Quoth Cringely: "Certainly, he never said WHICH Intel chip they'd be using, just mentioning an unnamed 3.6-Ghz development system -- a system which apparently doesn't benchmark very well, either (it's in the links)."
Those stupid benchmarks are comparing a G5 running native PPC code to the 3.6 Ghz Pentium running PPC code under emulation. Follow Cringely's link to an article that in turn links to ThinkSecret which then explains that the benchmarks are for Rosetta.
And I seen no reason to go 100% intel. They can still make PowerPC machines as long as there is a demand for them. The universal (fat) binaries are really cool.
Apple's technical documents on universal Binaries say that if you've been using Apple's accelerate framework it will be vectorized using VMX, SMD, etc on intel.
If IBM can miraculously come through with the 970's -- Apple can still use them. They'll be set up to use two different chips. Pentium-M chips in low end systems and laptops and PowerPC chips in XServes and PowerMacs.
Since they'll have the capability of running with two different chips, it would be silly to switch completely and give up that.
What's sad is that NASA is pulling the plug on Voyager, even though it only just now entered interstellar space and we know nothing about this region. For once slashdot humor is close to the reality...
I meant Tarski, not Tvarski, and he was one of the major logicians of the 20th century, not a liberal arts geek. He was trying to formalize a system of logical truth that would resist the Cretan paradox. And what I said about methodological behaviorism is infomed by my background in cognitive science, not "liberal arts." The words that I've thrown around are basic ones: methodological behaviorism is the "black box" approach to analysis, which is, essentially, what the use of formal models in economics is.
I still don't understand what you're trying to say here. I'm not an economist or a scientist... I just use a lot of math in my job. And I know that math can describe economic behavior well enough to be used as a tool to weigh policy decisions.
Using differential equations you can model any economic system... although you may not know all of the variables in the equations... however you can estimate the unknown parameters and eventually get a fit that is reasonably accurate in the domain of the problem that you are studying.
You avoid questions of human difference, of actual thoughts and beliefs, and hope that you can either treat people as rational agents, or at least model their "irrationality" (that is, their tendency to be motivated by things other than sheer efficiency in production) without doing any real study of what those motivations might be.
if this is the current state of the art in economics, then the learned minds doing this ought to go back and learn some more math. You can model individual decisions as a probability distribution and then combine the distributions to get a probability distribution for a collection of individuals. And although you may not know how an individual will decide, you can still say things about the probable behavior of large groups.
If these people are spending their careers doing economics, they can spend a couple years learning enough math to do their job correctly.
Characterizing this as "a big wad of liberal arts" isn't only incorrect, it's pretty much just ad hominem.
sure, but this is slashdot:)
But it's not exactly ad hominem, I meant that you are using jargon without defining it... and also that your argument is bordering on sophistry.
I think you are misstaken. Mathematical logic cannot be used to deduce the truth of it's own logic.
Mathematics can be proven or disproven to be internally consistent or not. That's all it needs to be useful.
This was investigated by Goeddel and led to the conclusion that every system that relies on axioms is by nature flawed, however these flaws cannot be corrected without accepting new axioms. As for economics. I don't know if a science that has "ceteribus paribus" as a guiding principle deserves to be taken seriously.
how about you say what you mean instead of just trying to get into some sort of intellectual pissing contest.
It may be a mathematical description of human behavior for people whose most important value is greed, at the expense of all other social and environmental concerns.
Being a science, it should solely seek to be descriptive and predictive. It shouldn't bias itself for or against greed.
While that may describe life in Western society, it's a long way from reality. Economics is actually an umbrella covering a range of differing socio-economic theories (including that "inefficient" Communism), none of which can claim to be "reality".
Seeking to describe reality does not make a theory the same as reality. Communism is an ideology not a science. It tries to use economics to justify its policies, but the policies themselves are not open to the rigor of scientific testing. Same thing for Capitalism.
You mean, economics, as you see it, and use the term here, isn't a philosophy at all. It's descriptive, not normative.
The wikipedia says economics is a social science. Being a science would make it a subset of philosophy, but would also make it not normative (it is testable).
This is statement makes no sense without context; the ways to define "efficient" are way too many, and most of them to wage, for anyone to understand what you want to say.
sorry.. efficiency is to maximize wealth. for a company profit, for a society GDP. I hypothosize that greater equitiy in access to the means of production leads to the gratest wealth for a society as a whole... (i.e. to maximize wealth you want the greatest probability that someone very talented will have access to the resources needed to succeed). I also posit that a system that would maximize wealth also maximizes social justice along the lines of a meritocracy.
