It isn't THAT bad over here...at the worst you see on any polls, about 70% of the people in the US LIKE what they have. I dare say you can't hardly come up with any other topic that many Americans would agree on. So, why try to chuck the whole system, that the majority of people are seemingly happy with? Why not just fix what parts of the current system are broken?
Because your health care system, such as it is, is the least efficient health care system in the developed world. Health care in the US costs twice as much per capita as the next worst nation, for what amounts to roughly comparable service. And really, the service is only roughly comparable if you ignore the significant numbers of people in the US who aren't insured at all (in the neighbourhood of 45M people, last time I checked), and don't really get any service unless they're catastrophically ill.
Just because your corporate masters have made you eat shit and like it, doesn't mean the shit is good for you.
Wouldn't those formats have the same scalability problem? There's nothing in the wikipedia entries to suggest the performance benefits/pitfalls either way. I'm having a hard time imagining how loading up your entire e-mail archive is efficient, when typically a user will only ever access a small portion of that archive.
I missed the part where having all your e-mail in one big file is a good thing. I've never had any problems with "slow to load" e-mails, whether I was using an offline e-mail client or being served e-mails from a webmail address. What exactly is so good about the PST/OST file that it's worth keeping EVERYTHING in RAM for? (I'm not being entirely sarcastic here, if there's a good reason for this, I'd like to know it).
Then maybe the real story here is how Microsoft has extended XML to include non-standard features, which they can implement in their own software while restricting third parties from implementing the same features...
I have the 15" Macbook, and run both Win7 and XP in VMware. Win7's performance is comparable to XP's, maybe a bit better, in terms of speed, and it's not too memory-needy. Whatever build I have though (Release Candidate) is still unstable. It doesn't always boot completely, and often is prone to crashes that look to me to be video-card related. Although I have hopes, it's not quite ready for prime time.
The trustee can settle all the cases out of court and on the terms that Novell and IBM dictate.
My understanding is that Novell already has a decision, no need to settle. Novell will get theirs first, then the creditors (and whatever IBM's Nazgul manage to squeeze, of course).
I picked laptops because it's the only place where you can make reasonable comparisons. I did the comparison between a Dell Latitude and a Macbook Pro elsewhere, if you care to you can go check it out. As for comparing desktops, there's just no way to do it reasonably. How do you compare a Mac Mini or an iMac to an HP atx box? You can't (at least, not if you're being honest with yourself. You may have noticed in my post up the tree there that I pointed out that Apple's product line was missing products at lower price points, and that's why.
You may not place any value in a smaller footprint or an all-in-one (and frankly, I'd rather that Apple provided a mid-range headless desktop), but the fact is that they are built differently and use different (and more expensive) components than a desktop. This makes it hard to compare prices in any reasonable manner.
Wordperfect is by no means dead, btw. Corel has been keeping it alive, and so far both law offices I've worked for us Wordperfect for document creation over Word.
I wonder about Apple's retail operations. They're certainly doing something right, as their stores are always busy to the point of being crowded, but whenever I've gone in to get something looked at, the lineup at the Genius Bar is far too long (i.e. they're taking appointments for the next day). That says that 1) too many users don't know what the fuck they're doing 2) too much of their stuff breaks or 3) they're intentionally understaffing their stores to create lineups. My guess is 1 and 3.
Except that this isn't actually true. You can certainly get a computer for half the price, but it's never the same specs/quality of build, it's always lower. You can spec out comparable Dells, HPs, ThinkPads, whatever, and they always come out to about the same price as the Apple gear. I always used to buy commodity PC stuff, and every time I end up replacing major components (motherboard, ram, power supply, etc) within about three years. True, if I spent more on the PC it would last longer, but then it would cost the same as the Mac.
The problem with Apple isn't that their stuff is overpriced (it isn't) it's that they don't offer any products at lower price points. Of course, Apple is managing pretty well with this strategy, so you can't fault them for sticking with it.
Given the amount of repair work and parts replacement they did on GP's first computer, they probably offered him the new extended warranty to recoup some of their losses on the work they did for him before (not to mention the new computer they gave him). Apple made no money off GP, even if they did manage to sell him the second warranty.
Otherwise, you're certainly right. EWP's are offered by companies because in the big picture, they're insanely profitable.
I would agree with this sentiment, and as someone who owns a lot of Apple gear, I'd add that my experience has been pleasant insofar as the electronics works well, but their customer care leaves much to be desired. I also think Apple's iCulture of iSecrecy has gone iTooFar. The need to control every aspect of the user experience leads Apple to do evil things (whereas Microsoft, on the other hand, is just evil).
Experience reading through hundreds of medical files, and reports, and other shit I'm not going to reproduce for you. If you're interested, look up the definitions of Chronic Pain Disorder, and start from there.
