I think the reason this will work when the eyetoy didn't will boil down to subtle differences and the fact that it's on an XBox and not a PS2. The XBox has a pretty good following and if M$ can manage to properly market the device (as Nintendo did the Wii) I think they'll have enough success to keep the top slot a while longer. However, what they're working on has been in the lab for at least a decade now see BLUI for example... and that has nothing to do with Microsoft.
stay lean. Stay lean in your personal lives and keep your development lean. By staying lean you can change directions quickly and respond to problems by altering tactics and even potentially abandoning entire lines of development.
Once you pickup weight in the form of staff (who will be dependent on your consistent revenue) you will have additional pressures on yourselves and your product. Large customers will also put demands on your product that may not be beneficial to its overall health. Pressure of legacy support can also derail development plans.
The more gradually you grow in your initial phases the higher probability you will have of laying a firm foundation to grow rapidly on. You hope to eventually get big. Putting it off initially should help you control how you grow when you finally do take off.
SaaS can mean free and open if the SaaS company publishes their source code as Open Source. The company can still make money because they provide the hosting, troubleshooting, administration, and support services to clients that choose to host their install with the parent company.
SaaS does not have to mean proprietary or even vendor lock-in. It can mean the software is libre free and what you are paying for is electrons (powering the machines) and not the bits (composing the software). It's a good model when run that way.
Nice little article I'm really glad this got posted. It really does nice job of tying things together. No, I don't take it seriously... but the author definitely understands the different philosophies that are under each programming language and manages to make a reasonably entertaining connection back to a philosopher.
I would just need that amount for a few days. I'm sure I could turn it all around. Just deposit that amount in my offshore bank account as my salary. If it doesn't work... you won't be out any more than usual. Why not give me a try?
I suppose if you put rules on the recipient of the "gift" on what they must do next... or fees they have to pay to get the gift... then it's not really a gift is it?
But, to avoid being modded offtopic, let's ask another question: Why should it be illegal to play pyramid schemes?
Because the unwritten rule of American style capitalism is that there must be value creation somewhere. Laborers create value by exchanging their lives for the creation of services or products. Miners dig value out of the ground. Bankers charge interest. Traders (stocks and otherwise) play the supply and demand game ostensibly creating value via manipulation of time or distance.
why is religion still legal while promising essentially the same?
Because (at least in the US) they are regulated to prevent the show of profit. They are "non-profit" which means they can pay salaries to clergy but they can't turn that into more money than they can justify needing. In other words, people may be "getting rich in heaven" but if anyone is getting rich here it ain't no church... its a business.
And that's why people tend to be suspicious of televangelism it sure looks like someone is getting rich here on this side of heaven. And if they are getting rich then they may go to jail because they aren't a church anymore but a pyramid scheme. Once profits are shown, non-profit protections are lifted.
The unwritten rule of American brand capitalism is: "Thou shall create value" anything else is a sin.
You have it just a little bit wrong. The labor the worker/slave produces is value. Precious value. The most precious value they have, the very stuff of their life. And they give it up. They give it to the guy at the top and in exchange they get money.
If the company produces any kind of product or service then the time is converted into this valuable thing. And that valuable thing is what the boss-man is trading for the money he has to pay the laborers for the slice of their lives they have sacrificed on the alter of the company.
For something to be called a Ponzi scheme, that necessitates that there is no intrinsic value in the trade. In other words I give you money in promise of more. You take my money and essentially give it to someone else while no value has been created anywhere. When I ask for my money back you go find another person (or twenty), take the money from them and give it to me.
If you charged someone interest, then you would be a bank. If you paid someone money so they could pay an employee... and the employee created something that was sold for more than the employee's salary sending the profits back to you... then you are an investor. If you take my money, invest it (remember the whole thing with paying an employee two or more links away from you) on my behalf... then you are a broker.
Remember the current crisis is a "banking" crisis because we started trading loans as if they were stocks. That's a relatively new idea (not a hundred years old yet IIRC) so we don't regulate it well. The reason that wasn't a Ponzi scheme is that the home owner pays interest... essentially they create value at their jobs and turn that into interest payments.
The trick is that the scheme may be very close to a Ponzi scheme but at the very tail... hundreds of trades deep... someone is drawing a paycheck and/or creating something of value in exchange. Their cut maybe small but they are the ones creating value with the very stuff their lives are made of. That value creation is what keeps the scheme from falling apart.
The fact that the laborers create value by sacrifice of their very lives means value is created. Therefore you don't have a Ponzi scheme. My hunch is the fewer steps there are between the worker and the investor the more profitable the system is since there are fewer middle-men taking their cut and less chance that a fellow like Ponzi can hide where the money really went.
