One of the problems with coding jobs is that your productivity can scale dramatically with your experience. My dad, who is a very intelligent guy, decided to do some programming work in his retirement. He found a local business who needed something done and did it. He doesn't make any real money at it, but he enjoys himself. The thing is, he doesn't understand how slow he is. He complains that his customer isn't appreciative of the work that he does, and that he works practically full time with little reward. In reality, what takes him a week to do would take me (a professional programmer with 20 years of experience) an afternoon.
Even if you are talking about building web sites and writing small web applications, there's a way of doing things. I often think this industry needs an apprenticeship program. You wouldn't be able to find work as a carpenter without significant experience apprenticing. Yes, pretty much anyone can build cabinets, but doing it well and in a reasonable time frame/cost is something that requires experience.
I don't want to disuade you. If you go down this avenue there are a lot of potential rewards. But they will be down the road. You might be able to get gigs after 2-3 months of training, but it will be years before you will be making money worthy of your time (similar to writing, really)
The idea that pharmacies should be forced to provide drugs cheaply outside the US, and Americans can fund R&D and profit margins is unfair. Those costs should be spread equally amongst all the developed nations of the world, not just the US.
That doesn't make any sense. US drug companies aren't force to provide drugs at all. If it weren't profitable, they wouldn't do it. They don't charge only enough to recoup their costs plus a fair profit. They charge what the market will bear. The U.S. market, being serviced entirely by insurance, will bear an enormous amount. Canada, for instance, has a limited healthcare budget, so if the drugs are too expensive they simply say, "No". That is the reason drugs are cheaper in Canada.
Canada honors US drug patents. It's not like Canadian drug companies are using US patents to make generic drugs. The US drug companies are choosing to sell at a lower cost because Canadians refuse to pay more.
What is *truly* unfair is that the American system encourages high prices. First you have government granted monopolies in the form of patents. But on top of that, everybody is forced to get insurance. How do insurance companies make money? By investing the premiums before they are spent on claims. The higher the claims, the more they can justify high premiums, the more they can invest and the more profit they can make. Everyone in the US system benefits from higher prices -- except the poor schmuck who is ill.
You don't need more protectionism to help this crazy industry. You need real government reform to remove the incentive for ridiculous prices.
If you would kindly supply links to what you are referring to, I'd have a chance. However, I caution you to noy rely too much on what the western press has reported on TEPCO. The reporting was truly abysmal. I've stated previously that I'm not a fan of TEPCO, but at the time of the disaster, their reporting was by and large timely and accurate. Unfortunately the western press wrote a lot of things that were either mistranslations of the original reports, misunderstandings of the issues or possibly even intentional falsehoods to increase the drama. It was a cause of a lot of panic among the expat community here in Japan. Since I speak and read Japanese, I was constantly having to tell my friends what TEPCO was *really* saying as opposed to what sources like CNN and even the usually accurate BBC were reporting. If you don't read Japanese, I found the the IAEA website had a lot of useful information about what TEPCO was reporting when, etc, etc. It helped to calm down my friends. I haven't looked to see if the information is still there, but it might be useful to you if you are interested.
Anyway, one of the reasons I replied about Gunderson is that he said some really off the wall stuff a while ago like Fukushima will result in 10s of thousands of deaths in Portland. It seemed a bit extreme, so I checked up on some of the other things he has said. If you search for his predictions about Chernobyl, for instance, you will find similar claims, which don't appear to hold up to what actually happened. To be honest, I was mostly replying in relation to the comment that Gunderson was an established expert in the field. This claim has been challenged before and he doesn't seem to have responded in any way. I would at least expect to find a list of nuclear energy related jobs he's worked in other than lobbying against the industry.
I recommend doing a Google Search on Arnie Gundersen's name. He is a hired consultant for anti-nuclear lobbyists. There is a record of people complaining about the exagerration of his experience. From what I have been able to find, he does indeed have a master's degree in nuclear engineering. He also worked briefly as a technician in a non-operational plant (I haven't been able to find reliable reports on how long he was employed in that capacity, but I have read that he has never worked at an operational plant. It seems likely that he last worked in a nuclear facility in the early 70s.). Most of his career has been as a high school math teacher.
As a high school teacher myself, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that profession. But when these kinds of stories come out with quotes from him (and if you really do the googling, you will see that there are a *lot* of scary sounding predictions from him going back decades), you are always left with the impression that he is an insider in the nuclear industry. But rather he seems to be just a guy with an engineering degree who doesn't like nuclear power. At one point some anti-nuclear lobbyists latched on to him as being a credible source and have used him as an expert witness in trials or to make sound bites like the above. It appears (but I can not verify) that his 39 years of nuclear power engineering is mostly his work as a consultant for lobbyists rather than actively working as an engineer.
This is, of course, simply an opinion based on googling around. I recommend having a look yourself.
It might sound strange, but why not try it and find out? I've shaved my legs before. It's fairly common in some sports for guys to do it. It will take you less than 5 minutes to understand why you need running water.
At 39 I quit my job and became an English teacher in Japan (I'm 44 now). 46 is older than 39, granted, but it's younger than 50;-) In other words, you'll never be younger than you are today.
I think you are correct to question the whole thing seriously. I don't think you can simply change your career. Rather, you are looking at a lifestyle change. For me, that was a welcome change. In my old job I was pulling in a lot of money. I had a big house, a nice car, a prestigious job, every toy I wanted, etc, etc. What I didn't have was time. What with working a bazillion hours a day (well, luckily at the end I managed to do "40 hour weeks" as part of XP), and having to commute from my lovely home in the suburbs my life was simply work. Not only that, but everything I was doing was for someone else. I never had time (or energy) for myself.
For me, as well, I was always compromising my principles. I'm a big advocate of free (as in freedom) software. I hated how we were treating the customer. But my ability to improve the situation was severely limited. I also hated how the companies were treating me. They owned all of my ideas. I had to fight tooth and nail keep the copyrights to my own projects outside of work. And the attitude was, "If you want to program outside of core hours you should be doing work for us". There was no space for me to just be me.
I've never been one to really grok money. I've always made more than I spend, so it's never been a problem. But even I understand the feeling of "Am I crazy to give up this high paying job". I make less money now than I was paying in taxes in my old job. But I've got time now. I live in a tiny apartment (currently infested with cockroaches -- luckily winter is coming), but it is a 5 minute walk from the school. On the way, I usually bump into my students who are almost always happy to see me and chat with me. I start at 8 and finish at 4 every day. "Overtime" consists of staying an hour late to help a student. If anyone asks me to come in on the weekend, I get another day off later.
Nobody has ever asked me not to teach something to the grade 10s because then we won't be able to charge them when they reach grade 11. Nobody has forced me to get agreements from my students forbidding them from passing on the things they learn to other students who aren't paying our school. Nobody cares if I help others learn English even if they aren't students of our school. These kinds of things would seem stupid to them. And nobody cares in the least what I do in my spare time. They harbor no secret thought of monetizing every idea that might pop out of my head. They don't try to own me.
In exchange I have less toys. But, you know, I never really got the chance to play with those toys anyway.
I spent a long time doing process improvement. And coincidently next week I'm giving a talk on process improvement. Here's a portion of that talk:
Take a minute to rate your current performance on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is just barely adequate and 10 is the best you can possibly be. Now look at that number and think about what it means. If you're like most people, you've probably written a 7, 8 or 9 down. Very few people think that they are perfect so they very rarely write 10. But most people think they are doing a decent job and they work hard every day so is 80% of the maximum so unreasonable?
Now imagine I ask you to improve your performance. How much can you improve? Well, you are already at 80%. If we are realistic we also realize that we can't achieve 100%. So, probably the maximum we can expect to improve is around 10%. If someone tells you that you can improve more than that, it is tantamount to telling you that you are currently incompetent at your job. Most people don't react favorably to such news.
In other words, our impression that we are currently doing a decent job limits our ability to improve. Not only that, but any suggestion that we can improve is practically an insult. Those of you who wish to do process improvement need to consider this seriously. If you go around insulting everybody around you, at best nobody will listen. At worst you will find yourself on the fast track out the door.
It's a single data point, I know, but I'm definitely getting slower as I get older. And it's not just a matter of locking my self in a conceptual box, or other commitments taking my time. My brain just doesn't function the same way it used to.
4 1/2 years ago, I quit my job as a programmer, moved to Japan and started teaching English. I had pretty much had it with my previous lifestyle, so I literally gave everything away (apart from my house, which I sold) and kept only what would fit in a back pack. I wanted to try something completely different and so I did. In the process I taught myself Japanese.
