Good one. Whooosh to the other repliers!! Anyhow, I don't see why some people think the Chinese can't do whatever they please, regarding patents and stuff. Patents are an industrial decision, countries are soverreign and can treat them as they please, and better serves their interest. Of course, if they sign treaties and fail to honour them, there might be consequences, but it's just a strategic decision they make, maybe it's worth not to honour them.
They represent the interest of shareholders. The interest of shareholders is profit.
They would be in FPMITA prison if they failed to take action toward maximizing profit. Of course, you can't send someone to jail based on failure, but you can based on their actions.
1. Your second statement does not follow the first, that's a logical fallacy. Anyhow, I get your point, but I don't agree. Just because there is some regulation, it doesn't mean it has a design.
2. You mean that investors are good for the economy, or for others. But they don't give back. They take as much as they can, period. That's their job. Of course, there might be some benefits to society from that, but it's not because they "give back". If there is a benefit to society, it's not intentional, but inevitable. The whole point was that capitalism is indistinguishable from greed. I thing that in order to be a difference, it would be easy to tell, for instance, a good investor from a greedy investor. I believe there is no difference. There is no such thing as too much profit.
Yes there is. Capitalism is a economic process designed to keep civilization working smoothly.
Capitalism was never designed. It's just the statu quo. You might say it's a natural consequence of having private banks, but not much more than that.
I don't believe there is such a difference. For instance, an investor is not supposed to "give back" anything. Their job is exactly to extract money from the markets. In fact, an executive usually has the legal obligation (towards shareholders) to do exactly that.
I am not a native English speaker, but I believe the only difference between "greed" and this, is that "greed" denotes an excess in the pursuit of wealth. I don't believe there is a line between moderate or an excessive wealth, in capitalism.
There are many license agreements that are even more free than GPL: BSD being the prime example. It grants much more broad right to reproduce, derive, and redistribute under much less restrictive terms. One of the freedoms provided by BSD is to unilaterally fork and re-license under any terms. So, anyone can take a piece of BSD-licensed code and re-release it as GPL, but only the sole author can re-release a piece of GPL code under BSD.
The issue here is who gets rights. GPL restricts the rights of distributors, and gives them to end users. BSD is more free for distributors, the GPL is more free for users.
Who cares? ALL my customers are on Windows. The tiny fragment of a market that can't run windows software is irrelevant to most people, especially those in the business of making money.
If you develop in.NET, it's not surprising that you only have customers that run Windows. It would be odd that it was otherwise. The fragment of a market that _can't_ run Windows is very small and irrelevant. The portion of a market that _won't_ run Windows for you app, is not small, and relevant. Keep in mind that most servers run Linux, so business software that doesn't run on Linux is a problem.
Even the largest of those tiny minorities (Mac users) can run.Net using bootcamp or parallels or some such.
And for the rest, there's Mono, which will run a subset of.Net stuff.
That could be true if you were just talking about desktop software. Other than MS Office, desktop software is not the largest kind in business. The real money is in business software, that needs to run (at least partially) on servers. In that case, Mac is not relevant, and Windows is not a leader. There is money to be lost if you don't target multiple platforms.
Of course, you can run a successful company, even if you don't target the whole of the available market, but there are actual, relevant, missed opportunities when you target just MS Windows.
I agree that Linus is a luminary. I don't agree that his opinion regarding UI is worth a damn. I would be like taking fashion advice from a textile industry engineer. His skills are orthogonal to UI, and his decisions were bad in the past (KDE!! WTF!?) .
I understand XFCE might be better suited to him, mainly because he won't need to learn new tricks. For the general public, Gnome Shell or Unity are great, they are a lot easier to learn from scratch, more discoverable, and suited to actual newbies, a very important audience to take into account when you have a single digit marketshare. For experts, they are also great, because they reward knowledge, are searchable, and save screen real estate.
Most importantly, they are designed by specialists, with the user in mind, and actual tests, with actual users. A kernel developers opinion is not that relevant here.
So, Google would have used SunOS, and MS Windows Server licenses, to run the servers they salvaged from the junkyard. I believe they could have acheived the same computing power growth, at thousands of dollars per server, when starting the company. And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.
How do you measure revenue? In US dollars? In US business, US dollars are important. For a Chinese business, chinese eyeballs might be more important than US dollars, strategically.
Excuse me. I am an atheist, and I wouldn't ever use a Transporter. Philosophically, it's impossible to tell whether you get actually transported, or you just die and get replaced by someone who thinks they were transported. Both cases look the same from the destination point, so you could never know for sure.
You lack perspective. My mom learned French when she was young, because she studied chemistry, and French was the language of science back then, from our perspective. And she's not even sixty. The world changed. Right now, English is the language of businesses. In the future, it doesn't have to stay that way. In the US, you will need to learn Spanish if you want to reach the fastest growing markets. In just a few decades, Spanish might become the first mother language in most of the United States, or at least most of those financially relevant.
