China develops a robust internal economy (which is already showing a great promise) and then limits its trade with, at that point fatally impoverished, USA
The problem with your scenario is right there. A thriving economy would not look inwards, it would be an aggressive trader because it would not be economic to produce domestically. If they were producing everything domestically, even when it made no sense, that would automatically introduce inefficiences into their system, as it did for the USSR.
And does China even need to trade? yes! Compared to the US and even the average European country, China is _very_ energy starved (India is worse). It has to get its energy via sea (land is viable via Iran and the 'stans but it's geopolitically dicey, especially with increased terrorist and US military activity there) unless someone makes Nuclear a viable option for everything soon.
Btw: the Chinese economy despite showing 'great promise' is very inequitable: you need a work permit to come work in Shanghai for a year from the Western provinces and these work permits are much sought after. The western provinces are also quite poor (and not in the sense the US refers to Miss. as poor: we're talking about grinding poverty here).
Assuming two sizably different economies take a 'hit' for whatever reason, the smaller economy will take more damage than the larger one. This was actually shown in Asia when SE Asian economies near-tanked but China and India actually grew.
software can easily be copied and made available to the world for free in no time
Software is copyrighted; it's actually easier to copy reference-design-based hardware. And in fact margins in hardware are razor-thin (and you have to compete against volume players like Dell). Of course, that's another reason Apple will never make their designs public.
It's kind of neat, how Apple manages to avoid that low-margins trap by making the customer say 'ooh, shiny' year after year. It's like watching Versace duke it out with Walmart's clothes.
But I wonder how long they can keep this up. Even fashion houses have bad years. The constant churn in Apple's product lines has come to the point that some of my non-geek friends now say, oh, yet another mac release when I show them pictures of Apple's new stuff.
> Innovation in Europe happens by government mandate or not at all
I should clarify about the innovation bit -- it's not always possible to be complete, esp on a/. post. Useful inventions have been made in Europe and by Europeans. The point is, it usually has to go "across the pond" to America for it to be capitalized upon and brought to its full potential.
You will see there's a fundamental mismatch between your sense of 'innovation' and mine. In my sense, commercial innovation is useful when it creates wealth. And Europe fails to do this consistently, primarily because of government overregulation (and if you think people are happy about the employment situation that has resulted because of this failure to create wealth, I have some burning French suburbs to show you).
I know it's unfashionable to talk about money on/., but you can't run a continent on a gift economy despite how much Creative Commons literature you read.
> It's the sort of anti-european statements that some Americans like to pull out of their asses.
This is not to say America is paradise either. However, when it comes to a crunch, America's MUCH larger economy will allow it to absorb shocks better.
Plus it doesn't have to deal with a dysfunctional currency (the Euro, and it's dysfunctional because it rewards poorly managed economies (e.g., the French economy) and punishes the better-managed ones (Germany, whose DM was much better managed than the Euro is now, with the stability pact in tatters)).
Neither does it have a schizophrenic attitude towards a free market: French wine should go be exported all over the continent duty free (vive la common market), but Polish plumbers are a problem (merde alors, freedom of work where you want?). The problem is, countries like France have so much invested in their 'national identity' that they often forget what makes good economic sense.
[posting while sleepy so might not make much sense]
The point is that Apple isn't a software company, still less one that makes money selling OSes. That's something I think they view as a mug's game, pitting themselves against Microsoft above and Linux below.
Apple isn't even a hardware company these days. They are a digital lifestyles company, selling computing and digital entertainment kit at high markups compared to the Dells of the world.
Apple has always been about control-- control of the hardware, software -- the whole experience. The fact that they're using Unix means nothing -- it only means they felt investing $$$ on a custom OS wasn't worth it. The fact that they're using x86 means nothing -- it only means they were no longer ready to pay IBM/Moto premium coin to be one of the few customers for an unsuitable chipset.
Because of Apple's total control over its sw+hw environment, it can do cool stuff no one else can (such as introduce new peripherals in one ship cycle or have the luxury of saying 'emulate' to customers and developers as a viable back compat strategy while switching OSes/chip architectures). Apple won't give up this freedom to innovate for doubtful 'platform vendor' benefits anytime soon.
Both can be gamed, but private charities are far more able to give to the really needy because they don't have access to the 'limitless' public purse (as state-run charity, er welfare does).
Of course when I say private charity I mean individual or community charities. The moment you get institutionalized private charity (think Ford Foundation) you get bureaucracy and bureaucracy is a dumb beast that knows only one thing wel-- how to perpetuate itself.
No, if you think carefully about how are you in fact helping. Giving an alcoholic money is not helpful in any way, while giving it to poor woman, who has many children and whose husband died is a real help
That sounds like charity -- because you can decide who you give money to. Charity is a good thing. Unfortunately, in welfare-state socialist systems you can't stop giving money to bums and leeches who game the system, because no one trusts the bureaucracy to figure out who the real needy are. This in turn creates a cycle where people figure out it's okay to not work for a living (or not work unless the wages are high) because they are going to get the dole anyway.