But. The differentiation between capitalism and socialism is who your boss' boss is. If your boss' boss is either the people (stock holders) or the government (the state) then you have either capitalism (stock holders) or a socialism (government officials).
Each system has its flaws. That's why America's capitalism has become a blend. Your drug company answers to share holders but it also answers to the FDA in the US and the EMEA (I think) in Europe. The blended approach seems to work well as companies remain profitable but also are prevented from absolute opportunism.
Consider... the Ponzi Scheme is illegal in the US. The reason is that no value creation is occurring. Why should the government care how profits are shown? A purely "laissez-faire" capitalism wouldn't care... right?
After all, if you can put it under test you could combinatorically determine the function of the software by slamming every combination of input at the thing and cataloging the output... but such an approach would be very expensive and time consuming
Slight understatement - such an approach would typically be totally impossible for a non-trivial program (some sort of exponential type function describing the number of inputs as a function of amount of input). Crudely, a program accepting just one 80 char record consisting only of upper case letters and display numerics has 36**80 possible inputs.
Oh, that's not too bad. We could just hook up a Beowulf cluster with a few thousand nodes and run an EA on it for a few million years. Not like you simply couldn't replace the original program.
Just a little thing called reality we would have to contend with.
I think you'll only notice if you join a company that uses COBOL a lot, a financial company generally, and only then if you're employed to help with it. Even then, you'll probably only be interfacing to a "black box" where you don;t know or care what language runs it.
Which is a very good point.
I've been thinking with all this virtualization and such that you could eventually package up all that old COBOL code onto a virtual machine and just port the virtualization software to new platforms. Forever creating a black box of software that "just works" with out any idea of how or why.
If that does indeed happen then there may develop pockets of entire industries over time that are as mysterious and unintelligible as tax code. Now even if you had a black box of software that was contained in a VM it wouldn't mean you could never replace it.
After all, if you can put it under test you could combinatorically determine the function of the software by slamming every combination of input at the thing and cataloging the output... but such an approach would be very expensive and time consuming and it is much more likely future generations will want to add new function instead of rewriting old function.
In other words, you could rewrite that COBOL but it would be impractical and why bother? Unless significant rules of the real world that the software is supposed to model changes. There may be very little call to do such a thing.
Its like your grandfather. Everyone knows he's too old and can't keep up with the kids anymore, but you don't want to say it to his face right? We're just waiting for the last COBOL programmer to die off and then then everyone will breath a remorseful sigh of relief and start coding in Java again.
And then the same thing will happen with Java and Python.
And since 1.6, with annotations and generics, I'm not sure that the complaint about inflexibility is really there.
Annotations and generics have been there since 1.5. However, yes, this is still quite inflexible - what about lambdas, for example (which Python has)?
I don't know much about these things but supposedly that's why Groovy Closures are a big deal.
from the link...
Since Groovy doesn't provide a way to define a closed lambda function and a block of code might not be a closed lambda function at all (because it has free variables), we refer to both as closure - even as syntactic concept.
... which gives Java programmers the ability to use Lambdas or at least lambda like things conceptually... albeit not in the same ways.
Just goes to prove that Python is the best language ever. Clearly you don't ever need to learn anything else. I strongly encourage you to not learn Groovy as it would poison your mind.
Obviously there's nothing the JVM has to offer you.
If Python does currying, closures, Functional Programming, and also allows for meta-programming and in line Domain Specific Languages, sports the ability to mock hash maps as objects, objects as hash maps, XML data as objects and method invocation as XML building... and perform code cached code synthesis at runtime... then I suppose it is. I don't remember any of that in Python when I used it last but that was a few years ago and a few versions ago.
When the newspapers die if there is a commercial vacuum that will "want" to be filled then we will see lots of attempts to fill that empty niche as it will represent a way to make money. If that fails and there is no commercial vacuum (in other words journalism makes money like environmentalism or political activism does) then you'll get your news from NPR.
Basically, financial support for the news will come from viewers like you. Think BBC or NPR.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the reason this will work when the eyetoy didn't will boil down to subtle differences and the fact that it's on an XBox and not a PS2. The XBox has a pretty good following and if M$ can manage to properly market the device (as Nintendo did the Wii) I think they'll have enough success to keep the top slot a while longer. However, what they're working on has been in the lab for at least a decade now see BLUI for example... and that has nothing to do with Microsoft.
stay lean. Stay lean in your personal lives and keep your development lean. By staying lean you can change directions quickly and respond to problems by altering tactics and even potentially abandoning entire lines of development.
