Sorry, I'm not making fun of you and I don't think I missed your point either.
All I wanted to say that you're right, that there are sometimes cases when even what is what in nested for loops gets confusing and then it's useful to choose proper names even for the iterators (counters, whatever one calls them).
True, I couldn't agree more! Especially if you have ever tried to speed up multiplication big matricies, by saving the second matrix transposed in the computer memory? That way the read ahead into L1 (and L2) caches that many CPU architectures use is used efficiently. Otherwise the CPU reads ahead the row, but we're really going down columns and so the main memory has to be accessed all the time instead of the fast CPU caches.
Judging by the scope of these variables and the fact that they seem to be docummented right at the top, I don't think anyone could have an issue with that.
In fact, sometimes explaining what a variable means and then using just a one letter name is much more helpful than names like "thisOneINeedToDoThisBecauseOfThat".
Just think of the use of "i" in for loops, no one in the right set of mind would use something like "loopCounter".
It's a bit like in PDE theory, if you use t, then you don't have to bother specifying that t belongs to [0,T] and that it's time - everyone expects that.
I couldn't agree more. As much as Microsoft does have a monopoly, this does not make sense. Maybe they should be ordered to make it easy for OEMs to include any media player they want.
But then the next service pack would probably revert this... all sorts of problems.
Besides I have a little sympathy for Real, QuickTime etc. because I'm sure that once they'll be in they'd try to be every inch as monopolistic as Microsoft.
Maybe a better approach would be to order that Microsoft has to release interoperability specifications for any data format they use. And make sure that unlike in the US, this ruling can be used by Microsoft's biggest rivals, which means Linux, which means that people could use it specifically in GPL software.
Who said those jobs are "high paid"? Maybe they were reasonably high paid in the US, but these jobs are going to India specifically because they are not high paid there.
High paid is not as relative as you're trying to suggest. If my job pays for nice accomodation, decent food and holiady, maybe a car that is high paid. Programming jobs are high paid (as in salary buys reasonable basket of goods) both in the US and in India. It's just that this basket costs a lot less in India.
It would seem reasonable to at least attempt to establish a minimum global standard of living to mitigate the race to the bottom. What evidince do you have for suggesting there is race to the bottom? There will be an equilibrium eventually, in the same way as if you have a hot piece of metal and cold piece of metal then eventually the whole piece will have the same temperature. Have you ever noticed, that both the Heat Equation and Black Scholes equations are very similar?
Otherwise, outsourcing becomes slave labor by another name (no health benefits, no job security, no wage leverage). How much difference does it make that the slaves' choices are so limited that they are willing slaves. That's just emotional rubbish now. I call people working for Nike factories in the 3rd World slaves but not programmers. Have you read any of the previously mentioned articles about what benefits it bring to whole (albeit relatively small) communities in India?
Think about it. If the entire employment of the US is outsourced (other than politicians, lawyers, doctors, nurses, hair dressers, and food preparation workers), there isn't going to be much of a market for stocks among the peons.
Yes, do as you say _think_ about it! But try to take it a step further. The scenario you've described is not that likely to happen, for a simple reason and that is: India won't be cheap forever! The Indian programmers will eventually start demanding better healthcare, education for the kids etc. Whether they pay for it themselves or the government taxes their income more does not really matter. The point is that it will evolve in some stable state, where the Indians will be as expensive as Americans. Want an example: Check out what's happening in Eastern Europe skilled workforce used to be dirt cheap there and is still probably cheaper than most Europe and e.g. in Prague the difference is becoming rather negligible.
Of course this might involve loss of income in America. But given the current situation, where couple of hundred million Americans consume rather bug share of worlds wealth, now that can't last forever can it?
The problem you're facing is to decide between being selfish and saying "all high paid jobs belong to us". Or being reasonable and saying, well acually the Indians deserve their share as well. Look up older Slashdot coverage of the topic to see that they're not working in sweatshops and that it's the Indians who benefit in the first place.
Of course you can resort to protectionism like you have with US and EU agricultural industry. Thirld world farmers can't export their cheap goods, because ours are far too subsidised. Furthermore EU and US dumps their produce in their market, below the production value, thus driving locals out of bussiness. See http://kickaas.typepad.com/ to get an idea of the outcome of protectionism.
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this...
on
Postfix
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Somehow, I have the feeling that you have never been in charge of anything than your home network.
