NO, they would want to publicise the fact that they did it: terrorist acts are done to terorise, i.e. to make people firghtened of the perpetrator, so there is not point doing them unless those responsible identify themselves.
Actually it undermines his argument - it talks about people moving to the US to work for (very well funded) universities, not profit making companies. It even spcifically mentions the large amounts of government money available: i.e. it is the US government, and non-profits, rather than profit making organisations that make the US so attractive to scietific talent.
All the usual flaws in your arguments. Your examples are also very selective
French healthcare is good and doctors are well paid.
Social security does not necessarilly depend on a growing population: the only thing that does are certain pension schemes which some countries use.
Patent royalties are a very ineffcient method of funding drug development. Patented drugs typically cost several times what they would without the patents, but ony around 15% of revenues goes into R & D at large pharma companies
R & D also tends to be overly directed towards low risk areas, such as variations on existing drugs, rather than developing wholly new drugs which would have more benefit for society as a whole.
On top of this drug development is heavilly subsidised and directed by the government. There is a lot of government subsidy for research and arragements such as orphan drug designation provide extra incentives for developing a drug the government think should be developed.
Capitalism also gives people a profit motive to follow ignoble goals.
How exactly is provision of services under the control of a democratically elected government a sacrifice to the collective and directing resources to those with the most money an asertion fo individual freedom: pure capitalism does not give the poor much freedon does it?
I for one, will be taking my tourist dollars elsewhere
Me too. I would have visited the US on holdiay sooner or later because I know so many people there, but I will now only go there if I have to (i.e. work) because it just oo much potential hassle and intursion getting in now: its not what I want when i am on holiday.
Their lower standard of living and (sometimes) lax labor laws allow American corporations to pay very low wages and offer little benefits or health considerations
Neither of these is true in the case of the software in South Asia - the case that most worries slashdotters. The salaries are lower in abolute terms but the lower cost of living allows at least as good a standard of living.
Labour laws are also much tighter: it is far more difficult to make someone redundant for example.
The only thing I would ask for in this period of globalization is that corporations that leave America be held to our human rights/workers' rights standards and laws.
Do you think foreign comapnies operating the the US would be allowed/compelled to apply their home country's standards and laws as well?
I used to think Excel was way ahead of any OSS spreadsheet software but I changed my mind last night when is started using Gnumeric for something non-trivial for the first time. Obviously it is still a small spreadsheet but I have been really impresed so far: it is definitely as good for most people (and has an excellent UI). I have still not done (and these days I am not likely to do) enough to see how it compares for heavyweight financial modeling (mind you even there at least I will know the stats funtions are accurate!).
I decided I prefered Lyx to MS Word a long time ago and I hate Powerpoint anyway so that has me pretty much coverted.
I think the advatage of Linux Office software is not that it is better (MS Office, especially Excel, is slightly better than Open Office) but that it offers you a choice of ways of working, so you can choose the software that suits the task in hand or your way of working.
The real problem is that there is an ideological faction in Congress -- which is primarily but hardly exclusively Republican -- which sees business and making money as a good thing, and which naively reasons, therefore, that bigger business and more money must be a better thing.
Very true.
It does help that very few politicians understand technological industries, or how they differ economically from manufacturing: e.g. negligible marginal cost of production and very strong network effects.
Wrong! He is not a business analyst. The guy is an equity analyst or investment analyst or reserach analyst. A business analyst is a completely different role. The former involves analysing companies and securities with a view to making investments in them, the latter (as far as I understand the term) involves analysing things like workflows with a view to improving them.
I agree UI design is hard. I spend a lot of time explaining end user needs to developers, and the biggest single problem that the users have is the UI. This is (albeit niche) proprietary software BTW
Pretty much every time I have a problem with Linux UI/configuration/drivers/whatever Windows usually pomptly presents me with something worse. So I am not convinced OSS is worse.
I also agree with the article that ESR has picked problem that naive end users are not going to face and local printers are easy to configure (usually auto detected and isntalled). I also think most things that naive users tend to do have good UIs: it is not that Linux is hard for ordinary users so much as it is hard to do certain things as efficiently as they would like.
