Xerox invents an interface, Apple improves it, IBM and NeXT sit down and creates variants on that, Microsoft takes the IBM CUA, tosses in some NeXTisms, and spends millions of dollars on interface testing to make it easy to use.
Guess what? Nobody's set up usability testing labs for KDE or Gnome yet, and depending on people comfortable using Unix to improve a UI is insane. We don't think like J. Random Luser, and we can't afford to hire a bunch of them to usability test. And remember logic and consistency are not always optimal for UIs -- see the jargon file entry for "miswart".
So even if the result is that we add nonoptimal features, it makes sense to copy Microsoft's UI for now -- it means we won't do anything to make it harder to use than Microsoft, and will at least have an easy learning curve for people switching.
Second, because it was a stupid design -- launching a hard-to-upgrade system of 66 highly specialized orbiting telephone switchboards which needed to be replaced every ten years and are incompatible with any other satphone service or other use.
(Instead, use relatively dumb and cheap satellites and keep the complex processing in a handful of distributed ground stations. Sure, you'd have to use two satellites each call, but reducing the complexity and weight of each satellite would save lots. And upgrading the system in the future would involve ground station upgrades, instead of satellite replacements).
Third, because it was stupid economics -- the market for the service is people who can't use cell phones where they are, but can afford to pay higher fees than with a cell phone. But any market where the cell phones can make money will sooner or later develop a local cellular system. So you have a serivce that appeals only to people who are by definition marginal markets, but which costs billions to maintain.
Eh, the SR-71 decomissioning simply ran in to the problem of a Congressman who objected because it reduced the flow of $$$ to his district. The Auroras are doing a fine job of reading Chineese newspapers from high altitudes.
Yes, they're all ways to do it. But, since my hypothetical Californian doesn't know anything about Beaver College, she doesn't have any reason to make a special effort to investigate it. She's sifting through a list of 150 colleges chosen from a first glance through the monster book; she's got to drop 145 of them, and it doesn't make sense to spend research time on one that's more difficult to research instead of the other 149. And so, Beaver College gets dropped.
Anyway, it's only one of several reasons mentioned (not the "determining factor") in addition to jokes and the fact that the name itself reduces the interest of possible students by 30% according to the college's market research data.
Maybe is people were willing to do more research than just look at the fancy graphics in choosing a college, this would not be such a severe problem.
Except, of course, that the research probably won't even include Beaver College as a possibility unless you have the Web. I'm willing to bet that 99.9% of Californians don't know anything about Beaver College (except maybe the name) and also don't know any alumni from the school. So how would one determine if one even wanted to bother to call up the college to send some literature?
What the Web does is put all those thousands of college brouchures on the web, which makes starting with a larger pool of possibilities easier. Otherwise, you're stuck investigating a handful of schools with national reputations and a handful of schools geographically close enough for you to have heard of them, instead of finding the small college on the other side of the country that fits your needs perfectly.
Not "for good" -- I've got nearly $1,000 of Steve Jackson Games materials sitting next to me, all stuff published after 1993. And a subscription to Pyramid, an online magazine that inculdes a MOO and NNTP message boards. And there's Illuminati Online, one of Texas's largest ISPs, which was originally owned by SJ Games.
Anyway, you can buy copies of the Cyberpunk sourcebook here, on their online store.
First, Adam Smith himself advocated government intervention in certain circumstances. So your claim "in the invisible hand metaphore, the market can readjust itself without ANY kind of intervention from a gorvernment" is a straw man. The invisible hand, as originally put forth in the Wealth of Nations, is only intended to explain certain functions of a market. Later economists, both pro- and anti-Smith overextended the metaphor.
Second, fiat money itself is government intervention in the market; a change in the interest rate at which the government loans out this fiat money is not an additional intervention, but a change in an existing intervention. So your example does not prove what you intend; it simply proves that when the government does intervene, it occassionally has to adjust its policy.
