While I agree that MySpace is inane, it's also unrealistic to expect that if you give millions of people a platform, they'll come up with anything inspirational, informative, or meaningful.
The vast majority of people are merely average Joes. Everyone cannot be Einstein, nor can everyone be Crichton. That's just the way it is and the way it always will be. Most people don't post anything deeper because most people simply aren't deeper, and it's unlikely that they ever will be, in particular when they're born, raised, and socialized in a consumer orgy of a society that is itself incredibly inane.
Not only have most people in our culture never had a deep thought, but most of them have never even been exposed to a deep thought. Deep thoughts aren't good for markets, they tend to reduce superficiality and overconsumption, which are the two things the growth and maintenance of our society most depends on.
I visited the site and didn't see an answer to my question. How is Parallels different from VMWare Workstation? Or is it the same thing at a different price point?
Hmmm, do I seem like the only one here making this complaint over this and the last two-dozen Slashdot stores about U.S. high schools? While accusing me of extrapolating based on a single personal incident you conveniently ignore the fact that it's clearly surrounded by (and standing in reinforcement of) a whole pile of similar opinions about and experiences with the U.S. educational system from others. Nice straw man.
It gets ridiculous and difficult to comparison shop without a notepad, thanks to every retailer having multiple rebates that occur in multiple ways. Say you want to buy a PC.
Retailer #1: $499 with $50 in-store rebate, $200 manufacturer's mail-in rebate (paperwork available only from manufacturer), $20 store mail-in rebate, and an additional $75 mail-in rebate if you use this PC to join AOL (rebate only available after you join, contact AOL for details). In order to get the full set of rebates, you will need to make and mail three copies of your receipt, after following up directly with the manufacturer to get their forms, then join AOL and once their paperwork arrives, try to get their customer service operator to understand what promotion you're referring to.
Retailer #2: $399 with $100 mail-in rebate and $100 bonus mail-in rebate if you also buy a PowerSurge[TM] surge protector. In order to get the full set of rebates, you will need to make and mail two copies of your reciept and buy a surge protector whether you need one or not.
Retailer #3: $449 with $75 in-store rebate, $10 instant manufacturer's rebate, $10 repeat buyer rebate for return customers, $150 online rebate from customer survey site (electronically credited only), and $25.99 mail-in rebate for new customers only. In order to maximize rebates, you will need to fill out an extensive survey on a consumer research website, giving away your personal details and also your receipt # and your credit card # so that they can credit you, and you will theoretically either receive one party's rebate if you've never filled out a rebate for this manufacturer (or any of its subsidiaries) in the past or the other party's rebate if you are a repeat customer, but good luck trying to prove either when they say that their database doesn't confirm your status.
This is not an exaggerated set of examples, every year in most "newer" (i.e. heavily suburban) US cities around "back to school" season and again during the winter holidays, virutally every advertisement you see is for "NEW HP PC! $FREE [after rebates]" and "NEW 8 Megapixel Canon Digital Camera! $0.00 [after rebates]" and "Sanyo Jumbo Microwave Oven! $1.00 [after rebates]" and so on. Every mailer that comes around is full of "$0" products, but the problem is, given an entire marketplace full of "deals" like those listed above, how do you know which one is actually the better deal, or more importantly, the better deal for you? As you might expect, the number of people who ultimately do pay $0 is very small, if not nonexistent... and in the meantime, everyone scrambles to jump through hoopes in order to get back what they can after arriving at the store and paying the real price of $399, $449, or $499, on many occasions unknown or unclear until you actually arrive at the retail establishment.
More often than not, it ends up not being worth the time spent calculating and (afterward) filling out and mailing paperwork to get the rebates. Compound this problem with the fact that something like 50 percent of rebates experience difficulty (read: scam) at which time they tell you that you're not "eligible" or you've sent a bad photocopy of your receipt, or you purchased a day before the promotion began, or a day after it ended, or they suspect you of rebate fraud (buying and processing rebates, then re-selling the items on eBay at near full price)... and it becomes a giant farce.
Rebates are, in short, a way for stores and manufacturers to obfuscate real pricing, sell "tie-in" goods, and get your personal information for consumer research purposes at no cost to them, often while being able to duck responsibility even for producing the rebates that they've promised.
Absolutely right, the evidence for the commoditization of the general processor market is everywhere you look, at any corporation or even just amongst your friends. I have a large "social network of computers" because (like many here, I suspect), I get to help everyone I know to fix their PCs. I don't know of any CPUs in my social network that even reach 1.2 GHz.
- My own PC is a laptop running a PIII 1.13GHz CPU, the fastest CPU anywhere in my social network - I recently visited my parents to help them replace the power supply in their 800MHz Athlon system - My friends and siblings all use laptops with CPUs ranging from 233MHz (runs Win2k!) to 900MHz - The largest server I currently maintain is an 8 way SMP setup, a ProLiant PIII at 550MHz - I'm freelancing now, but six months ago my employer (publisher) had a building full of beige G3 Macs
In all of this, I've heard precious little (if any) talk of "my computer is too slow" over the last few years. Even my sister, the one with the 233MHz Thinkpad 770 series running Windows 2k is perfectly happy. She runs Office, uses Firefox, and has a nice selection of turn-based strategy sim games that she likes and her computing world is nice and comfy for her.
