You're pretty new here, relatively speaking, but that's not really important.
The question of whether GnuCash *works* is important. If it doesn't do what you need it to do, you can either choose not to use it, or modify it until it does what you need. Nobody would expect you to make your business rely upon any piece of software before it works the way you need it to.
On the other hand, relying on a proprietary product means that features you want or require depend upon the developer. If it doesn't meet your needs today, you have no way to ensure it ever will. If your needs change over time, you don't have the ability to adapt the software to your new requirements.
Sometimes the best solution may be to use a proprietary product for awhile, while you work on a longer term free software solution. RMS might object, but for a business, you cannot allow ideology to prevent you from using the tools you need right now. But imagining that Microsoft, Intuit, Sun, Apple, etc., will ever "cater to your whims" is to hinge your business on a fantasy.
The formula for Coca Cola isn't hard to deduce, but that won't help you make an identically tasting beverage unless you can obtain the ingredients. And decocainized coca extract isn't exactly easy to acquire.
I think the "make -j4" example is a good example of using all your SMP processors for maximum performance, but not really why I prefer a dual system to a single processor. Frankly, one P4 3GHz is still gonna significantly outperform a dual 1.5GHz Xeon system even for this operation..
I have a dual Celeron 533 MHz at home, and while it's by no means a speed demon, I still prefer it to a single processor system of even 3GHz class.
The reason: No matter how processor intensive a background task I may be running, my computer continues to be smooth and usable. And if it's a long-running task, this is especially important. While it might be nice to be able to run the background job in an hour instead of six, if I cannot use my computer for that hour, I'm actually significantly more inconvenienced.
Yes, I could have two systems and a KVM, instead. But really, SMP is so much less cumbersome. And Intel's Hyperthreading does not provide this benefit, so the next system I'm hoping to get will be a dual Opteron.
IMHO, FORTH is just as good a syntax representation or better than LISP, and there is no fundamental reason why compilers would not use this as their intermediate object code.
Thus, take the C expr:
a = 3 * 4 + c;
The compiler then might generate the FORTH-like:
3 4 * c + a =
While you could say the difference is just Reverse Polish Notation vs. Polish Notation, in effect the LISP intermediate assumes an efficient processing of Lists, and the FORTH intermediate assumes an efficient processing of Stacks.
Since most general purpose computers are Stack based, I think the latter would be more sensible. But of course, where GCC and its descendents are concerned, LISP is it, because of who wrote it.
A "nonintellectual good or service, that does not provide value"?
I'm afraid this makes no sense. First of all, to be a good or service in economic terms, everything must have value. Or, in reverse, something without value is not an economic good at all.
Of course, there are non-economic activities, an excellent example being warfare. Here, the "good" is actually a "bad," the "service" is a "disservice," at least considered in overall economic terms. This doesn't mean that there aren't reasons other than economic for wars to occur, but I'm not trying to enter into a debate on that subject.
Anyhow, I'm not sure where you're going here. You haven't said anything meaningful with which I can grapple.
In fact, this is quite similar for almost any industrial process. Producing first car in a factory is radically different from producing the millionth car and can be thought of as analogous to invention. That is why he is talking about the marginal cost, i.e. the additional cost of producing a unit once the framework is in place.
Well, the industrial revolution certainly changed the economics of production, but it isn't incorrect to refer to the replication of a car as production of a car. But replication of the *design* for the car would not be the same thing as production of a car, and here is where Greenspan is indeed confused.
Intellectual works are not analogous to industrial products.
Interestingly, many of the more classical economists had a better grasp of fundamental principles a hundred years ago than modern economists today. I am sick unto death of seeing economic calculations treating different factors of production as equivalent (i.e., referring to labor as "human capital") and looking at demand as the driving force (you can "want" something that hasn't been produced yet, but economic demand only exists once it has been). The worst error of all is the confusion of money (or whatever proximately stands for money nowadays) and capital (which is production turned to the improvement of further production).
Okay, I could rant on, but I won't. I'll just say, with new technology, incorrect economic theories that may have "worked" in the past will cease to have any useful application, due to an inability to make accurate predictions. Intellectual works may be treated as property by law, but that does not make them subject to the same economic calculations in the real world. You can try to legislate against reality, but reality does not care.
