Not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, but consider this: At least you can still run those older systems. If they weren't contained in a VM, you'd have to keep not an outdated VM, but an entire outdated system - hardware, software, everything, around.
A company I worked for once had an ancient AIX system around because it was running some crucial thing they had long forgotten how to migrate elsewhere...
I disagree on that. I've seen plenty of management and business types "do programming" with their excel and access scripts and word macros, or with SQL or javascript or whatever else they have available. Because their first mistake is taking what they have available, and not what's the proper tool for the job. The problem with teaching non-techie people programming is that you end up with software that I would've ripped you a new one for back in university when I was the assistant for the C programming course.
Basically, this ultra-low level of programming will be lacking exactly the parts that you really, really want in a business application. Exception handling, input validation, that kind of stuff that makes sure a user error doesn't blow up your accounting system.
It's about making sure that $taxes can't be negative, $employee is properly set, the input field for $wage only accepts numbers, the payment handler returns a success code and your money still arrives if the connection is down at that second and the call needs to be repeated, everything is logged properly so in case one of the "impossible" failures does happen you can trace where the money went and a thousand other things that aren't half as sexy as that.
Technical and business people both live under the same illusion of thinking that with a bit of training they could do each others job. Few people think that about brain surgeons. But studying computer science, or business economics, or medicine is really quite comparable. (I only personally studied the first two, but I have plenty of friends in the 3rd field, which is why I think I can make the comparison.)
I know that I can't do the job of a marketing or sales person, because I lack the knowledge and experience to do it. I can't do a callcenter job, either. Or a firefighters duty. So don't tell me that someone with no prior experience in my field can be brought up to speed with a bit of training.
Plenty of it on github, lots more in older Free Software projects and another 150,000 or so lines of code in closed-source applications, including several commercial ones. Before you troll me, make sure you're not running any of my code on your Linux machine right now, because it could be.:-)
There's a difference between writing a language streamlined for a specific purpose and writing a language where a = 1+1; is expressed as ADD 1 TO 1 GIVING A.
I'm fairly sure I've heard every argument pro-COBOL. I studied this stuff. I've had this discussion a dozen times. I remain unconvinced.:-)
That's because the software is largely crap. I say that as someone who still learned COBOL and yes, on a mainframe, in university.
Seldom have I been so glad to forget everything about a programming language as quickly as possible after passing the exam.
The thing about old systems is that there are some that got lots of things right - Multics ACL and security still runs circles around Unix and giggles about Windows - and some of them were just horribly misguided (like COBOL, the programming language invented specifically so the business types had the wrong impression they could understand it).
Computing is this strange discipline where people either take the old and with it everything that sucked about it, or reinvent the wheel even though there was nothing wrong with the old one. Only rarely do people leave the good unchanged and improve only the bad.
I don't mean inventing a new programming language with all the best features from all the other programming languages you like - you still create a new language that needs to be learnt, will have implementation bugs early on, etc. etc.
The question is, how do you know the chain is false?
A mixture of experimental falsification and better theories. We know that rain dances don't cause rain because we know what does. We can also do them 20 times on days where no rain is projected and notice that - surprise - it doesn't start raining.
We do know that certain types of meditation, for example, do cause measurable changes in brain waves. We also know that this has nothing to do with Shiva or your guardian angel whatever the esoteric explanation may be, because the results remain the same if someone who doesn't believe in that simply follows the steps.
We know that certain substances cause certain effects, but not because of nature spirits or the shaman humming over them while slowly stirring them in a pot over a fire of elm wood that was quenched with baby blood because we know which chemicals are responsible for the effect.
And yes, science does discover that its theory was wrong every now and then, but there's one important detail that all the anti-science fanatics always conveniently forget to mention: When science throws out a theory as "wrong", what it really means is "it only had a 99% match with reality, and now we have a better theory with a 99.9% match".
Newton's laws are "wrong" by todays scientific standards, but for anything that's not rocket science or quantum physics, it's still very useable because it's close enough.
