Why do you try to paint atheists as if we're one thing? Your statement has no connection at all to what I and others who don't believe in your god think. The saying, "Atheism is a religion, like not collecting stamps is a hobby" couldn't be more appropriate. The only thing that is common among atheists is that they don't believe in a god. Period.
This particular atheist doesn't know what created the universe, or what came 'before' the universe. The data seems to support a big band theory, and those cosmologists haven't figured out what might have existed before the big bang. I'm inclined to continue to let them do the heavy lifting there, and enlighten me as they find out more. Other atheists may well think differently, I won't presume to speak for them.
I don't have the answer. Lacking the answer, I still don't think that making up fairy tales gets me any closer to whatever the answer may be.
You were modded down, perhaps unfairly, because your point is, well, stupid. There is no good science to support ID. None. It's a definitional thing that, if you don't get it, you need to get out of the scientific debate pool, because you don't know how to swim. ID becomes science if and when you come up with a testable hypothesis, you run the experiment, and come up with some data that is better explained by there being a Creator. That would have to be something that repeals the laws of thermodynamics or similar miraculous happenings.
Simply saying that you don't know how to explain the data without positing a creator doesn't wash, unless you can come up with an experiment to verify the existence. If any such experiment had been run, we'd be having a different debate. Currently the status of ID is equivalent to saying, "You can't prove without a doubt that your theories are absolutely word of God true, and I like what my preacher told me better, so ID is just as valid as your so-called theory." It's childish and stubbornly ignorant.
The existing theories allow prediction of future data. ID doesn't. The existing theories may or may not evolve as new data emerges. ID doesn't. ID is strictly a mechanism for resolution of the cognitive dissonance that holders of these primitive myths feel when confronted by evidence that their book of holy stories is contradicted by the real world. It's entertaining that you bring up the Catholics, because their motivation was similar - the emerging scientific community inherently challenged the position of the Church as the holder of knowledge. The continued growth of scientific thought weakens the position of your current priesthood/ministers to hold you under their control, and challenges their ability to suppress independent thinking. It makes you uncomfortable with your desire to believe that someone/thing out there does care for you. Unfortunately, as we learned as children, just because it would be nice if there was a Santa Claus, doesn't mean that there is one. It's pretty likely that the same situation exists with your god. Please deal with that fear directly, rather than contaminating the education of our children so that you can avoid doing so.
Because the window based tools are often easier to use than the equivalent command line tools. They make it easier to figure out some rarely performed tasks (eg., DNS configuration, for me). I have Gnome set up on all my Linux boxes for this reason. I know, I won't get many SuperGeek points, but it works for me.
So don't use a normal text editor. Use Notepad++, NetBeans, or Kdevelop. If you do a fair amount of work in these, any of them will make the job a bit easier.
I have no problem with XML files as configuration sources. They're straightforward, everyone can understand them, and the format has some error checking features. They're also universally usable in a straightforward manner by code. People can use them, code can use them, what's not to like?
It's also not that hard to do in this day and age. We're doing one now. It took us a few weeks to set up the gear, implement grid gain (www.gridgain.com), and set up a proof of concept architecture. Now all we have to do as add nodes as required. I did it all myself. I'm competent, but not magical.
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
To most people the law is a pretty fuzzy boundary. You need only drive on a freeway and observe people's speed to understand this.
And the difference between a tab and a curly brace semantically is exactly what? Except that with curly braces, you need to have two of them for the language to work, and tabs, so that your brain can make sense of it, and in your case, an editor to keep track of it so you don't biff it up.:-)
I suggest that this is fairly obviously a matter of preference, rather than something that has an actual functional issue nearby. Indentation works fine as a block mechanism, and you avoid a whole class of code entry errors. I say that as a long time C, Java, and Perl programmer, who has found my new love, Python. If it's good enough for the geeks at Google, I suspect it's good enough for me.
See Point Blank, by John Lott. He did a fairly extensive analysis of the impact of various levels of firearms regulation in the US, and found that "shall issue" permitting jurisdictions enjoyed lower crime rates, and that crime rates fell when these laws were enacted. "shall issue" refers to a legal requirement for issues concealed carry permits in the absence of any reason to deny the permit. In "shall issue" states, such as Washington, you can get a permit to carry a gun by walking into your police station and asking for one. They fingerprint you, and in two or three weeks, after they do a background check on you, you get the right to carry a handgun just about anywhere. Not surprisingly, holdup rates in these areas are lower than in districts such as NYC and Washington DC, which prohibit law abiding cictizens from owning or carrying a sidearm.
