He's saying that you shouldn't take big risks immediately after becoming rich, because it reduces the chances that you'll be able to actually enjoy your new wealth. I'm not sure why this is so difficult for you to understand...
It is crazy to become wealthy then chance it all on being shot into space.
$200k out of $5M is hardly "all", it's like 4%
You should read what you reply to. Being shot into space is still relatively risky. If you die, it doesn't matter that 96% of your wealth is still in the bank. The grandparent obviously considers the risk involved in a space launch with current technology to be too great.
I never understood why an IPO involved dumping a load of stock on the market at once, rather than trickling it out over a few days. If VA had offered 20% of the stock each day for a week and the price on the first day had gone up to $240 by the end of the day then on the second day that'd have been selling at $240/share.
The reality is that before all of the regulations and the Fed existence and before FDIC the banks never failed institutionally, as in - they never had a government giving them free money and preventing any potential competition
No, they went bust individually and people who happened to have accounts with those banks suddenly found that they were broke. Loans owed to the bank would be transferred to whoever bought them from the bankruptcy, but people in credit at the bank would have their savings wiped out. Customers had no way of evaluating how safe banks were, because the banks were not required (by evil regulations) to disclose how much capital they had nor what form it took.
A company doesn't have to be valuable for a share to be valuable, you just have to be able to persuade someone that the company will become valuable in the future.
Depends on how they do it. The clever ones bought the Goldman Sachs fund that was backed by a privately sold share in Facebook a while ago. After GS hyped the fund sufficiently, they quietly started dumping them and palming them off on ordinary investors. Some of those may be able to dump their stock at the IPO, others will hang onto them too long. The smart investors already made their 100+% ROI in a couple of months effectively risk free and are now moving on to the next bubble, while keeping this one hyped for just long enough that the plebs don't realise that it's already burst.
They're never visible settings, but they're often undocumented user defaults. One of the reasons I use OS X, however, is so that I don't have to waste time poking undocumented settings to get a usable system, and so this rather defeats the point.
Many people like how easy and straightforward Mac OSX is
But how many prefer the 10.7 version of iCal to the 10.6 one? With 10.6 I could quickly skip to any given month. With the 10.7 one, it decides to show me that it's like a real calendar by showing a page-flipping animation on every transition. It turns the sidebar into a pop-up, making inserting and inspecting appointments more difficult. It removes the small calendar display, making navigation harder. The same is true of the 10.7 Address Book. It now looks like a real book (so, once again, slow page-turning animations rather than instance changes) and the two-page metaphor means that you can no longer see groups and individuals at the same time. Using groups to navigate is harder. I was going to say that they'd removed the groups functionality, but on closer inspection it is there just less discoverable and requiring more mouse clicks and more mouse movement to use.
I agree on the ribbon though - it is a menu, just one that stays open all of the time and presents larger targets. I'm not totally convinced that it's better than menus + toolbar, because the hierarchical nature of it means that you need more mouse clicks and movement to use two actions that are on different menus. The only real complaint about it I have is the amount of screen real-estate it takes up - this is not a problem on a desktop, but Word on a laptop with a smallish screen ends up with less than 50% of the screen usable for actually displaying the document...
I have a friend out there who's been sending photos. His entire ground floor is flooded. He ran out of food last week and had to go out to get more. This involved swimming from his house, with a crocodile (or possibly alligator, I'm not sure which you get in Thailand) watching him from the opposite side of the canal (apparently it attacked a few people, but no one was killed). This doesn't sound like the ideal conditions for getting the raw materials or workers to the factory, and shipping the finished product would be quite a literal description. Oh, and his landline Internet has been down for over a month, but he's able to use 3G.
That depends on the country. In a lot of places, there is no equivalent of the FDA and doctors can attempt any procedure or prescribe any drugs as long as they have the patient's consent (or without it in some places). There's been a lot of stuff in the news over the last couple of years about people going to such places for miracle cures which have ended up killing them (typically when the original condition was not life threatening).
Not really. I don't know how you measure complexity in a brain, but dolphin brains appear to be very complex, for example. A huge amount of this complexity is devoted to creating a 3d model of the surroundings by interpreting the returns from sonar, but then a large amount of the complexity of the human brain is devoted to creating a 3d model of the surroundings by interpreting the inputs from two retinas.
The thing that appears to distinguish human brains is how little of their configuration is hereditary. Humans are born with less of their brain in its final configuration than other animals. Dolphins can swim already when they're born, but humans have to learn how to walk (and learn how to swim, how to talk, and so on). The human brain is actually a good example of the UNIX worse-is-better philosophy - it's just good enough that you can program it to do different things but doesn't start out able to do any of them. This turns out to be an evolutionary advantage, because it adapts more quickly to changing conditions than a brain whose configuration is more tightly controlled by heredity.