"More generally, in the physical world, the usual situation is that each additional unit of output is more costly to produce than the previous one; that is, production, at least eventually, is characterized by increasing marginal cost. By contrast, in the conceptual world, much of production is characterized by constant, and perhaps even zero, marginal cost."
This is a common economic confusion of production with distribution. The production of an intellectual work is not the same thing as its reproduction, but economic theories evolved in the past have no conception of this.
To take Greenspan's example, creation of an on-line encyclopedia, the fact that "the cost of reproduction and distribution is near zero" does not enter into the cost of actual production, i.e., the foregoing creation.
What economists like Greenspan are attempting to do is justify ex post facto a regime that compensates those who reproduce and distribute works, when what is really needed is an economic model that compensates the producers of intellectual works. The two may often be assumed to be one and the same, but this is often (perhaps rarely) the case.
* Many applications of context (predictive) modeling
* Things we haven't really thought of yet
The point is, the usefulness of general purpose 64-bit desktop processing capability is going to be tied to new applications and ways of working that we don't currently use because of the present impracticality. But once the capability exists, the applications will follow, and we will ask how we ever managed to get by with our old 32-bit systems.
Watching Bill Clinton address the conference while sitting in the hotel room of the President of Mozambique -- we were viewing it on closed circuit TV -- I got juicy blow-by=blow analysis of US foreign policy from a remarkably candid head of state.
Was I the only one who saw "juicy blow-by=blow-job analysis" in this sentence?
Other animals lack the neocortical centers that are stimulated by psychedelics. This is why it is really useless to try to study effects of these substances using animal models. They don't experience them in the same way. That isn't to say they have no effect, but a different effect that isn't comparable.
I really regret that psychedelics get lumped into the same category of "drugs" with simple CNS stimulants and depressants such as cocaine or heroin. What's more ridiculous, cocaine is schedule 2 in the US, and heroin is schedule 2 in the UK, i.e., these are prescribable. Psychedelics without physical dependence or demonstrated toxicity are schedule 1, absolutely prohibited.
Further, I don't see how a single class of substances can be linked to brain development. There are a whole host of chemicals in the human body, the consumption of which is evolutionarily invisible. Why should magic mushrooms be so special?
Without having germ-line effects, a substance can cause profound effects upon consciousness, attention, creativity, and a whole host of brain functions. Magic mushrooms are not "special" in this respect. Take, for example, the class of nootropic substances, such as piracetam, dmae, hydergine (an ergoloid closely related to LSD by the way, and also discovered by Hoffman). These have been demonstrated to improve performance on a variety of aptitude tests in double-blind random sampled trials. Some of these have been proven useful in reversing the mental deterioration of Alzheimer's and senile dementia.
Yes, it's "evolutionarily invisible" in a biological sense, but certainly need not be in a cultural/technological sense.
Nobody claimed that psychedelics had anything to do with biological evolution.
If you don't know what it means to refer to a culture, I guess you haven't actually studied anthropology at all. IHBT, but it's worth replying anyhow because I think there is an interesting point to be made.
Modern humans, with their mental capabilities, are a very different thing from most animals, inasmuch as we do not so much evolve new capabilities biologically, as develop them technologically. This occurs through a different kind of evolutionary process, one which depends upon communication and common understandings that lead others to derive improvements.
Yet, I think it is pretty clear that while humans have been pretty much genetically the same for tens of thousands of years, it is only in the last few thousand that such things as agriculture and modern social organizations developed. Why?
One possibility is indeed that, upon discovering the psychoactive properties of some rare plant or fungus, it became desirable to learn to cultivate it.
This could have been true in some populations and not others, and the particular plant or fungus might have (and almost certainly would have) differed from place to place.
Anyhow, it's not an idea to be dismissed out of hand. It might not be correct, but your supposed degree notwithstanding, you have presented no argument to the contrary.
Well thank you for your insight. With your bachelor's degree in Anthropology, nobody should doubt that you know precisely how cultures did or did not evolve. For instance, I'm sure there is also no truth to the idea that bread was invented as a byproduct of discovering fermentation to produce psychoactive (alcoholic) beverages.
Drugs are bad, m'kay? Except for legal drugs. Those are ok. Wait, when alcohol was illegal, it wasn't ok. When cocaine was legal, I guess it was ok. Or maybe anything that affects the mind or body should be illegal. Like, food, for instance.
