Consumers hidden preference, even then, was for cheaper. Those mechanisms had to be legislated, the market did not create them. The relative merits of legislating this sort of thing is a whole different subject.
You're wrong. They often will say they would pay a little more for a little larger seat, but when the decision to pay time comes, they won't. That's what hidden preferences are all about: customers don't actually understand their own preferences super well (until buying time, when they act).
Sure, I'm with ya. I was really merely citing what I call the "large airline seat phenomenon." Ask travellers if they want the airlines to offer "large airline seats". When the airlines offer the large seats (which by nature, must cost more), the consumers' hidden preference manifests: they lied. They wanted cheap seats.
The idea that code should be perfect is a stupid idea: consumers don't want that.
They want "good enough," not perfect. Perfect costs a great deal of money, probably 4X, and consumers will buy the good enough product, at 1/4 of that price, well beyond 95% of the time.
You've gotten a lot of different pieces of advice in the thread below. I think many of them are quite wise, in particular the remarks that turning your development effort into a real business operation may be a longer tougher haul than you think. The only thing I might add is that there is a certain stage to consider selling your operation... based on a sort of best value of what your small team has been able to complete. It's not clear to me that you are there. Perhaps you should put your feelers out, connect with some friendly venture capitalists, and ask them to assess for you. The ones that have been doing it for a while should have a good feel for it.
State ownership of schools is by definition socialism (to wit: the public ownership of the means of production, in this case the production of educational services). State funding of private schools is something in the middle: kinda, not quite, almost, socialism. I suppose socialism is a bit of a bad word; that's somewhat here, and not quite there.:-)
In the United States, companies, when facing legal action for advertising terms, are responsible for the interpretation of the average person reading the terms. There's no hiding behind weasel words: if the average person takes what you say to mean something, you're responsible, and can be held accountable. Britannica got into trouble on this something like two decades ago. I'm not sure how often it is enforced: I get the idea, not very. Truth in advertising just isn't given much credo over here, sadly.
I wish we had something more akin to the British Advertising Authority (I think that's what it's called).
You're mistaken that it's really the fault of "quick-buck executives". It's the market, and the people in it.
My wife often complains to me when some bit of software is manifesting a bug. She asks "why can't they make software that just works?!"
The answer is, "they can, but you wouldn't buy it". Bug free software is quite expensive. The programmers that write in bug free environments are typically 4-8X less productive, on a line count basis, than programmers who work in non bug free environments.
Unless such things are essential to the market in which they are used (flight control systems, financial transaction systems, etc), the market simply will not bear the costs of such development.
What I am trying to say here is that there are significant market forces at work that reward these "quick buck executives". Basically, they are making what the people want. No, kidding.
Try having to sit across from a guy who loves Sarah Palin and can't stop talking about how the government is lacking without her as VP,...
*Shrug*
Just tell him that you seriously considered voting for her but decided, after a great deal of thought, that voting for a candidate who's major appeal was "I really want to fuck her" wasn't sufficient reason to give up the vote.
However, centrally managed apps feature amongst other things little in the way of human visits to all the desktops in the organization. S/W upgrades become easy, as you do it at a single point.
Sure, other negative things apply, like not being able to use your app if the net is down.
I'm just sayin', many companies are concerned with the staffing tail on desktop computers.
Some of this will be solved with VDI. Particularly the new type of VDI that has support for disconnected operations. Some will be solved with centralized applications per se. And some apps will simply stay "fat".
The basic issue is that the analysts are right. Sun customers have been secretly worried about Sun's ability to go it alone for quite some time... their stock price, you know, dropped a lot. We noticed. Now Sun has put itself on the market, declaring that its own management team/knows/ that it can't go it alone. This undermines our confidence as Sun customers. The putting up of Sun for sale is almost a no-return event. IBM backing out of the deal is a disaster for them.
You really do not want to live under the rule of law where the media-ensorcelled prosecutors get rewards and fame for dolling out damage to those they believe are guilty, without regards for the ethics of doing it right. Trust me on this, you really don't.
