Konqueror is part of KDE, you cannot use Konqueror without using KDE. Yes, you can use Konqueror without using KWin, the KDE Window Manager. You are comparing window manager (Fluxbox) with a suite of desktop applications (KDE). Not a good comparison.
The problem with getting going at the same time when the light turns green is that when the front car brakes, the reaction time of the car behind it is not zero. You need to allow some safe distance between the cars. And that distance depends on speed.
You are right, I oversimplified... but what I was trying to say is that the standard deviation will converge to zero (theoretically) - obviously within a group eligible for a given product (more expensive customers would not be allowed to buy it, cheaper customers would not want to buy it). Once the product (insurance) cost is calculated for a target group of people who all share the same likelihood (including time appreciation) as you do, then the benefit of sharing the risk is greatly reduced.
To take this to an extreme where full information is available, the insurance company would know (and I would too) that in 5-7 year I would need an operation costing about 5 million. There is no room for me to share this cost with anyone else but people who are in the same situation - the only saving would be if the product was calculated say for 6 years and I needed the money after 5 year whereas someone else would be needing it after 7 years - he would be covering my saving through his cost.
Or, to take this even further, as I wrote before, if the future was known, then insurance could not exist. And the closer we are getting to "knowing" it, the less likely is insurance to work.
I do not think that I am disputing anything of what you said. Yes, the market can work with limited information, but some of the optimisations are not achieved. With insurance, my claim is that it will work differently (if at all) with full information. I.e. full information is boost for free market reaching optimum but detriment to insurance working at all.
As for the government performing badly - I never said that the government program would outperform free market. This is very complicated issue and the answer deeply depends on what is your aim, by which criteria you define "do better". If your criteria is that you want to reach as many people as possible but you do not care about efficiency then indeed government may do better (if at a hugely inflated price). Don't get me wrong, I am not saying this is the answer, I am just trying to say that this question is a huge question and we are very unlikely to come to a conclusion on pages of Slashdot.
Nice description of the problems can be found in Tim Harford's "The Undercover Enomonist".
The main point is that as information becomes better, the only people who will buy high insurance would be people very likely to need it. And on the contrary, if insurance companies would get hold of this information, they would not sell some products to some people. The utility of insurance is different for different people and with information available, insurance companies would have to price discriminate, otherwise they would not be able to sell.
Insurance works for insurance companies because a lot of people who don't need it (i.e. they are bloody healthy with no genetic predispositions) pay way too much, but they do not know any better so it is a rational decision on their part. On the other hand, insurance works for clients because insurance companies sell to people where is does not make sense (they are bloody ill and predisposed to even more). And both sides even out. (NB. I know that in individual cases even healthy person can become ill... but this is about probabilities and how accurately we can estimate them, not about being certain.)
When information becomes available, the situation would become uneven - insurance companies would sell at prices that would much more closely match true expected outlays for individual clients. This would be necessary because healthy clients would not be willing to pay more and ill clients would be forced to pay more or be deprived of the service (please note that I am using "healty" and "ill" in a very broad sense here).
The product would change from "insurance" to "saving", the cost would not be distributed between the broad population but rather population segments with similar expected cost of treatment because there would be no incentive to pay more than true expected cost. Of course, this is only the "I know the future" scenario, but every shift in making the information available moves us towards insurance that becomes unavailable to those who need it - because it approaches the true cost of treatment.
PS: Hmm, now that I think of it, I probably should not have written about asymmetry, but rather information availability
What do you mean "relatively late"? 37 or 40 is pretty damned early if you ask me.
Maybe that is why it says "relatively"? Relatively to making a lot of decisions... What job will I do? Will I have children? Where will I live? What kind of person will I be? 40 is by no means "late" in life, but it might be too late to change some things in your life. That is why it might be "relatively" late.
I am too lazy to google for sources, but according to some, we (Czech Republic) have the same level of health care as USA but the total spending per capita in CR is equal to red-tape overhead per capita in USA.