I'm supposed to be the geek, and as a working editorial stock photographer I often have to run image processing filters on 150MB TIFF images (i.e. 6144x4096 pixels @ 16-bit color). My 1.13GHz laptop with 1GB RAM handles the tasks reasonably well. Every now and then I think "maybe I should get a faster machine," but obviously not enough to do anything about it over the last couple of years. I can wait 30 seconds to a minute for a filter to finish, and given the bottlenecks across the rest of the PC (memory, storage, display density limitations) I'm not sure a 10x faster CPU would even result in a 2x better experience, even at these tasks.
I don't know who's out there snapping up the multi-GHz multi-core 64-bit CPUs, but I can't imagine what they're doing in today's software ecosystem (apart from the gamers and the physicists) that could require that sort of processing power.
I dropped out of an American high school at 15 and went straight to an international university instead, with the help of my parents. Why? I was a bright kid learning nothing and just a year and a half in had absolutely had more than I could stand.
Even decades ago when this occurred, high schools in the U.S. had already shifted roles, from being institutions of learning to being social infrastructure instead. At least in the inner city, U.S. high schools exist in order to:
- Segregate minors from the general population until they are old enough to be charged as an adult for their crimes (at which point we are willing to risk allowing them to move about freely in the city)
- While they are there, press on them and antagonize them as though they are in a prison or interrogation camp in order to evaluate their potential to crack, react, or develop an unfavorable attitude, at which point we can get them an early record and have them marked for life as a social/political miscreant or malcontent
When my principal in those days said that "this school is a testing ground to see if you are ready for life in society," he meant just that, and not at all "this school is here to teach you something."
I have nothing to add, except the obvious admonition: conservatives like to paint "terrorism" as some kind of insanity. It isn't. It's the perfectly rational and justifiable response to the "just" action that unjustly affects an innocent party... who later becomes a terrorist.
The other 2% actually get we're at war with an ideology that wants to take us all back the Dark Ages.
No, we're not. We're at war with someone who wants us off of their property, because we refuse to leave, though we'd have no problem bombing them back into the dark ages (oops, already did do, nevermind) if we felt a slight from them.
The U.S. and Israel are simply exercising the colonial impulse for domination and the typical colonial inability to bear even the tiniest indignity without imposing utterly disgusting and overreaching forms of collective punishment on everyone else.
Conservative: "Terrorism and war are not the same thing. They are terrorists because they kill people on purpose. We are not because we don't."
Normal person: "So the U.S. kills civilians entirely by accident?"
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "Nobody knew that any of these people were going to die?"
Conservative: "Oh, we knew. There is always collateral damage in war."
Normal person: "So you knew that innocent people were going to die... and then you went in and killed them just like you expected... by accident."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "Tens of thousands of them, more innocent civilians than combatants."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "But the 'enemy,' they're terrorists because they mean to kill innocents."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "And you're not because even though you knew you would and you went in and did it anyway, you didn't really mean it."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "For you, killing all these innocents is just holding the banner of right and freedom on high. Not at all like the terrorists."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "And you're sure that whomever remains among that population is going to love you for it, rather than want to kill you for it."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "Because you killed their family knowingly... erm... by accident... er... without meaning to... I mean... It was nothing personal, you didn't mean specifically to kill them, and you're totally sorry that they're dead, you promise (and who doesn't take a promise from an American?) and really, the terrorists would never be so kind, humanitarian, or enlightened. You're totally different from them."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "So you approve of the war in Iraq, the job that Bush has done as president, and measures that seek to crack down on Muslims all around the world, and if a few innocent ones have to die in the process, it's great, because Bush is great and even though you know bad things will happen to good people, it's... by accident. Merely a just war. Not terrorism."
Wow, I guess nobody remembers all that went down back then. I suppose it *WAS* a few years ago. I have boxed retail versions of all of these sitting here:
- CorelDRAW 9 and PhotoPaint 9 for Linux - WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux ("Deluxe" version came with Paradox for Linux) - WordPerfect 8.0 for Linux - Corel Linux (several versions)
This was ~6-7 years ago now. There were no real top-quality application suites for Linux at the time. Linux had been riding the "dot com bubble" wave, but it had meant lots of investment in the OS and distros, not nearly enough in applications. The buzz was that all Linux needed was a good set of applications to grab a big chunk of OS market share, and amongst the Linux user base, there was a lot of drool for a good set of applications that would "finally" let people get all of their work done on Linux.
There was no OpenOffice yet, GIMP was far behind where it is today, and the body of KDE and GNOME applications was much smaller.
Corel had announced that they were working on Linux versions of their major applications suites and abandoning the beta Java-based versions of the major suites that had been floating around (yes I downloaded and tried WordPerfect Office for Java, it did exist). Reviewers were waiting for copies and the Linux news sites were watching with excitement for the first "big name" consumer applications to come to Linux. WordPerfect 8 for Linux, a native X application, was already available as a free download for the personal version and was driving interest for the "modern" versions of the complete suite and for the CorelDRAW suite as well.
Corel could have done very well and beaten everyone else to the game in the Linux market.
Instead, they released bad software. WordPerfect 2000 for Linux came out first and was, to put it simply, so frustratingly close to a usable product that it pissed you off. The box (I have it here) says that it is "Compatible with every major Linux distribution." I ran it under Red Hat. You could see the "full fledged powerful big-name office suite" everywhere in the product--it looked and worked just like the Windows version--except it didn't work. It was crash-happy, didn't integrate with anything except one version of LPRng and a very narrow subset of the/etc/printcap file's properties, it didn't play nice with window managers (in particular, KDE's kwin, where you couldn't get windows to take focus properly). It wasn't compatible with the way most distributions had configured XFree86 because it tried to install its own proprietary TrueType font server, which fought with xfs for the same port and didn't simply try to set and add to the fontpath a new port. The launch scripts it used were poorly constructed and required hand-editing on many systems to get them to work right. The installer itself didn't work on a percentage of Linux systems.