Social security is problematic but since the benefits are not as generous as Europe's, it's not such a big deal. Also, US population growth is far healthier in Europe. Also, US rules allow certain classes of people (federal workers, for example) to choose to invest their social security in higher risk/higher return systems.
Yeah, but the most successful socialist countries tend to be small population-wise and have at least a replacement-level population growth. Scandinavia is a good example.
For larger countries, say Germany and France, it's a disaster waiting to happen-- all the benefits that they dole out have to be funded from somewhere, and when your taxpaying base is shrinking, it's not a good thing. (Of course, knowing France, they'll probably find a way to make the EU pay for all of this.)
Finally, standard of living-wise the US does have a lot of variation but have you looked at the size of the US economy vis-a-vis these socialist paradises you're talking about? This is like comparing a bonsai garden with a forest and saying the forest not as clean as the garden. Interestingly, other large economies (like China and India) show huge variations as well. You might call that a bug, I say it's a feature because those are the areas that'll drive growth in the future.
OTOH, Europe's 'uniformly' high standards (being government-imposed) have had an unexpected side-effect: it has reduced the European private sector's drive to improve. Innovation in Europe happens by government mandate or not at all. This is breeding stagnancy in Europe and there's no way _that_ is healthy for their economy.
Maybe some healthy competition from the government would've kept the US auto industry from being taken over by the Japanese.
'Taken over by the Japanese'? You still living in the 80s? American automobile manufacturers are very competitive. Of course that hasn't helped Detroit which is less competitive than Asia (but more competetive than Europe, hence European manufacturers outsourcing to America). And guess what? Many of those factories in Asia are run by -- American automakers.
However, the chances of me considering your opinion are extremely close to zero. Do you see why?
Oh the snarkiness. Frankly, I'm quite happy lunatics who say "Maybe some healthy competition from the government would've kept the US auto industry from being taken over" don't take me seriously. People like you (you're a registered Dem, right?) who think bigger governmental action is the solution to an inability to compete in the marketplace deserve all the shit Adam Smith's dead hand can fling at you.
Here's one more example: the NHS. It had a dramatic effect in increasing the overall health of postwar Britian
Not just postwar Britain, it definitely increased citizens' health in postwar W Europe. But it was crucial in reducing the health of W European societies: with worries about of being looked after in old age gone, the incentive of have family declined (of course, the other big factor was generous unemployment pensions which reduced the incentive to save for a rainy day).
Practically, this resulted in the decline of the family, replaced by a nanny state which took care of you. Europe is reaping the whirlwind today, with declining birthrates across the mainland (even Britain's modest rise is fueled by immigrant growth) and a graying population leaving governments wondering to how fund the current generations' healthcare when the next generation's numbers simply don't add up.
The solution has unsurprisingly being higher taxes, stealth taxes in Britain's case. But each of the steps taken by Europe have effects, only they won't be visible immediately -- both the increased immigrant presence and the graying population will have effects in a generation, the first signs are already visible.
> The "laws of economics" are based on assumptions which rarely hold in the real world.
Heh. Is this some kind of economic intelligent design at work? Oh wait, of course it is -- socialism is the intelligent design of economics.
you can't force people to come up with brilliant designs at gunpoint.
Most government-driven industrial failures do not involve design but execution, e.g. Yugoslav and Soviet peacetime designs were good enough, it was the execution that was shoddy, as was the lack of finish (somewhat like the Gnome/KDE desktops, really...). It is execution that improves dramatically at gunpoint (pun intended).
So yes, it is interesting that you point to totalitarian/wartime efforts as your success stories. You remind me so much of that old fascist apology: "...but the trains ran on time."
If you're funded by the government you're essentially (except for legal technicalities) a government employee.
So the BBN and Berkeley guys who worked on TCP/IP were government employees. Wow. Thank you for completely misunderstanding the nature of research grants.
My dentist lives 15 minutes walk from me, and I live in a medium-sized town. Considering that the NHS problems in Wales even made it to CNN here, I'd say you're not bullshitting, you're just ignorant. Or English;-) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3432181.stm
Could it do without the legal system to enforce the GPL? Stop changing the argument. The legal system has NOTHING to do with setting up a putative Federal Software Development Authority. You are just arguing for the heck of it.
I expect that everyone will have access to healthcare
That sounds good on Star Trek, but *I* expect everyone to obey the laws of economics, and that includes bleeding heart socialists and the governments who pander to them. And everyone will, in this generation or the next.
Yeah the Germans tried that... didn't suck... the Soviet Union built some extremely good tanks and planes during WW2
So the best examples you can come up with are totalitarian societies where you either performed 100% or were ostracized or worse?
As other posters have pointed out, the internet was a government development and it worked out pretty well
How can you parrot truisms without even realising what you're saying? Government development? Yeah, if you define 'government development' as a DOD-run incubation fudn that funded corporations and academia who worked on (the then revolutionary technology of) packet switching and TCP/IP. When they became commercially viable DARPA (and NSF) got out of the way ASAP and let the market do its work. Compare this to this thread's request for government to subsidize OSS development (which basically clones commercial offerings of a decade back) simply because they can't for the life of them figure out how to actually compete in a marketplace inspite of giving their product away for free.
