It's better than the paid for stuff. Even when it isn't.
Google, for example, could not have been achieved with operating systems and servers from Microsoft, because the economics involved would have forced them to stop scaling out to additional nodes. Their achievement is a huge benefit to mankind, and it would have died in the garage.
I would even go so far as to say that their achievement was concluded in the garage, and the years spent since then have been about trying to defend it from a capitalist system that would leave it to wither and die and participants in a capitalist system who would pervert and destroy its value in their efforts to swindle a buck out of a system they do not respect.
Capitalist economics is a shell game? I strongly disagree but I will go with it for the purposes of discussion. (I believe capitalism does a damn fine job of allocating resources efficiently)
Question for you: what is the alternative?
What is the utopian economic vision you have in mind? If capitalist economics sucks, then what is the "right" model, in your mind? Please enlighten us.
First off, the way to create a fair and equitable society is to recognize that people are not born free. The real world imposes requirements upon us, and those requirements must be met.
To be strong, self-sufficient and confident individuals, we must meet these needs through the direct application of our own power. We cannot yoke our fellow man like a horse to meet our requirements for us, because doing so strips us of our individuality transforms us into dependent parasites. We must do it ourselves, and we cultivate the capacity to do for ourselves within ourselves, and within each other.
The right economic model to deliver this is communism, without currency. No taxes. All contributions to be paid in labour, all people to contribute to each industry that sustains life to the best of their capacity.
Everyone, from the top to the bottom, does their time in the industries that create our food, our shelter, our power, etc.
This means spending some of your time in the areas you're good at, demonstrating to your peers that you're a skilled asset in that area, and being given the opportunity to lead by those who recognize that you have something to offer that they do not.
It also means spending some of your time in the areas you're not good at, recognizing your limitations, and learning to recognize the people who surpass your limitations so you know who to be led by, for your own self-interest.
This is how you create a self-reliant and informed population.
This would reduce the workload on all people dramatically, because we wouldn't have a vast multitude of people dedicating their entire lives to creating things which do nothing to sustain anyone, but merely titillate the fancy of our ruling class.
Once you have such a strong population of informed individuals, you need a democratic process to allow them to co-operate.
But not a democratic process like we have now. What we see in the world today is a joke, in which we are given a short list of unappealing rulers, and we must choose one who will rule over us for years, with no capacity to change our mind should we be betrayed.
What we need is a democratic process that leaves us always in control of our own political voice, small though it may be in a crowd so large.
Ideally, this would mean direct democracy, in which all people vote directly on all issues, in the fashion of the Romans. But this ideal would require that we have infinite time to inform ourselves, and to gather the opinions of those we trust more than ourselves to answer specific concerns.
So, the way to solve the problem is to allow us to embed expressions of our trust into the system, and have those expressions be under our control.
We allow everyone to vote directly on each issue, and we allow them to choose instead to vote for any individual they wish. If they choose to vote for an individual, that individual gets the extra vote transferred to them, to wield as they see fit.
The "vote", the "transfer of power", this should be revocable at any time, and all votes cast should be part of the public record, with no anonymity. This way, there's no power usurped under false pretenses and wielded in an arbitrary fashion without consequence during some arbitrary political term of office, which is what we see so much of today.
In such a world, people would remain strong individuals, understanding of how their life is maintained. They would have no need to prey on each other. They would have developed as much knowledge, wisdom and experience as
So next time my management refuse to buy a $200 tool and I lose a week of working time with an inferior FOSS equivalent that's me saved is it? Even if I have to make up the lost week in unpaid overtime? Good for my soul, maybe.
So, if there were no free tools, and your management had to close up shop and go get jobs working for someone else because the cumulative cost of all these tools was too much for their enterprise to bear, would that make you happier?
The problem with free software is that people often do not feel motivated to work on tedious and repetitious parts of the problem. You know, things like making GUI more attractive, giving user more control (without having them learn application source code) etc.
