Yes, you know what all of the things you cited as "doing fine" have in common?
They are used to run products produced by large corporations for consumer sale.
You know what they also have in common? Virtually nobody buying those products ever modifies the source code.
I didn't say GPL was "holding it back," I said the attitude that "you can just go hire somebody to write the software you wants" is holding back desktop Linux, and it will not encourage people to adopt Android "because they can mod the software on their device."
The only people modifying their software are the companies that produce the device, and a handful of hobbyists.
Dumb argument. Candidates change, making the "same action" quite different. Unless you mean to suggest that a vote for Barack Obama is the same as a vote for George Bush, and a vote for Sarah Palin is the same as a vote for Nancy Pelosi.
And you won't date because some time in the past you got dumped
If you dated a girl and got dumped, then started dating that same girl again... yeah, you'd be kind of stupid to not expect similar outcomes. That doesn't mean that dating Mary will turn out the same as dating Lori.
And you won't post on slashdot because it doesn't change anything
About the only reasonable statement you've made here. This isn't a place where people discuss things, it's a place where people shout at one another... so yeah, I don't expect anything written here to change minds. It's just fun to shout.
Apple makes a point of not being "main-stream."
Proving that you very much do NOT understand Apple's business model. How many millions of iPods have they sold? iPads? iPhones? iMacs? Apple is certainly 'mainstream' by just about any measure of popularity. I submit you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody with a TV who isn't at least aware of the Apple brand. Apple does not avoid being 'mainstream,' they simply aren't willing to whore out their product design philosophy to make a quick buck. If everybody in the world woke up tomorrow and said, "I'm buying a Mac today, I'm done with this (Linux|Windows) crap," do you think Steve Jobs would be upset?
Many of the people who buy Apple would shrivel up in horror if they ever thought their i{$WHATEVER} was mainstream.
I suspect you'd be surprised at exactly how small a number of people would *actually* be upset with this. Maybe you should examine your prejudices more closely.
The end user of a computer program distributed under the GNU GPL has the right to hire any developer to improve the program.
They also have the right to do the cheaper, more convenient thing:
Buy the commercial Windows or Mac OS version of the software and run that.
Still wondering why you still haven't seen the "Year of the Linux Desktop" yet? You just nailed it in a single sentence.
Re:Error 503: Too late, bittorrent already invente
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Some day, in a perfect utopia,*we* will rule the world -- that means that everyone will know what is right and do accordingly, thus, our ruling of the world will be the absence of the need to do so -- it would be a Perfect Anarchy.
Yeah, because the "open" guys have really shown that they know how to all control their egos and make sure everything they do is in the best interests of the "community", and not in the pursuit of some ridiculous need to flex an e-peen or get the last word.
I predict the first day you declare your utopia has been achieved, at least 3 people will fork it because they can't abide by trivial differences in your set of rules, and several dozen blog posts will go up lamenting the shoddy architecture and insecure design of your utopia, and talk about how short-sighted you are to have not anticipated these issues.
Because that's how your vaunted community works in actuality. Thank you, but as someone else mentioned, we'll be -- blessedly -- long dead before this hellish 'utopia' comes to pass. God save us from technical savants with the will to power and limited or nonexistent social skills.
The beauty of the system is, you could always go build one of the "big corps" and get listened to, or spend all your money on pursuing space travel, rather than grouse about how other people won't fund your science fiction fantasies.
they will eventually reposition themselves not as a consumer brand, but as a company that enables you to get things done.
That approach works well for Apple, and in fact, it's almost exclusively the focus of their advertising now - "Look at what you can get DONE with Mac OS X / iPhone / iPad". Even in the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campaign, they focused on highlighting how the Mac makes things easier while poking fun at the PC.
True, but don't forget that Apple, Android, and even WebOS have a several-year head start on Microsoft in the mobile space.
Several years.
That's a lot of lost ground to recapture before you can even begin to overtake any of them.
Start out slow and clunky, learn, get better, then slaughter.
Zune was DoA. Kin was DoA. Courier was vaporware. XBox 360 bet heavily on HD-DVD, and lost.
Was Vista part of the "getting better" process? IE6 stagnated for years until they were forced to begin upgrades again by Firefox. WP7 is several years behind its competitors, and for all its promise, it still has to make up that lag if it wants to seriously compete.
This is not to say that MSFT is a 'dead' or 'dying' company. But they've gotten complacent as the 800-pound gorilla, and other companies are capitalizing on their inability to adapt & move quickly, and in many cases, beating the pants off them. I think Microsoft's success is far from guaranteed, and it's clear that they are mostly in a reactive mode, rather than an "innovate & open new markets" mode -- they're *responding* to Apple & Android tablets. They're *responding* to Apple and Android phones. They're *responding* to the iPod. They're *responding* to other gaming consoles, other browsers, other search engines, other social networks. And every misstep they make, you can bet one of their competitors will capitalize on it.
If they don't get out of that reactive mode, they will slide towards irrelevance, and end up a "me too" brand on the market. It's not that MSFT is a "bad" company - they have a lot of bright people working there. But I don't think management has a clear strategic vision for the company, and it shows in the clear "nobody will take this segment seriously until there's a *MICROSOFT* product there" attitudes that Ballmer et. al convey. Nobody was going to take the iPhone seriously. Nobody was going to take the iPad seriously. Nobody would want an iPod once Zune was available. That's coasting, not leading.
That's a fair enough objection - I can't really speak for mages, I've got a very low-level one who I've messed around on occasionally, but no real serious experience. For some reason I keep coming back to my pally & my priest, and I've been pretty happy with the changes so far.
