Christ. His economic platform is built on a false premise from the very first sentence:
While wages remain flat, the costs of basic necessities are increasing.
This statement, in the midst of the nastiest deflationary environment since the Great Depression? The price of everything is going to be dropping for quite awhile, due simply to the fact that the money supply is being destroyed. Trying to force wages up in that sort of environment will inevitably result in high unemployment. Keep the price of oil high by similarly misguided policies and we'll get mass starvation (a major difference between the 1930's and today is that food is no longer grown where people live - it takes oil to feed people).
*Sigh*. Then:
The Bush tax cuts give those who earn over $1 million dollars a tax cut nearly 160 times greater than that received by middle-income Americans.
This is how percentages work. Percentage-wise, the middle and lower classes got a much bigger tax cut, both individually and as a group. By absolute numbers, the rich (individually) did, but there's not many of them. He's playing on people's weak grasp of basic math. Percentages are what matter in this case (as in most economic ones), not absolute numbers. Both in terms of percentages and absolute numbers, the rich as a group pay WAY WAY WAY more taxes than the middle class and poor. And I say this is a member of the "middle class."
At the same time, this administration has refused to tackle health care, education and housing in a manner that benefits the middle class.
The Bush administration's "compassionate conservatism" imitated liberal social spending. Domestic spending (not even talking about the war, which is a whole different issue) ballooned under this government, with no way to pay for it. Bush helped fuck up this economy by running it like a Democrat, except with more tax cuts (and those are no good without a decrease in spending).
Misdiagnose the problem and you can't possibly come up with a working solution. The next four years are going to be rough, and we'll be paying for them for far longer.
Why would a 2 year old lowest end macbook owner not want a Macbook Pro for Audio anyway?
Well, maybe it's just me, but dropping over 2 grand on a laptop isn't the best of ideas while we're sliding into the next Great Depression. In a perfect world, sure, the solution would just be to buy a MBP. But I'm complaining about the fact that I'm being forced to when all I need is a Firewire port.
Still, the specs on the new ones aren't THAT much better than mine. Certainly not to the point where sucking away a good chunk of the CPU isn't a cause for concern.
Define "new." It's certainly still an issue on my Macbook. Even with Firewire I can only have 2-3 tracks doing amp simulation at once before it bogs down (and by "bogs down", I mean the audio starts skipping and recording is impossible). Sure I can "freeze" the tracks (essentially "rendering" the output of the amp simulation to a static audio stream), but that gets annoying fast, and takes several minutes to finish.
USB does use quite a bit of CPU to do its work. Firewire doesn't. And depending on what you're doing, that CPU is likely needed elsewhere, particularly for real-time work like recording.
Along with the last of the white plastic MacBooks, the Mac mini still has a FireWire port.
Yeah, I'm considering getting a Mac mini and just using it as a dedicated recording box. I'd much prefer to use a laptop though - mobility is a useful feature.
Wait, what about the iMacs? Did those get the Firewire plug pulled too?
Firewire is absolutely key when recording audio (in my case, guitar, bass, vocals, etc). USB pushes the CPU too hard and doesn't leave it free for realtime sound processing - amp simulation, etc. Currently I'm doing it on a 2 year old MacBook, but at this point my only upgrade option is a MBP. After factoring in the cost of replacing my Firewire hardware, the MBP isn't much more expensive anyway.
Interesting defintion of "fad" you have there. Are you seriously claiming that relational databases went away after the initial burst of enthusiasm? Or OO? The web? XML?
I've designed and written specialized implementations of XMPP, both client- and server-side, at previous jobs, and am pushing it again at my current job. Several posters have mentioned (correctly) several problems with the protocol, but for all its warts and strange design choices it does make a good protocol for routing XML.
And that's really what it is - a way to reliably (if implemented properly on both ends) route generic XML documents to where they need to go, without polling of any kind, and to monitor the status and availability of whoever's on the receiving end. It just so happens that this framework provides what is needed for a chat application, but that's just the surface. Lots of applications can benefit from this.
