In fairness, the article ONLY 'suggests' otherwise. It doesn't report that these vans are 'roaming the streets,' or at least doesn't present any credible evidence of that. It simply says that they're being sold in vans which are certainly *capable* of 'roving the streets,' but there is nothing to suggest that they actually are.
Most of the article about its use indicates that it's being used in ports to scan incoming containers & vehicles, not just randomly driving down the street looking for a good T&A show. Doesn't mean it's NOT in use as such, but the price tag ($800k) also would suggest that these are not available for trivial usage on every side street in America.
MSNBC says "We're full of shit. What're you gonna do about it?"
Really? Because MSNBC's web site says:
Msnbc.com delivers “A Fuller Spectrum of News,” with the most compelling, diverse and visually engaging stories on your platform of choice.
I don't see anything about them claiming to be full of shit. Do you really think MSNBC delivers a "fuller spectrum" of news than anybody else?
This is not a defense of Fox - I agree that they're hypocritical and biased - but I think you're failing to demonstrate that Fox is "the most" hypocritical, and thus deserving of an extra helping of flak and ridicule than the other news organizations, who are also hypocritical and biased, and who also try to pretend that they are 'serious' journalists with no agenda to push.
You describe how market makers create liquidity, but not how HFT's create liquidity.
This presumes that market makers and HFTs are two mutually exclusive things, when in fact, they are not (or at least, not *necessarily*). Many HFTs are (officially or unofficially - depending on the exchange & their relationship to it), market makers as well. Even if they're not designated market makers, their presence helps reduce the spread that market makers are offering (they will buy and sell to take advantage of the spread, exerting pressure on the bid/ask prices to get closer and closer together), which makes investment more efficient for 'regular' traders.
As far as 'no risk' for HFTs, of course they have risk. They could lose money if a stock tanks just like anybody else, and they have to have a buyer or a seller in order to unload their positions. They are not (necessarily) required by the stock exchanges to stay in the market in bad conditions (designated market makers would be, unofficial ones wouldn't), such as during the "Flash Crash" back in May, but many of them stayed in anyway.
A report by the CME Group reported that high frequency traders had no discernible impact on the flash crash back in May: the report.
The SEC also found that they perhaps magnified the impact of the crash, but that many of them also stayed in the market... providing liquidity... throughout.
There *are* issues where HFT programs could (and should) be subject to more regulation - flash functionality (essentially, a 30ms-faster peek on large pending orders for people who pay a fee for it) is a big one, and has mostly been disallowed already by the exchanges I'm aware of. Use of dark pools is another one that could probably benefit from increased oversight.
Essentially, the trading volumes created by HFT (estimates I've seen range from 50-70% of market activity) help to smooth out the big swings which can be caused by large trades - they act as a damping mechanism on the volatility of the market, and several studies (here's one from the Journal of Finance) have found that algorithmic / HF trading has a net-beneficial effect on the market.
Running computerized systems doing things like stuffing and canceling etc for their own gain. But why is that they are not sued? They are the sanctioned ones.
Why don't you ask the Norwegian government, which is who went after the two traders you're up in arms over. The charges in Norway say that they didn't just "use the information to turn a profit in the market," it says they *manipulated stock prices* for their own gain.
As far as "perfect trading," one link provided is to a 'stock analyst' newsletter, and the other link shows that 'perfect quarters' don't seem to be as rare as you think they should be:
It was the first time Bank of America had a perfect quarter since acquiring Merrill Lynch in early 2009.
A JPMorgan spokesman said the last time the bank had a perfect run was the first quarter of 2003.
Goldman Sachs — which is fighting an S.E.C. suit claiming the bank defrauded customers on a complex mortgage investment — posted its first perfect quarter ever.
A Morgan Stanley spokesman said the firm’s last perfect run was the second quarter of 2007.
So 2 of them have had perfect runs in the last 12 quarters; a third in the last 7 years. Is it any wonder that they'd be very careful about their trading activities and oversight given the current regulatory climate and public opinion, and that that might result in them having a 'perfect quarter' at the beginning of 2010 in the midst of an economic recovery?
As for liquidity and spreed. 1 second trades would achieve both just as good as the current system as far as the over all market is concerned. Perhaps not for the 100us traders thou.
