I think someone went through my history and modded a bunch of my stuff down. I'm not particularly sure why, they even went back almost two weeks, like they had half a dozen mod points to burn and picked me as a target. Still, no dent in my karma, I've had this account for far FAR too long for 6 -1's to negatively affect me:)
Okay. But only if you run the same experiment from the other side of the coin. Get a linux 2.2-based system (if we take the release of v2.4.0 in 2001 as the point at which 2.2.x was most stable and use that for our comparison) and then take a recent 2.6.x based system.
Now throw in all the rest of the junk that goes with the 2.6 system (KDE, search tools, firefox, etc), and leave 2.2 with it's older interface.
The performance difference between the two is going to be *slower* on equivalent hardware on the 2.6.x system. Why? more stuff, doing more. There might be advantages in the disk subsystem (assuming you can even *find* drivers for 2.2.x for your current system) but those are going to be offset by KDE doing more, and there being more memory usage, etc. But that said, there are advantages in 2.6 as well. newer drivers, better queuing algorithms, better networking, better scheduling, which has allowed us to do more with more (which is still less, in total).
The only reason we didn't see it is because we were there, testing things out at a regular basis, every step of the way.
Sure, the release of a new OS (Vista) means we've taken a step backwards. Guess what, I took that same step backwards when going from win98 to win2000 (I needed to buy more ram to play diablo2.) I took the same step backwards when going from win2000 to XP. The only time i took a step forwards was when I upgraded hardware. That's been the case, every single time.
I've got to agree with you. Memory usage, per se, isn't going to affect speed, *if* that memory isn't constantly being addressed. If the memory in question are rendered page caches, which aren't going to get touched unless they're viewed. As long as the allocation tables are efficiently indexed, i don't see how memory usage is directly related to speed.
note that this is a javascript test, not a html test, but the main problem is, you need to break the problem down into many components, including, but not limited to:
a) efficient networking b) lexical analysis d) parsing. e) DOM tree construction (required because it's available to javascript) f) javascript lexical analysis g) javascript grammar parsing h) javascript compilation to bytecode j) javascript execution by vm (including subtasks: initialization, execution, security checks, etc) k) rendering output
It's probably even more complex than above, but it's a long process to go from <html><body><p>hi!</p></body></html> to a page that has "hi!" on it. Longer if it needs to execute javascript safely as well.
Only tech-savvy people will be bypassing this practice by using bind or another caching name server, and name service traffic doesn't really have enough volume to warrant interception for cost-cutting purposes, really.
Of course, ISPs can still be bastards. I'm constantly surprised by how broken the internet is here in America. I thought I had it bad in Australia. Apparently I actually had it good, with an ISP that doesn't play games with my connection, for any reason (and the CEO personally would make that claim on the consumer-run ISP forum whirlpool.
Now if i could just get that ISP to start installing ADSL2 DSLAMs in America. Screw this cable and FioS crap.
(Rudd-Labor in bold to emphasise that this wasn't a problem under the Liberals, who had a realistic approach based on educating children, which was very successful, rather than trying to make the internet pre-school safe.. To any Aussies reading let's bring the Liberals back next election.)
While I'm certainly not a fan of the protectionist tosh being thrown out for the media frenzy by the Labor Communications minister, not all of the Liberal plan worked either. The free filters being given away by the government cost millions of dollars to produce, and only got downloaded a few hundred thousand times (they were expecting 2 million).
I don't think either side has had particularly successful plans. The reality is, the problem isn't as big as people suggest. It's a problem, sure, but as the article states, and I can personally attest to, family abuse is far more worrying, but that lies under a "don't ask, don't tell" stigma.
It really needs to be easier for kids to report abuse by family members, but sadly, that's a big problem, and won't be addressed by the protectionist state Australia is becoming.
I'm currently working overseas, but I'm not looking forward to what kind of country I'll come home to. I can only hope for the best, I guess.
Well, given that information is increasingly audio/visual based and less textual-based, ideally, we want *something* that lets us play it online. Silverlight, Flash, whatever. If it's just an interface to whatever the content is, and you can still get access to the library in other means... uh. Big deal?
Silverlight does have some platform dependence issues, since it doesn't yet run easily on linux, but it does have Windows, Mac and probably WinCE. Of course, for the time being, I suspect things like the iphone will lose out, but depending on popularity, silverlight will probably reach those platforms eventually.
Yeah, except you're not doing your history here. We already handed over what we had, which was copious amounts in it's own right, a year or two back.