In my professional implementations, it has been used for anything from a "chat client on steriods" to a backend communications framework between various applications that as a whole form a business process. It's a good, flexible, and extensible protocol, and the basics are easy to implement.
Centralized decisions made by a few for everybody are never as good as decisions made on the individual level. This applies both to social issues (where the left seems to understand this principle) and on economic issues (where the right seems to understand it). Libertarians are the only group that apply the same principles to both issues.
I think the social issues side of the spectrum is more universally accepted among geeks, as many of us don't conform to society's definition of "normal." I don't feel as though social freedom needs to be defended among this crowd. But for me personally, the economic side is far more important. The free market screws some people, but on balance it is singularly responsible for the explosion in technological advancement and improvement of quality of life since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was written and the founding of the US on his principles.
The people that get screwed in a free market get screwed for a reason. The reason is simple, on a macro scale - too many people trying to do the same thing (for example, flipping burgers). The market as a whole is telling us that there are too many people trying to do this economically unproductive job. Forcibly raising wages does nothing but encourage these people to stay in these jobs - whereas if the wages float according to supply and demand (of workers), it will settle on an optimum level, and those that move elsewhere will provide a service that is more needed.
Even more importantly, the people who get screwed in a free market have a recourse. All the options of the free market are still open for them to take advantage of. A centralized government decision will screw people over as well, though it will screw over a different subset of people (and according to economics, it will be on balance a worse solution overall, thereby screwing over MORE people, not fewer). The difference is that those people have no recourse - government is a monopoly, and there is no alternative aside from moving to a different country.
What the free market provides is economic mobility based on how much effort you're willing to put into it. It distributes resources based on the aggregate needs and desires of society - i.e. what is needed and/or wanted by the majority. By contrast, a government-managed system distributes resources based on political connections or what is politically popular. To me, the contrast is clear.
A simple example - how many billions have been poured into Africa in the name of fighting poverty? How much has this accomplished? As a counterexample, how many people have been freed from poverty in the past decade due to the freeing of China's and India's economies? Over half a billion. And they've done it by providing a needed or wanted service to their society, not by sucking up and burning single-use foreign aid money.
Wine, for example, is quite fast, but there's a good deal more overhead in Parallels.
WINE is also a completely different beast. It isn't a virtual machine at all, but a natively compiled reimplementation of the Windows libraries. When you run an application under WINE, you're running it natively.
I had constant kernel panics with Parallels on my Macbook until I upgraded to 2GB of RAM... now it's solid as a rock and I haven't had any issues in the 4 months since.
Wow, your Mac has problems. Have you considered that you may have some faulty hardware (likely RAM)? I've been using a Mac for years, pushing it hard while using both File Vault and secure VM, and I've never seen any of these issues.
I am surprised that my Blackberry internet uses the same data channel from the T-Mo network, I knew that BES did, but I suppose the fact that google always defaulted to google canada was a giveaway.
Yes, it's ridiculous. If you want to switch TCP/IP traffic to go directly over your carrier's network instead of through RIM (and assuming your BES policy allows it), all you need to do is go into the Service Books preferences and delete Desktop[IPPP], which is the service book that routes TCP traffic through the BES.
I had to do this to get Opera Mini working on my (also T-Mo) Pearl, as my BES provider doesn't allow TCP traffic through it. Nothing broke when I did this (all other BES functionality remains).
As in why choose: Use AES *AND* TwoFish *AND* Serpent. Why other cipher packages haven't offered this is beyond me.
Because this is bad cryptography. When you combine two algorithms, you're essentially creating a new one - one that hasn't been reviewed or tested for weaknesses. Given that many of the current algorithms can be considerably weakened by seemingly benign changes, I find it odd to assume that drastic changes won't result in breaking the encryption.
Encryption isn't a wrapper that's applied around something, where you can add another layer for added protection. It's a transformation, and when you mix algorithms you're really just changing the equation that governs the transformation. There's no guarantee (and I'd say it's even rather unlikely) that the resulting equation just happens to be a stronger form of encryption.