More to the point, insurance operates on infomation asymetry, it cannot exist in economic models where transactions are based on full information (like the perfect competition model of free markets).
From the RFC1939:
The POP3 server marks the message as deleted. Any future
reference to the message-number associated with the message
in a POP3 command generates an error. The POP3 server does
not actually delete the message until the POP3 session
enters the UPDATE state.
When the client issues the QUIT command from the TRANSACTION state,
the POP3 session enters the UPDATE state.
Really? And what does the "DELE" command of POP3 protocol do then? POP3 is perfectly capable of deleting email on server. (And to be pedanting, POP3 most certainly cannot delete emails on your computer, that is not something POP3 enters into.)
Well, yes and no. A light bulb near your ceiling would warm the air where the air is not necessarily needed warm - few people have any of their body parts that high in their room.:) Sure, having the air near the ceiling warmer does make warming up the lower parts easier, but there is a reason why heating systems are often built into the floor and rarely part of the ceiling - it would not be very efficient.
First, "fonts" are by no means simply things. So your choice of example is not a good one.
Second, which version of KDE did you use and what Linux distribution was that? I have used KDE since version 1.2 and have never had everything in a single menu.
As to your question of why KDE implements things that are a UI disaster. Well, as you correctly state, it is mostly because people are used to it. It is not about "the switching argument", it is about providing consistent interface with "outside" world. And why not, if you let the user choose what UI approach they like? It is not like KDE forces taskbar down your throat like Windows do.
Well, meeting is a bit strong a word for a quick one question/one answer dialog, isn't it? There a lot of communication that is not a meeting. It is also about seeing other people, knowing when they are available, etc.
In one of the companies whom I contracted for they even had "open door" policy for most of the offices (which had glass walls anyway) to encourage people to enter and speak to the managers (some of them did have an office). Walls and closed doors are a huge barrier to communication.
In open space, it is very important that people are tolerant and respect the need of others to concentrate. If the culture is right (and it was everywhere I worked) and people respect each other, open-space does indeed work.
Cost saving is not an issue. A company where I worked had close to 1000 people in the facility and paid several million EUR each month in salaries. You think cost of walls matters? No, it does not.
In an open plan office, every discussion is a meeting for the whole team.
No, this is not true. You are obviously correct that any background activity is a distraction, but you are trying to make absolute statement about something, that is not so clear-cut. Sure, arguing with someone about design specs would probably be too disturbing, that is why these things are to be done in a meeting room. There are meeting rooms even in open-plan spaces, did you know that? Open space is not a replacement for meetings, it is a complement.
I have seen both approaches and I just like the open space better. Places with a lot of offices are creepy and "sleepy".
This is not absolute truth - "chatting with co-workers" can be rephrased as "getting feedback or sharing ideas" which is very much desirable. For jobs where the work is of a solitary nature (which programming can be, I guess) open office is a annoyance, for some type of work (large collaborative project) I cannot even imagine how many door I would have to knock on each day to get my work done - that or go about without half the information I need. Granted, open-office requires certain amount of adopting to and it requires discipline from all who share it, otherwise it becomes really annoying. But when approached right, it is very (IMO) productive way to do your work. And yes, I am speaking as someone who does actually work in open-space office, I am not some high-up manager disconnected from the real world. And yet, I like open-space.
It is not just you... I also prefer working in open-space. But then again, my work usually involves a lot of interaction with other people. Had I had a job which would be "get the assignement and now go away and work on that alone for two months", I would probably prefer working from home.
Maybe I was just lucky, but all the open-space offices I have seen (and I have seen quite a lot) were sort-of-ok designed with a lot of quiet places to run to when I needed to make a longer phonecall, discuss something with someone, or just stare at the wall and let my thoughts run thru my head.