Sorry that's just my impression, but a matter of fact is that IT managers don't allow willy/nilly upgrades. In fact the chances are that in real life, you're managing something that was not designed by you. So you have to put up with whatever is there. And if it works... sort of... then you'll find it hard to persuade anyone to bless an upgrade.
Same goes for coding; you take over project someone else has started and it might well be that you'll find yourself learning COBOL. You think that writing a CPU simulator in Java is stupid and inefficient; who cares we want it to run faster and you do whatever is needed to make that happen. That's life.
Ever seen an S390? Do you know how much IBM charges for fixing these? Do you have an idea how slow they are? But just taking the risk of upgrading to something new usually isn't worth it in real life.
Btw. he wasn't giving any advice on running a network, just a book review.
I was just thinking today, as I was writing this, that I should try to clarify how to use apostrophes properly!
The link you have sent me, however is not as helpful as I expected it will be when I first looked at it. In fact not only is it unhelpful, it is rude!
Besides I only slipped with "window's driver's writer's" where it should have been "writers". That's not that bad by American (and Slashdot) standarts is it? Besides, English is not my first language anyway (but I make spelling and grammar mistakes in Czech as well, it must be that I'm more concentrating on what I say, not how I say it).
Actually I'm glad that Intel has done at least as much as making it compatible. Shouldn't we at least be glad for this? I mean if they put a bit of marketing spin on what they have done, fine it will go away.
Imagine the mess though, if they decided, "ok we're going to make our instruction set just a little differnt and then use our dominance in the market to win over AMD." It would mean more work for hardware designers (I know PCI bus should take care, but you still need to test), kernel developers, window's driver's writer's, distributors and you and me, because we'll have even a harder time shopping for hardware.
I'm pretty certain that MBAs have been considering the above option. This is a compromise and people have to learn live in a world that is not ideal and thus full of compromises.
Oh dear, this thread really exposes the state of the Slashdot community: Grand-grandparent can't use adverbs properly, grandparent makes a typo, while correcting someone's grammer and finally the parent:
I assume it's not a typographical error.
shows that he has little clue about the fact, that typography is about designing thing containg text in such a way, that makes them aesthetically pleasing.
The question now is, of course, what have I screwed up?:-)
Sorry guys I was just trying to make a not too great joke. I clearly failed, being moderated as interesting! What I said was not interesting it's mainly rubbish, as you are mostly correctly pointing out.
By what standard is Britain successful and France strictly unsuccessful? Well actually to answer this one: not overrun by Germans in the 1st and 2nd World Wars? Spreading their language so that it became _the_ language to know outside your own country? Think about it: I'm Czech and I can speak reasonable German. But I talk to my German friends in English, because overall it's easier. I talk to my Spanish friends in English and not say French. Heck I even talk to Polish people in English even though Czech & Polish are so similar that people actually understand each other when they speak slowly.
Other than Cameroons (Kamerun), Caroline Islands (Karolinen), German East Africa, German New Guinea, German South West Africa, Kiautschou, Mariana Islands (Marianen), Marshall Islands, Samoa, and Togo.
Compare this to Canada, India (that included Pakistan and Bangladesh), Australia, New Zealnd, Iraq, Iran and Hong Kong. (should have said "Germans never managed to colonise _almost_ anyone, or maybe "Germans who didn't even manage to colonise anyone at the time, almost surely" depending whether people prefer probability terminology or integration theory terminology).
Of course, it doesn't hurt to colonize numerous less powerfull nations, systematically remove all profit and natural resources, then "benevolently" grant said colonies their independence when everything of value is gone and they're no longer profitable to the empire. Just ask the Indians and north Africans . ..
This still compares favourably with countries like France and Spain that did the same thing and didn't become sucessful:-) Not to mention the Germans who didn't even manage to colonise anyone at the time.
I'd say Sweden has pretty much a state run economy, but definitely counts as a democracy in the rules you set.
Sweden is a democracy, no doubt about that. They also have a huge welfare state and lot of state owned enterprises. To further support your point I have to admit that in Sweden it's the government that is spending 57% of GDP (source: Federal dep. of finance; OECD). That's still some 43% left to spend by the private sector, not to mention that the government is also getting the benefits of the free marker (e.g. cometetion driving down costs - yeah in theory, but it usually does work).
I'd see Iran as a democracy (abeit far from perfect) as well btw, the fact that the political struggle that is going on there can happen at all is proof enough for that.
I don't see a country where some non-elected authority (some ayatollah in Iran's case) can decide who's allowd to stand in an election and who's not. It was a common practice in the former Soviet satelite states that they held elections every couple of years but the Communist party had to approve of all the candidates. I wouldn't call those countries democratic. But that may be just me.
