Very nice strawman bashing! Now go read my post, and come back when you disagree with me. Please notice that I don't like monopolists and I don't support abusing monopolies. Please, do also note that I, even though I don't support monopolies, believe that Microsoft has given more (in terms of dollars) to the US than their dubious and unethical business practices has cost the US society.
Now, if you could please tell me how that makes me say that I think anything is OK, I would be thrilled. I thought I was making a simple addition and subtraction, not an ethical judgement.
Also, why is paying a large organisation to produce and market software ok, but donating a (probably smaller) amount to a free and open organisation wrong?
Would you please read my post? Everything is not a right/wrong issue. I think it's good to support mozilla. But I find it hard to accept that _at the same time_, aid organizations struggle. You see the difference? I don't say that one is wrong and one is right. Both are probably right. But the latter is more important. Because lives are more important than software.
It is not the responsibility of a public company to maximize profits. It is, instead, the responsibility of a public company to maximize the value of the company
Uh. The responsibility of the company is to maxmize profits for the shareholders, not profit for the company (which would rule out dividends!).
Well, that depends on your definition of unethically. My parents have middle-class wages in Norway, earned through hard work as teachers. I would hardly say they have earned them unethically, but as most norwegians our family has a far too large piece of the global wealth.
We need to differentiate between unethical systems (which I argue that the world economy is) and unethical acts (which everyone agrees Bill Gates have performed, but my parents haven't).
I do certainly agree that philantrophy of ill-gotten gains (as much of western wealth could be argued to be) won't fix all problems. But the acts of Gates are still good, and still helps people out of starvation. After all, Bill Gates can't be blamed for the unjust distribution of wealth (although he accounts for a part of it).
What are your suggestions to distribute basic needs evenly? Worldwide communism?
But isn't it better to get them out of whatever bad situation they're in? Isn't it better to impart the importance of financial responsibility to those that can't manage their money? Isn't it better to fix the problem than smooth it over with a little good will and cash?
Yep, and suggestions on how to do that are welcome. Meanwhile, I opt to give food to that dying child.
Really, what do you mean by "fixing problems"? "Financial responsibility"? Tell that to the poor Indonesian child whose poverty was caused by a mad dictator (Suharto) and a forgiving international society. Tell that to the people of Bangladesh, whose poorer classes must live in the lower areas, struck by floods and earthquakes almost every years.
Tell it to the people of the Papua New Guinea rainforest, whose homes (literally) are being cut down and made into fancy floors and toilet seats in a country they've never heard of.
Please do train the coffee peasants of Kenya how to get out of the bad situation they are in, being a part of a world economy where their coffee is being sold for virtually nothing to huge coffee houses competing to lower the price. The consequence of giving these people a decent pay is a doubling of the price of your coffee. Are you willing to take that lesson on "responsibility"?
People aren't generally poor because of some "bad situation they've got into" or "financial irresponsibility". We have to admit that the habits of the western world must change if we want acceptable conditions in the third world.
In this big picture, where people are dying because of lack of money, I think we shouldn't care whether Bill Gates earned money by killing Linux or not. The fact that billions of his dollars are used to right the wrongs of the world means more for those who starve than Linux will ever mean to me.
money he got (and is still getting) through unethical means. I don't see why someone who gets money through unethical means at the expense of other people should get an award for not keeping all of it for themselves. If he actually stopped being unethical then it would certainly add weight to an arguement in his favor since it shows he has seen the error of his ways. But continuing to be unethical shows that this is not the case. Or are we rewarding continuing bad behaviour if some good comes out of it? What kind of an example is that?
All of Microsoft's money isn't acquired through unethical means. They make a fairly popular operating system. They gained their monopoly legally: by making good business decisions and creating a fairly functional graphical user interface on a cheap platform (x86).
This was my point exactly: Things aren't black and white. Microsoft has done some bad things, but 90% of Microsoft's business is just like any other software company.
I'm sorry, but I think you're incredibly short sighted. Did it ever occur to you that people who support projects like Mozilla also may give to charity?
By the same token, if you go out to see a film you're diverting funds that you could've spent supporting a charity into a frivolous activity.
