Right. And I'm very happy that the Gates Foundation gives to charity. But it costs Bill Gates nothing in terms of his standards of living to make those donations. The less wealthy people who take a real measurable hit to their standard of living to support charity are, in my view, far more heroic than Bill Gates even if the net benefit of his donations is far more than the net benefit of theirs.
Again, I'm not criticizing Gates. What he's doing is awesome. But there are millions of less wealthy people who are more noble and deserve more praise because they're giving up far more than he is in proportion to what they have.
The problem isn't Microsoft management, the problem is the market changed. Consider:
1. It was easy to sell people on moving from Windows 95 and 98 to Windows 2000 and XP because 2000 and XP were dramatic improvements. Today, I happen to think Windows 7 is superior to Windows XP but it's not $200 superior. I wouldn't object to Windows 7 if I bought it pre-installed on a PC, but I wouldn't buy the upgrade for an existing machine either.
2. Hardware improvements moved much faster and hardware requirements moved much faster in the 1990s and early 2000s versus now. For the great majority of home and business PC uses, a mid range machine purchased in 2004 is still adequate to their needs. Buyers are purchasing new hardware less often, which causes a corresponding slow in software sales.
3. Lots of households did not have PCs from the 1990s through early 2000s. Now most families have one or more computers, so the exponential growth of the PC market has ended.
4. The competition is substantially better - although Microsoft still owns 90% of the market, so this is the weakest point. Microsoft has improved its products incrementally from Office 2000 and Windows 2000 to today, but in the same period Linux has gone from (arguably) trailing Windows in ease of installation and UI features to full parity plus all of the usual benefits of open source and easy software package management. Mac OS X is generally very well reviewed, too.
There are a lot of exceptions to that. I got laid off as a C++ developer and I was so desperate to pay the mortgage that I botched interview after interview by being panicked and answering questions like "How do you terminate a string?" with "I can't remember". Pretty soon no C++ shop in a fifty mile radius would look at me. Desperate, I started teaching myself Java and calmed down enough to not botch an interview for an entry level Java position. Three years later, I was earning double my salary as a C++ developer. Score one for dumb luck.
Some hard workers get sick. You start at a good job, you work as hard as you can, and then you catch Mononucleosis and get fired for missing six days in a row.
Sometimes events beyond your control mess you up. You open your restaurant, and two weeks later the township announces that the bridge on the main road to your location will be closed for construction for three months. All the commuters that were your customers take a different route, and your cash flow collapses and you go out of business.
Sometimes your boss is just an asshole, and you can't find a better job.
You have to keep working hard, because there's nothing else you can do. You certainly won't succeed by giving up. But there are plenty of unlucky people out there who run themselves ragged with hard work and get nowhere.
I don't download pirated films either. But consider, under current US copyright law if you make a mixed CD of songs for a friend it's illegal. If you play them a 2 minute clip from the latest NFL game it's illegal. If you rip a DVD to your hard drive so you can watch different sections without navigating through the previews and disclaimers first, it's illegal. (I don't pirate movies. I do rip my kids' DVDs to my hard drive and then re-burn them to another DVD so I don't have to click through 15 minutes of junk just to show them Over the Hedge. I can just put the DVD into the player and it starts playing immediately.)
And in this particular case, for downloading one film each defendant is expected to pay a settlement fee of $1500. That's not just punishment, that's not fair compensation for damages. That's a movie studio exploiting unfair laws to make a profit. When you can pay a $4000 speeding ticket and get two weeks in prison for shoplifting a pack of gum, I'll consider a $1500 penalty for pirating one film a fair price. Until then, this is a corruption of the legal system.
But then GM realized that profits would be low and found it more profitable to simply lobby against the laws and have them changed.
Notice how many Japanese, German, or Korean automakers offered an electric vehicle in the United States to compete with the EV1 between the EV1's introduction and 2007: zero. GM didn't cancel the project because of low profits per lease, they canceled it because they were losing a lot of money per lease. No one else could do better.