I sort of agree with you, its just that I do not actually find it much of a problem in practice: Saving to EPS is not that difficult, saving realted documents in the same directory is not that difficult (and that emans all you do is click on the doc in your file manager, the extra steps a switching from Lyx to file manager and save as EPS after each edit). I am quite happy to trade a few extra mouse clicks for getting things done faster, easy export to PDF and (good) HTML and most of all something in wich the natural way to work is to structure your documents neatly.
Of course personal preference come into this, and also how image heavy your documents. Incidentally I am not a programmer, and I like Lyx enough that it is one of the reasons I am glad I swtiched to Linux.
And even if you understand statistics using the tools that allow you to reflect uncertainty (the article mentions the fantastic Excel plug-in Crystal Ball) is difficult.
Where do you get the distributions from? It is much easier to obtain or estimate single points than a distribution. For example if you are projecting sales growth (the top line of a typical financial model)a year of two out you can often (assuming steady economic growth conditions in your market etc), assume a stable trend. Even if if some factors are shifting (e.g. the economy is slowing a bit) it is easy enough to do a rough and ready adjustment. If you want a meaningful distribution you need a whole model before you even get the top line right!
A bloated MS App has lots of functionality that does not actually work right so you embed documents from other bloated MS apps in it.
So MS dominates the office software market becuase people really need the functionality they offer, right? After all why would anyone want to use something lightweight with a clean UI (like Lyx for example) which makes you use another application just to draw a diagram?
very handy department-level utilities in Excel, for example
I am not sure that is altogether a good thing. The results often suck. Let me give you an example.
My former employer, a small invesment manager, needed to distribute short summaries of our research notes on around 200 companies that our internal reserach team (incuding me) covered. A paragraph one each company, plus some numbers. A fund manager with a bit of time on his hands and some knowledge of VBA and Excel came up with the following solution.
We wrote our comments into sheet of a large spread sheet, one line per company.
We then had to do the following daily:
Download the the numbers we needed from two different sources (as CSV) making.
Ran a macro in his spreadsheet to update it with the numbers from the two CSV files. It took about 5 minutes to run and crahed regularly.
Copy the spreadsheet to some branch offices that could not access our servers.
When someone wanted to see the information they opened the spreadsheet (which sat on a Windows file server) and choose the company from a drop down box. So to see one page of info (about twenty assorted numbers and maybe two hundred words of text) the end user had to open a 2 or 3MB spreadsheet off the server every time.
If they wanted the detailed version of our research they had to look though their email or in a public outlook folder.
I really feel it would ahve been worth hiring someone (apart from the fact that I offered to do it and I already worked for them) to serve the info as HTML off a web server one page at a time. It woud not exactly have been a lot of work to write something grab info from CSV and text files, do a few simple calculations (I mean a few multiplications and divisions!) and generate some HTML.
Did you do what I did (under Linux though) and keep adding useful tools, most of them in beta, until something broke the browser?
I found not using too many add-ons makes it more stable. That said these days I use Opera except when I find a site that does not work with it, then I switch to Fire* or Galeon.
If the US had a regulatory framework and said "OK everyone who wants to run a casino follows these rules" that would be OK with the WTO. The US could also ban gambling altogether and that would be OK too. The point of the ruling is that the US can not favour a US supplier over a non-US supplier. That is the whole point of the WTO.
NO: MS are obliged to license and can charge for this. No one HAS to license from: if you could reverse engineer before the decision you wtill can, if you could not reverse engineer you can now buy a license. Of course it would ahve been a lot more effective if the EU had imposed free-licensing, but I do not think they get OSS well enough to see the need.
I suggest you switch to something more lucrative.
LIke what?
Wall Street (and the City of London for that matter) is offshoring analysts.
Some medical jobs (e.g. diagnosis based on scans) are being outsourced.
An office job can always be moved more easilly than a manufacturing or physical service one (at least until we get good cheap waldos).