So why do the anti-empirical morons insist on taking things like wifi allergy seriously, and not PR-stunt allergy?
Well, because if I don't take is wifi allergy seriously, then why should he take my fibromyalgia seriously? Or your chronic pain disorder? What I think is happening is that there are two main effects at work here. One is a result of a kind of "post-scientific" thinking, the same kind of thinking that drives the New Age movement, basically the idea that nobody is wrong, everyone has their own opinion about the world, and that opinion is valid. If you subscribe to this school of thought, one of the rigours of it is that you have to assume each person is capable of creating a truth. And one of the benefits of course is that you can believe whatever you want and others like you will eat all your bullshit up with a smile. A lot of the ills of our society can be tracked to this kind of reasoning.
The other problem is our society's consistent inability to treat mental illness as an illness and not as a moral failing. Most of the mysterious illnesses of our society, from wifi allergies to "travelling" pain, to fibromyalgia and chronic pain disorder, are all manifestations of dysthemia and depression. People simply refuse to acknowledge that they're depressed, because of the moral stigma attaching to mental illness, and so the illness manifests itself in other ways.
Calling all these people stupid, however, is just counter-productive and innaccurate. Many of these people aren't stupid in the intellectual sense, even if they lack self-knowledge. Many people here at slashdot, though not stupid, also fail at self-knowledge. Our society simply doesn't encourage self-knowledge, in part because of that moral stigma attaching to mental illness, psychotherapy, or really anything to do with the workings of our emotions. These people are reacting to an illness the only way they know how, because they've never been taught better.
I've not found the upgrades to be necessary for compatibility reasons, though we did upgrade one of our older macs (a G5) to get the benefit of the performance boost. It had been running with the OS it came with for...I'm going to say about 4 years. I'm not sure why you feel that you'd be obligated to purchase upgrades, care to offer some insight?
Certainly if you feel that a point change in the OS X world is equivalent to a service pack, I can see how you might be put out by having to pay for one. But I think they're more like the change between XP > Vista than the change between XP SP1 to XP SP2.
But once you pass the point where the computer has human-level intelligence, it can take over its own design, both hardware and and software. While it's sitting around waiting for Moore's law to kick in, it can be refining its own software, and figuring out how to get itself on more chips instead of waiting around for humans to figure out how to make faster chips. For that matter, what happens to Moore's Law when the machines start designing their own chips? Don't you think they'll get a lot faster at it? I do.
Actually, the question in my mind was about whether a free market is regulated or not. Many people believe that a free market means a market without rules, which is why I was asking for a clarification from Bert. I must confess that I thought that way myself, despite my reading on the subject. If I understand correctly, in your conception (which I agree with by the way) a free market would be regulated exactly to the extent that the regulations preserved or brought about the axioms of free market theory.
Except that I didn't want to just give my definition, I wanted to see if the poster thought the terms were interchangeable, or had just missed the exact wording in the parent's post.
Incidentally, I got four or five replies to that, not just one. Each reply was different, most had something important to say, and led to more conversation, including this conversation. What exactly is wrong with that? We're here to waste time, not to be efficient purveyors of definitions, after all.
I don't understand your distinction between unregulated and free market capitalism. The proponents of "free market capitalism" model espouse a marketplace that is unregulated, as far as I know, and as you correctly stated, real-world examples of unrestricted markets have lead to the society moving toward fascism.
Capitalism itself is simply a system of market regulation in which the rich and powerful work to keep and grow their riches, while trying (successfully) to keep the poor and powerless from coming to take it back. Much like Communism, in fact.
As I replied to another person in this thread, the "free market" as it's known today is a theoretical model, some of the assumptions of which are patently untrue and are unlikely ever to come to exist. Capitalism is particular system of laws that govern the markets and other economic activity. There's a very eloquent post attached to mine above that explains this much better than I can.
The "free market" is a model that economists use to test and evaluate their theories. The problem is that the "free market" is a purely theoretical model, in that it is based on assumptions that are clearly untrue, and may never come to be, ever. Capitalism is a real-world economic practice, and as such is not at all equivalent to the free market. If you rely on an encyclopedia for your knowledge, you will learn much, and miss more.
What makes you think Moore's law will apply to a machine intelligence? Don't make the mistake of thinking that an intelligent machine will be a discrete object to which you can point. There's no reason, given how ubiquitous networking already is, to think that a machine consciousness is limited to the form of a robot. A machine intelligence will live in the cloud, and what we think of as robots will be merely appendages of that intelligence, with enough consciousness copied in as the machine needs to do whatever it's going to do.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't THAT bad over here...at the worst you see on any polls, about 70% of the people in the US LIKE what they have. I dare say you can't hardly come up with any other topic that many Americans would agree on. So, why try to chuck the whole system, that the majority of people are seemingly happy with? Why not just fix what parts of the current system are broken?
