I appreciate the effort to provide evidence (and to stay on topic:) I'll keep an eye out for the report that you mention.
I don't think that lawsuits tell us that much about the validity of the predatory pricing claims: witness the whole SCO-IBM mess - what does the existence of a lawsuit tell us about SCO IP in Linux?
That's all very nice, but doesn't really address the point. This whole debate wasn't about whether or not Walmart is "evil", it was about whether Walmart used low prices to drive out competitors, and then jacked prices up again to screw consumers. Which it patently doesn't do. Saying otherwise is just spreading FUD for no reason.
Which is nice anecdotal evidence, but doesn't prove anything. I guarantee that if you spend some time making right-leaning comments on/. you'll be just as likely to receive falames from various people accusing you of being "dangerously capitalist" (or words to that effect)./. is a very heterogeneous group. If you make comments that rub some part of that group the wrong way, they'll attack you. Doesn't really matter what view you espouse, you'll be attacked for it.
Uhm, please note that quotes from clontzman that you provide as evidence directly contradict your point. In case you missed it (which you apparently did), clontzman specifically said that IE didn't kill Netscape because of bundling. Please go back and read your own post.
Ah. I must have missed the part where Walmart raised prices once its competitors were out of business. I'm sure that you can provide numerous examples though. I look forward to seeing them.
The original point you brought up was price. I pointed out that profit was a more relevant metric.
Actually, you were the one that originally brought up price. Specifically, you said:
After the small companies close down, because of the lower prices from the big company, the prices are increased to higher than the small companies had before the big company went into the area!! [emphasis yours]
After it was pointed out that your argument about price was wrong you tried to change the argument to one about profit. To which I again say: who cares? Don't just claim that it's "a more relevant metric", tell me why.
Don't just claim that Everyone wins -- show it.
If, as I stated in my previous post, the consumer is getting lower prices for an equivalent product and the company is getting more profits then we have a classic win-win situation. If you don't believe that's a win-win situation then I doubt there's much I could say that would convinve you. Do you simply consider it bad to make any kind of profit?
I wait with baited breath for e.g. proof that IE is better than any other browser -- and just didn't stand still in features when it in practice didn't have competition (which supports my point -- and is NOT a win for the consumers).
Sigh, where to start:
I never claimed that e.g. IE was better than any other browser, so I really don't see any need for me to provide support for that claim.
Your original argument was about price, not quality (and not profit). Specifically, the argument was about MS (or hypothetical bakeries) dropping price to drive out competitors, and then raising the price again. This argument was refuted both logically (by Registered Coward) and empirically.
If we were going to argue quality, I'd point out that feature count is not necessarily the "most relevant metric" for product quality.
The fact the Opera was able to survive and thrive would seem to indicate that those who did want higher quality (and more features) would happily pay the higher price necessary to get it.
The rise of Mozilla/Firefox is a direct response to the market vacuum created by the lack of innovation in IE (stipulating for the moment that such lack existed), and basically provides yet another empirical datapoint to further refute your original bakery argument and its MS analogy.
If you don't stop trying to change your argument instead of addressing the issues that I (and others) have raised, I'll assume that I've fed a troll.
Who cares about profit? If a company can find a way to make prices lower (that being what matters to the consumer) while also reaping a larger profit (that being what matters to the company) then good for them. Everyone wins. I don't see a problem here.
However, if the government does nothing then the 1800's and the rail-barons is what you get.
Uh, you do realize that most of the railroad baron's fortunes were built on government contracts and government subsidies, don't you? If the government had "done nothing" there wouldn't have been any railroad barons.
As Registered Coward has already pointed out, your example (and the conclusions you draw from it) are fundamentally flawed. Furthermore, as others have commented elsewhere in these threads, prices for MS software in various application areas have remained below the price of equivalent software prior to MS entering that application area. So not only is your reasoning false, but your example is in direct contradiction with the evidence of the real world.
