hot CRTs waste (sp?) energy, it can be measured as heat. but the whole point of the article that you didn't grasp is that these are "cold". Instant-on, they don't require any actual heating for operation, and I doubt (though I don't know) that they'll even get warm in operation.
the word blessed comes from the French word "blesse'" which means "wounded"... as in Christ's wounds. So, saying "bless" is itself a Christian reference.
Um, that's my text. I'm the co-author of the release notes and... would think that I'm allowed to post that here and save a bit of load on our
releases page (not to mention the added convenience for/. readers).
um... posts are supposed to be modded based on what they contain rather than on who wrote them. Your post was identical to what other people would get accused of karma whoring for. You were saving mozilla.org some load? smirk.
but, you were correct to calculate that Slashdot sycophants do mod on the basis of who is famous. That does not make it right, however, so while you win the karma race, you lose the respect of rational readers.
he was using up between 8 and 20 megabits of bandwidth a day? let's see... omigod, that's a minimum of a megabyte! almost a whole floppy! no wonder they caught him.
Re:Cutting off you nose to spite your face
on
The LDP and Debian
·
· Score: 1
I don't want to argue this endlessly:)
but I will point out that you don't exactly quote yourself properly. your original phrasing
No-one likes to write documentation. Writing software is fun. Writing
documentation is boring.
is exactly how we convey in English that something is not cool. "nobody... blah blah" is dismissive.
Re:Cutting off you nose to spite your face
on
The LDP and Debian
·
· Score: 1
And documentation do not scratchg personal itchs simply because docs are made to
teach people things,
teaching and "setting the record straight" are itches to some of us. I participate in Slashdot for that reason.
But I have other itches too, so I don't need to write doc to have a gratifying day. which is nice because I don't perceive that it is respected at all. You phrase your objection to writing doc as "it's no fun" rather than "i'm inadequate, I can't do it". A call for someone to do the shitwork is not a way to get me to do something. I want to hear the part about your inadequacy.
your post is just about completely wrong. you know nothing about econ 101.
A natural monopoly is one that happens due to market forces.
no, all sorts of monopolies can arise due to market forces. "natural monopoly" describes market conditions that cause an inevitable monopoly. this occurs when bigger is cheaper.
so given that you are wrong as soon as you open your mouth, is there any need to refute the rest of what you say? yes.
Now, I'm not saying that such monopolies are necc. a bad thing,
too bad, you should. all monopolies are necessarily a bad thing. go look it up. look up profit maximization, the market clearing price, and dead weight loss. that should get you started.
Re:Cutting off you nose to spite your face
on
The LDP and Debian
·
· Score: 1
I like writing doc. I'm good at it. It's a skill few of you have.
But you don't respect it. I'm a coder, I don't need it, so fuck it, I'm not working on something other people don't respect.
mmmm... you make good points, but you are not exactly correct here. Just because utilty monopolies were granted by the state does not mean that they were not natural monopolies at the time they were created.
Think about it: if I have wires strung all over a neighborhood, total sunk cost, how are you going to justify stringing a second set of wires if I promise to price cut you to death? And in fact, the populace should not rationally be asked to pay for 2 (or more) expensive sets of wires when they simply need 1. Even if we start out with 3 full sets of wired networks competing, over time it makes sense for one company to acquire the others and maintain those wires or (fewer of them) because it's cheaper that way, and cheaper for consumers too... till one company emerges and starts raping them.
The utility sector of the economy is definitely governed by the theory of natural monopoly, regardless of the regulatory enviroment.
So, yes, natural monopolies are fine, iff (if and only if) they are well-regulated.
no, natural monopolies are not fine. The point about natural monopolies from econ 101 is that they are inevitable (because economies of scale make the biggest producer the cheapest), and therefore they require regulation for any hope that the market price will be close to marginal cost. But that regulation is guaranteed to be imperfect (political rather than economic) and somewhat static or at least "behind" and is no substitute for actual competition.
i'm no expert, but this sounds like bull to me.
When a ship's hull is over the horizon, the superstructure of the ship sticks up the most and becomes the first "visible" part. There is no water behind it, and stealth would work to make it invisible. This seems like an advantage. And as to radar waves that bend around the curvature, ok, then the same argument would apply to the radar horizon rather than the visible.
there may be other reasons not to do it, but if radar echos are how you find something, then a lack of radar echoes will be an advantage, perhaps not perfect, if you don't want to be found.