So does this mean that Jobs also supports selling software with no anti-copying protections?.... Or is that different somehow?
Apple DOES sell software with no anti-copying protections. When you buy a copy of OS X, there is nothing preventing you from installing it on 100 different machines (except for the law, obviously). No serial numbers to enter, no online activation, nothing.
Technically US owes to China about 0.6T (trillion) USD and counting. If China simply stops to buy those Treasuries US citizens will discover that their lifestyle is significantly less affordable.
And Bank of America owes $1.3 trillion (to various creditors). Your point? $600 billion is a lot of money, sure, but in the grand scheme of things it's on the same scale as a lot of other stuff.
Older model BlackBerrys (i.e. pre-Pearl) do not support Bluetooth dialup networking, so anything that makes this work is a hack and should be expected to work as such.
The Pearl, however (and most likely the not-yet-released 8800) *does* support this, and it does it with the standard Bluetooth profile for doing this sort of thing - no hack required. I regularly connect my laptop through my Pearl over Bluetooth, and it works beautifully in both OS X and Windows. It's not very speedy, but I do get 10-15k/sec downloads, which is good enough for what I use it for.
RIM is getting *better* about Bluetooth crippling, not worse. But if you try to force an older model to do something it wasn't designed for, don't be surprised when it doesn't work as well as you had hoped.
I don't know how this would play together with hibernate mode (I use it on a desktop machine, and I've heard rumblings that hibernate may not work properly with encrypted filesystems for some reason). If I had to guess, I'd say that the kernel writes the memory dump to the encrypted filesystem, but the wake up code doesn't know how to read it back correctly.
In any case, pam_usb happens later in the process than you need for this. You can use it for login purposes as well, but I'm talking about entirely encrypting the root filesystem with a key on the drive. PAM stuff lives inside this encrypted partition, and the key needs to be found before the root partition is mounted.
When I set this up, I had to write custom scripts that work with mkinitramfs (i.e. the scripts that put together the initial ramdisk for booting) that loop through/dev/sd*, mount everything there and look for the key, pass it to LUKS/cryptoloop if it finds it and using it to mount the root partition, and then unmount everything and continue booting from there.
If you DON'T want the root partition to be encrypted, it is much easier to accomplish - you can do it all through/etc/crypttab and/etc/fstab, but I suppose you'd need a small script which runs on boot and mounts the USB drive, since this will all happen before the automounter stuff is running.
Like I said, it was a huge pain in the ass. If you'd like, feel free to email me and I'll give you more details on how I got it all working. What I should really do, though, is make a custom Ubuntu installer that does all this automatically. It wouldn't be too difficult.
What happens in the case that your thumb drive gets corrupted?
Heh. Back up your keyfile somewhere:) It's only 32 bytes (for a 256 bit AES key), so you could even print out a hex dump of it and store it somewhere safe.
You could do what I do, and have it store the key on a USB thumb drive that gets automatically read by the boot scripts. Then just leave the keydrive plugged into the laptop overnight.
Sure, the initial install is a huge pain in the ass, but once it's set up you don't even notice it anymore, aside from the fact that you need your keys to boot it up. More convenient than having to type a password every time.
Not really. Stocks grow in value over time as the economy grows - that's just what they do. The NASDAQ composite index, which is very tech-heavy, is still well below its dotcom-bubble high. Stocks ARE going up lately, but this time they're supported by earnings, which means it's not a bubble but rather true economic growth. The price/earnings ratio of the S&P 500 is just slightly higher than the historical average of 15, and WAY below where it was during the bubble.
Private equity and acquisitions may be seeing a bubble, that's true. But that's an entirely different ballgame. Public stocks still have tons of room to grow, and the growth we've seen so far is real, organic economic growth rather than a speculative bubble.
I am not a financial analyst or anything of that sort, but it has me wondering if Google bought YouTube for such a high value so as to justify their own market cap and keep it up there.
No, Google's market cap is so high because the company is one ridiculous cash-generating machine. Which, in the end, is all that matters.