Third, there are no real life examples that prove the invisible hand "is poop", because there are no real-life examples of economies operating without interference. Taxes, tariffs, license fees, labor laws, political favors, theft, intimidation, violence, wars, whatever. Guess what -- Newton's Law of Inertia doesn't work in real life either, unless you account for friction...
First, I did not criticise Marxism as a school of economics, but as a theory of politics and history. Therefore, both Adam Smith and "'Modern Economics' is pure witchcraft" are both entirely irrelevant to my post.
Second, it's not "secret hand", it's "invisible hand".
Third, it's a metaphor for certain observable facts about market systems. Attacking metaphors for illogic is easy, since metaphors explicitly state that A and not-A are the same thing. Such an attack indicates a misunderstanding of the purpose of metaphors, which is illustration.
Fourth, I never explicitly nor implicity stated any agreement with Adam Smith -- there are plenty of economic theories other than Smith or Marx.
Fifth, I never claimed any other school of economics was any more valid than Marxism.
Sixth, I explicitly pointed out that dialectic logic can explain many of the major contradictions in Marxism, and I did not comment on the validity of the dialectic; I simply pointed out that it is illogical under Aristotelian logic, which is what most people refer to when they say "logic".
Marxism/communism is not "the recognition that all are equal and that the state should be there enforce the people's will." Communism recognizes the communist state as a temporary institution to guarantee completion of revolution, which will then wither away in favor of an anarchist-socialist utopia.
There are other, more extensive logical and factual errors in Marxism which would make the "academic Marxist" a laughingstock if he didn't claim the contradictions were explained by dialectic logic.
Go to www.slackware.com and grab ZipSlack. To quote:
Below is the minimum hardware you need in order to run ZipSlack.
386SX processor 8 megabytes of RAM 100 megabytes of hard disk space on a FAT or FAT32 filesystem
NOTE: The additional RAM is needed to compensate for the generic kernel included in ZipSlack. There is an addon for ZipSlack which installs an 8 MB swap file in the \LINUX directory. You must have this addon if you want to boot ZipSlack on a system with less than 8 MB of RAM.
So, now you've got a Linux installation in less than 100 megs, on a 386SX, with 8 megs of RAM.
Yes, but why do the calligraphy yourself? Use a calligraphy font, a fractal-based randomizer, a Beowulf cluster, and a Lego-based robotic arm with calligraphy pen! Engineer your way to her heart!
Well, that's really my point. I consistently thought of myself as a newbie, but then I saw people with numbers in the 40k range talking about how/. has degenerated since they were new.
Gosh, I'm amazed at these five- and six-digit user numbers. I've got a four-digit number (7681) -- never realized that I'm now an "old hand"... Steven E. Ehrbar
The development roadmap (here) is for M14 (due this month -- the current release is M13) to be the core of a Netscape branded beta. In short, a May final release is highly probable.
. If they're going to produce by spring, the "new" product will basically be Netscape 4.71 with AIM and ICQ integrated
Huh? M13, already out, is Alpha Mozilla, M14 is intended to be Beta Mozilla. Spring is a three-month season that begins on March 21 and doesn't end until June 21. Are you actually going to say that Mozilla can't move from near-beta to usable code (by Windows standards) by June 1 (i.e., in 120 days)?
What the hell are they doing, stealing the work of open source developers?... I get angry at the thought of AOL getting a browser for free
Er, well, you see, a significant majority of the Mozilla code was written by Netscape employees as their full-time job. And Netscape is owned by AOL. So most of Mozilla was written and paid for by -- AOL.
So they didn't steal anything, and they didn't get it for free.
The 5.0 codebase was killed six months after its release as open source. The current Mozilla codebase is what originally was going to be Netscape 6.0. So, it isn't completely marketing to call this Netscape 6.0.
Do you refuse to do buisness with people who tither to a religion you disagree with? No? Why then, aren't you helping that religion, and thus acting against your beliefs? Stand ALL the way up! Or be happy with whatever gets tossed your way, because you have proven yourself unworthy of having a voice as much as anyone who objects to CSS and also goes to a movie of an MPAA member.