To summarise, I would not want to work in an office anymore - I would feel lonely.:)
This cannot be more wrong. Capitalism is about assigning value to your utility. Both can and most ofter are non-monetary. It is usually more about time, inconvenience, conscience... money is just the common denominator, the clutch we use to make these things comparable.
Well, in many ways, the system does NOT work. It does not work for me when I want to register the name "zluounký" or "". It may work for people in the US, but it does not work for most of the world. It works in what it does but it does not do what people need.
Come on, there are loads of languages in which "photon" is spelled with "f" at the beginning. You can imagine, that other nations have universities, where you can graduate in "quantum information", can't you? For a non-native speaker, this kind of spelling errors is very common. So what?
You need to change your job, really. You live in a sad world and I would not want to be in your place. Or maybe not you but the moderators who moderated this "Insightful" rather than "Funny". Oh, wait, this is Slashdot.
---Posting again, as the previous post seems to have gone to a black hole---
No, you are not correct. Project manager needs to facilitate the design, they do not have to get involved on the technical level - if they have good people whom they can trust. Project management is not about delivering, it's about managing the delivery. Sometimes it is even a disadvantage to mix these two. You have to draw a line between your responsibilities as a project manager and the team who delivers. Otherwise you can be sidetracked easily - your job is not to deliver 100 % quality at 1000 % the price. Your job is to deliver adequate quality at reasonable price. Nothing is black-and-white once you factor the cost in - something technical people quite often fail to see.
And I am saying this as someone who has done project management for IT project but who has a master's degree in CS and who did the delivery as well.
Sure - you are correct that the design phase is crucial - but I do not agree that this means that the project manager must be involved on the technical level as you imply.
No, you are not correct. Project manager needs to facilitate the design, they do not have to get involved on the technical level - if they have good people whom they can trust. Project management is not about delivering, it's about managing the delivery. Sometimes it is even a disadvantage to mix these two. You have to draw a line between your responsibilities as a project manager and the team who delivers. Otherwise you can be sidetracked easily - your job is not to deliver 100 % quality at 1000 % the price. Your job is to deliver adequate quality at reasonable price. Nothing is black-and-white once you factor the cost in - something technical people quite often fail to see.
And I am saying this as someone who has done project management for IT project but who has a master's degree in CS and who did the delivery as well.
Sure - you are correct that the design phase is crucial - but I do not agree that this means that the project manager must be involved on the technical level as you imply.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows manager? But you know that KDE is not a window manager, don't you?
Konqueror is part of KDE, you cannot use Konqueror without using KDE. Yes, you can use Konqueror without using KWin, the KDE Window Manager. You are comparing window manager (Fluxbox) with a suite of desktop applications (KDE). Not a good comparison.
The problem with getting going at the same time when the light turns green is that when the front car brakes, the reaction time of the car behind it is not zero. You need to allow some safe distance between the cars. And that distance depends on speed.
To take this to an extreme where full information is available, the insurance company would know (and I would too) that in 5-7 year I would need an operation costing about 5 million. There is no room for me to share this cost with anyone else but people who are in the same situation - the only saving would be if the product was calculated say for 6 years and I needed the money after 5 year whereas someone else would be needing it after 7 years - he would be covering my saving through his cost.
Or, to take this even further, as I wrote before, if the future was known, then insurance could not exist. And the closer we are getting to "knowing" it, the less likely is insurance to work.
As for the government performing badly - I never said that the government program would outperform free market. This is very complicated issue and the answer deeply depends on what is your aim, by which criteria you define "do better". If your criteria is that you want to reach as many people as possible but you do not care about efficiency then indeed government may do better (if at a hugely inflated price). Don't get me wrong, I am not saying this is the answer, I am just trying to say that this question is a huge question and we are very unlikely to come to a conclusion on pages of Slashdot.
The main point is that as information becomes better, the only people who will buy high insurance would be people very likely to need it. And on the contrary, if insurance companies would get hold of this information, they would not sell some products to some people. The utility of insurance is different for different people and with information available, insurance companies would have to price discriminate, otherwise they would not be able to sell.
