The public must see high profile projects otherwise there will be nationwide depression and indifference
More likely voter apathy is caused by seeing taxpayer's money wasted on white elephant projects like the Dome, run by cronies of the Prime Minister, completely unaccountable to the taxpayer and the voter.
My Father was an asylum seeker, and was succesful in staying here in the UK. I'm glad that you feel money is wasted on me, would you rather kill people like me? If you threaten my life (that of immigrants and immigrants' descendants) by starving us to death (no welfare) then I will fucking join Al Qaeda and kill you first (I mean it!).
So what you're saying is that you want handouts, without having to work and earn them, and you'll use violence against anyone who doesn't hand over their money? Exactly how does that make you different from the common criminal? And why would anyone welcome criminals into their country?
Take your Aryan race superiority and bury it with the corpses of the millions of native American that you slaughtered and now don't give a damn about
Actually, I haven't killed anyone, and I'm not even white. Don't let the facts stand in the way of your opinions, tho'.
BUT India has technologically advanced so far that for the first time about 40% of them WANT to go back to India.
I'm all for open borders - the only problem is that along with doctors and teachers, we get freeloaders too. The solution is to abolish all forms of welfare for immigrants, so that the only ones who come are the ones willing to work for a living and contribute to society. Once they are integrated and have paid taxes into the system, than and only then should they receive the rights and benefits of citizens.
The beauracrats produce reports and purchase products and services to bring wealth and investment into the economy. If a shop-owner pays tax which goes to a beauracrat who then goes into his shop and buys products, then good products will be provided for him, thus shops with good products will be rewarded by consumers, so what if the consumers are paid via tax?
Very simple arithmetic shows that this cannot work. Lets say a shopkeeper pays $10 in tax, and a bureaucrat comes in and spends $10 on some goods. The bureaucrat now has some goods, but the shopkeeper has only gotten his own money back! That system works very well for the government, but destroys the shopkeeper, who must now spend more money to buy more stock.
No IT man is an honest worker who tends farm, raises cattle and actually gives something good to society; all we do is turn skilled jobs into Data Entry, Salesmens' jobs into CRM automatons, typesetters' jobs into Epson inkjets, recordkeepers' jobs into NAS/SAN, and mathematicians/operations jobs into mainframes.
Are you seriously suggesting that you'd rather live in a subsistence economy? Automation and industrialization create the economic surpluses that pay for sanitation, healthcare, education, a legal system and all the other advantages of a modern society. The computer you use would be impossible in a subsistence economy, because all the scientists and engineers would be out working in the fields! (I suggest you study the history of Cambodia to see what happens when a country tries to return to that economic system).
You, sir, are the worst kind of nay-sayer--the kind that ignores all the brilliance that's been donated to your own freedoms. Without that, we'd be locked into something far, far worse. You owe the Internet to free software: not in the sense of having to pay it back, but in the sense that the Internet wouldn't exist without free software.
What's free? The money came from NSF and ARPA, which in turn came from the taxpayer. The software is "free" only because it is collectively owned by all the people who've paid for it. I believe it was Heinlein who said "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
Yes, this is "an invasion of privacy", but what is the big deal? Does eeryone think that they are so important that the government wants to spy on them? Gimme a break!
One of the things that I've been waiting for is minature power cells, a la Star Trek. It was always really cool to me how equipment could be lugged around from here to there, apparently never needing recharged.
The Goa'uld on Stargate use Naquadah, a material not found on Earth that seems to generate power from neutrinos in the same way that solar panels generate power from photons. Which is useful because it will work underground and at night. Unfortunately, I don't think physics yet even has the theory for a material that would interact with and be energized by neutrinos, but it's a cool idea.
Funny how your first sentence provides a counter example to your thesis. All the innovation that went into to the LMI and Symbolics development initially was done in the public-domain free-software world of the MIT AI Lab. Then, the commercial entities sprang up to take advantage of this when it was shown to have value.
But that's how it's always worked, in every technological industry. Universities do the basic, theoretical research (paid for by industry sponsorship or government grants, which is the same thing indirectly) then commercial entities are formed to make the theories into something practical. Some of the profits made end up back at the universities to fund more research, even more so if the university was smart enough to take some equity - I believe MIT do that quite a bit.
What you are describing is competition. Whether from free software or from commercial software, that's all it is. Funny, I thought competition was good for markets. It clears out bad products in favor of others that have more favorable attributes, be it features or price.