The principal that you're objecting to is called "fruit of a poisoned tree". The current theory is that if the government prosecution engages in inappropriate and/or illegal behavior towards the accused, there is no chance of the accused getting a fair trial at all. The evidence itself is considered tainted, a new trial: pointless.
Well, I'm pretty sure that Intel envisions DirectX being the driver for consumers, yes. However they are looking at GPGPU as a threat, and want to own that space lest it take off.
Well, virtualization: it's the driving force behind enterprise adoption of multicore technology today. Companies are eating down all the cores they can get. The appetite is so voracious that memory busses are well and truly stressed. Worse, no one really has any serious technological proposal to solving the memory b/w problem as we get to 16 cores or so.
Yah; I pretty much thought I knew this, but was wondering if I'd missed something. Solaris is free'r than RH. And while there are truly free Linuxen, problem is RH has the highest TRL of any Linux, and therefore is often the only suitable Linux choice in Enterprisey settings, particularly government circles. Now I only need various and sundry to grab a Centos clue. Sigh.
Agreed that the switch can be costly and I could certainly see them producing T2's for as long as the install base supports it. But I would be surprised to see new development.
I am amazed, really, that special processors are used for anything other than embedded applications these days. POWER6, etc, who woulda thunk. Anyway, I see Niagara as Sun's last SPARC hw gasp.
Andy was designing some nice x86 gear while at Sun. Too bad that the rest of Sun's infrastructure has been a boat anchor on their margins, eh? Perhaps IBM can help with that. Thumper is a nice niche product, too, and it's x86 based. Such product could be a real nice basis for a grid based storage platform,...
Well; it's absurd enough to need a proven use case before attempting on any large societal scale, yes. About the same as communism that way: a system of government dreamed up in an ivory tower, on the theory that it will work, without any evidence thereof.
As a general hint, the absurdity is encouraging citizens to engage in a process of escalation. That's a recipe for a nightmare.
This proposal lacks all the basic understanding of human nature that communism does. Like communism, your system cannot/practically/ intersect human society at any nation state scale.
It's fine dream; don't get me wrong. Smaller government, good. Less paperwork, good. I suggest you start with a far easier to implement step, which as difficult as it would be, is far easier of a step than what you propose: merely get your fellow citizens to agree to shrink the government's ability to SPEND.
By and large most of the things that governments do to strangle us mere mortals requires copious financing...
The most libertarian society in the world at the moment, I believe, is Somalia. You are free to move there. By all means, do so. When your experiment is complete, let us know; until then, you are just dreaming.
The "niche" it services is fairly large: a huge swath of DoD legacy, for which recompiling the software and conducting full endianness switches is cost prohibitive. The h/w is vastly cheaper.
Wind power has a severe problem - uncontrolled availability
Well, yah. But as you point out, converting wind power by pushing it into a durable sink is of no particular challenge. There are many places that simply push water up hill to do this. They later let the water through a sluice and convert THAT to electricity.
And as you point out, hydrogen is a fine durable sink.
Essentially what you propose is a form of government where all the laws are case law instead of black letter law. Technically, I think the name of your government is "kritocracy". An additional difficulty of government by contract is that lawsuit must precede legal action.
For example, under current law, a police officer can come and disperse a noisy party after 11PM in many neighborhoods. If it were merely a contract, you'd have to suit to get the party to disperse. Is this what you envision?
Well yah. But this represents a wholesale abandonment of the very idea of the mainframe, which was a h/w based approach to 100% uptime. So calling the cargo container filled with parts designed around a "I don't care if you fail" 'tude can't reasonably used as an analogy to the mainframe a'tall.
The new data center has code written by an entire new breed of program, trained in statelessness, and so forth. This is contrasted with the past breed of engineer who wants to quibble with you about your definitions of statelessness and the like, and is just stuck in the old way of thinking....
Slashdot Mirror
Consumers hidden preference, even then, was for cheaper. Those mechanisms had to be legislated, the market did not create them. The relative merits of legislating this sort of thing is a whole different subject.
C//
You're wrong. They often will say they would pay a little more for a little larger seat, but when the decision to pay time comes, they won't. That's what hidden preferences are all about: customers don't actually understand their own preferences super well (until buying time, when they act).
