See, it was always going to come out that way. Fields usually have bitter feuds and disagreements. These are perfectly hermetic to outsiders. But questioning a result undisputed within a field, that is, the stuff people have been agreeing on since forever, when you come from outside it, this is ludicrous.
It is not because you do not understand all the details of how they do stuff that they do it wrong. Things are done in a certain way usually because it was found again and again to Work (TM). It was incredibly arrogant to think that your "advanced statistical methods" would yield different results.
Uhhh, see, it is clearly bad for the long-term benefits of their members that fox continues to exert any influence at all on American politics. So their move is in fact good economic policy.
It will be a long time until CLANG replaces gcc. Especially for c++ (if ever). I am ready to bet it will be too hard for them. They precisely did not rewrite KHTML, they forked and rebranded it -- KHTML still lives independantly. And they were forced go have webkit become a community project again (I guess they were not capable of maintaining it alone.). As for their OS, well, they could not do it from scratch (they would have been incapable of it). And now they can only hope they can stay with it, because if a major rewrite were necessary, they could not pull it off.
Apple: not very capable engineers, but genius re-branders!
I don't like MS, but at least they can do stuff on their own.
So you agree. they are wrong. Saying to someone "you are wrong" is not talking down to them. If you think it is, I am sorry for whatever culture you come from, because it will not last long.
Ignorance is not, and has never been a valid point of view. Being wrong is not a character flaw. However, any culture where being wrong is not only OK, but where there is a taboo about informing your interlocutors for fear that they might feel that they were wrong is going down the crapper pretty fast (see anti-intellectualism, science-religion "debates", etc.).
If you think that your computer is an appliance, you are wrong, and that is all there is to it. Your computer can, amongst the infinite number of things it can do, also work as an applicance. Thinking that it is the only state of things is simply not correct. Thinking it good that it be an appliance while simultaneously marveling at the limitless number of "apps" is not wrong, however, it is stupid [1].
To use the car analogy: choosing opensource vs the walled garden is not like choosing a DIY kit vs a car from the salesman. It is more akin to believing that a car cannot ever be repaired, because it is a magical self-contained entity vs realising that oil needs to be changed, and that you could do it yourself. Could, not should. If you think your car is a magical device, and repairmen are magicians from another realm of existance, you are wrong.
[1] I" like that my computer has a well-defined set of functions" (an appliance). "Oh, look, it can also do that, and that, and that" (obviously, anything can be done, ie, not an appliance). You hold that both A and non-A are simultaneously true: you are stupid.
There is a fundamental difference between a computer and a microwave oven. A computer executes code which is Turing-complete, whereas a microwave cooks stuff.
Many people think about their computer (and tablet, and phone, and music player) as an appliance. However, they are wrong: the potential of these devices is effectively unlimited, therefore, selling them sealed/closed/walled is effectively robbing you of a potentially infinite value.
The effective value of the devices is the capabilities of the hardware. That people do not realise that is a failure of education, not an endorsement of the walled garden strategy. Yes, FOSS geeks are not the target market of apple, but apple needs them more (safari, gcc, their OS) than they need apple (ie not at all). So now that the human face of apple, Jobs, is gone, and only the nasty business practises are left, apple will either open up or die a slow death.
Oh, no, it is worse than that actually: the market actually tries to solve an NP-complete problem. Thus, markets can (in theory) be perfect if and only if P == NP. In some cases, it is an OK heuristic.
So the frictionless surfaces has properties well defined by theory. Perfect markets may well be impossible, even in theory.
This is exactly it. There are two kind of shelves the design of which does not make me angry: the IKEA Billy, and those minimalist designer shelves, custom-built to order for 20 000 bucks.
I tend to go for the Billy (it is vastly cheaper), but long for the other type. Everything in between looks like it was designed by someone who has no sense of style, or is stuck in some weird clichéd version of the middle-class 1940s. With little ornaments and wiggle stuck on their products.
No, the effect is that the manufacture is 100 USD instead of 3. The rest is the stupid healthcare system, low number of doctors and the stupidity of people who should realize that at this price, a round-trip to Europe, including the doctor and hearing aid would be cheaper.
Note that according to your description, you are not working for profit but out of necessity. I would guess that paying you ten or twenty times your salary would not make you work ten or twenty times harder -- probably because unless you are a pathological slacker, you could not physically work ten times harder.
