Interestingly, this plays into the previous argument that sucking up the otherwise unemployed into menial, subsidized jobs is moderately preferable to just having them on welfare or committing crimes.
In reality, it's all very complex these days because implementing a balanced economic-social-contract requires inordinately enlightened voters.
Have you considered that "having a well-rounded liberal arts education" is critical to employability? It is. If you can cogently discuss the Byzantine Empire, perhaps do Calculus, deliberate the nature of political systems, and can craft a decent metaphor, it says something about your adaptability. That's what employers want, and it's why they considered a real education to be a marker for career-material. While the "customer" sees university as a gateway to employment, they apparently fail to realize why it ever was a gateway.
This fact is lost on people like Ms. Thompson. It is apparently lost on you as well. I'm sorry that you feel that employers are demanding that you have evidenced an ability to adapt functionally to a wide array of subjects. I'm sorry that you don't like that they are more concerned with their studying their subjects than justifying why you want to pay to take a class. Bottom line, you want to pay because your employer wants you to learn something there. If you don't like that, don't get a job. If you want to understand why, ask the employers.
This reminds me of the demotivational poster for Consultants. It states "If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made prolonging the problem." The watering down of education is precisely a matter of extracting value from the reputation of the institution. It's literally about capitalizing on the fact that you don't understand why universities are valuable, and it similarly capitalizes on the fact that you don't want to. Yeah consumer! Go ahead, shoot yourself in the foot. It's what Ms. Thompson did.
When universities become trade schools, it's no wonder that you have less chance of getting a job with that degree. Laud the productizing of education as being "what the customer wants". This article clearly shows that this particular segment is only good for taking their money and hopefully redirecting it into something useful. Something that actually generates some educated citizens. Something reinforces the benefits that they provide to our economy. Something that preserves and advances the knowledge of mankind. You know, a *university*.
I just hope that the people in charge of universities don't forget that's what they're doing.
Note that certs can and are used for things other than SSL on DNS names. In fact, the field used for the domain name is "Common Name". The CN field is used for a dozen things depending on what the cert is used for.
We should probably blame Netscape and everyone else who pushed using X.509 unchanged instead of trivially adding a field that required a valid DNS name.
This is a mismatch between the X.509 standard and how browsers use it. Most interesting is that the browsers have the information to correctly parse it, whereas the CAs don't have the information to do so, unless they are only issuing certs for SSL. As someone who would like to see widely usable PKI outside of the web-browser, I'd really rather fix the browsers than break the certs.
Microsoft is a marketing company more than a software company. This is a deft stroke of shaping opinion. Why?
Because the tacit assumption is that Open Sourcers focus on price, not value. They want to provoke the predictable "Microsoft software is too expensive" response. It lets them cast Open Sourcers as not being able to bridge the gap between technology and product.
Technology does something specific. A product solves a problem. All that this line of commentary does is to underscore Microsoft's message that Open Source isn't ready for business. Railing about expense without attacking the core problem of value only plays into Microsoft's hand.
What's more tragic is that they may be right. There are precious few Open Source technologies that are developed and focused to the point of being a product.
I did a control system for a covered skid that contained three natural gas compressors. They had to pump it up to 3600 psi (245 atmospheres). It was for fueling vehicles. The pressure had to be that high so that the tank would equalize to a reasonable pressure / gas content in under 10 minutes.
It was 40 degrees F in the winter and 95 degrees F in the summer. Took about 6 months so I got to feel both. It also reeked of natural gas, was greasy, oily, etc. There were metal shavings and fumes from all of the machining and welding.
I also worked a similar gig off and on for about two years involving a circuit-board drilling operation. Imagine walking through a factory floor with acid baths and various machinery to work on scoring machines and massive computer-controlled drills. The drills were pretty serious (60krpm) and they each had a 1.5 ton block of granite just to dampen vibration. To this day, it's the only computerized machine I've worked on that required a pneumatic hook-up.
Not only does it implement processes in a way that is quite similar to the existing threading implementation, but it provides a ton of synchronization / locking primitives that work seamlessly across processes. This includes the ability to utilize shared memory. It's crazy that this module doesn't get more press, because there's nothing quite as easy in most other languages.
Actually, cartesian products and joins aren't gone. It turns out that they just end up being done client side.
It's the tragedy of "join-less" databases. Joins do something that you need. The lack of joins forces people to correctly normalize, which ironically they should have been doing anyway. It doesn't take away any genuine need to join though.:(
In the end, the problem is that people just want a "default tool". They don't want to think about their requirements for data consistency. The really scary bit is that while RDBMses are the "default tool" of yesterday and slacker DBs are the "default tool" of tomorrow, neither of them are really the "problem".