The EU basically rejected it saying it wasn't enough, under their new, arbitrarily chosen, "standards". The documentation they've requested (and as Joel is pointing out) isn't going to help anyone, and producing it is just going to make things painful for everyone (not just us).
The documentation we had was already usable for most government procuring processes, and doesn't require any of these things to be documented the way that the EU is requesting.
Keep in mind that what we (and sun, and philips) needed to provide when bidding for contracts would have been compliance documentation, not down to the byte documentation of internal APIs, memory structures and file formats that were never intended to be used by any third party. We also have our own internal documentation processes, and a lot of that's going into what we've been asked to produce, as well, but obviously, it needs to be reworked to be appropriate, we can't just hand over a copy of the documentation version control tree to everyone, it wouldn't satisfy the requirements, and it'd include more than would be necessary, or useful.
Now, keep in mind that I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, or that it shouldn't be documented, but I'm pretty sure that the end result will be documentation that no-one has a need for, and it won't be usable to level whatever humps are in the playing field.
Yeah, that's not actually what a Loss Leader means. Sorry, my 16-year-old supermarket roots are showing:)
It's basically the kind of thing you sell in order to keep your brand visible, that you make cheap enough that people buy it regularly, IE, the returns don't match the investment. Now, sure, we still post profits thanks to asia and america, but you still need to balance the books.
Also, wouldn't they already have documents on file formats and APIs? What kind of operation are they running that they don't even have API docs handy? Sure some work may need to be done to clean them up for external use, but I hardly doubt that they would be working from scratch on most of these documents.
For what it's worth, we have those. The thing is, the EU is asking us to document API's we've previously declared as internal.
There's a vast difference in the commenting you can rely on when you can and can't see the code. Not to mention that lots of these areas are old products, and aren't even necessarily in use anymore, and the developers have moved on to other product groups. It's tricky.
The documentation you're talking about is about how things are designed to work, not how they're implemented. There's a difference between the two, and we had the former documented already, it's part of our development processes. That's not what the EU asked us to produce. We've got design specs and feature specs, etc already. The feature doesn't get built without those.
This documentation that we're being made to write is how the data structures look, *on disk*, etc. I would argue that we don't need that information unless we're writing an importer, particularly since for a lot of things, our constraints have changed completely, so knowing how we did it in the past is of historical value at best. Joel points that out as well.
Since we already have implementations of these importers, and you don't rewrite code unless it's the absolutely last resort (That's how Netscape got to where it is now, by throwing away code, Joel mentions that too in some of his older articles.)
I can assure you, the work we're doing to comply with the EU regulations is *not* minimal.
While I can't really opine on the EU's regulations themselves for various reasons, I've been talking with people who are directly affected by them, and the amount of work we're doing to accommodate the EU is astronomical. About a third of our developer workforce has basically lost 6 months or more of time to write documentation on things that range from current file formats, to things that aren't even current technologies anymore.
That's an astronomical amount of man hours for it to be 'minimal compliance'. We're producing the documentation we're required to produce, at great expense to us. I can't comment on other areas we're being regulated in, however, but it's probably going to take us years to make up the amount of time we've lost in revenue from Europe.
I'd say (in my own opinion) that the EU regulations have basically turned Europe into a loss leader for us for the next several years. I'm not even convinced that the documentation is going to actually be useful to anyone (See Joel Spolsky's commentary on the matter, for instance, and he helped write that code!)
How did you do the installation? I know the standalone download of SP1 (the multi-hundred megabyte monster that it is) automatically installs the three prerequisite updates as part of the install process.
You may well have them without knowing it.
As for this article, it's completely bogus. SP1 is still on schedule, and it's precisely that these updates require testing that we roll out these things in stages.
It's an extension of the {heroes} stuff you've been seeing if you're on campus. It's a bizarre attempt to raise the image of the IT pro in the workplace, as far as I can tell.
Tied into the upcoming launch of server 2008, the official launch of VS2008 and the eventual launch of sql server 2008 (she's late to the party, tho. Guess someone else was already wearing her dress:) )
You need to go back to school and retake your basic economic theory classes.
Except that they don't teach money theory *in* classes. Go out and ask people on the street, even highly educated ones from the financial sectors, very few of them are aware of the notion that credit is no longer based on principle anymore.
What I said was that all currency is based off of debt. That's what it is.... currency == debt
That's what it is *now*. My point is that we should not be basing it on a system that will, inevitably, result in all of us losing, as we are being given credit that's created effectively out of thin air. When you go get a Car loan, it's not backed on billy's investment in the bank, it's just created as debt.
