Well I remember Guardian readers "whining" about it - and at the time Iraq was Britain's (and the USA's) ally -- it was *only* "whining Guardian readers" who complained.
What, you mean like Saddam's close personal friends Tony Benn and George Galloway?
Hey, who gives a shit what the hell happens in America - so long as it's still better than North Korea?
I'm not saying the US/UK is perfect - merely pointing out a double standard. Look carefully at the issues "big protest" takes on, and you'll see a pattern - only capitalist democracies are ever their targets.
Riiight. I know things aren't perfect in the UK but at least we haven't set up anything like what you have at Guantanamo Bay, where the usual notions of justice don't even apply
It's funny, the US locks up a few terrorists and the Guardian-readers whine to the high heavens, but when their Socialist brother Castro locks up dozens of journalists for daring to criticize his regime, there's not a word.
As bad as the Apartheid regime in South Africa was, it never nerve gassed one particular ethnic group and Western lefties still held protests, boycotted products, called for sanctions. Yet when the Ba'ath (it means "Socialist Arab Rebirth") party gassed the Kurds, not a whisper of dissent from said Westerners.
That's the funny thing, the "Big Protest" movement will let any government get away with anything, so long as it's basically Socialist. So quit whining about "freedom" in the Western world; over here you can openly criticize your government in the press, on the TV, on a public web site without the slightest fear of reprisal. Try that in the "worker's paradise" of North Korea.
"Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000..."
Early builds of Win2K were certainly available in 1998... so yes, someone could have 5 years experience with it. In fact, I probably have, but just as a user not as a sysadmin.
You should have used "10 years EJB experience" or something as an example.
I saw more of Europe backpacking on the cheap in college than I have 'commuting' back and forth.
True. I've worked in every major financial center from Chicago to Frankfurt. All the airports, hotels, taxis and meeting rooms and the people in them look the same. Sometimes it got to the point where if I had vacation time, the last thing I wanted to do was jump on a plane to somewhere!
I travel less for work now, but more for fun, and I can say from experience that an office job is fine, if it means you can afford to do travel properly in your vacation time.
There's tons of biotech, materials-science, computing, optics, and other research that would be more rewarding. The most appalling omission is that the Department of Energy doesn't seem to think that battery technology - the thing holding back deployment of many other technologies - deserves even one project.
Battery technology is an engineering problem, and is being actively worked on by corporations all over the world. The purpose of direct funding from the DoE is to do research that does not have an immediate commercial application.
Nothing on portable fuel cells, microturbines, biodiesel, wave power, or other energy-related technologies either, except fusion.
All of those are engineering problems, not science. We already know how to make wind turbines, for example, and we already know how to make fuel cells, extract wave power and so on. Actually doing them is merely a matter of implementation. Actually, it is a matter off implementing them in an economically viable way. Solar cells are a classic example of this problem - they take so much energy to make that when you account for that, they actually aren't very efficient at all, despite solar energy being "free"! We don't know how to do fusion practically yet, and that is why it's being funded. And fusion, when it works on an industrial scale, will make all other forms of power generation irrelevant apart from for niche applications.
This means Duracells cost 3.2 cents/hour and the other brand costed 1.2 cents/hour.
That's not really an accurate assessment of the relative value, tho'. Take me for example: my idea of a good vacation is to head out into the wilderness. Sure I might save some money buying the cheaper batteries, but at the cost of tripling the weight and volume? It's just not worth it. That is why I believe that there is a market for longer-lasting batteries even at a premium price, because cents/hour doesn't tell the whole story.
The Guardian is like the New York Post of your nation isn't it? Obviously this is just some fluff piece that's trying to play off the Matrix just to get the average reader to go through it.
Let me explain. The Guardian is a newspaper written by Marxists, for Marxists, and as such, their world-view is divided into "the workers" and "the party". The party, or course, are the Guardian's readers. The workers are, well, everyone else. In a Marxist economy, it is necessary for workers to be perfectly interchangeable, because Marx could only understand very generic, unskilled economic roles such as "farm labourer" and "assembly line worker". So a worker could be moved from the farm to the factory and back again seamlessly, wherever the party felt his "ability" could best be used that day. The underlying reason is that if workers are specialists, and there is demand for specialists, that is a de-facto market, and Marxists hate markets. Similarly, the Guardian hates the idea that companies can make money by selling people what they want; they'd rather people not be able to work at all (for example, secretaries writing their own wordprocessors) than for a market to operate. But at the same time, the Party deserves all its luxuries, like a Mac user interface which is far too good for the proles, etc etc.
When you read a Guardian article with this in mind, it will make more sense.