So when you say "even science is sometimes wrong" then strictly speaking yes, but not in the same sense that, say, your navigation system leading you to the wrong city because it had the same name was wrong. More like the GPS being miscalibrated and you arrive at Bullshit Avenue 11 instead of Bullshit Avenue 13 like you wanted to. Yeah, it's technically speaking wrong, but it's a totally different kind of wrong than Homeopathy or Astrology.
modern Western medicine for example has no way to relate to theories of Chi flow,
Funny that you should mention that. As a martial artist, I've done some reading on that and in fact there are a couple of books attempting to do exactly that, including a spinal nerve path theory to explain some pressure point attacks and several scientific studies on meridians (all of which except one chinese one sponsored by some accupuncture society coming to the conclusion that no such thing exists).
When an esoteric system makes predictions, it can be tested. You don't even have to bother discussing its system or theories at all, you can go straight to testing the predictions.
I think the main mistake that the various anti-science conspiracy theories make is assuming that scientists hate challenges to their world-view as much as they themselves do. Religious and esoteric people loathe criticism. Scientists think differently, because nobody has ever gotten a noble price for confirming an established theory for the 50th time. But proving it wrong - that's a good start.
There is bias in science - Kuhn was right about paradigm changes. But it's not a directed bias the way a conspiracy theory presumes.
So yes, if you can repeatedly create a phenomenon that science cannot explain, you will almost certainly find scientists quite interested. In fact, Randis million dollar challenge still awaits a taker, so there's money on the table.
Again, that depends on how you define awareness. If you use a personal definition then yes, it is in the realm of personal experience.
There are various approaches to measure awareness, here's just one example I could find quickly: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372627/. They do require you to define awareness in a way that can be measured, however, and we are still early in that part with various studies working on confirming suspected links between subjective awareness and objective measurements.
Conscious is were magic begins and science ends.
It's simply an area where science is still in its beginning research. Much like early science about electro-magnetism, in a hundred years we'll see some was spot on and some was terribly off. But that's how science works, by investigation and adding to the body of knowledge.
Magick, on the other hand (to make clear we're not talking stage magic here), is in fact closely related to consciousness, but to the best of my knowledge and experience, the relation is much like that of meditation or herbal medicine - a set of rituals and practices with more or less repeatable results and an utterly fantastic and false chain of causality to explain them.
Thanks for the reminder. Yes, it does have a certain resemblance.
Following the ten minutes of research I did into the topic (http://slashdot.org/journal/714211/the-trolls), my working hypothesis would be that the two people suffer from a similar mental problem. The way that mentally ill express themselves is often a clue into their illness. It's why psychologists let patients draw pictures and stuff.
There's "truth" in a Picasso painting, a Frost poem or a Beethoven piano sonata. It's just not the kind of objective, rational truth that science pursues.
Your and my understand of the meaning of the word "true" apparently differ considerably. I would attribute beauty or emotional depth or meaning or any other number of attributes to works of art, but not truth.
Art, on the other hand, doesn't try to "claim" anything about the truth, it just endeavors to express examples of it.
Absolutely. I have friends who grew up poor and are used to a simple lifestyle and would almost certainly be perfectly content with half that, for example.
It's a statistical value, and I only remembered the mean and not the spread.
No, because it is a meta-statement about other statements. GÃdel's incompleteness theorem applies if you search for absolute truth values in meta-statements.
But this is where logic and practical application divert. It's a bit like predicting the weather - with unlimited computing power and perfect data you could potentially do a perfect job. However, to have an 80% reliable prediction on whether or not it'll rain tomorrow, limited data and computing power are good enough and can get you there.
And for practical purposes, that 80% result you can deliver today is more interesting than the perfect prediction that takes 100 years to calculate.;-)
It's a nice thought experiment for philosophy class, but falsifiability does not depend on any individual observer, so your corollary is, in fact, testable. You just may not be around to hear about the result.
Can you prove to me that you have a consciousness?
That depends on your precise definition of the word, but as consciousness is an actual field of current scientific research, as long as your definition aligns with the scientific one, the answer is yes.
I'm pretty sure you can piss him off just the same. He'll probably find something else to rage about, no problem.
But the way I tick it's made me to actually put a few minutes into researching the troll phenomenon and it's... well, here's my results: http://slashdot.org/journal/71...
