What I do see is end users rightfully objecting that they should pay for narrow-market SDK/developer features that may or may not ever be useful to the end-user. The average Safari/iTunes/Word user has zero use for any of this stuff.
What makes you think that anyone is going to force people to buy Snow Leopard? It's not like Apple is instantly dropping support for Leopard. So, you're right. The average Safari/iTunes/Word user won't buy Snow Leopard. They don't need to and nobody is going to rough them up.
Actually, you bring up an interesting point. Do you run OS X? I'm curious how many "end users" are the ones complaining. I run Tiger, no one made me buy Leopard and I haven't. I don't mind that Apple decided to focus that next release on new core technologies Grand Central, OpenCL, performance, reduced foot print, stability and MS Exchange interoperability. We don't even know what Snow Leopard will cost or what the upgrade policy will be. Somehow I can't bring myself to be outraged quite yet. Must be the tasty Kool-Aid.
Without the "Defend Everything Apple Does Or Might Do" crowd, this would be a pretty boring discussion.
And without the perpetual tribalism, overreactions and histrionics, this would not be Slashdot.
Two words: Invisible Hand [wikipedia.org]. The market is doing just what it's supposed to do.
The invisible hand is great for managing financial efficiencies, but as far as I can tell it doesn't do anything to prevent us from completely screwing ourselves. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley in the late 60s and we use to have smog alerts where we were advised to stay indoors and avoid exertion. On those days, my lungs burned. It was not the invisible hand the reduced pollution, it was evil, naughty, horrible, job killing regulations. [1]
I'm pretty sure that if we wait for the invisible hand to solve our resource and pollution problems, it will be with an invisible bitch slap.
[1] And yet somehow the economy did not collapse...
... why not go to a amd system with 2 cpus and Hyper Transport links?
The short answer is "I don't know." My assumption was that it was some combination of:
Marketing: For non-technical customer's Intel means something, AMD has less mind share.
Relationship: Maybe Intel was more willing to work with Apple on future chips/chipsets. I assume they were pretty pissed about the G5 never being usable in a notebook and were looking for some guarantees that their requests would be taken seriously.
NDAs: Related to above, they no doubt were given inside information on what was coming and future direction and maybe that looked better to them.
Price: Intel may have given them one of those sweet, anti-competitive, discounts for going 100% Intel.
Drag-and-drop sounds complicated to me ...
It's not. It's easy in Qt, it's easy in GTK, it's easy in WinForms, it's easy in SWING. Even in VB it is easy.
Methinks you are confusing languages, libraries, Frameworks and IDEs.
If people genuinely wanted to reduce trade in endangered species they'd support devaluing the products by ranching and harvesting the species instead.
It's an interesting idea, but I doubt it's economically feasible. Elephants eat a lot and I'm pretty sure that tusks grow quite slowly. You could try selling the meat too, but I think it would be an uphill battle.
Anyway, without effective enforcement poaching would still be cheaper, aka more efficient.
There are lots of possible reasons why such an overbroad statistic could be true, and most of them don't involve racism.
You're right. I just Googled around a bit and of course there are studies, summaries and aggregations that cut both ways, depending on what the presenter was trying to prove. I don't have the time or energy to figure out who's right.
Regardless though, I stand by the general point. I think life for poor blacks is tough and you can imagine that it might lead to a certain outlook. BTW - I think the same is true of poor whites. Imagine being a poor white and "hearing" about all these supposed programs favoring minorities. It could piss you off.
Look at Slashdot, we like to think we are "above average" intelligence yet there is an awful lot of my "tribe is right, you're tribe is evil!" going on. Where my tribe is a liberal, conservative, libertarian, Linux user, Mac user, Windows user, etc...
The same can be said for many of Wright's other ridiculous claims.
I've heard a lot more of Wright's sermons than the sound bites and he also says a lot of really interesting and positive things. In general comes off as an intelligent man.
mis-citing the Tuskegee experiments (which didn't infect anyone with syphilis, but rather allowed their infections to go untreated) as evidence
Letting someone's syphilis go untreated is a death sentence, a slow painful death sentence. So the AIDS claim is crazy, but Tuskegee was a big deal. And if you look at the incarceration rates, length of sentences, and the likelihood of getting the death penalty for blacks and whites accused of the same crime it's easy (at least for me) to understand why the man might be a little paranoid.
