Ignoring the simple fact that it costs A LOT of money to get to this stage with drug research, that money needs to be recouped, and more, otherwise it is not economical and thus no one would do it. Comprendez? Where is your suggestion for the company to recoup the money they invested in the R&D?
In the absence of patents, there would also be no incentive to perform useful research, you would wait for someone else to spend the money on it and then just copy them. Any suggestions for this problem?
We could of course have a system that would probably sit more comfortably in your idealistic mind, but the harsh reality is that more people would die in the long ruin, a lot more, because research would just not happen without the financial incentive (how do they perform simple tasks like paying their employees salarys?).
This is my problem with all these anti-capitalist views, they never present a workable alternative. Capitalism looks harsh in cases like this, but when you look at the bigger picture, it works. I am all for the "whats best for society as a whole" view, its just that I have not heard of anything that beats a free market in this respect.
So what you are saying is that you prefer to hire contractors on fixed price contracts, right? So presumably you have an absolutely watertight spec to accompany the contract they sign, and of course if you were to change their mind half way through and add an extra bit of functionality the contractor would be well within their rights to decline this work as being outside the specification. Right?
Or do you attempt to hire contractors on fixed priced contracts but still expect them to be controlled by you in the workplace? If this is the case and you expect them to follow your instruction during the course of the working day I don't see how you are doing anything but attempting to exploit the contractors by asking them to carry all the risk inherent in the deal.
Fixed proce deals carry risk, and the risk is all on the suppliers side. If it runs late, you dont get charged more, but they work more. Normally this means that a percentage premium is charged to partway guard against this, you seem to be handily skipping this step, and also increasing the level of risk by not having them work to a fixed spec, but under instruction from you. Why do you prefer this, why not just hire them on a daily rate, unless you are not confident in your ability to manage a project and the people that work for you? If they dont produce anything then cancel the contract, it should not be difficult to keep an eye on a contractor who is not performing.
Also this "corporate pace" thing sounds fishy. You have hired them for a fixed price job to be done in a fixed time, so let them do it and leave. If they take longer, then they incur the cost for that.
I can't imagine any contractor would expose themselves to that level of risk, but if you manage to get people to sign it, then I guess its their own fault.
Can we not have some sort of distributed.net client that basically DoS attacks known spammers. Rather than using your CPU idle time, it uses your free bandwidth, or a configurable amount of bandwidth. It updates its list of IP addresses daily from a central online list of known spammers.
They way I see it, they are sending unwanted packets to my machine, so there is absolutely no difference with me flood pinging them back.
This seems possible at first thought, anyone up for it?
OK, for the most part I think we are arguing the same point. I agree that people need to get paid for what they do, and thus there needs to be some profit to cover your salary for example. I sort of meant it did not need to be "profitable enough" to subsidize anything else (DSL or whatever), it certainly needs to make enough money to sustain itself, whatever amount that might be.
On another point, I don't think anyone this side of the pond has even heard about WiFi, let alone companies thinking about offering it as a service. We are struggling to get DSL or cable out to people, mainly due to the massively monopolistic BT (so I dispute your claim that these are rare). Here you cannot get DSL of any sort form anyone without having a BT phone line. You get phone services from someone else? no DSL for you! They actually own all the phone lines from exchange to your house.
Nothing is wrong with your company making a profit, charge what you like. Let me quote your original post
You're both wrong and I'll tell you why: I work for a local ISP; wi-fi is (perhaps) the only available high-speed option for us that doesn't involve reselling DSL from the phone company. We *need* that to be profitable. If it isn't, we're going to go under because dial-up is a dying market. No profit == screwed small ISPs (and I lose my job).
Previously people were saying that cheap WiFi networks were good for consumers, and you seem to counter that claim by saying that you will lose your job. I fail to see how the two are related. Charge what you like, if you get customers and that model works, winner. If it turns out that you charge too much and there is no uptake, hard cheese.
