I am a programmer and have a degree in Math/Computer Science, but I always scored better on language related aptitude tests than math... did significantly better on my SAT and ACT tests (in 1989! I'm sure they've changed alot since then!) in language related areas than I ever did in math. Luckily I still got into a good computer science school, got my degree, and have had a pretty good career in software development. I never realized that my skew towards language skill may actually have been a boon for my career choice instead of the disadvantage that I thought it was...
What about games where the player is stationary? Like sitting in a base shooting down aliens come at you from all directions. I admit that it's a much more limited subset of gaming than most people are looking for, but I am curious to know if such a game would alleviate the nausea problem.
I am one of those people who can't read while riding in a car, I get nauseous, so I am very pessimistic about my ability to enjoy a VR headset.
Understood, and of course people have a right to make money however they see fit.
Won't stop me from trying to plant the seeds of thought though. I'd be happier if there were fewer people operating from greed and more people trying to enrich themselves and their surrounding in more creative ways, so I don't mind trying to make the point and see if it resonates.
Why not go do something useful with your time, try to make money by creating actual value in the world, rather than surrounding yourself with get-rich-quick schemers, scammers, and thieves in the bitcoin world, hoping to score big?
I personally have tried a Mac. After 18 years of nearly Linux-exclusive computing, in 2012 I was wooed enough by the new retina Macbooks and tired enough of dealing with Linux suspend/resume/hibernate nightmares on laptops, that I decided to give a Mac a try.
Long story short: I like it, and nearly love it, but am disappointed in many aspects. The hardware is definitely a high point - I can honestly say that I have never owned another laptop with even close to the same quality of hardware design or manufacture as my 15 inch rMBP. And I say that despite having to return it to the store once to fix the image retention (at the same time getting a mainboard upgrade to fix the video flickering problem that was common on this laptop), again to fix the wireless that they somehow broke during the first fix, and finding that about 6 months later I killed 4 or 5 pixels on my own when a small grain of sand got onto the display and I closed it (the retina displays have literally *no* protection of the LCD surface and it is easy to pit/scratch them - my fault for taking the laptop on vacation I guess).
Mac OS X has impressed me with how well it integrates with its hardware, how nicely and seamlessly the UI functions, and how good the video drivers are. Also Apple's Objective C implementation and libraries are an interesting mix of weirdness and awesomeness, with the very best documentation I have ever read for any programming environment hands down (Microsoft's widows documentation is a complete and utter joke when compared to Linux man pages, let alone compared to the incredible documentation that Apple has for its APIs).
However - the Mac is still a let down in some areas. Printing is surprisingly difficult and bad. I am amazed that a company that created the desktop publishing market and that sold the first Laser printer, can have such an awful print dialog. It's inconsistent between apps and doesn't let me WYSIWYG the printouts whatsoever (I print alot of coloring pages for my kids and it's amazingly hard on the Mac, no matter what program I use, to get an image centered and fit to a page for printing). Also, some of the UI misbehaves sometimes - I've taken to completely disabling the wireless status icon in the menu bar because it tends to freeze up the entire menu bar functionality whenever it's searching for networks or otherwise unhappy. Which happens just about every time the laptop comes back from sleep.
Also I cannot stand the fact that Apple cannot give the user the choice of whether or not click-to-focus or focus-follows-mouse. Oh my god the number of times that I have been unable to interact with a program while looking at a web browser or somesuch because they overlap and I have to fidget and fuss with window positioning and size to be able to do my work. On any other system without this ridiculous flaw, I can type into my emacs buffer while observing some web page with documentation partially on top of some part of the emacs windows. But on Mac OS X I often just have to give up and copy-paste into a text edit window, save that to a file, and then open that within emacs because I just cannot manage to get the stupid windows to overlap in a way that lets me get what I need to do, done.
I think if Apple would not be such fascists about some UI policy, the Mac OS X experience would be alot better.
