And my experience was the opposite. Though I can't really give any details, as I got the job and have now signed an pretty far-reaching NDA, the recruitment process for Google Engineering was extremely rapid despite consisting of over 7 hours of interviews!
The questions were very thorough, really that's the deepest and widest technical interview I've ever done, though I was slightly surprised at the lack of interest in asking traditional personal-type interview questions. Even so I was generally impressed at how slick the thing was. They hire constantly and it shows - the longest I had to wait for feedback before going onto the next stage was about a week. Very far from "collapsing under their own weight".
Maybe their executive/management and technical recruitment are wildly different in terms of quality, it's certainly possible. But anyway, consider your anecdote matched.
I keep seeing people say that, but no matter what I search for, I can't make spam sites appear on the first pages of results.
I just tried again with the following search terms, "tuna", "the community solution", "honda", "viagra" and despite having a fair few spammy or vague keywords there I couldn't see any non relevant results. What are you searching for?
I already make money quite nicely thanks. As Warren Buffet has shown you can simultaneously benefit from the system and still criticise it.
I'm glad you live in America too; the inability to consider anything except extreme right wing economics hurts the American people and its society. Better there than here. The alternatives aren't necessarily an improvement but that doesn't mean we should stop looking.
I hate "the masses are stupid" type arguments. It implies that both the person saying it and the person listening are stupid too. Maybe if lots of people disagree with you, it's your own fault for not properly presenting the arguments or teaching the facts. I think it's also a reflection of the "invididual over the group" mentality pushed by American conservatives, and cynicism with two-party politics, but that isn't really relevant here.
Microsoft != Gates Foundation. Yes, Microsoft has cynically used charitable donations in the past as a kind of tax writeoff, but I'm not aware of the Gates Foundation doing the same thing. Please feel free to prove me wrong.
Gates himself no longer has much incentive to push Microsoft over all else, except emotional concern and pride. He no longer runs it and has been diversifying his investments for some time.
Gates is an ideological person with a set of beliefs, especially around computers and markets. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that biases his donations, even though it isn't really proven. Hence the arguments elsewhere in this thread about accountability of the rich vs The American Dream.
The allegations about vaccines come from one unnamed charity in the source you cite; whilst no charity can ever get it 100% right with giving the Gates Foundation - as pointed out elsewhere - is known for being unusually well managed and achieving a good results:costs ratio. Consider the example of the World Wildlife Fund which hosts glitzy balls for its top members using donations as a counter example.
Incidentally "I'm Don Giovanni" you might want to give the personal attacks a rest in future. I've never looked down on people who accept money for programming - hell I do it and I'm proud to make a living that way - so implying I do or worse that an entire group does is just irrelevant and makes you look like an idiot for bringing it up.
Also it is not the "height of arrogance" to question or discuss the behaviour of others. Ever. That leads to "if you don't support the President you support the terrorists!!" type debate. Over simplified and worthless.
I never said I wanted to dictate where his money went. I said the system which allowed an unelected and unaccountable person to allocate such large quantities of resources was questionable, and that what he was doing with said resources was questionable.
For goodness sake, how can I make that clearer? If you think it's OK for somebody unelected and unaccountable to control things because The People are stupid, go find your nearest dictatorship and live there. After all, if The People are greedy and stupid then things must be much better there right?
Grants are generally structured so that half of the money they make gets reinvested in the grant....
Thanks for explaning that. I was unaware that this is how it worked. Given that the Gates Foundation itself seems to try and grow the fund via investing I had assumed the scholarship grants simply spent the money allocated to it.
BMGF is notable because it has excellent management, and it isnt one of those charities where most of the money disappears, or is spent inefficiently. I hope you can at least respect that.
Oh I do. I'm sure they'll do an excellent job, within the parameters of their priorities.
Hmm in your first sentence you say the masses are stupid and don't know what they want, so they must be ruled by others. Very Greek.
In your second sentence though you agree that perhaps their judgement with respect to race isn't the greatest. So we seem to be stuck - is it really true that money is doomed to be spent unwisely regardless of what happens? I'd hope not!
I guess you didn't bother actually reading my last post. Oh well. It'll still be there if you change your mind and want to read it.
