which is what HFT is: an unfair tax by those who can afford the
screamiest servers, the closest fibre optic connection, and the
scariest code. it renders the idea of a fair marketplace a lie
the solution is easy: queue all trades on a heart beat
No. You're just shifting the advantage to other assets. The same companies that
can afford the screamiest servers, closest fibre optic connection and scariest code can also afford the smartest mathematicians on Wall Street. Unless you're proposing to outlaw smart people in the "fair" market, you're not solving anything, just rearranging the deck chairs.
The problem is that the stock markets have too much money in them, which attracts the gamblers and causes market events to have too much influence in the real world.
So what? Articles for laypersons are great, but completely useless. I'd much rather have useful wikipedia articles than fluff, when it comes to mathematics/physics/computer science.
There are enough books on mathematics that are worth reading by the general public. There's no reason why wikipedia's math section should follow suit. It fills a gap that is visible to, and only affects, highly trained professionals in scientific fields. It's a niche reasource, and as such it's pretty good as it goes.
How would that work? In mathematics, the intuitive interpretation is about as conjectural and unsourced as it gets. The whole *point* of doing mathematics rigorously is because the intuitive ideas are unreliable as a guide to the truth.
Given wikipedia's insistence on sourcing interpretations and skirting controversy, it seems natural that adding intuition (especially if the contributor is a random web surfer) is not appropriate for the majority of math articles.
Possession of bits of any source or type out not be a crime.
Bits can represent anything. For example, bits can represent a sum of money in a bank account. Possession of bits in that case is possession of money. And money can represent anything. For example, money can be stolen. Ergo, possession of bits can be proof of some crime.
What do you mean, he's not the one paying for the devices? He paid his money, and took delivery. That's all that matters in a court of law.
Your fantasy about making losses is irrelevant. If Amazon is making a loss, that's not the customers fault, it's the Amazon CEO's. And all they have to do is sell at a reasonable price. In fact, selling at a loss is dodgy, and is quite close to dumping and other monopolistic practices. And that harms customers in the long run.
There's no reason at all that people should be changing their own behaviour and expectations, just so that some multinational CEO's marketing brainfarts can be successful.
What you don't understand is that if Wikipedia wants to stop running behind, it needs more manpower. It can only get more manpower by lowering its standards to something that is reasonable to the population of volunteers it wants to attract.
The best way to interpret the symptom you describe is therefore as a gauge of how far Wikipedia has strayed from the mainstream standards, not as a problem with too much trivia.
Huh? Seriously? You think watching ads is like working for a living?
You need to wake up. You don't actually have to watch ads. You're not going to be evicted from your home, or prevented from getting a car loan, and restaurants aren't going to turn you away because you didn't watch your quota of ads that day.
Suggestion: Try a text browser. Seriously. At first it seems primitive, but stick with it for a few days, just enough time to get used to the keys etc. It's amazing how relaxing it gets to read websites without *any* visual layout or fonts or pictures of any kind. Pure information, all the time. I switched about 10 years ago, and still only run firefox occasionally.
Tracking can be
beneficial for both the advertiser and the user - we all like to be offered
relevant content, and the advertiser likes to offer it to people who he
thinks will be interested.
No, we do NOT. We do NOT all like to be offered RELEVANT content. That is one of the insidious fallacies that ad peddlers (and Google is a prime offender) like to claim so they can justify their practices.
Ads are noise, whether they are relevant or not. Take your favourite kind of music, say your favourite songs from your favourite band. Do you want to hear those songs ALL THE TIME? While you're driving to work, while working, after work when watching TV, etc? Clearly NOT.
NEARLY ALL THE TIME, PEOPLE DON'T WANT ADVERTISING, RELEVANT OR NOT (caps to make it easy on the stupid Googlebot;-)
The whole idea that we need to be aware of available choices and having choices is good is bullshit. What we need is to be able to control our environment, and if we want choices we'll ask our friends first, thanks very much.
If it's only 'all Australians who're under suspicion'
that's one thing, but it clearly says 'All Australians' without caveat.
Its still bad even in the first case. Collecting and keeping data about everybody means fishing expeditions are easy.
Let's say you don't like some guy like Julian Assange. You suspect he's a thief after a tipoff, but when you get a warrant and send the Police to check his appartment, they don't find anything. Drat!
Luckily, instead of suspecting something specific and trying to catch him out on *that*, you can just look at his complete life history for the last two years and find *something*. Maybe he's really not a thief at all, so how about a serious traffic offense? No? Well, there's no need to waste time and money on that attack. How about unpaid taxes? Nope. Dodgy property deals? Nope.