Competition is good for markets, but RMS wasn't competing, he was safe in his academic position, insulated from the risks of the market. All he was doing was destroying Symbolics - in doing so, he created no value.
If it's not sustainable, as you claim, what is the solution?
The solution is for the Free Software world to stop thinking in terms of free versions of commercial products, and start looking for solutions to problems that are too exotic or novel for the commercial world. New interfaces for example, and entirely new applications.
A good test would be: if it wasn't free, would anyone buy it? An awful lot of Free software fails that test. If MS Office and Star Office were the same price, which would be better?
Stallman is correct. Bitkeeper is a proprietary product produced by a commercial company and that commercial company has the legal means (whether right or not) to suddenly change their license terms.
RMS is ignoring the fact that while a company can release future products under different licenses than current products, it cannot retroactively change the license on already sold products.
Some compiler makers (propbably Microsoft too, but I can't dig out their eula right now) do specify in their eula that you cannot use their compiler to create a competing product (e.g. another compiler)
I'm not convinced by that. For example, the Oracle Developer IDE is written using Microsoft Visual Studio, IIRC.
"your Licensed Product shall not substantially duplicate the capabilities of Microsoft Access or, in the reasonable opinion of Microsoft, compete with same;"
Is there a way to use Jet in a product that does directly compete with Jet without it simply being a wrapper around Jet's functionality? I can't think of one.
His point is that Free Software is better because it gives freedom to its users: freedom to use it as they choose, to understand how it works, and to modify it to fit their needs.
Question: is the average Word user made more or less free by having the source code to Word?
proprietary software is so bad- it doesn't respect the needs of its users
On the contrary, proprietary software must respect the needs of its users, otherwise they won't buy it. There are no such incentives for free software, which doesn't have to respect the needs of anyone but its author.
Code something GPL that performs equal to or better than BitKeeper.
Well that is the structural problem of Open Source, and it goes all the way back to when RMS worked at MIT, and spent years reverse engineering Symbolics products and giving the code away to their competition. It's always been about seeing a commercial product - whether it's BitKeeper, Photoshop, CDE or even Unix itself - and producing a free clone. All the innovation and risk-taking happens in the commercial world, yet the Open Source movement damages the commercial world by making it more and more difficult for them to afford to create new products. It's not a sustainable situation.
Untrue. Why do you think they break "kernel module source compatibility" with every patchlevel release? Obviously this has something to do with ideology, because not having to recompile kernel modules is a lot easier to the end user.
The ideology that defines Free Software people in general is that you make things easier for the developer, not the user. If the user doesn't like it, they should do their own development (that's what the source is for). If they don't want to do that, they can pay someone to do it for them (even RMS has no problems with that, so long as the source is available). If they don't want to code and they don't want to pay, they're irrelevant and should shut up and be grateful for having any software in the first place. Harsh, but that's the way it works in practice.
If the BeOS had applications that could do something useful (where "useful" is defined as "commercially valueable") then that wouldn't have mattered, because people would have bought BeBoxes. That's exactly how Apple ran their business in the early days: customers bought the application (in that case, DTP) and bought the hardware specifically to run it. Do people buy Macs because of Photoshop or vice versa? To many Apple customers, their computers are simply image-manipulation tools, the applications are all that matters and the OS is just the plumbing.
A company will find an application that does what it wants and then buy the infrastructure to run it, not the other way around. (I have seen this many times in the engineering and finance industries). A savvy consumer will do the same.
Be had word processors, (and excellent printer support, sort of a oxymoron compared to the rest of their hardware support) Be had (has) some of the best console and arcade emulation support EVER! Mame games that take a 700mhz cpu in dos can do just as good with a 350. Their sound editing tools were the best, Be's sound drivers concentrated on low latency which meant the real time effects processing on be kicked ass.
Can it do any of that an order of magnitude better than the other products on the market? Word processing is a solved problem, you can get high quality word processors on any platform. Playing emulated games is fun, but there's no money to be made there, and what Be needed most of all was money. And sound editing is another application-centered business, if Be wasn't running Cubase (or whatever) it couldn't even compete.
Being able to compile POSIX compliant software is not a marketable advantage (even Windows NT can do it).
Oh yes it is. If you can't compile POSIX apps then you aren't FIPS compliant and it's extremely unlikely that the government will ever buy or use your OS. That's the one and only reason NT has it.
