"Is keeping prices artificially low actually illegal? Governments normally support anything that benefits the consumer."
The reason this sort of price fixing is illegal is because what originally happened was businesses would lower prices to drive out the competition while taking a big loss. Once the competition was gone, they would artificially inflate their prices to gain a huge profit and there would be no competition to stop them.
In situations such as this, what you're saying makes sense; however, the law is so complicated, extensive, and silly that it can be difficult for someone who isn't a lawyer in the business world to NOT break the law. Of course this truth applies more to certain types of businesses than others. The question is, where do you draw the line and put the officers of a company away for what the company did? (For example, if I incorporate as Murder, Inc. and start pumping lead through the streets of my New York under the authority of my corporation, I'm obviously going to jail.)
So essentially, all I would have to do is purchase eight PS3 systems for 5000 bucks, beowulf cluster, and I'll have one of the 500 fastest computers in the world.... And that's not even counting the GPU. Not to mention the fact that the hardware is built for Linux and requires NO hacking.
It is official; Manchester University confirms: Men are smarter than women.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered female community when the regents of the University of Manchester confirmed that the average female IQ has dropped yet again, now down to at least 5 points less than the average male.
Coming on the heels of a recent study conducted by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn which plainly states that women consistently score lower on IQ tests, this news serves to reinforce what mankind has known for millenia. Prior conceptions of female intelligence are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by the overwhelming ratio of male to female Nobel prize winners.
You don't need to be a chauvinist to predict womankind's future benefit to society. The hand-writing is on the wall: Females face a bleak future in fields requiring higher cognizant abilities such as science and engineering. In fact there won't be any future at all for women in science and engineering because women simply won't be able to be able to compete with their male colleagues. Things are looking very bad for women. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Based on IQ test scores from 80,000 people and 20,000 students, the average score for women was 5 points less than the average score for men. Twice as many men as women scored 125, only serving to raise the intellectual glass ceiling. At scores of 155, associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman.
All major studies show that women are consistently less intelligent than men. Women are simply not suited for higher level thinking and long term survival prospects in science/engineeringare very dim. Showingly, women chose not to enter such fields even when they were considered intellectually equal. 20th century notions of female equality continue to decay as old maxims are vindicated.
Nothing short of a miracle could save a woman's self respect at this point in time. Women are becoming increasingly irrelevent as our society focuses more on science/engineering. For all practical purposes, women serve no purpose other than bearing male children.
I'll let you track and profit from everything I do if you let me track and profit from everything you do. Complete discloser in both direction. Anything less is unacceptable.
Well next time you delete that Google tracking cookie, remember that you can download all the information they publish to shareholders and press releases any time you want.
After reading this article, it is clear to me that this man is trying more to get attention than he is trying to present an objective argument.
> [...] I hate Linux. I think it's the most over rated piece of software ever built and survives simply out of spite and not because it is terribly good at doing something because it is not!
> [...] as most of the people developing Linux probably sit at night writing up malicious code for windows!
These comments are so far out there in terms of prejudice that there is no way this man could actually have a goal of creating a legitimate argument.
Can you blame them for holding back on announcing the discovery? After all, it would be very embarassing to the astronomer community to retract such an important discovery, like the chemists did with Ununoctium.
Of course I use it as an Apache module... And to be honest. It's good that you mentioned the optimizer; however, when reviewing a language, I don't think it's a great idea to include third-party 'bails-you-out' software in the judgement.
I've written big apps in PHP where there can be about six parent classes for a page's class and it will end up taking 200 ms to load on load-free P4 Prescott machine. It's acceptable because this app isn't going to be used by thousands of persons simultaneously.
I know quite a few languages, and I write web apps for a living. I love them all, and don't think I'm going to tell you anything is 'dying' here... but here we go:
PHP 4.3 - Works well for small projects because you can pump scripts out REALLY FAST. However, if you want to make something big and complicated, you have to REALLY know how to hack around the language. Has FANTASTIC documentation and a large community of developers making great extensions. PHP is the kind of langauge that you can be assured that your code won't have much of a problem getting setup wherever you take it.
However, PHP runs pitifully slow, is buggy, and brain dead design features such as magic-quotes, register-globals, object assignment copies instead of references (REALLY BAD), segfaults on stack overflows, inconsistent naming conventions (Ex: nl2br(htmlspecialchars(str_replace($x, $y, $z)))), etc. PHP is what I like to call a, "good enough" langauge and isn't a bad choice, just don't shoot yourself in the foot with the bad features.
