And neither of those facts creates a claim on another individual's life, goods, or services, which is the ultimate goal of your so nicely-disguised "growing up".
No, but society already had some claim on your life, goods, and services, because none of these things in any practical sense exist without it.
If you want your life and what you produce to be wholly yours without debt to others, then you also need to live, create, and produce without others. Unfortunately, by being born you've already failed to manage that.
Asserting that no one has any claim on you is just as blind as asserting that everyone has every claim on you.
Easily the most ridiculous author in post war literature. "Selfishness is the only virtue" - the philosophy of a 6 year old.
I think that's a little unfair, even though I've had some unflattering things to say about Rand's writing elsewhere in this thread. Her work is just very much "of its time." If Rand hadn't said it, someone else would have -- it makes a certain amount of sense as a reaction to communism, and it does successfully point out some of the key ways that communism falls down in practice.
It does go too far in the opposite direction -- that is, it essentially assumes that if communism is bad, then the exact opposite of communism must be the best way to do everything -- but at the time, I think the world at large was more undecided about its viability, and writing about these ideas helped keep the conversation going.
Even every single one of the named characters in Atlas Shrugged doesn't fall into the nice divide of white-hat noble genius and black-hat greedy do-nothings, so the novel itself is more "complicated" than you make it out to be.
Oh, of course. It's a massive novel. This is a Slashdot post, not a structured criticism of multiple sizeable works of fiction and the philosophy they espouse.
That said, I think you're kidding yourself if you don't think most of her named characters fit pretty well into one of those categories, though: either you're some kind of rugged bold individualist creator and/or captain of industry, or you're looking to leech off the people who are. I think you're also kidding yourself if you think many real people fit very well into either category. (Generally, the assorted working-man mooks that assist said captains of industry in their labors might be said to be a third category, but I don't remember any of those characters being very developed.)
Significantly, nothing in Rand's philosophy says anything about brilliance and hard work necessarily leading to success, nor poverty always being an indication of sloth or lack of ambition.
Directly, no. But her brilliant, hardworking prime mover characters are always ultimately successful. It's never the case that their bold, uncompromising vision is just bad -- it's always that the rest of the world isn't smart or brave enough to realize it's great.
On the other side of the coin, there's basically nothing done by any government (that I can recall) in any of the novels that isn't about the leech-people wanting to steal from the mover-people. There's never any reasonable cause for any tax or collective action; it's always a greedy attempt to enslave harder working people.
When you're a young-ish maladjusted geek, that kind of quasi-optimistic, black-and-white view of the world is very seductive. If you're smart and trying hard and you're not yet successful, it's not because of something you're doing wrong, it's because people are afraid of the greatness of your work or because the leeches are plotting against you.
I'm talking from the perspective of having read something like Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, incidentally, and living in the view of the world as seen from her novels. Probably, a more direct stating of Rand's philosophy doesn't have a lot of these connotations, but again, I think you would have a hard time arguing that they aren't present in the novels.
By "get over it", of course, you mean, "compromise their principles out of convenience, instant gratification, or short-term benefit."
No, I'm pretty sure he meant that they grow up and realize that the world is more complicated. They come to realize that people don't divide nicely into white-hat noble genius captains of industry and black-hat greedy communist do-nothings. They may come to understand that people who disagree with them simply have different priorities and probably aren't mustache-twirling cartoonish villians. They come to discover that while there certainly is a correlation, in the real world, brilliance and hard work don't always result in success, and that poverty isn't always an indicator of sloth or a lack of ambition.
I mean, why shouldn't I as a citizen of the state of Abstraction be able to ask the Senator from the state of Facts to vote for a proposal that is in the best interests of the American people?
Sure; but if you talk about "your congressman" (singular) that clearly refers to the one congressman you get to vote for, and not one of the other 500some.
Now, I wonder: how much.NET customers have found out they overpaid for a.NET application when they could have done as good with an X language alternative?