Once you pickup weight in the form of staff (who will be dependent on your consistent revenue) you will have additional pressures on yourselves and your product. Large customers will also put demands on your product that may not be beneficial to its overall health. Pressure of legacy support can also derail development plans.
The more gradually you grow in your initial phases the higher probability you will have of laying a firm foundation to grow rapidly on. You hope to eventually get big. Putting it off initially should help you control how you grow when you finally do take off.
Besides Bloussard in his blog mentioned that the check list of undone/buggy stuff for DNF has/had only 24 objectives left.
I've seen the list...
SaaS can mean free and open if the SaaS company publishes their source code as Open Source. The company can still make money because they provide the hosting, troubleshooting, administration, and support services to clients that choose to host their install with the parent company.
SaaS does not have to mean proprietary or even vendor lock-in. It can mean the software is libre free and what you are paying for is electrons (powering the machines) and not the bits (composing the software). It's a good model when run that way.
Pay for electrons, not bits!
Is it time to saddle up for a new round of Internet land grabs?
Here we go again! Where it stops nobody knows... and few people seem to care.
Nice little article I'm really glad this got posted. It really does nice job of tying things together. No, I don't take it seriously... but the author definitely understands the different philosophies that are under each programming language and manages to make a reasonably entertaining connection back to a philosopher.
You wouldn't perchance be mixing those MP3's and Obama speeches (stolen via P2P) into a viral video to post on YouTube would you?
You are a super ninja pirate! Wow!
I would just need that amount for a few days. I'm sure I could turn it all around. Just deposit that amount in my offshore bank account as my salary. If it doesn't work... you won't be out any more than usual. Why not give me a try?
Okay, I'm an idiot and skipped the line which said that.
Yeah, this is slashdot! We demand cogent and intelligent arguments. We will ignore you if you have not read the article!
And furthermore...
I for one welcome our new facebook using overlords.
I suppose if you put rules on the recipient of the "gift" on what they must do next... or fees they have to pay to get the gift... then it's not really a gift is it?
But, to avoid being modded offtopic, let's ask another question: Why should it be illegal to play pyramid schemes?
Because the unwritten rule of American style capitalism is that there must be value creation somewhere. Laborers create value by exchanging their lives for the creation of services or products. Miners dig value out of the ground. Bankers charge interest. Traders (stocks and otherwise) play the supply and demand game ostensibly creating value via manipulation of time or distance.
why is religion still legal while promising essentially the same?
Because (at least in the US) they are regulated to prevent the show of profit. They are "non-profit" which means they can pay salaries to clergy but they can't turn that into more money than they can justify needing. In other words, people may be "getting rich in heaven" but if anyone is getting rich here it ain't no church ... its a business.
And that's why people tend to be suspicious of televangelism it sure looks like someone is getting rich here on this side of heaven. And if they are getting rich then they may go to jail because they aren't a church anymore but a pyramid scheme. Once profits are shown, non-profit protections are lifted.
The unwritten rule of American brand capitalism is: "Thou shall create value" anything else is a sin.
Banks charge interest.
You have it just a little bit wrong. The labor the worker/slave produces is value. Precious value. The most precious value they have, the very stuff of their life. And they give it up. They give it to the guy at the top and in exchange they get money.
If the company produces any kind of product or service then the time is converted into this valuable thing. And that valuable thing is what the boss-man is trading for the money he has to pay the laborers for the slice of their lives they have sacrificed on the alter of the company.
For something to be called a Ponzi scheme, that necessitates that there is no intrinsic value in the trade. In other words I give you money in promise of more. You take my money and essentially give it to someone else while no value has been created anywhere. When I ask for my money back you go find another person (or twenty), take the money from them and give it to me.
If you charged someone interest, then you would be a bank. If you paid someone money so they could pay an employee ... and the employee created something that was sold for more than the employee's salary sending the profits back to you ... then you are an investor. If you take my money, invest it (remember the whole thing with paying an employee two or more links away from you) on my behalf... then you are a broker.
Remember the current crisis is a "banking" crisis because we started trading loans as if they were stocks. That's a relatively new idea (not a hundred years old yet IIRC) so we don't regulate it well. The reason that wasn't a Ponzi scheme is that the home owner pays interest ... essentially they create value at their jobs and turn that into interest payments.
The trick is that the scheme may be very close to a Ponzi scheme but at the very tail... hundreds of trades deep... someone is drawing a paycheck and/or creating something of value in exchange. Their cut maybe small but they are the ones creating value with the very stuff their lives are made of. That value creation is what keeps the scheme from falling apart.
