Which is why centrally planned economies deserve nothing but contempt. Compare how humanity was treated in East Germany 1945-1985 to how humanity fared in West Germany during the same period.
And this is exactly a type of "one-way hash" argument that the article described.
First and foremost, in its core it's "status quo is best" argument that decries alternatives to the only thing target audience had experienced.
It points to one of the "best" implementation of Capitalism with "worst" implementation of socialism that happened to be geographically close. Those implementations also happen to be most praised/vilified by 50 years of propaganda, both blown out of proportions.
It implies that readiness of many Eastern Germany inhabitants to "escape" to the West was based on informed choice and not massive amounts of such propaganda.
It ignores the fact that after re-unification of Germany, conditions in its Eastern part of it ended up getting worse than they were under Communists.
And, of course, it ignores the fact that USSR, another Socialist country, contrary to Americans' beliefs supported higher average standard of living than their own country for most of its the post-WWII history. This is even more ironic considering that its superior public education system allowed population to realize that not all problems can be solved by voting of laymen or competitive marketing, or at least did so until it was overwhelmed by propaganda between late 80's and 90's -- something that proud Americans now (correctly) describe as "they hate our freedom".
However arguing against that would not only require debunking 50 years of myth-building but a discussion of things, most of American population is unable to process.
Now, before you respond with the usual American ideological crap, please don't forget that you will be talking to a person who actually lived in both USSR and US, and therefore has first-hand experience of everything you think, you know about your supposed enemies.
Unless the RIAA subtly change the music to fingerprint every CD uniquely, and then track from the point of sale with your information and watch for that fingerprint on the internet. (Dang, haven't quite got the conspiracy theory thing down quite yet!)
That would cost them more than all losses from piracy over the whole history of mankind (that is, including the kind that involves ships).
Right. And the source is so fictional that the KGB tortured people to get their hands on it.
Libel can get you pretty heavy penalties anywhere in the world.
And that's also why it's corroborated by Soviet records...
What? It never was.
"One of the noteworthy elements of Solzhenitsyn's analysis are the seemingly outlandish claims of Soviet brutality, which subsequently turned out to be true - or which in some cases turned out to be more outrageous than Solzhenitsyn had originally stated. For instance, Solzhenitsyn claimed that the Gulag system was so voracious that between 1930 and 1939, a quarter of the population of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was shipped to the Gulag. Post-Soviet scholarship has confirmed that the figure was even higher.[5] This one, seemingly unbelievable event, was reported by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, to skepticism in the West."
GULAG was a prison system, it was not made specifically for politically-related crimes, or had some outrageous mortality rate. It was harsh because it involved hard labor, however that was the extent of it for most of the prisoners (including Solzhenitsyn himself).
It seems to me the only reason you may hate Stalin is the negative publicity he gave the Soviet system.
I's not the only reason, however that's pretty much the only thing Americans know that is true about him.
And yet the intentions of RIAA and other copyright abusers, and intention behind copyright law itself somehow do not matter -- just make sure that publishers can milk everyone else because they can use copyright law in a way that contradicts its original purpose.
Actually I hate Stalin and Stalinists -- at the extent that it's possible to hate dead people. However history is about studying facts of the past, not producing creative writing about it. Ex: 300 movie is not history.
Let me guess, you think the Gulag Archipelago was American propaganda, too?
No, it's a vaguely autobiographic work of fiction that only American propaganda worker would use as a source for anything but literary criticism.
Our institutions of learning and higher learning *were* purposefully infiltrated by the Soviets in order to take us out from within. It's the same modus operandi that the Scientology folk have used on a larger scale, and like Scientology they also targeted Hollywood. Unfortunately for us, they were more successful.
Or maybe Communist ideas were popular among intellectuals to begin with, yet your politicians preferred to blame everything on "foreign spies". That is, before starting to promote blatant anti-intellectualism.
..and then at some point you exceed the amount of available memory, ptr is assigned NULL, and position of your actual allocated buffer is lost forever. And it takes up at least half of memory you have available for emergency cleanup, so all you can do is to call exit() or abort() right now.
I hope, you will be never allowed to write software that other people rely on.
This contradicts everything else that is known about KGB, however it is consistent with American propaganda that pretty much projected their own image on propaganda efforts of others -- real or imaginary.
So, 2 decades of non-windows usage would have had reversed centuries-old poverty?