Vertical means focussed on an industry, horizontal means things that are common to all industries.
Example: all companies need to do accounting, so accounting packages are often horizontal, i.e. you can use the same application no matter what industry you are in. So an accounting package will just do accounting in a generic sense.
Vertical applications only make sense within an industry. So, you might have one application that does lots of different things in that industry, but makes no sense outside of it. An example would be something which does lots of different engineering design and simulation tasks, but makes little sense outside of engineering.
In software terms, something like Oracle is a horizontal application - if you need a database, it doesn't matter what industry you are in, you can use Oracle. But, even tho' both engineering companies and animation companies need to draw stuff, engineers might use I-DEAS or Pro/E and animators would use Maya or 3D Studio Max, which are vertical applications.
If you are a company in a particular industry, you often have to make a choice: buy one vertical application and understand that it won't be perfect for all your tasks (because there are things that you do slightly different from the industry norm), or buy lots of horizontal applications and understand that you'll have to integrate them yourself.
So was the Nike model "We sell shoes, but first we'll have to give people feet for free" ?
The Nike model is to convince the customers that the sheer coolness of your product makes it worth paying a price that bears no relationship to the manufacturing cost. I could have called it the Coca-cola model, as they do exactly the same thing. Once you can do that, you don't have to compete on price (so long as the market will bear your price). If Nike sold their shoes on functionality to people who actually run, then they would have to compete on price, and they know it, so instead their target market is people who want to pose in sports clothing without ever actually getting sweaty.
I don't mean to sound rude, but wasn't this the business model all along.
Yes, it's a variant on Netscape's business model. Their idea was, we will make money selling servers, but no-one will want servers unless there are lots of people with browsers, so we'll give browsers away for free. I believe the original analogy was "we sell printing presses but first we have to teach people to read to create demand for books" - Jim Clark or Barksdale, can't remember which.
Apple just wants to get everyone accustomed to thinking of music as a file not a plastic disc. Once they do that, everyone will want a player - and judging by the price of iPods, Apple must be making an absolute killing on them. I can't believe they cost most than a few tens of dollars each at most, even including amortizing development costs at a reasonable rate. Apple didn't just study Netscape - they studied Nike too.
The objective of most 'anti-gun' groups isn't banning, anyway--it's strict control to prevent guns from falling into the hands of the real outlaws (i.e., the ones who actually commit crimes).
But laws against gun ownership only, by definition, affect people who obey laws.
Criminals do not obey laws. That is, after all, while we call them criminals.
Therefore, all gun "control" does is present criminals with defenseless victims.
I would have thought all this would be obvious to anyone with the slightest intelligence.
So does this mean Windows is finally going to have a unifying idea, something like "everything is almost like a file"?
Windows philosophy, incompletely realized to be sure, is "everything is a COM object". With.NET and 2003, we're getting there. The idea that "everything is a file" has its merits, but its limitations also - not least being the only way to move data between processes in it is as streams of text, there's little support for moving strongly-typed objects around (and no, CORBA is no a solution to that).
Back in the 2.0 browser days, something like 98% of all browsers were Netscape. They were more popular as a browser than even the mighty Google is as a search engine, and were without a doubt considered "a must".
Netscape's business plan from day 1 was "We will make money selling servers to large corporations. To create demand for servers we will give free browsers to the customers of those corporations". For Netscape' business plan to succeed, it didn't matter who made the browser, so long as the browser was ubiquitous. Remember, the model is "free browsers, expensive servers".
To blame Microsoft for Netscape's downfall is overly simplistic. Netscape failed because their server business didn't make money, because (and I speak as someone who was deploying large-scale Netscape server installations at the time) version 3 of all their server products, frankly, sucked. Version 2 of most everything was great; if they'd kept that quality going they'd have been fine.
What does this mean for Google? It means that it must focus on where it makes money and not get sidetracked by meaningless popularity contests. It doesn't matter if MSN is more popular overall if Google is making more money per search. If Google's management go all-out for popularity, they've lost the plot, and I don't think they will. Of course, the Slashbots will be in hysterics if MSN search becomes more popular, but if Slashbots knew about running a business, they wouldn't all be living in their parent's basements.
Such people have never really bred prolifically, however. So I can't fathom how you believe that this is connected with evolution in any significant way.
The same principles apply. In a society that rewards accomplishment, people strive to accomplish. In a society that punishes accomplishment with high taxation and rewards sitting around waiting for handouts, few people are driven to accomplish. I didn't say evolution, I said natural selection. In our society, the highest probability of reproduction is with those who do nothing but breed - and those kids go on not to value education but go straight onto welfare themselves. The people who do work hard are too busy working hard to have kids, so those values of hard work and education never get passed on.