My impression of the paladin changes are that they're fine - a little more time when tanking to use some other utility talents rather than simply mashing the 6-9-6-9-6-9 rotation to keep up threat - 3 holy power + shield slam puts up some pretty amazing threat. But as hybrids, pallies have an inherently different playstyle and flavor to each tree, so I can certainly see that having 3 trees all dedicated to the same role might make it harder to differentiate for the pure dps classes.
I dual-specced for disc/shadow, and primarily run pve. Before the patch, we had "one true spec" for pve shadow (14/0/57), and at most, a couple of free talent points at the end of a disc build to customize with. Holy used to offer the most versatility in terms of spec - you could focus on improving your direct-healing single-target heals, or you could buff your aoe & hots, or go for the 'comic relief' build and pick up Lightwell. I haven't spent any time as holy since about halfway through Ulduar, though, so I'm not sure how the new talent trees look for holy.
And yet we regularly spend $15-20 at the movies for 90 minutes of entertainment. $40 if you bring your girl and get some popcorn.
$10/hr, for a $60 game which gives you 6 hours of entertainment, really doesn't sound that expensive.
And if you want more complex games, go play more complex games, and don't buy the ez-bake fps games. Learn to play chess - get started quickly, years to master.
Hunters used to need to take care of ammo counts and bags.
How are any of these things "fun", though? Let's see:
"YES! I have to constantly remember to pack my bags before I leave town and stock up on useless gold-sink items like spell reagents and ammo." (Fun for whom? Accountants? Travel consultants?)
"YES! I have to devote a bag slot to carrying around a stack of wood so that I can light a fire to cook something to eat. Start the party... NOW!" (Fun for whom?)
"YES! I can spend 15 minutes riding around pointlessly to get to a battleground NPC or a summoning stone!" (Unless you're on a PvP server and enjoy world PvP, this is only possibly fun for the person ganking you while you're in transit.)
They've just dumbed down the whole stats and talenting system, so there will be even fewer cookie-cutter character builds.
The point of those changes was to make the talent points more interesting. Was it really "fun" to grind for 3 levels to get 3 talent points to increase the damage of your main attack by 2/3/6%? Wow. Thrill a minute stuff there. I'd argue that those changes actually have made the talent builds less cookie-cutterish, and encourage you to pick up some of the more fun / PvP / utility talents, because the tree isn't stuffed with a bunch of "Increase crit chance by 1%" talents, which aren't 'fun' in any sense of the word. I'd say my shadow priest's talent tree is a LOT more 'fun' to play (and easier to spec) than it used to be, more versatile (my spec functions passably well in bg's AND pve now), and the gear & combat ratings system has gotten simpler to compare new gear.
If you enjoy sitting there plugging values into a spreadsheet for an hour or two every evening, then yeah, WoW is less "fun" now because they've simplified things. If you don't (and most people don't) enjoy spreadsheets, then WoW let's you get to the "fun" stuff more readily now.
I'd say that a lot of the "dumbing down" of WoW has involved stripping out unnecessary and pointless complexity
Yes, that single paper does say that their analysis is a fairly short period of rising prices. But it then goes on to say:
Like Nasdaq market makers refusing to answer their phones during the 1987 stock market crash, algorithmic liquidity suppliers may simply turn off their machines when markets spike downward.
However if you read the other article I linked about the May 2010 "Flash Crash," you'll see that the SEC also concluded that some of them remained quite active in trading throughout the decline - lending some support to the notion that they have positive effects in the "more turbulent or declining" markets discussed by the Journal of Finance article.
The takeaway here is, once again, not that HFT is "unambiguously good and needs no regulation or oversight." Neither is it true that it is unambiguously evil, and in need of complete banning, which is more or less what is being suggested by many people throughout this thread.
Nice troll. You might try reading the full statement I made, which was:
If you refuse to participate in the process at all other than to show up on election day and check a box on the ballot, don't expect to have a large voice in shaping the political landscape.
In other words - if you refuse to play during the regular season, don't then start complaining that nobody will pass you the fucking ball during the championship game. There are plenty of ways to take part in the system, and in fact, change the system - none of them involve "making anonymous snarky comments on slashdot" as a major component of their strategy.
As far as me giving "zero consideration to alternatives," I'm willing to discuss them, and in fact in several responses to other folks above, you can see that I *have* asked what they feel would be a more sensible alternative system. So - what do you have to suggest as an alternative for me to give more than zero consideration to?
Or were you just trolling because you're like, upset with the system and stuff, man?
"System" here not being representative democracy, of course, but rather the peculiar US voting system.
Okay, I can't disagree that the current slate of candidates are pretty awful. But what would you suggest as a better alternative system? I'm not suggesting one doesn't exist, I'm honestly curious what you feel would be a better / more equitable arrangement for voting?
How do you get a more diverse slate of candidates to run (and get them elected) when people are checking out of the voting process altogether? And what system would encourage third party candidacies more than the current one, and what features does such a system need that our current one does not have?
I'm genuinely curious, because I haven't seen much of an argument for why these things can't be accomplished within the current framework - to me, it seems like laziness coupled with apathy breeds this 'checkout' mentality, and I wonder what the civil rights movement would look like today if this had been the norm in the 50's and 60's. What practical changes need to happen for us to reach a state you'd consider not-broken?
I'm glad I made you profoundly uncomfortable. This is how I feel about our political system all the time.
Fair enough - I haven't reached the point where I'd say that the system is irredeemably broken. I can see where someone might throw their hands up and say "fuck this shit, it's all broken," but I'm not willing to conclude that at this point.
