Then they will die. The world is not going to stand still for them. Customers arn't going to keep wanting Apache 1.x. OS's will stop supporting it. They won't be able to keep it secure if they stay behind on old OS's, and eventually won't be able to replace hardware when it wears out because such an old OS won't run on it. Changing tax codes might cause their frozen-in-time accountant's head to burst. Changing legal requirements might cause these in-a-rut businesses to fall apart.
Businesses that are so easily broken are like a soap bubble - if they can't even be bothered to deal with reality as it changes around them, there's no hope and any success they have will be fleeting.
How many years do you expect 1.x to be supported? 2.x is a bit over 8 years old right now, and as OP notes, it might not run on modern OSs. At some point, people will have to make the change (staying still is for the Amish - not everyone needs to be an early adopter, but doing anything on 1.x is getting very curmudgeonly at this point. You're not going to see a lot of support for ancient software in open *or* closed source environments.
Also, you're not the people if you're thinking this way, you're a business. Like in all business, someday your business model will need to be revised or will become obsolete as technology shifts happen. It's a basic fact of life - we may want things to be reasonable when you're reasonable (even if you're on the conservative end of reasonable), offering reasonably long support, but it will not last forever. Eventually you look around and find you're the last buggy on the road, surrounded by cars.
Either this thing is the bee's knees and will make a huge impact, or it's some mix of snake oil and too expensive. As usual, we're safest assuming the latter until we at least have details.
You misunderstand the alternative. Societies have been a mix of planning and autonomy for all of human civilisation, and *that* is what has worked well. It is not perfect, but it by-and-large works. Societies that overstress planning or autonomy have never been workable. No system in the world is lassiez-faire, nor is any system entirely planned, and all systems have their failures. It is not hard to find these for the systems that are closer to lassiez-faire, and you'd do this if you were really interested in a fair comparison.
The invisible hand, even to the extent that it supports the public good, is not always optimal. Often it doesn't even try to and is off optimising something else.
Experimentation is good, and certain amounts of competition can be worked into state structures to allow that. If there are better ways to run schools, we should find them and implement them in the public schools. We are, however, going to insist that the schools be public, that everyone pays for them, and that everyone goes to them. It's otherwise too easy for one person who earns privilege (to whatever extent the degree of that privilege is just is another question) turning it into a privilege passed, unearned, throughout many generations. Universal, public, mandatory, integrated schools help prevent that. They also help prevent racism by forcing people to rub shoulders, and they help prevent idiocy by preventing religious nuts from being the only people to educate their kids.
Formal freedoms are not the only ones worth considering - if you "allow" something in a system, but that same system effectively prevents you from enjoying it, then that allowance is very shallow. Having justice but having finances result in some people being unable to hire (any or a good) lawyer results in very shallow justice. Similarly with any other social good.
If you believe in the tangled libertarian notion of liberty as the only good, your philosophy might work. If you believe in any other goods, to cling tightly to libertarian traditions and hope to pick up reasonable amounts of these other goods will prove most unsatisfactory.
In practice, statistics is an attempt to quantify messy, uncertain events into a figure. We can even measure the extent to which this works, roughly speaking. Your hard drive has a rough time-to-failure, based on analyses of the things that tend to go wrong in that system. Sure, any time it fails, it's not statistics that broke it; it's one of the kinds of problems captured in the statistical analysis. And sure, you could break it down further for disks and note that the controller has a different failure rate than some other component, just as a bridge has a number of possible failures. Problem is, for any of those, you could break it down further and get failure rates for subcomponents, regions, etc. So what? It's still useful to have statistical measures - the real world is complex, and statistics helps us capture things we otherwise couldn't.
Programmers (particularly but not only young programmers) might not like to acknowledge any field but their own has any depth ("Everything is simple! Just do it my way", hence Ron Paul/Ayn Rand fanboyism and all sorts of other stupidities) - I don't know if there's a lot we can do but hope they grow out of it (It took me awhile to do it, as did a number of people I knew when I was younger, but I made it out).