And, if you look at the numbers, from the standpoint of a corporation, it usually makes the most sense to exploit the weak, and externalise all costs to (often poor) governments and other corporations. Problem arises when the people that make money from corporations (from stocks, or as sallaries) make the political decisions.
only if you think short term... in the long term such policy in untenable just like all other forms of looting.
Their perspective skews what "efficient" is, and when you have the wrong paramaters, you get the wrong answer, even if the equations are right (which we don't even know for certain that they are).
if the 'equations are right' they should tell you relationships between cause and effect that are correct even if you have the parameters wrong. They should also help you test the parameters that you have to see if they're right.
I generally find that what modern economists find "inefficent" translates to long-term, sustainable global development.
If you can't buy decent beer in your town, it doesn't mean all beer is bad. There is merit in the basic idea of beer, even if the execution is often flawed.
Yes, unfortunately it will most likely take an armed uprising to pry wealth and power from the miniscule elite, not just beautiful words. It's sad, but true.
such violence leads to long term instability, and makes it very likely that one elite will simply be replaced by a new elite (think of the French revolution). Sustainable change happens slowly.
And I hope you're not so deluded as to think that most political and economical decisions in goverments and corporations today defines their goal as "the highest possible standard of living for the most people". That would contradict the charter of both goverments and CEOs.
the best decision a company can make is one that is most likely to make a company prosper... this makes it most likely that a company will endure.
the best decission a government can make is one that makes a country prosper and thrive... i.e. to maximize the standard of living for its people... this makes it most likely that the government will endure.
Don't bother looking this up in your economics textbook, they don't bother making mathematical abstractions for this one.
I'm no expert in game theory... but this seems like a problem for game theory. I think you can prove that Mr. Dictator is not acting in his long term best interest. In all likelyhood he's going to end up dead acting this way because someone else is going to coup d'etat his ass. There's some math somewhere that can study this problem. If it can be imagined, math can handle it.
Of course economics always makes the most efficient decision, but who gets to decide what is efficient?
Economics doesn't make any decisions... it's a tool to help you decide. You decide what you think is best for you... companies decide what's best for them... governments, religions, etc. all have their own individual priorities which govern their decision making process.. and economics helps with that process.
This doesn't seem wise to me since good coders are very likely to know each other (from school / conferences / slashdot) and talk on the grapevine will make it very hard for such a company (e.g. Boeing in aerospace) to recruit good people in the future.
Without going into the digression (i.e., Ptolemy was, of course, Greek: but the epicycles were pushed during the medieval epoch) here's a great example of the problem:
huh? epicycles orginated with Ptolemy, not during medieval time... it's even a greek word.
You know, I don't want to be employed to the maximum of my ability. I kind of want to actually enjoy this life-time. I think you do too.
Someday you will die. Don't you want to live your finite life to its fullest and do the most good you can with your time here? Live each day like it's your last, etc, etc.
As far as the "tweaking models" goes, it constantly runs afoul of the fact that the models are themselves inputs into the behaviour they are trying to model!
no problem with that. this happens all of the time in many mathematical systems (e.g. missile guidance). math can cope with this.
Tvarski noted that a formal system cannot refer to itself, and economics breaks this rule by its nature.
whoever Tvarski was, he sounds like a twit. So economics isn't Tvarski's notion of a formal system... whatever that means. So what. Math can still handle it. Math can handle anything... it's cool like that.
Also, the application of models to a human science on the level of granularity which economics limits itself to runs into the same problem that methodological behaviorism did when trying to analyse human cognitive function.
This is a big wad of liberal arts b.s. like you see in term papers from students who never read the book. Basically you're drawing some sort of conclusion based on a definition of economics that you chose in such a way as to lead to the conclusion that you wanted. The big words are just terminology thrown in to try and cover your tracks...not to imply that this b.s. is intentional, but it's still b.s.
besides -- no matter how much you try and take down economic methods... unless you propose some better system, it's still better than ideology in that it gives an objective method by which to evaluate policy. So if you don't like economics you need to come up with some alternative that has better predictive power if you'd rather economics not be used.
In the absence of something better, It is the moral thing to use econimc models... in that such policy decisions effect people's lives in very real ways and should be decided on an objective basis.