Money is an artificial construct used to allocate resources. It's not a physical "thing" no more than music is a "thing" - money is at heart promise. Or you can see it as information if you like. We treat it like property because that's convenient, even though it's actually not.
Re:Microsoft and/or Windows have hit the wall?
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 1
Of course nobody would buy it if it had "crappy compatibility". It would have to have "very good, almost perfect compatibility". Fortunately for Microsoft, programs like VMWare have shown that this is a solved problem.
Using a VM doesn't give you good compatibility, it gives very poor compatibility. As the example of OSX/Classic showed!
Let's say Microsoft start work on your proposed project. They bundle Virtual PC in with some totally new operating system. Here's how such a project would go (btw I worked in the 'backwards compatibility business' until recently):
They set it up so launching a program from their spiffy new interface launches the VM automatically, boots Windows, and runs the app. Like Classic.
First problem. They just doubled their system requirements, because now everybody who spends all day inside Word and Excel need to have two completely different operating systems loaded at once. You can't square the circle - simplifying, emulating a computer with no performance loss requires you to have a machine twice as powerful. So they cut the number of potential customers by a large percentage.
Second problem. Users hate it. They don't like having their apps appear in a "screen in a box". I know this because it's been tried before. Users hated it when Apple did it, and back when Windows 95 was first being developed Microsoft tried a similar approach. Users hated it then too, so, they went for the API thunk approach which let them exist on the same screen, with the same clipboard, with drag/drop working etc.
Third problem. It doesn't get you anywhere. Let's say you develop an awesome new desktop, maybe it doesn't even have windows or icons, maybe it uses pervasive speech recognition to understand and predict your needs ahead of time or something. Think Star Trek type technology. So it's awesome and ass kicking but, peoples jobs still involve writing Word documents and Excel spreadsheets all day, so they don't get much benefit from using the new system until new apps are developed for it. Where do these apps come from? Rewriting Office? No, that's un-economic. It's been tried before both internally by Microsoft (the Pyramid project) and publically by Netscape (Mozilla). It didn't work out too well. Newly developed? By who? It would take years to be feature and format compatible with regular MS Office.
You might think that I must be wrong because Apple managed it with OS X. Well no not really... Office for the Mac is based on the legacy Carbon APIs, which allowed them to preserve most of the code. OS X is not revolutionary, it's just a prettier form of what came before, so there were no fundamental shifts required. Office for Mac isn't even based on XCode so now they're getting shafted by the switch to Intel. It was really just an UI upgrade, from the programmers perspective (as well as a few things like memory protection that didn't affect it anyway).
Fourth problem. It's too expensive. Apple nearly went bust trying to do this, and only managed it through a once-in-a-lifetime combination of fantastic consumer loyalty, massive code imports from the open source world, the purchase of NeXT, the legacy Classic codebases and pre-existing vendor support from companies like Microsoft, Adobe and MetroWorks. Windows represents billions of dollars of investment by now and tens of thousands of man years of work. You can't start that from scratch and expect to be feature competitive anytime soon.
Throwing away Windows would be like throwing away cars.... possible? Sure. Easy? Hell no. There'd have to be an amazingly good reason to do that and Windows just ain't that bad.
Heh, threads are always chopped up into tiny bits, that's how you can do two things at once with only one processor;)
It may have been that BeOS used much finer grained timeslices than the competition or something, I never knew. Most of my knowledge about it comes from reading interviews with the development team, and a few articles about it.
That's reductio ad absurdum... nobody can consult everybody they got wealth from before allocating it to charitable causes so we rely on other systems. In some places an elected government has a charitable giving program. For instance the UK Foreign Office funds various good causes around the world. In others we rely on the invisible hand in the market of charities to try and fairly allocate charitable giving.
We do this rather than having a randomly selected Charity Chief because, well, it's better.
You are correct that the pie is not only so big. It grows with time as the economy expands, either as people exploit new resources or create new services/products people want. What you miss is that the pie is still finite, and people compete for their share of it.
Money is created (currently) via interest bearing commercial bank loans. Something like 90% of our money is created that way. This is a part of the fractional reserve system.
Those loans represent debt, which accumulates interest... to pay off the interest there are two alternatives:
Expand the economy so the new money "covers" a new part of the system...
Take somebody elses money. Hence, one person must win and another must lose. We compete like this all the time, often without even realising it.