You are talking about something else entirely. Yes when an individual BORROWS more debt than they can account for with their own accrued debt notes ie: from their employer, and their amount of debt is completely unbalanced to the point where they will never be able to work it off before the interest on that debt becomes larger than the value of the debt itself (being upside down in a loan for instance)... that person is in trouble.
On an individual level, sure. But as a society as a whole, the only way to pay off debt when all money is based on debt is for you to get money from somewhere else. But who created the money that belonged to that other place? It is typically some other form of credit. All you're doing is shifting the debt, letting it accumulate. Paying off a debt in society does nothing to reduce the amount of debt in existence, and there is not enough principle to pay the debt in total, as the debt is currently created as an amount that's greater than the principle involved.
My entire point is that we shouldn't be basing the system on debt *at all*. The amount of debt has never been reduced, it's always increased, somewhere. Shifting it around is doing nothing to solve the problem I'm talking about, which is all that we can do currently.
Why would seized goods be any different than they are now? If the system gets to the point where too many people are foreclosed by whatever monetary system dishes out loans, then there's a problem with the economy, and it's up to the government to reduce the amount of money in circulation to push the economy in the right direction, ie, stopping inflation.
Conversely, if there's not enough money in circulation, then the value of the dollar goes up for that country. More loans can be provided in that case.
Both of these would be governed by how much the country is worth.
Corruption is a completely separate issue. Obviously, there are corrupt governments, as well as corrupt bankers. However, it's up to the people to correct a corrupt government, via whatever means is available (elections, insurrection, whatever). I realize this is hard to do, and it always will be a problem, there's no doubt, but the government is a representation of the people. A government who is responsible for the amount of money, and hence, it's worth, in circulation in that country is going to find that it will be running an economy of minuscule size if it screws over it's population.
A corrupt government will breed itself out of existence in the long term under such a scheme, as an embezzler will find that the embezzled funds will turn into dust fairly quickly. It's the current banking system that has allowed corrupt governments to exist for as long as they have, as the corrupt individuals behind the scenes are probably under the thumb of debt.
In that case why do you think the Government will do a better job than the banks?
I don't, necessarily. But in a different system, the economy's state would result in the government would be held accountable to it's performance by the general public, not by the banks shareholders.
While I do believe that a good government can do as good a job as a good bank (if not better), the trouble is the usual case is you get a mediocre or bad government.
We already have this problem. Managing the economy requires experts. Banks hire these experts. If the banks weren't doing it, the experts would be hired by whoever *was* doing it. I'm not saying the suggestion is idealized, I realize there are problems that would need to be addressed, but we've got far more freedom of information control over the government than we do over the banks...
At least if there's more than one bank, you have a choice. Using a different bank is usually easier than moving countries. Do note that often even if the governments change the people working in the civil service don't.
The banks, currently, are a closed loop of credit, supported by the central banks. There's no such thing as a 'different bank' if all credit comes from the same place, specifically, from invested debt money. One bank is the same as any other, even that industry credit union who has friendly staff that you use to make yourself feel like you're not being shafted by the banker.
So I still think it's better to have banks do that sort of stuff. Your concerns about banks being evil etc might be better addressed by having the government appoint a regulator to ensure that the banks aren't too evil and don't create too much misery.
I never said that the banks were evil. I said that the system is unstable and infeasible in the long term. I do submit that I'm concerned about the lack of understanding (hell, up until recently, I wasn't aware of the problem myself) the general population has about how credit is created. Regulators exist. The government was originally supposed to maintain the 9:1 ratio of principle to debt. However, as the amount of credit demand has increased, so has the ratio, since the bankers have an extreme amount of power (after all, how many politicians have just as much debt as the rest of us?)
It's entirely possible for some types of money to be created out of thin air, not even requiring the fiat ratio at all. the 9:1 restriction was abolished, quietly, a long time ago. There is no more regulation on the system, and regulation is untenable, when the banks control the debts of the regulators.
If a government can't even appoint a decent regulator AND keep it decent (or the government can't be convinced to do so), then I think there's an even smaller chance of the same government running a decent banking service in a sustainable manner.
The problem is, the government's credibility is currently undermined by the fact that the government is responsible for much of the debt used to stave off inflation. If the rate of inflation increases, the government borrows more money to invest in the economy. This bubble must burst, and is a direct result of the banks exerting influence over the government, getting the government to dig this hole. It should be noted that the US was originally free of this influence... until one of their presidents created the federal reserve, and let the banks in. It's been downhill since then.