I'm used to being thought of as being smart. I never had to work hard in high school. Even in university, I did well without having to work too hard. And in my job as a programmer, I was one of those hot-shot asshole programmers with a big ego, but a list of accomplishments to back it up. I kind of expected to be able to learn Japanese fairly quickly and it didn't happen. So, I started working really hard at it, and I slowly started learning. I'm now pretty fluent but I put in a lot more effort than many other people I know who got better results than me. My biggest problem is that I forget things easily. Even using spaced repetition tools, I tend to require more repetitions that other people I know.
I've also been programming in my spare time. I'm really starting to notice that my ability to hold large programs in my head and remember where everything is is degrading. Tricky pieces of code take me a lot longer to figure out (and I get a lot madder when I see them LOL -- but I think that's just being crabby...) I'm not nearly as agile as I once was.
But interestingly, I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. As I'm aging, I'm happy to throw out the "hot shot asshole" part of my programming ability. I'm quite happy to spend 2 days writing code that used to take me 1 day because it's also half as complex as it used to be. I just can't understand the shit I used to pump out any more;-) As for languages, I'm not sure that I need to learn any more quickly than I am. Language is a lot about experiences and learning language without the experience to go along with the language leads to a poor ability to apply the language.
There are advantages and disadvantages to getting older. But for me, at least, the way I think and learn has changed dramatically.
Education is hard. I've been doing it now (after 20 years as a programmer) for 4 1/2 years and am only now starting to see some of the issues.
One of the biggest problems is that there is a difference between knowing facts and being able to use them. It's a bit like knowing vocabulary in a language and being able to speak. It is the facility with knowledge that we require, but we value only the ability to recall facts. I'm teaching language at the moment and this is a field where it should be obvious. And yet after 6 years of study many students (well most, really) can't have *any* meaningful conversations in the target language. Their curriculum includes vocabulary similar to a 6 year old native speaker and the grammar of a 12 year old. But their conversational level is similar to a 2 or 3 year old. This is considered a success. It is even worse in other fields.
But an even bigger problem is the misunderstanding of the role of the teacher. We've got this absurdly naive idea that a teacher learns something and then somehow puts that knowledge into the heads of the students. This is so wrong headed that I barely know where to begin. Education depends on the students discovering information and using it fluently. A teacher's role is not to furnish the information, but to help the student learn how to explore. A teacher provides the context in which the student is able to be fluent.
But as teachers we are given a curriculum that consists of a list of facts. We are told to present these facts to the students in a particular order. The order often precludes any ability to generate a meaningful context. We discipline the students so that they accept sitting quietly and passively receiving these facts. We forbid them from working together. Timmy doesn't know the answer to question #1. Bad Timmy. Yes I know Tom knows the answer. No, you may not ask Tom. You are only allowed to learn facts from the teacher and since you were daydreaming you're not allowed to know the answer. Then we test them on the material. And the stupid thing is, we don't expect them to know the answers. Hey, yeah... you're doing awesome if you completely forgot a fifth of everything you were supposed to know. That's an A! Of course, we also switch topics every 2 months and never go back to review the topic we covered 10 months ago. You're supposed to remember (even though even the good students only knew 80% of it in the first place). By the time you get to the end of the year, there is virtually nothing in all the material that every student knows (80%, 80%, 80%,...). So when we get to the next year we can't base it on the previous year's material. We have to go back and reteach everything again.:-P
When people graduate they have this hodge podge of facts, incompletely remembered, hardly ever exercised in a meaningful context and forming a mostly random knowledge base. Fluency with the use of this information never occurred. It is also unlikely ever to occur because the students have been trained to simply shut up, listen to authority figures and regurgitate facts on command. Oh and that if you get 80% of the facts right, you're doing awesome (that 20% could never get anyone in trouble, right?)
Actually, all the best (most useful) eye candy is in the accessibility section. Unfortunately, quite a lot of it is broken in Unity.
If you set up focus follows mouse and use the opacity plugin, you can set it up so that you can check under the window you're working on. It's a bit like auto raise, except that it isn't as visually jarring. Basically, you set it up so that after a delay (300 ms seems good to me), if the focus changes it makes the top window semi transparent. This is great for situations like when you search for something on the internet and want to follow the directions while typing in another window. What was that command again . It's very much like working with paper.
I also use the desktop magnification quite a lot. Most of the time when I maximize a window, i don't want to expand the size of my window. I just want to focus on that particular piece of work. I've set up super-w to zoom to the window. It fills up the whole screen, but it is zoomed so it is easier to read/work with. Sometimes I want to control the amount of zoom. So I have super-left-button mark an area of the screen to zoom. super-e expands/shrinks the focused window to fit the zoomed area. Unfortunately, it doesn't pan to the window, so I usually have to press super-w as well (I should add that functionality). Then I have super-q zoom out to display the whole desktop. I forget which one it is, but I also have super-tab hooked up to one to the application switchers which works well with the desktop zoom. It zooms out, presents all the windows and when I select one it zooms back. If you set focus tracking it will even zoom to the correct level and pan to the window. It looks really slick and is incredibly functional.
I'm sorry to say that I don't find Unity functional at all (for me, anyway). And compared to the huge amounts of eye candy that I'm used to with my customized Compiz setup, it is incredibly drab in comparison (and the choice of black on black or white on white themes is just depressing).
My biggest problem with Ubuntu is not Unity per se... I hate it, even after trying to get used to it (but then I'm a focus follows mouse guy and there's just no way for me to adapt to Unity... good point about the shortcut keys too...) Ordinarily that wouldn't bother me. it's free software after all. What I did with 11.04 was simply deactivate Unity from the Compiz settings manager and run the other software I wanted (namely Docky). Life was still good.
But I "upgraded" to 11.10 today and after reconfirming that I can't live with Unity, I disabled it. Compiz is completely broken! It's possible that it's just something screwed up on my machine, but I simply can't get it to function properly without Unity. The backgrounds are screwed up. The menu is missing from various applications. There are serious graphics glitches with all of the other plugins that I normal use.
I've got Mint on another machine and I'm starting to wonder if I'll need to install something else if Compiz is broken in Ubuntu.
I really don't mind if Canonical wants to do their own thing. More power to them. But don't break stuff while you go about it...
It's not my responsibility as a customer to compensate for a supplier's bad business model. But having said that, Red Hat is far from hurting with their "bad" business decisions. A quick google shows me that last year their revenue grew about 15% and topped $1 billion. http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/03/24/1076990/software-company-says-revenue.html They make a lot of money from support, but they also make a lot of money from contract work.
If their support is not worth the money, then it deserves to die (although from their success, I gather that a lot of customers value the support). If we're talking about aggregating software, Red Hat is also not the only players in the market. There's this bunch of volunteers that go by the name "Debian" which have been doing a great job of aggregating software without Red Hat's help. I can get any number of distros that Red Hat did not originally compile.
True enough, Red Hat does a lot of work on the kernel, on Gnome, on LibreOffice and any number of other worthy projects. But they don't do it out of altruism. They obviously think that their activities provide a return (and looking at their steady growth over the years, I'm inclined to agree with them). This is especially true as they increase their custom development operations. If you need a problem solved, Red Hat would be a pretty likely place to find the solution. This is how they make money.
The OP seems to want to give money to Red Hat based on altruistic rather than business reasons. Red Hat did a lot of work and the OP seems to think they they deserve a reward. But Red Hat didn't go into business with an expectation of entitlement for working hard. They went into it with the expectation of receiving compensation for value. If the company in question doesn't value the support, they don't have to buy it. It doesn't hurt Red Hat that the company profits from Red Hat's hard work. Rather it continues to provide opportunities where Red Hat can get in and provide custom services (or even support if the company later decides that they actually need it).
This is based on my own back of an envelope calculation only, so I could be wrong. However, in comparison to other phenomena in the solar system, we don't actually use that much energy. I once looked at the increase in ocean temperatures due to global climate change, calculated how much energy that was and compared it to how much energy we use in a year. We use quite a bit less that the energy that we accumulate simply from global climate change (whatever the cause). It was a while ago, so I leave it as an exercise to the reader to verify my results. The amount of geothermal energy available is many orders of magnitude more than we use. In other words, it won't make any difference.
Japan expects to make geo-thermal about 10% PRIOR to the nuke over the next 15 years.