This is why our economic system must constantly expand to be stable.
Note that if the money supply is increased without a corresponding increase in the size of the economy itself, you get inflation. So we try and avoid that.
One way to take somebody elses money is to employ them, such that their work earns you more than what you pay them. This may seem such a fundamental thing that it's impossible to imagine a different model, but they do exist. For instance Kim Stanley Robinson has through his novels effectively proposed a system in which the "workers" (for Microsoft, think the programmers/artists/testers/program managers) rent upper management. Right now we mix together managing things and owning them; so... even though Gates did not make Windows, he managed the company that did, therefore he benefitted the most from it. I'm not saying such a system would be better, I don't know if it would or not. But the way we do things now is not the only way.
Meanwhile, the amount of wealth in the system at any one point is still finite despite the fact that it's also growing. The way wealth tends to flow uphill towards those who are already very rich is well documented.... take the example of currency speculators who many argue perform a task far less useful than their actual reward for it. Effectively a currency speculator can leverage a small amount of wealth into a very large amount by playing the system and extracting wealth out of the target currencies, so harming the people within it. But because there are so many people and that harm is spread out, it's hard to see, so nobody really notices.
Buffet has argued that people who allocate capital tend to benefit far more than is really fair; and as he has spent his life allocating capital more efficienctly when he speaks about it I listen./p?
You don't "trust" the Gates Foundation to spend their money as you would see fit? Well, whoop-dee-doo!
Bzzt, wrong. That's not what I said. Go back and read the post again. I apologise for the half finished sentence in the middle, lousy editing, what can I say.
To recap, I said I don't trust the Foundation to do what the masses would want, ie, if put to a vote what would The People opt to do with such collossal resources? Another poster has made the point that charities "compete" to do good, and that having a single mega-charity is a problem because it'll ultimately reflect the biases and priorities of the owners at the time.
You could argue that it doesn't matter, because it's a free world etc and so it's no business of anybodies what the Gates' choose to do with that money. But you'd be wrong, because that money didn't just magically appear out of nowhere - as Buffet eloquently put it, it came from an advanced industrialised society and that money represents wealth that everybody created together. As it happens, we use inequality to motivate people, but the downside to this inequality is that when the owners of wealth end up deciding to "reallocate" it they have no guidance or requirements to do it in the way the people who originally made the wealth would want. That's why having competition in charities is important and why I find their extremely tight focus on health and US education concerning. What about disaster relief? Oh, right, the Gates' can only do so much at once so tough luck.
To question how others go about their own charitable work? That is the height of arrogance. Look, I know it's very painful for you Gates haters to hear about his charitable work, but grow up.
One of the things I hate most about any Gates Foundation related thread on Slashdot is the ridiculous bias in debate towards the party line - "it's good so shut up".
If you think there's nothing to discuss or question here then I feel sorry for you. The exact flavor of capitalism we use today is not some fundamental unarguable happening, it is one of a spectrum of economic possibilities some of which lead to different outcomes to others.
When I state concern that such an unimaginablely large amount of wealth and power have been placed in the hands of just two people, who are not responsible or accountable to anybody else at all, I'd expect you to take that concern seriously even if you don't agree with it. It's two sides of the same coin - you can simultaneously see the Gates Foundation as wonderful/amazing/awe-inspiring and also evidence of a disgustingly undemocratic and divisive system that see the top 2% of the population control most of the worlds wealth. That's how I see it - as both things at once.
This is the sort of reasoning that Warren Buffet himself has used in the past. See his comments about limiting the number of share trades somebody may make in a lifetime for instance.
If you haven't contributed to the foundation, then it's not your place to "trust" the way it's spent, as it's none of your business. You don't like the causes that Gates contributes to? Then don't contribute to his foundation, simple. Good grief.
I already "donated" several times by buying copies of Windows. As a computer programmer I've usually had no choice about that; kinda hard to ply the trade without ever owning a copy these days. As it happens I also give every month to Concern Worldwide via direct debit and to put it bluntly, I would rather I was able to allocate my wealth to charities of my choosing rather than letting Gates do it for me....
The problem with that argument is that it has no limit - taken to its logical conclusion we shouldn't regulate the market at all because that would allow the rich to get richer, at which point, some of them might decide to give some of it away to.... well basically whoever the hell they want.