There's no substitute for having good people in charge, but I suggest that your proposed system is more dependent on good people in the "right places", as such it is less likely to work. Systems which are likely to keep working don't require as many good people around to run them.
I fail to see how anything I've suggested relies on goodwill. I'm not suggesting communism here. Market forces would still prevail, and the system would be governed by how prosperous a nation is. It might be a smaller economy, for certain, but I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing. The time of endless economic growth should be over, preferably while there's something left.
With all due respect, not only did you miss my point, you partially proved it. Pointing out that my promise to do some work for you represents something you can in turn use to pay for something else can just as easily mean that money could be represented by units of work, not the amount of debt currently in place.
I would submit that an economy based on ever increasing amounts of debt (and be assured, the amount of debt cannot be decreased except via depression, and we know what that looked like last time it happened) is inherently unsustainable. Ideally, no-one should be living above their means, yet this is exactly what the government is doing, in order to stave off inflation, and the inevitable crunch.
There's no question that investment is sane, and one can just as easily invest value based money the way we invest debt money today. This need not change. It is precisely because we have the ability to create credit from debt that has allowed our economy to outstrip our ability to repay, indefinitely.
As for the notion that we require debt in order to succeed, you're mistaking the point. Debt cannot be avoided. In a system with loans, obviously, there is debt, since they're two sides of the same coin. What is unsustainable is *interest* on the debt. We currently exist in a period where the net production of principle does not exceed the amount of debt. This means that there cannot ever be enough principle to fill the debt, and thus, someone's livelyhood is going to be sacrificed, eventually, to solve the problem. Who has the least power, and the most to lose? Who's been taking out loans in ever increasing amounts?
How is the government any different from a bank in this scenario. You make your business plan, or show your job stability and credit history, the government approves or disapproves based on the available amount of loans available, and you get your money. If your government makes the country richer during it's term, more loans come into the system. If they over extend on loans, they increase taxes to reduce inflation.
If you can't pay it back, the pledge of whatever assets you had are taken as collateral. How is that any different, once again? The difference being that the amount of the loan is not greater than the original loan amount, and thus, taking the collateral doesn't require more than was loaned in the first place. Anything seized because of foreclosure could be resold, which recoups some of the loss. Losses can easily be mitigated, since the amount of money in existence is based on the amount the country is worth, not how much credit is in circulation.
As for what's left, I'm not sure I understand your point. What do you expect to be left? I would submit that nothing would be left, that all things would be paid for using government loans, either at the state, council, or individual level (federal services nonwithstanding). Not much changes, except the direction that things flow. Investments by the government would typically benefit society by being investments in infrastructure, research, etc.
"Banks do not need 'money on hand' to create a loan."
Oh yes, they do. Have a look into the regulations, it is explicit there.
Well, on the face of it, correct. They need money, but that money has to be created in increasing amounts from debt. What, in essence, they need, is *more debt*, not *more money*.
That basically means they need to get people to use their credit car more often. Buy a bigger house. Get a new car. Go on that fantastic holiday in the pacific, which requires them to take out a second credit card.
The notion of increasing available product only works to a point. At some point, the market simply cannot consume all the milk that is produced, and it is not a product that stores well (ie, it rapidly loses value, unless heavily processed (eg UHT milk)) That's market economics, and an entirely different subject.
At some time the bank (or its owner) will want some kind of real good. When that happens, the bank will create debit within itself and give it to you. That is the debit you'll use to pay the interest on your loan. You quite possibly mistake the word 'debt' for 'debit', but no matter. Creating debt can only be backed by other, existing, debt. The amount of actual money, created by the government, in existence, is remarkably small. The problem is, if you have to create debt to pay off debt, and each debt you create adds the overhead of interest, then the debt has no way of shrinking, except by foreclosing on the debt, at which point the person indebted to the bank loses, and the bank will probably start taking their possessions.
If we're all in debt, and suddenly the debt stops, who's going to end up owning everything? The bankers. Why are we letting ourselves get into this position, it seems fundamentally flawed.
Slashdot Mirror
I think someone went through my history and modded a bunch of my stuff down. I'm not particularly sure why, they even went back almost two weeks, like they had half a dozen mod points to burn and picked me as a target. Still, no dent in my karma, I've had this account for far FAR too long for 6 -1's to negatively affect me :)
Okay. But only if you run the same experiment from the other side of the coin. Get a linux 2.2-based system (if we take the release of v2.4.0 in 2001 as the point at which 2.2.x was most stable and use that for our comparison) and then take a recent 2.6.x based system.