But overall, I'm like 90% happy with Mac OS X. Definitely beats the living hell out of Windows.
It's not the dropping into a recovery shell that is the problem; that is something that I would expect to happen (and always happened under init, as well).
It's the fact that the systemd recovery shell is nonfunctional. It doesn't accept keyboard input. I had this happen under Arch Linux, then switched to Fedora, and had the same thing happen. And thus concluded that it's endemic to systemd since it's hard to believe that both Arch Linux and Fedora independently managed to screw up systemd's recovery shell in their patches to or configurations of systemd.
When I lived in New Zealand I found their approach most sensible. Cash payments are always rounded to the nearest 10 cents.
Of course, they don't have dollar bills, only dollar coins (and two dollar coins), which is ridiculously annoying - you end up with a pocketful of heavy, clunky coins when bills would have been easier to deal with.
Not sure whether this supports your argument or refutes it; mostly I think it's just anecdotal evidence that doesn't really say anything either way.
However, just for fun, I grabbed every penny I could easily find in the house and counted those older than 1982.
Result: Pre-1982: 17 Post-1981: 110 Undentifiable: 1 (had been flattened by one of those flatten-a-penny amusement machines with a Sydney Opera House scene)
It didn't take long before I learned to identify the pre-1982 pennies pretty much on sight (although I double-checked the date on all pennies, I didn't rely on visual inspection of the appearance). The copper ones were all uniformly brown, in a way that was distinctive even from the few post-1981 pennies that were browned (most post-1981 were still shiny to varying degrees).
This is good because it will get systemd onto even more systems, which will hopefully be a forcing function for improving it so that it's more usable.
The introduction of systemd into my distros of choice (I was a heavy Arch Linux user until this year, when I switched back to Fedora after a ~8 year absence) has caused me more problems that any other single change to any part of the Linux operating system in my history of its usage (and I've been using Linux since 1994).
I'm at the point in my life where I just want things to work; and I found that systemd has in many places not worked well. I wholly believe that the problems are generally due to the implementation of the individual services, and not bugs in systemd itself, although I suspect that the 90 degree turn taken by systemd and its associated complexity are the genesis of the problems in the individual services themselves.
In particular, I've found that systemd on Fedora cannot properly start up an NFS server. I have a post-start up script that I run manually to start NFS because no matter what I do, it does not seem possible to force systemd to start all of the requisite NFS services. systemds tools for figuring out what could be going wrong are, I am sure, complete, but very impenetrable to a person who wants to understand the minimum necessary to fix a problem.
Additionally, it seems to be easy to break systemd's boot scripts in a way that prevent systemd from being able to boot the system (it's happened to me over and over again through what seemd like innocuous user actions), and I have never successfully gotten systemd to boot into its recovery shell. I can get to the recovery shell but I can never type anything into it, it seems like there's something borked with the way it handles keyboard input somehow.
In summary, systemd is much less mature than init ever was, which, combined with its tendency to reimplement everything and thus de-evolve much of what used-to-work into no-longer-works-easily, has resulted in whole system failures at a rate that I have never, ever experienced before under Linux.
All that being said, it's pretty clear that lots of Linux distro maintainers are more excited by the few advancements that systemd makes over the old init system, than they are put off by the lack of maturity and quality of systemd; therefore, systemd is an inevitability, and I'm glad that debian is taking it now, because it will mean even more developer effort towards fixing its problems.
In short: more pain for other people, making them more likely to fix my problems for me. So I'm happy that debian is doing this to their users, for my benefit.
I work in Silicon Valley, probably the ideal markey for electric cars, so of course this will not be representative of all places at all times.
But the long row of Nissan Leafs at my work every day shows that lots of people find them worth the money. I've ridden in one many times as one guy who tends to drive to lunch drives one, and it seems like a fine car to me.
Our company provides free chargers which must provide much of the appeal, along with the car pool stickers. Still seems like a fine car if your daily commute is short enough, which I believe for the vast majority of people, it is.
