... that economic productivity now is something like double what it was back then. This is particularly true in America (although measures of productivity in Europe generly understate the gains compared to the USA).
Why is everyone taking this measure of how people feel as being established fact? People may feel like they're getting less done, but the economic value of what they do is much higher.
>Look, you don't have to lose the indignation. What you felt is exactly what
>people in China feel everytime they use the internet,...
Except most of them don't. I know because half my family is Chinese, and I just got back from a 2 week holiday there for Chinsese New Year.
Honesly most ordinary Chinese just don't think about censorship, freedom of the press, etc in their daily lives. They just don't see it's meaningful relevence to them personaly. Things are the way they have always been, they grew up under this system and it's just a fact of life and China seems to be doing very well for itself at the moment, thank you very much.
I'm not making any judgements, just saying how it is from my experiences.
No, thy'd do what Virgin did in the UK and piggyback on an existing network, under their own brand. Apple has no expertise at running mobile networks, and no long-term interest in what is rapidly becoming a highly competitive, low-margin utility service.
In fact you could say the same for 'phones - I don't think this rumour has much chance of panning out.
Apple's success with the iPod is down to the combination of a great product and a great service which is what you need for any portable media device. PDA functions in the iPod are happening already, but only in an evolutionary way and to provide synergistic integration with the Mac platform.
1. Why don't the release writers first so there's something to play?
They can't. Even the industrial disk writing systems are still having yield problems, so there's no chance the home burning technology will be ready for years to come.
2. Nobody will buy them because there's nothing to play.
There's a chicken and egg problem here. Who is going to release content if nobody has players? Idealy players and disks should be released simultaneously, like XBOX 360 and it's launch titles but HD DVD is a longer term game. Exactly the same things were said about DVD when it first came out. Limited runs of HD DVDs are avilable, just not to consumers. I imagine the first buyers of HD DVD players will be HD DVD disk manufacturers, distributors and content developers with access to limited distribution material. With XBOX MS could deliver test boxes directly to such people, but for HD DVD there are so many of them in so many parts of the world it's probably more efficient to put the drives on the market and let such companies buy them through consumer channels.
Simon Hibbs
An interesting post for those of us interested in your personal biases, but since you didn't actualy try it out, we have no idea whether you would actualy have found it useful or easy to adapt to.
I have to admit I came across discussions and introductions to Python several years before I actualy tried it out and the whitespace issue did put me off. I immagined it would be awkward to use and would overly complicate code editing. I was wrong. In practice I found it wasn't. Instead it makes the code so much cleaner and easier to read. You might have found the same thing, and you might not, but we'll never know.
Simon Hibbs
I'd usualy end up fixing the indentation in any other language anyway.
IDLE (the default/most common Python code editor) includes very convenient tools for altering the indentation of selected text, and in fact most programmers editors have these anyway. For me, it's no big deal.
Simon
The problem is rooted in the difference between counting things and enumerating them.
If you are counting a row of people, you might start by pointing at the person on the far left and saying 'one', then the next person to the right and saying 'two', etc. However you are not actualy assigning them labels. You could count from right to left and it would be just as valid.
People don't realy have any limitation in the number of labels we can assign. Missing out 'zero' as a label to use to assign to thkings costs us nothing, and conveniently allows us to sometimes labels as a shortcut to counting things as a bonus. Computers do have a shortage of labels. An 8-bit numeric varable can only store 256 different values. If you want to count 256 things with it, you have to use 'zero' as a valid label and using it for the 'first' object being counted avoids the problem of having to use binary mathematical operations to use 'zero' for 256.
Simon Hibbs
Re:[OT] Re:How to boycott?
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Perhaps you should read some Adam Smith. He's widely regarded as the founding father of capitalist economic theory. He's a bit of a bugbear to socialist, but is often badly misrepresented. In fact he was insistent that regulation by government was vital if capitalist economics was to realise the maximum social good. He believed that capitalism is simply a means to an end, which is the welfare of the general population and the promotion of civil society. Much of the modern terminology we use in this area was 'invented' after his time, but the same ideas are there in his books.