As for liquidity and spread, if you introduce an arbitrary 1 second latency for every one of the tens or hundreds of millions of orders crossing an exchange every day... what will that do for volume, volatility, and efficiency? Hint: it won't have a positive effect. And all it will do is lead to a pulse, every second, in which the big guys get their orders first in the execution queue, and mine are last - why? Because they'll still have the fastest connections, and the largest orders. Your proposal to add some arbitrary amount of latency solves nothing, and will not ever solve the problem you think it will.
I decide I want to sell 100 shares of MSFT today - right now - at a price of $25.27, and I intend to take my $2527 and invest it into ~8 shares of AAPL, trading at $310.25.
I put my shares out for sale... and... huh. I can't sell. Nobody's interested in buying right now, or I won't know if anybody is for a few hours because of some artificial latency introduced into the market. SO I wait.
And the offer comes back, somebody willing to buy my 100 shares for... $24 per share. Do I want to accept? Well, it's the only offer I've had to buy, so I guess I better take it.
So I take my $2400, and offer to buy shares of AAPL at 310.24. And I wait a few hours... and somebody's offered to sell me 7.5 shares at $320 per share.
In an 'efficient, liquid' market, I would have been able to make the sale of MSFT & AAPL immediately, and I would have lost less money in the process. HFTs are the ones buying my share of MSFT *right now*, expecting to turn around and sell those in a batch to someone else in about 20 minutes, for pennies (or fractions of pennies) of profit per share. I lose less money, they get a small amount of money per trade, and make it up in volume.
So, because there wasn't liquidity in the market, my $2527 worth of 100 MSFT shares turned into 7.5 shares of AAPL worth $2400, all because I couldn't find somebody willing to accept a trade quickly, so I could take advantage of the *current* market prices. Remember, bid/ask spreads aren't guaranteed to be "a penny or two."
1) Do bees always visit every flower (node) on the map?
2) Once they've calculated their "optimal" route, do they ever vary it?
3) If it's a heuristic - does it scale? Will it work for more than 100 flowers spread across something the size of my backyard? Or is the heuristic going to break down or become completely unworkable once the number of nodes reaches a certain point?
What we can say so far is that they "appear" to be solving the problem, for some limited subset of the problem space. In actuality, they may be using some very simple rules that approximate the solution for small numbers of nodes and distances, but which would result in inefficient or sub-optimal solutions on a larger scale.
In other words - I can catch a pop-fly to right field. Does that mean I can also use the same heuristics I'd use to catch a small object at low speeds over small distances to accurately launch a Patriot Missile to intercept an ICBM? The physics are the same, but a little jitter of a couple millimeters in my calculations when applied to a distance of several hundreds or thousands of kilometers will result in a pretty big miss.
High frequency traders in the market tend to lower the bid-ask spread for equities, meaning that the markets generally become more liquid (and thus less volatile) because you can take a position or sell a position more easily.
If everybody in the market is holding a position for long-term investment, think about what that does for equity prices: If there's a million shares of a company available, and nobody wants to buy? If there's a million buyers, and nobody's willing to sell because everybody in the market is a 'long term' trader?
Somebody who buys a stock with no intention of holding it for long term is essentially providing a 'loan' to the person they buy from, and relying on the fact that somebody else will buy the security they've just purchased for a slightly higher price than they bought it at to turn a profit on that 'loan'.
They also foster competition among brokerage houses, which reduces per-trade costs, which benefits everybody making a trade, including 'mom and pop' investors.
You're thinking in terms of "why does it matter if a single trade is delayed a few seconds," but the markets operates on hundreds of millions of trades from hundreds of millions of actors. Delay them all by a few seconds, or a minute, or hours, congratulations, you've just introduced HUGE inefficiency into the market, guaranteeing that the 'insiders' are the only ones who will ever make a profit, because they'll be the only ones with sufficient information to buy and sell well.
I'd be interested to read the full paper... looks like it won't be published until this week.
I have to wonder if it's simply local optimization that the bees are using - i.e., "Fly to a close flower not yet visited" - that starts looking like they're solving a much more complex problem? Are they visiting *every* flower on the "map"? Are they ever skipping some? Do they visit the flowers in exactly the same order, or is there variance from bee to bee (or between two trips from the same bee?)
