the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence
as a political advantage for the President.
I know I'm not alone: when I saw the way he walks and the way he points, every poser alarm in my system started screaming bloody fool.
As you say, right or wrong, snap judgments convince no one; but that's not the trap I fell into.
The trap I fell into was that I didn't take the trouble to really eliminate the effects of confirmation bias. Laziness, really. I let my faith in the American system lull me, without acknowledging that I'm part of that system.
The trap I fell into was to dismiss my gut reaction as implausibly extreme; to leave the job of responding to people with, as I thought, cooler heads and clearer vision. What I did was, I allowed a really important question to remain "open": I recognized my own prejudice and did not work to eliminate its effects.
But it doesn't seem to me that confirmation bias has much chance of distorting these results. Take a gander at the last paragraph of
this speech
. Sit quiet and look at the premises, the reasoning, the implications.
I've opened my mind, done my looking, and the conclusion I've reached is this: Bram Stoker's masterpiece is a metaphorical treatise on the desire for vengeance.
Back in the day, when a million instructions per second was still very, very impressive stuff indeed, the VAX-11/780 came out at 1 MIP and 1 meg. It cost about $150,000 in 1978ish dollars.
Somebody with waaaaayyy too much time stared at the performance manual and constructed a "benchmark" on which the Apple II beat it. I no longer remember details if I ever knew them, but it'd have to be something along the lines of 8-bit integer arithmetic that'd fit in 256 bytes so the 6502 could run it all in page zero. Or was it an integer BASIC program? Anybody here remember?
On a similar note, I remember a film of an econobox car beating the Green Monster (famous dragster, powered by a jet fighter engine) in a few hundred yard drag race. Of course, they started the race with the engines off.
Seconded. Monitor at 50-60% bright, color temp at D50. Give your eyes a while to adjust (as in, give the cramps a while to subside), maybe a day or two.
I've still got my decent CRT from... 1998? 1998. Black-on-white for documents, green-on-black 10pt Courier for terminals, syntax coloring is ok mostly. I miss the layout tweaking I could do on Apple's Terminal; line- and letterspacing with sliders let me get my setup Just Exactly Right. It matters.
I think a theory I wish I'd bookmarked for attribution is correct: that the posts contain keywords intentionally inserted to prevent the surrounding discussion reaching people using filter software; that the posters are provocateurs infiltrated to portray the community as offensive and therefore negligible. Not bearing false witness against your neighbors seems to be missing from their value system.
The problem is, what I saidis true, is far from all of it and arguably not the worst.
To save you some time, my descriptions of Microsoft's intent and effect on the market is a straight paraphrase from the closing paragraph, my use of "multi-million" is from paragraph 317, and just some of the facts supporting the points in bold are found in the paragraphs immediately following 317.
Apple are doing nothing even remotely resembling what Microsoft did.
Microsoft made it very clear to every one in the business that any company that dared threaten their business model would be broken, and broken by any means necessary. The anti-trust suit had relatively little to do with them giving away anything for free. It had quite a lot to do with them threatening third parties with multiple-million dollar losses if they did not actually break working products' compatibility with Netscape. It had quite a lot to do with them threatening third parties with multiple-million dollar losses if they did not pull all advertising from Netscape's web site.
The day Apple threaten to hurt companies that do business with... wait, what market are Apple supposedly laying waste to?
Music players? Apple are trying to bully companies into not providing music that'll play on the Zune? They're trying to not just raise the barrier to entry but make it clear that they'll hurt anybody who tries?
Oh wait. Wrong canard, and no, they're not. They want un-DRM'd music. It's the exact opposite.
Browsers. Apple are trying to lay waste to the browser market just like Microsoft did. They're trying to bully companies into not making products that work on competitors' platforms.
Oh wait. No, they're not. Safari's aiming at full compliance with published standards. It's the exact opposite.
What are the top three browsers? IE, Firefox and Safari. All of them free, all of them shoved in people's faces at every opportunity their developers can contrive, all of them used to drive profits in one way or another, all of them competing on merit and availability.
