regarding the question that was raised, i.e. whether science can prove the existence of God. And then he concludes by saying that faith shouldn't interfere with science, which didn't seem to be the issue he was talking about, but seems to be the conclusion that he's most interested in.
I don't mind his conclusions, but for someone who seems to be arguing in favor of rationality and scientific rigor, you'd think he'd have a more rigorous argument. From my (admittedly superficial) reading, his argument is structured like this:
Premise 1: Someone presented the argument (which has been argued for and against many times by smarter people):
Premise 1: It is unlikely that we should exist
Premise 2: We exist
Conclusion: God exists, and he made us on purpose
Premise 2: Our existence actually is likely. I think. Or maybe not, because I don't really know for sure.
Conclusion: The argument is bad because I don't think faith should should be based on things we don't know for sure, shouldn't be based on science, and we'd all be better off if we didn't allow religious belief to hold back scientific progress.
That is to say, while you might prefer the conclusions of the second article, the method of argument is just as bad. Maybe worse-- I'm not sure, because as I said, I haven't been able to read the first article. He asserts things without support, and allows his unfounded opinions to be substituted in as a conclusion, despite having no relation to the premises.
And it's really shocking to me that whenever this argument comes up (and believe me, it's not new), people keep missing the obvious questions:
1) What is "God"?
2) What does it mean to "exist"?
3) Why should an unlikely occurrence be counted as proof of the "existence" of "God"?
Because really, at least some religious people do not claim that God is a physical entity that has a shape, occupying a particular place at a particular time. When we talk about things existing, we're usually talking about whether those things are physical things which "exist" in an actual location. So it's not actually clear to me at all that religions are claiming that "God" "exists", unless you think "God" is an old man who lives in the sky. (I suppose Christians would argue that Jesus "existed", in that he was a physical man who lived at a certain time, but for that much, many historians would agree)
Whether unlikely events can be taken as proof of "God"... well... it seems to me that it depends on what we're supposed to think you mean by "God". Is he an old man with a long beard who lives in the sky? Or is "God" the force that allows unlikely things to exist? When a person wins the lottery, since it's unlikely that that specific person would win the lottery, is that also proof that God exists?
Sorry for the rant. It's just... this is an argument that has been going on, in some form, for thousands of years. There's a lot of information to draw on, and a lot of arguments that have already been made. I wish people like Ethan Siegel would bother to become the slightest bit informed.
.. is assuming everybody is profit-motivated and is actually driven by "bringing something to market."
I think there's also a broader issue, and one that some people might have trouble really grasping: Google might be motivated by profits and "bringing something to market", but maybe they just understand something about technological development. Because the thing is, science and technology does not simply develop along the lines that you plan. You don't always sit down to make a marketable product, say, "I'm going to spend $X on R&D on that product," and then have everything go according to plan.
For example, many years ago, Microsoft sat down and said, "I'm going to spend a bunch of money to develop a tablet computer." I don't know what their budget was, but they spent a bunch of money, and they came up with crap. Nothing marketable. Apple, meanwhile, spend something close to a decade also trying to develop a tablet computer. Part way through the process, they figured out that what they were developing was better suited to be a phone, and the iPhone was born.
Sure, eventually the phone morphed into a tablet in the form of the iPad, but the point is, a lot of times you spend money on R&D with the intention of building one thing, and you build another. You want to build a marketable product, and you end up building junk. Or you want to build a marketable product, and you end up building a different marketable product. You're working on radar and you invent the microwave. You're working on better padding for airline passengers in a crash, and you end up inventing a bed mattress. You're trying to develop a new blood pressure medication, and you end up with a treatment for baldness.
The point is, you don't know where things are going to lead. If you want to be an innovative company, you should be devoting some portion of your R&D budget developing cool things, even if there isn't a market yet, and even if there isn't an obvious application yet. That's kind of the nature of R&D.
Because you can regret causing someone discomfort or pain, even if it wasn't intentional.
Offense, hurt feelings, and any kind of emotional pain or discomfort are arguably always the "personal problem" of the person experiencing them. And many times we cause those things without intending to or wanting to. It's pretty much impossible to live your life without somehow being the cause of those feelings for people. I guess that if you're a childish asshole or a psychopath, you don't care about hurting people's feelings or causing other people discomfort, but even a psychopath might apologize, since it doesn't really cost you anything to say, "I don't think I did anything wrong, and I won't take it back, but I'm sorry you were offended."
I sort of agree, in that I think his response should have been something more like, "Sorry if anyone was offended. It was intended to be all in good fun."
I don't think anyone should have been terribly offended by the original tweet. It didn't say anything bad about Jesus or dispute any religious beliefs. It was a mildly funny joke that did not seem particularly aimed at offending anyone or changing minds, or presenting any argument.
I think the problem is, he's an outspoken atheist, and I am not surprised that some religious people took this as a poke in the eye. I could imagine that if I were religious, if I saw his tweet, I might roll my eyes and think, "Give it a rest."
I don't think it's particularly offensive and I don't think that he should have taken it down. But in my opinion, when he goes out of his way to antagonize and belittle people who don't share his personal beliefs, he comes off the worse.
Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
So I would think that if the dominant "form of life" in the universe were robots, it seems like a reasonable guess that they'd have learned to self-replicate. If they're really so smart and able to dominate the universe, one might suppose that they would accomplish this through master of nanoscale engineering, creating robots that are able to grow copies of itself. It'd seem likely that such a process would include having a machine made up of organic molecules, able to take in and absorb matter, both for the material and for energy.
Little by little, imagining the scenario based on what we know of science, it becomes increasingly likely that these "robots" would be life pretty much as we know it. Maybe not quite the chemical bonds that we're used to, and maybe not in the shape of things that we're used to, but something that eats "food", excretes waste, is made of chemicals comparable to proteins, DNA, and whatever else. Able to "get pregnant" and "have children". Perhaps as different from us as we are from exotic deep-sea fish, perhaps even more different, but still recognizably "life".
So I guess what I'm wondering is, what do we mean if we say that the dominant life form In the cosmos are "robots"? I we imagining something with microchips, circuit boards, and metallic gears? I could think that super-intelligent machines would be less crude.