Not only that, but with the free software, you can see where they were lazy and messy and did a half assed job. Commercial software goes to much further lengths to conceal the messy, half-assed evidence from you, bringing peace of mind. And really, how much is your piece of mind worth?
The reason open source has taken off so much is because it allows people who have no capital to dodge around the wage-slave line and produce things with their own tools.
Teach a man to fish and all that jazz...
Capitalism and all its fictional scarcity have been destroying productivity in the name of control for a long time. The liberty that lies beneath free software and open publishing is increasing productivity, not damaging it.
Capitalist economics is a big shell game, meant to fleece suckers. It's monopoly, dependence, exploitation and theft, pure and simple.
However, the MVC architecture is triangular: the View sends updates to the Controller, the Controller updates the Model, and the View gets updated directly from the Model.
Which is wrong. The statement is contradicted by the very link embedded in it. In truth, the view directly updates the model and the view is modified indirectly by the model. The controller processes and responds to events, typically user actions, and may invoke changes on the model.
Rails isn't cool. It's a poor concept from the word go. They make the thing so damned weighty in their blind adherence to the flawed premise that just because MVC is a good model for desktop applications, it's a good model for everything, and that single premise is an insurmountable barrier to good performance.
Fact of the matter is, MVC is a piss poor model for stateless client-server applications, but it's not till you've wasted your time building a solution in this fashion and watching it fail to scale that you realize that.
They're not very good... rather cumbersome and don't scale very well, but they give you something flashy with only 3 lines of code, and I've got a ton of amateur developers who haven't learned well enough not to use it yet on board.
Can I have a blowjob too?
Come on... Developers, Developers, Developers!!! and all that jazz...
There is no flash wear myth. If it was a myth, they never would have gone to all that trouble. The whole point behind Static Wear Leveling is to mitigate a very significant and real weakness in the storage medium.
The fact that flash is only really well suited for infrequent writes and frequent non-contiguous reads doesn't bode well for its utility in OLTP applications.
communism-the-economic-model absent totalitarianism-the-political model has been tried - successfully - at least twice: in Anarcho-Communist sections of Spain during the Civil War, and in Ukraine (again by anarchists) in the early 1920s. Both times the eventual failure was brought about not by economic collapse but by... totalitarianism. The Red Army defeated Nestor Markov's Black Army in Ukraine, and the Red Army's paymasters in the CPSU and the pro-Moscow CP of Spain crushed the "fascists" in the anarchist unions in Spain. Your uninformed outlook makes you a perfect target for capitalist brainwashing.;)
I appreciate your point.
That is why I am in favour of a modified form of direct democracy, in which a person has the capacity built into the voting system to allow them to either personally vote on any and every issue if they wish, or to assign their vote to any individual they wish for as long or short a time frame as they wish.
Human beings have a herd instinct, and they will throw their support behind strong central rule when they are under threat. When they're not under threat, that is when they wish to follow their own agendas, be they individual pursuits or voluntarily following leadership that they believe in.
I think such a system could work where Anarcho-Communism failed, because it would not try to enforce an idealistic freedom that the realities of the world will not permit, but systematically and automatically leave the participants with as much self-determination as is practical, while still allowing them to rally into an efficient vertical power structure when under threat.
Are Intel ever going to do anything interesting with processor architecture that actually works better?
I mean, they came out with the P3, then they created the abortion that is the P4 architecture and managed to get it a little faster than the P3 through shrinking process, until finally, they switched back to the superior P3 architecture with a modern fab process and labelled it the Pentium M, then they glued them together in groups of two and four and called it the Pentium Core Whatever, and now they're re-using the same architecture yet again with a smaller fab process and calling it Atom.
So they've been selling us the same architecture for how many years now? Am I the only one who looks at this and thinks this looks like a plan to keep things from progressing any faster than Moores law allows so they can suck another decade or two of money out of the same old shit, because they really don't have any good ideas and haven't in a long time?
You can't take large populations of ethnically and religiously diverse populations, put them in close contact, and tell them "Get along - or else". It just doesn't work over the long term.