I'm no fan of MS or their products (in fact, I can't recall the last time I actually used an MS product), but they are not the epitome of pure villainy that so many slashdotters seem to want to portray them as.
Now you have to write what effectively amounts to large amounts of multithreaded code - behaving cooperatively on a system with an unknown number of nodes.
Now you either need:
a) A really intelligent compiler
or
b) A really intelligent programmer
or (c) A language and corresponding underlying concurrency theory that allows you to design and analyze complex interacting multithreaded systems with ease.
Multithreaded programming is only hard if you use poor tools. If you are trying to write multithreaded programs using ancient concepts of concurrency like mutexes and semaphores then yeah, it'll be hard. If you write software using more modern concepts like CSP, and languages or libraries like occam-pi or JCSP, then multithreading can become extremely easy. I've written reasonably complex multithreaded programs with several hundred "threads" (some nested inside others) running simultaneously and interacting with each other (not just a limited worker thread model) and faced no more debugging difficulties than I would have writing a sequential program of equal complexity.
The breakthroughs that you want were invented years ago. You might want to look into a language called occam - see occam-pi for a recent implementation. Occam is based on Hoare's CSP concurrency model, which makes dealing with concurrency easy. Similar ideas were implemented in Plan 9's Alef language, and also in Limbo on the Inferno OS.
All that said, I fully agree that as a rule, there's a huge difference between those who go to some 2-year programming school and those who actually get a 4(+) year Bachelor's degree from a quality CS school.
Neither of which would actually be a software engineer. Yes, even the CS grad is most likely not an engineer. There's a difference between science and engineering. The fact that so many "software engineers" are graduates of science programs goes a long way towards explaining why "software engineering" as a discipline is still such a mess.
The difference is that the questions you are talking about are usually asked by immigration officials at your destination, not by airline employees prior to departure. The question the Doctorow is raising is "why does the airline want this info?"
The original Burton Batman did a pretty good job of capturing the "feel" of Batman (at least for me). The 2nd Batman was even better in that regard. Then the franchise went sharply downhill (although I've heard some good things about the upcoming Batman movie with Christian Bale). For that matter, "The Rocketeer" was a halfway decent (though sadly obscure) film translation of a comic/graphic novel. Having said all of that, you're right that the majority of the Marvel-sanctioned stuff that's been coming out lately is pretty lame.
Without getting too bogged down in terminology, you are confusing (conflating really) "defects" and "failures". A failure is an observed behavior that doesn't match the specified behavior of a system. A software defect is a flaw in the design/implementation of a piece of software, where correctness is measured with respect to an assumed execution environment. A software defect may or may not result in a failure (or an error leading to a failure) depending on whether or not the code branch in question is executed. However, as you implied, it is possible to have system failures that result from something other than defects in the software (for example hardware defects). These failures are caused by variations in the software execution environment that fall outside the set of assumptions used to generate the software design. There's an entire field of research (software-implemented hardware fault-tolerance) dedicated to developing software that can mask execution environment defects (essentially by adding the potential defects to the assumed execution environment). This is distinct from software fault-tolerance, which seeks to mask defects in the software design (using e.g. recovery blocks)
Still wondering if these cores will support something that many supercomputing chips have for a long time. That is the ability for both cores to run the exact same instructions, thus eliminating overhead in error checks as the error check is the comparison between the two cores.
This can be achieved on a commodity single-core processor using pure software techniques. The technique is known as Error-Detection through Duplicated Instructions (EDDI), and is implemented as a compilation step between assmbly code generation and object file generation. Stanford has done a bunch of work on this at their Center for Reliable Computing. I don't have any links readily available, but I'm sure that if you Google on EDDI and the ARGOS project you'll find some good info.
Note that IIRC experiments at Stanford showed that when using EDDI on a modern super-scalar processor the EDDI instructions can take advantage of unused portions of the pipeline, resulting in a significant reduction in overhead. You might still experience a slight performance hit, but on the other hand you don't need to add a whole new processor or core.