(Off-topic: I pretty much think the only reason this language became so popular is because Perl was far too steeped in Unix culture for people who grew up on Windows and ASP costs money and was less availible)
JSP/Servlets - Difficult to setup, consumes a lot of memory, but runs faster than all the scripting languages. Unlike PHP, if you're distributing your code, your users won't be able to just throw it in a directory and have it work.
Because you're using Java, you get all it's plusses. For example, Java has a very, "there is only one way to do it" philosophy, making it great for a large team of developers and future developers. Definately the best for scalability, speed, and complicated applications.
Perl: Like PHP, this is also widely supported. The catch is Perl isn't a friendly language to Windows culture and is losing popularity. It has great documentation, but people these days just can't seem to figure out man pages. Perl is also quite fast relative to PHP. Perl doesn't scale well because it's not intended for large-scale OOP development. Perl's "there is more than one way to do it" philosophy is not great for a large team of developers, because the last thing you need is individuality in a corporate team setting (must... not... betray... hacker values...) But for small to medium applications, it's a solid choice.
C/C++ - Development time and bug-fixing time is VERY HIGH compared to Java/Perl/PHP. C is really only appropriately used for writing speed-critical functions that you can link in to your scripts. C++ is a tolerable choice for writing the bulk of the application.
Generally when you need absolute stability, you'll pick an old kernel version (like 2.4.x) that has been closed on development for years and just patched for bugs.
This development model will make kernel releases less buggy, but someone making a mission critical server probably isn't going to be persuaded to get the latest release. Due to the nature of open source and the volume of Linux users, bugs get hammered over time out no matter what development model Torvalds uses.
Didn't Torvalds once say something along the line that 'perfect is the enemy of good' when criticizing BSD? Is he moving away from 'good-enough' with lots of features constantly coming out, towards a more BSD-esque, move along slowly with stable-code philosophy?
There will only be conflict if extremists on either side create one. As long as the consumer has the right to choose, both sides should be able to reconsile and respect a different point of view.
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"Is keeping prices artificially low actually illegal? Governments normally support anything that benefits the consumer."
The reason this sort of price fixing is illegal is because what originally happened was businesses would lower prices to drive out the competition while taking a big loss. Once the competition was gone, they would artificially inflate their prices to gain a huge profit and there would be no competition to stop them.
Soon they'll have nothing left to do at all..
But they'll still be collecting salaries in the 100-200k range.
In situations such as this, what you're saying makes sense; however, the law is so complicated, extensive, and silly that it can be difficult for someone who isn't a lawyer in the business world to NOT break the law. Of course this truth applies more to certain types of businesses than others. The question is, where do you draw the line and put the officers of a company away for what the company did? (For example, if I incorporate as Murder, Inc. and start pumping lead through the streets of my New York under the authority of my corporation, I'm obviously going to jail.)
Forgive me if I'm incorrect here, but the 7-core cell processor that is shipping in the PS3 has a thoeretical max performance of 218 GFLOPS according to Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_gam e_consoles_(seventh_generation))
/hell/ said the PS3 was expensive?
Now the 500th fastest computer in the world has a speed of 1645 GFLOPS (http://www.top500.org/lists/2005/11/basic/5)
So essentially, all I would have to do is purchase eight PS3 systems for 5000 bucks, beowulf cluster, and I'll have one of the 500 fastest computers in the world.... And that's not even counting the GPU. Not to mention the fact that the hardware is built for Linux and requires NO hacking.
Who the
It is official; Manchester University confirms: Men are smarter than women.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered female community when the regents of the University of Manchester confirmed that the average female IQ has dropped yet again, now down to at least 5 points less than the average male.
Coming on the heels of a recent study conducted by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn which plainly states that women consistently score lower on IQ tests, this news serves to reinforce what mankind has known for millenia. Prior conceptions of female intelligence are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by the overwhelming ratio of male to female Nobel prize winners.
You don't need to be a chauvinist to predict womankind's future benefit to society. The hand-writing is on the wall: Females face a bleak future in fields requiring higher cognizant abilities such as science and engineering. In fact there won't be any future at all for women in science and engineering because women simply won't be able to be able to compete with their male colleagues. Things are looking very bad for women. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Based on IQ test scores from 80,000 people and 20,000 students, the average score for women was 5 points less than the average score for men. Twice as many men as women scored 125, only serving to raise the intellectual glass ceiling. At scores of 155, associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman.
