An MSDN subscription is actually remarkably inexpensive given the value one derives from it.
How does paying a positive amount of cash for an item with negative value equate to a 'remarkably inexpensive' transaction. The MSDN only seems to have positive value because you are operating in an environment where Microsoft's illegal monopoly forces you to use inferior tools to develop for inferior platforms. I guess paying protection money to a gangster looks 'remarkably inexpensive' when the alternative is having your business torched.
I don't know why folks who wrte computer software for a living like free software
For the same reason that Taxi drivers like 'free' roads (yes, I know that they pay for them in taxes, but they don't pay more for using them more). Every software developer is a software user first.
Besides, software developers don't want to get paid for writing software. They want to get paid for writing interesting software. Re-implementing the operating system, web server, word processor and RDBMS over and over again is not interesting or desirable. Software that can be classified as 'infrastructure' or 'commodity' is boring, and will be replaced by open source alternatives. Custom software that meets oddball requirements (and has requirements that change every two weeks) will not be the domain of open source software. However, as much commonality as possible should be squeezed out of those custom projects and put into re-usable packages such as JBoss, because re-implementing object containers for custom business objects is also not interesting.
BTW, I think that OSS is already reducing offshoring in this way. It makes more sense to offshore large projects than small ones. It makes more sense to offshore well-understood and already-solved problems than it does to offshore novel solutions to unique problems (you need the responsiveness and collaboration of onsite developers (co-located with your analysts) for novel problems). Since you can grab an OSS product off the shelf for more of your infrastructure needs, a much larger percentage of your now smaller project consists of the novel and unique.
Is he on drugs, or what? He can barely string together a coherent sentence, let alone manage to simplify a project like Wine
Yeah, that's going to be a real handicap seeing as how Wine is written in 'English' (the developers just wouldn't go for English++, dammit). You should see their codebase, it looks like James Joyce and ee cummings got into a pie-throwing contest, but with words.
If he has to program his phone to call him, then he probably doesn't have much use for the Barry White CD. And if his bachelor pad is 'Swinging', it is because he is a Java GUI developer.
Has it occurred to anyone else that this might be Nokia's attempt to pull a Ballmer-kneecap against Symbian? "Hey we're looking at Linux! Now Micros^W Symbian, what's your really-lowest offer?"
After a while, the pirated-software-loving folks who use these boobytrapped packages will suffer huge losses: lost sales (due to spontaneous e-mailing of company data to a competitor), injured patients (due to altered patient data), etc.
But legal M$ users have been suffering these problems for years, and they haven't cleaned-up their act. Even after you announced what you had done, no one could tell if their copy had been deliberately boobytrapped, or was just a normal copy of Windows.
I now see what you were trying to say, but I must call BS. There is no scientific principle that says that a population of 2 million prosimians cannot undergo 1,000 mutations in a single generation. We would expect to see fluctuations in mutation rates, and environmental pressures can increase the winnowing rate that will cause these mutations to be reinforced. To declare that we know enough put a cap on these changes is not credible, and even if it were, 2000 changes over 100,000 years doesn't pass the whiff test.
However, for one who have no faith in this, it is impossible to even get into it, because this is a world-view. There's no point in arguing about definitions.
I am not suggesting that your beliefs are wrong or invalid. I suggest that we speaking about them, that you delineate belief from knowledge, without implying that one is inferior to the other. In fact, one can say that knowledge is inferior because it is composed of possibly flawed conclusions drawn from a limited number of observations, whereas beliefs (and Faith) are pure, perfect, universal, and irrefutable. So keep your superior beliefs out of inferior Science (and vice versa). This point is especially valid when discussing ID, because Christian Fundamentalists want their beliefs taught as knowledge in Science classes.
Science is about knowledge, not Truth or Belief or Answers. The state of Science at any given moment is basically: these are the few things that we know, and here are the observations (direct or indirect) that cause us to know them. And BTW, please show us that the conclusions that we have drawn from these observation are incorrect, because that is the means by which our knowledge grows in both quantity and quality.
Considering that humans have approx 3x10^9 base-pairs and the long time span since the human-ape split, 1667 seems like an awfully small number of mutations to separate us from the apes. If that number is correct, then our relationship is incredibly close, and either: we are related, or the Intelligent Designer is an extremely lazy cut-and-paste-code-monkey.
Ask any seven year old and they would probably say humans came from apes - which is NOT proven.
Not only is it not proven, it's not even hypothesized. The creatures that became Humans and the creatures that became apes diverged long before the appearance of apes. Our most recent common ancestor probably resembled a modern-day lemur.
Are you surprised that the science we teach to seven years olds is imprecise?
You see, the homoreligiousous is incapable of logic
I respectfully submit that the above nomenclature is incorrect because speciation has not yet occurred. A more apt name would be home sapiens religiosus which is capable of producing offspring with homo sapiens sapiens. I suspect that your logical fallacy would be cleared up by the following statement: just because they do produce offspring by mating with their siblings, does not mean that they can only produce offspring with their siblings.
