You capitalize God. In my religion I use G-d because it is forbidden to use the whole name of G-d as this is considered to be taking "his" name in vain. Even though that is not his name, we still use the hyphen out of respect. Tom-ey-to, tom-ah-to - let's call the whole thing off:)
Incidentally the use of "his" is also, in my opinion, misguided since G-d doesn't really have a gender, there was no gender-neutral article in ancient Hebrew / Aramaic / Greek.
When posting on slashdot I don't use he/she/it to be impish or insulting to THE LORD. I do it because the likelihood is that whoever reads what I write probably doesn't believe in G-d the same way I do and I have no wish to shove the nature and manner of my personal relationship with the universe's creator down anyone else's neck. I will probably be addressing some of the many people who don't believe in one god, or any god, and who, though they lead thoroughly morally upstanding lives, don't believe in G-d. They live on the same planet I do and deserve the same respect as anyone. And certainly when we are talking about explosions on the sun, using the technology we have to detect spectrographic signatures of the rocks on the moon, I suspect that my degree in Geology and interest in space science probably counts a lot more than my religion.
The discussion is about using a rather novel and interesting technique (which we have devised because we are capable of doing so because we've evolved that way or because we were created that way and made to look like we'd evolved that way it doesn't really matter, the end result is the same) to try to ascertain the origin of the moon / how G-d made the moon look as though it was made through some other process.
I am trying to be as inclusive as possible and am interested in understand the nature of what is out there. Why? Because it's interesting.
You seem to be interested in getting people to follow THE LORD - I imagine to save their souls. (the old "the only way to G-d is through me" thing, I imagine?) I'm picking up some sort of crusade on your part to save the unbelievers on slashdot. I'm sorry but my soul isn't up for saving right now and I don't know that any of the people reading your diatribe will be converted by how holy and fervent your faith is. "Don't do this, don't do that, this is insulting, that is disrespectful, this is how it happened even though the evidence is to the contrary" give it a break. Go back to being a human, to being humble. Go back to being a human - as made in G-d's image - let people be. Lead by dogma and dictat and people will try to wind you up just for a laugh. Lead by example and they'll follow you because they think you're really cool.
first off I didn't insult god and nor did I intend to. However if I, an infinitessimally small speck on an infinitessimally small planet, in an insignificant galaxy in the unbelievable vastness of the universe DID insult him... well I think he has bigger fish to fry than me. This geo-centric view - that the world is God's big creation - THAT insults god because the whole point of what I was saying was that the universe and the elegance of the rules that run it are, for me, the miracle of creation (again if you do the whole god thing and the whole creation thing).
Secondly, please quote me. When you write, in a public forum, and accuse me of calling you small minded or closed minded at least have the courtesy to quote. Please. It shows a certain level of humility both towards him upstairs and towards others if you at least do this. Go back, read what I wrote, find the bit where I said you were closed mind, IT ISN'T THERE BECAUSE I DIDN'T SAY IT. Question - do you use the same level of accuracy when you quote god? Remember - I am made in his image...
You say the universe was created in six days. Six days from where? If you are at the centre of something as infinitely massive as the universe, at the point of the big bang then in fact the universe has just been created, just now. If you are one of the first bits of stuff ejected from the big bang you've been flying away from the big bang for the last 13 billion years. Welcome to relativity.
Finally, we were created in god's image, right? Ok so if I'm in god's image I have the right, even the duty, to question and learn and understand the HOW. A sheep can stand in the field and look at the world and appreciate it. I am a human, I have to go out there and understand HOW not just sit here saying "god is great, that's all there is to it".
1.) and how exactly did he/she/it create the moon?
2.) given that free will exists, to prove that god made the moon would then prove the existence of god which would render that free will redundant. Therefore when god created the moon (if god created the moon) he/she/it had to make it look as though it was formed through natural processes. Surely the studying of these natural processes allows us to appreciate even better the nature of the place where we live and the processes which occur and, if you're that way inclined, the wonder of god's creation.
To simply sit there and say "god created the moon, we don't need to study it" is to deny the very beauty and elegance of gods creation (if you believe in that).
Finally, I see you quote Genesis and I note that the story of the creation in Genesis is not too dissimilar to many earlier creation stories told in earlier, pre-Judaic cultures / religions. The story of creation as told in Genesis is, approximately, in the same chronological order as observed scientifically which is remarkable. What would have been more remarkable is if god had turned to the children of Israel 3000 years at Mount Sinai and said "well I created the universe 13 billion years ago, there were some bigger stars, they exploded and reformed to make newer stars until about 4.5 billion years ago there was just the right mix of heavier and lighter elements to create a solar system that would support life. I made sure there was a heavy gas giant quite a long way out to mop up most of the asteroids that could damage life as it formed, I caused a collision quite earlier on to create the moon which would create the tidal effects that would encourage water to be trapped on the planet and enable it to move around enough to cause sufficient denudation to allow some form of heat transference from the core via tectonics. Making sure that there was a strong electro-magnetic field that protected the earth from the sun's harmful rays, while having it swap once every half million years to allow just enough quick mutation to allow some sort of plausible evolution, I allowed stuff to evolve pretty much for 4 billion years safe in the knowledge that at some point, something would evolve that could look around and say "hey, who made us then?" and I'd be able to pop down, say hello and give you some laws".
It's not even intelligent design. It's just a bunch of circumstances that couldn't have ended any other way BUT to give life, whether you believe god put them there or that in a universe of 500 billion stars there's going to be at least one system that evolves life, or whether that is in fact the same thing. What is for sure is that had god come out with all that 3000 years ago they wouldn't have believed him/her/it - in fact there's plenty people around today who don't believe it and that's ok too. But back then, they already had a creation story, so he just took the one they had, changed it a bit and gave it back to them. Better something they could believe than the truth - that the universe is so big that something like the earth would have happened anyway and actually the miracle of the creation was something completely different if you choose to believe in it anyway.