They're all in the wrong of course, because they're laying waste to markets, resulting in visibly inferior products available to us all. It's just like what Microsoft did.
No, but a great many people have gone tribal: they like it that the President is willfully violating oath, honor, duty and law. It means the man at the top of the hierarchy they worship, and therefore the hierarchy itself, is above all, and they're part of that hierarchy. The only rules they have to follow are what Big Men say.
What I find worrying is the range of correction that needs to be applied and also the fact that the correction takes this long
Then you haven't understood the problem. When wss the last time you tried measuring anything by looking at it sideways through the bottom of a drinking glass? Except it's shaped more like a plate, and you're embedded in it, halfway out, trying to measure the thickness of the center from the inside. Except it's not really a plate, it's a flat lumpy glowing murky fog that's opaque enough you can't actually see the center.
Maybe it'll help to remember it took humanity many, many thousands of years to figure out what it means that 0.05% of the available relevant evidence — five of those dots in the sky out of the 10,000 or so you can see from a mountain top — behave in ways that only almost, but not exactly, fit the theory that the Earth is the center of the universe. 99.95% of the evidence available to the naked eye does fit that theory, exactly, and any scientific mind looking at the night sky without benefit of history will be driven to the older theory in short order.
So if, a few decades after humanity first got a good line on what that glorious arc in the night sky we call the Milky Way really is, we're still working on estimates of the size of far-away parts of it, maybe you could cut your family a little slack.
My adblock plus blacklist is pretty short. Not all that many adservers really treat you like prey, and adblock lets you treat them the same way in return. It's a shame so many of/.'s ads are animated. Every time I unblock them I stop feeling guilty about blocking them again.
The point here is that not only would businesses' taxes go up, but so would individuals' income, by at least the same amount.
The point here is at the level of object permanence, which infants learn right around the time they learn to crawl — which, by the way, happens before they can say "mama". Something's got your brain shut down at a very fundamental level.
Corporations don't pay tax, only people do, you and I.
Do you really think that if businesses paid none and individuals paid all of the cost of government, that employees wouldn't need higher wages to cover it?
It'd work (financially) much better if businesses paid all of the cost of government. Kaboom: less paperwork, fewer people required to process it. Lots more money in individuals' pockets.
It'd be a horrible idea for other reasons, but do the math: if the businesses are honest, prices go up by less than their employees' disposable income does.
it's the attitude that the ends justify the means underlying each little step.
Subcultures used to prosperity are facing the rising tide of poverty, now. It's the half-smart, the half-wit cliques who now can't find productive jobs at the wages they imagine are their due. And they certainly couldn't stomach honest welfare, no. That would embarrass them in front of their peers. So, since they can't find any way to produce or even pretend to produce good things, they have to protect us from bad things. In the absence of actual bad things, they'll make them up; when that becomes unpersuasive they'll make them.
These people don't care about ends. Social status is the only thing that matters to them. That social hierarchies are an evolved mechanism that we share with, say, chickens, makes it a tough nut to crack.
"Access" is what people will be paying for in the future, not the "ownership" of digital copies of pieces of music.
He flat out said it. Kudos for the balls, dude.
"We own it. We will own it for ever. You will pay us and our children, forever, for work other people did decades and soon hundreds of years ago. We will, ourselves, produce none of the human expression you pay to "access". But you will pay us. With that money we will buy laws that require you to continue to pay us. And your children, who see us for what we are and treat us with the respect we deserve (and in fact have for ourselves), we will call thieves."
Maybe, maybe not. Microsoft do deserve kudos for dropping it into their flagship application. I've only read the reviews, not tried it. From here it looks like the kind of bet Apple have made repeatedly in every aspect of their products. It's a significant or even major change in the interface, ante'ing the status quo. I get the strong impression that wherever the bits and pieces come from, they hang together rather than separately, and that's not an easy effect to achieve.
He picked three things (at Delta: safe, clean, on-time), put a feedback loop on them, and talks about them this way:
Each of these things costs money because it requires people to make it happen. Were these decisions therefore wrong by Wall Street standards? No, because the customer is happy and therefore the customer spends more money with Delta.