English is the language of businesses, because the US is where businesses are, they are the main buyer of stuff, oil is the number one commodity, and it sells in dollars, Wall Street rules the world.
If all that were to change, English would lose much of its appeal as a world language. After all, businesses will speak whatever their best clients want them to speak. We need to plan ahead, taking into account what we think the future will be like.
Are you so shallow enough not to buy a product or service from a company that could not speak English? I live in Latin America. If we want to export to the US or some parts of Europe, we need to speak English. If we want to do business with the Chinese, English helps, but Chinese can be better. If anything, speaking their language means you care enough about them particularly, enough to invest a significant part of your resources in them.
Well, Tiananmen is a big issue when it comes to censorship. The accepted fact is that we know the truth, and poor, oppressed Chinese people do not, due to censorship. If it turns out we, free people, believed a lie all these years, it would mean our information is just as doctored as what the Chinese get. That would mean that the rulers of the west are not better than the guys who build the Great Chinese Firewall, it would only mean that the West methods, mainly propaganda, are better than more direct ones.
So I'd hate to see the upgrade treadmill end up causing myself and other to dump perfectly functioning machines not because of it not being able to do the job, but because Google don't want to support anything older.
Google is in this for business. Each browser they support costs them money, and adds a small amount of HTML and a possible point of failure.
The issues you talk about are due to the high cost of vendor lock in, when the vendor you choose is not the winner in the field, of just abandons products. It's not resonable to expect Google to pay for some of those costs.
choosing the wrong proprietary vendors is abandonment.
He said he was a devout christian. Their religion tells them not to care whether something is natural or good by its own. What matter is what the scriptures say, or what they can read them to say in the case of evangelists, or what the pope-...-priest/tradition says, in the case of catholics.
As for the morality of it? Meh - it could backfire on them (or maybe not... after all, what are *you* going to do about it? Call the cops? Launch a lawsuit based on the premise that the app you violated copyright on must always be safe? Hire a hitman?) OTOH, They didn't damage anything, and honestly, it got them some PR. If you got bit by it (not you in particular, the generic "you"), then be grateful. After all, the thing didn't immediately broadcast-email every photo on the chip to your entire contact list, brick the phone, or start surfing particularly vicious pop-up happy pr0n sites on your behalf at random times...
What they do is unacceptable. They are not trustworthy. It's not reasonable to install a software in your phone, giving it access to your personal data and data plan, when you know that its publishers like to spend other peoples money, no matter the purpose.
It could be argued whether the victims deserve it or not, but the publishers are not to be trusted.
I think the best advice would be...to stay as far the fuck away from any middle eastern country to begin with!!
There is a western, christian country, that is in the news at all times, known for seizing laptops at borders and keeping your data. In fact, when I travel there, I don't carry my laptop or any personal/work data with me, that's how worried I am.
Why any sane person from the free part of the world would go over there....especially NOW...is beyond me.
There is no free part of the world. There are only shades of grey. There are places where you are safer and worse places, but enemies of freedom exist and act everywhere. Add to that the fact that your definition of freedom probably doesn't match what some other people believe, and the whole "free world" concept becomes a dumb idea.
I mean, hell...I'd do just about anything for a dollar..but I'd not risk my life (and head) by going over there for any amount of money.
And you probably make enough. The world is full of people who risk their lives to make a dime. Otherwise, there would be no cops, no antenna installers, no tall buildings. That is because they can make a better living that way than staying safe.
When the customer finds a result for a search, whatever engine they used, Bing takes advantage of it. You can complain about Microsoft violating the users privacy, but it's not taking anything from Google, just from the users. It's bad, because users are not aware of this, but Google is no victim here. They don't own search results.
Ok. and what if I told you that all the cow I eat spends it life grazing and watching the sun rise and set, in beautiful landscapes? After two or three years, they are sent in trucks to a slaughterhouse, but I hardly believe it's worse than no life at all, for a cow.
RMS ignited the modern revolutionary era of free software with his extraordinary legal invention, the GPL - but anyone informed in this area knows that the idea of freely sharing source code, for many of the same benefits underlined in the GPL and open source licenses, dates back at least to the 1950s and IBM SHARE.
Well, RMS says so in every talk he can. He talks about a beautiful world in which you could fix the software you worked with. Then, some crazy company came with an NDA in order to give the source code, and free software was born.
Slashdot Mirror
Good one. Whooosh to the other repliers!!
Anyhow, I don't see why some people think the Chinese can't do whatever they please, regarding patents and stuff.
Patents are an industrial decision, countries are soverreign and can treat them as they please, and better serves their interest.