GM leadership screwed up in huge ways from the 1970s until the mid 2000s, but somewhere around 2005 people started waking up and crash safety, fuel economy, and interior quality are way up on almost all models. There are still some embarrassments in the mix: Chevy Cobalt, Chevy Aveo, Chevy Impala, Buick Lucerne, Cadillac DTS. But there is plenty that is competent, for the first time since long before I was born. And the Cobalt gets replaced later this year, the Aveo gets redesigned next year, the Buick Lucerne is being retired, and the Cadillac DTS will be replaced by the much improved Cadillac XTS. And later this year the Chevy Volt goes on sale, the first plug-in electric car that uses an onboard generator to extend the range when you drive more than 40 miles at one time.
That's a solid point, but in terms of cost GUI network management apps that do everything you describe are pretty rare. Most of your cheaper firewalls with GUI management tools offer a limited subset of those options and little or no access to the underlying scripts they create and execute.
So with plenty of time and unlimited funds, I would purchase an off-the-shelf GUI solution or hire a group to write one. In the real world, in many circumstances doing things via the command line is far more practical in the long run.
Agreed. If you can read http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/ and still believe in the Bible, you are beyond reason. There is more logic and especially more mercy and internal consistency in stories of Santa Claus than the intolerant, slavery-promoting, sexist, inconsistent, genocidal torturer worshiped by the Jews and the Christians. If you can read, say, the Book of Genesis, the Book of Joshua, and the Book of Revelations and not conclude your deity is a vicious maniac, you lack the ability to reason.
Reasonable political dissent doesn't get much attention in the media. When most people read "libertarian", they think of someone who wants to dismantle the government entirely and improve things by becoming a bunch of warring anarchist tribes battling for resources. Just like most people think a "green" is someone who would rather see people starve to death than drive to work in a vehicle that runs on fossil fuels.
The linked article does not assert that this is Superman's first flight, or that this is the first super-hero working in the city. Where did the Slashdot author get that? One of the first tag lines for Superman was "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound" - writers did not give him the ability to fly until some time in the 1940s, I think, and by that time dozens or hundreds of other flying superheroes had been created.
The US burns 2 trillion pounds of coal per year for electricity. We should be able to find underground storage room for nuclear waste pretty easily when we burn the equivalent of one quarter of a mountain in excavated coal per year.
1. The US Department of Energy statistics are that the US burns 2 trillion pounds (just under 1 billion metric tons) of coal per year.
2. Solar and wind power is cost competitive with nuclear and coal when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. To generate renewable energy around the clock, you have two choices:
2a. Add a power storage system to your solar or wind power plant that captures most of the energy and stores it for night time, cloudy days, or calm winds. This increases your costs by at least a factor of five, blowing your cost parity with nuclear and coal to hell.
2b. Supplement your renewable energy source with another power source to fill in the gaps in renewable energy generation. This is what is usually done, and the favored backup is natural gas. This also ends your cost parity with nuclear and coal, and guarantees your continued reliance on non-renewable energy sources or nuclear.
We could bury all of the nuclear waste we generated in the history of the human race in the underground space the United States clears with one year of mining coal.
Changing an application into a good multi-threaded application can take more work than writing the original single-threaded version. By reputation, most game development companies work at a fast pace with long hours and plenty of overtime just for fixing regular bugs and adding normal game features. Many companies might not have the time or resources to tackle multi-threading at the same time.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that it's not easy and pure laziness does not explain it.
Read the link he provided on Thiomersal. It has not been used in vaccines in the US in ten years, and further was never proven to cause autism in any published, peer-reviewed study. Per the original article, the first author who published a 1998 article linking thiomersal in vaccines with autism was financially involved with alternative technology. He wasn't trying to save children, he was trying to get rich.
Except that they haven't used Mercury in vaccinations in years.
Your 1 in 20 million anecdote is not compelling - far more people would have died for not being vaccinated if the vaccines were removed. But further, which staff at what children's hospital? Care to provide a link? Because I think that kind of adverse reaction would have been all over the news and I've never heard of it.
I don't get the dislike for PHP. C has warts. Java has warts. PHP has warts. That doesn't change the fact that they're all tremendously popular and frequently used. If someone wants to write a PHP GUI app, what's wrong with that?
I love religious wars over programming languages as much as anyone, but at the end of the day getting things done is all that matters. I don't like Facebook much, but you can't argue with its success and its developers got the job done with PHP.
