This is exactly what MS will do. How freaking naive can MS weeines be? MS is all about dominating a market. Big deal if C# the language is a standard. The platform is what matters and MS controls their.Net platform. People/Companies will code to that MS.Net platform and leave all other platforms out of the game.
The question is, will these developers avoid.Net if there was no Mono? If not, then a few years from now you'll have the killer apps ported to the.Net API, and alternative OSes still won't be able to run any of them. If Mono is able to achieve significant compatibility, then a port becomes that much cheaper to make. Maybe even cheap enough to make a profit from Linux sales.
The commercial C# applications will be built on.Net and limited to MS Only.
MacOS X and Linux can probably claim at least 10% of the desktop market. MacOS X currently can attract major applications like PhotoShop. What if you could support twice the MacOS X market, using the same code base as your main Windows product, by avoiding a small set of Microsoft-only APIs?
The commercial C# applications will support Linux if enough Linux users are willing to pay enough for them to justify the port. Today is port is very expensive. Tomorrow there will be more Linux users, and Mono may lower the porting cost significantly.
You might want to read Eric Sink on how this happened:
I didn't say Microsoft played fair. In fact, I even pointed out they resorted to illegal actions. The point is that throwing money at the problem quickly overcame the fact that Microsoft didn't have Netscape's source code. The fact was that IE was not at a "virtual standstill" once Microsoft decided to enter the game.
Well you're making the other guy's point, since KHTML was, precisely, (open source and) being reused.
No, I'm not. Apple picked KHTML over Gecko, even though Gecko is more mature. Why? Because they know they can make up the difference quickly once they get to work on it. The portion that makes Gecko superior to KHTML at the time was not significant enough to Apple.
Reinvention is simply a fact of life in commercial software development. Look at how quickly the proprietary portions of MacOS X were put together relative to KDE or Gnome for another example. Yes, there was significant reuse from NeXTStep, BSD, and other sources, but the parts that were entirely new did not come about so slowly.
I'm not putting down reuse. I'm just saying that companies don't really have to think hard before deciding to code something themselves.
Keep the context in mind. The article I'm responding to said copyright "slows down the whole developement process to a virtual standstill", because code cannot be reused.
I'm pointing out that throwing money at the problem has been an effective way to get code written for decades now. In fact, plenty of software projects progress slowly despite publishing their source code. This means that copyright, closed source, and reinvention do not mean progress has to be slow.
I did not say all free software projects progress slowly. I did not say throwing money produces the best results. I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree.
I said that copyright is not an insurmountable problem when you have money to throw at it.
here lies one of the most basic problems of copyright. Nobody can see the other's code...to build on and possibly improve. Everybody has to learn what is already known by themselves. That slows down the whole developement process to a virtual standstill.
I agree that a lot of reinvention has to go on, but I think you exaggerate the effects of not being able to reuse code. To begin with, people tend to forget the steep learning curve required if you choose to reuse code as opposed to rolling your own.
Case in point: Microsoft started nearly from scratch (licensed a simpler browser, IIRC) with IE, at around the same time Netscape decided it was unable to maintain its aging source code. IE overtook Netscape 4 in terms of quality (despite illegal bundling) over a few years. We cannot know if Netscape could've survived if they kept maintaining their 4.x browser, but it's pretty clear that Microsoft wasn't moving slowly at all.
Apple then did the same years later, starting with KHTML (generally considered inferior to Gecko), and within a pretty short time has a really polished Safari browser. It's not as maximally compatible as some of the more established browsers, but it's probably 90% of the way there within a year or two of development.
In fact, the projects that truly move at a glacial pace tend to be the free software projects. Sourceforge is full of these projects, gasping for attention, despite disclosing full source code. In the commercial world, when you throw money at a problem, code gets written from scratch pretty quickly.
Ok fine then. In that case I want a discounted G5 that has absolutely no software pre-loaded, including OS. I want it at the exact price of a comparable PC that I could buy the parts off of Newegg for.
Whether something is "cheap" or "expensive" depends on the value of the product to the buyer. You can buy an acre of land for $1M and say it's cheap, or ten acres for $100,000 and call it expensive, depending on where the land is and what you need it for.
The point is, people who say Apple computers are expensive tend to focus solely on the value of the hardware components, and ignore the software that can be quite valuable. The same folks would also tend to ignore the generally higher price you can get when you sell the machine.
It doesn't mean you have any right to demand that Apple sell you its products piecemeal, just as you don't usually have the right to purchase just one cookie from a box. You are perfectly free to buy from somebody else, but that doesn't mean the box of 30 cookies (29 of which you don't need) is expensive.
The feature lists tend to be long, and it's easy to think that the camera you do pick has every feature its competitor has. In the consumer market, vendors really will strip out features that you might have just assumed it would have.
In my case, these were what I missed:
External microphone input - essential if you ever want to use a more suitable microphone than the omnidirectional ones that come with the camera.
External video input - essential for one or two VHS tapes that you need to digitize.
Digital still - my camera did have this feature, only the image quality was so poor it was really only usable when shrunk down into thumbnail sizes.
Also, make sure you allocate money in your budget for a bigger battery. The one that comes in the box will probably last you around 30 minutes on a full charge. This time pressure will severely impact your choice of shots.
