Could there still be a difference in build quality if not design?
In a rational world, yes. Maybe not all the time or even most of the time. Depending on the circumstances du jour, there should be some tendency to cherry-pick the best for the premium line.
Of course a rational world may be rather presumptious:-(
There's a reason for the clumping. To oversimplify, imagine a line with one store on it. Optimum placement of a second store has to be on one side of the first store. People on the other side will all go to the first store because the distance is shorter. People on your outside will all go to you because the distance is shorter. People in the middle with to to whichever is closer. You lose fewer people in the middle if there is less middle. So the first two stores wind up next to each other. A third store faces the same situation against the combination of one and two. Other stores will get occasional overflow from people who went to the primaries and didn't find what they wanted.
What's interesting is that something can be uneconomic at all single price points but profitable to all with discriminatory pricing.
When marginal cost is considerably lower than average cost it is possible to consrtuct scenarios with counter-intuitive properties, including competition being bad for consumer prices.
I think it'd be tricky, because it would break other high-precision things as well.
Run something with a known analytic solution through an artificially complicated computation to achieve the same solution. Any error means something is wrong. Somewhat like recompiling the kernel to check for strange memory errors. Too many eyes. Too many idle hands with idle computers.
Extremely more likely to get away with it with closed source because the scrutiny is less and much more predictable. By the time an open source gets anywhere near serious, there are egos to contend with. It's open. It's shared. But there's something even stronger than the "Not Invented Here" syndrome. An indication was when OpenBSD said "Everybody patch OpenSSH." Debian said "Show us the exploit." If OpenBSD doesn't get instant credibility on a security issue, notbody else is going to get much either.
There is an issue if the code itself is weak. With open source it will be found out and everybody will know about it. With closed source the odds favor your enemy knowing that you have no idea of.
Most bears are immune to bee stings and even electricity. Their coats protect them from both.
But these are Open Source bees. Massive stings inside the nasal cavities and multiple stings to the eyeballs are likely to make the bears rather uncomfortable.
This explains why the GPL is the way it is better than any of...
What AT&T owned was the name. Modern Unix itself, including AT&T's, is much more the product of various universities, including Berkeley and MIT, than of AT&T. "Unix is a trademark of AT&T" at the bottom of articles and research papers was more taking a gibe at AT&T than honoring AT&T in any way. Gnu's Not Unix is still a taunt.
Not exactly. The people involved were very aware of the huge steps forward that were being made concurrently. Think of Unix as poor man's Multics. Think of C as poor man's Algol68. Rash prediction: Algol68 will reappear in 2068 as a modern language.
Whether irrational or not, Democrat wins tend to drop the market initially.
The stockholders, mostly Republicans I suppose, think that the news is worse (better) than it really is. Market value is perceived market value and people tend to react a bit more emotionally that rationally.
Buy low sell high sounds good. Buy losers sell winners is the same thing but sounds bad.
1. "If you're not willing to help fix it then you shouldn't complain about it"
There is a confusion between free and cheap. It is cheap and easy to have an opinion on cheap software. Not that it will do much good. It can be very expensive to have an opinion (that anybody will listen to) on free software.
Assuming that much of the future of IT is in supply chain: A chain with only two links is kinda silly. A chain is as strong as its weakest link, which has the uncomfortable consequence that the most important links are the weakest links. This forces some strange-looking economics. Old Red Hat is now expensive and new Fedora can't be bought.
If you want to support open standards (as you should) then simply.... use open standards.
Or... introduce a (not-so-false*) dichotomy between "standard" and "non-standard".
* Proprietary has to imply non-standard, doesn't it?
Re:"open standard" are a waste of time
on
IT, Be Free!
·
· Score: 1
No vendor really wants to implement a standard, they only do so grudgingly to apease customers.
Rubbish. That applies to vendors who want to hang on as long as possible to their piece of an ever diminishing pie. That does not apply to vendors who seriously want to be around for a long time.
A vendor's attitute toward standards telegraphs a lot of how the vendor views its own competence. IBM's support of open standards indicates their desire to compete in an improved playing field and their belief in their own competence to successfully compete in that same field. IBM comes out ahead even if everything it does to set up and promote the open standards helps IBM's competitors more than it helps IBM. IBM is moving back to the situation where "nobody every got fired for buying IBM". Look at the IBM ads. Consider that those ads had to have been sold to IBM's management. Management appreciates On/Off puns?
Eventually, this will lead to code forks. The mainstream folks will be disatisfied that their wiz-bang DRM etc didn't make it into the software, so they'll all agree to make their own version. And they'll have the marketing to sell it. Sure, it will still be Open Source. And it will still be popular. But it won't be Free.
That's the advantage of code forks. That's the way evolution works. The latest fad does not come from the previous fad. It comes from where the previous fad came from. The latest fad may not be "Free", but the Free will still be Free.
