"* It is no longer possible for one player to be in alliance with a player who is at war with another player you are allied with."
Why?
Lets say I'm Switzerland, and I'm allied to both France and Germany. Germany and France declare war on each other.
So since France is fighting Germany, I can no longer be allied to both? How does it decide which one I'm forced to drop? Why can't I remain a neutral party?
Maybe there should be a "neutral party" civ advance?
You see, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have billions...why? Because they had these philosophies that they supposedly adhered to. So I may not have given them $'s directly, but I've given them 2 things far more valuable...my trust, and my time. And from those, they got their $billions.
"It's best to do one thing really, really well. Google does search. Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat."
No comment on the fact that they couldn't keep themselves from doing everything but the three things they list?
"Cleetus and Maude" might be consumers, but they're not big consumers (well, maybe in girth due to McDonalds, but I was speaking more of $'s spent).
Businesses will follow the dollars. The most attractive consumers are not "Cleetus and Maude," except maybe to people selling fast food or fishing lures. "Cleetus and Maude" want a lot of things that they don't get, simply because Clements and Maudine, their middle-class cousins, don't want them.
"Do no evil" (now written as item 6)? The two most evil things that MS does - forced upgrades due to locked-in proprietary formats. 2) continually releasing buggy software.
Ok, so...google has all this stuff in "beta" right now. But with the public gmail "beta" being over a year old now...shouldn't it start working right? Yet some of my most simple filters (like, anything emailed to a particular list) still get applied to the wrong things (like things sent to me, and not that list). And though I'm seeing the "unavailable" message less and less now, I'm still occassionally seeing it...what happened to philosophy #10, "Great just isn't good enough?"
But even better yet...what about philosophy #2: "It's best to do one thing really, really well. Google does search. Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat." So instead of doing yet another thing, shouldn't some of the public betas come out of beta first?
Sounds like Google needs to do some *serious* revamping of their "philosophies." You'd think if they specifically mention 3 things they don't do, they could at least do everything in the world except those 3 things (and hell, they might be doing horoscopes out there somewhere I don't know of). Hey Google - how about ya get what is out there working right, before putting out more public betas?
But you can't turn Linux into a platform even if you brand it, box it, and put a pricey sticker on it.
And here I thought it was succeeding because it wasn't doing that.
Good thing we're all still going to theatres as the only place we can see movies...oh wait, we can see them on tv too...oh, then again, there's those new-fangled vhs and dvd thingies, so we can watch them at home...or, watch them online...or watch them on a psp or even xbox...
Things change. The Open Source movement is considerably more versitle. We're also more prepared to deal with emerging technology.
And remember, there's more to the community than just the Linux kernel.
No news on open sourcing the client, but they're making a start
What the hell? So is every commercial company out there just supposed to release everything as open source? Good grief Charlie Brown...why would they do that?
There are plenty of Open Source options for reading pdf's. There's no reason to expect/demand that a commercial software company should open source their products. I mean, come on people...enough is enough.
miltarily - they're a very, very far way off from being able to prevent us from making their country a very, very deep hole in the ground.
economically - They'll not be able to handle a collapse of our economy, as the world at large would not be able to, and they are part of the world. So what if they actually *surpass* us in economic importance? I don't see why that is a problem. If your standard of living doesn't get worse, what do you care?
culturally - heaven forbid the trash we currently export that passes as "culture" has to take a back seat.
diplomatically - won't happen until they're considerably more liberal
environmentally - news flash: we're on the same planet. If they wreck it for us, they've wrecked it for themselves.
war no longer works to "solve problems." The only reason it worked (?) in Iraq is Saddam didn't have any ability (sans potential discrete weapons delivered in suitcases and such) to retailiate against the US. Realistically, no one {knock on wood} would ever start WW3 because, well, the world would be destroyed with nukes and other such weapons. Do you really think China could attack the US without us responding? And they can only hit parts of our west coast currently...we can take out their entire country many, many times over.
in dollars only, not in actual nutrition. A good chunk of their exports are in spices, something that is pound-per-pound is excessively more expensive than, say, wheat or corn.
The US produced 80 of the world's staple food just a short time back (a decade or two ago).
Its a matter of economics of production. Texas has a lot of oil, for example...but its all under a lot of rock and it has a lot of impurities. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has oil right near the surface below comparitively soft, easy-to-drill-through material, and the oil has far fewer impurities that need to be refined out of it. Iraqi oil is known for having some of the least amount of sulfur anywhere.