Actually, perhaps I wasn't clear. It is the fact that the U.S. intends to make it a state that would draw foreign investment. It is the fact that the U.S. intends to make it a state that would draw U.S. companies in.
No, your point was quite clear. I'm just entirely unconvinced that a simple statement will redirect investments.
What exactly would entice a business into investing in the Philippines, especially if the US government states that its goal is to lift standards of living (and therefore operating costs for businesses) dramatically? These businesses go to China and India precisely because they are poor countries, and will immediately go elsewhere when that changes. They can exploit the Philippines right now if they wanted to, given the lax law enforcement and easily bribable bureaucracy.
For that matter, we're talking about businesses that aren't even willing to invest in continental America! Why would declaring its eventual statehood attract investments? Where's the money coming from and going into?
If the U.S. states, unequivocally, "The Philippines will become a State in 30 years", the economy of the region will go into hyperdrive.
Please go into some more detail about how this would happen. You seem to take it almost as an article of faith, but I fear capitalists are far more cynical than you imagine.
Obviously, if it fails, it remains a commonwealth or whatever... It doesn't become a state and it doesn't get to put itself on wellfare.
You contradict yourself. If the Philippines can be allowed to fail, then the "30 year plan" to statehood would not mean nearly as much to investors. If it cannot be allowed to fail, then you'll find yourself propping up the currency against speculators among other problems, and you may ultimately find yourself 80 million more mouths to feed, not to mention a massive debt to inherit.
You can't have it both ways. If you don't want investors to wait and see what happens, then you'll need to make commitments and honor those commitments even if the Philippines doesn't ramp up as quickly as you had imagined. Who's going to guarantee the additional debt that the Philippines will inevitably incur during this build-up?
It is the fact that the U.S. intends to make it a state that would usher in infrastructure upgrades.
This is a pipe dream. Private investors do not spend money on basic infrastructure; governments do. Somebody has to spend a large amount of money to upgrade infrastructure in the Philippines. Who is this somebody, if not the US taxpayers?
Sorry, but your "if you build it they will come" proposal just doesn't seem realistic to me at all. There's simply not a lot stopping US investors from putting money into the Philippines, and the fact that they aren't lining up to do so is pretty deafening unless you're going to assert that the only reason for these business decisions is political.
It's primarily a problem of confidence and protection. With the U.S. protecting the Philippines (both economically and militarily), U.S. companies (not to mention foreign intrests) would take a much greater interest in the region.
I did not make myself clear. Despite massive investments into China and India, the very poor are not seeing the money trickle down to them, so all the attention from capitalists isn't benefiting the poor. This makes perfect sense, because capitalists are not terribly concerned about poverty.
If you look at Iraq as an example, you'll note that private companies are not rushing into Iraq to help build roads and bridges. They are contracted by the US government to build roads and bridges, using US taxpayer money.
This investment in infrastructure may eventually lead to real private investments, and may eventually lead to an improvement of overall living standards. For the most part, however, what we're seeing all over the world is a relatively small class of direct beneficiaries (i.e., the Indian software engineer), rather than improvements across the board. The process you are hoping for is neither cheap nor simple!
More importantly, we're talking about a significant up-front public investment before the country would be more interesting (than it is today) to private investments. That up-front money is almost certainly going to be tax money.
The U.S. : Protestant 56%, Roman Catholic 28%, Jewish 2%, other 4%, none 10% (1989) [...]
But in the U.S., this is not an issue like it is in Brittain.
I think you are naive to discount the political resistance that a large homogenous infusion of additional voters will invite. The Christian Right may not mind a whole lot, but consider what a pro-choice organization would have to think. Remember, this is a country that bans divorce, so it's entirely likely that controversial issues will be decisively put to rest by this new voting bloc. I simply don't think you've considered the impact of a third more eligible voters to the political establishment, with the power to put an entire political party out of business for decades at least.
They no longer have our bases in operation there and they are most certainly not under our economic protection.
The Philippines is under essentially the same umbrella that other NATO countries are. It has no real external security concerns, and Americans are already helping the Philippines deal with a chronic Muslim insurgency.
Now, I'm not saying what you propose isn't possible. The US is a large and rich country, and is technically able to absorb a smaller poor country the way West Germany absorbed East Germany. However, I am saying that this isn't viable, because of the size of the problems confronting the Philippines, and because there's no real US political will to push through with this. The Filipino elite, contrary to your suggestions, would not be losers in this proposition. Their land will not be taken away and given to the poor.
Finally, assuming your dream scenario does occur, and the Philippines is built up and the rest of the US takes advantage of its cheaper labor for a couple of decades. You will then face the same problem again: the cost of doing business in the Philippines will become comparable to elsewhere in the US. The jobs will be outsourced again. What country will you merge with then?
Furthermore, as with all major decisions, you also need to consider the cases when things don't go your way. What if you fail to raise the living standards in the Philippines? You now have 80 million more mouths to feed, with a government already in deficit spending and a social security system on the brink of collapse.
Take a cue from the page that attempts to answer why the US may want the Philippines as a state. It starts out with joint military operations against Islamic militants, something that the US can get right now. It then moves on to just one paragraph that reads:
The United States will greatly benefit in having the Philippines a state of the U.S. because of our rich natural resources which could potentially be developed with modern technologies. The Philippines will become the rice and sugar granary of the world along with her other unique countless agricultural products.
which borders on funny. The exploitation of Filipino natural resources is such a big problem that the recent governments have basically banned logging across the board. As a US state, environmental protection requirements will only increase, not decrease. The core problem with Filipino agricultural production is the near feudal arrangements with powerful landlords. In other words, agrarian reform is necessary, and I don't see how the US federal government would basically go in and topple the aristocratic class. How and why are two huge questions here.