The "default tool" attitude IS the problem. Unless you carefully weigh your data consistency requirements, you shouldn't be making that call at all.
I welcome the slackers and all of their new options along the spectrum of speed versus consistency. It's just that most of the people developing applications scare the shit out of me. They're so cavalier (or should I say, "agile", or maybe "pragmatic") about requirements that it's truly disturbing.
That said, if you're really interested in all of the options, I also recommend checking out memcachedb, memcacheq, and redis.
It's just saying that, if someone has a 1/10,000 chance of being wrong, their assurance that there is a 1/1,000,000,000 chance of something isn't that good of a bet. In other words, if you want the latter level of certainty, you don't really have it, because of the fallibility of the research itself.
This is actually rather obvious. If Jimbo tells you that there's a 1% chance that your tire will go flat if you don't fix it, that's not 1% if Jimbo is wrong 50% of the time. At best, it's 50.5%. Or something like that.
Assuming his brother Jethro is just as bad (but uncorrelated) with him, then their dual recommendation that it will go flat only gets you 25.25% certainty, not 1% (or 0.01%). The numbers may not be exactly right (my stats are rusty), but you get the point.
Basically, they're saying that the research provides a wider error bound than it may claim, assuming that scientists uniformly make logical mistakes--which they very probably do.
The implication, then, is that the LHC estimates should be independently done by other teams. This is, well, the basis of the scientific method, so essentially this study provides a statistical analysis of what we already know--after enough work, science gets results. Of course, the base theories assumed by all of the researchers could be wrong, which would be unfortunate, but the LHC is going to nail that one pretty quickly.:)
Free markets != no regulation. Unregulated markets generate monopolies. These are clearly bad.
For a market to function as free, it must be uncontrolled by any coercive forces. Monopolies control markets. Most big corporations try to do so today. It's appropriately called "Marketing", which doesn't just mean "advertising" as most people think.
Governments are pretty much the only response to that, short of riots. Democracy, being a civilized mob, is effectively that. Of course, the government can fail at keeping the market free, but it's hardly worse than the alternative.
At some point, you've got to draw a line that says "This is the limit of a player's coercive effect on a market". The government is the only place to do that. Unless you think the buyers should. Oh wait, we're (in theory) a democracy, same thing.
Do you live in a magical world where markets are free without government intervention? If you "criminalize" market manipulation and then get the government to "enforce the law", you just regulated the market.
Similarly, free market != 100% employment. Especially when the market trades in a currency. Monetary policy is a big deal. You can't avoid this without participating in civics. I'm sorry that you're civically lazy. Time to get back to work.
If you want our democracy to function, I'm fully willing to support you fixing that. If you want our market to function freely, I'll gladly support whatever regulations will achieve that. The problem is, in general, a lack of civic spirit. People don't want to work together to make the government functional. A lot of it is due to people with highly unrealistic ideologies. People that are not unlike you.
Ummm, Hobbes wasn't really predicting any sort of future. The entire "nasty, brutish, and short" thing is presupposed upon a continual condition of war. I don't think that Afghanistan, Iraq, or Palestine support any statement that war doesn't cause a man's life to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". He seemed to imply that humankind's natural state was war, which is debatable, but not entirely unsupported by average conditions for much of the world's populace.
That said, predictions are based on assumptions. We produce tons more food, and we're trashing our coastlines with the agricultural run-off. We're producing less food by fishing. Right now, it's a drop in the bucket. What percentage of the world's food is disappears when fishing is no longer viable?
Of course, we can change course for most things. We can fight run-off and protect fishing. The whole point of TFA was that we can't reverse dissolved carbon dioxide levels or ocean temperatures. Similarly, we can't immediately un-melt glaciers. We can't adapt ourselves out of basic facts of chemistry. We're working on relativistic physics, though.
Humankind's ability to adapt has dick to do with heat and carbon in the ocean. The only thing we need to do is hit a certain carbon-level. If you think getting the Chinese or Indians to curb industrializing will be as easy as getting people to switch from horses to cars, I truly fear for us all. I suppose we could bomb them, but I don't think that'll help.
The horse analogy is a good one. However, we can't innovate ourselves out of every problem. When we abandon this rock as unlivable, I'm sure someone will point to innovations in spaceflight. That's great. Of course, we could have just not flooded our coastlines, killed our oceans, and wiped out our forests.
It appears your argument is "we've always found a way before". Well, that's just as good of as the assumption that we'd all have been riding horses right now. Apparently not liking the result of a model somehow correlates it with failed models.
Meanwhile, the people who are going to try to innovate and prevent our way out of this mess will be paying attention to good research and data like this study, instead of trivializing it out of some sort of fearful reliance on manifest destiny.
