If there were a higher response rate, spamming would be more profitable. So more people would get into it. So the response rate would go down again, as we are bombarded with even more spams.
End result (assuming the Taguchi thing really works) - more spam, and the spammers are forced to use the Taguchi method to remain competitive.
The post you replied to didn't say "most users" would want to know low-level details, just that he did. And I don't know what planet you're from, where linux users think this, but here on Earth linux advocates are always talking about whether something is good for Joe User or grandma.
Google turns up 26,200 links for linux grandma, 8950 for linux "joe user", and only 1940 for linux packet mangling firewalls.
A remarkable exchange concerning Diebold's voting machines in Volusia County, Florida. On January 17, 2001, Lana Hines, a county elections official sends out an inquiry as to how Al Gore ended up with a vote-count of -16,022. That's NEGATIVE 16,022--which just happens also to have been the total number of votes cast for various independent and third-party candidates who also ran. (It was the largest number of such votes cast in Volusia County's history.)
Pay close attention to the final entry, from "Tab"--that is, Talbot Iredale, Vice President of Research & Development at Global/Diebold. The most troubling of his statement is in bold below. Iredale writes:...the error could only occur in one of four ways:
1.Corrupt memory card. This is the most likely explaination for the problem but since I know nothing about the 'second' memory card I have no ability to confirm the probability of this.
2.Invalid read from good memory card. This is unlikely since the candidates['] results for the race are not all read at the same time and the corruption was limited to a single race.There is a possib[ili]ty that a section of the memory card was bad but since I do not know anything more about the 'second' memory card I cannot validate this.
3.Corruption of memory, whether on the host or Accu-Vote. Again this is unlikely due to the localization of the problem to a single race.
4.Invalid memory card (i.e. one that should not have been uploaded). There is always the possib[i]lity that the 'second memory card' or 'second upload' came from an un-authorised source.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
When will this all-important story break out in the US mainstream press?
And Diebold has been sending cease-and-desist letters out to people who have covered this. This particular mistake looks like a screw-up rather than fraud, but either way I want no part of it.
BitTorrent wasn't even intended as a P2P piracy tool, it was to help serve up big files that hammer servers, like Linux isos. Anybody stupid enough to run a BitTorrent server with copyrighted material, and leave it up where the public can find it, is begging to be fucked over by the RIAA's lawyers.
They're not such a great stock. They have a lot of revenue, true, but everyone knows this, everyone has known this for a long time, so the stock price is accordingly already high, and has been high for years. They already monopolize their main market so there's no room for growth there. There's nowhere to go but down, and with big players like the Asian governments working against them, it's likely that they will go down.
There were probably buggy whip companies that had record revenues around the time the Model T Ford came out, or American steel mills that had record revenues just before they got their asses handed to them by foreign competition. That doesn't mean they were great stocks.
This argument doesn't hold water. Vietnam-era deficits were insignificant compared to the deficits of the 80s, which were insignificant compared to the deficits of WWII. If deficit spending was the whole story, there should have been much worse inflation in the 80s and in the late 40s.
Anyone can start their own fork if they want to, but it would be a pain in the ass to maintain, and it would be a lot of work to incorporate any future improvements in the main branch into a new fork. That would be expensive, and there would have to be a pretty compelling reason to go to that trouble. I don't see why anyone would do that unless Linus and co. stop doing a good enough job at maintaining the kernel.
If these robots ever exist, individual companies would be forced to lay off employees and replace them with robots. Otherwise, another company would do so, undercut their prices, and take away their business. If every company does this, yes, it would be a disaster for all companies, but each individual company would be powerless to resist the robotic-worker trend. Even the biggest, most powerful companies have to keep up with the competition
This sort of thing has happened before. During the Great Depression, we were stuck in a cycle of cost-cutting, which led to unemployment, which led to reduced business, which led to cost-cutting, rinse, lather, repeat. Only the stimulus of WWII finally ended that cycle. It was senseless on a large scale, but individual businessmen were just doing what they had to do.
The article didn't really address the fact that the rich will be super, super rich beyond the wildest imaginations of today's rich if this comes to pass. The arts could be a way to make a living, but I you'd make the money by finding a rich patron to sponser you. Today most successful artists become famous and lots of middle-class/poor people buy CD's/books/movie tickets, and the artist gets a small cut from each of them. If the middle-class and poor are destitute, you'd have to get money from the rich. If the rich are extremely rich, sponsoring an artist would be pocket change to them. That's the way artists made their living during the Renaissance and before.
