While I agree with some of your points, I disagree with your details. There's no proof that compilers can't be made smart enough for that - just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it couldn't. While I agree with some of your points, I disagree with your details. There's no proof that compilers can't be made smart enough for that - just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it couldn't. In fact, I think people are working on dealing with things like
Nested Data Parallelism (pdf) in compilers right now. I think this will happen in functional languages very, very soon (Haskell, someone below mentioned Erlang). Simpler things, like dealing with flat data parallelism via the compiler (+ a special library) have been possible for a while (see e.g. OpenMP).
Economists have been worried about the difference between correlation and causation since at least the 70s (sometimes this is referred to as an issue of "endogeneity"), and several strategies have been developed to deal with this. The people that examine these kind of issues are referred to as microeconometricians (the econometrics of microeconomics).
Yeah, funny. What about the size of the market, though?
Countries by Gross Domestic Product in 2005
1 United States $11,750,000,000,000 2 European Union $11,650,000,000,000 3 China $7,262,000,000,000 4 Japan $3,745,000,000,000 5 India $3,319,000,000,000 6 Germany $2,362,000,000,000 7 United Kingdom $1,782,000,000,000
I am guessing that a) All countries of the European Union would have meant to many languages , so they picked the biggest market within the European Union b) China and India have a large GDP, but are maybe not a large market for Software (to do with the composition of GDP and piracy, maybe).
The real question is: If you already need to have English speakers in your call centers, why not include the UK in the list?
(Also, if it is a question of invading other countries, why didn't they include France?:-P)
From TFA it is hard to tell whether this will create legal problems for the artists...
... but it is interesting to see that a major record label is being circumvented because it does not distribute the music in the way that customers demand it.
It is amazing that a company like Sony, which invented the walkman, just doesn't get it. They will go the way of the Dodo.
I don't believe that whether or not there is in-fighting between Linux distro fanboys will make any difference to the adoption of Linux on the desktop.
Frankly, I think most of the world ignores Linux fanboys.
What will make a difference is corporations looking to save money. Linux will eventually be more widely deployed on the (corporate) desktop in situations where people need only a restricted set of software and people don't depend to much on Windows-only software (like, say, a call centre), and will make inroads from there.
If people use it at work, they will use it at home eventually.
Go make yourself a coffee - when you come back you should have an idea of which ebuilds take the flag. There might be a more sophisticated way of finding out which ebuilds take that flag, but I can't think of it.
If you are using Gentoo, there is an "icc" useflag that allows using the Intel Compiler for code that supports this. This compiler already automatically vectorizes your code to work with the Pentium SIMD units (SSE, SSE2 etc).
The speedup is probably not as the one you would get from hand-coded libraries, but it can be quite significant (certain things can run up to twice as fast from my experience)
If you had ever worked with lots of data, you would know why. Try concatenating two 100MB data files on Windows and find out what happens - last time I tried that, everything just froze. For certain kinds of work, Windows is just not suited.
The German magazine "Der Spiegel" has some sounds and pictures here:
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltraum/0,1518,337019,00.html
For the sound, scroll down to where it says
"Sounds vom Titan". The first track is "Sounds during the descent through the haze of Titan", the second one is "Radar echos during the last kilometers towards the moon Titan". Sounds pretty weird if you ask me.
Kind of reminds me of this guy (Lefty?) who tries to sell Ernie an invisible ice cream on Sesame Street... except that Ernie paid for it with an invisible nickel.
At the very least, not entering into a contract with people who say that "Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights" would be the prudent way to go.
Buying a license probably makes you more vulnerable to any potential claims they might have against you. IANAL but would be interest to hear the opinion of one on this.
Linux on the desktop will happen, but it will start with call centres, budget airlines, etc, i. e. in situations where the set of software that people are using is small and standardised and there is a lot of pressure to reduce costs, where people need small amounts of training on the software, and where staff turnover is high (you are loosing the knowledge that people have of existing software anyway when they leave).
Once it starts getting used extensively in these kind of environments, it might gain sufficient critical mass to overcome the "we use Windows because it is popular" trap.