Disgusting. If you're an OSS evangelist or advocate, we don't need people like you. OSS can make it on its own without government assistance, it can make it without socialist apologists, because it makes economic sense -- cloning decade-old offerings may not be rocket science, it's commoditization, it's what generic drug companies do to Pfizer and Novartis. It doesn't kill Pfizer, it doesn't kill drug R&D, and it saves lives. OSS in an analogous way will save lives too.
*Shrugs* I live in the UK and our socialised healthcare system works reasonably well.
NHS? reasonably well? *blinks* Oh well, that only brings out my point-- socializing medicine increases apparent access (even if a little old lady in Wales has to cross three counties to see a dentist, hey she has *access* free at point of use) but dramatically reduces expectations and brings in a culture of 'good enough'. There are eerie similarities to OSS zealots who run about babbling how Linux is 'good enough' for the desktop, having never tried OSX or a modern Windows desktop in their lives. Don't let your love for a license take away your high technical standards.
Wow, 3-digit UID and such idiocy. The current auto market looks good to you? Glad you find it that way, but there was a time when American automobiles sucked royally and there was widespread dissatisfaction. Maybe the Feds should've gotten into the automobile business then? After all, cars are pretty much compulsory through most of America (esp in the 60s/70s when public transit systems were sparser) so everyone could benefit from cheap cars.
Heck, the Soviets, Yugoslavs and Indians tried their hand at cars built by government-built entities. They sucked. Wonder why...
> Every industry other than health care would benefit from a > streamlined, socialized health-care system.
The problem with health-care is that it's not allowed to be an industry, with rational risk/cost structures. It's overregulated and E&OE insurance is prohibitive. Oh and socialized healthcare? Go and actually look at Europe's state-run healthcare systems sometime, they're tottering and will not last a generation for the countries with declining populations.
The solution to healthcare woes isn't socialized healthcare, it's about distinguishing medical risk from malpractice and make sure customers can tell the difference.
The DARPA is basically a government-funded incubation fund for projects industry doesn't handle (and relies on very active gov/industry partnership).
You also (conveniently?) forget that TCP/IP was a sort of left-field move made possible by industry (BBN) and academia (Berkeley). At the time most *government* bodies were pushing OSI's 7-layer stack. You'll get no better example of design-by-committee and designs that look great on paper but suck royally to implement.
Running under the government's skirts because you're clueless about how to compete is royally, royally stupid. Either that or you're an EU bureucrat.
Revered? Irreverant is more his style. Authoritative? He's pretty authoritative on early versions on Excel and on running a small business and staying afloat. Interestingness (or lameness) is subjective and you are entitled to your opinion, but I dare say the reason the reason people link to him is because they do find him interesting.
And oh, about that 'lame blog entries' dig? A lot of people like blogs because they reveal a lot about the person. They sure make for more entertaining reading than PR pap, Unix man pages and the typical low S/N mailing list. Sure, you get angst-ridden teenagers, but you also get law professors, call girls, peoplewho run their own small business, SGML and XML gurus. On message boards like Slashdot, though, you get dupes and the same old tired arguments about Open Source and Digital Freedoms and (bonus!) Slashdot commenters complaining about how lame other people are. Oh the irony.
Mashooka? Yeh Dil? That's like forming an opinion of Hollywood based on 'Spy Kids 2'.
Try and see these if you can. I'd say they were all quite watchable, including decent production values:
Ab tak Chhappan (56 so far) - despite the 'hollywood'-like tag attached to the IMDB description, I found it quite gritty and interesting. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0402014/
Dil Chahta Hai (What the heart wants) - fluffy rom-com that shows Bollywood can get things right when it wants to. Fast forward through the songs, though. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0292490/
They are lacking overall, especially when compared to the masterpieces that regularly come from mainland Europe.
The problem about many European masterpieces is that they tend to be pretentious. For example, consider Kieslowski's 'Bleu'. Bleu's long periods of lazy silence following the characters around might stroke those who think it's "intellectual" but it just comes across as pretentious. Especially when other talented directors (oh, at random, Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) can make a approachable yet engaging movie.
> They're certainly not big outside of India, and I've heard and even seen a little of their films
I can't stand 'em myself (and get grief from family who are all in Bollywood's thrall) but 'not big outside India' is not true. Bollywood films are incredibly popular in Pakistan/Afghanistan, the Middle East and Egypt. I've even come (non-Indian diaspora) Bollywood fans from Nigeria (although their local film biz is getting bigger and more popular these days) and Uganda, as well East Europe and Russia.
To say that Bollywood would probably not appeal to Western tastes is probably a fair statement, though. It's not the music or that many are musicals, it's that they are *way* too melodramatic (but Indians like it that way) and basically have plotholes you could drive trucks through. That and the fact that 99% of all their stories follow variations around the same basic plotline about boy-meets-girl / $problem / marry-and-live-happily-ever-after.