The truly poor become blue-collar in the short term. Their children have an opportunity to become white collar. This is pretty simple stuff, really.
If it's such simple stuff, why haven't the Filipinos already solved their own problems? Before you answer, consider the mass of the capital influx into China and India, and what effect that has had on the very poor.
What would the continental US taxpayers (who are suffering a pretty bad job market) think when the government starts to actively encourage (or even partially fund with favorable tax treatment) the creation of tens of millions of jobs in the Philippines?
We are not talking about a 5 year plan here, more like 20 years or more.
When was the last time a US politician thought 20 years ahead about anything? Twenty years ago Donald Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam Hussein's hand, and the US was still giving portable anti-air missiles to Islamic extremists.
And, of course, federal assistance would not kick in until we used economic means to raise the people out of poverty. This would not take as long as you believe.
First of all, where in the US constitution does it allow you to discriminate against US citizens this way? We're not talking about federal assistance, we're talking about medicare and other federal rights of a citizen.
The Philippines suffers systematic problems with communication and transportation, hindered by a corrupt and inefficient government bureaucracy. These, by every past experience, takes a lot of time and money to fix.
Next consider migration. There is a constitutional right to travel freely, which means that every major US city will face a massive influx of population the same way they flock to Manila today. There is precisely zero possibility of preventing that flood. Wages will be depressed, and even the worst paying jobs will become hard to find. Are you familiar with the "squatter" problem that Philippine cities face? "Squatters" are typically poor people seeking jobs in the cities who cannot afford a place to live, and "squat" on other peoples' properties.
Also consider religion. The Philippines is approximately 83% Roman Catholic, which means adding over 60 million Catholic voters. In fact, divorce is illegal in the Philippines. Suffice to say, there is great disincentive to bring in voters who will decidedly sway national debates on controversies.
With American protection, U.S. companies would rush in to take advantage of the cheap labor. The country would transform very quickly.
The Philippines is already under US protection by virtue of a mutual defense treaty. Why does it need to be a US state?
Now, note that I'm not anti-Philippines in the least bit, nor am I even American. I'm presenting to you Filipino problems that would affect a US decision to accept the Philippines as a state. The socio-economic difference is simple too big today for the Philippines not to become a significant burden to the US economy and tax base.
It tends to be the politicians (rather than the people) in the Philippines that oppose statehood because it poses a threat to their wealth and power.
As I said, perhaps not clearly enough, there's really no grassroots support for such a proposal. People would joke about it, but it's not taken as a serious proposal by a serious candidate. Despite being a third world country, the Philippines does have some national pride.
There is a growing awareness of the coming economic competitiveness of China and India in the U.S, and a particular school of thought that believes that we should align ourselves closely with a country such as the Philippines in order to challenge the cheap labor of India/China. In this scenario, the 80 million Filipinos working for peanuts works greatly in our favor.
Only if you go cherry picking, and ignore the poor. The $5,000 GDP is grossly inflated because of the extremely rich. The government has a public sector debt of more than 100% its GDP. The public education system, except for a few shining stars, is in shambles. 40% of the population live below the poverty line, 10.2% are unemployed, and many many more are underemployed.
Done correctly, [...]
Sure, but what if it was done wrong? You'll have 80 million more Americans (which would be nearly 1 out of every 4) living in abject poverty qualified for federal assistance.
Here in Georgia we also have "Right to work" laws. I have no problem with them.
When are people going to understand that they are not entitled to a job?
It's not entitlement that's the problem, but the lopsided nature of the law. It is common courtesy to give your boss two weeks' notice when you leave, especially if you would like to retain the individual as a future reference. However, I have witnessed a co-worker who found a new job, arranged to start in two weeks, and turned in a notice but was asked to leave immediately. Courtesy, in this case, turned into two weeks of unemployment.
That makes it a bad law. Companies can ask you to leave at any time with no prior warning, and it's just good business. If you suddenly announce today is your last day, somehow you're burning bridges. Legal, but rude. I'd personally prefer to be required by law to give a two week notice whether you are being laid off or you resign.
You may also want to examine how the US arrived in this position of leadership in the computer industry in the first place. That's right, the US innovated. The model you seem to be proposing is that there's an end to innovation, when you can just rest on your laurels and rely on information control to maintain your lead.
I think that's wrongheaded. Innovation, and being an innovator, is a continuous process. Closing off the borders risks losing the head start completely, because it decreases necessity, which really is the mother of invention. You may face a day when the Indian or Chinese programmer is not only cheaper, but by all measures better. Worse, the bright foreign minds could open a whole new field that you could've invented and dominated, if you weren't so comfortable in your cushy protected job.
Here's the objective reality. Software can be developed cheaply in certain other countries, and exported cheaply to the US (I'm talking FTP). This is the same shot across the bow that free software is making to commercial vendors: we can do what you can do, and we can (nearly or really) give it away. Protectionism, I think, will be about as effective as legally requiring your customers not to use a free OS from Finland.
Market value comes from doing something necessary that others can't. (Yes, I'm a software developer.)