C//
Sure, I'm with ya. I was really merely citing what I call the "large airline seat phenomenon." Ask travellers if they want the airlines to offer "large airline seats". When the airlines offer the large seats (which by nature, must cost more), the consumers' hidden preference manifests: they lied. They wanted cheap seats.
That's all. Nothing more to it than that. :-)
C//
The idea that code should be perfect is a stupid idea: consumers don't want that.
They want "good enough," not perfect. Perfect costs a great deal of money, probably 4X, and consumers will buy the good enough product, at 1/4 of that price, well beyond 95% of the time.
C//
You've gotten a lot of different pieces of advice in the thread below. I think many of them are quite wise, in particular the remarks that turning your development effort into a real business operation may be a longer tougher haul than you think. The only thing I might add is that there is a certain stage to consider selling your operation... based on a sort of best value of what your small team has been able to complete. It's not clear to me that you are there. Perhaps you should put your feelers out, connect with some friendly venture capitalists, and ask them to assess for you. The ones that have been doing it for a while should have a good feel for it.
C//
Tired of needles.
State ownership of schools is by definition socialism (to wit: the public ownership of the means of production, in this case the production of educational services). State funding of private schools is something in the middle: kinda, not quite, almost, socialism. I suppose socialism is a bit of a bad word; that's somewhat here, and not quite there. :-)
C//
In the United States, companies, when facing legal action for advertising terms, are responsible for the interpretation of the average person reading the terms. There's no hiding behind weasel words: if the average person takes what you say to mean something, you're responsible, and can be held accountable. Britannica got into trouble on this something like two decades ago. I'm not sure how often it is enforced: I get the idea, not very. Truth in advertising just isn't given much credo over here, sadly.
I wish we had something more akin to the British Advertising Authority (I think that's what it's called).
C//
You're mistaken that it's really the fault of "quick-buck executives". It's the market, and the people in it.
My wife often complains to me when some bit of software is manifesting a bug. She asks "why can't they make software that just works?!"
The answer is, "they can, but you wouldn't buy it". Bug free software is quite expensive. The programmers that write in bug free environments are typically 4-8X less productive, on a line count basis, than programmers who work in non bug free environments.
Unless such things are essential to the market in which they are used (flight control systems, financial transaction systems, etc), the market simply will not bear the costs of such development.
What I am trying to say here is that there are significant market forces at work that reward these "quick buck executives". Basically, they are making what the people want. No, kidding.
C//
Try having to sit across from a guy who loves Sarah Palin and can't stop talking about how the government is lacking without her as VP, ...
*Shrug*
Just tell him that you seriously considered voting for her but decided, after a great deal of thought, that voting for a candidate who's major appeal was "I really want to fuck her" wasn't sufficient reason to give up the vote.
C//
Well. Sure.
However, centrally managed apps feature amongst other things little in the way of human visits to all the desktops in the organization. S/W upgrades become easy, as you do it at a single point.
Sure, other negative things apply, like not being able to use your app if the net is down.
I'm just sayin', many companies are concerned with the staffing tail on desktop computers.
Some of this will be solved with VDI. Particularly the new type of VDI that has support for disconnected operations. Some will be solved with centralized applications per se. And some apps will simply stay "fat".
C//
The basic issue is that the analysts are right. Sun customers have been secretly worried about Sun's ability to go it alone for quite some time... their stock price, you know, dropped a lot. We noticed. Now Sun has put itself on the market, declaring that its own management team /knows/ that it can't go it alone. This undermines our confidence as Sun customers. The putting up of Sun for sale is almost a no-return event. IBM backing out of the deal is a disaster for them.
C//
You really do not want to live under the rule of law where the media-ensorcelled prosecutors get rewards and fame for dolling out damage to those they believe are guilty, without regards for the ethics of doing it right. Trust me on this, you really don't.
The principal that you're objecting to is called "fruit of a poisoned tree". The current theory is that if the government prosecution engages in inappropriate and/or illegal behavior towards the accused, there is no chance of the accused getting a fair trial at all. The evidence itself is considered tainted, a new trial: pointless.