Start to think about memes reproducing, rather than people, and you will begin to understand.
Islamic restrictions on money lending have nothing to do with Arab contributions or lack thereof to mathematics. Finance was only a main accelerant during ancient times, i.e. before Islam. Sure theoretical economics is a modern-day motive for some mathematical research... but not the main driving force.
The point is that the application of maths to finance means that Western entrepreneurs could easily raise the capital needed to underwrite technological development or to insure trading expeditions. Therefore the maths had a second-order effect: not only did it make sophisticated financial products such as derivatives possible, it made it possible to vastly accelerate every other economic activity. That includes all the engineering and science that really developed the maths, and that fed back into finance - computer technology automating the markets is just one example.
Re:Rant: Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy. Deal with it.
on
Human Accomplishment
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But what have they done for humanity lately?
It's worse than you suggest. You see, not only is modern Islamic civilization vastly inferior to the West, it is even inferior to ancient Islamic civilization.
You are woefully ignorant about modern evolutionary theory.
And you are woefully ignorant of simple economics. In a society that rewards exploration and scientific discovery, people work hard to explore and discover. That was the West in the 18th century. In a society where there is no pressure to work because the welfare state will take care of you, and where if you do succeed you will be punitively taxed and villified by popular culture, people are less motivated. That is the West in the 20th.
Superior culture in what sense? Just because we don't have as many moral qualms about technology doesn't mean we're any better.
You are on exceedingly shaky grounds when you start to talk about morals in this context. For example, Western medicine and surgery are more advanced that anywhere else in the world. Western child mortality is the lowest in the world. And no culture in the history of humanity has been as generous with its surplus as the West. I have searched and I cannot find anything in say Mayan or ancient Egyptian culture that even compares to Western aid and vaccination programmes.
All that is the product of Western scientific and technological prowess. I will go so far as to say that cultures that do not exploit their scientific knowledge to practically enhance the lives of their citizens are immoral.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.brazzil.com/p120feb03.htm
Yes, collectivizing the farms worked so well when the Russians tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Cambodians tried it...
Well I remember Guardian readers "whining" about it - and at the time Iraq was Britain's (and the USA's) ally -- it was *only* "whining Guardian readers" who complained.
What, you mean like Saddam's close personal friends Tony Benn and George Galloway?
Hey, who gives a shit what the hell happens in America - so long as it's still better than North Korea?
I'm not saying the US/UK is perfect - merely pointing out a double standard. Look carefully at the issues "big protest" takes on, and you'll see a pattern - only capitalist democracies are ever their targets.
Riiight. I know things aren't perfect in the UK but at least we haven't set up anything like what you have at Guantanamo Bay, where the usual notions of justice don't even apply
It's funny, the US locks up a few terrorists and the Guardian-readers whine to the high heavens, but when their Socialist brother Castro locks up dozens of journalists for daring to criticize his regime, there's not a word.
As bad as the Apartheid regime in South Africa was, it never nerve gassed one particular ethnic group and Western lefties still held protests, boycotted products, called for sanctions. Yet when the Ba'ath (it means "Socialist Arab Rebirth") party gassed the Kurds, not a whisper of dissent from said Westerners.
That's the funny thing, the "Big Protest" movement will let any government get away with anything, so long as it's basically Socialist. So quit whining about "freedom" in the Western world; over here you can openly criticize your government in the press, on the TV, on a public web site without the slightest fear of reprisal. Try that in the "worker's paradise" of North Korea.
"Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000..."
Early builds of Win2K were certainly available in 1998... so yes, someone could have 5 years experience with it. In fact, I probably have, but just as a user not as a sysadmin.
You should have used "10 years EJB experience" or something as an example.
I saw more of Europe backpacking on the cheap in college than I have 'commuting' back and forth.
True. I've worked in every major financial center from Chicago to Frankfurt. All the airports, hotels, taxis and meeting rooms and the people in them look the same. Sometimes it got to the point where if I had vacation time, the last thing I wanted to do was jump on a plane to somewhere!
I travel less for work now, but more for fun, and I can say from experience that an office job is fine, if it means you can afford to do travel properly in your vacation time.
There's tons of biotech, materials-science, computing, optics, and other research that would be more rewarding. The most appalling omission is that the Department of Energy doesn't seem to think that battery technology - the thing holding back deployment of many other technologies - deserves even one project.
Battery technology is an engineering problem, and is being actively worked on by corporations all over the world. The purpose of direct funding from the DoE is to do research that does not have an immediate commercial application.
Nothing on portable fuel cells, microturbines, biodiesel, wave power, or other energy-related technologies either, except fusion.
