"Misleading Prices...subtracted $1 from a $3000 computer... next crackpot please"
While anyone will tell you that $2999 is close to $3000 once they think about it, the fact is that people are subject to all sorts of cognitive biases and weaknesses. One of them is they use invalid rounding techniques (round to next lower).
So this sort of thing is actually misleading. Why else would they do it?
Read up about behavioural finance. There is a whole field that studies this. If you think people are economically rational, ask yourself why people were pouring money into dot.coms in 1999?
" That algorithm is so fundamentally broken as to be practically useless..."
The problem is deeper than the algorithm. Soundex is quite useful when you are not quite sure of the spelling. For example, when someone gives their name over the phone.
Basic statistics is the issue. If there are 1,000 terrorists in the US and you have a procedure that is 99% accurate, then the test will nail 2,500,000 people. So you get 2499/2500 rate of false positives - 99.9+% false positives. Quickly, people will start to treat the alerts as a sick joke.
Any time you are looking for something rare, you are going to get a lot of false positives.
The same problem occurs with medical tests for rare diseases. Most people who come up positive on cancer screening tests do have have cancer. Cancer is common over a lifetime but rare at any given time in a given individual.
Face recognition technology has the same problem, looking for criminals in crowds.
"There is a major differences in options contracts in Europe and the US: when they can be exercised. In the US options can be bought and sold at any time during the contract. In Europe contracts can only be sold on the date that they mature. Either way they are priced by a method known as The Blask Scholes method. These two economists won a Noble Prize for developing these equations and the markets have never been the same since. The price that they come up with is based on many different things: the current price, the volume of stock, the amount of stock in play, and how fast the price is moving, among others."
Options can be bought or sold at any time, European or American. However only American options can be exercised before the end date.
"Blask Scholes method" should read "Black Scholes method". It is not entirely accurate, particularly for way out of the money options. various hacks exist to make it more accurate.
"By all appearances, Unisys successfully "reinvented" themselves"
Let's put this 'success' in context. Their stock price is 1/2 what it was in 1978. With inflation, that equates to loss of 80% of value, while the rest of the stock market has gone up enormously.
With success like that, I shudder to think what failure looks like.
On top of that, customers have realised that outsourcing is a high margin (read: expensive) business that causes them to lose control of their technology. A backlash is under way. Not a good place to be.
"Exactly true, and in some parts of Australia, there are laws prohibiting the use of full role cages and racing harnesses because they make a vehicle safer at high speed, thus enticing the driver to drive at a higher speed"
There is another economic aspect to this as well.
When I drive fast, I get all the benefit. However the risk is shared by other road users. This is the classic economic problem of externalities. Just as in pollution, the polluter gets the benefit, but everyone breathes the smoke.
This is not just theory. When they made seat belts compulsary here, more pedestrians died. The reason was that people drove faster and pedestrians were more likely to get hit, and got hit harder.
Re:An earlier Difference Engine....
on
Krawtchouk's Mind
·
· Score: 1
"Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace wrote some programs for it, converting equations into algorithms and generating register settings which could be punched on the Jacquard cards (Babbage pinched this idea from the manufacturers of automatic-looms, a long time before Hollerith). "
Some interesting background on Ada Byron.
The reason she was educated in math was because her mother was estranged from her father, a famous poet. In order to ensure the two had as little in common as possible, she has Ada educated primarily in science and math rather than literature.
A Scientific American article a few years back showed some of her programs. Though they were very short, equivalent to 10-20 lines of code, all had bugs.
~"Sex differences in cognitive abilities are real".
True, they are real, persistent, occur across different cultures and can be understood in terms of the environment in which we evolved. This is not news, for those who wanted to know the facts, as opposed to those who only want confirmation of preexisting idiologies such as feminism.
~"IQ tests are/were culturally biased"
Actually studies found that taking out the cultural baggage made no difference.
There are other confounding factors though. Ethnic groups are often poor people who therefore tend to have poor nutrition both before and after birth, more illness and a less stimulating environment.
If you look at the distribution of IQ of blacks in the US, you do not see a nice normal distribution as you do with whites. This seems to be because there are still a small number of things that keep holding back IQs of blacks.
