Because anything that can exist today must compete against everything else, which has had a couple billion years to evolve. In other words it needs an immune system, a system of acquiring or making food, etc....or it would be gobbled up or starve before you even noticed it was there.
The first form of "life" (i.e., a self replicating chemical) would probably be a million times simpler than anything that could survive today.
You barely mentioned the one thing that people here should be drooling over about the segway: artificial balance. That is an incredible accomplishment. And, being digital technology (mostly just software, with pretty standard hardware running it) it will only get cheaper and cheaper.
Well, perfect competition is ideal in many senses, in that it tends to approach a "reasonable" price for the goods. In a stable, perfect competition situation, you make a decent living at it, but don't get fabulously wealthy. In economic terms, it is ideal in that it is fair and balanced, and sellers are motivated to produce things efficiently and sell them for a fair price.
Still, my point was that the term "anti-competitive" certainly does apply to microsoft, as they are at the opposite extreme of perfect competition. And while perfect competition may not be ideal in everyone's eyes, the oppostite extreme is far, far worse. All the principles that capitalism are based on break down when one player has too much control over the market.
I'm all for people being able to get rich with their contributions. But a situation where they can be a bully is not so good.
Here's a refresher of economics 101: "Perfect competition"....the ideal situation where capitalist economies operate most efficiently...there is really no concept of "winning". You can see perfect competition (or really close to it) in commodity markets such as grains (wheat etc), and stuff like computer memory.....where no one "wins" per se, and there is one and only one price a rational merchant will sell his goods for at any given time (based on supply and demand).
Monopolies.... or situations where one merchant can significantly affect the market....are the exact opposite of perfect competition, hence anti-competitive. Admittedly, perfect competition is a theoretical extreme and cannot happen in all parts of the economy, but understanding the theory behind it is essential to understanding why what microsoft does is so bad.
This is a very good, concise explanation of the concept of competition (and anti-competitive acts):
http://www.consumersinternational.org/campaigns/co mpetition/competition2.html
Well, it's a whole different thing. If you need something specific to one task, and nobody else needs the same thing, well of course. But I am talking about a way to finance the things are currently either open source (linux kernel, sendmail, apache, emacs, etc) or commercial (windows, office, photoshop, autocad, etc), or shareware. Are you suggesting I hire a contractor to make the next generation of photoshop because I'd like to touch up a few photos?
Obviously all those things already exist today, but for their next generation (and for new stuff that hasn't yet been thought of), why not have a system that rewards people for their effort, and keeps it open so anyone may contribute/improve upon it? Best of both worlds. And its only complicated if the voting system is done poorly. (I'm sure many people see slashdot's moderation system as too complicated...but it seems to work)
> Wouldn't you also say it's true anything
> that assumes that people will act on
> self-interest alone is destined to failure?
Not at all. Care to give an example? The whole concept of capitalism is based on the idea that self interest alone will make the system work (Adam Smith's "invisible hand", blah, blah, blah), it it works pretty well. The more people are able to profit from their hard work, the harder they work. This isn't to say that their aren't other motivators, but any time you make assumptions that those other motivators alone will make a large-scale system work, it fails.
And no, I don't think any significant number of real companies (who have to answer to investors or shareholders or anyone for that matter) use the GPL just to "spite microsoft".
I think the general idea is good (find a way to pay people for contributing to open source projects), but the implementation described is not workable. Here's how I think it could work.
You have a general fee that companies and individuals could pay to be on an "all you can eat" subscription plan where they can use any software produced by such a system. Everyone who subscribes can use everything produced by the system.
Each subscriber also gets a fixed amount of "voting rights", so they can reward anyone who has contributed. They can give their vote to whole projects, individual developers, or whatever they like. The votes are weighted, so a licensee can throw all their votes at one thing or divide them up among a bunch of things, that is their choice. There is also a system for proposing and voting for things you'd like to see developed.....this doesn't commit actual money, but lets people know whether their proposed project might go over well. Again the voting would be weighted.