I think it's also worth realizing how quickly our knowledge of "hallucinogens" has expanded recently. While primitive societies long used such things as "magic mushrooms" they were actually not (re)discovered by Western researchers until lately.
60 years ago, the central activity of LSD was discovered by Hoffman. It was only after this that lysergic amides were realized to be present in morning glory seeds. DMT was first synthesized about ten years before that, and later realized to be present in many plants and even animal and human brains (yes, some argue this makes your brain illegal). Salvia divinorum was used traditionally for hundreds of years, but salvinorin was only really isolated and identified as the active principle about ten years ago, and its mechanism of action discovered as recently as last year.
If it is true that these substances can lead to an evolution of consciousness, then can you imagine what sorts of changes could occur in the next hundred years?
(Of course, if you really buy into McKenna's ideas, maybe I should say, in the next 10 years....)
I don't know if I buy all of this. Certainly I think that the case for what is commonly called "ESP" is inconclusive at best, and certainly no double-blind test has ever confirmed the ability in normal or "chemically enhanced" individuals. That said, if you define the term a little more generally, perhaps call it "altered sensory perception," which may include the ability to hear higher or lower frequencies, or view a greater spectrum of light waves, or perhaps even "tune in" to certain ideas which might exist in some sort of "noosphere" -- I think there might be a reasonable case here.
Much of Western civilization clearly followed from the teachings of Moses, following his encounter with a burning bush, supposedly an Acacia. It is known that many Acacias contain the potent hallucinogenic substance dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is active when smoked and inhaled. Could it be that this is how Moses "found God?"
Sadly, those wishing to partake of similar transformational experiences today are prohibited by law from doing so. Both psilocybin and DMT are Schedule 1 drugs in the United States, and illegal in most other jurisdictions as well. This is despite a lack of evidence of addiction or physical harm caused by these substances.
Slashdot Mirror
You're pretty new here, relatively speaking, but that's not really important.
The question of whether GnuCash *works* is important. If it doesn't do what you need it to do, you can either choose not to use it, or modify it until it does what you need. Nobody would expect you to make your business rely upon any piece of software before it works the way you need it to.
On the other hand, relying on a proprietary product means that features you want or require depend upon the developer. If it doesn't meet your needs today, you have no way to ensure it ever will. If your needs change over time, you don't have the ability to adapt the software to your new requirements.
Sometimes the best solution may be to use a proprietary product for awhile, while you work on a longer term free software solution. RMS might object, but for a business, you cannot allow ideology to prevent you from using the tools you need right now. But imagining that Microsoft, Intuit, Sun, Apple, etc., will ever "cater to your whims" is to hinge your business on a fantasy.
The formula for Coca Cola isn't hard to deduce, but that won't help you make an identically tasting beverage unless you can obtain the ingredients. And decocainized coca extract isn't exactly easy to acquire.
Wouldn't this be easier just to implement as a disk caching algorithm?
All Microsoft executives are now committing suicide.
I think the "make -j4" example is a good example of using all your SMP processors for maximum performance, but not really why I prefer a dual system to a single processor. Frankly, one P4 3GHz is still gonna significantly outperform a dual 1.5GHz Xeon system even for this operation..
I have a dual Celeron 533 MHz at home, and while it's by no means a speed demon, I still prefer it to a single processor system of even 3GHz class.
The reason: No matter how processor intensive a background task I may be running, my computer continues to be smooth and usable. And if it's a long-running task, this is especially important. While it might be nice to be able to run the background job in an hour instead of six, if I cannot use my computer for that hour, I'm actually significantly more inconvenienced.
Yes, I could have two systems and a KVM, instead. But really, SMP is so much less cumbersome. And Intel's Hyperthreading does not provide this benefit, so the next system I'm hoping to get will be a dual Opteron.
IMHO, FORTH is just as good a syntax representation or better than LISP, and there is no fundamental reason why compilers would not use this as their intermediate object code.
Thus, take the C expr:
a = 3 * 4 + c;
The compiler then might generate the FORTH-like:
3 4 * c + a =
While you could say the difference is just Reverse Polish Notation vs. Polish Notation, in effect the LISP intermediate assumes an efficient processing of Lists, and the FORTH intermediate assumes an efficient processing of Stacks.
Since most general purpose computers are Stack based, I think the latter would be more sensible. But of course, where GCC and its descendents are concerned, LISP is it, because of who wrote it.
http://www.FuckTheVote.org/
Don't let THEM imminetize the eschaton.
