Perhaps these computers aren't being aimed at the same people that you have experience with. Giving dying people drugs and clean water is very helpful to those who receive it, but it does nothing to stop the same problems happening again 6 months down the line. The best end scenario is to have these countries produce enough wealth that they can buy (or independently develop) their own drugs.
How do we get them to generate their own wealth? This is the $1M question that nobody has the definitive answer to. For many years the developed world has given grants and loans to governments to develop infrastructure, but this money is very inefficiently spent due to corruption. It has become clear that a bottom-up strategy of enabling individuals to generate their own wealth is necessary, so that corrupt governments can be bipassed. Despite your pessimism, mobile phones have proved to be very valuable in developing countries for this reason. They greatly improve economic efficiency, and they require little investment in infrastructure to get going. Nobody really knew that this would be the case until it was tried. Will cheap computers with access to the internet provide more ways for people in developing countries to create wealth (and hence let them pay for their own water and healthcare)? Maybe, maybe not, we'll have to wait and see. What is clear, however, is that focussing solely on giving handouts is very shortsighted.
Two-thirds of the companies that responded to a survey by InformationWeek reported either no change or a worsening in customer satisfaction as a result of business-process outsourcing.
But if 100% of customers reported "either no change or worsening in customer satisfaction", then the strategy could still be a resounding success. Surely it would be far more relevant to lump "no change" with "improving"?
I've often heard this argument, but as it stands it is incomplete. To be a good strategy, the price of diamonds would have to increase faster than supply gets decreased. For example, if the quantity sold halved, the price would have to more than double to compensate. Since this doesn't usually happen in other products (especially commodities), is it true that this happens in the diamond industry, and if so, why?
(And saying "because they did lots of clever marketing" isn't enough - everyone does this)
Because saying something is caused by evil implies (to me at least) that it is a possible yet peculiar outcome, caused primarily by the pathology of the individual. Hence the solution might be to punish that individual. Examples of evil in this context might include rape, murder etc.
Saying something is predictable, or systemic, or rational, implies that otherwise normal people will end up doing said things because the 'rules of the game' promote them (and by rules of the game i don't only mean laws). Rather than looking to solve the problem by punishing an unending stream of 'evil people' (eg downloaders) we should try to reformulate the system. Examples might include the existence of rich people in poor countries, people eating factory-farmed meat, insider trading etc.
Saying people are evil is used on the one hand to generate misdirected aggression at a whole group of people, e.g. the current Denmark fiasco. On the other hand it is also often used by those in power to try to deflect attention to others, e.g. GWB blaming the evil prison guards for what happened at Abu Ghraib or Microsoft blaming evil hackers for the insecurity of their own operating system.
Both uses are essentially unintellectual, which is why it is useful to describe things in other terms.
I remember trying to get nvidea drivers working on fedora not so long ago (fedora 3?). It involved changing runlevels and recompiling the kernel. Oh, and I had to do this twice because for some reason it didn't work the first time - something to do with versions. I wouldn't really class that as "Just works". Now I wouldn't be surprised if i took a very suboptimal route to installing the drivers, but if it's not going to come packaged with the OS nor the hardware, there are always going to be a lot of people who get lost.
But don't worry Mr. Musician, we can guarantee that you will make at least one sale before it finds it's way onto bittorrent. $15 is bound to pay for your production and living costs over the 6 months it took to record.
I'm not really surprised, it seems like there is far more scope for improvement in turning the web into a useful platform than there is in trying to make a search engine epsilon better than Google's. In the tech industry it seems you only supplant the incumbant in his own domain by being an order of magnitude better, as Google did in the 90's. Maybe search just doesn't have any potential order-of-magnitude improvements that could help Yahoo leapfrog Google. Perhaps they're better off staking their place in the next revolution - the web as a platform.
Also the arguments from liberalism that I've read say that a free market optimizes the economy and makes the best deal for everyone involved, but then fail to address those needs of the individuals - only measuring the aggregate economy of the system as a whole.
Well, there is a lot of literature on the subject of Welfare Economics, which I believe is what you are talking about. What some politician or blogger (or me) talks about should not be assumed to be what economists think.
I notice you use the word 'aggregate' rather than 'sum' or 'average'. Is this because you believe all methods of aggregation are bad? As far as i know, allowing utility functions to be nonlinear and thinking about marginal utility can be extremely useful.
There are many theoretical and phenomenological studies of the effect of unemployment on society and the individual. I refer you to wikipedia. As it happens the first section is titled "Impact on society and the economy", and the first subsection is titled "Cost".