Of course. In the rest of the world it already happened at various points in history, so there is no reason to expect that it wouldn't be the same in Africa. We see it as "centuries-old poverty" only in comparison with our own societies' conditions, however not long ago our societies were at the same level, just without a point of comparison to make them look this bad.
Explain me the economics of it, IN DETAIL, not with slogans passed as hypothetical.
The whole study of economy is basically a set of slogans, so I would rather omit it altogether and focus on things that are comparable and measurable. Each and every country that is now seen as "developed", at some point went through the same process, however as I mentioned before, most did it early enough to have no reference point to emphasize the poor living conditions before this change. Europe and US did it at the time of Industrial Revolution, however the same process continued later, and its speed corresponded with development of technology. Technology development in 80's-90's was mostly concentrated around entertainment and comfort, so it was of little use for such a process. I see Microsoft as one of the primary reasons why development of technology was shifted toward tinkering and mental masturbation.
Pro-Microsoft messages are pretty consistent here -- mentioned the same "problems" that are now long gone or never existed in the first place, pretend to be Linux users while obviously having no experience with the system, avoid mentioning Ubuntu like plague, make attacks on "M$" spelling as if it's some kind of important issue, etc.
Even a troll would get bored by repeating the same crap all over again, however for astroturfing purposes this works perfectly -- it creates an impression that those people's supposed opinions are popular.
They buy USB hard drives (at least six times the amount of data they have, split among at least three drives), rent a safety deposit box in a bank, and install rdiff-backup. Then they rotate the drives weekly -- at any point one drive is backing up their systems daily, two are stored at the bank. Complete incremental backup solution with offsite storage.
You do realize that they can build their own network infrastructure only because existing network's owner is not actively sabotaging them, right? Look at US and its telecom infrastructure development -- once a monopolist is allowed out of its cage, it buys or bans on his network everything that has a wire sticking out of it, then charges consumers exorbitant prices for access to whatever remains.
Seriously, you are 39, and an engineer to boot, and you still claimed that poor people in malaria-affected countries wouldn't so poor if Windows had come into existence?
Of course. Regardless of the other circumstances, overall progress in technology always had greater impact on the world population's living conditions than anything else. Messing with development of technology and culture as a whole is the easiest way to keep people poor. What do you think, keeps people poor, insufficient amount of green paper?
But, based on experience and observation, I will counterclaim that 1) the deterioration is, in greater part, to the inordinate focus on Java and C# in education to the detriment of C/C++, Assembly and Pascal-like languages
If Java didn't have to work under Windows, it would be able to expose Unix-like file descriptors to all its interfaces. Since Windows is the only OS that refuses to support them, Java had to develop layers upon layers of interfaces that work in an equally retarded manner with Windows and everything else.
C# is mostly an attempt to conceal Win32 under a less stupid-looking interface, combined with yet another attempt to produce a usable descendant of OLE/DDE (after COM, DCOM, etc.).
Both violate the very basic principle -- you can't improve a poorly designed system by adding stuff to it. The fact that those languages tend to place the programmer into a whole isolated environment, based almost entirely on language designers' idiosyncrasies, is a problem, too, however they would never be developed into this direction if not desperate need to use them as a new layer over the rotten foundation of Windows.
and 2) this is minimal considering that the overwhelming amount of development is first and foremost in embedded environments and that most of the target platforms are Unix-like, not windows.
What? Over the whole 90's the mantra was "Abandon Unix at any cost!". People were taught that they should never touch anything Unix-like, that it's a weak, doomed system that will be soon destroyed by mighty Microsoft. While this trend was reversed recently, the damage that was done is immense. Only few percents of the programmers I have encountered, seem to have any idea what interfaces and what functionality is provided by the OS (as opposed to other applications, specific libraries and languages' runtime). Even fewer can describe or recognize any of the most fundamental principles and definitions used in Unix-like systems, despite the fact that usually this very functionality is directly applicable to the development they are working on. And those people are software developers. None of the hardware engineers I have seen, has a development system that is not Windows-based -- even if they develop hardware that never touches Windows, and all functionality they use is available on Linux with much more straightforward and transparent interface.
Their minds, their methods, their whole approach to engineering and software development is shaped by Windows, it's all magic smoke, impenetrable black boxes at every corner, poorly learned formulas and vast amounts of endlessly cut-and-pasted code. Exceptions are few and far between.
Stop weaseling your way out via red herrings and answer the question.