Interestingly, there is still quite a bit of activity revolving around statehood for the Philippines. It could still happen, but it wouldn't be terribly soon. The U.S. would need to place them back into commonwealth status first, yady-yah...
As far as I understand, joining the US tends to be one-sided proposals by fringe politicians, and has almost no mainstream support. The US is also unlikely to accept a new state of nearly 85 million people with a per capita GDP of under $5,000. The US itself is only some 300 million people, with a GDP more than $36,000. Absorbing the Philippines and bringing it to the economic levels of other states will cripple the US economy for decades.
My limited experiences include getting engaged to a Filipina, spending months in the Philippines on business and getting to know my future family, learning Tagalog and emersing myself in the culture to better understand what I was getting myself into.
Good, I "outrank" you quite a bit. I lived in the Philippines for 15 years. Let me tell you, then, that like most or all third world countries, the Philippines has a small ruling class, a small middle class, and a large peasant class. Among the small ruling and middle classes, who typically send their children to private schools or a handful of good public schools, work ethic and educational attainments compare favorably. If money is not the problem, you will probably finish a 4-year college degree. Outsourcing companies will typically draw from this pool of human resources, so it's not at all unlikely to staff an entire call center with college graduates speaking good American English.
The situation among the poor is another thing altogether, living primarily at the subsistence level. They tend to be less educated and less ably educated. They tend to speak less English, and are probably more susceptible habits like smoking or alcoholism. It is easy to charge them with laziness, but that's the same as charging lazy Americans with not lifting themselves out of poverty. It is partly true, and partly false.
If you must build a network of repeaters won't you effectively make this a groundbased and not satelite based service?
The repeaters are probably installed in cities, where direct path to the satellites are often obscured by buildings and other structures. Once outside the city, the receiver will probably see the satellite more easily and not need any repeaters.
This wasn't just a bare breast, The dancers and music created a very sexual image.
In other words, you are claiming that there will be a similar outrage even if there was no breast bared. I disagree. I think it would've been business as usual otherwise.
as for the energy argument - get with the 90's - everyone is using similar internal execution units anyway - this is a red heering.
A quick googling shows that the G5 consumes about 75% of the power that a P4 would, when clocked to comparable performance levels. I have not verified the numbers, but if true a 25% reduction is certainly interesting enough to explore.
The x86 instruction set and successfully covered the widest range of CPU performance ever, and is available in by far the most computers...
You mean, on the most desktop, laptop, and server computers.
I would suggest by just about any measure it is by far the most successful ever.
But probably not by measure of units shipped. The embedded market consumes many many (smaller) CPUs.
Copyrights protect the "finished product" as it were, and not the "internals." In other words, you wouldn't be in violation by using facts from a database - only by making unlicensed copies of the original database.
Let's use something like Mapquest as an example, since their public service is useful, yet the fact collection process is valuable.
Mapquest can provide you a downloadable graphics file generated from their database to show a map and directions. Currently, it is very hard to regenerate the Mapquest database from piecing together these graphics files. Thus, a competitor cannot just download a file from Mapquest and open up shop without expending lots and lots of effort.
With copyright protection, Mapquest can allow you to download data in a form much closer to the original format. Instead of a graphics file, they can send you vector graphics commands to draw the streets. The advantages would probably include lower bandwidth requirements, and bigger and more readable maps. A competitor is prohibited by the new law to copy the downloaded vector graphics commands.
That's a problem, because copyright today doesn't distinguish whether you copied a novel by scanning it into a computer, or if you've never read the original novel but somehow wrote your own novel that's similar enough to it. If the vector map from Mapquest is copyrightable, then it should prohibit the use of similar vector maps even if independently collected and generated. That's why copyright is a monopoly.
We can and probably should protect Mapquest and others like it from blatant copying. However, granting them full traditional copyright is gross overkill.
nothing stops you from making the same investment and opening it to the public (freedb, anyone?). This just stops you from riding the coattails of somebody else's hard work without their permission.
Are you sure? The big problem is that copyright is a monopoly of content. Traditional copyright will punish somebody who independently writes a novel that is very similar to a copyrighted work. Thus, unless special exceptions are granted to databases, copyright itself does, in fact, prevent me from making the same investment in effort to compile and publish the data.
Re:I can read my Software Update window, thanks.
on
iCal 1.5.2 Released
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It's an insignificant point release. They turned a drawer into a bleeding panel, not water into wine.
Is the blood on the panel compliant with Aqua guidelines?
The most important geological findings on the moon were done precisely because of human intuition and the capability to make observations and on-the-spot changes in the original mission plan.
[...]
It's a sad state of affairs when people actually start to believe that robots could ever replace human explorers.
Logic flaw. Nevermind that computers and sensors are significantly better today, the fact that humans made the most important discoveries (kudos to them) does not mean that a machine could not make the same discoveries. For your assertion to stick, you need examples of discoveries a probe would never have found. In all likelihood, machine probes will remain cheaper, and will replace humans in all missions we don't particularly want to personally do. One-way tickets are just that much cheaper.
Want to talk about flexibility? The Mars Pathfinder had a priority inversion software bug fixed while it was on Mars. We're simply not dealing with Apollo-era computers anymore.
Landing on Mars is something people do want to do. But it's better if we don't assume it's all about science and discovery.