I think it's guaranteed that open source will ultimately overtake closed, proprietary systems.... when we could spend a fraction of the price and pay programmers to develop open source solutions solve issues like tax collection and payroll, among many other common problems.
That's assuming that the requirements are fixed and the problem is how to fill them. If the current technology were second-generation mainframes, I can assure you that anyone's idea of requirements would be cut to pieces. What will happen is that the efficiencies of open source will significantly up the ante on the requirements. Microsoft might be right in that the TCO of Linux is greater than the TCO of Windows, neglecting of course to mention that it's at a rather different Price/Value point.... to illustrate how much further we have to go to achieve "victory." "We ain't seen nothin' yet." It's like going from 3-nines to 5-nines while staying on a 3-nines budget.
Precisely. Since pseudo proofs exist that 0 equal 1 and other such impossibilities, I contend that math can be and is a sport. Similarly, puns make sport of language. It is arguable that such as the NFL is much too serious to be taken as sport.
I do not know of any other product where the designers/developers are so far removed from the end user.
The game of "gossip" goes both directions. The "highly trained, technically capable" person is solving the wrong damned problem. From the standpoint of break-even analysis, it is enteraining to see just how bad something that is on-target can be to be equivalent to something that is good but off-target.
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Could there still be a difference in build quality if not design?
:-(
In a rational world, yes.
Maybe not all the time or even most of the time.
Depending on the circumstances du jour, there should be some tendency to cherry-pick the best for the premium line.
Of course a rational world may be rather presumptious
There's a reason for the clumping.
To oversimplify, imagine a line with one store on it.
Optimum placement of a second store has to be on one side of the first store.
People on the other side will all go to the first store because the distance is shorter.
People on your outside will all go to you because the distance is shorter.
People in the middle with to to whichever is closer.
You lose fewer people in the middle if there is less middle.
So the first two stores wind up next to each other.
A third store faces the same situation against the combination of one and two.
Other stores will get occasional overflow from people who went to the primaries and didn't find what they wanted.
What's interesting is that something can be uneconomic at all single price points but profitable to all with discriminatory pricing.
When marginal cost is considerably lower than average cost it is possible to consrtuct scenarios with counter-intuitive properties, including competition being bad for consumer prices.
I think it'd be tricky, because it would break other high-precision things as well.
Run something with a known analytic solution through an artificially complicated computation to achieve the same solution. Any error means something is wrong. Somewhat like recompiling the kernel to check for strange memory errors. Too many eyes. Too many idle hands with idle computers.
Extremely more likely to get away with it with closed source because the scrutiny is less and much more predictable. By the time an open source gets anywhere near serious, there are egos to contend with. It's open. It's shared. But there's something even stronger than the "Not Invented Here" syndrome. An indication was when OpenBSD said "Everybody patch OpenSSH." Debian said "Show us the exploit." If OpenBSD doesn't get instant credibility on a security issue, notbody else is going to get much either.
There is an issue if the code itself is weak. With open source it will be found out and everybody will know about it. With closed source the odds favor your enemy knowing that you have no idea of.
The kernel behind Windows 2000/2003 is as solid as Linux. Crashes are almost without exception the result of third party device drivers.
or Microsoft Office or Microsoft Internet Explorer or Microsoft Print Spooling or gizmo happy Macromedia.
Year+ uptimes on NT4 Server. And no I wouldn't call it stable.
Most bears are immune to bee stings and even electricity. Their coats protect them from both.
But these are Open Source bees.
Massive stings inside the nasal cavities and multiple stings to the eyeballs are likely to make the bears rather uncomfortable.
they want the products dead and customers scared off.
Kinda like a county whose county seat scared off the railroads when the railroads were expanding across the American west.
This isn't about shooting yourself in the foot. It's about cutting off the industry's air supply. To whose benefit?
This explains why the GPL is the way it is better than any of ...
What AT&T owned was the name. Modern Unix itself, including AT&T's, is much more the product of various universities, including Berkeley and MIT, than of AT&T. "Unix is a trademark of AT&T" at the bottom of articles and research papers was more taking a gibe at AT&T than honoring AT&T in any way. Gnu's Not Unix is still a taunt.
for the time it was a *huge* step forward
Not exactly.
The people involved were very aware of the huge steps forward that were being made concurrently. Think of Unix as poor man's Multics. Think of C as poor man's Algol68.
Rash prediction: Algol68 will reappear in 2068 as a modern language.
Whether irrational or not, Democrat wins tend to drop the market initially.
The stockholders, mostly Republicans I suppose, think that the news is worse (better) than it really is. Market value is perceived market value and people tend to react a bit more emotionally that rationally.
Buy low sell high sounds good.