Also, there is a lot more to liberal democracy than just elections. For example independent and free media (Russia seems to failing that one) and reasonably just and effective courts.
(oh, and realize that in the USA you are getting a very discolored picture of Iran)
I wouldn't know what picture of Iran are the people in the USA getting. I don't live anywhere nearer the US than most Europeans. Anyway, I gave you my reasons for disqualifying Iran, you may have your reasons for not considering my criteria relevant.
The US is every bit as dodgy as the rest of the world.
That's a dangerous and blatantly wrong statemnet. It shows that you probably have never seen the darker side of a totalitarian regime. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that the US are any good (read the parent post, first paragraph). I'm just saying that there are much worse and less humane governments around (North Korea anybody? Cuba?).
Comparing CIA to Czech STB is laughable. Has CIA ever run concentration camps? Where people worked in uranium mines? To sell uranium to USSR?
Spied on people? Give me a break. Do you have a clue what consequences it had for the people involved? If they had relatives still in the Czech rep. they lost their jobs, their kids weren't allowed to go to Universities. The fact is that you British (just guessing that you are) live in such a sheltered world it's remarkable. If you lived in a Commnist country for 9 years you'd know better.
BUT, my original point was that the US has no better (or worse) moral grounding than the UN for anything.
liberal democracies and capitalism tend to co-exist in the western world, they are not dependent on one another - lots of brutal dictatorships are capitalist by nature.
That is true. You're not seeing the whole relation IMHO. Can you name one liberal democracy, that has other than capitalist system to run trade and production?
(capitalism in the vague sense, e.g. France, China count, but not, say North Korea).
(as for the term liberal democracy I assume we take that in a weak sense, so that say US and UK qualify, but not say Iran).
I know adoption of free software could help a lot of people in a lot of ways, but let's face it: the US has a _lot_ of misguided foreign policies (e.g the way they deal with countries producing illegal drugs in South America, not even getting into the whole war on terror thing).
On the other hand I'm not sure that UN has the position or moral authority free software want's to be associate with. Take for example that only last year Jan Kavan (former Czech foreign minister) used to be the chairman of UN. Mr Kavan was convinced of lying by a British court of justice. He also work for STB (Czech equiv. of KGB) and spied on people who fled to the UK from the communist Czechoslovakia.
My point is that just the fact that US has a misguided policy does not mean that what UN is doing would be in the best interest of everyone. Dodgy people who are mainly intrested in driving their agenda are involved in the UN. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
What's even more important IMHO, is that if the community wants to redesign or do a major change in the graphics subsystem layer, it should be done NOW, before Linux desktop becomes widely used. Just look at the serial and parallel ports at the back of your computer. Once something is widely used it will probably outlive us.
No really, XFree86 situation seems to be a mess at the moment, let's hope that interested parties (developers from KDE, GNOME, QT, Mandrake, RedHat, IBM etc.) will use it to reach a consensus on the whole desktop thing. It's now or never.
I think parent is right in the sense that it will use WINE one way or another. Maybe they can pay CrossWeavers enough to make the release CrossOver Office under LGPL. I can see why IBM could believe this will work out financially for them in the long run, because they are quickly becoming established as THE Linux provider for big businesses.
Besides one can argue, that running things trough wine is not really emulation in the sense of CPU emulation. It's almost like when WinXP are keeping around old Win 95 API just to be backward compatible. Wine applications usually work pretty damn fast, once they do actually work.
On the other hand, for most of us running MS Office on Linux defeats the point of not having our data locked in by a proprietary software vendor.
Even when I switched to Linux 6 years ago it wasn't in spite of MS Office, it was because MS Office in the sense that after Word made lots of my work dissapear completely one too many times, I started thinking that there must be some other way of creating formatted text.
I looked into LyX and later LaTeX (after trying to do it all in HTML for a while) and I figured out that using these is actually easier on Linux than on Windows. Then again, that's just me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to imply that Office on Linux won't be great for mass adoption of Linux, I'm just saying that you still have the disadvantage of having to buy MS Office, just to _read_ things _you_ have written.
The only issue I have with India as a "doctors" country is the poor record they have on transplants. I've read (sorry don't remember the source, try google), that many poor Indians are willing to sell their (or even their children's) kidney's just to get some cash. And the article went on about how some of the poor and unimportant people that no-one would miss are used as cheap and reliable sources of hearts and liver for transplants.