Corel released one update which solved some of these problems, but the initial buzz was horrible--probably 80% of the buyers, who were dot-com-bubble-era Linux converts ("the next big thing" newbies), couldn't get it to run right and the solutions were often second best (here's how to edit your X configuration... here's a text-mode installer for you instead... here's how to edit the launcher script so that it doesn't crash on launch). Those of us who did know enough to get it running (fix/etc/printcap, install update, edit X font settings) were frustrated because so much of the press around the product was *horrible* because it simply didn't work as advertised *yet* and it was clear that if they'd just waited and continued development until it was stable, they'd have beaten the rest of the market to a growing Linux customer base and at the same time made available a desperately needed product.
Once you got it running correctly, it was near-excellent, but with showstoppers. I wrote two books and and a pile of papers with WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and used the MS Office import/export filters he
I have done some hiring in my day, and in the post-blogs world. And I hired people who had something to say, who had the BALLS to be people, because more likely than not they would also be the people to take initiative and get things done.
I'd say that people who post things that make them look utterly irresponsible should probably not post them publicly, but since they're utterly irresponsible, they won't stop.
But people who post things like political opinions, personal problems, disease and depression, insights into human life and emotion... Bring them in. They'll be twice the employee that the timid by-the-numbers idiot who has been beaten down into "professionalism" will be.
I want powerful, agile, dynamic teams of critical, maybe even cynical people in my employ. I don't want sheep, yes-men, or the same cogs-in-wheel that the competition also has. An army of malcontents and visionaries will trample an army of faceless ties into the mud.
If dropping in rankings constitutes "suppresion" that is subject to antitrust restrictions under the theory that for a search business, the very act of placing other search engines in the rankings is inseparable from the business implications of such placement, then we have a very problematic logical extreme:
The first twenty pages of results at every search engines must be full merely of links to other search engines, since to drop them in the rankings is anticompetitive business practice. It would render search enginges useless. Such a ruling might even imply that search engines are by definition anticompetitive, since under that understanding the primary function of a search engine is to "suppress" the visibility of sites to varying extents, with the first result being least "suppressed" and the last result most "suppressed," excepting of course those who aren't even listed and are completely "suppressed."
Any search engine not turning up as the very first link in a major search engine's results would have an antitrust claim against them.
Not necessarily; all it says is that companies who need more capital than they have (i.e. generally all of them) can often get much more of it by going public, whatever the other limitations that this imposes.
I guess another way to put it is this: market economies place consumers in the uneviable position of having to choose between immediate return on investments (acting for present self-preservation) and the development of a better technological or ecological future (acting for future self-preservation).
Eat now, lose access to a needed cure later. Fund a needed cure later, don't eat now. Yes, it could be said that such tradeoffs are a natural part of the causal nexus (i.e. hunt-gather now, don't get hut built before storm; get hut built before storm, don't hunt-gather now) but the power of a collective (i.e. six billion humans) should be able to harness the mass of labor and the constellation of needs vs. surpluses in order to make such decisions largely unnecessary. Instead, marketplace economies fail to take advantage of this resource and instead re-encode such unfortunate choices at a much larger scale.
It is not a relative flaw in a closed system devoid of long-term interests, but the global economy is not such a closed system. It is an aggregate of multiple markets, some of which are not similarly bound to short-term profits due to vastly different market mechanisms including state-ownership or state-subsidy.
Thus, the short-term focus necessitated in short-term markets will ultimately place them behind long-term focuses that are more viable in competing markets, leading the companies in short-term markets ultimately to fall behind and (in a global marketplace) fail. Paradoxically, it's like economies where long-term focuses are more viable are getting a head start on satisfying future markets and winning dominance then, while the short term markets must struggle to satisfy present markets (usually at the expense of the best path for future development) or risk disappearing into oblivion.
Of course, there is also an absolute flaw, though whether or not it is a flaw is largely a matter of personal opinion. A short-term focus means that many technologies and models that require long-term development and attention will never be brought to bear, and that technologies or models that are not clearly expected to quickly profitable before development ever begins will never earn a chance to even attempt to turn a profit later on. Basically, the short-term returns focus means that a lot of what could have been in the end won't ever be and to me that's a much more sobering side-effect than any economic one.
A worrisome problem: the stockholders' pressure on these companies keeps pushing on these companies to produce and show profit now. I applaud Microsoft, in one example, in their snubbing of shareholders by announcing huge investments in R&D, rather than upping their dividends. In the long run, companies that stay focused will be the winners, for themselves, for the consumers, and for the shareholders.
This is a fundamental flaw in market economies, not in shareholders. Shareholders have a limited lifespan and depend on their investments in the market for their retirement and in many cases income before retirement. If a stock A performs better than stock B now, the investor will go there, because real bankable gains outweigh theoretical gains a) because theoretical gains fall in the future, perhaps too late to make a difference for an investor's livable income and b) real gains are *real*, i.e. in a volatile marketplace like public investing where a company's fortune can shift overnight, much less over a decade or two, it's prudent to take the dollar you can count on now over a dime now and a theoretical two dollars in the future. Companies that try to "stay focused in the long run" without producing real net gains now (whether through dividends or increase) that are larger than those produced by their competitors will lose their investors to those competitors and thus lose their ability to focus in the long run and their ability to create new focuses after that.