This should freak you out. Maybe not a lot, but it should be of concern. There is absolutely no solid reason to say "it's probably not accurate". There is reason to say "let's be calm about this". In the meantime, let's just hope nature doesn't decide to take us down a peg.
Some innovations don't happen without a ton of investment, and private individuals have limited capital. In the end, it usually happens funded by either a corporation, a university, or a government.
Make it patents sanely approved, nontransferrable, affordable to litigate, and have minimum royalties. Then, maybe individuals will sit on top of the innovation train. Until then, government funding may be the last, best hope for personal innovation.
Or are you waiting for Richie Rich and Bruce Wayne to privately innovate money-clip helicopters and batmobiles for us all?
I've found that making employees accountable for knowing their software is a huge benefit. Before a number of OSS shifts I've administered, nobody knew what was important. The entire workflow was undocumented. In some ways, tracking down this information is quite valuable in it's own right--and you'd never get it if you couldn't make people's jobs depend on it.
The key is to do it in responsible phases. Pick a representative set of really good people in your workflow. Make them into a "conversion team". Incentivize them to make the conversion process a success. Just doubling existing incentives works really well for sales people. They are notoriously hard to sell on OSS, but 2x-commission brings out the gambler in them. Most importantly--listen to them when they "can't do their work". If you've picked the right people, it'll be due to legitimate concerns.
Go department by department. Be tactical. Allow islands of resistance to form. If they can't be ignored, exploit existing divisions in the company to prevent them from uniting. When they're all that's left in a sea of OSS users, they're easier to deal with. Let their case be about real needs, not "everybody's doing it". Indeed, you don't even have to argue it, their arguments change on their own. It's a remarkably social phenomenon.
The legal department can be your friend. Most organizations are woefully out of compliance in licensing. If legal is made aware of this, they often just can't ignore it and will take it to the top. Ignoring it any any level can make people personally liable. The lawyers will tell them this.
Conversely, if you are in compliance, accounting is your friend. When software licenses are properly budgeted, they show up and they're ugly. It's also fairly easy to demonstrate that, once stabilized, OSS departments require less administrative labor than proprietary ones.
Most importantly, determine where there aren't OSS alternatives. In a big enough organization, you'll invariably have a few MS boxen just for interoperability or niche software. It's fine. That's what virtualization is for, and you can deal with that at your leisure. Rest assured that this is a dwindling list of software.
Be careful. Like any large IT shift, a bad roll-out can negate years of cost savings. No vendor, especially not the OSS community, should be blamed for your botched implementation.
In the end, the dream of an OSS organization is achievable. It can be worth the trouble. Rather you breathe Unix, sleep with a copy of the GPL, hate that your company is probably way out of license compliance, or just want that money in your bank instead of Redmond, there are plenty of reasons to do it.
For debugging, New Relic provides some awesome tools that allow introspection of delay and timing at a function dispatch level. If you're serious about Rails, New Relic is for you.
As for file-backing your Rails app, my company has had huge success with GFS. It can be a beast to maintain sometimes, but it will crank out the IOPS behind very hungry RoR apps fairly well. It also requires shared block devices, though, so it may not be for you. The S3 plugins for Merb and Rails also go a long way to scaling everything but the code itself (which should be manageable on even the surliest NFS deployment).
We've done some really good work with Rails deployment. There are a ton of ways to deploy it, but I think that is more reflective of the variance in people's deployment requirements more than anything else. Phusion's Passenger and Engine Yard's deployment work are helping to lay down best practices here, and we'd be glad to talk to you about smoothing out the deployment process.
Rails is definitely a good application for teasing out some of the pathological behavior in NFS, but that's not necessarily a bad thing about Rails. It's already used by some to test the pathological niches in new Ruby releases (e.g. "Does it pass the Rails test?").
Working with Yehuda and Ezra on a daily basis, I can safely say that you can expect to see a lot of attention to performance and refactoring some of the cruft that has inevitably popped up in Rails' large codebase. DHH has a great vision and Yehuda has great attention to detail. I don't want to imply that "Rails needs Merb" or "Merb needs Rails", but I expect some really good results from the collaboration.
When you petition in EVE, normally a GM shows up and they can use the game's audit trails to find the smoking gun. If it's a bug, it gets pretty obvious.
The auditing infrastructure is built around the realtime game. During "downtime" it's all batch processing, and I would be willing to bet that it either generates tons of useless audit logs with cryptic descriptions (which EVE is kind of famous for). Worse, it may be that it generates none at all!
Since there was really no way a GM could observe the bug, and the audit information that might have found it was nonexistent or buried in tons of useless information, CCP was really ill-prepared to deal with the problem. They just had no way to catch it at a low-level to get it escalated to the programmers--who presumably have to tear through the batch-processing code to find the actual bug.