First, he didn't paint a picture about the future of humanity. The move is set "long ago in a galaxy far away". It's no more a picture of the future of humanity than the Lord of the Rings.
As far as the "responsibility" argument . . . what you are advocating contains implied positions on both the purpose of art (propaganda, whatever the purpose) and the aesthetics of art (Naturalism). I am of the opinion that propaganda is not the proper calling of art, and that Naturalism is a crime against art, and therefore disagree with you on both implied points; but you can find plenty of people who agree with you.
It's very simple -- France has a decades-long record on spying on the U.S. and U.K., too. You should see the list of warnings about French espionage that U.S. multinationals give to their executives. France has to moderate its reaction to avoid an immoderate response if and when they get caught red-handed.
If I'm Sony, I'd try to cut a deal with AT&T to replace its cable descramblers with a descrambler-enhanced version of the Playstation 2. No matter what kind of losses I'd take on the console deal, I'm putting a DVD player and my console in 25% of U.S. households. Razor, meet razor blades...
Okay, I don't approve of what you are doing. But as long as you're doing it, why go after some basically inoffensive companies with DoS? I mean, Yahoo? Why not vandalized your local library's card catalog? Instead, go slam Disney, Viacom, Time-Warner, News Corp., etc. -- you know, the guys behind the MPAA, the DCMA, and DVD CSS. At least then you're going after people who, in some sense, deserve to be DoSed.
Sure, you can use Linux and StarOffice in a wide variety of desktop situations. Guess what -- you can still use Windows 3.1 and a circa-1994 copy of Office or SmartSuite in a wide variety of desktop situation. Sure, it'll crash more than Linux -- but if the buisnesses were worried about crashes on desktop machines enough to accept the disadvantages of a minority platform, they'd have bought OS/2 Warp 3.0 instead of Windows 95.
Linux won't be able to compete with Microsoft on the desktop until Linux doesn't just have an adequate office suite, but a suite with complete feature-parity with MS Office. Even then, it'll be an uphill climb...
Slashdot Mirror
Xerox invents an interface, Apple improves it, IBM and NeXT sit down and creates variants on that, Microsoft takes the IBM CUA, tosses in some NeXTisms, and spends millions of dollars on interface testing to make it easy to use.
Guess what? Nobody's set up usability testing labs for KDE or Gnome yet, and depending on people comfortable using Unix to improve a UI is insane. We don't think like J. Random Luser, and we can't afford to hire a bunch of them to usability test. And remember logic and consistency are not always optimal for UIs -- see the jargon file entry for "miswart".
So even if the result is that we add nonoptimal features, it makes sense to copy Microsoft's UI for now -- it means we won't do anything to make it harder to use than Microsoft, and will at least have an easy learning curve for people switching.
Steven E. Ehrbar
First, because it interfered with astronomy.
Second, because it was a stupid design -- launching a hard-to-upgrade system of 66 highly specialized orbiting telephone switchboards which needed to be replaced every ten years and are incompatible with any other satphone service or other use.
(Instead, use relatively dumb and cheap satellites and keep the complex processing in a handful of distributed ground stations. Sure, you'd have to use two satellites each call, but reducing the complexity and weight of each satellite would save lots. And upgrading the system in the future would involve ground station upgrades, instead of satellite replacements).
Third, because it was stupid economics -- the market for the service is people who can't use cell phones where they are, but can afford to pay higher fees than with a cell phone. But any market where the cell phones can make money will sooner or later develop a local cellular system. So you have a serivce that appeals only to people who are by definition marginal markets, but which costs billions to maintain.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Eh, the SR-71 decomissioning simply ran in to the problem of a Congressman who objected because it reduced the flow of $$$ to his district. The Auroras are doing a fine job of reading Chineese newspapers from high altitudes.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Yes, they're all ways to do it. But, since my hypothetical Californian doesn't know anything about Beaver College, she doesn't have any reason to make a special effort to investigate it. She's sifting through a list of 150 colleges chosen from a first glance through the monster book; she's got to drop 145 of them, and it doesn't make sense to spend research time on one that's more difficult to research instead of the other 149. And so, Beaver College gets dropped.