That is not my point at all. I am not trying to say that everyone should spend all their time doing charity, or that anyone should strive to live like the poorest of the world. My point was that there seems to, in the end, be a mismatch between what we spend money on and what is important to us when we stop and think about it.
I'm not saying anyone is doing anything unethical when they spend money at the cinema. After all, I think everyone should have the opportunity to watch good movies. Yet, I think we (as in the western world) need correctives. I do strongly believe it is unethical that some people get rich by making other people poor. I think it is unethical that I have the money to buy anything I want, while 30.000 children die from starvation every day (actual figure).
We must be able to differenciate between what is in itself unethical, and what only becomes unethical when made into a system. I think the poverty of the south is primarily a system issue.
Sorry for bashing you; I realize that my entire point wasn't very clear in my first post (actually, it was really obscure). To get back to the point: I find it hard to accept that aid organizations struggle to get funding, while something like a web browser so easily gets a lot of money for advertizing. I can find much worse examples, like the fact that 7.000 scientists are working on new formulas for Wella's shampoos instead of something useful for humanity.
In this big picture, where people are dying because of lack of money, I think we shouldn't care whether Microsoft earned money by killing Linux or not. It means so much more for those who starve.
Microsoft hasn't stolen 10 billion dollars from the American public. Some of their business practices were illegal due to being a monopolist, but that was pretty much a technical issue which I doubt Microsoft thought they would be convicted for.
Gates has obviously profited from some dubious business, but he has also given tons back to the US through taxes, employment, and extending the anglo-american cultural heritage in the western world by keeping the control of the single most important piece of software in the world in the US.
FUDding and monopolizing may have cost a lot for the US, but having the largest, most important software company in the world in your country is priceless.
I think you need to look out of your very narrow-minded view of the world. I totally agree on Microsoft being a little rough in some of their business practices, even unethical at times. Still, they are only convicted monopolists, which hardly constitutes a criminal offense.
The money from the foundation is extremely important for a lot of people, and it does real good for people with AIDS, or starving people, and so on. When you compare the good side to the bad side (a little FUD and bashing of a free operating system), it gets quite ridiculous to claim that he "shouldn't get off the hook". Obviously, we won't go "Oh, now he's a knight, then he can say whatever he want about Linux", but in the big picture very few people care about that issue. On the other hand, many people are (rightfully) concerned about AIDS/HIV and starvation.
Maybe some of your engagement should be spent on some more important issues?
I can hardly believe the amount of money ploughed into projects like the stupid Firefox ad in NYT, when charity projects and aid organizations at the same time struggle to keep their head above the water. Some people seem to have problems measuring the relative importance of different issues.
Okay, China only oppresses 1.3 billion of its own people.
If that is the case, I think we would see a revolution quite soon. I do not defend oppression, but I think the Chinese government only oppresses some people, not everyone (and themselves!).
All governments and laws oppress, in the sense that they diminish people's right to do exactly what they want. I think it's nice that people can't just do what they want all the time. It keeps me alive.
But China breaks human rights (so does the US - capital punishment, anyone?). That is unacceptable, but it doesn't apply to every single person in China.
Now, if the US would pay their membership fee in the UN for the period of 1946-2004, we could use the money to start fighting this oppression - in China and Texas.
Yes, there is a difference. If you do a recursive faculty function, like this pseudo:
FUNCTION faculty (int n) IF (n == 1) RETURN 1 ELSE RETURN faculty(n - 1) * n END faculty
If your compiler does that, for instance for n=5, after spinning down to 1, your stack would contain:
return (5 * (4 * (3 * (2 * (1)))))
While this isn't abysmal, it could be simplified to:
FUNCTION faculty_iter (int n, int count, int sum_so_far) IF (count > n) RETURN sum_so_far ELSE faculty_iter (n, count + 1, count * sum_so_far) END faculty_iter
Which is faster in most processors, because it resolves to extremely less nested function calls - just 1! This is due to the fact that the function is not part of an expression in the return call - and we don't need to know the value of the next recursion before we can compute the return value of the previous (because it has no return value!).
Not very noticable in such a simple function, but when computing 1500! it matters.
Facts aren't negotiable, nor are they reached by concensus. Nor are they "fair". They simply ARE.