The profit motive is overrated. This does not mean that people are not motivated by it. Simply that it is not a magical force which makes people productive members of society. On the contrary. Monetary incentive makes knowledge workers less productive. Do not mistake "I get paid because I need and deserve to" and "I will make millions! MUAHAHAHAH".
Fuck you! I do research and invent things. I don't patent them, I publish them. And I don't do that for profit, but out of curiosity and interest.
This belief that people do things for material profit only is a cancer of the mind and needs to die. For the record, removing the incentive of work through higher taxes is a good thing: filters out the greedy bastards and lets through the passionate.
The nominal number of bills with dead presidents may double without more money circulating. This is what we see now.
The reason is simple: although more money was printed, most of it went to bank coffers to prop up their capital reserves. It was not lent and therefore never got to be used for buying goods and services.
Thus inflation stayed flat.
The other poster was right: inflation describes the value of currency, and its value is entirely determined by how much people think it is (same for gold, BTW). This is related to the amount of currency passing through everyone's hands. Not to the amount there is, somewhere, in a vault.
Actually, I would argue that the cables are very much in favour of the US. Indeed, when your foreign office is the one making the news and your memos presented as analyses, then really, you are spreading your viewpoint about the world.
Of course, most people don't know what it is diplomats do. They probably assume their job is to go to dinners and eat. But that is really only the surface:)
As for the before/after thing it is mostly a change of tactic: the videos had very little impact, despite being some of the most informative documents about the way modern war happens. Having information is actually worthless if you cannot disseminate it: so they did this big thing out of the cables.
But on the other hand, they are working hard on the latter. With this difference that Somali communication infrastructure will still be better.
The difference between a first and a third world nation is not the average income, that changes quickly. It is the infrastructure: road, rail sanitation, power, communication. But also the bureaucracy and the education of the population.
People who want no/small government are exactly asking for third world infrastructure.
The point of open source licensing is different whether you are a software development house or whether you need some software (you are a user who can code). If I have a very specific need, and basically I can code it, there is a lot of value for me to do it and make it open source. Because the software really is only a tool which helps me and can help others. Creating commons grows my market (whatever it may be). And a license which allows me to attract contributors who will not feel someone will freeload on their work is good in that respect.
The problem is different if producing software is my trade. I can claim that the source adds value for the client: if I go under, the software development/maintenance can be picked up. But for me to make a lot of money out of a tool that I give away for free means I must establish myself as a very good provider of services around that tool. I believe it makes for a stronger economy/ecosystem overall, but it is a hard sell.
Interestingly, for the softs which were once upon a time sold in shrink-wrap boxes, the case is different again: eventually (and it may take many, many years) a GIMP will reach parity to a photoshop. Well, not GIMP, but maybe krita;). But cause those softs have such a wide userbase that enough hobbyist might well come up with competition for the closed-source software. And in this case, again, the GPL is good, because it helps creating communities.
You misunderstand. Companies might well be still run as autocracies. But only as long as the shareholders are fine with that, and with the autocrat of their choosing, and at their price. There is currently a problem that despite owning stock in a company, you do not have powers proportional to your investment. This is clearly wrong.
The cause of that is that the CEO class is basically a parasitic organism which feeds of the corporations and the shareholders (and by extension society) without bringing any value commensurate to their salaries. The alternative would be to curtail salaries, but that would not only be socialism, it would be stupid. Ideally, what I describe could happen (and could fail, who knows), but cannot while the CEOs have a stranglehold on the companies.
You are not allowed to sell yourself into slavery, and you should not be allowed to give up your property rights.
So no platform at all? Having a complete OS is _hard_. In fact, it is way too expensive/high risk for any "focus-on-the-next-quarter" companies. Apple did it (and iterated from very simple devices, with very limited interactions), but they think long term. Nokia did it over many years, and not well enough. MS could not muscle its way in the market. RIM started from an embedded UNIX.
Trade secrets are useless. Nvidia could publish the complete schematics to their silicon, give the code to their drivers, and still no one could do worse than copy it exactly, which means the competition-copycats would always be years behind.
No, the point of the GPL is that it forces people to acknowledge that the value a company adds is the work of their engineers/support staff/designers. Not the illusory holding of some "intellectual property" which brings revenue by itself only if they become patent trolls. Sure there is some blah about "software freedom", but this is irrelevant to the real benefit which is to foster an ecosystem where trust and cooperation are enforced, for the benefit of all.
Which is why linux is a failure, and the BSDs have taken over the world.
