Reading Mandelbrot's letter, he seems to focus rather more on the effects of market swings on the society, that on "making money".
Getting better tools to assess the risks to and effects on society of market behaviours seems to me like a good idea. Currently we mostly just look at what happens and try to pretend that it will soon get better.
This isn't about predicting individual stocks. As others have already pointed out, that is mostly about guessing the lottery right. But getting better at predicting how the market as a whole will develop, and getting better control over effects of the various tools we try to affect the markets as a whole with, would be useful.
Please note that the Lexmark 12A1970 is a low-yield cartridge, that is it contains about half the amount of ink compared to the Xerox 8R7881 he is replacing.
Now, comparing the Lexmark 12A1975 (the high-yield variant), we se that this has a list price of $40.99, compared to the Xerox part at $41.99. At amazon.com, you get them at $36.88 and $37.88 respectively.
I actually like that fact that Xerox doesn't seem to ship the low-yield variant.
The reason to fork is basically something that has turned into a pissing contest, with attitudes on all sides. It will either blow over, or it will happen. If it does, the loosers will be the Open Source community and the users (us).
The basic problem with forking X, is that it is such a huge and rather un-structured code base. Which means that we are probably talking about a few dozens of people who are able to maintain and develop the stuff. A few of these are in the UNIX-companies around, a couple are at fd.o, and by far the largest group is at XFree86. And I've not seen these people talking about defecting to some other project.
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Getting better tools to assess the risks to and effects on society of market behaviours seems to me like a good idea. Currently we mostly just look at what happens and try to pretend that it will soon get better.
This isn't about predicting individual stocks. As others have already pointed out, that is mostly about guessing the lottery right. But getting better at predicting how the market as a whole will develop, and getting better control over effects of the various tools we try to affect the markets as a whole with, would be useful.
Now, comparing the Lexmark 12A1975 (the high-yield variant), we se that this has a list price of $40.99, compared to the Xerox part at $41.99. At amazon.com, you get them at $36.88 and $37.88 respectively.
I actually like that fact that Xerox doesn't seem to ship the low-yield variant.
The basic problem with forking X, is that it is such a huge and rather un-structured code base. Which means that we are probably talking about a few dozens of people who are able to maintain and develop the stuff. A few of these are in the UNIX-companies around, a couple are at fd.o, and by far the largest group is at XFree86. And I've not seen these people talking about defecting to some other project.