It doesn't surprise me that MS doesn't use MFC for most of Office
The point is, when Word and Excel were written MFC didn't exist. Heck, 'C++' was probably a dinky little preprocessor from AT&T. Like LordSah said, MS would very rarely rewrite giant chunks of UI just to support a new technology (the one time they probably did was when they transitioned their apps from DOS->Windows).
It's obvious to anyone forced to use MFC that Microsoft hasn't eaten their own dog-food in quite some time
MFC isn't as bad as some people make it out to be. But in reality its not the sort of thing a products shop like MS would be using. MFC is all right for QnD C++ GUIs (inasmuch anything in C++ is QnD), but if you want to do anything serious, like write a vector editing design surface, you have to roll so much of your own code that it actually makes sense to not use MFC at all, instead develop your own framework.
That said, MFC's meant to be a thin OO shell over Win32 with sensible defaults for small apps, and it's good at what it does. The problem begins when people assume that CScrollView should be able to efficiently deal with their 30MB vector diagram document, or that CArchive should efficiently handle their boardgame state.
Finally, MFC is *old*. It doesn't use smart pointers (AFAIK) or templates, for example. Anyone programming in Win32 and C++ would probably do well to use ATL (or ATL-like libraries) and things like Boost.
For people looking to MFC-style RAD, the answer is very clearly.NET. C# and friends run rings around anything C++ can ever offer in the 'user friendly' department. But that's all right because I use C++ for control and efficiency, not RAD.
Re:Children, grow up and admit that OSS isn't perf
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 1
You, sir, ought to get a prize for showing exceptional idiocy even by/. standards.
All of those Windows DLLs that Office requires but are part of the OS don't get counted in the memory footprint.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Which DLLs are these? GDI? User? AdvApi? Kernel? Here's a clue: OO uses them as well. So does every other Windows app (that includes java.exe and javaw.exe)
Now it is true that they are part of the OS but technically, they should be counted.
They aren't counted in the working set, but they are counted in the virtual size (which is a measure of how much of a process' address space is used up). However, virtual size (for the purposes of this discussion) doesn't matter because its amortized across apps. The OS' shell (explorer.exe) already loads most of these DLLs. So any apps that links against these DLLs will 'run faster' because most of its stuff is already loaded.
Unless of course they insist on loading LOTS of their own dinky libraries at startup time. Like Seamonkey pre 1.7. Or OO.o. One reason Firefox got popular was because its developers actually had a clue about writing good Windows programs and took advantage of almost every trick in the book (I use XP and Ubuntu Hoary and Firefox always starts faster on XP).
Translation: code targeting a particular OS' features and environment will always run faster than generic crossplatform code. Big surprise.
If one day, Microsoft is successful in integrating.Net with the OS, then we'll here the same kind of arguments -- "Look how much memory a java app takes, when C# uses next to none!"
Wtf? Talk about clueless paranoia. Please. Someone give a the parent a Purple Brain for stupidity.
Odd, I _don't_ have MFC*.DLL in my Office11 folder, nor in Common Files/Microsoft Shared/Offic11 (XPSP2). But that could be because I don't have Outlook installed (and this guy who apparently was an Office dev says Outlook uses MFC). I'm not familiar with Outlook, but I'm pretty sure of my facts about Excel and Word.
Old tricks indeed. The only 'trick' I see here incompetence -- on the part of whining developers who write cross-platform code and then complain that Microsoft's platform-optimized code runs faster than theirs.
Netscape complained for ages that Navigator couldn't be as fast as IE because of 'hidden DLLs'. Pooh. They (and the early Mozilla 5 team) never bothered to read MSDN -- DLL rebasing, page fault reduction: all of this is documented there, but you have to be willing to actually read about and use them.
Today, Firefox uses them and Firefox's load times are almost as good as IE's (if slightly less due to the XUL overhead). The Moox builds, which optimize more aggressively, start even better. Even the Seamonkey devs clued up, current Seamonkey builds start MUCH faster as a result.
Office uses zero MFC. Most of the older bits is Platform SDK C, and is a b*tch to maintain, and the newer parts are C++ *but not* MFC -- I understand the Office team has its own lightweight frameworks, similar to ATL.
Yes, since skinning became all the rage consistency has taken a back seat. However you overstate the case for Windows: most Windows apps look different because they WANT to look different (think Winamp's/Quicktime's/WMP's skinned controls). That said, the Office/Windows/IE widget sets (yes IE has its own widget set for web pages) are largely consistent and have very cosmetic differences -- most users can easily live with those.
The problem in Linux is that an app written for one desktop looks like crap on another. Take Ubuntu (I'm still on Hoary Hedgehog so I'm not sure if Badger fixes these): My Gnome desktop looks great until I start Konquerer (and I _need_ Konq because ^#*&ing Nautilus crashes hard on my SSL-ed WebDAV share). If I start up with KDE then Gaim and Firefox looks even crappier (horried fonts, tiny text). This is completely ridiculous and a great example of how the distro war costs Linux on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
China develops a robust internal economy (which is already showing a great promise) and then limits its trade with, at that point fatally impoverished, USA
The problem with your scenario is right there. A thriving economy would not look inwards, it would be an aggressive trader because it would not be economic to produce domestically. If they were producing everything domestically, even when it made no sense, that would automatically introduce inefficiences into their system, as it did for the USSR.