But anyway, my point is that low unemployment in technologically advanced nations proves that whilst new technology sometimes gets rid of existing jobs (usually unskilled), people figure out other ways of providing value, and hence employment. The cause of unemployment is much more to do with how society is organised than it is to do with technology.
Reasonable people (and the smartest mathematicians and scientists I've ever seen) realize that math and even logic are human's own inventions
Whilst some people agree with this, it is horrendously overstating it to say that only unreasonable people think otherwise.
If humans hadn't studied arithmetic would 2+2 still equal 4? I think most "reasonable" people would agree. If humans hadn't studied geometry would it still be true that "If in a triangle two angles equal one another, then the sides opposite the equal angles also equal one another."?
IMO the distinction as to whether maths is invented or discovered is personal. Some mathematics consider themselves as discovering already existing structure, like someone mining for diamonds, whereas others think they are constructing the maths themselves, like someone building a cathedral. Which metaphor you choose is highly correlated to what field of maths you are in; geometers are often miners whereas analysts are usually builders.
But I agree with your overall point, maths doesn't answer everything and certainly fails if applied to reality in a naive way.
Someone else has already said it, but I strongly recommend you look at the field of financial maths. I'm currently studying for a phd in theoretical physics and by random fortune i'm in the "Financial Maths and Applied Probability" group. Whilst many of my non-FM friends have languished unemployed for a year after finishing, my FM friends have been snapped up almost straight away with starting salaries uniformly greater than $100,000. I'm doing only a little research in FM, am 9 months away from completion and I'm getting headhunters phoning me every week or so.
The maths is also quite deep and elegant, although by the time it gets used by banks it ends up being pretty dirty. I would recommend you take a look at An Introduction to Derivative Pricing for a gentle introduction to the maths and Against The Gods for a non mathematical acount of why it is useful.
The 'loser' is compensated by getting another job. As someone else pointed out, if the 'losers' remained unemployed, then after thousands of years of technology improvements, nobody would have a job anymore, except farmers. In fact, almost all developed nations (i.e. with the most advanced technology) have unemployment less than 15%. Since these countries do not have 85% working in agriculture there is clearly some 'compensation' going on. And further, in most developed nations even the unemployed are compensated by more than a fully employed person of a few thousand years ago.
As Microsoft's power ebbs away over the years, and the Gates Foundation donates more and more money to good causes, even geeks will start to forget about the crimes against computing he was responsible for. But how will slashdot survive if it no longer has the power of the borg icon and biased MS-funded TCO analyses to stir the readership into their daily Two Minutes Hate? Presumably the owners are hoping that another super-villain will be forged from the ashes of Desktop Computing to save them, but even this might not work for an institution that has defined itself for so long as the internet refuge for cyber freedom fighters selflessly defending the world from the advances of the evil Microsoft Empire.
What bothers me how fast people forget just how he has gotten theese money. For all we know computing as we know it would be years ahead if it wasnt for Microsoft and Bill Gates...A killer does not become better in any way by saving equal amounts of lives as he has killed.
Maybe you are right, although Bill hasn't (I assume) killed anybody, and yet his charity could save the lives of millions. So I don't think your analogy is anywhere near the truth.
Obviously one can't predict the future, but perhaps future generations will be left to evaluate these two outcomes: on the one hand he retarded the development in the field of computing by around two years, on the other his donations led to the hiv vaccine being created one year earlier than it would have otherwise, saving the lives of nearly 3 million people. I know which I would consider the more important.
But not everyone agrees with the mantra 'DRM is evil'. For people who want the internet to contain information that goes beyond surface deep, content that represents huge investments in time and money and that is too expensive to be supported by ads alone, such as books, video, music etc, DRM is a necessary technology.
I would be very happy to be able to watch TV shows over the internet, as and when I like. Since I watch very little TV, I would probably be happy to pay a couple of dollars for precisely the programmes I want when I want - an amount which is probably vastly more than they get per viewer from advertising. Without some kind of DRM, this just isn't going to happen.
You should not forget that Google's introduction of personalised ads did actually have the effect of dramatically reducing the amount of website real-estate devoted to advertising. Players such as Yahoo have reduced the number of ads to be competitive with Google.
Not that I'm saying that the same thing will neccesarily with TV, just that it could. Presumably it would depend on how competitive the industry is, etc.
This has little to do with piracy and everything to do with making consumers pay multiple times for the same product.
That's why movies are released first to film and then to DVD.