The socio-economic structure at the time can be likened to corporate addiction on Microsoft products. Because of the large investment in Word format documents and interoperability needs, your company is stuck with Office and Windows (unable to plant other varieties of potatoes). This monoculture is easily taken down by a single attacker, as we've seen several times now.
The attack would not have been possible if there was true diversity in both cases. Diversity would've been possible if not for English oppression or Microsoft monopoly. The attack simply exposes vulnerabilities in a deeply flawed system.
Couldn't this same argument be applied to omnipresent standards and not just monopolies? If everyone uses TCP/IP and a security flaw is found in it, doesn't that amount to the same type of security threat?
Yes, it would be. However, consider that if many people implemented TCP/IP independently, one of them might have realized that the protocol is flawed. If we all just borrowed BSD TCP/IP code without even reading it, we would be approximately as vulnerable as a proprietary protocol.
Saying people created viruses Microsoft didn't expect to deal with is bogus. That's a cop-out.
Perhaps, but it's probably accurate. Remember this is the OS that nearly missed the Internet bandwagon. Windows was designed to be the OS on a disconnected (which excludes limited connectivity like BBSes) desktop machine, where the main vector of threat comes from inserted floppy disks. In a sense, it's almost remarkable how well they are doing.
Now, lineage is no excuse. The point is that it's probably true that Microsoft didn't expect the networked virus.
Potato famine was not deliberate - it was caused by a microorganism. Both the hack and the monopoly are socially constructed.
I don't understand why you draw a difference. It is either possible or will soon be possible to design a virus to attack a certain plant. Releasing such a virus into a monoculture will devastate it.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is, will these developers avoid .Net if there was no Mono? If not, then a few years from now you'll have the killer apps ported to the .Net API, and alternative OSes still won't be able to run any of them. If Mono is able to achieve significant compatibility, then a port becomes that much cheaper to make. Maybe even cheap enough to make a profit from Linux sales.
The commercial C# applications will be built on .Net and limited to MS Only.
MacOS X and Linux can probably claim at least 10% of the desktop market. MacOS X currently can attract major applications like PhotoShop. What if you could support twice the MacOS X market, using the same code base as your main Windows product, by avoiding a small set of Microsoft-only APIs?
The commercial C# applications will support Linux if enough Linux users are willing to pay enough for them to justify the port. Today is port is very expensive. Tomorrow there will be more Linux users, and Mono may lower the porting cost significantly.
I didn't say Microsoft played fair. In fact, I even pointed out they resorted to illegal actions. The point is that throwing money at the problem quickly overcame the fact that Microsoft didn't have Netscape's source code. The fact was that IE was not at a "virtual standstill" once Microsoft decided to enter the game.
Well you're making the other guy's point, since KHTML was, precisely, (open source and) being reused.
No, I'm not. Apple picked KHTML over Gecko, even though Gecko is more mature. Why? Because they know they can make up the difference quickly once they get to work on it. The portion that makes Gecko superior to KHTML at the time was not significant enough to Apple.
Reinvention is simply a fact of life in commercial software development. Look at how quickly the proprietary portions of MacOS X were put together relative to KDE or Gnome for another example. Yes, there was significant reuse from NeXTStep, BSD, and other sources, but the parts that were entirely new did not come about so slowly.
I'm not putting down reuse. I'm just saying that companies don't really have to think hard before deciding to code something themselves.
I'm pointing out that throwing money at the problem has been an effective way to get code written for decades now. In fact, plenty of software projects progress slowly despite publishing their source code. This means that copyright, closed source, and reinvention do not mean progress has to be slow.
I did not say all free software projects progress slowly. I did not say throwing money produces the best results. I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree.
I said that copyright is not an insurmountable problem when you have money to throw at it.
I agree that a lot of reinvention has to go on, but I think you exaggerate the effects of not being able to reuse code. To begin with, people tend to forget the steep learning curve required if you choose to reuse code as opposed to rolling your own.
Case in point: Microsoft started nearly from scratch (licensed a simpler browser, IIRC) with IE, at around the same time Netscape decided it was unable to maintain its aging source code. IE overtook Netscape 4 in terms of quality (despite illegal bundling) over a few years. We cannot know if Netscape could've survived if they kept maintaining their 4.x browser, but it's pretty clear that Microsoft wasn't moving slowly at all.
Apple then did the same years later, starting with KHTML (generally considered inferior to Gecko), and within a pretty short time has a really polished Safari browser. It's not as maximally compatible as some of the more established browsers, but it's probably 90% of the way there within a year or two of development.
In fact, the projects that truly move at a glacial pace tend to be the free software projects. Sourceforge is full of these projects, gasping for attention, despite disclosing full source code. In the commercial world, when you throw money at a problem, code gets written from scratch pretty quickly.
Whether something is "cheap" or "expensive" depends on the value of the product to the buyer. You can buy an acre of land for $1M and say it's cheap, or ten acres for $100,000 and call it expensive, depending on where the land is and what you need it for.
The point is, people who say Apple computers are expensive tend to focus solely on the value of the hardware components, and ignore the software that can be quite valuable. The same folks would also tend to ignore the generally higher price you can get when you sell the machine.
It doesn't mean you have any right to demand that Apple sell you its products piecemeal, just as you don't usually have the right to purchase just one cookie from a box. You are perfectly free to buy from somebody else, but that doesn't mean the box of 30 cookies (29 of which you don't need) is expensive.
