You haven't described Wal-Mart as much as most capitalists today. The goal of every organization seems to be solely to drive down prices. Wal_Mart has just grown to the point where it's most effective at it.
The problem isn't walmart per se as much as how we've constructed the system. It focusses solely on a very small part of the complex system known as an economy, an individual corporation's costs. It rewards companies that do this - Wal-Mart, Dell, etc. The problem is this isn't good for the long term health of the overall system.
Henry Ford years ago knew that the best way to make his cars sell was to have overall system health. The efficiencies of the assembly line allowed him to raise wages, as he thought having people able to afford his cars was a good thing. The Snapper guy saw the same, the long term health of his company, and made a business decision that he felt was best for longer term health. I wish him well, he doesn't have the advantages that Ford did at his time, and lots of disadvantages.
I think it's connotation is more "solely as communication devices". They kind of had a point, if it's a communication device, it's a commodity. A game platform gives them some method of differentiation, which really means a way of charging more cash for stuff.
PayPal started on PDAs, so returns to roots kinda
on
PayPal Goes Mobile
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· Score: 1
The original PayPal was a Palm app, that let you beam money back and forth between your friends. Say bob picked up the bill, mary could beam 3 bucks to him to pick up her Latte. I think I have $5 of money beamed to me someplace i can't pick up.
The problem it was too clunky. You could get real money, but you'd have to have a computer, connected to the palm, and the internet. You'd upload your transactions, backing it with your credit card account.
Eventually PayPal learned that the clunkiest part was getting money in and out, whetehr or you had a Plam or not (making the accoutn was a small pain) so if you kept your money in the system, have all the small transactions just be virtual, until once a month get real money, you'd be on to something. and they made a hell of a lot of cash doing it. witht he new mobile technologies (1 bitdepth WAP phones, no java or other languages, were cutting edge then) i think they have a better shot at the interface problems now.
RANT #1 I always think it's weird, something about the art and craft of getting better code out gets little notice, but some FireFox alpha (which is feature INcomplete, really only for extension developers) gets 200,000 messages. Mabe a third of them will be flames "(IE/FireFox/Whatever) is so buggy, you suck unless you switch to (whatever)". But tools to debug these get ignored. How much work is going into KDE vs GNOME, and even a group that wants to fork KDE (deity() help us).
RANT #2 I really think we're reaching some of the limits of the current programming models. Think of how many states there are in a 1GB machine? 2^(2^30) is a lot of states. This is one of the best things about Java, trying to restrict the number of states, pointers massive complicate the state diagram, allow stray code from a totally unrelated segment fuck up yours if there is a bug. But we have the same 1 segment architecture that back with monolithic apps fitting into 10Kb or so. The security threats are radically different (stand alone machines to always on TCP/IP connctions) but we haven't isolated code much better, W^X just now making it's way into modern UNIXen. Why the hell do you have execution state (return address on the stack) next to data that can be overwritten? Maybe back in the old days of register poor architectures, but we shouldn't have that now. But there's so much code out there, can't rewrite it all.
If i link a library in, i should have a defined set of things that it can do. It should have it's own sandbox, and only do the things it specifies. If it does anything different, terminate the app and not let it do something crazy. I'm sure modern MMUs could be programmed to subsegment like this, but we don't.
They already do, botnets have been rented out for both Spam and DDoS attacks for some time. In fact, the price kept going down, since it was so easy to set up a botnet.
It will make a difference. The scenario i see is this: IF OpenBSD goes away, code stays out there. But the main driving force has always been Theo. Without a single direction, OpenBSD, as we know it today, fizzles out.
Immediately a couple groups try to pick up the code, effectively forking it. Not much happens for a while; it takes a while to get your head around an entire OS. But slowly some changes occur, maybe one or two security holes pop up. If so, people talk about how OpenBSD has lost it's way. People drift away.
