However unlike free riders on the train, it doesn't actually add any drag or cost. In most cases it's just free advertising.
I disagree -- it does create extra cost; just not monetary cost. You're right, having free-riders doesn't make a work more expensive (in terms of money or time) to create. But it does create negative emotion for the person creating the work -- especially if they feel like they're working really hard to make ends meet (as so many artists are) and so many people are just "stealing" their stuff. (Take this blog for example.) Since emotional rewards are a major factor in people becoming artists in the first place (because let's face it, most people never become rock stars), this has a large negative impact on the number of artists who continue making work. Furthermore, there's a network effect. There are many people who, if no one else was "free-riding", would pay for the work; but if they see other people getting it for free, they too will take it without paying. So a few free-rider "initiators" can cause a whole bunch of other free riders -- and those "contingent free-riders" actually do represent a lost sale.
Not too many PhDs; too many PhDs for the amount of jobs available. This isn't a problem in my field (operating systems), because there's a large demand for PhDs in the industry. But in other fields, there's not a demand in the industry, and there's not a demand in academia, leading to a situation where someone works like a slave for a long time, then ends up overqualified or in a dead-end job.
The simplest way to "take advantage of all of them" would be to increase government grants for science by an order of magnitude. The other way would be to make sure that they graduate having skills useful to private industry.
Besides which, in theory the PhD is supposed to mean that you can do research. If you can do research, you should be able to pick up things in lots of fields.
Although in practice, I suppose for me what made me the most valuable to my current employer was all the hours upon hours I'd spend debugging insane race conditions in the process of doing my PhD research...
I wonder if "mooching" or "free-riding" would be more accurate than "stealing". The free-riding problem shows up in a lot of areas, and definitely has a significant "drag" on goodness happening; but unlike stealing, doesn't involve taking from someone something that they would have otherwise had.
From my little experience with the iPhone and location, here are my guesses:
The GPS is expensive to run; having it on all the time would severely degrade battery life.
The GPS is also not very effective indoors
So I bet that it normally logs only the location of towers, and only logs your GPS location if available (generally only when you use a location-aware app like Maps).
Skills or ways of thinking from chess I think apply well in the real world:
Careful planning and consideration
Thinking about what other people may do in response to what you do
Don't accept the choices you are given. When you are apparently given two bad choices, there is usually a third choice which can get you out of trouble.
Things from chess I think don't apply well to the real world:
Pure competition. It's kill or be killed. The core strategy of chess is to put your opponent in a position of having to choose between the lesser of two bad options. In most areas of life that's actually a really bad strategy. Pure competition is rare, and the
Winning at any cost. It doesn't matter how many pieces you sacrifice, or what the damage is, if you checkmate with just two pieces, then you've won. In real life, that kind of "phyrric" victory is often not a victory at all; and if you can't win without major losses, the best strategy is not to play.
But of course, the above two problems aren't really that bad as long as people see it as a fun, friendly competition.:-)
And that's why so many people trust religion -- because, from their perspective, it delivers. It is psychologically impossible to maintain an activity that has no reward associated with it; the greater the cost, the greater the reward has to be to be sustainable. Many people find that Christianity gives meaning to their life and helps them through things. They find belief and religious activities like prayer, church attendance, and so on to be rewarding.
Obviously you haven't found it so. But lots of other people do.
The glut of new buildings on the local campus always bothers me.
If you had $50 mil to give away just to prove how rich you were, would you rather have the "SandyTaru Building", or hire+fund an extra 5 profs for 10 years?
But even if they did, instead of having parents ban the games for the child, why don't they teach them otherwise and then let them play them?
Because we don't learn primarily through word of mouth instruction, but by example and imitation. Our subconscious learns things by inference, not by logical deduction. Inference comes from stories, example, and our behavior. When we act consistently with a belief (such as, "I'm not that interesting to people"), we tend to strengthen that belief.
I've definitely noticed this, for example, in watching movies. In the last year or so a friend of mine has been organizing "movie nights" for our group of friends about twice a month; and since I don't really care much about what kind of movie to see (it's more about hanging out and having a shared experience), and he really likes action flicks, we see a lot of action flicks -- where violence is really the only solution to most problems. I've definitely noticed a change in my gut reaction when I encounter aggressive behavior in real life.