Basically, if your worldview doesn't wed empiricism and a reasonably flexible practical philosophy, your worldview is (if you err on the pro-logic end) too inflexible and you're going to miss out on standing on the shoulders of giants. Neither the logician nor the mystic understands the world.
Your expectations for cost are unrealistic, although it would help a lot if the US would ban bundling of plans with phones. The real cost of phones is now routinely subsidised by cellphone plans, preventing real competition on either cost.
Some things really are like locking a house - windows passwords, normal unix passwords, etc. With those things, the user expects that someone has or can get access to things anyhow. However, there are many devices that are not so analogous - if there's sophisticated encryption in the hardware and they're selling it as a reasonably secure device, it's more like your neighbourhood bank, where you probably don't expect jane random to read a secret word on the internet to say to the guards that will have them open the vault.
I guarantee I would've quit in an instant if asked to wear a uniform. I still would if I were working any kind of job where it would even be considered. Uniforms are a clear marker of a corporate culture going down the tubes.
I would love to see Miguel and Mono taken as distant from the GNU projects as possible. Next step is for us to contain and eventually cure instances of Mono in the wild.
I've seen the kind of monstrous experiments that have passed an IRB and gotten all kinds of funding. The problem is, so long as it's good research that can't be done any other way, generally these boards are willing to approve horrific things. Lopping off of the top of an ape skull for easy insertion of single cell recording devices, permanently affixing a cat's head into a cement frame to stop it from moving so they can do visual cortex experiments, they may be good science, but they're ethically unacceptable and should be stopped.
Science is a great thing, but this particular ethics guard doesn't work right - "no other way" should more often mean "no way" rather than "fine"
Just letting you know that the term you seem to be looking for is "minarchism" (I am not a minarchist or libertarian myself, but knowing the terms helps avoid lengthy summaries of an idea)
It's not particularly trendy, it's just given the variety of positions people can take, not everyone will choose a particular one. When Libertarians *cough* assert that everyone would be one if only they would look into it, they're being ridiculous.
I was a libertarian for many years. I eventually changed my positions.
You're very ignorant about the founding fathers. They were by no means posessed of any modern political ideologies - they had different issues, different positions, and radically different ways of framing issues. Do you want to claim both the Federalists (Washington, Adams) *and* the Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson) as being libertarian parties? I assert that neither I nor you could claim either of them.
Fail. People will always tell you how to live your life, and you will always have a stake in theirs. It's called living in society. No person is an island. We interact with each other, rely on each other, and have a stake in each other.
Our politics have been almost uniquely stupid recently. We've been meddling with other nations for a very long time, half our population is willfully ignorant to the point of rejecting evolution, we somehow think improving our healthcare system is immoral, one of our political parties is enthusiastically pro-torture, anti-science, and anti-reality while the other is hardly cohesive enough to be called a party, we think we're the best in the world while we do our very best to undermine the basics of civilization in the name of lassiez-faire. Just aim it for the middle of the bible belt in the US. The craziest of our crazies will even applaud it, because they're looking forward to punishment coming to the "sinful" nation.
At least it would be entertaining watching some yahoos talk about how it's immoral to use state power to deflect it, because... OH! Once there's a need, there's a market, and the market creates the invisible hand! And the invisible hand will swat that asteroid out of the sky. Yeah, it's the new religion, and watching them watch it smoosh them would at least give us a laugh while the impact slowly smothers the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Then they will die. The world is not going to stand still for them. Customers arn't going to keep wanting Apache 1.x. OS's will stop supporting it. They won't be able to keep it secure if they stay behind on old OS's, and eventually won't be able to replace hardware when it wears out because such an old OS won't run on it. Changing tax codes might cause their frozen-in-time accountant's head to burst. Changing legal requirements might cause these in-a-rut businesses to fall apart.