For the sake of argument, which of these options would you recommend if the system were well and truly rigged? None of them seem appropriate to me. Participating in a broken system only legitimizes it.
I'd say none of them are particularly appropriate. If it is, as you suggest, completely dysfunctional and broken, then the solution *is* revolution, and replacement with a better alternative - a blend of #2, and #3, I suppose. Hopefully your new country has a better time of implementing democracy than the countries I mentioned in #3.
But the issue I see is that the system we live in is expressly built to have representatives changed every few years, and that's why I think #1 is more or less our default state these days - it's a lot of work to get involved, engage other people in a real discussion of issues, and push for real, lasting change. It's a lot easier to sit at home (or here on Slashdot) and gripe about how all the candidates suck, and we oughta just get rid of the whole system.
But the question that point demands is: replace it with what? If the solution is more or less a 'reboot' of what we have, then get to work making it happen, no need for a civil war, just get new people elected to office, and hold them accountable for results. If the solution is something radically different... what would you propose?
I don't believe that it's a lost cause, and I volunteer for and support third party candidates. I also engage my friends, family, co-workers, and others in political discussion as often as I reasonably can, and encourage them to do the same. If the millions of people who opt out of the whole process did the same instead, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.
Also, our rights are protected by the constitution? Where have you been?
I chose that phrase for a reason - our rights *are* protected by the constitution. This does not guarantee that the *government* always behaves in a manner reflective of those principles. And we should absolutely be throwing any politician out of office who suggests that they have the right to disregard the constitution.
But we don't hold them responsible for their results. Both of them made mistakes, but the 'party faithful' can't or won't look at their track records objectively.
What I get from this whole attitude is that people want to have things exactly how they want, but they can't be arsed to work for it - they want it handed to them with no cost or effort. Is there something about the system today that makes it impossible (as in, 'it can't be done,' not 'it takes work') for change to happen? Is there some factor I'm missing that prevents them from being involved, or organizing other like-minded citizens together to push for changes and put new candidates forward?
Of course not. I'm just one person. Does your vote trump the wishes of millions of people who don't have enough faith in the system to even show up?
Votes are given in the context of the system they claim they've lost faith in - if you choose to 'opt out' of the system, then yes, my vote counts for more in that system than the wises of the millions who have chosen to not participate. Find a candidate you agree with, and get them on the ballot if the choices available are so unpalatable.
Until people stop seeing the political process as a ternary choice (Democrat; Republican; Abstain, no other choice possible), it will *continue* to be a ternary choice, and that simply plays into the wishes of both the Republican and the Democratic parties.
What I described was the situation Apple would have to confront if, as the post I replied to suggested, "what developers think is irrelevant," and thereby concluding that Android wouldn't be a long-term threat to iOS.
If Apple drives developers away, or lets Android lure them away, where do you think the developers will go, exactly, and where do you think the consumers will go once they realize that the Android phones are no more expensive than iPhones, and offer cool new features that the devs won't bother porting?
Right, because their options in the market were... what, exactly, when the iPhone came out?
Remind me again - which consumer smartphones were available when the iPhone debuted? Windows was a turd. Blackberries were business phones. Palm was more or less dead.
The market has changed, and iOS has viable competition now. But I suppose you think that refusing to compete is how a company goes about attracting new customers and retaining existing customers?
If the people cannot agree on a leader to support, then it's time to dissolve the institution and start over.
I'm unable to fully articulate how uncomfortable this statement makes me.
It takes a peculiar sense of entitlement to say "If you all won't agree and give me a pre-made set of choices which match my desires perfectly, I'll take my ball and go home." If you want a candidate who agrees 100% with you - run for office. If you don't like the democratic or republican candidate - support a third party candidate that does agree with your views. Elections don't happen randomly, with no advanced notice. You have plenty of time to educate yourself, decide which candidates to support (or whether or not to run yourself). Refusing to participate, and then demanding that everybody else allow their government be dissolved to honor the fact that your wishes weren't met (even though you did nothing to go out and try and make them come true yourself) is a childish notion.
If you refuse to participate in the process at all other than to show up on election day and check a box on the ballot, don't expect to have a large voice in shaping the political landscape.
Thomas Jefferson said something to the effect of, "The people get the rulers they deserve." He was right. Your options are: 1) Don't participate, and just grumble about the choices other people make; 2) Participate actively in shaping your political system & your society, secure in the knowledge that even if your guy loses, your rights are protected under the constitution, and you can continue trying to bring people around to your way of thinking; 3) Let your society collapse into a patchwork of warring tribal factions (See: Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan), with power falling to the most ruthles.
Saying, "Right, Hatta wasn't happy with the results, let's do it all over again, and let's get some new candidates on stage this time," is a recipe for #3. Your wishes do not trump the wishes of millions of other people who did take the time to support candidates & go out and vote.
So complacency leading to long term irrelevance is a valid business strategy now?
As I said, I *like* iOS, and I like Apple's approach. But nowhere in the history of business will you find precedent to support your suppositions. I don't know what you're basing your conclusions on, except some sort of blind devotion.
"We've had tons of customers for a long time, so that'll never change no matter what happens," is not a business strategy.
And if iOS is the best platform ever, but no developers are developing for it... consumers (eventually) won't buy it, because they can get all the cool apps and features they want on Android.