Same bit here - we can toss some seeds to the wind and have a field of corn in most of the US (my grandfather was a working farmer, so yes I'm aware I'm oversimplifying). China and India, on the other hand, can't toss seeds to the wind and feed 3 million people with *actual* food.
There's food, and there's food. Analyze the data a bit more if you think they're an export country.
some sectors, sure...but not enough for them to be able to feed themselves in 30 years.
In a situation where no country exported food to any other country, the US would be faaaaaaar better off than anyone else in the world. We've got all the veggies, dairy, and meat we need. Some fruits we import, as well as some peppers - we simply don't have enough of the right climates to supply our demand - but all in all, we can feed ourselves many many times over. It wasn't that long ago that we (just the US) were producing 80% of the world's food, after all.
ah...well, some of us don't want the headache of setting up companies that outsource to India. So those that aren't cut out for doing that, and instead are actually *techies* that are having their jobs outsourced...like I thought the discussion was about...what about them/us? Those that can't form multi-national companies?
you do realize that the reason outsourcing is occuring is because people get paid less there...right? Remember the recent slash story where they say "$350,000 (Rs. 1.5 crores) in their names, a large sum in Indian currency?"
Pocketing the difference? Have a good time trying to pay for that desk (or education) if you're outsourcing yourself to India. The standard of living is MUCH lower there, hence the pay is much lower too.
The gov of China knows that India is supposed to surpass them in population relatively soon. According to the CIA, by 2020 (15 years, folks...) a China/India duo would account for 36% of the global population. Western Europe plus the United States will only be 9% of the global population. With emerging economies, it is forecasted that we westerners are supposed to become quite obsolete.
China, knowing that by 2030 india is predicted to pass them in population, knows they have to act. Most of China's land mass is worthless, after all (why do you think Tiawan is so important to them?) so they have to position themselves as a solid consumer front.
The problem India/China will face: they'll be *consumers*. Being the biggest consumers has been a major harm to the US economy (trade deficits, etc). For our substantially smaller work force (1/5th-ish), we still produce twice as much as China does (see above CIA link). They need to seriously work on their production per-capita. That, and feeding those folks is already a serious problem. Production, on their end, is not just an industrial issue - its a natural resource issue.
The Western Hemisphere controls the food, and with it...we'll still control the wealth. If the US made some strong ties with South America, we'd retain power with even just 2% of the global population...put 3 billion people in an area that can only make food for 1 billion, and what does supply/demand dictate? It dictates that food prices will skyrocket, and non-food goods will plummet. Watches and games will become trivial, throw-away items (already are), but an apple...an apple will be valuable.
I'm not overly interested (or even interested at all) in "praising" IBM. I'm just reacting to what happens every single time this story gets reposted in/. - endless IBM-bashing. "Pot, meet kettle" has been repeated a billion times (at the very least) in the repeated stories on IBM looking for patent reform.
Of course they're a business. But I would think that business that is heavily research-oriented would be looking for patent reform, and that those who don't do any real amount of research (I already mentioned Amazon, Dell and Microsoft, but there are countless other well-known players..."market research" doesn't count in a patent discussion either) would want the status-quo to stay the same.
Silly patents are, from what I've seen of IBM's research, statistically irrelevent for them. This isn't the case for those who abuse the system, though.
for years, techies laughed at users of AOL and said it wasn't the "real" internet. AOL didn't work with normal browsers, wouldn't allow one to have access to normal things, etc.
There is a HUGE market for that now. Imagine an environment where spam is mostly non-existent because the network is isolated and only approved hosts can send email. Imagine an environment where sites didn't do mischevious things to your system. There's a market out there right now almost screaming to get the very thing for which AOL used to be criticized. There are millions of people out there that don't want 15,124,617,179,945,562 different search results for what they're after (esp when only 5 of them will be what they actually want, the first being on page 20 or so, and the rest will be trash), and they don't care to have to deal with all the other junk out there.
A couple nights ago I was looking for something online, and my wife and our roommate were in the room goofing off. After having to wade through pages of squatter-crap and such that had all the dumb tags that improve search engine results, I yelled "what have you people done to my beloved internet? It was a wonderful place until you all started getting on too!" I was only half-kidding. I never used AOL (I owned an ISP back in 95, and after that went to broadband for personal use) but I would count myself as someone that would sign up for a trusted environment.