Insurance works for insurance companies because a lot of people who don't need it (i.e. they are bloody healthy with no genetic predispositions) pay way too much, but they do not know any better so it is a rational decision on their part. On the other hand, insurance works for clients because insurance companies sell to people where is does not make sense (they are bloody ill and predisposed to even more). And both sides even out. (NB. I know that in individual cases even healthy person can become ill... but this is about probabilities and how accurately we can estimate them, not about being certain.)
When information becomes available, the situation would become uneven - insurance companies would sell at prices that would much more closely match true expected outlays for individual clients. This would be necessary because healthy clients would not be willing to pay more and ill clients would be forced to pay more or be deprived of the service (please note that I am using "healty" and "ill" in a very broad sense here).
The product would change from "insurance" to "saving", the cost would not be distributed between the broad population but rather population segments with similar expected cost of treatment because there would be no incentive to pay more than true expected cost. Of course, this is only the "I know the future" scenario, but every shift in making the information available moves us towards insurance that becomes unavailable to those who need it - because it approaches the true cost of treatment.
PS: Hmm, now that I think of it, I probably should not have written about asymmetry, but rather information availability
Maybe that is why it says "relatively"? Relatively to making a lot of decisions... What job will I do? Will I have children? Where will I live? What kind of person will I be? 40 is by no means "late" in life, but it might be too late to change some things in your life. That is why it might be "relatively" late.
More to the point, insurance operates on infomation asymetry, it cannot exist in economic models where transactions are based on full information (like the perfect competition model of free markets).
From the RFC1939:
The POP3 server marks the message as deleted. Any future reference to the message-number associated with the message in a POP3 command generates an error. The POP3 server does not actually delete the message until the POP3 session enters the UPDATE state.
When the client issues the QUIT command from the TRANSACTION state, the POP3 session enters the UPDATE state.
Really? And what does the "DELE" command of POP3 protocol do then? POP3 is perfectly capable of deleting email on server. (And to be pedanting, POP3 most certainly cannot delete emails on your computer, that is not something POP3 enters into.)
Can you please elaborate?
Well, yes and no. A light bulb near your ceiling would warm the air where the air is not necessarily needed warm - few people have any of their body parts that high in their room. :) Sure, having the air near the ceiling warmer does make warming up the lower parts easier, but there is a reason why heating systems are often built into the floor and rarely part of the ceiling - it would not be very efficient.
First, "fonts" are by no means simply things. So your choice of example is not a good one.
Second, which version of KDE did you use and what Linux distribution was that? I have used KDE since version 1.2 and have never had everything in a single menu.
As to your question of why KDE implements things that are a UI disaster. Well, as you correctly state, it is mostly because people are used to it. It is not about "the switching argument", it is about providing consistent interface with "outside" world. And why not, if you let the user choose what UI approach they like? It is not like KDE forces taskbar down your throat like Windows do.
Open sores hookers... I am not sure I will finish my dinner today.
Well, meeting is a bit strong a word for a quick one question/one answer dialog, isn't it? There a lot of communication that is not a meeting. It is also about seeing other people, knowing when they are available, etc.
In one of the companies whom I contracted for they even had "open door" policy for most of the offices (which had glass walls anyway) to encourage people to enter and speak to the managers (some of them did have an office). Walls and closed doors are a huge barrier to communication.
In open space, it is very important that people are tolerant and respect the need of others to concentrate. If the culture is right (and it was everywhere I worked) and people respect each other, open-space does indeed work.
Cost saving is not an issue. A company where I worked had close to 1000 people in the facility and paid several million EUR each month in salaries. You think cost of walls matters? No, it does not.