Now throw in all the rest of the junk that goes with the 2.6 system (KDE, search tools, firefox, etc), and leave 2.2 with it's older interface.
The performance difference between the two is going to be *slower* on equivalent hardware on the 2.6.x system. Why? more stuff, doing more. There might be advantages in the disk subsystem (assuming you can even *find* drivers for 2.2.x for your current system) but those are going to be offset by KDE doing more, and there being more memory usage, etc. But that said, there are advantages in 2.6 as well. newer drivers, better queuing algorithms, better networking, better scheduling, which has allowed us to do more with more (which is still less, in total).
The only reason we didn't see it is because we were there, testing things out at a regular basis, every step of the way.
Sure, the release of a new OS (Vista) means we've taken a step backwards. Guess what, I took that same step backwards when going from win98 to win2000 (I needed to buy more ram to play diablo2.) I took the same step backwards when going from win2000 to XP. The only time i took a step forwards was when I upgraded hardware. That's been the case, every single time.
ash
I've got to agree with you. Memory usage, per se, isn't going to affect speed, *if* that memory isn't constantly being addressed.
If the memory in question are rendered page caches, which aren't going to get touched unless they're viewed. As long as the allocation tables are efficiently indexed, i don't see how memory usage is directly related to speed.
note that this is a javascript test, not a html test, but the main problem is, you need to break the problem down into many components, including, but not limited to:
a) efficient networking
b) lexical analysis
d) parsing.
e) DOM tree construction (required because it's available to javascript)
f) javascript lexical analysis
g) javascript grammar parsing
h) javascript compilation to bytecode
j) javascript execution by vm (including subtasks: initialization, execution, security checks, etc)
k) rendering output
It's probably even more complex than above, but it's a long process to go from <html><body><p>hi!</p></body></html> to a page that has "hi!" on it. Longer if it needs to execute javascript safely as well.
Probably because there's not enough to gain.
Only tech-savvy people will be bypassing this practice by using bind or another caching name server, and name service traffic doesn't really have enough volume to warrant interception for cost-cutting purposes, really.
Of course, ISPs can still be bastards. I'm constantly surprised by how broken the internet is here in America. I thought I had it bad in Australia. Apparently I actually had it good, with an ISP that doesn't play games with my connection, for any reason (and the CEO personally would make that claim on the consumer-run ISP forum whirlpool.
Now if i could just get that ISP to start installing ADSL2 DSLAMs in America. Screw this cable and FioS crap.
(Rudd-Labor in bold to emphasise that this wasn't a problem under the Liberals, who had a realistic approach based on educating children, which was very successful, rather than trying to make the internet pre-school safe.. To any Aussies reading let's bring the Liberals back next election.)
While I'm certainly not a fan of the protectionist tosh being thrown out for the media frenzy by the Labor Communications minister, not all of the Liberal plan worked either. The free filters being given away by the government cost millions of dollars to produce, and only got downloaded a few hundred thousand times (they were expecting 2 million).
I don't think either side has had particularly successful plans. The reality is, the problem isn't as big as people suggest. It's a problem, sure, but as the article states, and I can personally attest to, family abuse is far more worrying, but that lies under a "don't ask, don't tell" stigma.
It really needs to be easier for kids to report abuse by family members, but sadly, that's a big problem, and won't be addressed by the protectionist state Australia is becoming.
I'm currently working overseas, but I'm not looking forward to what kind of country I'll come home to. I can only hope for the best, I guess.
Rofl. That took me way too many rereads to get.
.... oh. right."
Thinking to myself, "Worms, what does worms have to do with an article about sql worms
I really need to take a nap after lunch, it appears.
Well, given that information is increasingly audio/visual based and less textual-based, ideally, we want *something* that lets us play it online. Silverlight, Flash, whatever. If it's just an interface to whatever the content is, and you can still get access to the library in other means... uh. Big deal?
Silverlight does have some platform dependence issues, since it doesn't yet run easily on linux, but it does have Windows, Mac and probably WinCE. Of course, for the time being, I suspect things like the iphone will lose out, but depending on popularity, silverlight will probably reach those platforms eventually.
Looks like i was misinformed anyway. Someone i know has mentioned that many major pornographic studios have switched to blu-ray recently as well.
The odd thing is, most of the *cough* porn I've seen in high-def has had the HD-DVD label at the top, not Blu-ray.