The best thing you can do is to do whatever you are really good at, in any really skilled job there is always a huge premium for the best skills.
I am not going into the economic arguments becuase they are simply not worth repeating again (read an economics text book). I always get better moderated for comments on software topics than (on topic) posts on my area of expertise (investment, financial economics, perhaps some other areas of economics, definitely a lot of other areas of business and finance) so I am not bothering any more.
IBM would have entered the market with another OS which may or may not have got where Windows is now (remember MS was free to license DOC to anyone, and IBM's BIOS was sucessfully reverse engineered). If this did not happen we would have had a bigger diversity of OSes. We may also have had abigger diversity of hardware.
It is also unlikely that the same combination of monopolies would have been established (i.e. Windows + MS Office) and the monopolies do significantly strenghten each other (people buy Windows to run MS OFfice, MS used Windows to get OFfice into its current position).
Less commoditization would have meant slightly higher prices, but whatever the software there would always be demand for faster hardware (hardware was developing pretty fast before MS).
On the other hand more diversity would have porbably meant more innovation. OPen standards would be used mroe to cope with the diveristy, so it woudl be easy to make a completely new product (BeOS, Open Office) compatible with what already exists.
For the same reason we would probably use open stadards a lot more for everything.
One of the driving forces behind Java's evolution was the fragmentation of the C++ camp.
Can you blame that on open source? Surely the existence of different proprietary compilers is just as much of a problem.
In fact, making it opens source may reduce the incentive to create re-implmentations of Java: no reliance on Sun, improvements can be contriubted back and all the usual OSS benefits.
Even if it created the danger of a fork, a fork is better than a complete re-implementation.
Not a bad idea. If we had only numbers as addresses think of all trademark litigation we would have saved. Conflicts about the address scheme would not happen as they would not be worth it. There has been very little conflict over phone numbers
Of course we can not use IPs as people need to be able to change IPs. The ideal system would have been resolving numerical IDs to IPs.
Has anyone ever come up with any radially different way identifying locations? I mean something tht does not involve taking an address and look up the matching IP.
If it happened litterally overnight it would probably cause a downward spike as peeople worried about who else it could happen to. A few months later they would get over it and that is not long enough for the stock market to severly effect the real economy very much.
Anyway it would not be overnight. Big companies have tanked over a period of a few years before, even very recently: GEC (renamed Marconi) went from being one of the biggest companies in the UK (smaller than MS but very big in terms of the UK) to the verge of bankruptcy. It did not do very much to change investors perceptions of the UK market (of course it contributed a bit to the hangover after the dot com bust).
People hardly even notice unless a company actually goes bust or comes very close to it (not going to happen to MS thanks to the cash pile). Valuations can plummet and people hardly take notice: Glaxo Smithkline used to be worth about 180 billion pounds, about the same as the $260 billion MS is now. Glaxo is now worth barely half that and it has had little effect on people's perceptions of the market as a whole.
If MS screwed up one major business (say OSes or Office) so badly it had to pull out of the business altogether, its value should be about the same amount (in relative and absolute terms both) as Glaxo's has: no big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
NO, they would want to publicise the fact that they did it: terrorist acts are done to terorise, i.e. to make people firghtened of the perpetrator, so there is not point doing them unless those responsible identify themselves.
Actually it undermines his argument - it talks about people moving to the US to work for (very well funded) universities, not profit making companies. It even spcifically mentions the large amounts of government money available: i.e. it is the US government, and non-profits, rather than profit making organisations that make the US so attractive to scietific talent.
Me too. I would have visited the US on holdiay sooner or later because I know so many people there, but I will now only go there if I have to (i.e. work) because it just oo much potential hassle and intursion getting in now: its not what I want when i am on holiday.
Neither of these is true in the case of the software in South Asia - the case that most worries slashdotters. The salaries are lower in abolute terms but the lower cost of living allows at least as good a standard of living.
Labour laws are also much tighter: it is far more difficult to make someone redundant for example.
