it is a good thing, makes tax filing really simple and easy to understand.
However, many taxes are used as social nudges. eg. we tax unhealthy things to discourage you from indulging in them - like alcohol, tobacco, etc. The alternative without that would be outright bans or restrictions in some form.
We also use taxes to encourage socially-beneficial aspects, but these could be replaced with direct benefit handouts instead so I don't see a problem with these, but the "discourage taxes" are a tricky problem.
There's a good point that countries like Greece should implement it, as tax evasion is rife there (mainly by the rich, apparently)
There is an argument that flat-rate tax places a bigger burden on the lower and middle paid, as 20% of 10k leaves you much less to spend on essentials like food and energy than someone earning 100k getting taxed at the same rate. I think this is easily fixed by putting a threshold before tax gets paid - so the first 10k is tax-free, then you start paying at the flat rate.
The idea of the tobin tax is to stop the financial "whiz kids" from trading vast amounts of stock then trading it again a few milliseconds later. The concept being that the fraction of a penny gained multiplies by the tremendously large number of shares traded. Once you put a tax of 0.5% (as it is in the UK's stamp duty) then the ability to trade off the minor fluctations in stock prices becomes profitless, and the financial institutions will have to stop it... and maybe, just maybe, start investing in stocks instead of mindlessly shuffling them around.
The economic freedom you talk about doesn't apply here - the algorithmic trading that goes on is just gaming the system for the traders own advantage. The entire stock market becomes their casino where they always win, unfortunately when this goes a bit wrong (as you've seen recently) the knock-on effects of large-scale selling just serves to screw you, me and the listed companies over. Economic freedom will be better served with a tax like this.
There's plenty to be said for flat-rate tax schemes, but here we're not trying to tax their wealth, we're trying to stop them from abusing the system.
fantastic - love the linked stuff in the stream, especially the bloodied polar bears captions "you want a coke mother fucker".
But of course, even though that looked like a stream on pepsi's page, it was really just search results. Too bad that I can't really see which one was the real pepsi google+ page (glad to see their policy on real names is working fine).
In short - Google+ is a total failure, which is a pity. They need to stop trying to be like facebook and start being like a communications hub where we can share all the google products (and our own) in a central location. *Then* they might get some use out of it. Keeping it like a mini blog is just not working.
unfortunately you failed to read even the summary!
The top tag on SO is for C# - which you say must mean C# is an abomination, fair enough. (actually I think it'll be because the.NET framework is rather large, and now becoming susceptible to the usual Microsoft 'obsolete it, replace it and bloat it' process. Therefore it's incomprehensible to most people, thus requiring many more questions on how to do things)
The article goes on to compare the number of SO questions against the 'language popularity' of TIOBE, and then describes the ratio.
Also, FYI, the people running SO aren't the ones who answer the questions.
yes, I use Mailwasher for donkeys years and it works great - its a little 'notifier' type app that sits in the taskbar and checks your email, you can delete or bounce, or mark as spam all in the little app, and only bother booting your real email client when you need to read more of the email than the top 25 lines, or need to view it in html.
I don't even use my regular email client much anyway, i find i can deal with email happily in mailwasher. (and you can filter things like email list emails so they don't show up in MWP, if you get hundreds of them).
totally agree with points 2 and 3: I don;t even know what half of the products do - vSphere? is that a hypervisor, or a management package addon? How about Fusion? it's all so unclear and confusing that I can;t go to their website and find out exactly WTF it is that they're selling in clear and simple terms.
It doesn't help that they jiggle the names and features around every so often too. Licencing... I just don't bother, I stick with the free stuff from them and don't even bother trying to navigate the nightmare.
So: VMWare, you need to make things clear, then people might start to buy your stuff from you again. ('cos it is really good stuff).
it did when you installed it. Most people don't change it to google, they just click the 'yeah, let me get on with browsing' button which leaves the bing default in place.
No-one I know would ever type 'bing.com' into the url and search... but plenty will type the search query into IE's search field... and that defaults to Bing.
Maybe there are other microsoft things that use bing too without you realising it.
but this is the point - you have apps written by people who do not understand the filesystem and end up putting their binaries in/usr/local/bin or worse -/opt/bin, or even/home/user/bin
There are too many/bin directories on a modern system that do not really need to be there,/bin and/sbin - does it really make a difference if they were consolidated?