And here's me thinking the porn industry was going to decide this battle.
Yeah, except you're not doing your history here. We already handed over what we had, which was copious amounts in it's own right, a year or two back.
The EU basically rejected it saying it wasn't enough, under their new, arbitrarily chosen, "standards". The documentation they've requested (and as Joel is pointing out) isn't going to help anyone, and producing it is just going to make things painful for everyone (not just us).
The documentation we had was already usable for most government procuring processes, and doesn't require any of these things to be documented the way that the EU is requesting.
Keep in mind that what we (and sun, and philips) needed to provide when bidding for contracts would have been compliance documentation, not down to the byte documentation of internal APIs, memory structures and file formats that were never intended to be used by any third party. We also have our own internal documentation processes, and a lot of that's going into what we've been asked to produce, as well, but obviously, it needs to be reworked to be appropriate, we can't just hand over a copy of the documentation version control tree to everyone, it wouldn't satisfy the requirements, and it'd include more than would be necessary, or useful.
Now, keep in mind that I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, or that it shouldn't be documented, but I'm pretty sure that the end result will be documentation that no-one has a need for, and it won't be usable to level whatever humps are in the playing field.
Yeah, that's not actually what a Loss Leader means. Sorry, my 16-year-old supermarket roots are showing :)
It's basically the kind of thing you sell in order to keep your brand visible, that you make cheap enough that people buy it regularly, IE, the returns don't match the investment. Now, sure, we still post profits thanks to asia and america, but you still need to balance the books.
Also, wouldn't they already have documents on file formats and APIs? What kind of operation are they running that they don't even have API docs handy? Sure some work may need to be done to clean them up for external use, but I hardly doubt that they would be working from scratch on most of these documents.
For what it's worth, we have those. The thing is, the EU is asking us to document API's we've previously declared as internal.
There's a vast difference in the commenting you can rely on when you can and can't see the code. Not to mention that lots of these areas are old products, and aren't even necessarily in use anymore, and the developers have moved on to other product groups. It's tricky.
The documentation you're talking about is about how things are designed to work, not how they're implemented. There's a difference between the two, and we had the former documented already, it's part of our development processes. That's not what the EU asked us to produce. We've got design specs and feature specs, etc already. The feature doesn't get built without those.
This documentation that we're being made to write is how the data structures look, *on disk*, etc. I would argue that we don't need that information unless we're writing an importer, particularly since for a lot of things, our constraints have changed completely, so knowing how we did it in the past is of historical value at best. Joel points that out as well.
Since we already have implementations of these importers, and you don't rewrite code unless it's the absolutely last resort (That's how Netscape got to where it is now, by throwing away code, Joel mentions that too in some of his older articles.)
I can assure you, the work we're doing to comply with the EU regulations is *not* minimal.
While I can't really opine on the EU's regulations themselves for various reasons, I've been talking with people who are directly affected by them, and the amount of work we're doing to accommodate the EU is astronomical. About a third of our developer workforce has basically lost 6 months or more of time to write documentation on things that range from current file formats, to things that aren't even current technologies anymore.
That's an astronomical amount of man hours for it to be 'minimal compliance'. We're producing the documentation we're required to produce, at great expense to us. I can't comment on other areas we're being regulated in, however, but it's probably going to take us years to make up the amount of time we've lost in revenue from Europe.
I'd say (in my own opinion) that the EU regulations have basically turned Europe into a loss leader for us for the next several years. I'm not even convinced that the documentation is going to actually be useful to anyone (See Joel Spolsky's commentary on the matter, for instance, and he helped write that code!)
Ah yes. I fondly remember those days.
Far too many of my computer systems got sanctified by the blood of the innocent while being built when I was a teenager.
How did you do the installation? I know the standalone download of SP1 (the multi-hundred megabyte monster that it is) automatically installs the three prerequisite updates as part of the install process.
You may well have them without knowing it.
As for this article, it's completely bogus. SP1 is still on schedule, and it's precisely that these updates require testing that we roll out these things in stages.
Hm. And it looks like these Source Force toys are from a few years ago anyway, not related to the {heroes} stuff after all.
It's an extension of the {heroes} stuff you've been seeing if you're on campus. It's a bizarre attempt to raise the image of the IT pro in the workplace, as far as I can tell.
:) )
Tied into the upcoming launch of server 2008, the official launch of VS2008 and the eventual launch of sql server 2008 (she's late to the party, tho. Guess someone else was already wearing her dress
ash
You need to go back to school and retake your basic economic theory classes.
