Areas where rule of law and property rights are nonexistent will of course be unattractive to foreign investment - unless you're large enough to "purchase" them through bribes.
Hardly ideal, but it will be interesting seeing countries where Rule of Law (tm) is brought to you by Pepsi, Co. It would sure as heck beat genocide, right?
Just as an FYI, that *Does* mater, and quite a lot. Imagine a game that runs at 60FPS now running at 30. think that matters? Answer: Yes. Say you have a game that dips between 90 and 120FPS, now down to 45-60. Think that matters? Yes. You just crossed the realm between "smooth" and not
You're batshit insane if you think the human eye can distinguish between 60, 90, and 120 frames per second. You're equally deluded if you think 30fps isn't "smooth" when movies are played at 24fps.
Mods are on crack. That deserves a +5 troll, because that was the most successful troll I've seen... well, in a few days. But still, a hearty chuckle ye brought me, Bad Analogy Guy.
FWIW, they didn't include a back button/address bar precisely because they don't want it being used for day-to-day browsing. They just wanted to be able to wow/woo web developers with shinies before they're even ready to release a proper beta.
When IE9 is actually released, it will indeed have a back button.
It's true that being at the mercy of a capricious CEO sucks. However, what the CEO can is peanuts compared to what a capricious government can do - you cannot "quit" your government (without really voting with your feet), and the CEO doesn't control the police or the army.
You can only get away with working the bobbin boy 20 hours a day if there's no other factory in town. That may have been the case during Charles Dickens' time, but there is competition for labor in a post-industrial period.
However, I think most labor laws fall under the "benefits of regulation" I alluded to. The problem is that government is now the sole decider of who succeeds and fails - we can't blame IBM for hedging their bets.
Also, most shareholders care about long-term profit as well as short-term gains. If the opposite wasn't true, most volume would be in penny stocks. I won't argue that a lot of companies have spectacularly stupid boards.
Yes, I said Marxist. You too seem to have bought into the class warfare/false consciousness arguments all on your own, without studying those who could have given you a vocabulary beyond "LOL" to describe it.
I leave you, sir, with this rebuttle to your most eloquent of of counterpoints.
Oh, you Marxists and your accusations of false consciousness. Not everyone who finds politicians scummier than businessmen is a "deluded fool."
Corporations simply obey the rules of government, as apples obey the law of gravity. If the system is corrupt, we should blame those who make the rules rather than those who are subject to them.
good for india. but how is that not a betrayal of the usa in your mind?
Can't you also see it as the USA betraying IBM? Government is so entrenched in our economy that companies are forced to play the political game. Don't lobby congressmen? You'll be taxed out of existence. Your competitors will get subsidies instead of you, and you'll go out of business. Our patent office is worse, and the "arms race" of spurious patents made necessary by our IP laws has been well documented/ranted about here.
Government controls what you can import and what you can export. Who you can hire. What you can pay them. What you can charge for your product. Where you can sell your product. Who you have to pay for the privilege of doing so. How many clicks you can use to sell. Which states can extort you.
Your entire existence is at the whim and mercy of a capricious government. If you are successful, your "windfall profits" will be subject to special taxes. If you are unsuccessful, you better hope you and not your competitors are "too big to fail."
Now, have patience with my anarcho-Libertarian rant. Even I know that cheap foreign labor is a big draw, not just Evil Big Bad Government. But, nobody - no one in this country, in government, in this forum - has any love for IBM, or any of our enterprises. Our large corporations and their executives are reviled, justly or not, and then driven away.
And we wonder why. You don't really want to make the Ayn Rand's intellectual masturbation come true, do you? I'd hate to have to listen to a 100-page speech by John Galt in meatspace because we have an paranoid anti-corporatism fetish.
Instead of branding IBM a "traitor," we should recognize the business realities we have created. For all the benefits of regulation and high wages, this is an inevitable consequence.
We should instead be welcoming those who are doing business in this country - for example Toyota, despite being a "Japanese" company, is building plants in America while GM has been steadily moving to Mexico.
We should also recognize that in the "race to the bottom," the bottom is rising up. China is now too expensive to outsource some industries to - Malaysia, Thailand, and other countries are taking a lot of their manufacturing business. And then their standards of living will rise, making offshoring to them unattractive.
Now, if I end my rant with the incantation "I know I'll get modded down, but..", I'll get favorable moderation instead, right? I guess my point is that getting out the tar and feathers for the simple realities of business is like castigating an apple for falling from the tree.