Children are starving because many locales thought it would be more efficient to convert the national economy to goods and crops for export.
This doesn't make sense. If it is more efficient to make goods for export, then you will make enough money to buy more food than you can grow yourself.... otherwise you would grow food instead of making goods for export. That's what being more efficient means.
And, if you conglomerate the income of the wealthy, and the wealth taken by the kleptocratic governments in those countries together, you'd be numerically right. It would be "more".
Such things are precisely what I mean by inefficiency. Inefficient distribution of the means of production to a wealthy elite that lets good land lie fallow... corruption that takes away any incentive for people to work hard. This is the sort of inefficiency that starves people.
Perfect economic efficiency would lead to everyone being employed to the maximum of their ability. This is a goal to shoot for that benefits everyone except looters who make more stealing from others than they could ever get working on their own ability.
But economics regulary chooses abstractions as its objects of analysis, knowing that they're wrong (and tweaking the models numerically,
Models are predicitve tools. The tweaking improves them and makes them better at prediciting the outcome of a certain policy. It's better to use a less than perfect model to evaluate a policy than some ideologically based gut feeling.
Airplanes are designed with imperfect models, rather than aesthetic notions... and this is the responsible thing to do since lives depend on the design of airplanes. People's lives also depend on economic policy and it should be held to the same standard of rigor.
like medieval astronomers adding more and more little concentric circles to explain the movement of the planets) but doing it anyway.
Ptolemy was in ancient, not medieval times... and his epicycle system is mathematically equivalent to Fourrier series approximation... and it is actually much closer than Copernicus to the modern system of using Chebychev polynomials to predict planetary motion.
The prescriptive one is the one that treats people as both completely rational and completely instrumental: as both agents and resources, and advocates for political choices based on the optimization of certain statistics.
That's just simple-mided economics. People clearly make irrational choices all of the time. How else would some car salesmen and mortgage broakers stay in business? You can do analysis with better statistics where you assign a probablity to a rational verses an irrational decision. Similarly you don't have to be completely instrumental... you can use Kalmen filters and the like to estimate quanities that you cannot directly measure. (math is cool).
There's nothing wrong with efficiency, but turning efficiency into an end rather than a means is part of the pathology of the modern.
What's wrong with efficiency as an end? We are only going to live a finite life, why not seek the maximum efficiency in doing good with the time we have here? Why shouldn't socieities set policy on maximizing economic efficiency? That would keep the most people fed verses any other policy.
Children are starving right now all over the world because of economic inefficiency. Good, hard working people in 3rd world countries can't find a job because of economic inefficiency. Economic inefficiency is one of the greatest sources for suffering and dispair in the world.
f every corporation was required to be non-profit, you'd be amazed at what would happen to our economy. Microsoft's hundreds of millions of dollars in cash reserves on hand? It'd be spent, generating more technology, more business, more jobs
yeah, it'd be spent and at the first hiccup that interrupts Micosoft's revenue stream the whole company would collapse and a ton of people at microsoft and other companies that depend on microsoft would be out of work. So many people would be out of work, so suddenly that the economy of Washington state and maybe even the whole US would also collapse.
Microsoft keeps its cash reserves so that it can weather economic downturns. And since a big employer like Microsoft is more resiliant to such downturns, it benefits us all by making a large scale economic collapse less likely.
I thik this suggests a kind of fascination with authority and power that has distorted any sense of fairness, or any idea that economics should serve people, not vice-versa.
That's like saying gravity should serve people and not vice versa!
Economics isn't just a philosophy... it's a mathematical description of reality. If economics tells you you are inefficient, then you should listen or risk going out of business... or worse yet in managed economies like North Korea and the old Soviet Union risk people starving.
If you want to have the highest possible standard of living for the most people, then you should develop a plan with economic rigor... don't just rely on wishful thinking.
There is definitely a pervasive looter mentality in corporate boardrooms in setting these outrageous salaries... these salaries are for the most part too high. However, barring the current abuses, good leaders should make a lot more than most other employees. There is a severe shortage of them, and they can increase profits by way more than they're paid.
Just look at Apple pre Steve Jobs vs. post Jobs. How much was his leadership worth? Apple's massively turned things around... not only protecting the jobs it had, but adding tons of new ones around the world.