Japan currently has 18 geo-thermel wells for a total of 540 MW of power. As far as I know there are no extensive plans to increase that amount drastically. The US already has over 3,000 MW of geothermal energy, even though Japan has much more potential. This excellent article outlines some of the problems that are associated with geothermal power generation in Japan: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/05/japans-geothermal-resources-gets-a-closer-look
If you have a reference for plans for getting to 10% in 15 years (highly aggressive since it takes a good 10 years to develop a well), I would love to see it. I live in Japan and have been advocating geothermal energy to others when I can, but even the local environmental groups around here seem to have blinders when it comes to geothermal.
Having proprietary drivers is completely unrelated to having GNU. GNU is an operating system which is composed of entirely free software, but if you have software that isn't free along with it, it's still GNU. Most systems using the Linux kernel are running GNU as well (and X and probably some desktop environment, which may or may not be part of GNU (e.g., Gnome is part of GNU)). A good exception to this is Android which runs the Linux kernel and uses Android for the rest of the operating system.
What most people call a "Linux" system is a the Linux kernel with GNU providing the rest of the OS. You don't have to use GNU. You could probably use BSD if you worked at it a bit (although I'm not sure what the point would be). As I said, Android uses Android for most of the OS and Linux as the kernel. You can also use other kernels with GNU (though, again most people would have little reason to do so since Linux works well and is free software). No matter what drivers you use with the kernel, you're still relying on GNU for the rest of the OS, so it is a GNU system.
I think the confusion with the GNU/Linux ordeal was the emotional way it was brought to light. An Android system is just as much "Linux" as a GNU/Linux system. But it is confusing to call both of them "Linux". In most people's mind a "Linux" system includes GNU... Well, most people don't even know what GNU is, but they often attribute the parts of the OS that belong to GNU to "Linux". I think that's what pissed RMS off. But being pissed off, he did a bad job of explaining why it is important to distinguish "Linux" from "GNU".
Anyway, the OP almost certainly wants a GNU system (although he says he like BSD, which makes me wonder why he doesn't choose a BSD system... likely he doesn't understand the difference again). Whether or not he uses proprietary kernel modules or proprietary software on top of GNU is kind of beside the point.
I think this is the 10th time I've written a similar response (the confusion is widespread), but have yet to do so in an intelligible way. It's a surprisingly complex issue. I hope I was able to shed some light, though.
I really don't understand what you are saying, but I'll try my best to respond to clear up what I think is a confusion.
Calling them GNU/Linux and Android/Linux would help to clear up the confusion that the original poster had. Personally, if I were describing the typical "Linux" system in a context where it would be confused, I would probably say GNU/X/Linux, because this describes what I want to know. Most people who describe a "Linux" system really only care about the GNU/X part. For example, I noticed recently that Debian has a distribution using the Free BSD kernel instead of the Linux kernel. I haven't checked, but I assume it uses GNU. As a user, I don't really care that much whether my kernel is Free BSD or Linux, as long as my hardware is supported. It hardly makes any difference to me. I can't imagine it makes much difference to most other people either. What I want is a GNU system with X.
If I installed a "Linux" system and found that it was Android rather than GNU, I would be very disappointed. I don't want Android n my desktop. It's not useful to me. The fact that it runs a Linux kernel is completely unrelated to what I care about. Similarly, if Google decided to use a different kernel on my phone instead of Linux, I wouldn't give a monkey's because it doesn't affect me as a user (as long as my hardware is supported). Assuming I want Android (though, to me honest more and more I think I'd rather have GNU on my phone... too bad Meego is dead...) I'll be happy.
The thing about Red Hat is that it is a GNU/Linux system. That's all they distribute. So I'm quite happy to call a distribution "Red Hat" and revel in the lack of confusion. Even Debian with a choice of different kernels isn't so bad. I know what I'm getting. When I need to specify, I can say Debian/Free BSD or Debian/Linux. It's GNU and X. I know that, because it's all they do. Red Hat and Debian are brands.
But if you are talking about GNU with the Linux kernel and saying what software you want to run, etc, etc, calling it "Linux" is just plain confusing. GNU and X is the important part to the user, not Linux. I can replace the Linux part and not much will change (assuming my hardware is supported). The other way around is untrue.
One thing I'll give you is that the FSF did a *very* bad job of explaining this issue. It was wrapped up in a lot of emotional language. This caused people like yourself to respond in a similarly emotional way. I don't blame you. You see this guy getting all worked up over something and you can't understand why. You think he's just a nutter. And since he's talking on and on about morality you think he's attacking you. It's fair enough that you get upset. When the whole GNU/Linux thing erupted I couldn't see the point either because *all* Linux distros were GNU and X. That's not true anymore and I spend quite a lot of time clearing up confusion that would be easier to deal with if people would simply talk about the parts that are important to them and not the kernel.
This confusion is precisely why the FSF complained about using the term "Linux" to refer to the OS when it is only the kernel. You need lots of user space code to complete the OS (and in fact the kernel is a small part of your OS).
Linux is the kernel. It specifically allows you to run any code you want in user space on top of it. Usually Linux ships with GNU user space tools along with X windows and your desktop environment and whatever else you want. Where the OS stops being the OS and starts being just whatever you want to run is probably open to debate, but generally speaking with a Linux kernel you get GNU plus X. There are very few exceptions.
Android is one of the exceptions. You have Linux and Android. Android takes over where you would normally have GNU plus X. Virtually all of your user experience with your OS is a result of either GNU plus X, or in this case Android. The Linux kernel is really only important to programmers, or for hardware compatibility. On most Linux distributions, you don't even usually interface with the kernel directly as a programmer. You use the C library which gives you a nice Posix interface (a long time ago Linux had it's own C library, but now I think everybody uses GNU's). With Android, you interface with Android that interfaces with the kernel.
Like I said, the Linux kernel specifically allows anyone to run whatever they want in the user space (without that provision, you would only be able to run GPL compatible code on your system, which would be too limiting, even for the FSF). So Android can be licensed however they want. They decided to license some of the Android versions under the Apache license. So far they have not licensed anything with version 3.0+ with a free software license.
This is not necessarily a problem, except that you can already buy devices with 3.0 installed. This means that these people, who may have thought they were buying a machine with a free software OS, do not have access to the code. It's really not acceptable to tell people your OS is open source and then publish a version which isn't (unless you warn them in big neon letters first). Maybe some people don't care. But I assure you that some people care very much.
The proof-of-work follows an asymptotic curve (I think), easy at first and then steadily more difficult, meaning that the massive deflation has/will soon have occurred and hoarding should cease to be viable.
I think you have a wrong idea about what the proof-of-work is doing and what is causing the deflation. I'll try to explain as best I can.
The proof of work is a computationally intensive activity used to "authorise" transaction. The clients insist that this computation is done before the transactions are formed into a block and the block is put into the chain of historical transactions (thereby "authorising" them). There are two intents here. The first is to slow down the speed of transactions so that a large number of clients can catch up with the transactions. If you were to allow transactions to occur at any rate, somebody could process them very quickly and dictate the order in which the transactions can occur. This could allow them to double spend bitcoins. By insisting that there be proof-of-work, you can dictate the speed at which transactions are processed (one block every 10 minutes). Blocks are also not official until 100 have gone by. So this gives clients 1000 minutes (nearly a day) to receive the transactions. This is important in a P2P system -- you have to allow time for the transactions to propogate otherwise people can't check up on each other.
The difficulty of the proof-of-work doesn't necessarily increase over time. The current speed of transaction processing is measured and adjusted every once in a while (2 weeks I think...). The difficulty of the proof-of-work is adjusted so that it takes about 10 minutes on average to create blocks. So if there is more computing power available, the problems get more difficult. If there is less, the problems get easier.
However, you want the difficulty to be quite high. Even though the rate is adjusted every once in a while, there is always the possibility that someone will pour a lot of hardware on the problem and overtake the network. The lowest level of difficulty was set so that a fairly top end CPU would take 10 minutes to create a block on average. Right now, the difficulty is at about 1.8 million times that. In other words, you would need the equivalent of several hundred thousand processors to (or several thousand graphics boards) to make a dent on that. It is economically infeasible to try. That is why the system encourages increasing the difficulty of solving blocks. It makes it much more difficult/expensive to cheat the system. Or as the original developer said, it is more economically feasible to use those computing resources to make bitcoins ligitimately rather than undermine the very currency you want to use by cheating it. This is also the reason for the rather large initial payouts for solving blocks -- it encourages people to invest computing resources to solve blocks, increasing the difficulty.
The deflation issue is completely unrelated to this. Deflation is the *increase* in the value of the currency. It seems backwards because of the word "deflation", but what is happening is that the cost of *goods* and services are going down as a result of the currency's value going up. So called fiat currencies are designed for "inflation". The decrease in value. They do this by steadily increasing the supply of money. This is intentional.