So yes, joint operations are fine, I'd be vary of the ethical consequences of getting a cheap transplant in India.
On the other hand if any of you lot have lost jobs due to outsourcing, what a great way to get even, "Kill Bill style".
Also relate is the article in last week's Sunday Times (English ones) about English people going to Budapest to have their teeth fixed for a fraction of the cost.
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains.
Possibly, eh? I'd say certainly. I'd be willing to bet my life on the fact the ethanol _certainly_ takes more energy to make than it contains. Otherwise we'd just be making ethanol to solve world's energy problems.
The question is where is this energy comming from? If it's the sun then fine. However I'm not sure how would they distill ethanol from corn, without using fossil fuels to heat the distillation apparatus. Maybe that has been solved using solar panels (you only need less that 100C so it's not impossible).
Another problem, as others have pointed out is the water needed to plant all the corn. Salt free water does not come out of nowhere and diverting rivers is a dangerous bussiness. Just try I'm feeling lucky on "Caspian Sea".
So it's definitely a tremendous achievement, but we're still far from having replaced fossil fuels. My guess is that effective and cheap solar panels will actually be the thing to use. That way places like Saudi Arabia don't go out of bussiness once their oil runs out; they'll export electricity.
Oh come on, dig a bit deeper (I know that on slashdot it's still popular to shout QT IS PROPRIETARY, but that's just not true. Repeating it over and over agin won't make it true either!):
Qt/Mac competition promotes the creation of software for a proprietary toolkit
Qt/Mac is _dually licensed_ under _GPL_ and a _proprietary_ license. Mac Qt/GPL is for developing _free_ apps for Mac. Similarly as with Qt/X11. Yes Darwin and most of MacOS X sitting above is proprietary, but that doesn't matter, because if someone develops something _original_ and _useful_ for the GPL part of the competition, it will be easy to port to Linux (or would you rather if I said GNU/Linux?).
I don't see anything "frivolous" about a G5--its performance is roughly comparable to that of modern desktop PCs. It has a particularly stylish case design, but that's all.
Exactly, you said it yourself, performance comparable to modern PC, stylish desigh, what about the _price_ though? That's what I call frivolous. Buying a Jaguar instead of Honda, or B&O stereo instead of Sony, is similarly frivolous. But I _never_ even hinted that it's silly to do so, I didn't mean to suggest that it's not something I wouldn't ever do, either. My sole point was that getting G5 is a great price, because there are not that many developers who own one already.
Sorry, but with this logic, there would never be any Linux or GNU software. Since Linux and GNU is here, you argument must be wrong. Why?
When someone writes something to release under GPL then he does it other things than profit (exercise, to show of..) so if he wins he basically gets something for nothing (the G5) and a bit of fame on top of it.
When you submit a commercial Qt application then I guess you'll be able to sell it anyway, for profit _maybe_. Now getting something as frivolous as Apple G5 is nice, since most rational people realise that they don't really need a G5 and so won't buy it.
The toughest competion might be the "best ported X11/Qt app" since this group that ported konqueror and effectively KDE will be silly not to submit it...
Besides with outsourcing to India the $100/h programming days are over anyway, so once you start counting $10/h or maybe $1/h... you'll get radically different numbers.
Not _necessarily_, the term "X windows" has been around for a while, Xerox engineers have probably been calling that GUI element a window, not to mention Apple. Since technical terms are often not translated it still remains a generic term.
It's bit like trying to trademark the word "Petrol" for a combustion engine based car. It's simple a common word when used in certain context.
In all honesty I don't really care whether its AAC or WMA. I prefer mp3s for a couple of reasons: Anyone can play them on their PC People's old mp3 players are happy with them 192kbits gives me all the quality I can hear
Yes I know that the patents are annoying but that's not come to bite me yet. I shall see. Also I know that I won't find an online store selling mp3s, but I still only buy CDs since, they're not all that much more expensive, you get the album artwork and they look nice on a shelf (I still have them on a computer, since it makes searching faster).
Btw. has everyone seen the mini iPod on Apple's website yet? I wonder what the UK price will be and also when Apple makes it officially compatible with Linux.
IBM & Intel won't just throw all this money away would they. I think what this means is:
We're pretty damn sure that Linux is clean. You can be sure too, because if you get sued we'll pay the legal costs for the time being, but since we know that you (we, Linux) will win in the end, SCO will have to pay and so it won't cost us a dime.
And so our Linux bussiness can roll on. It's more than PR. It's saying we'll win.