Businesses that are so easily broken are like a soap bubble - if they can't even be bothered to deal with reality as it changes around them, there's no hope and any success they have will be fleeting.
I really hope the new interface is based on Boxxy.
How many years do you expect 1.x to be supported? 2.x is a bit over 8 years old right now, and as OP notes, it might not run on modern OSs. At some point, people will have to make the change (staying still is for the Amish - not everyone needs to be an early adopter, but doing anything on 1.x is getting very curmudgeonly at this point. You're not going to see a lot of support for ancient software in open *or* closed source environments.
Also, you're not the people if you're thinking this way, you're a business. Like in all business, someday your business model will need to be revised or will become obsolete as technology shifts happen. It's a basic fact of life - we may want things to be reasonable when you're reasonable (even if you're on the conservative end of reasonable), offering reasonably long support, but it will not last forever. Eventually you look around and find you're the last buggy on the road, surrounded by cars.
Either this thing is the bee's knees and will make a huge impact, or it's some mix of snake oil and too expensive. As usual, we're safest assuming the latter until we at least have details.
What does cyber monday have to do with stores? Unless you're buying kinky ... ohhh ... err excuse me I have some apologies to send.
You misunderstand the alternative. Societies have been a mix of planning and autonomy for all of human civilisation, and *that* is what has worked well. It is not perfect, but it by-and-large works. Societies that overstress planning or autonomy have never been workable. No system in the world is lassiez-faire, nor is any system entirely planned, and all systems have their failures. It is not hard to find these for the systems that are closer to lassiez-faire, and you'd do this if you were really interested in a fair comparison.
The invisible hand, even to the extent that it supports the public good, is not always optimal. Often it doesn't even try to and is off optimising something else.
Experimentation is good, and certain amounts of competition can be worked into state structures to allow that. If there are better ways to run schools, we should find them and implement them in the public schools. We are, however, going to insist that the schools be public, that everyone pays for them, and that everyone goes to them. It's otherwise too easy for one person who earns privilege (to whatever extent the degree of that privilege is just is another question) turning it into a privilege passed, unearned, throughout many generations. Universal, public, mandatory, integrated schools help prevent that. They also help prevent racism by forcing people to rub shoulders, and they help prevent idiocy by preventing religious nuts from being the only people to educate their kids.
Formal freedoms are not the only ones worth considering - if you "allow" something in a system, but that same system effectively prevents you from enjoying it, then that allowance is very shallow. Having justice but having finances result in some people being unable to hire (any or a good) lawyer results in very shallow justice. Similarly with any other social good.
If you believe in the tangled libertarian notion of liberty as the only good, your philosophy might work. If you believe in any other goods, to cling tightly to libertarian traditions and hope to pick up reasonable amounts of these other goods will prove most unsatisfactory.
In practice, statistics is an attempt to quantify messy, uncertain events into a figure. We can even measure the extent to which this works, roughly speaking. Your hard drive has a rough time-to-failure, based on analyses of the things that tend to go wrong in that system. Sure, any time it fails, it's not statistics that broke it; it's one of the kinds of problems captured in the statistical analysis. And sure, you could break it down further for disks and note that the controller has a different failure rate than some other component, just as a bridge has a number of possible failures. Problem is, for any of those, you could break it down further and get failure rates for subcomponents, regions, etc. So what? It's still useful to have statistical measures - the real world is complex, and statistics helps us capture things we otherwise couldn't.
Programmers (particularly but not only young programmers) might not like to acknowledge any field but their own has any depth ("Everything is simple! Just do it my way", hence Ron Paul/Ayn Rand fanboyism and all sorts of other stupidities) - I don't know if there's a lot we can do but hope they grow out of it (It took me awhile to do it, as did a number of people I knew when I was younger, but I made it out).