I think it's wonderful that Gates and Buffet are giving their wealth away to good causes, but there's the end and then there's the means, and there's no doubt that this is only possible due to a system in which the vast majority are pushed into poverty and a tiny minority accumulate nearly all the wealth. It's hard to argue that's a good thing, at least to the extent we see today. Especially when, in the case of Gates, that wealth was accumulated via illegal behaviour.
Yeah, maybe. I have a lot of respect for Buffet, he always seems to have played it straight (though I am no expert on him). My main concern about giving such a huge proportion to the Gates Foundation is that it seems to have a rather skewed donation bias - it's most famous for global health (awesome) but it also gives massive amounts to very specific areas of Washington and Oregon... a postcode "lottery" hardly seems like a fair use of resources and if a government had that money it'd be lampooned for such a weird selection of good causes.
Gates also has interesting ideas about education. It gives grants to scholars from "low income and minority backgrounds" and he believes high schools are obsolete. He feels that this is because low income/minority people don't get His scholarship fund gives me cause for concern for three reasons:
It only gives grants to Americans. This is despite the fact that Gates and Buffet got their money from all over the world.
The Gates Millennium Scholars (GMS), funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was established in 1999 to provide outstanding African American, American Indian/Alaska Natives, Asian Pacific Islander Americans, and Hispanic American students with an opportunity to complete an undergraduate college education, in all discipline areas and a graduate education for those students pursuing studies in mathematics, science, engineering, education, or library science.
Sorry, but whatever the statistics say, I think anybody should be able to apply regardless of background. It's just pushing some PC agenda otherwise.
Despite having a grant of over a billion dollars it only seems to have about 20 students ?!?
I applaud the work done on polio and global health as that is truly something that benefits all humanity and would be hard to achieve via other means. But while it's easy to be dazzled by the sheer numbers here I'm not at all sure that I trust the B&MG Foundation to spend their money in a way that would be selected by the masses.
I never said it wasn't.... I know what it means outside of Slashdot but as far as I know, "hacker" meant programmer first and digital attacker later.
I personally don't think of myself as a "hacker" and would never actually call myself that for the reason you mentioned, but the posters were mixing the two meanings up (no surprise as they're so close).
In that case you are a hacker in the original sense of the word - a competent professional who Gets Things Done.
The OP was complaining about "hackers" in the ZOMG HOLLYWOOD!! sense of the word, usually people who want the thrill of Beating The Man without actually having to do anything dangerous, like getting off their seats.
You have three days to post "I have been trolled by Bantown" on global notice.
Or what? You'll attack FreeNode further?
Wow. Big deal. A chat service populated by geeks mostly working on open source projects, some of which I bet you use. It ain't big, it ain't clever, and about the most serious effect it'll have will be to annoy some people who will use some other method to communicate for a while. At least until either FreeNode recovers or we all migrate somewhere else.
Seriously. Of all the amazing things you could have done with your tick tick ticking time on this earth you choose to spend it kicking over sandcastles. Big waste. When the rest of us are 80 we'll look back on what we have achieved with life, the things we built, and we'll be proud. When you're 80 you'll look back on your life and think, man, that was so short! Why did I chuck my youth down the drain when I could have been getting shit done?
Well, BeOS made heavy use of multi-threading, which made it feel quite responsive but a nightmare to program for. The Be API was not terribly well designed and was rather riddled with race conditions.... for instance if I recall correctly when starting an app it had to contact the app server within X number of seconds otherwise the system assumed it'd failed/hung and killed it. But what happens if your memory is full and stuff has to be swapped out to a slow disk as the app loads itself up? Right.... the app fails to start the first time for no clear reason, and if you run it again it mysteriously works. Oops.
Re:Microsoft and/or Windows have hit the wall?
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 1
But perhaps Microsoft should be looking at starting over with a fresh new OS design (with backwards compatibility provided via virtual machine emulation only, a la MacOS Classic running in MacOS/X)?
I see this idea so much and it's totally wrong. Let's review some facts:
Mac users hated Classic. Far from being some superior form of clean emulation it was a collosal hack that end users couldn't wait to be rid of.
Mac users were an endangered species. That meant Apple didn't have to be backwards compatible very much in order to sell well, they could just expand their market instead.