I have already answered it -- if not Windows, progress in technology would inevitably pull developing countries out of poverty.
Well, in my country with a fixed line state owned (until recently majority owned) company and private cellular companies, I would prefer private companies. The fixed line operator has 3 million people with phones.
Then what was the problem? That "fixed line" company actually operates infrastructure that those cellular companies (and Internet service providers, and emergency services, and a whole bunch of other things) use for interconnectivity, and being government-operated it wasn't inclined to sabotage them or buy them all out like a privatized phone network would. You got benefits from its government-operated position even if you never paid a single cent to it directly. Government may be full of idiots and assholes, however as long as they can't put profit into their own pocket, they are not interested in destroying everyone who has a misfortune of being their competitor while depending on their services.
Actually I am 39, and I have spent most of my life doing engineering and software development. Engineers underwent a massive shift in the very basic approach to the thinking process after Windows became a "you have to develop for this system!" environment.
All problems now should be approached as tinkering with a broken system that can not be possibly repaired or understood. Underlying infrastructure must be treated as a collection of specific pieces, each performing the complete piece of functionality without any chance of generalization. Ideas, creativity, search for better solutions are replaced with endless perma-debugging cycle. People no longer study to develop a consistent system of knowledge -- they search for tiny morsels of informations that supposedly can be glanced from supposedly incomprehensible books. Humans are afraid of using their brains and analyzing each other's work in fear that they will encounter yet another wasp nest of inconsistencies that will push them too far toward insanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why centrally planned economies deserve nothing but contempt. Compare how humanity was treated in East Germany 1945-1985 to how humanity fared in West Germany during the same period.
And this is exactly a type of "one-way hash" argument that the article described.
First and foremost, in its core it's "status quo is best" argument that decries alternatives to the only thing target audience had experienced.
It points to one of the "best" implementation of Capitalism with "worst" implementation of socialism that happened to be geographically close. Those implementations also happen to be most praised/vilified by 50 years of propaganda, both blown out of proportions.
It implies that readiness of many Eastern Germany inhabitants to "escape" to the West was based on informed choice and not massive amounts of such propaganda.
It ignores the fact that after re-unification of Germany, conditions in its Eastern part of it ended up getting worse than they were under Communists.
And, of course, it ignores the fact that USSR, another Socialist country, contrary to Americans' beliefs supported higher average standard of living than their own country for most of its the post-WWII history. This is even more ironic considering that its superior public education system allowed population to realize that not all problems can be solved by voting of laymen or competitive marketing, or at least did so until it was overwhelmed by propaganda between late 80's and 90's -- something that proud Americans now (correctly) describe as "they hate our freedom".
However arguing against that would not only require debunking 50 years of myth-building but a discussion of things, most of American population is unable to process.
Now, before you respond with the usual American ideological crap, please don't forget that you will be talking to a person who actually lived in both USSR and US, and therefore has first-hand experience of everything you think, you know about your supposed enemies.
The trivial solution would be a cavity filled with water same shape and size as the submarine, at the same position as the submarine.
Unless the RIAA subtly change the music to fingerprint every CD uniquely, and then track from the point of sale with your information and watch for that fingerprint on the internet. (Dang, haven't quite got the conspiracy theory thing down quite yet!)
That would cost them more than all losses from piracy over the whole history of mankind (that is, including the kind that involves ships).
Right. And the source is so fictional that the KGB tortured people to get their hands on it.
Libel can get you pretty heavy penalties anywhere in the world.
And that's also why it's corroborated by Soviet records...
What? It never was.
"One of the noteworthy elements of Solzhenitsyn's analysis are the seemingly outlandish claims of Soviet brutality, which subsequently turned out to be true - or which in some cases turned out to be more outrageous than Solzhenitsyn had originally stated. For instance, Solzhenitsyn claimed that the Gulag system was so voracious that between 1930 and 1939, a quarter of the population of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was shipped to the Gulag. Post-Soviet scholarship has confirmed that the figure was even higher.[5] This one, seemingly unbelievable event, was reported by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, to skepticism in the West."
GULAG was a prison system, it was not made specifically for politically-related crimes, or had some outrageous mortality rate. It was harsh because it involved hard labor, however that was the extent of it for most of the prisoners (including Solzhenitsyn himself).
It seems to me the only reason you may hate Stalin is the negative publicity he gave the Soviet system.