How about something sexual? Unfortunately, he's not gay, that's inconvenient. Unless... how about rape? Let's see has he slept with anyone recently? Yes! How about we bribe them!
With 16GB RAM being about $100, claiming memory usage is pointless.
And that attitude is why Microsoft just shat its pants and frantically tries
to reinvent Windows into a tablet friendly OS.
Being efficient is always a good idea. Even if your system has 16GB of memory available, how do you know what else is running on the system? How can you tell what other long running processes the _user_ thinks are much more important than yours?
Besides, RAM has been the new disk for years now. If your program doesn't fit in L2 cache, all those intermittent RAM fetches will make it dog slow.
You are only held liable if the elite don't like you.
In other words, *everybody* is now liable. Look at how the RIAA makes these blanket accusations and random lawsuits against everybody and their pet hamster. If unrelated individuals can now be considered infringers due to performing a single step of some bullshit patent, this means that any patent troll like Nathan Myrvold's company has now grounds to potentially sue everyone (and extort a settlement fee).
That would be great, since it would mean those nice Russians did all the hard work of
identifying the evil spying functions for us hackers to remove;-)
I get what you're saying. Customers' IT departments like to lock down their systems, and that caused problems for your (former?) company. So it's natural to wish that the Linux community would adjust its development practices so that various distros' users' IT departments' decision makers can't mess about too much.
But the fact is that decision makers in IT departments will always find ways to mess about. If it isn't ABIs, it will be something else. The philosophy of the Linux community is that technical excellence is more important than IT policies. This is quite deliberate, and is IMHO the reason for Linux's success, and also the reason why there are so many different versions of everything. If ABIs were locked down, and everything else IT departments can think of was imposed as a constraint, the developer community would simply die off for lack of interest.
Personally, I'm intensely comfortable with the idea that GNU/Linux is a niche OS that will continue to be around in 30 years, while more focused OSes intended for a particular market segment come and go.
Way to miss the point. Apple and Google's asking PRICE is way too HIGH. PERIOD.
When they come back with a reasonable offer where they don't expect to spy on our lives, they'll be invited back to the negotiating table. Until then, nobody owes them respect just because their CEOs thought up some crazy evil business plan .
The OP is talking about ABIs (Application Binary Interface), but as your post implies, that's a red herring. Who cares if the low level binary interface that handles OS and library system calls changes? Just recompile the software for the most recent version of everything you've got.
We can do that in the FOSS world, because we ship the source to everything and the APIs are what matters. The ABI "problem" is a nonproblem that's really a side effect of the misguided commercial belief in secrecy.
If you're a company that only wants to sell a compiled binary to a bunch of clients, then you don't get to complain if the binary you prepared fifteen years ago for some distro using linux 2.1 no longer works in 2012.
Just tell your clients to run the older distro, or else recompile your code for a modern distro.
Or you know, you could make your code open source, and reap the benefits of community support.
COM is a poor way of doing client/server and dynamic link libraries rolled into one. There are only a few problems solved by COM objects which already have proven solutions in Unix/Linux like systems:
1) having one COM object offering services to several applications to reduce duplication. It's a client/server design, but with nonstandard communication betwen the client and the server in the form of an API instead of a socket connection.
When the connection breaks because the COM object or the application crashes,
you get failures that aren't as clean to recover from as a proper socket connection. When you use dynamic link libraries, you get more graceful handling of
versioning (note: versioning of DLLs in Windows is hell).
2) The Unix pipeline/scripting approach is a cleaner way to combine common functionality available on the system than combining COM objects. At the core the issue is that COM object interfaces are too diverse to be mixed and matched as easily as a collection of scripts with command line switches. In particular, it's a pain to shunt an extra middle man object between some program calling a COM object's API member function, and the API function being called, because member function signatures are too diverse. With the command line paradigm this is much easier.
3) The Unix filesystem philosophy is more robust than a special purpose registry of data. Since COM objects aren't intended to be standalone server applications, they normally have to be managed by a complex support system. By contrast, in Unix systems the applications are essentially on their own, which leads to a simpler base system, which can be optimized more readily. In particular, the system doesn't have to load a miriad of components during boot just because the shell needs hundreds of COM objects which depend on hundreds of others, all to display a mouse and some icons.
4) While you might think that 20 years is old for some COM based applications, you might like to know that popular editors on Unix like Emacs or vi for example are well past 30. It is safe to say that if their success did not depend on a system of COM objects provided by some system.
That makes no sense. You want to solve a problem (female mutilation) by making it a non-problem (they get mutilated everywhere).
THINK about what you're arguing for. Either you believe in a country that protects the rights of its citizens, or you don't.