Now, I think you're right, if a child is getting a moderate amount of violence in video games (a few hours a week), and is getting a lot of positive examples in other areas of life -- interaction with parents, friends, coaches, &c -- on the balance the video games won't really have that large of an effect.
But if there aren't many positive influences, it can go into a negative feedback loop. For example, say his parents are mostly absent, so he's a little more aggressive when playing with friends or playing sports. So most kids don't really like being around him, and his coach tells him he can't be on the team. So he ends up with mostly more aggressive friends (whom he doesn't really like either, but at least they put up with him), and not many rewarding things to do in his free time other than play violent video games. And if his aggressive friends are more likely to get him into other kinds of things... you see where this might go.
There's a lot in this example that went wrong of course -- parents who weren't really doing their job, the unlucky lack of an adult to step in and invest in him for the better, or the particular circumstances of the people at school. No one thing would cause all the badness; but it's not hard to see how violent video games could definitely contribute to the problem.
those who already operate outside the law are more likely to protect their business by violent means
Not only that, the only way that those who operate outside of the law have to enforce agreements or punish "breaches of contract" is by violent means. For all we complain about lawyers, I'd prefer them a thousand times to warlord "enforcers".
...yet thanks to the "Free beer!" brigade nearly 30% of the web servers are running not RH but CentOS...
RH doesn't mind CentOS -- the people who run CentOS and stay there generally wouldn't have been paying for RH anyway; and it's an opportunity to start free, realize you actually need support (or that support is cheaper than hiring an army of IT people capable of doing it themselves), and upgrade to RedHat.
I'm not at all crazy about MIX, but Knuth can't be criticized for not "simplifying" a language that hadn't even been invented at the time.
Sorry -- I didn't actually mean to criticize him for not writing it with C originally, but looking back at my comment, it sure sounded like that.:-) What was really meant (although I didn't actually write it) was that the books would have a much wider influence now if they were translated into very simplified C.
Yup. If you're boss doesn't understand it, you can't use it. Or at least not make it central to your architecture.
I think if your boss either can't trust you to make good decisions or has such an ego problem that he can't stand the idea that you're smarter than him, you should really find another job.
There is definitely something to be said for maintainability, though. "Debugging is twice as hard as writing code in the first place, so if you code as cleverly as possible, you're by definition not smart enough to debug it." The only reason to use a "too clever to understand quickly" algorithm is if you're really hitting a performance limit; and then should be contained, with a very well-defined input and output, and with references to any tomes which you used as reference.
Yeah -- I bought the first three as a set, but I never could bring myself to invest the effort to learn an imaginary language. The book could have been written in a very simplified C, which can be trivially reduced to assembly if need-be, but can be easily read by nearly any programmer today. His books could have a much wider impact if they were translated into something that had a lower barrier-to-entry.
And so we come to the essential paradox of our age. Despite the proven record of corruption by bankers and CEOs, despite the massive damage and hardship they have caused, and despite mass public embitterment towards them, somehow collectively, our society still trusts these people with custodianship of our collective wealth, power, and future. What is wrong with us?
I don't know what GP was talking about wrt XenServer. XenServer is a great piece of software, and getting better all the time; the free-as-in-beer version is very fully featured, missing only high-end features like automatic fail-over and disaster recovery. You can still create pools of VMs using shared storage, and there are no limits on the number of VMs, amount of memory, amount of virtual cpus, or anything like that. And if you prefer an "open" distribution, you can use the Xen Cloud Project, which is very similar to XenServer, but designed to be community-developed (and thus completely free-as-in-speech as well).
As a developer who joined XenSource and now works for Citrix, I have to say they did a really good job of not screwing up the acquisition. Even though all of the XenSource options vested some time ago, a large percentage of the core developers still work for Citrix, and show no signs of leaving any time soon. So the "Big corp bought something cool and screwed it up" narrative just doesn't fit here.
I've seen no technical reasons to use it over KVM or VMWare in the enterprise.
Is anyone using KVM for server consolidation?