And yes, I have one, and yes, I sometimes carry a gun. Why? Because it makes me feel more manly.:-)
I'm sorry I struck a nerve, that was not my intent. It seemed to me that most purchasers of support are willing to pay for the availability of a benefit for a need that may or may not happen, and, like purchasers of insurance policies, the economic viability of the business depends on the majority of the purchasers not actually using or needing the service. Customers buy based on a perception of risk, and a desire to minimize that risk. The pricing and delivery model counts on most customers not needing the service most of the time.
Certainly it's different in that the mitigation benefit is a service, rather than a payment. But that's just a different cost function - the overall business model even depends on actuarial considerations - how many customers are there, how many machine do they run, how often will the need what kind of service, and how much will MySQL/RedHat, etc, pay out in satisfying their obligation.
Your assumption is that the companies providing the service have built the product. MySQL doesn't build all the MySQL code, RedHat certainly didn't build the Linux kernel, and CrossOver took over Wine. Yet they all provide support on the aforementioned model. I'm not sure where your building the cars metaphor comes from, but it seems, to use your acidic words, hardly relevant.
The insurance business model, which is alive and well. You might as well ask, "what kind of business model depends on people crashing their cars?" or "what kind of business model depends on houses burning down?"
Now, there are viable alternative strategies to the insurance model of protecting against risk, but there is no denying that this model is popular and perceived to be effective by millions of consumers.
So you think having a bunch of civil servants running a bunch of tests is going to improve the quality of software developers? Have you worked with many people with MSFT certifications?
I dunno. I took four years worth of the real kind, with a healthy does of statistics and accounting along the way. It seems hyperbolic to me to claim that an average family of 4 people, with a median income of somewhere around $65k a year (US Census) is contributing $2400 of that to bad software. That's about 5% of after tax income.
Bad software costs us 180 billion dollars a year? That would be about $600 per person in the US. Per year. I call bullshit. Unless you are going to claim that Mozilla is costing my family money because it allows me to waste time on/., this just doesn't make a shred of sense.
What is currently inhibiting competition is the last mile problem. To give high bandwidth service, you have to have a high bandwidth connection to the premise. Currently the options for that connection are:
1) DSL over phone lines, which are monopoly owned by the phone company
2) Cable internet, which require the cable conneciton, which are monopoly owned by the cable companies
3) FiOS, which is monopoly owned by the phone companies
Any competitor has to provide new infrastructure to a very large number of consumers in order to become viable. During the time that they are laying out this infrastructure, they would be vulnerable to predatory pricing from the incumbent providers. It's pretty much a non starter unless you have literally 10's of billions of dollars lying around, which means a large corporation, eg., the phone companies.
The days of free competition in the connection space are numbered. It'll only be oligopolistic competition from here on out. Look into Verizon's approach to the Washington state market, where they are slowing FiOS rollout until they get their legislative way, for an example of how consumer friendly this will be in the future.
Call me back when your mother installs Fedora herself. As to your friend with the teenagers, I have two myself. The reason those issues are going to zero is you've installed a system that they can't install new apps onto. While that reduces issues, you did so by reducing 'usability'. You could have achieved the same affect by installing XP Pro and removing administrative access from their logins. But again, these are system administration steps that reduce usability, which, as I said before, exists in a competing balance with stability.
You won't agree, and that doesn't worry me too much. If Linux were 'usable', it would be popular among the unwashed masses.
I ran a chain of video stores back in those days. This actually was where the doctrine of First Sale was largely forged. Many of the studios tried to take the position that renting their videos was illegal. It was resolved in the courts that it wasn't. Many of the studios then hiked their prices even higher, to try and extract all the revenue from the business. This suppressed the number of rental outlets for a bit, and the studios (Paramount leading the way)finally figured out the concept of price elasticity, and lowered the sale price, which opened up the sell through market that you now see today.
The average price that we paid, wholesale, was in the range of $65 in 1983-4.
Well, it only worked in a relatively unsupported way for 10's, if not 100's of millions of people, 99% of which would have not been able to use linux in any way. Linux is only approaching being usable by those same people. During this time, vast amounts of business and user work got done, the majority of which was done on win 3.1/95/98. You have to deny reality to declare that windows didn't function fairly well for running Excel, Word, and email.