As far as I'm concerned, from a purely technical standpoint, BeOS is the BEst Operating System ever. It has absolutely everythign I've ever wanted. The only reason I don't use it is the lack of software. Can I get photoshop for it? How about Winamp? Icq? Aim? Eudora? Most importantly Half-Life: Counterstrike? Some yes some no. Despite all of its outstanding technical greatness BeOS doesn't have all of the software I need.
So what you're saying is it had absolutely everything you've ever ever wanted... apart from absolutely everything you've ever wanted?
It booted faster than DOS(and I'm not kidding), heck, it booted faster than anything else I've ever seen. It had one of the best browsers I've ever seen(Netpositive)
It takes more than fast booting and a pretty web browser to make a viable product. There is only one justification for any product and that is its economic viability. Oracle exists because their software makes their customers more productive. Linux exists because the pleasure of working on it is worth more to its developers than the cost of their time and equipment. BeOS simply didn't offer enough value to enough people to be viable.
In the final analysis, the company spent too much of its resources doing things that would only appeal to people who didn't have much money.
So where is RT-11? RSX? Venix? PRIMEOS? CYBER NOS/VE? HP MVS? Lots of operating environments have come and gone...
I work in the finance industry and I can practically guarantee that within 20 mins walk of my office you will find all of those operating systems still in production use. The combination of extreme urgency and extreme aversion to risk in this business means that there are some very strange configurations in use today that doubtless made perfect sense at the time and far outlive their original designer's intentions.
I'm happy to pay my taxes, if the Government wasted lots of money it would be in the news.
I see from your URL that you are British. How about the Millenium dome as a simple example? How about the billions wasted on asylum seekers? Or on Railtrack? Or the massive amounts of red tape tying up teachers and doctors, and the bureaucrats to enforce it all? Or the CAP, which spends billions every year subsidizing farmers to produce food that must be destroyed because there's no demand for it? Or legal aid, on which billions are wasted on frivolous actions? (No coincidence that Blair, his wife and his friends are all lawyers, and lawyers are getting ever richer on the taxpayer's money). Or that the EU's own accountant won't sign the accounts because billions every year are lost?
Really, Enron and Marconi are utterly insignificant compared to the fraud and corruption that the government perpetrates every day.
You cannot copyright an idea, only the expression of the idea. Patents are all about ideas, as in methods, processes and apparatus.
What I meant, to use my earlier example, is that you cannot patent the idea of wrangling sprockets (which would prevent anyone else from doing it) but only a specific sprocket wrangling technique (which would prevent anyone else from using your technique, but leave them free to wrangle sprockets by other means). The first is an idea, the second an implementation.
It sounds like they've patented a kind of technology that is virtually inevitable in the computing field. Could I run out and patent the idea of 128 bit parallel chip?
You cannot patent an idea, only the implementation of an idea. Further, it must be non-obvious to a practitioner in the field, and of course it must be original. An example would be that you could patent your design for a sprocket wrangling machine, but if someone else came up with a different way to wrangle sprockets they would be unaffected by your patent - the fact that they both produced wrangled sprockets is irrelevant.
You could patent a new chip fabrication technique, and you could patent a specific design for a 128-bit chip. But any chip that's 2^n bits would be obvious to a practitioner, and only an idea, so no.
Because if you had read the article you'd realize that this is essentially a zero cost, backwards compatable method of dramatically increasing program execution speed several orders of magnitude -- so the question is really, "Why not?"
It does not matter how fast your CPU is if it spends a significant amount of its time waiting for main memory access. All that happens is that it's doing more NOPs/sec, which isn't terribly useful. That's why industrial-grade systems have fancy buses like the GigaPlane.
there's a strong socialist net as is needed which shows the superior compassion of the Europeans over the American "Pay or die" hospitals.
It's easy to be "compassionate" with someone elses money. I don't care if they say they're going to spend it on puppies for orphans, the fact is that the money I earn is taken away from me and spent on things that don't benefit me at all.
Frankly, anyone imprudent enough not to save for retirement, and irresponsible enough not to insure their health, does not deserve help from anyone.
...What will it take to bring things back into balance?
A start would be to rationalize taxation. If you pay for a private pension and private healthcare (or your employer does, same thing really) then you should be exempt from NI (or whatever social security taxes are called where you are).
The next step would be to extend this and start cutting into income tax - this would be more complex to calculate, but that's what we have computers for. Pay for private education for your kids? Exempt from the portion of your tax that goes into the State education system. Pay for unemployment insurance (or have x months cash in the bank)? Exempt from the portion of your tax that goes towards unemployment benefits.