I like iOS, don't get me wrong. I also think Google missed a huge opportunity to do right by consumers by forcing some of the 'if you want to call it Android, customers must be able to do X, Y, Z with this OS" issues (which may have prevented some of the increasingly carrier-restricted things we're seeing in Android). But you can't pretend that stock iOS devices with no developers putting out apps for them are going to compete with "anything goes" Android which will only continue to grow more polished & more functional over time.
iOS needs to compete for developers to stay relevant in the mobile space, and I think at some point Apple is going to have to either open iOS up to installing arbitrary packages without going through them, or throw out their guidelines and say "we will only stop listings where there is obvious bad behavior." I think they're more likely to allow arbitrary installs - then it's "You install it, your risk. Our app store is still clean & curated." - but allowing that would kill most of the serious criticism of iOS as an Android competitor. People will still carp about it being "not open source," but that's mostly irrelevant to the consumers, if they can install whatever software they want on the phone. Apple probably wouldn't lose a *significant* amount of business from the App Store by doing this, either. It'd make apps sort of like mp3s - Apple operates a store that they think is the best way to buy music, but if you want to buy through Amazon, or Emusic, or rip your own, well... you can still use them on your Apple device.
At this point, I'm most interested to see how iOS fares once the iPhone is available on more than one carrier in the US. I think the question that remains to be answered is, are people buying Android handsets because the iPhone isn't available on their carrier, and they don't want to switch to AT&T? Or are people buying Android handsets because they prefer them to the iPhone? I haven't seen any comparison of Android vs. iPhone sales specific to AT&T, so it'll be an interesting scenario to watch play out.
It's people making lots of money in ways that are completely inaccessible to the rest of us.
As I asked in an earlier follow-up in this thread: should nobody be allowed to build skyscrapers, because the tools, techniques, and capital required are 'inaccessible to the rest of us'? Numerous mathematical studies of the market (I linked one of them earlier as well) show that HFTs have a net-positive effect on the market, including (but not necessarily limited to) increasing liquidity, damping volatility, and reducing per-trade costs by fostering competition among brokerages.
You can doubt that's the case, but until you can point me to your analyses published in a reputable financial journal, I'm inclined to believe the guys with the economics degrees and publications.
But maybe I happen to think that investing actually means holding onto something for more than a fraction of a second and that the value of a company cannot swing noticeable amounts from one second to the next for no apparent reason.
What's interesting is, again, that several studies have concluded that HFTs don't have any appreciable long-term impact on a stock's 'actual' price for the long-term investors, and that the existence of HFTs in a security acts as a damping mechanism to reduce volatility: when an HF algorithm notices a change, it's likely that it'll be moving quickly to take advantage of that change, which tends to drive the price back towards the 'real' value - think of it as constant minor course corrections, rather than a couple giant swerves & recoveries.
As I've also said elsewhere in this thread - none of this says that there is NO room for sensible regulation & oversight of high-frequency trading; however, the knee-jerk view of it here seems to be that it's "money for nothing, and so somebody is taking advantage of someone else and cheating the system," and that's simply not the case. HFT is not the unmitigated evil that most people here seem to think it is, and if you look at studies done on actual market performance and market data, they generally conclude that these activities have a net-positive (or, at worst, net-neutral) effect on other (long-term) investors in the market.
just an artifact of the researchers re-defining the problem after the fact to only include the flowers the bee visited on that particular trip
This is my first take on it as well. But we'll see... I'd definitely be interested to see the paper, I just suspect that it won't be as clear of a 'solution' to the TSP as the biology researcher suggests
Since a bee is flying, a simple change in wind direction would have a large impact on finding the best route and locations to stop at.
That's true, although you could still reduce it back to the TSP easily enough - optimize for 'minimal energy expenditure' instead of 'minimal distance,' since distance traveled factors into the energy expended. Of course, even that still varies in 'real world' conditions - breezes come and go and change direction, birds come by looking for a snack, a lawnmower destroys a dozen of the flowers you were 'planning' to visit; turns out that what looked like an optimal route 20 minutes ago may put you facing a hurricane-force headwind on the return trip, with half the flowers you planned to visit initially destroyed and no longer options for stopping.
If they're somehow choosing each leg in an attempt to visit a consistent set of nodes every time, in the same order, then I'd say there's some basis to say they're 'solving' this problem; if they're not doing that, it would be more like telling the Traveling Salesmen, "visit some cities until you get tired, and skip some if you just don't feel like going to them, or if a nuclear attack destroys them while you're en route."
My initial impulse is to say that it sounds like researchers are angling for a little crossover press & grant money by using a buzzword like "biomimetics." Doesn't mean there's nothing to the story, but I'm skeptical that it maps as well to the problem domain as TFS & TFA suggest.
After the big guys have made their money, are 150ms trades really any benefit to the rest of us compared to 250ms trades, 400ms trades, 5s trades?
Numerous analyses have indicated that yes, there is really a benefit to the rest of us, in reduced trade prices, smaller bid/ask spreads, lower market volatility, increased liquidity, and so on. These are economic analyses of the actual market data, not just knee-jerk "THEY'RE RICH FROM THE STOCK MARKET, therefore they must have done something evil" pronouncements on slashdot.
This is not to say that high-frequency trading requires no additional or no different oversight, or that we should stop enforcing our existing regulations - but 'high frequency trading' is not the devil people are making it out to be.
Everyone else claims that that's a smokescreen for some exclusive protected profit;
Some lines of business require a larger initial investment to get started in. Does the company that contracts to build a skyscraper do so at the expense of the contractor who builds a single-family house? Or do they both benefit from each others' activities in the market?
The existence of construction firms specializing in large projects - skyscrapers, dams, power plants, etc., does not do so as part of a nefarious scheme to keep the single-family ranch house contractor poor. The large company is better capitalized, has the necessary staffing, equipment, funding, and education to take on these tasks, and as such, reaps a profit on the work it is qualified for. Why should the stock market be any different?