In a fiat currency, your intent is to put money in the hands of people who don't have it. People without money have no resources and can't do anything. If you have absolutely no money, no matter how much you want to farm, or fish, or start a business, you can't do it. You don't have land, or a boat, or capital to buy the materials to manufacture something. So you can't produce anything. You are wasted. In a fiat system, we create money (out of thin air) and lend it to you. By creating money, this devalues the money (there is more of it now), but it allows you to produce. Because you can produce, there is more food,
If you lived in Tokyo, then virtually any company will have reasonably good coverage. But Japan is a lot bigger than Tokyo. When I first came to Japan I was with Softbank mainly because they supposedly have an English help line (although every time I called it, it was out of service). Living in a small town in Shizuoka prefecture, I could not conduct telephone calls in my apartment because the signal was poor. I had to go out doors. Wherever I went, I had about a 50% chance of receiving telephone calls. Well, I don't phone a lot, so I put up with it, and 3G coverage was OK, so I could get email. But over time, the 3G coverage got worse. It got to a point where I couldn't connect to the network most of the time, and I couldn't get emails. Softbank was cheap, but last year I changed to Docomo since "cheap and not working" is not as good as "expensive and working".
Similarly, I have been using Yahoo! Softbank ADSL (Hikari is only being rolled out in my town this month). I had good internet connection initially for about 6 months, and then it slowed down to dialup speeds. I phoned them up (in Japanese since their English help line didn't pick up) and got a new modem. That one lasted another 6 months. Rinse and repeat. After going through 6 modems, they decided that there must be something wrong with my line (you think...). So they scheduled NTT to come and look at the line. No change. So they remotely tuned the receiver on my modem and that fixed it for 3 weeks. At that point they didn't know what else to do, so I was left with dialup speed (or less) for a good year. I'm 50 meters from the end office, and while it's hard to fault Softbank for a crappy phone line (they don't own the phone lines), given the fact that new modems fix the problem for a while, I have to think that the modem is not as robust as it could be. As I said, Hikari is being rolled out this month and I'm already scheduled to be switched over to NTT.
As far as the iPhone goes, it is true that Softbank was the first to roll out a smart phone. All the other carriers refused to carry the iPhone as the other poster noted. But it wasn't long before Docomo came out with the Xperia (Android). In fact you will notice now that Android phones absolutely bury the iPhone in numbers and popularity. The iPhone is still popular with foreigners, but I barely see any Japanese people carrying one.
I also think you are wrong to say that Softbank brought the "iPhone revolution". Whether or not the other carriers realised the importance of smart phones at that time, or whether they were waiting for Android phones I don't know. Au was especially slow, but has certainly jumped in with both feet as you can know choose from something like 6 different Android models. Even Softbank carries Android phones now. When the revolution came, it was Android, not Apple.
Like I said. I don't doubt that your experience with Softbank was good. Friends of mine in big cities use Softbank and are happy. But with respect to the OP's point that Softbank has a horrible network compared to Docomo and Au, he's right on. Softbank is virtually unusable in a lot of places in Japan, which is why it isn't popular. And while we can give credit where it's due for taking a chance on smart phones, the bigger companies did a much better job following through and dominate the market in that area too.
I'm not as hard on Softbank as the OP. I'm happy there is some competition. I just wish it were stronger.
What I can't figure out is why nobody in Japan is talking about geothermal. There has been a lot of talk about increasing wind power (and it is noticeably expanding at a good rate already), and building big solar farms (some at sea, which seems like a completely daft idea). But I haven't heard a single word on expanding geothermal, which should be the key for this kind of undertaking. What I'd like to know is why not. The existing geothermal plants seem to be working acceptably, so it should be feasible. I'm a bit suspicious that these renewable initiatives are not as serious as the appear.
I think the key point the article is making is that the job of a currency is to spur growth in an economy. A currency with a fixed number of units won't be as effective at doing this because restricting their use increases their value (deflation). The more you horde the higher the value. But hording means that the money isn't being used to create growth, and so it is working against its original purpose.
But what if we say that Bitcoin is never going to be that kind of currency? As long as there is liquidity in terms of real world currencies, it has utility. The author of TFA says that there are many ways to do commerce online. But this is not true for micro payments. The transaction costs for credit cards, pay pal, etc are too large to do micro payments. Even Flattr takes 10% of every transaction (and has the gall to say "hope that's ok" -- it's not!). But even if you accept the outrageous transaction fees with something like Flattr, you *still* pay a service fee going in, and the recipient pays a service fee going out.
Bitcoin is potentially useful as a micro-payment option as long as there is liquidity to real world currencies. At the moment, we have such liquidity and I'm less worried about a bubble effect than I am with this liquidity ending. My understanding is that most of this liquidity comes from illegal activities wrt Bitcoin (money laundering and drugs trade). But Bitcoin is inherently much more traceable than cash, and as soon as people start to understand this, I suspect the utility of Bitcoin will cease to be.
That will be sad, because it is actually a fairly elegant system. If nothing else I recommend people to get over their skepticism enough to understand how it works internally, and what the design tradeoffs were. We see so many articles about Bitcoin on Slashdot discussing rather boring aspects about it, when the interesting bits (proof of work, merkel chain for enforcing temporal order in a p2p system) are ignored. It's too bad.
His blog is here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/ It seems he's purposely stayed out of the limelight for 10 years, or at least his "Speaking Engagements" section of his home page says that he has stopped giving them since 2002 for personal reasons. Not wanting to speculate, but at around the same time he took a lot of flack for talking about the shares he received from the IPO of VA Linux. I think a lot of technical people can identify with having made political gaffs and I wish he'd been given some slack. But there you go, being famous has both its ups and downs. I think in the end we all lost out because his voice was valuable and he doesn't seem to raise it as much any more. Still, he appears to be quite active on a lot of projects, just not as vocal.
Thinking about it, it's an interesting question given that my response was really intended to deflect some all too common, unwarranted criticism of RMS. Like a lot of people, I don't agree with everything he says (though I could say that about anyone, really), but the guy stands up to an incredible amount of abuse and keeps marching on in the spotlight. I don't blame ESR one bit for not wanting to follow suit (if that's really what happened).
having a portfolio with a wide variety of open source projects has done more for my employability than anything else
I'm out of IT now (teaching instead:-) ), but when I was a programmer my portfolio was gold. It needn't take all that long to do. Work on a project in your spare time for a while, take pieces of code out of it and document why you did what you did. Because I was an XP coach for several years, on my own open source projects I did a kind of mini planning game complete with iteration plans, velocity, etc, etc. I included some of these in my portfolio as well. I got more feedback about that than anything else, which surprised me somewhat. One manager even told me that he hired me specifically due to the planning artifacts (which made him comfortable that I knew how to work in a controlled manner).
A lot of time people put in insane hours at work but leave nothing for themselves. It can really, really helps you professionally to take a few hours a week out for yourself so that you can make a portfolio. If you aren't working 40-hour-weeks, it pays to tell the boss that you need to take some of those overtime hours back to practice programming techniques. They get a better programmer and you get a portfolio (and new skills). It's a good trade-off.
No offence, but before you start criticising, it would help if you understood the issue. RMS uses the words "open source" himself. I have emails from him to prove it. What is at issue is that there is a distinction between "open source" and "free software". Originally ESR started using the term "open source" as a replacement for "free software". He (probably correctly) felt that the word "free" was confusing. However, at the same time he created a definition of "open source" that was different from "free software" while insisting that they were the same. The FSF is concerned with the freedom of all subsequent users to use the software for any purpose, modify it for their needs and to redistribute their modifications. "Open source" discusses the development practice of allowing other developers to view and modify the source code. There is no implication that all subsequent users will be able to modify the code.
An equivalent term would have been fine at the time. The problem was that ESR ignored the only thing that the FSF was interested in. At the same time, he championed many useful and pragmatic practices that have value in their own right. Thus one movement became two.
It is quite reasonable to say that the practice of producing open source software is becoming more and more mainstream, but that the issues of software freedom have not taken hold to the same extent. I doubt there would be many people who would disagree with that statement or find it objectionable. Open source development practices are a definite step forward. But for those interested in software freedom, there is still a long way to go. In some ways the open source movement has taken up a lot of the technical issues that the free software movement used to deal with. Personally, I think it is more important for free software advocates to concentrate on social rather than technical issues (and, in fact, I think that is being done).