Basically, if your worldview doesn't wed empiricism and a reasonably flexible practical philosophy, your worldview is (if you err on the pro-logic end) too inflexible and you're going to miss out on standing on the shoulders of giants. Neither the logician nor the mystic understands the world.
Nice post. If I had any mod points atm, and if you wern't already at 5, I'd mod you up.
It may be true that high framerates are a good thing, but the linked article is rubbish - the author's arguments are really very stupid.
I hope he throws it while chanting DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS...
There's this thing called banks. Maybe you've heard of them.
Your expectations for cost are unrealistic, although it would help a lot if the US would ban bundling of plans with phones. The real cost of phones is now routinely subsidised by cellphone plans, preventing real competition on either cost.
Some things really are like locking a house - windows passwords, normal unix passwords, etc. With those things, the user expects that someone has or can get access to things anyhow. However, there are many devices that are not so analogous - if there's sophisticated encryption in the hardware and they're selling it as a reasonably secure device, it's more like your neighbourhood bank, where you probably don't expect jane random to read a secret word on the internet to say to the guards that will have them open the vault.
I guarantee I would've quit in an instant if asked to wear a uniform. I still would if I were working any kind of job where it would even be considered. Uniforms are a clear marker of a corporate culture going down the tubes.
I would love to see Miguel and Mono taken as distant from the GNU projects as possible. Next step is for us to contain and eventually cure instances of Mono in the wild.
I've seen the kind of monstrous experiments that have passed an IRB and gotten all kinds of funding. The problem is, so long as it's good research that can't be done any other way, generally these boards are willing to approve horrific things. Lopping off of the top of an ape skull for easy insertion of single cell recording devices, permanently affixing a cat's head into a cement frame to stop it from moving so they can do visual cortex experiments, they may be good science, but they're ethically unacceptable and should be stopped.
Science is a great thing, but this particular ethics guard doesn't work right - "no other way" should more often mean "no way" rather than "fine"
Just letting you know that the term you seem to be looking for is "minarchism" (I am not a minarchist or libertarian myself, but knowing the terms helps avoid lengthy summaries of an idea)
It's not particularly trendy, it's just given the variety of positions people can take, not everyone will choose a particular one. When Libertarians *cough* assert that everyone would be one if only they would look into it, they're being ridiculous.
I was a libertarian for many years. I eventually changed my positions.
You're very ignorant about the founding fathers. They were by no means posessed of any modern political ideologies - they had different issues, different positions, and radically different ways of framing issues. Do you want to claim both the Federalists (Washington, Adams) *and* the Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson) as being libertarian parties? I assert that neither I nor you could claim either of them.
Fail. People will always tell you how to live your life, and you will always have a stake in theirs. It's called living in society. No person is an island. We interact with each other, rely on each other, and have a stake in each other.
Culture has always done this. It's part of being human.
I think the coffee was spiked with something.
Our politics have been almost uniquely stupid recently. We've been meddling with other nations for a very long time, half our population is willfully ignorant to the point of rejecting evolution, we somehow think improving our healthcare system is immoral, one of our political parties is enthusiastically pro-torture, anti-science, and anti-reality while the other is hardly cohesive enough to be called a party, we think we're the best in the world while we do our very best to undermine the basics of civilization in the name of lassiez-faire. Just aim it for the middle of the bible belt in the US. The craziest of our crazies will even applaud it, because they're looking forward to punishment coming to the "sinful" nation.
At least it would be entertaining watching some yahoos talk about how it's immoral to use state power to deflect it, because... OH! Once there's a need, there's a market, and the market creates the invisible hand! And the invisible hand will swat that asteroid out of the sky. Yeah, it's the new religion, and watching them watch it smoosh them would at least give us a laugh while the impact slowly smothers the rest of us.
From what I know of the inside of google, it's a lot of things, but the chief attractions are not really that it's noble.
We do have the source to Chrome, you know...
Oh google, you're so adorable. Everyone come pet the cute and innocent puppy!