The Blender people aren't the only ones. Many artists who make their work available under permissive licenses know about the problem. One music artist I use regularily for videos who makes all his work available under CC licenses even has a page on his webpage dedicated to the problem. It doesn't even matter if you link to his license page in the video comment. Filing a counterclaim works, but it sometimes takes a week to resolve it.
Anyone still thinking it's a coincidence that the DMCA and related laws give you zero recourse for false claims?
They really need to make it perjury to make a false claim.
Right now I'm still laughing too hard and I definitely wouldn't give his sorry ass the validation of changing my.sig.
Maybe I'm naive, but I still trust that the/. readership is smart enough to see this guy for what he is. I mean, just look at the style of his comments. If/. supported the blink tag, he'd be using it, wanna bet?:-)
Haven't had so much fun on/. in a long while. I could extend this because it's such a laugh, but you're only link-spamming so I'll stop, and no doubt you'll comment on this again with more link-spam and of course you'll repeat that now I shut up and make it sound as if that would prove anything.
So I leave you, laughing all the way, to the misery of your pathetic little excuse for a life.
After an extensive discussion, I must strongly warn against using this tool. In fact, I strongly recommend running several virus scanners on it if you've downloaded.
Follow the discussion in my comments section if you want. The basic summary is that "APK" (always posting anonymously) make several claims that are objectively false and point to a horribly bad comprehension of the whole system, including a claim that hosts files would be case-sensitive (they aren't). With such basic mistakes, one has to doubt the quality of his tool.
In addition, his obnoxious link-spamming to the above comment indicates he's trying to get as many links as possible pointing towards his site, probably to drive traffic, possibly with malicious intent.
If you are interested in 3rd party managed hosts files, there are alternatives available. Google will get you some, this one is just an example and appears to be popular: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho...
Please don't be fooled by this moron. He obviously has no idea what he's talking about, so beware of his tool, it can't be good.
1.) hosts files don't deal with full URLs, but with domain-to-IP resolution. They don't do "trailing material". Test this for yourself: # ping "slashdot.org " ping: cannot resolve slashdot.org : Unknown host
2.) DNS is case-insensitive. Test this for yourself: # ping SLASHDOT.ORG PING slashdot.org (216.34.181.45): 56 data bytes
(emphasis mine)
I would beware to install a tool from someone so ignorant about the basic elements of what his tool claims to provide. As he's obviously link-spamming, too, I would strongly recommend running a virus scan on his tool.
Whether or not his tool does anything useful at all I don't know. If you are interested in having a hosts file managed by a 3rd party, there are alternatives, like this one, for example: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho... - and Google will show you more.
No doubt he will respond to this with more nonsense. Caveat lector.
Because there's no need to make a fool out of you anymore, you're doing a perfectly good job on that all by yourself. It's been a long time I laughed this hard, thank you.:-)
Ah yes. You're right in pointing that out. Yes, we need to allow for the subjective and many areas of human experience are in fields where truth doesn't matter - art, literature, music - who cares if a moving song is true or just a story?
The pseudo-sciences, however, don't peddle in those areas. Astrology doesn't claim to tell a nice story, it claims to be able to say something about your character and future events.
So I refine my demand to include only those fields that claim truth values.
Numerous fully falsifiable studies have shown that almost nothing "objective" will have a sustained impact on our emotional well being
I read some of them, and beg to differ in details. Continuing your example, yes money does not make us happy. However, lack of money can make us unhappy. There's a fairly low value (I think it was the equivalent of $50k per year) above which additional income doesn't change your happiness value anymore. But below that, and especially when you're struggling and have Existenzangst, then it does.
Meanwhile "woo woo" stuff like meditation and friendship show very definite improvements in well-being.
I think meditation is an excellent example, precisely because it has been extensively researched. And we now know that it does, in fact, work. We also know that all the esoteric bullshit in some forms of meditation is entirely unnecessary. That's science at work, right there.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, but consider this: At least you can still run those older systems. If they weren't contained in a VM, you'd have to keep not an outdated VM, but an entire outdated system - hardware, software, everything, around.
A company I worked for once had an ancient AIX system around because it was running some crucial thing they had long forgotten how to migrate elsewhere...