Of course, since they're on such a hiring binge now they surely are not always hiring the best people... and they will probably lay off a lot of people as soon as their growth slows enough to let them do so. If such layoffs are unethical, they should not be hiring people that they don't plan on keeping around... but that sort of wrong-headed ethic would be bad for Apple and bad for the people who are going to get laid off (they wouldn't have a job right now).
when you are making $9 billion in profit a year it is bloody unethical to lay off the people who help make that profit
It isn't unethical if those people are just free riders. What if that $9 billion in profit was mostly because of the work of the people who didn't get laid off?? Is it ethical to to keep on extra people who aren't really contributing to that profit at the expense of those who are doing the hard work??
If those people who are laid off were contributing to that profit, I'd expect to see IBM's profits to go down in the long term. If they weren't I'd expect the profits to go up. We can wait and see what happens and find out if IBM is making a mistake... but either way they aren't being unethical.
I know what it's like to work with dead wood. And I think it's perfectly fine to get rid of the dead wood. Now, some of those laid off are probably not dead wood, but they can get another job (maybe even with IBM). Skilled, hard working people are always very hard to find.
What is unethical is how so many people think a job is an entitlement and drive whole companies under with their selfishness. When whole divisions fail, it's because of a pervasive culture of this selfishness. It's because of free rider leeches who do nothing but enrich themselves at the expense of the common good.
(bracing for negative mods... but please look up what troll and flamebait really mean before hammering away at my rant)
Ouch... but my keyboard isn't (sorry for the aborted post, here's what I meant to write:)
Get a real Mac.
I have a real Mac (dual 2 Ghz G5 with 2 GB RAM), and Spotlight still is slow!
I used to use the old search in finder and it was much faster (after you indexed your directories).
I'll type in what I'm looking for and it will beach-ball in the middle of my typing and not let me type the whole thing in. And I always get tons of false positives for stuff that should be unique (e.g. man_cims).
Spotlight is really starting to get on my nerves...
Slashdot Mirror
Every nipple I've ever met had a friendly interface. The real problem is access permissions.
hence the DRM
Quoth Cringely: "Certainly, he never said WHICH Intel chip they'd be using, just mentioning an unnamed 3.6-Ghz development system -- a system which apparently doesn't benchmark very well, either (it's in the links)."
Those stupid benchmarks are comparing a G5 running native PPC code to the 3.6 Ghz Pentium running PPC code under emulation. Follow Cringely's link to an article that in turn links to ThinkSecret which then explains that the benchmarks are for Rosetta.
And I seen no reason to go 100% intel. They can still make PowerPC machines as long as there is a demand for them. The universal (fat) binaries are really cool.
I think the more likely scenario is a version of Virtual PC that doesn't suck. Runs the windows code semi-natively...
sounds like this could be WINE if Apple were to invest resources
What about all your Altavec code?
Apple's technical documents on universal Binaries say that if you've been using Apple's accelerate framework it will be vectorized using VMX, SMD, etc on intel.
If IBM can miraculously come through with the 970's -- Apple can still use them. They'll be set up to use two different chips. Pentium-M chips in low end systems and laptops and PowerPC chips in XServes and PowerMacs.
Since they'll have the capability of running with two different chips, it would be silly to switch completely and give up that.
Now there is no possibility of a multi-boot machine. Good or bad? I don't know.
:)
Now suddenly WINE for OS X becomes much more interesting... and Apple has an incentive to to maybe have a few engineers help out
What's sad is that NASA is pulling the plug on Voyager, even though it only just now entered interstellar space and we know nothing about this region. For once slashdot humor is close to the reality...
I meant Tarski, not Tvarski, and he was one of the major logicians of the 20th century, not a liberal arts geek. He was trying to formalize a system of logical truth that would resist the Cretan paradox. And what I said about methodological behaviorism is infomed by my background in cognitive science, not "liberal arts." The words that I've thrown around are basic ones: methodological behaviorism is the "black box" approach to analysis, which is, essentially, what the use of formal models in economics is.
:)
I still don't understand what you're trying to say here. I'm not an economist or a scientist... I just use a lot of math in my job. And I know that math can describe economic behavior well enough to be used as a tool to weigh policy decisions.
Using differential equations you can model any economic system... although you may not know all of the variables in the equations... however you can estimate the unknown parameters and eventually get a fit that is reasonably accurate in the domain of the problem that you are studying.
