I'm saying 40 years ago the same sharing happened, but the music industry wasn't asking for the right to mess with our mail or our ability to play musical instruments as a necessary step to protect their copyrights. You can't fix a wrong by doing something worse, and that's what is happening today.
Dancing. Swing, Salsa, Ballroom, Tap, Country Line, whatever. Hours of indoor activity and socialization almost any time of year. Many places offer free beginner lessons, and if you're patient you can learn a lot from Youtube.
The prices they set for the games is fair. And making copies of the games without permission is generally wrong (except for backups, etc...).
But in order to protect their business model, look at what they do. They lobby for legislation and regulation that invades your privacy. They add requirements to games that you be playing with an active internet connection, running some sort of digital rights management software in the background. The DRM technology has matured, Steam doesn't suck quite as much now as it did three years ago. But the fact remains that they're chipping away at our rights and putting software and software requirements that are not a fundamental part of gameplay into the game.
Think of this in terms of mail. 40 years ago I could rent or buy sheet music for some Elvis songs, copy it, and send it by mail to a friend of mine. The music industry wasn't asking for the right to have people monitor my guitar use or my friend's guitar use in their house in case illegally duplicated sheet music was present. And the music industry wasn't asking for the right to monitor my mail because that's not their business, even if I could be using it to conduct illegal activities.
This is a case where the people who started out the good guys are making deals with the devil to protect themselves. And we the consumers know that they're actively screwing us and we give them our business anyway. I'm voting with my money, I buy mostly (but I admit, not entirely) DRM free games.
I'm sure Medicare has had an inflationary effect on medical costs.
But the thing is, I see the college education market as something loaded with excess and ready for disruption. There are high quality free online learning resources, the schools that are not prestigious but still charge $40,000 or more per year in tuition deserve to collapse. I don't need to go to college to learn.
Medical care is different - I do think it's a basic right in any first world nation in the 21st century. But other countries have much better cost controls than we do.
The number to watch today is the highest bracket for the long term capital gains tax, which is capped at 15%. If you have a good job with a salary in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, you're paying that 35% tax on most of your income. But if you're truly wealthy and you have millions or billions of dollars in investments, your actual tax rate is 15% - that's what you pay when you sell some of your stocks.
Under Reagan, at its lowest the highest bracket for the long term capital gains tax was 28%. That wouldn't affect people earning a salary, even a good salary, but for really wealthy people that meant their tax burden was far higher.
I've seen plenty of Democrats propose that the income tax and especially capital gains tax only be raised to Clinton-era levels for people earning a million dollars a year or more. It's the Republicans who are intentionally putting the line at $250,000, for the express purpose of drawing the middle class into the fight on their side.
Consumption, not investment? Nonsense. The government doesn't take money from citizens and then bury it in boxes, it spends it on roads, schools, police, courts, food regulation, air quality, water quality, waste removal, research grants, etc... and a lot of that spending is in salary, which gets circulated back into the economy in a way very similar to money that might be spent on candy bars or invested in stocks if it hadn't been taken by taxation.
The question of whether the government does a more or less useful thing with the money is very complex. If the revenue comes from raising taxes on gas, that has a different effect than raising income taxes, or real estate taxes, or whatever. And if the spending is on roads, that has a different effect than spending on the "War on Drugs", and they both have a different effect than spending the money on more suicide prevention resources for veterans.
But you can't blankly assume the government is less efficient with its spending. The market has its own inefficiencies, all of the time.
In the 1950s, Social Security and Medicare didn't exist and inflation-adjusted medical costs per person were a fraction of what they are today. The after-effects of the education subsidies from the GI Bill (an inflationary effect on college tuition costs) weren't felt yet.
Then in the 1960s Social Security and Medicare were created, and they were great except the politicans were too stupid or too indifferent to two problem that would only affect future generations. First, they failed to set up the programs so that the beneficiary age automatically increased in step with the average American lifespan. Second, they didn't take into account the inevitable fact that the population of the United States could not continue increasing at a growing rate forever.
Then in the 1980s and especially the 1990s and 2000s medical costs started increasing in the neighborhood of 10% per year, every year.
