There were a total of 765 homicides in England and Wales during the year 2005-2006, which have a combined population of around 54 million. This includes the 52 who were killed in the 7th July bombings. There are several US cities with populations that are a small fraction of this with significantly higher homicide figures for the same period.
"Or Switzerland?"
A country whose entire population is smaller than that of London, and around 15% of the population of England and Wales. But of course, comparing Switzerland with a similar country such as Austria or Sweden (comparable populations, similar individual wealth levels, strict gun laws, and lower homicide rates than Switzerland) doesn't make Switzerland look quite so glowing, just as comparing the UK with similarly populous European countries such as France and Spain reveals that it's actually a much safer country than either. But hey, if you can cherry-pick, then so can I -- my example is Colombia, a country with extremely liberal gun laws, a population that's similar in size to that of England and Wales (40 million or so), and a murder rate of 25,000 people per year compared with the UK's less than 800. If I used your tactics, I would claim that this proves removing the UK's strict gun laws would result in their murder rate leaping to around 35,000 per year almost immediately (it does not of course prove anything of the sort).
"These make a pretty good case for arming everyone!"
They make a pretty good case for living in a country with a small and extremely wealthy, contented populace. Note also that despite everyone having guns, events like this (http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/09/27/sw itzerland.shooting/index.html) prove that, as anyone who has actually been to Switzerland knows, Swiss people don't carry them around for the sake of it, so the probability of them being able to deal with a lunatic who starts shooting people in a shopping mall, post office, factory, or school is no greater than that other non-armed Europeans.
"because what could Firefox/Opera possibly mean for non-English speaker?"
Opera is an Italian word (meaning "the work") that English adopted along with many other languages to describe a specific form of musical drama, just as many languages use the French word "ballet" for a type of dance. It will thus have precisely the same meaning for many non-English speakers as it does to you, and rather more meaning to an Italian.
We'd have given anything for stone tablets and a chisel. In my day, we had to write by quenching areas of molten igneous rock wi' our tongues, and then wait for them to cool enough that we could carry 'em up the lip of the volcano on our backs, where our dad would beat us wi' 'em if we made a spelling mistake.
"If you are old enough to remember people cried about XP not running well on hardware that ran Windows98 just fine too."
There were also many who loudly proclaimed that the need for activating it whenever certain pieces of hardware were changed together with its inability to run certain pieces of older software would drive hordes of Windows 9X users to Linux.
"If people could choose what country they shopped from, everyone would buy from the cheapest country."
This is pretty common in the EC.
"Then the other countries stores would be effectively obsolete"
Strange then that this doesn't seem to have happened. Most businesses in the EC are far more concerned about competition from big chain stores that can undercut them locally than whether people can buy something 20% cheaper from another country, because buying from abroad by mail order is only feasible with a narrow range of goods, and the problems with getting them replaced if they're unsatisfactory can far outweigh any price differences.
"you'd end up back at square one with a price that was too low to be profitable in the richer economies and/or too expensive for anyone to buy anything in the poorer economies"
Your assumption is flawed because (a) identical items aren't always cheaper in poorer countries than rich ones (they can actually be more expensive), and (b) it doesn't necessarily cost more to sell an item in a rich country than a poor one due to the presence of an efficient distribution infrastructure, and a lower incidence of thefts and breakages.
While both are sciences, it is important to distinguish between them in order to avoid the sort of deliberate straw man building that the ID lobby does by lumping life origin theories together with the theory of evolution, when they are in fact two separate fields which are only connected by life origin theorists assuming the theory of evolution is correct. Thus, while cosmologists depend on both astronomers and physicists for data on which to both base their theories and falsify them, the data that astronomers and physicists collect doesn't depend in any way on whatever the prevailing cosmological theories of the day might be, and cannot therefore be invalidated by knocking holes in current ideas of cosmology.
"Microsoft originally marketed a spreadsheet program called Multiplan in 1982, which was very popular on CP/M systems"
I would dispute Wikipedia's statement that it was "very popular on CP/M systems". SuperCalc was "the standard" on CP/M due to having been launched two years before MultiPlan, and having a feature that MultiPlan (and indeed the much later Lotus 1-2-3) lacked: it could automatically resolve circular references, something that Excel wasn't capable of doing until a decade later.
The "big three" applications on CP/M were WordStar, SuperCalc, and dBase-II, with Microsoft's most popular offering being their BASIC-80 interpreter and BASCOM compiler. Nearly every CP/M 2.0 system I ever saw seemed to have (usually pirated copies of) all of these.
"For instance, I transfer anywhere from 2gb - 50gb a month depending on what I am doing. Here in the US I pay about $50 for an 8mbit/768k connection. My understanding is that with most European providers you pay by the MB and my connection would cost a fortune."
Most Europeans pay a flat rate, not per MB. There is ferocious competition between suppliers in many countries, with large numbers of them competing for the same customers, so at least in some places we seem to get better deals than are typical in the US. I currently live in Spain, and have received telemarketing calls from several companies offering 20Mbit/sec links with free national phone calls for 20 Euro/month (under $27 at today's exchange rates).
"Wow as much as the place I work ticks me off I am grateful that programmers make the decision what tools are used."
You're very lucky to work at a place like that. Most just tell you what to work with, and then blame the programmers if the tools turn out to be unsuitable for the task at hand, and the end results are therefore sub-optimal.
"it never crossed my mind that I would want to be forced to port the same working code to a new Microsoft platform over and over again"
You only have to look at how many web sites have been completely rewritten to use Ajax or Flash in an entirely superfluous way to see that It isn't just Microsoft tool and language users who constantly change working stuff to be compliant the latest buzzwords. I've seen several working, mature, and stable "fat-client" client-server products that customers were happy with get totally rewritten to use web interfaces, Java, etc. at great expense, only to scrap the lot because their customers unanimously prefer the old system.
"But then we use C++, Java, Perl, PHP, and Python where I work."