And does China even need to trade? yes! Compared to the US and even the average European country, China is _very_ energy starved (India is worse). It has to get its energy via sea (land is viable via Iran and the 'stans but it's geopolitically dicey, especially with increased terrorist and US military activity there) unless someone makes Nuclear a viable option for everything soon.
Btw: the Chinese economy despite showing 'great promise' is very inequitable: you need a work permit to come work in Shanghai for a year from the Western provinces and these work permits are much sought after. The western provinces are also quite poor (and not in the sense the US refers to Miss. as poor: we're talking about grinding poverty here).
Assuming two sizably different economies take a 'hit' for whatever reason, the smaller economy will take more damage than the larger one. This was actually shown in Asia when SE Asian economies near-tanked but China and India actually grew.
Sometimes size does matter.
software can easily be copied and made available to the world for free in no time
Software is copyrighted; it's actually easier to copy reference-design-based hardware. And in fact margins in hardware are razor-thin (and you have to compete against volume players like Dell). Of course, that's another reason Apple will never make their designs public.
It's kind of neat, how Apple manages to avoid that low-margins trap by making the customer say 'ooh, shiny' year after year. It's like watching Versace duke it out with Walmart's clothes.
But I wonder how long they can keep this up. Even fashion houses have bad years. The constant churn in Apple's product lines has come to the point that some of my non-geek friends now say, oh, yet another mac release when I show them pictures of Apple's new stuff.
> Innovation in Europe happens by government mandate or not at all
/. post. Useful inventions have been made in Europe and by Europeans. The point is, it usually has to go "across the pond" to America for it to be capitalized upon and brought to its full potential.
/., but you can't run a continent on a gift economy despite how much Creative Commons literature you read.
c id=14007162c id=14007284
I should clarify about the innovation bit -- it's not always possible to be complete, esp on a
You will see there's a fundamental mismatch between your sense of 'innovation' and mine. In my sense, commercial innovation is useful when it creates wealth. And Europe fails to do this consistently, primarily because of government overregulation (and if you think people are happy about the employment situation that has resulted because of this failure to create wealth, I have some burning French suburbs to show you).
I know it's unfashionable to talk about money on
> It's the sort of anti-european statements that some Americans like to pull out of their asses.
How is pointing out that Europe has problems 'anti-European'? You think Europe is paradise? Read these comments from people who actually _live_ in mainland Europe:
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167982&
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167982&
This is not to say America is paradise either. However, when it comes to a crunch, America's MUCH larger economy will allow it to absorb shocks better.
Plus it doesn't have to deal with a dysfunctional currency (the Euro, and it's dysfunctional because it rewards poorly managed economies (e.g., the French economy) and punishes the better-managed ones (Germany, whose DM was much better managed than the Euro is now, with the stability pact in tatters)).
Neither does it have a schizophrenic attitude towards a free market: French wine should go be exported all over the continent duty free (vive la common market), but Polish plumbers are a problem (merde alors, freedom of work where you want?). The problem is, countries like France have so much invested in their 'national identity' that they often forget what makes good economic sense.
[posting while sleepy so might not make much sense]
The point is that Apple isn't a software company, still less one that makes money selling OSes. That's something I think they view as a mug's game, pitting themselves against Microsoft above and Linux below.
Apple isn't even a hardware company these days. They are a digital lifestyles company, selling computing and digital entertainment kit at high markups compared to the Dells of the world.
Apple has always been about control-- control of the hardware, software -- the whole experience. The fact that they're using Unix means nothing -- it only means they felt investing $$$ on a custom OS wasn't worth it. The fact that they're using x86 means nothing -- it only means they were no longer ready to pay IBM/Moto premium coin to be one of the few customers for an unsuitable chipset.
Because of Apple's total control over its sw+hw environment, it can do cool stuff no one else can (such as introduce new peripherals in one ship cycle or have the luxury of saying 'emulate' to customers and developers as a viable back compat strategy while switching OSes/chip architectures). Apple won't give up this freedom to innovate for doubtful 'platform vendor' benefits anytime soon.
Both can be gamed, but private charities are far more able to give to the really needy because they don't have access to the 'limitless' public purse (as state-run charity, er welfare does).
Of course when I say private charity I mean individual or community charities. The moment you get institutionalized private charity (think Ford Foundation) you get bureaucracy and bureaucracy is a dumb beast that knows only one thing wel-- how to perpetuate itself.
No, if you think carefully about how are you in fact helping. Giving an alcoholic money is not helpful in any way, while giving it to poor woman, who has many children and whose husband died is a real help
That sounds like charity -- because you can decide who you give money to. Charity is a good thing. Unfortunately, in welfare-state socialist systems you can't stop giving money to bums and leeches who game the system, because no one trusts the bureaucracy to figure out who the real needy are. This in turn creates a cycle where people figure out it's okay to not work for a living (or not work unless the wages are high) because they are going to get the dole anyway.
