I'm not a communist, but get real... should one person DIE simply because he can't afford to live? It's all around us and no one is willing to say I'm wrong about that. But who is willing to actually step up to the plate and actually give to mankind rather than profit from its needs?
The thing is, even in a Communist society, you do need something like money, even as an abstract concept to keep a track on where the finite resources of your society are going and being used. If you are using more resource than you are generating, then this is obviously an unsustainable situation.
How long would it be in a Communist society before the People decided that some of the People weren't contributing as much as they should, or were taking more than they should? History shows that the People will turn on their own in a heartbeat.
The same situation can of course arise in a Capitalist society, but it will be objective, is person A costing our society more economic value, measured in dollars, than he contributes? Expand that to, are group A consuming more resource than groups B, C and D are creating and you have the questions that are being asked today.
I know some of this may sound callous, but there is a universal economic law, you cannot have your cake and let your brother eat it.
After all, it's not the management and marketing sections of a corporation that produce the drugs, it's the R&D people
Who are expensive, and need lots of time and expensive equipment. Where does all that resource come from?
Let me give you an example, I don't have the reference to hand, but I believe the article was in HBR and the company in question was Pfizer. Their lab had developed a great new antihistamine, but it had the side effect of drowsiness, and they were going to abandon it because no-one would buy an allergy medicine that meant they couldn't carry on their day as normal - the point of most of the medicines on the market. One of the "suits" came up with idea that they could sell it as a medicine to help allergy sufferers get a good night's sleep - and it was a great success.
I know it's cool for "geeks" to think that only "geeks" produce value and that "suits" are a waste of time and space, but it simply isn't true. Ultimately, 1 brilliant manager will make more difference than 100 ordinary scientists.
The conflict is between citizens and artificial legal constructs, not between "classes".
Not quite - unless you assume that shareholders, officers and employees of corporations are not also citizens. The conflict is between two groups of individuals, with a great deal of overlap between them. One group of individuals prefers the nation-state, based on territory and military force, the other group prefers the joint-stock corporation, based on independence of territory and economic force.
Personally, I favor the latter, for the simple reason that you are born into a nation, but can freely choose to join a corporation.
Only humans could worry that they would create something smart enough to be smarter than themselves...
Let's all take a quick reality check, we simply aren't that smart. It would be nice if we were, but we aren't.
What absolute nonsense. It it apparent even in recent history that successive generations can be "smarter" then the previous generations. Not as individuals necessarily, but certainly as a culture. The synergistic effects of near-universal literacy led to a massive leap in the collective capability of our civilization, for example. The use of computing means that we can tackle scientific problems that would be literally impossible before. Industrialization freed up immense amounts of thinking time that could be directed towards creativity and research that would otherwise have been spent on basic survival. Our civilization is becoming exponentially smarter, and we always relied on technology of one form or another to make this possible. The question is, how smart can we get, and what happens then?
All you need to be able to do is make something as smart as yourself, but faster - exactly what Caxton did when the printing press meant information could be rapidly distributed. Then let it iterate.
It would be illegal to do this in Europe without the express permission of everybody who they take the data from
You need to study EU law more closely, my friend. Every and any right enshrined in the Social Chapter can be suspended or revoked if the security of the EU is threatened. A minimum level of threat is not, however, defined.
Oracle may be moving their backoffice to Linux but what about the database software itself? It is still a closed source proprietary application.
I hate to break it to you, but Larry Ellison doesn't give a crap about Linux. He only cares, is consumed and obsessed by, his ongoing feud with Bill Gates. Linux is a pawn in his game, nothing more.
Re:Only Trillian v0.7x affected?
on
AOL vs. Trillian
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Trillian is a very nice client - we use it almost exclusively here at work, as it lets us keep in contact with people using multiple IM platforms, and also doesn't ram ads down our throats.
Those ads are what pay for the servers, the infrastructure, the maintenance and enhancement of the software, etc. If you are using the service without the ads, you're getting a free ride on all the people who do use the service as intended.