That doesn't sound like happy-happy where's-my-axe blather to me.
Microsoft had no monopoly in browsers when they started. Microsoft had a desktop OS monopoly. They leveraged that to kill a company whose product might, someday, indirectly have hurt their desktop OS profits. The specific leverage they applied was to sink massive resources into developing a high-quality browser, and... not only give it away free, but threaten to hurt other companies dependent on them for making products that worked with Netscape. They lost money hand over fist on the effort.
The assertions above are not rhetoric. They're fact. Hunt up the words "malevolent" and "obsessive" in that link. When the Netscape threat was gone, Microsoft virtually abandoned browser development.
Apple had no monopoly on MP3 players or desktop OS's when they started. Apple used no leverage of any kind. They used high-quality industrial design and user-interface research, attention to detail, superb marketing and smart partnerships to earn their present spot on top of the market. They have not, ever, even once, stopped adding new capacity and features on to the iPod. The iPod has been phenomenally profitable since its introduction. Apple continued improving it at a torrid pace even when they had left the competition so far behind there essentially wasn't any, and they're still doing it today.
Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations,
and what the law says of people who behave that way:
shall be deemed guilty of a felony,
and the prescribed penalties if the prosecutor decides to make it a criminal case (which he didn't):
and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Note that a hundred million dollars is and was chump change to Microsoft. They had a hundred seventy two times that much available in *cash and short-term notes*.
In short, "to monopolize" trade is not "to have a monopoly on a product". Publishers have a monopoly on distribution of books they publish. That isn't the same as monopolizing trade in books.
Apple have a monopoly on Mac OS X. They are not monopolizing trade in personal-computer OS's. They have a monopoly on iPods. They aren't monopolizing trade in digital music.
Sure, sure. The GPL doesn't play well with code that can be sold as a product. BSDish ones do, and by that fact are vulnerable to e.g. what Microsoft did to Kerberos, to the lasting detriment of everyone but people happy to pay Microsoft repeatedly for work Microsoft never did. Proprietary (non-)licenses have their own problems. Nothing's perfect. Stop whining.
Some people are cool with you selling their work in your product and keeping the money, some people aren't. Some people insist that their work be salable by others as a product. Others are easy, and will dual-license their work, GPL/BSDish. Some people don't want *anybody* else using their work. Chacun a son gout. De gustibus non est disuptandum. Whatever floats your boat.
I think he could have more clearly said "it's reasonable to conclude that many more than 7% of actual desktops are running Mac OS, since the fraction of Mac users visiting PC World is probably much lower than that of Windows users."
If I was arguing against that line, I'd start by pointing out that the visits spiked about the time it became possible to run Windows on a Mac, and the marketing for that feature was ubiquitous. That would explain an initial spike, anyway. Why has it stayed high, and continued climbing? Surely, if Mac users were interested because they wanted to run Windows, they'd mostly be running Windows when visiting PC World by now. And that still argues for under-representation: not all Mac users care to run Windows.
Right?
Could it be that there are so many new Mac users who want Windows only for specific uses, so e.g they can run games or AutoCAD on their better-than-the-average-PC, it-just-works hardware, that the fraction of Mac users who don't run Windows is insignificant? I won't believe that without evidence, which I'm too lazy to hunt for. And it *still* would leave us with at least 7% of real desktops being Macs.
How about something skewing the stats? If Mac users toss their cookies more often than Windows users, and PC World is trying to count unique visitors, that would explain it... if that changed at the same time as the x86 switch... uhhh, nope. I don't believe that.
Mac users visit PC World more times per person than PC users? Nope.
I've been unable to find any anti-GPL agitators who were actually prevented from selling their own work.
All the ones I've found want to sell *other people's work* and keep the money for themselves.
And they complain that the GPL prevents them from doing that.
</world's smallest violin>
It's real simple: either the fraction of GPL code in this putative product that the GPL is supposedly denying to the world is significant, or it isn't.
If it's a significant part, then they're thieves.
If it's not a significant part, then they're just lazy whiners.