I am an industrialist in EVE, and I can imagine that this would have been an limitless source of ISK for the cheater.
We don't need stereotypes. They're an excuse not to think. We do not need excuses not to think.
Isn't a stereotype in direct contradiction with standing out? You seem to support people standing out. That pretty much breaks the stereotypes--oh, wait, you say that we need them for something.
Save your city versus country wedge for politics--exactly where they are used for exactly the wrong reasons. I was born in Missouri, spent twenty-five years there, and have spent plenty of time in big coastal cities and small Midwestern towns. People like you just can't take criticism. Tap into some of that cowboy bravado, grow a spine, and stop bitching at people for fitting your "politically correct" stereotype.
You claim that "politically correct" people are trying to "tear people down". No, they're just telling you that you're an asshole.
Actually, it wasn't so much made for European languages. It was made for typesetting in general. In fact, look to the KOMA-Scripts package, which was designed because European publishing wasn't originally well accounted for in TeX.
There are a number of other benefits which are, perhaps, why it looks more "bookish". Kerning, ligatures, finer control over hyphenation, glyph variants, real fonts, support for semetic languages, support for asian languages, etc. Take a look at the index of Knuth's Art of Programming. Arabic, Chinese, everything beautifully typeset. The Index seamlessly generated with appropriate sorting.
I suppose it's possible to look at professional typesetting and say, so what? In the end, though, that's the benefit. TeX is a typesetting system and a lot of people seem to want a Word Processor. These are different things.
There are things that are possible in TeX that aren't possible in Word. You have more control over the document (although Word certainly gives an appearance of control). TeX can make type that looks GOOD. However, some people think of text and publishing as commodities in the online world. They decide that they can live without these things.
That's fine with me. Personally, I enjoy seeing something done really well. I use TeX as it suits me. Someday, maybe someone will make a good WYSIWYG typesetting system. Until then, we have TeX.
$50 per share. Of course, you'll have to buy a common lot, so that seemingly reasonable number becomes $5,000.
I readily admit that $5,000 is not a huge sum of money, but I would be willing to bet that much less than the majority of people will have $5,000 lying around to make such an investment.
Copyright existed originally because production of books was a large, capital-intensive project. It existed precisely to enable authors to publish without the threat of a large corporation denying them the profits of their work (which they couldn't realize on their own).
So, Copyright exists precisely BECAUSE large Corporations screwed the individual. Now you are somehow claiming to legitimize further abuse by claiming that Corporations are somehow democratized because we can buy into them.
Well, most of us can't buy in, those who can are only compensated in proportion to their wealth (hardly democratic), only public corporations are subject to your argument, and the existence of Copyright Law is a longstanding counter-argument to your claim that Corporations are not the abusive construct that we all know and love.
Face it. Corporations not only divorce investors from responsibility, but they effectively shield the officers most of the time. Google "Moral Hazard", think a bit about how much control a minor shareholder really has, and see how long it takes for you to figure out that this system feeds immoral behavior on the part of corporations.
In fact, this has historically been well accounted for. Corporations were always worth less than a corporeal person. There have been jurisdications and times when a Corporation couldn't even pursue a civil suit against a person. Decades of money, lobbying, and corruption (oh wait, all the same thing) have eroded it to what it is today.
Those businesses don't have to do business in California, you know. They could stop at any point.
Ignoring the question of jurisdiction, how is this any different than setting a speed limit? What about requirements for headlights or seat belts? How much did it cost the auto industry to require seat belts? If the NTSB stepped in to block a state law would that even remotely make sense?
The Constitution gives the right to the federal government to regulate inter-state commerce, sure. Driving a car in that state is not inter-state commerce. It involves only one state. California isn't outlawing the manufacture of the cars. It probably can't do anything to make it illegal to buy one in another state. The moment that the only state involved is California, the Commerce Clause no longer applies.
California has (and should have) the right to make polluting cars illegal to drive in their state. It has (and should have) the right to open their utilities as well, for that matter. They also should have the right to set unreasonable laws that deal them the consequences--whether it be failing electrical power or a lack of new cars. At no point does the Commerce Clause require them to enable the ability to do business with any out-of-state business--and it shouldn't.
Car manufacturers can choose rather they want to make a more efficient (and expensive) car, or to forgo revenues from California. This is not rocket science.
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Interestingly, this plays into the previous argument that sucking up the otherwise unemployed into menial, subsidized jobs is moderately preferable to just having them on welfare or committing crimes.
In reality, it's all very complex these days because implementing a balanced economic-social-contract requires inordinately enlightened voters.