I know it sounds harsh, but no-one owes anyone else a living. The Baby Boomers had decades to invest for their futures; if they didn't, it's not my problem, and I won't lose a second's sleep if the State pension is abolished overnight.
Thus, it makes more financial sense to get a tech degree from some state university rather than Harvard (unless you go into research perhaps).
Hmmm, would need more data to evaluate this. Certainly CS graduates from MIT, CMU, Waterloo, et al are paid a premium and here in Britain, technologists from Imperial are well respected.
Also, although you will undoubtedly experience a higher tax burden when the baby boom generation retires, the job opportunities and prospects will be a lot better because of the openings those retiring boomers will create. The Gen-X'ers will be next in line for the best jobs once that happens.
Not if the boomers are vacating middle management jobs that can be more efficiently done by technology, and they can these days.
And so what if you got off to a bad start. Even if you are like me at the older end of the Gen-X generation you still have 30 years to go before retirement age. That's plenty enough time to correct the mistakes of our youth, plan ahead and retire comfortably.
The mistakes were not of our youth, but the Boomers. We are trapped between a rock and a hard place; don't save and there will be no state pension for you, save and it will be raided by the taxman.
Personally I don't really want to "retire" because people tend to keel over and die shortly after they stop using their minds and/or bodies to be productive.
Even if you did want to - and many people do - that option probably won't exist. Paying for our own mistakes is fine, but we are picking up the tab for theirs, and they're laughing all the way to the bank.
If your Unix box is wandering about the globe, powered, running, changing timezones willy-nilly, please do consider selecting some sort of generic time zone for the system, one that you won't feel compelled to change system-wide.
Unfortunately, it's a test rig for a date and locale sensitive application - timezone needs to be changed frequently system-wide as part of testing (the machines themselves are physically static:-) ).
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The public must see high profile projects otherwise there will be nationwide depression and indifference
More likely voter apathy is caused by seeing taxpayer's money wasted on white elephant projects like the Dome, run by cronies of the Prime Minister, completely unaccountable to the taxpayer and the voter.
My Father was an asylum seeker, and was succesful in staying here in the UK. I'm glad that you feel money is wasted on me, would you rather kill people like me? If you threaten my life (that of immigrants and immigrants' descendants) by starving us to death (no welfare) then I will fucking join Al Qaeda and kill you first (I mean it!).
So what you're saying is that you want handouts, without having to work and earn them, and you'll use violence against anyone who doesn't hand over their money? Exactly how does that make you different from the common criminal? And why would anyone welcome criminals into their country?
Take your Aryan race superiority and bury it with the corpses of the millions of native American that you slaughtered and now don't give a damn about
Actually, I haven't killed anyone, and I'm not even white. Don't let the facts stand in the way of your opinions, tho'.
BUT India has technologically advanced so far that for the first time about 40% of them WANT to go back to India.
I'm all for open borders - the only problem is that along with doctors and teachers, we get freeloaders too. The solution is to abolish all forms of welfare for immigrants, so that the only ones who come are the ones willing to work for a living and contribute to society. Once they are integrated and have paid taxes into the system, than and only then should they receive the rights and benefits of citizens.
The beauracrats produce reports and purchase products and services to bring wealth and investment into the economy. If a shop-owner pays tax which goes to a beauracrat who then goes into his shop and buys products, then good products will be provided for him, thus shops with good products will be rewarded by consumers, so what if the consumers are paid via tax?
Very simple arithmetic shows that this cannot work. Lets say a shopkeeper pays $10 in tax, and a bureaucrat comes in and spends $10 on some goods. The bureaucrat now has some goods, but the shopkeeper has only gotten his own money back! That system works very well for the government, but destroys the shopkeeper, who must now spend more money to buy more stock.
No IT man is an honest worker who tends farm, raises cattle and actually gives something good to society; all we do is turn skilled jobs into Data Entry, Salesmens' jobs into CRM automatons, typesetters' jobs into Epson inkjets, recordkeepers' jobs into NAS/SAN, and mathematicians/operations jobs into mainframes.
Are you seriously suggesting that you'd rather live in a subsistence economy? Automation and industrialization create the economic surpluses that pay for sanitation, healthcare, education, a legal system and all the other advantages of a modern society. The computer you use would be impossible in a subsistence economy, because all the scientists and engineers would be out working in the fields! (I suggest you study the history of Cambodia to see what happens when a country tries to return to that economic system).