Or go even further back
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iPods at War
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· Score: 1
during the Napoleonic wars troops on both sides would regularly rape and pillage wherever they were, safe in the knowledge that they were unlikely to be caught or punished.
Which ever side you support, whatever your views on the current situation, what can not be denied is there are a LOT of tooled up, strong, testosterone-filled soldiers in these places. When not at work they need to keep themselves entertained and occupied, surely anything which avoids raping, pillaging, the use of narcotics and general misbehaviour is to be welcomed. And if the RIAA have a problem with that they can try footing the bill for reparations and compensation when, having been denied electronic entertainment, soldiers resort to their more "traditional" distractions.
I don't think the turion was meant to be seen like that, it's just sort of worked out that way. Also it doesn't square with what it's used for. Turion is a low(ish) power (in terms of wattage) performance chip, Centrino is an integrated chipset which uses a Pentium M processor. But the higher performance Turion is still not used in higher power, desktop replacement machines because it's not a centrino, it's not an integrated chipset. That's what AMD are aiming for with this ATI merger thing. Something they can churn out to someone like Dell in high quantity that Dell can just build a shell around.
ATI and AMD shouldn't merge because ATI's drivers suck.
I think that's the concensus on here, certainly the linux drivers are apparently awful.
My AMD64 desktop machine has an NVidia graphics card which works much better than the ATI rubbish built into the motherboard. But I'm not using that machine to write this. In fact, other than for occasional gaming, that machine rarely gets switched on.
I tend to use my laptop. Which has a Centrino chipset.
You know - that one that Intel brought out for laptops? The one that's hugely, massively successful in one of the main growth areas of hardware sales? Everyone wants a laptop... or a home media centre based on a pc but doesn't run like one... Everyone is buying Intel. Why? Because to all intents and purposes all the laptops come with Intel centrino sets. It's dead easy - they're dead easy to support, all the bits work together, no conflicts. AMD? Sure nice chips but who makes Turion laptops? Acer... Asus... and... um... some other companies... Perhaps Alienware? HP make a couple, Fujitsu Siemens make a couple but these aren't their high-end desirable laptops. It's like "well if I spend money I get a centrino, otherwise it's a toss-up between Celeron - the cacheless wonder - and a chip that sounds like a sticky nut treat..."
Who makes Centrino laptops? Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu Siemens, Samsung, Panasonic, whatever IBM are calling themselves now - oh and Acer and Asus and Alienware too but - oh yes, and one really important company who basically stuck 2 fingers up to AMD - Apple. I'll bet Apple choosing Intel hurt. But everyone's buying laptops with Centrino chipsets in... No-one's really buying AMD... because AMD don't provide a chipset and an easy way for manufacturers to just kind of put their machines together in a lego-style fashion.
Does it make business sense for AMD to tie up with the chipset and motherboard manufacturer that also happens to make graphics cards? Hell yes. Does it make sense for AMD to try to get into the laptop market in a meaningful way? Probably. Will their driver support get any better? We can hope...
For those too lazy to read the article, here's what you gotta do to secure your sql:
Principle: Never trust user input Implementation Validate all textbox entries using validation controls, regular expressions, code, and so on
Principle: Never use dynamic SQL Implementation: Use parameterized SQL or stored procedures
Principle: Never connect to a database using an admin-level account Implementation: Use a limited access account to connect to the database
Principle: Don't store secrets in plain text Implementation: Encrypt or hash passwords and other sensitive data; you should also encrypt connection strings
Principle: Exceptions should divulge minimal information Implementation: Don't reveal too much information in error messages; display minimal information in the event of unhandled error; set debug to false
I thought there'd be some crazy-mad stuff you'd need to do to protect against SQL injection but it seems that decent programming techniques and the application of sanity is all that's required, panic over then?
> Wallis was frequently classified as being in a permanent vegetative state. Though his family fought for a re-evaluation after seeing many promising signs that he was trying to communicate, their requests were turned down.
Schiavo was also in a PVS and showed certain signs of consciousness, allbeit with severe mental handicap. Therefore she could have been argued to have been in a minimally conscious state.
Here's some more information about how the case progressed but it's still from 2 years ago - presumably he is continuing to improve but it'd be interesting to find out: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=147582 5
Now here's an interesting thing. Terry Wallis regained consciousness in 2003. I have spent a good half hour searching the internet for anything about him since then. I have one link (see above) and that's it. Nothing. It's as if the world is stuck in 2003 when it comes to news about Terry Wallis, which is a strange parallel to his being stuck in 1984.
I have a vested interest in these sorts of articles. I have Multiple Sclerosis although I've been lucky in that it's relapsing-remitting and controlled by medication. But the worry is the same, will enough brain damage be caused that I am eventually in permanent pain, permanently disabled or enter a permanently vegetative state? If my brain can be trained to re-wire itself is there a way to learn how to induce this? If a brain can be trained to re-wire, can that overcome the effects of dementia and conditions such as Alzheimers?
Why do people buy stuff on ebay? You run the risk of dealing with stolen goods, with substandard goods, with substandard sellers - why run that risk? Because you can get a deal, and as a seller because you can shift stock.
If the auction gets extended by 10 minutes then why would I bid at all and give someone else the chance to outbid me? I'd be better off using the other stock sourcing avenues available to me - since I buy items on ebay to sell elsewhere. As a busy person, I can't spend hours at a time hanging around on ebay trying to bid within 10 minutes - I'm too busy ranting on slashdot;)
And if I'm selling on ebay, sellers will be more reticent at bidding since they know that if outbid at a late stage they must be logged in, possibly at an inconvenient hour, to enter a bidding war. Remember the concept of sniping is more for convenience than for missing out on an auction - it's also so you don't get carried away and bid more than you can afford, maybe even more than you actually have.