No, this is not true. You are obviously correct that any background activity is a distraction, but you are trying to make absolute statement about something, that is not so clear-cut. Sure, arguing with someone about design specs would probably be too disturbing, that is why these things are to be done in a meeting room. There are meeting rooms even in open-plan spaces, did you know that? Open space is not a replacement for meetings, it is a complement.
I have seen both approaches and I just like the open space better. Places with a lot of offices are creepy and "sleepy".
This is not absolute truth - "chatting with co-workers" can be rephrased as "getting feedback or sharing ideas" which is very much desirable. For jobs where the work is of a solitary nature (which programming can be, I guess) open office is a annoyance, for some type of work (large collaborative project) I cannot even imagine how many door I would have to knock on each day to get my work done - that or go about without half the information I need.
Granted, open-office requires certain amount of adopting to and it requires discipline from all who share it, otherwise it becomes really annoying. But when approached right, it is very (IMO) productive way to do your work. And yes, I am speaking as someone who does actually work in open-space office, I am not some high-up manager disconnected from the real world. And yet, I like open-space.
It is not just you... I also prefer working in open-space. But then again, my work usually involves a lot of interaction with other people. Had I had a job which would be "get the assignement and now go away and work on that alone for two months", I would probably prefer working from home.
:)
Maybe I was just lucky, but all the open-space offices I have seen (and I have seen quite a lot) were sort-of-ok designed with a lot of quiet places to run to when I needed to make a longer phonecall, discuss something with someone, or just stare at the wall and let my thoughts run thru my head.
To summarise, I would not want to work in an office anymore - I would feel lonely.
This cannot be more wrong. Capitalism is about assigning value to your utility. Both can and most ofter are non-monetary. It is usually more about time, inconvenience, conscience... money is just the common denominator, the clutch we use to make these things comparable.
Well, in many ways, the system does NOT work. It does not work for me when I want to register the name "zluounký" or "". It may work for people in the US, but it does not work for most of the world. It works in what it does but it does not do what people need.
Come on, there are loads of languages in which "photon" is spelled with "f" at the beginning. You can imagine, that other nations have universities, where you can graduate in "quantum information", can't you? For a non-native speaker, this kind of spelling errors is very common. So what?
You need to change your job, really. You live in a sad world and I would not want to be in your place. Or maybe not you but the moderators who moderated this "Insightful" rather than "Funny". Oh, wait, this is Slashdot.
---Posting again, as the previous post seems to have gone to a black hole---
No, you are not correct. Project manager needs to facilitate the design, they do not have to get involved on the technical level - if they have good people whom they can trust. Project management is not about delivering, it's about managing the delivery. Sometimes it is even a disadvantage to mix these two. You have to draw a line between your responsibilities as a project manager and the team who delivers. Otherwise you can be sidetracked easily - your job is not to deliver 100 % quality at 1000 % the price. Your job is to deliver adequate quality at reasonable price. Nothing is black-and-white once you factor the cost in - something technical people quite often fail to see.
And I am saying this as someone who has done project management for IT project but who has a master's degree in CS and who did the delivery as well.
Sure - you are correct that the design phase is crucial - but I do not agree that this means that the project manager must be involved on the technical level as you imply.
No, you are not correct. Project manager needs to facilitate the design, they do not have to get involved on the technical level - if they have good people whom they can trust. Project management is not about delivering, it's about managing the delivery. Sometimes it is even a disadvantage to mix these two. You have to draw a line between your responsibilities as a project manager and the team who delivers. Otherwise you can be sidetracked easily - your job is not to deliver 100 % quality at 1000 % the price. Your job is to deliver adequate quality at reasonable price. Nothing is black-and-white once you factor the cost in - something technical people quite often fail to see.
And I am saying this as someone who has done project management for IT project but who has a master's degree in CS and who did the delivery as well.
Sure - you are correct that the design phase is crucial - but I do not agree that this means that the project manager must be involved on the technical level as you imply.
Humour? How is this humour? Humour is a kick in the kneecap or a blow on the head, but not this.