I disagree on that. I've seen plenty of management and business types "do programming" with their excel and access scripts and word macros, or with SQL or javascript or whatever else they have available. Because their first mistake is taking what they have available, and not what's the proper tool for the job.
The problem with teaching non-techie people programming is that you end up with software that I would've ripped you a new one for back in university when I was the assistant for the C programming course.
Basically, this ultra-low level of programming will be lacking exactly the parts that you really, really want in a business application. Exception handling, input validation, that kind of stuff that makes sure a user error doesn't blow up your accounting system.
Programming is not about being able to write:
$pay = $wage - $taxes;
sendToPaymentHandler($employee, $pay);
It's about making sure that $taxes can't be negative, $employee is properly set, the input field for $wage only accepts numbers, the payment handler returns a success code and your money still arrives if the connection is down at that second and the call needs to be repeated, everything is logged properly so in case one of the "impossible" failures does happen you can trace where the money went and a thousand other things that aren't half as sexy as that.
Technical and business people both live under the same illusion of thinking that with a bit of training they could do each others job. Few people think that about brain surgeons. But studying computer science, or business economics, or medicine is really quite comparable. (I only personally studied the first two, but I have plenty of friends in the 3rd field, which is why I think I can make the comparison.)
I know that I can't do the job of a marketing or sales person, because I lack the knowledge and experience to do it. I can't do a callcenter job, either. Or a firefighters duty. So don't tell me that someone with no prior experience in my field can be brought up to speed with a bit of training.
Plenty of it on github, lots more in older Free Software projects and another 150,000 or so lines of code in closed-source applications, including several commercial ones. Before you troll me, make sure you're not running any of my code on your Linux machine right now, because it could be. :-)
There's a difference between writing a language streamlined for a specific purpose and writing a language where a = 1+1; is expressed as ADD 1 TO 1 GIVING A.
I'm fairly sure I've heard every argument pro-COBOL. I studied this stuff. I've had this discussion a dozen times. I remain unconvinced. :-)
That's because the software is largely crap. I say that as someone who still learned COBOL and yes, on a mainframe, in university.
Seldom have I been so glad to forget everything about a programming language as quickly as possible after passing the exam.
The thing about old systems is that there are some that got lots of things right - Multics ACL and security still runs circles around Unix and giggles about Windows - and some of them were just horribly misguided (like COBOL, the programming language invented specifically so the business types had the wrong impression they could understand it).
Computing is this strange discipline where people either take the old and with it everything that sucked about it, or reinvent the wheel even though there was nothing wrong with the old one. Only rarely do people leave the good unchanged and improve only the bad.
I don't mean inventing a new programming language with all the best features from all the other programming languages you like - you still create a new language that needs to be learnt, will have implementation bugs early on, etc. etc.
The question is, how do you know the chain is false?
A mixture of experimental falsification and better theories. We know that rain dances don't cause rain because we know what does. We can also do them 20 times on days where no rain is projected and notice that - surprise - it doesn't start raining.
We do know that certain types of meditation, for example, do cause measurable changes in brain waves. We also know that this has nothing to do with Shiva or your guardian angel whatever the esoteric explanation may be, because the results remain the same if someone who doesn't believe in that simply follows the steps.
We know that certain substances cause certain effects, but not because of nature spirits or the shaman humming over them while slowly stirring them in a pot over a fire of elm wood that was quenched with baby blood because we know which chemicals are responsible for the effect.
And yes, science does discover that its theory was wrong every now and then, but there's one important detail that all the anti-science fanatics always conveniently forget to mention: When science throws out a theory as "wrong", what it really means is "it only had a 99% match with reality, and now we have a better theory with a 99.9% match".
Newton's laws are "wrong" by todays scientific standards, but for anything that's not rocket science or quantum physics, it's still very useable because it's close enough.
So when you say "even science is sometimes wrong" then strictly speaking yes, but not in the same sense that, say, your navigation system leading you to the wrong city because it had the same name was wrong. More like the GPS being miscalibrated and you arrive at Bullshit Avenue 11 instead of Bullshit Avenue 13 like you wanted to. Yeah, it's technically speaking wrong, but it's a totally different kind of wrong than Homeopathy or Astrology.
modern Western medicine for example has no way to relate to theories of Chi flow,
Funny that you should mention that. As a martial artist, I've done some reading on that and in fact there are a couple of books attempting to do exactly that, including a spinal nerve path theory to explain some pressure point attacks and several scientific studies on meridians (all of which except one chinese one sponsored by some accupuncture society coming to the conclusion that no such thing exists).