Well, GP was close. I would get a "regular" phone plan in Canada and subsist on prepaid for four months in America. Google Voice lets you use the same number for both phones and gives you free long distance to Canada.
If you Google a bit, Tracfone will cost you around 6-8 cents a minute. This is competitive with the cheapest monthly plans you can get (in my area) at around 500 minutes talked per month. Above 500 minutes, it will still beat an ETF.
So, Google Voice lets you use whatever cheap plan you want - international calls between US and Canada don't cost any more than a local call.
He might not want to release it because if everything since borrows so much from it, it would look cliche. What if they discovered the first "Boy meets girl" drama from 467 BC and re-released it? The plot certainly wouldn't be as novel to a modern audience. And they would probably call it "Twilight."
Any economist will tell you there needs to be ways of moderating the natural boom-bust cycle of capitalism.
Actually, a lot - maybe even most - won't. Keynes was the only economist that really, really pushed the idea that it's even possible to "flatten" such a cycle, and that government is the perfect tool with which to do it.
Friedman would chuckle, and Ron Paul (OK, not an economist) wrote a book on why the boom/bust cycle is really a symptom of central banks. Mankiw explicitly condemns such things.
Now, if you want to talk about what caused the Great Depression, ask Bernanke. But, lack of economic fiber was just a piece of it.
It's a difference in scale over Havok. I haven't had much time to play video games lately, but I saw a particularly nifty shot from Arkham Asylum. Shoot a bookshelf without PhysX and it falls over. Shoot it with PhysX and suddenly every individual page from every book flies through the air, each tracing its own path down from the sky.
So, you can do physics in Havok. But not on that scale.
I'd suspect that it's not being used for anything other than "ground clutter" is because you can't design your game around PhysX - not everyone has an NVIDIA card. So, PhysX has to be optional and can't change gameplay - which pretty much relegates it to ground clutter.
Way to be intentionally obtuse. Fees, penalties and taxes aren't examples of making money - that's taking money made by those "loud" and "persuasive" business.
Now I'm waiting for you to tell me that money is actually "made" by the Treasury and Mint.
if you can get arrested for using someone else's wireless signal, then they can get arrested for trespassing. if the signal wasn't in your house, you wouldn't be able to use it!!
But then, you would be arrested for trespassing by transmitting your HTTP requests into THEIR house.
Yup. I gave up PC based gaming a long time ago. Each flashy new game release seems to require a very expensive upgrade of hardware too.
Anecdote:
My parents have a 2001-era PC. Pentium 4. It had an extra gigabyte of RAM added ($30) for 2 total, and the videocard was replaced when it died with a $99 model from circuit city.
So, $120 in upgrades over 9 years. It plays Team Fortress 2, World of Warcraft, and other games at decent frame rates at 1280x1024. (Although I don't know what else my brother runs on it.) Of course, the initial investment is larger - but you need a computer anyway for real work, right? Keeping it retrofitted as a gaming rig will be much cheaper than running the console treadmill, assuming you're not chasing the bleedingest of edges.
Bonus points for getting an $18 HDMI cable and Xbox controllers.
There is something to be said for not having to compile your own code. Especially since I'd have to download a gigabyte of patches and additional SDKs to do it in Visual Studio 2008, as well as integrate some special add-ons I'd rather not have in my IDE.
Which still doesn't get me a deployable installer.
Unique identifier removed; no information sent to Google
#1 means it's a headache to deploy on a workstation image.
#2 is mostly an annoyance, but especially so on "frozen" workstations that preserve their state. (Download and install the same update indefinitely until the image is updated, along with Java and Adobe and iTunes and EVERYTHING ELSE...)
#3 I honestly don't care about enough to verify with Wireshark - I use Google search, GMail, and Voice; they have that already. But it's important to some.
Chrome is unusable. Iron removing a few show-stoppers makes it incredible. I'd still be using Firefox without it.
Funny thing about those splodey things at 30,000 feet - they suck for taking and holding territory.
Now, if you just want to firebomb Dresden again, be my guest - those'll work perfect. If you want to actually control the land you purport to govern you need men on the ground. That's why we have that whole surge thingy in Iraq, despite our preponderance of the aforementioned 'splodey thingies.
Slashdot Mirror
Areas where rule of law and property rights are nonexistent will of course be unattractive to foreign investment - unless you're large enough to "purchase" them through bribes.
Hardly ideal, but it will be interesting seeing countries where Rule of Law (tm) is brought to you by Pepsi, Co. It would sure as heck beat genocide, right?
I guess the last region to be exploited is Africa. Is it already too late to start buying land?
Yup. China is already buying and developing land in Africa. (Not kidding!)