In my case, these were what I missed:
- External microphone input - essential if you ever want to use a more suitable microphone than the omnidirectional ones that come with the camera.
- External video input - essential for one or two VHS tapes that you need to digitize.
- Digital still - my camera did have this feature, only the image quality was so poor it was really only usable when shrunk down into thumbnail sizes.
Also, make sure you allocate money in your budget for a bigger battery. The one that comes in the box will probably last you around 30 minutes on a full charge. This time pressure will severely impact your choice of shots.Hope this helps.
No, your point was quite clear. I'm just entirely unconvinced that a simple statement will redirect investments.
What exactly would entice a business into investing in the Philippines, especially if the US government states that its goal is to lift standards of living (and therefore operating costs for businesses) dramatically? These businesses go to China and India precisely because they are poor countries, and will immediately go elsewhere when that changes. They can exploit the Philippines right now if they wanted to, given the lax law enforcement and easily bribable bureaucracy.
For that matter, we're talking about businesses that aren't even willing to invest in continental America! Why would declaring its eventual statehood attract investments? Where's the money coming from and going into?
If the U.S. states, unequivocally, "The Philippines will become a State in 30 years", the economy of the region will go into hyperdrive.
Please go into some more detail about how this would happen. You seem to take it almost as an article of faith, but I fear capitalists are far more cynical than you imagine.
Obviously, if it fails, it remains a commonwealth or whatever... It doesn't become a state and it doesn't get to put itself on wellfare.
You contradict yourself. If the Philippines can be allowed to fail, then the "30 year plan" to statehood would not mean nearly as much to investors. If it cannot be allowed to fail, then you'll find yourself propping up the currency against speculators among other problems, and you may ultimately find yourself 80 million more mouths to feed, not to mention a massive debt to inherit.
You can't have it both ways. If you don't want investors to wait and see what happens, then you'll need to make commitments and honor those commitments even if the Philippines doesn't ramp up as quickly as you had imagined. Who's going to guarantee the additional debt that the Philippines will inevitably incur during this build-up?
It is the fact that the U.S. intends to make it a state that would usher in infrastructure upgrades.
This is a pipe dream. Private investors do not spend money on basic infrastructure; governments do. Somebody has to spend a large amount of money to upgrade infrastructure in the Philippines. Who is this somebody, if not the US taxpayers?
Sorry, but your "if you build it they will come" proposal just doesn't seem realistic to me at all. There's simply not a lot stopping US investors from putting money into the Philippines, and the fact that they aren't lining up to do so is pretty deafening unless you're going to assert that the only reason for these business decisions is political.
I did not make myself clear. Despite massive investments into China and India, the very poor are not seeing the money trickle down to them, so all the attention from capitalists isn't benefiting the poor. This makes perfect sense, because capitalists are not terribly concerned about poverty.
If you look at Iraq as an example, you'll note that private companies are not rushing into Iraq to help build roads and bridges. They are contracted by the US government to build roads and bridges, using US taxpayer money.
This investment in infrastructure may eventually lead to real private investments, and may eventually lead to an improvement of overall living standards. For the most part, however, what we're seeing all over the world is a relatively small class of direct beneficiaries (i.e., the Indian software engineer), rather than improvements across the board. The process you are hoping for is neither cheap nor simple!
More importantly, we're talking about a significant up-front public investment before the country would be more interesting (than it is today) to private investments. That up-front money is almost certainly going to be tax money.
The U.S. : Protestant 56%, Roman Catholic 28%, Jewish 2%, other 4%, none 10% (1989) [...] But in the U.S., this is not an issue like it is in Brittain.
I think you are naive to discount the political resistance that a large homogenous infusion of additional voters will invite. The Christian Right may not mind a whole lot, but consider what a pro-choice organization would have to think. Remember, this is a country that bans divorce, so it's entirely likely that controversial issues will be decisively put to rest by this new voting bloc. I simply don't think you've considered the impact of a third more eligible voters to the political establishment, with the power to put an entire political party out of business for decades at least.
They no longer have our bases in operation there and they are most certainly not under our economic protection.
The Philippines is under essentially the same umbrella that other NATO countries are. It has no real external security concerns, and Americans are already helping the Philippines deal with a chronic Muslim insurgency.
Now, I'm not saying what you propose isn't possible. The US is a large and rich country, and is technically able to absorb a smaller poor country the way West Germany absorbed East Germany. However, I am saying that this isn't viable, because of the size of the problems confronting the Philippines, and because there's no real US political will to push through with this. The Filipino elite, contrary to your suggestions, would not be losers in this proposition. Their land will not be taken away and given to the poor.
Finally, assuming your dream scenario does occur, and the Philippines is built up and the rest of the US takes advantage of its cheaper labor for a couple of decades. You will then face the same problem again: the cost of doing business in the Philippines will become comparable to elsewhere in the US. The jobs will be outsourced again. What country will you merge with then?
Furthermore, as with all major decisions, you also need to consider the cases when things don't go your way. What if you fail to raise the living standards in the Philippines? You now have 80 million more mouths to feed, with a government already in deficit spending and a social security system on the brink of collapse.