I've seen a lot of PHP getting rewritten to use the latest features, and newer versions of Python have introduced some incompatibilities with existing code bases, so once again, this isn't just something that people in the MS tool world do.
"And we use PostgresSQL for most of our in house databases except the accounting system which runs on our only Windows server."
Databases are IMO one of the areas where the open source world really shines. There's plenty of choice ranging from small "embedable" systems to full blown servers, and they run on all major platforms and several not-so-major ones. I haven't used PostgreSQL much, but have had excellent results from Firebird and SQLite, and would thus recommend either for the sorts of jobs they're suited to.
" have to agree about Mono. I have not learned it so I don't want to bad mouth it too much."
The problems Mono has with the few executive decision makers who've heard of it are two-fold:
1) It isn't supported by a major corporation who can be used a "blame sink" if things go wrong.
2) By chasing Microsoft's coat-tails, they're in the same position as the people who are maintaining Wine, i.e. that of tracking a company with a notable habit of regularly deprecating stuff they were pushing a short while ago in favour of something new that does a similar job in an entirely different way. This means that one cannot write an arbitrary.NET application using the latest MS tools and expect it to run under Mono without any issues, so people who want to support both are effectively restricted to using only those features that Mono implements, and they'll have to test and optimise all code on both platforms. This is obviously rather more costly than simply writing for.NET on Windows and ignoring the much smaller number of non-Windows users, or using (for example) Java, which has "official" versions for several platforms, and a set of excellent free tools that run pretty much identically on all all of them.
"Java I know and I actually like. You can write a good application very quickly with Java."
What I like about Java is the large number of quality frameworks, beans, and tools that make nearly every job a matter of selecting the right components, and tying them together with what amounts to some "glue code". Python and Perl programmers also have large bodies of code, frameworks, and tools to chose from, and PHP is getting that way (as is Ruby). There is a also a wide variety of more traditional compiled languages and libraries for them that are highly portable (albeit in a different way), most of which have excellent free implementations, so it's difficult to make a convincing business case for Mono when so many other (often considerably more mature) options exist.
"there are a number of free Development systems that are actually very nice to use like Netbeans and Eclipse."
They do indeed. However, for those with commitments to families, other factors may be more important than what programming language is being used.
"I still don't know how VB managed to sneak in to IT"
The same way that PowerBuilder, Oracle Forms, and other similar tools got adopted in the past.
"I mean Basic???"
It's no worse than COBOL or RPG, which were also popular in the corporate world.
"I think it started with little useful utilities written by somebody out side of IT just mutated from there"
It actually gained traction because corporate types thought it could utilise the significant numbers of semi-skilled BASIC programmers that were out there (this was actually largely an illusion because the event-driven nature of VB was very alien to most people who'd used other types of BASIC).
"I do lump the decision makers into the classification of developer."
How you lump things is up to you. Reality is of course another matter entirely.
"The people they decide what tools are used to develop should be developers themselves."
Unfortunately, what they should be is very different from what they are. And those very rare executives who started out as developers usually haven't done it seriously for years, so they're hopelessly out of date, and therefore often do more harm than good.
" They should also know that they have a big and expensive task in moving from traditional VB to C# or VB.NET"
Has it ever occurred to you that this might be what everyone from the senior IT managers to the most junior programmers actually want? Big buzzword-compliant rewrites mean a constant source of funding and steady jobs, all of which can be easily justified to upper management by all the executive-level crap that Microsoft have prepared for just this purpose.
"Let us not for get the several million lines of Foxpro code that are now also facing it's end of life"
See above.
"Seems like a great opportunity for Java or Mono if they can just wake up the sheep"
Java's already got the corporate ear, but Microsoft have a very powerful marketing machine that's out to convince "all MS" shops that there's no advantage to Java in their specific case. Mono has little visibility, and those executives who do know about it tend to see it as a poor.NET knock-off with the notable disadvantage of not being supported by a big company, which in the risk-averse world of corporate IT means it's slightly less desirable than leprosy.
"for some reason they are lining up for.NET like lambs to the slaughter while the developers that choose Java just go on their merry way."
Developers don't get to choose the languages or environments they work with except in small shops or one man outfits. People wrote in the old VB because somebody far higher up in the corporate food chain decided they were going to use it, and the same goes for.NET, Java, and for that matter any other language with a regular pay cheque attached.
" Personally I think the advantages of big brains is so overwhelming that to attribute it to just raw non-utilitarian sexual selection is rather odd."
They also have notable disadvantages. Human brains require significant amounts of energy to sustain them; and babies must be born while their heads are small enough to fit the birth canal, which means they're less developed than most other animals, and therefore remain helpless (and potentially vulnerable) for a much longer period -- they're also dependent on parents for protection and sustenance for significantly more time than any other animal. Humans were extremely rare creatures for well over 90% of our history, and we nearly became extinct on more than one occasion, so from a biological perspective, whether the advantages of large brains outweigh their costs is debatable.
"My bet is that Sony realizes that the PS3 is only really a value for people needing HD, and many people simply aren't running HD yet."
The current Spanish PS3 advertising campaign pushes the Sony Bravia 1080P TVs as an ideal companion to it for this reason (in addition to Sony hoping to sell a bunch of Bravias, obviously!). Big screen TVs are reasonably popular, but HD isn't because there are no HD services on standard broadcast, digital terrestrial, cable, or digital satellite, so there's not really been any motivation to ask for it, or pay the extra for TVs that have it. 1080P systems (labelled "True HD") are thus ridiculously expensive at around 3500 Euros (or at least they were when I looked at them near the end of last year -- maybe the price has fallen a little since then), well over double the price of a 720P / 1080i "HD Ready" set with the same size screen.
Note that AFAIK the PS3 is the first device capable of playing HD media to be widely sold here. I've not seen either a HD-DVD or Blue-Ray player being offered at a general retail level, or any media for them, although this does not of course mean that they aren't available from some specialist retailers. The PS3 is however being sold by department stores and general electrical places who certainly didn't carry such devices, so it's somewhat unique in that respect.