Have you considered that "having a well-rounded liberal arts education" is critical to employability? It is. If you can cogently discuss the Byzantine Empire, perhaps do Calculus, deliberate the nature of political systems, and can craft a decent metaphor, it says something about your adaptability. That's what employers want, and it's why they considered a real education to be a marker for career-material. While the "customer" sees university as a gateway to employment, they apparently fail to realize why it ever was a gateway.
This fact is lost on people like Ms. Thompson. It is apparently lost on you as well. I'm sorry that you feel that employers are demanding that you have evidenced an ability to adapt functionally to a wide array of subjects. I'm sorry that you don't like that they are more concerned with their studying their subjects than justifying why you want to pay to take a class. Bottom line, you want to pay because your employer wants you to learn something there. If you don't like that, don't get a job. If you want to understand why, ask the employers.
This reminds me of the demotivational poster for Consultants. It states "If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made prolonging the problem." The watering down of education is precisely a matter of extracting value from the reputation of the institution. It's literally about capitalizing on the fact that you don't understand why universities are valuable, and it similarly capitalizes on the fact that you don't want to. Yeah consumer! Go ahead, shoot yourself in the foot. It's what Ms. Thompson did.
When universities become trade schools, it's no wonder that you have less chance of getting a job with that degree. Laud the productizing of education as being "what the customer wants". This article clearly shows that this particular segment is only good for taking their money and hopefully redirecting it into something useful. Something that actually generates some educated citizens. Something reinforces the benefits that they provide to our economy. Something that preserves and advances the knowledge of mankind. You know, a *university*.
I just hope that the people in charge of universities don't forget that's what they're doing.
Note that certs can and are used for things other than SSL on DNS names. In fact, the field used for the domain name is "Common Name". The CN field is used for a dozen things depending on what the cert is used for.
We should probably blame Netscape and everyone else who pushed using X.509 unchanged instead of trivially adding a field that required a valid DNS name.
This is a mismatch between the X.509 standard and how browsers use it. Most interesting is that the browsers have the information to correctly parse it, whereas the CAs don't have the information to do so, unless they are only issuing certs for SSL. As someone who would like to see widely usable PKI outside of the web-browser, I'd really rather fix the browsers than break the certs.
Microsoft is a marketing company more than a software company. This is a deft stroke of shaping opinion. Why?
Because the tacit assumption is that Open Sourcers focus on price, not value. They want to provoke the predictable "Microsoft software is too expensive" response. It lets them cast Open Sourcers as not being able to bridge the gap between technology and product.
Technology does something specific. A product solves a problem. All that this line of commentary does is to underscore Microsoft's message that Open Source isn't ready for business. Railing about expense without attacking the core problem of value only plays into Microsoft's hand.
What's more tragic is that they may be right. There are precious few Open Source technologies that are developed and focused to the point of being a product.
I did a control system for a covered skid that contained three natural gas compressors. They had to pump it up to 3600 psi (245 atmospheres). It was for fueling vehicles. The pressure had to be that high so that the tank would equalize to a reasonable pressure / gas content in under 10 minutes.
It was 40 degrees F in the winter and 95 degrees F in the summer. Took about 6 months so I got to feel both. It also reeked of natural gas, was greasy, oily, etc. There were metal shavings and fumes from all of the machining and welding.
I also worked a similar gig off and on for about two years involving a circuit-board drilling operation. Imagine walking through a factory floor with acid baths and various machinery to work on scoring machines and massive computer-controlled drills. The drills were pretty serious (60krpm) and they each had a 1.5 ton block of granite just to dampen vibration. To this day, it's the only computerized machine I've worked on that required a pneumatic hook-up.
Here's a photo of the drills from the internet: http://www.cerambus.com/equip/images/4-MK%205%20DR.JPG
As of Python 2.6, look at the multiprocessing module.
The shared memory feature is nice.
As of Python 2.6, look at the multiprocessing module.
Look at the multiprocessing module.
Not only does it implement processes in a way that is quite similar to the existing threading implementation, but it provides a ton of synchronization / locking primitives that work seamlessly across processes. This includes the ability to utilize shared memory. It's crazy that this module doesn't get more press, because there's nothing quite as easy in most other languages.
Actually, cartesian products and joins aren't gone. It turns out that they just end up being done client side.
It's the tragedy of "join-less" databases. Joins do something that you need. The lack of joins forces people to correctly normalize, which ironically they should have been doing anyway. It doesn't take away any genuine need to join though. :(
In the end, the problem is that people just want a "default tool". They don't want to think about their requirements for data consistency. The really scary bit is that while RDBMses are the "default tool" of yesterday and slacker DBs are the "default tool" of tomorrow, neither of them are really the "problem".
The "default tool" attitude IS the problem. Unless you carefully weigh your data consistency requirements, you shouldn't be making that call at all.