Yes, it does. However, you have to wait until everyone who remembers when it all started is dead, and everyone alive was born into the situation. If you hold it together that long, you create a new cultural identity. If you don't hold it together for 4 generations, it disintegrates.
Communism, on the other hand, called for totally arbitrary pre-planning of economy (you couldn't really go and tell people "do what the fuck you want"), which were the infamous Quinquennial plans of the Soviets.
That is a falsehood. The arbitrary nature of planning comes from a lack of democratic process in determining leadership, not from the nature of the economic system. If a responsive democratic process were in place, this would not happen.
Be that so. Although some Russian leaders have ruined the idea of communism for many people,
Who supplied you with all your news about what was going on in those Communist states? Was it Stalin, or was it your own national news?
It's not communism-the-economic-model that's the problem, it's totalitarianism-the-political-model. You can't dissociate the two in your mind because your own nation has been brainwashing you to think of them as inseparable, most likely since the time you were born.
Both democratic capitalist states and totalitarian communist states have carrots and sticks.
In the democratic state, you are dominated through economics, but liberated from autocratic government, in totalitarian communist states, you are dominated by government, but liberated from dynastic capitalist empires.
Capitalism is the same as Totalitarianism, Communism is the same as Democracy, ain't nobody free on this hunk of dirt, and very few who even know well enough how to even ask for freedom in the first place.
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.
Wow, has professional writing ever gone downhill. Ever heard of a period?
Just say to them "Je ne parle pas francais, mais je comprende un peu. Eske tu comprende Anglais?"
I used to hitchhike through Quebec quite a bit when I was younger, and if you can understand the gist of what they say in French, they'll generally be able to do the same for your English. I've successfully had conversations lasting hours with the two of us speaking different languages at each other because even though we could decipher the foreign language, our native tongue was the only language we could find the words to express ourselves in.
What the hell does any of that have to do with copyright?
It's simple. If we take copyright law off the books, we can give a copy of the entire sum of human creativity to every man woman and child on earth for a penny each. And, we have the practical means to actually do it.
If we don't take the copyright law off the books, it would cost billions of dollars for each disc each, and we would be unable to do it, not due to any practical barrier, but because of an unfortunate side effect of the clumsy mechanism we're using to look after the creative people in our society.
When you get down to it, your copyright comes, not from any power that you hold over us, but from our recognition that it's worthwhile to support creators like you. If there was another political/economic system to support you, and give you even more support than you're get right now, but through a different mechanism, what would your problem be with that? Wouldn't that be better than the status quo?
thats great.
but that doesn't really translate to the movie and TV industry does it?
Because a business model works for what YOU do, it doesn't mean it work for everyone on earth.
Furthermore, copyright does not in any way "screw things up for the vast majority of us". Poorly done copyright screws things up, not copyright itself.
Ok. Well, according to the article on the front page of Slashdot this very day, in very short order, it will apparently be possible using consumer level tools to burn 1TB to an optical disc.
This should mean that it's practical to assemble a collection of every written work ever created in the recorded history of man, build a factory that churns them out at negligible cost, and distribute a copy to every child on the face of the earth.
Now, will you argue that copyright is consistent with such a lofty goal? Will you argue that this goal does not benefit the vast majority of us? Or, will you concede the fucking point already and, if you can't make a suggestion for an alternative scheme, at least acknowledge that there is a need for one?
Slashdot Mirror
It's better than the paid for stuff. Even when it isn't.
Google, for example, could not have been achieved with operating systems and servers from Microsoft, because the economics involved would have forced them to stop scaling out to additional nodes. Their achievement is a huge benefit to mankind, and it would have died in the garage.
I would even go so far as to say that their achievement was concluded in the garage, and the years spent since then have been about trying to defend it from a capitalist system that would leave it to wither and die and participants in a capitalist system who would pervert and destroy its value in their efforts to swindle a buck out of a system they do not respect.
Capitalist economics is a shell game? I strongly disagree but I will go with it for the purposes of discussion. (I believe capitalism does a damn fine job of allocating resources efficiently)
Question for you: what is the alternative?
