Well, so in Germany it is legal to sell OO for any amount of money I feel like charging for it.
So what if this company wrote up EULA saying by downloading OO from them I am agreeing to buy it for 10 million dollars. Would you still recommend to pay?
But is it ANY different than asking for 100 dollars?
What would German law say if company was asking for 1 billion dollar per sale? After all, that number is just as arbitrary as any other number they are charging.
If reducing your standard of living by 20% seems like a doomsday to you then you are spoiled. You will still be living better than you deserve after this depression is over.
It is very likely that economy is sliding into depression. No record sales in such environment, sorry.
Wall Street has been convulsing in a crisis for 6 month now, and things are getting worse by the day.
We just had one of the largest investment banks collapse on Friday.
Events of such significance have not happened since the Great Depression, and don't for a second assume this will not pull the broader economy down.
I said "may make Great Depression seem mild". Emphasis on 'may' - I think there is like a 20% chance of a complete economic disaster happening. And that this recession will be deeper than most recent ones, is almost a given.
You know, "doom and gloom" really does happen all the time around the world, but people always believe their country is somehow immune...
no , world is not coming to an end, recessions and even depressions are a normal part of business cycle and happen every decade or two. What I am saying is there is strong indication that this time the swing of the cycle will be deeper than usual, with GDP decline of 10% and more not out of the question (Great Depression led to 30% decline).
I just think the fact that the financial system is caught up in a seizure not seen for 100 years is a lot more interesting that 30 years old pointless paper.
Slashdot Nerdiness at its best! The country is on the brink of unstoppable financial catastrophe that may make Great Depression seem mild, major banks have come || this close to failing in the last few days, the best economist on the planet has been openly panicking on his blog, but Slashdot decided to talk about the financial theory of science fiction!
Maybe, just maybe, since the original story is about Krugman (who is considered by many to be the most celebrated economist of the present) you should go and check out his blog, read his posts for the last 20 days, and realize that we probably should be talking about something else now...
I am scientist. Been for a long time. I have seen so many scientists who are complete and plain retards in matters of ordinary life, who believe things that make just no sense at all, that I am kind of surprised the question is even posed here. Most of these scientists should be happy if a girl, any girl, loves them and tolerates their quirkiness.
Besides, it has been scientifically proven that the season in which a baby is born correlates with the qualities that child has, in terms of health, smartness, and even temper. Granted, correlation is very small, but this almost qualifies as astrology, doesn't it? Oh well, rant off.
No need to build the case, just let MS buy Yahoo, this will be a total financial disaster for MS. If they really buy Yahoo for the price they offered, they will suddenly become a few years closer to irrelevance.
Let's be economically realistic here. If you look at the OLPC progress timescale here: http://laptop.org/en/vision/progress/index.shtml You will notice that the price tag of 100$ per laptop initiates back in the end of 2004.
Now, I hope all of you here have heard about an economic phenomenon called inflation - the process where governments inflate money supply making your dollars buy less. Very few know that for the past decade or so the government has been massaging the official inflation numbers to make them appear lower - this allows them to make fewer and fewer payments on inflation adjusted liabilities such as social security. However, they still publish all the numbers one needs to calculate the actual inflation, and some people have been doing that, look for example here: http://www.shadowstats.com/cgi-bin/sgs/data Notice how inflation has been running steadily at about 10% for the last few years. Today, the engineers who drafted the 100$ plan in the end of 2004 / beginning of 2005, should expect the cost to be 100*1.1*1.1*1.1 or roughly 135 dollars. That already would take a lot of sensationalism out of the story. However, let's not stop here. Remember, the real culprit behind inflation is the money supply, and consumer inflation is usually the latest to price rising party. The money supply (as you may have noticed from previous link) has been running at 14% annually, causing serious mischief in prices of things like energy (http://www.investmenttools.com/futures/energy/index.htm) or metals (http://www.investmenttools.com/futures/metals/welcome_to_the_page_about_copper_futures.htm) - both are important for making technology. Just for the sake of an example, let's trivialize the problem a little, and say that to make a laptop you need to spend 60% of your budget on metals, and 40% on energy (it's wrong, but I am just making an example). What would you expect to happen to the price of such laptop according the charts I linked to? Well, it would go up from 100$ to slightly over 200$.
So what is the real story here, engineers screwing up their designs, or governments inflating away the buying power of the dollar making the same thing cost twice more over 3 years? Look at my links, do your research, decide for yourself.
no, that's a cumbersome way in which theorists try to understand their equations. This "analogy" (and a pretty weak one) came after the math was written.
I think it's quite apparent the creators didn't
try to hide the fact that the video was staged.