KVM is a great tool for having a secondary VM on your desktop. In fact, one of the Xen developers who works remotely (and thus doesn't have the same access to a big farm of test hardware) actually uses KVM to do Xen development, when what he's working on doesn't require any hardware virtualization features. But if what you want is a dedicated VM-hosting box, Xen is the way to go.
Ref please? IBM has never been a major contributor to Xen, and Xen development, especially over the last year, has been just fine.
The project is still alive because it is useful to thousands of organizations (including large corporations like Tesco, Bechtel, Fujitsu, SAP, cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace, to name just a very few), and thus worth the time of various organizations (including Citrix, Oracle, AMD, Intel, and yes even RedHat) to pay developers to work on improving it.
Are any major corporations with a significant deployment of KVM or VirtualBox?
The underlying features aren't really the important point - they haven't been for some time and that isn't going to change with this release. The important features right now are manageability - is there a pretty GUI to show the managers? A programmable, easily scriptable API?
Consider the Linux kernel from the criticisms you've just made. Does Linus's tree have important features for manageability? Does it have a pretty GUI to show managers? Is it programmable and easily scriptable? The answer is, of course, no; management, GUI, scripts & come from other projects built on top of the Linux Kernel.
The same is true of Xen. The core Xen project is about operating-system-level functionality, just like Linux is. It is, if you will the engine; but what most people want is a car. The scriptable engines, GUI, management tools, and so on are of a completely different type of programming than OS programming, and should be separate projects.
And these projects exist. XenServer is such a system that includes everything that you describe; and the free-as-in-beer version is very powerful. For those wanting an open system, the Xen Cloud Project is a community-oriented version with feature parity, having been based on the same codebase. Additionally, there are people working on porting libvirt bindings to Xen 4.1, so that any management and GUI software that uses libvirt as a backend to manage KVM can also manage Xen.
To claim that all of them will die simply because the vast majority of humans born to date have died would be unscientific.
And if I were speaking in a scientific paper, I would have been much more precise. Furthermore, in order for this statement to be false we would have to overcome the heat death of the universe in some way. Otherwise, even if some of humans managed to live for quadrillions of years, once the universe went cold, they would die too.
Which is not to say that it can't happen; but, at the moment, my money is on "all humans die".:-)
Yeah, and everyone in the US thought that was perfectly normal.
This is a classic weakness of Western thinking: overclassification (the entire country is one entity, not a gigantic group of different people with different values), and black-and-white thinking (a country is either "good" or "bad"). The fact is that the US, as a whole is not as good as it needs to be. It is not consistently good. There are a lot of bad people, and there are certainly bad elements of the culture. But that doesn't change the fact that ideals are still very important to many Americans. Americans didn't all vote to buy homosexual child sex slaves; in fact, the very idea horrifies most people, including the people in the government who hired the company responsible for it.
Your kind of thinking basically guarantees things cannot get better. They can only get better if we stick with ideals, insist that the ideals are valid, and that they be applied in all cases. Saying, "Well, a handful of poorly-supervised contractors broke the ideals here, so why should we apply the ideals anywhere" is a sure-fire way to bring chaos and anarchy.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree -- it does create extra cost; just not monetary cost. You're right, having free-riders doesn't make a work more expensive (in terms of money or time) to create. But it does create negative emotion for the person creating the work -- especially if they feel like they're working really hard to make ends meet (as so many artists are) and so many people are just "stealing" their stuff. (Take this blog for example.) Since emotional rewards are a major factor in people becoming artists in the first place (because let's face it, most people never become rock stars), this has a large negative impact on the number of artists who continue making work. Furthermore, there's a network effect. There are many people who, if no one else was "free-riding", would pay for the work; but if they see other people getting it for free, they too will take it without paying. So a few free-rider "initiators" can cause a whole bunch of other free riders -- and those "contingent free-riders" actually do represent a lost sale.
Not too many PhDs; too many PhDs for the amount of jobs available. This isn't a problem in my field (operating systems), because there's a large demand for PhDs in the industry. But in other fields, there's not a demand in the industry, and there's not a demand in academia, leading to a situation where someone works like a slave for a long time, then ends up overqualified or in a dead-end job.
The simplest way to "take advantage of all of them" would be to increase government grants for science by an order of magnitude. The other way would be to make sure that they graduate having skills useful to private industry.
