On your second point. Yes, you should always provide your end-user with the source, even if there's no chance in hell that he will look at it. If there's a problem with it, and he comes back to you, you will be happy that you now have the correct version. If somebody else gets the unthankful job, they can see what is different, and go to the main source (ignoring your patches). This is what free software is about: having access to the design plans of the binaries. It might not be 100% sensible in your particular circumstance, but it doesn't hurt you either. You never know.
I have, at several occasions, done custom coding around (L)GPL but also BSD software. I take it as a matter of pride to provide the source code of everything I have used to the customer as a zip file along with the binaries that do the actual work. This for the above reasons, but also to acquiant my customer with the concepts of free software: source included!
Maybe we should be extremely thankful that SMS is so expensive. If it were as cheap as email, spamming would become an issue. As it is now, the price does cull the spam.
If you've read the article, or at least looked at the graphs, you will see that being at Best Buy, Wal Mart, Target or Sam Goody is becoming completely irrelevant. CDs are not being bought anymore.
So are you also going to tell me what I can eat (no big macs I presume?) and what recreational chemicals I can enjoy (no nicotine or booze?) because those can increase your costs as well? What about hobbies? Going to tell me that I can't engage in skydiving or bungee jumping because of the increased risk of injury? Where does it end?
Where it ends? Currently I think the worst way of fucking over people with health-care insurance is the evil of 'pre-existing condition'. Funnily enough, that one only exists in the private insurance arena...
Excellent: you failed to give even a single argument for points 1, 3, and 4. Next to this, you fail to include in your analysis the incumbent: private insurance. How do they stack up? I'm now curious: you say you are a businessman, do you run a bank?
The really interesting thing would be to start copyrighting possible outputs of Wolfram Alpha (without actually running it), and then suing Wolfram for violating your copyright on the prospective query. Let the courts sort out that mess!
The confounding variable is called diversity. In a mono-culture such as Microsoft, a single exploit immediately makes 90% of the market vulnerable. In a Unix world, a crack for Solaris has no effect on HP-UX, Linux or *BSD. So, the blackhat might be able to take out a particular version of Solaris, but he then needs to figure out where all these boxes are... In the meantime, the rest of the internet keeps chugging along nicely until the pieces are picked up.
You've got an interesting goal-oriented form of evolution going for you here. What's the 'worst' of the population? Dumb? Can be a survival trait in the right circumstance, and you might even argue that it is one *today*. Aided reproduction? Well, if the offspring can reproduce, no biggie. If they can't... well as long as we as a society can keep providing the pills, no biggie. Once we can't? Selection needs but one generation to get back. Fertility is not something easily bred out of a species.
Overweight? What's 'over', evolutionary speaking? It has been argued that overweight is a survivability trait, eat a lot in times of plenty, store it and consume it in times of need. Thinnies die, fatties survive. Predators for humans? Not seen in any significant form in the last 100K years. We won that race.
We are not evolving? There's sexual selection, viral selection, monetary selection (part of sexual). Due to pollution the quality of sperm in the western world is dropping fast. Guess what that means in a few generations?
This selection is not really on the scale of fang and claw, but there's a lot of stuff going on. It's a bit presumptuous to think that all is under control for the human race.
It seems that your view of evolution for the human species is stuck somewhere between a million and 100K years ago. You might want to read up on it.
So, these apps are neither browsers nor office suites? Come back when you've got something of comparable complexity. I can program a 'frontend for a bunch of encoding tools' in probably 60K of memory (if I lazily load the tools). Doesn't prove a thing.
In some cases it makes sense to exactly know when a piece of memory is freed. In most cases, a general GC suffices. C++ allows the 'some', Java/C# does only the 'most'. Do you have any idea how much time your program spents in GC cycles? The Java programmers I know, don't have a clue, as it usually doesn't show up in their profilers...
Hmm, so you postulate a cause for 'self-ness', the 'universe', and 'ethics', namely God, and then say that because these three exist, God must exist. This is called begging the question. You even do something logically worse than this: you state that someone who does not belief in your favourite cause, must therefore not believe in the existence of your three consequences, under which the existence of the universe itself!