Bring in the 10 minute auction offset rule and ebay reverts from being a useful and usable business to being a game. Silly.
as he says almost immediately, as they're coming up to release the status meetings switch to being 3 times a day. Presumably if they just increased the frequency of the status meetings, nothing would ever get released on schedule... hang on...
Users who want the "premium experience" (read: Aero interface) will need 1GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and plenty of RAM for that DirectX 9.0-Capable graphics card.
What on earth is it doing using up a Gig of Ram, a 1GHz processor, goodness knows how much video RAM? A 3D game - for sure needs that kind of processing power, but an operating system for goodness sake? Whatever happened to writing efficient, non-bloated, elegant code? What's wrong with writing something that doesn't use more and more and more memory? Why is it that a knackered old heap running KDE or Gnome or whatever looks prettier, works faster and has funkier graphical add-ons than MS bother with? Most of the world uses Windows, why don't they bother making it half-decent?
Sorry I know the answers to this, it just infuriates me that most companies, most users are expected to put up with such mediocre pap. And I have a hangover so I'm right:)
AMD merging with ATI is most likely a business decision. By bringing in the provider of onboard GPUs into the fold, AMD can create a chipset like the Intel's Centrino where everything is integrated with everything else and not nearly as good as if you put your own components in. While, from a performance point of view, this sucks horribly, it has huge advantages in laptops, slimline pcs, multimedia devices and some of the stuff AMD are trying to do with their embedded chipsets.
However your point is that ATI drivers suck, their linux support is indeed awful, and so AMD should merge with NVidia.
Firstly business decisions tend to be made on the basis of potential improvement rather than looking at how things already are. Secondly, technically, AMD should merge with ATI and here's why.
1.) ATI make the cheap GPUs for motherboard manufacturers - AMD need a GPU manufacturer onboard so they can push the laptop market.
2.) AMD were stung when Apple opted for Intel as AMD's platform is way ahead of Intel. Intel is also used in the Xbox and AMD figure that with ATI in the AMD fold they can present a platform at least as enticing as Intel's
3.) From ATI's point of view, they need to start supporting better written drivers. You mention ATI's lack of Linux support - well the fastest selling server CPU right now is the Opteron, I don't think ATI's poor driver support would survive an AMD merge, maybe ATI is looking to AMD to provide that driver support. But moving forward, with the new Windows Vista, drivers will probably have to be better written for Windows too. ATI drivers for Windows are no great shakes either and ATI may be looking to AMD to provide some well needed technical assistance on the driver authoring front.
Point 3 is a technical point, no-one would base business decisions on "the drivers suck for the 5% of users who don't use Windows". But if they deal with point 3 then the people who make decisions on buying the "nice" hardware will be better disposed towards ATI.
So it's entirely in ATI & AMD's interest to merge and to make the merger really work.
If Linux was as popular, you'd have just as many naive and clueless Linux users as you now have Windows users.
Apple are pretty popular. OS X has it's fans and the majority of them aren't particularly technically adept. Of course OS X is Unix, not Linux, but the comparison stands, it's fairly popular and most of its users lack clue.
I'd love to see the user percentages of zombi-fied Apple boxes vs zombi-fied MS/Windows boxes if anyone has them, my suspicion is that your argument may be cromulent.
However it doesn't get added to the list of "spurious claims regarding potential adequacy or compliance of Microsoft products" until Symantec admit to it... So technically it was zero months since they admitted to it and changed the published list at the same time...
Maybe the best way to ensure your browser stays top of the pile is to admit nothing...
Re:beyond?
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Beyond Java
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· Score: 2, Informative
for small and even medium sized sites you're right, of course. Using WARs is an unnecessary pile of pants EXCEPT that it makes your site portable. If your server dies, you copy the war (a single file) somewhere else and your site's back.
When you start getting into bigger sites with clustering and multiple layers & tiers and whatnot WARs kind of bring sanity to the front-end. You create a WAR, you distribute it across the presentation-layer servers and you have a handy package with which to build a presentation server. If you have load balanced across 2 servers and you need it across 4 WARS are really handy for the distribution of that code.
it's just a slow down in growth, it's still growing. I'm going to do that right now. In fact I'm going to redownload and install firefox individually on all the machines on the network...
Maybe they aren't counting downloads from mirrors?
The girlfriend was concerned when I used "Internet Explorer" to do windows update. "That's not the internet, I'm with AOL" Patiently explained that the browser wasn't the internet, just used to view it and browse it. Hence being called a browser.
Haven't tried explaining why Firefox should be used instead. Something along the lines of "well, whenever you use IE, likely as not a load of hackers can look at what you're doing"
The mind truly boggles. The amount of time and money people spend on gaming in general and RPGs in particular I feel guilty for having a life / being a musician and playing gigs / doing stuff that isn't work or gaming. I saw the appeal when I was a kid but I just don't any more, life is way too short to spend hours of it pretending to exist in a mythical world when I already exist in this world.
Guess it depends where you played that cd... If you played that cd on a critical server at some bank somewhere, just whiling away the hours backing up terabytes of data over a network... hey now that server has a rootkit installed and they WOULD want to be contacting the authorities... though you could lose your job.
What about if you're in charge of an ISP (a bit more likely on/.) and you played your Sony BMG cd in a machine with... say... all the passwords on it or something. Now you can gripe AND you can't sack yourself...
There's no reason not to stick with Windows on your desktop in a Windows environment except where licensing is crippling your IT bill, suddenly free software looks tempting.