In the first case, the correct answer is to penalize the parents who send/allow the girls to be sent abroad for the procedure. It's easy to do, make it a legal obligation on doctors to report mutilation when they checkup on children. Parents who are caught pay a large fine, go to jail, etc: no different from "honour killings" and other dubious ethnic practices that are incompatible with individual human rights.
Apple is progressively moving towards fewer and fewer button.
Don't worry! Once they've removed ALL the buttons, they'll introduce cool new skeuomorphic versions of classic vintage MacOS System 4 UI buttons from the last millenium for the discerning hipster customer who likes the pseudo tactile experience of turning their iPhone 12 on (and also off) every once in a while.
All terrorists are reckless and amoral. Of course, some people call them freedom fighters, and then they're the opposite.
So, aside from showing us on which side you sit, do you actually have anything constructive to suggest? I mean besides invoking nebulous "people of good moral character" (heh, how did that work out for Thomas More?).
Slashdot Mirror
No. You're just shifting the advantage to other assets. The same companies that can afford the screamiest servers, closest fibre optic connection and scariest code can also afford the smartest mathematicians on Wall Street. Unless you're proposing to outlaw smart people in the "fair" market, you're not solving anything, just rearranging the deck chairs.
The problem is that the stock markets have too much money in them, which attracts the gamblers and causes market events to have too much influence in the real world.
There are enough books on mathematics that are worth reading by the general public. There's no reason why wikipedia's math section should follow suit. It fills a gap that is visible to, and only affects, highly trained professionals in scientific fields. It's a niche reasource, and as such it's pretty good as it goes.
How would that work? In mathematics, the intuitive interpretation is about as conjectural and unsourced as it gets. The whole *point* of doing mathematics rigorously is because the intuitive ideas are unreliable as a guide to the truth. Given wikipedia's insistence on sourcing interpretations and skirting controversy, it seems natural that adding intuition (especially if the contributor is a random web surfer) is not appropriate for the majority of math articles.
Bits can represent anything. For example, bits can represent a sum of money in a bank account. Possession of bits in that case is possession of money. And money can represent anything. For example, money can be stolen. Ergo, possession of bits can be proof of some crime.
The precedent with cable television is clear. Once ad-spammers gain a foothold, they will never leave. The only solutions are technical.
Your fantasy about making losses is irrelevant. If Amazon is making a loss, that's not the customers fault, it's the Amazon CEO's. And all they have to do is sell at a reasonable price. In fact, selling at a loss is dodgy, and is quite close to dumping and other monopolistic practices. And that harms customers in the long run.
There's no reason at all that people should be changing their own behaviour and expectations, just so that some multinational CEO's marketing brainfarts can be successful.
Aye, there secrets oot, no!
The best way to interpret the symptom you describe is therefore as a gauge of how far Wikipedia has strayed from the mainstream standards, not as a problem with too much trivia.
These imperial droids are not the ones you're looking for...
You need to wake up. You don't actually have to watch ads. You're not going to be evicted from your home, or prevented from getting a car loan, and restaurants aren't going to turn you away because you didn't watch your quota of ads that day.
Suggestion: Try a text browser. Seriously. At first it seems primitive, but stick with it for a few days, just enough time to get used to the keys etc. It's amazing how relaxing it gets to read websites without *any* visual layout or fonts or pictures of any kind. Pure information, all the time. I switched about 10 years ago, and still only run firefox occasionally.
No, we do NOT. We do NOT all like to be offered RELEVANT content. That is one of the insidious fallacies that ad peddlers (and Google is a prime offender) like to claim so they can justify their practices.
Ads are noise, whether they are relevant or not. Take your favourite kind of music, say your favourite songs from your favourite band. Do you want to hear those songs ALL THE TIME? While you're driving to work, while working, after work when watching TV, etc? Clearly NOT.
NEARLY ALL THE TIME, PEOPLE DON'T WANT ADVERTISING, RELEVANT OR NOT (caps to make it easy on the stupid Googlebot ;-)
The whole idea that we need to be aware of available choices and having choices is good is bullshit. What we need is to be able to control our environment, and if we want choices we'll ask our friends first, thanks very much.
Its still bad even in the first case. Collecting and keeping data about everybody means fishing expeditions are easy.
Let's say you don't like some guy like Julian Assange. You suspect he's a thief after a tipoff, but when you get a warrant and send the Police to check his appartment, they don't find anything. Drat!
Luckily, instead of suspecting something specific and trying to catch him out on *that*, you can just look at his complete life history for the last two years and find *something*. Maybe he's really not a thief at all, so how about a serious traffic offense? No? Well, there's no need to waste time and money on that attack. How about unpaid taxes? Nope. Dodgy property deals? Nope. How about something sexual? Unfortunately, he's not gay, that's inconvenient. Unless... how about rape? Let's see has he slept with anyone recently? Yes! How about we bribe them!