I have never seen a convincing analsysis of why CD sales have fallen.
I see one label is shutting down its classical music operation. Are classical music fans really downloading mp3s instead of buying CDs?
Some reasons why CD sales may have fallen.
1. Baby boomers have now replaced all their vinyl with CDs. This is a once off boost to sales and is now over.
2. Popular music is getting tired. There is no innovation and nothing to get excited about.
3. Lack of range. Go into a CD shop or listen to the radio. It is all the same bland rubbish.
4. Competition in other places. A lot of people are spending their money elsewhere: DVDs, whose sales are skyrocketing; mobile phones (texting is epxensive and an alternate form of entertainment).
5. Prices are up. This is both a disencentive to buy because of the poorer value for money, but also because people dislike being ripped off.
Technology has reduced the cost of music distribution but the record companies want to appropriate all those savings.
It is hard to see how this will end up. The media companies will fight tooth and nail, with the help of their wholly owned subsidiary the US congress, but technically it is hard to defeat distributed distribution.
"I've never understood the need to print stuff out."
It's simple.
1. Print resolution is higher than screen resolution. That translates to faster reading, according to the research. If your time is valuable, it is quicker to print and read.
2. You can read in environments where you can't open a laptop e.g. crowded train/plane.
3. Paper does not run out of battery life! Boot up time is zero.
Steve McConnell's book "Rapid Development" (Microsoft Press if that worries you) has a chapter on this. Most of the recommendations have been established in peer reviewed research.
One interesting aspect is that noise and open office bother some people but not others. However the studies show they affect everyone's productivity, whether it consciously bothers them or not.
And yes, "creative" and "artistic" are not synonyms.
> As an X developer and heavy user, I personally am looking forward to having an X repository with current bits and sensible organization.
I currently have problems with one of the X drivers. Attempts to get involved in the X process with a view to getting it fixed got nowhere. The process seems closed, bottlenecked and opaque.
The hardware vendor referred me to the X team to get the specs which they had previously supplied to them. I was quite capable and willing to do all the work, but it was just too hard it seems.
In the past I had no trouble getting fixes into gcc, dip, and other projects, and I am running an open source project (cobol4gcc). However the degree of difficulty with X seems too extreme, as others have reported.
While code forks are usually used in extreme circumstances, this may well be such a situation.
> Now, most copyright and patent infringement advocates don't have a problem with private ownership of material property, even though this is also an artificial construct which takes away their "right" to steal whatever they like and gives whoever acquires ownership of property through lawful market transactions a "monopoly" over its use. So why do they claim that intellectual property is any different? Usually the answer is a hodgepodge of weak analogies, claiming it is similar to such things as oxygen and water, unsubstantiated slogans like information wants to be free", and of course the favorite retort of totalitarian zealots, "its inevitable".
Your analogy is not relevant.
Patent law deprives me of the right to use the fruit of my own labour, if I independently invent something that has already been patented. Given the patent office's tendency to patent obvious ideas, this is a real problem.
If I independently invent something, why should I be prevented from using it just because someone else invented it too?
In concert with this, companies like microsoft use patent law to prevent interoperation. They embed some patent in a protocol, and presto! you can't write an interoperating program without infringing.
"Capitalism (Score:1) by composer777 (175489) on Tuesday February 11, @03:27PM (#5282525) Is any of this a suprise to anyone? Haven't we witnessed the same thing with the economic anarchy that we call capitalism?..."
The point is that this is not a social phenomenon. Any situation where positive feedback occurs tends to result in power laws.
You can see it in the distribution of wealth in capitalist economies, in the size of earthquakes, and in the size of financial fluctuations.
Thus insurance companies keep getting surprised by the size of natural disasters, a few people are disproportionately wealthy, and hedge funds keep getting wiped out by market movements that their naive models say should almost never happen.
Attempts to seek explanations within individual participants in the system are a waste of time. If you don't like the outcome, then you need to damp down the positive feedback.
For example, to reduce wealth distribution skew, have heavy taxes on the wealthy, especially on unearned wealth.