MacOS X was not a "clean slate". It's a pile of totally different legacy and competing technologies lumped together under a pretty GUI. UNIX dates from the 70s. The MacOS Classic based Carbon APIs - which many modern apps still use - date from the late 80s, and the NeXT stuff (ObjC etc) dates from the early 90s. They're tied together by a bunch of hacks and wrapper layers.
So why couldn't Microsoft do the same? Well, people use Windows for the apps. There is no market of people who weren't buying Windows before who suddenly would if they started from scratch with crappy compatibility, because statistically everybody already buys Windows. Hence, its biggest competitor is previous versions of itself. Nobody would use this magical new OS for the same reason that statistically so few people use MacOS X - they have businesses, workflows and even game characters all based on Win32 based software.
About the only way they could pull this off is if they were to produce something so revolutionary, so new, so epoch-making that people would be willing to buy both the new system AND the old simultaneously. And it'd have to offer some measurable and large improvements over existing technology. Imagine computers from 2100 dumped into todays society. Apple haven't managed that, OS X is nice but not epoch making or earth shattering, and that's one reason that their market share continues to sit stubbornly at 5% or below.
thios is only gettin worse. the whole point of having a COMPUTOR is so that you can manipulate your own media, ie get rid of ads.
Er, no, "getting free stuff" is not the whole point of having a COMPUTOR, unless you are an extremely boring and greedy individual. Surely being able to post on Slashdot is the whole point?;)
Anyway, if a significant number of people feel the same way there's nothing under this model to stop Google allowing you to pay a bit of your own cash to skip the ads. You can't do that with broadcast TV because there's no personalisation ability, but with a broadband media network like Google has it's trivial to do so and the only limiting factor is demand.
Personally, I'd be willing to pay to skip interstitial ads in shows like Lost/24 because they really pull you out of the story. The sort of ads they have currently at the end I don't see any reason to pay to skip as you can just hit the "stop" button instead... but hey anything to reduce the dreaded product placement. God damn I hate that shit.
The Teoma algorithm is indeed impressive, but Asks habit of making sponsored links look exactly like top search results (with a little label) is highly annoying and causes the top 5 or 6 "results" for each search to be total junk in many cases. Once you skip them the results are good, but the mental effort involved in this is such that I might as well use Google. It's not *that* different.
Slashdot Mirror
And my experience was the opposite. Though I can't really give any details, as I got the job and have now signed an pretty far-reaching NDA, the recruitment process for Google Engineering was extremely rapid despite consisting of over 7 hours of interviews!
The questions were very thorough, really that's the deepest and widest technical interview I've ever done, though I was slightly surprised at the lack of interest in asking traditional personal-type interview questions. Even so I was generally impressed at how slick the thing was. They hire constantly and it shows - the longest I had to wait for feedback before going onto the next stage was about a week. Very far from "collapsing under their own weight".
Maybe their executive/management and technical recruitment are wildly different in terms of quality, it's certainly possible. But anyway, consider your anecdote matched.
I keep seeing people say that, but no matter what I search for, I can't make spam sites appear on the first pages of results.
I just tried again with the following search terms, "tuna", "the community solution", "honda", "viagra" and despite having a fair few spammy or vague keywords there I couldn't see any non relevant results. What are you searching for?
Well, that's why it was in double quotes, I know it's not really a donation. Kind of a lame way of sounding sarcastic in text I know.
I already make money quite nicely thanks. As Warren Buffet has shown you can simultaneously benefit from the system and still criticise it.
I'm glad you live in America too; the inability to consider anything except extreme right wing economics hurts the American people and its society. Better there than here. The alternatives aren't necessarily an improvement but that doesn't mean we should stop looking.
I hate "the masses are stupid" type arguments. It implies that both the person saying it and the person listening are stupid too. Maybe if lots of people disagree with you, it's your own fault for not properly presenting the arguments or teaching the facts. I think it's also a reflection of the "invididual over the group" mentality pushed by American conservatives, and cynicism with two-party politics, but that isn't really relevant here.
Microsoft != Gates Foundation. Yes, Microsoft has cynically used charitable donations in the past as a kind of tax writeoff, but I'm not aware of the Gates Foundation doing the same thing. Please feel free to prove me wrong.