I think the person meant that they would rather have a traditional seatbelt and a front end crumple zone made of this metal foam versus a seatbelt, a regular crumple zone, and an airbag.
I'm not sure I agree. I've been in collisions where the vehicles involved were moving at about 20 or 25 mph, and the speed was too low for airbags to deploy. In both cases the vehicles involved were nearly destroyed and none of the occupants were hurt. If you're moving fast enough in a collision that an airbag deploys, you probably want the protection it offers.
The United States uses 2 trillion pounds (0.909 trillion kg) of coal per year to generate 50% of our electricity, and operates 104 nuclear power plants to generate about 20% of our electricity. Even if we can't come up with an effective, safe technology for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, I think it's clear that a few dozen or even few hundred tons of nuclear waste per year is a tiny problem compared to the mind-boggling amount of mining and pollution associated with coal power.
Microsoft has the resources to keep trying until they get it right. If it takes two more generations of Xbox until it's profitable, so what? They aren't likely to implode any time soon.
"Learn how to program, you likely don't need more than 128 megs of RAM anyways. Learning how to write tight code is the trick."
Unless you expect me to rewrite KDE and Firefox, your advice is not too useful. Even if I make my own apps very tiny, the off-the-shelf applications I prefer are major memory hogs.
I'm impressed by what this fellow has done, and I want to learn more about hardware and memory manipulation because I'm very curious. My own formal and self-taught programming background is very weak on low level stuff, and while it doesn't hurt my web development skills it bothers me. But in terms of big news, hacking the PS3 near launch when 256 MB of RAM and multi-core CPUs were much more expensive would have been more noteworthy.
Good point, good point. For example you can find a dozen different diet recommendations, each with ten medical studies backing their particular nutrient mix. As to which is actually healthiest, who knows?
The American Heart Association does not profit from this news, and it is not trying to sell anything with the results. If there was a particular medicine, exercise, food, or other product implicit in their recommendations I would be dubious. I don't think your accusation of bias is justified.
On the other hand, I am personally troubled by the results. Between work and leisure I spend 50-60 hours per week in front of a monitor, and if the study is accurate than I would guess that most of the negative results of television watching transfer to computer use. I may resort to something absurd like an alert system every hour to force me to take a walk.
Well, be warned - a fair number of books on "non spanking parenting" are totally obnoxious. "Instead of wrapping a fence post in barbed wire, holding it over a fire, and dipping it into sulphuric acid before beating your child into a slab of meat for the offense of dropping a few drops of milk onto the table, you might try...." The idea that a parent who believes in spanking is intelligent and well meaning but may not have been exposed to effective non-spanking techniques is alien to some writers, and they present the topic as though we were just too mean and stupid to consider other methods before.
But I found 1 2 3 Magic helpful, and spending time with experienced Daycare staff - they have to control a horde of children without hitting them, they get very good at control without violence.
Time outs, and losing privileges. For most of our meals we give the kids a choice between two or three (reasonably) healthy things, and they pick what we cook. When they misbehave, my wife and I pick. Normally the kids get to watch one movie a day, two when we're especially busy. Most times they pick the film. When they misbehave, they watch nothing or I pick something I want to see. Likewise you can take away toys, trips to the park, favorite items of clothing, and so forth. When they act like a baby, they're forced to take extra two hour naps just like a baby. If the child won't sit still and be quiet for their time out, three minutes are added (more if the kid is older) and I physically pin them down.
It works just fine. My wife and I don't hit our kids, except for the very young ones who understand nothing else. They behave better than I did at their age, and my parents whacked my behind with a wooden spoon or a paddle all of the time.
Or to look at it another way, watch a dog trainer. Some of the best ones out there don't need to hit the dogs at all. My dog is a big Rottweiler mix, and I've never had to hit him. If he gets in trouble, I just yell at him to get into his crate, and he walks in on his own. I lock the door, and he's stuck in there for an hour.
It's normal to get very defensive when the discipline techniques your own parents used are criticized. I was a big defender of spanking for years. But just because you didn't grow up with anxiety problems, depression, or alcoholism doesn't change the fact that statistically, kids who are hit are more likely to grow up with those problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. And I'm very happy that the Gates Foundation gives to charity. But it costs Bill Gates nothing in terms of his standards of living to make those donations. The less wealthy people who take a real measurable hit to their standard of living to support charity are, in my view, far more heroic than Bill Gates even if the net benefit of his donations is far more than the net benefit of theirs.