Of course, if they sign treaties and fail to honour them, there might be consequences, but it's just a strategic decision they make, maybe it's worth not to honour them.
They represent the interest of shareholders.
The interest of shareholders is profit.
They would be in FPMITA prison if they failed to take action toward maximizing profit. Of course, you can't send someone to jail based on failure, but you can based on their actions.
1. Your second statement does not follow the first, that's a logical fallacy. Anyhow, I get your point, but I don't agree. Just because there is some regulation, it doesn't mean it has a design.
2. You mean that investors are good for the economy, or for others. But they don't give back. They take as much as they can, period. That's their job. Of course, there might be some benefits to society from that, but it's not because they "give back". If there is a benefit to society, it's not intentional, but inevitable.
The whole point was that capitalism is indistinguishable from greed. I thing that in order to be a difference, it would be easy to tell, for instance, a good investor from a greedy investor. I believe there is no difference. There is no such thing as too much profit.
Yes there is.
Capitalism is a economic process designed to keep civilization working smoothly.
Capitalism was never designed. It's just the statu quo. You might say it's a natural consequence of having private banks, but not much more than that.
I don't believe there is such a difference. For instance, an investor is not supposed to "give back" anything. Their job is exactly to extract money from the markets. In fact, an executive usually has the legal obligation (towards shareholders) to do exactly that.
I am not a native English speaker, but I believe the only difference between "greed" and this, is that "greed" denotes an excess in the pursuit of wealth. I don't believe there is a line between moderate or an excessive wealth, in capitalism.
There are many license agreements that are even more free than GPL: BSD being the prime example. It grants much more broad right to reproduce, derive, and redistribute under much less restrictive terms. One of the freedoms provided by BSD is to unilaterally fork and re-license under any terms. So, anyone can take a piece of BSD-licensed code and re-release it as GPL, but only the sole author can re-release a piece of GPL code under BSD.
The issue here is who gets rights. GPL restricts the rights of distributors, and gives them to end users. BSD is more free for distributors, the GPL is more free for users.
-1, Shill
Who cares? ALL my customers are on Windows. The tiny fragment of a market that can't run windows software is irrelevant to most people, especially those in the business of making money.
If you develop in .NET, it's not surprising that you only have customers that run Windows. It would be odd that it was otherwise.
The fragment of a market that _can't_ run Windows is very small and irrelevant.
The portion of a market that _won't_ run Windows for you app, is not small, and relevant.
Keep in mind that most servers run Linux, so business software that doesn't run on Linux is a problem.
Even the largest of those tiny minorities (Mac users) can run .Net using bootcamp or parallels or some such.
And for the rest, there's Mono, which will run a subset of .Net stuff.
That could be true if you were just talking about desktop software. Other than MS Office, desktop software is not the largest kind in business.
The real money is in business software, that needs to run (at least partially) on servers. In that case, Mac is not relevant, and Windows is not a leader. There is money to be lost if you don't target multiple platforms.
Of course, you can run a successful company, even if you don't target the whole of the available market, but there are actual, relevant, missed opportunities when you target just MS Windows.
I agree that Linus is a luminary.
I don't agree that his opinion regarding UI is worth a damn.
I would be like taking fashion advice from a textile industry engineer.
His skills are orthogonal to UI, and his decisions were bad in the past (KDE!! WTF!?) .
I understand XFCE might be better suited to him, mainly because he won't need to learn new tricks.
For the general public, Gnome Shell or Unity are great, they are a lot easier to learn from scratch, more discoverable, and suited to actual newbies, a very important audience to take into account when you have a single digit marketshare.
For experts, they are also great, because they reward knowledge, are searchable, and save screen real estate.
Most importantly, they are designed by specialists, with the user in mind, and actual tests, with actual users.
A kernel developers opinion is not that relevant here.
That would be going too far.
You know that muslims can't be portrayed as the good guys, in the news, in games, and of course not in comics.
Whoooshhhh!!!
So, Google would have used SunOS, and MS Windows Server licenses, to run the servers they salvaged from the junkyard.
I believe they could have acheived the same computing power growth, at thousands of dollars per server, when starting the company.
And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.
I didn't say they were worth the paper they are printed on. I just said they were worth more than US dollars.
How do you measure revenue? In US dollars?
In US business, US dollars are important.
For a Chinese business, chinese eyeballs might be more important than US dollars, strategically.
Excuse me.
I am an atheist, and I wouldn't ever use a Transporter.
Philosophically, it's impossible to tell whether you get actually transported, or you just die and get replaced by someone who thinks they were transported. Both cases look the same from the destination point, so you could never know for sure.
You lack perspective.
My mom learned French when she was young, because she studied chemistry, and French was the language of science back then, from our perspective. And she's not even sixty.