Take a cue from the page that attempts to answer why the US may want the Philippines as a state. It starts out with joint military operations against Islamic militants, something that the US can get right now. It then moves on to just one paragraph that reads:
which borders on funny. The exploitation of Filipino natural resources is such a big problem that the recent governments have basically banned logging across the board. As a US state, environmental protection requirements will only increase, not decrease. The core problem with Filipino agricultural production is the near feudal arrangements with powerful landlords. In other words, agrarian reform is necessary, and I don't see how the US federal government would basically go in and topple the aristocratic class. How and why are two huge questions here.The truly poor become blue-collar in the short term. Their children have an opportunity to become white collar. This is pretty simple stuff, really.
If it's such simple stuff, why haven't the Filipinos already solved their own problems? Before you answer, consider the mass of the capital influx into China and India, and what effect that has had on the very poor.
What would the continental US taxpayers (who are suffering a pretty bad job market) think when the government starts to actively encourage (or even partially fund with favorable tax treatment) the creation of tens of millions of jobs in the Philippines?
We are not talking about a 5 year plan here, more like 20 years or more.
When was the last time a US politician thought 20 years ahead about anything? Twenty years ago Donald Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam Hussein's hand, and the US was still giving portable anti-air missiles to Islamic extremists.
And, of course, federal assistance would not kick in until we used economic means to raise the people out of poverty. This would not take as long as you believe.
First of all, where in the US constitution does it allow you to discriminate against US citizens this way? We're not talking about federal assistance, we're talking about medicare and other federal rights of a citizen.
The Philippines suffers systematic problems with communication and transportation, hindered by a corrupt and inefficient government bureaucracy. These, by every past experience, takes a lot of time and money to fix.
Next consider migration. There is a constitutional right to travel freely, which means that every major US city will face a massive influx of population the same way they flock to Manila today. There is precisely zero possibility of preventing that flood. Wages will be depressed, and even the worst paying jobs will become hard to find. Are you familiar with the "squatter" problem that Philippine cities face? "Squatters" are typically poor people seeking jobs in the cities who cannot afford a place to live, and "squat" on other peoples' properties.
Also consider religion. The Philippines is approximately 83% Roman Catholic, which means adding over 60 million Catholic voters. In fact, divorce is illegal in the Philippines. Suffice to say, there is great disincentive to bring in voters who will decidedly sway national debates on controversies.
With American protection, U.S. companies would rush in to take advantage of the cheap labor. The country would transform very quickly.
The Philippines is already under US protection by virtue of a mutual defense treaty. Why does it need to be a US state?
Now, note that I'm not anti-Philippines in the least bit, nor am I even American. I'm presenting to you Filipino problems that would affect a US decision to accept the Philippines as a state. The socio-economic difference is simple too big today for the Philippines not to become a significant burden to the US economy and tax base.
As I said, perhaps not clearly enough, there's really no grassroots support for such a proposal. People would joke about it, but it's not taken as a serious proposal by a serious candidate. Despite being a third world country, the Philippines does have some national pride.
There is a growing awareness of the coming economic competitiveness of China and India in the U.S, and a particular school of thought that believes that we should align ourselves closely with a country such as the Philippines in order to challenge the cheap labor of India/China. In this scenario, the 80 million Filipinos working for peanuts works greatly in our favor.
Only if you go cherry picking, and ignore the poor. The $5,000 GDP is grossly inflated because of the extremely rich. The government has a public sector debt of more than 100% its GDP. The public education system, except for a few shining stars, is in shambles. 40% of the population live below the poverty line, 10.2% are unemployed, and many many more are underemployed.
Done correctly, [...]
Sure, but what if it was done wrong? You'll have 80 million more Americans (which would be nearly 1 out of every 4) living in abject poverty qualified for federal assistance.
It's not entitlement that's the problem, but the lopsided nature of the law. It is common courtesy to give your boss two weeks' notice when you leave, especially if you would like to retain the individual as a future reference. However, I have witnessed a co-worker who found a new job, arranged to start in two weeks, and turned in a notice but was asked to leave immediately. Courtesy, in this case, turned into two weeks of unemployment.
That makes it a bad law. Companies can ask you to leave at any time with no prior warning, and it's just good business. If you suddenly announce today is your last day, somehow you're burning bridges. Legal, but rude. I'd personally prefer to be required by law to give a two week notice whether you are being laid off or you resign.
I think that's wrongheaded. Innovation, and being an innovator, is a continuous process. Closing off the borders risks losing the head start completely, because it decreases necessity, which really is the mother of invention. You may face a day when the Indian or Chinese programmer is not only cheaper, but by all measures better. Worse, the bright foreign minds could open a whole new field that you could've invented and dominated, if you weren't so comfortable in your cushy protected job.
Here's the objective reality. Software can be developed cheaply in certain other countries, and exported cheaply to the US (I'm talking FTP). This is the same shot across the bow that free software is making to commercial vendors: we can do what you can do, and we can (nearly or really) give it away. Protectionism, I think, will be about as effective as legally requiring your customers not to use a free OS from Finland.
Market value comes from doing something necessary that others can't. (Yes, I'm a software developer.)
As far as I understand, joining the US tends to be one-sided proposals by fringe politicians, and has almost no mainstream support. The US is also unlikely to accept a new state of nearly 85 million people with a per capita GDP of under $5,000. The US itself is only some 300 million people, with a GDP more than $36,000. Absorbing the Philippines and bringing it to the economic levels of other states will cripple the US economy for decades.