Either way, as OpenBSD stops, the world doesn't. New peripherals come out, but no new drivers. Features that people want, like virtualization never get implemented.
The code exists, but becomes less and less relevant. It's still valid for a point in time, but worthless for now. Just as Linux.95 wouldn't do much on modern hardware, OpenBSD becomes useful for books and not much else.
In your statement, s/AJAX/HTML/ yet people still code to IE. If you have 90% of the market, you can code to a single platform, and not lose much.
Microsoft's line in this, is it's server side and the serverside components write client specific markup. They want to be seen as saying "if you want quecker development, use AJAX on ASP.NET, and your client will be fine". Somehow i dobt it.
If you've ever actually seen a Scamp in real life you'd know that Dodge should be sued for vision damage - it was so ugly you'd poke out your own eyes.
It did, in the old days. They rewrote it a long time ago, I think in the jump to Nt 4.0. The userspace command line tools are still BSD based in XP though.
for me, i didn't need anything past Word 95 feature wise, but Word 95 didn't support native scroll wheel, and that sucked. Only cool feature in Word 97 for me.
Surely the Dragonball would be a better choice?:) Not sure if you were joking, but Dragonball was already used. Motorola uses Dragonball for it's 68k embedded line. I never got a Dragonball Z sticker cool enough that i wanted to stick on my Palm IIIxe.
Opera had always been the "good guys" You say this, but give no backup, why are they good and Mozilla guys not? Mozilla.org has given not one but two decent browsers, a XML cross platform GUI, and various build tools to the community. I feel they should get a good guy label as well.
before Firefox came around and stole the limelight. You state this as if it was somehow unfair, as if Firefox was some Johnny come lately with style but no substance. Firefox has been around for a long time as well. It was a branch of of Mozilla (and I'm a long time user, for me it became usable enough for daily use around Mozilla Milestone M-18) started because a lot of the Mozilla developers didn't like the Mozilla interface. Too difficult for the average user to use. So they forked it internally, and eventually became so popular it became the mainline product and now seamonkey (what was once the mozilla suite) is an afterthought. I remember some of the debates from this time, the Mozilla (err, seamonkey?) folks wouldn't listen about any UI issues. They were more interested in cool tech and platform creation. A small group realized a good platform means nothing if people don't want to use it, and that's how Firefox (nee Phoenix) started.
So Opera hasn't been able to take "shortcuts" What shortcuts? If you include Mozilla development Firefox development goes back many years. Even longer if you include the tiem wated on Netscape 5, though that's a little (but not huge) stretch. They created a whole cross platform GUI toolkit, a rendering engine, and various build tools. If anything they've been too ambitious, though the general OpenSource community is better for the tools....Opera has always had [to] make money Yes, this is a huge disadvantage for Opera. As it was for Netscape, who essentially abandoned development because of cash losses, sadly going from being the darling of Wall Street to using accounting tricks to look decent enough to be bought out by companies that were more interested in the value of their name than any tech. This is not Firefox's fault, it is Microsoft's, who set the price that people would pay for a browser to be $0.
and rely on donations until it turned out that searches could actually pay for development, alongside other deals of course. The searches are only a recent addition, if anything, the relationship with AOL sponsoring Mozilla development as a counter to IE is a bigger impact on Mozilla/Phoenix/FireBird/FireFox development. That was always tenuous though, AOL has never been good at integrating acquisitions (look at NullSoft) and ended badly, but it did keep Mozilla going when it needed a couple bucks to sustain it. Netscape itself didn't have the vision to make money on the portal thing. Here they had the tremendous advantage of making the client, but they didn't have the vision to monetize searches. If they did, maybe Netscape would have more developer cash and the landscape would be different. It is a mistake a few people have made.
Opera was also a power user program for many years. It is not until recently that Opera has cleaned up the default user interface to make it easy for newbies to start using it as well. True, much like Mozilla was a power user's program. They both had the same difficulties, Mozilla's being worse since it crashed multiple times per hour.
Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right time, and backed by a massive marketing campaign. Like "steal their limelight" above, you say "steal their thunder" like it was Opera's to own. Mozilla had a long gestation, FireFox had a long gestation where they had to fight for approval in their own community (the suite vs. single browser split) and had two name changes (Phoenix to Firebird to FireFox) to deal with. It wasn't overnight, and it took a few foul starts. Opera never seemed to capitalize.
Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right t
I generally think this every time i see one of these stories. People just don't see the economy as a system, and think they can optimize a portion of it and not have it affect them down the road. I don't know where the faith of "we can make totally self serving decisions at every level and it will in general create a healthy ecosystem" got so deeply ingrained that no one can think of larger issues, but it will harm us in the end.
Henry Ford got this, he realized his employees were his customers, and the people his employees bought services from were his customers, and who they spent money on.. and so on. Buoyed from profits from the revolutionary assembly line, Ford raised salaries, and somehow managed to survive. Ironically, they've gotten so bad at making cars (instead making trucks and buying expensive car companies that serve niche markets) they need to cut jobs now.
And they just released their own 5D, decent camera (the built in anti-shake tech is cool, i hope canon licenses it), but they started too late, wasted too much time on the merger, and have their first generation cams fighting gen 3 and gen 4 cameras from Canon and Nikon. No chance.
Hunh? if you can find ANY new film cameras, ANY, offered in one year, it will be a major surprise. Canon just upgraded several cameras. the Elan7n(30V) was a major upgrade, and the Rebel Ti (eos300v) got a refresh as well. Canon seems to be stable in film, not many new upgrades, mostly using tech developed for the digital market. The elan7n has ETTL-2 from the D20.
I suspect canon and nikon will offer one more digital back for their F lines Only nikon makes the F, and it's called the N in consumer level Cams in the US.
Most Nikon and Canon film bodies have different shapes from one model to the next. Couldn't make a single back, so would be very expensive to manufacture.
There is only one 35mm i know of with a digital back, the Leica R9. The digital back is 5K or so, not something i'd put on a Rebel. The cost is more than a breand new 5D, full frame Digital cam with all new electronics. No use for it here.
If Google is to remain un-evil, maybe it's time for a solar flare to wipe out the records (until the backups can be restored after this is all over). I was reading that (In I think England) that the government can respond to an F.O.I.A. request by stating "well, that would cost too much money for us to find, so you can't have it". It would be asking too much to have the government follow it's own rules and for google to be able to decline the request with this excuse
For me, i'd be missing wide angle lenses (on something less than a $4000 digital camera), low light capabilities (best most cameras can do is 3200, i push to 6400 usually, and 12800 and 25600 on occasion) and B/W film has more of a tonal range (about 8 stops or so for most B/W film, about 5 or 6 stops for a good sensor).
Even if canon came out with a camera tomorrow that fit all that (and I don't think Nikon will, they haven't releasead a 24x36mm sensor yet, Canon is already on 2nd or 3rd generation) it wil be $4000 or so, and i don't think i'll bring it to bars any time soon. My rebel and 50/1.8 mk2 is about $200 total, won't be scared to take it into a bar and drink, i'd leave teh $4000 home out of fear too much to make it useful.
3.1 was a different hell, having to find a Winsock, having various third party ones (anyone else remember Trumpet Winsock?) getting SLIP or PPP on top of that. There were people on the net, just not as many.
1) There are some components that are installed whether or not you click Yes. THis is the basis of the Texas suit - malware installed without consent
2) You now have to drive to return your unwrapped CD to a store that will hassle you about your return. Why isn't there an "in order to play on your computer you will ahve to install software that will alter your computer and give us some control of it" sticker on the box?
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't described Wal-Mart as much as most capitalists today. The goal of every organization seems to be solely to drive down prices. Wal_Mart has just grown to the point where it's most effective at it.