It seems to me that a few simple rules ("visit closest flower from current flower that you haven't visited yet") might approximate the correct TS solution for small maps & limited nodes, but that it would become quite a bit harder to generalize that solution to larger sets of nodes & longer distances.
Is Flash, or is Flash NOT, pre-installed on a stock Ubuntu system?
If it is NOT, then you are downloading the package from a third party and installing it yourself.
I don't care what mechanism you use to download it and install it - once again, that is a matter of convenience and efficiency of downloading. Trying to pretend that being able to type "sudo apt-get install flash-player" somehow means that the Flash Player is preinstalled on a Ubuntu system is what's moronic.
The two men managed to work out how the computerised system would react to certain trading patterns. This allowed them to influence the price of low-volume stocks for their own gain.
Manipulating stock prices is what got them in trouble.
There is no value to equalizing prices in less than a second,
You are wrong, of course. They are providing liquidity in the market - which has tremendous value, if you understand how the markets actually work, and don't just assume they're there to funnel money from investors into scammers' pockets.
Should they not be compensated for providing that liquidity? They make a (small) profit on these trades, in return for providing a ready flow of cash to support other people trying to buy and sell.
I'm not sure why you don't seem to understand that what I put in as an example was just that - an example of brittle code.
You see, code has to be written by someone, and it doesn't matter what language you use, you can write stupid, brittle code in any language.
In light of that, the point is that brittle code is more of a problem of developer skill and process, rattier than some intrinsic property of "shell scripting," which was more or less what Eskarel opined above. I disagree with his definition of brittle coding, which says that if you change inputs or outputs from one piece of the tool, other pieces may break, because that is a property of ALL pieces of code, shell or script; if you change the way your components interface, you will have to adjust the pieces that depend on that output, or provide the inputs.
In my opinion, that has nothing to do with "brittleness," so I provided an example of what I think of when somebody uses the term "brittle."
Would you care to try again and tell me why I'm wrong? Or are you going to insist on violently agreeing with me some more?
Agreed. And it's something that a lot of FOSS advocates here lose sight of - in the grand scheme of things, "sticker prices" are a vanishingly small part of the total cost of ownership - choosing a piece of software *simply* because it's "free" doesn't make sense if it costs your organization 2x the cost to operate as you would have spent on licensing a 'closed' piece of software instead. You choose the best tool for the job you need to accomplish - sticker price should almost always be the *last* piece of the equation you look at - staffing & hardware costs to support the software in your organization will turn the purchase price into a rounding error in your total cost. If everything else is absolutely equivalent, then the free one should win... but I've yet to see an assessment come down purely to purchase cost (rather than functionality & ease of maintenance) - in the cases where the open-source tool has won out (Linux, apache, tomcat, perl, eclipse...), the 'free to use' bullet point has simply been an additional bonus above and beyond the other functionality & cost savings that drove the decision.
Thanks for that insightful comment. Would you care to explain what YOU consider to be 'brittle' programming, if you don't think the sample qualifies? Or did you just come here to underscore our understanding that brittle code is shitty?
If you think we're talking specifically about Flash, you're wrong.
You might want to review the history of this thread, because we are *specifically* talking about flash, and how it gets installed on Mac OS X and Linux.
I'm not sure why you'd conclude, in a conversation that is ALL about Flash, that Flash is somehow irrelevant.
It's like calling perl/python/C subroutines "brittle" because if you change the arguments or return values of any of them, all hell can break loose.
'Brittle' to me means that ridiculous assumptions don't hold true *often*, leading to breakage, like this gem I found the other day in a developer's installation script:
In other words - the envfile is "the single most recent tar file in the/tmp directory," with no checks or verification to ensure that it was the right one before you blasted it on into production.
That's what I'd call 'brittle' programming, anyway - likely to break, and break spectacularly because you haven't thought through your requirements clearly, or bothered to verify that inputs are reasonable and sane.
Of course, the paranoid in their tinfoil hats will read that and say "STEVE LIED." He's not that fucking stupid - the linked email exchange was from April of this year - 6 months ago. They obviously had the app store in the works back then, and he has a history of responding to large "loaded" questions with a very terse redirection.
The rumor communicated in the email linked above states: 1) A Mac App Store is coming; 2) Only apple-approved software will run on OS X;
Then asks, "is that true?" The answer: "Nope."