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Sorry, I'm not making fun of you and I don't think I missed your point either.
All I wanted to say that you're right, that there are sometimes cases when even what is what in nested for loops gets confusing and then it's useful to choose proper names even for the iterators (counters, whatever one calls them).
True, I couldn't agree more! Especially if you have ever tried to speed up multiplication big matricies, by saving the second matrix transposed in the computer memory? That way the read ahead into L1 (and L2) caches that many CPU architectures use is used efficiently. Otherwise the CPU reads ahead the row, but we're really going down columns and so the main memory has to be accessed all the time instead of the fast CPU caches.
Judging by the scope of these variables and the fact that they seem to be docummented right at the top, I don't think anyone could have an issue with that.
In fact, sometimes explaining what a variable means and then using just a one letter name is much more helpful than names like "thisOneINeedToDoThisBecauseOfThat".
Just think of the use of "i" in for loops, no one in the right set of mind would use something like "loopCounter".
It's a bit like in PDE theory, if you use t, then you don't have to bother specifying that t belongs to [0,T] and that it's time - everyone expects that.
I couldn't agree more. As much as Microsoft does have a monopoly, this does not make sense. Maybe they should be ordered to make it easy for OEMs to include any media player they want.
But then the next service pack would probably revert this... all sorts of problems.
Besides I have a little sympathy for Real, QuickTime etc. because I'm sure that once they'll be in they'd try to be every inch as monopolistic as Microsoft.
Maybe a better approach would be to order that Microsoft has to release interoperability specifications for any data format they use. And make sure that unlike in the US, this ruling can be used by Microsoft's biggest rivals, which means Linux, which means that people could use it specifically in GPL software.
Who said those jobs are "high paid"? Maybe they were reasonably high paid in the US, but these jobs are going to India specifically because they are not high paid there.
High paid is not as relative as you're trying to suggest. If my job pays for nice accomodation, decent food and holiady, maybe a car that is high paid. Programming jobs are high paid (as in salary buys reasonable basket of goods) both in the US and in India. It's just that this basket costs a lot less in India.
It would seem reasonable to at least attempt to establish a minimum global standard of living to mitigate the race to the bottom.
What evidince do you have for suggesting there is race to the bottom? There will be an equilibrium eventually, in the same way as if you have a hot piece of metal and cold piece of metal then eventually the whole piece will have the same temperature. Have you ever noticed, that both the Heat Equation and Black Scholes equations are very similar?
Otherwise, outsourcing becomes slave labor by another name (no health benefits, no job security, no wage leverage). How much difference does it make that the slaves' choices are so limited that they are willing slaves.
That's just emotional rubbish now. I call people working for Nike factories in the 3rd World slaves but not programmers. Have you read any of the previously mentioned articles about what benefits it bring to whole (albeit relatively small) communities in India?
Think about it. If the entire employment of the US is outsourced (other than politicians, lawyers, doctors, nurses, hair dressers, and food preparation workers), there isn't going to be much of a market for stocks among the peons.
Yes, do as you say _think_ about it! But try to take it a step further. The scenario you've described is not that likely to happen, for a simple reason and that is: India won't be cheap forever! The Indian programmers will eventually start demanding better healthcare, education for the kids etc. Whether they pay for it themselves or the government taxes their income more does not really matter. The point is that it will evolve in some stable state, where the Indians will be as expensive as Americans. Want an example: Check out what's happening in Eastern Europe skilled workforce used to be dirt cheap there and is still probably cheaper than most Europe and e.g. in Prague the difference is becoming rather negligible.
Of course this might involve loss of income in America. But given the current situation, where couple of hundred million Americans consume rather bug share of worlds wealth, now that can't last forever can it?
The problem you're facing is to decide between being selfish and saying "all high paid jobs belong to us". Or being reasonable and saying, well acually the Indians deserve their share as well. Look up older Slashdot coverage of the topic to see that they're not working in sweatshops and that it's the Indians who benefit in the first place.
Of course you can resort to protectionism like you have with US and EU agricultural industry. Thirld world farmers can't export their cheap goods, because ours are far too subsidised. Furthermore EU and US dumps their produce in their market, below the production value, thus driving locals out of bussiness. See http://kickaas.typepad.com/ to get an idea of the outcome of protectionism.
Somehow, I have the feeling that you have never been in charge of anything than your home network.
... then you'll find it hard to persuade anyone to bless an upgrade.