The only thing I would ask for in this period of globalization is that corporations that leave America be held to our human rights/workers' rights standards and laws.
Do you think foreign comapnies operating the the US would be allowed/compelled to apply their home country's standards and laws as well?
I used to think Excel was way ahead of any OSS spreadsheet software but I changed my mind last night when is started using Gnumeric for something non-trivial for the first time. Obviously it is still a small spreadsheet but I have been really impresed so far: it is definitely as good for most people (and has an excellent UI). I have still not done (and these days I am not likely to do) enough to see how it compares for heavyweight financial modeling (mind you even there at least I will know the stats funtions are accurate!).
I decided I prefered Lyx to MS Word a long time ago and I hate Powerpoint anyway so that has me pretty much coverted.
I think the advatage of Linux Office software is not that it is better (MS Office, especially Excel, is slightly better than Open Office) but that it offers you a choice of ways of working, so you can choose the software that suits the task in hand or your way of working.
Very true. It does help that very few politicians understand technological industries, or how they differ economically from manufacturing: e.g. negligible marginal cost of production and very strong network effects.
Wrong! He is not a business analyst. The guy is an equity analyst or investment analyst or reserach analyst. A business analyst is a completely different role. The former involves analysing companies and securities with a view to making investments in them, the latter (as far as I understand the term) involves analysing things like workflows with a view to improving them.
Pretty much every time I have a problem with Linux UI/configuration/drivers/whatever Windows usually pomptly presents me with something worse. So I am not convinced OSS is worse.
I also agree with the article that ESR has picked problem that naive end users are not going to face and local printers are easy to configure (usually auto detected and isntalled). I also think most things that naive users tend to do have good UIs: it is not that Linux is hard for ordinary users so much as it is hard to do certain things as efficiently as they would like.
Of course personal preference come into this, and also how image heavy your documents. Incidentally I am not a programmer, and I like Lyx enough that it is one of the reasons I am glad I swtiched to Linux.
Where do you get the distributions from? It is much easier to obtain or estimate single points than a distribution. For example if you are projecting sales growth (the top line of a typical financial model)a year of two out you can often (assuming steady economic growth conditions in your market etc), assume a stable trend. Even if if some factors are shifting (e.g. the economy is slowing a bit) it is easy enough to do a rough and ready adjustment. If you want a meaningful distribution you need a whole model before you even get the top line right!
So MS dominates the office software market becuase people really need the functionality they offer, right? After all why would anyone want to use something lightweight with a clean UI (like Lyx for example) which makes you use another application just to draw a diagram?
I KEEP getting Excel files from project managers containing a table containing only text and no formulae.
I am pleased to announce the release of Womble Linux 0.001a.
At the moment its still just Mandrake with a few extra unstable packages, but it will be revolutionary: just you wait and see. Oh yes.
Exclusively available from:
That pub that used to be opposite my school
Southside
Wimbledon Common
London SW19
I am not sure that is altogether a good thing. The results often suck. Let me give you an example.
My former employer, a small invesment manager, needed to distribute short summaries of our research notes on around 200 companies that our internal reserach team (incuding me) covered. A paragraph one each company, plus some numbers. A fund manager with a bit of time on his hands and some knowledge of VBA and Excel came up with the following solution.
We wrote our comments into sheet of a large spread sheet, one line per company.
We then had to do the following daily:
When someone wanted to see the information they opened the spreadsheet (which sat on a Windows file server) and choose the company from a drop down box. So to see one page of info (about twenty assorted numbers and maybe two hundred words of text) the end user had to open a 2 or 3MB spreadsheet off the server every time.
If they wanted the detailed version of our research they had to look though their email or in a public outlook folder.
I really feel it would ahve been worth hiring someone (apart from the fact that I offered to do it and I already worked for them) to serve the info as HTML off a web server one page at a time. It woud not exactly have been a lot of work to write something grab info from CSV and text files, do a few simple calculations (I mean a few multiplications and divisions!) and generate some HTML.