High frequency traders are often well-funded with lots of capital, which gets circulated in the market creating benefits for everybody else, and creating a profit for the person injecting that capital. Legitimate barriers to entry (the need for a large amount of seed capital to get started) is not an intrinsic evil of any industry. If the government started saying "ONLY 4 large banks can engage in high-frequency trading," I'd agree with your pronouncement that they are getting some sort of 'protected' market.
But that's not the case. If you have a 20 million dollars or so to invest in developing high-frequency trade algorithms and technology, you could go ahead and enter that market, too, and you'd probably make a good profit at it.
Steep barriers to entry are not 'evil' - they are merely too high for someone without significant capital to invest, which means that only some people are able to take advantage of the market opportunity. If everybody in the building trades was restricted from building skyscrapers because not everybody could afford to start Modern Continental, that would not be a 'victory' for the small-scale contractor any more so than eliminating high-frequency trading would be a 'victory' for the small investor.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you know what all of the things you cited as "doing fine" have in common?
They are used to run products produced by large corporations for consumer sale.
You know what they also have in common? Virtually nobody buying those products ever modifies the source code.
I didn't say GPL was "holding it back," I said the attitude that "you can just go hire somebody to write the software you wants" is holding back desktop Linux, and it will not encourage people to adopt Android "because they can mod the software on their device."
The only people modifying their software are the companies that produce the device, and a handful of hobbyists.
Dumb argument. Candidates change, making the "same action" quite different. Unless you mean to suggest that a vote for Barack Obama is the same as a vote for George Bush, and a vote for Sarah Palin is the same as a vote for Nancy Pelosi.
If you dated a girl and got dumped, then started dating that same girl again... yeah, you'd be kind of stupid to not expect similar outcomes. That doesn't mean that dating Mary will turn out the same as dating Lori.
About the only reasonable statement you've made here. This isn't a place where people discuss things, it's a place where people shout at one another... so yeah, I don't expect anything written here to change minds. It's just fun to shout.
Proving that you very much do NOT understand Apple's business model. How many millions of iPods have they sold? iPads? iPhones? iMacs? Apple is certainly 'mainstream' by just about any measure of popularity. I submit you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody with a TV who isn't at least aware of the Apple brand. Apple does not avoid being 'mainstream,' they simply aren't willing to whore out their product design philosophy to make a quick buck. If everybody in the world woke up tomorrow and said, "I'm buying a Mac today, I'm done with this (Linux|Windows) crap," do you think Steve Jobs would be upset?
I suspect you'd be surprised at exactly how small a number of people would *actually* be upset with this. Maybe you should examine your prejudices more closely.
They also have the right to do the cheaper, more convenient thing:
Buy the commercial Windows or Mac OS version of the software and run that.
Still wondering why you still haven't seen the "Year of the Linux Desktop" yet? You just nailed it in a single sentence.
Yeah, because the "open" guys have really shown that they know how to all control their egos and make sure everything they do is in the best interests of the "community", and not in the pursuit of some ridiculous need to flex an e-peen or get the last word.
I predict the first day you declare your utopia has been achieved, at least 3 people will fork it because they can't abide by trivial differences in your set of rules, and several dozen blog posts will go up lamenting the shoddy architecture and insecure design of your utopia, and talk about how short-sighted you are to have not anticipated these issues.
Because that's how your vaunted community works in actuality. Thank you, but as someone else mentioned, we'll be -- blessedly -- long dead before this hellish 'utopia' comes to pass. God save us from technical savants with the will to power and limited or nonexistent social skills.
The beauty of the system is, you could always go build one of the "big corps" and get listened to, or spend all your money on pursuing space travel, rather than grouse about how other people won't fund your science fiction fantasies.
That approach works well for Apple, and in fact, it's almost exclusively the focus of their advertising now - "Look at what you can get DONE with Mac OS X / iPhone / iPad". Even in the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campaign, they focused on highlighting how the Mac makes things easier while poking fun at the PC.
True, but don't forget that Apple, Android, and even WebOS have a several-year head start on Microsoft in the mobile space.
Several years.
That's a lot of lost ground to recapture before you can even begin to overtake any of them.
Zune was DoA. Kin was DoA. Courier was vaporware. XBox 360 bet heavily on HD-DVD, and lost.
Was Vista part of the "getting better" process? IE6 stagnated for years until they were forced to begin upgrades again by Firefox. WP7 is several years behind its competitors, and for all its promise, it still has to make up that lag if it wants to seriously compete.
This is not to say that MSFT is a 'dead' or 'dying' company. But they've gotten complacent as the 800-pound gorilla, and other companies are capitalizing on their inability to adapt & move quickly, and in many cases, beating the pants off them. I think Microsoft's success is far from guaranteed, and it's clear that they are mostly in a reactive mode, rather than an "innovate & open new markets" mode -- they're *responding* to Apple & Android tablets. They're *responding* to Apple and Android phones. They're *responding* to the iPod. They're *responding* to other gaming consoles, other browsers, other search engines, other social networks. And every misstep they make, you can bet one of their competitors will capitalize on it.
If they don't get out of that reactive mode, they will slide towards irrelevance, and end up a "me too" brand on the market. It's not that MSFT is a "bad" company - they have a lot of bright people working there. But I don't think management has a clear strategic vision for the company, and it shows in the clear "nobody will take this segment seriously until there's a *MICROSOFT* product there" attitudes that Ballmer et. al convey. Nobody was going to take the iPhone seriously. Nobody was going to take the iPad seriously. Nobody would want an iPod once Zune was available. That's coasting, not leading.