I also test drove a Model S at the Tesla factory a couple of months back, and it was fine too. I'm not a huge car person but it seemed like a nice enough car. The smugness of the test drive attendant was a little hard to take, though. But nothing against the car. I also took a guide tour of the factory, it's not exactly what I expected, but the only other car factory I've ever been in is a Mazda factory in Japan. Those guys really have their sh** together, the Tesla plant seemed quite a bit less well organized in comparison, but whatever; the Tesla technology and design is more impressive than anything.
I'm with you on everything except documentation. If you think you are a good developer and you don't care about accessible, thorough, and well maintained documentation of whatever it is you produce... well you're not as good as you think you are.
My biggest problem with being a 'passionate programmer' is that I get into too many pointless fights with other developers because that passion makes it hard to let anything go, to let anything be done in a way that I believe is unnecessarily substandard. This is where reigning in the passion is absolutely called for but very difficult to do at times.
I read Slashdot literally every single day, multiple times per day usually, from 1998 until 2007. Then I got tired of the trend towards fluff articles posted solely to incite flame wars and all of the constant barrage of tinfoil hat articles. I came back and started reading semi-regularly a couple of weeks ago and I see that things haven't really changed at all. The big difference is that I've lowered my expectations and no longer expect every headline to be relevent and interesting like they used to be back in Slashdot's golden years (1998 - 2005-ish).
I wrote CmdTaco numerous times in the mid to late 2000s expressing my concern over the poor judgement of the at-the-time "new" editors (who appear to have become the only editors now) but he dismissed my concerns outright.
I was in 7th grade and my teacher had taken us into a classroom that had a TV so that we could watch the launch. I don't remember the surprise of seeing the explosion, it was so long ago, although I am sure we were all surprised. What I distinctly remember is that our teacher cried, which was very unusual and surreal for all of us who had never seen a teacher cry before.
I always thought it was a terribly weak analogy to begin with, because the analogy itself relies on gravity - the very thing it's trying to be an analogy of - which must exist in the world of this hypothetical sheet of rubber in order to pull the marble around the orbit of the mass deforming the rubber.
I can't think of a worse kind of analogy that requires that the entity being described exist within the analogy itself.
I believe this is not true. When I lived in New Zealand I noticed that the octane ratings were higher than in the USA, but after researching this, discovered that the difference is mostly accounted for in a difference in the way that octane is measured. In New Zealand (and probably Australia, and probably Europe), the rating uses just the "research octane", i.e. that measured in a lab somewhere; but in the USA, the rating is an average of the "research octane" and the "measured octane", the measured octane producing a lower number, that when averaged with the research octane, means that the same fuel is rated at a lower octane rating than it would be in New Zealand.
I disagree. I don't think Bill Gates could change a thing about Microsoft's downward spiral.
I've been around long enough to see the arc of MS's success since Windows 95 (wasn't paying close attention before that).
I never saw a company that could really create products that consumers demanded on their own merits.
What I saw instead was a company that got itself into a critical, un-dislodgeable, dare I say it - monopolistic - position in the PC market and milked that for all that it was worth.
Now, finally, after 20 years, the market is moving to a place where there is less dependence on the Windows operating system; alternative platforms are finally big enough to start makign Windows irrelevant.
Microsoft will never be able to produce the next greatest product because they never created a next greatest product. They just rode their lynchpin position in the PC stack to undeserved fortune. And without the DNA to actually innovate, they have absolutely no hope of making inroads into markets that they didn't luck into back in 1982.
Good riddance, Microsoft. Never has so much money been pumped into such an undeserving company.
I think you are vastly overstating the deflation rates likely to be seen with Bitcoin. Once new bitcoins stop being generated, the deflation rate will equal the growth rate of goods and services paid for using bitcoins plus the natural loss rate of bitcoins.
Because the number of bitcoins will be (essentially) fixed, every additional credit that needs to be represented will require a corresponding reduction in average value of a bitcoin to allow the sum total of all bitcoins to be large enough to cover that additional credit.
