He spoke of competition and innovation, not honest brokers. The beauty of capitalism is that it doesnt matter if youre honest or not, if you provide crappy service you will be out competed.
That's the case when you're the little guy, sure.
Once you start to get monopoly power, things get more interesting. In the absence of contrary regulation, you can prevent resellers or middlemen from handling competing products, preventing them from reaching market. You can get exclusive contracts on materials or infrastructure your competitors would need, driving up their costs and thus their prices; you can drive standards and make the creation of interchangeable or interoperable widgets unnecessarily expensive or complex... etc.
"The beauty of capitalism" works fine when the startup and infrastructure costs are small, the inputs widely available, the output truly fungible, and customers and suppliers unhindered in their ability to select the product they wish to carry or purchase. Here in the real world, we need regulation to ensure that the free market keeps working outside those ideal conditions.
Ah, no. Security is an engineering objective, not a history from legacy systems.
It's both.
If software you want to be backwards-compatible with assumes that it's going to have the rights to write to the area of disk where its executables are stored? That's a security issue. (End users are accustomed to granting business software written with the above assumptions escalated privileges on a regular basis? The end-user training to evade security that provides is definitely a security issue).
If you have a large selection of 3rd-party drivers written to an API which assumes that they run with kernel-level privileges (rather than keeping them sandboxed in userland, as with a decent microkernel)? That's also a security issue.
This is where I've said that Microsoft is changing (for at least one of these examples, has changed) its API and user expectations to allow them to fix longstanding, large security holes -- but for someone with as much to lose by breaking compatibility as they have, it's a slow process.
Windows is still trying to be backwards-compatible with an API and end-user experience that was designed around single-user systems, whereas the UNIXy legacy is from large university systems where users were expected to be hostile (and, frequently, were).
Security on Windows has been getting a lot better over the last decade and a half, and it's going to continue to get better as Microsoft stops supporting legacy APIs and continues to modify workflows to adjust user expectations, but I'm still not much inclined to accept the assertion that there's no remaining difference that isn't directly and exclusively caused by the delta in marketshare.
If your phone costs $50, $250, $450, $650, it's about 5-15% of the total cost of ownership.
Seen T-Mobile's Monthly 4G plan? $30/month for unlimited data and 100 minutes.
And talking about "total cost of ownership" is silly. First, a smartphone plan isn't part of legitimate TCO -- I gave my mother my old smartphone, and she doesn't have any plan for it at all -- she uses it around her house with her local wifi. Second, it makes unnecessary and useless assumptions about aligning the phone-buying cycle with the plan-renewal cycle.
If you use TCO arguments to convince yourself to pay too much for a phone simply because you're paying too much for a service -- you, sir, are an idiot.
The bulk of the cost of owning a smart phone is the cellular service.
The cost of service is part of the cost of owning a phone, but it's not part of the cost of the phone!
If we're talking about new phone manufacturers trying to get into the market, it's the cost of phones that matters for purposes of determining if they're competitive with other makers of phones. Discussing cost-of-service is an irrelevant distraction.
Thanks for the explanation -- it's good to know. That said -- to determine the extent to which the splitter was contributing to the issue, I tried using hers standalone, and could only barely make out sound (had to cup my hands around my ears to reduce the ambient airplane noise).
Used a splitter on a recent airplane trip to try to listen to music with my fiancee -- me with good earbuds, her with the ones that came with her iDevice.
She couldn't hear anything at all at the maximum volume I was comfortable with -- and her hearing is far, far better than mine.
The loans which governments forced on the banks were an infinitesimal part of the subprime bubble.
There were no loans forced on the banks.
The banks were "forced" only to use the same lending standards for everyone. If their standards weren't stringent enough, they were free to make them more strict -- so long as they did so across the board.
That they didn't do so, and instead focused on repackaging questionable (but profitable) loans is their on their heads alone.
We, the working people, don't benefit from food stamps, free housing, free utilities, and sure don't benefit from an inverted tax schedule scheme
You, the working people, benefit from those things as soon as you have a catastrophe in your life and aren't working any longer. Programs are mostly designed for that purpose -- Welfare has a maximum allowance (in terms of time benefits can be claimed) for a reason.
We don't live in a just world -- bad things happen to good people. My fiancee was born well-to-do -- and then, a decade ago, needed brain surgery. That was fine -- she had a good job with benefits... but then her employer went under while she was still in the hospital, and she was wiped out entirely by paying out-of-pocket for follow-up care while she still wasn't well enough to work.
Another good friend of mine who's on food stamps right now worked her rear off and graduated at the top of her class... in a field for which the market tanked immediately after. She's applying everywhere she can, not just within that specialty -- but having been in the "household management" business for several years before going back to school, it's tough to compete.