P.O.S. - the windows based POS machines are an interesting one. Of course I don't have the stats to hand, just my own experience as customer. But in my experience they crash with alarming regularity. Maybe it's just me and my bank card. And the other people I queue with. And the large chain stores I visit. Maybe the majority of people / card / queue / store combinations work fine and I'm the only one who has problems, somehow I doubt it. A lot of companies are willing to write off POS crashes as "well they're computers what do you expect?". Expecting your till not to crash is probably the least you ought to expect from a POS solution.
When you need to do some Windows admin stuff you just do it? What kind of admin do you do? What's your backup regime? Do you run disk quotas for users on servers? Do you run Exchange or other mail server? Do you have centralised scheduling? Windows doesn't GIVE you any of these, you pay for them through the nose. I presume you have a license for the copy of Office you are using...
WRT uptime and reliability - if I don't reboot my XP workstation every night I can't work the next day. I do a mixture of graphics (photoshop) and a bit of programming (php & mysql running on a standalone mambo server, nothing too taxing) and a bunch of office stuff. This is real standard stuff and Windows can't cope and has memory leaks. If your POS crashes chances are you're having the same problems but ignoring them. We all ignore them, we're all used to them, we need to get UNused to them and start being a bit more demanding of our business apps IMO.
Hey your Linux friends are scrambling around trying to get their Linux machines to boot. Here's how to do it.
1.) Insert Knoppix cd in cd drive. 2.) Restart computer.
There you go. Linux (well a bsd distro but same difference) on your pc. Sure they may be trying to recompile kernels and optimise stuff and that's hobbyist stuff, good for them, they enjoy the challenge. But I'll tell you what - next time you have a virus on your pc and don't want to boot it but want to back stuff off the harddrive without taking it out, try a Knoppix disk and a USB key. Data stored, machine safe til they come out with a fix for the virus, all done. Or you could use a DOS boot disk and try mounting the USB key & ntfs drives in DOS...
What your friend's son needs to realize is that he has a choice to make.
If he wants to become a programmer then he has to realize that there are underlying architectures and systems that he has to accept as reality and to embrace their existence. In the end his code is compiled by the compiler into a stream of 1s and 0s. Prior to this it was a bunch of translatable instructions the compiler could translate. It doesn't matter how pretty or funky or well designed a dialog box is or how user friendly and expressive his buttons are if they don't do anything. And they can only "do anything" if the compiler has the necessary instructions.
It's not the case that "you have to learn to code cos that's how we've always done it". Simply put, you have to learn to code because otherwise the computer is treating you like a moron and doing your coding for you. And doing it wrong!
Otherwise become an artist or designer or project manager or sys admin or Window technician or whatever and don't feel the need to worry about coding. It is not "a bad thing" to be any of these. I'm also an artist (musician) and a designer and I have to say, when I'm playing I don't worry about the underlying fabric of the guitar strings or the circuitry in the amplifier any more than is necessary to execute the job at hand - namely playing music.
But if I were to become a luthier and turn around and say "oh woodwork is stupid" then I'd be doing what your friend's son is doing. Tell him to take the stabilizers off and stop having Uncle Bill Gates holding his hands - and learn to do it properly if that's what he wants to do.
Service-based marketing - sure. Solution-based marketing - by all means.
But a solution stack? How does marketing the architecture running the "service" provide a customer with any idea of its benefit. Sure I may be using LAMP or a Java-based solution but are customers as interested in my architecture choices as they are in having as much uptime / as much ease of maintenance / as low a total cost of ownership as possible?
And before you say "well the big boys care" remember that the vast majority of companies looking for web solutions / services / whatever are going to be of the smaller variety, possibly with better stuff to be doing than worrying about what their website architecture is - as long as it works.
The marketing droids don't seem to understand that babbling on incoherently in pseudo-tech market speak frightens people into the arms of providers who say stuff like "this is what it looks like and here's where it ties in to what you already have and do"
Solution stacks my arse. Mark my words it'll all end in tiers.
This has been written so many times by so many other people, all from the point of view that they wished Microsoft WOULD make Windows open source. It strikes me that Windows NOT being open source is a good thing.
If Microsoft were to follow the example of Apple and switch to a Posix compliant core - or even an Open-source Linux based core - they would probably make even more money than they do now.
Firstly I'm not saying the software would be free to buy. You'd still buy the compiled software package at PC World or with your new PC - and this is how the majority of people would get it. Optionally you could download and compile the thing but most people wouldn't know how or care how - they want a PC that works. Or you could obtain a pirated copy - at least now there would be no need for pirated copies...
This brings us nicely to stability. Since you could download and compile Windows, geeks will do exactly that. Remember we're in the minority here. Most people don't know how to do this and even if they did couldn't be bothered. So we're downloading Windows, compiling it, fixing bits that don't work and submitting the fixes back to the trunk, making Windows more stable and more efficient.
Of course Office needn't be open source. In fact most of Windows needn't be open source. They'd only open out the core OS - when you finish the download and compile what you get is very rudimentary and you have to add even basic tools: text editors, browsers, productivity tools - yourself. People will release their own packages of these but by and large most will use Internet Explorer (part of a Windows productivity pack which you'd be able to buy if you had the free version of Windows - would only cost slightly less than Windows itself) which of course would stay closed. Only IE's hooks into the OS would be open and so open to scrutiny (and thorough testing, debugging, fixing etc from the community).
Not much would change for the 99% majority of computer users who couldn't care less except their PC crashes less and they can get more done. The 1% of us that are interested end up devoting our time polishing up an operating system, for free, for a company making a hell of a lot of money from selling that operating system (including source code, what the hell most people will do with that is up to them) and feeling good about the fact that we have the opportunity to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
You capitalize God. :)
In my religion I use G-d because it is forbidden to use the whole name of G-d as this is considered to be taking "his" name in vain. Even though that is not his name, we still use the hyphen out of respect. Tom-ey-to, tom-ah-to - let's call the whole thing off
Incidentally the use of "his" is also, in my opinion, misguided since G-d doesn't really have a gender, there was no gender-neutral article in ancient Hebrew / Aramaic / Greek.