Now, given that 6 months ago, Steve Jobs couldn't have NOT known about an App Store being built... we can only conclude that he's either:
1) Lying, and lying on the record, with no care for whether or not people feel that he's betrayed them; 2) The second part of the rumor ('only apple-approved software will run...') is not true, making the rumor taken as a whole false.
How tight your tinfoil hat is will determine which explanation you think is most likely.
Historically, to manually install some GNU type software on a linux machine, you had to download the tarball, unpack it, and run a script that compiled the sources, and automatically put all of the resulting libraries and executables in a sane place. My guess is, most people don't do that these days.
I'm very familiar with the configure / make / make test / make install cycle, thank you. I've even written some autoconf-based build stuff myself. I actually built gcc recently, on both Sun and RHEL5, using more or less this process.
If it wasn't previously installed,
We've all agreed that flash isn't preinstalled on a stock build of Ubuntu.
Because of the un-free nature of flash, yes, apt does in fact fetch the tarball of the current edition of flash from Macromedias' site.
Thank you. That was the only thing in question - the answer then is, 'yes, the tool downloads FLash for you, and installs it on your system, because it's not there by default. The tool only knows to go and install Flash when you ask it to.'
So you want to install a new OS without root access?
I want to know which of these devices do not require you, with factory presets, to hack into your own device in order to install an "open" ROM. You're trying to divert attention with all this bullshit about "of course you need root access" - that was never in question. What I'm asking is, which of them provide documentation in some form telling you how to get root without having to hack your own device?
I'm amused. Clicking through the various phone models, have you noticed that they all start with:
"How do I root and install CyanogenMOD"?
And also contain such amusing notes as "DOING THIS WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY!"
Do ANY of these, with the exception of the Nexus One (which requires "unlocking the bootloader" anyway, and still voids your warranty) support installation of arbitrary Android ROMs without rooting?
Because the iPhone and the iPad are mobile devices which are not full-fledged 'general purpose computers,' whereas a computer running Mac OS X *is* a 'general purpose computer', and unless you're going to assert that you also believe every other computing platform will eventually morph into the mobile device version of the platform because this is an 'inevitable' consequence of someone wanting to make money, then you have no logical or historical precedent to make the assertion. What is so hard to understand about "phones and tablets" being different than "general purpose computers"?
At the same time, Apple has stated at least twice that they have no intention of 'locking down' the Mac OS X software like they have with the iPhone - once when the iPhone store debuted and people started with the "ZOMG THE SKY R FALLING" nonsense, and once in this past keynote, where Steve Jobs specifically said "this is one way to get software", not "this is the only way to get software."
Logically, the conclusion is that they consider the two devices separate categories, with separate operating systems, and are simply borrowing useful ideas from one OS to the other.
Are you really saying that within one sentence you went from asking about the original poster's opening phrase to his final question/speculation? If so, you were linking two separate things together as if they were one concept.
Well, since we've established that the "rumor" about optionally-installed frameworks is NOT a rumor, what the fuck else would I have been talking about, except his *speculation* and unsubstantiated 'what-if's' which he was clearly hoping to astroturf with? His post code be restated to say: "Fact has it that you can't install optionally installed frameworks. I'd like to submit that this is the first step in Apple's nefarious "control everything" scheme to the rumor mill."
There is zero credible evidence that Apple has any intention of 'locking down' Mac OS X. If you want to install Java, or Flash, or any other software that requires optional frameworks, you can't do it through the Mac App Store. That doesn't mean you can't do it, and you know it.
Anybody with two brain cells to rub together can see that "you can only install Apple-approved software" is a ridiculous fantasy because it would result in Apple committing suicide by anti-trust regulation and/or by consumer outrage, and I think we can both agree that Apple is, if nothing else, not a bunch of lackwits who can't understand how the consumer markets operate.
Your speculation is worst-case "ZOMG THE SKY R FALLINGZ!" alarmist nonsense that isn't even worth considering, much less lending credence to by pretending it's even remotely a likely outcome.
No, the "installer" is already present on your system, you are simply downloading data for the installer to process.
This is a ridiculous attempt to twist the words to mean what you want them to mean.