I am interested in how your company make money since you claim to make no money on DSL or ISDN, does all your income come from dial up? How are your competitors making money? Gong forward how will they make money with dial-up dying out? Why is your company any different?
Perhaps you need WiFi to be profitable (especially as it seems subsidize all your other offerings), but consumers don't need this. For instance, how will you compete with a WiFi only company that does not run a loss making DSL or ISDN service? Surely they will always be able to undercut whatever you offer !? This is what I mean by saying that if you can't compete, its just tough, don't moan about it. If you need to keep existing ISDN customers whilst making a loss that is a business decision to basically invest that money in market share, alternatively you could decide to stop offering the loss making service, but at the expense of losing customers. Play your cards how you like.
In any case, whether or not you have a job does not affect consumers in any way, and thus I can't see how this can be used to disprove earlier posts.
Times change, old industries and business practices die out, new ones take their place. Its called progress, and it is I guess a form of evolution.
I hate the way people complain about this and say its a bad thing for whatever reason. There is lliterally nothing more natural than evolution in all areas of life.
In the private sector companies either start squeezing their customers because they are not willing or are not forward thinking enough to move with the times (Music online, Cable Companies saying we are stealing when skipping commercials).
Public sector workers demand their job for life and insist that the rest of the country is bled to keep them in their same old job. To me this is nothing but selfish. Money should be provided, but not in the form of subsidies, in the form of new equipment, training etc to make sure that industries keep up with the pace.
Jobs don't become redundant overnight its just that people either don't open their eyes to the advancements or are too lazy to adapt. Everyone has the chance to keep up with modern practices or retrain to ensure they can actually give to society rather than take.
"Yes, this is exactly what has happened. Only a few people in the world can deal with a computer that evaluates all possible moves 5 or more steps ahead."
Gotta disagree here. A lot of programs look at positions more than 5 moves deep, even programs on the palm pilot can do this, and they are certainly beatable by a decent player (turn on evaluations in GNUChess). I find the same principles apply at the lower level, i.e. avoid complexities and the positional play is weak.
The point is, most humans can look 5 moves ahead in the few variations that matter in a given position, but the advantage is that the general pattern of the resulting position is easier for a human to value, because we can do this at a glance from pattern recognition. The value of a position is of course dependent on the moves that can be played after it, but if the computer is not looking any further ahead, the valuation of the position is generally not as accurate as human perception. Human evaluation is also effectively looking at future moves, its just we take a big shortcut.
The reason why computers beat humans regularly are that they generally look much deeper than 5 moves, especially in important lines (they discard some lines they don't think matter at the point of 'quiescence' and concentrate on important ones), and thus are trying to value a final position that is more developed than the position a human player would be evaluating.
So - would you buy a motherboard where the CPU and RAM couldn't be upgraded?
Yes I would actually, if it was substantially cheaper. The reason for this is that invariably when a new processor comes out that is worth upgrading to, you realise that it requires a new chipset or worse still a new socket type on the motherboard (for big changes e.g. P3 - PIV), and your motherboard wont support the new chip. So what do you end up doing? Yes, buying a new motherboard with a faster chipset to get the best out of the new processor, and because it throws in USB2 that you did not have before, or bluetooth or whatever. And dont forget, you can now use DDR333 instead of DDR266, so better upgrade that too, or it will be a waste...
I have an Athlon 1400 Tbird and I am considering upgrading, should I buy a new processor and stick with the old chipset and old RAM? Or should I make the upgrade actually worthwhile and advance all the components along together?
Integrating components also reduces the amount of compatibility testing manufacturers have to do, which in turn reduces costs further and increases stability and performance.
Just look at mini-itx for a hint at the success a low cost integrated solution can have.
I dont see a problem, everything is fair
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The entire setup seems entirely fair to me:
Some people here call card counting cheating, this is obviously rubbish, even the casinos dont see it that way, it is playing by the rules and you are fully entitled to play any way you like. The casinos decide on a certain way to play (each has slightly different rules) and these are based on statistical analysis to try and have an advantage. Card counting is simply the player doing a similar thing on their side.