That's a fair enough objection - I can't really speak for mages, I've got a very low-level one who I've messed around on occasionally, but no real serious experience. For some reason I keep coming back to my pally & my priest, and I've been pretty happy with the changes so far.
My impression of the paladin changes are that they're fine - a little more time when tanking to use some other utility talents rather than simply mashing the 6-9-6-9-6-9 rotation to keep up threat - 3 holy power + shield slam puts up some pretty amazing threat. But as hybrids, pallies have an inherently different playstyle and flavor to each tree, so I can certainly see that having 3 trees all dedicated to the same role might make it harder to differentiate for the pure dps classes.
I dual-specced for disc/shadow, and primarily run pve. Before the patch, we had "one true spec" for pve shadow (14/0/57), and at most, a couple of free talent points at the end of a disc build to customize with. Holy used to offer the most versatility in terms of spec - you could focus on improving your direct-healing single-target heals, or you could buff your aoe & hots, or go for the 'comic relief' build and pick up Lightwell. I haven't spent any time as holy since about halfway through Ulduar, though, so I'm not sure how the new talent trees look for holy.
And yet we regularly spend $15-20 at the movies for 90 minutes of entertainment. $40 if you bring your girl and get some popcorn.
$10/hr, for a $60 game which gives you 6 hours of entertainment, really doesn't sound that expensive.
And if you want more complex games, go play more complex games, and don't buy the ez-bake fps games. Learn to play chess - get started quickly, years to master.
How are any of these things "fun", though? Let's see:
"YES! I have to constantly remember to pack my bags before I leave town and stock up on useless gold-sink items like spell reagents and ammo." (Fun for whom? Accountants? Travel consultants?)
"YES! I have to devote a bag slot to carrying around a stack of wood so that I can light a fire to cook something to eat. Start the party... NOW!" (Fun for whom?)
"YES! I can spend 15 minutes riding around pointlessly to get to a battleground NPC or a summoning stone!" (Unless you're on a PvP server and enjoy world PvP, this is only possibly fun for the person ganking you while you're in transit.)
The point of those changes was to make the talent points more interesting. Was it really "fun" to grind for 3 levels to get 3 talent points to increase the damage of your main attack by 2/3/6%? Wow. Thrill a minute stuff there. I'd argue that those changes actually have made the talent builds less cookie-cutterish, and encourage you to pick up some of the more fun / PvP / utility talents, because the tree isn't stuffed with a bunch of "Increase crit chance by 1%" talents, which aren't 'fun' in any sense of the word. I'd say my shadow priest's talent tree is a LOT more 'fun' to play (and easier to spec) than it used to be, more versatile (my spec functions passably well in bg's AND pve now), and the gear & combat ratings system has gotten simpler to compare new gear.
If you enjoy sitting there plugging values into a spreadsheet for an hour or two every evening, then yeah, WoW is less "fun" now because they've simplified things. If you don't (and most people don't) enjoy spreadsheets, then WoW let's you get to the "fun" stuff more readily now.
I'd say that a lot of the "dumbing down" of WoW has involved stripping out unnecessary and pointless complexity
Yes, that single paper does say that their analysis is a fairly short period of rising prices. But it then goes on to say:
However if you read the other article I linked about the May 2010 "Flash Crash," you'll see that the SEC also concluded that some of them remained quite active in trading throughout the decline - lending some support to the notion that they have positive effects in the "more turbulent or declining" markets discussed by the Journal of Finance article.
The takeaway here is, once again, not that HFT is "unambiguously good and needs no regulation or oversight." Neither is it true that it is unambiguously evil, and in need of complete banning, which is more or less what is being suggested by many people throughout this thread.
Nice troll. You might try reading the full statement I made, which was:
In other words - if you refuse to play during the regular season, don't then start complaining that nobody will pass you the fucking ball during the championship game. There are plenty of ways to take part in the system, and in fact, change the system - none of them involve "making anonymous snarky comments on slashdot" as a major component of their strategy.
As far as me giving "zero consideration to alternatives," I'm willing to discuss them, and in fact in several responses to other folks above, you can see that I *have* asked what they feel would be a more sensible alternative system. So - what do you have to suggest as an alternative for me to give more than zero consideration to?
Or were you just trolling because you're like, upset with the system and stuff, man?
Okay, I can't disagree that the current slate of candidates are pretty awful. But what would you suggest as a better alternative system? I'm not suggesting one doesn't exist, I'm honestly curious what you feel would be a better / more equitable arrangement for voting?
How do you get a more diverse slate of candidates to run (and get them elected) when people are checking out of the voting process altogether? And what system would encourage third party candidacies more than the current one, and what features does such a system need that our current one does not have?
I'm genuinely curious, because I haven't seen much of an argument for why these things can't be accomplished within the current framework - to me, it seems like laziness coupled with apathy breeds this 'checkout' mentality, and I wonder what the civil rights movement would look like today if this had been the norm in the 50's and 60's. What practical changes need to happen for us to reach a state you'd consider not-broken?
Fair enough - I haven't reached the point where I'd say that the system is irredeemably broken. I can see where someone might throw their hands up and say "fuck this shit, it's all broken," but I'm not willing to conclude that at this point.
I'd say none of them are particularly appropriate. If it is, as you suggest, completely dysfunctional and broken, then the solution *is* revolution, and replacement with a better alternative - a blend of #2, and #3, I suppose. Hopefully your new country has a better time of implementing democracy than the countries I mentioned in #3.