... at least in the short term. And while it's supremely logical in the long term (stock price follows earnings), to predict how a company will fare long-term takes human intuition and intelligence. A computer couldn't have examined Wal-Mart's quarterly reports from 20 years ago and determined that it would be a world-beater.
In the short-term, the driving factor is human psychology. Things that are mathematically "supposed" to happen don't necessarily. The smartest mathematicians, economists, and programmers have tried this, and the resulting disaster nearly toppled the global financial system:
The scheme finally unraveled in August and September 1998 when the Russian government defaulted on their government bonds (GKOs). Panicked investors sold Japanese and European bonds to buy U.S. treasury bonds. The profits that were supposed to occur as the value of these bonds converged became huge losses as the value of the bonds diverged. By the end of August the fund had lost $1.85 billion in capital.
The company, which was providing annual returns of almost 40% up to this point, experienced a "flight to liquidity". This prompted a bail-out of $3.625 bn by the banks, organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, ostensibly in order to avoid a wider collapse in the financial markets. The fear was that there would be a chain reaction as the company liquidated its securities to cover its debt, leading to a drop in prices which would force other companies to liquidate their own debt creating a vicious cycle.
Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing and Warren Buffet's inspiration, even talked about this. You simply cannot take the previous behavior of a chaotic system (and in the short term, the stock market certainly qualifies as such) and extrapolate the future. Any predictions you might make successfully will still only result in very small gains, so you'd have to bet enormous sums of money to make any sort of return. Then when you get the unexpected 10, 15, 40% drop in the market (October, 1987 anybody? Nobody saw that coming) you're screwed.
If you want to make money in the stock market, it's really not that hard. Pick some good companies that you have reason to believe will grow their earnings over the next 5-10+ years, hopefully paying good dividends along the way, and use dollar-cost averaging to minimize losses and maximize gains. But the act of picking the companies in the first place is not a mathematical problem, but one at the intersection of business, economics, psychology, sociology, and politics.
Not to stir anything up, but how does Qt compare to GTK?
API-wise, Qt is far superior. GTK is a horrible API, and requires way too much typing to get anything done. Qt is a nice, clean C++-based API that's pretty nice to use. The upside of GTK is that it's much easier to use from non-C++ languages*.
From an end-user standpoint, GTK is pretty decent. I'm not sure I see the benefit in rewriting a GTK app in Qt, or vice versa.
* Before anyone gets bent out of shape, I've been using both toolkits for a long time... writing open source (and a little paid work) with both in the 90's, and several full-time and contract jobs in this millenium writing Qt code.
Could things like gaim or GIMP be redone in Qt (mostly gaim as I think GTK is a whole lot of the reason it takes up so much memory in Windows)? What kind of project would that be?
Well, seeing as how GTK stands for GIMP Toolkit (or used to, anyway... I don't really pay much attention to this stuff anymore, but it was originally written specifically as an interface toolkit for GIMP), GIMP is pretty tied to it. And in any case, GTK and Qt are really pretty different beasts - Qt is a pretty clean system of C++ classes, with a preprocessor to add some (very handy) syntactic sugar, while GTK-based programs spend much of their time and effort trying to work with a class hierarchy shoehorned into C. Programs written in GTK have a very different flow than those written in Qt.
As for memory usage, if GTK is using more memory than the pixel buffers in GIMP, something's very wrong.
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Christ. His economic platform is built on a false premise from the very first sentence:
This statement, in the midst of the nastiest deflationary environment since the Great Depression? The price of everything is going to be dropping for quite awhile, due simply to the fact that the money supply is being destroyed. Trying to force wages up in that sort of environment will inevitably result in high unemployment. Keep the price of oil high by similarly misguided policies and we'll get mass starvation (a major difference between the 1930's and today is that food is no longer grown where people live - it takes oil to feed people).
*Sigh*. Then:
This is how percentages work. Percentage-wise, the middle and lower classes got a much bigger tax cut, both individually and as a group. By absolute numbers, the rich (individually) did, but there's not many of them. He's playing on people's weak grasp of basic math. Percentages are what matter in this case (as in most economic ones), not absolute numbers. Both in terms of percentages and absolute numbers, the rich as a group pay WAY WAY WAY more taxes than the middle class and poor. And I say this is a member of the "middle class."
