That's clearer. Still, I expect Bill Gates has been much more of an ambassador (If I asked the 50 people that I am most closely related to what 'lopht' was, they would first think I was talking about a thing you put a bed on and then not have heard of the group, but most of them would know who Bill Gates is), and that much of the rest of it has been due to a simple increase in numbers of people who write software (and other similar tasks that go beyond the uses that the majority has for computers).
That's just stupid. Computer skills became more in demand because computers became more entrenched in society, and no, computers did not become more entrenched in society because the press did some articles about some guys that were smart.
And yet I somehow doubt that Chuck Yeager thought he was going to die. There is no need to tell the worriers not to worry, they generally are not the ones that make progress.
I think Asimov deserves more credit than to call his laws silly. Namely, they were a great device; short, clear, supposedly perfectly embedded in the robots, and yet they still went sideways.
My impression was that the appstore is already a morass of crap anyway (the crap in the store might not present resource or security problems, but that doesn't mean it is useful).
I agree with your assessment that Apple tries to sell a good experience, but from what I can tell, the Appstore suffers from the same plight as pretty much every freeware review site, inclusiveness is favored over editorial opinion (they sort of have to do this is they are going to sell the phones in a state that is locked to their store, but there really wouldn't be any big ramifications to letting Google offer their own store).
This is using the statistic rather naively, but so far this year, the chances of dying of swine flu (for someone in the U.S.) have been about 1 in a million. The chances of dying in a car accident have been somewhere around 1 in 10,000 (historical rates are something like 30-40 thousand vehicular deaths per year in the U.S., so between 1/2 year and not knowing how many people regularly travel by vehicle, it could be 1/20,000 or 1/5,000, but 1/10,000 isn't insane). The chances of even catching swine flu have also been about 1/10,000.
Throw in that driving deaths are probably a lot more random than swine flu deaths (being otherwise sick is a big factor in dying from swine flu), and it looks like driving for a year is quite a lot more dangerous than living through several swine flu type disease outbreaks.
Since the early 90s or so, GM and Chrysler weren't selling crap (no seriously, they might not have been as low maintenance as Toyota, but they weren't crap).
The problem is that they made impossible promises 20-30-40 years ago, and the unions agreed to them (when the media talks about 'labor' costs of Detroit cars being higher, they aren't just talking about hourly, they are talking about funding retiree pensions and medical).
The unions then agreed to work in new American factories for Toyota et al., with greater automation and lower wages. Go figure that GM and Chrysler couldn't compete.
I'd rather just make them state the phone subsidy repayment right in the contract.
I guess people that want to finance something like a cell phone are being a little foolish, and the financing could always be arranged separately from the monthly plan, but I don't think binding the financing to the monthly plan is particularly harmful, it is the pretending that it isn't happening that is the problem.
Quality quickly becomes subjective. Something like bugs/operation is a useful metric, but then you have to decide if the programmers productivity matters, if the severity of the bugs matter, if the clarity of the code matters, and it just keeps going.
I'm not sure it is that simple, antitrust laws were essentially created to deal with companies like Standard oil, years after the companies had established themselves, whereas Microsoft has always operated under the specter of such laws.
So the consequences of actual government action were greater for Standard oil, but I think it would take a pretty deep analysis to decide what impact the threat of government action had on Microsoft.
But that's a terrible example, the resolution of that particular incident was the creation of what has become one of most popular (new) revision management systems.
Using BitKeeper for a while probably even gave Linus a chance to think about how he could build a better tool for himself.
It isn't pure zero sum though, if 10% of the shares of a company trade in order to take the price from 3 to 4 and then back down to 3, the numbers the media shouts about will include the amount that the 90% 'lost', an amount that is 4 or 5 times larger than the actual amount that anybody gained or lost.
I have this theory that many of the people who hate the stock market have a history of thinking it is a scam, seeing it go high, getting in high, watching it crash, getting out low thinking it is a big scam, watching it go high...
Imagine if monsters from space turned us all into frogs. We'd all be frogs!
If everyone quit their jobs, the prices for goods that required real production would skyrocket, and people would quickly switch away from day trading, so 'imagine if everyone quit their jobs' doesn't really make much of a point.
Alternatively, people who were bad at day trading would resort to subsistence farming, or maybe a life of physical crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
That's clearer. Still, I expect Bill Gates has been much more of an ambassador (If I asked the 50 people that I am most closely related to what 'lopht' was, they would first think I was talking about a thing you put a bed on and then not have heard of the group, but most of them would know who Bill Gates is), and that much of the rest of it has been due to a simple increase in numbers of people who write software (and other similar tasks that go beyond the uses that the majority has for computers).
That's just stupid. Computer skills became more in demand because computers became more entrenched in society, and no, computers did not become more entrenched in society because the press did some articles about some guys that were smart.
And yet I somehow doubt that Chuck Yeager thought he was going to die. There is no need to tell the worriers not to worry, they generally are not the ones that make progress.