You are raising a straw man. Yes it's possible for capitalist theory to be taken too far, but in practice you won't find many people actualy promoting such extreme forms of it. Well, outside the White House anyway.
And of course the Rabinical movement didn't emerge untill after the destruction of the temple in 79 AD. Before that Judaism had a priesthood (plus the Pharisees, precursors of the Rabbis). But I'll stop now before your eyes glaze over.
Well, you can make VCDs. That's quite attractive to me actualy as my wife's half of the family are Chinese and VCD is the standard over there. Not typical I know, but then as a software developer you're not an average Mac user either. A valuable one though, of course.
Simon Hibbs
All the price comparisons I've seen, including the 'in-depth' analysis on CNet, talk purely about the value of the hardware. (BTW, theirs is bogus, because they compare to boxes with crappy integrated graphics and no DVD player).
The attraction of the Mac is in the software, mainly iLife. This is why people buy computers - to do stuff. Of the news site anayses I've seen, most of them don't even mention the bundled iLife software at all, yet it's the core of the digital lifestyle that Apple are selling.
This is why comparisons of Windows PCs and Macs are nearly uniformly missing the point. A Mac isn't realy in the same product category as a PC. It's more like the product category of digital cameras, synthesisers and DVD players.
Simon Hibbs
My favourite bit is this:
"The Linux desktop could fail if companies continue to pilot programs and conclude that it's less trouble to buy Microsoft. Everyone loses in that scenario.'"
Does Microsoft lose? If the customer decides that the MS solution is genuinely better value for them (and in laptops especialy they may have a point), are they losing?
Simon Hibbs
>It really does depend on the application, but for him to suggest an HPC is always a more
>economic, or even better option than a cluster of cheap x86 boxes is demonstrably false...
But he doesn't say that. He spends quite a bit of time explicitly saying that clusters are great for some problems, particularly embarrasingly parallel computational problems.
I thought his comments were much fairer and overall more informative than most of the score 4 and 5 ones here.
Simon Hibbs
Slashdot Mirror
... that economic productivity now is something like double what it was back then. This is particularly true in America (although measures of productivity in Europe generly understate the gains compared to the USA).
Why is everyone taking this measure of how people feel as being established fact? People may feel like they're getting less done, but the economic value of what they do is much higher.
Simon Hibbs
>Look, you don't have to lose the indignation. What you felt is exactly what >people in China feel everytime they use the internet,... Except most of them don't. I know because half my family is Chinese, and I just got back from a 2 week holiday there for Chinsese New Year. Honesly most ordinary Chinese just don't think about censorship, freedom of the press, etc in their daily lives. They just don't see it's meaningful relevence to them personaly. Things are the way they have always been, they grew up under this system and it's just a fact of life and China seems to be doing very well for itself at the moment, thank you very much. I'm not making any judgements, just saying how it is from my experiences.
No, thy'd do what Virgin did in the UK and piggyback on an existing network, under their own brand. Apple has no expertise at running mobile networks, and no long-term interest in what is rapidly becoming a highly competitive, low-margin utility service.
In fact you could say the same for 'phones - I don't think this rumour has much chance of panning out.
Apple's success with the iPod is down to the combination of a great product and a great service which is what you need for any portable media device. PDA functions in the iPod are happening already, but only in an evolutionary way and to provide synergistic integration with the Mac platform.