Gates himself no longer has much incentive to push Microsoft over all else, except emotional concern and pride. He no longer runs it and has been diversifying his investments for some time.
Gates is an ideological person with a set of beliefs, especially around computers and markets. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that biases his donations, even though it isn't really proven. Hence the arguments elsewhere in this thread about accountability of the rich vs The American Dream.
The allegations about vaccines come from one unnamed charity in the source you cite; whilst no charity can ever get it 100% right with giving the Gates Foundation - as pointed out elsewhere - is known for being unusually well managed and achieving a good results:costs ratio. Consider the example of the World Wildlife Fund which hosts glitzy balls for its top members using donations as a counter example.
Incidentally "I'm Don Giovanni" you might want to give the personal attacks a rest in future. I've never looked down on people who accept money for programming - hell I do it and I'm proud to make a living that way - so implying I do or worse that an entire group does is just irrelevant and makes you look like an idiot for bringing it up.
Also it is not the "height of arrogance" to question or discuss the behaviour of others. Ever. That leads to "if you don't support the President you support the terrorists!!" type debate. Over simplified and worthless.
For goodness sake, how can I make that clearer? If you think it's OK for somebody unelected and unaccountable to control things because The People are stupid, go find your nearest dictatorship and live there. After all, if The People are greedy and stupid then things must be much better there right?
Thanks for explaning that. I was unaware that this is how it worked. Given that the Gates Foundation itself seems to try and grow the fund via investing I had assumed the scholarship grants simply spent the money allocated to it.
Oh I do. I'm sure they'll do an excellent job, within the parameters of their priorities.
In your second sentence though you agree that perhaps their judgement with respect to race isn't the greatest. So we seem to be stuck - is it really true that money is doomed to be spent unwisely regardless of what happens? I'd hope not!
Money is an artificial construct used to allocate resources. It's not a physical "thing" no more than music is a "thing" - money is at heart promise. Or you can see it as information if you like. We treat it like property because that's convenient, even though it's actually not.
Using a VM doesn't give you good compatibility, it gives very poor compatibility. As the example of OSX/Classic showed!
Let's say Microsoft start work on your proposed project. They bundle Virtual PC in with some totally new operating system. Here's how such a project would go (btw I worked in the 'backwards compatibility business' until recently):
Third problem. It doesn't get you anywhere. Let's say you develop an awesome new desktop, maybe it doesn't even have windows or icons, maybe it uses pervasive speech recognition to understand and predict your needs ahead of time or something. Think Star Trek type technology. So it's awesome and ass kicking but, peoples jobs still involve writing Word documents and Excel spreadsheets all day, so they don't get much benefit from using the new system until new apps are developed for it. Where do these apps come from? Rewriting Office? No, that's un-economic. It's been tried before both internally by Microsoft (the Pyramid project) and publically by Netscape (Mozilla). It didn't work out too well. Newly developed? By who? It would take years to be feature and format compatible with regular MS Office.
You might think that I must be wrong because Apple managed it with OS X. Well no not really ... Office for the Mac is based on the legacy Carbon APIs, which allowed them to preserve most of the code. OS X is not revolutionary, it's just a prettier form of what came before, so there were no fundamental shifts required. Office for Mac isn't even based on XCode so now they're getting shafted by the switch to Intel. It was really just an UI upgrade, from the programmers perspective (as well as a few things like memory protection that didn't affect it anyway).
Throwing away Windows would be like throwing away cars .... possible? Sure. Easy? Hell no. There'd have to be an amazingly good reason to do that and Windows just ain't that bad.
It may have been that BeOS used much finer grained timeslices than the competition or something, I never knew. Most of my knowledge about it comes from reading interviews with the development team, and a few articles about it.
That's reductio ad absurdum ... nobody can consult everybody they got wealth from before allocating it to charitable causes so we rely on other systems. In some places an elected government has a charitable giving program. For instance the UK Foreign Office funds various good causes around the world. In others we rely on the invisible hand in the market of charities to try and fairly allocate charitable giving.
We do this rather than having a randomly selected Charity Chief because, well, it's better.
This is why our economic system must constantly expand to be stable.
Note that if the money supply is increased without a corresponding increase in the size of the economy itself, you get inflation. So we try and avoid that.