Slashdot Mirror
Prejudice is the mother of all traps, sure. Here's the one I fell into:
In an essay by Ron Suskind, one of the President's advisors is quoted referring to
as a political advantage for the President.I know I'm not alone: when I saw the way he walks and the way he points, every poser alarm in my system started screaming bloody fool.
As you say, right or wrong, snap judgments convince no one; but that's not the trap I fell into.
The trap I fell into was that I didn't take the trouble to really eliminate the effects of confirmation bias. Laziness, really. I let my faith in the American system lull me, without acknowledging that I'm part of that system.
The trap I fell into was to dismiss my gut reaction as implausibly extreme; to leave the job of responding to people with, as I thought, cooler heads and clearer vision. What I did was, I allowed a really important question to remain "open": I recognized my own prejudice and did not work to eliminate its effects.
But it doesn't seem to me that confirmation bias has much chance of distorting these results. Take a gander at the last paragraph of this speech . Sit quiet and look at the premises, the reasoning, the implications.
I've opened my mind, done my looking, and the conclusion I've reached is this: Bram Stoker's masterpiece is a metaphorical treatise on the desire for vengeance.
Back in the day, when a million instructions per second was still very, very impressive stuff indeed, the VAX-11/780 came out at 1 MIP and 1 meg. It cost about $150,000 in 1978ish dollars.
Somebody with waaaaayyy too much time stared at the performance manual and constructed a "benchmark" on which the Apple II beat it. I no longer remember details if I ever knew them, but it'd have to be something along the lines of 8-bit integer arithmetic that'd fit in 256 bytes so the 6502 could run it all in page zero. Or was it an integer BASIC program? Anybody here remember?
On a similar note, I remember a film of an econobox car beating the Green Monster (famous dragster, powered by a jet fighter engine) in a few hundred yard drag race. Of course, they started the race with the engines off.
Seconded. Monitor at 50-60% bright, color temp at D50. Give your eyes a while to adjust (as in, give the cramps a while to subside), maybe a day or two.
I've still got my decent CRT from ... 1998? 1998. Black-on-white for documents, green-on-black 10pt Courier for terminals, syntax coloring is ok mostly. I miss the layout tweaking I could do on Apple's Terminal; line- and letterspacing with sliders let me get my setup Just Exactly Right. It matters.
I think a theory I wish I'd bookmarked for attribution is correct: that the posts contain keywords intentionally inserted to prevent the surrounding discussion reaching people using filter software; that the posters are provocateurs infiltrated to portray the community as offensive and therefore negligible. Not bearing false witness against your neighbors seems to be missing from their value system.
Thank you for replying.
The problem is, what I said is true, is far from all of it and arguably not the worst.
To save you some time, my descriptions of Microsoft's intent and effect on the market is a straight paraphrase from the closing paragraph, my use of "multi-million" is from paragraph 317, and just some of the facts supporting the points in bold are found in the paragraphs immediately following 317.
Horse shit.
Apple are doing nothing even remotely resembling what Microsoft did.
Microsoft made it very clear to every one in the business that any company that dared threaten their business model would be broken, and broken by any means necessary. The anti-trust suit had relatively little to do with them giving away anything for free. It had quite a lot to do with them threatening third parties with multiple-million dollar losses if they did not actually break working products' compatibility with Netscape. It had quite a lot to do with them threatening third parties with multiple-million dollar losses if they did not pull all advertising from Netscape's web site.
The day Apple threaten to hurt companies that do business with ... wait, what market are Apple supposedly laying waste to?
Music players? Apple are trying to bully companies into not providing music that'll play on the Zune? They're trying to not just raise the barrier to entry but make it clear that they'll hurt anybody who tries?
Oh wait. Wrong canard, and no, they're not. They want un-DRM'd music. It's the exact opposite.
Browsers. Apple are trying to lay waste to the browser market just like Microsoft did. They're trying to bully companies into not making products that work on competitors' platforms.
Oh wait. No, they're not. Safari's aiming at full compliance with published standards. It's the exact opposite.