I have to think not many.
If you want me (or someone) to write a custom application for your business, I'll do it in C# if you want or I'll do it in Java or PHP or whatever, but no matter what you have to pay me pretty much the same amount of money. Depending on what the project is I may be able to write it faster for one language/platform than another, but in most cases it's not going to differ a lot.
VMs are still crappy. VMs are still for lazy programmers. Real men still do not use these languages for anything that requires high performance or low resource usage.
However, most programmers do not fall into this catagory.
It would be more accurate to say that most programs no longer fall into this category.
Definitely there are still lots of cases where performance or resource usage (assuming reasonable/realistic inefficiencies) are important, but in the business world today, speed/cost of development is likely to be a much bigger concern than speed of execution or resources to run. Throwing an extra or new server at something often costs less than a week of developer time.
but I've used both Eclipse and Visual Studio for years, and trialed ReSharper, and Eclipse is still far better.
Without starting a holy war, that's a matter of opinion.
I just need to spend too much time dicking around with Eclipse and configuring it to be the way I want and not enough time actually getting something useful done. That's my experience; obviously yours is different.
1) It's impossible to make all development easy, but you can make some parts/kinds of it easier.
That is to say, just because a language like VB.Net makes throwing together a passable UI fast/easy doesn't automatically mean that all VB.Net tasks are easy or that someone who's qualified to slap a DataSet on a web page is qualified to do something more complicated.
2) They're really not competing with free (as in beer) in the sense that you seem to be saying that they are.
I can get something like OpenOffice as a free (as in costing no money) word processor to use at my business; I can't get someone for free to write an app that solves the specific needs of my business processes. I'm going to end up paying a team of developers for that, and whether they're using Java or PHP or C#, the cost to me is still pretty similar.
As I said C# has mostly gathered the ground which was occupied by Microsoft before anyway, quite a big ground but territory java never had.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
Most of the work I've done in the last 5 years or so has been as a consultant, developing apps (some web, some not) for businesses. Some of that work has been in Java, and some of it has been in C#. Most of the projects could really have been done in either -- there wasn't any kind of company-wide mandate or environmental limitation that required one over the other.
Not everything, but in the business world, lots of the projects that are done in C# or Java could have been done in either language.
My thought is... while what you're saying is true (most cracked releases will include the cracked DLC), the number of people who didn't buy the original game but do buy the DLR is still greater than zero.
Maybe they're looking more for the 'piracy in the form of borrowing the DVD from my friend and installing it' kind of piracy -- I suspect (for games that don't have some kind of online play that makes it problematic) that kind of piracy is a lot more prevalent than the downloading cracked torrents kind. Not among the Slashdot crowd, perhaps, but there's a ton of gamers who aren't tech-savvy enough to rock the online piracy but who are tech-savvy enough to borrow their roommate's copy of a game.
I think that you know that I disagree. Linux does not have any form of autorun.
This does go back to what the grandparent poster was saying about flaws in XP that no longer exist in Windows 7.
At least, my Vista machine doesn't autorun (as in from the CD drive) anything, so I assume Win7 won't either. Probably I could still change the config in some way so it would, but that isn't really what you're getting at, I don't think.
This time last year, I had a job that would pay for all of its employees to go to about a conference per year within a certain budget. It would also give them paid time off to go.
Since then, that company cut many of its senior/expensive people (including me) and eliminated that benefit for those that remained. My new job doesn't have such a benefit and I'm not likely to attend a conference I have to pay for purely out of pocket and take vacation time for. Probably a lot of former conference attendees are in a similar boat.
First, because trying to be the leader in search was never really Yahoo's game. They were about being a web portal -- basically, they wanted to be your home page. Personally, I prefer a clean home page for searching like Google's, and I suspect a lot of the people who read Slashdot do too, but an awful lot of people don't.
To that end they went after a lot of different things. Webmail, video, fantasy sports leagues, photo hosting (Flickr), games, news, etc. I'm not saying that's necessarily been a winning strategy for them as a company, but what they were trying to do was never strictly about search.