This also carries over to funds at the meta level, i.e. funds must select stocks that perform now because if they don't they will be measurably outperformed by other funds now, and consumers will quickly go to the funds that perform best, often not over 100 years or even 50 years, but over 5 years or 10 years, which is really short-term in terms of gains from the business vs. R&D perspective.
So what you're saying is that you think it's okay to kill anything by which you feel threatened, anywhere, anytime. Basically, you're an immoral person employing a doctrine of pre-emption in life.
Right, because it's not about government oppression when it comes to illegal immigration, punishing journalists for criticizing the government, or seizing assets in the "war on drugs," it's just about obeying the law--but when the targets are corporations as opposed to people it's not just about obeying the law but rather about government oppression. I get it.
In fact, the article is its own contradiction. They don't matter so much that they deserve a mention and a photo? Right. They matter in technology, a lot, that's why they've been selected and listed (in a shorter, more exclusive list than the people who "did" supposedly matter) rather than 10 or 100 or 1000 joe-schmos out there right now fixing Chevys or planting beets who *actually* don't matter to tech. See, when someone doesn't matter, they're not worth singling out. Anyone who does get singled out, by defintion--matters.
It's a marketing gimmick, and a sadly effective one at that, judging by the Slashdot response.
[blockquote]Give the homeless guy in a park a sandwhich[sic] he's liable to throw it back at you. He'll never say no to the quarter though. Funny huh?[/blockquote]
You would be what's called an "asshole."
a) I've given away plenty of sandwiches, juices, and salads and I've never had one thrown at me, ever. These extensive food distribution networks you speak of often have trouble surviving. Even if they manage to get plenty of food donations (and they don't, always) they can have all kinds of other logistical problems: transportation (how to we get the donated food from points a through f to g?), location (what building or property can we use?), zoning/permits (some schmuck in government thinks it's a "safety hazard" to have this many people in line here or responds to a complaint from a nearby business, no doubt owned by someone like you, that if food is free in the area, there's no reason for people to BUY with those quarters you say not give them) and so on. My girlfriend is working full time trying to hold just such a group together, so that they don't have to keep sending word out on the street that "there's no food from us for the next few days, we can't find a place to distribute legally" while their donations rot in a volunteer's garage twenty miles out of town in the burbs despite the gas an volunteer man-hours it took to collect them all, where it does nobody any good.
b) I've also given away transit cards to very appreciative individuals who were asking for money to *get* somewhere, like, say, to a hospital, or to a family member's abode, or just off of a truly rotten street corner and on to a better one.
c) Addiction, whether to alcohol or drugs, is not "funny," it sucks. It is not a matter of self control, it is a matter of brain chemistry. Once addicted, logic and reasoning skills change, and as a result, so do conclusions and behavior. It's just not a matter of "don't give the lazy indulgent bums your change to buy their hedonistic high."
I should follow this up by saying that she's still one of my best friends. But thank god I'm no longer the boyfriend and can just laugh at her behavior and help to pick up her many pieces all the time, rather than having to be responsible for it.:-)
Yup, I once had a girlfriend for a brief moment that actually verbalized this explicitly. She was a drama queen, vain as hell, and ultimately impossible to be around (which is why we broke up), though incredibly endearing and adorable and feminine on the surface of things. She could only be trusted in certain ways: trusted to start a ruckus, be the life of the party, cheat on you, start fights with you, let you down, forget important responsibilities and take on unimportant ones, spend energy trying to look good all the time, even when it made no sense.
She wasn't a dumb girl, though, her IQ and education level were very high. One night while we were having something of a mix between a fight and a heart-to-heart, she explained it to me something like this:
"I'm a woman. Anthropologically, genetically, at my core, I want to compete for attention. I want other women to know that they're inferior to me and I want men to pursue me. But this is the modern world. I have stiff competition for that attention. I have to compete against video games where you get to bed prostitutes and shoot cops. I have to compete against Rachel on friends and Elaine on Seinfeld, not to mention all the college football teams where it's all muscle and adrenaline and combat.
If don't stimulate everyone more than all of these other things, whats to stop them from watching these other things instead of watching me? And I want people watching me. Its instinct. It leads to better social networks, increased opportunity, increased wealth, increased mate selection, lots of general success if I can be the watched one.
So as long as Friends is on TV, buddy, you'll find that I'm going to be a better character than any of them so that you'll pay attention to me and other women will defer to me just as much as they would defer to Lisa Kudrow if she walked by. I'm going to be sluttier than the hookers in the video games and I'm going to be more exciting than the entire Miami football team.
It's not that I go to bed every night planning all of this. But it's instinctive for me as a woman. You're my man and I want your attention. And the other men in the room... well, I want their attention, too, just in case."
Needless to say, we broke up. She forgot a couple of important points: television is only interesting in small doses (most sitcoms are only half an hour), while real people are "on" all the time when you're around them; if you've seen all the episodes in a show, unless it's TRULY SPECTACULAR you often don't care for the re-runs; once you've played a video game, you're done with it; men watch TV and play video games mostly to get away from women for a while.;-)
In any case, the point is that this subthread is right on. Television and entertainment culture competes in a crowded marketplace for our attention, and as a result must rely on ever more basic instincts (motion, sex, fight/flight) to win it, and this bleeds into our personal lives, silently educating generations about social interaction both by example and by suggesting similar adaptations to human personalities in order to compete.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that MySpace is inane, it's also unrealistic to expect that if you give millions of people a platform, they'll come up with anything inspirational, informative, or meaningful.