Other people think that it stinks that the casinos ask you to leave when you win too much, but this is also totally fair. Its a two player game, you play by choice, and so do they. The reverse equivalent of them asking you to leave 'cos you are winning too much, is you walking out cos you are losing too much. Do you people think you should be able to force the casino to play you?
On the subject of anti-state arguments being more popular, this is true, and there is a good reason for it that I touched on in my post, and that has been mentioned elsewhere in the replies to this topic.
stealing from some other poster..
Enlightened people dont worry about law, they worry about ethics
Most of this country are idiots, and thus dont care about this stuff, and it has no effect on who gets into power and elections and the like. The relatively small percentage of people who understand the important things such as ethics, and realise that state control is a very dangerous thing, are the enlightened ones.
It should not be a great surprise that there are more enlightened people reading slashdots than idiots, hence the reason for the larger percentage of these type of arguments on/.
Taking this further of course and you end up totally refuting democracy.
People need to be very sceptical of anything David Blunkett does. Deep down he is the ultimate control freak and a very evil man
I also have no respect for Tony Blair, he manages to stay at arms length from any of these discussions, yet he is strongly behind them. He prefers to basically sacrifice someone elses reputation fighting for these bills, rather than damage his own. And with Jack Straw and David Blunkett he has had two very willing servants.
The government's job is to attempt to preserve the lives of those who are willing to risk them.
This is not the governments job at all, or at least it should not be. If I want to ride a rollercoaster I should be able to, if I want to jump off a cliff I should be able to. The point is, its my life and my body, and having a nanny state that stops you doing as you want only helps the retarded members of society. There are indeed some people who are just too stupid to look after themselves, but law is not the way to protect them. As long as I am not affecting or endangering anyone else by my actions, i.e. if they only affect me, I should be able to do as I please.
These days, XML must be the most overused tool around, great in the right situation, painful in the wrong ones.
My point is that so many apps in big companies feel they have to incorporate XML and often XSLT aswell. Now while you may not consider XML as a language in itself (more of a data representation) XSLT certainly is a language - it just so happens that the programs are XML compliant. So many apps that are 'Pure Java', are really using 2 languages Java and XSL and its all too easy for business logic to seep into the stylesheets.
Not knocking the commonly used idea totally, it is great when applied in the right situation.
Yes actually, stories posted here are indeed food for thought and discussion, but the stories posted should be up to date and relevant. This is a similar site to (The Reg) and I am wondering why slashdot posts articles less frequently than The Reg and when they do, well after the event, they are stories that other sites managed to publish days ago. If TheReg can do it, why cant slashdot?
Not a pointless bitch, but an honest question.
There is an established international federation that deals with the ratings, and runs the international tournatments, FIDE. The FIDE world championship is a big tournament, no mumber 1 contender stuff, anyone can play. It starts with local tournaments, then tournaments like the british championships, then on to a zonal tournament and interzonal tournaments. Eventually you are at the knockout stage and most non GMs are out already. Finally they battle there way down till one is left - he then plays the current champion. In short, the FIDE world championship is a monster of a competition and anyone who wins this is a very worthy champion.
The current FIDE world champion is Alexander Khalifman, who won in Las Vegas last year. Kasparov did not play as he has set up his own chess organisation (the name escapes me, PCA or something) a few years back whilst have huge disagreements with FIDE. Basically a lot of other top GMs followed Kasparov to this new organisation with the promise of more money, less FIDE bullshit etc.(leaving Khalifman who is a good player, but not the best in the world) as world champion.
My view is that if there is a problem with the main organisational body, fix it, dont just ignore it and form your own body to satisfy the control freak inside you. The situation is akin to Michael Jonson saying he does not like the Olympic Committee and so running the "Michael Johnson Olympics", where he chooses his opponents, and indeed chooses the number 2 contender rather than the number 1 contender to race against.
In any case, he is almost certainly the strongest player of all time, and I would not be surprised if he won "Gary Kasparov's World Championship" back next time. As for the real world champion, who knows.