If it were simpler (not that I'm saying RH are right here BTW), you'd get a lot more consistency and *nixs would be easier to maintain.
but it's not for a single server that runs a renderfarm, that's not the target market. (for that you'd want dedicated graphics type chips anyway)
These are to support cloud and web type servers. Note that the intent here is not to provide a single massively virtualized server that you cram hundreds of paying customers onto, but to create a single server that runs 4000 individual OSs. At 1.25W per OS that makes a huge cost saving for most datacentres that are filled with web servers that pretty much don't need CPU power anyway.
Compare to the intel version - at 100W for that 3ghz chip (plus all the other chips that are already integrated into the ARM SoC), you'd have to run 100 VMs to get the same power consumption levels, at potentially drastically reduced performance per user.
I guess you could stick a clustered OS on them all and then run it as a single OS that does parallel tasks well but single-core tasks poorly, but again - that's not the target market for these things.
Because the standard Win7install requires "16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)"
Which is the absolute minimum requirements. You'll soon fill the remaining 16Gb up with software updates, applications and data.
I try to install programs and user data on my D drive, but Win7 still has taken up 30.4 Gb. My untouched-by-me Windows subdirectory takes up 20.8 Gb! (10.9 Gb of which is in that crappy WinSxS directory)
yeah, this is exactly the problem. No-one cares too much about software being patented, as long as its done in a manner that shows you've actually done some work and come up with something new.
That many of the 'software' patents are just vague concepts or pie-in-the-sky ideas is the problem. We need to make software patentable if a working system is submitted to the patent office.
I read once that the patent system was not just to protect the inventor, but society too - as once the patent expired (or the inventor!) then a full blueprint was available for all to use and couldn't be forgotten or lost.
considering just how large the US debt is today, I'm real glad for you guys that you got your money's worth out of it - monorails to every city, free public transport for all, slum regeneration, fibre broadband to every household,.... oh wait.
maybe the point is that IE is just a few dozen lines of code that put Trident in a window and that all the functionality we'd all recognise as a browser is part of the underlying 'shared' library.
for example, in Windows Explorer, the address bar history is the same as IEs. If you want to prevent Explorer from keeping history of folders you've typed in there, you can - by turning off IEs history option.
it was because Microsoft bundled it and so killed Netscape's browser which was the de-factor standard back in the day.
In other words, they used their market monopoly position to destroy a competitor.
Now, there's a big difference between providing a HTML rendering library in your OS that you can use if you want to - like sticking webkit in as a default Windows dll, it's another thing to provide a browser application that cannot be removed. There was a lot of FUD about the difference between the 2 things during the court cases, where MS tried to say IE was the rendering library. Looks like they're trying the same thing all over again so your 3rd party apps will not use the library, but will have to have the whole IE shebang.
Oh, and no-one gives 2 figs about Safari, Konqueror or Epiphany. Not until Linux gets 90% share of the desktop marketplace (ans even then Epiphany and Konqueror will compete against each other thus preventing the same kind of problems MS inflicted upon us with their 'standard' IE6)
As we all know DirectX 10 and 11 weren't backported to XP because they were calling parts of the new WPF that would have been a royal bitch to rewrite for XP
no, DX10 wasn't written for XP because they wanted as many excuses as they could get to make you buy Windows 7.
Given that disconnecting the wheels from the engine is just as easy in an automatic (just push the selector forward until it stick - that'll put it in "N"), what relevance does this have to TFA?
maybe that the Jaguar cruise control (which is very good BTW) can be turned off in a manual gearbox version by depressing the clutch might be what the poster was on about. Alternatively, he could have just been saying that you don't have to switch the engine off, but do all automatic boxes allow you to move to N while you're in motion?
BTW it is more fun to drive with a manual, you're confusing utility with driving for the sake of it - you might not appreciate a manual when driving to the shops (or so it sounds, and that's fine) but you can't deny that an automatic removes plenty of human interaction with the car, which is a bad thing when you want mor interaction.
yes, but a lot of that was built through the reflection feature of.NET, which in turn makes it very slow and clumsy. Reflection has its uses, but the easiest way to tell is to use the following rule: "if you're using it you're doing things wrong."
I have developed some code (mainly diagnosing problems) before now, perched on a server with an old laptop resting on the box it came in, so sometimes you don't get the environment you'd prefer.