The Bush administration's "compassionate conservatism" imitated liberal social spending. Domestic spending (not even talking about the war, which is a whole different issue) ballooned under this government, with no way to pay for it. Bush helped fuck up this economy by running it like a Democrat, except with more tax cuts (and those are no good without a decrease in spending).
Misdiagnose the problem and you can't possibly come up with a working solution. The next four years are going to be rough, and we'll be paying for them for far longer.
Cry.
Well, maybe it's just me, but dropping over 2 grand on a laptop isn't the best of ideas while we're sliding into the next Great Depression. In a perfect world, sure, the solution would just be to buy a MBP. But I'm complaining about the fact that I'm being forced to when all I need is a Firewire port.
Heh. Touché.
Still, the specs on the new ones aren't THAT much better than mine. Certainly not to the point where sucking away a good chunk of the CPU isn't a cause for concern.
Define "new." It's certainly still an issue on my Macbook. Even with Firewire I can only have 2-3 tracks doing amp simulation at once before it bogs down (and by "bogs down", I mean the audio starts skipping and recording is impossible). Sure I can "freeze" the tracks (essentially "rendering" the output of the amp simulation to a static audio stream), but that gets annoying fast, and takes several minutes to finish.
USB does use quite a bit of CPU to do its work. Firewire doesn't. And depending on what you're doing, that CPU is likely needed elsewhere, particularly for real-time work like recording.
Yeah, I'm considering getting a Mac mini and just using it as a dedicated recording box. I'd much prefer to use a laptop though - mobility is a useful feature.
Wait, what about the iMacs? Did those get the Firewire plug pulled too?
Firewire is absolutely key when recording audio (in my case, guitar, bass, vocals, etc). USB pushes the CPU too hard and doesn't leave it free for realtime sound processing - amp simulation, etc. Currently I'm doing it on a 2 year old MacBook, but at this point my only upgrade option is a MBP. After factoring in the cost of replacing my Firewire hardware, the MBP isn't much more expensive anyway.
Then again, I guess that's what Apple wants.
Interesting defintion of "fad" you have there. Are you seriously claiming that relational databases went away after the initial burst of enthusiasm? Or OO? The web? XML?
I've designed and written specialized implementations of XMPP, both client- and server-side, at previous jobs, and am pushing it again at my current job. Several posters have mentioned (correctly) several problems with the protocol, but for all its warts and strange design choices it does make a good protocol for routing XML.
And that's really what it is - a way to reliably (if implemented properly on both ends) route generic XML documents to where they need to go, without polling of any kind, and to monitor the status and availability of whoever's on the receiving end. It just so happens that this framework provides what is needed for a chat application, but that's just the surface. Lots of applications can benefit from this.
In my professional implementations, it has been used for anything from a "chat client on steriods" to a backend communications framework between various applications that as a whole form a business process. It's a good, flexible, and extensible protocol, and the basics are easy to implement.
Centralized decisions made by a few for everybody are never as good as decisions made on the individual level. This applies both to social issues (where the left seems to understand this principle) and on economic issues (where the right seems to understand it). Libertarians are the only group that apply the same principles to both issues.
I think the social issues side of the spectrum is more universally accepted among geeks, as many of us don't conform to society's definition of "normal." I don't feel as though social freedom needs to be defended among this crowd. But for me personally, the economic side is far more important. The free market screws some people, but on balance it is singularly responsible for the explosion in technological advancement and improvement of quality of life since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was written and the founding of the US on his principles.
The people that get screwed in a free market get screwed for a reason. The reason is simple, on a macro scale - too many people trying to do the same thing (for example, flipping burgers). The market as a whole is telling us that there are too many people trying to do this economically unproductive job. Forcibly raising wages does nothing but encourage these people to stay in these jobs - whereas if the wages float according to supply and demand (of workers), it will settle on an optimum level, and those that move elsewhere will provide a service that is more needed.