When posting on slashdot I don't use he/she/it to be impish or insulting to THE LORD. I do it because the likelihood is that whoever reads what I write probably doesn't believe in G-d the same way I do and I have no wish to shove the nature and manner of my personal relationship with the universe's creator down anyone else's neck. I will probably be addressing some of the many people who don't believe in one god, or any god, and who, though they lead thoroughly morally upstanding lives, don't believe in G-d. They live on the same planet I do and deserve the same respect as anyone. And certainly when we are talking about explosions on the sun, using the technology we have to detect spectrographic signatures of the rocks on the moon, I suspect that my degree in Geology and interest in space science probably counts a lot more than my religion.
The discussion is about using a rather novel and interesting technique (which we have devised because we are capable of doing so because we've evolved that way or because we were created that way and made to look like we'd evolved that way it doesn't really matter, the end result is the same) to try to ascertain the origin of the moon / how G-d made the moon look as though it was made through some other process.
I am trying to be as inclusive as possible and am interested in understand the nature of what is out there. Why? Because it's interesting.
You seem to be interested in getting people to follow THE LORD - I imagine to save their souls. (the old "the only way to G-d is through me" thing, I imagine?) I'm picking up some sort of crusade on your part to save the unbelievers on slashdot. I'm sorry but my soul isn't up for saving right now and I don't know that any of the people reading your diatribe will be converted by how holy and fervent your faith is. "Don't do this, don't do that, this is insulting, that is disrespectful, this is how it happened even though the evidence is to the contrary" give it a break. Go back to being a human, to being humble. Go back to being a human - as made in G-d's image - let people be. Lead by dogma and dictat and people will try to wind you up just for a laugh. Lead by example and they'll follow you because they think you're really cool.
first off I didn't insult god and nor did I intend to. However if I, an infinitessimally small speck on an infinitessimally small planet, in an insignificant galaxy in the unbelievable vastness of the universe DID insult him... well I think he has bigger fish to fry than me. This geo-centric view - that the world is God's big creation - THAT insults god because the whole point of what I was saying was that the universe and the elegance of the rules that run it are, for me, the miracle of creation (again if you do the whole god thing and the whole creation thing).
Secondly, please quote me. When you write, in a public forum, and accuse me of calling you small minded or closed minded at least have the courtesy to quote. Please. It shows a certain level of humility both towards him upstairs and towards others if you at least do this. Go back, read what I wrote, find the bit where I said you were closed mind, IT ISN'T THERE BECAUSE I DIDN'T SAY IT. Question - do you use the same level of accuracy when you quote god? Remember - I am made in his image...
You say the universe was created in six days. Six days from where? If you are at the centre of something as infinitely massive as the universe, at the point of the big bang then in fact the universe has just been created, just now. If you are one of the first bits of stuff ejected from the big bang you've been flying away from the big bang for the last 13 billion years. Welcome to relativity.
Finally, we were created in god's image, right? Ok so if I'm in god's image I have the right, even the duty, to question and learn and understand the HOW. A sheep can stand in the field and look at the world and appreciate it. I am a human, I have to go out there and understand HOW not just sit here saying "god is great, that's all there is to it".
1.) and how exactly did he/she/it create the moon?
2.) given that free will exists, to prove that god made the moon would then prove the existence of god which would render that free will redundant. Therefore when god created the moon (if god created the moon) he/she/it had to make it look as though it was formed through natural processes. Surely the studying of these natural processes allows us to appreciate even better the nature of the place where we live and the processes which occur and, if you're that way inclined, the wonder of god's creation.
To simply sit there and say "god created the moon, we don't need to study it" is to deny the very beauty and elegance of gods creation (if you believe in that).
Finally, I see you quote Genesis and I note that the story of the creation in Genesis is not too dissimilar to many earlier creation stories told in earlier, pre-Judaic cultures / religions. The story of creation as told in Genesis is, approximately, in the same chronological order as observed scientifically which is remarkable. What would have been more remarkable is if god had turned to the children of Israel 3000 years at Mount Sinai and said "well I created the universe 13 billion years ago, there were some bigger stars, they exploded and reformed to make newer stars until about 4.5 billion years ago there was just the right mix of heavier and lighter elements to create a solar system that would support life. I made sure there was a heavy gas giant quite a long way out to mop up most of the asteroids that could damage life as it formed, I caused a collision quite earlier on to create the moon which would create the tidal effects that would encourage water to be trapped on the planet and enable it to move around enough to cause sufficient denudation to allow some form of heat transference from the core via tectonics. Making sure that there was a strong electro-magnetic field that protected the earth from the sun's harmful rays, while having it swap once every half million years to allow just enough quick mutation to allow some sort of plausible evolution, I allowed stuff to evolve pretty much for 4 billion years safe in the knowledge that at some point, something would evolve that could look around and say "hey, who made us then?" and I'd be able to pop down, say hello and give you some laws".
It's not even intelligent design. It's just a bunch of circumstances that couldn't have ended any other way BUT to give life, whether you believe god put them there or that in a universe of 500 billion stars there's going to be at least one system that evolves life, or whether that is in fact the same thing. What is for sure is that had god come out with all that 3000 years ago they wouldn't have believed him/her/it - in fact there's plenty people around today who don't believe it and that's ok too. But back then, they already had a creation story, so he just took the one they had, changed it a bit and gave it back to them. Better something they could believe than the truth - that the universe is so big that something like the earth would have happened anyway and actually the miracle of the creation was something completely different if you choose to believe in it anyway.
during the Napoleonic wars troops on both sides would regularly rape and pillage wherever they were, safe in the knowledge that they were unlikely to be caught or punished.