Some of the partial solutions are obvious - Social Security and Medicare need to have a rapid, if not immediate, transition towards raising the eligibility age to the average lifespan in the country. That solves half the problem, but it still doesn't address the fact that the rate of population growth slowed. Controlling medical costs is coming, it's inevitable unless you want to tell anyone not in the top 10% of income earners that gets sick to just fuck off and die.
But that 90% cap is also a ways off from the 15% capital gains tax rate we have now. We have an awful lot to raise it before we reach 1950s levels.
We are coming out of a bigger recession than during the Reagan era, there are more Medicare recipients as a percentage of the population, medical costs per person are dramatically higher (and that was the case even before Obamacare), and we're wrapping up two wars that were funded by the clever tactic of cutting taxes.
So costs are higher to provide the same levels of services - not more - as were provided under Reagan. None of that is Obama's fault.
But more importantly, I'm sick to death of this whining over socialism and unfair taxation. The biggest factor in economic success is luck, always has been, always will be. You're lucky enough not to die of cancer, or be born retarded. You're lucky if you inherit wealth. You're lucky if someone else - your teacher, your parents, your guardian, your uncle, your sister, your priest, your boss, your wrestling coach, or the guy who wrote the book you read at the library - taught you what you needed to learn about hard work and social networking (in the non-Facebook sense) to succeed. Throw Bill Gates and Warren Buffett into Uganda as children and then look at the fortune they would have today -- zero. It is absolutely fair to demand the people most able to afford it carry the largest financial burden for maintaining the roads, the police, the fire departments, the military, the courts, clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, safe food to eat, and yes the social safety net for citizens less lucky than they are.
The conservatives have pulled the world's greatest con, fooling most of the country into thinking they earned every cent they own and it would be immoral to ask them to share for any reason. I'm not advocating socialism - Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, and Tim Cook would still be billionaires. And I'm not advocating waste, obviously we should be monitoring our agencies better and ruthlessly consolidating or flat out shutting down the ones that aren't serving the voters properly. (Note, however, that proper auditing costs money. The EPA screwed the pooch monitoring Hyundai's fuel economy because Congress doesn't give them the resources they would need to test the fuel economy of every vehicle properly.) But refusing to increase the budget for food stamps or unemployment compensation while these guys can buy more units of yachts than the average American can buy units of socks is unforgiveable.
Obama is dealing with a major recession, two wars that were funded by the clever strategy of cutting taxes, a population with a higher average age, and much higher medical costs per person (even before Obamacare). Reagan's tax cuts took care of the recession when he entered office, but even after his early tax cuts the taxes were far higher than they are now.
George W Bush tried to repeat Reagan's magic with his 2002 tax cuts to stimulate the economy, but 2007 taught us that the economic stimulus we saw from 2002 until then was the result of a financial bubble, not his tax cuts. Raising taxes on the wealthy will have a temporary negative effect on the economy, but nobody has evidence that keeping taxes at this level or lowering them further will have a stimulating effect.
There are already third party tools for that, and even if the current ones suck (I don't know, I haven't used any) sooner or later good ones will be created. e.g. http://www.mobileiron.com/
I think there are two separate points the writer brings up. The first, that Perl is not changing, is - as you say - an advantage and not a problem.
But the second point is that Perl use is declining. It's declining slowly, but it's declining and fewer new projects use it. For fans of the language that would rather see it in use than, say, PHP, Ruby, Python, or even Java or C#, that is a problem.
I know it has Windows binaries. We were using it on Windows first, and once I could show them that it's effectively identical on Linux it was easy to make the switch.
At a big company with lots of resources, we could just take the Windows team and send them to training with the edict "adapt to the changes or be replaced". But this is a very small company, and just as importantly these people are pleasant to work with and intelligent. Even if I had the resources and authority to steamroll changes in place, I wouldn't do it.
When I started at this job we ran everything off Windows Servers, and our admins had learned to use Windows Server back before Microsoft had anything like PowerShell, so they were expert clickmonkeys that only occasionally resorted to cmd.exe.
I tried to sell them on Linux without X as a superior replacement, but I couldn't get any interest from the rest of the team. I set up a Linux server with XFCE and XRDP, the program menu in the bottom left, the clock in the bottom right, a taskbar, icons on the desktop, and Firefox, resource monitoring tools, and pgAdmin3 (a graphical tool for administering Postgres) in the menu. That got enough acceptance that we put it into production and our Windows team is becoming more comfortable in a mixed server operating system environment.