What are the top three browsers? IE, Firefox and Safari. All of them free, all of them shoved in people's faces at every opportunity their developers can contrive, all of them used to drive profits in one way or another, all of them competing on merit and availability.
They're all in the wrong of course, because they're laying waste to markets, resulting in visibly inferior products available to us all. It's just like what Microsoft did.
Riiiiiight.
why parent got modded down?
No, but a great many people have gone tribal: they like it that the President is willfully violating oath, honor, duty and law. It means the man at the top of the hierarchy they worship, and therefore the hierarchy itself, is above all, and they're part of that hierarchy. The only rules they have to follow are what Big Men say.
What state of mind do you have to be in to claim that as some sort of Windows-specific thing?
Then you haven't understood the problem. When wss the last time you tried measuring anything by looking at it sideways through the bottom of a drinking glass? Except it's shaped more like a plate, and you're embedded in it, halfway out, trying to measure the thickness of the center from the inside. Except it's not really a plate, it's a flat lumpy glowing murky fog that's opaque enough you can't actually see the center.
Maybe it'll help to remember it took humanity many, many thousands of years to figure out what it means that 0.05% of the available relevant evidence — five of those dots in the sky out of the 10,000 or so you can see from a mountain top — behave in ways that only almost, but not exactly, fit the theory that the Earth is the center of the universe. 99.95% of the evidence available to the naked eye does fit that theory, exactly, and any scientific mind looking at the night sky without benefit of history will be driven to the older theory in short order.
So if, a few decades after humanity first got a good line on what that glorious arc in the night sky we call the Milky Way really is, we're still working on estimates of the size of far-away parts of it, maybe you could cut your family a little slack.
My adblock plus blacklist is pretty short. Not all that many adservers really treat you like prey, and adblock lets you treat them the same way in return. It's a shame so many of /.'s ads are animated. Every time I unblock them I stop feeling guilty about blocking them again.
uhh, ... oh, never mind.
The point here is that not only would businesses' taxes go up, but so would individuals' income, by at least the same amount.
The point here is at the level of object permanence, which infants learn right around the time they learn to crawl — which, by the way, happens before they can say "mama". Something's got your brain shut down at a very fundamental level.
Do you really think that if businesses paid none and individuals paid all of the cost of government, that employees wouldn't need higher wages to cover it?
It'd work (financially) much better if businesses paid all of the cost of government. Kaboom: less paperwork, fewer people required to process it. Lots more money in individuals' pockets.
It'd be a horrible idea for other reasons, but do the math: if the businesses are honest, prices go up by less than their employees' disposable income does.
Subcultures used to prosperity are facing the rising tide of poverty, now. It's the half-smart, the half-wit cliques who now can't find productive jobs at the wages they imagine are their due. And they certainly couldn't stomach honest welfare, no. That would embarrass them in front of their peers. So, since they can't find any way to produce or even pretend to produce good things, they have to protect us from bad things. In the absence of actual bad things, they'll make them up; when that becomes unpersuasive they'll make them.
These people don't care about ends. Social status is the only thing that matters to them. That social hierarchies are an evolved mechanism that we share with, say, chickens, makes it a tough nut to crack.
He flat out said it. Kudos for the balls, dude.
"We own it. We will own it for ever. You will pay us and our children, forever, for work other people did decades and soon hundreds of years ago. We will, ourselves, produce none of the human expression you pay to "access". But you will pay us. With that money we will buy laws that require you to continue to pay us. And your children, who see us for what we are and treat us with the respect we deserve (and in fact have for ourselves), we will call thieves."
Maybe, maybe not. Microsoft do deserve kudos for dropping it into their flagship application. I've only read the reviews, not tried it. From here it looks like the kind of bet Apple have made repeatedly in every aspect of their products. It's a significant or even major change in the interface, ante'ing the status quo. I get the strong impression that wherever the bits and pieces come from, they hang together rather than separately, and that's not an easy effect to achieve.
He picked three things (at Delta: safe, clean, on-time), put a feedback loop on them, and talks about them this way:
That doesn't sound like happy-happy where's-my-axe blather to me.
Not even close.