Shit happens. Sometimes, shit even happens to you. Pretending that shit only happens to people who don't plan ahead / were raised wrong / aren't willing to work only works for so long in life.
An even better example would probably be DC. I bet there's all sorts of bullshit that everyone in political/diplomatic circles in DC knows about, but your average person off the street doesn't.
That reminds me -- one of my former coworkers (a computational linguistics specialist) used to live next door to Bush Sr's mistress. She described her neighbor's station as something everybody knew, but which there was a tacit agreement not to discuss.
And you think that not raising the artificial-and-arbitrary "debt ceiling" is the problem?
"The" problem? I never said it was "the" problem -- but it sure as hell is a problem, and a big one.
The debt ceiling is only used to pay for things that Congress already approved. So -- they're happily passing spending bills, but then by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, they're refusing to pay for the things they already spent the money on.
Your claim that our credit rating is entirely unrelated to the debt ceiling is directly contradicted by (very) recent history -- S&P described their reasoning clearly and in detail when we lost our AAA rating, and a great deal of it had to do with political paralysis: for instance, their prior rating had assumed that the Bush tax cuts would be allowed to expire. Moreover -- to claim that a default on T-bills, which the enforcement of this arbitrary limit would trigger, absolutely will impact our credit rating -- much akin to how a household credit rating can be hurt badly by being in too much debt, but hurts far worse after bills have gone past due.
Sure, we've got problems, but trying to leverage the debt ceiling is the wrong way to solve them.
Let's say you come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup in your neighborhood, and your home has sewage all the way up to your ceilings...
What do you think you should do?
Raise the ceiling, or remove the shit?
I'll tell you what you don't do: Keep on spending as if nothing was wrong, and simply refuse to pay the collections agents. That's what refusing to raise the debt ceiling does, and that's why it wrecks our credit rating.
You know, I don't do anything in any given year that would have the Feds bangin on my door by the laws of that year. But we've about reached the point when all Internet traffic information will be logged and available to the Feds forever. And who knows what content a site I visit today will have in 10 years. And who knows what the laws will be in 10 years.
I'm pretty sure the Constitutional provision against ex post facto laws isn't going away any time soon, though.
Google did this to increase their profits for the benefit of their share holders and employees. There is nothing wrong with it, but they should have called the spade a spade.
Or maybe they did it because their Apps For Business was getting a bad rep from the folks using the free version being unable to get real-human support, getting a bad taste in their mouth over that, making the supported, ad-free, upscale version a harder sell.
In both cases the bottom line is revenue, but in only one case are they lying.
I haven't seen the data. Neither have you; it's all a matter of which preexisting bias we'd prefer to confirm.
Functional programming works okay if you're doing lots of similar things at the same time, but not if you're doing lots of different - but parallelizable - tasks.
Speaking with my FP hat on here, I have not the slightest idea what you're talking about.
The big gains from FP come from isolation of side effects, and you get that gain no matter whether you're doing the same thing or a lot of little things.
We live in a dictatorship where if you don't support the right guy anymore you will be destroyed. The original poster is merely saying what is already factual.
There are a lot of Republicans working in government service, and a lot of Republican senators trying to guide investigatory committees to find evidence of corruption. Conspiracies of this sort wouldn't stay secret.
Can your iPad run Eclipse or Visual Studio? Or the real Photoshop and not the super crippled lite version? Or the real Matlab?
Yes, I can -- through remote control of my desktop, which is big, beefy and cheap.
Also, price matters. If I can buy a Nexus 10, a Nexus 4 and a Chromebook (which, again, can remotely control my real hardware at home) for the same money... why would I want a $1000 device with less battery life than either?
Hell, people will complain about road maintenance as well - those who don't drive probably complain how much is spent on them, and those who do complain how little is spent.
Folks who don't drive largely don't mind spending money on roads -- spending money on on-street parking (subsidizing others' use of a limited resource), and claiming that roads are paid for by use taxes (when that's only 51% of the budget, and only for highways) are a different matter.
Being willing to spend literally 1% of the transportation budget on human-powered alternatives much more than pays for itself -- providing better transportation infrastructure for folks who can't afford a car increases employment levels (as people can travel further to work, and have more last-mile options before and after using other transit mechanisms), and dedicated bike paths (when designed to be useful for commuting rather than sport) have far greater throughput per square foot of dedicated roadway in city centers during high-congestion periods.
Finally, building roads out to suburbs leads to lower population density -- building out rather than up -- increasing infrastructure costs and decreasing the opportunities for active transportation.