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One of the problems with coding jobs is that your productivity can scale dramatically with your experience. My dad, who is a very intelligent guy, decided to do some programming work in his retirement. He found a local business who needed something done and did it. He doesn't make any real money at it, but he enjoys himself. The thing is, he doesn't understand how slow he is. He complains that his customer isn't appreciative of the work that he does, and that he works practically full time with little reward. In reality, what takes him a week to do would take me (a professional programmer with 20 years of experience) an afternoon.
Even if you are talking about building web sites and writing small web applications, there's a way of doing things. I often think this industry needs an apprenticeship program. You wouldn't be able to find work as a carpenter without significant experience apprenticing. Yes, pretty much anyone can build cabinets, but doing it well and in a reasonable time frame/cost is something that requires experience.
I don't want to disuade you. If you go down this avenue there are a lot of potential rewards. But they will be down the road. You might be able to get gigs after 2-3 months of training, but it will be years before you will be making money worthy of your time (similar to writing, really)
The idea that pharmacies should be forced to provide drugs cheaply outside the US, and Americans can fund R&D and profit margins is unfair. Those costs should be spread equally amongst all the developed nations of the world, not just the US.
That doesn't make any sense. US drug companies aren't force to provide drugs at all. If it weren't profitable, they wouldn't do it. They don't charge only enough to recoup their costs plus a fair profit. They charge what the market will bear. The U.S. market, being serviced entirely by insurance, will bear an enormous amount. Canada, for instance, has a limited healthcare budget, so if the drugs are too expensive they simply say, "No". That is the reason drugs are cheaper in Canada.
Canada honors US drug patents. It's not like Canadian drug companies are using US patents to make generic drugs. The US drug companies are choosing to sell at a lower cost because Canadians refuse to pay more.
What is *truly* unfair is that the American system encourages high prices. First you have government granted monopolies in the form of patents. But on top of that, everybody is forced to get insurance. How do insurance companies make money? By investing the premiums before they are spent on claims. The higher the claims, the more they can justify high premiums, the more they can invest and the more profit they can make. Everyone in the US system benefits from higher prices -- except the poor schmuck who is ill.
You don't need more protectionism to help this crazy industry. You need real government reform to remove the incentive for ridiculous prices.
If you would kindly supply links to what you are referring to, I'd have a chance. However, I caution you to noy rely too much on what the western press has reported on TEPCO. The reporting was truly abysmal. I've stated previously that I'm not a fan of TEPCO, but at the time of the disaster, their reporting was by and large timely and accurate. Unfortunately the western press wrote a lot of things that were either mistranslations of the original reports, misunderstandings of the issues or possibly even intentional falsehoods to increase the drama. It was a cause of a lot of panic among the expat community here in Japan. Since I speak and read Japanese, I was constantly having to tell my friends what TEPCO was *really* saying as opposed to what sources like CNN and even the usually accurate BBC were reporting. If you don't read Japanese, I found the the IAEA website had a lot of useful information about what TEPCO was reporting when, etc, etc. It helped to calm down my friends. I haven't looked to see if the information is still there, but it might be useful to you if you are interested.
Anyway, one of the reasons I replied about Gunderson is that he said some really off the wall stuff a while ago like Fukushima will result in 10s of thousands of deaths in Portland. It seemed a bit extreme, so I checked up on some of the other things he has said. If you search for his predictions about Chernobyl, for instance, you will find similar claims, which don't appear to hold up to what actually happened. To be honest, I was mostly replying in relation to the comment that Gunderson was an established expert in the field. This claim has been challenged before and he doesn't seem to have responded in any way. I would at least expect to find a list of nuclear energy related jobs he's worked in other than lobbying against the industry.
I recommend doing a Google Search on Arnie Gundersen's name. He is a hired consultant for anti-nuclear lobbyists. There is a record of people complaining about the exagerration of his experience. From what I have been able to find, he does indeed have a master's degree in nuclear engineering. He also worked briefly as a technician in a non-operational plant (I haven't been able to find reliable reports on how long he was employed in that capacity, but I have read that he has never worked at an operational plant. It seems likely that he last worked in a nuclear facility in the early 70s.). Most of his career has been as a high school math teacher.
As a high school teacher myself, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that profession. But when these kinds of stories come out with quotes from him (and if you really do the googling, you will see that there are a *lot* of scary sounding predictions from him going back decades), you are always left with the impression that he is an insider in the nuclear industry. But rather he seems to be just a guy with an engineering degree who doesn't like nuclear power. At one point some anti-nuclear lobbyists latched on to him as being a credible source and have used him as an expert witness in trials or to make sound bites like the above. It appears (but I can not verify) that his 39 years of nuclear power engineering is mostly his work as a consultant for lobbyists rather than actively working as an engineer.
This is, of course, simply an opinion based on googling around. I recommend having a look yourself.
It might sound strange, but why not try it and find out? I've shaved my legs before. It's fairly common in some sports for guys to do it. It will take you less than 5 minutes to understand why you need running water.
At 39 I quit my job and became an English teacher in Japan (I'm 44 now). 46 is older than 39, granted, but it's younger than 50 ;-) In other words, you'll never be younger than you are today.
I think you are correct to question the whole thing seriously. I don't think you can simply change your career. Rather, you are looking at a lifestyle change. For me, that was a welcome change. In my old job I was pulling in a lot of money. I had a big house, a nice car, a prestigious job, every toy I wanted, etc, etc. What I didn't have was time. What with working a bazillion hours a day (well, luckily at the end I managed to do "40 hour weeks" as part of XP), and having to commute from my lovely home in the suburbs my life was simply work. Not only that, but everything I was doing was for someone else. I never had time (or energy) for myself.
For me, as well, I was always compromising my principles. I'm a big advocate of free (as in freedom) software. I hated how we were treating the customer. But my ability to improve the situation was severely limited. I also hated how the companies were treating me. They owned all of my ideas. I had to fight tooth and nail keep the copyrights to my own projects outside of work. And the attitude was, "If you want to program outside of core hours you should be doing work for us". There was no space for me to just be me.
I've never been one to really grok money. I've always made more than I spend, so it's never been a problem. But even I understand the feeling of "Am I crazy to give up this high paying job". I make less money now than I was paying in taxes in my old job. But I've got time now. I live in a tiny apartment (currently infested with cockroaches -- luckily winter is coming), but it is a 5 minute walk from the school. On the way, I usually bump into my students who are almost always happy to see me and chat with me. I start at 8 and finish at 4 every day. "Overtime" consists of staying an hour late to help a student. If anyone asks me to come in on the weekend, I get another day off later.
Nobody has ever asked me not to teach something to the grade 10s because then we won't be able to charge them when they reach grade 11. Nobody has forced me to get agreements from my students forbidding them from passing on the things they learn to other students who aren't paying our school. Nobody cares if I help others learn English even if they aren't students of our school. These kinds of things would seem stupid to them. And nobody cares in the least what I do in my spare time. They harbor no secret thought of monetizing every idea that might pop out of my head. They don't try to own me.
In exchange I have less toys. But, you know, I never really got the chance to play with those toys anyway.
I spent a long time doing process improvement. And coincidently next week I'm giving a talk on process improvement. Here's a portion of that talk:
Take a minute to rate your current performance on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is just barely adequate and 10 is the best you can possibly be. Now look at that number and think about what it means. If you're like most people, you've probably written a 7, 8 or 9 down. Very few people think that they are perfect so they very rarely write 10. But most people think they are doing a decent job and they work hard every day so is 80% of the maximum so unreasonable?
Now imagine I ask you to improve your performance. How much can you improve? Well, you are already at 80%. If we are realistic we also realize that we can't achieve 100%. So, probably the maximum we can expect to improve is around 10%. If someone tells you that you can improve more than that, it is tantamount to telling you that you are currently incompetent at your job. Most people don't react favorably to such news.
In other words, our impression that we are currently doing a decent job limits our ability to improve. Not only that, but any suggestion that we can improve is practically an insult. Those of you who wish to do process improvement need to consider this seriously. If you go around insulting everybody around you, at best nobody will listen. At worst you will find yourself on the fast track out the door.
It's a single data point, I know, but I'm definitely getting slower as I get older. And it's not just a matter of locking my self in a conceptual box, or other commitments taking my time. My brain just doesn't function the same way it used to.
4 1/2 years ago, I quit my job as a programmer, moved to Japan and started teaching English. I had pretty much had it with my previous lifestyle, so I literally gave everything away (apart from my house, which I sold) and kept only what would fit in a back pack. I wanted to try something completely different and so I did. In the process I taught myself Japanese.