Again, I'm not criticizing Gates. What he's doing is awesome. But there are millions of less wealthy people who are more noble and deserve more praise because they're giving up far more than he is in proportion to what they have.
The problem isn't Microsoft management, the problem is the market changed. Consider:
1. It was easy to sell people on moving from Windows 95 and 98 to Windows 2000 and XP because 2000 and XP were dramatic improvements. Today, I happen to think Windows 7 is superior to Windows XP but it's not $200 superior. I wouldn't object to Windows 7 if I bought it pre-installed on a PC, but I wouldn't buy the upgrade for an existing machine either.
2. Hardware improvements moved much faster and hardware requirements moved much faster in the 1990s and early 2000s versus now. For the great majority of home and business PC uses, a mid range machine purchased in 2004 is still adequate to their needs. Buyers are purchasing new hardware less often, which causes a corresponding slow in software sales.
3. Lots of households did not have PCs from the 1990s through early 2000s. Now most families have one or more computers, so the exponential growth of the PC market has ended.
4. The competition is substantially better - although Microsoft still owns 90% of the market, so this is the weakest point. Microsoft has improved its products incrementally from Office 2000 and Windows 2000 to today, but in the same period Linux has gone from (arguably) trailing Windows in ease of installation and UI features to full parity plus all of the usual benefits of open source and easy software package management. Mac OS X is generally very well reviewed, too.
There are a lot of exceptions to that. I got laid off as a C++ developer and I was so desperate to pay the mortgage that I botched interview after interview by being panicked and answering questions like "How do you terminate a string?" with "I can't remember". Pretty soon no C++ shop in a fifty mile radius would look at me. Desperate, I started teaching myself Java and calmed down enough to not botch an interview for an entry level Java position. Three years later, I was earning double my salary as a C++ developer. Score one for dumb luck.
Some hard workers get sick. You start at a good job, you work as hard as you can, and then you catch Mononucleosis and get fired for missing six days in a row.
Sometimes events beyond your control mess you up. You open your restaurant, and two weeks later the township announces that the bridge on the main road to your location will be closed for construction for three months. All the commuters that were your customers take a different route, and your cash flow collapses and you go out of business.
Sometimes your boss is just an asshole, and you can't find a better job.
You have to keep working hard, because there's nothing else you can do. You certainly won't succeed by giving up. But there are plenty of unlucky people out there who run themselves ragged with hard work and get nowhere.
I don't download pirated films either. But consider, under current US copyright law if you make a mixed CD of songs for a friend it's illegal. If you play them a 2 minute clip from the latest NFL game it's illegal. If you rip a DVD to your hard drive so you can watch different sections without navigating through the previews and disclaimers first, it's illegal. (I don't pirate movies. I do rip my kids' DVDs to my hard drive and then re-burn them to another DVD so I don't have to click through 15 minutes of junk just to show them Over the Hedge. I can just put the DVD into the player and it starts playing immediately.)
And in this particular case, for downloading one film each defendant is expected to pay a settlement fee of $1500. That's not just punishment, that's not fair compensation for damages. That's a movie studio exploiting unfair laws to make a profit. When you can pay a $4000 speeding ticket and get two weeks in prison for shoplifting a pack of gum, I'll consider a $1500 penalty for pirating one film a fair price. Until then, this is a corruption of the legal system.
But then GM realized that profits would be low and found it more profitable to simply lobby against the laws and have them changed.
Notice how many Japanese, German, or Korean automakers offered an electric vehicle in the United States to compete with the EV1 between the EV1's introduction and 2007: zero. GM didn't cancel the project because of low profits per lease, they canceled it because they were losing a lot of money per lease. No one else could do better.
GM leadership screwed up in huge ways from the 1970s until the mid 2000s, but somewhere around 2005 people started waking up and crash safety, fuel economy, and interior quality are way up on almost all models. There are still some embarrassments in the mix: Chevy Cobalt, Chevy Aveo, Chevy Impala, Buick Lucerne, Cadillac DTS. But there is plenty that is competent, for the first time since long before I was born. And the Cobalt gets replaced later this year, the Aveo gets redesigned next year, the Buick Lucerne is being retired, and the Cadillac DTS will be replaced by the much improved Cadillac XTS. And later this year the Chevy Volt goes on sale, the first plug-in electric car that uses an onboard generator to extend the range when you drive more than 40 miles at one time.