Except that they don't teach money theory *in* classes. Go out and ask people on the street, even highly educated ones from the financial sectors, very few of them are aware of the notion that credit is no longer based on principle anymore.
What I said was that all currency is based off of debt. That's what it is.... currency == debt
That's what it is *now*. My point is that we should not be basing it on a system that will, inevitably, result in all of us losing, as we are being given credit that's created effectively out of thin air. When you go get a Car loan, it's not backed on billy's investment in the bank, it's just created as debt.
You are talking about something else entirely. Yes when an individual BORROWS more debt than they can account for with their own accrued debt notes ie: from their employer, and their amount of debt is completely unbalanced to the point where they will never be able to work it off before the interest on that debt becomes larger than the value of the debt itself (being upside down in a loan for instance)... that person is in trouble.
On an individual level, sure. But as a society as a whole, the only way to pay off debt when all money is based on debt is for you to get money from somewhere else. But who created the money that belonged to that other place? It is typically some other form of credit. All you're doing is shifting the debt, letting it accumulate. Paying off a debt in society does nothing to reduce the amount of debt in existence, and there is not enough principle to pay the debt in total, as the debt is currently created as an amount that's greater than the principle involved.
My entire point is that we shouldn't be basing the system on debt *at all*. The amount of debt has never been reduced, it's always increased, somewhere. Shifting it around is doing nothing to solve the problem I'm talking about, which is all that we can do currently.
Why would seized goods be any different than they are now? If the system gets to the point where too many people are foreclosed by whatever monetary system dishes out loans, then there's a problem with the economy, and it's up to the government to reduce the amount of money in circulation to push the economy in the right direction, ie, stopping inflation.
Conversely, if there's not enough money in circulation, then the value of the dollar goes up for that country. More loans can be provided in that case.
Both of these would be governed by how much the country is worth.
Corruption is a completely separate issue. Obviously, there are corrupt governments, as well as corrupt bankers. However, it's up to the people to correct a corrupt government, via whatever means is available (elections, insurrection, whatever). I realize this is hard to do, and it always will be a problem, there's no doubt, but the government is a representation of the people. A government who is responsible for the amount of money, and hence, it's worth, in circulation in that country is going to find that it will be running an economy of minuscule size if it screws over it's population.
A corrupt government will breed itself out of existence in the long term under such a scheme, as an embezzler will find that the embezzled funds will turn into dust fairly quickly. It's the current banking system that has allowed corrupt governments to exist for as long as they have, as the corrupt individuals behind the scenes are probably under the thumb of debt.
In that case why do you think the Government will do a better job than the banks?
I don't, necessarily. But in a different system, the economy's state would result in the government would be held accountable to it's performance by the general public, not by the banks shareholders.
While I do believe that a good government can do as good a job as a good bank (if not better), the trouble is the usual case is you get a mediocre or bad government.
We already have this problem. Managing the economy requires experts. Banks hire these experts. If the banks weren't doing it, the experts would be hired by whoever *was* doing it. I'm not saying the suggestion is idealized, I realize there are problems that would need to be addressed, but we've got far more freedom of information control over the government than we do over the banks...
At least if there's more than one bank, you have a choice. Using a different bank is usually easier than moving countries. Do note that often even if the governments change the people working in the civil service don't.
The banks, currently, are a closed loop of credit, supported by the central banks. There's no such thing as a 'different bank' if all credit comes from the same place, specifically, from invested debt money. One bank is the same as any other, even that industry credit union who has friendly staff that you use to make yourself feel like you're not being shafted by the banker.
So I still think it's better to have banks do that sort of stuff. Your concerns about banks being evil etc might be better addressed by having the government appoint a regulator to ensure that the banks aren't too evil and don't create too much misery.
I never said that the banks were evil. I said that the system is unstable and infeasible in the long term. I do submit that I'm concerned about the lack of understanding (hell, up until recently, I wasn't aware of the problem myself) the general population has about how credit is created.
Regulators exist. The government was originally supposed to maintain the 9:1 ratio of principle to debt. However, as the amount of credit demand has increased, so has the ratio, since the bankers have an extreme amount of power (after all, how many politicians have just as much debt as the rest of us?)
It's entirely possible for some types of money to be created out of thin air, not even requiring the fiat ratio at all. the 9:1 restriction was abolished, quietly, a long time ago. There is no more regulation on the system, and regulation is untenable, when the banks control the debts of the regulators.