You, sir, are the worst kind of nay-sayer--the kind that ignores all the brilliance that's been donated to your own freedoms. Without that, we'd be locked into something far, far worse. You owe the Internet to free software: not in the sense of having to pay it back, but in the sense that the Internet wouldn't exist without free software.
What's free? The money came from NSF and ARPA, which in turn came from the taxpayer. The software is "free" only because it is collectively owned by all the people who've paid for it. I believe it was Heinlein who said "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
Because they have _ZERO_ scruples. As far as I am concerned, the Judge is right on in his analogies of M$
Hmm, a choice between Microsoft and lawyer as to who has the fewer scruples.
Sorry, but history suggests that the lawyers do.
Yes, this is "an invasion of privacy", but what is the big deal? Does eeryone think that they are so important that the government wants to spy on them? Gimme a break!
Well, one day you might be. Maybe you'll survive a rail disaster and make the mistake of trying to bring the negligent parties to justice? Then you'll see exactly how important the government thinks you are.
One of the things that I've been waiting for is minature power cells, a la Star Trek. It was always really cool to me how equipment could be lugged around from here to there, apparently never needing recharged.
The Goa'uld on Stargate use Naquadah, a material not found on Earth that seems to generate power from neutrinos in the same way that solar panels generate power from photons. Which is useful because it will work underground and at night. Unfortunately, I don't think physics yet even has the theory for a material that would interact with and be energized by neutrinos, but it's a cool idea.
Funny how your first sentence provides a counter example to your thesis. All the innovation that went into to the LMI and Symbolics development initially was done in the public-domain free-software world of the MIT AI Lab. Then, the commercial entities sprang up to take advantage of this when it was shown to have value.
But that's how it's always worked, in every technological industry. Universities do the basic, theoretical research (paid for by industry sponsorship or government grants, which is the same thing indirectly) then commercial entities are formed to make the theories into something practical. Some of the profits made end up back at the universities to fund more research, even more so if the university was smart enough to take some equity - I believe MIT do that quite a bit.
What you are describing is competition. Whether from free software or from commercial software, that's all it is. Funny, I thought competition was good for markets. It clears out bad products in favor of others that have more favorable attributes, be it features or price.
Competition is good for markets, but RMS wasn't competing, he was safe in his academic position, insulated from the risks of the market. All he was doing was destroying Symbolics - in doing so, he created no value.
If it's not sustainable, as you claim, what is the solution?
The solution is for the Free Software world to stop thinking in terms of free versions of commercial products, and start looking for solutions to problems that are too exotic or novel for the commercial world. New interfaces for example, and entirely new applications.
A good test would be: if it wasn't free, would anyone buy it? An awful lot of Free software fails that test. If MS Office and Star Office were the same price, which would be better?
Stallman is correct. Bitkeeper is a proprietary product produced by a commercial company and that commercial company has the legal means (whether right or not) to suddenly change their license terms.
RMS is ignoring the fact that while a company can release future products under different licenses than current products, it cannot retroactively change the license on already sold products.
Some compiler makers (propbably Microsoft too, but I can't dig out their eula right now) do specify in their eula that you cannot use their compiler to create a competing product (e.g. another compiler)
I'm not convinced by that. For example, the Oracle Developer IDE is written using Microsoft Visual Studio, IIRC.
"your Licensed Product shall not substantially duplicate the capabilities of Microsoft Access or, in the reasonable opinion of Microsoft, compete with same;"
Is there a way to use Jet in a product that does directly compete with Jet without it simply being a wrapper around Jet's functionality? I can't think of one.
His point is that Free Software is better because it gives freedom to its users: freedom to use it as they choose, to understand how it works, and to modify it to fit their needs.
Question: is the average Word user made more or less free by having the source code to Word?
proprietary software is so bad- it doesn't respect the needs of its users
On the contrary, proprietary software must respect the needs of its users, otherwise they won't buy it. There are no such incentives for free software, which doesn't have to respect the needs of anyone but its author.
Code something GPL that performs equal to or better than BitKeeper.
Well that is the structural problem of Open Source, and it goes all the way back to when RMS worked at MIT, and spent years reverse engineering Symbolics products and giving the code away to their competition. It's always been about seeing a commercial product - whether it's BitKeeper, Photoshop, CDE or even Unix itself - and producing a free clone. All the innovation and risk-taking happens in the commercial world, yet the Open Source movement damages the commercial world by making it more and more difficult for them to afford to create new products. It's not a sustainable situation.