Contrast your statement: "It's not as good as putting your money in a bank (because your protection in case of PayPal's insolvency doesn't seem totally assured, just in the case of the *bank's* insolvency), but it's not totally unprotected."
with their statement (from your link): "FDIC pass-through deposit insurance protects you only against the failure of the bank at which PayPal places your funds, and does NOT protect you against PayPal's insolvency."
Basically, you are insured against the failure of the bank (which you are not worried about), but are *not* insured against the failure of PayPal. To make matters worse (IANAL), in the case of a failure of bank, even if deposits weren't insured, you would still be given preference over other debtors in bankruptcy (Google for "depositor preference"), whereas with PayPal, you would probably rank as a trade creditor and would therefore rank very low down on the list of people who get any money back at all.
Grandparent is right to point out that "They could just never come back, and there's really not much anyone could do."
Does anyone else also think that the text is more equivocal than suggested by the submitter?
As far as I can tell, this is the relevant paragraph from the report:
342 There are particular threats to the European ICT industry such as the
current discussion on the patent on software. The mild regime of IP protection in
the past has led to a very innovative and competitive software industry with low
entry barriers. A software patent, which serves to protect inventions of a
non-technical nature, could kill the high innovation rate. However, opinions on
software patent in its current proposed form vary a lot. Many large companies
operating on a global scale, including European ones, seem to be in favour of a
software patenting regime. But most small enterprises are strongly opposed.
Only very few European companies have prepared themselves for the
consequences of a software patent regime. It raises the question how the
introduction of the European software patent interacts with a European strategy
based on widespread use of ICT's.
This is not the whole-hearted indictment of software patents I was hoping for.
Also, *we* might have known it for years and told people about it, but if a conservative consultancy/ accountancy firm says it, it immediately makes it more credible in the eyes of the mainstream media, the public, and in the eyes of our representative. It makes it easier to convince people that the issue is real and serious.
On a slightly different note, who knows where I can find the MEPs for London?
I agree. I don't think Microsoft would have to hire really obnoxious Linux fanboys. Just read Slashdot at -1 to see how many of them there really are.
Oh, and Linux is superior to Micro$oft Windows (just to make that clear).;-)
The main problem with this theory is not that some nations stand to lose from free trade per se, but that, as the wikipedia article puts it "Workers and capital may not be able to be transferred painlessly from one industry to another." Now whether this warrants supporting uncompetitive domestic industries is for you the US citizens to decide. However, I have the impression that as other people here have pointed out, many have already made that decision. For example, if people have a choice of buying expensive clothes from the US or cheap clothes from South East Asia, what do they tend to choose? Most of them choose "cheap" over "made in the USA" most of the time.
If you are interested in the way modern economists (Adam Smith is great, but a bit dated) see things, have a look at e. g. Krugman and Obstfeld's International Economics.
If the question is "how does the average US citizen benefit", then the answer is "by cheaper goods and services". Not all US citizens work in IT. That's not to say it doesn't suck for people who do work in IT.
One wonders what they are trying to achieve with this. Surely this is not going to stop rampant piracy. If I have the choice of a cheap full version from the blackmarket with next to no probability of being caught, and a (probably more expensive) hobbled version, which one am I going to get?
In a way, it reminds me of the police raids that they sometimes have in places like Hong Kong, where they seize lots of CDs, and put them in front of a bulldozer. Then the press arrives, takes some photos for the papers, and that's it. These sort of things look like they are something against piracy, but in the end it never makes a differene.
Any one been to Hong Kong recently? Golden Shopping Arcade (Sham Shui Po) still there? They have been selling pirated software there since 1987. I would be surprised if they have been closed down permanently.
Slashdot Mirror
Doomsday device. Hm... how about subprime collateralized debt obligations?
Oh, that's not really science fiction any more. Right.
Amen to that.
Why don't they just move all the non-notable articles into a Trivipedia? Wouldn't that make both overzealous editors and fancruft-fans etc happy?