Why do you think TiVo doesn't let you completely strip away ads and watch programmes seamlessly? Because without ad revenue there are no programmes, at least not on non-PPV channels. The TV companies know this, and the enlightened consumer knows it too.
IMHO, this is all about a minority of users wanting free beer, and dressing it up in free speech rhetoric. Don't forget that ICQ was a small company once... if you really need IM functionality and don't want to use a commercial service... implement your own for internal use.
And how would a CEO sell that one to the shareholders/venture capitalists. 'We're going to spend several billion dollars on a mission that might not succeed, trying to establish if there's any way of making money out there'.
Columbus made a pitch like that, and he didn't even have an MBA!
While the right size and (possibly) the right composition, a planet that's tidelocked or nearly tidelocked isn't in any way, shape, or form terraformable.
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that by the time that terraforming is actually feasible, there will be a technique for altering the orbit of a planet. I mean, how hard could it be?:0)
Wiping out the wilds is sad, but a choice of farms or forests is easy for hungry people
This argument is almost exactly backwards, because you are food. By this I mean you are quite literally what you eat, every molecule your body is made of is there because at one point or another it was food, and then it was eaten.
On the whole, human effort is greatly increasing human habitability of Earth, not decreasing it. The pristine, wild world of a hundred centuries ago couldn't support half a billion humans, while today it supports well over 6 billion, and the way is being made for 10.
Increasing populations don't lead to a higher demand for food; rather a higher availability of food results in population growth.
For this reason, increasing the food production capacity of our planet - of any planet - is inherently unsustainable. Eventually, you will get to the point where resources are exhausted, and the population will be abruptly adjusted by famine - which is just as nature intended. But since humans are intelligent, we should be capable of regulating ourselves, and on the whole the Western nations are, to manage supply and demand.
Things probably won't get tight here on Earth's surface until at least 100 billion, by which time we'll be seriously working on these other places to live
A planet that was nothing but farms and dormitories would be a pretty miserable place.
I think a more meaningful statistic (speaking as a *not* Ph.D. in economics) is the per-capita yearly income. That compares, more accurately, the lifestyle of the people of that country on average, if they lived in your country...
No it doesn't. The reason that people are paid $2/day in the third world does not mean they have to work solidly for 2 days just to afford a cup of coffee in Starbucks. They are being paid in their local currency, which has a very poor rate of exchange to "hard" currencies (USD, GBP, CHF and so forth) because people who buy and sell currencies want hard currencies to support their other business operations, as they can be used for trading with low currency risk, and don't want whatever the local currency is. So it's a low dollar value, but it is comparable to the price of stuff in the local economy in the same way that the dollar is comparable to the price of stuff in the US.
Quoting in USD is great for hysterical anti-globalization protestors, because it makes things in the third world seem much worse than they really are. The only way to sensibly compare living in an economy is to compare prices of goods and services relative to income, all in the local currencies, for example, what percentage of annual income needs to be spent on groceries of a given standaard for an average family of 4?
. While this book is probably great for biologists just learning to write code, for coders entering the field (bioinformatics) it contains too little biology or math to be really educational. My opinion
A question for practitioners: why would you want to use Perl over a flat file data set, rather than loading the data into Oracle and using professional data mining (OLAP/DSS/DW) tools? Surely the latter are more mature and comprehensive.
It is interesting to see Intel pick on GCC. They are in the CHIP BUSINESS... A compiler (any compiler) helps them.
You're right, it is strange, and also they charge money for VTune, their tool for optimizing code for Intel processors. You would think that they would want to get their own development tools into as many hands as possible in an attempt to get ISVs to write apps that favored Intel over AMD.
But Intel have the money to hire very smart consultants, so there must be a good reason, maybe related to anti-trust worries.
Rule #1 in dealing with businesses. If they have any reason to lie to you, they will. Plan for it.
If anyone has a reason, they'll lie to you. It all depends whether their reason is good enough.