Bankrupt means your time has passed and lets find a way of orderly repaying creditors
not true. the Empire State Building has gone bankrupt dozens and dozens - literally - of times in its life.
the interplay of debt and equity offer the capability to create investments with non-differentiatable payout patterns. Sometimes these make sense. Bankruptcy means that the current equity holders's stake has gone to zero, so their rights dissolve and the debt holders become the new equity holders. All of the assets continue to exist, simply their ownership changes.
Also, Charles Simonyi was chief architect at
Microsoft at the time he created the Hungarian notation (early 80s)
no, he developed Hungarian Notation in the 70s as a small part of his PhD thesis at Xerox PARC. His thesis has a very interesting concept in it: imagine that programming is a game where two programmers are given the same task to work on, independently. They are allowed to communicate before beginning, but not once they start. If they produce identical code, they win big.
The point is that this is exactly how the software industry works: if you and I followed a set of conventions that caused us to generate the same code, we could maintain each others code with no extra effort (and rewriting it would produce the same result again:)
it illustrates what is wrong with perl's "there's more than one way to do it"
Hungarian Notation? Ugh. Spare me the need to be ever so explicit about types. Good programming is all about layers of abstraction. It isn't a "pointer to an object with..." It's a pointer to a DEVICE, damn it! Learn the paradigms and
abstractions before delving into the code.
FYI, it's not your fault, but you learned the wrong version of Hungarian Notation, the one deployed in the Windows API by a bunch of morons at Microsoft.
True Hungarian Notation is exactly about layers of abstraction. Hungarian Notation tells you exactly that it's a pointer to a DEVICE and nothing else. Read Charles Simoni's paper about it In fact, if you read the bit about how traditional variable naming mnemonics tend to create ambiguity of reference, you'll see that Hungarian Notation is much more precise about economically distinguishing between different abstractions like files, file pointers, file handles, filenames, etc. (Simoni, BTW, implemented the first WYSIWYG word processor when he was at Xerox PARC)
I came in here specifically to comment on 80/20, and I searched for it an found your comment.
I totally agree with him on pretty much everything he says, but he's wrong about the details of the 80/20 rule they teach in business school, and it's not a fallacy.
The 80/20 rule is that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. It's true.
It's probably not that interesting because it simply reflects a normal distribution of spending or something, but its useful to keep in mind.
that post you are responding to went into a lot of detail about all the places that files live, and all of the other places that reference those files... do you really think that the existence of a --relocate switch on rpm indicates that the rpm implementors thought through the implications fully... would you run rpm with --relocate on the command line without worrying that it would trash something you didn't anticipate, and with an assuredness that it would work? how many times would you need to put --relocate on the command line to make sure that the lib files didn't overvrite anything, and that the bin files didn't overwrite anything, and that the etc files didn't overwrite anything, and the var files didn't overwrite anything, and the X files didn't overwrite anything. Then, you're sure the app would run? and it would work because you'd manually edit your PATH and your LIBPATH and your MAN path and your... do you really think that the problem is solved?
it's you who is the idiot: if the sweatshops closed, what would those people do? what would their choice be then? they'd have none and many would starve which is exactly what happens in parts of the world with no industry at all.
Yes, it is true that these people could be offered better jobs at higher wages... but by whom? are you willing to put up your money to open a factory that pays higher wages and works people fewer hours? of course, you have no money. but what about daddy's money? why can't you convince daddy how much sense it makes to pay third world people more? So, let's say you did convince daddy to own a factory in the third world...
you could buy an existing factory and just pay those workers more, or
you could open a new factory and hire unemployed people and pay them more, or
you could open a new factory and hire unemployed people and pay them the same low wages... and take the money you saved doing that and hire even more unemployed people
notice that in the third case the maximum number of people would have jobs, and the maximum amount of clothing and/or whatever would be produced, and that extra production could be sold and that money used to hire even more productive people, people who would be learning job skills, etc. In fact if you did this enough, soon you'd have employed all of the unemployed people and then the wage rate would increase on it's own. that's how our economy got to the high wage level it got to.
do you see? 2 wage earners at low wage is better than one wage earner at a high wage... hopefully now you begin to understand why economists all agree on the benefits of globalization. take a course in econ, learn something, and you will stop believing in magic and calling people names.
the ancients built many marvelous things. Archimedes once built a giant mirror that would focus the sun on enemy ships and catch them afire.
could somebody build a scaled down version of Archmedes mirror and mirror this Leonardo bridge site so I can see the pictures? Use wood if you need to.