Sorry that's just my impression, but a matter of fact is that IT managers don't allow willy/nilly upgrades. In fact the chances are that in real life, you're managing something that was not designed by you. So you have to put up with whatever is there. And if it works... sort of
Same goes for coding; you take over project someone else has started and it might well be that you'll find yourself learning COBOL. You think that writing a CPU simulator in Java is stupid and inefficient; who cares we want it to run faster and you do whatever is needed to make that happen. That's life.
Ever seen an S390? Do you know how much IBM charges for fixing these? Do you have an idea how slow they are? But just taking the risk of upgrading to something new usually isn't worth it in real life.
Btw. he wasn't giving any advice on running a network, just a book review.
I was just thinking today, as I was writing this, that I should try to clarify how to use apostrophes properly!
The link you have sent me, however is not as helpful as I expected it will be when I first looked at it. In fact not only is it unhelpful, it is rude!
Besides I only slipped with "window's driver's writer's" where it should have been "writers". That's not that bad by American (and Slashdot) standarts is it? Besides, English is not my first language anyway (but I make spelling and grammar mistakes in Czech as well, it must be that I'm more concentrating on what I say, not how I say it).
Actually I'm glad that Intel has done at least as much as making it compatible. Shouldn't we at least be glad for this? I mean if they put a bit of marketing spin on what they have done, fine it will go away.
Imagine the mess though, if they decided, "ok we're going to make our instruction set just a little differnt and then use our dominance in the market to win over AMD." It would mean more work for hardware designers (I know PCI bus should take care, but you still need to test), kernel developers, window's driver's writer's, distributors and you and me, because we'll have even a harder time shopping for hardware.
I'm pretty certain that MBAs have been considering the above option. This is a compromise and people have to learn live in a world that is not ideal and thus full of compromises.
Oh dear, this thread really exposes the state of the Slashdot community: Grand-grandparent can't use adverbs properly, grandparent makes a typo, while correcting someone's grammer and finally the parent:
:-)
I assume it's not a typographical error.
shows that he has little clue about the fact, that typography is about designing thing containg text in such a way, that makes them aesthetically pleasing.
The question now is, of course, what have I screwed up?
Sorry guys I was just trying to make a not too great joke. I clearly failed, being moderated as interesting! What I said was not interesting it's mainly rubbish, as you are mostly correctly pointing out.
By what standard is Britain successful and France strictly unsuccessful?
Well actually to answer this one: not overrun by Germans in the 1st and 2nd World Wars? Spreading their language so that it became _the_ language to know outside your own country? Think about it: I'm Czech and I can speak reasonable German. But I talk to my German friends in English, because overall it's easier. I talk to my Spanish friends in English and not say French. Heck I even talk to Polish people in English even though Czech & Polish are so similar that people actually understand each other when they speak slowly.
Other than Cameroons (Kamerun), Caroline Islands (Karolinen), German East Africa, German New Guinea, German South West Africa, Kiautschou, Mariana Islands (Marianen), Marshall Islands, Samoa, and Togo.
Compare this to Canada, India (that included Pakistan and Bangladesh), Australia, New Zealnd, Iraq, Iran and Hong Kong. (should have said "Germans never managed to colonise _almost_ anyone, or maybe "Germans who didn't even manage to colonise anyone at the time, almost surely" depending whether people prefer probability terminology or integration theory terminology).
Of course, it doesn't hurt to colonize numerous less powerfull nations, systematically remove all profit and natural resources, then "benevolently" grant said colonies their independence when everything of value is gone and they're no longer profitable to the empire. Just ask the Indians and north Africans . . .
:-) Not to mention the Germans who didn't even manage to colonise anyone at the time.
This still compares favourably with countries like France and Spain that did the same thing and didn't become sucessful
I'd say Sweden has pretty much a state run economy, but definitely counts as a democracy in the rules you set.
Sweden is a democracy, no doubt about that. They also have a huge welfare state and lot of state owned enterprises. To further support your point I have to admit that in Sweden it's the government that is spending 57% of GDP (source: Federal dep. of finance; OECD). That's still some 43% left to spend by the private sector, not to mention that the government is also getting the benefits of the free marker (e.g. cometetion driving down costs - yeah in theory, but it usually does work).
I'd see Iran as a democracy (abeit far from perfect) as well btw, the fact that the political struggle that is going on there can happen at all is proof enough for that.
I don't see a country where some non-elected authority (some ayatollah in Iran's case) can decide who's allowd to stand in an election and who's not. It was a common practice in the former Soviet satelite states that they held elections every couple of years but the Communist party had to approve of all the candidates. I wouldn't call those countries democratic. But that may be just me.