So, your argument boils down to: if you are an atheist you do not believe in the existence of the universe. Why? Because God made the universe, that's why!
Why would SSD's not take over within the next few years? I expect that in one, two years time, all new notebooks will be flash based. Desktops will soon follow, possibly with a few year of a HDD next to the SSD for mass storage.
I for one do not need a 350 GB HDD on my notebook such as I have now. I would love to have better power life and snappier response though. 80GB is comfy for me, and has been so for 5 years. Movies and stuff I put on an external drive, and transfer when I need it. Netbooks already don't have HDDs. Why would you want to have a desktop that's 100% HDD based? Yes, to store your stash of pron and movies, a few TB HDD would be useful, but using it to also host your OS and user files and see your friends mock your system for its slowness? Why?
SSD beat HDD on speed, energy used and on longevity. All HDD has going for it is bytes per buck. Note that the computer race in the eyes of the consumer has always been on speed, never on storage.
Is that opinion or a fact that can be backed up with some solid evidence?
Given that every species is evolving, the solid evidence requirement is in your court. What solid evidence do you have that humans stopped evolving? There's a constant onslaught of viral infections (Swine flu the most recent one) that cull the weak, there are bacterial infections that do the same thing. Bacteria are getting pretty good at circumventing antibiotics, so be prepared for some extra natural selection. And that's just the immune system evolving.
Don't forget humans themselves. We've always been pretty good at wiping out the neighbouring village, and since history began with the written word, we've been able to do that for large regions. Christians, Arabs, Ottomans, Persians, Indians, Chinese: all have done their bit in annihilating the less strong. Only recently we've had Darfur, Iraq, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, where a particularly strong selection pressure on survival abilities has been applied. China, North Korea, Soviet Union, Russia: all have had their mass-murders in the last few generations. You think all this has not changed the composition of the population? You think genetic traits of surviving murderous regimes or bureaucracies have not been selected for?
All in all, the human race has had a pretty easy time in a small part of the world for a couple of decades. I'm pretty sure every species has this from time to time. Given the time the human race has been around, and the challenges we face, we're far from 'end of evolution'.
Practically, you are right. Mutation is needed. Mathematically, it isn't necessary. What research in random number generators has shown is that you can create arbitrary long pseudo-random sequences through deterministic means by shuffling enough bits around. So, if you sacrifice a couple of million nucleotides for implementing a random number generator, you're good to go with 'random' mutations in a deterministic process to last until the sun burns out.
The term "fittest" is referring to animals that have the highest fitness in an evolutionary sense. Fitness [Wikipedia] is defined as an organism's ability to propagate genes to future generations. Although this definition seems vague on a short time scale, it is general enough to mean that organisms whose genes survive well into the future have high fitness whereas those whose genes don't survive for whatever reason have low fitness. Breeding a lot increases the short-term fitness without any guarantee of the long-term fitness. Of course, an organism that doesn't reproduce at all has a fitness of zero.
It might be helpful here to use the traditional definition of Fitness (no link). The fitness of a critter is defined as the number of offspring it produces that reach a fertile age. In other words, it doesn't matter how much children you produce, it matters how many can themselves start to procreate. Therefore, the 'breedy' fish that spawn 100,000 offspring of which on average 2 survive to reproduce is equally fit to the non-breedy human that produces 2.1 offspring that both survive to reproduce. This is all. There's no sense of long-term fitness or short term fitness, it's just the 'take-over' rate of a species at a specific point in time. When circumstances change (an animal taking over the world), its fitness changes due to resource depletion.
Your entire argument hinges on the assumption that an OS is a natural monopoly. This is flat-out false: Google doesn't need to run Windows to serve search-results, banks don't need to run Windows to perform transactions, people don't need to run Windows to create and share documents.
What is more likely happen if Linux comes out on top is that there will be several companies that will provide distributions that will all be different, but which all will function and (god forbid) interoperate. If such a thing comes to pass, the single attack vector for malware writers dissappears, and they will have to work significantly harder to get a smaller payoff. You know that little thing, free market? The one we almost got rid off in our desire to serve the corporate overlords?