I'm used to being thought of as being smart. I never had to work hard in high school. Even in university, I did well without having to work too hard. And in my job as a programmer, I was one of those hot-shot asshole programmers with a big ego, but a list of accomplishments to back it up. I kind of expected to be able to learn Japanese fairly quickly and it didn't happen. So, I started working really hard at it, and I slowly started learning. I'm now pretty fluent but I put in a lot more effort than many other people I know who got better results than me. My biggest problem is that I forget things easily. Even using spaced repetition tools, I tend to require more repetitions that other people I know.
I've also been programming in my spare time. I'm really starting to notice that my ability to hold large programs in my head and remember where everything is is degrading. Tricky pieces of code take me a lot longer to figure out (and I get a lot madder when I see them LOL -- but I think that's just being crabby...) I'm not nearly as agile as I once was.
But interestingly, I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. As I'm aging, I'm happy to throw out the "hot shot asshole" part of my programming ability. I'm quite happy to spend 2 days writing code that used to take me 1 day because it's also half as complex as it used to be. I just can't understand the shit I used to pump out any more ;-) As for languages, I'm not sure that I need to learn any more quickly than I am. Language is a lot about experiences and learning language without the experience to go along with the language leads to a poor ability to apply the language.
There are advantages and disadvantages to getting older. But for me, at least, the way I think and learn has changed dramatically.
Education is hard. I've been doing it now (after 20 years as a programmer) for 4 1/2 years and am only now starting to see some of the issues.
One of the biggest problems is that there is a difference between knowing facts and being able to use them. It's a bit like knowing vocabulary in a language and being able to speak. It is the facility with knowledge that we require, but we value only the ability to recall facts. I'm teaching language at the moment and this is a field where it should be obvious. And yet after 6 years of study many students (well most, really) can't have *any* meaningful conversations in the target language. Their curriculum includes vocabulary similar to a 6 year old native speaker and the grammar of a 12 year old. But their conversational level is similar to a 2 or 3 year old. This is considered a success. It is even worse in other fields.
But an even bigger problem is the misunderstanding of the role of the teacher. We've got this absurdly naive idea that a teacher learns something and then somehow puts that knowledge into the heads of the students. This is so wrong headed that I barely know where to begin. Education depends on the students discovering information and using it fluently. A teacher's role is not to furnish the information, but to help the student learn how to explore. A teacher provides the context in which the student is able to be fluent.
But as teachers we are given a curriculum that consists of a list of facts. We are told to present these facts to the students in a particular order. The order often precludes any ability to generate a meaningful context. We discipline the students so that they accept sitting quietly and passively receiving these facts. We forbid them from working together. Timmy doesn't know the answer to question #1. Bad Timmy. Yes I know Tom knows the answer. No, you may not ask Tom. You are only allowed to learn facts from the teacher and since you were daydreaming you're not allowed to know the answer. Then we test them on the material. And the stupid thing is, we don't expect them to know the answers. Hey, yeah... you're doing awesome if you completely forgot a fifth of everything you were supposed to know. That's an A! Of course, we also switch topics every 2 months and never go back to review the topic we covered 10 months ago. You're supposed to remember (even though even the good students only knew 80% of it in the first place). By the time you get to the end of the year, there is virtually nothing in all the material that every student knows (80%, 80%, 80%,...). So when we get to the next year we can't base it on the previous year's material. We have to go back and reteach everything again. :-P
When people graduate they have this hodge podge of facts, incompletely remembered, hardly ever exercised in a meaningful context and forming a mostly random knowledge base. Fluency with the use of this information never occurred. It is also unlikely ever to occur because the students have been trained to simply shut up, listen to authority figures and regurgitate facts on command. Oh and that if you get 80% of the facts right, you're doing awesome (that 20% could never get anyone in trouble, right?)
Actually, all the best (most useful) eye candy is in the accessibility section. Unfortunately, quite a lot of it is broken in Unity.
If you set up focus follows mouse and use the opacity plugin, you can set it up so that you can check under the window you're working on. It's a bit like auto raise, except that it isn't as visually jarring. Basically, you set it up so that after a delay (300 ms seems good to me), if the focus changes it makes the top window semi transparent. This is great for situations like when you search for something on the internet and want to follow the directions while typing in another window. What was that command again . It's very much like working with paper.
I also use the desktop magnification quite a lot. Most of the time when I maximize a window, i don't want to expand the size of my window. I just want to focus on that particular piece of work. I've set up super-w to zoom to the window. It fills up the whole screen, but it is zoomed so it is easier to read/work with. Sometimes I want to control the amount of zoom. So I have super-left-button mark an area of the screen to zoom. super-e expands/shrinks the focused window to fit the zoomed area. Unfortunately, it doesn't pan to the window, so I usually have to press super-w as well (I should add that functionality). Then I have super-q zoom out to display the whole desktop. I forget which one it is, but I also have super-tab hooked up to one to the application switchers which works well with the desktop zoom. It zooms out, presents all the windows and when I select one it zooms back. If you set focus tracking it will even zoom to the correct level and pan to the window. It looks really slick and is incredibly functional.
I'm sorry to say that I don't find Unity functional at all (for me, anyway). And compared to the huge amounts of eye candy that I'm used to with my customized Compiz setup, it is incredibly drab in comparison (and the choice of black on black or white on white themes is just depressing).
My biggest problem with Ubuntu is not Unity per se... I hate it, even after trying to get used to it (but then I'm a focus follows mouse guy and there's just no way for me to adapt to Unity ... good point about the shortcut keys too...) Ordinarily that wouldn't bother me. it's free software after all. What I did with 11.04 was simply deactivate Unity from the Compiz settings manager and run the other software I wanted (namely Docky). Life was still good.
But I "upgraded" to 11.10 today and after reconfirming that I can't live with Unity, I disabled it. Compiz is completely broken! It's possible that it's just something screwed up on my machine, but I simply can't get it to function properly without Unity. The backgrounds are screwed up. The menu is missing from various applications. There are serious graphics glitches with all of the other plugins that I normal use.
I've got Mint on another machine and I'm starting to wonder if I'll need to install something else if Compiz is broken in Ubuntu.
I really don't mind if Canonical wants to do their own thing. More power to them. But don't break stuff while you go about it...
We already have Linux on the Tablet. It's called Android.
What we don't have is GNU on the Tablet.
It's not my responsibility as a customer to compensate for a supplier's bad business model. But having said that, Red Hat is far from hurting with their "bad" business decisions. A quick google shows me that last year their revenue grew about 15% and topped $1 billion. http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/03/24/1076990/software-company-says-revenue.html They make a lot of money from support, but they also make a lot of money from contract work.
If their support is not worth the money, then it deserves to die (although from their success, I gather that a lot of customers value the support). If we're talking about aggregating software, Red Hat is also not the only players in the market. There's this bunch of volunteers that go by the name "Debian" which have been doing a great job of aggregating software without Red Hat's help. I can get any number of distros that Red Hat did not originally compile.
True enough, Red Hat does a lot of work on the kernel, on Gnome, on LibreOffice and any number of other worthy projects. But they don't do it out of altruism. They obviously think that their activities provide a return (and looking at their steady growth over the years, I'm inclined to agree with them). This is especially true as they increase their custom development operations. If you need a problem solved, Red Hat would be a pretty likely place to find the solution. This is how they make money.
The OP seems to want to give money to Red Hat based on altruistic rather than business reasons. Red Hat did a lot of work and the OP seems to think they they deserve a reward. But Red Hat didn't go into business with an expectation of entitlement for working hard. They went into it with the expectation of receiving compensation for value. If the company in question doesn't value the support, they don't have to buy it. It doesn't hurt Red Hat that the company profits from Red Hat's hard work. Rather it continues to provide opportunities where Red Hat can get in and provide custom services (or even support if the company later decides that they actually need it).
This is based on my own back of an envelope calculation only, so I could be wrong. However, in comparison to other phenomena in the solar system, we don't actually use that much energy. I once looked at the increase in ocean temperatures due to global climate change, calculated how much energy that was and compared it to how much energy we use in a year. We use quite a bit less that the energy that we accumulate simply from global climate change (whatever the cause). It was a while ago, so I leave it as an exercise to the reader to verify my results. The amount of geothermal energy available is many orders of magnitude more than we use. In other words, it won't make any difference.
Japan expects to make geo-thermal about 10% PRIOR to the nuke over the next 15 years.