Also, there is a lot more to liberal democracy than just elections. For example independent and free media (Russia seems to failing that one) and reasonably just and effective courts.
(oh, and realize that in the USA you are getting a very discolored picture of Iran)
I wouldn't know what picture of Iran are the people in the USA getting. I don't live anywhere nearer the US than most Europeans. Anyway, I gave you my reasons for disqualifying Iran, you may have your reasons for not considering my criteria relevant.
The US is every bit as dodgy as the rest of the world.
That's a dangerous and blatantly wrong statemnet. It shows that you probably have never seen the darker side of a totalitarian regime. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that the US are any good (read the parent post, first paragraph). I'm just saying that there are much worse and less humane governments around (North Korea anybody? Cuba?).
Comparing CIA to Czech STB is laughable. Has CIA ever run concentration camps? Where people worked in uranium mines? To sell uranium to USSR?
Spied on people? Give me a break. Do you have a clue what consequences it had for the people involved? If they had relatives still in the Czech rep. they lost their jobs, their kids weren't allowed to go to Universities. The fact is that you British (just guessing that you are) live in such a sheltered world it's remarkable. If you lived in a Commnist country for 9 years you'd know better.
BUT, my original point was that the US has no better (or worse) moral grounding than the UN for anything.
liberal democracies and capitalism tend to co-exist in the western world, they are not dependent on one another - lots of brutal dictatorships are capitalist by nature.
That is true. You're not seeing the whole relation IMHO. Can you name one liberal democracy, that has other than capitalist system to run trade and production?
(capitalism in the vague sense, e.g. France, China count, but not, say North Korea).
(as for the term liberal democracy I assume we take that in a weak sense, so that say US and UK qualify, but not say Iran).
I know adoption of free software could help a lot of people in a lot of ways, but let's face it: the US has a _lot_ of misguided foreign policies (e.g the way they deal with countries producing illegal drugs in South America, not even getting into the whole war on terror thing).
On the other hand I'm not sure that UN has the position or moral authority free software want's to be associate with. Take for example that only last year Jan Kavan (former Czech foreign minister) used to be the chairman of UN. Mr Kavan was convinced of lying by a British court of justice. He also work for STB (Czech equiv. of KGB) and spied on people who fled to the UK from the communist Czechoslovakia.
My point is that just the fact that US has a misguided policy does not mean that what UN is doing would be in the best interest of everyone. Dodgy people who are mainly intrested in driving their agenda are involved in the UN. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
What's even more important IMHO, is that if the community wants to redesign or do a major change in the graphics subsystem layer, it should be done NOW, before Linux desktop becomes widely used. Just look at the serial and parallel ports at the back of your computer. Once something is widely used it will probably outlive us.
No really, XFree86 situation seems to be a mess at the moment, let's hope that interested parties (developers from KDE, GNOME, QT, Mandrake, RedHat, IBM etc.) will use it to reach a consensus on the whole desktop thing. It's now or never.
I think parent is right in the sense that it will use WINE one way or another. Maybe they can pay CrossWeavers enough to make the release CrossOver Office under LGPL. I can see why IBM could believe this will work out financially for them in the long run, because they are quickly becoming established as THE Linux provider for big businesses.
Besides one can argue, that running things trough wine is not really emulation in the sense of CPU emulation. It's almost like when WinXP are keeping around old Win 95 API just to be backward compatible. Wine applications usually work pretty damn fast, once they do actually work.
On the other hand, for most of us running MS Office on Linux defeats the point of not having our data locked in by a proprietary software vendor.
Even when I switched to Linux 6 years ago it wasn't in spite of MS Office, it was because MS Office in the sense that after Word made lots of my work dissapear completely one too many times, I started thinking that there must be some other way of creating formatted text.
I looked into LyX and later LaTeX (after trying to do it all in HTML for a while) and I figured out that using these is actually easier on Linux than on Windows. Then again, that's just me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to imply that Office on Linux won't be great for mass adoption of Linux, I'm just saying that you still have the disadvantage of having to buy MS Office, just to _read_ things _you_ have written.
The only issue I have with India as a "doctors" country is the poor record they have on transplants. I've read (sorry don't remember the source, try google), that many poor Indians are willing to sell their (or even their children's) kidney's just to get some cash. And the article went on about how some of the poor and unimportant people that no-one would miss are used as cheap and reliable sources of hearts and liver for transplants.