And not just the teacher training. This goes beyond what some students are capable of and can handle. What happens to them if they can't function inside a creative mathematical atmosphere?
And what makes you think these kids can handle the current 'training'? Most kids can't handle the current mindless drilling of irrelevant facts, what makes you think that this would be worse?
Functional is too abstract for most people to deal with (yes, I understand it is easy for *you*).
Well, I do seem to recall that the only language non-programmers actually program in, Excel, is purely functional. They don't seem to have a problem understanding it, but visual basic is way too complicated.
Uhm, the US taxpayer has not payed their bills for roughly the last fourty years (1971, cancellation of Bretton Woods). The US doesn't own a whole lot of stuff, and China (as well as Europe) might want to repossess it at some point.
I grant you the free speech standards argument (notwithstanding free speech 'zones' of recent), but lack of corruption? From the perspective of an outsider, the American political process presents, through pork-barreling, and massive behind the doors deals, the most corrupt government of the Western world. That this form of corruption is legal does not make it less corrupt, on the contrary.
Perversion by special interest groups? Again the US takes the lead with lobbyists apparently governing the country. That it's not petty dictators, but petty CEO's that run the show makes no difference whatsoever.
The UN are just amateurs. W.r.t. corruption, the US is king.
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I have, at several occasions, done custom coding around (L)GPL but also BSD software. I take it as a matter of pride to provide the source code of everything I have used to the customer as a zip file along with the binaries that do the actual work. This for the above reasons, but also to acquiant my customer with the concepts of free software: source included!
Maybe we should be extremely thankful that SMS is so expensive. If it were as cheap as email, spamming would become an issue. As it is now, the price does cull the spam.
If you've read the article, or at least looked at the graphs, you will see that being at Best Buy, Wal Mart, Target or Sam Goody is becoming completely irrelevant. CDs are not being bought anymore.
Good point! In particular, you can tell the whining original dev that he can pony up 99 bucks to free his app if he finds this so important.
Well, as long as I'm going to go bankrupt anyway, dumping an extra 100 grand per congress critter wouldn't be a big problem.
Where it ends? Currently I think the worst way of fucking over people with health-care insurance is the evil of 'pre-existing condition'. Funnily enough, that one only exists in the private insurance arena...
Excellent: you failed to give even a single argument for points 1, 3, and 4. Next to this, you fail to include in your analysis the incumbent: private insurance. How do they stack up? I'm now curious: you say you are a businessman, do you run a bank?
The really interesting thing would be to start copyrighting possible outputs of Wolfram Alpha (without actually running it), and then suing Wolfram for violating your copyright on the prospective query. Let the courts sort out that mess!
The confounding variable is called diversity. In a mono-culture such as Microsoft, a single exploit immediately makes 90% of the market vulnerable. In a Unix world, a crack for Solaris has no effect on HP-UX, Linux or *BSD. So, the blackhat might be able to take out a particular version of Solaris, but he then needs to figure out where all these boxes are... In the meantime, the rest of the internet keeps chugging along nicely until the pieces are picked up.
Overweight? What's 'over', evolutionary speaking? It has been argued that overweight is a survivability trait, eat a lot in times of plenty, store it and consume it in times of need. Thinnies die, fatties survive. Predators for humans? Not seen in any significant form in the last 100K years. We won that race.
We are not evolving? There's sexual selection, viral selection, monetary selection (part of sexual). Due to pollution the quality of sperm in the western world is dropping fast. Guess what that means in a few generations? This selection is not really on the scale of fang and claw, but there's a lot of stuff going on. It's a bit presumptuous to think that all is under control for the human race. It seems that your view of evolution for the human species is stuck somewhere between a million and 100K years ago. You might want to read up on it.
So, these apps are neither browsers nor office suites? Come back when you've got something of comparable complexity. I can program a 'frontend for a bunch of encoding tools' in probably 60K of memory (if I lazily load the tools). Doesn't prove a thing.
How many Java browsers are out there? None? Case in point.