The world changed. Right now, English is the language of businesses.
In the future, it doesn't have to stay that way.
In the US, you will need to learn Spanish if you want to reach the fastest growing markets. In just a few decades, Spanish might become the first mother language in most of the United States, or at least most of those financially relevant.
English is the language of businesses, because the US is where businesses are, they are the main buyer of stuff, oil is the number one commodity, and it sells in dollars, Wall Street rules the world.
If all that were to change, English would lose much of its appeal as a world language. After all, businesses will speak whatever their best clients want them to speak. We need to plan ahead, taking into account what we think the future will be like.
Are you so shallow enough not to buy a product or service from a company that could not speak English?
I live in Latin America. If we want to export to the US or some parts of Europe, we need to speak English.
If we want to do business with the Chinese, English helps, but Chinese can be better. If anything, speaking their language means you care enough about them particularly, enough to invest a significant part of your resources in them.
Well, Tiananmen is a big issue when it comes to censorship.
The accepted fact is that we know the truth, and poor, oppressed Chinese people do not, due to censorship.
If it turns out we, free people, believed a lie all these years, it would mean our information is just as doctored as what the Chinese get.
That would mean that the rulers of the west are not better than the guys who build the Great Chinese Firewall, it would only mean that the West methods, mainly propaganda, are better than more direct ones.
So I'd hate to see the upgrade treadmill end up causing myself and other to dump perfectly functioning machines not because of it not being able to do the job, but because Google don't want to support anything older.
Google is in this for business. Each browser they support costs them money, and adds a small amount of HTML and a possible point of failure.
The issues you talk about are due to the high cost of vendor lock in, when the vendor you choose is not the winner in the field, of just abandons products. It's not resonable to expect Google to pay for some of those costs.
choosing the wrong proprietary vendors is abandonment.
He said he was a devout christian. Their religion tells them not to care whether something is natural or good by its own. What matter is what the scriptures say, or what they can read them to say in the case of evangelists, or what the pope-...-priest/tradition says, in the case of catholics.
As for the morality of it? Meh - it could backfire on them (or maybe not... after all, what are *you* going to do about it? Call the cops? Launch a lawsuit based on the premise that the app you violated copyright on must always be safe? Hire a hitman?) OTOH, They didn't damage anything, and honestly, it got them some PR. If you got bit by it (not you in particular, the generic "you"), then be grateful. After all, the thing didn't immediately broadcast-email every photo on the chip to your entire contact list, brick the phone, or start surfing particularly vicious pop-up happy pr0n sites on your behalf at random times...
What they do is unacceptable. They are not trustworthy.
It's not reasonable to install a software in your phone, giving it access to your personal data and data plan, when you know that its publishers like to spend other peoples money, no matter the purpose.
It could be argued whether the victims deserve it or not, but the publishers are not to be trusted.
Gorilla, circle, dot, green, Toyota, Al Jazeera, and Chocolate Chip flavour
I think the best advice would be...to stay as far the fuck away from any middle eastern country to begin with!!
There is a western, christian country, that is in the news at all times, known for seizing laptops at borders and keeping your data.
In fact, when I travel there, I don't carry my laptop or any personal/work data with me, that's how worried I am.
Why any sane person from the free part of the world would go over there....especially NOW...is beyond me.
There is no free part of the world. There are only shades of grey. There are places where you are safer and worse places, but enemies of freedom exist and act everywhere.
Add to that the fact that your definition of freedom probably doesn't match what some other people believe, and the whole "free world" concept becomes a dumb idea.
I mean, hell...I'd do just about anything for a dollar..but I'd not risk my life (and head) by going over there for any amount of money.
And you probably make enough. The world is full of people who risk their lives to make a dime. Otherwise, there would be no cops, no antenna installers, no tall buildings. That is because they can make a better living that way than staying safe.
When the customer finds a result for a search, whatever engine they used, Bing takes advantage of it.
You can complain about Microsoft violating the users privacy, but it's not taking anything from Google, just from the users.
It's bad, because users are not aware of this, but Google is no victim here. They don't own search results.
Ok. and what if I told you that all the cow I eat spends it life grazing and watching the sun rise and set, in beautiful landscapes?
After two or three years, they are sent in trucks to a slaughterhouse, but I hardly believe it's worse than no life at all, for a cow.
RMS ignited the modern revolutionary era of free software with his extraordinary legal invention, the GPL - but anyone informed in this area knows that the idea of freely sharing source code, for many of the same benefits underlined in the GPL and open source licenses, dates back at least to the 1950s and IBM SHARE.
Well, RMS says so in every talk he can. He talks about a beautiful world in which you could fix the software you worked with. Then, some crazy company came with an NDA in order to give the source code, and free software was born.