Social security is problematic but since the benefits are not as generous as Europe's, it's not such a big deal. Also, US population growth is far healthier in Europe. Also, US rules allow certain classes of people (federal workers, for example) to choose to invest their social security in higher risk/higher return systems.
Yeah, but the most successful socialist countries tend to be small population-wise and have at least a replacement-level population growth. Scandinavia is a good example.
For larger countries, say Germany and France, it's a disaster waiting to happen-- all the benefits that they dole out have to be funded from somewhere, and when your taxpaying base is shrinking, it's not a good thing. (Of course, knowing France, they'll probably find a way to make the EU pay for all of this.)
Finally, standard of living-wise the US does have a lot of variation but have you looked at the size of the US economy vis-a-vis these socialist paradises you're talking about? This is like comparing a bonsai garden with a forest and saying the forest not as clean as the garden. Interestingly, other large economies (like China and India) show huge variations as well. You might call that a bug, I say it's a feature because those are the areas that'll drive growth in the future.
OTOH, Europe's 'uniformly' high standards (being government-imposed) have had an unexpected side-effect: it has reduced the European private sector's drive to improve. Innovation in Europe happens by government mandate or not at all. This is breeding stagnancy in Europe and there's no way _that_ is healthy for their economy.
Maybe some healthy competition from the government would've kept the US auto industry from being taken over by the Japanese.
'Taken over by the Japanese'? You still living in the 80s? American automobile manufacturers are very competitive. Of course that hasn't helped Detroit which is less competitive than Asia (but more competetive than Europe, hence European manufacturers outsourcing to America). And guess what? Many of those factories in Asia are run by -- American automakers.
However, the chances of me considering your opinion are extremely close to zero. Do you see why?
Oh the snarkiness. Frankly, I'm quite happy lunatics who say "Maybe some healthy competition from the government would've kept the US auto industry from being taken over" don't take me seriously. People like you (you're a registered Dem, right?) who think bigger governmental action is the solution to an inability to compete in the marketplace deserve all the shit Adam Smith's dead hand can fling at you.
Here's one more example: the NHS. It had a dramatic effect in increasing the overall health of postwar Britian
Not just postwar Britain, it definitely increased citizens' health in postwar W Europe. But it was crucial in reducing the health of W European societies: with worries about of being looked after in old age gone, the incentive of have family declined (of course, the other big factor was generous unemployment pensions which reduced the incentive to save for a rainy day).
Practically, this resulted in the decline of the family, replaced by a nanny state which took care of you. Europe is reaping the whirlwind today, with declining birthrates across the mainland (even Britain's modest rise is fueled by immigrant growth) and a graying population leaving governments wondering to how fund the current generations' healthcare when the next generation's numbers simply don't add up.
The solution has unsurprisingly being higher taxes, stealth taxes in Britain's case. But each of the steps taken by Europe have effects, only they won't be visible immediately -- both the increased immigrant presence and the graying population will have effects in a generation, the first signs are already visible.
> The "laws of economics" are based on assumptions which rarely hold in the real world.
Heh. Is this some kind of economic intelligent design at work? Oh wait, of course it is -- socialism is the intelligent design of economics.
you can't force people to come up with brilliant designs at gunpoint.
;-) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3432181.stm
Most government-driven industrial failures do not involve design but execution, e.g. Yugoslav and Soviet peacetime designs were good enough, it was the execution that was shoddy, as was the lack of finish (somewhat like the Gnome/KDE desktops, really...). It is execution that improves dramatically at gunpoint (pun intended).
So yes, it is interesting that you point to totalitarian/wartime efforts as your success stories. You remind me so much of that old fascist apology: "...but the trains ran on time."
If you're funded by the government you're essentially (except for legal technicalities) a government employee.
So the BBN and Berkeley guys who worked on TCP/IP were government employees. Wow. Thank you for completely misunderstanding the nature of research grants.
My dentist lives 15 minutes walk from me, and I live in a medium-sized town. Considering that the NHS problems in Wales even made it to CNN here, I'd say you're not bullshitting, you're just ignorant. Or English
Could it do without the legal system to enforce the GPL? Stop changing the argument. The legal system has NOTHING to do with setting up a putative Federal Software Development Authority. You are just arguing for the heck of it.
I expect that everyone will have access to healthcare
That sounds good on Star Trek, but *I* expect everyone to obey the laws of economics, and that includes bleeding heart socialists and the governments who pander to them. And everyone will, in this generation or the next.
Yeah the Germans tried that ... didn't suck... the Soviet Union built some extremely good tanks and planes during WW2
So the best examples you can come up with are totalitarian societies where you either performed 100% or were ostracized or worse?
As other posters have pointed out, the internet was a government development and it worked out pretty well
How can you parrot truisms without even realising what you're saying? Government development? Yeah, if you define 'government development' as a DOD-run incubation fudn that funded corporations and academia who worked on (the then revolutionary technology of) packet switching and TCP/IP. When they became commercially viable DARPA (and NSF) got out of the way ASAP and let the market do its work. Compare this to this thread's request for government to subsidize OSS development (which basically clones commercial offerings of a decade back) simply because they can't for the life of them figure out how to actually compete in a marketplace inspite of giving their product away for free.