I have no problem with Obama having had Wright as his pasture and spiritual mentor. I have no problem with him cutting him some slack. If you get a chance, check out the entire Bill Moyer interview.
If there was anything suspicious about the three democrats that flew to Iraq during Bush's rush to invade a country that posed no threat, I'm sure the then the then Republican congress would have spent millions of dollars to investigate. Even if they are douche bags, it doesn't make the decision to invade wise.
and killing children.
So Saddam Hussein was a sick bastard, maybe we should have waited for the UN. While we were waiting we could have helped out in one of the other many countries slaughtering innocent people. By the way, we've now killed a few Iraqi children too: Iraq Body Count
Yeah, great guy. No wonder the Democrat Party is running a Hussein, they loved Saddam so much.
You do realize that arguing against someone based on their name is lame, don't you?
Those are really good points, I feel naive for not thinking more about the military implications of "securing" access.
Of course given Rumsfeld's stupid (IMHO) fantasies about only needing a small fast military and this administration's continued destruction of our military infrastructure (it seems) and morale, it's hard to believe they were focusing on improving the US military capability.
I still think it was mostly driven by the desire to extend the economics of consumption. Not for the good of the consumers (although it does keep prices down), but for the good of the producers.
What ever the reasons, it sounded like a bad idea during the rush to invade and so far nothing has convinced me that it was the Right Thing (tm) to do.
Oh, really? Where are the mega-bucks coming from our new oil colony? Where's our massive new oil supply? Why are we still so concerned with OPEC decisions?
Yes, it's about oil. Check out 1998: PNAC Letter to Clinton: Remove Saddam... vital interests in the Gulf. The people that wrote that letter ended up in the Bush administration and helped "architect" the war. Oil is important to the US economy and rather than invest in alternative energy and conservation, Bush and his cronies choose to invade a country that was no threat to the US.
It was about securing access to oil. It was a stupid idea that did not work and we will be paying for it the rest of our lives.
The money from Iraq's oil production goes to the provisional government, not to the US. The facts do not square with your theory.
Iraq's massive oil reserves may be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies - which could end up grabbing up to 75% of the beleagured nation's oil profits - under a law seen coming before the Iraqi parliament within days, the Independent reported on its Web site Monday.
As I said, the idea was to secure future access to oil because it's important to the US (and world) economy. The intent was not such much for cheap gas, but a continuing supply of oil and gasoline. Bush and friends have strong connections to the oil industry and they were more than happy to let them (not you, or Iraq) profit heavily.
You may dislike corporations, but history has shown they are very effective at making money, and at the end of the day that is what matters to the shareholders.
The issue is that corporations effect much more than the shareholder's finances. I'm not arguing for co-ops. I do believe that some form of regulation is vital. Cigarette companies would still be telling us that smoking is good for us, if not for regulation. Cars would be pumping out much more particulates and other pollution, factories would dump more toxins into the environment, more old forests would be destroyed, etc.
Some people talk about the free market as if it is some magical universal Truth that will make everything OK. That seems like just another form of ideological fundamentalism to me.
Modding the parent as Flamebait seems harsh, methinks humor was the goal. I actually thought the parent was correct based on the much cited quote from Mussolini:
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
But I just learned (from Wikipedia so it must be true) that he didn't say that. It's too bad, I liked being able to use the term Fascist to slander those who treat cooperate profits as if it were the ultimate Truth of the universe.
Whatever it's called, the preamble of the US constitution is "We the People", not "We the Legal Entities," 'nuff said.
People have a right to freely associate and operate collectively. A corporation is just a formal way of doing this.
I believe the issue is that cooperate entities in the US (and apparently elsewhere) have been given essentially all the rights of an actual person. But for the most part the people leading the corporation are protected from personal liability for the actions of the corporation. Furthermore there don't seem to be many ways to hold a corporation responsible either. You can't jail or execute a corporation. I seem to recall there was a time when the government could dissolve a corporation but that changed a long time ago.
