...I read "flavor" or "flavour", "color" or "colour" without even noticing the spelling. But there is a Britishism that I have trouble getting used to. Am I the only one who has to stop and translate into American when I read a sentence that uses the name of a company as a third-person plural noun?
When I read, for example, "SCO are a bunch of idiots," I feel a need to change it around in my head to "SCO is a bunch of idiots."
But don't everybody change on my account. I can adjust, given time.
I disagree on several points. First, I don't come by my knowledge of supply and demand by Slashdot--or maybe you meant my readers/modders. Regardless, I stil think I'm right about this. Second, the cost of an operating system is frequently in excess of 10% of the purchase price of a new machine--that is certainly economically significant. It hardly matters whether people know they're being charged for it--if one can sell a computer without that cost, they'll surely notice the price difference.
Finally, I believe your last point about open source software not driving demand for new hardware is wrong, BUT as I was asking a question (not of you, actually, but what the hell), I appreciate your insights. I still would like to hear Bruce's, too.
It would seem that hardware manufacturers taking (financial) interest in open source may be the force we need to counter-balance entrenched Big Software. Econ 101 supports this idea, as lowering the total cost of owning computers should result in more being sold. Having IBM and HP (maybe Sun?--they seem conflicted) on board is great, but there are a lot of hardware companies that still don't get it. Obviously, companies like Intel and AMD and ATI and NVidia have to weigh the benefits of actively (and monetarily) supporting Linux and other open source against the problems it might cause in their current business arrangements (read: don't want to piss off Micrsoft).
The question(s): Do you think their current lukewarm (at best) support represents enlightened self-interest, or are they missing the boat? Is there anything the community can do to improve the returns for companies that do jump on the bandwagon?
Seriously, have you considered blowing off college and bumming it for a while? Wait tables or whatever for food money, and waste as much time as you like on the internet or lost inside your own head. It seems like there's only a few possible outcomes--either you'll get bored with it and develop some real motivation to go to school (then you won't need motivational tricks), or you'll love it forever (in which case you avoided wasting your life doing stuff you hated), or maybe you'll even find something you really love to do and become a fabulous success at it (may require school, may not--either way, the motivation is there).
Of course, there are pitfalls here, too. For instance, you may love bumming around for twenty years, get sick of it finally, only to find yourself too dysfunctional to go to school even though you really want to. That would suck. Also, you'll find that the bum's life isn't usually awash in women (or whatever turns you on). Most people (though not all) are looking for less starry-eyed partners.
If you're going to school to please other people (parents?), you might want to sit down and really think about what YOU want out of your life. You only get one, you know. You're not doing anybody any favors spending all that money on something you're only giving a half-assed effort.
Absolutely not. Women love married men--it's like a Seal of Approval from the women's union. My personal estimate: not one woman in 10 would turn down a proposition from a man she was interested in just because he was married.
"Protecting the language is normal....", the nice lady says. Well, actually, no. Infantile, futile, sad, and pathetic, yes. Normal, no.
Why do the French, paragons on internationalism that they be, seek to root out invading foreign words, while the parochial Americans just absorb it all and keep on going? If French people really didn't want to use English words, it wouldn't be necessary for the government to tell them to stop. I think this demonstrates what den Beste talks about from time to time: the French have never gotten over their belief that common people are simply unable to govern themselves and must be told what to do.
As for the terrorist thing... who would want to use 3rd-party info for targeting, anyhow? But if you're going after a specific target, and you know it's going over a big desolate area (where there won't be any bystanders, quick-responding police force or whatnot), then 3-minute info is still damn useful and every bit as good as realtime.
Ooh, you're sneaky. I was thinking of the "consequences be damned" kind of terrorist who wouldn't give a lot of though to his own getaway.
As for the rest, I'm not really using on-the-ground experience, I'm using 20 years of experience at Atlanta Center. There's no place in our airspace (or any of our neighboring Centers, or their neighbors either) where you could just shoot of a rocket with no fear of killing somebody (that includes Texas). Use that traffic display thing that started this conversation--you'll see what I mean. They're everywhere, and that still doesn't include the VFRs (yes, I know the airplanes in the display are 20 miles wide--I don't think that changes things for the purposes we're talking about.)