I's not the only reason, however that's pretty much the only thing Americans know that is true about him.
You mean, they sent people who hated them them to promote Communist ideas abroad?
Or are you just googling for anything that is supposed to make Communists look bad, and pretending that it's a relevant argument?
No, seriously. I have no words.
And yet the intentions of RIAA and other copyright abusers, and intention behind copyright law itself somehow do not matter -- just make sure that publishers can milk everyone else because they can use copyright law in a way that contradicts its original purpose.
Right?
Welcome, Stalin Apologist...
Actually I hate Stalin and Stalinists -- at the extent that it's possible to hate dead people. However history is about studying facts of the past, not producing creative writing about it. Ex: 300 movie is not history.
Let me guess, you think the Gulag Archipelago was American propaganda, too?
No, it's a vaguely autobiographic work of fiction that only American propaganda worker would use as a source for anything but literary criticism.
Our institutions of learning and higher learning *were* purposefully infiltrated by the Soviets in order to take us out from within. It's the same modus operandi that the Scientology folk have used on a larger scale, and like Scientology they also targeted Hollywood. Unfortunately for us, they were more successful.
Or maybe Communist ideas were popular among intellectuals to begin with, yet your politicians preferred to blame everything on "foreign spies". That is, before starting to promote blatant anti-intellectualism.
This is an evidence that Microsoft lacks the most basic understanding what secure programming practices are.
If you don't know why, please avoid touching a compiler for the rest of your life.
int len = N; ...
void *ptr = malloc( len );
len *= 2;
ptr = realloc (ptr, len);
..and then at some point you exceed the amount of available memory, ptr is assigned NULL, and position of your actual allocated buffer is lost forever. And it takes up at least half of memory you have available for emergency cleanup, so all you can do is to call exit() or abort() right now.
I hope, you will be never allowed to write software that other people rely on.
Until 30,000 people will get sick? That would be what, few hours? I can live with that.
I also really hate that people generalize ax murderers and baby rapists because of a few bad apples.
NONE of those calls are legitimate. Credit card companies simply block the card and wait until the customer notices and calls them.
This contradicts everything else that is known about KGB, however it is consistent with American propaganda that pretty much projected their own image on propaganda efforts of others -- real or imaginary.
So, 2 decades of non-windows usage would have had reversed centuries-old poverty?
Of course. In the rest of the world it already happened at various points in history, so there is no reason to expect that it wouldn't be the same in Africa. We see it as "centuries-old poverty" only in comparison with our own societies' conditions, however not long ago our societies were at the same level, just without a point of comparison to make them look this bad.
Explain me the economics of it, IN DETAIL, not with slogans passed as hypothetical.
The whole study of economy is basically a set of slogans, so I would rather omit it altogether and focus on things that are comparable and measurable. Each and every country that is now seen as "developed", at some point went through the same process, however as I mentioned before, most did it early enough to have no reference point to emphasize the poor living conditions before this change. Europe and US did it at the time of Industrial Revolution, however the same process continued later, and its speed corresponded with development of technology. Technology development in 80's-90's was mostly concentrated around entertainment and comfort, so it was of little use for such a process. I see Microsoft as one of the primary reasons why development of technology was shifted toward tinkering and mental masturbation.
Pro-Microsoft messages are pretty consistent here -- mentioned the same "problems" that are now long gone or never existed in the first place, pretend to be Linux users while obviously having no experience with the system, avoid mentioning Ubuntu like plague, make attacks on "M$" spelling as if it's some kind of important issue, etc.
Even a troll would get bored by repeating the same crap all over again, however for astroturfing purposes this works perfectly -- it creates an impression that those people's supposed opinions are popular.
Oh, Phoenix...
(rolls eyes)
(rolls eyes continuously for a minute)
(rolls eyes at 7200rpm)
(attaches a generator to the still-rolling eyes and powers his computers with it)
They buy USB hard drives (at least six times the amount of data they have, split among at least three drives), rent a safety deposit box in a bank, and install rdiff-backup. Then they rotate the drives weekly -- at any point one drive is backing up their systems daily, two are stored at the bank. Complete incremental backup solution with offsite storage.
That phrase would work better if there was any reason to suspect that you can back up your assertions.
Now go, prove it.
Don't fine them for abusing their dominant position--take away the dominant position.
That's crazy talk -- the primary purpose of people's lives is to support and defend deserved privileges of their lords and masters!!!