Can anyone here give an experiment which can be used to falsify evolution
Sequence the human genome and the genomes of the primates that we suspect are our evolutionary cousins. If you find that our genome is 'too different' than theirs, that could be proof that we are not related, and our species is not the result of evolutionary speciation. For a value of x that would be sufficient proof, I submit 30% but IANAEB.
This experiment is an attempt to prove evolution is false, and as such, finding more than a 30% overlap does not prove evolution to be true. If you find more than a 30% overlap, then maybe we are related or maybe the Intelligent Designer is a cut-and-paste-code-monkey.
Actually, to avoid the 'separation of church and state' issue, most IDers don't say 'God did it'. They say that some Intelligent Designer did it, maybe aliens. By pointing out the flaws that a perfect god would not have incorporated, you have shown that while ID may or may not be debatable, the one thing that can be ruled out is ID by a perfect god. Now all we have left on the ID side is a bickering pantheon of imperfect gods, or some hoopy froods from outer space.
I just know that there is a Big Mind behind it all.
Why use the word 'know' when the word 'believe' would work? You do not have knowledge of this Big Mind, hence you do not 'know' that it exists. Did you chose to use the word 'know' because you feel that it is more emphatic or well respected than the word 'believe'? You are free to hold a belief stronger than you hold a piece of knowledge.
"and there's been a lot of innovation (in the last decade or so) in the software industry where patents exist and are enforced in so many countries."
Translation: our software sucks; OSS is better, but we have been able (in many cases) to make it illegal to write competing software. Therefor, you are stuck with our inferior software, so bend over and open your wallets.
You don't seem to understand that when we say "change our clocks", we don't actually change the clocks. We just change the time to which the clocks are set.
OTOH if we forced every American to buy new clocks and watches twice a year, that would really stimulate the economy!
The evil is not in the machine, it is and or will be in the use of the machine.
And if the same people were working on a mind-control machine that could 'convince' protesters that the government was doing the right thing about insert-issue-here? The evil would still be in the use of the device. Who would you trust to not abuse this device?
he obviously must be carrying some trade secrets with him
This guy is an Exec. What do you think are the chances that he ever understood the aspects of search engine technology that could be considered 'trade secrets'? At his level, Google probably wants him because of a proven track record of motivating and managing a department of Chinese techies.
I still say making biodiesel from algae is the best prospect.
Some of the algae varieties look very interesting (and harvesting them would be a 'flow' process since they would naturally form a slurry). Another prospect is industrial hemp. It is an oil-rich plant (like corn), but it is a 'weed' that grows very fast and doesn't need ferilizer or pesticides. It still has to be harvested, but remember that petroleum oil has to be pumped out of the ground, and shipped across oceans (most of it). Domestically grown bio-diesel may well require less energy input per harnessable erg than foreign petro-oil (IANACE).
Nature does all of the work putting energy into corn too; it's called the Sun. Corn oil is an energy-rich compound, and all of that energy was solar. The 'P' for Physics argument is absolutely retarded.
Slashdot Mirror
How does paying a positive amount of cash for an item with negative value equate to a 'remarkably inexpensive' transaction. The MSDN only seems to have positive value because you are operating in an environment where Microsoft's illegal monopoly forces you to use inferior tools to develop for inferior platforms. I guess paying protection money to a gangster looks 'remarkably inexpensive' when the alternative is having your business torched.
For the same reason that Taxi drivers like 'free' roads (yes, I know that they pay for them in taxes, but they don't pay more for using them more). Every software developer is a software user first.
Besides, software developers don't want to get paid for writing software. They want to get paid for writing interesting software. Re-implementing the operating system, web server, word processor and RDBMS over and over again is not interesting or desirable. Software that can be classified as 'infrastructure' or 'commodity' is boring, and will be replaced by open source alternatives. Custom software that meets oddball requirements (and has requirements that change every two weeks) will not be the domain of open source software. However, as much commonality as possible should be squeezed out of those custom projects and put into re-usable packages such as JBoss, because re-implementing object containers for custom business objects is also not interesting.
BTW, I think that OSS is already reducing offshoring in this way. It makes more sense to offshore large projects than small ones. It makes more sense to offshore well-understood and already-solved problems than it does to offshore novel solutions to unique problems (you need the responsiveness and collaboration of onsite developers (co-located with your analysts) for novel problems). Since you can grab an OSS product off the shelf for more of your infrastructure needs, a much larger percentage of your now smaller project consists of the novel and unique.
Don't forget about us: The United Evolutionarians of Latter Day Natural Philosophers! You insensitive clod.
Yeah, that's going to be a real handicap seeing as how Wine is written in 'English' (the developers just wouldn't go for English++, dammit). You should see their codebase, it looks like James Joyce and ee cummings got into a pie-throwing contest, but with words.
If he has to program his phone to call him, then he probably doesn't have much use for the Barry White CD. And if his bachelor pad is 'Swinging', it is because he is a Java GUI developer.
Has it occurred to anyone else that this might be Nokia's attempt to pull a Ballmer-kneecap against Symbian? "Hey we're looking at Linux! Now Micros^W Symbian, what's your really-lowest offer?"