Add into that the natural loss of bitcoins to things like forgotten passwords, deaths while holding bitcoins that cannot be recovered, loss of computing equipment, hard drive crashes, etc, and I think you get the total deflation rate of the currency.
Normal economic growth is something lie 2% - 7% per year isn't it? So let's assume that deflation due to economic growth is 2% - 7% or so. Now add in the deflation due to loss - 5%? - and you get a deflation rate that caps out in the low teens.
This is quite a bit less than the 50% deflation rate that you cited, and the economic effects are considerably easier to bear.
Essentially under bitcoin all goods and services become very similar to rapidly-improving technology products - say, iPhones. People decide to spend $200 on an iPhone this year and then a year later they find that they could have either gotten the same iPhone for 50% less had they waited, or complain that if they had waited they could have gotten a much better iPhone for the same $200.
This is very similar to how all goods and services would seem with a deflationary currency - you'd always have to balance the current value of the good or service versus the future value of the currency you are spending it on. This doesn't mean that nobody would spend bitcoins or that it would be so onerous to do so that people would nearly starve themselves to death rather than spend a coin. It just means that there would be a little bit more care put into purchasing decisions - just like people put more care into deciding when to buy their iPhone than when to buy their $200 pair of sunglasses.
Would a world where everyone thought much harder about how to spend their money wisely, and correspondingly were less incented to spend and more incented to save, be a bad thing? I doubt it, but then again, I don't think we'll ever know. Certainly bitcoin isn't going to achieve the level of success necessary to test these waters, but this is for technical reasons (I've written at length in the past on the technical problems built into the bitcoin protocol - in short, it requires a volume of data transfer that cannot be sustained by any end-user which means that the pipe dream of people exchanging the currency pseudo-anonymously without requiring intermediaries is impossible).
In essense, bitcoin is self-defeating beause it requires popularity in order to be viable, but popularity makes it unusable by end-users, and end-user features are what would make it popular; therefore, it can never get beyond a low transaction count, speculator hoarding stage. That's where it is now and that's as far as it will go.
In my experience, GUIs are the messiest and most difficult part of an application to get right. All that stuff that's just slinging bits around memory under the covers? That's the easy part. The part that faces the user and has to deal with thousands and thousands of possible user actions? Very hard to get right.
You can go and read a Wikipedia article on just about any "complex" algorithm and understand and implement it in the nice safe vaccuum of non-user-facing code quite easily. But providing a consistent, coherent, complete, and bug-free user experience? That is freaking hard.
Or do you think that there is some other reason that free operating systems like Linux are wonderful at everything except GUIs?
It's in the only "big boy" word processor that matters: emacs.
transpose-chars is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `simple.el'.
It is bound to C-t.
(transpose-chars ARG)
Interchange characters around point, moving forward one character. With prefix arg ARG, effect is to take character before point and drag it forward past ARG other characters (backward if ARG negative). If no argument and at end of line, the previous two chars are exchanged.
The difference between an Intel-only world and an Intel-AMD world would not be very great at this point. x86 development is already a walking corpse and there will not be significant advances in x86 performance ever again, regardless of whether or not AMD is in the market. x86 will only get about 50% faster than the current top of the line i7. The costs to moving the x86 performance bar have become high enough and the x86 market outlook is stagnant at best with mobile devices taking center stage. x86 does not compete in that market and even if it did, it would be lower performing parts with vastly less power usage, not parts faster than current x86 fastest parts.
The point being, x86 is not getting significantly faster, ever. It's done. 50% faster than the fastest current core i7 is the fastest x86 will ever be. It will get cheaper but never faster. It doesn't matter if AMD is in the market or not, this fact is true either way.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a programmer and have a degree in Math/Computer Science, but I always scored better on language related aptitude tests than math ... did significantly better on my SAT and ACT tests (in 1989! I'm sure they've changed alot since then!) in language related areas than I ever did in math. Luckily I still got into a good computer science school, got my degree, and have had a pretty good career in software development. I never realized that my skew towards language skill may actually have been a boon for my career choice instead of the disadvantage that I thought it was ...