I agree, but then again any given encyclopedia doesn't consist of more than five or ten percent facts. "Facts" about history or "facts" about dinosaurs may very well be in Encyclopedia Britannica, but they don't fall into the category of things that simply are. The reasons for world war 2 aren't a priori facts.
Written, monolithic encyclopedias are known to be quite error-prone on information that should be easy to check for correctness, like dates etc. This is due to the fact that even encyclopedias are written by people. Even people who have had first-hand experience with something will sometimes make errors when they try to remember it. Encyclopedias are very seldomly written by primary sources, but are written on the basis of existing articles and books on the subject. Therefore, errors propagate in those as well.
Google groups reference to ext3 corruption (Nov 2004)
Oh, please. This is one incident - that may be just as much a hardware as software problem. In addition, it is on LVM/ext3, which means it could be due to LVM, not ext3. LVM is known to be quirky.
In addition-addition, this was posted to the samba mailing list, suggesting it could be samba's fault.
This isn't exactly conclusive evidence, or statistically significant.
Google groups references to changes to the kernel "in the hopes of lessening reports of Reiser corruption" (Dec 2004)
Hello. Look at that header. It says: "Accepted kernel-source-2.6.9 2.6.9-4". 2.6.9 is a development branch, not to be used in production systems. It is not meant to be bug-free, but meant to test different solutions with a lot of volunteer systems.
Obviously, ext3 and Reiser aren't perfect. Loss of data occurs, even due to bugs or bad design- But your examples are very far from proving any claim that Reiser of ext3 are worse than NTFS (or FAT, for that sake, but no-one would claim that).
Although I definitely agree with your conclusions, the above sentence is not correct. Most implementations of Scheme, for instance, does a lot of algorithmic optimisations, basically by turning tail-recursion into (functional) iteration when possible.
These kind of optimizations are extremely effective in some scenarios because it significantly reduces memory use and read/write of memory, and can be illustrated quite easily by turning optimization off in any good Scheme interpreter (like DrScheme).
I agree on your analysis, but I do believe that there are some possible ways to determine whether the advertisement did cause more downloads.
For instance, you could make a general trend by analyzing download statistics of other comparable software releases. Obviously, there aren't many comparable releases, but I guess there must be some. When we have that trend line, we compare it to the stats for Firefox. If the general trend line dives at about the day number when the advertisement came, and Firefox didn't dive (and this difference is significant, it could indicate that the advertisement worked.
However, you can't draw the conclusion that it did or didn't based on this simple analysis. But in a real market analysis I would definitely use this as one of my strategies for analysis.
Uh.. so all these people should get their 5 back? Well, I doubt there are many examples of such class action suits. Generally, we are talking about quite a lot bigger sums of money.
I understand the reasoning behind the class action suits, but I think it's a bad idea to implement.
(price of (XP - WMP) == price of XP) because the value of WMP is 0. This case isn't about making stuff easy for customers - it is an antitrust issue. After all, it would be easier for the customers if your power company brought you groceries, carpenters and the newspaper, but it isn't necessarily good for society as a whole that someone abuses its monopoly.
So this product has value for society, not for customers. On the other hand, customers make up society, so it kind of bites its own tail. And by the way: EU is going to force Microsoft to sell this product cheaper than XP Pro.
Yeah, except the fact that only the incredibly silly american courts understand the concept of "class action". In Europe, we don't, and it is a good thing. Except when you want to push Microsoft for money because they've provided you a service for years without making you pay for it.
Actually, in this case, I would strongly suggest that the buttons are made "action oriented" -- that you write "Format" and "Cancel" on them. Having "Yes" and "No" makes it easier to do a mistake due to misreading the question.
More seriously, netcraft sez http://www.fbi.gov was running Sun-ONE-Web-Server on Linux when last queried at 4-Feb-2005 18:26:45 GMT. Whatever that is.
Oops. I blame that one on being foreign to this english language thingy:-) Although I keep messing these two devices in Norwegian as well -- "vaskemaskin" and "oppvaskmaskin".
Slashdot Mirror
Very nice strawman bashing! Now go read my post, and come back when you disagree with me. Please notice that I don't like monopolists and I don't support abusing monopolies. Please, do also note that I, even though I don't support monopolies, believe that Microsoft has given more (in terms of dollars) to the US than their dubious and unethical business practices has cost the US society.