Economists have been worried about the difference between correlation and causation since at least the 70s (sometimes this is referred to as an issue of "endogeneity"), and several strategies have been developed to deal with this. The people that examine these kind of issues are referred to as microeconometricians (the econometrics of microeconomics).
Two standard ways to approach this are Instrumental Variables
and Natural Experiments.
AFAICT she is using the second to try identify the effect of lead here, same as Levitt did with the effect of abortion.
Yeah, funny. What about the size of the market, though?
:-P)
Countries by Gross Domestic Product in 2005
1 United States $11,750,000,000,000
2 European Union $11,650,000,000,000
3 China $7,262,000,000,000
4 Japan $3,745,000,000,000
5 India $3,319,000,000,000
6 Germany $2,362,000,000,000
7 United Kingdom $1,782,000,000,000
I am guessing that
a) All countries of the European Union would have meant to many languages , so they picked the biggest market within the European Union
b) China and India have a large GDP, but are maybe not a large market for Software (to do with the composition of GDP and piracy, maybe).
The real question is: If you already need to have English speakers in your call centers, why not include the UK in the list?
(Also, if it is a question of invading other countries, why didn't they include France?
From TFA it is hard to tell whether this will create legal problems for the artists...
... but it is interesting to see that a major record label is being circumvented because it does not distribute the music in the way that customers demand it.
It is amazing that a company like Sony, which invented the walkman, just doesn't get it. They will go the way of the Dodo.
I don't believe that whether or not there is in-fighting between Linux distro fanboys will make any difference to the adoption of Linux on the desktop.
Frankly, I think most of the world ignores Linux fanboys.
What will make a difference is corporations looking to save money. Linux will eventually be more widely deployed on the (corporate) desktop in situations where people need only a restricted set of software and people don't depend to much on Windows-only software (like, say, a call centre), and will make inroads from there.
If people use it at work, they will use it at home eventually.
But what if the machine is running? Can you reboot via WOL even if the machine is running?
Ah, thanks, found it:; en-us;317371
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
Looks a bit weird - can you shutdown/ restart computers without authenticating? Is there some way to do this from Unix? Maybe Samba? Wine?
cd /usr/portage
Go make yourself a coffee - when you come back you should have an idea of which ebuilds take the flag. There might be a more sophisticated way of finding out which ebuilds take that flag, but I can't think of it.find . -name '*.ebuild' -exec egrep -H "IUSE.*\Wicc\W.*" {} \;
If you are using Gentoo, there is an "icc" useflag that allows using the Intel Compiler for code that supports this. This compiler already automatically vectorizes your code to work with the Pentium SIMD units (SSE, SSE2 etc).
The speedup is probably not as the one you would get from hand-coded libraries, but it can be quite significant (certain things can run up to twice as fast from my experience)
When I want to get WORK done, I use Unix.
If you had ever worked with lots of data, you would know why. Try concatenating two 100MB data files on Windows and find out what happens - last time I tried that, everything just froze. For certain kinds of work, Windows is just not suited.
The German magazine "Der Spiegel" has some sounds and pictures here: http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltraum/0,1518 ,337019,00.html
For the sound, scroll down to where it says
"Sounds vom Titan". The first track is "Sounds during the descent through the haze of Titan", the second one is "Radar echos during the last kilometers towards the moon Titan". Sounds pretty weird if you ask me.
Kind of reminds me of this guy (Lefty?) who tries to sell Ernie an invisible ice cream on Sesame Street... except that Ernie paid for it with an invisible nickel.
At the very least, not entering into a contract with people who say that "Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights" would be the prudent way to go.
Buying a license probably makes you more vulnerable to any potential claims they might have against you. IANAL but would be interest to hear the opinion of one on this.
Linux on the desktop will happen, but it will start with call centres, budget airlines, etc, i. e. in situations where the set of software that people are using is small and standardised and there is a lot of pressure to reduce costs, where people need small amounts of training on the software, and where staff turnover is high (you are loosing the knowledge that people have of existing software anyway when they leave).