Japan currently has 18 geo-thermel wells for a total of 540 MW of power. As far as I know there
are no extensive plans to increase that amount drastically. The US already has over 3,000 MW of
geothermal energy, even though Japan has much more potential. This excellent article
outlines some of the problems that are associated with geothermal power generation
in Japan: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/05/japans-geothermal-resources-gets-a-closer-look
If you have a reference for plans for getting to 10% in 15 years (highly aggressive since
it takes a good 10 years to develop a well), I would love to see it. I live in Japan and
have been advocating geothermal energy to others when I can, but even the local
environmental groups around here seem to have blinders when it comes to
geothermal.
Having proprietary drivers is completely unrelated to having GNU. GNU is an operating system which is composed of entirely free software, but if you have software that isn't free along with it, it's still GNU. Most systems using the Linux kernel are running GNU as well (and X and probably some desktop environment, which may or may not be part of GNU (e.g., Gnome is part of GNU)). A good exception to this is Android which runs the Linux kernel and uses Android for the rest of the operating system.
What most people call a "Linux" system is a the Linux kernel with GNU providing the rest of the OS. You don't have to use GNU. You could probably use BSD if you worked at it a bit (although I'm not sure what the point would be). As I said, Android uses Android for most of the OS and Linux as the kernel. You can also use other kernels with GNU (though, again most people would have little reason to do so since Linux works well and is free software). No matter what drivers you use with the kernel, you're still relying on GNU for the rest of the OS, so it is a GNU system.
I think the confusion with the GNU/Linux ordeal was the emotional way it was brought to light. An Android system is just as much "Linux" as a GNU/Linux system. But it is confusing to call both of them "Linux". In most people's mind a "Linux" system includes GNU... Well, most people don't even know what GNU is, but they often attribute the parts of the OS that belong to GNU to "Linux". I think that's what pissed RMS off. But being pissed off, he did a bad job of explaining why it is important to distinguish "Linux" from "GNU".
Anyway, the OP almost certainly wants a GNU system (although he says he like BSD, which makes me wonder why he doesn't choose a BSD system... likely he doesn't understand the difference again). Whether or not he uses proprietary kernel modules or proprietary software on top of GNU is kind of beside the point.
I think this is the 10th time I've written a similar response (the confusion is widespread), but have yet to do so in an intelligible way. It's a surprisingly complex issue. I hope I was able to shed some light, though.
I really don't understand what you are saying, but I'll try my best to respond to clear up what I think is a confusion.
Calling them GNU/Linux and Android/Linux would help to clear up the confusion that the original poster had. Personally, if I were describing the typical "Linux" system in a context where it would be confused, I would probably say GNU/X/Linux, because this describes what I want to know. Most people who describe a "Linux" system really only care about the GNU/X part. For example, I noticed recently that Debian has a distribution using the Free BSD kernel instead of the Linux kernel. I haven't checked, but I assume it uses GNU. As a user, I don't really care that much whether my kernel is Free BSD or Linux, as long as my hardware is supported. It hardly makes any difference to me. I can't imagine it makes much difference to most other people either. What I want is a GNU system with X.
If I installed a "Linux" system and found that it was Android rather than GNU, I would be very disappointed. I don't want Android n my desktop. It's not useful to me. The fact that it runs a Linux kernel is completely unrelated to what I care about. Similarly, if Google decided to use a different kernel on my phone instead of Linux, I wouldn't give a monkey's because it doesn't affect me as a user (as long as my hardware is supported). Assuming I want Android (though, to me honest more and more I think I'd rather have GNU on my phone... too bad Meego is dead...) I'll be happy.
The thing about Red Hat is that it is a GNU/Linux system. That's all they distribute. So I'm quite happy to call a distribution "Red Hat" and revel in the lack of confusion. Even Debian with a choice of different kernels isn't so bad. I know what I'm getting. When I need to specify, I can say Debian/Free BSD or Debian/Linux. It's GNU and X. I know that, because it's all they do. Red Hat and Debian are brands.
But if you are talking about GNU with the Linux kernel and saying what software you want to run, etc, etc, calling it "Linux" is just plain confusing. GNU and X is the important part to the user, not Linux. I can replace the Linux part and not much will change (assuming my hardware is supported). The other way around is untrue.
One thing I'll give you is that the FSF did a *very* bad job of explaining this issue. It was wrapped up in a lot of emotional language. This caused people like yourself to respond in a similarly emotional way. I don't blame you. You see this guy getting all worked up over something and you can't understand why. You think he's just a nutter. And since he's talking on and on about morality you think he's attacking you. It's fair enough that you get upset. When the whole GNU/Linux thing erupted I couldn't see the point either because *all* Linux distros were GNU and X. That's not true anymore and I spend quite a lot of time clearing up confusion that would be easier to deal with if people would simply talk about the parts that are important to them and not the kernel.
This confusion is precisely why the FSF complained about using the term "Linux" to refer to the OS when it is only the kernel. You need lots of user space code to complete the OS (and in fact the kernel is a small part of your OS).
Linux is the kernel. It specifically allows you to run any code you want in user space on top of it. Usually Linux ships with GNU user space tools along with X windows and your desktop environment and whatever else you want. Where the OS stops being the OS and starts being just whatever you want to run is probably open to debate, but generally speaking with a Linux kernel you get GNU plus X. There are very few exceptions.
Android is one of the exceptions. You have Linux and Android. Android takes over where you would normally have GNU plus X. Virtually all of your user experience with your OS is a result of either GNU plus X, or in this case Android. The Linux kernel is really only important to programmers, or for hardware compatibility. On most Linux distributions, you don't even usually interface with the kernel directly as a programmer. You use the C library which gives you a nice Posix interface (a long time ago Linux had it's own C library, but now I think everybody uses GNU's). With Android, you interface with Android that interfaces with the kernel.
Like I said, the Linux kernel specifically allows anyone to run whatever they want in the user space (without that provision, you would only be able to run GPL compatible code on your system, which would be too limiting, even for the FSF). So Android can be licensed however they want. They decided to license some of the Android versions under the Apache license. So far they have not licensed anything with version 3.0+ with a free software license.
This is not necessarily a problem, except that you can already buy devices with 3.0 installed. This means that these people, who may have thought they were buying a machine with a free software OS, do not have access to the code. It's really not acceptable to tell people your OS is open source and then publish a version which isn't (unless you warn them in big neon letters first). Maybe some people don't care. But I assure you that some people care very much.
The proof-of-work follows an asymptotic curve (I think), easy at first and then steadily more difficult, meaning that the massive deflation has/will soon have occurred and hoarding should cease to be viable.
I think you have a wrong idea about what the proof-of-work is doing and what is causing the deflation. I'll try to explain as best I can.
The proof of work is a computationally intensive activity used to "authorise" transaction. The clients insist that this computation is done before the transactions are formed into a block and the block is put into the chain of historical transactions (thereby "authorising" them). There are two intents here. The first is to slow down the speed of transactions so that a large number of clients can catch up with the transactions. If you were to allow transactions to occur at any rate, somebody could process them very quickly and dictate the order in which the transactions can occur. This could allow them to double spend bitcoins. By insisting that there be proof-of-work, you can dictate the speed at which transactions are processed (one block every 10 minutes). Blocks are also not official until 100 have gone by. So this gives clients 1000 minutes (nearly a day) to receive the transactions. This is important in a P2P system -- you have to allow time for the transactions to propogate otherwise people can't check up on each other.
The difficulty of the proof-of-work doesn't necessarily increase over time. The current speed of transaction processing is measured and adjusted every once in a while (2 weeks I think...). The difficulty of the proof-of-work is adjusted so that it takes about 10 minutes on average to create blocks. So if there is more computing power available, the problems get more difficult. If there is less, the problems get easier.
However, you want the difficulty to be quite high. Even though the rate is adjusted every once in a while, there is always the possibility that someone will pour a lot of hardware on the problem and overtake the network. The lowest level of difficulty was set so that a fairly top end CPU would take 10 minutes to create a block on average. Right now, the difficulty is at about 1.8 million times that. In other words, you would need the equivalent of several hundred thousand processors to (or several thousand graphics boards) to make a dent on that. It is economically infeasible to try. That is why the system encourages increasing the difficulty of solving blocks. It makes it much more difficult/expensive to cheat the system. Or as the original developer said, it is more economically feasible to use those computing resources to make bitcoins ligitimately rather than undermine the very currency you want to use by cheating it. This is also the reason for the rather large initial payouts for solving blocks -- it encourages people to invest computing resources to solve blocks, increasing the difficulty.