You avoid questions of human difference, of actual thoughts and beliefs, and hope that you can either treat people as rational agents, or at least model their "irrationality" (that is, their tendency to be motivated by things other than sheer efficiency in production) without doing any real study of what those motivations might be.
if this is the current state of the art in economics, then the learned minds doing this ought to go back and learn some more math. You can model individual decisions as a probability distribution and then combine the distributions to get a probability distribution for a collection of individuals. And although you may not know how an individual will decide, you can still say things about the probable behavior of large groups.
If these people are spending their careers doing economics, they can spend a couple years learning enough math to do their job correctly.
Characterizing this as "a big wad of liberal arts" isn't only incorrect, it's pretty much just ad hominem.
sure, but this is slashdot
But it's not exactly ad hominem, I meant that you are using jargon without defining it... and also that your argument is bordering on sophistry.
I think you are misstaken. Mathematical logic cannot be used to deduce the truth of it's own logic.
Mathematics can be proven or disproven to be internally consistent or not. That's all it needs to be useful.
This was investigated by Goeddel and led to the conclusion that every system that relies on axioms is by nature flawed, however these flaws cannot be corrected without accepting new axioms. As for economics. I don't know if a science that has "ceteribus paribus" as a guiding principle deserves to be taken seriously.
how about you say what you mean instead of just trying to get into some sort of intellectual pissing contest.
It may be a mathematical description of human behavior for people whose most important value is greed, at the expense of all other social and environmental concerns.
Being a science, it should solely seek to be descriptive and predictive. It shouldn't bias itself for or against greed.
While that may describe life in Western society, it's a long way from reality. Economics is actually an umbrella covering a range of differing socio-economic theories (including that "inefficient" Communism), none of which can claim to be "reality".
Seeking to describe reality does not make a theory the same as reality. Communism is an ideology not a science. It tries to use economics to justify its policies, but the policies themselves are not open to the rigor of scientific testing. Same thing for Capitalism.
You mean, economics, as you see it, and use the term here, isn't a philosophy at all. It's descriptive, not normative.
The wikipedia says economics is a social science. Being a science would make it a subset of philosophy, but would also make it not normative (it is testable).
This is statement makes no sense without context; the ways to define "efficient" are way too many, and most of them to wage, for anyone to understand what you want to say.
sorry.. efficiency is to maximize wealth. for a company profit, for a society GDP. I hypothosize that greater equitiy in access to the means of production leads to the gratest wealth for a society as a whole... (i.e. to maximize wealth you want the greatest probability that someone very talented will have access to the resources needed to succeed). I also posit that a system that would maximize wealth also maximizes social justice along the lines of a meritocracy.
And, if you look at the numbers, from the standpoint of a corporation, it usually makes the most sense to exploit the weak, and externalise all costs to (often poor) governments and other corporations. Problem arises when the people that make money from corporations (from stocks, or as sallaries) make the political decisions.
only if you think short term... in the long term such policy in untenable just like all other forms of looting.
Their perspective skews what "efficient" is, and when you have the wrong paramaters, you get the wrong answer, even if the equations are right (which we don't even know for certain that they are).
if the 'equations are right' they should tell you relationships between cause and effect that are correct even if you have the parameters wrong. They should also help you test the parameters that you have to see if they're right.
I generally find that what modern economists find "inefficent" translates to long-term, sustainable global development.
If you can't buy decent beer in your town, it doesn't mean all beer is bad. There is merit in the basic idea of beer, even if the execution is often flawed.
Yes, unfortunately it will most likely take an armed uprising to pry wealth and power from the miniscule elite, not just beautiful words. It's sad, but true.
such violence leads to long term instability, and makes it very likely that one elite will simply be replaced by a new elite (think of the French revolution). Sustainable change happens slowly.
And I hope you're not so deluded as to think that most political and economical decisions in goverments and corporations today defines their goal as "the highest possible standard of living for the most people". That would contradict the charter of both goverments and CEOs.
the best decision a company can make is one that is most likely to make a company prosper... this makes it most likely that a company will endure.
the best decission a government can make is one that makes a country prosper and thrive... i.e. to maximize the standard of living for its people... this makes it most likely that the government will endure.
Don't bother looking this up in your economics textbook, they don't bother making mathematical abstractions for this one.
I'm no expert in game theory... but this seems like a problem for game theory. I think you can prove that Mr. Dictator is not acting in his long term best interest. In all likelyhood he's going to end up dead acting this way because someone else is going to coup d'etat his ass. There's some math somewhere that can study this problem. If it can be imagined, math can handle it.