Now, if you could please tell me how that makes me say that I think anything is OK, I would be thrilled. I thought I was making a simple addition and subtraction, not an ethical judgement.
Also, why is paying a large organisation to produce and market software ok, but donating a (probably smaller) amount to a free and open organisation wrong?
Would you please read my post? Everything is not a right/wrong issue. I think it's good to support mozilla. But I find it hard to accept that _at the same time_, aid organizations struggle. You see the difference? I don't say that one is wrong and one is right. Both are probably right. But the latter is more important. Because lives are more important than software.
It is not the responsibility of a public company to maximize profits. It is, instead, the responsibility of a public company to maximize the value of the company
Uh. The responsibility of the company is to maxmize profits for the shareholders, not profit for the company (which would rule out dividends!).
Well, that depends on your definition of unethically. My parents have middle-class wages in Norway, earned through hard work as teachers. I would hardly say they have earned them unethically, but as most norwegians our family has a far too large piece of the global wealth.
We need to differentiate between unethical systems (which I argue that the world economy is) and unethical acts (which everyone agrees Bill Gates have performed, but my parents haven't).
I do certainly agree that philantrophy of ill-gotten gains (as much of western wealth could be argued to be) won't fix all problems. But the acts of Gates are still good, and still helps people out of starvation. After all, Bill Gates can't be blamed for the unjust distribution of wealth (although he accounts for a part of it).
What are your suggestions to distribute basic needs evenly? Worldwide communism?
But isn't it better to get them out of whatever bad situation they're in? Isn't it better to impart the importance of financial responsibility to those that can't manage their money? Isn't it better to fix the problem than smooth it over with a little good will and cash?
Yep, and suggestions on how to do that are welcome. Meanwhile, I opt to give food to that dying child.
Really, what do you mean by "fixing problems"? "Financial responsibility"? Tell that to the poor Indonesian child whose poverty was caused by a mad dictator (Suharto) and a forgiving international society. Tell that to the people of Bangladesh, whose poorer classes must live in the lower areas, struck by floods and earthquakes almost every years.
Tell it to the people of the Papua New Guinea rainforest, whose homes (literally) are being cut down and made into fancy floors and toilet seats in a country they've never heard of.
Please do train the coffee peasants of Kenya how to get out of the bad situation they are in, being a part of a world economy where their coffee is being sold for virtually nothing to huge coffee houses competing to lower the price. The consequence of giving these people a decent pay is a doubling of the price of your coffee. Are you willing to take that lesson on "responsibility"?
People aren't generally poor because of some "bad situation they've got into" or "financial irresponsibility". We have to admit that the habits of the western world must change if we want acceptable conditions in the third world.
Uh, I think I'll write that last paragraph again:
In this big picture, where people are dying because of lack of money, I think we shouldn't care whether Bill Gates earned money by killing Linux or not. The fact that billions of his dollars are used to right the wrongs of the world means more for those who starve than Linux will ever mean to me.
money he got (and is still getting) through unethical means. I don't see why someone who gets money through unethical means at the expense of other people should get an award for not keeping all of it for themselves. If he actually stopped being unethical then it would certainly add weight to an arguement in his favor since it shows he has seen the error of his ways. But continuing to be unethical shows that this is not the case. Or are we rewarding continuing bad behaviour if some good comes out of it? What kind of an example is that?
All of Microsoft's money isn't acquired through unethical means. They make a fairly popular operating system. They gained their monopoly legally: by making good business decisions and creating a fairly functional graphical user interface on a cheap platform (x86).
This was my point exactly: Things aren't black and white. Microsoft has done some bad things, but 90% of Microsoft's business is just like any other software company.
I'm sorry, but I think you're incredibly short sighted. Did it ever occur to you that people who support projects like Mozilla also may give to charity?
By the same token, if you go out to see a film you're diverting funds that you could've spent supporting a charity into a frivolous activity.
That is not my point at all. I am not trying to say that everyone should spend all their time doing charity, or that anyone should strive to live like the poorest of the world. My point was that there seems to, in the end, be a mismatch between what we spend money on and what is important to us when we stop and think about it.