Disgusting. If you're an OSS evangelist or advocate, we don't need people like you. OSS can make it on its own without government assistance, it can make it without socialist apologists, because it makes economic sense -- cloning decade-old offerings may not be rocket science, it's commoditization, it's what generic drug companies do to Pfizer and Novartis. It doesn't kill Pfizer, it doesn't kill drug R&D, and it saves lives. OSS in an analogous way will save lives too.
*Shrugs* I live in the UK and our socialised healthcare system works reasonably well.
NHS? reasonably well? *blinks* Oh well, that only brings out my point-- socializing medicine increases apparent access (even if a little old lady in Wales has to cross three counties to see a dentist, hey she has *access* free at point of use) but dramatically reduces expectations and brings in a culture of 'good enough'. There are eerie similarities to OSS zealots who run about babbling how Linux is 'good enough' for the desktop, having never tried OSX or a modern Windows desktop in their lives. Don't let your love for a license take away your high technical standards.
Wow, 3-digit UID and such idiocy. The current auto market looks good to you? Glad you find it that way, but there was a time when American automobiles sucked royally and there was widespread dissatisfaction. Maybe the Feds should've gotten into the automobile business then? After all, cars are pretty much compulsory through most of America (esp in the 60s/70s when public transit systems were sparser) so everyone could benefit from cheap cars.
Heck, the Soviets, Yugoslavs and Indians tried their hand at cars built by government-built entities. They sucked. Wonder why...
> Every industry other than health care would benefit from a
> streamlined, socialized health-care system.
The problem with health-care is that it's not allowed to be an industry, with rational risk/cost structures. It's overregulated and E&OE insurance is prohibitive. Oh and socialized healthcare? Go and actually look at Europe's state-run healthcare systems sometime, they're tottering and will not last a generation for the countries with declining populations.
The solution to healthcare woes isn't socialized healthcare, it's about distinguishing medical risk from malpractice and make sure customers can tell the difference.
The DARPA is basically a government-funded incubation fund for projects industry doesn't handle (and relies on very active gov/industry partnership).
You also (conveniently?) forget that TCP/IP was a sort of left-field move made possible by industry (BBN) and academia (Berkeley). At the time most *government* bodies were pushing OSI's 7-layer stack. You'll get no better example of design-by-committee and designs that look great on paper but suck royally to implement.
Running under the government's skirts because you're clueless about how to compete is royally, royally stupid. Either that or you're an EU bureucrat.
Revered? Irreverant is more his style. Authoritative? He's pretty authoritative on early versions on Excel and on running a small business and staying afloat. Interestingness (or lameness) is subjective and you are entitled to your opinion, but I dare say the reason the reason people link to him is because they do find him interesting.
And oh, about that 'lame blog entries' dig? A lot of people like blogs because they reveal a lot about the person. They sure make for more entertaining reading than PR pap, Unix man pages and the typical low S/N mailing list. Sure, you get angst-ridden teenagers, but you also get law professors, call girls, people who run their own small business, SGML and XML gurus. On message boards like Slashdot, though, you get dupes and the same old tired arguments about Open Source and Digital Freedoms and (bonus!) Slashdot commenters complaining about how lame other people are. Oh the irony.
Mashooka? Yeh Dil? That's like forming an opinion of Hollywood based on 'Spy Kids 2'.
Try and see these if you can. I'd say they were all quite watchable, including decent production values:
Ab tak Chhappan (56 so far) - despite the 'hollywood'-like tag attached to the IMDB description, I found it quite gritty and interesting. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0402014/
Dil Chahta Hai (What the heart wants) - fluffy rom-com that shows Bollywood can get things right when it wants to. Fast forward through the songs, though. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0292490/
They are lacking overall, especially when compared to the masterpieces that regularly come from mainland Europe.
The problem about many European masterpieces is that they tend to be pretentious. For example, consider Kieslowski's 'Bleu'. Bleu's long periods of lazy silence following the characters around might stroke those who think it's "intellectual" but it just comes across as pretentious. Especially when other talented directors (oh, at random, Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) can make a approachable yet engaging movie.
> They're certainly not big outside of India, and I've heard and even seen a little of their films
I can't stand 'em myself (and get grief from family who are all in Bollywood's thrall) but 'not big outside India' is not true. Bollywood films are incredibly popular in Pakistan/Afghanistan, the Middle East and Egypt. I've even come (non-Indian diaspora) Bollywood fans from Nigeria (although their local film biz is getting bigger and more popular these days) and Uganda, as well East Europe and Russia.
To say that Bollywood would probably not appeal to Western tastes is probably a fair statement, though. It's not the music or that many are musicals, it's that they are *way* too melodramatic (but Indians like it that way) and basically have plotholes you could drive trucks through. That and the fact that 99% of all their stories follow variations around the same basic plotline about boy-meets-girl / $problem / marry-and-live-happily-ever-after.