And that attitude is why Microsoft just shat its pants and frantically tries to reinvent Windows into a tablet friendly OS.
Being efficient is always a good idea. Even if your system has 16GB of memory available, how do you know what else is running on the system? How can you tell what other long running processes the _user_ thinks are much more important than yours? Besides, RAM has been the new disk for years now. If your program doesn't fit in L2 cache, all those intermittent RAM fetches will make it dog slow.
Unless you expect an American RIAA goon to have you extradited to Gitmo just on the day of your release.
In other words, *everybody* is now liable. Look at how the RIAA makes these blanket accusations and random lawsuits against everybody and their pet hamster. If unrelated individuals can now be considered infringers due to performing a single step of some bullshit patent, this means that any patent troll like Nathan Myrvold's company has now grounds to potentially sue everyone (and extort a settlement fee).
That would be great, since it would mean those nice Russians did all the hard work of identifying the evil spying functions for us hackers to remove ;-)
But the fact is that decision makers in IT departments will always find ways to mess about. If it isn't ABIs, it will be something else. The philosophy of the Linux community is that technical excellence is more important than IT policies. This is quite deliberate, and is IMHO the reason for Linux's success, and also the reason why there are so many different versions of everything. If ABIs were locked down, and everything else IT departments can think of was imposed as a constraint, the developer community would simply die off for lack of interest.
Personally, I'm intensely comfortable with the idea that GNU/Linux is a niche OS that will continue to be around in 30 years, while more focused OSes intended for a particular market segment come and go.
When they come back with a reasonable offer where they don't expect to spy on our lives, they'll be invited back to the negotiating table. Until then, nobody owes them respect just because their CEOs thought up some crazy evil business plan .
We can do that in the FOSS world, because we ship the source to everything and the APIs are what matters. The ABI "problem" is a nonproblem that's really a side effect of the misguided commercial belief in secrecy.
If you're a company that only wants to sell a compiled binary to a bunch of clients, then you don't get to complain if the binary you prepared fifteen years ago for some distro using linux 2.1 no longer works in 2012.
Just tell your clients to run the older distro, or else recompile your code for a modern distro. Or you know, you could make your code open source, and reap the benefits of community support.
1) having one COM object offering services to several applications to reduce duplication. It's a client/server design, but with nonstandard communication betwen the client and the server in the form of an API instead of a socket connection. When the connection breaks because the COM object or the application crashes, you get failures that aren't as clean to recover from as a proper socket connection. When you use dynamic link libraries, you get more graceful handling of versioning (note: versioning of DLLs in Windows is hell).
2) The Unix pipeline/scripting approach is a cleaner way to combine common functionality available on the system than combining COM objects. At the core the issue is that COM object interfaces are too diverse to be mixed and matched as easily as a collection of scripts with command line switches. In particular, it's a pain to shunt an extra middle man object between some program calling a COM object's API member function, and the API function being called, because member function signatures are too diverse. With the command line paradigm this is much easier.
3) The Unix filesystem philosophy is more robust than a special purpose registry of data. Since COM objects aren't intended to be standalone server applications, they normally have to be managed by a complex support system. By contrast, in Unix systems the applications are essentially on their own, which leads to a simpler base system, which can be optimized more readily. In particular, the system doesn't have to load a miriad of components during boot just because the shell needs hundreds of COM objects which depend on hundreds of others, all to display a mouse and some icons.
4) While you might think that 20 years is old for some COM based applications, you might like to know that popular editors on Unix like Emacs or vi for example are well past 30. It is safe to say that if their success did not depend on a system of COM objects provided by some system.
THINK about what you're arguing for. Either you believe in a country that protects the rights of its citizens, or you don't.
In the first case, the correct answer is to penalize the parents who send/allow the girls to be sent abroad for the procedure. It's easy to do, make it a legal obligation on doctors to report mutilation when they checkup on children. Parents who are caught pay a large fine, go to jail, etc: no different from "honour killings" and other dubious ethnic practices that are incompatible with individual human rights.
Don't worry! Once they've removed ALL the buttons, they'll introduce cool new skeuomorphic versions of classic vintage MacOS System 4 UI buttons from the last millenium for the discerning hipster customer who likes the pseudo tactile experience of turning their iPhone 12 on (and also off) every once in a while.
D'Oh! Couldn't they just say it's a reboot of the Leather Godesses Of Phobos? Mmmmh, .... Phobos ....
So, aside from showing us on which side you sit, do you actually have anything constructive to suggest? I mean besides invoking nebulous "people of good moral character" (heh, how did that work out for Thomas More?).