I think Asimov deserves more credit than to call his laws silly. Namely, they were a great device; short, clear, supposedly perfectly embedded in the robots, and yet they still went sideways.
My impression was that the appstore is already a morass of crap anyway (the crap in the store might not present resource or security problems, but that doesn't mean it is useful).
I agree with your assessment that Apple tries to sell a good experience, but from what I can tell, the Appstore suffers from the same plight as pretty much every freeware review site, inclusiveness is favored over editorial opinion (they sort of have to do this is they are going to sell the phones in a state that is locked to their store, but there really wouldn't be any big ramifications to letting Google offer their own store).
This is using the statistic rather naively, but so far this year, the chances of dying of swine flu (for someone in the U.S.) have been about 1 in a million. The chances of dying in a car accident have been somewhere around 1 in 10,000 (historical rates are something like 30-40 thousand vehicular deaths per year in the U.S., so between 1/2 year and not knowing how many people regularly travel by vehicle, it could be 1/20,000 or 1/5,000, but 1/10,000 isn't insane). The chances of even catching swine flu have also been about 1/10,000.
Throw in that driving deaths are probably a lot more random than swine flu deaths (being otherwise sick is a big factor in dying from swine flu), and it looks like driving for a year is quite a lot more dangerous than living through several swine flu type disease outbreaks.
Probably no need to throw in getting drunk, driving is risky enough.
(Swine flu is a great deal more lethal than driving, but it isn't quite as prevalent...)
8.5 is much saner than 8.0 was.
It is probably more reasonable to talk about the $1.2 billion that they earn each quarter, rather than their revenues:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AAPL
For instance, when Google has a good quarter, they make more than that, on 70% of the revenues:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=goog
And HP manages to only make a little more than Apple, on 340% of the revenues:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=hpq
If we are having an anecdote battle, I would point to my 12 year old Chrysler Concorde that runs just fine.
Yes, that's why I think the phone companies should be required to split the phone payoff out from the service prices in the contracts.
If people were forced to consider that phone A added $20 a month for 2 years, they just might want to outright buy phone B for $80.
Fuck you dill weed, Vonnegut you ain't.
Since the early 90s or so, GM and Chrysler weren't selling crap (no seriously, they might not have been as low maintenance as Toyota, but they weren't crap).
The problem is that they made impossible promises 20-30-40 years ago, and the unions agreed to them (when the media talks about 'labor' costs of Detroit cars being higher, they aren't just talking about hourly, they are talking about funding retiree pensions and medical).
The unions then agreed to work in new American factories for Toyota et al., with greater automation and lower wages. Go figure that GM and Chrysler couldn't compete.
I'd rather just make them state the phone subsidy repayment right in the contract.
I guess people that want to finance something like a cell phone are being a little foolish, and the financing could always be arranged separately from the monthly plan, but I don't think binding the financing to the monthly plan is particularly harmful, it is the pretending that it isn't happening that is the problem.
Quality quickly becomes subjective. Something like bugs/operation is a useful metric, but then you have to decide if the programmers productivity matters, if the severity of the bugs matter, if the clarity of the code matters, and it just keeps going.
Grandparent (apparently) has bad Karma, no $&@#$&% modded the comment down, it started there.
What's the difference between learning how to draw to an abstract pygame canvas versus whatever abstraction the system provides for drawing?
There's a pref that you can set to make 'Plain Old Text' the default.
I'm not sure it is that simple, antitrust laws were essentially created to deal with companies like Standard oil, years after the companies had established themselves, whereas Microsoft has always operated under the specter of such laws.
So the consequences of actual government action were greater for Standard oil, but I think it would take a pretty deep analysis to decide what impact the threat of government action had on Microsoft.
This has all happened before:
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/08/17/0030243.shtml#9987007
You got the caps wrong though.
But that's a terrible example, the resolution of that particular incident was the creation of what has become one of most popular (new) revision management systems.
Using BitKeeper for a while probably even gave Linus a chance to think about how he could build a better tool for himself.
Eh, depends on what the pragmatist thinks will be easier.
It isn't pure zero sum though, if 10% of the shares of a company trade in order to take the price from 3 to 4 and then back down to 3, the numbers the media shouts about will include the amount that the 90% 'lost', an amount that is 4 or 5 times larger than the actual amount that anybody gained or lost.
I have this theory that many of the people who hate the stock market have a history of thinking it is a scam, seeing it go high, getting in high, watching it crash, getting out low thinking it is a big scam, watching it go high...
Imagine if monsters from space turned us all into frogs. We'd all be frogs!
If everyone quit their jobs, the prices for goods that required real production would skyrocket, and people would quickly switch away from day trading, so 'imagine if everyone quit their jobs' doesn't really make much of a point.
Alternatively, people who were bad at day trading would resort to subsistence farming, or maybe a life of physical crimes.