That's a solid point, but in terms of cost GUI network management apps that do everything you describe are pretty rare. Most of your cheaper firewalls with GUI management tools offer a limited subset of those options and little or no access to the underlying scripts they create and execute.
So with plenty of time and unlimited funds, I would purchase an off-the-shelf GUI solution or hire a group to write one. In the real world, in many circumstances doing things via the command line is far more practical in the long run.
Agreed. If you can read http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/ and still believe in the Bible, you are beyond reason. There is more logic and especially more mercy and internal consistency in stories of Santa Claus than the intolerant, slavery-promoting, sexist, inconsistent, genocidal torturer worshiped by the Jews and the Christians. If you can read, say, the Book of Genesis, the Book of Joshua, and the Book of Revelations and not conclude your deity is a vicious maniac, you lack the ability to reason.
Reasonable political dissent doesn't get much attention in the media. When most people read "libertarian", they think of someone who wants to dismantle the government entirely and improve things by becoming a bunch of warring anarchist tribes battling for resources. Just like most people think a "green" is someone who would rather see people starve to death than drive to work in a vehicle that runs on fossil fuels.
The linked article does not assert that this is Superman's first flight, or that this is the first super-hero working in the city. Where did the Slashdot author get that? One of the first tag lines for Superman was "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound" - writers did not give him the ability to fly until some time in the 1940s, I think, and by that time dozens or hundreds of other flying superheroes had been created.
The US burns 2 trillion pounds of coal per year for electricity. We should be able to find underground storage room for nuclear waste pretty easily when we burn the equivalent of one quarter of a mountain in excavated coal per year.
Some other facts:
1. The US Department of Energy statistics are that the US burns 2 trillion pounds (just under 1 billion metric tons) of coal per year.
2. Solar and wind power is cost competitive with nuclear and coal when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. To generate renewable energy around the clock, you have two choices:
2a. Add a power storage system to your solar or wind power plant that captures most of the energy and stores it for night time, cloudy days, or calm winds. This increases your costs by at least a factor of five, blowing your cost parity with nuclear and coal to hell.
2b. Supplement your renewable energy source with another power source to fill in the gaps in renewable energy generation. This is what is usually done, and the favored backup is natural gas. This also ends your cost parity with nuclear and coal, and guarantees your continued reliance on non-renewable energy sources or nuclear.
We could bury all of the nuclear waste we generated in the history of the human race in the underground space the United States clears with one year of mining coal.
Changing an application into a good multi-threaded application can take more work than writing the original single-threaded version. By reputation, most game development companies work at a fast pace with long hours and plenty of overtime just for fixing regular bugs and adding normal game features. Many companies might not have the time or resources to tackle multi-threading at the same time.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that it's not easy and pure laziness does not explain it.
Then there should be studies demonstrating that children who are not vaccinated have lower incidences of autism. Where are they?
Read the link he provided on Thiomersal. It has not been used in vaccines in the US in ten years, and further was never proven to cause autism in any published, peer-reviewed study. Per the original article, the first author who published a 1998 article linking thiomersal in vaccines with autism was financially involved with alternative technology. He wasn't trying to save children, he was trying to get rich.
Except that they haven't used Mercury in vaccinations in years.
Your 1 in 20 million anecdote is not compelling - far more people would have died for not being vaccinated if the vaccines were removed. But further, which staff at what children's hospital? Care to provide a link? Because I think that kind of adverse reaction would have been all over the news and I've never heard of it.
I don't get the dislike for PHP. C has warts. Java has warts. PHP has warts. That doesn't change the fact that they're all tremendously popular and frequently used. If someone wants to write a PHP GUI app, what's wrong with that?
I love religious wars over programming languages as much as anyone, but at the end of the day getting things done is all that matters. I don't like Facebook much, but you can't argue with its success and its developers got the job done with PHP.