There are not many ways to reduce positive feedback in information distribution, and maybe you don't want to do this. After all, most blogs aren't that good. However to the extent that the skew is random, it is probably bad, so services that look for and publicize good new or underrated blogs would be useful for example.
The average car uses several tons of fossil fuel per year. In comparison the 1.6kg for making a dram chip is minute. Remember you only buy a PC at most every couple of years.
Similarly the water used would be less than a week's worth of showers.
The big users of energy are transportation, particularly cars, and heating and cooling. Don't sweat the small stuff.
And PCs make life more efficient thus saving energy.
The biggest and best thing you can do though, maybe more important than reducing your own energy consumption, is to limit the number of children you have.
Overpopulation causes poverty, hunger, disease and war. Has done for thousands of years.
Anyone who has a large family but claims to be environmentally aware is a hypocrite.
>... one of only four outts in the world to achieve Level 5 certication from the Software Engineering Institute...
> Trust me, these folks are VERY concerned about their careers and their industry. They are also very concerned about quality.
The trouble with SEI's CMM is that the whole thing is just the opinion of some academics. It is not evidence based. It was developed for the US defence department because they wanted a predictable software development process.
To some extent it can make the process more predictable, but at a huge cost in paperwork, and it does not make the process efficient or innovative.
If CMM is so good, why do so few of the top software companies use it? Why is there so little evidence that it works?
The Indian companies adopted CMM because they were rightly perceived as being low quality suppliers. CMM is being used as a marketing tool to convince the PHBs of this world they they have fixed their quality problems. It is a very bureacratic paper-driven process, well suited to the way many people in India tend to operate.
Go and look and you will find as I did that there is little or no evidence that CMM is worth even a tinker's cuss.
> A refugee is one who seeks refuge. Period. Illegal immigrants can be (and most are) refugees.
Not according to the UN's definition. A refugee is someone with a well founded fear of persecution, etc, according to specific criteria.
Are large percentage of asylum seekers are simply economic migrants.
> If your friend's mother was to die, you would tell your friend `I'm Sorry'. This is in no way an admission that you killed his/her mother, but extending your compassion, and wishing to make your friend feel better.
The problem, as the BBC article stated, is that the demands for an apology are linked to demands for compensation.
It is one thing to tell your friend you are sorry his mother died, but you might be careful if you thought he might then demand compensation.
All over the world, tribal people struggle to cope with the modern world. This is the case everywhere, in the US, Canada, India, and of course Africa.
Partly this is due to exploitation etc but partly it is just because tribal cultures do not fit well with modern concepts like private property, the rule of law, the need for saving, and so forth.
It is natural to want to blame someone but it is not very helpful. In any case most of the worst offenders are dead.
It is more helpful to try to take concrete steps to improve the well being and opprortunities of indigenous people, which is what John Howard is trying to do.
"Literally, our very lives are at stake now. George and I are just praying that we can finish 'Episode III' in time, before it's all over."
People tend to use exaggeration when they know their case is weak. It is also a good sign that someone knows they are lying.
Given he is a producer - a moneyman in the movie business - it looks like this is just a self serving attempt to paint the 'piracy' of DVDs as a crisis, which it is not.
Self serving tripe and exaggeration, in other words.
I had a similar situation recently when I wanted to learn some math for learning about quantum mechanics.
I just went and bought some books. The text books these days are so much better than they used to be. I had no trouble at all. Well, you have to work your way through the books;-)
P.S. After all that, the math doesn't really help to understand the 'philosophical' aspects of of quantum machanics e.g. does God play dice with the universe, non-locality, the possibility of hidden variable theories etc.
IBM had a mainframe program called IEFBR14, whose spec was 'do nothing'. It existed to allow the job control language to allocate files and so forth.
Over the years it had at least two fixes applied to it:
1. Make sure it issues a specific return code of 0.
2. Allow it to work in extended addressing mode, which was not taken into account in the original design.
The first was a spec omission, the second was an unanticipated change in environment.
Testing is incredibly expensive. Most large software projects spend 60-80% of the time on testing. The percentage is higher for more critical projects.