Microsoft, too, has a very multi-pronged business plan, even for the web. Sure, we've seen their mostly unsuccessful efforts in the search, web portal, webmail, and instant messenging areas, but there's also IE, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and too many other things to count, to say nothing of all the more indirect efforts like the XBox which start to bleed back over into the online space. In a lot of these areas they've taken on more successful established players or technologies and fought to gain market share, something that's been good for everyone since it's forced those established options to become better to stay ahead. Microsoft is the kind of company that will try to compete in a hundred different arenas, knowing that someone else might falter and that, even if not, maybe you can still make something good out of being #2 in a couple related areas.
Or, a person could do almost anything more useful instead.
You don't have to read the dictionary cover to cover before you can try to speak a language. You shouldn't need to treat an operating system that way, either.
When people get fed up with crippled "home" versions and paying more for "ultimate" versions, Linux will surely take off. If Microsoft is unwilling to provide all the features in one simple install, 2010 will be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
We need something like Poe's Law for Linux zealotry, because I think you're being facetious, but I'm really not sure.
Slashdot Mirror
The dumb thing about this study is that they ask women if they have a G-spot.
Shit, with that methodology and the right sample population I can prove that men don't have prostate glands or spleens.
And neither of those facts creates a claim on another individual's life, goods, or services, which is the ultimate goal of your so nicely-disguised "growing up".
No, but society already had some claim on your life, goods, and services, because none of these things in any practical sense exist without it.
If you want your life and what you produce to be wholly yours without debt to others, then you also need to live, create, and produce without others. Unfortunately, by being born you've already failed to manage that.
Asserting that no one has any claim on you is just as blind as asserting that everyone has every claim on you.
Easily the most ridiculous author in post war literature. "Selfishness is the only virtue" - the philosophy of a 6 year old.
I think that's a little unfair, even though I've had some unflattering things to say about Rand's writing elsewhere in this thread. Her work is just very much "of its time." If Rand hadn't said it, someone else would have -- it makes a certain amount of sense as a reaction to communism, and it does successfully point out some of the key ways that communism falls down in practice.
It does go too far in the opposite direction -- that is, it essentially assumes that if communism is bad, then the exact opposite of communism must be the best way to do everything -- but at the time, I think the world at large was more undecided about its viability, and writing about these ideas helped keep the conversation going.
Even every single one of the named characters in Atlas Shrugged doesn't fall into the nice divide of white-hat noble genius and black-hat greedy do-nothings, so the novel itself is more "complicated" than you make it out to be.
Oh, of course. It's a massive novel. This is a Slashdot post, not a structured criticism of multiple sizeable works of fiction and the philosophy they espouse.
That said, I think you're kidding yourself if you don't think most of her named characters fit pretty well into one of those categories, though: either you're some kind of rugged bold individualist creator and/or captain of industry, or you're looking to leech off the people who are. I think you're also kidding yourself if you think many real people fit very well into either category. (Generally, the assorted working-man mooks that assist said captains of industry in their labors might be said to be a third category, but I don't remember any of those characters being very developed.)
Significantly, nothing in Rand's philosophy says anything about brilliance and hard work necessarily leading to success, nor poverty always being an indication of sloth or lack of ambition.
Directly, no. But her brilliant, hardworking prime mover characters are always ultimately successful. It's never the case that their bold, uncompromising vision is just bad -- it's always that the rest of the world isn't smart or brave enough to realize it's great.
On the other side of the coin, there's basically nothing done by any government (that I can recall) in any of the novels that isn't about the leech-people wanting to steal from the mover-people. There's never any reasonable cause for any tax or collective action; it's always a greedy attempt to enslave harder working people.
When you're a young-ish maladjusted geek, that kind of quasi-optimistic, black-and-white view of the world is very seductive. If you're smart and trying hard and you're not yet successful, it's not because of something you're doing wrong, it's because people are afraid of the greatness of your work or because the leeches are plotting against you.