Because your health care system, such as it is, is the least efficient health care system in the developed world. Health care in the US costs twice as much per capita as the next worst nation, for what amounts to roughly comparable service. And really, the service is only roughly comparable if you ignore the significant numbers of people in the US who aren't insured at all (in the neighbourhood of 45M people, last time I checked), and don't really get any service unless they're catastrophically ill.
Just because your corporate masters have made you eat shit and like it, doesn't mean the shit is good for you.
Wouldn't those formats have the same scalability problem? There's nothing in the wikipedia entries to suggest the performance benefits/pitfalls either way. I'm having a hard time imagining how loading up your entire e-mail archive is efficient, when typically a user will only ever access a small portion of that archive.
I missed the part where having all your e-mail in one big file is a good thing. I've never had any problems with "slow to load" e-mails, whether I was using an offline e-mail client or being served e-mails from a webmail address. What exactly is so good about the PST/OST file that it's worth keeping EVERYTHING in RAM for? (I'm not being entirely sarcastic here, if there's a good reason for this, I'd like to know it).
Then maybe the real story here is how Microsoft has extended XML to include non-standard features, which they can implement in their own software while restricting third parties from implementing the same features...
I have the 15" Macbook, and run both Win7 and XP in VMware. Win7's performance is comparable to XP's, maybe a bit better, in terms of speed, and it's not too memory-needy. Whatever build I have though (Release Candidate) is still unstable. It doesn't always boot completely, and often is prone to crashes that look to me to be video-card related. Although I have hopes, it's not quite ready for prime time.
The trustee can settle all the cases out of court and on the terms that Novell and IBM dictate.
My understanding is that Novell already has a decision, no need to settle. Novell will get theirs first, then the creditors (and whatever IBM's Nazgul manage to squeeze, of course).
I picked laptops because it's the only place where you can make reasonable comparisons. I did the comparison between a Dell Latitude and a Macbook Pro elsewhere, if you care to you can go check it out. As for comparing desktops, there's just no way to do it reasonably. How do you compare a Mac Mini or an iMac to an HP atx box? You can't (at least, not if you're being honest with yourself. You may have noticed in my post up the tree there that I pointed out that Apple's product line was missing products at lower price points, and that's why.
You may not place any value in a smaller footprint or an all-in-one (and frankly, I'd rather that Apple provided a mid-range headless desktop), but the fact is that they are built differently and use different (and more expensive) components than a desktop. This makes it hard to compare prices in any reasonable manner.
Maybe you just pick the shittiest laptops on Dell's site:
Dell Latitude = $1559.00
MacBook Pro = $1699.00
A hundred dollars difference, and the MacBook Pro uses DDR3 while the Dell Latitude uses DDR2.
Wordperfect is by no means dead, btw. Corel has been keeping it alive, and so far both law offices I've worked for us Wordperfect for document creation over Word.
I wonder about Apple's retail operations. They're certainly doing something right, as their stores are always busy to the point of being crowded, but whenever I've gone in to get something looked at, the lineup at the Genius Bar is far too long (i.e. they're taking appointments for the next day). That says that 1) too many users don't know what the fuck they're doing 2) too much of their stuff breaks or 3) they're intentionally understaffing their stores to create lineups. My guess is 1 and 3.
Except that this isn't actually true. You can certainly get a computer for half the price, but it's never the same specs/quality of build, it's always lower. You can spec out comparable Dells, HPs, ThinkPads, whatever, and they always come out to about the same price as the Apple gear. I always used to buy commodity PC stuff, and every time I end up replacing major components (motherboard, ram, power supply, etc) within about three years. True, if I spent more on the PC it would last longer, but then it would cost the same as the Mac.
The problem with Apple isn't that their stuff is overpriced (it isn't) it's that they don't offer any products at lower price points. Of course, Apple is managing pretty well with this strategy, so you can't fault them for sticking with it.
Given the amount of repair work and parts replacement they did on GP's first computer, they probably offered him the new extended warranty to recoup some of their losses on the work they did for him before (not to mention the new computer they gave him). Apple made no money off GP, even if they did manage to sell him the second warranty.
Otherwise, you're certainly right. EWP's are offered by companies because in the big picture, they're insanely profitable.
I would agree with this sentiment, and as someone who owns a lot of Apple gear, I'd add that my experience has been pleasant insofar as the electronics works well, but their customer care leaves much to be desired. I also think Apple's iCulture of iSecrecy has gone iTooFar. The need to control every aspect of the user experience leads Apple to do evil things (whereas Microsoft, on the other hand, is just evil).
I think Sony has prior art...
Experience reading through hundreds of medical files, and reports, and other shit I'm not going to reproduce for you. If you're interested, look up the definitions of Chronic Pain Disorder, and start from there.