Did you read the article, Gay Nigger? If Marshall Brain's robots ever come to pass, there will be no need for human capital. Productivity will approach infinity. Workers will be useless. That has nothing to do with IT jobs moving overseas and no analogy with the destruction of various trades in the past. Sure, new industries would be created, but they would not employ human workers and would benefit only the owners.
Profit = gross revenue - expenses. That means all expenses, from the assembly line to the cost of the parts to the truck driver to shrinkage to the engineer to the PHBs to the marketing dept. etc. etc.. you get the picture. Not to mention that the wholesaler and retailer probably get something like 1/2 of the sticker price.
What would your homebrew equipment cost if you had to pay yourself a wage at reasonable market value?
The children of factory workers went to college and became clerks or salesmen or scientists.
And now, we're going away from having near-universal access to higher education to higher and higher tuitions, with less and less financial aid available, for worse and worse universities. The "creative" part of creative destruction comes from investing in R&D and in human capital (training and education); most of that happens in universities. And we're cutting higher education to the bone. Madness.
At this rate, during the next cycle, Asia will get the "creative" and we'll get the "destruction."
3. Assuming the company cuts their salary expenses in half. Where did that money go? Your post seemed to be anti-outsourcing so I'll assume the worst: the evil company paid more tax and kept the money. Which now belongs to the shareholders. Who now invest more heavily in technology. Which causes other businesses to pop up in this very profitable field. Other companies hire more people (a few of which have to be local).
There's been a lot of cost cutting in IT over the past few years (by outsourcing, among other methods). I don't know where the savings are going, but given the fact that we're in a job-loss recovery they don't seem to be going to high-tech start-ups (at least not in the US). Your theory sounds plausible, but I don't see that it matches reality (at least on this excruciatingly hot planet).
If everyone else is using Windows, you're sort of stuck with it yourself. I'm running a Linux desktop and the problems with it are strictly related to the fact that so many people assume you have Windows - I can't get support from my DSL provider, can't reliably open a.doc, and can't run the CD that comes with a textbook (unless it happens to work with WINE - an iffy proposition).
Also, a few websites don't work (they were tested on IE only). If MS gets much more market share we can expect them to subvert HTML/Javascript with IE only features, which will mean that you have to have IE to access the web. With the demise (finally) of NS Navigator 4, that seems possible to me.
But if we get just 5-10% market share, we cannot be ignored. Only a website run by morons would shut that much of its potential audience out, and people would stop using.doc as a standard, more games would be made for Linux, etc. That's why it's important that a certain number of Joe Blows switch from Windows.
Also, in this lawsuit happy world, what if MS decides to sue a project that copies their look and feel? Surely these projects violate a couple hundred MS patents?
Just because they haven't done so yet, doesn't mean they won't. They could be waiting until the right moment (like when it starts eating their market share in a real way).
When I switched to Linux (KDE), it was simply not a problem to switch my non-technical girlfriend. I had to show her that you use OpenOffice.org instead of MS Office and Mozilla instead of IE. Otherwise it's fairly obvious and intuitive.
If something should go wrong under the hood, like the internet connection drops, God help her if I'm not around. And she could not have set the system up herself. But with large organizations like the article discusses, that's not the end-user's problem.
Google HTTP shows Mac ALWAYS 9x larger tahn Linux every year since 1995.
Where do you get this? According to Google's zeitgeist
the ratio is more like 3:1.
If they said in 5 years everyone would be using FreeBSD-Mach-Darwin OS (Apple OS X) that might be believable... but not 20% desktop Linux.
Yeah, the same Apple which has been steadily losing market share since longer than I can remember.. whatever you think of the quality of their OS, the idea that they will have 20% market share in 5 years is ludicrous.
That's true.. I forgot about how German has 7 words for "the". But most languages have more consistency between the spoken and written languages. I used to work with Mexicans who could speak English, but couldn't read it (they were literate in their own language), whereas I spoke only passable broken Spanish, but could read it out loud and sound like I was fluent, to their great amusement.
In case you're wondering, center/centre is from the Latin centrum, so the French were right.
That's the kind of thinking that has made English into such a mess. Other languages change the spelling of words to conform to the spoken standard. English standards are based on the origin of a word. That's why you can't be sure of the pronounciation of an English word by sight (you can in Spanish or German).
It's hard enough to learn even a simple language like Spanish. It must be a real bitch to learn English as a second language. I'm glad it's my first.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll sink a notch lower and vote for the Count from Sesame Street over Bush.