I'm guessing that the money that nVidia make off their expensive Quadros will subsidize development that will eventually make it into their cheaper Geforces. This isn't a bad thing; the alternative is that the consumer cards are more expensive and less capable.
I don't know of anyone with a CS degree doing mechanical or electrical engineering though.
You can go into almost any field with an engineering degree. Engineering is in practice what Liberal Arts is in theory, it equips you with generic problem solving skills, enables you to develop your own heuristics and conduct your own research. Unlike Liberal Arts, you also get the quantitative grounding necessary to actually implement and prove, whenever that's necessary.
I have a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, my first job was at an ISP, then management consulting, and now I work in the financial services industry. I find also that Engineering, Maths and Physics graduates are much more in demand for any sort of technical or quantitative work than CS graduates, even in computing.
If I buy a PS2 game (or CD, DVD, whatever), and it is illegal for me to make a backup copy, shouldn't I be allowed to get the disc replaced for free if/when it becomes scratched to the point of being unusable?
After all, if I buy a license for a piece of software, I retain the rights use that software for an unlimited amount of time.
Quite. And you should have been able to upgrade your vinyl records to CD for just the cost of the media, but you couldn't. The law is being particularly an ass here.
'Customers' who pirate games aren't really customers, and I doubt Sony give a flying frogstar fart about alienating THEM
No, but it should be worried about alienating customers who love the product so much they'll pay extra to import games from Japan as soon as they're released, and rave to friends about how good they are, generating more sales when the games are released in Europe.
Any brand-oriented company in a commodity market knows, you piss off trend-setters and early adopters at your peril. Especially if you're competing against other very strong brands who can do most of what you can, and more of their own.
Oh such brutal cuts. And less than two years after the private sector had to cut such frivolities as . . . everything. I know my company sympathizes with them.
You are absolutely correct. No academic I knwo would spend money flying first class out of their research budget (altho' they will happily accept it if a company wants to fly them in as a speaker).
The Media Lab has coasted on its reputation for a long time, and has produced a lot of column inches in Wired for Negroponte, but let's face it, not much else. Any undergraduate knows the basic law of economics, you can't have your cake and eat it.
This is significant as our servers are used to provide Point-of-Sale availability for registers in the retail environment, which is heavily dependent on disk i/o performance for efficiency.
Whenever I come across a scenario like this, I tell people to take a step back and before making any technical decisions, figure out what it is you are actually trying to accomplish. If you are really after high performance, get SCSI disks. If you're after cheapness, then you will simply have to accept that IDE disks are slower.
This isn't a question for a techie to answer, BTW. One of your business managers will have to think about how many transactions per day are processed, when the cost of the system can be recouped at a given percentage of each transaction, whether or not paying more for SCSI makes financial sense, and whether higher unit cost will mean you sell fewer units. Get one of your tame MBAs to think about this for you.
This sounds to me like a "shovelware" book, albeit too late to have any impact on anything other then the trees that died to print it. Do they pay the authors of these tomes by the pound?
The fact of the matter is anything Unix programming related or C related has been done already and done well. These attempts to cash in by vendors like WROX (and their ilk, like QUE) by slapping "Linux" on the cover are just that, attempts to cash in.
Unix and C, perhaps, but there are all the layered products to consider also.
I think most people know that VALinux (or is it VAsoftware now?) owns Slashdot. And for those who don't know I don't really think it's that relevant in this case. This has to do with CSFB's underhandedness with VA stock, not something VA did itself
Even so. On CNN, for example, every time they report on anything that's owned by AOL/TW, they make sure they say, XYZ Corp is owned by AOL/TW, parent company of CNN. You have to whiter than white in cases like this, to be completely safe, if you do anything that might affect the stock price. I'd like to think this was just an oversight on/.'s part, but it's a little odd to be reporting on a market irregularity and not conform perfectly yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
The Chocobos?
On Aki's pyjamas...
I'm not a communist, but get real... should one person DIE simply because he can't afford to live? It's all around us and no one is willing to say I'm wrong about that. But who is willing to actually step up to the plate and actually give to mankind rather than profit from its needs?