I'm talking from the perspective of having read something like Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, incidentally, and living in the view of the world as seen from her novels. Probably, a more direct stating of Rand's philosophy doesn't have a lot of these connotations, but again, I think you would have a hard time arguing that they aren't present in the novels.
My question: Why do so many people with liberal arts degrees write articles about this?
It's either because engineers are too busy doing real work to do it, or because everyone knows engineers can't write. Take your pick. :)
By "get over it", of course, you mean, "compromise their principles out of convenience, instant gratification, or short-term benefit."
No, I'm pretty sure he meant that they grow up and realize that the world is more complicated. They come to realize that people don't divide nicely into white-hat noble genius captains of industry and black-hat greedy communist do-nothings. They may come to understand that people who disagree with them simply have different priorities and probably aren't mustache-twirling cartoonish villians. They come to discover that while there certainly is a correlation, in the real world, brilliance and hard work don't always result in success, and that poverty isn't always an indicator of sloth or a lack of ambition.
Otherwise, the entire legislative and executive branches would be in jail ;-)
You say that like it's a bad thing. :)
(In seriousness I don't think all of both branches would be in jail, but an awful lot sure would.)
I mean, why shouldn't I as a citizen of the state of Abstraction be able to ask the Senator from the state of Facts to vote for a proposal that is in the best interests of the American people?
Sure; but if you talk about "your congressman" (singular) that clearly refers to the one congressman you get to vote for, and not one of the other 500some.
, as one of the idiots himself posted, there are only 74 so positions open on a site like dice. merely 74
In the particular town in which he lives.
Or did you think that calling someone an idiot without actually reading their post makes you look smart?
Now, I wonder: how much .NET customers have found out they overpaid for a .NET application when they could have done as good with an X language alternative?
I have to think not many.
If you want me (or someone) to write a custom application for your business, I'll do it in C# if you want or I'll do it in Java or PHP or whatever, but no matter what you have to pay me pretty much the same amount of money. Depending on what the project is I may be able to write it faster for one language/platform than another, but in most cases it's not going to differ a lot.
Agreed, Swing is a fucking travesty.
I've often wondered to what degree Java would be more popular vs. .NET today if Swing had been good.
Not that 'easy/better UI development' drives everything, but...
I have to admit that I'm curious what kind of business you're in that you can afford to ignore most of the market.
VMs are still crappy. VMs are still for lazy programmers. Real men still do not use these languages for anything that requires high performance or low resource usage.
However, most programmers do not fall into this catagory.
It would be more accurate to say that most programs no longer fall into this category.
Definitely there are still lots of cases where performance or resource usage (assuming reasonable/realistic inefficiencies) are important, but in the business world today, speed/cost of development is likely to be a much bigger concern than speed of execution or resources to run. Throwing an extra or new server at something often costs less than a week of developer time.
but I've used both Eclipse and Visual Studio for years, and trialed ReSharper, and Eclipse is still far better.
Without starting a holy war, that's a matter of opinion.
I just need to spend too much time dicking around with Eclipse and configuring it to be the way I want and not enough time actually getting something useful done. That's my experience; obviously yours is different.
You're missing a few things:
1) It's impossible to make all development easy, but you can make some parts/kinds of it easier.
That is to say, just because a language like VB.Net makes throwing together a passable UI fast/easy doesn't automatically mean that all VB.Net tasks are easy or that someone who's qualified to slap a DataSet on a web page is qualified to do something more complicated.
2) They're really not competing with free (as in beer) in the sense that you seem to be saying that they are.
I can get something like OpenOffice as a free (as in costing no money) word processor to use at my business; I can't get someone for free to write an app that solves the specific needs of my business processes. I'm going to end up paying a team of developers for that, and whether they're using Java or PHP or C#, the cost to me is still pretty similar.