I welcome the slackers and all of their new options along the spectrum of speed versus consistency. It's just that most of the people developing applications scare the shit out of me. They're so cavalier (or should I say, "agile", or maybe "pragmatic") about requirements that it's truly disturbing.
That said, if you're really interested in all of the options, I also recommend checking out memcachedb, memcacheq, and redis.
Maybe it's a declarative language?
I don't know why, but "They dropped dolomite on it." made me think of http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072895/
Actually, this isn't that much voodoo.
It's just saying that, if someone has a 1/10,000 chance of being wrong, their assurance that there is a 1/1,000,000,000 chance of something isn't that good of a bet. In other words, if you want the latter level of certainty, you don't really have it, because of the fallibility of the research itself.
This is actually rather obvious. If Jimbo tells you that there's a 1% chance that your tire will go flat if you don't fix it, that's not 1% if Jimbo is wrong 50% of the time. At best, it's 50.5%. Or something like that.
Assuming his brother Jethro is just as bad (but uncorrelated) with him, then their dual recommendation that it will go flat only gets you 25.25% certainty, not 1% (or 0.01%). The numbers may not be exactly right (my stats are rusty), but you get the point.
Basically, they're saying that the research provides a wider error bound than it may claim, assuming that scientists uniformly make logical mistakes--which they very probably do.
The implication, then, is that the LHC estimates should be independently done by other teams. This is, well, the basis of the scientific method, so essentially this study provides a statistical analysis of what we already know--after enough work, science gets results. Of course, the base theories assumed by all of the researchers could be wrong, which would be unfortunate, but the LHC is going to nail that one pretty quickly. :)
This is not surprising, but not voodoo either.
Free markets != no regulation. Unregulated markets generate monopolies. These are clearly bad.
For a market to function as free, it must be uncontrolled by any coercive forces. Monopolies control markets. Most big corporations try to do so today. It's appropriately called "Marketing", which doesn't just mean "advertising" as most people think.
Governments are pretty much the only response to that, short of riots. Democracy, being a civilized mob, is effectively that. Of course, the government can fail at keeping the market free, but it's hardly worse than the alternative.
At some point, you've got to draw a line that says "This is the limit of a player's coercive effect on a market". The government is the only place to do that. Unless you think the buyers should. Oh wait, we're (in theory) a democracy, same thing.
Do you live in a magical world where markets are free without government intervention? If you "criminalize" market manipulation and then get the government to "enforce the law", you just regulated the market.
Similarly, free market != 100% employment. Especially when the market trades in a currency. Monetary policy is a big deal. You can't avoid this without participating in civics. I'm sorry that you're civically lazy. Time to get back to work.
If you want our democracy to function, I'm fully willing to support you fixing that. If you want our market to function freely, I'll gladly support whatever regulations will achieve that. The problem is, in general, a lack of civic spirit. People don't want to work together to make the government functional. A lot of it is due to people with highly unrealistic ideologies. People that are not unlike you.
Ummm, Hobbes wasn't really predicting any sort of future. The entire "nasty, brutish, and short" thing is presupposed upon a continual condition of war. I don't think that Afghanistan, Iraq, or Palestine support any statement that war doesn't cause a man's life to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". He seemed to imply that humankind's natural state was war, which is debatable, but not entirely unsupported by average conditions for much of the world's populace.
That said, predictions are based on assumptions. We produce tons more food, and we're trashing our coastlines with the agricultural run-off. We're producing less food by fishing. Right now, it's a drop in the bucket. What percentage of the world's food is disappears when fishing is no longer viable?
Of course, we can change course for most things. We can fight run-off and protect fishing. The whole point of TFA was that we can't reverse dissolved carbon dioxide levels or ocean temperatures. Similarly, we can't immediately un-melt glaciers. We can't adapt ourselves out of basic facts of chemistry. We're working on relativistic physics, though.
Humankind's ability to adapt has dick to do with heat and carbon in the ocean. The only thing we need to do is hit a certain carbon-level. If you think getting the Chinese or Indians to curb industrializing will be as easy as getting people to switch from horses to cars, I truly fear for us all. I suppose we could bomb them, but I don't think that'll help.
The horse analogy is a good one. However, we can't innovate ourselves out of every problem. When we abandon this rock as unlivable, I'm sure someone will point to innovations in spaceflight. That's great. Of course, we could have just not flooded our coastlines, killed our oceans, and wiped out our forests.
It appears your argument is "we've always found a way before". Well, that's just as good of as the assumption that we'd all have been riding horses right now. Apparently not liking the result of a model somehow correlates it with failed models.
Meanwhile, the people who are going to try to innovate and prevent our way out of this mess will be paying attention to good research and data like this study, instead of trivializing it out of some sort of fearful reliance on manifest destiny.