Windows reliability is fun to make fun of, but let's be real - the majority of users ran and still run the shit day in, day out without significant issues. I ran IT organizations during the 90's, supporting 100's of users. For a while, I supported a download farm that served up 10's of millions of windows based clients for one of the major consumer applications out there. If Windows didn't work and wasn't usable, we wouldn't have had a business, and my retirement wouldn't be paid for. Compare the Windows downloads for Firefox to the Linux downloads. Which platform is used by the unwashed masses? In the aforementioned download farm, our linux downloads were less than 2% of the total.
Geez, think critically for a second. Could your Grandmother user Linux? Linux is great, and I love it, but "usability" is not high on the list of positive attributes.
Now, it is not out of the question that I might be high. But that again would be besides the point.
So, if you purchase a song from an artist, and you happen to be a filmmaker, you should be able to use that purchased song in your hit movie without further compensation to the artists?
It won't be popular here, but it's a perfectly reasonable position for the owner of a work to take that they are selling you the right to play their music, off of the CD, for your personal use only. It may not be a workable position in the ethos of today's market, but it's a position consistent with the rest of property and rights law. Where the **AA get off the tracks is in their non-fact based pursuit of people on the edge of the fray.
"No wonder it's 2008 and your products are just now reaching the reliability of single UNIX boxes of the mid 90's. "
Of course, it's 2008, and Linux boxes are just now getting to be as functional and usable as windows boxes from the mid 90's. And what do you know, those are the pieces that have issues.
Linux and Unix are reliable at their core because they are relatively simple. Windows has issues because it isn't. The surprising thing isn't that Windows has issues, the surprising thing is how rare they really are in the scheme of things. It works pretty damn well, considering that there are hundreds of millions of copies out there, and they run on just about everything reasonably well.
I like Linux as much as the next guy, but it's just juvenile to trash windows like some of the folks here want to. Oh, wait, that's right, this is/., and they -are- juveniles.
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Why do you try to paint atheists as if we're one thing? Your statement has no connection at all to what I and others who don't believe in your god think. The saying, "Atheism is a religion, like not collecting stamps is a hobby" couldn't be more appropriate. The only thing that is common among atheists is that they don't believe in a god. Period.
This particular atheist doesn't know what created the universe, or what came 'before' the universe. The data seems to support a big band theory, and those cosmologists haven't figured out what might have existed before the big bang. I'm inclined to continue to let them do the heavy lifting there, and enlighten me as they find out more. Other atheists may well think differently, I won't presume to speak for them.
I don't have the answer. Lacking the answer, I still don't think that making up fairy tales gets me any closer to whatever the answer may be.
You were modded down, perhaps unfairly, because your point is, well, stupid. There is no good science to support ID. None. It's a definitional thing that, if you don't get it, you need to get out of the scientific debate pool, because you don't know how to swim. ID becomes science if and when you come up with a testable hypothesis, you run the experiment, and come up with some data that is better explained by there being a Creator. That would have to be something that repeals the laws of thermodynamics or similar miraculous happenings.
Simply saying that you don't know how to explain the data without positing a creator doesn't wash, unless you can come up with an experiment to verify the existence. If any such experiment had been run, we'd be having a different debate. Currently the status of ID is equivalent to saying, "You can't prove without a doubt that your theories are absolutely word of God true, and I like what my preacher told me better, so ID is just as valid as your so-called theory." It's childish and stubbornly ignorant.
The existing theories allow prediction of future data. ID doesn't. The existing theories may or may not evolve as new data emerges. ID doesn't. ID is strictly a mechanism for resolution of the cognitive dissonance that holders of these primitive myths feel when confronted by evidence that their book of holy stories is contradicted by the real world. It's entertaining that you bring up the Catholics, because their motivation was similar - the emerging scientific community inherently challenged the position of the Church as the holder of knowledge. The continued growth of scientific thought weakens the position of your current priesthood/ministers to hold you under their control, and challenges their ability to suppress independent thinking. It makes you uncomfortable with your desire to believe that someone/thing out there does care for you. Unfortunately, as we learned as children, just because it would be nice if there was a Santa Claus, doesn't mean that there is one. It's pretty likely that the same situation exists with your god. Please deal with that fear directly, rather than contaminating the education of our children so that you can avoid doing so.
Because the window based tools are often easier to use than the equivalent command line tools. They make it easier to figure out some rarely performed tasks (eg., DNS configuration, for me). I have Gnome set up on all my Linux boxes for this reason. I know, I won't get many SuperGeek points, but it works for me.