The vast majority of people are merely average Joes. Everyone cannot be Einstein, nor can everyone be Crichton. That's just the way it is and the way it always will be. Most people don't post anything deeper because most people simply aren't deeper, and it's unlikely that they ever will be, in particular when they're born, raised, and socialized in a consumer orgy of a society that is itself incredibly inane.
Not only have most people in our culture never had a deep thought, but most of them have never even been exposed to a deep thought. Deep thoughts aren't good for markets, they tend to reduce superficiality and overconsumption, which are the two things the growth and maintenance of our society most depends on.
I visited the site and didn't see an answer to my question. How is Parallels different from VMWare Workstation? Or is it the same thing at a different price point?
Thank you.
I can't get over my shock at the previous poster having actually asked that question in the first place. Jesus.
Hmmm, do I seem like the only one here making this complaint over this and the last two-dozen Slashdot stores about U.S. high schools? While accusing me of extrapolating based on a single personal incident you conveniently ignore the fact that it's clearly surrounded by (and standing in reinforcement of) a whole pile of similar opinions about and experiences with the U.S. educational system from others. Nice straw man.
It gets ridiculous and difficult to comparison shop without a notepad, thanks to every retailer having multiple rebates that occur in multiple ways. Say you want to buy a PC.
Retailer #1: $499 with $50 in-store rebate, $200 manufacturer's mail-in rebate (paperwork available only from manufacturer), $20 store mail-in rebate, and an additional $75 mail-in rebate if you use this PC to join AOL (rebate only available after you join, contact AOL for details). In order to get the full set of rebates, you will need to make and mail three copies of your receipt, after following up directly with the manufacturer to get their forms, then join AOL and once their paperwork arrives, try to get their customer service operator to understand what promotion you're referring to.
Retailer #2: $399 with $100 mail-in rebate and $100 bonus mail-in rebate if you also buy a PowerSurge[TM] surge protector. In order to get the full set of rebates, you will need to make and mail two copies of your reciept and buy a surge protector whether you need one or not.
Retailer #3: $449 with $75 in-store rebate, $10 instant manufacturer's rebate, $10 repeat buyer rebate for return customers, $150 online rebate from customer survey site (electronically credited only), and $25.99 mail-in rebate for new customers only. In order to maximize rebates, you will need to fill out an extensive survey on a consumer research website, giving away your personal details and also your receipt # and your credit card # so that they can credit you, and you will theoretically either receive one party's rebate if you've never filled out a rebate for this manufacturer (or any of its subsidiaries) in the past or the other party's rebate if you are a repeat customer, but good luck trying to prove either when they say that their database doesn't confirm your status.
This is not an exaggerated set of examples, every year in most "newer" (i.e. heavily suburban) US cities around "back to school" season and again during the winter holidays, virutally every advertisement you see is for "NEW HP PC! $FREE [after rebates]" and "NEW 8 Megapixel Canon Digital Camera! $0.00 [after rebates]" and "Sanyo Jumbo Microwave Oven! $1.00 [after rebates]" and so on. Every mailer that comes around is full of "$0" products, but the problem is, given an entire marketplace full of "deals" like those listed above, how do you know which one is actually the better deal, or more importantly, the better deal for you? As you might expect, the number of people who ultimately do pay $0 is very small, if not nonexistent... and in the meantime, everyone scrambles to jump through hoopes in order to get back what they can after arriving at the store and paying the real price of $399, $449, or $499, on many occasions unknown or unclear until you actually arrive at the retail establishment.
More often than not, it ends up not being worth the time spent calculating and (afterward) filling out and mailing paperwork to get the rebates. Compound this problem with the fact that something like 50 percent of rebates experience difficulty (read: scam) at which time they tell you that you're not "eligible" or you've sent a bad photocopy of your receipt, or you purchased a day before the promotion began, or a day after it ended, or they suspect you of rebate fraud (buying and processing rebates, then re-selling the items on eBay at near full price)... and it becomes a giant farce.
Rebates are, in short, a way for stores and manufacturers to obfuscate real pricing, sell "tie-in" goods, and get your personal information for consumer research purposes at no cost to them, often while being able to duck responsibility even for producing the rebates that they've promised.
Absolutely right, the evidence for the commoditization of the general processor market is everywhere you look, at any corporation or even just amongst your friends. I have a large "social network of computers" because (like many here, I suspect), I get to help everyone I know to fix their PCs. I don't know of any CPUs in my social network that even reach 1.2 GHz.
- My own PC is a laptop running a PIII 1.13GHz CPU, the fastest CPU anywhere in my social network
- I recently visited my parents to help them replace the power supply in their 800MHz Athlon system
- My friends and siblings all use laptops with CPUs ranging from 233MHz (runs Win2k!) to 900MHz
- The largest server I currently maintain is an 8 way SMP setup, a ProLiant PIII at 550MHz
- I'm freelancing now, but six months ago my employer (publisher) had a building full of beige G3 Macs
In all of this, I've heard precious little (if any) talk of "my computer is too slow" over the last few years. Even my sister, the one with the 233MHz Thinkpad 770 series running Windows 2k is perfectly happy. She runs Office, uses Firefox, and has a nice selection of turn-based strategy sim games that she likes and her computing world is nice and comfy for her.