I found not using too many add-ons makes it more stable. That said these days I use Opera except when I find a site that does not work with it, then I switch to Fire* or Galeon.
If the US had a regulatory framework and said "OK everyone who wants to run a casino follows these rules" that would be OK with the WTO. The US could also ban gambling altogether and that would be OK too. The point of the ruling is that the US can not favour a US supplier over a non-US supplier. That is the whole point of the WTO.
NO: MS are obliged to license and can charge for this. No one HAS to license from: if you could reverse engineer before the decision you wtill can, if you could not reverse engineer you can now buy a license. Of course it would ahve been a lot more effective if the EU had imposed free-licensing, but I do not think they get OSS well enough to see the need.
Are you incapable of making you point without using an offensive term?
Ir we were discussing something to do with race would you say "niggers" and "non-niggers"?
Wall Street (and the City of London for that matter) is offshoring analysts.
Some medical jobs (e.g. diagnosis based on scans) are being outsourced.
An office job can always be moved more easilly than a manufacturing or physical service one (at least until we get good cheap waldos).
The best thing you can do is to do whatever you are really good at, in any really skilled job there is always a huge premium for the best skills.
I am not going into the economic arguments becuase they are simply not worth repeating again (read an economics text book). I always get better moderated for comments on software topics than (on topic) posts on my area of expertise (investment, financial economics, perhaps some other areas of economics, definitely a lot of other areas of business and finance) so I am not bothering any more.
IBM would have entered the market with another OS which may or may not have got where Windows is now (remember MS was free to license DOC to anyone, and IBM's BIOS was sucessfully reverse engineered). If this did not happen we would have had a bigger diversity of OSes. We may also have had abigger diversity of hardware.
It is also unlikely that the same combination of monopolies would have been established (i.e. Windows + MS Office) and the monopolies do significantly strenghten each other (people buy Windows to run MS OFfice, MS used Windows to get OFfice into its current position).
Less commoditization would have meant slightly higher prices, but whatever the software there would always be demand for faster hardware (hardware was developing pretty fast before MS).
On the other hand more diversity would have porbably meant more innovation. OPen standards would be used mroe to cope with the diveristy, so it woudl be easy to make a completely new product (BeOS, Open Office) compatible with what already exists.
For the same reason we would probably use open stadards a lot more for everything.
Can you blame that on open source? Surely the existence of different proprietary compilers is just as much of a problem.
In fact, making it opens source may reduce the incentive to create re-implmentations of Java: no reliance on Sun, improvements can be contriubted back and all the usual OSS benefits.
Even if it created the danger of a fork, a fork is better than a complete re-implementation.
Of course we can not use IPs as people need to be able to change IPs. The ideal system would have been resolving numerical IDs to IPs.
Has anyone ever come up with any radially different way identifying locations? I mean something tht does not involve taking an address and look up the matching IP.
It would not be that bad.
If it happened litterally overnight it would probably cause a downward spike as peeople worried about who else it could happen to. A few months later they would get over it and that is not long enough for the stock market to severly effect the real economy very much.
Anyway it would not be overnight. Big companies have tanked over a period of a few years before, even very recently: GEC (renamed Marconi) went from being one of the biggest companies in the UK (smaller than MS but very big in terms of the UK) to the verge of bankruptcy. It did not do very much to change investors perceptions of the UK market (of course it contributed a bit to the hangover after the dot com bust).
People hardly even notice unless a company actually goes bust or comes very close to it (not going to happen to MS thanks to the cash pile). Valuations can plummet and people hardly take notice: Glaxo Smithkline used to be worth about 180 billion pounds, about the same as the $260 billion MS is now. Glaxo is now worth barely half that and it has had little effect on people's perceptions of the market as a whole.
If MS screwed up one major business (say OSes or Office) so badly it had to pull out of the business altogether, its value should be about the same amount (in relative and absolute terms both) as Glaxo's has: no big deal.
How generous: give some money away AFTER you have ruthlessly and greedily made more than you could possibly actually use yourself.
I prefer Jesus' view of what constitutes generosity to yours.