Economies are based on the decisions of its citizens
But the results of those decisions aren't. Laissez-faire capitalism gave the 80s boom, and the present tech boom, but it also gave you the Great Depression. Once again, you've simply reinforced my point that the main arguments of American Exceptionalism tend to be simply post hoc ergo propter hoc.
And I didn't say success was always luck -- luck is residue of design, after all [Branch Rickey said that] -- but it is a massive factor.
Paul Graham's seems to limit his definition of start-ups as "small, new companies that suddenly attract an almost unbelievable amount of venture capital."
Well, here's another reason why there aren't any "start-ups" in Europe: we remember the dotcom crash, the Wall St Crash, the Dutch tulip disaster and the South Sea Bubble, Enron, and all the other disasters caused by rampant speculation. And although a small slice of canny speculators managed to stay rich throughout, we still like our companies to grow slowly and stably, rather than a massive explosion of investment and no end product. Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.
Despite's Grahams's assertions, there are plenty of highly successful European small businesses. Yes, even tech businesses (we're largely free of religo-governmental interference in the biosciences, for example), but we tend not to run around boasting about our unique and exceptional cultures made this possible.
Does he have extensive and long experience with foreign universities to ascertain this? Or is it simple chest-thumping of an American
Oh, he's plenty of hard, conclusive evidence and is talking from experience, rather than just making this stuff up... Let me quote from the article:
You need a great university to seed a silicon valley, and so far there are few outside the US. I asked a handful of American computer science professors which universities in Europe were most admired, and they all basically said "Cambridge" followed by a long pause while they tried to think of others. There don't seem to be many universities elsewhere that compare with the best in America, at least in technology.
How can you possibly argue with a comprehensive survey like that?
Does he have extensive and long experience with foreign universities to ascertain this? Or is it simple chest-thumping of an AmericanOh, he's plenty of hard, conclusive evidence. Let me quote from the article:
You need a great university to seed a silicon valley, and so far there are few outside the US. I asked a handful of American computer science professors which universities in Europe were most admired, and they all basically said "Cambridge" followed by a long pause while they tried to think of others. There don't seem to be many universities elsewhere that compare with the best in America, at least in technology.
How can you possibly argue with a comprehensive survey like that?
American Exceptionalism (or any other Exceptionalism through history, British Exceptionalism in particular) has never needed, or wanted, hard evidence. Like Manifest Destiny, it simply relies on an assertion of superiority, backed up by the evidence of being the most powerful country in the World, (like Britain was in the 19th Century, or France in the 18th).
The only trouble with this is, it blinds us to what makes those empires really succesful -- natural resources, opportunism and good old blind luck, in the form of historical happenstance.
Fair enough. IANAL either, but I notice that although a coder can get a patent license, they cannot pass this license on to their users. What this means, is that those who receive XPS implementing code cannot redistribute it. I think we can all figure out what that means.
You've neatly side-stepped the point I was making. Anything can parse XML, with the DTD to provide a mapping between the XML semantics and the desired printed output. With this specification, printer manufacturers and embedded OSes could all compete.
Will XPS be a fully open standard, or will the schema be like the Office XML schema, simply a container for largely undocumented binary streams?
Aye. And the stated aims of XPS mean that now every printer, and soon thousands of other devices, will need an XML parser built into them. And they'll need to understand XPS DTD. Which means they'll need to be running Windows CE.
How many printers do you know that ship today or will be out within a year allow you to send a raw PDF file to it and have it print as is without any kind of client spooling and image degradation? XPS lets you do that.
So, XPS implements the same technology that PostScript has implemented for years, only using the wholy inappropriate XML, rather than a stack based schema.
Oh, and PostScript being an established, stable open standard, of course.
Re:Art is about creativity, not rote coding
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 1
I know its a real word. I also know what it meant. Paradigm shifts are dramatic changes in the fundamental structure of our thought and understanding.
Quantum theory is a new paradigm. "Let's sell books over the internet" is not a new paradigm.
Re:Art is about creativity, not rote coding
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Ah. You were doing so well, and then you said "paradigm".
There's a difference between something being an art and something being art.
Science, yes even computer science, and mathematics are particularly susceptible to elegance, and science (and engineering) built on elegant designs, based on concrete principles, have fewer points of failure, and can often be conceptually simpler, and algorithmically faster. Art is simply the application of insight, and this book (seems) to show us how insight into the problem space and the mathematics can achieve elegant (and efficient) designs.
Having said that, I know nothing about SQL, a bit of database theory and a lot of set theory. Also, that book review was far above the usual/. standards, where book reviews look more like book reports. Here's to you, SQL-book-reviewing-guy.
Refuse to comply and (evilly) deprive every Chinese citizen of what is arguably the world's best search engine
It's only the world's best search engine when the results are basically uncensored. If you censor google to the extent that you can't look up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights anymore, it ceases to be the world's best search engine, and becomes just another tool of oppression.