Of course economics always makes the most efficient decision, but who gets to decide what is efficient?
Economics doesn't make any decisions... it's a tool to help you decide. You decide what you think is best for you... companies decide what's best for them... governments, religions, etc. all have their own individual priorities which govern their decision making process.. and economics helps with that process.
This doesn't seem wise to me since good coders are very likely to know each other (from school / conferences / slashdot) and talk on the grapevine will make it very hard for such a company (e.g. Boeing in aerospace) to recruit good people in the future.
Without going into the digression (i.e., Ptolemy was, of course, Greek: but the epicycles were pushed during the medieval epoch) here's a great example of the problem:
..not to imply that this b.s. is intentional, but it's still b.s.
huh? epicycles orginated with Ptolemy, not during medieval time... it's even a greek word.
You know, I don't want to be employed to the maximum of my ability. I kind of want to actually enjoy this life-time. I think you do too.
Someday you will die. Don't you want to live your finite life to its fullest and do the most good you can with your time here? Live each day like it's your last, etc, etc.
As far as the "tweaking models" goes, it constantly runs afoul of the fact that the models are themselves inputs into the behaviour they are trying to model!
no problem with that. this happens all of the time in many mathematical systems (e.g. missile guidance). math can cope with this.
Tvarski noted that a formal system cannot refer to itself, and economics breaks this rule by its nature.
whoever Tvarski was, he sounds like a twit. So economics isn't
Tvarski's notion of a formal system... whatever that means. So what. Math can still handle it. Math can handle anything... it's cool like that.
Also, the application of models to a human science on the level of granularity which economics limits itself to runs into the same problem that methodological behaviorism did when trying to analyse human cognitive function.
This is a big wad of liberal arts b.s. like you see in term papers from students who never read the book. Basically you're drawing some sort of conclusion based on a definition of economics that you chose in such a way as to lead to the conclusion that you wanted. The big words are just terminology thrown in to try and cover your tracks.
besides -- no matter how much you try and take down economic methods... unless you propose some better system, it's still better than ideology in that it gives an objective method by which to evaluate policy. So if you don't like economics you need to come up with some alternative that has better predictive power if you'd rather economics not be used.
In the absence of something better, It is the moral thing to use econimc models... in that such policy decisions effect people's lives in very real ways and should be decided on an objective basis.
Children are starving because many locales thought it would be more efficient to convert the national economy to goods and crops for export.
This doesn't make sense. If it is more efficient to make goods for export, then you will make enough money to buy more food than you can grow yourself.... otherwise you would grow food instead of making goods for export. That's what being more efficient means.
And, if you conglomerate the income of the wealthy, and the wealth taken by the kleptocratic governments in those countries together, you'd be numerically right. It would be "more".
Such things are precisely what I mean by inefficiency. Inefficient distribution of the means of production to a wealthy elite that lets good land lie fallow... corruption that takes away any incentive for people to work hard. This is the sort of inefficiency that starves people.
Perfect economic efficiency would lead to everyone being employed to the maximum of their ability. This is a goal to shoot for that benefits everyone except looters who make more stealing from others than they could ever get working on their own ability.
But economics regulary chooses abstractions as its objects of analysis, knowing that they're wrong (and tweaking the models numerically,
Models are predicitve tools. The tweaking improves them and makes them better at prediciting the outcome of a certain policy. It's better to use a less than perfect model to evaluate a policy than some ideologically based gut feeling.
Airplanes are designed with imperfect models, rather than aesthetic notions... and this is the responsible thing to do since lives depend on the design of airplanes. People's lives also depend on economic policy and it should be held to the same standard of rigor.
like medieval astronomers adding more and more little concentric circles to explain the movement of the planets) but doing it anyway.
Ptolemy was in ancient, not medieval times... and his epicycle system is mathematically equivalent to Fourrier series approximation... and it is actually much closer than Copernicus to the modern system of using Chebychev polynomials to predict planetary motion.
it's $70K per year per license... 12 licenses run $840,000 /yr which would pay for a decent size team.
The prescriptive one is the one that treats people as both completely rational and completely instrumental: as both agents and resources, and advocates for political choices based on the optimization of certain statistics.