All of those are engineering problems, not science. We already know how to make wind turbines, for example, and we already know how to make fuel cells, extract wave power and so on. Actually doing them is merely a matter of implementation. Actually, it is a matter off implementing them in an economically viable way. Solar cells are a classic example of this problem - they take so much energy to make that when you account for that, they actually aren't very efficient at all, despite solar energy being "free"! We don't know how to do fusion practically yet, and that is why it's being funded. And fusion, when it works on an industrial scale, will make all other forms of power generation irrelevant apart from for niche applications.
This means Duracells cost 3.2 cents/hour and the other brand costed 1.2 cents/hour.
That's not really an accurate assessment of the relative value, tho'. Take me for example: my idea of a good vacation is to head out into the wilderness. Sure I might save some money buying the cheaper batteries, but at the cost of tripling the weight and volume? It's just not worth it. That is why I believe that there is a market for longer-lasting batteries even at a premium price, because cents/hour doesn't tell the whole story.
even if that is a troll it explains a hell of a lot about the guardian.
Not a troll, just the way it is. Probably modded down by a Guardian reader who doesn't like what they see in the mirror.
The Guardian is like the New York Post of your nation isn't it? Obviously this is just some fluff piece that's trying to play off the Matrix just to get the average reader to go through it.
Let me explain. The Guardian is a newspaper written by Marxists, for Marxists, and as such, their world-view is divided into "the workers" and "the party". The party, or course, are the Guardian's readers. The workers are, well, everyone else. In a Marxist economy, it is necessary for workers to be perfectly interchangeable, because Marx could only understand very generic, unskilled economic roles such as "farm labourer" and "assembly line worker". So a worker could be moved from the farm to the factory and back again seamlessly, wherever the party felt his "ability" could best be used that day. The underlying reason is that if workers are specialists, and there is demand for specialists, that is a de-facto market, and Marxists hate markets. Similarly, the Guardian hates the idea that companies can make money by selling people what they want; they'd rather people not be able to work at all (for example, secretaries writing their own wordprocessors) than for a market to operate. But at the same time, the Party deserves all its luxuries, like a Mac user interface which is far too good for the proles, etc etc.
When you read a Guardian article with this in mind, it will make more sense.
Revolutions instead gave us man and machine, living in some kind of weird state of... not-war. (Sadly, no word has been invented for this yet).
:-)
The word is detente. Ask the Merovingian what it means
What the hell is a vertical market?
Vertical means focussed on an industry, horizontal means things that are common to all industries.
Example: all companies need to do accounting, so accounting packages are often horizontal, i.e. you can use the same application no matter what industry you are in. So an accounting package will just do accounting in a generic sense.
Vertical applications only make sense within an industry. So, you might have one application that does lots of different things in that industry, but makes no sense outside of it. An example would be something which does lots of different engineering design and simulation tasks, but makes little sense outside of engineering.
In software terms, something like Oracle is a horizontal application - if you need a database, it doesn't matter what industry you are in, you can use Oracle. But, even tho' both engineering companies and animation companies need to draw stuff, engineers might use I-DEAS or Pro/E and animators would use Maya or 3D Studio Max, which are vertical applications.
If you are a company in a particular industry, you often have to make a choice: buy one vertical application and understand that it won't be perfect for all your tasks (because there are things that you do slightly different from the industry norm), or buy lots of horizontal applications and understand that you'll have to integrate them yourself.
So was the Nike model "We sell shoes, but first we'll have to give people feet for free" ?
The Nike model is to convince the customers that the sheer coolness of your product makes it worth paying a price that bears no relationship to the manufacturing cost. I could have called it the Coca-cola model, as they do exactly the same thing. Once you can do that, you don't have to compete on price (so long as the market will bear your price). If Nike sold their shoes on functionality to people who actually run, then they would have to compete on price, and they know it, so instead their target market is people who want to pose in sports clothing without ever actually getting sweaty.
Last time I checked, they're not going for tens of dollars...
Wholesale?
I don't mean to sound rude, but wasn't this the business model all along.
Yes, it's a variant on Netscape's business model. Their idea was, we will make money selling servers, but no-one will want servers unless there are lots of people with browsers, so we'll give browsers away for free. I believe the original analogy was "we sell printing presses but first we have to teach people to read to create demand for books" - Jim Clark or Barksdale, can't remember which.
Apple just wants to get everyone accustomed to thinking of music as a file not a plastic disc. Once they do that, everyone will want a player - and judging by the price of iPods, Apple must be making an absolute killing on them. I can't believe they cost most than a few tens of dollars each at most, even including amortizing development costs at a reasonable rate. Apple didn't just study Netscape - they studied Nike too.