But the issue I see is that the system we live in is expressly built to have representatives changed every few years, and that's why I think #1 is more or less our default state these days - it's a lot of work to get involved, engage other people in a real discussion of issues, and push for real, lasting change. It's a lot easier to sit at home (or here on Slashdot) and gripe about how all the candidates suck, and we oughta just get rid of the whole system.
But the question that point demands is: replace it with what? If the solution is more or less a 'reboot' of what we have, then get to work making it happen, no need for a civil war, just get new people elected to office, and hold them accountable for results. If the solution is something radically different... what would you propose?
I don't believe that it's a lost cause, and I volunteer for and support third party candidates. I also engage my friends, family, co-workers, and others in political discussion as often as I reasonably can, and encourage them to do the same. If the millions of people who opt out of the whole process did the same instead, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.
I chose that phrase for a reason - our rights *are* protected by the constitution. This does not guarantee that the *government* always behaves in a manner reflective of those principles. And we should absolutely be throwing any politician out of office who suggests that they have the right to disregard the constitution.
But we don't hold them responsible for their results. Both of them made mistakes, but the 'party faithful' can't or won't look at their track records objectively.
What I get from this whole attitude is that people want to have things exactly how they want, but they can't be arsed to work for it - they want it handed to them with no cost or effort. Is there something about the system today that makes it impossible (as in, 'it can't be done,' not 'it takes work') for change to happen? Is there some factor I'm missing that prevents them from being involved, or organizing other like-minded citizens together to push for changes and put new candidates forward?
Votes are given in the context of the system they claim they've lost faith in - if you choose to 'opt out' of the system, then yes, my vote counts for more in that system than the wises of the millions who have chosen to not participate. Find a candidate you agree with, and get them on the ballot if the choices available are so unpalatable.
Until people stop seeing the political process as a ternary choice (Democrat; Republican; Abstain, no other choice possible), it will *continue* to be a ternary choice, and that simply plays into the wishes of both the Republican and the Democratic parties.
No, I haven't missed that point at all.
What I described was the situation Apple would have to confront if, as the post I replied to suggested, "what developers think is irrelevant," and thereby concluding that Android wouldn't be a long-term threat to iOS.
If Apple drives developers away, or lets Android lure them away, where do you think the developers will go, exactly, and where do you think the consumers will go once they realize that the Android phones are no more expensive than iPhones, and offer cool new features that the devs won't bother porting?
Right, because their options in the market were... what, exactly, when the iPhone came out?
Remind me again - which consumer smartphones were available when the iPhone debuted? Windows was a turd. Blackberries were business phones. Palm was more or less dead.
The market has changed, and iOS has viable competition now. But I suppose you think that refusing to compete is how a company goes about attracting new customers and retaining existing customers?
I'm unable to fully articulate how uncomfortable this statement makes me.
It takes a peculiar sense of entitlement to say "If you all won't agree and give me a pre-made set of choices which match my desires perfectly, I'll take my ball and go home." If you want a candidate who agrees 100% with you - run for office. If you don't like the democratic or republican candidate - support a third party candidate that does agree with your views. Elections don't happen randomly, with no advanced notice. You have plenty of time to educate yourself, decide which candidates to support (or whether or not to run yourself). Refusing to participate, and then demanding that everybody else allow their government be dissolved to honor the fact that your wishes weren't met (even though you did nothing to go out and try and make them come true yourself) is a childish notion.
If you refuse to participate in the process at all other than to show up on election day and check a box on the ballot, don't expect to have a large voice in shaping the political landscape.
Thomas Jefferson said something to the effect of, "The people get the rulers they deserve." He was right. Your options are:
1) Don't participate, and just grumble about the choices other people make;
2) Participate actively in shaping your political system & your society, secure in the knowledge that even if your guy loses, your rights are protected under the constitution, and you can continue trying to bring people around to your way of thinking;
3) Let your society collapse into a patchwork of warring tribal factions (See: Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan), with power falling to the most ruthles.
Saying, "Right, Hatta wasn't happy with the results, let's do it all over again, and let's get some new candidates on stage this time," is a recipe for #3. Your wishes do not trump the wishes of millions of other people who did take the time to support candidates & go out and vote.
So complacency leading to long term irrelevance is a valid business strategy now?
As I said, I *like* iOS, and I like Apple's approach. But nowhere in the history of business will you find precedent to support your suppositions. I don't know what you're basing your conclusions on, except some sort of blind devotion.
"We've had tons of customers for a long time, so that'll never change no matter what happens," is not a business strategy.
I'll take lessons in good whiskey, joint-rolling, and entering firewall rules via the command line any day.
But maybe you could sub in a lesson about good scotch (or how to make a good mixed drink) instead of the whole thai lady-boy thing?
And if iOS is the best platform ever, but no developers are developing for it... consumers (eventually) won't buy it, because they can get all the cool apps and features they want on Android.
I like iOS, don't get me wrong. I also think Google missed a huge opportunity to do right by consumers by forcing some of the 'if you want to call it Android, customers must be able to do X, Y, Z with this OS" issues (which may have prevented some of the increasingly carrier-restricted things we're seeing in Android). But you can't pretend that stock iOS devices with no developers putting out apps for them are going to compete with "anything goes" Android which will only continue to grow more polished & more functional over time.
iOS needs to compete for developers to stay relevant in the mobile space, and I think at some point Apple is going to have to either open iOS up to installing arbitrary packages without going through them, or throw out their guidelines and say "we will only stop listings where there is obvious bad behavior." I think they're more likely to allow arbitrary installs - then it's "You install it, your risk. Our app store is still clean & curated." - but allowing that would kill most of the serious criticism of iOS as an Android competitor. People will still carp about it being "not open source," but that's mostly irrelevant to the consumers, if they can install whatever software they want on the phone. Apple probably wouldn't lose a *significant* amount of business from the App Store by doing this, either. It'd make apps sort of like mp3s - Apple operates a store that they think is the best way to buy music, but if you want to buy through Amazon, or Emusic, or rip your own, well... you can still use them on your Apple device.