Yeah, I think this is a fair question. I like having the pretty widgets on my desktop machine, but when I want a graphical interface on a server it has to be XFCE - everything else is too heavyweight to run well over a remote protocol like VNC or XRDP (which I understand just wraps VNC, but I didn't do a deep exploration of how it works).
I know it would be potentially a lot more work, but it would be easier if KDE and GNOME and Ubuntu Unity had a fallback 2D mode that was friendly for remote viewers. I understand Unity used to have that, but Canonical dropped it. (Cue flame war over Unity.)
I'm a guy who graduated school and went to work at a shop that used a very narrow subset of C and C++, which works fine until you interview elsewhere and don't know a damn thing about STL or Boost or a host of other language features. So seven years ago I moved into the Java world. I thought it was a pretty damn cool language and first, and I learned how to get a lot done with it.
I've gradually come to the view that the language is so syntactically heavy that it gets in its own way a lot. I'm still working in it, because they pay me nicely and treat me well. But I'm also thinking that some other JVM options might be better. I think for complex projects the Java static type system very nearly is more hindrance than help, and the solution might be languages like Python/Jython or Clojure with dynamic types so the type system doesn't get in the way, or languages like Scala which has a heavyweight type system that is a bit of a pain to learn but far more flexible than the one in Java.
I don't know if they have access to the source from Adobe, or if they just get the binaries with fixes faster than Adobe posts them to their own website, but Chrome tends to get security updates for Flash faster than stand-alone Flash gets them.
In terms of other convenient methods for doing lots of concurrent work, there's the Akka project under the Apache 2 license: http://akka.io/ It is supposed to be a pretty decent implementation of the Actor concurrency model for Java and Scala ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model )
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I'm not saying it was legal. It wasn't.
I'm saying 40 years ago the same sharing happened, but the music industry wasn't asking for the right to mess with our mail or our ability to play musical instruments as a necessary step to protect their copyrights. You can't fix a wrong by doing something worse, and that's what is happening today.
Nah, I never bought a PS3 because they removed the Other OS option. My most recent gaming console is a PS2. I put my money where my mouth was.
Now if only a few ten million other people would do the same.
Dancing. Swing, Salsa, Ballroom, Tap, Country Line, whatever. Hours of indoor activity and socialization almost any time of year. Many places offer free beginner lessons, and if you're patient you can learn a lot from Youtube.
The prices they set for the games is fair. And making copies of the games without permission is generally wrong (except for backups, etc...).
But in order to protect their business model, look at what they do. They lobby for legislation and regulation that invades your privacy. They add requirements to games that you be playing with an active internet connection, running some sort of digital rights management software in the background. The DRM technology has matured, Steam doesn't suck quite as much now as it did three years ago. But the fact remains that they're chipping away at our rights and putting software and software requirements that are not a fundamental part of gameplay into the game.
Think of this in terms of mail. 40 years ago I could rent or buy sheet music for some Elvis songs, copy it, and send it by mail to a friend of mine. The music industry wasn't asking for the right to have people monitor my guitar use or my friend's guitar use in their house in case illegally duplicated sheet music was present. And the music industry wasn't asking for the right to monitor my mail because that's not their business, even if I could be using it to conduct illegal activities.
This is a case where the people who started out the good guys are making deals with the devil to protect themselves. And we the consumers know that they're actively screwing us and we give them our business anyway. I'm voting with my money, I buy mostly (but I admit, not entirely) DRM free games.
I'm sure Medicare has had an inflationary effect on medical costs.
But the thing is, I see the college education market as something loaded with excess and ready for disruption. There are high quality free online learning resources, the schools that are not prestigious but still charge $40,000 or more per year in tuition deserve to collapse. I don't need to go to college to learn.
Medical care is different - I do think it's a basic right in any first world nation in the 21st century. But other countries have much better cost controls than we do.
Whoops! Thanks for the correction.
The number to watch today is the highest bracket for the long term capital gains tax, which is capped at 15%. If you have a good job with a salary in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, you're paying that 35% tax on most of your income. But if you're truly wealthy and you have millions or billions of dollars in investments, your actual tax rate is 15% - that's what you pay when you sell some of your stocks.