Re:Much Too Complicated
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
I would have given you a funny comment for that, although I am not sure you are aware of your comic genius!
Slashdot Mirror
I hate idiotic self-rigtheous comments like this.
Ignoring the simple fact that it costs A LOT of money to get to this stage with drug research, that money needs to be recouped, and more, otherwise it is not economical and thus no one would do it. Comprendez? Where is your suggestion for the company to recoup the money they invested in the R&D?
In the absence of patents, there would also be no incentive to perform useful research, you would wait for someone else to spend the money on it and then just copy them. Any suggestions for this problem?
We could of course have a system that would probably sit more comfortably in your idealistic mind, but the harsh reality is that more people would die in the long ruin, a lot more, because research would just not happen without the financial incentive (how do they perform simple tasks like paying their employees salarys?).
This is my problem with all these anti-capitalist views, they never present a workable alternative. Capitalism looks harsh in cases like this, but when you look at the bigger picture, it works. I am all for the "whats best for society as a whole" view, its just that I have not heard of anything that beats a free market in this respect.
Chess games will be a lot stronger, pretty much all chess consists of is &,|,~ 'ing 64bit numbers (bitboards).
I'd be interested to see how Deep Fritz performs on a quick 64bit machine in comparison to the 4 way Compaq box it was running on.
So what you are saying is that you prefer to hire contractors on fixed price contracts, right? So presumably you have an absolutely watertight spec to accompany the contract they sign, and of course if you were to change their mind half way through and add an extra bit of functionality the contractor would be well within their rights to decline this work as being outside the specification. Right?
Or do you attempt to hire contractors on fixed priced contracts but still expect them to be controlled by you in the workplace? If this is the case and you expect them to follow your instruction during the course of the working day I don't see how you are doing anything but attempting to exploit the contractors by asking them to carry all the risk inherent in the deal.
Fixed proce deals carry risk, and the risk is all on the suppliers side. If it runs late, you dont get charged more, but they work more. Normally this means that a percentage premium is charged to partway guard against this, you seem to be handily skipping this step, and also increasing the level of risk by not having them work to a fixed spec, but under instruction from you. Why do you prefer this, why not just hire them on a daily rate, unless you are not confident in your ability to manage a project and the people that work for you? If they dont produce anything then cancel the contract, it should not be difficult to keep an eye on a contractor who is not performing.
Also this "corporate pace" thing sounds fishy. You have hired them for a fixed price job to be done in a fixed time, so let them do it and leave. If they take longer, then they incur the cost for that.
I can't imagine any contractor would expose themselves to that level of risk, but if you manage to get people to sign it, then I guess its their own fault.
Can we not have some sort of distributed.net client that basically DoS attacks known spammers. Rather than using your CPU idle time, it uses your free bandwidth, or a configurable amount of bandwidth. It updates its list of IP addresses daily from a central online list of known spammers.
They way I see it, they are sending unwanted packets to my machine, so there is absolutely no difference with me flood pinging them back.
This seems possible at first thought, anyone up for it?
On another point, I don't think anyone this side of the pond has even heard about WiFi, let alone companies thinking about offering it as a service. We are struggling to get DSL or cable out to people, mainly due to the massively monopolistic BT (so I dispute your claim that these are rare). Here you cannot get DSL of any sort form anyone without having a BT phone line. You get phone services from someone else? no DSL for you! They actually own all the phone lines from exchange to your house.
You're both wrong and I'll tell you why: I work for a local ISP; wi-fi is (perhaps) the only available high-speed option for us that doesn't involve reselling DSL from the phone company. We *need* that to be profitable. If it isn't, we're going to go under because dial-up is a dying market. No profit == screwed small ISPs (and I lose my job).
Previously people were saying that cheap WiFi networks were good for consumers, and you seem to counter that claim by saying that you will lose your job. I fail to see how the two are related. Charge what you like, if you get customers and that model works, winner. If it turns out that you charge too much and there is no uptake, hard cheese.I am interested in how your company make money since you claim to make no money on DSL or ISDN, does all your income come from dial up? How are your competitors making money? Gong forward how will they make money with dial-up dying out? Why is your company any different?