True or false: Without first downloading the flash player installer package from a repository or from adobe, you will be unable to view flash content on a default Ubuntu install. (Answer: TRUE)
If you have to go out over the network to download a package and install it, in order to view flash content, then the difference between Ubuntu and Mac OS X in this regard is one of *efficiency,* not of fundamental design difference: -- Ubuntu doesn't include it by default - you must install the package yourself. -- Mac OS X doesn't include it by default - you must install the package yourself.
The only difference is that on Ubuntu, it's a little easier, and perhaps a bit faster, to do that install. That is all.
Considering RPM uses both HTTP and FTP protocols, I think you could make a pretty convincing argument that that the package management software is downloading from a "web site". You can even set FTP & HTTP proxies for the tool to use for downloading - just like any other application that accesses the web.
Slashdot Mirror
In fairness, the article ONLY 'suggests' otherwise. It doesn't report that these vans are 'roaming the streets,' or at least doesn't present any credible evidence of that. It simply says that they're being sold in vans which are certainly *capable* of 'roving the streets,' but there is nothing to suggest that they actually are.
Most of the article about its use indicates that it's being used in ports to scan incoming containers & vehicles, not just randomly driving down the street looking for a good T&A show. Doesn't mean it's NOT in use as such, but the price tag ($800k) also would suggest that these are not available for trivial usage on every side street in America.
Really? Because MSNBC's web site says:
I don't see anything about them claiming to be full of shit. Do you really think MSNBC delivers a "fuller spectrum" of news than anybody else?
This is not a defense of Fox - I agree that they're hypocritical and biased - but I think you're failing to demonstrate that Fox is "the most" hypocritical, and thus deserving of an extra helping of flak and ridicule than the other news organizations, who are also hypocritical and biased, and who also try to pretend that they are 'serious' journalists with no agenda to push.
This presumes that market makers and HFTs are two mutually exclusive things, when in fact, they are not (or at least, not *necessarily*). Many HFTs are (officially or unofficially - depending on the exchange & their relationship to it), market makers as well. Even if they're not designated market makers, their presence helps reduce the spread that market makers are offering (they will buy and sell to take advantage of the spread, exerting pressure on the bid/ask prices to get closer and closer together), which makes investment more efficient for 'regular' traders.
As far as 'no risk' for HFTs, of course they have risk. They could lose money if a stock tanks just like anybody else, and they have to have a buyer or a seller in order to unload their positions. They are not (necessarily) required by the stock exchanges to stay in the market in bad conditions (designated market makers would be, unofficial ones wouldn't), such as during the "Flash Crash" back in May, but many of them stayed in anyway.
A report by the CME Group reported that high frequency traders had no discernible impact on the flash crash back in May: the report.
The SEC also found that they perhaps magnified the impact of the crash, but that many of them also stayed in the market... providing liquidity... throughout.
There *are* issues where HFT programs could (and should) be subject to more regulation - flash functionality (essentially, a 30ms-faster peek on large pending orders for people who pay a fee for it) is a big one, and has mostly been disallowed already by the exchanges I'm aware of. Use of dark pools is another one that could probably benefit from increased oversight.
Essentially, the trading volumes created by HFT (estimates I've seen range from 50-70% of market activity) help to smooth out the big swings which can be caused by large trades - they act as a damping mechanism on the volatility of the market, and several studies (here's one from the Journal of Finance) have found that algorithmic / HF trading has a net-beneficial effect on the market.
Why don't you ask the Norwegian government, which is who went after the two traders you're up in arms over. The charges in Norway say that they didn't just "use the information to turn a profit in the market," it says they *manipulated stock prices* for their own gain.
As far as "perfect trading," one link provided is to a 'stock analyst' newsletter, and the other link shows that 'perfect quarters' don't seem to be as rare as you think they should be:
So 2 of them have had perfect runs in the last 12 quarters; a third in the last 7 years. Is it any wonder that they'd be very careful about their trading activities and oversight given the current regulatory climate and public opinion, and that that might result in them having a 'perfect quarter' at the beginning of 2010 in the midst of an economic recovery?
As for liquidity and spread, if you introduce an arbitrary 1 second latency for every one of the tens or hundreds of millions of orders crossing an exchange every day... what will that do for volume, volatility, and efficiency? Hint: it won't have a positive effect. And all it will do is lead to a pulse, every second, in which the big guys get their orders first in the execution queue, and mine are last - why? Because they'll still have the fastest connections, and the largest orders. Your proposal to add some arbitrary amount of latency solves nothing, and will not ever solve the problem you think it will.