However, the development of Africa means the end of the "race to the bottom" and the end of absolute poverty.
Just as an FYI, that *Does* mater, and quite a lot. Imagine a game that runs at 60FPS now running at 30. think that matters? Answer: Yes. Say you have a game that dips between 90 and 120FPS, now down to 45-60. Think that matters? Yes. You just crossed the realm between "smooth" and not
You're batshit insane if you think the human eye can distinguish between 60, 90, and 120 frames per second. You're equally deluded if you think 30fps isn't "smooth" when movies are played at 24fps.
Mods are on crack. That deserves a +5 troll, because that was the most successful troll I've seen... well, in a few days. But still, a hearty chuckle ye brought me, Bad Analogy Guy.
FWIW, they didn't include a back button/address bar precisely because they don't want it being used for day-to-day browsing. They just wanted to be able to wow/woo web developers with shinies before they're even ready to release a proper beta.
When IE9 is actually released, it will indeed have a back button.
It's true that being at the mercy of a capricious CEO sucks. However, what the CEO can is peanuts compared to what a capricious government can do - you cannot "quit" your government (without really voting with your feet), and the CEO doesn't control the police or the army.
You can only get away with working the bobbin boy 20 hours a day if there's no other factory in town. That may have been the case during Charles Dickens' time, but there is competition for labor in a post-industrial period.
However, I think most labor laws fall under the "benefits of regulation" I alluded to. The problem is that government is now the sole decider of who succeeds and fails - we can't blame IBM for hedging their bets.
Also, most shareholders care about long-term profit as well as short-term gains. If the opposite wasn't true, most volume would be in penny stocks. I won't argue that a lot of companies have spectacularly stupid boards.
I see what you did there.
Actually, that puts a lot of world history into perspective.
Yes, I said Marxist. You too seem to have bought into the class warfare/false consciousness arguments all on your own, without studying those who could have given you a vocabulary beyond "LOL" to describe it.
I leave you, sir, with this rebuttle to your most eloquent of of counterpoints.
Oh, you Marxists and your accusations of false consciousness. Not everyone who finds politicians scummier than businessmen is a "deluded fool."
Corporations simply obey the rules of government, as apples obey the law of gravity. If the system is corrupt, we should blame those who make the rules rather than those who are subject to them.
good for india. but how is that not a betrayal of the usa in your mind?
Can't you also see it as the USA betraying IBM? Government is so entrenched in our economy that companies are forced to play the political game. Don't lobby congressmen? You'll be taxed out of existence. Your competitors will get subsidies instead of you, and you'll go out of business. Our patent office is worse, and the "arms race" of spurious patents made necessary by our IP laws has been well documented/ranted about here.
Government controls what you can import and what you can export. Who you can hire. What you can pay them. What you can charge for your product. Where you can sell your product. Who you have to pay for the privilege of doing so. How many clicks you can use to sell. Which states can extort you.
Your entire existence is at the whim and mercy of a capricious government. If you are successful, your "windfall profits" will be subject to special taxes. If you are unsuccessful, you better hope you and not your competitors are "too big to fail."
Now, have patience with my anarcho-Libertarian rant. Even I know that cheap foreign labor is a big draw, not just Evil Big Bad Government. But, nobody - no one in this country, in government, in this forum - has any love for IBM, or any of our enterprises. Our large corporations and their executives are reviled, justly or not, and then driven away.
And we wonder why. You don't really want to make the Ayn Rand's intellectual masturbation come true, do you? I'd hate to have to listen to a 100-page speech by John Galt in meatspace because we have an paranoid anti-corporatism fetish.
Instead of branding IBM a "traitor," we should recognize the business realities we have created. For all the benefits of regulation and high wages, this is an inevitable consequence.
We should instead be welcoming those who are doing business in this country - for example Toyota, despite being a "Japanese" company, is building plants in America while GM has been steadily moving to Mexico.
We should also recognize that in the "race to the bottom," the bottom is rising up. China is now too expensive to outsource some industries to - Malaysia, Thailand, and other countries are taking a lot of their manufacturing business. And then their standards of living will rise, making offshoring to them unattractive.
Now, if I end my rant with the incantation "I know I'll get modded down, but..", I'll get favorable moderation instead, right? I guess my point is that getting out the tar and feathers for the simple realities of business is like castigating an apple for falling from the tree.
Well, GP was close. I would get a "regular" phone plan in Canada and subsist on prepaid for four months in America. Google Voice lets you use the same number for both phones and gives you free long distance to Canada.