The problem isn't walmart per se as much as how we've constructed the system. It focusses solely on a very small part of the complex system known as an economy, an individual corporation's costs. It rewards companies that do this - Wal-Mart, Dell, etc. The problem is this isn't good for the long term health of the overall system.
Henry Ford years ago knew that the best way to make his cars sell was to have overall system health. The efficiencies of the assembly line allowed him to raise wages, as he thought having people able to afford his cars was a good thing. The Snapper guy saw the same, the long term health of his company, and made a business decision that he felt was best for longer term health. I wish him well, he doesn't have the advantages that Ford did at his time, and lots of disadvantages.
I think the CERN webserver predated even NCSA. It never got lots of traction. Any one know the timelines better?
I think it's connotation is more "solely as communication devices". They kind of had a point, if it's a communication device, it's a commodity. A game platform gives them some method of differentiation, which really means a way of charging more cash for stuff.
The original PayPal was a Palm app, that let you beam money back and forth between your friends. Say bob picked up the bill, mary could beam 3 bucks to him to pick up her Latte. I think I have $5 of money beamed to me someplace i can't pick up.
The problem it was too clunky. You could get real money, but you'd have to have a computer, connected to the palm, and the internet. You'd upload your transactions, backing it with your credit card account.
Eventually PayPal learned that the clunkiest part was getting money in and out, whetehr or you had a Plam or not (making the accoutn was a small pain) so if you kept your money in the system, have all the small transactions just be virtual, until once a month get real money, you'd be on to something. and they made a hell of a lot of cash doing it. witht he new mobile technologies (1 bitdepth WAP phones, no java or other languages, were cutting edge then) i think they have a better shot at the interface problems now.
RANT #1
I always think it's weird, something about the art and craft of getting better code out gets little notice, but some FireFox alpha (which is feature INcomplete, really only for extension developers) gets 200,000 messages. Mabe a third of them will be flames "(IE/FireFox/Whatever) is so buggy, you suck unless you switch to (whatever)". But tools to debug these get ignored. How much work is going into KDE vs GNOME, and even a group that wants to fork KDE (deity() help us).
RANT #2
I really think we're reaching some of the limits of the current programming models. Think of how many states there are in a 1GB machine? 2^(2^30) is
a lot of states. This is one of the best things about Java, trying to restrict the number of states, pointers massive complicate the state diagram, allow stray code from a totally unrelated segment fuck up yours if there is a bug. But we have the same 1 segment architecture that back with monolithic apps fitting into 10Kb or so. The security threats are radically different (stand alone machines to always on TCP/IP connctions) but we haven't isolated code much better, W^X just now making it's way into modern UNIXen. Why the hell do you have execution state (return address on the stack) next to data that can be overwritten? Maybe back in the old days of register poor architectures, but we shouldn't have that now. But there's so much code out there, can't rewrite it all.
If i link a library in, i should have a defined set of things that it can do. It should have it's own sandbox, and only do the things it specifies. If it does anything different, terminate the app and not let it do something crazy. I'm sure modern MMUs could be programmed to subsegment like this, but we don't.
OK, rant over.
They already do, botnets have been rented out for both Spam and DDoS attacks for some time. In fact, the price kept going down, since it was so easy to set up a botnet.
It will make a difference. The scenario i see is this:
.95 wouldn't do much on modern hardware, OpenBSD becomes useful for books and not much else.
IF OpenBSD goes away, code stays out there. But the main driving force has always been Theo. Without a single direction, OpenBSD, as we know it today, fizzles out.
Immediately a couple groups try to pick up the code, effectively forking it. Not much happens for a while; it takes a while to get your head around an entire OS. But slowly some changes occur, maybe one or two security holes pop up. If so, people talk about how OpenBSD has lost it's way. People drift away.
Either way, as OpenBSD stops, the world doesn't. New peripherals come out, but no new drivers. Features that people want, like virtualization never get implemented.