What is the utopian economic vision you have in mind? If capitalist economics sucks, then what is the "right" model, in your mind? Please enlighten us.
First off, the way to create a fair and equitable society is to recognize that people are not born free. The real world imposes requirements upon us, and those requirements must be met.
To be strong, self-sufficient and confident individuals, we must meet these needs through the direct application of our own power. We cannot yoke our fellow man like a horse to meet our requirements for us, because doing so strips us of our individuality transforms us into dependent parasites. We must do it ourselves, and we cultivate the capacity to do for ourselves within ourselves, and within each other.
The right economic model to deliver this is communism, without currency. No taxes. All contributions to be paid in labour, all people to contribute to each industry that sustains life to the best of their capacity.
Everyone, from the top to the bottom, does their time in the industries that create our food, our shelter, our power, etc.
This means spending some of your time in the areas you're good at, demonstrating to your peers that you're a skilled asset in that area, and being given the opportunity to lead by those who recognize that you have something to offer that they do not.
It also means spending some of your time in the areas you're not good at, recognizing your limitations, and learning to recognize the people who surpass your limitations so you know who to be led by, for your own self-interest.
This is how you create a self-reliant and informed population.
This would reduce the workload on all people dramatically, because we wouldn't have a vast multitude of people dedicating their entire lives to creating things which do nothing to sustain anyone, but merely titillate the fancy of our ruling class.
Once you have such a strong population of informed individuals, you need a democratic process to allow them to co-operate.
But not a democratic process like we have now. What we see in the world today is a joke, in which we are given a short list of unappealing rulers, and we must choose one who will rule over us for years, with no capacity to change our mind should we be betrayed.
What we need is a democratic process that leaves us always in control of our own political voice, small though it may be in a crowd so large.
Ideally, this would mean direct democracy, in which all people vote directly on all issues, in the fashion of the Romans. But this ideal would require that we have infinite time to inform ourselves, and to gather the opinions of those we trust more than ourselves to answer specific concerns.
So, the way to solve the problem is to allow us to embed expressions of our trust into the system, and have those expressions be under our control.
We allow everyone to vote directly on each issue, and we allow them to choose instead to vote for any individual they wish. If they choose to vote for an individual, that individual gets the extra vote transferred to them, to wield as they see fit.
The "vote", the "transfer of power", this should be revocable at any time, and all votes cast should be part of the public record, with no anonymity. This way, there's no power usurped under false pretenses and wielded in an arbitrary fashion without consequence during some arbitrary political term of office, which is what we see so much of today.
In such a world, people would remain strong individuals, understanding of how their life is maintained. They would have no need to prey on each other. They would have developed as much knowledge, wisdom and experience as
So next time my management refuse to buy a $200 tool and I lose a week of working time with an inferior FOSS equivalent that's me saved is it? Even if I have to make up the lost week in unpaid overtime? Good for my soul, maybe.
So, if there were no free tools, and your management had to close up shop and go get jobs working for someone else because the cumulative cost of all these tools was too much for their enterprise to bear, would that make you happier?
The problem with free software is that people often do not feel motivated to work on tedious and repetitious parts of the problem. You know, things like making GUI more attractive, giving user more control (without having them learn application source code) etc.
Not only that, but with the free software, you can see where they were lazy and messy and did a half assed job. Commercial software goes to much further lengths to conceal the messy, half-assed evidence from you, bringing peace of mind. And really, how much is your piece of mind worth?
That is bullshit.
The reason open source has taken off so much is because it allows people who have no capital to dodge around the wage-slave line and produce things with their own tools.
Teach a man to fish and all that jazz...
Capitalism and all its fictional scarcity have been destroying productivity in the name of control for a long time. The liberty that lies beneath free software and open publishing is increasing productivity, not damaging it.
Capitalist economics is a big shell game, meant to fleece suckers. It's monopoly, dependence, exploitation and theft, pure and simple.