Plus the cinema creates much better marketing than otherwise available.
If quantum field theory is true, then how come rest mass of an electron is not measured to be infinity? I propose a theory whereby God actually chose the value of m_e such that the universe will allow humans to exist.
If the second law of thermodynamics is true, then how come the universe started in a state of such incredibly low gravitational entropy? Since the relevant laws of physics don't predict such a thing, there must have been some intelligent design going on. I propose that God purposely started our universe in a state with low entropy, for reasons that will only be known himself.
These were the first two that occured to me. If I.D. proponents were smart enough to understand qft and general relativity then there is no doubt in my mind they would say these sorts of things. Funnily enough, some actual scientists do say these sorts of things - and worse. Obviously they are not to be directly compared with religious nutters, but it's strange nonetheless.
Yes, but GPL blurs the distinction. Relative to other licenses (and esp public domain) it takes away some free will, but many believe this generates more value for the community, directly because of this removal of free will. Compare with a government who outlaws murder; it is the removal of some free will to benefit the community as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
How do we get them to generate their own wealth? This is the $1M question that nobody has the definitive answer to. For many years the developed world has given grants and loans to governments to develop infrastructure, but this money is very inefficiently spent due to corruption. It has become clear that a bottom-up strategy of enabling individuals to generate their own wealth is necessary, so that corrupt governments can be bipassed. Despite your pessimism, mobile phones have proved to be very valuable in developing countries for this reason. They greatly improve economic efficiency, and they require little investment in infrastructure to get going. Nobody really knew that this would be the case until it was tried. Will cheap computers with access to the internet provide more ways for people in developing countries to create wealth (and hence let them pay for their own water and healthcare)? Maybe, maybe not, we'll have to wait and see. What is clear, however, is that focussing solely on giving handouts is very shortsighted.
But if 100% of customers reported "either no change or worsening in customer satisfaction", then the strategy could still be a resounding success. Surely it would be far more relevant to lump "no change" with "improving"?
Actually, I take that back.
(And saying "because they did lots of clever marketing" isn't enough - everyone does this)
Excel
Visual Studio
Saying something is predictable, or systemic, or rational, implies that otherwise normal people will end up doing said things because the 'rules of the game' promote them (and by rules of the game i don't only mean laws). Rather than looking to solve the problem by punishing an unending stream of 'evil people' (eg downloaders) we should try to reformulate the system. Examples might include the existence of rich people in poor countries, people eating factory-farmed meat, insider trading etc.
Saying people are evil is used on the one hand to generate misdirected aggression at a whole group of people, e.g. the current Denmark fiasco. On the other hand it is also often used by those in power to try to deflect attention to others, e.g. GWB blaming the evil prison guards for what happened at Abu Ghraib or Microsoft blaming evil hackers for the insecurity of their own operating system.
Both uses are essentially unintellectual, which is why it is useful to describe things in other terms.
I remember trying to get nvidea drivers working on fedora not so long ago (fedora 3?). It involved changing runlevels and recompiling the kernel. Oh, and I had to do this twice because for some reason it didn't work the first time - something to do with versions. I wouldn't really class that as "Just works". Now I wouldn't be surprised if i took a very suboptimal route to installing the drivers, but if it's not going to come packaged with the OS nor the hardware, there are always going to be a lot of people who get lost.
But don't worry Mr. Musician, we can guarantee that you will make at least one sale before it finds it's way onto bittorrent. $15 is bound to pay for your production and living costs over the 6 months it took to record.
I'm not really surprised, it seems like there is far more scope for improvement in turning the web into a useful platform than there is in trying to make a search engine epsilon better than Google's. In the tech industry it seems you only supplant the incumbant in his own domain by being an order of magnitude better, as Google did in the 90's. Maybe search just doesn't have any potential order-of-magnitude improvements that could help Yahoo leapfrog Google. Perhaps they're better off staking their place in the next revolution - the web as a platform.
Well, there is a lot of literature on the subject of Welfare Economics, which I believe is what you are talking about. What some politician or blogger (or me) talks about should not be assumed to be what economists think.
I notice you use the word 'aggregate' rather than 'sum' or 'average'. Is this because you believe all methods of aggregation are bad? As far as i know, allowing utility functions to be nonlinear and thinking about marginal utility can be extremely useful.
But anyway, my point is that low unemployment in technologically advanced nations proves that whilst new technology sometimes gets rid of existing jobs (usually unskilled), people figure out other ways of providing value, and hence employment. The cause of unemployment is much more to do with how society is organised than it is to do with technology.