Untrue. Why do you think they break "kernel module source compatibility" with every patchlevel release? Obviously this has something to do with ideology, because not having to recompile kernel modules is a lot easier to the end user.
The ideology that defines Free Software people in general is that you make things easier for the developer, not the user. If the user doesn't like it, they should do their own development (that's what the source is for). If they don't want to do that, they can pay someone to do it for them (even RMS has no problems with that, so long as the source is available). If they don't want to code and they don't want to pay, they're irrelevant and should shut up and be grateful for having any software in the first place. Harsh, but that's the way it works in practice.
All that killed Be was crappy hardware support.
If the BeOS had applications that could do something useful (where "useful" is defined as "commercially valueable") then that wouldn't have mattered, because people would have bought BeBoxes. That's exactly how Apple ran their business in the early days: customers bought the application (in that case, DTP) and bought the hardware specifically to run it. Do people buy Macs because of Photoshop or vice versa? To many Apple customers, their computers are simply image-manipulation tools, the applications are all that matters and the OS is just the plumbing.
A company will find an application that does what it wants and then buy the infrastructure to run it, not the other way around. (I have seen this many times in the engineering and finance industries). A savvy consumer will do the same.
Be had word processors, (and excellent printer support, sort of a oxymoron compared to the rest of their hardware support)
Be had (has) some of the best console and arcade emulation support EVER! Mame games that take a 700mhz cpu in dos can do just as good with a 350.
Their sound editing tools were the best, Be's sound drivers concentrated on low latency which meant the real time effects processing on be kicked ass.
Can it do any of that an order of magnitude better than the other products on the market? Word processing is a solved problem, you can get high quality word processors on any platform. Playing emulated games is fun, but there's no money to be made there, and what Be needed most of all was money. And sound editing is another application-centered business, if Be wasn't running Cubase (or whatever) it couldn't even compete.
Being able to compile POSIX compliant software is not a marketable advantage (even Windows NT can do it).
Oh yes it is. If you can't compile POSIX apps then you aren't FIPS compliant and it's extremely unlikely that the government will ever buy or use your OS. That's the one and only reason NT has it.
As far as I'm concerned, from a purely technical standpoint, BeOS is the BEst Operating System ever. It has absolutely everythign I've ever wanted. The only reason I don't use it is the lack of software. Can I get photoshop for it? How about Winamp? Icq? Aim? Eudora? Most importantly Half-Life: Counterstrike? Some yes some no. Despite all of its outstanding technical greatness BeOS doesn't have all of the software I need.
So what you're saying is it had absolutely everything you've ever ever wanted... apart from absolutely everything you've ever wanted?
It booted faster than DOS(and I'm not kidding), heck, it booted faster than anything else I've ever seen. It had one of the best browsers I've ever seen(Netpositive)
It takes more than fast booting and a pretty web browser to make a viable product. There is only one justification for any product and that is its economic viability. Oracle exists because their software makes their customers more productive. Linux exists because the pleasure of working on it is worth more to its developers than the cost of their time and equipment. BeOS simply didn't offer enough value to enough people to be viable.
In the final analysis, the company spent too much of its resources doing things that would only appeal to people who didn't have much money.
So where is RT-11? RSX? Venix? PRIMEOS? CYBER NOS/VE? HP MVS? Lots of operating environments have come and gone...
I work in the finance industry and I can practically guarantee that within 20 mins walk of my office you will find all of those operating systems still in production use. The combination of extreme urgency and extreme aversion to risk in this business means that there are some very strange configurations in use today that doubtless made perfect sense at the time and far outlive their original designer's intentions.
I'm happy to pay my taxes, if the Government wasted lots of money it would be in the news.
I see from your URL that you are British. How about the Millenium dome as a simple example? How about the billions wasted on asylum seekers? Or on Railtrack? Or the massive amounts of red tape tying up teachers and doctors, and the bureaucrats to enforce it all? Or the CAP, which spends billions every year subsidizing farmers to produce food that must be destroyed because there's no demand for it? Or legal aid, on which billions are wasted on frivolous actions? (No coincidence that Blair, his wife and his friends are all lawyers, and lawyers are getting ever richer on the taxpayer's money). Or that the EU's own accountant won't sign the accounts because billions every year are lost?