So why do the anti-empirical morons insist on taking things like wifi allergy seriously, and not PR-stunt allergy?
Well, because if I don't take is wifi allergy seriously, then why should he take my fibromyalgia seriously? Or your chronic pain disorder? What I think is happening is that there are two main effects at work here. One is a result of a kind of "post-scientific" thinking, the same kind of thinking that drives the New Age movement, basically the idea that nobody is wrong, everyone has their own opinion about the world, and that opinion is valid. If you subscribe to this school of thought, one of the rigours of it is that you have to assume each person is capable of creating a truth. And one of the benefits of course is that you can believe whatever you want and others like you will eat all your bullshit up with a smile. A lot of the ills of our society can be tracked to this kind of reasoning.
The other problem is our society's consistent inability to treat mental illness as an illness and not as a moral failing. Most of the mysterious illnesses of our society, from wifi allergies to "travelling" pain, to fibromyalgia and chronic pain disorder, are all manifestations of dysthemia and depression. People simply refuse to acknowledge that they're depressed, because of the moral stigma attaching to mental illness, and so the illness manifests itself in other ways.
Calling all these people stupid, however, is just counter-productive and innaccurate. Many of these people aren't stupid in the intellectual sense, even if they lack self-knowledge. Many people here at slashdot, though not stupid, also fail at self-knowledge. Our society simply doesn't encourage self-knowledge, in part because of that moral stigma attaching to mental illness, psychotherapy, or really anything to do with the workings of our emotions. These people are reacting to an illness the only way they know how, because they've never been taught better.
And I'm sure they'll get the chance to defend that claim in court.
I've not found the upgrades to be necessary for compatibility reasons, though we did upgrade one of our older macs (a G5) to get the benefit of the performance boost. It had been running with the OS it came with for...I'm going to say about 4 years. I'm not sure why you feel that you'd be obligated to purchase upgrades, care to offer some insight?
Certainly if you feel that a point change in the OS X world is equivalent to a service pack, I can see how you might be put out by having to pay for one. But I think they're more like the change between XP > Vista than the change between XP SP1 to XP SP2.
But once you pass the point where the computer has human-level intelligence, it can take over its own design, both hardware and and software. While it's sitting around waiting for Moore's law to kick in, it can be refining its own software, and figuring out how to get itself on more chips instead of waiting around for humans to figure out how to make faster chips. For that matter, what happens to Moore's Law when the machines start designing their own chips? Don't you think they'll get a lot faster at it? I do.
Actually, the question in my mind was about whether a free market is regulated or not. Many people believe that a free market means a market without rules, which is why I was asking for a clarification from Bert. I must confess that I thought that way myself, despite my reading on the subject. If I understand correctly, in your conception (which I agree with by the way) a free market would be regulated exactly to the extent that the regulations preserved or brought about the axioms of free market theory.
Except that I didn't want to just give my definition, I wanted to see if the poster thought the terms were interchangeable, or had just missed the exact wording in the parent's post.
Incidentally, I got four or five replies to that, not just one. Each reply was different, most had something important to say, and led to more conversation, including this conversation. What exactly is wrong with that? We're here to waste time, not to be efficient purveyors of definitions, after all.
I don't understand your distinction between unregulated and free market capitalism. The proponents of "free market capitalism" model espouse a marketplace that is unregulated, as far as I know, and as you correctly stated, real-world examples of unrestricted markets have lead to the society moving toward fascism.
Capitalism itself is simply a system of market regulation in which the rich and powerful work to keep and grow their riches, while trying (successfully) to keep the poor and powerless from coming to take it back. Much like Communism, in fact.
I would call it
1) Anarchy.
2) non-existent.
As I replied to another person in this thread, the "free market" as it's known today is a theoretical model, some of the assumptions of which are patently untrue and are unlikely ever to come to exist. Capitalism is particular system of laws that govern the markets and other economic activity. There's a very eloquent post attached to mine above that explains this much better than I can.
The "free market" is a model that economists use to test and evaluate their theories. The problem is that the "free market" is a purely theoretical model, in that it is based on assumptions that are clearly untrue, and may never come to be, ever. Capitalism is a real-world economic practice, and as such is not at all equivalent to the free market. If you rely on an encyclopedia for your knowledge, you will learn much, and miss more.
What makes you think Moore's law will apply to a machine intelligence? Don't make the mistake of thinking that an intelligent machine will be a discrete object to which you can point. There's no reason, given how ubiquitous networking already is, to think that a machine consciousness is limited to the form of a robot. A machine intelligence will live in the cloud, and what we think of as robots will be merely appendages of that intelligence, with enough consciousness copied in as the machine needs to do whatever it's going to do.
The limit will be compile times, not Moore's law.