My point isn't that you cannot do it, it's just that everyone who talks about 'programmer productivity' is really talking about the strengths of the IDE, and getting that confused with the language. I mean people say C# is "so easy to develop in, you just click here and half your code is written for you, then type and intellisense tells you what to type next". Without that tool they're a bit lost. So what does that say about the 'ease' of use of the language itself, if you need that tool? Often it means that you're no longer programming C#, say, but programming using VS. Extrapolate that a little and soon you find that knocking up a quick web app (in the context of Dart, now) might require a load of wizard-generated code and a bunch of under-the-covers, don't-worry-your-little-head boilerplate.
That's what I would be trying to avoid in designing a new language.
SuperSpeed USB may be able to compatibly downgrade to full-speed USB communication, but that doesn't mean that anything you plug a SuperSpeed device into is magically SuperSpeed.
true, but there is 1 crucial factor. When you plug a SuperSpeed device into an existing port, it still works. I'd rather have a fancy device that works on everything than a fancy device that doesn't.
indeed. I wanted G+ to work, but when I get to it all I see is a 'stream' where people post notes about stuff I don't really care about.
Meanwhile the stuff I do care about - communication between me and my friends and potential contacts - is pretty poor. I couldn't send an email from G+ to a friend on there, I had to post it as a private post, which is pretty pathetic all in all. When he sent me a private post, it did pop up in my email, but guess what - I had to return to G+ to reply. Useless.
I worry now about the draconian policies too, what would I do if all my gmail mail was inaccessible because some grunt somewhere pressed the 'abuse' button for no good reason?.
If G+ wants to be successful, I think it has to stop trying to tell us what we want, and instead give us what we want instead. That's usually simple stuff, basically a communications hub where we can contact people and occasionally share stuff with them - not crappy posts about crap I've seen on the web attached to a picture.
Give us email and gtalk integration that doesn't have to sit in G+, give us file sharing abilities, give us personal information features (eg like LinkedIn or Friends Reunited), give us the ability to organise links to stuff we know about (eg like online bookmarks organised into groups so I can store all the links to the stuff I am interested in).
Circles and Stream is ok, but a social network it isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
it is a good thing, makes tax filing really simple and easy to understand.
However, many taxes are used as social nudges. eg. we tax unhealthy things to discourage you from indulging in them - like alcohol, tobacco, etc. The alternative without that would be outright bans or restrictions in some form.
We also use taxes to encourage socially-beneficial aspects, but these could be replaced with direct benefit handouts instead so I don't see a problem with these, but the "discourage taxes" are a tricky problem.
There are some countries that have implemented flat rate tax schemes, Lithuania and Estonia IIRC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4444717.stm
There's a good point that countries like Greece should implement it, as tax evasion is rife there (mainly by the rich, apparently)
There is an argument that flat-rate tax places a bigger burden on the lower and middle paid, as 20% of 10k leaves you much less to spend on essentials like food and energy than someone earning 100k getting taxed at the same rate. I think this is easily fixed by putting a threshold before tax gets paid - so the first 10k is tax-free, then you start paying at the flat rate.
this time we do need another tax.
The idea of the tobin tax is to stop the financial "whiz kids" from trading vast amounts of stock then trading it again a few milliseconds later. The concept being that the fraction of a penny gained multiplies by the tremendously large number of shares traded. Once you put a tax of 0.5% (as it is in the UK's stamp duty) then the ability to trade off the minor fluctations in stock prices becomes profitless, and the financial institutions will have to stop it... and maybe, just maybe, start investing in stocks instead of mindlessly shuffling them around.
The economic freedom you talk about doesn't apply here - the algorithmic trading that goes on is just gaming the system for the traders own advantage. The entire stock market becomes their casino where they always win, unfortunately when this goes a bit wrong (as you've seen recently) the knock-on effects of large-scale selling just serves to screw you, me and the listed companies over. Economic freedom will be better served with a tax like this.
There's plenty to be said for flat-rate tax schemes, but here we're not trying to tax their wealth, we're trying to stop them from abusing the system.
fantastic - love the linked stuff in the stream, especially the bloodied polar bears captions "you want a coke mother fucker".
But of course, even though that looked like a stream on pepsi's page, it was really just search results. Too bad that I can't really see which one was the real pepsi google+ page (glad to see their policy on real names is working fine).
In short - Google+ is a total failure, which is a pity. They need to stop trying to be like facebook and start being like a communications hub where we can share all the google products (and our own) in a central location. *Then* they might get some use out of it. Keeping it like a mini blog is just not working.
lets just hope that the visual message indicating that "this is NOT a test" will pop up when needed!
unfortunately you failed to read even the summary!