End result (assuming the Taguchi thing really works) - more spam, and the spammers are forced to use the Taguchi method to remain competitive.
Google turns up 26,200 links for linux grandma, 8950 for linux "joe user", and only 1940 for linux packet mangling firewalls.
How did this get modded up +4 Insightful?
And Diebold has been sending cease-and-desist letters out to people who have covered this. This particular mistake looks like a screw-up rather than fraud, but either way I want no part of it.
Example: the success of Microsoft vs, well, anyone.
that they've automated away a major part of a professors job, while we still need humans to pick spinach and deliver pizzas.
BitTorrent wasn't even intended as a P2P piracy tool, it was to help serve up big files that hammer servers, like Linux isos. Anybody stupid enough to run a BitTorrent server with copyrighted material, and leave it up where the public can find it, is begging to be fucked over by the RIAA's lawyers.
There were probably buggy whip companies that had record revenues around the time the Model T Ford came out, or American steel mills that had record revenues just before they got their asses handed to them by foreign competition. That doesn't mean they were great stocks.
There's a lot of kiddie pr0n exchanged on port 80. Also pictures of Osama bin Laden. And articles supporting Saddam Hussein. And stuff in French.
This argument doesn't hold water. Vietnam-era deficits were insignificant compared to the deficits of the 80s, which were insignificant compared to the deficits of WWII. If deficit spending was the whole story, there should have been much worse inflation in the 80s and in the late 40s.
Flamebaiting in the defense of liberty is no vice.
Anyone can start their own fork if they want to, but it would be a pain in the ass to maintain, and it would be a lot of work to incorporate any future improvements in the main branch into a new fork. That would be expensive, and there would have to be a pretty compelling reason to go to that trouble. I don't see why anyone would do that unless Linus and co. stop doing a good enough job at maintaining the kernel.
This sort of thing has happened before. During the Great Depression, we were stuck in a cycle of cost-cutting, which led to unemployment, which led to reduced business, which led to cost-cutting, rinse, lather, repeat. Only the stimulus of WWII finally ended that cycle. It was senseless on a large scale, but individual businessmen were just doing what they had to do.
The article didn't really address the fact that the rich will be super, super rich beyond the wildest imaginations of today's rich if this comes to pass. The arts could be a way to make a living, but I you'd make the money by finding a rich patron to sponser you. Today most successful artists become famous and lots of middle-class/poor people buy CD's/books/movie tickets, and the artist gets a small cut from each of them. If the middle-class and poor are destitute, you'd have to get money from the rich. If the rich are extremely rich, sponsoring an artist would be pocket change to them. That's the way artists made their living during the Renaissance and before.
Did you read the article, Gay Nigger? If Marshall Brain's robots ever come to pass, there will be no need for human capital. Productivity will approach infinity. Workers will be useless. That has nothing to do with IT jobs moving overseas and no analogy with the destruction of various trades in the past. Sure, new industries would be created, but they would not employ human workers and would benefit only the owners.
What would your homebrew equipment cost if you had to pay yourself a wage at reasonable market value?
At this rate, during the next cycle, Asia will get the "creative" and we'll get the "destruction."
Also, a few websites don't work (they were tested on IE only). If MS gets much more market share we can expect them to subvert HTML/Javascript with IE only features, which will mean that you have to have IE to access the web. With the demise (finally) of NS Navigator 4, that seems possible to me.
But if we get just 5-10% market share, we cannot be ignored. Only a website run by morons would shut that much of its potential audience out, and people would stop using .doc as a standard, more games would be made for Linux, etc. That's why it's important that a certain number of Joe Blows switch from Windows.
Just because they haven't done so yet, doesn't mean they won't. They could be waiting until the right moment (like when it starts eating their market share in a real way).
If something should go wrong under the hood, like the internet connection drops, God help her if I'm not around. And she could not have set the system up herself. But with large organizations like the article discusses, that's not the end-user's problem.
That's true.. I forgot about how German has 7 words for "the". But most languages have more consistency between the spoken and written languages. I used to work with Mexicans who could speak English, but couldn't read it (they were literate in their own language), whereas I spoke only passable broken Spanish, but could read it out loud and sound like I was fluent, to their great amusement.
It's hard enough to learn even a simple language like Spanish. It must be a real bitch to learn English as a second language. I'm glad it's my first.
I can't wait to see clean-scrubbed SCO guys on bicycles trying to sell us Linux licenses.