Especially the way they discuss the strategy, and the bit where they "crunch the numbers" and evaluate chances of survival as 32.333%. I thought this was funny as hell and at this point it becomes clear that the guys are just trying to make a funny movie:)
I think they succeeded quite spectacularly, and also depicted very accurately all the non-staged, real situations when the Leeroys of the world go suicidal.
Everytime Slashdot links to another article where someone says something about a subject in which they have direct commercial interest, I wonder - WHY???
We are not really getting to hear someone's opinion on the matter, because these people will say anything that they think may improve their cash flow, even if they know they are saying crap. So what potentially interesting or useful information is in such articles??
We are not reading anything remotely productive, we are not learning anything, you just get another snapshot of the greediness of human nature. But we don't need any more of that, do we?
Doesn't seem ecnomically sensible. Your post implies that right now you can make diamonds cheaper than DeBeers, so why not make some and sell them - since you are already set up to do that and are making diamonds anyways.
And if DeBeers later at some point drops prices too low, you can always go back to your cutting tools niche.
Java itself is just a language, like English, and it isn't a problem itself.
What you probably mean is that Sun's virtual machine for running Java is not free, but that still isn't automatically a problem of any program written in Java, it's only problem of Sun's JDK.
It has been mentioned already that OO compiles fine in GCJ which _is_ free software, so there is certainly no problem here.
I know that oftentimes I see something cool in an online store and I get all very impulsive and stuff, and I say "No way I am going to wait 3 days for this gadget to arrive!" and I get out of the house and drive to Best Buy so I can have my toy today.
So I think it may be that online stores bring out the impulsive side in people better than traditional stores, but the nature of impulsiveness demands us to have something right away and therefore these sales go to local stores instead, even if you got the idea of the purchase online.
energy wasted by hard drive goes into heating your room as well. In short, all and any energy your computer is using ends up in your room because it has nowhere else to go (except back up the power lines, but you will agree it doesn't go there).
and right there in the abstract the researchers summarize the conclusion of their work:
We find that the decimal digits of pi are in fact good candidates for random number generators and can be used for practical scientific and engineering computations.
So it seems paper authors do not want to say anything about pi's randomness and we will get in a second to why. They instead say: This study probably says more about our commercially available random number generators than the nature of pi.... But they, and pi as well, might perform differently if the tests were run under different circumstances.
Now that we established the fact that the headline is just sensationalism and not what authors intended to say, let's see where confusion comes from. (Most people can stop reading here.)
The authors generated some random sequences and looked at a variable that desribed the randomness of those. By construction, any measure of randomness of such sequence is itself a random variable obeying some unknown distribution. So the scores would themselves be random, therefore the rank of any RNG (including pi) is itself a random number. So the authors found that pi digits were ranked not on top of the list. But gee, the rank itself is random, so even if pi digits were ranked the worst of all, that doesn't tell us ANYTHING.
And as a final point, were the authors really to discover any non-randomness in pi digits, that would have effectively proven pi to not be a normal number, and that is something that has been waiting for a while for someone to sort out and would be a serious scientific achievement. So for all we know, pi digits are a perfect random generator and the paper does not disprove that.
I read the powerbook prank story. What I find disturbing is the outcome of the prank. Scammer sending him virus and DoS-ing his website is alright, but then in a short while Jeff himself disappears completely, noone can find him, his email and websites all go down, what the hell?
I mean we all know that playing with scammers might get dangerous, so why don't the guys who do this check up on each other to make sure they are fine? I mean, from the way it looks it might be that scammer arranged for Jeff to be killed or something.
Here we have Larry - so worried that someone might potentially be working on a competing product that he was ready to put his foot down at the first sign of some random guy doing reverse engineering.
And what he got as a result? Now he has Linus himself working on a replacement product, and potentially some of the hundreds of other developers.
it's strange how a few people that actually put some posts here saying that this is a dupe and even made links to original slashdot discussion are being modded into zeros as redundant.
I think the article is redundant, not the posters who point you to a correct place to read the discussion. They are just being informative - if not for them, you would miss an actual discussion.
You will need rating system with moderators; Initially a few trusted admins will moderate, then after system has been working for a while everyone with high trust rating will be able to moderate.
System works like this - when you have a new user join the site, their posts won't be submitted immediately, but go into a queue first. Queue is being monitored by moderators who can approve and rate a comment on a scale 1-5 and then it becomes visible to all, and poster's rating grows. When rating reaches 25 (just 5 really useful comment or 25 trashy), user can post and his comments become visible immediately.
If a new user who is known to be "good" joins the site he can be given high rating immedately - implement the sponsorship. High rating users can sponsor new users so that they can post immedately without going to the queue. But if this user is later banned, his sponsor won't be allowed to sponsor anyone anymore.
This system should work well for you. Oh, and obvioysly keep the moderation system in place, a-la Slashdot and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, so in Germany it is legal to sell OO for any amount of money I feel like charging for it.