The deflation issue is completely unrelated to this. Deflation is the *increase* in the value of the currency. It seems backwards because of the word "deflation", but what is happening is that the cost of *goods* and services are going down as a result of the currency's value going up. So called fiat currencies are designed for "inflation". The decrease in value. They do this by steadily increasing the supply of money. This is intentional.
In a fiat currency, your intent is to put money in the hands of people who don't have it. People without money have no resources and can't do anything. If you have absolutely no money, no matter how much you want to farm, or fish, or start a business, you can't do it. You don't have land, or a boat, or capital to buy the materials to manufacture something. So you can't produce anything. You are wasted. In a fiat system, we create money (out of thin air) and lend it to you. By creating money, this devalues the money (there is more of it now), but it allows you to produce. Because you can produce, there is more food,
If you lived in Tokyo, then virtually any company will have reasonably good coverage. But Japan is a lot bigger than Tokyo. When I first came to Japan I was with Softbank mainly because they supposedly have an English help line (although every time I called it, it was out of service). Living in a small town in Shizuoka prefecture, I could not conduct telephone calls in my apartment because the signal was poor. I had to go out doors. Wherever I went, I had about a 50% chance of receiving telephone calls. Well, I don't phone a lot, so I put up with it, and 3G coverage was OK, so I could get email. But over time, the 3G coverage got worse. It got to a point where I couldn't connect to the network most of the time, and I couldn't get emails. Softbank was cheap, but last year I changed to Docomo since "cheap and not working" is not as good as "expensive and working".
Similarly, I have been using Yahoo! Softbank ADSL (Hikari is only being rolled out in my town this month). I had good internet connection initially for about 6 months, and then it slowed down to dialup speeds. I phoned them up (in Japanese since their English help line didn't pick up) and got a new modem. That one lasted another 6 months. Rinse and repeat. After going through 6 modems, they decided that there must be something wrong with my line (you think...). So they scheduled NTT to come and look at the line. No change. So they remotely tuned the receiver on my modem and that fixed it for 3 weeks. At that point they didn't know what else to do, so I was left with dialup speed (or less) for a good year. I'm 50 meters from the end office, and while it's hard to fault Softbank for a crappy phone line (they don't own the phone lines), given the fact that new modems fix the problem for a while, I have to think that the modem is not as robust as it could be. As I said, Hikari is being rolled out this month and I'm already scheduled to be switched over to NTT.
As far as the iPhone goes, it is true that Softbank was the first to roll out a smart phone. All the other carriers refused to carry the iPhone as the other poster noted. But it wasn't long before Docomo came out with the Xperia (Android). In fact you will notice now that Android phones absolutely bury the iPhone in numbers and popularity. The iPhone is still popular with foreigners, but I barely see any Japanese people carrying one.
I also think you are wrong to say that Softbank brought the "iPhone revolution". Whether or not the other carriers realised the importance of smart phones at that time, or whether they were waiting for Android phones I don't know. Au was especially slow, but has certainly jumped in with both feet as you can know choose from something like 6 different Android models. Even Softbank carries Android phones now. When the revolution came, it was Android, not Apple.
Like I said. I don't doubt that your experience with Softbank was good. Friends of mine in big cities use Softbank and are happy. But with respect to the OP's point that Softbank has a horrible network compared to Docomo and Au, he's right on. Softbank is virtually unusable in a lot of places in Japan, which is why it isn't popular. And while we can give credit where it's due for taking a chance on smart phones, the bigger companies did a much better job following through and dominate the market in that area too.
I'm not as hard on Softbank as the OP. I'm happy there is some competition. I just wish it were stronger.
What I can't figure out is why nobody in Japan is talking about geothermal. There has been a lot of talk about increasing wind power (and it is noticeably expanding at a good rate already), and building big solar farms (some at sea, which seems like a completely daft idea). But I haven't heard a single word on expanding geothermal, which should be the key for this kind of undertaking. What I'd like to know is why not. The existing geothermal plants seem to be working acceptably, so it should be feasible. I'm a bit suspicious that these renewable initiatives are not as serious as the appear.
I think the key point the article is making is that the job of a currency is to spur growth in an economy. A currency with a fixed number of units won't be as effective at doing this because restricting their use increases their value (deflation). The more you horde the higher the value. But hording means that the money isn't being used to create growth, and so it is working against its original purpose.
But what if we say that Bitcoin is never going to be that kind of currency? As long as there is liquidity in terms of real world currencies, it has utility. The author of TFA says that there are many ways to do commerce online. But this is not true for micro payments. The transaction costs for credit cards, pay pal, etc are too large to do micro payments. Even Flattr takes 10% of every transaction (and has the gall to say "hope that's ok" -- it's not!). But even if you accept the outrageous transaction fees with something like Flattr, you *still* pay a service fee going in, and the recipient pays a service fee going out.
Bitcoin is potentially useful as a micro-payment option as long as there is liquidity to real world currencies. At the moment, we have such liquidity and I'm less worried about a bubble effect than I am with this liquidity ending. My understanding is that most of this liquidity comes from illegal activities wrt Bitcoin (money laundering and drugs trade). But Bitcoin is inherently much more traceable than cash, and as soon as people start to understand this, I suspect the utility of Bitcoin will cease to be.
That will be sad, because it is actually a fairly elegant system. If nothing else I recommend people to get over their skepticism enough to understand how it works internally, and what the design tradeoffs were. We see so many articles about Bitcoin on Slashdot discussing rather boring aspects about it, when the interesting bits (proof of work, merkel chain for enforcing temporal order in a p2p system) are ignored. It's too bad.
His blog is here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/ It seems he's purposely stayed out of the limelight for 10 years, or at least his "Speaking Engagements" section of his home page says that he has stopped giving them since 2002 for personal reasons. Not wanting to speculate, but at around the same time he took a lot of flack for talking about the shares he received from the IPO of VA Linux. I think a lot of technical people can identify with having made political gaffs and I wish he'd been given some slack. But there you go, being famous has both its ups and downs. I think in the end we all lost out because his voice was valuable and he doesn't seem to raise it as much any more. Still, he appears to be quite active on a lot of projects, just not as vocal.
Thinking about it, it's an interesting question given that my response was really intended to deflect some all too common, unwarranted criticism of RMS. Like a lot of people, I don't agree with everything he says (though I could say that about anyone, really), but the guy stands up to an incredible amount of abuse and keeps marching on in the spotlight. I don't blame ESR one bit for not wanting to follow suit (if that's really what happened).
having a portfolio with a wide variety of open source projects has done more for my employability than anything else
I'm out of IT now (teaching instead :-) ), but when I was a programmer my portfolio was gold. It needn't take all that long to do. Work on a project in your spare time for a while, take pieces of code out of it and document why you did what you did. Because I was an XP coach for several years, on my own open source projects I did a kind of mini planning game complete with iteration plans, velocity, etc, etc. I included some of these in my portfolio as well. I got more feedback about that than anything else, which surprised me somewhat. One manager even told me that he hired me specifically due to the planning artifacts (which made him comfortable that I knew how to work in a controlled manner).
A lot of time people put in insane hours at work but leave nothing for themselves. It can really, really helps you professionally to take a few hours a week out for yourself so that you can make a portfolio. If you aren't working 40-hour-weeks, it pays to tell the boss that you need to take some of those overtime hours back to practice programming techniques. They get a better programmer and you get a portfolio (and new skills). It's a good trade-off.
No offence, but before you start criticising, it would help if you understood the issue. RMS uses the words "open source" himself. I have emails from him to prove it. What is at issue is that there is a distinction between "open source" and "free software". Originally ESR started using the term "open source" as a replacement for "free software". He (probably correctly) felt that the word "free" was confusing. However, at the same time he created a definition of "open source" that was different from "free software" while insisting that they were the same. The FSF is concerned with the freedom of all subsequent users to use the software for any purpose, modify it for their needs and to redistribute their modifications. "Open source" discusses the development practice of allowing other developers to view and modify the source code. There is no implication that all subsequent users will be able to modify the code.
An equivalent term would have been fine at the time. The problem was that ESR ignored the only thing that the FSF was interested in. At the same time, he championed many useful and pragmatic practices that have value in their own right. Thus one movement became two.
It is quite reasonable to say that the practice of producing open source software is becoming more and more mainstream, but that the issues of software freedom have not taken hold to the same extent. I doubt there would be many people who would disagree with that statement or find it objectionable. Open source development practices are a definite step forward. But for those interested in software freedom, there is still a long way to go. In some ways the open source movement has taken up a lot of the technical issues that the free software movement used to deal with. Personally, I think it is more important for free software advocates to concentrate on social rather than technical issues (and, in fact, I think that is being done).