The word is immanentize. To be distinguished from imminentize. Imminetize isn't a word.
Sorry if this seems like a spelling nitpick, but it's more significant, due to the common confusion of terms and meanings.
Some discussion here.
A "nonintellectual good or service, that does not provide value"?
I'm afraid this makes no sense. First of all, to be a good or service in economic terms, everything must have value. Or, in reverse, something without value is not an economic good at all.
Of course, there are non-economic activities, an excellent example being warfare. Here, the "good" is actually a "bad," the "service" is a "disservice," at least considered in overall economic terms. This doesn't mean that there aren't reasons other than economic for wars to occur, but I'm not trying to enter into a debate on that subject.
Anyhow, I'm not sure where you're going here. You haven't said anything meaningful with which I can grapple.
In fact, this is quite similar for almost any industrial process. Producing first car in a factory is radically different from producing the millionth car and can be thought of as analogous to invention. That is why he is talking about the marginal cost, i.e. the additional cost of producing a unit once the framework is in place.
Well, the industrial revolution certainly changed the economics of production, but it isn't incorrect to refer to the replication of a car as production of a car. But replication of the *design* for the car would not be the same thing as production of a car, and here is where Greenspan is indeed confused.
Intellectual works are not analogous to industrial products.
Interestingly, many of the more classical economists had a better grasp of fundamental principles a hundred years ago than modern economists today. I am sick unto death of seeing economic calculations treating different factors of production as equivalent (i.e., referring to labor as "human capital") and looking at demand as the driving force (you can "want" something that hasn't been produced yet, but economic demand only exists once it has been). The worst error of all is the confusion of money (or whatever proximately stands for money nowadays) and capital (which is production turned to the improvement of further production).
Okay, I could rant on, but I won't. I'll just say, with new technology, incorrect economic theories that may have "worked" in the past will cease to have any useful application, due to an inability to make accurate predictions. Intellectual works may be treated as property by law, but that does not make them subject to the same economic calculations in the real world. You can try to legislate against reality, but reality does not care.
Greenspan writes:
"More generally, in the physical world, the usual situation is that each additional unit of output is more costly to produce than the previous one; that is, production, at least eventually, is characterized by increasing marginal cost. By contrast, in the conceptual world, much of production is characterized by constant, and perhaps even zero, marginal cost."
This is a common economic confusion of production with distribution. The production of an intellectual work is not the same thing as its reproduction, but economic theories evolved in the past have no conception of this.
To take Greenspan's example, creation of an on-line encyclopedia, the fact that "the cost of reproduction and distribution is near zero" does not enter into the cost of actual production, i.e., the foregoing creation.
What economists like Greenspan are attempting to do is justify ex post facto a regime that compensates those who reproduce and distribute works, when what is really needed is an economic model that compensates the producers of intellectual works. The two may often be assumed to be one and the same, but this is often (perhaps rarely) the case.
* Realtime DivX encoding
* Point-to-Point encrypted communication
* Many applications of context (predictive) modeling
* Things we haven't really thought of yet
The point is, the usefulness of general purpose 64-bit desktop processing capability is going to be tied to new applications and ways of working that we don't currently use because of the present impracticality. But once the capability exists, the applications will follow, and we will ask how we ever managed to get by with our old 32-bit systems.
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Nowt \Nowt\, n. pl. (Zo["o]l.)
Neat cattle.
There's a good pub at L5. Called the Libation Point.
Watching Bill Clinton address the conference while sitting in the hotel room of the President of Mozambique -- we were viewing it on closed circuit TV -- I got juicy blow-by=blow analysis of US foreign policy from a remarkably candid head of state.
Was I the only one who saw "juicy blow-by=blow-job analysis" in this sentence?
Don't vote.
http://www.fuckthevote.org/
Because a one that is not cold, is hardly a one at all.
Why does the fact that it's unencrypted make it non-scary?
Other animals lack the neocortical centers that are stimulated by psychedelics. This is why it is really useless to try to study effects of these substances using animal models. They don't experience them in the same way. That isn't to say they have no effect, but a different effect that isn't comparable.
I really regret that psychedelics get lumped into the same category of "drugs" with simple CNS stimulants and depressants such as cocaine or heroin. What's more ridiculous, cocaine is schedule 2 in the US, and heroin is schedule 2 in the UK, i.e., these are prescribable. Psychedelics without physical dependence or demonstrated toxicity are schedule 1, absolutely prohibited.