If the difference between a plane being somewhere it could be hit and not is less than three minutes of flight time, folks shouldn't be shooting off rockets anyhow!
I think that's the FAA's point, actually. East of the Mississippi, at least, that's all day long--and who wants to shoot rockets in the mountains? Nebraska might be okay.
There are lots of places (in nonconjested airspace) where even knowing that no plane is within a 6-minute window provides more than enough of a margin.
I don't disagree with this, but I would remind you that the traffic feed from the FAA only includes aircraft being worked by ATC Centers. In good weather, there are thousands of planes in the air not being worked by ATC at all.
Similarly, I don't see how using only 3-minute updates substantially encumbers any halfway intelligent terrorist.
I just meant to say that it doesn't help them any. It doesn't take a lot of research to figure out where to stand to see a steady flow of targets, if that's what you're trying to do. When the airplanes are going over head three miles apart all day long, getting three minute updates doesn't really improve your aim any.
I'm afraid the updates are way too slow to allow anybody shooting off rockets to miss the airplanes overhead. It's every three minutes, I believe (can't remember precisely, but I know it's measured in minutes). On the other hand, that's precisely why it's not considered a security risk--too slow to be useful for terrorist activities (though I harbor a suspicion that it has caused the military to occasionally obfuscate their flight plans--and even ignore the system entirely when it suits them).
I'm not saying "sharecropper" is the greatest analogy in the world; I'm just giving examples of software that fell to competition with Microsoft. What all of these cases have in common is that they increased the value of their target OS by providing users with needed software--effectively subsidizing their own competition. Microsoft can hardly be accused of being nimble, but they didn't need to be since they had their OS cash cow paying the bills while they got their other products right.
Trying to pin the blame for this on Microsoft when every other OS developer was also doing it is just lame.
I don't think I "blamed" anything on Microsoft. I read the article as a cautionary tale for developers, and I was giving examples of programs that got run over by the company that sold their target OS. I could give examples of programs this hasn't happened to as well, but nobody asked for that.
Well, I can think of a few cases that seem to apply, if you're interested.
There used to be more than one word processor for MS OSes: WordStar, Ami, Q&A (primarily a DB manager, but a lot of people preferred to included word processor to the other choices of the day), and of course, WordPerfect--which dominated the market until Microsoft decided to take it over. Now (effectively) there's only one: Word.
In the same vein, there used to be a lot of choices in the spreadsheet category: CalcStar, Lotus 123, and Quattro spring to mind, but I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch. There used to be (viable) database managers for the PC besides Access (Paradox, Q&A, FoxPro (was there a Fox first? I assume so.), etc. Now both these categories are so dominated by Microsoft that we take it for granted.
Do I need to mention the browser wars and the fate of Netscape?
What was the first widely used disk compression program? Stacker? Doublespace? I forget, but I know Microsoft decided to include that functionality with their OS, and that was the end of that market (though not the end of the litigation).
Go back to MS-DOS. Anybody remember third-party memory managers? They were big money for their developers--until Windows broke the 640Kb barrier.
I think it requires a pretty short memory to say that relatively few developers have had the ground pulled out from under them when developing for someone else's platform. That's not to say it's always a bad idea--I'm sure somebody got rich off of all these programs before they got pounded into oblivion. But unless you occupy a niche too small for the big guys to notice, it's definitely an invitation to trouble in the long run.
My first thought was that the printer scans the page as you move it and uses what it has already printed to locate itself. That leaves the problem of how you start out.
I couldn't figure that out, so I gave up. I'll trust them, too.
Uh, yeah, that's gonna hurt--up until now they've had a lot of trouble finding me.
Just think of every call from a politician or non-profit as an opportunity to score an $11,000 hit if they ignore your request and call again. In fact, I think I'll buy a little log book for each phone so I can keep track of who I've told to piss off.
Of course, I'm showing my naivete here--as if this shit is ever going to be enforced. Oh, well.