Whereas the patent portfolio for Amazon is filled with things like "one click shopping" or whatever, IBM has always done *EXTENSIVE* research. They make chips, and have a gambit of patents associated with them. They even work on things like teleportation for crying out loud. Yes - like "beam me up, Scott" type teleportation.
No - IBM isn't Dell, a company that has never come up with anything new and does little else other than figure out the cheapest way to produce something. IBM isn't even a Microsoft, a company based entirely off taking someone else's ideas and implimenting them in proprietary ways (a compnay whose only real contribution is getting platforms and applications to work together well). Instead, IBM is very very heavily research-based. IMO, it's perfectly valid for IBM to have a vast # of patents, considering how much research it does. Dollar per research dollar, I'm willing to be it doesn't have all that many more per year than anyone else - they just put more dollars into it.
With that in mind - suggesting they're the pot calling the kettle black is a bit of a stretch. They've got a lot of patent experience sure (there's a nice soft word for it, eh?) but back to that dollar per research dollar thing...
If Cornell and Harvard got together and tried to get higher education to be more affordable for all Americans, would their intent be questioned simply because they're a couple of the more expensive schools? I pay $30k a year for my wife to go to vet school at Cornell. It's very painful. Cornell knows it, and is sympathetic to a degree...I know they would have loved to have seen Clinton's promised education costs reforms.
Same bit. IBM does a lot of research, gets a lot of patents. Simply because they have a lot of patents doesn't invalidate their opinion that there is abuse of the patent system.
Slashdot Mirror
"* It is no longer possible for one player to be in alliance with a player who is at war with another player you are allied with."
Why?
Lets say I'm Switzerland, and I'm allied to both France and Germany. Germany and France declare war on each other.
So since France is fighting Germany, I can no longer be allied to both? How does it decide which one I'm forced to drop? Why can't I remain a neutral party?
Maybe there should be a "neutral party" civ advance?
Walmart didn't become rich by catering to people that can't afford the internet. It got rich by catering to the lower-middle class.
ah, so since google hires out to subcontractors, they're not giving financial advice. Got it.
So who are they giving an anti-comparison to, since moneycentral.msn.com doesn't even go as far as google does?
You're so funny.
You see, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have billions...why? Because they had these philosophies that they supposedly adhered to. So I may not have given them $'s directly, but I've given them 2 things far more valuable...my trust, and my time. And from those, they got their $billions.
"It's best to do one thing really, really well. Google does search. Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat."
No comment on the fact that they couldn't keep themselves from doing everything but the three things they list?
"Cleetus and Maude" might be consumers, but they're not big consumers (well, maybe in girth due to McDonalds, but I was speaking more of $'s spent).
Businesses will follow the dollars. The most attractive consumers are not "Cleetus and Maude," except maybe to people selling fast food or fishing lures. "Cleetus and Maude" want a lot of things that they don't get, simply because Clements and Maudine, their middle-class cousins, don't want them.
The Google Philosophy.
"Do no evil" (now written as item 6)? The two most evil things that MS does - forced upgrades due to locked-in proprietary formats. 2) continually releasing buggy software.
Ok, so...google has all this stuff in "beta" right now. But with the public gmail "beta" being over a year old now...shouldn't it start working right? Yet some of my most simple filters (like, anything emailed to a particular list) still get applied to the wrong things (like things sent to me, and not that list). And though I'm seeing the "unavailable" message less and less now, I'm still occassionally seeing it...what happened to philosophy #10, "Great just isn't good enough?"
But even better yet...what about philosophy #2: "It's best to do one thing really, really well. Google does search. Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat." So instead of doing yet another thing, shouldn't some of the public betas come out of beta first?
Speaking of "Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat," how about this financial advice? Or, how about this chat program?
Sounds like Google needs to do some *serious* revamping of their "philosophies." You'd think if they specifically mention 3 things they don't do, they could at least do everything in the world except those 3 things (and hell, they might be doing horoscopes out there somewhere I don't know of). Hey Google - how about ya get what is out there working right, before putting out more public betas?
But you can't turn Linux into a platform even if you brand it, box it, and put a pricey sticker on it.
And here I thought it was succeeding because it wasn't doing that.