I see. Thanks for the explanation.
So presumably Category Theory doesn't exist?
I don't really know much about this, but wouldn't the construction of the real numbers lead to the construction of the natural numbers and arithmetic?
Whilst some people agree with this, it is horrendously overstating it to say that only unreasonable people think otherwise.
If humans hadn't studied arithmetic would 2+2 still equal 4? I think most "reasonable" people would agree. If humans hadn't studied geometry would it still be true that "If in a triangle two angles equal one another, then the sides opposite the equal angles also equal one another."?
IMO the distinction as to whether maths is invented or discovered is personal. Some mathematics consider themselves as discovering already existing structure, like someone mining for diamonds, whereas others think they are constructing the maths themselves, like someone building a cathedral. Which metaphor you choose is highly correlated to what field of maths you are in; geometers are often miners whereas analysts are usually builders.
But I agree with your overall point, maths doesn't answer everything and certainly fails if applied to reality in a naive way.
The maths is also quite deep and elegant, although by the time it gets used by banks it ends up being pretty dirty. I would recommend you take a look at An Introduction to Derivative Pricing for a gentle introduction to the maths and Against The Gods for a non mathematical acount of why it is useful.
The 'loser' is compensated by getting another job. As someone else pointed out, if the 'losers' remained unemployed, then after thousands of years of technology improvements, nobody would have a job anymore, except farmers. In fact, almost all developed nations (i.e. with the most advanced technology) have unemployment less than 15%. Since these countries do not have 85% working in agriculture there is clearly some 'compensation' going on. And further, in most developed nations even the unemployed are compensated by more than a fully employed person of a few thousand years ago.
Not at all, s/he does not attempt to define it, merely to place an extra condition on something defined elsewhere.
Paul Graham has a slightly better elucidation of a similar idea.
As Microsoft's power ebbs away over the years, and the Gates Foundation donates more and more money to good causes, even geeks will start to forget about the crimes against computing he was responsible for. But how will slashdot survive if it no longer has the power of the borg icon and biased MS-funded TCO analyses to stir the readership into their daily Two Minutes Hate? Presumably the owners are hoping that another super-villain will be forged from the ashes of Desktop Computing to save them, but even this might not work for an institution that has defined itself for so long as the internet refuge for cyber freedom fighters selflessly defending the world from the advances of the evil Microsoft Empire.
Maybe you are right, although Bill hasn't (I assume) killed anybody, and yet his charity could save the lives of millions. So I don't think your analogy is anywhere near the truth.
Obviously one can't predict the future, but perhaps future generations will be left to evaluate these two outcomes: on the one hand he retarded the development in the field of computing by around two years, on the other his donations led to the hiv vaccine being created one year earlier than it would have otherwise, saving the lives of nearly 3 million people. I know which I would consider the more important.
But not everyone agrees with the mantra 'DRM is evil'. For people who want the internet to contain information that goes beyond surface deep, content that represents huge investments in time and money and that is too expensive to be supported by ads alone, such as books, video, music etc, DRM is a necessary technology. I would be very happy to be able to watch TV shows over the internet, as and when I like. Since I watch very little TV, I would probably be happy to pay a couple of dollars for precisely the programmes I want when I want - an amount which is probably vastly more than they get per viewer from advertising. Without some kind of DRM, this just isn't going to happen.
Not that I'm saying that the same thing will neccesarily with TV, just that it could. Presumably it would depend on how competitive the industry is, etc.
Plus the cinema creates much better marketing than otherwise available.
- If quantum field theory is true, then how come rest mass of an electron is not measured to be infinity? I propose a theory whereby God actually chose the value of m_e such that the universe will allow humans to exist.
- If the second law of thermodynamics is true, then how come the universe started in a state of such incredibly low gravitational entropy? Since the relevant laws of physics don't predict such a thing, there must have been some intelligent design going on. I propose that God purposely started our universe in a state with low entropy, for reasons that will only be known himself.
These were the first two that occured to me. If I.D. proponents were smart enough to understand qft and general relativity then there is no doubt in my mind they would say these sorts of things. Funnily enough, some actual scientists do say these sorts of things - and worse. Obviously they are not to be directly compared with religious nutters, but it's strange nonetheless.Yes, but GPL blurs the distinction. Relative to other licenses (and esp public domain) it takes away some free will, but many believe this generates more value for the community, directly because of this removal of free will. Compare with a government who outlaws murder; it is the removal of some free will to benefit the community as a whole.