I'm supposed to be the geek, and as a working editorial stock photographer I often have to run image processing filters on 150MB TIFF images (i.e. 6144x4096 pixels @ 16-bit color). My 1.13GHz laptop with 1GB RAM handles the tasks reasonably well. Every now and then I think "maybe I should get a faster machine," but obviously not enough to do anything about it over the last couple of years. I can wait 30 seconds to a minute for a filter to finish, and given the bottlenecks across the rest of the PC (memory, storage, display density limitations) I'm not sure a 10x faster CPU would even result in a 2x better experience, even at these tasks.
I don't know who's out there snapping up the multi-GHz multi-core 64-bit CPUs, but I can't imagine what they're doing in today's software ecosystem (apart from the gamers and the physicists) that could require that sort of processing power.
I dropped out of an American high school at 15 and went straight to an international university instead, with the help of my parents. Why? I was a bright kid learning nothing and just a year and a half in had absolutely had more than I could stand.
Even decades ago when this occurred, high schools in the U.S. had already shifted roles, from being institutions of learning to being social infrastructure instead. At least in the inner city, U.S. high schools exist in order to:
- Segregate minors from the general population until they are old enough to be charged as an adult for their crimes (at which point we are willing to risk allowing them to move about freely in the city)
- While they are there, press on them and antagonize them as though they are in a prison or interrogation camp in order to evaluate their potential to crack, react, or develop an unfavorable attitude, at which point we can get them an early record and have them marked for life as a social/political miscreant or malcontent
When my principal in those days said that "this school is a testing ground to see if you are ready for life in society," he meant just that, and not at all "this school is here to teach you something."
And? Anti-Americanism is a valid and admirable value.
I have nothing to add, except the obvious admonition: conservatives like to paint "terrorism" as some kind of insanity. It isn't. It's the perfectly rational and justifiable response to the "just" action that unjustly affects an innocent party... who later becomes a terrorist.
The other 2% actually get we're at war with an ideology that wants to take us all back the Dark Ages.
No, we're not. We're at war with someone who wants us off of their property, because we refuse to leave, though we'd have no problem bombing them back into the dark ages (oops, already did do, nevermind) if we felt a slight from them.
The U.S. and Israel are simply exercising the colonial impulse for domination and the typical colonial inability to bear even the tiniest indignity without imposing utterly disgusting and overreaching forms of collective punishment on everyone else.
Conservative: "Terrorism and war are not the same thing. They are terrorists because they kill people on purpose. We are not because we don't."
Normal person: "So the U.S. kills civilians entirely by accident?"
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "Nobody knew that any of these people were going to die?"
Conservative: "Oh, we knew. There is always collateral damage in war."
Normal person: "So you knew that innocent people were going to die... and then you went in and killed them just like you expected... by accident."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "Tens of thousands of them, more innocent civilians than combatants."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "But the 'enemy,' they're terrorists because they mean to kill innocents."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "And you're not because even though you knew you would and you went in and did it anyway, you didn't really mean it."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "For you, killing all these innocents is just holding the banner of right and freedom on high. Not at all like the terrorists."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "And you're sure that whomever remains among that population is going to love you for it, rather than want to kill you for it."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "Because you killed their family knowingly... erm... by accident... er... without meaning to... I mean... It was nothing personal, you didn't mean specifically to kill them, and you're totally sorry that they're dead, you promise (and who doesn't take a promise from an American?) and really, the terrorists would never be so kind, humanitarian, or enlightened. You're totally different from them."
Conservative: "Yes."
Normal person: "So you approve of the war in Iraq, the job that Bush has done as president, and measures that seek to crack down on Muslims all around the world, and if a few innocent ones have to die in the process, it's great, because Bush is great and even though you know bad things will happen to good people, it's... by accident. Merely a just war. Not terrorism."
Conservitive: "Yes."
Wow, I guess nobody remembers all that went down back then. I suppose it *WAS* a few years ago. I have boxed retail versions of all of these sitting here:
/etc/printcap file's properties, it didn't play nice with window managers (in particular, KDE's kwin, where you couldn't get windows to take focus properly). It wasn't compatible with the way most distributions had configured XFree86 because it tried to install its own proprietary TrueType font server, which fought with xfs for the same port and didn't simply try to set and add to the fontpath a new port. The launch scripts it used were poorly constructed and required hand-editing on many systems to get them to work right. The installer itself didn't work on a percentage of Linux systems.
/etc/printcap, install update, edit X font settings) were frustrated because so much of the press around the product was *horrible* because it simply didn't work as advertised *yet* and it was clear that if they'd just waited and continued development until it was stable, they'd have beaten the rest of the market to a growing Linux customer base and at the same time made available a desperately needed product.
- CorelDRAW 9 and PhotoPaint 9 for Linux
- WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux ("Deluxe" version came with Paradox for Linux)
- WordPerfect 8.0 for Linux
- Corel Linux (several versions)
This was ~6-7 years ago now. There were no real top-quality application suites for Linux at the time. Linux had been riding the "dot com bubble" wave, but it had meant lots of investment in the OS and distros, not nearly enough in applications. The buzz was that all Linux needed was a good set of applications to grab a big chunk of OS market share, and amongst the Linux user base, there was a lot of drool for a good set of applications that would "finally" let people get all of their work done on Linux.
There was no OpenOffice yet, GIMP was far behind where it is today, and the body of KDE and GNOME applications was much smaller.