"That known the best way to get people evangelizing about the product is to make sure they are using it in the most optimal scenario."
A number of large outlets don't seem to have had any problems shifting their entire launch-day allocation of PS3s without resorting to any gimmicks or tricks (that I know of) here, but it it should also be noted that these same outlets have been back-ordered for Wiis since November, and I obviously have no way of knowing how many PS3s they were actually supplied with. The news for Sony is however initially pretty good in this country, although it doesn't of course indicate that they'll be successful over the long-term, and says nothing whatsoever about how well they're doing in the rest of Europe.
"You said "precisely zero", you're wrong, that and other reports of malware on the Mac prove it."
Ok then, show me one piece of malware that's been _confirmed_ to affect anyone besides those who deliberately ran them for testing purposes.
"You're the one talking rubbish."
LOL! And this from a man who has been attempting to avoid answering any point except this one, and isn't even capable of doing that.
"Again, you said "precisely zero" not "significant numbers"
Then prove me wrong by providing something that's _been confirmed_ to affect anyone who wasn't deliberately experimenting with it in full knowledge of what it was. I haven't seen any such confirmation for the example you cited -- indeed, every alert, advisory, blog entry, and article I can find seems to be derived from one incident where _a reader_ sent an example file to MacWorld UK _claiming_ that he was "infected" by it (downloading and running an embedded script that deletes some files and then stops doesn't really count as an infection).
"Just pick your words more carefully."
So I should emulate you by writing outright lies such as:
"This is an actual backdoor running out there on more than 1 Mac."
NB: it's rather obvious that you studiously avoid dealing with points that demonstrate your immense balderdash-to-content ratio such as the answers I gave to the above piece of laughable false tripe.
So, in summary, you say:
""You said "precisely zero", you're wrong, "that and other reports of malware on the Mac prove it.""
And I have responded by asking you to back up this assertion by providing an authoritative source confirming that any of these have affected _a single Macintosh running OS X_ that wasn't the result of somebody deliberately running them for testing purposes. If they don't affect anyone, they're proofs of concept, not malware, so my assertion of zero pieces of _malware_ for OS X still stands until you can provide some proof that this isn't the case.
Now, now, no need to be rude just because you were caught out talking utter rubbish.
"Back in 2004 this trojan was found in the wild. Yes that's "in the wild", not some proof of concept crap. This is an actual backdoor running out there on more than 1 Mac."
1) It hasn't been confirmed to have affected _any_ Macs. It was originally sent by a reader who _claimed_ to have downloaded it from LimeWire believing it to be a free version of MS Office (despite being only about 2K in length) to MacWorld UK, but there's no way of knowing whether this actually happened -- for all they know, the "reader" could have written it himself. There is no record of anyone else having been affected by it.
2) It isn't a "back door". The "trojan" is a simple piece of AppleScript with an icon pasted in that deletes files in a user's home directory if run -- it has no other capabilities, and is thus simply a graphical version of a UNIX shell script containing "rm -rf".
"There are other worms and viruses but again because so few people run a Mac it's not widespread."
If this is the case, then I'm sure you can provide some links to prove that this isn't yet another case of you blowing a load of hot air. It should be easy, because if, as you claimed previously, that this is entirely a function of market share, you should have _at least_ 2,500 to choose from.
"Mac is getting burned this bad at only 6.38% market share I really shudder to think how bad it would be if they ever got really big."
I agree - only 6% of the market, and there's already been a Mac user who claims to have downloaded and run a piece of AppleScript that deleted some files in his home directory. Imagine if it had the same share as Windows -- there'd be 20 or 30 times as many things like this, making a grand total of 30, dwarfing the mere half million for Windows XP.
So come on, show us some evidence of _real malware_ that's affecting significant numbers of those 5 million Macs that Apple sold last year. I eagerly await your response.
"Windows has 93.05%* market share. Mac has 6.38%* market share. That means there are almost 15 times the amount people possibly trying to break Windows security yet it has less vulnerabilities and took less time to release patches."
Yet strangely, OS X doesn't have 6% of the malware that's been produced for Windows XP alone, despite being two years older. So let's be generous, and use the Mac's average of 2% global market share over the lifetime of OS X, and reduce it to 1% just in case somebody's exaggerating Apple's sales. This should mean that 1% of all the malware out there targets OS X if your assertion about market share being the determinant factor is correct. AV Comparatives (who test AV software) use a database of XP malware that contains a little less than half a million entries. Let's assume for the sake of argument that (a) this database contains a sample of every piece of malware ever released for XP, and (b) that 50% of the entries are garbage, which leaves us with only 250,000 entries. For your assertion to hold water, using all these extremely generous figures, there should thus be _at least_ 2,500 pieces of assorted malware for OS X. So where are they?
"In fact Mac users were left vulnerable on average over 2 months longer than Windows users"
Indeed. So where is all the malware? If what you, Symantec, and Microsoft keep telling us is is true, the fact that few Mac users bother with any security measures beyond those in the OS itself should mean virtually every Mac with an Internet connection is infected by at least one of the 2,500 viruses, trojans, bots, premium-rate diallers, etc., etc., that should be out there, so please explain why, after eight years on the market, Macs running OS X have precisely zero infections despite much crying wolf by the likes of Symantec during the last two years, highly publicised events such as the Month Of Apple Bugs, and Apple's slowness in fixing _known_ vulnerabilities?
I wasn't particularly referring to _a_ religion, but rather all those religions (hence my use of the plural) who contend that morality is absolute rather than relative. This was a subject of philosophical debate centuries before Christianity appeared, and has also been debated in cultures where Judaeo-inspired religions such as Christianity and Islam never gained much of a foothold.
" But why did you narrow to primitive, tribal cultures?"
Because the post I was replying to was talking about how art may have evolved. The people who produced early cave paintings were probably too small to be classed as tribes -- even clans would I think be pushing it, as they were probably contained between 20 or 30 individuals (if that).