In my COBOL compiler project I spend most of my time writing and running tests. Writing code that doesn't work is fast and easy.
Actually when companies have competitions to think up a new slogan promoting the company their aim is not to find a new slogan. They want you to think that but it is not true.
The real purpose is to get people saying - and therefore thinking - good things about the product or service. It has been shown that if people write something down they are likely to end up believing what they wrote down.
These techniques were perfected by the Chinese brainwwashing teams during the Korean war.
"When penalties were allowed, the common good prevailed, and the investment by each group member climbed. "But if there's no opportunity for punishment, cooperation unravels," says Fehr, with investment declining rapidly."
Actually there are some more subtleties to this.
Other simulations have found that it is necessary to have a way to punish people for tolerating freeloaders. Without this, it is very hard to achieve stable cooperation. In a way, it's a bit like meta-moderation - a second level of assessment of people.
So not only do we shun those who behave badly, we shun anyone who does not shun those who behave badly. Of course this can be very coercive and intolerant if it gets out of hand.
Even with this, a society can converge into one of two modes.
1. Where almost everyone cooperates and almost everyone punishes those who don't cooperate, and also punishes those who do not punish those who don't cooperate.
2. Where few people cooperate and few people punish those who don't cooperate.
Which of these outcomes occurs depends on chance and initial conditions to a large degree.
You can see this in human societies. If you have traveled, you would have been astonished how ethical standards differ from one country to another. These differences seem to be quite stable.
This is not all about calculated self interest. People seem to have some inbuilt notions of fairness that predispose them to reject freeloaders and leeches even if it is in their short term interest to go along with them.
It's very common for people to use the heuistic "price = value". For this and many other interesting such issues see "Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert B. Cialdini.
It is often a useful short cut. In the case of linux it doesn't work. It may be better to add a few semi-useful things and services and charge a lot of money for Linux. That way people may perceive value.
Slashdot Mirror
"Misleading Prices...subtracted $1 from a $3000 computer... next crackpot please"
While anyone will tell you that $2999 is close to $3000 once they think about it, the fact is that people are subject to all sorts of cognitive biases and weaknesses. One of them is they use invalid rounding techniques (round to next lower).
So this sort of thing is actually misleading. Why else would they do it?
Read up about behavioural finance. There is a whole field that studies this. If you think people are economically rational, ask yourself why people were pouring money into dot.coms in 1999?
" That algorithm is so fundamentally broken as to be practically useless ..."
The problem is deeper than the algorithm. Soundex is quite useful when you are not quite sure of the spelling. For example, when someone gives their name over the phone.
Basic statistics is the issue. If there are 1,000 terrorists in the US and you have a procedure that is 99% accurate, then the test will nail 2,500,000 people. So you get 2499/2500 rate of false positives - 99.9+% false positives. Quickly, people will start to treat the alerts as a sick joke.
Any time you are looking for something rare, you are going to get a lot of false positives.
The same problem occurs with medical tests for rare diseases. Most people who come up positive on cancer screening tests do have have cancer. Cancer is common over a lifetime but rare at any given time in a given individual.
Face recognition technology has the same problem, looking for criminals in crowds.
"There is a major differences in options contracts in Europe and the US: when they can be exercised. In the US options can be bought and sold at any time during the contract. In Europe contracts can only be sold on the date that they mature. Either way they are priced by a method known as The Blask Scholes method. These two economists won a Noble Prize for developing these equations and the markets have never been the same since. The price that they come up with is based on many different things: the current price, the volume of stock, the amount of stock in play, and how fast the price is moving, among others."
Options can be bought or sold at any time, European or American. However only American options can be exercised before the end date.
"Blask Scholes method" should read "Black Scholes method". It is not entirely accurate, particularly for way out of the money options. various hacks exist to make it more accurate.
"Unisys is a $5.6B services company"
"By all appearances, Unisys successfully "reinvented" themselves"
Let's put this 'success' in context. Their stock price is 1/2 what it was in 1978. With inflation, that equates to loss of 80% of value, while the rest of the stock market has gone up enormously.
With success like that, I shudder to think what failure looks like.