It doesn't surprise me that MS doesn't use MFC for most of Office
.NET. C# and friends run rings around anything C++ can ever offer in the 'user friendly' department. But that's all right because I use C++ for control and efficiency, not RAD.
The point is, when Word and Excel were written MFC didn't exist. Heck, 'C++' was probably a dinky little preprocessor from AT&T. Like LordSah said, MS would very rarely rewrite giant chunks of UI just to support a new technology (the one time they probably did was when they transitioned their apps from DOS->Windows).
It's obvious to anyone forced to use MFC that Microsoft hasn't eaten their own dog-food in quite some time
MFC isn't as bad as some people make it out to be. But in reality its not the sort of thing a products shop like MS would be using. MFC is all right for QnD C++ GUIs (inasmuch anything in C++ is QnD), but if you want to do anything serious, like write a vector editing design surface, you have to roll so much of your own code that it actually makes sense to not use MFC at all, instead develop your own framework.
That said, MFC's meant to be a thin OO shell over Win32 with sensible defaults for small apps, and it's good at what it does. The problem begins when people assume that CScrollView should be able to efficiently deal with their 30MB vector diagram document, or that CArchive should efficiently handle their boardgame state.
Finally, MFC is *old*. It doesn't use smart pointers (AFAIK) or templates, for example. Anyone programming in Win32 and C++ would probably do well to use ATL (or ATL-like libraries) and things like Boost.
For people looking to MFC-style RAD, the answer is very clearly
You, sir, ought to get a prize for showing exceptional idiocy even by /. standards.
.Net with the OS, then we'll here the same kind of arguments -- "Look how much memory a java app takes, when C# uses next to none!"
All of those Windows DLLs that Office requires but are part of the OS don't get counted in the memory footprint.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Which DLLs are these? GDI? User? AdvApi? Kernel? Here's a clue: OO uses them as well. So does every other Windows app (that includes java.exe and javaw.exe)
Now it is true that they are part of the OS but technically, they should be counted.
They aren't counted in the working set, but they are counted in the virtual size (which is a measure of how much of a process' address space is used up). However, virtual size (for the purposes of this discussion) doesn't matter because its amortized across apps. The OS' shell (explorer.exe) already loads most of these DLLs. So any apps that links against these DLLs will 'run faster' because most of its stuff is already loaded.
Unless of course they insist on loading LOTS of their own dinky libraries at startup time. Like Seamonkey pre 1.7. Or OO.o. One reason Firefox got popular was because its developers actually had a clue about writing good Windows programs and took advantage of almost every trick in the book (I use XP and Ubuntu Hoary and Firefox always starts faster on XP).
Translation: code targeting a particular OS' features and environment will always run faster than generic crossplatform code. Big surprise.
If one day, Microsoft is successful in integrating
Wtf? Talk about clueless paranoia. Please. Someone give a the parent a Purple Brain for stupidity.
Odd, I _don't_ have MFC*.DLL in my Office11 folder, nor in Common Files/Microsoft Shared/Offic11 (XPSP2). But that could be because I don't have Outlook installed (and this guy who apparently was an Office dev says Outlook uses MFC). I'm not familiar with Outlook, but I'm pretty sure of my facts about Excel and Word.
Joel Spolsky was, among other things, PM on Excel pre Office 95. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 07.html and http://discuss.fogcreek.com/askjoel/default.asp?cm d=show&ixPost=4201 might be of interest.
Old tricks indeed. The only 'trick' I see here incompetence -- on the part of whining developers who write cross-platform code and then complain that Microsoft's platform-optimized code runs faster than theirs.
Netscape complained for ages that Navigator couldn't be as fast as IE because of 'hidden DLLs'. Pooh. They (and the early Mozilla 5 team) never bothered to read MSDN -- DLL rebasing, page fault reduction: all of this is documented there, but you have to be willing to actually read about and use them.
Today, Firefox uses them and Firefox's load times are almost as good as IE's (if slightly less due to the XUL overhead). The Moox builds, which optimize more aggressively, start even better. Even the Seamonkey devs clued up, current Seamonkey builds start MUCH faster as a result.
Office uses zero MFC. Most of the older bits is Platform SDK C, and is a b*tch to maintain, and the newer parts are C++ *but not* MFC -- I understand the Office team has its own lightweight frameworks, similar to ATL.
Yes, since skinning became all the rage consistency has taken a back seat. However you overstate the case for Windows: most Windows apps look different because they WANT to look different (think Winamp's/Quicktime's/WMP's skinned controls). That said, the Office/Windows/IE widget sets (yes IE has its own widget set for web pages) are largely consistent and have very cosmetic differences -- most users can easily live with those.
The problem in Linux is that an app written for one desktop looks like crap on another. Take Ubuntu (I'm still on Hoary Hedgehog so I'm not sure if Badger fixes these): My Gnome desktop looks great until I start Konquerer (and I _need_ Konq because ^#*&ing Nautilus crashes hard on my SSL-ed WebDAV share). If I start up with KDE then Gaim and Firefox looks even crappier (horried fonts, tiny text). This is completely ridiculous and a great example of how the distro war costs Linux on the desktop.