I think the person meant that they would rather have a traditional seatbelt and a front end crumple zone made of this metal foam versus a seatbelt, a regular crumple zone, and an airbag.
I'm not sure I agree. I've been in collisions where the vehicles involved were moving at about 20 or 25 mph, and the speed was too low for airbags to deploy. In both cases the vehicles involved were nearly destroyed and none of the occupants were hurt. If you're moving fast enough in a collision that an airbag deploys, you probably want the protection it offers.
The United States uses 2 trillion pounds (0.909 trillion kg) of coal per year to generate 50% of our electricity, and operates 104 nuclear power plants to generate about 20% of our electricity. Even if we can't come up with an effective, safe technology for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, I think it's clear that a few dozen or even few hundred tons of nuclear waste per year is a tiny problem compared to the mind-boggling amount of mining and pollution associated with coal power.
Microsoft has the resources to keep trying until they get it right. If it takes two more generations of Xbox until it's profitable, so what? They aren't likely to implode any time soon.
"Learn how to program, you likely don't need more than 128 megs of RAM anyways. Learning how to write tight code is the trick."
Unless you expect me to rewrite KDE and Firefox, your advice is not too useful. Even if I make my own apps very tiny, the off-the-shelf applications I prefer are major memory hogs.
I'm impressed by what this fellow has done, and I want to learn more about hardware and memory manipulation because I'm very curious. My own formal and self-taught programming background is very weak on low level stuff, and while it doesn't hurt my web development skills it bothers me. But in terms of big news, hacking the PS3 near launch when 256 MB of RAM and multi-core CPUs were much more expensive would have been more noteworthy.
Good point, good point. For example you can find a dozen different diet recommendations, each with ten medical studies backing their particular nutrient mix. As to which is actually healthiest, who knows?
The American Heart Association does not profit from this news, and it is not trying to sell anything with the results. If there was a particular medicine, exercise, food, or other product implicit in their recommendations I would be dubious. I don't think your accusation of bias is justified.
On the other hand, I am personally troubled by the results. Between work and leisure I spend 50-60 hours per week in front of a monitor, and if the study is accurate than I would guess that most of the negative results of television watching transfer to computer use. I may resort to something absurd like an alert system every hour to force me to take a walk.
Well, be warned - a fair number of books on "non spanking parenting" are totally obnoxious. "Instead of wrapping a fence post in barbed wire, holding it over a fire, and dipping it into sulphuric acid before beating your child into a slab of meat for the offense of dropping a few drops of milk onto the table, you might try...." The idea that a parent who believes in spanking is intelligent and well meaning but may not have been exposed to effective non-spanking techniques is alien to some writers, and they present the topic as though we were just too mean and stupid to consider other methods before.
But I found 1 2 3 Magic helpful, and spending time with experienced Daycare staff - they have to control a horde of children without hitting them, they get very good at control without violence.
When you figure out how to get a one year old to stop biting without hitting them, I'm willing to listen. I haven't figured it out.
Time outs, and losing privileges. For most of our meals we give the kids a choice between two or three (reasonably) healthy things, and they pick what we cook. When they misbehave, my wife and I pick. Normally the kids get to watch one movie a day, two when we're especially busy. Most times they pick the film. When they misbehave, they watch nothing or I pick something I want to see. Likewise you can take away toys, trips to the park, favorite items of clothing, and so forth. When they act like a baby, they're forced to take extra two hour naps just like a baby. If the child won't sit still and be quiet for their time out, three minutes are added (more if the kid is older) and I physically pin them down.
It works just fine. My wife and I don't hit our kids, except for the very young ones who understand nothing else. They behave better than I did at their age, and my parents whacked my behind with a wooden spoon or a paddle all of the time.
Or to look at it another way, watch a dog trainer. Some of the best ones out there don't need to hit the dogs at all. My dog is a big Rottweiler mix, and I've never had to hit him. If he gets in trouble, I just yell at him to get into his crate, and he walks in on his own. I lock the door, and he's stuck in there for an hour.
It's normal to get very defensive when the discipline techniques your own parents used are criticized. I was a big defender of spanking for years. But just because you didn't grow up with anxiety problems, depression, or alcoholism doesn't change the fact that statistically, kids who are hit are more likely to grow up with those problems.