Actually, human brains are quite a bit smaller than a lot of animals. Bottlenose dolphins have larger brains than humans. Whales and elephants have much larger brains (elephant brains are about five times the size of human brains). As a percentage of their body mass, mice have larger brains than humans (3.2% of body mass, as opposed to 2.1% for a human).
It's only been about half a century since there was active social debate in the US about whether people from other races were just dumb, mindless beasts
And after more careful thought, the native american population decided that yes, on the balance of evidence, they were?
That's more or less what I thought. Most COBOL programmers these days have been doing it for decades, or have learned COBOL after learning half a dozen other languages and realising that the skill shortage means anyone who can stomach writing COBOL is massively overpaid. In contrast, schools and universities are churning out Java 'programmers' in vast quantities. You can get a cheap person who kind-of knows Java very cheaply. There aren't many programmers who kind-of know COBOL, you get either either experienced COBOL programmers or experienced programmers who can easily learn COBOL.
I'd agree on 1 and 3. I can do editing quite competently, but I can't edit my own work because my brain automatically corrects what I said to what I meant. The most helpful feedback from my most recent book has been from the person doing the Japanese translation. If anything isn't completely clear then having someone who isn't a native speaker reading it will usually spot it - I had a German person doing a review of my last book for the same reason.
Marketing is something I would have no clue how to do well. My publisher, in contrast, got B&N to do a big splash when my third book was released and shifted the entire first print run within a month of publication.
Typesetting though is something anyone can do easily. LaTeX and Lout can produce beautiful output. My last two books have both had to match an existing house style, but LaTeX has been equal to the task.
Publishers can pay a some money up front, and then a certain crappy percentage per book later
Technically, publishers lend some money up front. An advance is just that - an advance on royalty payments. If the book doesn't sell, then they can demand the royalty back (I've not seen this happen - my books have sold enough to cover the advance in the first few months, but it's possible).
if it sells bad, that's a good idea for the author, and if it sells well the publishers win. If you're an author, do you want to take the risk?
They are taking some risk in that they front the money to do the printing, but only after they've done some market research to believe that the book will sell. In the case of my third book, there was almost no risk - they sold the entire first print run to a big-name book store in the first week and had to rush a second print run.
If they consider it a high risk, then the simply won't accept the book. As an individual, you can go through a print-on-demand service, but then you don't get the bulk rates. If you use print-on-demand then you'll probably not get much more than you'll get in royalties from a publisher, because the printing costs will be much higher per unit (as will the distribution costs - my publisher can chuck a container with 1,000 copies at B&N or Amazon and let them deal with the last mile, while a print-on-demand service has to package and ship each book individually).
For eBooks, this is a bit different because the incremental costs are effectively zero. There are still some up-front costs. I do my own layout and typesetting, but getting a book copyedited takes about a week of someone's time.
In addition, the authors often wish to see their books in book stores. And guess what? The publishers have contracts with those.
Sure, it's nice, but I'm not sure how much it translates into actual sales. Books in shops tend to cost 50%+ more than online, so the only physical bookshops I visit these days are second-hand ones. I'm not sure how many actual sales I get from having the printed copy available.
For something that's likely to be low circulation, doing it yourself is probably a good idea. I have a couple of things that my publisher won't be interested in that I'm working on. When they're finished I'll probably self publish.
Now try using it in an environment variable, or as an argument to xargs. The first thing that reads the string will turn the escaped spaces into spaces. The second thing will interpret them as multiple values. UNIX shells are notoriously bad at handling things with spaces in them.
The unfortunate down side of this is that you can also pay $100,000 that the insurance won't cover for a lot of snake-oil treatments (some of which are quite harmful) and most people don't have the medical expertise to distinguish between them.
Yes they do, and in exactly the way that the grandparent said. Antibiotics (and antiseptics before them) made a massive change to medicine. The discovery of penicillin turned a large number diseases from always-fatal to mildly irritating. A broad-spectrum antiviral would have a similarly huge impact.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than informing me that you didn't understand at least one of the words in my post, did you have a point?
He's saying that you shouldn't take big risks immediately after becoming rich, because it reduces the chances that you'll be able to actually enjoy your new wealth. I'm not sure why this is so difficult for you to understand...
It is crazy to become wealthy then chance it all on being shot into space.