I'm not saying anyone is doing anything unethical when they spend money at the cinema. After all, I think everyone should have the opportunity to watch good movies. Yet, I think we (as in the western world) need correctives. I do strongly believe it is unethical that some people get rich by making other people poor. I think it is unethical that I have the money to buy anything I want, while 30.000 children die from starvation every day (actual figure).
We must be able to differenciate between what is in itself unethical, and what only becomes unethical when made into a system. I think the poverty of the south is primarily a system issue.
Sorry for bashing you; I realize that my entire point wasn't very clear in my first post (actually, it was really obscure). To get back to the point: I find it hard to accept that aid organizations struggle to get funding, while something like a web browser so easily gets a lot of money for advertizing. I can find much worse examples, like the fact that 7.000 scientists are working on new formulas for Wella's shampoos instead of something useful for humanity.
In this big picture, where people are dying because of lack of money, I think we shouldn't care whether Microsoft earned money by killing Linux or not. It means so much more for those who starve.
I call bullshit.
Microsoft hasn't stolen 10 billion dollars from the American public. Some of their business practices were illegal due to being a monopolist, but that was pretty much a technical issue which I doubt Microsoft thought they would be convicted for.
Gates has obviously profited from some dubious business, but he has also given tons back to the US through taxes, employment, and extending the anglo-american cultural heritage in the western world by keeping the control of the single most important piece of software in the world in the US.
FUDding and monopolizing may have cost a lot for the US, but having the largest, most important software company in the world in your country is priceless.
I think you need to look out of your very narrow-minded view of the world. I totally agree on Microsoft being a little rough in some of their business practices, even unethical at times. Still, they are only convicted monopolists, which hardly constitutes a criminal offense.
The money from the foundation is extremely important for a lot of people, and it does real good for people with AIDS, or starving people, and so on. When you compare the good side to the bad side (a little FUD and bashing of a free operating system), it gets quite ridiculous to claim that he "shouldn't get off the hook". Obviously, we won't go "Oh, now he's a knight, then he can say whatever he want about Linux", but in the big picture very few people care about that issue. On the other hand, many people are (rightfully) concerned about AIDS/HIV and starvation.
Maybe some of your engagement should be spent on some more important issues?
I can hardly believe the amount of money ploughed into projects like the stupid Firefox ad in NYT, when charity projects and aid organizations at the same time struggle to keep their head above the water. Some people seem to have problems measuring the relative importance of different issues.
Okay, China only oppresses 1.3 billion of its own people.
If that is the case, I think we would see a revolution quite soon. I do not defend oppression, but I think the Chinese government only oppresses some people, not everyone (and themselves!).
All governments and laws oppress, in the sense that they diminish people's right to do exactly what they want. I think it's nice that people can't just do what they want all the time. It keeps me alive.
But China breaks human rights (so does the US - capital punishment, anyone?). That is unacceptable, but it doesn't apply to every single person in China.
Now, if the US would pay their membership fee in the UN for the period of 1946-2004, we could use the money to start fighting this oppression - in China and Texas.
Yes, there is a difference. If you do a recursive faculty function, like this pseudo:
If your compiler does that, for instance for n=5, after spinning down to 1, your stack would contain:
While this isn't abysmal, it could be simplified to:
Which is faster in most processors, because it resolves to extremely less nested function calls - just 1! This is due to the fact that the function is not part of an expression in the return call - and we don't need to know the value of the next recursion before we can compute the return value of the previous (because it has no return value!).
Not very noticable in such a simple function, but when computing 1500! it matters.
Facts aren't negotiable, nor are they reached by concensus. Nor are they "fair". They simply ARE.
I agree, but then again any given encyclopedia doesn't consist of more than five or ten percent facts. "Facts" about history or "facts" about dinosaurs may very well be in Encyclopedia Britannica, but they don't fall into the category of things that simply are. The reasons for world war 2 aren't a priori facts.
Written, monolithic encyclopedias are known to be quite error-prone on information that should be easy to check for correctness, like dates etc. This is due to the fact that even encyclopedias are written by people. Even people who have had first-hand experience with something will sometimes make errors when they try to remember it. Encyclopedias are very seldomly written by primary sources, but are written on the basis of existing articles and books on the subject. Therefore, errors propagate in those as well.