The fact that the laborers create value by sacrifice of their very lives means value is created. Therefore you don't have a Ponzi scheme. My hunch is the fewer steps there are between the worker and the investor the more profitable the system is since there are fewer middle-men taking their cut and less chance that a fellow like Ponzi can hide where the money really went.
But. The differentiation between capitalism and socialism is who your boss' boss is. If your boss' boss is either the people (stock holders) or the government (the state) then you have either capitalism (stock holders) or a socialism (government officials).
Each system has its flaws. That's why America's capitalism has become a blend. Your drug company answers to share holders but it also answers to the FDA in the US and the EMEA (I think) in Europe. The blended approach seems to work well as companies remain profitable but also are prevented from absolute opportunism.
Consider... the Ponzi Scheme is illegal in the US. The reason is that no value creation is occurring. Why should the government care how profits are shown? A purely "laissez-faire" capitalism wouldn't care... right?
Now, there is something to consider.
After all, if you can put it under test you could combinatorically determine the function of the software by slamming every combination of input at the thing and cataloging the output... but such an approach would be very expensive and time consuming
Slight understatement - such an approach would typically be totally impossible for a non-trivial program (some sort of exponential type function describing the number of inputs as a function of amount of input). Crudely, a program accepting just one 80 char record consisting only of upper case letters and display numerics has 36**80 possible inputs.
Oh, that's not too bad. We could just hook up a Beowulf cluster with a few thousand nodes and run an EA on it for a few million years. Not like you simply couldn't replace the original program.
Just a little thing called reality we would have to contend with.
Two words:
Computer Archeologist.
I think you'll only notice if you join a company that uses COBOL a lot, a financial company generally, and only then if you're employed to help with it. Even then, you'll probably only be interfacing to a "black box" where you don;t know or care what language runs it.
Which is a very good point.
I've been thinking with all this virtualization and such that you could eventually package up all that old COBOL code onto a virtual machine and just port the virtualization software to new platforms. Forever creating a black box of software that "just works" with out any idea of how or why.
If that does indeed happen then there may develop pockets of entire industries over time that are as mysterious and unintelligible as tax code. Now even if you had a black box of software that was contained in a VM it wouldn't mean you could never replace it.
After all, if you can put it under test you could combinatorically determine the function of the software by slamming every combination of input at the thing and cataloging the output... but such an approach would be very expensive and time consuming and it is much more likely future generations will want to add new function instead of rewriting old function.
In other words, you could rewrite that COBOL but it would be impractical and why bother? Unless significant rules of the real world that the software is supposed to model changes. There may be very little call to do such a thing.
Its like your grandfather. Everyone knows he's too old and can't keep up with the kids anymore, but you don't want to say it to his face right? We're just waiting for the last COBOL programmer to die off and then then everyone will breath a remorseful sigh of relief and start coding in Java again.
And then the same thing will happen with Java and Python.
You fools, COBOL is immortal because of the Lords of COBOL. COBOL can neither be created nor destroyed...
And since 1.6, with annotations and generics, I'm not sure that the complaint about inflexibility is really there.
Annotations and generics have been there since 1.5. However, yes, this is still quite inflexible - what about lambdas, for example (which Python has)?
I don't know much about these things but supposedly that's why Groovy Closures are a big deal.
from the link ...
Since Groovy doesn't provide a way to define a closed lambda function and a block of code might not be a closed lambda function at all (because it has free variables), we refer to both as closure - even as syntactic concept.
... which gives Java programmers the ability to use Lambdas or at least lambda like things conceptually ... albeit not in the same ways.
I don't recall calling Python useless...
I encourage you to spend your time in Clojure and port it to the Google App Engine.
Just goes to prove that Python is the best language ever. Clearly you don't ever need to learn anything else. I strongly encourage you to not learn Groovy as it would poison your mind.
Obviously there's nothing the JVM has to offer you.
If Python does currying, closures, Functional Programming, and also allows for meta-programming and in line Domain Specific Languages, sports the ability to mock hash maps as objects, objects as hash maps, XML data as objects and method invocation as XML building... and perform code cached code synthesis at runtime... then I suppose it is. I don't remember any of that in Python when I used it last but that was a few years ago and a few versions ago.
When the newspapers die if there is a commercial vacuum that will "want" to be filled then we will see lots of attempts to fill that empty niche as it will represent a way to make money. If that fails and there is no commercial vacuum (in other words journalism makes money like environmentalism or political activism does) then you'll get your news from NPR.
Basically, financial support for the news will come from viewers like you. Think BBC or NPR.
... you won't like us when we're angry.