At this point, I'm most interested to see how iOS fares once the iPhone is available on more than one carrier in the US. I think the question that remains to be answered is, are people buying Android handsets because the iPhone isn't available on their carrier, and they don't want to switch to AT&T? Or are people buying Android handsets because they prefer them to the iPhone? I haven't seen any comparison of Android vs. iPhone sales specific to AT&T, so it'll be an interesting scenario to watch play out.
Yeah, you can do a million things with potatoes. But what if, suddenly, there were no potatoes?
As I asked in an earlier follow-up in this thread: should nobody be allowed to build skyscrapers, because the tools, techniques, and capital required are 'inaccessible to the rest of us'? Numerous mathematical studies of the market (I linked one of them earlier as well) show that HFTs have a net-positive effect on the market, including (but not necessarily limited to) increasing liquidity, damping volatility, and reducing per-trade costs by fostering competition among brokerages.
You can doubt that's the case, but until you can point me to your analyses published in a reputable financial journal, I'm inclined to believe the guys with the economics degrees and publications.
What's interesting is, again, that several studies have concluded that HFTs don't have any appreciable long-term impact on a stock's 'actual' price for the long-term investors, and that the existence of HFTs in a security acts as a damping mechanism to reduce volatility: when an HF algorithm notices a change, it's likely that it'll be moving quickly to take advantage of that change, which tends to drive the price back towards the 'real' value - think of it as constant minor course corrections, rather than a couple giant swerves & recoveries.
As I've also said elsewhere in this thread - none of this says that there is NO room for sensible regulation & oversight of high-frequency trading; however, the knee-jerk view of it here seems to be that it's "money for nothing, and so somebody is taking advantage of someone else and cheating the system," and that's simply not the case. HFT is not the unmitigated evil that most people here seem to think it is, and if you look at studies done on actual market performance and market data, they generally conclude that these activities have a net-positive (or, at worst, net-neutral) effect on other (long-term) investors in the market.
This is my first take on it as well. But we'll see... I'd definitely be interested to see the paper, I just suspect that it won't be as clear of a 'solution' to the TSP as the biology researcher suggests
That's true, although you could still reduce it back to the TSP easily enough - optimize for 'minimal energy expenditure' instead of 'minimal distance,' since distance traveled factors into the energy expended. Of course, even that still varies in 'real world' conditions - breezes come and go and change direction, birds come by looking for a snack, a lawnmower destroys a dozen of the flowers you were 'planning' to visit; turns out that what looked like an optimal route 20 minutes ago may put you facing a hurricane-force headwind on the return trip, with half the flowers you planned to visit initially destroyed and no longer options for stopping.
If they're somehow choosing each leg in an attempt to visit a consistent set of nodes every time, in the same order, then I'd say there's some basis to say they're 'solving' this problem; if they're not doing that, it would be more like telling the Traveling Salesmen, "visit some cities until you get tired, and skip some if you just don't feel like going to them, or if a nuclear attack destroys them while you're en route."
My initial impulse is to say that it sounds like researchers are angling for a little crossover press & grant money by using a buzzword like "biomimetics." Doesn't mean there's nothing to the story, but I'm skeptical that it maps as well to the problem domain as TFS & TFA suggest.
Numerous analyses have indicated that yes, there is really a benefit to the rest of us, in reduced trade prices, smaller bid/ask spreads, lower market volatility, increased liquidity, and so on. These are economic analyses of the actual market data, not just knee-jerk "THEY'RE RICH FROM THE STOCK MARKET, therefore they must have done something evil" pronouncements on slashdot.
This is not to say that high-frequency trading requires no additional or no different oversight, or that we should stop enforcing our existing regulations - but 'high frequency trading' is not the devil people are making it out to be.
Some lines of business require a larger initial investment to get started in. Does the company that contracts to build a skyscraper do so at the expense of the contractor who builds a single-family house? Or do they both benefit from each others' activities in the market?
The existence of construction firms specializing in large projects - skyscrapers, dams, power plants, etc., does not do so as part of a nefarious scheme to keep the single-family ranch house contractor poor. The large company is better capitalized, has the necessary staffing, equipment, funding, and education to take on these tasks, and as such, reaps a profit on the work it is qualified for. Why should the stock market be any different?
High frequency traders are often well-funded with lots of capital, which gets circulated in the market creating benefits for everybody else, and creating a profit for the person injecting that capital. Legitimate barriers to entry (the need for a large amount of seed capital to get started) is not an intrinsic evil of any industry. If the government started saying "ONLY 4 large banks can engage in high-frequency trading," I'd agree with your pronouncement that they are getting some sort of 'protected' market.
But that's not the case. If you have a 20 million dollars or so to invest in developing high-frequency trade algorithms and technology, you could go ahead and enter that market, too, and you'd probably make a good profit at it.
Steep barriers to entry are not 'evil' - they are merely too high for someone without significant capital to invest, which means that only some people are able to take advantage of the market opportunity. If everybody in the building trades was restricted from building skyscrapers because not everybody could afford to start Modern Continental, that would not be a 'victory' for the small-scale contractor any more so than eliminating high-frequency trading would be a 'victory' for the small investor.