What about games where the player is stationary? Like sitting in a base shooting down aliens come at you from all directions. I admit that it's a much more limited subset of gaming than most people are looking for, but I am curious to know if such a game would alleviate the nausea problem.
I am one of those people who can't read while riding in a car, I get nauseous, so I am very pessimistic about my ability to enjoy a VR headset.
There is a pompus ass here, but I'm pretty sure it's not the O.P. And I don't think it's me either ...
Understood, and of course people have a right to make money however they see fit.
Won't stop me from trying to plant the seeds of thought though. I'd be happier if there were fewer people operating from greed and more people trying to enrich themselves and their surrounding in more creative ways, so I don't mind trying to make the point and see if it resonates.
Why not go do something useful with your time, try to make money by creating actual value in the world, rather than surrounding yourself with get-rich-quick schemers, scammers, and thieves in the bitcoin world, hoping to score big?
I personally have tried a Mac. After 18 years of nearly Linux-exclusive computing, in 2012 I was wooed enough by the new retina Macbooks and tired enough of dealing with Linux suspend/resume/hibernate nightmares on laptops, that I decided to give a Mac a try.
Long story short: I like it, and nearly love it, but am disappointed in many aspects. The hardware is definitely a high point - I can honestly say that I have never owned another laptop with even close to the same quality of hardware design or manufacture as my 15 inch rMBP. And I say that despite having to return it to the store once to fix the image retention (at the same time getting a mainboard upgrade to fix the video flickering problem that was common on this laptop), again to fix the wireless that they somehow broke during the first fix, and finding that about 6 months later I killed 4 or 5 pixels on my own when a small grain of sand got onto the display and I closed it (the retina displays have literally *no* protection of the LCD surface and it is easy to pit/scratch them - my fault for taking the laptop on vacation I guess).
Mac OS X has impressed me with how well it integrates with its hardware, how nicely and seamlessly the UI functions, and how good the video drivers are. Also Apple's Objective C implementation and libraries are an interesting mix of weirdness and awesomeness, with the very best documentation I have ever read for any programming environment hands down (Microsoft's widows documentation is a complete and utter joke when compared to Linux man pages, let alone compared to the incredible documentation that Apple has for its APIs).
However - the Mac is still a let down in some areas. Printing is surprisingly difficult and bad. I am amazed that a company that created the desktop publishing market and that sold the first Laser printer, can have such an awful print dialog. It's inconsistent between apps and doesn't let me WYSIWYG the printouts whatsoever (I print alot of coloring pages for my kids and it's amazingly hard on the Mac, no matter what program I use, to get an image centered and fit to a page for printing). Also, some of the UI misbehaves sometimes - I've taken to completely disabling the wireless status icon in the menu bar because it tends to freeze up the entire menu bar functionality whenever it's searching for networks or otherwise unhappy. Which happens just about every time the laptop comes back from sleep.
Also I cannot stand the fact that Apple cannot give the user the choice of whether or not click-to-focus or focus-follows-mouse. Oh my god the number of times that I have been unable to interact with a program while looking at a web browser or somesuch because they overlap and I have to fidget and fuss with window positioning and size to be able to do my work. On any other system without this ridiculous flaw, I can type into my emacs buffer while observing some web page with documentation partially on top of some part of the emacs windows. But on Mac OS X I often just have to give up and copy-paste into a text edit window, save that to a file, and then open that within emacs because I just cannot manage to get the stupid windows to overlap in a way that lets me get what I need to do, done.
I think if Apple would not be such fascists about some UI policy, the Mac OS X experience would be alot better.
But overall, I'm like 90% happy with Mac OS X. Definitely beats the living hell out of Windows.