Perhaps you need WiFi to be profitable (especially as it seems subsidize all your other offerings), but consumers don't need this. For instance, how will you compete with a WiFi only company that does not run a loss making DSL or ISDN service? Surely they will always be able to undercut whatever you offer !? This is what I mean by saying that if you can't compete, its just tough, don't moan about it. If you need to keep existing ISDN customers whilst making a loss that is a business decision to basically invest that money in market share, alternatively you could decide to stop offering the loss making service, but at the expense of losing customers. Play your cards how you like.
In any case, whether or not you have a job does not affect consumers in any way, and thus I can't see how this can be used to disprove earlier posts.
Why label this as sarcastic?
Times change, old industries and business practices die out, new ones take their place. Its called progress, and it is I guess a form of evolution.
I hate the way people complain about this and say its a bad thing for whatever reason. There is lliterally nothing more natural than evolution in all areas of life.
In the private sector companies either start squeezing their customers because they are not willing or are not forward thinking enough to move with the times (Music online, Cable Companies saying we are stealing when skipping commercials).
Public sector workers demand their job for life and insist that the rest of the country is bled to keep them in their same old job. To me this is nothing but selfish. Money should be provided, but not in the form of subsidies, in the form of new equipment, training etc to make sure that industries keep up with the pace.
Jobs don't become redundant overnight its just that people either don't open their eyes to the advancements or are too lazy to adapt. Everyone has the chance to keep up with modern practices or retrain to ensure they can actually give to society rather than take.
Why thank you, kind sir.
Gotta disagree here. A lot of programs look at positions more than 5 moves deep, even programs on the palm pilot can do this, and they are certainly beatable by a decent player (turn on evaluations in GNUChess). I find the same principles apply at the lower level, i.e. avoid complexities and the positional play is weak.
The point is, most humans can look 5 moves ahead in the few variations that matter in a given position, but the advantage is that the general pattern of the resulting position is easier for a human to value, because we can do this at a glance from pattern recognition. The value of a position is of course dependent on the moves that can be played after it, but if the computer is not looking any further ahead, the valuation of the position is generally not as accurate as human perception. Human evaluation is also effectively looking at future moves, its just we take a big shortcut.
The reason why computers beat humans regularly are that they generally look much deeper than 5 moves, especially in important lines (they discard some lines they don't think matter at the point of 'quiescence' and concentrate on important ones), and thus are trying to value a final position that is more developed than the position a human player would be evaluating.
So - would you buy a motherboard where the CPU and RAM couldn't be upgraded?
...
Yes I would actually, if it was substantially cheaper. The reason for this is that invariably when a new processor comes out that is worth upgrading to, you realise that it requires a new chipset or worse still a new socket type on the motherboard (for big changes e.g. P3 - PIV), and your motherboard wont support the new chip. So what do you end up doing? Yes, buying a new motherboard with a faster chipset to get the best out of the new processor, and because it throws in USB2 that you did not have before, or bluetooth or whatever. And dont forget, you can now use DDR333 instead of DDR266, so better upgrade that too, or it will be a waste
I have an Athlon 1400 Tbird and I am considering upgrading, should I buy a new processor and stick with the old chipset and old RAM? Or should I make the upgrade actually worthwhile and advance all the components along together?
Integrating components also reduces the amount of compatibility testing manufacturers have to do, which in turn reduces costs further and increases stability and performance.
Just look at mini-itx for a hint at the success a low cost integrated solution can have.
People are getting broadband, almost everyone now has a CD writer so why would anyone buy a boxed set of linux?
On the subject of anti-state arguments being more popular, this is true, and there is a good reason for it that I touched on in my post, and that has been mentioned elsewhere in the replies to this topic.
stealing from some other poster ..