That's unlikely to fly (pun intended) because of the new 9/11-induced rules (at least on US airlines) banning congregating anywhere on the plane (including near the loos).
France was more than happy to turn a blind eye when Saddam Hussein was slaughtering thousands of Kurds for fun, as long as the French oil tankers could still load up. Is that more or less troublesome than the Americans picking up a United Nations mandate and executing it when no one else will?
You know, I was with you rightg up until this last statement. I'm no fan of French foreign policy, but the US doesn't exactly have clean hands here. The US was just as buddy-buddy with Iraq as the French were, for quite a long time. I mean, you can find file photos of Don Rumsfeld (the last time he was in office) hanging out with Saddam Hussein. The US supplied Iraq with weapons for quite a few years (all prior to the 1st Gulf war of course). The US didn't give a rat's ass about Hussein's brutality until it suited their own agenda - just like the French.
Should Hussein have been booted from Kuwait back in '91? Yeah. Should the current action in Iraq have occurred? Not for the reasons that were given. Which is why the US is now grasping at the whole "slaughtered Kurds" thing. For starters, that happened a number of years ago, so why wasn't anything done at the time? Secondly, if you want to use that justification ("save the oppressed people") for invasion then the US shouldn't be continuing to support other dictatorial regimes around the world (the Saudis for starters). Nor should it have supported Hussein in the past.
'Scholar' as a term for a search assistant is probably not generic enough when applied to this product - librarian probably would be though.
Well, yes, but 'Google Scholar' isn't called that because it's a search assistant. The name derives from the fact that it is intended for use by scholars, and searches across scholarly journals, conferences, and other academic publications.
No. Just the US. Fisher's Deduction: "The more issues a person crudely shoehorns down into a liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American"
I suspect that it depends on the engineering school. My undergrad program required a large number of written reports. Those reports were graded on both technical content, and writing quality. After a few years of that, looking back at my earliest reports caused me to physically cringe in response to the awful writing I had actually had the gall to submit. I'm still by no means a great writer, but I'm certainly far better than I was before I went through engineering school.
Ha ha. But probably funnier if Neil had actually been on Apollo 12, instead of Apollo 11.
Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?
on
Embedded Gentoo?
·
· Score: 1
According to the Gentoo website they have "Support for x86, AMD64, PowerPC, UltraSparc, Alpha and MIPS processors". Which is nice, but not as many as Debian - and lacking in popular embedded archs like ARM and SuperH.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that lawsuits tell us that much about the validity of the predatory pricing claims: witness the whole SCO-IBM mess - what does the existence of a lawsuit tell us about SCO IP in Linux?
That's all very nice, but doesn't really address the point. This whole debate wasn't about whether or not Walmart is "evil", it was about whether Walmart used low prices to drive out competitors, and then jacked prices up again to screw consumers. Which it patently doesn't do. Saying otherwise is just spreading FUD for no reason.
Which is nice anecdotal evidence, but doesn't prove anything. I guarantee that if you spend some time making right-leaning comments on /. you'll be just as likely to receive falames from various people accusing you of being "dangerously capitalist" (or words to that effect). /. is a very heterogeneous group. If you make comments that rub some part of that group the wrong way, they'll attack you. Doesn't really matter what view you espouse, you'll be attacked for it.
Uhm, please note that quotes from clontzman that you provide as evidence directly contradict your point. In case you missed it (which you apparently did), clontzman specifically said that IE didn't kill Netscape because of bundling. Please go back and read your own post.
Ah. I must have missed the part where Walmart raised prices once its competitors were out of business. I'm sure that you can provide numerous examples though. I look forward to seeing them.
Actually, you were the one that originally brought up price. Specifically, you said:
After it was pointed out that your argument about price was wrong you tried to change the argument to one about profit. To which I again say: who cares? Don't just claim that it's "a more relevant metric", tell me why.
Don't just claim that Everyone wins -- show it.