One way to take somebody elses money is to employ them, such that their work earns you more than what you pay them. This may seem such a fundamental thing that it's impossible to imagine a different model, but they do exist. For instance Kim Stanley Robinson has through his novels effectively proposed a system in which the "workers" (for Microsoft, think the programmers/artists/testers/program managers) rent upper management. Right now we mix together managing things and owning them; so ... even though Gates did not make Windows, he managed the company that did, therefore he benefitted the most from it. I'm not saying such a system would be better, I don't know if it would or not. But the way we do things now is not the only way.
Meanwhile, the amount of wealth in the system at any one point is still finite despite the fact that it's also growing. The way wealth tends to flow uphill towards those who are already very rich is well documented .... take the example of currency speculators who many argue perform a task far less useful than their actual reward for it. Effectively a currency speculator can leverage a small amount of wealth into a very large amount by playing the system and extracting wealth out of the target currencies, so harming the people within it. But because there are so many people and that harm is spread out, it's hard to see, so nobody really notices.
Buffet has argued that people who allocate capital tend to benefit far more than is really fair; and as he has spent his life allocating capital more efficienctly when he speaks about it I listen. /p?
Poverty is relative, clearly. It's possible for people to be better off than they once were yet still be below the poverty line.
Bzzt, wrong. That's not what I said. Go back and read the post again. I apologise for the half finished sentence in the middle, lousy editing, what can I say.
To recap, I said I don't trust the Foundation to do what the masses would want, ie, if put to a vote what would The People opt to do with such collossal resources? Another poster has made the point that charities "compete" to do good, and that having a single mega-charity is a problem because it'll ultimately reflect the biases and priorities of the owners at the time.
You could argue that it doesn't matter, because it's a free world etc and so it's no business of anybodies what the Gates' choose to do with that money. But you'd be wrong, because that money didn't just magically appear out of nowhere - as Buffet eloquently put it, it came from an advanced industrialised society and that money represents wealth that everybody created together. As it happens, we use inequality to motivate people, but the downside to this inequality is that when the owners of wealth end up deciding to "reallocate" it they have no guidance or requirements to do it in the way the people who originally made the wealth would want. That's why having competition in charities is important and why I find their extremely tight focus on health and US education concerning. What about disaster relief? Oh, right, the Gates' can only do so much at once so tough luck.
One of the things I hate most about any Gates Foundation related thread on Slashdot is the ridiculous bias in debate towards the party line - "it's good so shut up".
If you think there's nothing to discuss or question here then I feel sorry for you. The exact flavor of capitalism we use today is not some fundamental unarguable happening, it is one of a spectrum of economic possibilities some of which lead to different outcomes to others.
When I state concern that such an unimaginablely large amount of wealth and power have been placed in the hands of just two people, who are not responsible or accountable to anybody else at all, I'd expect you to take that concern seriously even if you don't agree with it. It's two sides of the same coin - you can simultaneously see the Gates Foundation as wonderful/amazing/awe-inspiring and also evidence of a disgustingly undemocratic and divisive system that see the top 2% of the population control most of the worlds wealth. That's how I see it - as both things at once.
This is the sort of reasoning that Warren Buffet himself has used in the past. See his comments about limiting the number of share trades somebody may make in a lifetime for instance.
I already "donated" several times by buying copies of Windows. As a computer programmer I've usually had no choice about that; kinda hard to ply the trade without ever owning a copy these days. As it happens I also give every month to Concern Worldwide via direct debit and to put it bluntly, I would rather I was able to allocate my wealth to charities of my choosing rather than letting Gates do it for me ....
The problem with that argument is that it has no limit - taken to its logical conclusion we shouldn't regulate the market at all because that would allow the rich to get richer, at which point, some of them might decide to give some of it away to .... well basically whoever the hell they want.
I think it's wonderful that Gates and Buffet are giving their wealth away to good causes, but there's the end and then there's the means, and there's no doubt that this is only possible due to a system in which the vast majority are pushed into poverty and a tiny minority accumulate nearly all the wealth. It's hard to argue that's a good thing, at least to the extent we see today. Especially when, in the case of Gates, that wealth was accumulated via illegal behaviour.