It's not the dropping into a recovery shell that is the problem; that is something that I would expect to happen (and always happened under init, as well).
It's the fact that the systemd recovery shell is nonfunctional. It doesn't accept keyboard input. I had this happen under Arch Linux, then switched to Fedora, and had the same thing happen. And thus concluded that it's endemic to systemd since it's hard to believe that both Arch Linux and Fedora independently managed to screw up systemd's recovery shell in their patches to or configurations of systemd.
When I lived in New Zealand I found their approach most sensible. Cash payments are always rounded to the nearest 10 cents.
Of course, they don't have dollar bills, only dollar coins (and two dollar coins), which is ridiculously annoying - you end up with a pocketful of heavy, clunky coins when bills would have been easier to deal with.
Not sure whether this supports your argument or refutes it; mostly I think it's just anecdotal evidence that doesn't really say anything either way.
However, just for fun, I grabbed every penny I could easily find in the house and counted those older than 1982.
Result:
Pre-1982: 17
Post-1981: 110
Undentifiable: 1 (had been flattened by one of those flatten-a-penny amusement machines with a Sydney Opera House scene)
It didn't take long before I learned to identify the pre-1982 pennies pretty much on sight (although I double-checked the date on all pennies, I didn't rely on visual inspection of the appearance). The copper ones were all uniformly brown, in a way that was distinctive even from the few post-1981 pennies that were browned (most post-1981 were still shiny to varying degrees).
This is good because it will get systemd onto even more systems, which will hopefully be a forcing function for improving it so that it's more usable.
The introduction of systemd into my distros of choice (I was a heavy Arch Linux user until this year, when I switched back to Fedora after a ~8 year absence) has caused me more problems that any other single change to any part of the Linux operating system in my history of its usage (and I've been using Linux since 1994).
I'm at the point in my life where I just want things to work; and I found that systemd has in many places not worked well. I wholly believe that the problems are generally due to the implementation of the individual services, and not bugs in systemd itself, although I suspect that the 90 degree turn taken by systemd and its associated complexity are the genesis of the problems in the individual services themselves.
In particular, I've found that systemd on Fedora cannot properly start up an NFS server. I have a post-start up script that I run manually to start NFS because no matter what I do, it does not seem possible to force systemd to start all of the requisite NFS services. systemds tools for figuring out what could be going wrong are, I am sure, complete, but very impenetrable to a person who wants to understand the minimum necessary to fix a problem.
Additionally, it seems to be easy to break systemd's boot scripts in a way that prevent systemd from being able to boot the system (it's happened to me over and over again through what seemd like innocuous user actions), and I have never successfully gotten systemd to boot into its recovery shell. I can get to the recovery shell but I can never type anything into it, it seems like there's something borked with the way it handles keyboard input somehow.
In summary, systemd is much less mature than init ever was, which, combined with its tendency to reimplement everything and thus de-evolve much of what used-to-work into no-longer-works-easily, has resulted in whole system failures at a rate that I have never, ever experienced before under Linux.
All that being said, it's pretty clear that lots of Linux distro maintainers are more excited by the few advancements that systemd makes over the old init system, than they are put off by the lack of maturity and quality of systemd; therefore, systemd is an inevitability, and I'm glad that debian is taking it now, because it will mean even more developer effort towards fixing its problems.
In short: more pain for other people, making them more likely to fix my problems for me. So I'm happy that debian is doing this to their users, for my benefit.
"Low 6 digit number". Cute :)
markey -> market. Obviously.
I work in Silicon Valley, probably the ideal markey for electric cars, so of course this will not be representative of all places at all times.
But the long row of Nissan Leafs at my work every day shows that lots of people find them worth the money. I've ridden in one many times as one guy who tends to drive to lunch drives one, and it seems like a fine car to me.
Our company provides free chargers which must provide much of the appeal, along with the car pool stickers. Still seems like a fine car if your daily commute is short enough, which I believe for the vast majority of people, it is.