If you Google a bit, Tracfone will cost you around 6-8 cents a minute. This is competitive with the cheapest monthly plans you can get (in my area) at around 500 minutes talked per month. Above 500 minutes, it will still beat an ETF.
So, Google Voice lets you use whatever cheap plan you want - international calls between US and Canada don't cost any more than a local call.
He might not want to release it because if everything since borrows so much from it, it would look cliche. What if they discovered the first "Boy meets girl" drama from 467 BC and re-released it? The plot certainly wouldn't be as novel to a modern audience. And they would probably call it "Twilight."
No. That's how you reboot the iPad. And Etch-a-Sketches.
Any economist will tell you there needs to be ways of moderating the natural boom-bust cycle of capitalism.
Actually, a lot - maybe even most - won't. Keynes was the only economist that really, really pushed the idea that it's even possible to "flatten" such a cycle, and that government is the perfect tool with which to do it.
Friedman would chuckle, and Ron Paul (OK, not an economist) wrote a book on why the boom/bust cycle is really a symptom of central banks. Mankiw explicitly condemns such things.
Now, if you want to talk about what caused the Great Depression, ask Bernanke. But, lack of economic fiber was just a piece of it.
Very true - I was thinking of Valve's "Source" engine when I read "Havok." My brain had too little coffee for real-time posting simulations.
It's a difference in scale over Havok. I haven't had much time to play video games lately, but I saw a particularly nifty shot from Arkham Asylum. Shoot a bookshelf without PhysX and it falls over. Shoot it with PhysX and suddenly every individual page from every book flies through the air, each tracing its own path down from the sky.
So, you can do physics in Havok. But not on that scale.
I'd suspect that it's not being used for anything other than "ground clutter" is because you can't design your game around PhysX - not everyone has an NVIDIA card. So, PhysX has to be optional and can't change gameplay - which pretty much relegates it to ground clutter.
Toyotas wouldn't halt. This is a problem.
If they did, I could use such a vehicle to solve some fundamental CS problems...
The article's examples - 160 days to process a VA claim, 3 years to process a patent - are exactly all that taking going down a black hole.
You're on a roll. Nowhere did I say public goods are t3h evilz.
Way to be intentionally obtuse. Fees, penalties and taxes aren't examples of making money - that's taking money made by those "loud" and "persuasive" business.
Now I'm waiting for you to tell me that money is actually "made" by the Treasury and Mint.
if you can get arrested for using someone else's wireless signal, then they can get arrested for trespassing. if the signal wasn't in your house, you wouldn't be able to use it!!
But then, you would be arrested for trespassing by transmitting your HTTP requests into THEIR house.
Yup. I gave up PC based gaming a long time ago. Each flashy new game release seems to require a very expensive upgrade of hardware too.
Anecdote:
My parents have a 2001-era PC. Pentium 4. It had an extra gigabyte of RAM added ($30) for 2 total, and the videocard was replaced when it died with a $99 model from circuit city.
So, $120 in upgrades over 9 years. It plays Team Fortress 2, World of Warcraft, and other games at decent frame rates at 1280x1024. (Although I don't know what else my brother runs on it.) Of course, the initial investment is larger - but you need a computer anyway for real work, right? Keeping it retrofitted as a gaming rig will be much cheaper than running the console treadmill, assuming you're not chasing the bleedingest of edges.
Bonus points for getting an $18 HDMI cable and Xbox controllers.
There is something to be said for not having to compile your own code. Especially since I'd have to download a gigabyte of patches and additional SDKs to do it in Visual Studio 2008, as well as integrate some special add-ons I'd rather not have in my IDE.
Which still doesn't get me a deployable installer.
Iron isn't just a "scam." It's Chrome with
#1 means it's a headache to deploy on a workstation image.
#2 is mostly an annoyance, but especially so on "frozen" workstations that preserve their state. (Download and install the same update indefinitely until the image is updated, along with Java and Adobe and iTunes and EVERYTHING ELSE...)
#3 I honestly don't care about enough to verify with Wireshark - I use Google search, GMail, and Voice; they have that already. But it's important to some.
Chrome is unusable. Iron removing a few show-stoppers makes it incredible. I'd still be using Firefox without it.
Funny thing about those splodey things at 30,000 feet - they suck for taking and holding territory.
Now, if you just want to firebomb Dresden again, be my guest - those'll work perfect. If you want to actually control the land you purport to govern you need men on the ground. That's why we have that whole surge thingy in Iraq, despite our preponderance of the aforementioned 'splodey thingies.
So that's what that batch file did. Thanks, mate.