Even more importantly, the people who get screwed in a free market have a recourse. All the options of the free market are still open for them to take advantage of. A centralized government decision will screw people over as well, though it will screw over a different subset of people (and according to economics, it will be on balance a worse solution overall, thereby screwing over MORE people, not fewer). The difference is that those people have no recourse - government is a monopoly, and there is no alternative aside from moving to a different country.
What the free market provides is economic mobility based on how much effort you're willing to put into it. It distributes resources based on the aggregate needs and desires of society - i.e. what is needed and/or wanted by the majority. By contrast, a government-managed system distributes resources based on political connections or what is politically popular. To me, the contrast is clear.
A simple example - how many billions have been poured into Africa in the name of fighting poverty? How much has this accomplished? As a counterexample, how many people have been freed from poverty in the past decade due to the freeing of China's and India's economies? Over half a billion. And they've done it by providing a needed or wanted service to their society, not by sucking up and burning single-use foreign aid money.
WINE is also a completely different beast. It isn't a virtual machine at all, but a natively compiled reimplementation of the Windows libraries. When you run an application under WINE, you're running it natively.
Hell, it stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator.
I had constant kernel panics with Parallels on my Macbook until I upgraded to 2GB of RAM... now it's solid as a rock and I haven't had any issues in the 4 months since.
Wow, your Mac has problems. Have you considered that you may have some faulty hardware (likely RAM)? I've been using a Mac for years, pushing it hard while using both File Vault and secure VM, and I've never seen any of these issues.
Seriously, run your RAM through a checker.
Yes, it's ridiculous. If you want to switch TCP/IP traffic to go directly over your carrier's network instead of through RIM (and assuming your BES policy allows it), all you need to do is go into the Service Books preferences and delete Desktop[IPPP], which is the service book that routes TCP traffic through the BES.
I had to do this to get Opera Mini working on my (also T-Mo) Pearl, as my BES provider doesn't allow TCP traffic through it. Nothing broke when I did this (all other BES functionality remains).
Because this is bad cryptography. When you combine two algorithms, you're essentially creating a new one - one that hasn't been reviewed or tested for weaknesses. Given that many of the current algorithms can be considerably weakened by seemingly benign changes, I find it odd to assume that drastic changes won't result in breaking the encryption.
Encryption isn't a wrapper that's applied around something, where you can add another layer for added protection. It's a transformation, and when you mix algorithms you're really just changing the equation that governs the transformation. There's no guarantee (and I'd say it's even rather unlikely) that the resulting equation just happens to be a stronger form of encryption.
Older model BlackBerrys (i.e. pre-Pearl) do not support Bluetooth dialup networking, so anything that makes this work is a hack and should be expected to work as such.
The Pearl, however (and most likely the not-yet-released 8800) *does* support this, and it does it with the standard Bluetooth profile for doing this sort of thing - no hack required. I regularly connect my laptop through my Pearl over Bluetooth, and it works beautifully in both OS X and Windows. It's not very speedy, but I do get 10-15k/sec downloads, which is good enough for what I use it for.
RIM is getting *better* about Bluetooth crippling, not worse. But if you try to force an older model to do something it wasn't designed for, don't be surprised when it doesn't work as well as you had hoped.
I don't know how this would play together with hibernate mode (I use it on a desktop machine, and I've heard rumblings that hibernate may not work properly with encrypted filesystems for some reason). If I had to guess, I'd say that the kernel writes the memory dump to the encrypted filesystem, but the wake up code doesn't know how to read it back correctly.
/dev/sd*, mount everything there and look for the key, pass it to LUKS/cryptoloop if it finds it and using it to mount the root partition, and then unmount everything and continue booting from there.
/etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab, but I suppose you'd need a small script which runs on boot and mounts the USB drive, since this will all happen before the automounter stuff is running.
In any case, pam_usb happens later in the process than you need for this. You can use it for login purposes as well, but I'm talking about entirely encrypting the root filesystem with a key on the drive. PAM stuff lives inside this encrypted partition, and the key needs to be found before the root partition is mounted.