Under Reagan, at its lowest the highest bracket for the long term capital gains tax was 28%. That wouldn't affect people earning a salary, even a good salary, but for really wealthy people that meant their tax burden was far higher.
I've seen plenty of Democrats propose that the income tax and especially capital gains tax only be raised to Clinton-era levels for people earning a million dollars a year or more. It's the Republicans who are intentionally putting the line at $250,000, for the express purpose of drawing the middle class into the fight on their side.
Consumption, not investment? Nonsense. The government doesn't take money from citizens and then bury it in boxes, it spends it on roads, schools, police, courts, food regulation, air quality, water quality, waste removal, research grants, etc... and a lot of that spending is in salary, which gets circulated back into the economy in a way very similar to money that might be spent on candy bars or invested in stocks if it hadn't been taken by taxation.
The question of whether the government does a more or less useful thing with the money is very complex. If the revenue comes from raising taxes on gas, that has a different effect than raising income taxes, or real estate taxes, or whatever. And if the spending is on roads, that has a different effect than spending on the "War on Drugs", and they both have a different effect than spending the money on more suicide prevention resources for veterans.
But you can't blankly assume the government is less efficient with its spending. The market has its own inefficiencies, all of the time.
In the 1950s, Social Security and Medicare didn't exist and inflation-adjusted medical costs per person were a fraction of what they are today. The after-effects of the education subsidies from the GI Bill (an inflationary effect on college tuition costs) weren't felt yet.
Then in the 1960s Social Security and Medicare were created, and they were great except the politicans were too stupid or too indifferent to two problem that would only affect future generations. First, they failed to set up the programs so that the beneficiary age automatically increased in step with the average American lifespan. Second, they didn't take into account the inevitable fact that the population of the United States could not continue increasing at a growing rate forever.
Then in the 1980s and especially the 1990s and 2000s medical costs started increasing in the neighborhood of 10% per year, every year.
Some of the partial solutions are obvious - Social Security and Medicare need to have a rapid, if not immediate, transition towards raising the eligibility age to the average lifespan in the country. That solves half the problem, but it still doesn't address the fact that the rate of population growth slowed. Controlling medical costs is coming, it's inevitable unless you want to tell anyone not in the top 10% of income earners that gets sick to just fuck off and die.
But that 90% cap is also a ways off from the 15% capital gains tax rate we have now. We have an awful lot to raise it before we reach 1950s levels.
And today the long term capital gains tax is 15%, which is quite a ways under 28%.
We are coming out of a bigger recession than during the Reagan era, there are more Medicare recipients as a percentage of the population, medical costs per person are dramatically higher (and that was the case even before Obamacare), and we're wrapping up two wars that were funded by the clever tactic of cutting taxes.
So costs are higher to provide the same levels of services - not more - as were provided under Reagan. None of that is Obama's fault.
But more importantly, I'm sick to death of this whining over socialism and unfair taxation. The biggest factor in economic success is luck, always has been, always will be. You're lucky enough not to die of cancer, or be born retarded. You're lucky if you inherit wealth. You're lucky if someone else - your teacher, your parents, your guardian, your uncle, your sister, your priest, your boss, your wrestling coach, or the guy who wrote the book you read at the library - taught you what you needed to learn about hard work and social networking (in the non-Facebook sense) to succeed. Throw Bill Gates and Warren Buffett into Uganda as children and then look at the fortune they would have today -- zero. It is absolutely fair to demand the people most able to afford it carry the largest financial burden for maintaining the roads, the police, the fire departments, the military, the courts, clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, safe food to eat, and yes the social safety net for citizens less lucky than they are.
The conservatives have pulled the world's greatest con, fooling most of the country into thinking they earned every cent they own and it would be immoral to ask them to share for any reason. I'm not advocating socialism - Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, and Tim Cook would still be billionaires. And I'm not advocating waste, obviously we should be monitoring our agencies better and ruthlessly consolidating or flat out shutting down the ones that aren't serving the voters properly. (Note, however, that proper auditing costs money. The EPA screwed the pooch monitoring Hyundai's fuel economy because Congress doesn't give them the resources they would need to test the fuel economy of every vehicle properly.) But refusing to increase the budget for food stamps or unemployment compensation while these guys can buy more units of yachts than the average American can buy units of socks is unforgiveable.