The thing is, even in a Communist society, you do need something like money, even as an abstract concept to keep a track on where the finite resources of your society are going and being used. If you are using more resource than you are generating, then this is obviously an unsustainable situation.
How long would it be in a Communist society before the People decided that some of the People weren't contributing as much as they should, or were taking more than they should? History shows that the People will turn on their own in a heartbeat.
The same situation can of course arise in a Capitalist society, but it will be objective, is person A costing our society more economic value, measured in dollars, than he contributes? Expand that to, are group A consuming more resource than groups B, C and D are creating and you have the questions that are being asked today.
I know some of this may sound callous, but there is a universal economic law, you cannot have your cake and let your brother eat it.
After all, it's not the management and marketing sections of a corporation that produce the drugs, it's the R&D people
Who are expensive, and need lots of time and expensive equipment. Where does all that resource come from?
Let me give you an example, I don't have the reference to hand, but I believe the article was in HBR and the company in question was Pfizer. Their lab had developed a great new antihistamine, but it had the side effect of drowsiness, and they were going to abandon it because no-one would buy an allergy medicine that meant they couldn't carry on their day as normal - the point of most of the medicines on the market. One of the "suits" came up with idea that they could sell it as a medicine to help allergy sufferers get a good night's sleep - and it was a great success.
I know it's cool for "geeks" to think that only "geeks" produce value and that "suits" are a waste of time and space, but it simply isn't true. Ultimately, 1 brilliant manager will make more difference than 100 ordinary scientists.
The conflict is between citizens and artificial legal constructs, not between "classes".
Not quite - unless you assume that shareholders, officers and employees of corporations are not also citizens. The conflict is between two groups of individuals, with a great deal of overlap between them. One group of individuals prefers the nation-state, based on territory and military force, the other group prefers the joint-stock corporation, based on independence of territory and economic force.
Personally, I favor the latter, for the simple reason that you are born into a nation, but can freely choose to join a corporation.
Only humans could worry that they would create something smart enough to be smarter than themselves...
Let's all take a quick reality check, we simply aren't that smart. It would be nice if we were, but we aren't.
What absolute nonsense. It it apparent even in recent history that successive generations can be "smarter" then the previous generations. Not as individuals necessarily, but certainly as a culture. The synergistic effects of near-universal literacy led to a massive leap in the collective capability of our civilization, for example. The use of computing means that we can tackle scientific problems that would be literally impossible before. Industrialization freed up immense amounts of thinking time that could be directed towards creativity and research that would otherwise have been spent on basic survival. Our civilization is becoming exponentially smarter, and we always relied on technology of one form or another to make this possible. The question is, how smart can we get, and what happens then?
All you need to be able to do is make something as smart as yourself, but faster - exactly what Caxton did when the printing press meant information could be rapidly distributed. Then let it iterate.
It would be illegal to do this in Europe without the express permission of everybody who they take the data from
You need to study EU law more closely, my friend. Every and any right enshrined in the Social Chapter can be suspended or revoked if the security of the EU is threatened. A minimum level of threat is not, however, defined.
Oracle may be moving their backoffice to Linux but what about the database software itself? It is still a closed source proprietary application.
I hate to break it to you, but Larry Ellison doesn't give a crap about Linux. He only cares, is consumed and obsessed by, his ongoing feud with Bill Gates. Linux is a pawn in his game, nothing more.
Trillian is a very nice client - we use it almost exclusively here at work, as it lets us keep in contact with people using multiple IM platforms, and also doesn't ram ads down our throats.
Those ads are what pay for the servers, the infrastructure, the maintenance and enhancement of the software, etc. If you are using the service without the ads, you're getting a free ride on all the people who do use the service as intended.
Why do you think TiVo doesn't let you completely strip away ads and watch programmes seamlessly? Because without ad revenue there are no programmes, at least not on non-PPV channels. The TV companies know this, and the enlightened consumer knows it too.