In some cases it makes sense to exactly know when a piece of memory is freed. In most cases, a general GC suffices. C++ allows the 'some', Java/C# does only the 'most'. Do you have any idea how much time your program spents in GC cycles? The Java programmers I know, don't have a clue, as it usually doesn't show up in their profilers...
So, your argument boils down to: if you are an atheist you do not believe in the existence of the universe. Why? Because God made the universe, that's why!
I for one do not need a 350 GB HDD on my notebook such as I have now. I would love to have better power life and snappier response though. 80GB is comfy for me, and has been so for 5 years. Movies and stuff I put on an external drive, and transfer when I need it. Netbooks already don't have HDDs. Why would you want to have a desktop that's 100% HDD based? Yes, to store your stash of pron and movies, a few TB HDD would be useful, but using it to also host your OS and user files and see your friends mock your system for its slowness? Why?
SSD beat HDD on speed, energy used and on longevity. All HDD has going for it is bytes per buck. Note that the computer race in the eyes of the consumer has always been on speed, never on storage.
Given that every species is evolving, the solid evidence requirement is in your court. What solid evidence do you have that humans stopped evolving? There's a constant onslaught of viral infections (Swine flu the most recent one) that cull the weak, there are bacterial infections that do the same thing. Bacteria are getting pretty good at circumventing antibiotics, so be prepared for some extra natural selection. And that's just the immune system evolving.
Don't forget humans themselves. We've always been pretty good at wiping out the neighbouring village, and since history began with the written word, we've been able to do that for large regions. Christians, Arabs, Ottomans, Persians, Indians, Chinese: all have done their bit in annihilating the less strong. Only recently we've had Darfur, Iraq, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, where a particularly strong selection pressure on survival abilities has been applied. China, North Korea, Soviet Union, Russia: all have had their mass-murders in the last few generations. You think all this has not changed the composition of the population? You think genetic traits of surviving murderous regimes or bureaucracies have not been selected for?
All in all, the human race has had a pretty easy time in a small part of the world for a couple of decades. I'm pretty sure every species has this from time to time. Given the time the human race has been around, and the challenges we face, we're far from 'end of evolution'.
Practically, you are right. Mutation is needed. Mathematically, it isn't necessary. What research in random number generators has shown is that you can create arbitrary long pseudo-random sequences through deterministic means by shuffling enough bits around. So, if you sacrifice a couple of million nucleotides for implementing a random number generator, you're good to go with 'random' mutations in a deterministic process to last until the sun burns out.
It might be helpful here to use the traditional definition of Fitness (no link). The fitness of a critter is defined as the number of offspring it produces that reach a fertile age. In other words, it doesn't matter how much children you produce, it matters how many can themselves start to procreate. Therefore, the 'breedy' fish that spawn 100,000 offspring of which on average 2 survive to reproduce is equally fit to the non-breedy human that produces 2.1 offspring that both survive to reproduce. This is all. There's no sense of long-term fitness or short term fitness, it's just the 'take-over' rate of a species at a specific point in time. When circumstances change (an animal taking over the world), its fitness changes due to resource depletion.
What is more likely happen if Linux comes out on top is that there will be several companies that will provide distributions that will all be different, but which all will function and (god forbid) interoperate. If such a thing comes to pass, the single attack vector for malware writers dissappears, and they will have to work significantly harder to get a smaller payoff. You know that little thing, free market? The one we almost got rid off in our desire to serve the corporate overlords?
I usually read "M$" as M-string. Yes this is BASIC. The company that gave us BASIC = M$.
And what makes you think these kids can handle the current 'training'? Most kids can't handle the current mindless drilling of irrelevant facts, what makes you think that this would be worse?
Interesting and creative summary of the article. You might want to read it...
Well, I do seem to recall that the only language non-programmers actually program in, Excel, is purely functional. They don't seem to have a problem understanding it, but visual basic is way too complicated.
Uhm, the US taxpayer has not payed their bills for roughly the last fourty years (1971, cancellation of Bretton Woods). The US doesn't own a whole lot of stuff, and China (as well as Europe) might want to repossess it at some point.
The UN are just amateurs. W.r.t. corruption, the US is king.