Besides which, in theory the PhD is supposed to mean that you can do research. If you can do research, you should be able to pick up things in lots of fields.
Although in practice, I suppose for me what made me the most valuable to my current employer was all the hours upon hours I'd spend debugging insane race conditions in the process of doing my PhD research...
I wonder if "mooching" or "free-riding" would be more accurate than "stealing". The free-riding problem shows up in a lot of areas, and definitely has a significant "drag" on goodness happening; but unlike stealing, doesn't involve taking from someone something that they would have otherwise had.
From my little experience with the iPhone and location, here are my guesses:
So I bet that it normally logs only the location of towers, and only logs your GPS location if available (generally only when you use a location-aware app like Maps).
Things from chess I think don't apply well to the real world:
But of course, the above two problems aren't really that bad as long as people see it as a fun, friendly competition. :-)
And that's why so many people trust religion -- because, from their perspective, it delivers. It is psychologically impossible to maintain an activity that has no reward associated with it; the greater the cost, the greater the reward has to be to be sustainable. Many people find that Christianity gives meaning to their life and helps them through things. They find belief and religious activities like prayer, church attendance, and so on to be rewarding.
Obviously you haven't found it so. But lots of other people do.
If you had $50 mil to give away just to prove how rich you were, would you rather have the "SandyTaru Building", or hire+fund an extra 5 profs for 10 years?
+1 Informative
Because we don't learn primarily through word of mouth instruction, but by example and imitation. Our subconscious learns things by inference, not by logical deduction. Inference comes from stories, example, and our behavior. When we act consistently with a belief (such as, "I'm not that interesting to people"), we tend to strengthen that belief.
I've definitely noticed this, for example, in watching movies. In the last year or so a friend of mine has been organizing "movie nights" for our group of friends about twice a month; and since I don't really care much about what kind of movie to see (it's more about hanging out and having a shared experience), and he really likes action flicks, we see a lot of action flicks -- where violence is really the only solution to most problems. I've definitely noticed a change in my gut reaction when I encounter aggressive behavior in real life.
Now, I think you're right, if a child is getting a moderate amount of violence in video games (a few hours a week), and is getting a lot of positive examples in other areas of life -- interaction with parents, friends, coaches, &c -- on the balance the video games won't really have that large of an effect.
But if there aren't many positive influences, it can go into a negative feedback loop. For example, say his parents are mostly absent, so he's a little more aggressive when playing with friends or playing sports. So most kids don't really like being around him, and his coach tells him he can't be on the team. So he ends up with mostly more aggressive friends (whom he doesn't really like either, but at least they put up with him), and not many rewarding things to do in his free time other than play violent video games. And if his aggressive friends are more likely to get him into other kinds of things... you see where this might go.
There's a lot in this example that went wrong of course -- parents who weren't really doing their job, the unlucky lack of an adult to step in and invest in him for the better, or the particular circumstances of the people at school. No one thing would cause all the badness; but it's not hard to see how violent video games could definitely contribute to the problem.
Health care?
Not only that, the only way that those who operate outside of the law have to enforce agreements or punish "breaches of contract" is by violent means. For all we complain about lawyers, I'd prefer them a thousand times to warlord "enforcers".
RH doesn't mind CentOS -- the people who run CentOS and stay there generally wouldn't have been paying for RH anyway; and it's an opportunity to start free, realize you actually need support (or that support is cheaper than hiring an army of IT people capable of doing it themselves), and upgrade to RedHat.
Sorry -- I didn't actually mean to criticize him for not writing it with C originally, but looking back at my comment, it sure sounded like that. :-) What was really meant (although I didn't actually write it) was that the books would have a much wider influence now if they were translated into very simplified C.
I think if your boss either can't trust you to make good decisions or has such an ego problem that he can't stand the idea that you're smarter than him, you should really find another job.
There is definitely something to be said for maintainability, though. "Debugging is twice as hard as writing code in the first place, so if you code as cleverly as possible, you're by definition not smart enough to debug it." The only reason to use a "too clever to understand quickly" algorithm is if you're really hitting a performance limit; and then should be contained, with a very well-defined input and output, and with references to any tomes which you used as reference.
