ytinas

Um... no, it might be what drove him to use bitkeeper. Losing bitkeeper is what drove him to create git. This is pretty well documented.

Virtualization is good in e.g. cloud scenarios where the usage is spread out to different machines through out the day. Rather than have 10 machines averaging 5% utilization at all times you can have 1 machine with e.g. 60% utilization all the time. A win.

Sadly, pointy-haired bosses have started putting developers on VMs which is exactly the opposite use case: all people loading their machines at roughly the same time (e.g. I've heard people claim that in Java 1/3rd of time is spent compiling. If you have more then 3 devs....). A fail.

People always site multi-tasking as some huge problem when talking about the iPhone/iPad, but you use this kind of device differently than a computer. Everything you actually need multi-tasking for can be done some other way (e.g. timer actions to replace "services").

Well for one thing, anonymity. If you are very free with your opinions on e.g. youtube, but use your real name with gmail it can be really annoying when a purchase fuses these two.

Most anything from Noam Chomsky should be good.

>...but who somehow feel that they do know enough to try and falsify a theory?

You don't have to try to falsify a theory not to believe it. Agnostic is also a valid position (so long as you're not trying to influence others one way or another).

Also, your comment smacks of "you aren't qualified to do anything but agree". Personally, when I hear someone say that one would need years upon years of training before being qualified to even have an opinion I wonder what controls are in place to ensure this qualification process isn't tainting their thinking.

For example, long time programmers of some awful programming language will report that it "works just how I think", but in fact long repetition has programmed them to work and think this way.

>Quoth the OP

Ah, but you've misunderstood me. I'm not saying science is a religion itself, rather that some people put blind faith into it. I've seen plenty of people ridiculing others for not believing in some theory, but when engaged they don't really know anything more than "most people believe this".

I once saw a self-proclaimed Christian ridiculing a non-Christian about some moral issue. When I asked how many times he had read through the bible he admitted he had never read the whole thing. I don't see much difference between this and what I see from some laymen "champions of science" I've encountered.

>They could simply be using a reversible encryption algorithm.

I'm sorry, but this difference is completely trivial. Putting a password in some reversible encryption is just security by obscurity. In the worst case the people who managed to break into your site and steal all the passwords can just steal your magical decryption routine as well.

Great post. For some people science is absolutely a religion. These folks don't know enough to try and falsify the theory they believe but they have no issue trashing people who aren't as convinced.

I don't know why this was downvoted. I don't agree with the post completely but I don't find it snarky or anything.

To the post itself: It's a bit more complex than that. If the kids mean a lot to you then splitting up means seeing them less, making the "trade" times stressful for everyone, etc. It's a trade off like many things in life.

But I do agree that there are times that staying can be more damaging than leaving.

I said "seems" because I didn't want to make the statement absolute and spend a bunch of time debating the point. Regardless of what is theoretically possible, what appears to happen in practice is a (terminal imo) short term focus.

The most important contributors to a company are said to be the share holders, but investment via stock is a very temporal affair. Just get in, try to enforce policy that will quickly generate increase stock value, then dump it before it crashes and move to the next.

And no, I don't think any random control is a help, just that no control what-so-ever is just as bad as all the wrong controls.

Sorry, I obviously wasn't clear enough. What I meant was: Capitalism is a system to manage resources. Since it seems to end up with an extremely short term focus when it isn't tightly controlled, I wonder if there aren't possible alternative systems that would do a better job. We can't know if we never try.

True, but (regardless of your stance on if drugs actually should be illegal or not) do we punish the drug dealers or the users harsher? In cases of exploiting a vice, the precedent is to punish the exploiter harsher than the exploitie. And in America unrealistically low prices seem to be more habit forming than heroin.

I don't buy that they are as efficient as actually possible. I wish there were some means of trying out different resource allocation strategies, but I think people who are doing so well in the current setup will do whatever it takes to maintain status quo.

Ah, I interpreted your comment to mean that what ever happens we will be smart enough to solve it. I agree that worrying about things utterly beyond our control is senseless.

Well, in the case of the US the voter has consistently and demonstrably voted against their own interests for a while now. How else would you explain e.g. the flood of money from the middle classes to the rich since at least Reagan, the corporatism (as opposed to just "capitalism") we now toil under, etc.

I often hear lower middle class people suggesting it is more important for the mega corporate monopoly they work for to get big tax breaks, etc., than for they themselves! I think these people always want breaks for the rich because they envision being rich some day themselves. Ironically the very policies they are in favor of appear to actually be preventing them from prosperity.