Anyway, it's only one of several reasons mentioned (not the "determining factor") in addition to jokes and the fact that the name itself reduces the interest of possible students by 30% according to the college's market research data.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Maybe is people were willing to do more research than just look at the fancy graphics in choosing a college, this would not be such a severe problem.
Except, of course, that the research probably won't even include Beaver College as a possibility unless you have the Web. I'm willing to bet that 99.9% of Californians don't know anything about Beaver College (except maybe the name) and also don't know any alumni from the school. So how would one determine if one even wanted to bother to call up the college to send some literature?
What the Web does is put all those thousands of college brouchures on the web, which makes starting with a larger pool of possibilities easier. Otherwise, you're stuck investigating a handful of schools with national reputations and a handful of schools geographically close enough for you to have heard of them, instead of finding the small college on the other side of the country that fits your needs perfectly.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Not "for good" -- I've got nearly $1,000 of Steve Jackson Games materials sitting next to me, all stuff published after 1993. And a subscription to Pyramid, an online magazine that inculdes a MOO and NNTP message boards. And there's Illuminati Online, one of Texas's largest ISPs, which was originally owned by SJ Games.
Anyway, you can buy copies of the Cyberpunk sourcebook here, on their online store.
Steven E. Ehrbar
First, Adam Smith himself advocated government intervention in certain circumstances. So your claim "in the invisible hand metaphore, the market can readjust itself without ANY kind of intervention from a gorvernment" is a straw man. The invisible hand, as originally put forth in the Wealth of Nations, is only intended to explain certain functions of a market. Later economists, both pro- and anti-Smith overextended the metaphor.
Second, fiat money itself is government intervention in the market; a change in the interest rate at which the government loans out this fiat money is not an additional intervention, but a change in an existing intervention. So your example does not prove what you intend; it simply proves that when the government does intervene, it occassionally has to adjust its policy.
Third, there are no real life examples that prove the invisible hand "is poop", because there are no real-life examples of economies operating without interference. Taxes, tariffs, license fees, labor laws, political favors, theft, intimidation, violence, wars, whatever. Guess what -- Newton's Law of Inertia doesn't work in real life either, unless you account for friction...
Steven E. Ehrbar
First, I did not criticise Marxism as a school of economics, but as a theory of politics and history. Therefore, both Adam Smith and "'Modern Economics' is pure witchcraft" are both entirely irrelevant to my post.
Second, it's not "secret hand", it's "invisible hand".
Third, it's a metaphor for certain observable facts about market systems. Attacking metaphors for illogic is easy, since metaphors explicitly state that A and not-A are the same thing. Such an attack indicates a misunderstanding of the purpose of metaphors, which is illustration.
Fourth, I never explicitly nor implicity stated any agreement with Adam Smith -- there are plenty of economic theories other than Smith or Marx.
Fifth, I never claimed any other school of economics was any more valid than Marxism.
Sixth, I explicitly pointed out that dialectic logic can explain many of the major contradictions in Marxism, and I did not comment on the validity of the dialectic; I simply pointed out that it is illogical under Aristotelian logic, which is what most people refer to when they say "logic".
Thank you for playing; please try again.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Ever actually read Marx?
Marxism/communism is not "the recognition that all are equal and that the state should be there enforce the people's will." Communism recognizes the communist state as a temporary institution to guarantee completion of revolution, which will then wither away in favor of an anarchist-socialist utopia.
There are other, more extensive logical and factual errors in Marxism which would make the "academic Marxist" a laughingstock if he didn't claim the contradictions were explained by dialectic logic.
Steven E. Ehrbar
You said, in "The Design and Evolution of C++" (p. 207), "Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out."
Do you still beleive this? If so, is it likely that such a language shall be created within the forseeable future?
Steven E. Ehrbar
Steven E. Ehrbar
Yes, but why do the calligraphy yourself? Use a calligraphy font, a fractal-based randomizer, a Beowulf cluster, and a Lego-based robotic arm with calligraphy pen! Engineer your way to her heart!