$200k out of $5M is hardly "all", it's like 4%
You should read what you reply to. Being shot into space is still relatively risky. If you die, it doesn't matter that 96% of your wealth is still in the bank. The grandparent obviously considers the risk involved in a space launch with current technology to be too great.
I never understood why an IPO involved dumping a load of stock on the market at once, rather than trickling it out over a few days. If VA had offered 20% of the stock each day for a week and the price on the first day had gone up to $240 by the end of the day then on the second day that'd have been selling at $240/share.
The reality is that before all of the regulations and the Fed existence and before FDIC the banks never failed institutionally, as in - they never had a government giving them free money and preventing any potential competition
No, they went bust individually and people who happened to have accounts with those banks suddenly found that they were broke. Loans owed to the bank would be transferred to whoever bought them from the bankruptcy, but people in credit at the bank would have their savings wiped out. Customers had no way of evaluating how safe banks were, because the banks were not required (by evil regulations) to disclose how much capital they had nor what form it took.
A company doesn't have to be valuable for a share to be valuable, you just have to be able to persuade someone that the company will become valuable in the future.
Depends on how they do it. The clever ones bought the Goldman Sachs fund that was backed by a privately sold share in Facebook a while ago. After GS hyped the fund sufficiently, they quietly started dumping them and palming them off on ordinary investors. Some of those may be able to dump their stock at the IPO, others will hang onto them too long. The smart investors already made their 100+% ROI in a couple of months effectively risk free and are now moving on to the next bubble, while keeping this one hyped for just long enough that the plebs don't realise that it's already burst.
Depends on whether he's talking about cardinals or ordinals.
They're never visible settings, but they're often undocumented user defaults. One of the reasons I use OS X, however, is so that I don't have to waste time poking undocumented settings to get a usable system, and so this rather defeats the point.
Many people like how easy and straightforward Mac OSX is
But how many prefer the 10.7 version of iCal to the 10.6 one? With 10.6 I could quickly skip to any given month. With the 10.7 one, it decides to show me that it's like a real calendar by showing a page-flipping animation on every transition. It turns the sidebar into a pop-up, making inserting and inspecting appointments more difficult. It removes the small calendar display, making navigation harder. The same is true of the 10.7 Address Book. It now looks like a real book (so, once again, slow page-turning animations rather than instance changes) and the two-page metaphor means that you can no longer see groups and individuals at the same time. Using groups to navigate is harder. I was going to say that they'd removed the groups functionality, but on closer inspection it is there just less discoverable and requiring more mouse clicks and more mouse movement to use.
I agree on the ribbon though - it is a menu, just one that stays open all of the time and presents larger targets. I'm not totally convinced that it's better than menus + toolbar, because the hierarchical nature of it means that you need more mouse clicks and movement to use two actions that are on different menus. The only real complaint about it I have is the amount of screen real-estate it takes up - this is not a problem on a desktop, but Word on a laptop with a smallish screen ends up with less than 50% of the screen usable for actually displaying the document...
I have a friend out there who's been sending photos. His entire ground floor is flooded. He ran out of food last week and had to go out to get more. This involved swimming from his house, with a crocodile (or possibly alligator, I'm not sure which you get in Thailand) watching him from the opposite side of the canal (apparently it attacked a few people, but no one was killed). This doesn't sound like the ideal conditions for getting the raw materials or workers to the factory, and shipping the finished product would be quite a literal description. Oh, and his landline Internet has been down for over a month, but he's able to use 3G.
That depends on the country. In a lot of places, there is no equivalent of the FDA and doctors can attempt any procedure or prescribe any drugs as long as they have the patient's consent (or without it in some places). There's been a lot of stuff in the news over the last couple of years about people going to such places for miracle cures which have ended up killing them (typically when the original condition was not life threatening).
Not really. I don't know how you measure complexity in a brain, but dolphin brains appear to be very complex, for example. A huge amount of this complexity is devoted to creating a 3d model of the surroundings by interpreting the returns from sonar, but then a large amount of the complexity of the human brain is devoted to creating a 3d model of the surroundings by interpreting the inputs from two retinas.
The thing that appears to distinguish human brains is how little of their configuration is hereditary. Humans are born with less of their brain in its final configuration than other animals. Dolphins can swim already when they're born, but humans have to learn how to walk (and learn how to swim, how to talk, and so on). The human brain is actually a good example of the UNIX worse-is-better philosophy - it's just good enough that you can program it to do different things but doesn't start out able to do any of them. This turns out to be an evolutionary advantage, because it adapts more quickly to changing conditions than a brain whose configuration is more tightly controlled by heredity.