Yeah, maybe. I have a lot of respect for Buffet, he always seems to have played it straight (though I am no expert on him). My main concern about giving such a huge proportion to the Gates Foundation is that it seems to have a rather skewed donation bias - it's most famous for global health (awesome) but it also gives massive amounts to very specific areas of Washington and Oregon ... a postcode "lottery" hardly seems like a fair use of resources and if a government had that money it'd be lampooned for such a weird selection of good causes.
Gates also has interesting ideas about education. It gives grants to scholars from "low income and minority backgrounds" and he believes high schools are obsolete. He feels that this is because low income/minority people don't get His scholarship fund gives me cause for concern for three reasons:
I applaud the work done on polio and global health as that is truly something that benefits all humanity and would be hard to achieve via other means. But while it's easy to be dazzled by the sheer numbers here I'm not at all sure that I trust the B&MG Foundation to spend their money in a way that would be selected by the masses.
I personally don't think of myself as a "hacker" and would never actually call myself that for the reason you mentioned, but the posters were mixing the two meanings up (no surprise as they're so close).
In that case you are a hacker in the original sense of the word - a competent professional who Gets Things Done.
The OP was complaining about "hackers" in the ZOMG HOLLYWOOD!! sense of the word, usually people who want the thrill of Beating The Man without actually having to do anything dangerous, like getting off their seats.
Or what? You'll attack FreeNode further?
Wow. Big deal. A chat service populated by geeks mostly working on open source projects, some of which I bet you use. It ain't big, it ain't clever, and about the most serious effect it'll have will be to annoy some people who will use some other method to communicate for a while. At least until either FreeNode recovers or we all migrate somewhere else.
Seriously. Of all the amazing things you could have done with your tick tick ticking time on this earth you choose to spend it kicking over sandcastles. Big waste. When the rest of us are 80 we'll look back on what we have achieved with life, the things we built, and we'll be proud. When you're 80 you'll look back on your life and think, man, that was so short! Why did I chuck my youth down the drain when I could have been getting shit done?
Well, BeOS made heavy use of multi-threading, which made it feel quite responsive but a nightmare to program for. The Be API was not terribly well designed and was rather riddled with race conditions .... for instance if I recall correctly when starting an app it had to contact the app server within X number of seconds otherwise the system assumed it'd failed/hung and killed it. But what happens if your memory is full and stuff has to be swapped out to a slow disk as the app loads itself up? Right .... the app fails to start the first time for no clear reason, and if you run it again it mysteriously works. Oops.
I see this idea so much and it's totally wrong. Let's review some facts:
So why couldn't Microsoft do the same? Well, people use Windows for the apps. There is no market of people who weren't buying Windows before who suddenly would if they started from scratch with crappy compatibility, because statistically everybody already buys Windows. Hence, its biggest competitor is previous versions of itself. Nobody would use this magical new OS for the same reason that statistically so few people use MacOS X - they have businesses, workflows and even game characters all based on Win32 based software.
About the only way they could pull this off is if they were to produce something so revolutionary, so new, so epoch-making that people would be willing to buy both the new system AND the old simultaneously. And it'd have to offer some measurable and large improvements over existing technology. Imagine computers from 2100 dumped into todays society. Apple haven't managed that, OS X is nice but not epoch making or earth shattering, and that's one reason that their market share continues to sit stubbornly at 5% or below.
Er, no, "getting free stuff" is not the whole point of having a COMPUTOR, unless you are an extremely boring and greedy individual. Surely being able to post on Slashdot is the whole point? ;)
Anyway, if a significant number of people feel the same way there's nothing under this model to stop Google allowing you to pay a bit of your own cash to skip the ads. You can't do that with broadcast TV because there's no personalisation ability, but with a broadband media network like Google has it's trivial to do so and the only limiting factor is demand.
Personally, I'd be willing to pay to skip interstitial ads in shows like Lost/24 because they really pull you out of the story. The sort of ads they have currently at the end I don't see any reason to pay to skip as you can just hit the "stop" button instead ... but hey anything to reduce the dreaded product placement. God damn I hate that shit.
The Teoma algorithm is indeed impressive, but Asks habit of making sponsored links look exactly like top search results (with a little label) is highly annoying and causes the top 5 or 6 "results" for each search to be total junk in many cases. Once you skip them the results are good, but the mental effort involved in this is such that I might as well use Google. It's not *that* different.