"I would submit that this happens still in many cultures. "I'm bored, you're here... let's have sex.""
And "Let's have sex despite the fact that I'm not in the least bored"!
"A cave\modern restaurant\living-room couch"
I think one of the key differences with the cave would be a complete lack of hangups about sex. When you have an extended family group living in a large communal area with no privacy, people copulate in public because it's the only way they can copulate, and children will therefore be accustomed to seeing it from birth, just as they'll have also seen babies being born, people dying, and everyone from the most respected elder to the most insignificant child shitting and pissing. This form of "do what nature demands without caring who's watching" seems to be one of the first casualties of civilisation, irrespective of where in the world that civilisation occurs (i.e. it's not simply a Judaeo-Christian thing).
"plagiarism is "the copying of someone's ideas, text or other creative work and claiming it as one's own." Ghostwriting most definitely is plagiarism and it is allowed by copyright law."
Oh dear. A ghost writer is employed to write about the life of another person who provides them with interviews and / or notes to work from, so where is this supposed plagiarism occurring? The person who is being written about is the sole source of information, so a ghost writer essentially acts as a specialised form of editor, much as a good secretary who turns a swearing infested rant by an annoyed executive into a formal letter does. Furthermore, the only thing "allowed by copyright law" is the ability to voluntarily relinquish one's rights, just as employees of software companies, people who write advertising jingles, and various other types of creative professional regularly do in return for being paid.
"The only reason you may be sued if you plagiarize without permission is that doing so requires that you make a copy of the work. In other words, it has nothing to you plagiarizing, but with you making an unauthorized copy."
If you'd bothered to read the cases I included (especially the first one), you would know that this is utter rubbish. To win a plagiarism case, one merely needs to show that there is a similarity between two works, not that they are identical (or even nearly identical), or that the person being sued for plagiarism had access to the original, or even that it was a deliberate act. If a plaintiff can show that it wasn't _impossible_ for me to have read, heard, or seen a work at some time during my life, and show that they both have enough in common for a jury to believe that they're "substantially similar" (a deliberately vague term that various juries seem to interpret very differently), then they stand a chance for successfully suing me for plagiarism, even if it is accepted by both the plaintiff and jury that the act was entirely unintentional (i.e. I had produced what I sincerely believed was an entirely original work).
" Art is quite often a creative process and according to Geoffrey Miller could easily have helped with sexual selection of mates; why that is a pretty picture... let's have sex."
From a purely anthropological viewpoint, the preoccupation of primitive art with animals that bone fragments indicate were hunted by the people who painted it, competed with them for food, or hunted them would seem to indicate that they were extremely unlikely to be a mechanism for getting laid. In primitive tribal cultures where infant mortality rates are high, the fact that girls babies are stronger and therefore more likely to survive results in there being several females of breeding age for each male, and the adult mortality rate among young males also tends to be higher because of hunting accidents and violent conflicts with other groups, again increasing the ratio of females to males. It's unlikely therefore that any male capable of doing something the group regarded as having some value would require anything beyond being present to have a choice of several willing sexual partners.
"We're going to see a huge backlash against doing any serious study of biological basis for morality because it threatens religion."
It actually threatens moral relativism rather than religions, many of whom are likely to see this as scientific evidence for their contention that Man has an absolute moral framework which was "programmed" by a divine creator, who also gave us the capability of consciously deciding whether to follow it or not.
NB: I a not religious, and do not believe in divine creators or intelligent designers.
"We're already seeing an organized effort to marginalize science by zealots who see the writing on the wall."
The problem is that they _don't_ see the writing on the wall. People who believe that their ideas are _the truth_ simply regard those who don't agree with them as being at best misguided, and at worst deliberate spreaders of lies. And make no mistake -- in the US (and increasingly in the UK) they're gaining ground with the general public, not losing it, so it's science rather than religion that's increasingly on the defensive, because 99% of people are incapable of judging the validity of evidence for themselves, so they'll happily believe that the human eye or bacterial cilia are too complex to have evolved if somebody who _appears_ to know what they're talking about tells them that it is so.
Science isn't particularly easy for ordinary people to accept because it's full of unimaginable numbers that they can't grasp, and also full of unknowns, probables, and maybes. By contrast, religion offers simple solutions that are claimed to be certain rather than merely probable, possible, or likely, and for many, require less belief than the scientific explanation because they fit what people observe around them. Man demonstrably conceives, designs, and makes complex machines, so it's easier to accept that the huge variety complex biological machines were also conceived, designed, and made than that they _probably_ evolved from simple organisms via sheer chance over spans of time that are too immense for them to grasp or visualise. If science is to survive in the Western world beyond the 21st century, we need to realise that a great deal of it is not immediately obvious to everyone, and also that mocking and belittling those who can't immediately grasp certain areas of it (something I've been guilty of on many occasions) is counterproductive because it can drive them into the arms of the religious, who will welcome them instead of trying to make them look like idiots.
"It is legal to plagiarize, and big companies do it very often (it's generally known as ghost writing). Copyright infringement is illegal."
1. While not "illegal", plagiarism is classed as a form of copyright infringement, so people and companies can be, and have been successfully sued for it. Here are some links (Google for "plagiarism lawsuit" to see a whole load of others):
2. Ghost writing isn't plagiarism. A ghost writer is paid to write books or articles in somebody else's name, with the "somebody else" usually being a famous or topical person whose writing are judged to be insufficient for publication. A link to some definitions:
Slashdot Mirror
"Which part of Europe?"
s p
w itzerland.shooting/index.html) prove that, as anyone who has actually been to Switzerland knows, Swiss people don't carry them around for the sake of it, so the probability of them being able to deal with a lunatic who starts shooting people in a shopping mall, post office, factory, or school is no greater than that other non-armed Europeans.
Just about all of them.
"England? Where guns are banned entirely..."