Good thing we're all still going to theatres as the only place we can see movies...oh wait, we can see them on tv too...oh, then again, there's those new-fangled vhs and dvd thingies, so we can watch them at home...or, watch them online...or watch them on a psp or even xbox...
Things change. The Open Source movement is considerably more versitle. We're also more prepared to deal with emerging technology.
And remember, there's more to the community than just the Linux kernel.
No news on open sourcing the client, but they're making a start
What the hell? So is every commercial company out there just supposed to release everything as open source? Good grief Charlie Brown...why would they do that?
There are plenty of Open Source options for reading pdf's. There's no reason to expect/demand that a commercial software company should open source their products. I mean, come on people...enough is enough.
taking current rates of reproduction, making estimates, and etc...a bit more precise than tea leaves.
;)
And last I checked, 2020 isn't 30 years from now. Maybe you do the "new math" though, so who am I to judge
sshhhh...
;)
I could have used any food. Wheat would have been most appropriate. I was trying to slip something in there all sneaky-like. Now, keep it hush-hush!
Er, where did you get this statistic from?
Er, from the CIA link I provided in the post you're responding to.
=)
mayhaps you would care to explain what that has to do with the post I made?
miltarily - they're a very, very far way off from being able to prevent us from making their country a very, very deep hole in the ground.
economically - They'll not be able to handle a collapse of our economy, as the world at large would not be able to, and they are part of the world. So what if they actually *surpass* us in economic importance? I don't see why that is a problem. If your standard of living doesn't get worse, what do you care?
culturally - heaven forbid the trash we currently export that passes as "culture" has to take a back seat.
diplomatically - won't happen until they're considerably more liberal
environmentally - news flash: we're on the same planet. If they wreck it for us, they've wrecked it for themselves.
why is it a threat? On what basis? Militarily?
war no longer works to "solve problems." The only reason it worked (?) in Iraq is Saddam didn't have any ability (sans potential discrete weapons delivered in suitcases and such) to retailiate against the US. Realistically, no one {knock on wood} would ever start WW3 because, well, the world would be destroyed with nukes and other such weapons. Do you really think China could attack the US without us responding? And they can only hit parts of our west coast currently...we can take out their entire country many, many times over.
in dollars only, not in actual nutrition. A good chunk of their exports are in spices, something that is pound-per-pound is excessively more expensive than, say, wheat or corn.
The US produced 80 of the world's staple food just a short time back (a decade or two ago).
Its a matter of economics of production. Texas has a lot of oil, for example...but its all under a lot of rock and it has a lot of impurities. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has oil right near the surface below comparitively soft, easy-to-drill-through material, and the oil has far fewer impurities that need to be refined out of it. Iraqi oil is known for having some of the least amount of sulfur anywhere.
Same bit here - we can toss some seeds to the wind and have a field of corn in most of the US (my grandfather was a working farmer, so yes I'm aware I'm oversimplifying). China and India, on the other hand, can't toss seeds to the wind and feed 3 million people with *actual* food.
There's food, and there's food. Analyze the data a bit more if you think they're an export country.
some sectors, sure...but not enough for them to be able to feed themselves in 30 years.
In a situation where no country exported food to any other country, the US would be faaaaaaar better off than anyone else in the world. We've got all the veggies, dairy, and meat we need. Some fruits we import, as well as some peppers - we simply don't have enough of the right climates to supply our demand - but all in all, we can feed ourselves many many times over. It wasn't that long ago that we (just the US) were producing 80% of the world's food, after all.
ah...well, some of us don't want the headache of setting up companies that outsource to India. So those that aren't cut out for doing that, and instead are actually *techies* that are having their jobs outsourced...like I thought the discussion was about...what about them/us? Those that can't form multi-national companies?
you do realize that the reason outsourcing is occuring is because people get paid less there...right? Remember the recent slash story where they say "$350,000 (Rs. 1.5 crores) in their names, a large sum in Indian currency?"
Pocketing the difference? Have a good time trying to pay for that desk (or education) if you're outsourcing yourself to India. The standard of living is MUCH lower there, hence the pay is much lower too.
because those of us that can't afford to go to school are unable to be very mobile in our occupations. DUH
The gov of China knows that India is supposed to surpass them in population relatively soon. According to the CIA, by 2020 (15 years, folks...) a China/India duo would account for 36% of the global population. Western Europe plus the United States will only be 9% of the global population. With emerging economies, it is forecasted that we westerners are supposed to become quite obsolete.