I decide I want to sell 100 shares of MSFT today - right now - at a price of $25.27, and I intend to take my $2527 and invest it into ~8 shares of AAPL, trading at $310.25.
I put my shares out for sale... and... huh. I can't sell. Nobody's interested in buying right now, or I won't know if anybody is for a few hours because of some artificial latency introduced into the market. SO I wait.
And the offer comes back, somebody willing to buy my 100 shares for... $24 per share. Do I want to accept? Well, it's the only offer I've had to buy, so I guess I better take it.
So I take my $2400, and offer to buy shares of AAPL at 310.24. And I wait a few hours... and somebody's offered to sell me 7.5 shares at $320 per share.
In an 'efficient, liquid' market, I would have been able to make the sale of MSFT & AAPL immediately, and I would have lost less money in the process. HFTs are the ones buying my share of MSFT *right now*, expecting to turn around and sell those in a batch to someone else in about 20 minutes, for pennies (or fractions of pennies) of profit per share. I lose less money, they get a small amount of money per trade, and make it up in volume.
So, because there wasn't liquidity in the market, my $2527 worth of 100 MSFT shares turned into 7.5 shares of AAPL worth $2400, all because I couldn't find somebody willing to accept a trade quickly, so I could take advantage of the *current* market prices. Remember, bid/ask spreads aren't guaranteed to be "a penny or two."
The questions this raises are:
1) Do bees always visit every flower (node) on the map?
2) Once they've calculated their "optimal" route, do they ever vary it?
3) If it's a heuristic - does it scale? Will it work for more than 100 flowers spread across something the size of my backyard? Or is the heuristic going to break down or become completely unworkable once the number of nodes reaches a certain point?
What we can say so far is that they "appear" to be solving the problem, for some limited subset of the problem space. In actuality, they may be using some very simple rules that approximate the solution for small numbers of nodes and distances, but which would result in inefficient or sub-optimal solutions on a larger scale.
In other words - I can catch a pop-fly to right field. Does that mean I can also use the same heuristics I'd use to catch a small object at low speeds over small distances to accurately launch a Patriot Missile to intercept an ICBM? The physics are the same, but a little jitter of a couple millimeters in my calculations when applied to a distance of several hundreds or thousands of kilometers will result in a pretty big miss.
The entire broad context of the market itself.
High frequency traders in the market tend to lower the bid-ask spread for equities, meaning that the markets generally become more liquid (and thus less volatile) because you can take a position or sell a position more easily.
If everybody in the market is holding a position for long-term investment, think about what that does for equity prices: If there's a million shares of a company available, and nobody wants to buy? If there's a million buyers, and nobody's willing to sell because everybody in the market is a 'long term' trader?
Somebody who buys a stock with no intention of holding it for long term is essentially providing a 'loan' to the person they buy from, and relying on the fact that somebody else will buy the security they've just purchased for a slightly higher price than they bought it at to turn a profit on that 'loan'.
They also foster competition among brokerage houses, which reduces per-trade costs, which benefits everybody making a trade, including 'mom and pop' investors.
You're thinking in terms of "why does it matter if a single trade is delayed a few seconds," but the markets operates on hundreds of millions of trades from hundreds of millions of actors. Delay them all by a few seconds, or a minute, or hours, congratulations, you've just introduced HUGE inefficiency into the market, guaranteeing that the 'insiders' are the only ones who will ever make a profit, because they'll be the only ones with sufficient information to buy and sell well.
I'd be interested to read the full paper... looks like it won't be published until this week.
I have to wonder if it's simply local optimization that the bees are using - i.e., "Fly to a close flower not yet visited" - that starts looking like they're solving a much more complex problem? Are they visiting *every* flower on the "map"? Are they ever skipping some? Do they visit the flowers in exactly the same order, or is there variance from bee to bee (or between two trips from the same bee?)
It seems to me that a few simple rules ("visit closest flower from current flower that you haven't visited yet") might approximate the correct TS solution for small maps & limited nodes, but that it would become quite a bit harder to generalize that solution to larger sets of nodes & longer distances.