You cite a old article in a rag. A much better and more current source is here:
http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/output/page40.a
There were a total of 765 homicides in England and Wales during the year 2005-2006, which have a combined population of around 54 million. This includes the 52 who were killed in the 7th July bombings. There are several US cities with populations that are a small fraction of this with significantly higher homicide figures for the same period.
"Or Switzerland?"
A country whose entire population is smaller than that of London, and around 15% of the population of England and Wales. But of course, comparing Switzerland with a similar country such as Austria or Sweden (comparable populations, similar individual wealth levels, strict gun laws, and lower homicide rates than Switzerland) doesn't make Switzerland look quite so glowing, just as comparing the UK with similarly populous European countries such as France and Spain reveals that it's actually a much safer country than either. But hey, if you can cherry-pick, then so can I -- my example is Colombia, a country with extremely liberal gun laws, a population that's similar in size to that of England and Wales (40 million or so), and a murder rate of 25,000 people per year compared with the UK's less than 800. If I used your tactics, I would claim that this proves removing the UK's strict gun laws would result in their murder rate leaping to around 35,000 per year almost immediately (it does not of course prove anything of the sort).
"These make a pretty good case for arming everyone!"
They make a pretty good case for living in a country with a small and extremely wealthy, contented populace. Note also that despite everyone having guns, events like this
(http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/09/27/s
"because what could Firefox/Opera possibly mean for non-English speaker?"
Opera is an Italian word (meaning "the work") that English adopted along with many other languages to describe a specific form of musical drama, just as many languages use the French word "ballet" for a type of dance. It will thus have precisely the same meaning for many non-English speakers as it does to you, and rather more meaning to an Italian.
We'd have given anything for stone tablets and a chisel. In my day, we had to write by quenching areas of molten igneous rock wi' our tongues, and then wait for them to cool enough that we could carry 'em up the lip of the volcano on our backs, where our dad would beat us wi' 'em if we made a spelling mistake.
"If you are old enough to remember people cried about XP not running well on hardware that ran Windows98 just fine too."
There were also many who loudly proclaimed that the need for activating it whenever certain pieces of hardware were changed together with its inability to run certain pieces of older software would drive hordes of Windows 9X users to Linux.
"If people could choose what country they shopped from, everyone would buy from the cheapest country."
This is pretty common in the EC.
"Then the other countries stores would be effectively obsolete"
Strange then that this doesn't seem to have happened. Most businesses in the EC are far more concerned about competition from big chain stores that can undercut them locally than whether people can buy something 20% cheaper from another country, because buying from abroad by mail order is only feasible with a narrow range of goods, and the problems with getting them replaced if they're unsatisfactory can far outweigh any price differences.
"you'd end up back at square one with a price that was too low to be profitable in the richer economies and/or too expensive for anyone to buy anything in the poorer economies"
Your assumption is flawed because (a) identical items aren't always cheaper in poorer countries than rich ones (they can actually be more expensive), and (b) it doesn't necessarily cost more to sell an item in a rich country than a poor one due to the presence of an efficient distribution infrastructure, and a lower incidence of thefts and breakages.
While both are sciences, it is important to distinguish between them in order to avoid the sort of deliberate straw man building that the ID lobby does by lumping life origin theories together with the theory of evolution, when they are in fact two separate fields which are only connected by life origin theorists assuming the theory of evolution is correct. Thus, while cosmologists depend on both astronomers and physicists for data on which to both base their theories and falsify them, the data that astronomers and physicists collect doesn't depend in any way on whatever the prevailing cosmological theories of the day might be, and cannot therefore be invalidated by knocking holes in current ideas of cosmology.
"Consider Astronomy. That's definitely a science, but it's fairly hard to repeat the Big Bang"
Big Bang is cosmology, not astronomy.
"Microsoft originally marketed a spreadsheet program called Multiplan in 1982, which was very popular on CP/M systems"
I would dispute Wikipedia's statement that it was "very popular on CP/M systems". SuperCalc was "the standard" on CP/M due to having been launched two years before MultiPlan, and having a feature that MultiPlan (and indeed the much later Lotus 1-2-3) lacked: it could automatically resolve circular references, something that Excel wasn't capable of doing until a decade later.
The "big three" applications on CP/M were WordStar, SuperCalc, and dBase-II, with Microsoft's most popular offering being their BASIC-80 interpreter and BASCOM compiler. Nearly every CP/M 2.0 system I ever saw seemed to have (usually pirated copies of) all of these.
"For instance, I transfer anywhere from 2gb - 50gb a month depending on what I am doing. Here in the US I pay about $50 for an 8mbit/768k connection. My understanding is that with most European providers you pay by the MB and my connection would cost a fortune."
Most Europeans pay a flat rate, not per MB. There is ferocious competition between suppliers in many countries, with large numbers of them competing for the same customers, so at least in some places we seem to get better deals than are typical in the US. I currently live in Spain, and have received telemarketing calls from several companies offering 20Mbit/sec links with free national phone calls for 20 Euro/month (under $27 at today's exchange rates).
"Wow as much as the place I work ticks me off I am grateful that programmers make the decision what tools are used."
.NET application using the latest MS tools and expect it to run under Mono without any issues, so people who want to support both are effectively restricted to using only those features that Mono implements, and they'll have to test and optimise all code on both platforms. This is obviously rather more costly than simply writing for .NET on Windows and ignoring the much smaller number of non-Windows users, or using (for example) Java, which has "official" versions for several platforms, and a set of excellent free tools that run pretty much identically on all all of them.
You're very lucky to work at a place like that. Most just tell you what to work with, and then blame the programmers if the tools turn out to be unsuitable for the task at hand, and the end results are therefore sub-optimal.
"it never crossed my mind that I would want to be forced to port the same working code to a new Microsoft platform over and over again"
You only have to look at how many web sites have been completely rewritten to use Ajax or Flash in an entirely superfluous way to see that It isn't just Microsoft tool and language users who constantly change working stuff to be compliant the latest buzzwords. I've seen several working, mature, and stable "fat-client" client-server products that customers were happy with get totally rewritten to use web interfaces, Java, etc. at great expense, only to scrap the lot because their customers unanimously prefer the old system.