You think doing a lot of censorship would improve discourse? What do you mean? Just remove snarky comments? Fine, but those get strongly down voted anyway. Comments someone in charge doesn't agree with? Then it isn't discourse.

EDIT: I realize your comment was in response to PG's, but what is considered a "censor-able" comment? I've seen some discourse on here where someone legitimately called PG out. As I recall, the person turned out to be wrong but they weren't trolling (at least not at first) even though they were accused of it from the start. Should this have been censored?

>But what are THE ODDS of us not figuring out a solution in time?

What? If the right size celestial body were heading for the earth there wouldn't be much we could do about it. There are a great deal of things that can happen that we would be utterly powerless to stop.

Given that, there is no point worrying about such things. If such a thing ever does happen, I'll probably be gone by then anyway.

>Open-source has created more clones than any single company, and it keeps on cloning.

Well, it takes more than simply dumping a free product on the market. It has to be comparably usable.

>do you see it competing against Facebook?

Facebook is also free.

>They also have a Wikipedia competitor ... knol.google.com ... do you see it overtaking Wikipedia?

Again. Two free products competing with each other.

>But I do remember what my online-life was like before Google Search / GMail / Google Maps

People and companies are not static. Yes, google did a lot of good things for us (as did MS and various other places before them). No, they wont continue to do so forever.

><snip a bunch of stuff about using google for most everything>

This seems to back up my point. You're using all these free things instead of buying something from an aspiring new start up.

>I don't really think it's debatable whether Google provides value or not ... they clearly do.

Perhaps, but it's not a zero sum game. Them providing valuable services for free means that I will have a much harder time making a start up to provide those things for even a small cost.

>But if you're fear-mongering about freebies, it means you're not providing enough value to justify your sales.

With google the threat is two fold: a huge company with vastly more resources than any start up will have who gives away most of their stuff for free.

I recall reading a study about happiness somewhere years ago [1] that showed people's happiness generally doesn't change that much. It reacts temporarily to positive/negative effects but then tends to go back where it was.

[1] I think it was probably a critique of this article: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10499

As far as I got, they had some good points (i.e this race to the bottom is going to impact the consumers themselves at some point), but I think it's part of a bigger overall issue and is probably better (and less frustratingly) covered by e.g. "The Walmart Effect".

What a horrible post. Google hasn't done anything for us, they've done things for their business. It happens that for the moment their business model (largely) requires them to do things that we find convenient or good. This is extremely unlikely to remain the case forever.

Have loyalty to your friends/family. Not to some public company that doesn't know or care about you.

Ok, fair enough. I suppose in the case of some of our manufacturing industries the labor was sent oversees not because it had to be fundamentally cheaper, but because it was easier than dealing with the unions.

Well, I don't know that growth is a fair metric. Once you hit saturation point you can't grow much anymore. I was actually thinking desktops (windows, OSX, Linux. In that order).

OSX may have some BSD code but they have heavily modified it.

I agree that in servers open source might be ahead (but then, a lot of places are using Sun, Oracle and the like).

>openness always wins

What do you mean? If we take OS'es the most open one is the least used.

At which point your currency/bonds are worthless to everyone who doesn't have to pay taxes with them since you look for reasons to break your promises when things don't go your way.

Uhm, what? For a developed country, the US has very cheap labor already. And there are minimum wages laws to deal with as well. How exactly would the US compete with labor as cheap as it is in China?

I can't imagine you actually mean slavery here (and I'm not convinced that would be cheaper in any case, morals aside), but I don't know what you could mean.

Google is a better MS in the same way that MS was a better IBM. And for me personally Google is synonomous with NIH. I mean, a search/ads company making their own Phone? Operating system??? Router?!

You don't? You're on this site so I imagine you dream of having your own start up some day, no? How would you like it if every single idea you have ends up with you working it to 80% completion only to have Google release a free version of it. Every time. Not freemium, not pay-as-you-go. Totally free. Would you like that?

If you say yes then I think you need to take a step back and consider the possibility that you've been brain washed.

Kudos for watching The Power of Nightmares, but did you miss the part where they pointed out [b]that these organizations are largely fictional and used as a tool by governments to appear more necessary than they are[/b]? The government isn't working on how to deal with fictional "flat, loosely organized and decentralized groups", it's working on how to make it look like we need government protection from the ultimate boogie man.

Wow, thanks! I hope you find good resources to draw from so it doesn't turn out disappointing to you. I would look at things that Joe Armstrong writes. Not so much erlweb and stuff like that.