Simon Hibbs
1. Why don't the release writers first so there's something to play? They can't. Even the industrial disk writing systems are still having yield problems, so there's no chance the home burning technology will be ready for years to come. 2. Nobody will buy them because there's nothing to play. There's a chicken and egg problem here. Who is going to release content if nobody has players? Idealy players and disks should be released simultaneously, like XBOX 360 and it's launch titles but HD DVD is a longer term game. Exactly the same things were said about DVD when it first came out. Limited runs of HD DVDs are avilable, just not to consumers. I imagine the first buyers of HD DVD players will be HD DVD disk manufacturers, distributors and content developers with access to limited distribution material. With XBOX MS could deliver test boxes directly to such people, but for HD DVD there are so many of them in so many parts of the world it's probably more efficient to put the drives on the market and let such companies buy them through consumer channels. Simon Hibbs
An interesting post for those of us interested in your personal biases, but since you didn't actualy try it out, we have no idea whether you would actualy have found it useful or easy to adapt to. I have to admit I came across discussions and introductions to Python several years before I actualy tried it out and the whitespace issue did put me off. I immagined it would be awkward to use and would overly complicate code editing. I was wrong. In practice I found it wasn't. Instead it makes the code so much cleaner and easier to read. You might have found the same thing, and you might not, but we'll never know. Simon Hibbs
I'd usualy end up fixing the indentation in any other language anyway. IDLE (the default/most common Python code editor) includes very convenient tools for altering the indentation of selected text, and in fact most programmers editors have these anyway. For me, it's no big deal. Simon
The problem is rooted in the difference between counting things and enumerating them. If you are counting a row of people, you might start by pointing at the person on the far left and saying 'one', then the next person to the right and saying 'two', etc. However you are not actualy assigning them labels. You could count from right to left and it would be just as valid. People don't realy have any limitation in the number of labels we can assign. Missing out 'zero' as a label to use to assign to thkings costs us nothing, and conveniently allows us to sometimes labels as a shortcut to counting things as a bonus. Computers do have a shortage of labels. An 8-bit numeric varable can only store 256 different values. If you want to count 256 things with it, you have to use 'zero' as a valid label and using it for the 'first' object being counted avoids the problem of having to use binary mathematical operations to use 'zero' for 256. Simon Hibbs
Perhaps you should read some Adam Smith. He's widely regarded as the founding father of capitalist economic theory. He's a bit of a bugbear to socialist, but is often badly misrepresented. In fact he was insistent that regulation by government was vital if capitalist economics was to realise the maximum social good. He believed that capitalism is simply a means to an end, which is the welfare of the general population and the promotion of civil society. Much of the modern terminology we use in this area was 'invented' after his time, but the same ideas are there in his books.
You are raising a straw man. Yes it's possible for capitalist theory to be taken too far, but in practice you won't find many people actualy promoting such extreme forms of it. Well, outside the White House anyway.
Simon
And of course the Rabinical movement didn't emerge untill after the destruction of the temple in 79 AD. Before that Judaism had a priesthood (plus the Pharisees, precursors of the Rabbis). But I'll stop now before your eyes glaze over.
Well, you can make VCDs. That's quite attractive to me actualy as my wife's half of the family are Chinese and VCD is the standard over there. Not typical I know, but then as a software developer you're not an average Mac user either. A valuable one though, of course. Simon Hibbs
All the price comparisons I've seen, including the 'in-depth' analysis on CNet, talk purely about the value of the hardware. (BTW, theirs is bogus, because they compare to boxes with crappy integrated graphics and no DVD player). The attraction of the Mac is in the software, mainly iLife. This is why people buy computers - to do stuff. Of the news site anayses I've seen, most of them don't even mention the bundled iLife software at all, yet it's the core of the digital lifestyle that Apple are selling. This is why comparisons of Windows PCs and Macs are nearly uniformly missing the point. A Mac isn't realy in the same product category as a PC. It's more like the product category of digital cameras, synthesisers and DVD players. Simon Hibbs
My favourite bit is this: "The Linux desktop could fail if companies continue to pilot programs and conclude that it's less trouble to buy Microsoft. Everyone loses in that scenario.'" Does Microsoft lose? If the customer decides that the MS solution is genuinely better value for them (and in laptops especialy they may have a point), are they losing? Simon Hibbs
>It really does depend on the application, but for him to suggest an HPC is always a more >economic, or even better option than a cluster of cheap x86 boxes is demonstrably false... But he doesn't say that. He spends quite a bit of time explicitly saying that clusters are great for some problems, particularly embarrasingly parallel computational problems. I thought his comments were much fairer and overall more informative than most of the score 4 and 5 ones here. Simon Hibbs