I also test drove a Model S at the Tesla factory a couple of months back, and it was fine too. I'm not a huge car person but it seemed like a nice enough car. The smugness of the test drive attendant was a little hard to take, though. But nothing against the car. I also took a guide tour of the factory, it's not exactly what I expected, but the only other car factory I've ever been in is a Mazda factory in Japan. Those guys really have their sh** together, the Tesla plant seemed quite a bit less well organized in comparison, but whatever; the Tesla technology and design is more impressive than anything.
I'm with you on everything except documentation. If you think you are a good developer and you don't care about accessible, thorough, and well maintained documentation of whatever it is you produce ... well you're not as good as you think you are.
My biggest problem with being a 'passionate programmer' is that I get into too many pointless fights with other developers because that passion makes it hard to let anything go, to let anything be done in a way that I believe is unnecessarily substandard. This is where reigning in the passion is absolutely called for but very difficult to do at times.
I read Slashdot literally every single day, multiple times per day usually, from 1998 until 2007. Then I got tired of the trend towards fluff articles posted solely to incite flame wars and all of the constant barrage of tinfoil hat articles. I came back and started reading semi-regularly a couple of weeks ago and I see that things haven't really changed at all. The big difference is that I've lowered my expectations and no longer expect every headline to be relevent and interesting like they used to be back in Slashdot's golden years (1998 - 2005-ish).
I wrote CmdTaco numerous times in the mid to late 2000s expressing my concern over the poor judgement of the at-the-time "new" editors (who appear to have become the only editors now) but he dismissed my concerns outright.
Until we can somehow talk sense into bigots like you, it is going to be an uphill battle, for sure.
I was in 7th grade and my teacher had taken us into a classroom that had a TV so that we could watch the launch. I don't remember the surprise of seeing the explosion, it was so long ago, although I am sure we were all surprised. What I distinctly remember is that our teacher cried, which was very unusual and surreal for all of us who had never seen a teacher cry before.
I always thought it was a terribly weak analogy to begin with, because the analogy itself relies on gravity - the very thing it's trying to be an analogy of - which must exist in the world of this hypothetical sheet of rubber in order to pull the marble around the orbit of the mass deforming the rubber.
I can't think of a worse kind of analogy that requires that the entity being described exist within the analogy itself.
I believe this is not true. When I lived in New Zealand I noticed that the octane ratings were higher than in the USA, but after researching this, discovered that the difference is mostly accounted for in a difference in the way that octane is measured. In New Zealand (and probably Australia, and probably Europe), the rating uses just the "research octane", i.e. that measured in a lab somewhere; but in the USA, the rating is an average of the "research octane" and the "measured octane", the measured octane producing a lower number, that when averaged with the research octane, means that the same fuel is rated at a lower octane rating than it would be in New Zealand.
I disagree. I don't think Bill Gates could change a thing about Microsoft's downward spiral.
I've been around long enough to see the arc of MS's success since Windows 95 (wasn't paying close attention before that).
I never saw a company that could really create products that consumers demanded on their own merits.
What I saw instead was a company that got itself into a critical, un-dislodgeable, dare I say it - monopolistic - position in the PC market and milked that for all that it was worth.
Now, finally, after 20 years, the market is moving to a place where there is less dependence on the Windows operating system; alternative platforms are finally big enough to start makign Windows irrelevant.
Microsoft will never be able to produce the next greatest product because they never created a next greatest product. They just rode their lynchpin position in the PC stack to undeserved fortune. And without the DNA to actually innovate, they have absolutely no hope of making inroads into markets that they didn't luck into back in 1982.
Good riddance, Microsoft. Never has so much money been pumped into such an undeserving company.
I think you are vastly overstating the deflation rates likely to be seen with Bitcoin. Once new bitcoins stop being generated, the deflation rate will equal the growth rate of goods and services paid for using bitcoins plus the natural loss rate of bitcoins.