Further, I don't see how a single class of substances can be linked to brain development. There are a whole host of chemicals in the human body, the consumption of which is evolutionarily invisible. Why should magic mushrooms be so special?
Without having germ-line effects, a substance can cause profound effects upon consciousness, attention, creativity, and a whole host of brain functions. Magic mushrooms are not "special" in this respect. Take, for example, the class of nootropic substances, such as piracetam, dmae, hydergine (an ergoloid closely related to LSD by the way, and also discovered by Hoffman). These have been demonstrated to improve performance on a variety of aptitude tests in double-blind random sampled trials. Some of these have been proven useful in reversing the mental deterioration of Alzheimer's and senile dementia.
Yes, it's "evolutionarily invisible" in a biological sense, but certainly need not be in a cultural/technological sense.
You are way too sure of yourself.
Nobody claimed that psychedelics had anything to do with biological evolution.
If you don't know what it means to refer to a culture, I guess you haven't actually studied anthropology at all. IHBT, but it's worth replying anyhow because I think there is an interesting point to be made.
Modern humans, with their mental capabilities, are a very different thing from most animals, inasmuch as we do not so much evolve new capabilities biologically, as develop them technologically. This occurs through a different kind of evolutionary process, one which depends upon communication and common understandings that lead others to derive improvements.
Yet, I think it is pretty clear that while humans have been pretty much genetically the same for tens of thousands of years, it is only in the last few thousand that such things as agriculture and modern social organizations developed. Why?
One possibility is indeed that, upon discovering the psychoactive properties of some rare plant or fungus, it became desirable to learn to cultivate it.
This could have been true in some populations and not others, and the particular plant or fungus might have (and almost certainly would have) differed from place to place.
Anyhow, it's not an idea to be dismissed out of hand. It might not be correct, but your supposed degree notwithstanding, you have presented no argument to the contrary.
Well thank you for your insight. With your bachelor's degree in Anthropology, nobody should doubt that you know precisely how cultures did or did not evolve. For instance, I'm sure there is also no truth to the idea that bread was invented as a byproduct of discovering fermentation to produce psychoactive (alcoholic) beverages.
Drugs are bad, m'kay? Except for legal drugs. Those are ok. Wait, when alcohol was illegal, it wasn't ok. When cocaine was legal, I guess it was ok. Or maybe anything that affects the mind or body should be illegal. Like, food, for instance.
What is a drug, exactly?
I think it's also worth realizing how quickly our knowledge of "hallucinogens" has expanded recently. While primitive societies long used such things as "magic mushrooms" they were actually not (re)discovered by Western researchers until lately.
60 years ago, the central activity of LSD was discovered by Hoffman. It was only after this that lysergic amides were realized to be present in morning glory seeds. DMT was first synthesized about ten years before that, and later realized to be present in many plants and even animal and human brains (yes, some argue this makes your brain illegal). Salvia divinorum was used traditionally for hundreds of years, but salvinorin was only really isolated and identified as the active principle about ten years ago, and its mechanism of action discovered as recently as last year.
If it is true that these substances can lead to an evolution of consciousness, then can you imagine what sorts of changes could occur in the next hundred years?
(Of course, if you really buy into McKenna's ideas, maybe I should say, in the next 10 years....)
I don't know if I buy all of this. Certainly I think that the case for what is commonly called "ESP" is inconclusive at best, and certainly no double-blind test has ever confirmed the ability in normal or "chemically enhanced" individuals. That said, if you define the term a little more generally, perhaps call it "altered sensory perception," which may include the ability to hear higher or lower frequencies, or view a greater spectrum of light waves, or perhaps even "tune in" to certain ideas which might exist in some sort of "noosphere" -- I think there might be a reasonable case here.
Much of Western civilization clearly followed from the teachings of Moses, following his encounter with a burning bush, supposedly an Acacia. It is known that many Acacias contain the potent hallucinogenic substance dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is active when smoked and inhaled. Could it be that this is how Moses "found God?"
Sadly, those wishing to partake of similar transformational experiences today are prohibited by law from doing so. Both psilocybin and DMT are Schedule 1 drugs in the United States, and illegal in most other jurisdictions as well. This is despite a lack of evidence of addiction or physical harm caused by these substances.