Once it starts getting used extensively in these kind of environments, it might gain sufficient critical mass to overcome the "we use Windows because it is popular" trap.
Contrast your statement: "It's not as good as putting your money in a bank (because your protection in case of PayPal's insolvency doesn't seem totally assured, just in the case of the *bank's* insolvency), but it's not totally unprotected."
with their statement (from your link): "FDIC pass-through deposit insurance protects you only against the failure of the bank at which PayPal places your funds, and does NOT protect you against PayPal's insolvency."
Basically, you are insured against the failure of the bank (which you are not worried about), but are *not* insured against the failure of PayPal. To make matters worse (IANAL), in the case of a failure of bank, even if deposits weren't insured, you would still be given preference over other debtors in bankruptcy (Google for "depositor preference"), whereas with PayPal, you would probably rank as a trade creditor and would therefore rank very low down on the list of people who get any money back at all.
Grandparent is right to point out that "They could just never come back, and there's really not much anyone could do."
Cheers, mate!
Does anyone else also think that the text is more equivocal than suggested by the submitter?
As far as I can tell, this is the relevant paragraph from the report: 342 There are particular threats to the European ICT industry such as the current discussion on the patent on software. The mild regime of IP protection in the past has led to a very innovative and competitive software industry with low entry barriers. A software patent, which serves to protect inventions of a non-technical nature, could kill the high innovation rate. However, opinions on software patent in its current proposed form vary a lot. Many large companies operating on a global scale, including European ones, seem to be in favour of a software patenting regime. But most small enterprises are strongly opposed. Only very few European companies have prepared themselves for the consequences of a software patent regime. It raises the question how the introduction of the European software patent interacts with a European strategy based on widespread use of ICT's.
This is not the whole-hearted indictment of software patents I was hoping for.
Also, *we* might have known it for years and told people about it, but if a conservative consultancy/ accountancy firm says it, it immediately makes it more credible in the eyes of the mainstream media, the public, and in the eyes of our representative. It makes it easier to convince people that the issue is real and serious.
On a slightly different note, who knows where I can find the MEPs for London?
I agree. I don't think Microsoft would have to hire really obnoxious Linux fanboys. Just read Slashdot at -1 to see how many of them there really are. Oh, and Linux is superior to Micro$oft Windows (just to make that clear). ;-)
"the system AS A WHOLE benefits from free market economics. This DOES NOT MEAN that EVERY NATION benefits from this situation."
Actually, the economic theory of comparative advantage suggests that every nation benefits from free trade, or to be more precise, that free trade produces a Pareto improvement. (See also the wikipedia article on comparative advantage).
The main problem with this theory is not that some nations stand to lose from free trade per se, but that, as the wikipedia article puts it "Workers and capital may not be able to be transferred painlessly from one industry to another." Now whether this warrants supporting uncompetitive domestic industries is for you the US citizens to decide. However, I have the impression that as other people here have pointed out, many have already made that decision. For example, if people have a choice of buying expensive clothes from the US or cheap clothes from South East Asia, what do they tend to choose? Most of them choose "cheap" over "made in the USA" most of the time.
If you are interested in the way modern economists (Adam Smith is great, but a bit dated) see things, have a look at e. g. Krugman and Obstfeld's International Economics.
If the question is "how does the average US citizen benefit", then the answer is "by cheaper goods and services". Not all US citizens work in IT. That's not to say it doesn't suck for people who do work in IT.
One wonders what they are trying to achieve with this. Surely this is not going to stop rampant piracy. If I have the choice of a cheap full version from the blackmarket with next to no probability of being caught, and a (probably more expensive) hobbled version, which one am I going to get?
In a way, it reminds me of the police raids that they sometimes have in places like Hong Kong, where they seize lots of CDs, and put them in front of a bulldozer. Then the press arrives, takes some photos for the papers, and that's it. These sort of things look like they are something against piracy, but in the end it never makes a differene.
Any one been to Hong Kong recently? Golden Shopping Arcade (Sham Shui Po) still there? They have been selling pirated software there since 1987. I would be surprised if they have been closed down permanently.