There is no truth to the rumor that Slashdot is the modern equivalent of the hemlock that Socrates drank.
Netscape with no Javascript punished?
on
WipOut Contest
·
· Score: 2
Strange that nobody here has mentioned it, but I'm one of the people who runs Netscape with Javascript turned off--yes, I put my browser where my mouth is with regard to monopoly, security, and invasive marketing--and the site explicitly disses us:
Note to Netscape Users
I am sorry, but the design of this site does not work in Netscape unless you have Javascript enabled. I
appreciate that this is a problem (and I am working on a better solution than just this page) but that's what
comes of using propietary software to create the site, I guess. If you have javascript turned off, you can still
see the pages, but not quite in the way I intended them (as you will see).
If I entered, I'd win a prize in the contest. I would do it by writing an informed pro-free market and pro-globalization piece that would shame anarchists, third world socialists, and WIPO alike.
However, to me it showed the organizers are not committed to open standards and it left me completely loathe to join in.
SGI nearly ten years ago was a specialized tool in the video world and they made very
advanced workstations for those applications.
but to think that it is interesting in the context of affordable desktop machines 10 years later is deluded. But yes, even today mainstream PCs are 10 years behind all sorts of specialized tools, some of which are workstations.
Brenden Eich... also explains why 1.0 is so important to reach, and why it isn't just another milestone, either.
there was once a shepard boy who was so bored he started shouting "wolf! wolf!"... and soon the villagers didn't come running.
I'll keep downloading a Mozilla every 8 months or so and throw it at the fridge, and when one of them sticks, ok, that will be an important milestone to reach. So far, too slow, too bloated.
Does Microsoft hurt the consumer? This is the question I have been pondering for a long time now. There is no doubt that
msft hurts other companies by integrating the best ideas in to the OS itself, but that
must be a plus for the consumer.
well, pondering is often a good thing, but pondering "solved" problems from the standpoint of no education is eventually a waste of time.
it is mathematically provable that monopolies hurt consumers. The price that maximizes profit for the monopoly is not the price that maximizes happiness to the consumer. in a competitive marketplace, it is.
'K? it is mathematically provable. So, if your pondering does not lead to further understanding along those lines (or to an overturning of accepted theory:) then you've got to change your thinking, most effectively through learning. Microsoft makes fistfuls of dough at a very high ratio to money invested, and they do it without competition. It turns out that it is also mathematically provable that in competitive markets, no competitor will make fistfuls of dough at a high ratio to money invested.
So, anything Microsoft "gives away" as a "benefit to consumers" must be seen in the light of the stuff that they do not give away that they make so much money from. The final thing that is provable in economics is that excess money that monopolists extract from a market would ordinarily be money that would belong to other people. Furthermore, it's not just a reshuffling of assets that libertarians think is "ok". By charging excess prices, monopolists also shrink the overall size of the market, destroying value that would belong to society at large. How many small businesses don't upgrade their computers because prices are too high? how many working class kids don't have computers because prices are too high? How many small businesses that could serve those markets simply don't exist? Many Many Many.
stop pondering and take a class in microeconomics, preferably one that requires calculus as a prereq.
Slashdot Mirror
hot CRTs waste (sp?) energy, it can be measured as heat. but the whole point of the article that you didn't grasp is that these are "cold". Instant-on, they don't require any actual heating for operation, and I doubt (though I don't know) that they'll even get warm in operation.