Anyone can go ahead and develop anything they want, in hopes that someone will like it and send a vote their way. Then the subscription fees are divided up based upon how people vote. Some people may not get anything for their efforts, but at least their is the chance of making a lot of money if you do something that really is great.
The key is that 1) voting for project doesn't require you to pay more money, the amount you pay is the same regardless, and 2) the rewards are not given out until the project has delivered.
...but a real challenge to implement well. You need a way of deciding how to reward people based on how good it is, not just based on how good they say it will be. So some sort of general fund, which gets distributed based upon contributors votes seems to make sense. Making it work right and not be too complicated would be tough, but doable I'd think.
If people think XP is worth their money, they will buy it, regardless of the miniscule effect their individual purchase has on microsoft's behaviour. Boycotts assume that people, in mass, will behave in an altruistic "for the good of everyone" way, and that has been demonstrated time and again to not be reality.
I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but the more I think about it the more I wonder why no one has done this: IM systems should standardize on using your email address as your unique identifier. Any system you use simply looks you up by your email address in a "presense server", finds which system you use (AOL, ICQ, MSN or whatever) and connects to you through that transparently. In some cases you may be logged into multiple systems, and it could tell that too and negotiate which one to connect to. The nice thing is your email provider does not have to cooperate (unlike Jabber, which will not let me use an address which is at a domain which does not have a jabber server)
Why not just base it on your email address? I mean, everyone already has a unique identifier which is their email address. You still need some sort of DNS-like system to connect email addresses to clients, but that shouldn't be so hard to pull off.
Jabber seemed to attempt something like this, but it makes the assumption that the domain you have an email address at has a jabber server.
Nobody cares about using aol's bandwidth and hardware. Unless you are communicating with an AOL user, of course. If it worked just like email, i think everyone would be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
With respect to radio waves, calling the far side of the moon the "dark side" is not so inaccurate.
Because anything that can exist today must compete against everything else, which has had a couple billion years to evolve. In other words it needs an immune system, a system of acquiring or making food, etc....or it would be gobbled up or starve before you even noticed it was there.
The first form of "life" (i.e., a self replicating chemical) would probably be a million times simpler than anything that could survive today.
You barely mentioned the one thing that people here should be drooling over about the segway: artificial balance. That is an incredible accomplishment. And, being digital technology (mostly just software, with pretty standard hardware running it) it will only get cheaper and cheaper.
water is the by product of burning hydrogen
From their description, it just sounds like an improvement on C. So you don't need to "rewrite" your C code, just modify and recompile it.
"None" means you don't have a religion or belief system or whatever. Like if you just don't think about it or give a shit.
Atheist means you are convinced there is no god.
(and agnostic means you've thought about, and haven't drawn any conclusions)
Still, my point was that the term "anti-competitive" certainly does apply to microsoft, as they are at the opposite extreme of perfect competition. And while perfect competition may not be ideal in everyone's eyes, the oppostite extreme is far, far worse. All the principles that capitalism are based on break down when one player has too much control over the market.
I'm all for people being able to get rich with their contributions. But a situation where they can be a bully is not so good.
Here's a refresher of economics 101: "Perfect competition"....the ideal situation where capitalist economies operate most efficiently...there is really no concept of "winning". You can see perfect competition (or really close to it) in commodity markets such as grains (wheat etc), and stuff like computer memory.....where no one "wins" per se, and there is one and only one price a rational merchant will sell his goods for at any given time (based on supply and demand). Monopolies .... or situations where one merchant can significantly affect the market....are the exact opposite of perfect competition, hence anti-competitive. Admittedly, perfect competition is a theoretical extreme and cannot happen in all parts of the economy, but understanding the theory behind it is essential to understanding why what microsoft does is so bad.