So what if this company wrote up EULA saying by downloading OO from them I am agreeing to buy it for 10 million dollars. Would you still recommend to pay?
But is it ANY different than asking for 100 dollars?
What would German law say if company was asking for 1 billion dollar per sale? After all, that number is just as arbitrary as any other number they are charging.
Everyone on Earth deserves to live exactly the same.
You will be living better.
If reducing your standard of living by 20% seems like a doomsday to you then you are spoiled.
You will still be living better than you deserve after this depression is over.
It is very likely that economy is sliding into depression. No record sales in such environment, sorry. Wall Street has been convulsing in a crisis for 6 month now, and things are getting worse by the day. We just had one of the largest investment banks collapse on Friday. Events of such significance have not happened since the Great Depression, and don't for a second assume this will not pull the broader economy down.
I said "may make Great Depression seem mild". Emphasis on 'may' - I think there is like a 20% chance of a complete economic disaster happening. And that this recession will be deeper than most recent ones, is almost a given.
You know, "doom and gloom" really does happen all the time around the world, but people always believe their country is somehow immune...
no , world is not coming to an end, recessions and even depressions are a normal part of business cycle and happen every decade or two. What I am saying is there is strong indication that this time the swing of the cycle will be deeper than usual, with GDP decline of 10% and more not out of the question (Great Depression led to 30% decline).
I just think the fact that the financial system is caught up in a seizure not seen for 100 years is a lot more interesting that 30 years old pointless paper.
Slashdot Nerdiness at its best! The country is on the brink of unstoppable financial catastrophe that may make Great Depression seem mild, major banks have come || this close to failing in the last few days, the best economist on the planet has been openly panicking on his blog, but Slashdot decided to talk about the financial theory of science fiction! Maybe, just maybe, since the original story is about Krugman (who is considered by many to be the most celebrated economist of the present) you should go and check out his blog, read his posts for the last 20 days, and realize that we probably should be talking about something else now...
I am scientist. Been for a long time.
I have seen so many scientists who are complete and plain retards in matters of ordinary life, who believe things that make just no sense at all, that I am kind of surprised the question is even posed here. Most of these scientists should be happy if a girl, any girl, loves them and tolerates their quirkiness.
Besides, it has been scientifically proven that the season in which a baby is born correlates with the qualities that child has, in terms of health, smartness, and even temper. Granted, correlation is very small, but this almost qualifies as astrology, doesn't it?
Oh well, rant off.
No need to build the case, just let MS buy Yahoo, this will be a total financial disaster for MS.
If they really buy Yahoo for the price they offered, they will suddenly become a few years closer to irrelevance.
Let's be economically realistic here. If you look at the OLPC progress timescale here:
http://laptop.org/en/vision/progress/index.shtml
You will notice that the price tag of 100$ per laptop initiates back in the end of 2004.
Now, I hope all of you here have heard about an economic phenomenon called inflation - the process where governments inflate money supply making your dollars buy less. Very few know that for the past decade or so the government has been massaging the official inflation numbers to make them appear lower - this allows them to make fewer and fewer payments on inflation adjusted liabilities such as social security. However, they still publish all the numbers one needs to calculate the actual inflation, and some people have been doing that, look for example here:
http://www.shadowstats.com/cgi-bin/sgs/data
Notice how inflation has been running steadily at about 10% for the last few years. Today, the engineers who drafted the 100$ plan in the end of 2004 / beginning of 2005, should expect the cost to be 100*1.1*1.1*1.1 or roughly 135 dollars.
That already would take a lot of sensationalism out of the story. However, let's not stop here. Remember, the real culprit behind inflation is the money supply, and consumer inflation is usually the latest to price rising party. The money supply (as you may have noticed from previous link) has been running at 14% annually, causing serious mischief in prices of things like energy (http://www.investmenttools.com/futures/energy/index.htm) or metals (http://www.investmenttools.com/futures/metals/welcome_to_the_page_about_copper_futures.htm) - both are important for making technology.
Just for the sake of an example, let's trivialize the problem a little, and say that to make a laptop you need to spend 60% of your budget on metals, and 40% on energy (it's wrong, but I am just making an example). What would you expect to happen to the price of such laptop according the charts I linked to? Well, it would go up from 100$ to slightly over 200$.
So what is the real story here, engineers screwing up their designs, or governments inflating away the buying power of the dollar making the same thing cost twice more over 3 years?
Look at my links, do your research, decide for yourself.
no, that's a cumbersome way in which theorists try to understand their equations.
This "analogy" (and a pretty weak one) came after the math was written.
I think they succeeded quite spectacularly, and also depicted very accurately all the non-staged, real situations when the Leeroys of the world go suicidal.