Yeah -- I bought the first three as a set, but I never could bring myself to invest the effort to learn an imaginary language. The book could have been written in a very simplified C, which can be trivially reduced to assembly if need-be, but can be easily read by nearly any programmer today. His books could have a much wider impact if they were translated into something that had a lower barrier-to-entry.
So, what exactly do you propose?
Ah, that was your prime opportunity to bring in actual examples. The lack thereof makes it clear to everyone that "Xen is dead" is just FUD.
I don't know what GP was talking about wrt XenServer. XenServer is a great piece of software, and getting better all the time; the free-as-in-beer version is very fully featured, missing only high-end features like automatic fail-over and disaster recovery. You can still create pools of VMs using shared storage, and there are no limits on the number of VMs, amount of memory, amount of virtual cpus, or anything like that. And if you prefer an "open" distribution, you can use the Xen Cloud Project, which is very similar to XenServer, but designed to be community-developed (and thus completely free-as-in-speech as well).
As a developer who joined XenSource and now works for Citrix, I have to say they did a really good job of not screwing up the acquisition. Even though all of the XenSource options vested some time ago, a large percentage of the core developers still work for Citrix, and show no signs of leaving any time soon. So the "Big corp bought something cool and screwed it up" narrative just doesn't fit here.
Is anyone using KVM for server consolidation?
KVM is a great tool for having a secondary VM on your desktop. In fact, one of the Xen developers who works remotely (and thus doesn't have the same access to a big farm of test hardware) actually uses KVM to do Xen development, when what he's working on doesn't require any hardware virtualization features. But if what you want is a dedicated VM-hosting box, Xen is the way to go.
Ref please? IBM has never been a major contributor to Xen, and Xen development, especially over the last year, has been just fine.
The project is still alive because it is useful to thousands of organizations (including large corporations like Tesco, Bechtel, Fujitsu, SAP, cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace, to name just a very few), and thus worth the time of various organizations (including Citrix, Oracle, AMD, Intel, and yes even RedHat) to pay developers to work on improving it.
Are any major corporations with a significant deployment of KVM or VirtualBox?
Consider the Linux kernel from the criticisms you've just made. Does Linus's tree have important features for manageability? Does it have a pretty GUI to show managers? Is it programmable and easily scriptable? The answer is, of course, no; management, GUI, scripts & come from other projects built on top of the Linux Kernel.
The same is true of Xen. The core Xen project is about operating-system-level functionality, just like Linux is. It is, if you will the engine; but what most people want is a car. The scriptable engines, GUI, management tools, and so on are of a completely different type of programming than OS programming, and should be separate projects.
And these projects exist. XenServer is such a system that includes everything that you describe; and the free-as-in-beer version is very powerful. For those wanting an open system, the Xen Cloud Project is a community-oriented version with feature parity, having been based on the same codebase. Additionally, there are people working on porting libvirt bindings to Xen 4.1, so that any management and GUI software that uses libvirt as a backend to manage KVM can also manage Xen.
And if I were speaking in a scientific paper, I would have been much more precise. Furthermore, in order for this statement to be false we would have to overcome the heat death of the universe in some way. Otherwise, even if some of humans managed to live for quadrillions of years, once the universe went cold, they would die too.
Which is not to say that it can't happen; but, at the moment, my money is on "all humans die". :-)
I don't know if you've noticed this, but 100% of humans die.
Yeah, and everyone in the US thought that was perfectly normal.
This is a classic weakness of Western thinking: overclassification (the entire country is one entity, not a gigantic group of different people with different values), and black-and-white thinking (a country is either "good" or "bad"). The fact is that the US, as a whole is not as good as it needs to be. It is not consistently good. There are a lot of bad people, and there are certainly bad elements of the culture. But that doesn't change the fact that ideals are still very important to many Americans. Americans didn't all vote to buy homosexual child sex slaves; in fact, the very idea horrifies most people, including the people in the government who hired the company responsible for it.
Your kind of thinking basically guarantees things cannot get better. They can only get better if we stick with ideals, insist that the ideals are valid, and that they be applied in all cases. Saying, "Well, a handful of poorly-supervised contractors broke the ideals here, so why should we apply the ideals anywhere" is a sure-fire way to bring chaos and anarchy.