Really, Enron and Marconi are utterly insignificant compared to the fraud and corruption that the government perpetrates every day.
You cannot copyright an idea, only the expression of the idea. Patents are all about ideas, as in methods, processes and apparatus.
What I meant, to use my earlier example, is that you cannot patent the idea of wrangling sprockets (which would prevent anyone else from doing it) but only a specific sprocket wrangling technique (which would prevent anyone else from using your technique, but leave them free to wrangle sprockets by other means). The first is an idea, the second an implementation.
It sounds like they've patented a kind of technology that is virtually inevitable in the computing field. Could I run out and patent the idea of 128 bit parallel chip?
You cannot patent an idea, only the implementation of an idea. Further, it must be non-obvious to a practitioner in the field, and of course it must be original. An example would be that you could patent your design for a sprocket wrangling machine, but if someone else came up with a different way to wrangle sprockets they would be unaffected by your patent - the fact that they both produced wrangled sprockets is irrelevant.
You could patent a new chip fabrication technique, and you could patent a specific design for a 128-bit chip. But any chip that's 2^n bits would be obvious to a practitioner, and only an idea, so no.
Because if you had read the article you'd realize that this is essentially a zero cost, backwards compatable method of dramatically increasing program execution speed several orders of magnitude -- so the question is really, "Why not?"
It does not matter how fast your CPU is if it spends a significant amount of its time waiting for main memory access. All that happens is that it's doing more NOPs/sec, which isn't terribly useful. That's why industrial-grade systems have fancy buses like the GigaPlane.
there's a strong socialist net as is needed which shows the superior compassion of the Europeans over the American "Pay or die" hospitals.
It's easy to be "compassionate" with someone elses money. I don't care if they say they're going to spend it on puppies for orphans, the fact is that the money I earn is taken away from me and spent on things that don't benefit me at all.
Frankly, anyone imprudent enough not to save for retirement, and irresponsible enough not to insure their health, does not deserve help from anyone.
...What will it take to bring things back into balance?
A start would be to rationalize taxation. If you pay for a private pension and private healthcare (or your employer does, same thing really) then you should be exempt from NI (or whatever social security taxes are called where you are).
The next step would be to extend this and start cutting into income tax - this would be more complex to calculate, but that's what we have computers for. Pay for private education for your kids? Exempt from the portion of your tax that goes into the State education system. Pay for unemployment insurance (or have x months cash in the bank)? Exempt from the portion of your tax that goes towards unemployment benefits.
I know it sounds harsh, but no-one owes anyone else a living. The Baby Boomers had decades to invest for their futures; if they didn't, it's not my problem, and I won't lose a second's sleep if the State pension is abolished overnight.
Thus, it makes more financial sense to get a tech degree from some state university rather than Harvard (unless you go into research perhaps).
Hmmm, would need more data to evaluate this. Certainly CS graduates from MIT, CMU, Waterloo, et al are paid a premium and here in Britain, technologists from Imperial are well respected.
I believe if you check your facts you'll find that every industrialized nation has experienced just the opposite in the last 10 years.
This article, originally published in The Times suggests otherwise, and so does this article from the BBC.
Also, although you will undoubtedly experience a higher tax burden when the baby boom generation retires, the job opportunities and prospects will be a lot better because of the openings those retiring boomers will create. The Gen-X'ers will be next in line for the best jobs once that happens.
Not if the boomers are vacating middle management jobs that can be more efficiently done by technology, and they can these days.
And so what if you got off to a bad start. Even if you are like me at the older end of the Gen-X generation you still have 30 years to go before retirement age. That's plenty enough time to correct the mistakes of our youth, plan ahead and retire comfortably.
The mistakes were not of our youth, but the Boomers. We are trapped between a rock and a hard place; don't save and there will be no state pension for you, save and it will be raided by the taxman.
Personally I don't really want to "retire" because people tend to keel over and die shortly after they stop using their minds and/or bodies to be productive.
Even if you did want to - and many people do - that option probably won't exist. Paying for our own mistakes is fine, but we are picking up the tab for theirs, and they're laughing all the way to the bank.
If your Unix box is wandering about the globe, powered, running, changing timezones willy-nilly, please do consider selecting some sort of generic time zone for the system, one that you won't feel compelled to change system-wide.
:-) ).
Unfortunately, it's a test rig for a date and locale sensitive application - timezone needs to be changed frequently system-wide as part of testing (the machines themselves are physically static