However, the MVC architecture is triangular: the View sends updates to the Controller, the Controller updates the Model, and the View gets updated directly from the Model.
Which is wrong. The statement is contradicted by the very link embedded in it. In truth, the view directly updates the model and the view is modified indirectly by the model. The controller processes and responds to events, typically user actions, and may invoke changes on the model.
It's on Wikipedia. Fix it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_(computing)#Comparison_with_the_MVC_architecture
Rails isn't cool. It's a poor concept from the word go. They make the thing so damned weighty in their blind adherence to the flawed premise that just because MVC is a good model for desktop applications, it's a good model for everything, and that single premise is an insurmountable barrier to good performance.
Fact of the matter is, MVC is a piss poor model for stateless client-server applications, but it's not till you've wasted your time building a solution in this fashion and watching it fail to scale that you realize that.
Hey Balmer!
I've put together a language and framework.
I call them Diamond and Diamond-On-Wings.
They're not very good... rather cumbersome and don't scale very well, but they give you something flashy with only 3 lines of code, and I've got a ton of amateur developers who haven't learned well enough not to use it yet on board.
Can I have a blowjob too?
Come on... Developers, Developers, Developers!!! and all that jazz...
On your knees, fat man!
You assume they are Chinese. Why do you assume that?
Apparently, they may be going to Y. They may even go to Z. And, according to a non-authoritative source, they may even bypass Y and Z and go to AA.
In other news, it may rain tomorrow. Or, it may not. And I may be having sex with your sister. But then, maybe I'm not.
That's it... I'm going into journalism. This is just way too easy!
There is no flash wear myth. If it was a myth, they never would have gone to all that trouble. The whole point behind Static Wear Leveling is to mitigate a very significant and real weakness in the storage medium.
The fact that flash is only really well suited for infrequent writes and frequent non-contiguous reads doesn't bode well for its utility in OLTP applications.
... but is it open source? Yes! Screenshot: http://google-gadgets-for-linux.googlecode.com/svn/images/ggl-standalone.jpg There are many reasons for me to hate Google. Their commitment to Linux and Open Source makes me look past all of them!
Isn't that like a woman saying, "I know he beats me, but he bought me a nice car so I'll stay" ?
Sharon Phillips sang it best...
I ain't goin nowhere, baby take off your clothes, I don't mind being slapped, I deserve the blows, You know I speak the truth, ask God, he knows...
communism-the-economic-model absent totalitarianism-the-political model has been tried - successfully - at least twice: in Anarcho-Communist sections of Spain during the Civil War, and in Ukraine (again by anarchists) in the early 1920s. Both times the eventual failure was brought about not by economic collapse but by... totalitarianism. The Red Army defeated Nestor Markov's Black Army in Ukraine, and the Red Army's paymasters in the CPSU and the pro-Moscow CP of Spain crushed the "fascists" in the anarchist unions in Spain. Your uninformed outlook makes you a perfect target for capitalist brainwashing. ;)
I appreciate your point.
That is why I am in favour of a modified form of direct democracy, in which a person has the capacity built into the voting system to allow them to either personally vote on any and every issue if they wish, or to assign their vote to any individual they wish for as long or short a time frame as they wish.
Human beings have a herd instinct, and they will throw their support behind strong central rule when they are under threat. When they're not under threat, that is when they wish to follow their own agendas, be they individual pursuits or voluntarily following leadership that they believe in.
I think such a system could work where Anarcho-Communism failed, because it would not try to enforce an idealistic freedom that the realities of the world will not permit, but systematically and automatically leave the participants with as much self-determination as is practical, while still allowing them to rally into an efficient vertical power structure when under threat.
Thank you.
Are Intel ever going to do anything interesting with processor architecture that actually works better?
I mean, they came out with the P3, then they created the abortion that is the P4 architecture and managed to get it a little faster than the P3 through shrinking process, until finally, they switched back to the superior P3 architecture with a modern fab process and labelled it the Pentium M, then they glued them together in groups of two and four and called it the Pentium Core Whatever, and now they're re-using the same architecture yet again with a smaller fab process and calling it Atom.