When an esoteric system makes predictions, it can be tested. You don't even have to bother discussing its system or theories at all, you can go straight to testing the predictions.
I think the main mistake that the various anti-science conspiracy theories make is assuming that scientists hate challenges to their world-view as much as they themselves do. Religious and esoteric people loathe criticism. Scientists think differently, because nobody has ever gotten a noble price for confirming an established theory for the 50th time. But proving it wrong - that's a good start.
There is bias in science - Kuhn was right about paradigm changes. But it's not a directed bias the way a conspiracy theory presumes.
So yes, if you can repeatedly create a phenomenon that science cannot explain, you will almost certainly find scientists quite interested. In fact, Randis million dollar challenge still awaits a taker, so there's money on the table.
Again, that depends on how you define awareness. If you use a personal definition then yes, it is in the realm of personal experience.
There are various approaches to measure awareness, here's just one example I could find quickly: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372627/. They do require you to define awareness in a way that can be measured, however, and we are still early in that part with various studies working on confirming suspected links between subjective awareness and objective measurements.
Conscious is were magic begins and science ends.
It's simply an area where science is still in its beginning research. Much like early science about electro-magnetism, in a hundred years we'll see some was spot on and some was terribly off. But that's how science works, by investigation and adding to the body of knowledge.
Magick, on the other hand (to make clear we're not talking stage magic here), is in fact closely related to consciousness, but to the best of my knowledge and experience, the relation is much like that of meditation or herbal medicine - a set of rituals and practices with more or less repeatable results and an utterly fantastic and false chain of causality to explain them.
Thanks for the reminder. Yes, it does have a certain resemblance.
Following the ten minutes of research I did into the topic (http://slashdot.org/journal/714211/the-trolls), my working hypothesis would be that the two people suffer from a similar mental problem. The way that mentally ill express themselves is often a clue into their illness. It's why psychologists let patients draw pictures and stuff.
There's "truth" in a Picasso painting, a Frost poem or a Beethoven piano sonata. It's just not the kind of objective, rational truth that science pursues.
Your and my understand of the meaning of the word "true" apparently differ considerably. I would attribute beauty or emotional depth or meaning or any other number of attributes to works of art, but not truth.
Art, on the other hand, doesn't try to "claim" anything about the truth, it just endeavors to express examples of it.
In that sense, yes I can agree.
That depends entirely on the person.
Absolutely. I have friends who grew up poor and are used to a simple lifestyle and would almost certainly be perfectly content with half that, for example.
It's a statistical value, and I only remembered the mean and not the spread.
No, because it is a meta-statement about other statements. GÃdel's incompleteness theorem applies if you search for absolute truth values in meta-statements.
But this is where logic and practical application divert. It's a bit like predicting the weather - with unlimited computing power and perfect data you could potentially do a perfect job. However, to have an 80% reliable prediction on whether or not it'll rain tomorrow, limited data and computing power are good enough and can get you there.
And for practical purposes, that 80% result you can deliver today is more interesting than the perfect prediction that takes 100 years to calculate. ;-)
It's a nice thought experiment for philosophy class, but falsifiability does not depend on any individual observer, so your corollary is, in fact, testable. You just may not be around to hear about the result.
Can you prove to me that you have a consciousness?
That depends on your precise definition of the word, but as consciousness is an actual field of current scientific research, as long as your definition aligns with the scientific one, the answer is yes.
For a more philosophical definition, it depends.
I'm pretty sure you can piss him off just the same. He'll probably find something else to rage about, no problem.
But the way I tick it's made me to actually put a few minutes into researching the troll phenomenon and it's... well, here's my results: http://slashdot.org/journal/71...
The Blender people aren't the only ones. Many artists who make their work available under permissive licenses know about the problem. One music artist I use regularily for videos who makes all his work available under CC licenses even has a page on his webpage dedicated to the problem. It doesn't even matter if you link to his license page in the video comment. Filing a counterclaim works, but it sometimes takes a week to resolve it.