My limited experiences include getting engaged to a Filipina, spending months in the Philippines on business and getting to know my future family, learning Tagalog and emersing myself in the culture to better understand what I was getting myself into.
Good, I "outrank" you quite a bit. I lived in the Philippines for 15 years. Let me tell you, then, that like most or all third world countries, the Philippines has a small ruling class, a small middle class, and a large peasant class. Among the small ruling and middle classes, who typically send their children to private schools or a handful of good public schools, work ethic and educational attainments compare favorably. If money is not the problem, you will probably finish a 4-year college degree. Outsourcing companies will typically draw from this pool of human resources, so it's not at all unlikely to staff an entire call center with college graduates speaking good American English.
The situation among the poor is another thing altogether, living primarily at the subsistence level. They tend to be less educated and less ably educated. They tend to speak less English, and are probably more susceptible habits like smoking or alcoholism. It is easy to charge them with laziness, but that's the same as charging lazy Americans with not lifting themselves out of poverty. It is partly true, and partly false.
The repeaters are probably installed in cities, where direct path to the satellites are often obscured by buildings and other structures. Once outside the city, the receiver will probably see the satellite more easily and not need any repeaters.
They're not forgetting anything. Their main competitive advantage is a lower price, driven by people who look no further at a product than price.
In other words, you are claiming that there will be a similar outrage even if there was no breast bared. I disagree. I think it would've been business as usual otherwise.
This is exactly about a bared breast.
A quick googling shows that the G5 consumes about 75% of the power that a P4 would, when clocked to comparable performance levels. I have not verified the numbers, but if true a 25% reduction is certainly interesting enough to explore.
The x86 instruction set and successfully covered the widest range of CPU performance ever, and is available in by far the most computers...
You mean, on the most desktop, laptop, and server computers.
I would suggest by just about any measure it is by far the most successful ever.
But probably not by measure of units shipped. The embedded market consumes many many (smaller) CPUs.
Let's use something like Mapquest as an example, since their public service is useful, yet the fact collection process is valuable.
Mapquest can provide you a downloadable graphics file generated from their database to show a map and directions. Currently, it is very hard to regenerate the Mapquest database from piecing together these graphics files. Thus, a competitor cannot just download a file from Mapquest and open up shop without expending lots and lots of effort.
With copyright protection, Mapquest can allow you to download data in a form much closer to the original format. Instead of a graphics file, they can send you vector graphics commands to draw the streets. The advantages would probably include lower bandwidth requirements, and bigger and more readable maps. A competitor is prohibited by the new law to copy the downloaded vector graphics commands.
That's a problem, because copyright today doesn't distinguish whether you copied a novel by scanning it into a computer, or if you've never read the original novel but somehow wrote your own novel that's similar enough to it. If the vector map from Mapquest is copyrightable, then it should prohibit the use of similar vector maps even if independently collected and generated. That's why copyright is a monopoly.
We can and probably should protect Mapquest and others like it from blatant copying. However, granting them full traditional copyright is gross overkill.
Are you sure? The big problem is that copyright is a monopoly of content. Traditional copyright will punish somebody who independently writes a novel that is very similar to a copyrighted work. Thus, unless special exceptions are granted to databases, copyright itself does, in fact, prevent me from making the same investment in effort to compile and publish the data.
Is the blood on the panel compliant with Aqua guidelines?
[...]
It's a sad state of affairs when people actually start to believe that robots could ever replace human explorers.
Logic flaw. Nevermind that computers and sensors are significantly better today, the fact that humans made the most important discoveries (kudos to them) does not mean that a machine could not make the same discoveries. For your assertion to stick, you need examples of discoveries a probe would never have found. In all likelihood, machine probes will remain cheaper, and will replace humans in all missions we don't particularly want to personally do. One-way tickets are just that much cheaper.
Want to talk about flexibility? The Mars Pathfinder had a priority inversion software bug fixed while it was on Mars. We're simply not dealing with Apollo-era computers anymore.
Landing on Mars is something people do want to do. But it's better if we don't assume it's all about science and discovery.
The socio-economic structure at the time can be likened to corporate addiction on Microsoft products. Because of the large investment in Word format documents and interoperability needs, your company is stuck with Office and Windows (unable to plant other varieties of potatoes). This monoculture is easily taken down by a single attacker, as we've seen several times now.
The attack would not have been possible if there was true diversity in both cases. Diversity would've been possible if not for English oppression or Microsoft monopoly. The attack simply exposes vulnerabilities in a deeply flawed system.
Why is it such an irritating analogy to you?
Yes, it would be. However, consider that if many people implemented TCP/IP independently, one of them might have realized that the protocol is flawed. If we all just borrowed BSD TCP/IP code without even reading it, we would be approximately as vulnerable as a proprietary protocol.
Perhaps, but it's probably accurate. Remember this is the OS that nearly missed the Internet bandwagon. Windows was designed to be the OS on a disconnected (which excludes limited connectivity like BBSes) desktop machine, where the main vector of threat comes from inserted floppy disks. In a sense, it's almost remarkable how well they are doing.
Now, lineage is no excuse. The point is that it's probably true that Microsoft didn't expect the networked virus.
I don't understand why you draw a difference. It is either possible or will soon be possible to design a virus to attack a certain plant. Releasing such a virus into a monoculture will devastate it.
Nature's answer is biodiversity.