Is Flash, or is Flash NOT, pre-installed on a stock Ubuntu system?
If it is NOT, then you are downloading the package from a third party and installing it yourself.
I don't care what mechanism you use to download it and install it - once again, that is a matter of convenience and efficiency of downloading. Trying to pretend that being able to type "sudo apt-get install flash-player" somehow means that the Flash Player is preinstalled on a Ubuntu system is what's moronic.
You should really read your own links:
Manipulating stock prices is what got them in trouble.
You are wrong, of course. They are providing liquidity in the market - which has tremendous value, if you understand how the markets actually work, and don't just assume they're there to funnel money from investors into scammers' pockets.
Should they not be compensated for providing that liquidity? They make a (small) profit on these trades, in return for providing a ready flow of cash to support other people trying to buy and sell.
I'm not sure why you don't seem to understand that what I put in as an example was just that - an example of brittle code.
You see, code has to be written by someone, and it doesn't matter what language you use, you can write stupid, brittle code in any language.
In light of that, the point is that brittle code is more of a problem of developer skill and process, rattier than some intrinsic property of "shell scripting," which was more or less what Eskarel opined above. I disagree with his definition of brittle coding, which says that if you change inputs or outputs from one piece of the tool, other pieces may break, because that is a property of ALL pieces of code, shell or script; if you change the way your components interface, you will have to adjust the pieces that depend on that output, or provide the inputs.
In my opinion, that has nothing to do with "brittleness," so I provided an example of what I think of when somebody uses the term "brittle."
Would you care to try again and tell me why I'm wrong? Or are you going to insist on violently agreeing with me some more?
Agreed. And it's something that a lot of FOSS advocates here lose sight of - in the grand scheme of things, "sticker prices" are a vanishingly small part of the total cost of ownership - choosing a piece of software *simply* because it's "free" doesn't make sense if it costs your organization 2x the cost to operate as you would have spent on licensing a 'closed' piece of software instead. You choose the best tool for the job you need to accomplish - sticker price should almost always be the *last* piece of the equation you look at - staffing & hardware costs to support the software in your organization will turn the purchase price into a rounding error in your total cost. If everything else is absolutely equivalent, then the free one should win... but I've yet to see an assessment come down purely to purchase cost (rather than functionality & ease of maintenance) - in the cases where the open-source tool has won out (Linux, apache, tomcat, perl, eclipse...), the 'free to use' bullet point has simply been an additional bonus above and beyond the other functionality & cost savings that drove the decision.
Thanks for that insightful comment. Would you care to explain what YOU consider to be 'brittle' programming, if you don't think the sample qualifies? Or did you just come here to underscore our understanding that brittle code is shitty?
You might want to review the history of this thread, because we are *specifically* talking about flash, and how it gets installed on Mac OS X and Linux.
I'm not sure why you'd conclude, in a conversation that is ALL about Flash, that Flash is somehow irrelevant.
This seems to be an odd criticism.
It's like calling perl/python/C subroutines "brittle" because if you change the arguments or return values of any of them, all hell can break loose.
'Brittle' to me means that ridiculous assumptions don't hold true *often*, leading to breakage, like this gem I found the other day in a developer's installation script:
envfile = `ls -1tr /tmp/*.tar | tail -1` /apps/prod /apps/prod/${envfile}
cp ${envfile}
tar -xvf
In other words - the envfile is "the single most recent tar file in the /tmp directory," with no checks or verification to ensure that it was the right one before you blasted it on into production.
That's what I'd call 'brittle' programming, anyway - likely to break, and break spectacularly because you haven't thought through your requirements clearly, or bothered to verify that inputs are reasonable and sane.
Here you go.
Of course, the paranoid in their tinfoil hats will read that and say "STEVE LIED." He's not that fucking stupid - the linked email exchange was from April of this year - 6 months ago. They obviously had the app store in the works back then, and he has a history of responding to large "loaded" questions with a very terse redirection.
The rumor communicated in the email linked above states:
1) A Mac App Store is coming;
2) Only apple-approved software will run on OS X;
Then asks, "is that true?" The answer: "Nope."