Anyone still thinking it's a coincidence that the DMCA and related laws give you zero recourse for false claims?
They really need to make it perjury to make a false claim.
Right now I'm still laughing too hard and I definitely wouldn't give his sorry ass the validation of changing my .sig.
Maybe I'm naive, but I still trust that the /. readership is smart enough to see this guy for what he is. I mean, just look at the style of his comments. If /. supported the blink tag, he'd be using it, wanna bet? :-)
...but...but... but it's interesting homework! :-)
experiment successful. :-)
Haven't had so much fun on /. in a long while. I could extend this because it's such a laugh, but you're only link-spamming so I'll stop, and no doubt you'll comment on this again with more link-spam and of course you'll repeat that now I shut up and make it sound as if that would prove anything.
So I leave you, laughing all the way, to the misery of your pathetic little excuse for a life.
If adware is malware, why wait until July?
Because they need to give time to their OEM and other partners as well as their own departments to transition to something that'll bypass this change.
just testing to see if the troll will reply to absolutely everything :-)
After an extensive discussion, I must strongly warn against using this tool. In fact, I strongly recommend running several virus scanners on it if you've downloaded.
Follow the discussion in my comments section if you want. The basic summary is that "APK" (always posting anonymously) make several claims that are objectively false and point to a horribly bad comprehension of the whole system, including a claim that hosts files would be case-sensitive (they aren't). With such basic mistakes, one has to doubt the quality of his tool.
In addition, his obnoxious link-spamming to the above comment indicates he's trying to get as many links as possible pointing towards his site, probably to drive traffic, possibly with malicious intent.
If you are interested in 3rd party managed hosts files, there are alternatives available. Google will get you some, this one is just an example and appears to be popular: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho...
Dear readers:
Please don't be fooled by this moron. He obviously has no idea what he's talking about, so beware of his tool, it can't be good.
1.) hosts files don't deal with full URLs, but with domain-to-IP resolution. They don't do "trailing material". Test this for yourself:
# ping "slashdot.org "
ping: cannot resolve slashdot.org : Unknown host
2.) DNS is case-insensitive. Test this for yourself:
# ping SLASHDOT.ORG
PING slashdot.org (216.34.181.45): 56 data bytes
(emphasis mine)
I would beware to install a tool from someone so ignorant about the basic elements of what his tool claims to provide. As he's obviously link-spamming, too, I would strongly recommend running a virus scan on his tool.
Whether or not his tool does anything useful at all I don't know. If you are interested in having a hosts file managed by a 3rd party, there are alternatives, like this one, for example: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho... - and Google will show you more.
No doubt he will respond to this with more nonsense. Caveat lector.
Notice you shut up too. Hahaha why's that?
Because there's no need to make a fool out of you anymore, you're doing a perfectly good job on that all by yourself. It's been a long time I laughed this hard, thank you. :-)
Ah yes. You're right in pointing that out. Yes, we need to allow for the subjective and many areas of human experience are in fields where truth doesn't matter - art, literature, music - who cares if a moving song is true or just a story?
The pseudo-sciences, however, don't peddle in those areas. Astrology doesn't claim to tell a nice story, it claims to be able to say something about your character and future events.
So I refine my demand to include only those fields that claim truth values.
Numerous fully falsifiable studies have shown that almost nothing "objective" will have a sustained impact on our emotional well being
I read some of them, and beg to differ in details. Continuing your example, yes money does not make us happy. However, lack of money can make us unhappy. There's a fairly low value (I think it was the equivalent of $50k per year) above which additional income doesn't change your happiness value anymore. But below that, and especially when you're struggling and have Existenzangst, then it does.
Meanwhile "woo woo" stuff like meditation and friendship show very definite improvements in well-being.
I think meditation is an excellent example, precisely because it has been extensively researched. And we now know that it does, in fact, work. We also know that all the esoteric bullshit in some forms of meditation is entirely unnecessary. That's science at work, right there.
Look, I have a troll who will post some bullshit on absolutely everything I write.
I'm curious - is he just the worst troll ever, or is this a trick to pump links to his stupid windows tool around to improve his SEO?