But legal M$ users have been suffering these problems for years, and they haven't cleaned-up their act. Even after you announced what you had done, no one could tell if their copy had been deliberately boobytrapped, or was just a normal copy of Windows.
If you aren't cutting traces on the PCB with an X-Acto knife then you are a prime candidate for an AOL account.
The spammer was beaten to death with an artifically enlarged and artifically erect body part.
I now see what you were trying to say, but I must call BS. There is no scientific principle that says that a population of 2 million prosimians cannot undergo 1,000 mutations in a single generation. We would expect to see fluctuations in mutation rates, and environmental pressures can increase the winnowing rate that will cause these mutations to be reinforced. To declare that we know enough put a cap on these changes is not credible, and even if it were, 2000 changes over 100,000 years doesn't pass the whiff test.
I am not suggesting that your beliefs are wrong or invalid. I suggest that we speaking about them, that you delineate belief from knowledge, without implying that one is inferior to the other. In fact, one can say that knowledge is inferior because it is composed of possibly flawed conclusions drawn from a limited number of observations, whereas beliefs (and Faith) are pure, perfect, universal, and irrefutable. So keep your superior beliefs out of inferior Science (and vice versa). This point is especially valid when discussing ID, because Christian Fundamentalists want their beliefs taught as knowledge in Science classes.
Science is about knowledge, not Truth or Belief or Answers. The state of Science at any given moment is basically: these are the few things that we know, and here are the observations (direct or indirect) that cause us to know them. And BTW, please show us that the conclusions that we have drawn from these observation are incorrect, because that is the means by which our knowledge grows in both quantity and quality.
Considering that humans have approx 3x10^9 base-pairs and the long time span since the human-ape split, 1667 seems like an awfully small number of mutations to separate us from the apes. If that number is correct, then our relationship is incredibly close, and either: we are related, or the Intelligent Designer is an extremely lazy cut-and-paste-code-monkey.
Not only is it not proven, it's not even hypothesized. The creatures that became Humans and the creatures that became apes diverged long before the appearance of apes. Our most recent common ancestor probably resembled a modern-day lemur.
Are you surprised that the science we teach to seven years olds is imprecise?
I respectfully submit that the above nomenclature is incorrect because speciation has not yet occurred. A more apt name would be home sapiens religiosus which is capable of producing offspring with homo sapiens sapiens. I suspect that your logical fallacy would be cleared up by the following statement: just because they do produce offspring by mating with their siblings, does not mean that they can only produce offspring with their siblings.
Sequence the human genome and the genomes of the primates that we suspect are our evolutionary cousins. If you find that our genome is 'too different' than theirs, that could be proof that we are not related, and our species is not the result of evolutionary speciation. For a value of x that would be sufficient proof, I submit 30% but IANAEB.
This experiment is an attempt to prove evolution is false, and as such, finding more than a 30% overlap does not prove evolution to be true. If you find more than a 30% overlap, then maybe we are related or maybe the Intelligent Designer is a cut-and-paste-code-monkey.
Actually, to avoid the 'separation of church and state' issue, most IDers don't say 'God did it'. They say that some Intelligent Designer did it, maybe aliens. By pointing out the flaws that a perfect god would not have incorporated, you have shown that while ID may or may not be debatable, the one thing that can be ruled out is ID by a perfect god. Now all we have left on the ID side is a bickering pantheon of imperfect gods, or some hoopy froods from outer space.
Why use the word 'know' when the word 'believe' would work? You do not have knowledge of this Big Mind, hence you do not 'know' that it exists. Did you chose to use the word 'know' because you feel that it is more emphatic or well respected than the word 'believe'? You are free to hold a belief stronger than you hold a piece of knowledge.
Translation: our software sucks; OSS is better, but we have been able (in many cases) to make it illegal to write competing software. Therefor, you are stuck with our inferior software, so bend over and open your wallets.
OTOH if we forced every American to buy new clocks and watches twice a year, that would really stimulate the economy!
Can't be. We change our smoke alarm batteries on Pedant Day, and who can afford that many batteries?
And if the same people were working on a mind-control machine that could 'convince' protesters that the government was doing the right thing about insert-issue-here? The evil would still be in the use of the device. Who would you trust to not abuse this device?
And programmers in *nix would rather be sandblasted and dipped in rubbing alcohol than have to write Pascal.
This guy is an Exec. What do you think are the chances that he ever understood the aspects of search engine technology that could be considered 'trade secrets'? At his level, Google probably wants him because of a proven track record of motivating and managing a department of Chinese techies.
Some of the algae varieties look very interesting (and harvesting them would be a 'flow' process since they would naturally form a slurry). Another prospect is industrial hemp. It is an oil-rich plant (like corn), but it is a 'weed' that grows very fast and doesn't need ferilizer or pesticides. It still has to be harvested, but remember that petroleum oil has to be pumped out of the ground, and shipped across oceans (most of it). Domestically grown bio-diesel may well require less energy input per harnessable erg than foreign petro-oil (IANACE).
Nature does all of the work putting energy into corn too; it's called the Sun. Corn oil is an energy-rich compound, and all of that energy was solar. The 'P' for Physics argument is absolutely retarded.