This should freak you out. Maybe not a lot, but it should be of concern. There is absolutely no solid reason to say "it's probably not accurate". There is reason to say "let's be calm about this". In the meantime, let's just hope nature doesn't decide to take us down a peg.
Funding has to come from somewhere.
Some innovations don't happen without a ton of investment, and private individuals have limited capital. In the end, it usually happens funded by either a corporation, a university, or a government.
Make it patents sanely approved, nontransferrable, affordable to litigate, and have minimum royalties. Then, maybe individuals will sit on top of the innovation train. Until then, government funding may be the last, best hope for personal innovation.
Or are you waiting for Richie Rich and Bruce Wayne to privately innovate money-clip helicopters and batmobiles for us all?
I love it. Score: 5 (Flamebait).
Ironically, SPSS was cloned fairly early on in the OSS wars.
http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/
I've found that making employees accountable for knowing their software is a huge benefit. Before a number of OSS shifts I've administered, nobody knew what was important. The entire workflow was undocumented. In some ways, tracking down this information is quite valuable in it's own right--and you'd never get it if you couldn't make people's jobs depend on it.
The key is to do it in responsible phases. Pick a representative set of really good people in your workflow. Make them into a "conversion team". Incentivize them to make the conversion process a success. Just doubling existing incentives works really well for sales people. They are notoriously hard to sell on OSS, but 2x-commission brings out the gambler in them. Most importantly--listen to them when they "can't do their work". If you've picked the right people, it'll be due to legitimate concerns.
Go department by department. Be tactical. Allow islands of resistance to form. If they can't be ignored, exploit existing divisions in the company to prevent them from uniting. When they're all that's left in a sea of OSS users, they're easier to deal with. Let their case be about real needs, not "everybody's doing it". Indeed, you don't even have to argue it, their arguments change on their own. It's a remarkably social phenomenon.
The legal department can be your friend. Most organizations are woefully out of compliance in licensing. If legal is made aware of this, they often just can't ignore it and will take it to the top. Ignoring it any any level can make people personally liable. The lawyers will tell them this.
Conversely, if you are in compliance, accounting is your friend. When software licenses are properly budgeted, they show up and they're ugly. It's also fairly easy to demonstrate that, once stabilized, OSS departments require less administrative labor than proprietary ones.
Most importantly, determine where there aren't OSS alternatives. In a big enough organization, you'll invariably have a few MS boxen just for interoperability or niche software. It's fine. That's what virtualization is for, and you can deal with that at your leisure. Rest assured that this is a dwindling list of software.
Be careful. Like any large IT shift, a bad roll-out can negate years of cost savings. No vendor, especially not the OSS community, should be blamed for your botched implementation.
In the end, the dream of an OSS organization is achievable. It can be worth the trouble. Rather you breathe Unix, sleep with a copy of the GPL, hate that your company is probably way out of license compliance, or just want that money in your bank instead of Redmond, there are plenty of reasons to do it.
In some ways, it already functions this way. There's just a lot of people waiting to be replaced with shell-scripts.
For debugging, New Relic provides some awesome tools that allow introspection of delay and timing at a function dispatch level. If you're serious about Rails, New Relic is for you.
As for file-backing your Rails app, my company has had huge success with GFS. It can be a beast to maintain sometimes, but it will crank out the IOPS behind very hungry RoR apps fairly well. It also requires shared block devices, though, so it may not be for you. The S3 plugins for Merb and Rails also go a long way to scaling everything but the code itself (which should be manageable on even the surliest NFS deployment).
We've done some really good work with Rails deployment. There are a ton of ways to deploy it, but I think that is more reflective of the variance in people's deployment requirements more than anything else. Phusion's Passenger and Engine Yard's deployment work are helping to lay down best practices here, and we'd be glad to talk to you about smoothing out the deployment process.
Rails is definitely a good application for teasing out some of the pathological behavior in NFS, but that's not necessarily a bad thing about Rails. It's already used by some to test the pathological niches in new Ruby releases (e.g. "Does it pass the Rails test?").
Working with Yehuda and Ezra on a daily basis, I can safely say that you can expect to see a lot of attention to performance and refactoring some of the cruft that has inevitably popped up in Rails' large codebase. DHH has a great vision and Yehuda has great attention to detail. I don't want to imply that "Rails needs Merb" or "Merb needs Rails", but I expect some really good results from the collaboration.
I think the downtime aspect was the key.
When you petition in EVE, normally a GM shows up and they can use the game's audit trails to find the smoking gun. If it's a bug, it gets pretty obvious.