Obama is dealing with a major recession, two wars that were funded by the clever strategy of cutting taxes, a population with a higher average age, and much higher medical costs per person (even before Obamacare). Reagan's tax cuts took care of the recession when he entered office, but even after his early tax cuts the taxes were far higher than they are now.
George W Bush tried to repeat Reagan's magic with his 2002 tax cuts to stimulate the economy, but 2007 taught us that the economic stimulus we saw from 2002 until then was the result of a financial bubble, not his tax cuts. Raising taxes on the wealthy will have a temporary negative effect on the economy, but nobody has evidence that keeping taxes at this level or lowering them further will have a stimulating effect.
Yeah, god forbid Congress set our tax levels back up to the high rates of the Ronald Reagan era. That Reagan dude was clearly a fucking socialist.
There are already third party tools for that, and even if the current ones suck (I don't know, I haven't used any) sooner or later good ones will be created. e.g. http://www.mobileiron.com/
I think there are two separate points the writer brings up. The first, that Perl is not changing, is - as you say - an advantage and not a problem.
But the second point is that Perl use is declining. It's declining slowly, but it's declining and fewer new projects use it. For fans of the language that would rather see it in use than, say, PHP, Ruby, Python, or even Java or C#, that is a problem.
I know it has Windows binaries. We were using it on Windows first, and once I could show them that it's effectively identical on Linux it was easy to make the switch.
At a big company with lots of resources, we could just take the Windows team and send them to training with the edict "adapt to the changes or be replaced". But this is a very small company, and just as importantly these people are pleasant to work with and intelligent. Even if I had the resources and authority to steamroll changes in place, I wouldn't do it.
When I started at this job we ran everything off Windows Servers, and our admins had learned to use Windows Server back before Microsoft had anything like PowerShell, so they were expert clickmonkeys that only occasionally resorted to cmd.exe.
I tried to sell them on Linux without X as a superior replacement, but I couldn't get any interest from the rest of the team. I set up a Linux server with XFCE and XRDP, the program menu in the bottom left, the clock in the bottom right, a taskbar, icons on the desktop, and Firefox, resource monitoring tools, and pgAdmin3 (a graphical tool for administering Postgres) in the menu. That got enough acceptance that we put it into production and our Windows team is becoming more comfortable in a mixed server operating system environment.
Thanks. I didn't know that.
Yeah, I think this is a fair question. I like having the pretty widgets on my desktop machine, but when I want a graphical interface on a server it has to be XFCE - everything else is too heavyweight to run well over a remote protocol like VNC or XRDP (which I understand just wraps VNC, but I didn't do a deep exploration of how it works).
I know it would be potentially a lot more work, but it would be easier if KDE and GNOME and Ubuntu Unity had a fallback 2D mode that was friendly for remote viewers. I understand Unity used to have that, but Canonical dropped it. (Cue flame war over Unity.)
I'm a guy who graduated school and went to work at a shop that used a very narrow subset of C and C++, which works fine until you interview elsewhere and don't know a damn thing about STL or Boost or a host of other language features. So seven years ago I moved into the Java world. I thought it was a pretty damn cool language and first, and I learned how to get a lot done with it.
I've gradually come to the view that the language is so syntactically heavy that it gets in its own way a lot. I'm still working in it, because they pay me nicely and treat me well. But I'm also thinking that some other JVM options might be better. I think for complex projects the Java static type system very nearly is more hindrance than help, and the solution might be languages like Python/Jython or Clojure with dynamic types so the type system doesn't get in the way, or languages like Scala which has a heavyweight type system that is a bit of a pain to learn but far more flexible than the one in Java.
Thanks. I'll read the link you provided. I appreciate the help.
I don't know if they have access to the source from Adobe, or if they just get the binaries with fixes faster than Adobe posts them to their own website, but Chrome tends to get security updates for Flash faster than stand-alone Flash gets them.
What would you use instead of the JVM? That's curiosity, not an intent to challenge.
I haven't played much with concurrency and multi-threading in Java, but I think Java Futures (sounds like an investment vehicle, but I think it's the feature you want) fit the bill: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/Future.html
In terms of other convenient methods for doing lots of concurrent work, there's the Akka project under the Apache 2 license: http://akka.io/ It is supposed to be a pretty decent implementation of the Actor concurrency model for Java and Scala ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model )