The objective of most 'anti-gun' groups isn't banning, anyway--it's strict control to prevent guns from falling into the hands of the real outlaws (i.e., the ones who actually commit crimes).
But laws against gun ownership only, by definition, affect people who obey laws.
Criminals do not obey laws. That is, after all, while we call them criminals.
Therefore, all gun "control" does is present criminals with defenseless victims.
I would have thought all this would be obvious to anyone with the slightest intelligence.
Is to fight to uphold the rights of people we really disagree with.
At the end of the day, the second amendment is all that guarantees the first.
So does this mean Windows is finally going to have a unifying idea, something like "everything is almost like a file"?
.NET and 2003, we're getting there. The idea that "everything is a file" has its merits, but its limitations also - not least being the only way to move data between processes in it is as streams of text, there's little support for moving strongly-typed objects around (and no, CORBA is no a solution to that).
Windows philosophy, incompletely realized to be sure, is "everything is a COM object". With
Back in the 2.0 browser days, something like 98% of all browsers were Netscape. They were more popular as a browser than even the mighty Google is as a search engine, and were without a doubt considered "a must".
Netscape's business plan from day 1 was "We will make money selling servers to large corporations. To create demand for servers we will give free browsers to the customers of those corporations". For Netscape' business plan to succeed, it didn't matter who made the browser, so long as the browser was ubiquitous. Remember, the model is "free browsers, expensive servers".
To blame Microsoft for Netscape's downfall is overly simplistic. Netscape failed because their server business didn't make money, because (and I speak as someone who was deploying large-scale Netscape server installations at the time) version 3 of all their server products, frankly, sucked. Version 2 of most everything was great; if they'd kept that quality going they'd have been fine.
What does this mean for Google? It means that it must focus on where it makes money and not get sidetracked by meaningless popularity contests. It doesn't matter if MSN is more popular overall if Google is making more money per search. If Google's management go all-out for popularity, they've lost the plot, and I don't think they will. Of course, the Slashbots will be in hysterics if MSN search becomes more popular, but if Slashbots knew about running a business, they wouldn't all be living in their parent's basements.
Such people have never really bred prolifically, however. So I can't fathom how you believe that this is connected with evolution in any significant way.
The same principles apply. In a society that rewards accomplishment, people strive to accomplish. In a society that punishes accomplishment with high taxation and rewards sitting around waiting for handouts, few people are driven to accomplish. I didn't say evolution, I said natural selection. In our society, the highest probability of reproduction is with those who do nothing but breed - and those kids go on not to value education but go straight onto welfare themselves. The people who do work hard are too busy working hard to have kids, so those values of hard work and education never get passed on.
Start to think about memes reproducing, rather than people, and you will begin to understand.
Islamic restrictions on money lending have nothing to do with Arab contributions or lack thereof to mathematics. Finance was only a main accelerant during ancient times, i.e. before Islam. Sure theoretical economics is a modern-day motive for some mathematical research... but not the main driving force.
The point is that the application of maths to finance means that Western entrepreneurs could easily raise the capital needed to underwrite technological development or to insure trading expeditions. Therefore the maths had a second-order effect: not only did it make sophisticated financial products such as derivatives possible, it made it possible to vastly accelerate every other economic activity. That includes all the engineering and science that really developed the maths, and that fed back into finance - computer technology automating the markets is just one example.
But what have they done for humanity lately?
It's worse than you suggest. You see, not only is modern Islamic civilization vastly inferior to the West, it is even inferior to ancient Islamic civilization.
I'm sure that more than a few trust fund babies have made scientific discoveries.
A good deal more than welfare families...
You are woefully ignorant about modern evolutionary theory.
And you are woefully ignorant of simple economics. In a society that rewards exploration and scientific discovery, people work hard to explore and discover. That was the West in the 18th century. In a society where there is no pressure to work because the welfare state will take care of you, and where if you do succeed you will be punitively taxed and villified by popular culture, people are less motivated. That is the West in the 20th.
Understand?
Superior culture in what sense? Just because we don't have as many moral qualms about technology doesn't mean we're any better.
You are on exceedingly shaky grounds when you start to talk about morals in this context. For example, Western medicine and surgery are more advanced that anywhere else in the world. Western child mortality is the lowest in the world. And no culture in the history of humanity has been as generous with its surplus as the West. I have searched and I cannot find anything in say Mayan or ancient Egyptian culture that even compares to Western aid and vaccination programmes.
All that is the product of Western scientific and technological prowess. I will go so far as to say that cultures that do not exploit their scientific knowledge to practically enhance the lives of their citizens are immoral.