Corel had announced that they were working on Linux versions of their major applications suites and abandoning the beta Java-based versions of the major suites that had been floating around (yes I downloaded and tried WordPerfect Office for Java, it did exist). Reviewers were waiting for copies and the Linux news sites were watching with excitement for the first "big name" consumer applications to come to Linux. WordPerfect 8 for Linux, a native X application, was already available as a free download for the personal version and was driving interest for the "modern" versions of the complete suite and for the CorelDRAW suite as well.
Corel could have done very well and beaten everyone else to the game in the Linux market.
Instead, they released bad software. WordPerfect 2000 for Linux came out first and was, to put it simply, so frustratingly close to a usable product that it pissed you off. The box (I have it here) says that it is "Compatible with every major Linux distribution." I ran it under Red Hat. You could see the "full fledged powerful big-name office suite" everywhere in the product--it looked and worked just like the Windows version--except it didn't work. It was crash-happy, didn't integrate with anything except one version of LPRng and a very narrow subset of the
Corel released one update which solved some of these problems, but the initial buzz was horrible--probably 80% of the buyers, who were dot-com-bubble-era Linux converts ("the next big thing" newbies), couldn't get it to run right and the solutions were often second best (here's how to edit your X configuration... here's a text-mode installer for you instead... here's how to edit the launcher script so that it doesn't crash on launch). Those of us who did know enough to get it running (fix
Once you got it running correctly, it was near-excellent, but with showstoppers. I wrote two books and and a pile of papers with WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and used the MS Office import/export filters he
I have done some hiring in my day, and in the post-blogs world. And I hired people who had something to say, who had the BALLS to be people, because more likely than not they would also be the people to take initiative and get things done.
I'd say that people who post things that make them look utterly irresponsible should probably not post them publicly, but since they're utterly irresponsible, they won't stop.
But people who post things like political opinions, personal problems, disease and depression, insights into human life and emotion... Bring them in. They'll be twice the employee that the timid by-the-numbers idiot who has been beaten down into "professionalism" will be.
I want powerful, agile, dynamic teams of critical, maybe even cynical people in my employ. I don't want sheep, yes-men, or the same cogs-in-wheel that the competition also has. An army of malcontents and visionaries will trample an army of faceless ties into the mud.
If dropping in rankings constitutes "suppresion" that is subject to antitrust restrictions under the theory that for a search business, the very act of placing other search engines in the rankings is inseparable from the business implications of such placement, then we have a very problematic logical extreme:
The first twenty pages of results at every search engines must be full merely of links to other search engines, since to drop them in the rankings is anticompetitive business practice. It would render search enginges useless. Such a ruling might even imply that search engines are by definition anticompetitive, since under that understanding the primary function of a search engine is to "suppress" the visibility of sites to varying extents, with the first result being least "suppressed" and the last result most "suppressed," excepting of course those who aren't even listed and are completely "suppressed."
Any search engine not turning up as the very first link in a major search engine's results would have an antitrust claim against them.
Not necessarily; all it says is that companies who need more capital than they have (i.e. generally all of them) can often get much more of it by going public, whatever the other limitations that this imposes.
I guess another way to put it is this: market economies place consumers in the uneviable position of having to choose between immediate return on investments (acting for present self-preservation) and the development of a better technological or ecological future (acting for future self-preservation).
Eat now, lose access to a needed cure later. Fund a needed cure later, don't eat now. Yes, it could be said that such tradeoffs are a natural part of the causal nexus (i.e. hunt-gather now, don't get hut built before storm; get hut built before storm, don't hunt-gather now) but the power of a collective (i.e. six billion humans) should be able to harness the mass of labor and the constellation of needs vs. surpluses in order to make such decisions largely unnecessary. Instead, marketplace economies fail to take advantage of this resource and instead re-encode such unfortunate choices at a much larger scale.
It is not a relative flaw in a closed system devoid of long-term interests, but the global economy is not such a closed system. It is an aggregate of multiple markets, some of which are not similarly bound to short-term profits due to vastly different market mechanisms including state-ownership or state-subsidy.
Thus, the short-term focus necessitated in short-term markets will ultimately place them behind long-term focuses that are more viable in competing markets, leading the companies in short-term markets ultimately to fall behind and (in a global marketplace) fail. Paradoxically, it's like economies where long-term focuses are more viable are getting a head start on satisfying future markets and winning dominance then, while the short term markets must struggle to satisfy present markets (usually at the expense of the best path for future development) or risk disappearing into oblivion.
Of course, there is also an absolute flaw, though whether or not it is a flaw is largely a matter of personal opinion. A short-term focus means that many technologies and models that require long-term development and attention will never be brought to bear, and that technologies or models that are not clearly expected to quickly profitable before development ever begins will never earn a chance to even attempt to turn a profit later on. Basically, the short-term returns focus means that a lot of what could have been in the end won't ever be and to me that's a much more sobering side-effect than any economic one.
This is a fundamental flaw in market economies, not in shareholders. Shareholders have a limited lifespan and depend on their investments in the market for their retirement and in many cases income before retirement. If a stock A performs better than stock B now, the investor will go there, because real bankable gains outweigh theoretical gains a) because theoretical gains fall in the future, perhaps too late to make a difference for an investor's livable income and b) real gains are *real*, i.e. in a volatile marketplace like public investing where a company's fortune can shift overnight, much less over a decade or two, it's prudent to take the dollar you can count on now over a dime now and a theoretical two dollars in the future. Companies that try to "stay focused in the long run" without producing real net gains now (whether through dividends or increase) that are larger than those produced by their competitors will lose their investors to those competitors and thus lose their ability to focus in the long run and their ability to create new focuses after that.