Buy losers sell winners is the same thing but sounds bad.
The Internet itself will die soon for a variety of reasons
Like San Francisco was destroyed by earthquake.
Like Chicago and London were destroyed by fire.
Like New York was destroyed by 9/11.
Bad things will happen and people will find ways to cope and rebuild.
if you drop the question of how you get perfect management.
Hehe.
Only way I know of, you only have resources for one and you call it perfect.
Of course it isn't, but how could you tell the difference?
1. "If you're not willing to help fix it then you shouldn't complain about it"
There is a confusion between free and cheap.
It is cheap and easy to have an opinion on cheap software. Not that it will do much good.
It can be very expensive to have an opinion (that anybody will listen to) on free software.
Assuming that much of the future of IT is in supply chain:
A chain with only two links is kinda silly.
A chain is as strong as its weakest link, which has the uncomfortable consequence that the most important links are the weakest links.
This forces some strange-looking economics. Old Red Hat is now expensive and new Fedora can't be bought.
Ho boy!
I'm curious -- how is that a bad thing?
It's not. If you consider Unix a good thing.
"And because Dr Ritchie had been careful to keep the core of C very compact, this [write a compiler] was relatively easy to do."
Personally I think C is a lousy language, but:
It is small.
It is compilable.
It is useable.
It is possible to make forward progress with minimal resources.
Something much better that requires resources you do not have is just pie in the sky.
If you want to support open standards (as you should) then simply.... use open standards.
... introduce a (not-so-false*) dichotomy between "standard" and "non-standard".
Or
* Proprietary has to imply non-standard, doesn't it?
No vendor really wants to implement a standard, they only do so grudgingly to apease customers.
Rubbish.
That applies to vendors who want to hang on as long as possible to their piece of an ever diminishing pie. That does not apply to vendors who seriously want to be around for a long time.
A vendor's attitute toward standards telegraphs a lot of how the vendor views its own competence. IBM's support of open standards indicates their desire to compete in an improved playing field and their belief in their own competence to successfully compete in that same field. IBM comes out ahead even if everything it does to set up and promote the open standards helps IBM's competitors more than it helps IBM. IBM is moving back to the situation where "nobody every got fired for buying IBM". Look at the IBM ads. Consider that those ads had to have been sold to IBM's management. Management appreciates On/Off puns?
Actually we should call inbound-only firewalls half-firewalls to distinguish from real firewalls.
Finally, somebody gets it.
A firewall has to be as much about protecting the internet from the big bad intranet if it is to stand any chance of being effective.
When there are subsequent copy operations without pasting, move the buffer to a new file and display a UI to select items from it.
So that's why when I change my mind about what I want to copy I get a popup asking me which window I want to paste.
Eventually, this will lead to code forks. The mainstream folks will be disatisfied that their wiz-bang DRM etc didn't make it into the software, so they'll all agree to make their own version. And they'll have the marketing to sell it. Sure, it will still be Open Source. And it will still be popular. But it won't be Free.
That's the advantage of code forks.
That's the way evolution works. The latest fad does not come from the previous fad. It comes from where the previous fad came from.
The latest fad may not be "Free", but the Free will still be Free.
Don't count on seeing a single contribution from Malaysia to the opensource community in the next couple of years.
I don't care about the next couple of years. I do care about the next couple of decades.
I think it's guaranteed that open source will ultimately overtake closed, proprietary systems. ... when we could spend a fraction of the price and pay programmers to develop open source solutions solve issues like tax collection and payroll, among many other common problems.
... to illustrate how much further we have to go to achieve "victory."
That's assuming that the requirements are fixed and the problem is how to fill them. If the current technology were second-generation mainframes, I can assure you that anyone's idea of requirements would be cut to pieces. What will happen is that the efficiencies of open source will significantly up the ante on the requirements. Microsoft might be right in that the TCO of Linux is greater than the TCO of Windows, neglecting of course to mention that it's at a rather different Price/Value point.
"We ain't seen nothin' yet."
It's like going from 3-nines to 5-nines while staying on a 3-nines budget.
Math should be a sport as much as 0 equals 1.
Precisely.
Since pseudo proofs exist that 0 equal 1 and other such impossibilities, I contend that math can be and is a sport.
Similarly, puns make sport of language.
It is arguable that such as the NFL is much too serious to be taken as sport.
Microsoft's cash cow is everybody else's cash drain.
Who will develop it is a political/economic problem, and humans have been coping with such problems for a long, long time.
I do not know of any other product where the designers/developers are so far removed from the end user.
The game of "gossip" goes both directions. The "highly trained, technically capable" person is solving the wrong damned problem.
From the standpoint of break-even analysis, it is enteraining to see just how bad something that is on-target can be to be equivalent to something that is good but off-target.