The point of the article (to try to get back on topic) is that currently the people behind corporations use the argument of fiduciary responsibility as an excuse to base all decisions on short term financial gain and stock price. Regardless of whether those decisions are counter to the interests of the people of the planet, nation, or state in which they operate. Meanwhile, to attract business national and state governments keep reducing the responsibilities placed on corporations.
Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially.
Perhaps Ray Ozzie is going to start a new organization to protect developers of free software from themselves.
METH - Microsoft for the Ethical Treatment of Hobbyists!
My GF is a teacher and she works much harder than I (a software geek) do on a regular bases. Sure I have the customer emergencies and tight schedules, but her workload is unrelenting. Lesson planning, grading, and harassing parents to try to get them to actually parent.
The whole "once they have tenure" complaint may have some merit, but good luck surviving long enough to get tenure anymore.
You are right that people need to make money to survive in this world, no doubt about it. And as you point out, a lot of people are making money working on open source projects. But I think Gate's is intentionally confusing the issues. To paraphrase, "This here commie-free-love stuff won't work in the grown up world."
I also think the new trend of calling it "hobby software" seems to be nothing but spin and FUD to me. Try to scare people into thinking, "wait a minute, we can't base our business on someone's hobby!" Well, it seems to be working OK for Google and IBM. And there is a ton of BSD and GNU code in Mac OS X. And there are thousands of devices out there running Linux. So the whole "hobby" comment strikes me as propaganda. It's actually working well and more and more people are making money developing open source, or building products and projects on open source platforms.
(I personally find it hard to believe that someone would kill you simply because you owned a gun, but I digress...)
I think the scenario is that some burglar breaks in to steal your goodies, you try to be Rambo and it turns out he's a better shot. Another possibility is the lover's quarrel that escalates to murder in the heat of the moment. Or if you have a concealed weapon in our purse and it gets snatched, you just armed the thief. Come on, I'm sure you can think a few ways that having a gun could backfire, so to speak.
Simply pointing to the correlation between gun ownership and suicide or the likelihood of being murdered as arguments against gun ownership are rather weak and generally an intellectually dishonest tactic to imply conclusions that don't
actually fit the data.
Who said I was against gun ownership? I was amused by the call for a citation that didn't include one, so I Googled a couple. I should have said "some studies show," although I did try to make my lack of expertise clear. I don't really care if people own guns, and as a matter of fact I support the 2nd amendment given the current reality. But I think it is just as dishonest to assume that guns are an equally good idea for all households. If you live in a low crime area, have children, etc. it's is perfectly possible that you are safer not to have a loaded gun lying around. And if it's not loaded and easily accessible it loses a lot of the home protection value.
You are right about correlation and causation, but when making decisions you've got to start somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: "It's a slow news day, let's start a pro/anti-Apple flamewar to increase advertising revenue."
FTFY
Well, it ships with Python, so I guess the answer is yes.
What makes you think that anyone is going to force people to buy Snow Leopard? It's not like Apple is instantly dropping support for Leopard. So, you're right. The average Safari/iTunes/Word user won't buy Snow Leopard. They don't need to and nobody is going to rough them up.
Actually, you bring up an interesting point. Do you run OS X? I'm curious how many "end users" are the ones complaining. I run Tiger, no one made me buy Leopard and I haven't. I don't mind that Apple decided to focus that next release on new core technologies Grand Central, OpenCL, performance, reduced foot print, stability and MS Exchange interoperability. We don't even know what Snow Leopard will cost or what the upgrade policy will be. Somehow I can't bring myself to be outraged quite yet. Must be the tasty Kool-Aid.
Without the "Defend Everything Apple Does Or Might Do" crowd, this would be a pretty boring discussion.And without the perpetual tribalism, overreactions and histrionics, this would not be Slashdot.
The invisible hand is great for managing financial efficiencies, but as far as I can tell it doesn't do anything to prevent us from completely screwing ourselves. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley in the late 60s and we use to have smog alerts where we were advised to stay indoors and avoid exertion. On those days, my lungs burned. It was not the invisible hand the reduced pollution, it was evil, naughty, horrible, job killing regulations. [1]
I'm pretty sure that if we wait for the invisible hand to solve our resource and pollution problems, it will be with an invisible bitch slap.
[1] And yet somehow the economy did not collapse...