If, as I stated in my previous post, the consumer is getting lower prices for an equivalent product and the company is getting more profits then we have a classic win-win situation. If you don't believe that's a win-win situation then I doubt there's much I could say that would convinve you. Do you simply consider it bad to make any kind of profit?
I wait with baited breath for e.g. proof that IE is better than any other browser -- and just didn't stand still in features when it in practice didn't have competition (which supports my point -- and is NOT a win for the consumers).
Sigh, where to start:
- I never claimed that e.g. IE was better than any other browser, so I really don't see any need for me to provide support for that claim.
- Your original argument was about price, not quality (and not profit). Specifically, the argument was about MS (or hypothetical bakeries) dropping price to drive out competitors, and then raising the price again. This argument was refuted both logically (by Registered Coward) and empirically.
- If we were going to argue quality, I'd point out that feature count is not necessarily the "most relevant metric" for product quality.
- The fact the Opera was able to survive and thrive would seem to indicate that those who did want higher quality (and more features) would happily pay the higher price necessary to get it.
- The rise of Mozilla/Firefox is a direct response to the market vacuum created by the lack of innovation in IE (stipulating for the moment that such lack existed), and basically provides yet another empirical datapoint to further refute your original bakery argument and its MS analogy.
If you don't stop trying to change your argument instead of addressing the issues that I (and others) have raised, I'll assume that I've fed a troll.Who cares about profit? If a company can find a way to make prices lower (that being what matters to the consumer) while also reaping a larger profit (that being what matters to the company) then good for them. Everyone wins. I don't see a problem here.
Uh, you do realize that most of the railroad baron's fortunes were built on government contracts and government subsidies, don't you? If the government had "done nothing" there wouldn't have been any railroad barons.
That much is clear.
As Registered Coward has already pointed out, your example (and the conclusions you draw from it) are fundamentally flawed. Furthermore, as others have commented elsewhere in these threads, prices for MS software in various application areas have remained below the price of equivalent software prior to MS entering that application area. So not only is your reasoning false, but your example is in direct contradiction with the evidence of the real world.
I'm no fan of MS or their products (in fact, I can't recall the last time I actually used an MS product), but they are not the epitome of pure villainy that so many slashdotters seem to want to portray them as.
Now you either need:
a) A really intelligent compiler
or
b) A really intelligent programmer
or
(c) A language and corresponding underlying concurrency theory that allows you to design and analyze complex interacting multithreaded systems with ease.
Multithreaded programming is only hard if you use poor tools. If you are trying to write multithreaded programs using ancient concepts of concurrency like mutexes and semaphores then yeah, it'll be hard. If you write software using more modern concepts like CSP, and languages or libraries like occam-pi or JCSP, then multithreading can become extremely easy. I've written reasonably complex multithreaded programs with several hundred "threads" (some nested inside others) running simultaneously and interacting with each other (not just a limited worker thread model) and faced no more debugging difficulties than I would have writing a sequential program of equal complexity.
The breakthroughs that you want were invented years ago. You might want to look into a language called occam - see occam-pi for a recent implementation. Occam is based on Hoare's CSP concurrency model, which makes dealing with concurrency easy. Similar ideas were implemented in Plan 9's Alef language, and also in Limbo on the Inferno OS.
Neither of which would actually be a software engineer. Yes, even the CS grad is most likely not an engineer. There's a difference between science and engineering. The fact that so many "software engineers" are graduates of science programs goes a long way towards explaining why "software engineering" as a discipline is still such a mess.
For a good discussion of the differences between CS education and SE education see either David Parnas' excellent paper Software Engineering Programmes are not Computer Science Programmes, or Steve McConnell's comments on why software engineering is not the same as CS.
The difference is that the questions you are talking about are usually asked by immigration officials at your destination, not by airline employees prior to departure. The question the Doctorow is raising is "why does the airline want this info?"