IMHO, this is all about a minority of users wanting free beer, and dressing it up in free speech rhetoric. Don't forget that ICQ was a small company once... if you really need IM functionality and don't want to use a commercial service... implement your own for internal use.
And how would a CEO sell that one to the shareholders/venture capitalists. 'We're going to spend several billion dollars on a mission that might not succeed, trying to establish if there's any way of making money out there'.
Columbus made a pitch like that, and he didn't even have an MBA!
While the right size and (possibly) the right composition, a planet that's tidelocked or nearly tidelocked isn't in any way, shape, or form terraformable.
:0)
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that by the time that terraforming is actually feasible, there will be a technique for altering the orbit of a planet. I mean, how hard could it be?
Wiping out the wilds is sad, but a choice of farms or forests is easy for hungry people
This argument is almost exactly backwards, because you are food. By this I mean you are quite literally what you eat, every molecule your body is made of is there because at one point or another it was food, and then it was eaten.
On the whole, human effort is greatly increasing human habitability of Earth, not decreasing it. The pristine, wild world of a hundred centuries ago couldn't support half a billion humans, while today it supports well over 6 billion, and the way is being made for 10.
Increasing populations don't lead to a higher demand for food; rather a higher availability of food results in population growth.
For this reason, increasing the food production capacity of our planet - of any planet - is inherently unsustainable. Eventually, you will get to the point where resources are exhausted, and the population will be abruptly adjusted by famine - which is just as nature intended. But since humans are intelligent, we should be capable of regulating ourselves, and on the whole the Western nations are, to manage supply and demand.
Things probably won't get tight here on Earth's surface until at least 100 billion, by which time we'll be seriously working on these other places to live
A planet that was nothing but farms and dormitories would be a pretty miserable place.
my observations are that the thing that drives the economy of EQ is one of the same things that drives the "luxury" economy of the real world: status.
Not unlike the motivation of many "hackers" and other open source authors...
I think a more meaningful statistic (speaking as a *not* Ph.D. in economics) is the per-capita yearly income. That compares, more accurately, the lifestyle of the people of that country on average, if they lived in your country...
No it doesn't. The reason that people are paid $2/day in the third world does not mean they have to work solidly for 2 days just to afford a cup of coffee in Starbucks. They are being paid in their local currency, which has a very poor rate of exchange to "hard" currencies (USD, GBP, CHF and so forth) because people who buy and sell currencies want hard currencies to support their other business operations, as they can be used for trading with low currency risk, and don't want whatever the local currency is. So it's a low dollar value, but it is comparable to the price of stuff in the local economy in the same way that the dollar is comparable to the price of stuff in the US.
Quoting in USD is great for hysterical anti-globalization protestors, because it makes things in the third world seem much worse than they really are. The only way to sensibly compare living in an economy is to compare prices of goods and services relative to income, all in the local currencies, for example, what percentage of annual income needs to be spent on groceries of a given standaard for an average family of 4?
. While this book is probably great for biologists just learning to write code, for coders entering the field (bioinformatics) it contains too little biology or math to be really educational. My opinion
A question for practitioners: why would you want to use Perl over a flat file data set, rather than loading the data into Oracle and using professional data mining (OLAP/DSS/DW) tools? Surely the latter are more mature and comprehensive.
Weird how they're upset about this, but allowed "The Spy Who Shagged Me". I thought that satire counted as fair use of copyrighted material?
It is interesting to see Intel pick on GCC. They are in the CHIP BUSINESS... A compiler (any compiler) helps them.
You're right, it is strange, and also they charge money for VTune, their tool for optimizing code for Intel processors. You would think that they would want to get their own development tools into as many hands as possible in an attempt to get ISVs to write apps that favored Intel over AMD.
But Intel have the money to hire very smart consultants, so there must be a good reason, maybe related to anti-trust worries.
Rule #1 in dealing with businesses. If they have any reason to lie to you, they will. Plan for it.
If anyone has a reason, they'll lie to you. It all depends whether their reason is good enough.