"But then we use C++, Java, Perl, PHP, and Python where I work."
I've seen a lot of PHP getting rewritten to use the latest features, and newer versions of Python have introduced some incompatibilities with existing code bases, so once again, this isn't just something that people in the MS tool world do.
"And we use PostgresSQL for most of our in house databases except the accounting system which runs on our only Windows server."
Databases are IMO one of the areas where the open source world really shines. There's plenty of choice ranging from small "embedable" systems to full blown servers, and they run on all major platforms and several not-so-major ones. I haven't used PostgreSQL much, but have had excellent results from Firebird and SQLite, and would thus recommend either for the sorts of jobs they're suited to.
" have to agree about Mono. I have not learned it so I don't want to bad mouth it too much."
The problems Mono has with the few executive decision makers who've heard of it are two-fold:
1) It isn't supported by a major corporation who can be used a "blame sink" if things go wrong.
2) By chasing Microsoft's coat-tails, they're in the same position as the people who are maintaining Wine, i.e. that of tracking a company with a notable habit of regularly deprecating stuff they were pushing a short while ago in favour of something new that does a similar job in an entirely different way. This means that one cannot write an arbitrary
"Java I know and I actually like. You can write a good application very quickly with Java."
What I like about Java is the large number of quality frameworks, beans, and tools that make nearly every job a matter of selecting the right components, and tying them together with what amounts to some "glue code". Python and Perl programmers also have large bodies of code, frameworks, and tools to chose from, and PHP is getting that way (as is Ruby). There is a also a wide variety of more traditional compiled languages and libraries for them that are highly portable (albeit in a different way), most of which have excellent free implementations, so it's difficult to make a convincing business case for Mono when so many other (often considerably more mature) options exist.
"there are a number of free Development systems that are actually very nice to use like Netbeans and Eclipse."
Not only are they
"Developers choose their jobs."
.NET knock-off with the notable disadvantage of not being supported by a big company, which in the risk-averse world of corporate IT means it's slightly less desirable than leprosy.
They do indeed. However, for those with commitments to families, other factors may be more important than what programming language is being used.
"I still don't know how VB managed to sneak in to IT"
The same way that PowerBuilder, Oracle Forms, and other similar tools got adopted in the past.
"I mean Basic???"
It's no worse than COBOL or RPG, which were also popular in the corporate world.
"I think it started with little useful utilities written by somebody out side of IT just mutated from there"
It actually gained traction because corporate types thought it could utilise the significant numbers of semi-skilled BASIC programmers that were out there (this was actually largely an illusion because the event-driven nature of VB was very alien to most people who'd used other types of BASIC).
"I do lump the decision makers into the classification of developer."
How you lump things is up to you. Reality is of course another matter entirely.
"The people they decide what tools are used to develop should be developers themselves."
Unfortunately, what they should be is very different from what they are. And those very rare executives who started out as developers usually haven't done it seriously for years, so they're hopelessly out of date, and therefore often do more harm than good.
" They should also know that they have a big and expensive task in moving from traditional VB to C# or VB.NET"
Has it ever occurred to you that this might be what everyone from the senior IT managers to the most junior programmers actually want? Big buzzword-compliant rewrites mean a constant source of funding and steady jobs, all of which can be easily justified to upper management by all the executive-level crap that Microsoft have prepared for just this purpose.
"Let us not for get the several million lines of Foxpro code that are now also facing it's end of life"
See above.
"Seems like a great opportunity for Java or Mono if they can just wake up the sheep"
Java's already got the corporate ear, but Microsoft have a very powerful marketing machine that's out to convince "all MS" shops that there's no advantage to Java in their specific case. Mono has little visibility, and those executives who do know about it tend to see it as a poor
"for some reason they are lining up for .NET like lambs to the slaughter while the developers that choose Java just go on their merry way."
.NET, Java, and for that matter any other language with a regular pay cheque attached.
Developers don't get to choose the languages or environments they work with except in small shops or one man outfits. People wrote in the old VB because somebody far higher up in the corporate food chain decided they were going to use it, and the same goes for
" Personally I think the advantages of big brains is so overwhelming that to attribute it to just raw non-utilitarian sexual selection is rather odd."
They also have notable disadvantages. Human brains require significant amounts of energy to sustain them; and babies must be born while their heads are small enough to fit the birth canal, which means they're less developed than most other animals, and therefore remain helpless (and potentially vulnerable) for a much longer period -- they're also dependent on parents for protection and sustenance for significantly more time than any other animal. Humans were extremely rare creatures for well over 90% of our history, and we nearly became extinct on more than one occasion, so from a biological perspective, whether the advantages of large brains outweigh their costs is debatable.
"Idiots exist".
But they're already on the Internet. This was a survey of the other 1/3 of the the US population.
"My bet is that Sony realizes that the PS3 is only really a value for people needing HD, and many people simply aren't running HD yet."
The current Spanish PS3 advertising campaign pushes the Sony Bravia 1080P TVs as an ideal companion to it for this reason (in addition to Sony hoping to sell a bunch of Bravias, obviously!). Big screen TVs are reasonably popular, but HD isn't because there are no HD services on standard broadcast, digital terrestrial, cable, or digital satellite, so there's not really been any motivation to ask for it, or pay the extra for TVs that have it. 1080P systems (labelled "True HD") are thus ridiculously expensive at around 3500 Euros (or at least they were when I looked at them near the end of last year -- maybe the price has fallen a little since then), well over double the price of a 720P / 1080i "HD Ready" set with the same size screen.
Note that AFAIK the PS3 is the first device capable of playing HD media to be widely sold here. I've not seen either a HD-DVD or Blue-Ray player being offered at a general retail level, or any media for them, although this does not of course mean that they aren't available from some specialist retailers. The PS3 is however being sold by department stores and general electrical places who certainly didn't carry such devices, so it's somewhat unique in that respect.