When I set this up, I had to write custom scripts that work with mkinitramfs (i.e. the scripts that put together the initial ramdisk for booting) that loop through
If you DON'T want the root partition to be encrypted, it is much easier to accomplish - you can do it all through
Like I said, it was a huge pain in the ass. If you'd like, feel free to email me and I'll give you more details on how I got it all working. What I should really do, though, is make a custom Ubuntu installer that does all this automatically. It wouldn't be too difficult.
What happens in the case that your thumb drive gets corrupted?
:) It's only 32 bytes (for a 256 bit AES key), so you could even print out a hex dump of it and store it somewhere safe.
Heh. Back up your keyfile somewhere
You could do what I do, and have it store the key on a USB thumb drive that gets automatically read by the boot scripts. Then just leave the keydrive plugged into the laptop overnight.
Sure, the initial install is a huge pain in the ass, but once it's set up you don't even notice it anymore, aside from the fact that you need your keys to boot it up. More convenient than having to type a password every time.
Not really. Stocks grow in value over time as the economy grows - that's just what they do. The NASDAQ composite index, which is very tech-heavy, is still well below its dotcom-bubble high. Stocks ARE going up lately, but this time they're supported by earnings, which means it's not a bubble but rather true economic growth. The price/earnings ratio of the S&P 500 is just slightly higher than the historical average of 15, and WAY below where it was during the bubble.
Private equity and acquisitions may be seeing a bubble, that's true. But that's an entirely different ballgame. Public stocks still have tons of room to grow, and the growth we've seen so far is real, organic economic growth rather than a speculative bubble.
I am not a financial analyst or anything of that sort, but it has me wondering if Google bought YouTube for such a high value so as to justify their own market cap and keep it up there.
No, Google's market cap is so high because the company is one ridiculous cash-generating machine. Which, in the end, is all that matters.
In the short-term, the driving factor is human psychology. Things that are mathematically "supposed" to happen don't necessarily. The smartest mathematicians, economists, and programmers have tried this, and the resulting disaster nearly toppled the global financial system:
Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing and Warren Buffet's inspiration, even talked about this. You simply cannot take the previous behavior of a chaotic system (and in the short term, the stock market certainly qualifies as such) and extrapolate the future. Any predictions you might make successfully will still only result in very small gains, so you'd have to bet enormous sums of money to make any sort of return. Then when you get the unexpected 10, 15, 40% drop in the market (October, 1987 anybody? Nobody saw that coming) you're screwed.
If you want to make money in the stock market, it's really not that hard. Pick some good companies that you have reason to believe will grow their earnings over the next 5-10+ years, hopefully paying good dividends along the way, and use dollar-cost averaging to minimize losses and maximize gains. But the act of picking the companies in the first place is not a mathematical problem, but one at the intersection of business, economics, psychology, sociology, and politics.
API-wise, Qt is far superior. GTK is a horrible API, and requires way too much typing to get anything done. Qt is a nice, clean C++-based API that's pretty nice to use. The upside of GTK is that it's much easier to use from non-C++ languages*.
From an end-user standpoint, GTK is pretty decent. I'm not sure I see the benefit in rewriting a GTK app in Qt, or vice versa.
* Before anyone gets bent out of shape, I've been using both toolkits for a long time... writing open source (and a little paid work) with both in the 90's, and several full-time and contract jobs in this millenium writing Qt code.
Well, seeing as how GTK stands for GIMP Toolkit (or used to, anyway... I don't really pay much attention to this stuff anymore, but it was originally written specifically as an interface toolkit for GIMP), GIMP is pretty tied to it. And in any case, GTK and Qt are really pretty different beasts - Qt is a pretty clean system of C++ classes, with a preprocessor to add some (very handy) syntactic sugar, while GTK-based programs spend much of their time and effort trying to work with a class hierarchy shoehorned into C. Programs written in GTK have a very different flow than those written in Qt.
As for memory usage, if GTK is using more memory than the pixel buffers in GIMP, something's very wrong.