C//
If Apple bought Sun, then they would be a very interesting Server-Desktop combo.
That's curious. I've often heard Steve Jobs called an ass, but never a dummy.
C//
Hmmm? I believe there is not really such a thing as a "merger". There is always a buyer. A "merger" is declared to be nice.
C//
Well, I'm pretty sure that Intel envisions DirectX being the driver for consumers, yes. However they are looking at GPGPU as a threat, and want to own that space lest it take off.
C//
Well, virtualization: it's the driving force behind enterprise adoption of multicore technology today. Companies are eating down all the cores they can get. The appetite is so voracious that memory busses are well and truly stressed. Worse, no one really has any serious technological proposal to solving the memory b/w problem as we get to 16 cores or so.
C//
Yah; I pretty much thought I knew this, but was wondering if I'd missed something. Solaris is free'r than RH. And while there are truly free Linuxen, problem is RH has the highest TRL of any Linux, and therefore is often the only suitable Linux choice in Enterprisey settings, particularly government circles. Now I only need various and sundry to grab a Centos clue. Sigh.
Anyway, yah, Solaris is rock solid.
C//
Agreed that the switch can be costly and I could certainly see them producing T2's for as long as the install base supports it. But I would be surprised to see new development.
I am amazed, really, that special processors are used for anything other than embedded applications these days. POWER6, etc, who woulda thunk. Anyway, I see Niagara as Sun's last SPARC hw gasp.
Andy was designing some nice x86 gear while at Sun. Too bad that the rest of Sun's infrastructure has been a boat anchor on their margins, eh? Perhaps IBM can help with that. Thumper is a nice niche product, too, and it's x86 based. Such product could be a real nice basis for a grid based storage platform, ...
C//
Well; it's absurd enough to need a proven use case before attempting on any large societal scale, yes. About the same as communism that way: a system of government dreamed up in an ivory tower, on the theory that it will work, without any evidence thereof.
As a general hint, the absurdity is encouraging citizens to engage in a process of escalation. That's a recipe for a nightmare.
This proposal lacks all the basic understanding of human nature that communism does. Like communism, your system cannot /practically/ intersect human society at any nation state scale.
It's fine dream; don't get me wrong. Smaller government, good. Less paperwork, good. I suggest you start with a far easier to implement step, which as difficult as it would be, is far easier of a step than what you propose: merely get your fellow citizens to agree to shrink the government's ability to SPEND.
By and large most of the things that governments do to strangle us mere mortals requires copious financing...
C//
The most libertarian society in the world at the moment, I believe, is Somalia. You are free to move there. By all means, do so. When your experiment is complete, let us know; until then, you are just dreaming.
C//
The "niche" it services is fairly large: a huge swath of DoD legacy, for which recompiling the software and conducting full endianness switches is cost prohibitive. The h/w is vastly cheaper.
C//
Wind power has a severe problem - uncontrolled availability
Well, yah. But as you point out, converting wind power by pushing it into a durable sink is of no particular challenge. There are many places that simply push water up hill to do this. They later let the water through a sluice and convert THAT to electricity.
And as you point out, hydrogen is a fine durable sink.
C//
Essentially what you propose is a form of government where all the laws are case law instead of black letter law. Technically, I think the name of your government is "kritocracy". An additional difficulty of government by contract is that lawsuit must precede legal action.
For example, under current law, a police officer can come and disperse a noisy party after 11PM in many neighborhoods. If it were merely a contract, you'd have to suit to get the party to disperse. Is this what you envision?
C//
Well yah. But this represents a wholesale abandonment of the very idea of the mainframe, which was a h/w based approach to 100% uptime. So calling the cargo container filled with parts designed around a "I don't care if you fail" 'tude can't reasonably used as an analogy to the mainframe a'tall.
The new data center has code written by an entire new breed of program, trained in statelessness, and so forth. This is contrasted with the past breed of engineer who wants to quibble with you about your definitions of statelessness and the like, and is just stuck in the old way of thinking....
C//