Seriously, what kind of idiot would care about being nice to people who make their life goal to take from society more than they give back?
You do realize that they can build their own network infrastructure only because existing network's owner is not actively sabotaging them, right? Look at US and its telecom infrastructure development -- once a monopolist is allowed out of its cage, it buys or bans on his network everything that has a wire sticking out of it, then charges consumers exorbitant prices for access to whatever remains.
Seriously, you are 39, and an engineer to boot, and you still claimed that poor people in malaria-affected countries wouldn't so poor if Windows had come into existence?
Of course. Regardless of the other circumstances, overall progress in technology always had greater impact on the world population's living conditions than anything else. Messing with development of technology and culture as a whole is the easiest way to keep people poor. What do you think, keeps people poor, insufficient amount of green paper?
But, based on experience and observation, I will counterclaim that 1) the deterioration is, in greater part, to the inordinate focus on Java and C# in education to the detriment of C/C++, Assembly and Pascal-like languages
If Java didn't have to work under Windows, it would be able to expose Unix-like file descriptors to all its interfaces. Since Windows is the only OS that refuses to support them, Java had to develop layers upon layers of interfaces that work in an equally retarded manner with Windows and everything else.
C# is mostly an attempt to conceal Win32 under a less stupid-looking interface, combined with yet another attempt to produce a usable descendant of OLE/DDE (after COM, DCOM, etc.).
Both violate the very basic principle -- you can't improve a poorly designed system by adding stuff to it. The fact that those languages tend to place the programmer into a whole isolated environment, based almost entirely on language designers' idiosyncrasies, is a problem, too, however they would never be developed into this direction if not desperate need to use them as a new layer over the rotten foundation of Windows.
and 2) this is minimal considering that the overwhelming amount of development is first and foremost in embedded environments and that most of the target platforms are Unix-like, not windows.
What? Over the whole 90's the mantra was "Abandon Unix at any cost!". People were taught that they should never touch anything Unix-like, that it's a weak, doomed system that will be soon destroyed by mighty Microsoft. While this trend was reversed recently, the damage that was done is immense. Only few percents of the programmers I have encountered, seem to have any idea what interfaces and what functionality is provided by the OS (as opposed to other applications, specific libraries and languages' runtime). Even fewer can describe or recognize any of the most fundamental principles and definitions used in Unix-like systems, despite the fact that usually this very functionality is directly applicable to the development they are working on. And those people are software developers. None of the hardware engineers I have seen, has a development system that is not Windows-based -- even if they develop hardware that never touches Windows, and all functionality they use is available on Linux with much more straightforward and transparent interface.
Their minds, their methods, their whole approach to engineering and software development is shaped by Windows, it's all magic smoke, impenetrable black boxes at every corner, poorly learned formulas and vast amounts of endlessly cut-and-pasted code. Exceptions are few and far between.
Stop weaseling your way out via red herrings and answer the question.
I have already answered it -- if not Windows, progress in technology would inevitably pull developing countries out of poverty.
Well, in my country with a fixed line state owned (until recently majority owned) company and private cellular companies, I would prefer private companies. The fixed line operator has 3 million people with phones.
Then what was the problem? That "fixed line" company actually operates infrastructure that those cellular companies (and Internet service providers, and emergency services, and a whole bunch of other things) use for interconnectivity, and being government-operated it wasn't inclined to sabotage them or buy them all out like a privatized phone network would. You got benefits from its government-operated position even if you never paid a single cent to it directly. Government may be full of idiots and assholes, however as long as they can't put profit into their own pocket, they are not interested in destroying everyone who has a misfortune of being their competitor while depending on their services.
Actually I am 39, and I have spent most of my life doing engineering and software development. Engineers underwent a massive shift in the very basic approach to the thinking process after Windows became a "you have to develop for this system!" environment.
All problems now should be approached as tinkering with a broken system that can not be possibly repaired or understood. Underlying infrastructure must be treated as a collection of specific pieces, each performing the complete piece of functionality without any chance of generalization. Ideas, creativity, search for better solutions are replaced with endless perma-debugging cycle. People no longer study to develop a consistent system of knowledge -- they search for tiny morsels of informations that supposedly can be glanced from supposedly incomprehensible books. Humans are afraid of using their brains and analyzing each other's work in fear that they will encounter yet another wasp nest of inconsistencies that will push them too far toward insanity.