The code exists, but becomes less and less relevant. It's still valid for a point in time, but worthless for now. Just as Linux
In your statement, s/AJAX/HTML/ yet people still code to IE. If you have 90% of the market, you can code to a single platform, and not lose much.
Microsoft's line in this, is it's server side and the serverside components write client specific markup. They want to be seen as saying "if you want quecker development, use AJAX on ASP.NET, and your client will be fine". Somehow i dobt it.
If you've ever actually seen a Scamp in real life you'd know that Dodge should be sued for vision damage - it was so ugly you'd poke out your own eyes.
It did, in the old days. They rewrote it a long time ago, I think in the jump to Nt 4.0. The userspace command line tools are still BSD based in XP though.
for me, i didn't need anything past Word 95 feature wise, but Word 95 didn't support native scroll wheel, and that sucked. Only cool feature in Word 97 for me.
Surely the Dragonball would be a better choice? :)
Not sure if you were joking, but Dragonball was already used. Motorola uses Dragonball for it's 68k embedded line. I never got a Dragonball Z sticker cool enough that i wanted to stick on my Palm IIIxe.
Slashdot to offer dupe protection as well?
Opera had always been the "good guys"
...Opera has always had [to] make money
You say this, but give no backup, why are they good and Mozilla guys not? Mozilla.org has given not one but two decent browsers, a XML cross platform GUI, and various build tools to the community. I feel they should get a good guy label as well.
before Firefox came around and stole the limelight.
You state this as if it was somehow unfair, as if Firefox was some Johnny come lately with style but no substance. Firefox has been around for a long time as well. It was a branch of of Mozilla (and I'm a long time user, for me it became usable enough for daily use around Mozilla Milestone M-18) started because a lot of the Mozilla developers didn't like the Mozilla interface. Too difficult for the average user to use. So they forked it internally, and eventually became so popular it became the mainline product and now seamonkey (what was once the mozilla suite) is an afterthought. I remember some of the debates from this time, the Mozilla (err, seamonkey?) folks wouldn't listen about any UI issues. They were more interested in cool tech and platform creation. A small group realized a good platform means nothing if people don't want to use it, and that's how Firefox (nee Phoenix) started.
So Opera hasn't been able to take "shortcuts"
What shortcuts? If you include Mozilla development Firefox development goes back many years. Even longer if you include the tiem wated on Netscape 5, though that's a little (but not huge) stretch. They created a whole cross platform GUI toolkit, a rendering engine, and various build tools. If anything they've been too ambitious, though the general OpenSource community is better for the tools.
Yes, this is a huge disadvantage for Opera. As it was for Netscape, who essentially abandoned development because of cash losses, sadly going from being the darling of Wall Street to using accounting tricks to look decent enough to be bought out by companies that were more interested in the value of their name than any tech. This is not Firefox's fault, it is Microsoft's, who set the price that people would pay for a browser to be $0.
and rely on donations until it turned out that searches could actually pay for development, alongside other deals of course.
The searches are only a recent addition, if anything, the relationship with AOL sponsoring Mozilla development as a counter to IE is a bigger impact on Mozilla/Phoenix/FireBird/FireFox development. That was always tenuous though, AOL has never been good at integrating acquisitions (look at NullSoft) and ended badly, but it did keep Mozilla going when it needed a couple bucks to sustain it.
Netscape itself didn't have the vision to make money on the portal thing. Here they had the tremendous advantage of making the client, but they didn't have the vision to monetize searches. If they did, maybe Netscape would have more developer cash and the landscape would be different. It is a mistake a few people have made.
Opera was also a power user program for many years. It is not until recently that Opera has cleaned up the default user interface to make it easy for newbies to start using it as well.
True, much like Mozilla was a power user's program. They both had the same difficulties, Mozilla's being worse since it crashed multiple times per hour.
Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right time, and backed by a massive marketing campaign.