So, I can create the greatest encyclopedia on earth by being very accurate? Well, here goes say's quality encyclopedia:
a-r no entries. s say's quality encyclopedia The encyclopedia with the highest quality in the entire known world. t-z no entries.Google groups reference to ext3 corruption (Nov 2004)
Oh, please. This is one incident - that may be just as much a hardware as software problem. In addition, it is on LVM/ext3, which means it could be due to LVM, not ext3. LVM is known to be quirky.
In addition-addition, this was posted to the samba mailing list, suggesting it could be samba's fault.
This isn't exactly conclusive evidence, or statistically significant.
Google groups references to changes to the kernel "in the hopes of lessening reports of Reiser corruption" (Dec 2004)
Hello. Look at that header. It says: "Accepted kernel-source-2.6.9 2.6.9-4". 2.6.9 is a development branch, not to be used in production systems. It is not meant to be bug-free, but meant to test different solutions with a lot of volunteer systems.
Obviously, ext3 and Reiser aren't perfect. Loss of data occurs, even due to bugs or bad design- But your examples are very far from proving any claim that Reiser of ext3 are worse than NTFS (or FAT, for that sake, but no-one would claim that).
no compiler I've sean can optimize an algorithm
Although I definitely agree with your conclusions, the above sentence is not correct. Most implementations of Scheme, for instance, does a lot of algorithmic optimisations, basically by turning tail-recursion into (functional) iteration when possible.
These kind of optimizations are extremely effective in some scenarios because it significantly reduces memory use and read/write of memory, and can be illustrated quite easily by turning optimization off in any good Scheme interpreter (like DrScheme).
I agree on your analysis, but I do believe that there are some possible ways to determine whether the advertisement did cause more downloads. For instance, you could make a general trend by analyzing download statistics of other comparable software releases. Obviously, there aren't many comparable releases, but I guess there must be some. When we have that trend line, we compare it to the stats for Firefox. If the general trend line dives at about the day number when the advertisement came, and Firefox didn't dive (and this difference is significant, it could indicate that the advertisement worked. However, you can't draw the conclusion that it did or didn't based on this simple analysis. But in a real market analysis I would definitely use this as one of my strategies for analysis.
It is up to YOU the people to elect at least half-way savvy human beings who can change the system.
Yeah, that's easy when you've got a two-party-who-are-almost-the-same political system. I call for revolution.
Uh.. so all these people should get their 5 back? Well, I doubt there are many examples of such class action suits. Generally, we are talking about quite a lot bigger sums of money.
I understand the reasoning behind the class action suits, but I think it's a bad idea to implement.
(price of (XP - WMP) == price of XP) because the value of WMP is 0. This case isn't about making stuff easy for customers - it is an antitrust issue. After all, it would be easier for the customers if your power company brought you groceries, carpenters and the newspaper, but it isn't necessarily good for society as a whole that someone abuses its monopoly.
So this product has value for society, not for customers. On the other hand, customers make up society, so it kind of bites its own tail. And by the way: EU is going to force Microsoft to sell this product cheaper than XP Pro.
Yeah, except the fact that only the incredibly silly american courts understand the concept of "class action". In Europe, we don't, and it is a good thing. Except when you want to push Microsoft for money because they've provided you a service for years without making you pay for it.
Actually, in this case, I would strongly suggest that the buttons are made "action oriented" -- that you write "Format" and "Cancel" on them. Having "Yes" and "No" makes it easier to do a mistake due to misreading the question.
Actually, the project leader (Marc Andreesen) left NCSA, took with him Mosaic, and started Netscape.
But Netcraft confirms it, mail.fbi.gov is dead!
More seriously, netcraft sez http://www.fbi.gov was running Sun-ONE-Web-Server on Linux when last queried at 4-Feb-2005 18:26:45 GMT. Whatever that is.
In Fayette county, only old people pirate music!
Oops. I blame that one on being foreign to this english language thingy :-) Although I keep messing these two devices in Norwegian as well -- "vaskemaskin" and "oppvaskmaskin".