... why not go to a amd system with 2 cpus and Hyper Transport links?The short answer is "I don't know." My assumption was that it was some combination of:
Of course, it's pure speculation.
Methinks you are confusing languages, libraries, Frameworks and IDEs.
It's an interesting idea, but I doubt it's economically feasible. Elephants eat a lot and I'm pretty sure that tusks grow quite slowly. You could try selling the meat too, but I think it would be an uphill battle.
Anyway, without effective enforcement poaching would still be cheaper, aka more efficient.
You're right. I just Googled around a bit and of course there are studies, summaries and aggregations that cut both ways, depending on what the presenter was trying to prove. I don't have the time or energy to figure out who's right.
Regardless though, I stand by the general point. I think life for poor blacks is tough and you can imagine that it might lead to a certain outlook. BTW - I think the same is true of poor whites. Imagine being a poor white and "hearing" about all these supposed programs favoring minorities. It could piss you off.
Look at Slashdot, we like to think we are "above average" intelligence yet there is an awful lot of my "tribe is right, you're tribe is evil!" going on. Where my tribe is a liberal, conservative, libertarian, Linux user, Mac user, Windows user, etc...
Your making a judgment re: Obama and McCain based on the summary of a summary? Really?
I've heard a lot more of Wright's sermons than the sound bites and he also says a lot of really interesting and positive things. In general comes off as an intelligent man.
mis-citing the Tuskegee experiments (which didn't infect anyone with syphilis, but rather allowed their infections to go untreated) as evidenceLetting someone's syphilis go untreated is a death sentence, a slow painful death sentence. So the AIDS claim is crazy, but Tuskegee was a big deal. And if you look at the incarceration rates, length of sentences, and the likelihood of getting the death penalty for blacks and whites accused of the same crime it's easy (at least for me) to understand why the man might be a little paranoid.
I have no problem with Obama having had Wright as his pasture and spiritual mentor. I have no problem with him cutting him some slack. If you get a chance, check out the entire Bill Moyer interview.
If there was anything suspicious about the three democrats that flew to Iraq during Bush's rush to invade a country that posed no threat, I'm sure the then the then Republican congress would have spent millions of dollars to investigate. Even if they are douche bags, it doesn't make the decision to invade wise.
and killing children.So Saddam Hussein was a sick bastard, maybe we should have waited for the UN. While we were waiting we could have helped out in one of the other many countries slaughtering innocent people. By the way, we've now killed a few Iraqi children too: Iraq Body Count
Yeah, great guy. No wonder the Democrat Party is running a Hussein, they loved Saddam so much.You do realize that arguing against someone based on their name is lame, don't you?
Those are really good points, I feel naive for not thinking more about the military implications of "securing" access.
Of course given Rumsfeld's stupid (IMHO) fantasies about only needing a small fast military and this administration's continued destruction of our military infrastructure (it seems) and morale, it's hard to believe they were focusing on improving the US military capability.
I still think it was mostly driven by the desire to extend the economics of consumption. Not for the good of the consumers (although it does keep prices down), but for the good of the producers.
What ever the reasons, it sounded like a bad idea during the rush to invade and so far nothing has convinced me that it was the Right Thing (tm) to do.
Yes, it's about oil. Check out 1998: PNAC Letter to Clinton: Remove Saddam ... vital interests in the Gulf. The people that wrote that letter ended up in the Bush administration and helped "architect" the war. Oil is important to the US economy and rather than invest in alternative energy and conservation, Bush and his cronies choose to invade a country that was no threat to the US.
It was about securing access to oil. It was a stupid idea that did not work and we will be paying for it the rest of our lives.
The money from Iraq's oil production goes to the provisional government, not to the US. The facts do not square with your theory.Actually most the money goes to the companies that extract the oil, they are suppose to get a sweat heart deal. See Western companies may get 75% of Iraqi oil profits:
Iraq's massive oil reserves may be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies - which could end up grabbing up to 75% of the beleagured nation's oil profits - under a law seen coming before the Iraqi parliament within days, the Independent reported on its Web site Monday.As I said, the idea was to secure future access to oil because it's important to the US (and world) economy. The intent was not such much for cheap gas, but a continuing supply of oil and gasoline. Bush and friends have strong connections to the oil industry and they were more than happy to let them (not you, or Iraq) profit heavily.