So yes, joint operations are fine, I'd be vary of the ethical consequences of getting a cheap transplant in India.
On the other hand if any of you lot have lost jobs due to outsourcing, what a great way to get even, "Kill Bill style".
Also relate is the article in last week's Sunday Times (English ones) about English people going to Budapest to have their teeth fixed for a fraction of the cost.
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains.
Possibly, eh? I'd say certainly. I'd be willing to bet my life on the fact the ethanol _certainly_ takes more energy to make than it contains. Otherwise we'd just be making ethanol to solve world's energy problems.
The question is where is this energy comming from? If it's the sun then fine. However I'm not sure how would they distill ethanol from corn, without using fossil fuels to heat the distillation apparatus. Maybe that has been solved using solar panels (you only need less that 100C so it's not impossible).
Another problem, as others have pointed out is the water needed to plant all the corn. Salt free water does not come out of nowhere and diverting rivers is a dangerous bussiness. Just try I'm feeling lucky on "Caspian Sea".
So it's definitely a tremendous achievement, but we're still far from having replaced fossil fuels. My guess is that effective and cheap solar panels will actually be the thing to use. That way places like Saudi Arabia don't go out of bussiness once their oil runs out; they'll export electricity.
Oh come on, dig a bit deeper (I know that on slashdot it's still popular to shout QT IS PROPRIETARY, but that's just not true. Repeating it over and over agin won't make it true either!):
Qt/Mac competition promotes the creation of software for a proprietary toolkit
Qt/Mac is _dually licensed_ under _GPL_ and a _proprietary_ license. Mac Qt/GPL is for developing _free_ apps for Mac. Similarly as with Qt/X11. Yes Darwin and most of MacOS X sitting above is proprietary, but that doesn't matter, because if someone develops something _original_ and _useful_ for the GPL part of the competition, it will be easy to port to Linux (or would you rather if I said GNU/Linux?).
I don't see anything "frivolous" about a G5--its performance is roughly comparable to that of modern desktop PCs. It has a particularly stylish case design, but that's all.
Exactly, you said it yourself, performance comparable to modern PC, stylish desigh, what about the _price_ though? That's what I call frivolous. Buying a Jaguar instead of Honda, or B&O stereo instead of Sony, is similarly frivolous. But I _never_ even hinted that it's silly to do so, I didn't mean to suggest that it's not something I wouldn't ever do, either. My sole point was that getting G5 is a great price, because there are not that many developers who own one already.
Sorry, but with this logic, there would never be any Linux or GNU software. Since Linux and GNU is here, you argument must be wrong. Why?
... you'll get radically different numbers.
When someone writes something to release under GPL then he does it other things than profit (exercise, to show of..) so if he wins he basically gets something for nothing (the G5) and a bit of fame on top of it.
When you submit a commercial Qt application then I guess you'll be able to sell it anyway, for profit _maybe_. Now getting something as frivolous as Apple G5 is nice, since most rational people realise that they don't really need a G5 and so won't buy it.
The toughest competion might be the "best ported X11/Qt app" since this group that ported konqueror and effectively KDE will be silly not to submit it...
Besides with outsourcing to India the $100/h programming days are over anyway, so once you start counting $10/h or maybe $1/h
Not _necessarily_, the term "X windows" has been around for a while, Xerox engineers have probably been calling that GUI element a window, not to mention Apple. Since technical terms are often not translated it still remains a generic term.
It's bit like trying to trademark the word "Petrol" for a combustion engine based car. It's simple a common word when used in certain context.
In all honesty I don't really care whether its AAC or WMA. I prefer mp3s for a couple of reasons:
Anyone can play them on their PC
People's old mp3 players are happy with them
192kbits gives me all the quality I can hear
Yes I know that the patents are annoying but that's not come to bite me yet. I shall see. Also I know that I won't find an online store selling mp3s, but I still only buy CDs since, they're not all that much more expensive, you get the album artwork and they look nice on a shelf (I still have them on a computer, since it makes searching faster).
Btw. has everyone seen the mini iPod on Apple's website yet? I wonder what the UK price will be and also when Apple makes it officially compatible with Linux.
IBM & Intel won't just throw all this money away would they. I think what this means is:
We're pretty damn sure that Linux is clean. You can be sure too, because if you get sued we'll pay the legal costs for the time being, but since we know that you (we, Linux) will win in the end, SCO will have to pay and so it won't cost us a dime.
And so our Linux bussiness can roll on. It's more than PR. It's saying we'll win.