On top of that, customers have realised that outsourcing is a high margin (read: expensive) business that causes them to lose control of their technology. A backlash is under way. Not a good place to be.
Tim Josling
"Exactly true, and in some parts of Australia, there are laws prohibiting the use of full role cages and racing harnesses because they make a vehicle safer at high speed, thus enticing the driver to drive at a higher speed"
There is another economic aspect to this as well.
When I drive fast, I get all the benefit. However the risk is shared by other road users. This is the classic economic problem of externalities. Just as in pollution, the polluter gets the benefit, but everyone breathes the smoke.
This is not just theory. When they made seat belts compulsary here, more pedestrians died. The reason was that people drove faster and pedestrians were more likely to get hit, and got hit harder.
"Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace wrote some programs for it, converting equations into algorithms and generating register settings which could be punched on the Jacquard cards (Babbage pinched this idea from the manufacturers of automatic-looms, a long time before Hollerith). "
Some interesting background on Ada Byron.
The reason she was educated in math was because her mother was estranged from her father, a famous poet. In order to ensure the two had as little in common as possible, she has Ada educated primarily in science and math rather than literature.
A Scientific American article a few years back showed some of her programs. Though they were very short, equivalent to 10-20 lines of code, all had bugs.
Tim Josling
~"Sex differences in cognitive abilities are real".
True, they are real, persistent, occur across different cultures and can be understood in terms of the environment in which we evolved. This is not news, for those who wanted to know the facts, as opposed to those who only want confirmation of preexisting idiologies such as feminism.
~"IQ tests are/were culturally biased"
Actually studies found that taking out the cultural baggage made no difference.
There are other confounding factors though. Ethnic groups are often poor people who therefore tend to have poor nutrition both before and after birth, more illness and a less stimulating environment.
If you look at the distribution of IQ of blacks in the US, you do not see a nice normal distribution as you do with whites. This seems to be because there are still a small number of things that keep holding back IQs of blacks.
I have never seen a convincing analsysis of why CD sales have fallen.
I see one label is shutting down its classical music operation. Are classical music fans really downloading mp3s instead of buying CDs?
Some reasons why CD sales may have fallen.
1. Baby boomers have now replaced all their vinyl with CDs. This is a once off boost to sales and is now over.
2. Popular music is getting tired. There is no innovation and nothing to get excited about.
3. Lack of range. Go into a CD shop or listen to the radio. It is all the same bland rubbish.
4. Competition in other places. A lot of people are spending their money elsewhere: DVDs, whose sales are skyrocketing; mobile phones (texting is epxensive and an alternate form of entertainment).
5. Prices are up. This is both a disencentive to buy because of the poorer value for money, but also because people dislike being ripped off.
Technology has reduced the cost of music distribution but the record companies want to appropriate all those savings.
It is hard to see how this will end up. The media companies will fight tooth and nail, with the help of their wholly owned subsidiary the US congress, but technically it is hard to defeat distributed distribution.
Tim Josling
"I've never understood the need to print stuff out."
It's simple.
1. Print resolution is higher than screen resolution. That translates to faster reading, according to the research. If your time is valuable, it is quicker to print and read.
2. You can read in environments where you can't open a laptop e.g. crowded train/plane.
3. Paper does not run out of battery life! Boot up time is zero.
Steve McConnell's book "Rapid Development" (Microsoft Press if that worries you) has a chapter on this. Most of the recommendations have been established in peer reviewed research.
One interesting aspect is that noise and open office bother some people but not others. However the studies show they affect everyone's productivity, whether it consciously bothers them or not.
And yes, "creative" and "artistic" are not synonyms.
Tim Josling
> As an X developer and heavy user, I personally am looking forward to having an X repository with current bits and sensible organization.
I currently have problems with one of the X drivers. Attempts to get involved in the X process with a view to getting it fixed got nowhere. The process seems closed, bottlenecked and opaque.
The hardware vendor referred me to the X team to get the specs which they had previously supplied to them. I was quite capable and willing to do all the work, but it was just too hard it seems.