That's just simple-mided economics. People clearly make irrational choices all of the time. How else would some car salesmen and mortgage broakers stay in business? You can do analysis with better statistics where you assign a probablity to a rational verses an irrational decision. Similarly you don't have to be completely instrumental... you can use Kalmen filters and the like to estimate quanities that you cannot directly measure. (math is cool).
There's nothing wrong with efficiency, but turning efficiency into an end rather than a means is part of the pathology of the modern.
What's wrong with efficiency as an end? We are only going to live a finite life, why not seek the maximum efficiency in doing good with the time we have here? Why shouldn't socieities set policy on maximizing economic efficiency? That would keep the most people fed verses any other policy.
Children are starving right now all over the world because of economic inefficiency. Good, hard working people in 3rd world countries can't find a job because of economic inefficiency. Economic inefficiency is one of the greatest sources for suffering and dispair in the world.
f every corporation was required to be non-profit, you'd be amazed at what would happen to our economy. Microsoft's hundreds of millions of dollars in cash reserves on hand? It'd be spent, generating more technology, more business, more jobs
yeah, it'd be spent and at the first hiccup that interrupts Micosoft's revenue stream the whole company would collapse and a ton of people at microsoft and other companies that depend on microsoft would be out of work. So many people would be out of work, so suddenly that the economy of Washington state and maybe even the whole US would also collapse.
Microsoft keeps its cash reserves so that it can weather economic downturns. And since a big employer like Microsoft is more resiliant to such downturns, it benefits us all by making a large scale economic collapse less likely.
I thik this suggests a kind of fascination with authority and power that has distorted any sense of fairness, or any idea that economics should serve people, not vice-versa.
That's like saying gravity should serve people and not vice versa!
Economics isn't just a philosophy... it's a mathematical description of reality. If economics tells you you are inefficient, then you should listen or risk going out of business... or worse yet in managed economies like North Korea and the old Soviet Union risk people starving.
If you want to have the highest possible standard of living for the most people, then you should develop a plan with economic rigor... don't just rely on wishful thinking.
There is definitely a pervasive looter mentality in corporate boardrooms in setting these outrageous salaries... these salaries are for the most part too high. However, barring the current abuses, good leaders should make a lot more than most other employees. There is a severe shortage of them, and they can increase profits by way more than they're paid.
Just look at Apple pre Steve Jobs vs. post Jobs. How much was his leadership worth? Apple's massively turned things around... not only protecting the jobs it had, but adding tons of new ones around the world.
Of course, since they're on such a hiring binge now they surely are not always hiring the best people... and they will probably lay off a lot of people as soon as their growth slows enough to let them do so. If such layoffs are unethical, they should not be hiring people that they don't plan on keeping around... but that sort of wrong-headed ethic would be bad for Apple and bad for the people who are going to get laid off (they wouldn't have a job right now).
when you are making $9 billion in profit a year it is bloody unethical to lay off the people who help make that profit
It isn't unethical if those people are just free riders. What if that $9 billion in profit was mostly because of the work of the people who didn't get laid off?? Is it ethical to to keep on extra people who aren't really contributing to that profit at the expense of those who are doing the hard work??
If those people who are laid off were contributing to that profit, I'd expect to see IBM's profits to go down in the long term. If they weren't I'd expect the profits to go up. We can wait and see what happens and find out if IBM is making a mistake... but either way they aren't being unethical.
I know what it's like to work with dead wood. And I think it's perfectly fine to get rid of the dead wood. Now, some of those laid off are probably not dead wood, but they can get another job (maybe even with IBM). Skilled, hard working people are always very hard to find.
What is unethical is how so many people think a job is an entitlement and drive whole companies under with their selfishness. When whole divisions fail, it's because of a pervasive culture of this selfishness. It's because of free rider leeches who do nothing but enrich themselves at the expense of the common good.
(bracing for negative mods... but please look up what troll and flamebait really mean before hammering away at my rant)
Ouch... but my keyboard isn't (sorry for the aborted post, here's what I meant to write:)
Get a real Mac.
I have a real Mac (dual 2 Ghz G5 with 2 GB RAM), and Spotlight still is slow!
I used to use the old search in finder and it was much faster (after you indexed your directories).
I'll type in what I'm looking for and it will beach-ball in the middle of my typing and not let me type the whole thing in. And I always get tons of false positives for stuff that should be unique (e.g. man_cims).
Spotlight is really starting to get on my nerves...
Get a real Mac.
$70k/yr X 12 licenses for my project is enought to add the features we need to octave.