Like "steal their limelight" above, you say "steal their thunder" like it was Opera's to own. Mozilla had a long gestation, FireFox had a long gestation where they had to fight for approval in their own community (the suite vs. single browser split) and had two name changes (Phoenix to Firebird to FireFox) to deal with. It wasn't overnight, and it took a few foul starts. Opera never seemed to capitalize.
Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right t
I generally think this every time i see one of these stories. People just don't see the economy as a system, and think they can optimize a portion of it and not have it affect them down the road. I don't know where the faith of "we can make totally self serving decisions at every level and it will in general create a healthy ecosystem" got so deeply ingrained that no one can think of larger issues, but it will harm us in the end.
Henry Ford got this, he realized his employees were his customers, and the people his employees bought services from were his customers, and who they spent money on.. and so on. Buoyed from profits from the revolutionary assembly line, Ford raised salaries, and somehow managed to survive. Ironically, they've gotten so bad at making cars (instead making trucks and buying expensive car companies that serve niche markets) they need to cut jobs now.
"Most slashdot users as well..."
Just saw the ads for Babmi II, is this trip really necessary?
And they just released their own 5D, decent camera (the built in anti-shake tech is cool, i hope canon licenses it), but they started too late, wasted too much time on the merger, and have their first generation cams fighting gen 3 and gen 4 cameras from Canon and Nikon. No chance.
Hunh?
if you can find ANY new film cameras, ANY, offered in one year, it will be a major surprise.
Canon just upgraded several cameras. the Elan7n(30V) was a major upgrade, and the Rebel Ti (eos300v) got a refresh as well. Canon seems to be stable in film, not many new upgrades, mostly using tech developed for the digital market. The elan7n has ETTL-2 from the D20.
I suspect canon and nikon will offer one more digital back for their F lines
Only nikon makes the F, and it's called the N in consumer level Cams in the US.
Most Nikon and Canon film bodies have different shapes from one model to the next. Couldn't make a single back, so would be very expensive to manufacture.
There is only one 35mm i know of with a digital back, the Leica R9. The digital back is 5K or so, not something i'd put on a Rebel. The cost is more than a breand new 5D, full frame Digital cam with all new electronics. No use for it here.
If Google is to remain un-evil, maybe it's time for a solar flare to wipe out the records (until the backups can be restored after this is all over).
I was reading that (In I think England) that the government can respond to an F.O.I.A. request by stating "well, that would cost too much money for us to find, so you can't have it". It would be asking too much to have the government follow it's own rules and for google to be able to decline the request with this excuse
For me, i'd be missing wide angle lenses (on something less than a $4000 digital camera), low light capabilities (best most cameras can do is 3200, i push to 6400 usually, and 12800 and 25600 on occasion) and B/W film has more of a tonal range (about 8 stops or so for most B/W film, about 5 or 6 stops for a good sensor).
Even if canon came out with a camera tomorrow that fit all that (and I don't think Nikon will, they haven't releasead a 24x36mm sensor yet, Canon is already on 2nd or 3rd generation) it wil be $4000 or so, and i don't think i'll bring it to bars any time soon. My rebel and 50/1.8 mk2 is about $200 total, won't be scared to take it into a bar and drink, i'd leave teh $4000 home out of fear too much to make it useful.
3.1 was a different hell, having to find a Winsock, having various third party ones (anyone else remember Trumpet Winsock?) getting SLIP or PPP on top of that. There were people on the net, just not as many.
and me without mod points... ;)
1) There are some components that are installed whether or not you click Yes. THis is the basis of the Texas suit - malware installed without consent
2) You now have to drive to return your unwrapped CD to a store that will hassle you about your return. Why isn't there an "in order to play on your computer you will ahve to install software that will alter your computer and give us some control of it" sticker on the box?
No tech books were ever as clear as A.P.U.E and the Networking books from Stevens. There were giants in the earth in those days.