Which ever side you support, whatever your views on the current situation, what can not be denied is there are a LOT of tooled up, strong, testosterone-filled soldiers in these places. When not at work they need to keep themselves entertained and occupied, surely anything which avoids raping, pillaging, the use of narcotics and general misbehaviour is to be welcomed. And if the RIAA have a problem with that they can try footing the bill for reparations and compensation when, having been denied electronic entertainment, soldiers resort to their more "traditional" distractions.
I don't think the turion was meant to be seen like that, it's just sort of worked out that way. Also it doesn't square with what it's used for. Turion is a low(ish) power (in terms of wattage) performance chip, Centrino is an integrated chipset which uses a Pentium M processor. But the higher performance Turion is still not used in higher power, desktop replacement machines because it's not a centrino, it's not an integrated chipset. That's what AMD are aiming for with this ATI merger thing. Something they can churn out to someone like Dell in high quantity that Dell can just build a shell around.
ATI and AMD shouldn't merge because ATI's drivers suck.
I think that's the concensus on here, certainly the linux drivers are apparently awful.
My AMD64 desktop machine has an NVidia graphics card which works much better than the ATI rubbish built into the motherboard. But I'm not using that machine to write this. In fact, other than for occasional gaming, that machine rarely gets switched on.
I tend to use my laptop. Which has a Centrino chipset.
You know - that one that Intel brought out for laptops? The one that's hugely, massively successful in one of the main growth areas of hardware sales? Everyone wants a laptop... or a home media centre based on a pc but doesn't run like one... Everyone is buying Intel. Why? Because to all intents and purposes all the laptops come with Intel centrino sets. It's dead easy - they're dead easy to support, all the bits work together, no conflicts. AMD? Sure nice chips but who makes Turion laptops? Acer... Asus... and... um... some other companies... Perhaps Alienware? HP make a couple, Fujitsu Siemens make a couple but these aren't their high-end desirable laptops. It's like "well if I spend money I get a centrino, otherwise it's a toss-up between Celeron - the cacheless wonder - and a chip that sounds like a sticky nut treat..."
Who makes Centrino laptops? Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu Siemens, Samsung, Panasonic, whatever IBM are calling themselves now - oh and Acer and Asus and Alienware too but - oh yes, and one really important company who basically stuck 2 fingers up to AMD - Apple. I'll bet Apple choosing Intel hurt. But everyone's buying laptops with Centrino chipsets in... No-one's really buying AMD... because AMD don't provide a chipset and an easy way for manufacturers to just kind of put their machines together in a lego-style fashion.
Does it make business sense for AMD to tie up with the chipset and motherboard manufacturer that also happens to make graphics cards? Hell yes. Does it make sense for AMD to try to get into the laptop market in a meaningful way? Probably. Will their driver support get any better? We can hope...
For those too lazy to read the article, here's what you gotta do to secure your sql:
Principle: Never trust user input
Implementation Validate all textbox entries using validation controls, regular expressions, code, and so on
Principle: Never use dynamic SQL
Implementation: Use parameterized SQL or stored procedures
Principle: Never connect to a database using an admin-level account
Implementation: Use a limited access account to connect to the database
Principle: Don't store secrets in plain text
Implementation: Encrypt or hash passwords and other sensitive data; you should also encrypt connection strings
Principle: Exceptions should divulge minimal information
Implementation: Don't reveal too much information in error messages; display minimal information in the event of unhandled error; set debug to false
I thought there'd be some crazy-mad stuff you'd need to do to protect against SQL injection but it seems that decent programming techniques and the application of sanity is all that's required, panic over then?
read the article.
2 5
> Wallis was frequently classified as being in a permanent vegetative state. Though his family fought for a re-evaluation after seeing many promising signs that he was trying to communicate, their requests were turned down.
Schiavo was also in a PVS and showed certain signs of consciousness, allbeit with severe mental handicap. Therefore she could have been argued to have been in a minimally conscious state.
Here's some more information about how the case progressed but it's still from 2 years ago - presumably he is continuing to improve but it'd be interesting to find out: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=14758
Now here's an interesting thing. Terry Wallis regained consciousness in 2003. I have spent a good half hour searching the internet for anything about him since then. I have one link (see above) and that's it. Nothing. It's as if the world is stuck in 2003 when it comes to news about Terry Wallis, which is a strange parallel to his being stuck in 1984.
I have a vested interest in these sorts of articles. I have Multiple Sclerosis although I've been lucky in that it's relapsing-remitting and controlled by medication. But the worry is the same, will enough brain damage be caused that I am eventually in permanent pain, permanently disabled or enter a permanently vegetative state? If my brain can be trained to re-wire itself is there a way to learn how to induce this? If a brain can be trained to re-wire, can that overcome the effects of dementia and conditions such as Alzheimers?
Why do people buy stuff on ebay? You run the risk of dealing with stolen goods, with substandard goods, with substandard sellers - why run that risk? Because you can get a deal, and as a seller because you can shift stock.
;)
If the auction gets extended by 10 minutes then why would I bid at all and give someone else the chance to outbid me? I'd be better off using the other stock sourcing avenues available to me - since I buy items on ebay to sell elsewhere. As a busy person, I can't spend hours at a time hanging around on ebay trying to bid within 10 minutes - I'm too busy ranting on slashdot
And if I'm selling on ebay, sellers will be more reticent at bidding since they know that if outbid at a late stage they must be logged in, possibly at an inconvenient hour, to enter a bidding war. Remember the concept of sniping is more for convenience than for missing out on an auction - it's also so you don't get carried away and bid more than you can afford, maybe even more than you actually have.