Steven E. Ehrbar
Well, that's really my point. I consistently thought of myself as a newbie, but then I saw people with numbers in the 40k range talking about how /. has degenerated since they were new.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Gosh, I'm amazed at these five- and six-digit user numbers. I've got a four-digit number (7681) -- never realized that I'm now an "old hand"...
Steven E. Ehrbar
Oops. The actual URL is he re.
Steven E. Ehrbar
The development roadmap (here) is for M14 (due this month -- the current release is M13) to be the core of a Netscape branded beta. In short, a May final release is highly probable.
Steven E. Ehrbar
. If they're going to produce by spring, the "new" product will basically be Netscape 4.71 with AIM and ICQ integrated
Huh? M13, already out, is Alpha Mozilla, M14 is intended to be Beta Mozilla. Spring is a three-month season that begins on March 21 and doesn't end until June 21. Are you actually going to say that Mozilla can't move from near-beta to usable code (by Windows standards) by June 1 (i.e., in 120 days)?
Steven E. Ehrbar
What the hell are they doing, stealing the work of open source developers?... I get angry at the thought of AOL getting a browser for free
Er, well, you see, a significant majority of the Mozilla code was written by Netscape employees as their full-time job. And Netscape is owned by AOL. So most of Mozilla was written and paid for by -- AOL.
So they didn't steal anything, and they didn't get it for free.
Steven E. Ehrbar
The 5.0 codebase was killed six months after its release as open source. The current Mozilla codebase is what originally was going to be Netscape 6.0. So, it isn't completely marketing to call this Netscape 6.0.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Do you refuse to do buisness with people who tither to a religion you disagree with? No? Why then, aren't you helping that religion, and thus acting against your beliefs? Stand ALL the way up! Or be happy with whatever gets tossed your way, because you have proven yourself unworthy of having a voice as much as anyone who objects to CSS and also goes to a movie of an MPAA member.
Steven E. Ehrbar
First, he didn't paint a picture about the future of humanity. The move is set "long ago in a galaxy far away". It's no more a picture of the future of humanity than the Lord of the Rings.
As far as the "responsibility" argument . . . what you are advocating contains implied positions on both the purpose of art (propaganda, whatever the purpose) and the aesthetics of art (Naturalism). I am of the opinion that propaganda is not the proper calling of art, and that Naturalism is a crime against art, and therefore disagree with you on both implied points; but you can find plenty of people who agree with you.
Steven E. Ehrbar
It's very simple -- France has a decades-long record on spying on the U.S. and U.K., too. You should see the list of warnings about French espionage that U.S. multinationals give to their executives. France has to moderate its reaction to avoid an immoderate response if and when they get caught red-handed.
Steven E. Ehrbar
If I'm Sony, I'd try to cut a deal with AT&T to replace its cable descramblers with a descrambler-enhanced version of the Playstation 2. No matter what kind of losses I'd take on the console deal, I'm putting a DVD player and my console in 25% of U.S. households. Razor, meet razor blades...
Steven E. Ehrbar
Okay, I don't approve of what you are doing. But as long as you're doing it, why go after some basically inoffensive companies with DoS? I mean, Yahoo? Why not vandalized your local library's card catalog? Instead, go slam Disney, Viacom, Time-Warner, News Corp., etc. -- you know, the guys behind the MPAA, the DCMA, and DVD CSS. At least then you're going after people who, in some sense, deserve to be DoSed.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Sure, you can use Linux and StarOffice in a wide variety of desktop situations. Guess what -- you can still use Windows 3.1 and a circa-1994 copy of Office or SmartSuite in a wide variety of desktop situation. Sure, it'll crash more than Linux -- but if the buisnesses were worried about crashes on desktop machines enough to accept the disadvantages of a minority platform, they'd have bought OS/2 Warp 3.0 instead of Windows 95.
Linux won't be able to compete with Microsoft on the desktop until Linux doesn't just have an adequate office suite, but a suite with complete feature-parity with MS Office. Even then, it'll be an uphill climb...
Steven E. Ehrbar