This also carries over to funds at the meta level, i.e. funds must select stocks that perform now because if they don't they will be measurably outperformed by other funds now, and consumers will quickly go to the funds that perform best, often not over 100 years or even 50 years, but over 5 years or 10 years, which is really short-term in terms of gains from the business vs. R&D perspective.
So what you're saying is that you think it's okay to kill anything by which you feel threatened, anywhere, anytime. Basically, you're an immoral person employing a doctrine of pre-emption in life.
Right, because it's not about government oppression when it comes to illegal immigration, punishing journalists for criticizing the government, or seizing assets in the "war on drugs," it's just about obeying the law--but when the targets are corporations as opposed to people it's not just about obeying the law but rather about government oppression. I get it.
That strange noise you just heard was the sound of a point flying straight over your head... and then coming around to bite you in the ass.
You have made OP's point for them.
In fact, the article is its own contradiction. They don't matter so much that they deserve a mention and a photo? Right. They matter in technology, a lot, that's why they've been selected and listed (in a shorter, more exclusive list than the people who "did" supposedly matter) rather than 10 or 100 or 1000 joe-schmos out there right now fixing Chevys or planting beets who *actually* don't matter to tech. See, when someone doesn't matter, they're not worth singling out. Anyone who does get singled out, by defintion--matters.
It's a marketing gimmick, and a sadly effective one at that, judging by the Slashdot response.
[blockquote]Give the homeless guy in a park a sandwhich[sic] he's liable to throw it back at you. He'll never say no to the quarter though. Funny huh?[/blockquote]
You would be what's called an "asshole."
a) I've given away plenty of sandwiches, juices, and salads and I've never had one thrown at me, ever. These extensive food distribution networks you speak of often have trouble surviving. Even if they manage to get plenty of food donations (and they don't, always) they can have all kinds of other logistical problems: transportation (how to we get the donated food from points a through f to g?), location (what building or property can we use?), zoning/permits (some schmuck in government thinks it's a "safety hazard" to have this many people in line here or responds to a complaint from a nearby business, no doubt owned by someone like you, that if food is free in the area, there's no reason for people to BUY with those quarters you say not give them) and so on. My girlfriend is working full time trying to hold just such a group together, so that they don't have to keep sending word out on the street that "there's no food from us for the next few days, we can't find a place to distribute legally" while their donations rot in a volunteer's garage twenty miles out of town in the burbs despite the gas an volunteer man-hours it took to collect them all, where it does nobody any good.
b) I've also given away transit cards to very appreciative individuals who were asking for money to *get* somewhere, like, say, to a hospital, or to a family member's abode, or just off of a truly rotten street corner and on to a better one.
c) Addiction, whether to alcohol or drugs, is not "funny," it sucks. It is not a matter of self control, it is a matter of brain chemistry. Once addicted, logic and reasoning skills change, and as a result, so do conclusions and behavior. It's just not a matter of "don't give the lazy indulgent bums your change to buy their hedonistic high."
So f*** you.
I should follow this up by saying that she's still one of my best friends. But thank god I'm no longer the boyfriend and can just laugh at her behavior and help to pick up her many pieces all the time, rather than having to be responsible for it. :-)
Yup, I once had a girlfriend for a brief moment that actually verbalized this explicitly. She was a drama queen, vain as hell, and ultimately impossible to be around (which is why we broke up), though incredibly endearing and adorable and feminine on the surface of things. She could only be trusted in certain ways: trusted to start a ruckus, be the life of the party, cheat on you, start fights with you, let you down, forget important responsibilities and take on unimportant ones, spend energy trying to look good all the time, even when it made no sense.
;-)
She wasn't a dumb girl, though, her IQ and education level were very high. One night while we were having something of a mix between a fight and a heart-to-heart, she explained it to me something like this:
"I'm a woman. Anthropologically, genetically, at my core, I want to compete for attention. I want other women to know that they're inferior to me and I want men to pursue me. But this is the modern world. I have stiff competition for that attention. I have to compete against video games where you get to bed prostitutes and shoot cops. I have to compete against Rachel on friends and Elaine on Seinfeld, not to mention all the college football teams where it's all muscle and adrenaline and combat.
If don't stimulate everyone more than all of these other things, whats to stop them from watching these other things instead of watching me? And I want people watching me. Its instinct. It leads to better social networks, increased opportunity, increased wealth, increased mate selection, lots of general success if I can be the watched one.
So as long as Friends is on TV, buddy, you'll find that I'm going to be a better character than any of them so that you'll pay attention to me and other women will defer to me just as much as they would defer to Lisa Kudrow if she walked by. I'm going to be sluttier than the hookers in the video games and I'm going to be more exciting than the entire Miami football team.
It's not that I go to bed every night planning all of this. But it's instinctive for me as a woman. You're my man and I want your attention. And the other men in the room... well, I want their attention, too, just in case."
Needless to say, we broke up. She forgot a couple of important points: television is only interesting in small doses (most sitcoms are only half an hour), while real people are "on" all the time when you're around them; if you've seen all the episodes in a show, unless it's TRULY SPECTACULAR you often don't care for the re-runs; once you've played a video game, you're done with it; men watch TV and play video games mostly to get away from women for a while.
In any case, the point is that this subthread is right on. Television and entertainment culture competes in a crowded marketplace for our attention, and as a result must rely on ever more basic instincts (motion, sex, fight/flight) to win it, and this bleeds into our personal lives, silently educating generations about social interaction both by example and by suggesting similar adaptations to human personalities in order to compete.