The original Burton Batman did a pretty good job of capturing the "feel" of Batman (at least for me). The 2nd Batman was even better in that regard. Then the franchise went sharply downhill (although I've heard some good things about the upcoming Batman movie with Christian Bale). For that matter, "The Rocketeer" was a halfway decent (though sadly obscure) film translation of a comic/graphic novel. Having said all of that, you're right that the majority of the Marvel-sanctioned stuff that's been coming out lately is pretty lame.
Without getting too bogged down in terminology, you are confusing (conflating really) "defects" and "failures". A failure is an observed behavior that doesn't match the specified behavior of a system. A software defect is a flaw in the design/implementation of a piece of software, where correctness is measured with respect to an assumed execution environment. A software defect may or may not result in a failure (or an error leading to a failure) depending on whether or not the code branch in question is executed. However, as you implied, it is possible to have system failures that result from something other than defects in the software (for example hardware defects). These failures are caused by variations in the software execution environment that fall outside the set of assumptions used to generate the software design. There's an entire field of research (software-implemented hardware fault-tolerance) dedicated to developing software that can mask execution environment defects (essentially by adding the potential defects to the assumed execution environment). This is distinct from software fault-tolerance, which seeks to mask defects in the software design (using e.g. recovery blocks)
This can be achieved on a commodity single-core processor using pure software techniques. The technique is known as Error-Detection through Duplicated Instructions (EDDI), and is implemented as a compilation step between assmbly code generation and object file generation. Stanford has done a bunch of work on this at their Center for Reliable Computing. I don't have any links readily available, but I'm sure that if you Google on EDDI and the ARGOS project you'll find some good info.
Note that IIRC experiments at Stanford showed that when using EDDI on a modern super-scalar processor the EDDI instructions can take advantage of unused portions of the pipeline, resulting in a significant reduction in overhead. You might still experience a slight performance hit, but on the other hand you don't need to add a whole new processor or core.
That's unlikely to fly (pun intended) because of the new 9/11-induced rules (at least on US airlines) banning congregating anywhere on the plane (including near the loos).
You know, I was with you rightg up until this last statement. I'm no fan of French foreign policy, but the US doesn't exactly have clean hands here. The US was just as buddy-buddy with Iraq as the French were, for quite a long time. I mean, you can find file photos of Don Rumsfeld (the last time he was in office) hanging out with Saddam Hussein. The US supplied Iraq with weapons for quite a few years (all prior to the 1st Gulf war of course). The US didn't give a rat's ass about Hussein's brutality until it suited their own agenda - just like the French.
Should Hussein have been booted from Kuwait back in '91? Yeah. Should the current action in Iraq have occurred? Not for the reasons that were given. Which is why the US is now grasping at the whole "slaughtered Kurds" thing. For starters, that happened a number of years ago, so why wasn't anything done at the time? Secondly, if you want to use that justification ("save the oppressed people") for invasion then the US shouldn't be continuing to support other dictatorial regimes around the world (the Saudis for starters). Nor should it have supported Hussein in the past.
Well, yes, but 'Google Scholar' isn't called that because it's a search assistant. The name derives from the fact that it is intended for use by scholars, and searches across scholarly journals, conferences, and other academic publications.
No. Just the US. Fisher's Deduction: "The more issues a person crudely shoehorns down into a liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American"
I suspect that it depends on the engineering school. My undergrad program required a large number of written reports. Those reports were graded on both technical content, and writing quality. After a few years of that, looking back at my earliest reports caused me to physically cringe in response to the awful writing I had actually had the gall to submit. I'm still by no means a great writer, but I'm certainly far better than I was before I went through engineering school.
Apollo 11 never went anywhere near the surveyor landing site...
Ha ha. But probably funnier if Neil had actually been on Apollo 12, instead of Apollo 11.
According to the Gentoo website they have "Support for x86, AMD64, PowerPC, UltraSparc, Alpha and MIPS processors". Which is nice, but not as many as Debian - and lacking in popular embedded archs like ARM and SuperH.