The issue is that corporations effect much more than the shareholder's finances. I'm not arguing for co-ops. I do believe that some form of regulation is vital. Cigarette companies would still be telling us that smoking is good for us, if not for regulation. Cars would be pumping out much more particulates and other pollution, factories would dump more toxins into the environment, more old forests would be destroyed, etc.
Some people talk about the free market as if it is some magical universal Truth that will make everything OK. That seems like just another form of ideological fundamentalism to me.
Modding the parent as Flamebait seems harsh, methinks humor was the goal. I actually thought the parent was correct based on the much cited quote from Mussolini:
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.But I just learned (from Wikipedia so it must be true) that he didn't say that. It's too bad, I liked being able to use the term Fascist to slander those who treat cooperate profits as if it were the ultimate Truth of the universe.
Whatever it's called, the preamble of the US constitution is "We the People", not "We the Legal Entities," 'nuff said.
I believe the issue is that cooperate entities in the US (and apparently elsewhere) have been given essentially all the rights of an actual person. But for the most part the people leading the corporation are protected from personal liability for the actions of the corporation. Furthermore there don't seem to be many ways to hold a corporation responsible either. You can't jail or execute a corporation. I seem to recall there was a time when the government could dissolve a corporation but that changed a long time ago.
The point of the article (to try to get back on topic) is that currently the people behind corporations use the argument of fiduciary responsibility as an excuse to base all decisions on short term financial gain and stock price. Regardless of whether those decisions are counter to the interests of the people of the planet, nation, or state in which they operate. Meanwhile, to attract business national and state governments keep reducing the responsibilities placed on corporations.
Doh!
Perhaps Ray Ozzie is going to start a new organization to protect developers of free software from themselves.
METH - Microsoft for the Ethical Treatment of Hobbyists!
Will someone please tag this article as a troll?
Quick, sell your Google stock!
There is a lot of solid Python code out there. The best way to write Python is to also write unit tests. Which is a good practice in any language.
My GF is a teacher and she works much harder than I (a software geek) do on a regular bases. Sure I have the customer emergencies and tight schedules, but her workload is unrelenting. Lesson planning, grading, and harassing parents to try to get them to actually parent.
The whole "once they have tenure" complaint may have some merit, but good luck surviving long enough to get tenure anymore.
Nothing personal, but with the right attachments it may not get turned down... Ouch.
You are right that people need to make money to survive in this world, no doubt about it. And as you point out, a lot of people are making money working on open source projects. But I think Gate's is intentionally confusing the issues. To paraphrase, "This here commie-free-love stuff won't work in the grown up world."
I also think the new trend of calling it "hobby software" seems to be nothing but spin and FUD to me. Try to scare people into thinking, "wait a minute, we can't base our business on someone's hobby!" Well, it seems to be working OK for Google and IBM. And there is a ton of BSD and GNU code in Mac OS X. And there are thousands of devices out there running Linux. So the whole "hobby" comment strikes me as propaganda. It's actually working well and more and more people are making money developing open source, or building products and projects on open source platforms.
I think the scenario is that some burglar breaks in to steal your goodies, you try to be Rambo and it turns out he's a better shot. Another possibility is the lover's quarrel that escalates to murder in the heat of the moment. Or if you have a concealed weapon in our purse and it gets snatched, you just armed the thief. Come on, I'm sure you can think a few ways that having a gun could backfire, so to speak.
Simply pointing to the correlation between gun ownership and suicide or the likelihood of being murdered as arguments against gun ownership are rather weak and generally an intellectually dishonest tactic to imply conclusions that don't actually fit the data.Who said I was against gun ownership? I was amused by the call for a citation that didn't include one, so I Googled a couple. I should have said "some studies show," although I did try to make my lack of expertise clear. I don't really care if people own guns, and as a matter of fact I support the 2nd amendment given the current reality. But I think it is just as dishonest to assume that guns are an equally good idea for all households. If you live in a low crime area, have children, etc. it's is perfectly possible that you are safer not to have a loaded gun lying around. And if it's not loaded and easily accessible it loses a lot of the home protection value.
You are right about correlation and causation, but when making decisions you've got to start somewhere.
Mutual Assured Destruction?