Because the number of bitcoins will be (essentially) fixed, every additional credit that needs to be represented will require a corresponding reduction in average value of a bitcoin to allow the sum total of all bitcoins to be large enough to cover that additional credit.
Add into that the natural loss of bitcoins to things like forgotten passwords, deaths while holding bitcoins that cannot be recovered, loss of computing equipment, hard drive crashes, etc, and I think you get the total deflation rate of the currency.
Normal economic growth is something lie 2% - 7% per year isn't it? So let's assume that deflation due to economic growth is 2% - 7% or so. Now add in the deflation due to loss - 5%? - and you get a deflation rate that caps out in the low teens.
This is quite a bit less than the 50% deflation rate that you cited, and the economic effects are considerably easier to bear.
Essentially under bitcoin all goods and services become very similar to rapidly-improving technology products - say, iPhones. People decide to spend $200 on an iPhone this year and then a year later they find that they could have either gotten the same iPhone for 50% less had they waited, or complain that if they had waited they could have gotten a much better iPhone for the same $200.
This is very similar to how all goods and services would seem with a deflationary currency - you'd always have to balance the current value of the good or service versus the future value of the currency you are spending it on. This doesn't mean that nobody would spend bitcoins or that it would be so onerous to do so that people would nearly starve themselves to death rather than spend a coin. It just means that there would be a little bit more care put into purchasing decisions - just like people put more care into deciding when to buy their iPhone than when to buy their $200 pair of sunglasses.
Would a world where everyone thought much harder about how to spend their money wisely, and correspondingly were less incented to spend and more incented to save, be a bad thing? I doubt it, but then again, I don't think we'll ever know. Certainly bitcoin isn't going to achieve the level of success necessary to test these waters, but this is for technical reasons (I've written at length in the past on the technical problems built into the bitcoin protocol - in short, it requires a volume of data transfer that cannot be sustained by any end-user which means that the pipe dream of people exchanging the currency pseudo-anonymously without requiring intermediaries is impossible).
In essense, bitcoin is self-defeating beause it requires popularity in order to be viable, but popularity makes it unusable by end-users, and end-user features are what would make it popular; therefore, it can never get beyond a low transaction count, speculator hoarding stage. That's where it is now and that's as far as it will go.
In my experience, GUIs are the messiest and most difficult part of an application to get right. All that stuff that's just slinging bits around memory under the covers? That's the easy part. The part that faces the user and has to deal with thousands and thousands of possible user actions? Very hard to get right.
You can go and read a Wikipedia article on just about any "complex" algorithm and understand and implement it in the nice safe vaccuum of non-user-facing code quite easily. But providing a consistent, coherent, complete, and bug-free user experience? That is freaking hard.
Or do you think that there is some other reason that free operating systems like Linux are wonderful at everything except GUIs?
My E-350 system is fanless. Not even a case fan.
It's in the only "big boy" word processor that matters: emacs.
transpose-chars is an interactive compiled Lisp function in
`simple.el'.
It is bound to C-t.
(transpose-chars ARG)
Interchange characters around point, moving forward one character.
With prefix arg ARG, effect is to take character before point
and drag it forward past ARG other characters (backward if ARG negative).
If no argument and at end of line, the previous two chars are exchanged.
The difference between an Intel-only world and an Intel-AMD world would not be very great at this point. x86 development is already a walking corpse and there will not be significant advances in x86 performance ever again, regardless of whether or not AMD is in the market. x86 will only get about 50% faster than the current top of the line i7. The costs to moving the x86 performance bar have become high enough and the x86 market outlook is stagnant at best with mobile devices taking center stage. x86 does not compete in that market and even if it did, it would be lower performing parts with vastly less power usage, not parts faster than current x86 fastest parts.
The point being, x86 is not getting significantly faster, ever. It's done. 50% faster than the fastest current core i7 is the fastest x86 will ever be. It will get cheaper but never faster. It doesn't matter if AMD is in the market or not, this fact is true either way.