Now, given that 6 months ago, Steve Jobs couldn't have NOT known about an App Store being built... we can only conclude that he's either:
1) Lying, and lying on the record, with no care for whether or not people feel that he's betrayed them;
2) The second part of the rumor ('only apple-approved software will run...') is not true, making the rumor taken as a whole false.
How tight your tinfoil hat is will determine which explanation you think is most likely.
I'm very familiar with the configure / make / make test / make install cycle, thank you. I've even written some autoconf-based build stuff myself. I actually built gcc recently, on both Sun and RHEL5, using more or less this process.
We've all agreed that flash isn't preinstalled on a stock build of Ubuntu.
Thank you. That was the only thing in question - the answer then is, 'yes, the tool downloads FLash for you, and installs it on your system, because it's not there by default. The tool only knows to go and install Flash when you ask it to.'
That wasn't so hard, was it?
I want to know which of these devices do not require you, with factory presets, to hack into your own device in order to install an "open" ROM. You're trying to divert attention with all this bullshit about "of course you need root access" - that was never in question. What I'm asking is, which of them provide documentation in some form telling you how to get root without having to hack your own device?
Which Android devices behave in that fashion?
I'm amused. Clicking through the various phone models, have you noticed that they all start with:
"How do I root and install CyanogenMOD"?
And also contain such amusing notes as "DOING THIS WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY!"
Do ANY of these, with the exception of the Nexus One (which requires "unlocking the bootloader" anyway, and still voids your warranty) support installation of arbitrary Android ROMs without rooting?
Because the iPhone and the iPad are mobile devices which are not full-fledged 'general purpose computers,' whereas a computer running Mac OS X *is* a 'general purpose computer', and unless you're going to assert that you also believe every other computing platform will eventually morph into the mobile device version of the platform because this is an 'inevitable' consequence of someone wanting to make money, then you have no logical or historical precedent to make the assertion. What is so hard to understand about "phones and tablets" being different than "general purpose computers"?
At the same time, Apple has stated at least twice that they have no intention of 'locking down' the Mac OS X software like they have with the iPhone - once when the iPhone store debuted and people started with the "ZOMG THE SKY R FALLING" nonsense, and once in this past keynote, where Steve Jobs specifically said "this is one way to get software", not "this is the only way to get software."
Logically, the conclusion is that they consider the two devices separate categories, with separate operating systems, and are simply borrowing useful ideas from one OS to the other.
Well, since we've established that the "rumor" about optionally-installed frameworks is NOT a rumor, what the fuck else would I have been talking about, except his *speculation* and unsubstantiated 'what-if's' which he was clearly hoping to astroturf with? His post code be restated to say: "Fact has it that you can't install optionally installed frameworks. I'd like to submit that this is the first step in Apple's nefarious "control everything" scheme to the rumor mill."
There is zero credible evidence that Apple has any intention of 'locking down' Mac OS X. If you want to install Java, or Flash, or any other software that requires optional frameworks, you can't do it through the Mac App Store. That doesn't mean you can't do it, and you know it.
Anybody with two brain cells to rub together can see that "you can only install Apple-approved software" is a ridiculous fantasy because it would result in Apple committing suicide by anti-trust regulation and/or by consumer outrage, and I think we can both agree that Apple is, if nothing else, not a bunch of lackwits who can't understand how the consumer markets operate.
Your speculation is worst-case "ZOMG THE SKY R FALLINGZ!" alarmist nonsense that isn't even worth considering, much less lending credence to by pretending it's even remotely a likely outcome.
And they run on which hardware, exactly?
This is a ridiculous attempt to twist the words to mean what you want them to mean.
True or false: Without first downloading the flash player installer package from a repository or from adobe, you will be unable to view flash content on a default Ubuntu install. (Answer: TRUE)
If you have to go out over the network to download a package and install it, in order to view flash content, then the difference between Ubuntu and Mac OS X in this regard is one of *efficiency,* not of fundamental design difference:
-- Ubuntu doesn't include it by default - you must install the package yourself.
-- Mac OS X doesn't include it by default - you must install the package yourself.
The only difference is that on Ubuntu, it's a little easier, and perhaps a bit faster, to do that install. That is all.
Considering RPM uses both HTTP and FTP protocols, I think you could make a pretty convincing argument that that the package management software is downloading from a "web site". You can even set FTP & HTTP proxies for the tool to use for downloading - just like any other application that accesses the web.