Microsoft had no monopoly in browsers when they started. Microsoft had a desktop OS monopoly. They leveraged that to kill a company whose product might, someday, indirectly have hurt their desktop OS profits. The specific leverage they applied was to sink massive resources into developing a high-quality browser, and ... not only give it away free, but threaten to hurt other companies dependent on them for making products that worked with Netscape. They lost money hand over fist on the effort.
The assertions above are not rhetoric. They're fact. Hunt up the words "malevolent" and "obsessive" in that link. When the Netscape threat was gone, Microsoft virtually abandoned browser development.
Apple had no monopoly on MP3 players or desktop OS's when they started. Apple used no leverage of any kind. They used high-quality industrial design and user-interface research, attention to detail, superb marketing and smart partnerships to earn their present spot on top of the market. They have not, ever, even once, stopped adding new capacity and features on to the iPod. The iPod has been phenomenally profitable since its introduction. Apple continued improving it at a torrid pace even when they had left the competition so far behind there essentially wasn't any, and they're still doing it today.
Here's the legal description of how Microsoft behaved:
and what the law says of people who behave that way:
and the prescribed penalties if the prosecutor decides to make it a criminal case (which he didn't):
Note that a hundred million dollars is and was chump change to Microsoft. They had a hundred seventy two times that much available in *cash and short-term notes*.
In short, "to monopolize" trade is not "to have a monopoly on a product". Publishers have a monopoly on distribution of books they publish. That isn't the same as monopolizing trade in books.
Apple have a monopoly on Mac OS X. They are not monopolizing trade in personal-computer OS's. They have a monopoly on iPods. They aren't monopolizing trade in digital music.
They law applies equally to Microsoft and Apple.
It's just that Apple didn't break it.
Sure, sure. The GPL doesn't play well with code that can be sold as a product. BSDish ones do, and by that fact are vulnerable to e.g. what Microsoft did to Kerberos, to the lasting detriment of everyone but people happy to pay Microsoft repeatedly for work Microsoft never did. Proprietary (non-)licenses have their own problems. Nothing's perfect. Stop whining.
Some people are cool with you selling their work in your product and keeping the money, some people aren't. Some people insist that their work be salable by others as a product. Others are easy, and will dual-license their work, GPL/BSDish. Some people don't want *anybody* else using their work. Chacun a son gout. De gustibus non est disuptandum. Whatever floats your boat.
What was your complaint again?
And I just let my last mod point expire.
I think he could have more clearly said "it's reasonable to conclude that many more than 7% of actual desktops are running Mac OS, since the fraction of Mac users visiting PC World is probably much lower than that of Windows users."
If I was arguing against that line, I'd start by pointing out that the visits spiked about the time it became possible to run Windows on a Mac, and the marketing for that feature was ubiquitous. That would explain an initial spike, anyway. Why has it stayed high, and continued climbing? Surely, if Mac users were interested because they wanted to run Windows, they'd mostly be running Windows when visiting PC World by now. And that still argues for under-representation: not all Mac users care to run Windows.
Right?
Could it be that there are so many new Mac users who want Windows only for specific uses, so e.g they can run games or AutoCAD on their better-than-the-average-PC, it-just-works hardware, that the fraction of Mac users who don't run Windows is insignificant? I won't believe that without evidence, which I'm too lazy to hunt for. And it *still* would leave us with at least 7% of real desktops being Macs.
How about something skewing the stats? If Mac users toss their cookies more often than Windows users, and PC World is trying to count unique visitors, that would explain it ... if that changed at the same time as the x86 switch ... uhhh, nope. I don't believe that.
Mac users visit PC World more times per person than PC users? Nope.
I suspect he's right.
I've been unable to find any anti-GPL agitators who were actually prevented from selling their own work.
All the ones I've found want to sell *other people's work* and keep the money for themselves.
And they complain that the GPL prevents them from doing that.
</world's smallest violin>
It's real simple: either the fraction of GPL code in this putative product that the GPL is supposedly denying to the world is significant, or it isn't.
If it's a significant part, then they're thieves.
If it's not a significant part, then they're just lazy whiners.