So don't use a normal text editor. Use Notepad++, NetBeans, or Kdevelop. If you do a fair amount of work in these, any of them will make the job a bit easier.
I have no problem with XML files as configuration sources. They're straightforward, everyone can understand them, and the format has some error checking features. They're also universally usable in a straightforward manner by code. People can use them, code can use them, what's not to like?
It's also not that hard to do in this day and age. We're doing one now. It took us a few weeks to set up the gear, implement grid gain (www.gridgain.com), and set up a proof of concept architecture. Now all we have to do as add nodes as required. I did it all myself. I'm competent, but not magical.
To most people the law is a pretty fuzzy boundary. You need only drive on a freeway and observe people's speed to understand this.
And the difference between a tab and a curly brace semantically is exactly what? Except that with curly braces, you need to have two of them for the language to work, and tabs, so that your brain can make sense of it, and in your case, an editor to keep track of it so you don't biff it up. :-)
I suggest that this is fairly obviously a matter of preference, rather than something that has an actual functional issue nearby. Indentation works fine as a block mechanism, and you avoid a whole class of code entry errors. I say that as a long time C, Java, and Perl programmer, who has found my new love, Python. If it's good enough for the geeks at Google, I suspect it's good enough for me.
Common, religion is bad enough in politics.
See Point Blank, by John Lott. He did a fairly extensive analysis of the impact of various levels of firearms regulation in the US, and found that "shall issue" permitting jurisdictions enjoyed lower crime rates, and that crime rates fell when these laws were enacted. "shall issue" refers to a legal requirement for issues concealed carry permits in the absence of any reason to deny the permit. In "shall issue" states, such as Washington, you can get a permit to carry a gun by walking into your police station and asking for one. They fingerprint you, and in two or three weeks, after they do a background check on you, you get the right to carry a handgun just about anywhere. Not surprisingly, holdup rates in these areas are lower than in districts such as NYC and Washington DC, which prohibit law abiding cictizens from owning or carrying a sidearm.
:-)
And yes, I have one, and yes, I sometimes carry a gun. Why? Because it makes me feel more manly.
Does the phrase, "suck the chrome off a trailer hitch", mean anything to you? ;-)
I'm sorry I struck a nerve, that was not my intent. It seemed to me that most purchasers of support are willing to pay for the availability of a benefit for a need that may or may not happen, and, like purchasers of insurance policies, the economic viability of the business depends on the majority of the purchasers not actually using or needing the service. Customers buy based on a perception of risk, and a desire to minimize that risk. The pricing and delivery model counts on most customers not needing the service most of the time.
Certainly it's different in that the mitigation benefit is a service, rather than a payment. But that's just a different cost function - the overall business model even depends on actuarial considerations - how many customers are there, how many machine do they run, how often will the need what kind of service, and how much will MySQL/RedHat, etc, pay out in satisfying their obligation.
Your assumption is that the companies providing the service have built the product. MySQL doesn't build all the MySQL code, RedHat certainly didn't build the Linux kernel, and CrossOver took over Wine. Yet they all provide support on the aforementioned model. I'm not sure where your building the cars metaphor comes from, but it seems, to use your acidic words, hardly relevant.
The insurance business model, which is alive and well. You might as well ask, "what kind of business model depends on people crashing their cars?" or "what kind of business model depends on houses burning down?"
Now, there are viable alternative strategies to the insurance model of protecting against risk, but there is no denying that this model is popular and perceived to be effective by millions of consumers.
A pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel sticking out of his pants. The bartender says, "Hey, bud, what's with the steering wheel?"
The pirate responds, "Argh-h-h, it's drivin' me nuts!"
Thank, you, thank you, I'll be here all week, try the veal.
Oh. Pardon my lack of quickness. We accountants can be like that. :-)
So you think having a bunch of civil servants running a bunch of tests is going to improve the quality of software developers? Have you worked with many people with MSFT certifications?
I dunno. I took four years worth of the real kind, with a healthy does of statistics and accounting along the way. It seems hyperbolic to me to claim that an average family of 4 people, with a median income of somewhere around $65k a year (US Census) is contributing $2400 of that to bad software. That's about 5% of after tax income.
Bad software costs us 180 billion dollars a year? That would be about $600 per person in the US. Per year. I call bullshit. Unless you are going to claim that Mozilla is costing my family money because it allows me to waste time on /., this just doesn't make a shred of sense.