All major studies show that women are consistently less intelligent than men. Women are simply not suited for higher level thinking and long term survival prospects in science/engineeringare very dim. Showingly, women chose not to enter such fields even when they were considered intellectually equal. 20th century notions of female equality continue to decay as old maxims are vindicated.
Nothing short of a miracle could save a woman's self respect at this point in time. Women are becoming increasingly irrelevent as our society focuses more on science/engineering. For all practical purposes, women serve no purpose other than bearing male children.
FACT: Men are smarter than women
I'll let you track and profit from everything I do if you let me track and profit from everything you do. Complete discloser in both direction. Anything less is unacceptable.
Well next time you delete that Google tracking cookie, remember that you can download all the information they publish to shareholders and press releases any time you want.
After reading this article, it is clear to me that this man is trying more to get attention than he is trying to present an objective argument. > [...] I hate Linux. I think it's the most over rated piece of software ever built and survives simply out of spite and not because it is terribly good at doing something because it is not! > [...] as most of the people developing Linux probably sit at night writing up malicious code for windows! These comments are so far out there in terms of prejudice that there is no way this man could actually have a goal of creating a legitimate argument.
Microsoft and Yahoo's new formula for success on the web seems to be: Do whatever Google does!
Can you blame them for holding back on announcing the discovery? After all, it would be very embarassing to the astronomer community to retract such an important discovery, like the chemists did with Ununoctium.
Of course I use it as an Apache module... And to be honest. It's good that you mentioned the optimizer; however, when reviewing a language, I don't think it's a great idea to include third-party 'bails-you-out' software in the judgement.
I've written big apps in PHP where there can be about six parent classes for a page's class and it will end up taking 200 ms to load on load-free P4 Prescott machine. It's acceptable because this app isn't going to be used by thousands of persons simultaneously.
I know quite a few languages, and I write web apps for a living. I love them all, and don't think I'm going to tell you anything is 'dying' here... but here we go:
PHP 4.3 - Works well for small projects because you can pump scripts out REALLY FAST. However, if you want to make something big and complicated, you have to REALLY know how to hack around the language. Has FANTASTIC documentation and a large community of developers making great extensions. PHP is the kind of langauge that you can be assured that your code won't have much of a problem getting setup wherever you take it.
However, PHP runs pitifully slow, is buggy, and brain dead design features such as magic-quotes, register-globals, object assignment copies instead of references (REALLY BAD), segfaults on stack overflows, inconsistent naming conventions (Ex: nl2br(htmlspecialchars(str_replace($x, $y, $z)))), etc. PHP is what I like to call a, "good enough" langauge and isn't a bad choice, just don't shoot yourself in the foot with the bad features.
(Off-topic: I pretty much think the only reason this language became so popular is because Perl was far too steeped in Unix culture for people who grew up on Windows and ASP costs money and was less availible)
JSP/Servlets - Difficult to setup, consumes a lot of memory, but runs faster than all the scripting languages. Unlike PHP, if you're distributing your code, your users won't be able to just throw it in a directory and have it work.
Because you're using Java, you get all it's plusses. For example, Java has a very, "there is only one way to do it" philosophy, making it great for a large team of developers and future developers. Definately the best for scalability, speed, and complicated applications.
Perl: Like PHP, this is also widely supported. The catch is Perl isn't a friendly language to Windows culture and is losing popularity. It has great documentation, but people these days just can't seem to figure out man pages. Perl is also quite fast relative to PHP. Perl doesn't scale well because it's not intended for large-scale OOP development. Perl's "there is more than one way to do it" philosophy is not great for a large team of developers, because the last thing you need is individuality in a corporate team setting (must... not... betray... hacker values...) But for small to medium applications, it's a solid choice.
C/C++ - Development time and bug-fixing time is VERY HIGH compared to Java/Perl/PHP. C is really only appropriately used for writing speed-critical functions that you can link in to your scripts. C++ is a tolerable choice for writing the bulk of the application.
Generally when you need absolute stability, you'll pick an old kernel version (like 2.4.x) that has been closed on development for years and just patched for bugs. This development model will make kernel releases less buggy, but someone making a mission critical server probably isn't going to be persuaded to get the latest release. Due to the nature of open source and the volume of Linux users, bugs get hammered over time out no matter what development model Torvalds uses.
Didn't Torvalds once say something along the line that 'perfect is the enemy of good' when criticizing BSD? Is he moving away from 'good-enough' with lots of features constantly coming out, towards a more BSD-esque, move along slowly with stable-code philosophy?
There will only be conflict if extremists on either side create one. As long as the consumer has the right to choose, both sides should be able to reconsile and respect a different point of view.