This is a very good, concise explanation of the concept of competition (and anti-competitive acts):
http://www.consumersinternational.org/campaigns/co mpetition/competition2.html
Well, it's a whole different thing. If you need something specific to one task, and nobody else needs the same thing, well of course. But I am talking about a way to finance the things are currently either open source (linux kernel, sendmail, apache, emacs, etc) or commercial (windows, office, photoshop, autocad, etc), or shareware. Are you suggesting I hire a contractor to make the next generation of photoshop because I'd like to touch up a few photos?
Obviously all those things already exist today, but for their next generation (and for new stuff that hasn't yet been thought of), why not have a system that rewards people for their effort, and keeps it open so anyone may contribute/improve upon it? Best of both worlds. And its only complicated if the voting system is done poorly. (I'm sure many people see slashdot's moderation system as too complicated...but it seems to work)
> Wouldn't you also say it's true anything > that assumes that people will act on > self-interest alone is destined to failure? Not at all. Care to give an example? The whole concept of capitalism is based on the idea that self interest alone will make the system work (Adam Smith's "invisible hand", blah, blah, blah), it it works pretty well. The more people are able to profit from their hard work, the harder they work. This isn't to say that their aren't other motivators, but any time you make assumptions that those other motivators alone will make a large-scale system work, it fails. And no, I don't think any significant number of real companies (who have to answer to investors or shareholders or anyone for that matter) use the GPL just to "spite microsoft".
I think the general idea is good (find a way to pay people for contributing to open source projects), but the implementation described is not workable. Here's how I think it could work.
You have a general fee that companies and individuals could pay to be on an "all you can eat" subscription plan where they can use any software produced by such a system. Everyone who subscribes can use everything produced by the system.
Each subscriber also gets a fixed amount of "voting rights", so they can reward anyone who has contributed. They can give their vote to whole projects, individual developers, or whatever they like. The votes are weighted, so a licensee can throw all their votes at one thing or divide them up among a bunch of things, that is their choice. There is also a system for proposing and voting for things you'd like to see developed.....this doesn't commit actual money, but lets people know whether their proposed project might go over well. Again the voting would be weighted.
Anyone can go ahead and develop anything they want, in hopes that someone will like it and send a vote their way. Then the subscription fees are divided up based upon how people vote. Some people may not get anything for their efforts, but at least their is the chance of making a lot of money if you do something that really is great.
The key is that 1) voting for project doesn't require you to pay more money, the amount you pay is the same regardless, and 2) the rewards are not given out until the project has delivered.
...but a real challenge to implement well. You need a way of deciding how to reward people based on how good it is, not just based on how good they say it will be. So some sort of general fund, which gets distributed based upon contributors votes seems to make sense. Making it work right and not be too complicated would be tough, but doable I'd think.
If people think XP is worth their money, they will buy it, regardless of the miniscule effect their individual purchase has on microsoft's behaviour. Boycotts assume that people, in mass, will behave in an altruistic "for the good of everyone" way, and that has been demonstrated time and again to not be reality.
I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but the more I think about it the more I wonder why no one has done this: IM systems should standardize on using your email address as your unique identifier. Any system you use simply looks you up by your email address in a "presense server", finds which system you use (AOL, ICQ, MSN or whatever) and connects to you through that transparently. In some cases you may be logged into multiple systems, and it could tell that too and negotiate which one to connect to. The nice thing is your email provider does not have to cooperate (unlike Jabber, which will not let me use an address which is at a domain which does not have a jabber server)
Why not just base it on your email address? I mean, everyone already has a unique identifier which is their email address. You still need some sort of DNS-like system to connect email addresses to clients, but that shouldn't be so hard to pull off. Jabber seemed to attempt something like this, but it makes the assumption that the domain you have an email address at has a jabber server.
Nobody cares about using aol's bandwidth and hardware. Unless you are communicating with an AOL user, of course. If it worked just like email, i think everyone would be happy.