Bring in the 10 minute auction offset rule and ebay reverts from being a useful and usable business to being a game. Silly.
as he says almost immediately, as they're coming up to release the status meetings switch to being 3 times a day. Presumably if they just increased the frequency of the status meetings, nothing would ever get released on schedule... hang on...
it will run in Darwin...
Users who want the "premium experience" (read: Aero interface) will need 1GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and plenty of RAM for that DirectX 9.0-Capable graphics card.
:)
What on earth is it doing using up a Gig of Ram, a 1GHz processor, goodness knows how much video RAM? A 3D game - for sure needs that kind of processing power, but an operating system for goodness sake? Whatever happened to writing efficient, non-bloated, elegant code? What's wrong with writing something that doesn't use more and more and more memory? Why is it that a knackered old heap running KDE or Gnome or whatever looks prettier, works faster and has funkier graphical add-ons than MS bother with? Most of the world uses Windows, why don't they bother making it half-decent?
Sorry I know the answers to this, it just infuriates me that most companies, most users are expected to put up with such mediocre pap. And I have a hangover so I'm right
Not sure I understand your point.
AMD merging with ATI is most likely a business decision. By bringing in the provider of onboard GPUs into the fold, AMD can create a chipset like the Intel's Centrino where everything is integrated with everything else and not nearly as good as if you put your own components in. While, from a performance point of view, this sucks horribly, it has huge advantages in laptops, slimline pcs, multimedia devices and some of the stuff AMD are trying to do with their embedded chipsets.
However your point is that ATI drivers suck, their linux support is indeed awful, and so AMD should merge with NVidia.
Firstly business decisions tend to be made on the basis of potential improvement rather than looking at how things already are. Secondly, technically, AMD should merge with ATI and here's why.
1.) ATI make the cheap GPUs for motherboard manufacturers - AMD need a GPU manufacturer onboard so they can push the laptop market.
2.) AMD were stung when Apple opted for Intel as AMD's platform is way ahead of Intel. Intel is also used in the Xbox and AMD figure that with ATI in the AMD fold they can present a platform at least as enticing as Intel's
3.) From ATI's point of view, they need to start supporting better written drivers. You mention ATI's lack of Linux support - well the fastest selling server CPU right now is the Opteron, I don't think ATI's poor driver support would survive an AMD merge, maybe ATI is looking to AMD to provide that driver support. But moving forward, with the new Windows Vista, drivers will probably have to be better written for Windows too. ATI drivers for Windows are no great shakes either and ATI may be looking to AMD to provide some well needed technical assistance on the driver authoring front.
Point 3 is a technical point, no-one would base business decisions on "the drivers suck for the 5% of users who don't use Windows". But if they deal with point 3 then the people who make decisions on buying the "nice" hardware will be better disposed towards ATI.
So it's entirely in ATI & AMD's interest to merge and to make the merger really work.
If Linux was as popular, you'd have just as many naive and clueless Linux users as you now have Windows users.
Apple are pretty popular. OS X has it's fans and the majority of them aren't particularly technically adept. Of course OS X is Unix, not Linux, but the comparison stands, it's fairly popular and most of its users lack clue.
I'd love to see the user percentages of zombi-fied Apple boxes vs zombi-fied MS/Windows boxes if anyone has them, my suspicion is that your argument may be cromulent.
However it doesn't get added to the list of "spurious claims regarding potential adequacy or compliance of Microsoft products" until Symantec admit to it... So technically it was zero months since they admitted to it and changed the published list at the same time...
Maybe the best way to ensure your browser stays top of the pile is to admit nothing...
for small and even medium sized sites you're right, of course. Using WARs is an unnecessary pile of pants EXCEPT that it makes your site portable. If your server dies, you copy the war (a single file) somewhere else and your site's back.
When you start getting into bigger sites with clustering and multiple layers & tiers and whatnot WARs kind of bring sanity to the front-end. You create a WAR, you distribute it across the presentation-layer servers and you have a handy package with which to build a presentation server. If you have load balanced across 2 servers and you need it across 4 WARS are really handy for the distribution of that code.
They can be an almighty faff though.
it's just a slow down in growth, it's still growing. I'm going to do that right now. In fact I'm going to redownload and install firefox individually on all the machines on the network...
Maybe they aren't counting downloads from mirrors?
The girlfriend was concerned when I used "Internet Explorer" to do windows update. "That's not the internet, I'm with AOL"
Patiently explained that the browser wasn't the internet, just used to view it and browse it. Hence being called a browser.
Haven't tried explaining why Firefox should be used instead. Something along the lines of "well, whenever you use IE, likely as not a load of hackers can look at what you're doing"
"So why do you use IE for windowsupdate"
erm...
free as in speech, not as in beer.
;)
Although I'd have to say as a license-fee payer, it is by far the best thing the beeb have ever done with my license fee
The mind truly boggles. The amount of time and money people spend on gaming in general and RPGs in particular I feel guilty for having a life / being a musician and playing gigs / doing stuff that isn't work or gaming. I saw the appeal when I was a kid but I just don't any more, life is way too short to spend hours of it pretending to exist in a mythical world when I already exist in this world.
Guess it depends where you played that cd... If you played that cd on a critical server at some bank somewhere, just whiling away the hours backing up terabytes of data over a network... hey now that server has a rootkit installed and they WOULD want to be contacting the authorities... though you could lose your job.
/.) and you played your Sony BMG cd in a machine with... say... all the passwords on it or something. Now you can gripe AND you can't sack yourself...
What about if you're in charge of an ISP (a bit more likely on
There's no reason not to stick with Windows on your desktop in a Windows environment except where licensing is crippling your IT bill, suddenly free software looks tempting.