Perhaps you should have another look at the article. It has this to say, which may be relevant to you (and thousands of other people), since your software is apparently compiled with GCC, which was only used in 29% of the programs used in the benchmark:
It is probably the NAGWare Fortran compiler which is poorly optimized for the Intel P4, not so much GCC. I say this because according to this SPEC FAQ, SPECfp2000 contains 10 Fortran programs, and 4 C programs. In other words, SPECfp is mostly Fortran, and NAGWare is the Fortran compiler, so therefore it is most likely NAGWare that is the bad compiler for Intel, not GCC.
Everything you say here is the truth as I understand it, also. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the guy who put up the c0wz site (it's been about 3 years since I needed to go there, since my LRP just runs)--was he in the short list of people who got some acknowledgement?
The key to understanding economics is to remember that small (dis)incentives matter. If a rise in component prices drives the cost of all computers up, causing all computers to be sold for higher prices, fewer computers will be bought.
Demand for no product is completely price-inelastic; I suspect demand for computers is very elastic indeed.
Will this trash the market for computers? No. Will it make no difference at all? No.
Slashdot Mirror
When I read, for example, "SCO are a bunch of idiots," I feel a need to change it around in my head to "SCO is a bunch of idiots."
But don't everybody change on my account. I can adjust, given time.
Finally, I believe your last point about open source software not driving demand for new hardware is wrong, BUT as I was asking a question (not of you, actually, but what the hell), I appreciate your insights. I still would like to hear Bruce's, too.
It would seem that hardware manufacturers taking (financial) interest in open source may be the force we need to counter-balance entrenched Big Software. Econ 101 supports this idea, as lowering the total cost of owning computers should result in more being sold. Having IBM and HP (maybe Sun?--they seem conflicted) on board is great, but there are a lot of hardware companies that still don't get it. Obviously, companies like Intel and AMD and ATI and NVidia have to weigh the benefits of actively (and monetarily) supporting Linux and other open source against the problems it might cause in their current business arrangements (read: don't want to piss off Micrsoft).
The question(s): Do you think their current lukewarm (at best) support represents enlightened self-interest, or are they missing the boat? Is there anything the community can do to improve the returns for companies that do jump on the bandwagon?
Of course, there are pitfalls here, too. For instance, you may love bumming around for twenty years, get sick of it finally, only to find yourself too dysfunctional to go to school even though you really want to. That would suck. Also, you'll find that the bum's life isn't usually awash in women (or whatever turns you on). Most people (though not all) are looking for less starry-eyed partners.
If you're going to school to please other people (parents?), you might want to sit down and really think about what YOU want out of your life. You only get one, you know. You're not doing anybody any favors spending all that money on something you're only giving a half-assed effort.
Get a life.
Of course, for men it's more like 1 in 500.
That settles it, then. It's "Sko".
Why do the French, paragons on internationalism that they be, seek to root out invading foreign words, while the parochial Americans just absorb it all and keep on going? If French people really didn't want to use English words, it wouldn't be necessary for the government to tell them to stop. I think this demonstrates what den Beste talks about from time to time: the French have never gotten over their belief that common people are simply unable to govern themselves and must be told what to do.
RMS nailed this one.
Ooh, you're sneaky. I was thinking of the "consequences be damned" kind of terrorist who wouldn't give a lot of though to his own getaway.
As for the rest, I'm not really using on-the-ground experience, I'm using 20 years of experience at Atlanta Center. There's no place in our airspace (or any of our neighboring Centers, or their neighbors either) where you could just shoot of a rocket with no fear of killing somebody (that includes Texas). Use that traffic display thing that started this conversation--you'll see what I mean. They're everywhere, and that still doesn't include the VFRs (yes, I know the airplanes in the display are 20 miles wide--I don't think that changes things for the purposes we're talking about.)
I think that's the FAA's point, actually. East of the Mississippi, at least, that's all day long--and who wants to shoot rockets in the mountains? Nebraska might be okay.
There are lots of places (in nonconjested airspace) where even knowing that no plane is within a 6-minute window provides more than enough of a margin.