I'm guessing that the money that nVidia make off their expensive Quadros will subsidize development that will eventually make it into their cheaper Geforces. This isn't a bad thing; the alternative is that the consumer cards are more expensive and less capable.
I don't know of anyone with a CS degree doing mechanical or electrical engineering though.
You can go into almost any field with an engineering degree. Engineering is in practice what Liberal Arts is in theory, it equips you with generic problem solving skills, enables you to develop your own heuristics and conduct your own research. Unlike Liberal Arts, you also get the quantitative grounding necessary to actually implement and prove, whenever that's necessary.
I have a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, my first job was at an ISP, then management consulting, and now I work in the financial services industry. I find also that Engineering, Maths and Physics graduates are much more in demand for any sort of technical or quantitative work than CS graduates, even in computing.
Don't get me wrong; GCC is greak - but C++ Builder is an impressive way to write GUI applications quickly.
;0)
Great? Weak? Greek? What?!
If I buy a PS2 game (or CD, DVD, whatever), and it is illegal for me to make a backup copy, shouldn't I be allowed to get the disc replaced for free if/when it becomes scratched to the point of being unusable?
After all, if I buy a license for a piece of software, I retain the rights use that software for an unlimited amount of time.
Quite. And you should have been able to upgrade your vinyl records to CD for just the cost of the media, but you couldn't. The law is being particularly an ass here.
'Customers' who pirate games aren't really customers, and I doubt Sony give a flying frogstar fart about alienating THEM
No, but it should be worried about alienating customers who love the product so much they'll pay extra to import games from Japan as soon as they're released, and rave to friends about how good they are, generating more sales when the games are released in Europe.
Any brand-oriented company in a commodity market knows, you piss off trend-setters and early adopters at your peril. Especially if you're competing against other very strong brands who can do most of what you can, and more of their own.
Oh such brutal cuts. And less than two years after the private sector had to cut such frivolities as . . . everything. I know my company sympathizes with them.
You are absolutely correct. No academic I knwo would spend money flying first class out of their research budget (altho' they will happily accept it if a company wants to fly them in as a speaker).
The Media Lab has coasted on its reputation for a long time, and has produced a lot of column inches in Wired for Negroponte, but let's face it, not much else. Any undergraduate knows the basic law of economics, you can't have your cake and eat it.
This is significant as our servers are used to provide Point-of-Sale availability for registers in the retail environment, which is heavily dependent on disk i/o performance for efficiency.
Whenever I come across a scenario like this, I tell people to take a step back and before making any technical decisions, figure out what it is you are actually trying to accomplish. If you are really after high performance, get SCSI disks. If you're after cheapness, then you will simply have to accept that IDE disks are slower.
This isn't a question for a techie to answer, BTW. One of your business managers will have to think about how many transactions per day are processed, when the cost of the system can be recouped at a given percentage of each transaction, whether or not paying more for SCSI makes financial sense, and whether higher unit cost will mean you sell fewer units. Get one of your tame MBAs to think about this for you.
This sounds to me like a "shovelware" book, albeit too late to have any impact on anything other then the trees that died to print it. Do they pay the authors of these tomes by the pound?
I wrote some of Professional Oracle 8i Application Programming, and was paid by the page.
The fact of the matter is anything Unix programming related or C related has been done already and done well. These attempts to cash in by vendors like WROX (and their ilk, like QUE) by slapping "Linux" on the cover are just that, attempts to cash in.
Unix and C, perhaps, but there are all the layered products to consider also.
I think most people know that VALinux (or is it VAsoftware now?) owns Slashdot. And for those who don't know I don't really think it's that relevant in this case. This has to do with CSFB's underhandedness with VA stock, not something VA did itself
/.'s part, but it's a little odd to be reporting on a market irregularity and not conform perfectly yourself.
Even so. On CNN, for example, every time they report on anything that's owned by AOL/TW, they make sure they say, XYZ Corp is owned by AOL/TW, parent company of CNN. You have to whiter than white in cases like this, to be completely safe, if you do anything that might affect the stock price. I'd like to think this was just an oversight on