You do actually need a half-decent SLR before that creative power can be unleashed. If you can't alter the shutter speed or the aperture, you lose a lot of expressive possibility. Which is why I'm still shooting with a film SLR (Eos 5), because I can't afford a digital SLR with the same level of control.
If a published mathematical proof is of the form where competent readers can't fill in the missing steps, then the author hasn't published a proof at all.
Who ever said there were missing steps?
So, either you need to publish a complete, formally verifiable proof
A proof may be verifiable even if there are no people alive capable of verifying it.
Slashdot Mirror
And I didn't say success was always luck -- luck is residue of design, after all [Branch Rickey said that] -- but it is a massive factor.
Paul Graham's seems to limit his definition of start-ups as "small, new companies that suddenly attract an almost unbelievable amount of venture capital."
Well, here's another reason why there aren't any "start-ups" in Europe: we remember the dotcom crash, the Wall St Crash, the Dutch tulip disaster and the South Sea Bubble, Enron, and all the other disasters caused by rampant speculation. And although a small slice of canny speculators managed to stay rich throughout, we still like our companies to grow slowly and stably, rather than a massive explosion of investment and no end product. Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.
Despite's Grahams's assertions, there are plenty of highly successful European small businesses. Yes, even tech businesses (we're largely free of religo-governmental interference in the biosciences, for example), but we tend not to run around boasting about our unique and exceptional cultures made this possible.
Oh, he's plenty of hard, conclusive evidence and is talking from experience, rather than just making this stuff up... Let me quote from the article:
How can you possibly argue with a comprehensive survey like that?
American Exceptionalism (or any other Exceptionalism through history, British Exceptionalism in particular) has never needed, or wanted, hard evidence. Like Manifest Destiny, it simply relies on an assertion of superiority, backed up by the evidence of being the most powerful country in the World, (like Britain was in the 19th Century, or France in the 18th).
The only trouble with this is, it blinds us to what makes those empires really succesful -- natural resources, opportunism and good old blind luck, in the form of historical happenstance.
"Forecasts" to regain letter 'e'.
Slashdot editors to be trained at basic spelling, punctuation, grammar.
Fair enough. IANAL either, but I notice that although a coder can get a patent license, they cannot pass this license on to their users. What this means, is that those who receive XPS implementing code cannot redistribute it. I think we can all figure out what that means.
Hey, unreliable information is what the NSA crave.
That's why they paid Ahmed Chalabi all that money.
And boy, did they get all the unreliable information they wanted.
You've neatly side-stepped the point I was making. Anything can parse XML, with the DTD to provide a mapping between the XML semantics and the desired printed output. With this specification, printer manufacturers and embedded OSes could all compete.
Will XPS be a fully open standard, or will the schema be like the Office XML schema, simply a container for largely undocumented binary streams?
Aye. And the stated aims of XPS mean that now every printer, and soon thousands of other devices, will need an XML parser built into them. And they'll need to understand XPS DTD. Which means they'll need to be running Windows CE.
You've got it admit that its genius.
Oh, and PostScript being an established, stable open standard, of course.
I know its a real word. I also know what it meant. Paradigm shifts are dramatic changes in the fundamental structure of our thought and understanding.
Quantum theory is a new paradigm.
"Let's sell books over the internet" is not a new paradigm.
Ah. You were doing so well, and then you said "paradigm".
There's a difference between something being an art and something being art.
/. standards, where book reviews look more like book reports. Here's to you, SQL-book-reviewing-guy.
Science, yes even computer science, and mathematics are particularly susceptible to elegance, and science (and engineering) built on elegant designs, based on concrete principles, have fewer points of failure, and can often be conceptually simpler, and algorithmically faster. Art is simply the application of insight, and this book (seems) to show us how insight into the problem space and the mathematics can achieve elegant (and efficient) designs.
Having said that, I know nothing about SQL, a bit of database theory and a lot of set theory. Also, that book review was far above the usual
Doing what a totalitarian regime tells you, and allowing your desire for money to compromise your principles, is absolutely immoral.
Their corporate logo has the first 'O' replaced by the yin-yang symbol, representing the karmic balance between doing equal amounts of good and evil.
Can those of us who pointed this out at the time get or (-1 Troll) and (-1 Flamebait) moderations reversed please :)
Hey nice solipsistic generalisation. Translation : "I'm a dick, therefore you must be a dick too".
You do actually need a half-decent SLR before that creative power can be unleashed. If you can't alter the shutter speed or the aperture, you lose a lot of expressive possibility. Which is why I'm still shooting with a film SLR (Eos 5), because I can't afford a digital SLR with the same level of control.
Maybe they're targeting their computers at grown-ups?