What I would like is the seperation of code and UI so I can work on the underlying code and then somebody else can work on the UI code
You mean like NeXT had in 1988 and Cocoa / GNUstep have now? Interfaces can be drawn by UI designers and just wired up to controller objects.
If you can find two people whose reaction to weightlessness is feeling horny, rather than the more common nausea, then probably...
Reentry control is fixed in svn, plz update...
Actually, human brains are quite a bit smaller than a lot of animals. Bottlenose dolphins have larger brains than humans. Whales and elephants have much larger brains (elephant brains are about five times the size of human brains). As a percentage of their body mass, mice have larger brains than humans (3.2% of body mass, as opposed to 2.1% for a human).
It's only been about half a century since there was active social debate in the US about whether people from other races were just dumb, mindless beasts
And after more careful thought, the native american population decided that yes, on the balance of evidence, they were?
People also mock Fortran, yet it still rocks and has been updated to include many 'modern' features
Fortran doesn't get updated. Every decade or so a new and totally incompatible language is released and called Fortran.
That's more or less what I thought. Most COBOL programmers these days have been doing it for decades, or have learned COBOL after learning half a dozen other languages and realising that the skill shortage means anyone who can stomach writing COBOL is massively overpaid. In contrast, schools and universities are churning out Java 'programmers' in vast quantities. You can get a cheap person who kind-of knows Java very cheaply. There aren't many programmers who kind-of know COBOL, you get either either experienced COBOL programmers or experienced programmers who can easily learn COBOL.
I'd agree on 1 and 3. I can do editing quite competently, but I can't edit my own work because my brain automatically corrects what I said to what I meant. The most helpful feedback from my most recent book has been from the person doing the Japanese translation. If anything isn't completely clear then having someone who isn't a native speaker reading it will usually spot it - I had a German person doing a review of my last book for the same reason.
Marketing is something I would have no clue how to do well. My publisher, in contrast, got B&N to do a big splash when my third book was released and shifted the entire first print run within a month of publication.
Typesetting though is something anyone can do easily. LaTeX and Lout can produce beautiful output. My last two books have both had to match an existing house style, but LaTeX has been equal to the task.
Publishers can pay a some money up front, and then a certain crappy percentage per book later
Technically, publishers lend some money up front. An advance is just that - an advance on royalty payments. If the book doesn't sell, then they can demand the royalty back (I've not seen this happen - my books have sold enough to cover the advance in the first few months, but it's possible).
if it sells bad, that's a good idea for the author, and if it sells well the publishers win. If you're an author, do you want to take the risk?
They are taking some risk in that they front the money to do the printing, but only after they've done some market research to believe that the book will sell. In the case of my third book, there was almost no risk - they sold the entire first print run to a big-name book store in the first week and had to rush a second print run.
If they consider it a high risk, then the simply won't accept the book. As an individual, you can go through a print-on-demand service, but then you don't get the bulk rates. If you use print-on-demand then you'll probably not get much more than you'll get in royalties from a publisher, because the printing costs will be much higher per unit (as will the distribution costs - my publisher can chuck a container with 1,000 copies at B&N or Amazon and let them deal with the last mile, while a print-on-demand service has to package and ship each book individually).
For eBooks, this is a bit different because the incremental costs are effectively zero. There are still some up-front costs. I do my own layout and typesetting, but getting a book copyedited takes about a week of someone's time.
In addition, the authors often wish to see their books in book stores. And guess what? The publishers have contracts with those.
Sure, it's nice, but I'm not sure how much it translates into actual sales. Books in shops tend to cost 50%+ more than online, so the only physical bookshops I visit these days are second-hand ones. I'm not sure how many actual sales I get from having the printed copy available.
For something that's likely to be low circulation, doing it yourself is probably a good idea. I have a couple of things that my publisher won't be interested in that I'm working on. When they're finished I'll probably self publish.
Now try using it in an environment variable, or as an argument to xargs. The first thing that reads the string will turn the escaped spaces into spaces. The second thing will interpret them as multiple values. UNIX shells are notoriously bad at handling things with spaces in them.
The unfortunate down side of this is that you can also pay $100,000 that the insurance won't cover for a lot of snake-oil treatments (some of which are quite harmful) and most people don't have the medical expertise to distinguish between them.
Yes they do, and in exactly the way that the grandparent said. Antibiotics (and antiseptics before them) made a massive change to medicine. The discovery of penicillin turned a large number diseases from always-fatal to mildly irritating. A broad-spectrum antiviral would have a similarly huge impact.