In the past I had no trouble getting fixes into gcc, dip, and other projects, and I am running an open source project (cobol4gcc). However the degree of difficulty with X seems too extreme, as others have reported.
While code forks are usually used in extreme circumstances, this may well be such a situation.
"compotence" - there is something ironic about spelling this wrong.
> Now, most copyright and patent infringement advocates don't have a problem with private ownership of material property, even though this is also an artificial construct which takes away their "right" to steal whatever they like and gives whoever acquires ownership of property through lawful market transactions a "monopoly" over its use. So why do they claim that intellectual property is any different? Usually the answer is a hodgepodge of weak analogies, claiming it is similar to such things as oxygen and water, unsubstantiated slogans like information wants to be free", and of course the favorite retort of totalitarian zealots, "its inevitable".
Your analogy is not relevant.
Patent law deprives me of the right to use the fruit of my own labour, if I independently invent something that has already been patented. Given the patent office's tendency to patent obvious ideas, this is a real problem.
If I independently invent something, why should I be prevented from using it just because someone else invented it too?
In concert with this, companies like microsoft use patent law to prevent interoperation. They embed some patent in a protocol, and presto! you can't write an interoperating program without infringing.
Tim Josling
Congress: the best government money can buy.
"It is OK if we do bad things, because we are good people".
"Capitalism (Score:1) ..."
by composer777 (175489) on Tuesday February 11, @03:27PM (#5282525)
Is any of this a suprise to anyone? Haven't we witnessed the same thing with the economic anarchy that we call capitalism?
The point is that this is not a social phenomenon. Any situation where positive feedback occurs tends to result in power laws.
You can see it in the distribution of wealth in capitalist economies, in the size of earthquakes, and in the size of financial fluctuations.
Thus insurance companies keep getting surprised by the size of natural disasters, a few people are disproportionately wealthy, and hedge funds keep getting wiped out by market movements that their naive models say should almost never happen.
Attempts to seek explanations within individual participants in the system are a waste of time. If you don't like the outcome, then you need to damp down the positive feedback.
For example, to reduce wealth distribution skew, have heavy taxes on the wealthy, especially on unearned wealth.
There are not many ways to reduce positive feedback in information distribution, and maybe you don't want to do this. After all, most blogs aren't that good. However to the extent that the skew is random, it is probably bad, so services that look for and publicize good new or underrated blogs would be useful for example.
Tim Josling
The average car uses several tons of fossil fuel per year. In comparison the 1.6kg for making a dram chip is minute. Remember you only buy a PC at most every couple of years.
Similarly the water used would be less than a week's worth of showers.
The big users of energy are transportation, particularly cars, and heating and cooling. Don't sweat the small stuff.
And PCs make life more efficient thus saving energy.
The biggest and best thing you can do though, maybe more important than reducing your own energy consumption, is to limit the number of children you have.
Overpopulation causes poverty, hunger, disease and war. Has done for thousands of years.
Anyone who has a large family but claims to be environmentally aware is a hypocrite.
Tim Josling
> Perhaps you should read the article closely.
... one of only four outts in the world to achieve Level 5 certication from the Software Engineering Institute...
>
> Trust me, these folks are VERY concerned about their careers and their industry. They are also very concerned about quality.
The trouble with SEI's CMM is that the whole thing is just the opinion of some academics. It is not evidence based. It was developed for the US defence department because they wanted a predictable software development process.
To some extent it can make the process more predictable, but at a huge cost in paperwork, and it does not make the process efficient or innovative.
If CMM is so good, why do so few of the top software companies use it? Why is there so little evidence that it works?
The Indian companies adopted CMM because they were rightly perceived as being low quality suppliers. CMM is being used as a marketing tool to convince the PHBs of this world they they have fixed their quality problems. It is a very bureacratic paper-driven process, well suited to the way many people in India tend to operate.
Go and look and you will find as I did that there is little or no evidence that CMM is worth even a tinker's cuss.
Tim Josling
> A refugee is one who seeks refuge. Period. Illegal immigrants can be (and most are) refugees.
Not according to the UN's definition. A refugee is someone with a well founded fear of persecution, etc, according to specific criteria.