If a government can't even appoint a decent regulator AND keep it decent (or the government can't be convinced to do so), then I think there's an even smaller chance of the same government running a decent banking service in a sustainable manner.
The problem is, the government's credibility is currently undermined by the fact that the government is responsible for much of the debt used to stave off inflation. If the rate of inflation increases, the government borrows more money to invest in the economy. This bubble must burst, and is a direct result of the banks exerting influence over the government, getting the government to dig this hole. It should be noted that the US was originally free of this influence... until one of their presidents created the federal reserve, and let the banks in. It's been downhill since then.
There's no substitute for having good people in charge, but I suggest that your proposed system is more dependent on good people in the "right places", as such it is less likely to work. Systems which are likely to keep working don't require as many good people around to run them.
I fail to see how anything I've suggested relies on goodwill. I'm not suggesting communism here. Market forces would still prevail, and the system would be governed by how prosperous a nation is. It might be a smaller economy, for certain, but I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing. The time of endless economic growth should be over, preferably while there's something left.
With all due respect, not only did you miss my point, you partially proved it. Pointing out that my promise to do some work for you represents something you can in turn use to pay for something else can just as easily mean that money could be represented by units of work, not the amount of debt currently in place.
I would submit that an economy based on ever increasing amounts of debt (and be assured, the amount of debt cannot be decreased except via depression, and we know what that looked like last time it happened) is inherently unsustainable. Ideally, no-one should be living above their means, yet this is exactly what the government is doing, in order to stave off inflation, and the inevitable crunch.
There's no question that investment is sane, and one can just as easily invest value based money the way we invest debt money today. This need not change. It is precisely because we have the ability to create credit from debt that has allowed our economy to outstrip our ability to repay, indefinitely.
As for the notion that we require debt in order to succeed, you're mistaking the point. Debt cannot be avoided. In a system with loans, obviously, there is debt, since they're two sides of the same coin. What is unsustainable is *interest* on the debt. We currently exist in a period where the net production of principle does not exceed the amount of debt. This means that there cannot ever be enough principle to fill the debt, and thus, someone's livelyhood is going to be sacrificed, eventually, to solve the problem. Who has the least power, and the most to lose? Who's been taking out loans in ever increasing amounts?
How is the government any different from a bank in this scenario. You make your business plan, or show your job stability and credit history, the government approves or disapproves based on the available amount of loans available, and you get your money. If your government makes the country richer during it's term, more loans come into the system. If they over extend on loans, they increase taxes to reduce inflation.
If you can't pay it back, the pledge of whatever assets you had are taken as collateral. How is that any different, once again? The difference being that the amount of the loan is not greater than the original loan amount, and thus, taking the collateral doesn't require more than was loaned in the first place. Anything seized because of foreclosure could be resold, which recoups some of the loss. Losses can easily be mitigated, since the amount of money in existence is based on the amount the country is worth, not how much credit is in circulation.
As for what's left, I'm not sure I understand your point. What do you expect to be left? I would submit that nothing would be left, that all things would be paid for using government loans, either at the state, council, or individual level (federal services nonwithstanding). Not much changes, except the direction that things flow. Investments by the government would typically benefit society by being investments in infrastructure, research, etc.
"Banks do not need 'money on hand' to create a loan."
Oh yes, they do. Have a look into the regulations, it is explicit there.
Well, on the face of it, correct. They need money, but that money has to be created in increasing amounts from debt. What, in essence, they need, is *more debt*, not *more money*.
That basically means they need to get people to use their credit car more often. Buy a bigger house. Get a new car. Go on that fantastic holiday in the pacific, which requires them to take out a second credit card.
The notion of increasing available product only works to a point. At some point, the market simply cannot consume all the milk that is produced, and it is not a product that stores well (ie, it rapidly loses value, unless heavily processed (eg UHT milk)) That's market economics, and an entirely different subject.
At some time the bank (or its owner) will want some kind of real good. When that happens, the bank will create debit within itself and give it to you. That is the debit you'll use to pay the interest on your loan.
You quite possibly mistake the word 'debt' for 'debit', but no matter. Creating debt can only be backed by other, existing, debt. The amount of actual money, created by the government, in existence, is remarkably small. The problem is, if you have to create debt to pay off debt, and each debt you create adds the overhead of interest, then the debt has no way of shrinking, except by foreclosing on the debt, at which point the person indebted to the bank loses, and the bank will probably start taking their possessions.
If we're all in debt, and suddenly the debt stops, who's going to end up owning everything? The bankers. Why are we letting ourselves get into this position, it seems fundamentally flawed.