The auditing infrastructure is built around the realtime game. During "downtime" it's all batch processing, and I would be willing to bet that it either generates tons of useless audit logs with cryptic descriptions (which EVE is kind of famous for). Worse, it may be that it generates none at all!
Since there was really no way a GM could observe the bug, and the audit information that might have found it was nonexistent or buried in tons of useless information, CCP was really ill-prepared to deal with the problem. They just had no way to catch it at a low-level to get it escalated to the programmers--who presumably have to tear through the batch-processing code to find the actual bug.
I am an industrialist in EVE, and I can imagine that this would have been an limitless source of ISK for the cheater.
We don't need stereotypes. They're an excuse not to think. We do not need excuses not to think.
Isn't a stereotype in direct contradiction with standing out? You seem to support people standing out. That pretty much breaks the stereotypes--oh, wait, you say that we need them for something.
Save your city versus country wedge for politics--exactly where they are used for exactly the wrong reasons. I was born in Missouri, spent twenty-five years there, and have spent plenty of time in big coastal cities and small Midwestern towns. People like you just can't take criticism. Tap into some of that cowboy bravado, grow a spine, and stop bitching at people for fitting your "politically correct" stereotype.
You claim that "politically correct" people are trying to "tear people down". No, they're just telling you that you're an asshole.
Actually, it wasn't so much made for European languages. It was made for typesetting in general. In fact, look to the KOMA-Scripts package, which was designed because European publishing wasn't originally well accounted for in TeX.
There are a number of other benefits which are, perhaps, why it looks more "bookish". Kerning, ligatures, finer control over hyphenation, glyph variants, real fonts, support for semetic languages, support for asian languages, etc. Take a look at the index of Knuth's Art of Programming. Arabic, Chinese, everything beautifully typeset. The Index seamlessly generated with appropriate sorting.
I suppose it's possible to look at professional typesetting and say, so what? In the end, though, that's the benefit. TeX is a typesetting system and a lot of people seem to want a Word Processor. These are different things.
There are things that are possible in TeX that aren't possible in Word. You have more control over the document (although Word certainly gives an appearance of control). TeX can make type that looks GOOD. However, some people think of text and publishing as commodities in the online world. They decide that they can live without these things.
That's fine with me. Personally, I enjoy seeing something done really well. I use TeX as it suits me. Someday, maybe someone will make a good WYSIWYG typesetting system. Until then, we have TeX.
$50 per share. Of course, you'll have to buy a common lot, so that seemingly reasonable number becomes $5,000.
I readily admit that $5,000 is not a huge sum of money, but I would be willing to bet that much less than the majority of people will have $5,000 lying around to make such an investment.
Copyright existed originally because production of books was a large, capital-intensive project. It existed precisely to enable authors to publish without the threat of a large corporation denying them the profits of their work (which they couldn't realize on their own).
So, Copyright exists precisely BECAUSE large Corporations screwed the individual. Now you are somehow claiming to legitimize further abuse by claiming that Corporations are somehow democratized because we can buy into them.
Well, most of us can't buy in, those who can are only compensated in proportion to their wealth (hardly democratic), only public corporations are subject to your argument, and the existence of Copyright Law is a longstanding counter-argument to your claim that Corporations are not the abusive construct that we all know and love.
Face it. Corporations not only divorce investors from responsibility, but they effectively shield the officers most of the time. Google "Moral Hazard", think a bit about how much control a minor shareholder really has, and see how long it takes for you to figure out that this system feeds immoral behavior on the part of corporations.
In fact, this has historically been well accounted for. Corporations were always worth less than a corporeal person. There have been jurisdications and times when a Corporation couldn't even pursue a civil suit against a person. Decades of money, lobbying, and corruption (oh wait, all the same thing) have eroded it to what it is today.
Those businesses don't have to do business in California, you know. They could stop at any point.
Ignoring the question of jurisdiction, how is this any different than setting a speed limit? What about requirements for headlights or seat belts? How much did it cost the auto industry to require seat belts? If the NTSB stepped in to block a state law would that even remotely make sense?
The Constitution gives the right to the federal government to regulate inter-state commerce, sure. Driving a car in that state is not inter-state commerce. It involves only one state. California isn't outlawing the manufacture of the cars. It probably can't do anything to make it illegal to buy one in another state. The moment that the only state involved is California, the Commerce Clause no longer applies.
California has (and should have) the right to make polluting cars illegal to drive in their state. It has (and should have) the right to open their utilities as well, for that matter. They also should have the right to set unreasonable laws that deal them the consequences--whether it be failing electrical power or a lack of new cars. At no point does the Commerce Clause require them to enable the ability to do business with any out-of-state business--and it shouldn't.
Car manufacturers can choose rather they want to make a more efficient (and expensive) car, or to forgo revenues from California. This is not rocket science.