Are large percentage of asylum seekers are simply economic migrants.
> If your friend's mother was to die, you would tell your friend `I'm Sorry'. This is in no way an admission that you killed his/her mother, but extending your compassion, and wishing to make your friend feel better.
The problem, as the BBC article stated, is that the demands for an apology are linked to demands for compensation.
It is one thing to tell your friend you are sorry his mother died, but you might be careful if you thought he might then demand compensation.
All over the world, tribal people struggle to cope with the modern world. This is the case everywhere, in the US, Canada, India, and of course Africa.
Partly this is due to exploitation etc but partly it is just because tribal cultures do not fit well with modern concepts like private property, the rule of law, the need for saving, and so forth.
It is natural to want to blame someone but it is not very helpful. In any case most of the worst offenders are dead.
It is more helpful to try to take concrete steps to improve the well being and opprortunities of indigenous people, which is what John Howard is trying to do.
"Literally, our very lives are at stake now. George and I are just praying that we can finish 'Episode III' in time, before it's all over."
People tend to use exaggeration when they know their case is weak. It is also a good sign that someone knows they are lying.
Given he is a producer - a moneyman in the movie business - it looks like this is just a self serving attempt to paint the 'piracy' of DVDs as a crisis, which it is not.
Self serving tripe and exaggeration, in other words.
Read how Microsoft planned to use patents to stifle competition.
p hp
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween2.
I had a similar situation recently when I wanted to learn some math for learning about quantum mechanics.
;-)
I just went and bought some books. The text books these days are so much better than they used to be. I had no trouble at all. Well, you have to work your way through the books
P.S. After all that, the math doesn't really help to understand the 'philosophical' aspects of of quantum machanics e.g. does God play dice with the universe, non-locality, the possibility of hidden variable theories etc.
IBM had a mainframe program called IEFBR14, whose spec was 'do nothing'. It existed to allow the job control language to allocate files and so forth.
Over the years it had at least two fixes applied to it:
1. Make sure it issues a specific return code of 0.
2. Allow it to work in extended addressing mode, which was not taken into account in the original design.
The first was a spec omission, the second was an unanticipated change in environment.
Testing is incredibly expensive. Most large software projects spend 60-80% of the time on testing. The percentage is higher for more critical projects.
In my COBOL compiler project I spend most of my time writing and running tests. Writing code that doesn't work is fast and easy.
Actually when companies have competitions to think up a new slogan promoting the company their aim is not to find a new slogan. They want you to think that but it is not true.
The real purpose is to get people saying - and therefore thinking - good things about the product or service. It has been shown that if people write something down they are likely to end up believing what they wrote down.
These techniques were perfected by the Chinese brainwwashing teams during the Korean war.
"When penalties were allowed, the common good prevailed, and the investment by each group member climbed. "But if there's no opportunity for punishment, cooperation unravels," says Fehr, with investment declining rapidly."
Actually there are some more subtleties to this.
Other simulations have found that it is necessary to have a way to punish people for tolerating freeloaders. Without this, it is very hard to achieve stable cooperation. In a way, it's a bit like meta-moderation - a second level of assessment of people.
So not only do we shun those who behave badly, we shun anyone who does not shun those who behave badly. Of course this can be very coercive and intolerant if it gets out of hand.
Even with this, a society can converge into one of two modes.
1. Where almost everyone cooperates and almost everyone punishes those who don't cooperate, and also punishes those who do not punish those who don't cooperate.
2. Where few people cooperate and few people punish those who don't cooperate.
Which of these outcomes occurs depends on chance and initial conditions to a large degree.
You can see this in human societies. If you have traveled, you would have been astonished how ethical standards differ from one country to another. These differences seem to be quite stable.
This is not all about calculated self interest. People seem to have some inbuilt notions of fairness that predispose them to reject freeloaders and leeches even if it is in their short term interest to go along with them.
It's very common for people to use the heuistic "price = value". For this and many other interesting such issues see "Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert B. Cialdini.
It is often a useful short cut. In the case of linux it doesn't work. It may be better to add a few semi-useful things and services and charge a lot of money for Linux. That way people may perceive value.