As I said C# has mostly gathered the ground which was occupied by Microsoft before anyway, quite a big ground but territory java never had.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
Most of the work I've done in the last 5 years or so has been as a consultant, developing apps (some web, some not) for businesses. Some of that work has been in Java, and some of it has been in C#. Most of the projects could really have been done in either -- there wasn't any kind of company-wide mandate or environmental limitation that required one over the other.
Not everything, but in the business world, lots of the projects that are done in C# or Java could have been done in either language.
when HTML5 adoption comes around all of this garbage will be gone.
I'm curious as to what makes you so sure that's going to happen in a meaningful way.
I'm not saying that Flash will be the dominant tech of its kind forever, but I wouldn't bet that it won't still be in five years.
My thought is... while what you're saying is true (most cracked releases will include the cracked DLC), the number of people who didn't buy the original game but do buy the DLR is still greater than zero.
Maybe they're looking more for the 'piracy in the form of borrowing the DVD from my friend and installing it' kind of piracy -- I suspect (for games that don't have some kind of online play that makes it problematic) that kind of piracy is a lot more prevalent than the downloading cracked torrents kind. Not among the Slashdot crowd, perhaps, but there's a ton of gamers who aren't tech-savvy enough to rock the online piracy but who are tech-savvy enough to borrow their roommate's copy of a game.
fail to see how government specific help around one specific product from one specific company, is not a bailout.
However, that's not what the actual article (not the summary) discusses.
I think that you know that I disagree. Linux does not have any form of autorun.
This does go back to what the grandparent poster was saying about flaws in XP that no longer exist in Windows 7.
At least, my Vista machine doesn't autorun (as in from the CD drive) anything, so I assume Win7 won't either. Probably I could still change the config in some way so it would, but that isn't really what you're getting at, I don't think.
This time last year, I had a job that would pay for all of its employees to go to about a conference per year within a certain budget. It would also give them paid time off to go.
Since then, that company cut many of its senior/expensive people (including me) and eliminated that benefit for those that remained. My new job doesn't have such a benefit and I'm not likely to attend a conference I have to pay for purely out of pocket and take vacation time for. Probably a lot of former conference attendees are in a similar boat.
You're simplifying this all too much.
First, because trying to be the leader in search was never really Yahoo's game. They were about being a web portal -- basically, they wanted to be your home page. Personally, I prefer a clean home page for searching like Google's, and I suspect a lot of the people who read Slashdot do too, but an awful lot of people don't.
To that end they went after a lot of different things. Webmail, video, fantasy sports leagues, photo hosting (Flickr), games, news, etc. I'm not saying that's necessarily been a winning strategy for them as a company, but what they were trying to do was never strictly about search.
Microsoft, too, has a very multi-pronged business plan, even for the web. Sure, we've seen their mostly unsuccessful efforts in the search, web portal, webmail, and instant messenging areas, but there's also IE, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and too many other things to count, to say nothing of all the more indirect efforts like the XBox which start to bleed back over into the online space. In a lot of these areas they've taken on more successful established players or technologies and fought to gain market share, something that's been good for everyone since it's forced those established options to become better to stay ahead. Microsoft is the kind of company that will try to compete in a hundred different arenas, knowing that someone else might falter and that, even if not, maybe you can still make something good out of being #2 in a couple related areas.
Then, do man on each of those.
It's rather remarkable, how much you can learn.
Or, a person could do almost anything more useful instead.
You don't have to read the dictionary cover to cover before you can try to speak a language. You shouldn't need to treat an operating system that way, either.
But on the flipside, I tend to use Google as the documentation for Windows/MacOS and most assorted non-free software that runs on them, too.
When people get fed up with crippled "home" versions and paying more for "ultimate" versions, Linux will surely take off. If Microsoft is unwilling to provide all the features in one simple install, 2010 will be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
We need something like Poe's Law for Linux zealotry, because I think you're being facetious, but I'm really not sure.