I don't disagree with this, but I would remind you that the traffic feed from the FAA only includes aircraft being worked by ATC Centers. In good weather, there are thousands of planes in the air not being worked by ATC at all.
Similarly, I don't see how using only 3-minute updates substantially encumbers any halfway intelligent terrorist.
I just meant to say that it doesn't help them any. It doesn't take a lot of research to figure out where to stand to see a steady flow of targets, if that's what you're trying to do. When the airplanes are going over head three miles apart all day long, getting three minute updates doesn't really improve your aim any.
I'm afraid the updates are way too slow to allow anybody shooting off rockets to miss the airplanes overhead. It's every three minutes, I believe (can't remember precisely, but I know it's measured in minutes). On the other hand, that's precisely why it's not considered a security risk--too slow to be useful for terrorist activities (though I harbor a suspicion that it has caused the military to occasionally obfuscate their flight plans--and even ignore the system entirely when it suits them).
Trying to pin the blame for this on Microsoft when every other OS developer was also doing it is just lame.
I don't think I "blamed" anything on Microsoft. I read the article as a cautionary tale for developers, and I was giving examples of programs that got run over by the company that sold their target OS. I could give examples of programs this hasn't happened to as well, but nobody asked for that.
There used to be more than one word processor for MS OSes: WordStar, Ami, Q&A (primarily a DB manager, but a lot of people preferred to included word processor to the other choices of the day), and of course, WordPerfect--which dominated the market until Microsoft decided to take it over. Now (effectively) there's only one: Word.
In the same vein, there used to be a lot of choices in the spreadsheet category: CalcStar, Lotus 123, and Quattro spring to mind, but I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch. There used to be (viable) database managers for the PC besides Access (Paradox, Q&A, FoxPro (was there a Fox first? I assume so.), etc. Now both these categories are so dominated by Microsoft that we take it for granted.
Do I need to mention the browser wars and the fate of Netscape?
What was the first widely used disk compression program? Stacker? Doublespace? I forget, but I know Microsoft decided to include that functionality with their OS, and that was the end of that market (though not the end of the litigation).
Go back to MS-DOS. Anybody remember third-party memory managers? They were big money for their developers--until Windows broke the 640Kb barrier.
I think it requires a pretty short memory to say that relatively few developers have had the ground pulled out from under them when developing for someone else's platform. That's not to say it's always a bad idea--I'm sure somebody got rich off of all these programs before they got pounded into oblivion. But unless you occupy a niche too small for the big guys to notice, it's definitely an invitation to trouble in the long run.
I couldn't figure that out, so I gave up. I'll trust them, too.
Hell, everybody did that. My buddy's Gateway still lives as my LRP router. That massive 500mb hard drive just sits there, wasted.
Just think of every call from a politician or non-profit as an opportunity to score an $11,000 hit if they ignore your request and call again. In fact, I think I'll buy a little log book for each phone so I can keep track of who I've told to piss off.
Of course, I'm showing my naivete here--as if this shit is ever going to be enforced. Oh, well.
That sentence with no predicate at all, actually.
Maybe I'm just in a silly mood, but this seems very funny. Somebody with points please mod it up.
It is probably the NAGWare Fortran compiler which is poorly optimized for the Intel P4, not so much GCC. I say this because according to this SPEC FAQ, SPECfp2000 contains 10 Fortran programs, and 4 C programs. In other words, SPECfp is mostly Fortran, and NAGWare is the Fortran compiler, so therefore it is most likely NAGWare that is the bad compiler for Intel, not GCC.
Hope this helps.
Everything you say here is the truth as I understand it, also. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the guy who put up the c0wz site (it's been about 3 years since I needed to go there, since my LRP just runs)--was he in the short list of people who got some acknowledgement?
How many times have I wished I could buy some patience--at any price.
Excuse me, but "someone" is one wird.
Demand for no product is completely price-inelastic; I suspect demand for computers is very elastic indeed.
Will this trash the market for computers? No. Will it make no difference at all? No.
As I recall, the propfan was phenomenally fuel-efficient. Can the improved turbojet engines you mention approach the propfan's thriftiness?