Or that google picked a BSD instead of linux for android.
Basically, if you develop a free software project and want people to participate, your odds are better if you are in effect saying: "no one will benefit from your work if they are not giving back". Now the (L)GPL is not perfect in that respect -- look at the KHTML/WebKit debacle -- but it sure is better than the BSD license.
BSD is for people who either are so pure in their generosity that they hope people will take advantage of their work -- admirable ethics, but not so common, or people who think that commercialisation of their work is a desirable outcome -- weird ethics, but to each his own.
Why LLVM? for one, Apple are control freaks, and they hate not to control everything. For another, I guess there are technical reasons for it, I guess being able to port to their own proprietary platform and still release some form of SDK is important to them. But they are still a long way from being able to replace GCC... And in any case some competition in the field of compiler is something we all benefit from.
The point is this: you as an employee wishes to have a guarantied income pension plan. You as an employer wish only to offer (provided you need to hire) only a guarantied contribution.
Of course, nothing is certain, and if the employee picked a company that goes out of business, well, they were a moron. However, if they pick an IBM, then they win.
No, they are just human. It is not so easy to anger such a large number of people at once... Fairness is not a moral obligation: rather it is a strongly enforced social behaviour which you go against at your own risk. Be an asshole, suffer the consequences.
Oh, the requirement are easy: you should be able to commute quickly and cheaply to work. Services should be near. When peak oil strikes, you will understand why suburbia was not just a bad idea, but in fact a horrible idea.
I am not German, but I did know about the German rule... But I do think shareholders, as the owner of the corporation should in fact be responsible for deciding on the payoffs. The reason for that is that with ownership should come responsibility. Those companies with forward-looking investors will thrives, and the vultures will quickly get off the market. I also expect that if a strategy is well explained at the shareholder meeting, there should be no problem to get is approved.
Playing the market for stock prices is madness. A company is there to make a profit, hopefully in the long term. Thus, you should invest to get dividends, not stock value growth. A system where the stock brokers are not necessary is a better system.
Slashdot Mirror
See, it was always going to come out that way. Fields usually have bitter feuds and disagreements. These are perfectly hermetic to outsiders. But questioning a result undisputed within a field, that is, the stuff people have been agreeing on since forever, when you come from outside it, this is ludicrous.
It is not because you do not understand all the details of how they do stuff that they do it wrong. Things are done in a certain way usually because it was found again and again to Work (TM). It was incredibly arrogant to think that your "advanced statistical methods" would yield different results.
This is Europe. The FDA has no jurisdiction there.
Uhhh, see, it is clearly bad for the long-term benefits of their members that fox continues to exert any influence at all on American politics. So their move is in fact good economic policy.
Because supporting a media which itself funds a campaign against the retirement benefits which they are supposed to provide makes sense?
It will be a long time until CLANG replaces gcc. Especially for c++ (if ever). I am ready to bet it will be too hard for them. They precisely did not rewrite KHTML, they forked and rebranded it -- KHTML still lives independantly. And they were forced go have webkit become a community project again (I guess they were not capable of maintaining it alone.). As for their OS, well, they could not do it from scratch (they would have been incapable of it). And now they can only hope they can stay with it, because if a major rewrite were necessary, they could not pull it off.
Apple: not very capable engineers, but genius re-branders!
I don't like MS, but at least they can do stuff on their own.
So you agree. they are wrong. Saying to someone "you are wrong" is not talking down to them. If you think it is, I am sorry for whatever culture you come from, because it will not last long.
Ignorance is not, and has never been a valid point of view. Being wrong is not a character flaw. However, any culture where being wrong is not only OK, but where there is a taboo about informing your interlocutors for fear that they might feel that they were wrong is going down the crapper pretty fast (see anti-intellectualism, science-religion "debates", etc.).
If you think that your computer is an appliance, you are wrong, and that is all there is to it. Your computer can, amongst the infinite number of things it can do, also work as an applicance. Thinking that it is the only state of things is simply not correct. Thinking it good that it be an appliance while simultaneously marveling at the limitless number of "apps" is not wrong, however, it is stupid [1].
To use the car analogy: choosing opensource vs the walled garden is not like choosing a DIY kit vs a car from the salesman. It is more akin to believing that a car cannot ever be repaired, because it is a magical self-contained entity vs realising that oil needs to be changed, and that you could do it yourself. Could, not should. If you think your car is a magical device, and repairmen are magicians from another realm of existance, you are wrong.