The top tag on SO is for C# - which you say must mean C# is an abomination, fair enough. (actually I think it'll be because the .NET framework is rather large, and now becoming susceptible to the usual Microsoft 'obsolete it, replace it and bloat it' process. Therefore it's incomprehensible to most people, thus requiring many more questions on how to do things)
The article goes on to compare the number of SO questions against the 'language popularity' of TIOBE, and then describes the ratio.
Also, FYI, the people running SO aren't the ones who answer the questions.
yes, I use Mailwasher for donkeys years and it works great - its a little 'notifier' type app that sits in the taskbar and checks your email, you can delete or bounce, or mark as spam all in the little app, and only bother booting your real email client when you need to read more of the email than the top 25 lines, or need to view it in html.
I don't even use my regular email client much anyway, i find i can deal with email happily in mailwasher. (and you can filter things like email list emails so they don't show up in MWP, if you get hundreds of them).
totally agree with points 2 and 3: I don;t even know what half of the products do - vSphere? is that a hypervisor, or a management package addon? How about Fusion? it's all so unclear and confusing that I can;t go to their website and find out exactly WTF it is that they're selling in clear and simple terms.
It doesn't help that they jiggle the names and features around every so often too. Licencing... I just don't bother, I stick with the free stuff from them and don't even bother trying to navigate the nightmare.
So: VMWare, you need to make things clear, then people might start to buy your stuff from you again. ('cos it is really good stuff).
it did when you installed it. Most people don't change it to google, they just click the 'yeah, let me get on with browsing' button which leaves the bing default in place.
No-one I know would ever type 'bing.com' into the url and search... but plenty will type the search query into IE's search field... and that defaults to Bing.
Maybe there are other microsoft things that use bing too without you realising it.
but this is the point - you have apps written by people who do not understand the filesystem and end up putting their binaries in /usr/local/bin or worse - /opt/bin, or even /home/user/bin
There are too many /bin directories on a modern system that do not really need to be there, /bin and /sbin - does it really make a difference if they were consolidated?
If it were simpler (not that I'm saying RH are right here BTW), you'd get a lot more consistency and *nixs would be easier to maintain.
pah. Forget /usr/bin, put it all into /program%20files/ and /program%20files%20(x86)/
now *that* is easier!
but it's not for a single server that runs a renderfarm, that's not the target market. (for that you'd want dedicated graphics type chips anyway)
These are to support cloud and web type servers. Note that the intent here is not to provide a single massively virtualized server that you cram hundreds of paying customers onto, but to create a single server that runs 4000 individual OSs. At 1.25W per OS that makes a huge cost saving for most datacentres that are filled with web servers that pretty much don't need CPU power anyway.
Compare to the intel version - at 100W for that 3ghz chip (plus all the other chips that are already integrated into the ARM SoC), you'd have to run 100 VMs to get the same power consumption levels, at potentially drastically reduced performance per user.
I guess you could stick a clustered OS on them all and then run it as a single OS that does parallel tasks well but single-core tasks poorly, but again - that's not the target market for these things.
Because the standard Win7install requires "16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)"
Which is the absolute minimum requirements. You'll soon fill the remaining 16Gb up with software updates, applications and data.
I try to install programs and user data on my D drive, but Win7 still has taken up 30.4 Gb. My untouched-by-me Windows subdirectory takes up 20.8 Gb! (10.9 Gb of which is in that crappy WinSxS directory)
yeah, this is exactly the problem. No-one cares too much about software being patented, as long as its done in a manner that shows you've actually done some work and come up with something new.
That many of the 'software' patents are just vague concepts or pie-in-the-sky ideas is the problem. We need to make software patentable if a working system is submitted to the patent office.
I read once that the patent system was not just to protect the inventor, but society too - as once the patent expired (or the inventor!) then a full blueprint was available for all to use and couldn't be forgotten or lost.
considering just how large the US debt is today, I'm real glad for you guys that you got your money's worth out of it - monorails to every city, free public transport for all, slum regeneration, fibre broadband to every household, .... oh wait.
so, no-one claims that you cannot replace Safari in OSX, but on Windows they do say that you *need* IE10 installed in order to use the OS.
That's the difference, MS using the underlying component to push their web browser (and therefore the default Bing and MS advert engine) to the users.
maybe the point is that IE is just a few dozen lines of code that put Trident in a window and that all the functionality we'd all recognise as a browser is part of the underlying 'shared' library.
for example, in Windows Explorer, the address bar history is the same as IEs. If you want to prevent Explorer from keeping history of folders you've typed in there, you can - by turning off IEs history option.
it was because Microsoft bundled it and so killed Netscape's browser which was the de-factor standard back in the day.