China, knowing that by 2030 india is predicted to pass them in population, knows they have to act. Most of China's land mass is worthless, after all (why do you think Tiawan is so important to them?) so they have to position themselves as a solid consumer front.
The problem India/China will face: they'll be *consumers*. Being the biggest consumers has been a major harm to the US economy (trade deficits, etc). For our substantially smaller work force (1/5th-ish), we still produce twice as much as China does (see above CIA link). They need to seriously work on their production per-capita. That, and feeding those folks is already a serious problem. Production, on their end, is not just an industrial issue - its a natural resource issue.
The Western Hemisphere controls the food, and with it...we'll still control the wealth. If the US made some strong ties with South America, we'd retain power with even just 2% of the global population...put 3 billion people in an area that can only make food for 1 billion, and what does supply/demand dictate? It dictates that food prices will skyrocket, and non-food goods will plummet. Watches and games will become trivial, throw-away items (already are), but an apple...an apple will be valuable.
I'm not overly interested (or even interested at all) in "praising" IBM. I'm just reacting to what happens every single time this story gets reposted in /. - endless IBM-bashing. "Pot, meet kettle" has been repeated a billion times (at the very least) in the repeated stories on IBM looking for patent reform.
Of course they're a business. But I would think that business that is heavily research-oriented would be looking for patent reform, and that those who don't do any real amount of research (I already mentioned Amazon, Dell and Microsoft, but there are countless other well-known players..."market research" doesn't count in a patent discussion either) would want the status-quo to stay the same.
Silly patents are, from what I've seen of IBM's research, statistically irrelevent for them. This isn't the case for those who abuse the system, though.
for years, techies laughed at users of AOL and said it wasn't the "real" internet. AOL didn't work with normal browsers, wouldn't allow one to have access to normal things, etc.
There is a HUGE market for that now. Imagine an environment where spam is mostly non-existent because the network is isolated and only approved hosts can send email. Imagine an environment where sites didn't do mischevious things to your system. There's a market out there right now almost screaming to get the very thing for which AOL used to be criticized. There are millions of people out there that don't want 15,124,617,179,945,562 different search results for what they're after (esp when only 5 of them will be what they actually want, the first being on page 20 or so, and the rest will be trash), and they don't care to have to deal with all the other junk out there.
A couple nights ago I was looking for something online, and my wife and our roommate were in the room goofing off. After having to wade through pages of squatter-crap and such that had all the dumb tags that improve search engine results, I yelled "what have you people done to my beloved internet? It was a wonderful place until you all started getting on too!" I was only half-kidding. I never used AOL (I owned an ISP back in 95, and after that went to broadband for personal use) but I would count myself as someone that would sign up for a trusted environment.
Whereas the patent portfolio for Amazon is filled with things like "one click shopping" or whatever, IBM has always done *EXTENSIVE* research. They make chips, and have a gambit of patents associated with them. They even work on things like teleportation for crying out loud. Yes - like "beam me up, Scott" type teleportation.
No - IBM isn't Dell, a company that has never come up with anything new and does little else other than figure out the cheapest way to produce something. IBM isn't even a Microsoft, a company based entirely off taking someone else's ideas and implimenting them in proprietary ways (a compnay whose only real contribution is getting platforms and applications to work together well). Instead, IBM is very very heavily research-based. IMO, it's perfectly valid for IBM to have a vast # of patents, considering how much research it does. Dollar per research dollar, I'm willing to be it doesn't have all that many more per year than anyone else - they just put more dollars into it.
With that in mind - suggesting they're the pot calling the kettle black is a bit of a stretch. They've got a lot of patent experience sure (there's a nice soft word for it, eh?) but back to that dollar per research dollar thing...
If Cornell and Harvard got together and tried to get higher education to be more affordable for all Americans, would their intent be questioned simply because they're a couple of the more expensive schools? I pay $30k a year for my wife to go to vet school at Cornell. It's very painful. Cornell knows it, and is sympathetic to a degree...I know they would have loved to have seen Clinton's promised education costs reforms.
Same bit. IBM does a lot of research, gets a lot of patents. Simply because they have a lot of patents doesn't invalidate their opinion that there is abuse of the patent system.
{snicker}