Everytime Slashdot links to another article where someone says something about a subject in which they have direct commercial interest, I wonder - WHY???
We are not really getting to hear someone's opinion on the matter, because these people will say anything that they think may improve their cash flow, even if they know they are saying crap.
So what potentially interesting or useful information is in such articles??
We are not reading anything remotely productive, we are not learning anything, you just get another snapshot of the greediness of human nature. But we don't need any more of that, do we?
So why do we have these articles?
that's why I always first check out Slashdot comments.
If within 30 seconds I find a comment which says "boring", "stupid", "markedroid" or "obvious" I don't bother clicking anything.
Besides, most articles are so scarce on insight and information you will learn more from Slashdot discussion browsing at +4.
Doesn't seem ecnomically sensible. Your post implies that right now you can make diamonds cheaper than DeBeers, so why not make some and sell them - since you are already set up to do that and are making diamonds anyways.
And if DeBeers later at some point drops prices too low, you can always go back to your cutting tools niche.
Java itself is just a language, like English, and it isn't a problem itself.
What you probably mean is that Sun's virtual machine for running Java is not free, but that still isn't automatically a problem of any program written in Java, it's only problem of Sun's JDK.
It has been mentioned already that OO compiles fine in GCJ which _is_ free software, so there is certainly no problem here.
I know that oftentimes I see something cool in an online store and I get all very impulsive and stuff, and I say "No way I am going to wait 3 days for this gadget to arrive!" and I get out of the house and drive to Best Buy so I can have my toy today.
So I think it may be that online stores bring out the impulsive side in people better than traditional stores, but the nature of impulsiveness demands us to have something right away and therefore these sales go to local stores instead, even if you got the idea of the purchase online.
energy wasted by hard drive goes into heating your room as well.
In short, all and any energy your computer is using ends up in your room because it has nowhere else to go (except back up the power lines, but you will agree it doesn't go there).
We find that the decimal digits of pi are in fact good candidates for random number generators and can be used for practical scientific and engineering computations.
So it seems paper authors do not want to say anything about pi's randomness and we will get in a second to why. They instead say: This study probably says more about our commercially available random number generators than the nature of pi.
Now that we established the fact that the headline is just sensationalism and not what authors intended to say, let's see where confusion comes from. (Most people can stop reading here.)
The authors generated some random sequences and looked at a variable that desribed the randomness of those. By construction, any measure of randomness of such sequence is itself a random variable obeying some unknown distribution. So the scores would themselves be random, therefore the rank of any RNG (including pi) is itself a random number. So the authors found that pi digits were ranked not on top of the list. But gee, the rank itself is random, so even if pi digits were ranked the worst of all, that doesn't tell us ANYTHING.
And as a final point, were the authors really to discover any non-randomness in pi digits, that would have effectively proven pi to not be a normal number, and that is something that has been waiting for a while for someone to sort out and would be a serious scientific achievement. So for all we know, pi digits are a perfect random generator and the paper does not disprove that.
I read the powerbook prank story.
What I find disturbing is the outcome of the prank.
Scammer sending him virus and DoS-ing his website is alright, but then in a short while Jeff himself disappears completely, noone can find him, his email and websites all go down, what the hell?
I mean we all know that playing with scammers might get dangerous, so why don't the guys who do this check up on each other to make sure they are fine? I mean, from the way it looks it might be that scammer arranged for Jeff to be killed or something.
Here we have Larry - so worried that someone might potentially be working on a competing product that he was ready to put his foot down at the first sign of some random guy doing reverse engineering.
And what he got as a result? Now he has Linus himself working on a replacement product, and potentially some of the hundreds of other developers.
um, why doesn't it add up to 100%? What are we missing?
it's strange how a few people that actually put some posts here saying that this is a dupe and even made links to original slashdot discussion are being modded into zeros as redundant.
I think the article is redundant, not the posters who point you to a correct place to read the discussion. They are just being informative - if not for them, you would miss an actual discussion.
You will need rating system with moderators;
Initially a few trusted admins will moderate, then after system has been working for a while everyone with high trust rating will be able to moderate.
System works like this - when you have a new user join the site, their posts won't be submitted immediately, but go into a queue first. Queue is being monitored by moderators who can approve and rate a comment on a scale 1-5 and then it becomes visible to all, and poster's rating grows. When rating reaches 25 (just 5 really useful comment or 25 trashy), user can post and his comments become visible immediately.
If a new user who is known to be "good" joins the site he can be given high rating immedately - implement the sponsorship. High rating users can sponsor new users so that they can post immedately without going to the queue. But if this user is later banned, his sponsor won't be allowed to sponsor anyone anymore.
This system should work well for you. Oh, and obvioysly keep the moderation system in place, a-la Slashdot and the like.
also this and this explains how that happened