[1] I" like that my computer has a well-defined set of functions" (an appliance). "Oh, look, it can also do that, and that, and that" (obviously, anything can be done, ie, not an appliance). You hold that both A and non-A are simultaneously true: you are stupid.
There is a fundamental difference between a computer and a microwave oven. A computer executes code which is Turing-complete, whereas a microwave cooks stuff.
Many people think about their computer (and tablet, and phone, and music player) as an appliance. However, they are wrong: the potential of these devices is effectively unlimited, therefore, selling them sealed/closed/walled is effectively robbing you of a potentially infinite value.
The effective value of the devices is the capabilities of the hardware. That people do not realise that is a failure of education, not an endorsement of the walled garden strategy. Yes, FOSS geeks are not the target market of apple, but apple needs them more (safari, gcc, their OS) than they need apple (ie not at all). So now that the human face of apple, Jobs, is gone, and only the nasty business practises are left, apple will either open up or die a slow death.
At least MS has their own OS...
Oh, no, it is worse than that actually: the market actually tries to solve an NP-complete problem. Thus, markets can (in theory) be perfect if and only if P == NP. In some cases, it is an OK heuristic.
So the frictionless surfaces has properties well defined by theory. Perfect markets may well be impossible, even in theory.
This is exactly it. There are two kind of shelves the design of which does not make me angry: the IKEA Billy, and those minimalist designer shelves, custom-built to order for 20 000 bucks.
I tend to go for the Billy (it is vastly cheaper), but long for the other type. Everything in between looks like it was designed by someone who has no sense of style, or is stuck in some weird clichéd version of the middle-class 1940s. With little ornaments and wiggle stuck on their products.
No, the effect is that the manufacture is 100 USD instead of 3. The rest is the stupid healthcare system, low number of doctors and the stupidity of people who should realize that at this price, a round-trip to Europe, including the doctor and hearing aid would be cheaper.
Note that according to your description, you are not working for profit but out of necessity. I would guess that paying you ten or twenty times your salary would not make you work ten or twenty times harder -- probably because unless you are a pathological slacker, you could not physically work ten times harder.
The profit motive is overrated. This does not mean that people are not motivated by it. Simply that it is not a magical force which makes people productive members of society. On the contrary. Monetary incentive makes knowledge workers less productive. Do not mistake "I get paid because I need and deserve to" and "I will make millions! MUAHAHAHAH".
Fuck you! I do research and invent things.
I don't patent them, I publish them. And I don't do that for profit, but out of curiosity and interest.
This belief that people do things for material profit only is a cancer of the mind and needs to die. For the record, removing the incentive of work through higher taxes is a good thing: filters out the greedy bastards and lets through the passionate.
But the link is not immediate, nor trivial.
The nominal number of bills with dead presidents may double without more money circulating. This is what we see now.
The reason is simple: although more money was printed, most of it went to bank coffers to prop up their capital reserves. It was not lent and therefore never got to be used for buying goods and services.
Thus inflation stayed flat.
The other poster was right: inflation describes the value of currency, and its value is entirely determined by how much people think it is (same for gold, BTW). This is related to the amount of currency passing through everyone's hands. Not to the amount there is, somewhere, in a vault.
Actually, I would argue that the cables are very much in favour of the US. Indeed, when your foreign office is the one making the news and your memos presented as analyses, then really, you are spreading your viewpoint about the world.
Of course, most people don't know what it is diplomats do. They probably assume their job is to go to dinners and eat. But that is really only the surface :)
As for the before/after thing it is mostly a change of tactic: the videos had very little impact, despite being some of the most informative documents about the way modern war happens. Having information is actually worthless if you cannot disseminate it: so they did this big thing out of the cables.
But on the other hand, they are working hard on the latter. With this difference that Somali communication infrastructure will still be better.
The difference between a first and a third world nation is not the average income, that changes quickly. It is the infrastructure: road, rail sanitation, power, communication. But also the bureaucracy and the education of the population.
People who want no/small government are exactly asking for third world infrastructure.
3.31 kilo shitloads (kSL). Metric system FTW.
The point of open source licensing is different whether you are a software development house or whether you need some software (you are a user who can code). If I have a very specific need, and basically I can code it, there is a lot of value for me to do it and make it open source. Because the software really is only a tool which helps me and can help others. Creating commons grows my market (whatever it may be). And a license which allows me to attract contributors who will not feel someone will freeload on their work is good in that respect.