I stand corrected ... but now I'm even more scared. Druids practice routine human sacrifice and sprinkled human blood all over the place.
the word blessed comes from the French word "blesse'" which means "wounded"... as in Christ's wounds. So, saying "bless" is itself a Christian reference.
um... posts are supposed to be modded based on what they contain rather than on who wrote them. Your post was identical to what other people would get accused of karma whoring for. You were saving mozilla.org some load? smirk.
but, you were correct to calculate that Slashdot sycophants do mod on the basis of who is famous. That does not make it right, however, so while you win the karma race, you lose the respect of rational readers.
he was using up between 8 and 20 megabits of bandwidth a day? let's see... omigod, that's a minimum of a megabyte! almost a whole floppy! no wonder they caught him.
but I will point out that you don't exactly quote yourself properly. your original phrasing
No-one likes to write documentation. Writing software is fun. Writing documentation is boring.
is exactly how we convey in English that something is not cool. "nobody... blah blah" is dismissive.
teaching and "setting the record straight" are itches to some of us. I participate in Slashdot for that reason.
But I have other itches too, so I don't need to write doc to have a gratifying day. which is nice because I don't perceive that it is respected at all. You phrase your objection to writing doc as "it's no fun" rather than "i'm inadequate, I can't do it". A call for someone to do the shitwork is not a way to get me to do something. I want to hear the part about your inadequacy.
A natural monopoly is one that happens due to market forces.
no, all sorts of monopolies can arise due to market forces. "natural monopoly" describes market conditions that cause an inevitable monopoly. this occurs when bigger is cheaper.
so given that you are wrong as soon as you open your mouth, is there any need to refute the rest of what you say? yes.
Now, I'm not saying that such monopolies are necc. a bad thing,
too bad, you should. all monopolies are necessarily a bad thing. go look it up. look up profit maximization, the market clearing price, and dead weight loss. that should get you started.
But you don't respect it. I'm a coder, I don't need it, so fuck it, I'm not working on something other people don't respect.
Things you aren't good at, you should respect.
Think about it: if I have wires strung all over a neighborhood, total sunk cost, how are you going to justify stringing a second set of wires if I promise to price cut you to death? And in fact, the populace should not rationally be asked to pay for 2 (or more) expensive sets of wires when they simply need 1. Even if we start out with 3 full sets of wired networks competing, over time it makes sense for one company to acquire the others and maintain those wires or (fewer of them) because it's cheaper that way, and cheaper for consumers too... till one company emerges and starts raping them.
The utility sector of the economy is definitely governed by the theory of natural monopoly, regardless of the regulatory enviroment.
no, natural monopolies are not fine. The point about natural monopolies from econ 101 is that they are inevitable (because economies of scale make the biggest producer the cheapest), and therefore they require regulation for any hope that the market price will be close to marginal cost. But that regulation is guaranteed to be imperfect (political rather than economic) and somewhat static or at least "behind" and is no substitute for actual competition.
there may be other reasons not to do it, but if radar echos are how you find something, then a lack of radar echoes will be an advantage, perhaps not perfect, if you don't want to be found.
not true. the Empire State Building has gone bankrupt dozens and dozens - literally - of times in its life.
the interplay of debt and equity offer the capability to create investments with non-differentiatable payout patterns. Sometimes these make sense. Bankruptcy means that the current equity holders's stake has gone to zero, so their rights dissolve and the debt holders become the new equity holders. All of the assets continue to exist, simply their ownership changes.
no, he developed Hungarian Notation in the 70s as a small part of his PhD thesis at Xerox PARC. His thesis has a very interesting concept in it: imagine that programming is a game where two programmers are given the same task to work on, independently. They are allowed to communicate before beginning, but not once they start. If they produce identical code, they win big.
The point is that this is exactly how the software industry works: if you and I followed a set of conventions that caused us to generate the same code, we could maintain each others code with no extra effort (and rewriting it would produce the same result again :)
it illustrates what is wrong with perl's "there's more than one way to do it"
the evil comes from the monopoly. "...absolute power corrupts absolutely"
FYI, it's not your fault, but you learned the wrong version of Hungarian Notation, the one deployed in the Windows API by a bunch of morons at Microsoft.