What is currently inhibiting competition is the last mile problem. To give high bandwidth service, you have to have a high bandwidth connection to the premise. Currently the options for that connection are:
1) DSL over phone lines, which are monopoly owned by the phone company
2) Cable internet, which require the cable conneciton, which are monopoly owned by the cable companies
3) FiOS, which is monopoly owned by the phone companies
Any competitor has to provide new infrastructure to a very large number of consumers in order to become viable. During the time that they are laying out this infrastructure, they would be vulnerable to predatory pricing from the incumbent providers. It's pretty much a non starter unless you have literally 10's of billions of dollars lying around, which means a large corporation, eg., the phone companies.
The days of free competition in the connection space are numbered. It'll only be oligopolistic competition from here on out. Look into Verizon's approach to the Washington state market, where they are slowing FiOS rollout until they get their legislative way, for an example of how consumer friendly this will be in the future.
The single best developer I have ever worked with had a degree in medieval poetry.
Well, there's a mature, civil response. Someone around here has a good sig that discusses the meaning of ad hominem. Keep your eye's peeled.
Call me back when your mother installs Fedora herself. As to your friend with the teenagers, I have two myself. The reason those issues are going to zero is you've installed a system that they can't install new apps onto. While that reduces issues, you did so by reducing 'usability'. You could have achieved the same affect by installing XP Pro and removing administrative access from their logins. But again, these are system administration steps that reduce usability, which, as I said before, exists in a competing balance with stability.
You won't agree, and that doesn't worry me too much. If Linux were 'usable', it would be popular among the unwashed masses.
I ran a chain of video stores back in those days. This actually was where the doctrine of First Sale was largely forged. Many of the studios tried to take the position that renting their videos was illegal. It was resolved in the courts that it wasn't. Many of the studios then hiked their prices even higher, to try and extract all the revenue from the business. This suppressed the number of rental outlets for a bit, and the studios (Paramount leading the way)finally figured out the concept of price elasticity, and lowered the sale price, which opened up the sell through market that you now see today.
The average price that we paid, wholesale, was in the range of $65 in 1983-4.
Well, it only worked in a relatively unsupported way for 10's, if not 100's of millions of people, 99% of which would have not been able to use linux in any way. Linux is only approaching being usable by those same people. During this time, vast amounts of business and user work got done, the majority of which was done on win 3.1/95/98. You have to deny reality to declare that windows didn't function fairly well for running Excel, Word, and email.
Windows reliability is fun to make fun of, but let's be real - the majority of users ran and still run the shit day in, day out without significant issues. I ran IT organizations during the 90's, supporting 100's of users. For a while, I supported a download farm that served up 10's of millions of windows based clients for one of the major consumer applications out there. If Windows didn't work and wasn't usable, we wouldn't have had a business, and my retirement wouldn't be paid for. Compare the Windows downloads for Firefox to the Linux downloads. Which platform is used by the unwashed masses? In the aforementioned download farm, our linux downloads were less than 2% of the total.
Geez, think critically for a second. Could your Grandmother user Linux? Linux is great, and I love it, but "usability" is not high on the list of positive attributes.
Now, it is not out of the question that I might be high. But that again would be besides the point.
So, if you purchase a song from an artist, and you happen to be a filmmaker, you should be able to use that purchased song in your hit movie without further compensation to the artists?
It won't be popular here, but it's a perfectly reasonable position for the owner of a work to take that they are selling you the right to play their music, off of the CD, for your personal use only. It may not be a workable position in the ethos of today's market, but it's a position consistent with the rest of property and rights law. Where the **AA get off the tracks is in their non-fact based pursuit of people on the edge of the fray.
"No wonder it's 2008 and your products are just now reaching the reliability of single UNIX boxes of the mid 90's. "
/., and they -are- juveniles.
Of course, it's 2008, and Linux boxes are just now getting to be as functional and usable as windows boxes from the mid 90's. And what do you know, those are the pieces that have issues.
Linux and Unix are reliable at their core because they are relatively simple. Windows has issues because it isn't. The surprising thing isn't that Windows has issues, the surprising thing is how rare they really are in the scheme of things. It works pretty damn well, considering that there are hundreds of millions of copies out there, and they run on just about everything reasonably well.
I like Linux as much as the next guy, but it's just juvenile to trash windows like some of the folks here want to. Oh, wait, that's right, this is
All apples are clones, as are all seedless grapes. Closer to my heart, most good pot is cloned, and I have never noticed any problems with that...