But with those caveats? Active transportation activists are (for the most part) happy to pay for road infrastructure -- where we have trouble is when it's design in ways that increase costs down the road and ensure further generations of sprawl.
You must get frightened easily then. There wasn't a single moment in BioShock or BioShock 2 that I found the least bit scary. In fact, the games were quite a bore and far too easy.
And you missed out on a good chunk of the experience you paid for by not getting into the (beautifully envisioned) world.
A good chunk of the experience, as I said before, is player involvement. If you're trying to treat it as a game or a challenge, rather than trying to live in that world, you're Doing It Wrong.
Want something really frightening? Try playing System Shock 2 with good headphones, in the dark. BioShock is just a very cheap imitation.
Heh. I only played a very little of that (wasn't my computer -- didn't own a Mac), but it was indeed good stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. Never mind those power lines, water lines, and other physical infrastructure...
Do you actually think about the things you say?
That's the case when you're the little guy, sure.
Once you start to get monopoly power, things get more interesting. In the absence of contrary regulation, you can prevent resellers or middlemen from handling competing products, preventing them from reaching market. You can get exclusive contracts on materials or infrastructure your competitors would need, driving up their costs and thus their prices; you can drive standards and make the creation of interchangeable or interoperable widgets unnecessarily expensive or complex... etc.
"The beauty of capitalism" works fine when the startup and infrastructure costs are small, the inputs widely available, the output truly fungible, and customers and suppliers unhindered in their ability to select the product they wish to carry or purchase. Here in the real world, we need regulation to ensure that the free market keeps working outside those ideal conditions.
But they don't capture output, so you couldn't use them for the exact example the parent gave that you were supposedly refuting.
It's both.
If software you want to be backwards-compatible with assumes that it's going to have the rights to write to the area of disk where its executables are stored? That's a security issue. (End users are accustomed to granting business software written with the above assumptions escalated privileges on a regular basis? The end-user training to evade security that provides is definitely a security issue).
If you have a large selection of 3rd-party drivers written to an API which assumes that they run with kernel-level privileges (rather than keeping them sandboxed in userland, as with a decent microkernel)? That's also a security issue.
This is where I've said that Microsoft is changing (for at least one of these examples, has changed) its API and user expectations to allow them to fix longstanding, large security holes -- but for someone with as much to lose by breaking compatibility as they have, it's a slow process.
Maybe, maybe not.
Windows is still trying to be backwards-compatible with an API and end-user experience that was designed around single-user systems, whereas the UNIXy legacy is from large university systems where users were expected to be hostile (and, frequently, were).
Security on Windows has been getting a lot better over the last decade and a half, and it's going to continue to get better as Microsoft stops supporting legacy APIs and continues to modify workflows to adjust user expectations, but I'm still not much inclined to accept the assertion that there's no remaining difference that isn't directly and exclusively caused by the delta in marketshare.
Seen T-Mobile's Monthly 4G plan? $30/month for unlimited data and 100 minutes.
And talking about "total cost of ownership" is silly. First, a smartphone plan isn't part of legitimate TCO -- I gave my mother my old smartphone, and she doesn't have any plan for it at all -- she uses it around her house with her local wifi. Second, it makes unnecessary and useless assumptions about aligning the phone-buying cycle with the plan-renewal cycle.
If you use TCO arguments to convince yourself to pay too much for a phone simply because you're paying too much for a service -- you, sir, are an idiot.
The cost of service is part of the cost of owning a phone, but it's not part of the cost of the phone!
If we're talking about new phone manufacturers trying to get into the market, it's the cost of phones that matters for purposes of determining if they're competitive with other makers of phones. Discussing cost-of-service is an irrelevant distraction.
Some of us buy our hardware and our plans separately.
If you do differently, well, that's your own problem.
Thanks for the explanation -- it's good to know. That said -- to determine the extent to which the splitter was contributing to the issue, I tried using hers standalone, and could only barely make out sound (had to cup my hands around my ears to reduce the ambient airplane noise).
Some earbuds are definitely awful at isolation.
Used a splitter on a recent airplane trip to try to listen to music with my fiancee -- me with good earbuds, her with the ones that came with her iDevice.
She couldn't hear anything at all at the maximum volume I was comfortable with -- and her hearing is far, far better than mine.
There were no loans forced on the banks.
The banks were "forced" only to use the same lending standards for everyone. If their standards weren't stringent enough, they were free to make them more strict -- so long as they did so across the board.
That they didn't do so, and instead focused on repackaging questionable (but profitable) loans is their on their heads alone.
You, the working people, benefit from those things as soon as you have a catastrophe in your life and aren't working any longer. Programs are mostly designed for that purpose -- Welfare has a maximum allowance (in terms of time benefits can be claimed) for a reason.