True Hungarian Notation is exactly about layers of abstraction. Hungarian Notation tells you exactly that it's a pointer to a DEVICE and nothing else. Read Charles Simoni's paper about it In fact, if you read the bit about how traditional variable naming mnemonics tend to create ambiguity of reference, you'll see that Hungarian Notation is much more precise about economically distinguishing between different abstractions like files, file pointers, file handles, filenames, etc. (Simoni, BTW, implemented the first WYSIWYG word processor when he was at Xerox PARC)
The 80/20 rule is that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. It's true. It's probably not that interesting because it simply reflects a normal distribution of spending or something, but its useful to keep in mind.
that post you are responding to went into a lot of detail about all the places that files live, and all of the other places that reference those files... do you really think that the existence of a --relocate switch on rpm indicates that the rpm implementors thought through the implications fully... would you run rpm with --relocate on the command line without worrying that it would trash something you didn't anticipate, and with an assuredness that it would work? how many times would you need to put --relocate on the command line to make sure that the lib files didn't overvrite anything, and that the bin files didn't overwrite anything, and that the etc files didn't overwrite anything, and the var files didn't overwrite anything, and the X files didn't overwrite anything. Then, you're sure the app would run? and it would work because you'd manually edit your PATH and your LIBPATH and your MAN path and your... do you really think that the problem is solved?
Yes, it is true that these people could be offered better jobs at higher wages... but by whom? are you willing to put up your money to open a factory that pays higher wages and works people fewer hours? of course, you have no money. but what about daddy's money? why can't you convince daddy how much sense it makes to pay third world people more? So, let's say you did convince daddy to own a factory in the third world...
- you could buy an existing factory and just pay those workers more, or
- you could open a new factory and hire unemployed people and pay them more, or
- you could open a new factory and hire unemployed people and pay them the same low wages
... and take the money you saved doing that and hire even more unemployed people
notice that in the third case the maximum number of people would have jobs, and the maximum amount of clothing and/or whatever would be produced, and that extra production could be sold and that money used to hire even more productive people, people who would be learning job skills, etc. In fact if you did this enough, soon you'd have employed all of the unemployed people and then the wage rate would increase on it's own. that's how our economy got to the high wage level it got to.do you see? 2 wage earners at low wage is better than one wage earner at a high wage... hopefully now you begin to understand why economists all agree on the benefits of globalization. take a course in econ, learn something, and you will stop believing in magic and calling people names.
could somebody build a scaled down version of Archmedes mirror and mirror this Leonardo bridge site so I can see the pictures? Use wood if you need to.
There is no truth to the rumor that Slashdot is the modern equivalent of the hemlock that Socrates drank.
If I entered, I'd win a prize in the contest. I would do it by writing an informed pro-free market and pro-globalization piece that would shame anarchists, third world socialists, and WIPO alike.
However, to me it showed the organizers are not committed to open standards and it left me completely loathe to join in.
SGI nearly ten years ago was a specialized tool in the video world and they made very advanced workstations for those applications. but to think that it is interesting in the context of affordable desktop machines 10 years later is deluded. But yes, even today mainstream PCs are 10 years behind all sorts of specialized tools, some of which are workstations.
there was once a shepard boy who was so bored he started shouting "wolf! wolf!"... and soon the villagers didn't come running.
I'll keep downloading a Mozilla every 8 months or so and throw it at the fridge, and when one of them sticks, ok, that will be an important milestone to reach. So far, too slow, too bloated.
msft hurts other companies by integrating the best ideas in to the OS itself, but that
must be a plus for the consumer.
well, pondering is often a good thing, but pondering "solved" problems from the standpoint of no education is eventually a waste of time.
'K? it is mathematically provable. So, if your pondering does not lead to further understanding along those lines (or to an overturning of accepted theory
So, anything Microsoft "gives away" as a "benefit to consumers" must be seen in the light of the stuff that they do not give away that they make so much money from. The final thing that is provable in economics is that excess money that monopolists extract from a market would ordinarily be money that would belong to other people. Furthermore, it's not just a reshuffling of assets that libertarians think is "ok". By charging excess prices, monopolists also shrink the overall size of the market, destroying value that would belong to society at large. How many small businesses don't upgrade their computers because prices are too high? how many working class kids don't have computers because prices are too high? How many small businesses that could serve those markets simply don't exist? Many Many Many.
stop pondering and take a class in microeconomics, preferably one that requires calculus as a prereq.
they should hire ventriloquists as reporters: ventriloquists can talk without moving their lips and this will save a ton of compressed bandwidth!