So they've been selling us the same architecture for how many years now? Am I the only one who looks at this and thinks this looks like a plan to keep things from progressing any faster than Moores law allows so they can suck another decade or two of money out of the same old shit, because they really don't have any good ideas and haven't in a long time?
Maybe I'm just a cynic...
You can't take large populations of ethnically and religiously diverse populations, put them in close contact, and tell them "Get along - or else". It just doesn't work over the long term.
Yes, it does. However, you have to wait until everyone who remembers when it all started is dead, and everyone alive was born into the situation. If you hold it together that long, you create a new cultural identity. If you don't hold it together for 4 generations, it disintegrates.
Communism, on the other hand, called for totally arbitrary pre-planning of economy (you couldn't really go and tell people "do what the fuck you want"), which were the infamous Quinquennial plans of the Soviets.
That is a falsehood. The arbitrary nature of planning comes from a lack of democratic process in determining leadership, not from the nature of the economic system. If a responsive democratic process were in place, this would not happen.
Be that so. Although some Russian leaders have ruined the idea of communism for many people,
Who supplied you with all your news about what was going on in those Communist states? Was it Stalin, or was it your own national news?
It's not communism-the-economic-model that's the problem, it's totalitarianism-the-political-model. You can't dissociate the two in your mind because your own nation has been brainwashing you to think of them as inseparable, most likely since the time you were born.
Both democratic capitalist states and totalitarian communist states have carrots and sticks.
In the democratic state, you are dominated through economics, but liberated from autocratic government, in totalitarian communist states, you are dominated by government, but liberated from dynastic capitalist empires.
Capitalism is the same as Totalitarianism, Communism is the same as Democracy, ain't nobody free on this hunk of dirt, and very few who even know well enough how to even ask for freedom in the first place.
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.
Wow, has professional writing ever gone downhill. Ever heard of a period?
Just say to them "Je ne parle pas francais, mais je comprende un peu. Eske tu comprende Anglais?"
I used to hitchhike through Quebec quite a bit when I was younger, and if you can understand the gist of what they say in French, they'll generally be able to do the same for your English. I've successfully had conversations lasting hours with the two of us speaking different languages at each other because even though we could decipher the foreign language, our native tongue was the only language we could find the words to express ourselves in.
It is a matter of principle. A principle worth overthrowing governments for.
What the hell does any of that have to do with copyright?
It's simple. If we take copyright law off the books, we can give a copy of the entire sum of human creativity to every man woman and child on earth for a penny each. And, we have the practical means to actually do it.
If we don't take the copyright law off the books, it would cost billions of dollars for each disc each, and we would be unable to do it, not due to any practical barrier, but because of an unfortunate side effect of the clumsy mechanism we're using to look after the creative people in our society.
When you get down to it, your copyright comes, not from any power that you hold over us, but from our recognition that it's worthwhile to support creators like you. If there was another political/economic system to support you, and give you even more support than you're get right now, but through a different mechanism, what would your problem be with that? Wouldn't that be better than the status quo?
thats great. but that doesn't really translate to the movie and TV industry does it? Because a business model works for what YOU do, it doesn't mean it work for everyone on earth.
Nice backpedal. Worked for William Shakespeare.
Furthermore, copyright does not in any way "screw things up for the vast majority of us". Poorly done copyright screws things up, not copyright itself.
Ok. Well, according to the article on the front page of Slashdot this very day, in very short order, it will apparently be possible using consumer level tools to burn 1TB to an optical disc.
This should mean that it's practical to assemble a collection of every written work ever created in the recorded history of man, build a factory that churns them out at negligible cost, and distribute a copy to every child on the face of the earth.
Now, will you argue that copyright is consistent with such a lofty goal? Will you argue that this goal does not benefit the vast majority of us? Or, will you concede the fucking point already and, if you can't make a suggestion for an alternative scheme, at least acknowledge that there is a need for one?