"That known the best way to get people evangelizing about the product is to make sure they are using it in the most optimal scenario."
A number of large outlets don't seem to have had any problems shifting their entire launch-day allocation of PS3s without resorting to any gimmicks or tricks (that I know of) here, but it it should also be noted that these same outlets have been back-ordered for Wiis since November, and I obviously have no way of knowing how many PS3s they were actually supplied with. The news for Sony is however initially pretty good in this country, although it doesn't of course indicate that they'll be successful over the long-term, and says nothing whatsoever about how well they're doing in the rest of Europe.
"You said "precisely zero", you're wrong, that and other reports of malware on the Mac prove it."
Ok then, show me one piece of malware that's been _confirmed_ to affect anyone besides those who deliberately ran them for testing purposes.
"You're the one talking rubbish."
LOL! And this from a man who has been attempting to avoid answering any point except this one, and isn't even capable of doing that.
"Again, you said "precisely zero" not "significant numbers"
Then prove me wrong by providing something that's _been confirmed_ to affect anyone who wasn't deliberately experimenting with it in full knowledge of what it was. I haven't seen any such confirmation for the example you cited -- indeed, every alert, advisory, blog entry, and article I can find seems to be derived from one incident where _a reader_ sent an example file to MacWorld UK _claiming_ that he was "infected" by it (downloading and running an embedded script that deletes some files and then stops doesn't really count as an infection).
"Just pick your words more carefully."
So I should emulate you by writing outright lies such as:
"This is an actual backdoor running out there on more than 1 Mac."
NB: it's rather obvious that you studiously avoid dealing with points that demonstrate your immense balderdash-to-content ratio such as the answers I gave to the above piece of laughable false tripe.
So, in summary, you say:
""You said "precisely zero", you're wrong, "that and other reports of malware on the Mac prove it.""
And I have responded by asking you to back up this assertion by providing an authoritative source confirming that any of these have affected _a single Macintosh running OS X_ that wasn't the result of somebody deliberately running them for testing purposes. If they don't affect anyone, they're proofs of concept, not malware, so my assertion of zero pieces of _malware_ for OS X still stands until you can provide some proof that this isn't the case.
"Because you're either a liar or a moron."
Now, now, no need to be rude just because you were caught out talking utter rubbish.
"Back in 2004 this trojan was found in the wild. Yes that's "in the wild", not some proof of concept crap. This is an actual backdoor running out there on more than 1 Mac."
1) It hasn't been confirmed to have affected _any_ Macs. It was originally sent by a reader who _claimed_ to have downloaded it from LimeWire believing it to be a free version of MS Office (despite being only about 2K in length) to MacWorld UK, but there's no way of knowing whether this actually happened -- for all they know, the "reader" could have written it himself. There is no record of anyone else having been affected by it.
2) It isn't a "back door". The "trojan" is a simple piece of AppleScript with an icon pasted in that deletes files in a user's home directory if run -- it has no other capabilities, and is thus simply a graphical version of a UNIX shell script containing "rm -rf".
"There are other worms and viruses but again because so few people run a Mac it's not widespread."
If this is the case, then I'm sure you can provide some links to prove that this isn't yet another case of you blowing a load of hot air. It should be easy, because if, as you claimed previously, that this is entirely a function of market share, you should have _at least_ 2,500 to choose from.
"Mac is getting burned this bad at only 6.38% market share I really shudder to think how bad it would be if they ever got really big."
I agree - only 6% of the market, and there's already been a Mac user who claims to have downloaded and run a piece of AppleScript that deleted some files in his home directory. Imagine if it had the same share as Windows -- there'd be 20 or 30 times as many things like this, making a grand total of 30, dwarfing the mere half million for Windows XP.
So come on, show us some evidence of _real malware_ that's affecting significant numbers of those 5 million Macs that Apple sold last year. I eagerly await your response.
"Windows has 93.05%* market share. Mac has 6.38%* market share. That means there are almost 15 times the amount people possibly trying to break Windows security yet it has less vulnerabilities and took less time to release patches."
Yet strangely, OS X doesn't have 6% of the malware that's been produced for Windows XP alone, despite being two years older. So let's be generous, and use the Mac's average of 2% global market share over the lifetime of OS X, and reduce it to 1% just in case somebody's exaggerating Apple's sales. This should mean that 1% of all the malware out there targets OS X if your assertion about market share being the determinant factor is correct. AV Comparatives (who test AV software) use a database of XP malware that contains a little less than half a million entries. Let's assume for the sake of argument that (a) this database contains a sample of every piece of malware ever released for XP, and (b) that 50% of the entries are garbage, which leaves us with only 250,000 entries. For your assertion to hold water, using all these extremely generous figures, there should thus be _at least_ 2,500 pieces of assorted malware for OS X. So where are they?
"In fact Mac users were left vulnerable on average over 2 months longer than Windows users"
Indeed. So where is all the malware? If what you, Symantec, and Microsoft keep telling us is is true, the fact that few Mac users bother with any security measures beyond those in the OS itself should mean virtually every Mac with an Internet connection is infected by at least one of the 2,500 viruses, trojans, bots, premium-rate diallers, etc., etc., that should be out there, so please explain why, after eight years on the market, Macs running OS X have precisely zero infections despite much crying wolf by the likes of Symantec during the last two years, highly publicised events such as the Month Of Apple Bugs, and Apple's slowness in fixing _known_ vulnerabilities?
I wasn't particularly referring to _a_ religion, but rather all those religions (hence my use of the plural) who contend that morality is absolute rather than relative. This was a subject of philosophical debate centuries before Christianity appeared, and has also been debated in cultures where Judaeo-inspired religions such as Christianity and Islam never gained much of a foothold.
" But why did you narrow to primitive, tribal cultures?"