P.O.S. - the windows based POS machines are an interesting one. Of course I don't have the stats to hand, just my own experience as customer. But in my experience they crash with alarming regularity. Maybe it's just me and my bank card. And the other people I queue with. And the large chain stores I visit. Maybe the majority of people / card / queue / store combinations work fine and I'm the only one who has problems, somehow I doubt it. A lot of companies are willing to write off POS crashes as "well they're computers what do you expect?". Expecting your till not to crash is probably the least you ought to expect from a POS solution.
When you need to do some Windows admin stuff you just do it? What kind of admin do you do? What's your backup regime? Do you run disk quotas for users on servers? Do you run Exchange or other mail server? Do you have centralised scheduling? Windows doesn't GIVE you any of these, you pay for them through the nose. I presume you have a license for the copy of Office you are using...
WRT uptime and reliability - if I don't reboot my XP workstation every night I can't work the next day. I do a mixture of graphics (photoshop) and a bit of programming (php & mysql running on a standalone mambo server, nothing too taxing) and a bunch of office stuff. This is real standard stuff and Windows can't cope and has memory leaks. If your POS crashes chances are you're having the same problems but ignoring them. We all ignore them, we're all used to them, we need to get UNused to them and start being a bit more demanding of our business apps IMO.
Hey your Linux friends are scrambling around trying to get their Linux machines to boot. Here's how to do it.
1.) Insert Knoppix cd in cd drive.
2.) Restart computer.
There you go. Linux (well a bsd distro but same difference) on your pc. Sure they may be trying to recompile kernels and optimise stuff and that's hobbyist stuff, good for them, they enjoy the challenge. But I'll tell you what - next time you have a virus on your pc and don't want to boot it but want to back stuff off the harddrive without taking it out, try a Knoppix disk and a USB key. Data stored, machine safe til they come out with a fix for the virus, all done. Or you could use a DOS boot disk and try mounting the USB key & ntfs drives in DOS...
What your friend's son needs to realize is that he has a choice to make.
If he wants to become a programmer then he has to realize that there are underlying architectures and systems that he has to accept as reality and to embrace their existence. In the end his code is compiled by the compiler into a stream of 1s and 0s. Prior to this it was a bunch of translatable instructions the compiler could translate. It doesn't matter how pretty or funky or well designed a dialog box is or how user friendly and expressive his buttons are if they don't do anything. And they can only "do anything" if the compiler has the necessary instructions.
It's not the case that "you have to learn to code cos that's how we've always done it". Simply put, you have to learn to code because otherwise the computer is treating you like a moron and doing your coding for you. And doing it wrong!
Otherwise become an artist or designer or project manager or sys admin or Window technician or whatever and don't feel the need to worry about coding. It is not "a bad thing" to be any of these. I'm also an artist (musician) and a designer and I have to say, when I'm playing I don't worry about the underlying fabric of the guitar strings or the circuitry in the amplifier any more than is necessary to execute the job at hand - namely playing music.
But if I were to become a luthier and turn around and say "oh woodwork is stupid" then I'd be doing what your friend's son is doing. Tell him to take the stabilizers off and stop having Uncle Bill Gates holding his hands - and learn to do it properly if that's what he wants to do.
A solution stack? What on earth?
Service-based marketing - sure.
Solution-based marketing - by all means.
But a solution stack? How does marketing the architecture running the "service" provide a customer with any idea of its benefit. Sure I may be using LAMP or a Java-based solution but are customers as interested in my architecture choices as they are in having as much uptime / as much ease of maintenance / as low a total cost of ownership as possible?
And before you say "well the big boys care" remember that the vast majority of companies looking for web solutions / services / whatever are going to be of the smaller variety, possibly with better stuff to be doing than worrying about what their website architecture is - as long as it works.
The marketing droids don't seem to understand that babbling on incoherently in pseudo-tech market speak frightens people into the arms of providers who say stuff like "this is what it looks like and here's where it ties in to what you already have and do"
Solution stacks my arse. Mark my words it'll all end in tiers.
This has been written so many times by so many other people, all from the point of view that they wished Microsoft WOULD make Windows open source. It strikes me that Windows NOT being open source is a good thing.
If Microsoft were to follow the example of Apple and switch to a Posix compliant core - or even an Open-source Linux based core - they would probably make even more money than they do now.
Firstly I'm not saying the software would be free to buy. You'd still buy the compiled software package at PC World or with your new PC - and this is how the majority of people would get it. Optionally you could download and compile the thing but most people wouldn't know how or care how - they want a PC that works. Or you could obtain a pirated copy - at least now there would be no need for pirated copies...
This brings us nicely to stability. Since you could download and compile Windows, geeks will do exactly that. Remember we're in the minority here. Most people don't know how to do this and even if they did couldn't be bothered. So we're downloading Windows, compiling it, fixing bits that don't work and submitting the fixes back to the trunk, making Windows more stable and more efficient.
Of course Office needn't be open source. In fact most of Windows needn't be open source. They'd only open out the core OS - when you finish the download and compile what you get is very rudimentary and you have to add even basic tools: text editors, browsers, productivity tools - yourself. People will release their own packages of these but by and large most will use Internet Explorer (part of a Windows productivity pack which you'd be able to buy if you had the free version of Windows - would only cost slightly less than Windows itself) which of course would stay closed. Only IE's hooks into the OS would be open and so open to scrutiny (and thorough testing, debugging, fixing etc from the community).
Not much would change for the 99% majority of computer users who couldn't care less except their PC crashes less and they can get more done. The 1% of us that are interested end up devoting our time polishing up an operating system, for free, for a company making a hell of a lot of money from selling that operating system (including source code, what the hell most people will do with that is up to them) and feeling good about the fact that we have the opportunity to do this.