The problem is different if producing software is my trade. I can claim that the source adds value for the client: if I go under, the software development/maintenance can be picked up. But for me to make a lot of money out of a tool that I give away for free means I must establish myself as a very good provider of services around that tool. I believe it makes for a stronger economy/ecosystem overall, but it is a hard sell.
Interestingly, for the softs which were once upon a time sold in shrink-wrap boxes, the case is different again: eventually (and it may take many, many years) a GIMP will reach parity to a photoshop. Well, not GIMP, but maybe krita ;). But cause those softs have such a wide userbase that enough hobbyist might well come up with competition for the closed-source software. And in this case, again, the GPL is good, because it helps creating communities.
You misunderstand. Companies might well be still run as autocracies. But only as long as the shareholders are fine with that, and with the autocrat of their choosing, and at their price. There is currently a problem that despite owning stock in a company, you do not have powers proportional to your investment. This is clearly wrong.
The cause of that is that the CEO class is basically a parasitic organism which feeds of the corporations and the shareholders (and by extension society) without bringing any value commensurate to their salaries. The alternative would be to curtail salaries, but that would not only be socialism, it would be stupid. Ideally, what I describe could happen (and could fail, who knows), but cannot while the CEOs have a stranglehold on the companies.
You are not allowed to sell yourself into slavery, and you should not be allowed to give up your property rights.
So no platform at all? Having a complete OS is _hard_. In fact, it is way too expensive/high risk for any "focus-on-the-next-quarter" companies. Apple did it (and iterated from very simple devices, with very limited interactions), but they think long term. Nokia did it over many years, and not well enough. MS could not muscle its way in the market. RIM started from an embedded UNIX.
Trade secrets are useless. Nvidia could publish the complete schematics to their silicon, give the code to their drivers, and still no one could do worse than copy it exactly, which means the competition-copycats would always be years behind.
No, the point of the GPL is that it forces people to acknowledge that the value a company adds is the work of their engineers/support staff/designers. Not the illusory holding of some "intellectual property" which brings revenue by itself only if they become patent trolls. Sure there is some blah about "software freedom", but this is irrelevant to the real benefit which is to foster an ecosystem where trust and cooperation are enforced, for the benefit of all.
Which is why linux is a failure, and the BSDs have taken over the world.
Or that google picked a BSD instead of linux for android.
Basically, if you develop a free software project and want people to participate, your odds are better if you are in effect saying: "no one will benefit from your work if they are not giving back". Now the (L)GPL is not perfect in that respect -- look at the KHTML/WebKit debacle -- but it sure is better than the BSD license.
BSD is for people who either are so pure in their generosity that they hope people will take advantage of their work -- admirable ethics, but not so common, or people who think that commercialisation of their work is a desirable outcome -- weird ethics, but to each his own.
Why LLVM? for one, Apple are control freaks, and they hate not to control everything. For another, I guess there are technical reasons for it, I guess being able to port to their own proprietary platform and still release some form of SDK is important to them. But they are still a long way from being able to replace GCC... And in any case some competition in the field of compiler is something we all benefit from.
The point is this: you as an employee wishes to have a guarantied income pension plan. You as an employer wish only to offer (provided you need to hire) only a guarantied contribution.
Of course, nothing is certain, and if the employee picked a company that goes out of business, well, they were a moron. However, if they pick an IBM, then they win.
But maybe you think risk should not be rewarded?
Are you of the "the poor are raccoons" church?
No, they are just human. It is not so easy to anger such a large number of people at once... Fairness is not a moral obligation: rather it is a strongly enforced social behaviour which you go against at your own risk. Be an asshole, suffer the consequences.
Oh, the requirement are easy: you should be able to commute quickly and cheaply to work. Services should be near. When peak oil strikes, you will understand why suburbia was not just a bad idea, but in fact a horrible idea.
I am not German, but I did know about the German rule... But I do think shareholders, as the owner of the corporation should in fact be responsible for deciding on the payoffs. The reason for that is that with ownership should come responsibility. Those companies with forward-looking investors will thrives, and the vultures will quickly get off the market. I also expect that if a strategy is well explained at the shareholder meeting, there should be no problem to get is approved.
Playing the market for stock prices is madness. A company is there to make a profit, hopefully in the long term. Thus, you should invest to get dividends, not stock value growth. A system where the stock brokers are not necessary is a better system.