Because the post I was replying to was talking about how art may have evolved. The people who produced early cave paintings were probably too small to be classed as tribes -- even clans would I think be pushing it, as they were probably contained between 20 or 30 individuals (if that).
"I would submit that this happens still in many cultures. "I'm bored, you're here... let's have sex.""
And "Let's have sex despite the fact that I'm not in the least bored"!
"A cave\modern restaurant\living-room couch"
I think one of the key differences with the cave would be a complete lack of hangups about sex. When you have an extended family group living in a large communal area with no privacy, people copulate in public because it's the only way they can copulate, and children will therefore be accustomed to seeing it from birth, just as they'll have also seen babies being born, people dying, and everyone from the most respected elder to the most insignificant child shitting and pissing. This form of "do what nature demands without caring who's watching" seems to be one of the first casualties of civilisation, irrespective of where in the world that civilisation occurs (i.e. it's not simply a Judaeo-Christian thing).
"plagiarism is "the copying of someone's ideas, text or other creative work and claiming it as one's own." Ghostwriting most definitely is plagiarism and it is allowed by copyright law."
Oh dear. A ghost writer is employed to write about the life of another person who provides them with interviews and / or notes to work from, so where is this supposed plagiarism occurring? The person who is being written about is the sole source of information, so a ghost writer essentially acts as a specialised form of editor, much as a good secretary who turns a swearing infested rant by an annoyed executive into a formal letter does. Furthermore, the only thing "allowed by copyright law" is the ability to voluntarily relinquish one's rights, just as employees of software companies, people who write advertising jingles, and various other types of creative professional regularly do in return for being paid.
"The only reason you may be sued if you plagiarize without permission is that doing so requires that you make a copy of the work. In other words, it has nothing to you plagiarizing, but with you making an unauthorized copy."
If you'd bothered to read the cases I included (especially the first one), you would know that this is utter rubbish. To win a plagiarism case, one merely needs to show that there is a similarity between two works, not that they are identical (or even nearly identical), or that the person being sued for plagiarism had access to the original, or even that it was a deliberate act. If a plaintiff can show that it wasn't _impossible_ for me to have read, heard, or seen a work at some time during my life, and show that they both have enough in common for a jury to believe that they're "substantially similar" (a deliberately vague term that various juries seem to interpret very differently), then they stand a chance for successfully suing me for plagiarism, even if it is accepted by both the plaintiff and jury that the act was entirely unintentional (i.e. I had produced what I sincerely believed was an entirely original work).
" Art is quite often a creative process and according to Geoffrey Miller could easily have helped with sexual selection of mates; why that is a pretty picture... let's have sex."
From a purely anthropological viewpoint, the preoccupation of primitive art with animals that bone fragments indicate were hunted by the people who painted it, competed with them for food, or hunted them would seem to indicate that they were extremely unlikely to be a mechanism for getting laid. In primitive tribal cultures where infant mortality rates are high, the fact that girls babies are stronger and therefore more likely to survive results in there being several females of breeding age for each male, and the adult mortality rate among young males also tends to be higher because of hunting accidents and violent conflicts with other groups, again increasing the ratio of females to males. It's unlikely therefore that any male capable of doing something the group regarded as having some value would require anything beyond being present to have a choice of several willing sexual partners.
"We're going to see a huge backlash against doing any serious study of biological basis for morality because it threatens religion."
It actually threatens moral relativism rather than religions, many of whom are likely to see this as scientific evidence for their contention that Man has an absolute moral framework which was "programmed" by a divine creator, who also gave us the capability of consciously deciding whether to follow it or not.
NB: I a not religious, and do not believe in divine creators or intelligent designers.
"We're already seeing an organized effort to marginalize science by zealots who see the writing on the wall."
The problem is that they _don't_ see the writing on the wall. People who believe that their ideas are _the truth_ simply regard those who don't agree with them as being at best misguided, and at worst deliberate spreaders of lies. And make no mistake -- in the US (and increasingly in the UK) they're gaining ground with the general public, not losing it, so it's science rather than religion that's increasingly on the defensive, because 99% of people are incapable of judging the validity of evidence for themselves, so they'll happily believe that the human eye or bacterial cilia are too complex to have evolved if somebody who _appears_ to know what they're talking about tells them that it is so.
Science isn't particularly easy for ordinary people to accept because it's full of unimaginable numbers that they can't grasp, and also full of unknowns, probables, and maybes. By contrast, religion offers simple solutions that are claimed to be certain rather than merely probable, possible, or likely, and for many, require less belief than the scientific explanation because they fit what people observe around them. Man demonstrably conceives, designs, and makes complex machines, so it's easier to accept that the huge variety complex biological machines were also conceived, designed, and made than that they _probably_ evolved from simple organisms via sheer chance over spans of time that are too immense for them to grasp or visualise. If science is to survive in the Western world beyond the 21st century, we need to realise that a great deal of it is not immediately obvious to everyone, and also that mocking and belittling those who can't immediately grasp certain areas of it (something I've been guilty of on many occasions) is counterproductive because it can drive them into the arms of the religious, who will welcome them instead of trying to make them look like idiots.
"It is legal to plagiarize, and big companies do it very often (it's generally known as ghost writing). Copyright infringement is illegal."
- loses-plagiarism-lawsuit/
r ls=en-us&defl=en&q=define:ghostwriter&sa=X&oi=glos sary_definition&ct=title
1. While not "illegal", plagiarism is classed as a form of copyright infringement, so people and companies can be, and have been successfully sued for it. Here are some links (Google for "plagiarism lawsuit" to see a whole load of others):
http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/mysweet.htm
http://arthistory.about.com/b/a/116985.htm
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2005/11/18/madonna
http://www.own-it.org/news/article/?p=15&a=220&t=
2. Ghost writing isn't plagiarism. A ghost writer is paid to write books or articles in somebody else's name, with the "somebody else" usually being a famous or topical person whose writing are judged to be insufficient for publication. A link to some definitions:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&
LOL!