Enlightened people dont worry about law, they worry about ethics
Most of this country are idiots, and thus dont care about this stuff, and it has no effect on who gets into power and elections and the like. The relatively small percentage of people who understand the important things such as ethics, and realise that state control is a very dangerous thing, are the enlightened ones.
It should not be a great surprise that there are more enlightened people reading slashdots than idiots, hence the reason for the larger percentage of these type of arguments on /.
Taking this further of course and you end up totally refuting democracy.
People need to be very sceptical of anything David Blunkett does. Deep down he is the ultimate control freak and a very evil man
I also have no respect for Tony Blair, he manages to stay at arms length from any of these discussions, yet he is strongly behind them. He prefers to basically sacrifice someone elses reputation fighting for these bills, rather than damage his own. And with Jack Straw and David Blunkett he has had two very willing servants.
Should that not be 'open sauce' ?
The government's job is to attempt to preserve the lives of those who are willing to risk them.
This is not the governments job at all, or at least it should not be. If I want to ride a rollercoaster I should be able to, if I want to jump off a cliff I should be able to. The point is, its my life and my body, and having a nanny state that stops you doing as you want only helps the retarded members of society. There are indeed some people who are just too stupid to look after themselves, but law is not the way to protect them. As long as I am not affecting or endangering anyone else by my actions, i.e. if they only affect me, I should be able to do as I please.
So true, mod this up to 5 Informative
These days, XML must be the most overused tool around, great in the right situation, painful in the wrong ones.
My point is that so many apps in big companies feel they have to incorporate XML and often XSLT aswell. Now while you may not consider XML as a language in itself (more of a data representation) XSLT certainly is a language - it just so happens that the programs are XML compliant. So many apps that are 'Pure Java', are really using 2 languages Java and XSL and its all too easy for business logic to seep into the stylesheets.
Not knocking the commonly used idea totally, it is great when applied in the right situation.
try http://www.moreover.com they provide news feeds for several sites.
Has anyone mentioned the cracking pair of baps on that site?
Yes actually, stories posted here are indeed food for thought and discussion, but the stories posted should be up to date and relevant. This is a similar site to (The Reg) and I am wondering why slashdot posts articles less frequently than The Reg and when they do, well after the event, they are stories that other sites managed to publish days ago. If TheReg can do it, why cant slashdot? Not a pointless bitch, but an honest question.
I used to read slashdot all the time, but is there a good reason why they are 2 days behing theregegister.co.uk on almost every story?
There is an established international federation that deals with the ratings, and runs the international tournatments, FIDE. The FIDE world championship is a big tournament, no mumber 1 contender stuff, anyone can play. It starts with local tournaments, then tournaments like the british championships, then on to a zonal tournament and interzonal tournaments. Eventually you are at the knockout stage and most non GMs are out already. Finally they battle there way down till one is left - he then plays the current champion. In short, the FIDE world championship is a monster of a competition and anyone who wins this is a very worthy champion.
The current FIDE world champion is Alexander Khalifman, who won in Las Vegas last year. Kasparov did not play as he has set up his own chess organisation (the name escapes me, PCA or something) a few years back whilst have huge disagreements with FIDE. Basically a lot of other top GMs followed Kasparov to this new organisation with the promise of more money, less FIDE bullshit etc.(leaving Khalifman who is a good player, but not the best in the world) as world champion.
My view is that if there is a problem with the main organisational body, fix it, dont just ignore it and form your own body to satisfy the control freak inside you. The situation is akin to Michael Jonson saying he does not like the Olympic Committee and so running the "Michael Johnson Olympics", where he chooses his opponents, and indeed chooses the number 2 contender rather than the number 1 contender to race against.
In any case, he is almost certainly the strongest player of all time, and I would not be surprised if he won "Gary Kasparov's World Championship" back next time. As for the real world champion, who knows.
I would have given you a funny comment for that, although I am not sure you are aware of your comic genius!
I'm convinced, fancy going to the movies on Saturday? Perhaps you can fiddle with my joystick when we get home !?