In other words, they used their market monopoly position to destroy a competitor.
Now, there's a big difference between providing a HTML rendering library in your OS that you can use if you want to - like sticking webkit in as a default Windows dll, it's another thing to provide a browser application that cannot be removed. There was a lot of FUD about the difference between the 2 things during the court cases, where MS tried to say IE was the rendering library. Looks like they're trying the same thing all over again so your 3rd party apps will not use the library, but will have to have the whole IE shebang.
Oh, and no-one gives 2 figs about Safari, Konqueror or Epiphany. Not until Linux gets 90% share of the desktop marketplace (ans even then Epiphany and Konqueror will compete against each other thus preventing the same kind of problems MS inflicted upon us with their 'standard' IE6)
As we all know DirectX 10 and 11 weren't backported to XP because they were calling parts of the new WPF that would have been a royal bitch to rewrite for XP
no, DX10 wasn't written for XP because they wanted as many excuses as they could get to make you buy Windows 7.
Given that disconnecting the wheels from the engine is just as easy in an automatic (just push the selector forward until it stick - that'll put it in "N"), what relevance does this have to TFA?
maybe that the Jaguar cruise control (which is very good BTW) can be turned off in a manual gearbox version by depressing the clutch might be what the poster was on about. Alternatively, he could have just been saying that you don't have to switch the engine off, but do all automatic boxes allow you to move to N while you're in motion?
BTW it is more fun to drive with a manual, you're confusing utility with driving for the sake of it - you might not appreciate a manual when driving to the shops (or so it sounds, and that's fine) but you can't deny that an automatic removes plenty of human interaction with the car, which is a bad thing when you want mor interaction.
absolutely.
http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2011/03/its-time-radiation-stopped-being-scare.html
yes, but a lot of that was built through the reflection feature of .NET, which in turn makes it very slow and clumsy. Reflection has its uses, but the easiest way to tell is to use the following rule: "if you're using it you're doing things wrong."
I have developed some code (mainly diagnosing problems) before now, perched on a server with an old laptop resting on the box it came in, so sometimes you don't get the environment you'd prefer.
My point isn't that you cannot do it, it's just that everyone who talks about 'programmer productivity' is really talking about the strengths of the IDE, and getting that confused with the language. I mean people say C# is "so easy to develop in, you just click here and half your code is written for you, then type and intellisense tells you what to type next". Without that tool they're a bit lost. So what does that say about the 'ease' of use of the language itself, if you need that tool? Often it means that you're no longer programming C#, say, but programming using VS. Extrapolate that a little and soon you find that knocking up a quick web app (in the context of Dart, now) might require a load of wizard-generated code and a bunch of under-the-covers, don't-worry-your-little-head boilerplate.
That's what I would be trying to avoid in designing a new language.
SuperSpeed USB may be able to compatibly downgrade to full-speed USB communication, but that doesn't mean that anything you plug a SuperSpeed device into is magically SuperSpeed.
true, but there is 1 crucial factor. When you plug a SuperSpeed device into an existing port, it still works. I'd rather have a fancy device that works on everything than a fancy device that doesn't.
indeed. I wanted G+ to work, but when I get to it all I see is a 'stream' where people post notes about stuff I don't really care about.
Meanwhile the stuff I do care about - communication between me and my friends and potential contacts - is pretty poor. I couldn't send an email from G+ to a friend on there, I had to post it as a private post, which is pretty pathetic all in all. When he sent me a private post, it did pop up in my email, but guess what - I had to return to G+ to reply. Useless.
I worry now about the draconian policies too, what would I do if all my gmail mail was inaccessible because some grunt somewhere pressed the 'abuse' button for no good reason?.
If G+ wants to be successful, I think it has to stop trying to tell us what we want, and instead give us what we want instead. That's usually simple stuff, basically a communications hub where we can contact people and occasionally share stuff with them - not crappy posts about crap I've seen on the web attached to a picture.
Give us email and gtalk integration that doesn't have to sit in G+, give us file sharing abilities, give us personal information features (eg like LinkedIn or Friends Reunited), give us the ability to organise links to stuff we know about (eg like online bookmarks organised into groups so I can store all the links to the stuff I am interested in).
Circles and Stream is ok, but a social network it isn't.