We don't live in a just world -- bad things happen to good people. My fiancee was born well-to-do -- and then, a decade ago, needed brain surgery. That was fine -- she had a good job with benefits... but then her employer went under while she was still in the hospital, and she was wiped out entirely by paying out-of-pocket for follow-up care while she still wasn't well enough to work.
Another good friend of mine who's on food stamps right now worked her rear off and graduated at the top of her class... in a field for which the market tanked immediately after. She's applying everywhere she can, not just within that specialty -- but having been in the "household management" business for several years before going back to school, it's tough to compete.
Shit happens. Sometimes, shit even happens to you. Pretending that shit only happens to people who don't plan ahead / were raised wrong / aren't willing to work only works for so long in life.
That reminds me -- one of my former coworkers (a computational linguistics specialist) used to live next door to Bush Sr's mistress. She described her neighbor's station as something everybody knew, but which there was a tacit agreement not to discuss.
"The" problem? I never said it was "the" problem -- but it sure as hell is a problem, and a big one.
The debt ceiling is only used to pay for things that Congress already approved. So -- they're happily passing spending bills, but then by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, they're refusing to pay for the things they already spent the money on.
Your claim that our credit rating is entirely unrelated to the debt ceiling is directly contradicted by (very) recent history -- S&P described their reasoning clearly and in detail when we lost our AAA rating, and a great deal of it had to do with political paralysis: for instance, their prior rating had assumed that the Bush tax cuts would be allowed to expire. Moreover -- to claim that a default on T-bills, which the enforcement of this arbitrary limit would trigger, absolutely will impact our credit rating -- much akin to how a household credit rating can be hurt badly by being in too much debt, but hurts far worse after bills have gone past due.
Sure, we've got problems, but trying to leverage the debt ceiling is the wrong way to solve them.
I'll tell you what you don't do: Keep on spending as if nothing was wrong, and simply refuse to pay the collections agents. That's what refusing to raise the debt ceiling does, and that's why it wrecks our credit rating.
It's an entirely irresponsible "solution".
Or you can do as I do, and patronize cinemas who kick talkers/texters out without refund.
I'm pretty sure the Constitutional provision against ex post facto laws isn't going away any time soon, though.
Or maybe they did it because their Apps For Business was getting a bad rep from the folks using the free version being unable to get real-human support, getting a bad taste in their mouth over that, making the supported, ad-free, upscale version a harder sell.
In both cases the bottom line is revenue, but in only one case are they lying.
I haven't seen the data. Neither have you; it's all a matter of which preexisting bias we'd prefer to confirm.
Speaking with my FP hat on here, I have not the slightest idea what you're talking about.
The big gains from FP come from isolation of side effects, and you get that gain no matter whether you're doing the same thing or a lot of little things.
There are a lot of Republicans working in government service, and a lot of Republican senators trying to guide investigatory committees to find evidence of corruption. Conspiracies of this sort wouldn't stay secret.
Yes, I can -- through remote control of my desktop, which is big, beefy and cheap.
Also, price matters. If I can buy a Nexus 10, a Nexus 4 and a Chromebook (which, again, can remotely control my real hardware at home) for the same money... why would I want a $1000 device with less battery life than either?
Folks who don't drive largely don't mind spending money on roads -- spending money on on-street parking (subsidizing others' use of a limited resource), and claiming that roads are paid for by use taxes (when that's only 51% of the budget, and only for highways) are a different matter.
Being willing to spend literally 1% of the transportation budget on human-powered alternatives much more than pays for itself -- providing better transportation infrastructure for folks who can't afford a car increases employment levels (as people can travel further to work, and have more last-mile options before and after using other transit mechanisms), and dedicated bike paths (when designed to be useful for commuting rather than sport) have far greater throughput per square foot of dedicated roadway in city centers during high-congestion periods.
Finally, building roads out to suburbs leads to lower population density -- building out rather than up -- increasing infrastructure costs and decreasing the opportunities for active transportation.
But with those caveats? Active transportation activists are (for the most part) happy to pay for road infrastructure -- where we have trouble is when it's design in ways that increase costs down the road and ensure further generations of sprawl.
A quick check of Wikipedia indicates that they were created for both platforms. The Mac version was the only one I was exposed to.
And you missed out on a good chunk of the experience you paid for by not getting into the (beautifully envisioned) world.
A good chunk of the experience, as I said before, is player involvement. If you're trying to treat it as a game or a challenge, rather than trying to live in that world, you're Doing It Wrong.
Heh. I only played a very little of that (wasn't my computer -- didn't own a Mac), but it was indeed good stuff.
Being down the ammo one expended in the prior attempt is certainly losing something.