Yet we have seen, time and time again, that those who do things for the love of money will cash out. Heck, even those who do so for the love of creating will cash out when they want to move on. While open source doesn't eliminate this possibility, at least it disincentivises it.
While I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, exceptions that we rarely hear about because they are smaller companies that don't monopolise our attention, it is important to realize that capitalism is just a high level theory. It says things that sound good. over a long enough time period and a large enough samples it may be roughly correct. Yet it has no value over short time periods, small samples, or when it's underlying assumptions are violated.
That last bit is particularly important, even though it probably isn't applicable to Nova Launcher. Everything from the asymmetry of information, to anti-competitive actions of the business itself, to regulation will disrupt those assumptions.
> Gambling refers to taking on risk for the feeling it brings.
Is there much of a difference when it comes to placing bets on the news?
To play off the article's opening example: investing in mineral exploration in Greenland, with an American invasion opening up opportunities for resource extraction, would be taking a risk with an unknown payout due to imperfect information. That is to say, it is taking a risk to build a business. A business where the payout may exceed what is going in. Betting on the news is just an exchange of money, with the intermediary taking a cut. Risks are being taken, but no value is being created. It is all about emotional involvement.
Investing in a business is also a bet. The capital you provide is a known quantity, you risk it for an uncertain outcome (the future value of the shares).
If your informational edge is just America invading Greenland, let's say you know that for sure. Then you could invest in the business, but you might actually be diluting your edge if you don't know more than the market does about the fundamentals of the business.
The business could already have a lot of debt, and unable to get more to finance an expansion into Greenland.
It would be less risky in that instance to just bet on the invasion, since that is where your edge is.
The early days of Silicon Valley were literally the product of defense contracts and defense research spending. The whole consumer and business products thing (hardware or software) came much later. Even the early days business computing, the days of mainframes and minis, were largely driven by east coast companies.
> You don't -have- to buy there, if you have the financial means I urge/recommend/encourage you to buy locally or from a responsible seller
That is assuming the component is even available locally or from a responsible seller. I live in a small city (half a million people). It is often impossible to find parts locally even for popular products that were purchased locally. Then there are parts where it is impossible to find official replacements, either because it is outside of the product's support windows, or because the replacement parts were never available to start with.
Yup, an important caveat. And sometimes, it may not be available, due to it not legally being allowed to be sold there (eg not following relevant regulations). And that's a valid enough reason for it not to be sold there, regardless of seller.
> No, the CPU doesn't have a special pointer value which is designated invalid
Sort of right, sort of wrong.
From my understanding: older, simpler, architectures treat memory location zero as a normal memory address. On x86 and x64, the OS can configure the MMU to treat certain pages as invalid. Many years ago, I ran across a reference to Sparcs treating accesses to memory location zero as invalid. In other words, it depends upon which architecture you're dealing with.
The 68000 series used 0 as the initial (boot) program counter, and 4 as the initial stack pointer. (I might have those two backwards; it's been a long time.) That meant that they had to be in ROM, which meant that they were not writable. But addresses 8 through 1K were the interrupt vector table, and they did have to be writable.
This led to strange hardware implementations like "0 and 4 point to 0x800000 and 0x800004 (or wherever the ROM is) until a latch is cleared, then they point to 0" - with the latch being cleared fairly early in the boot process. This let you create a different entry point for soft and hard boot, if you wanted.
In that implementation, you could read and write to 0, once the latch was cleared.
Or you could have an implementation where 0 and 4 pointed to ROM always, and you could not have a different entry point for soft boot, and you could not write to 0, ever.
Skimming appendix H of https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/cs423/sp2011/lectures/..., I can't see any special treatment of the zero page, but https://stackoverflow.com/a/22847758/5223757 contains an anecdote about SPARCs not placing a page of zeroes at that address. I expect that's probably an OS restriction, and they considered it safer to modify the in-house software they understood, rather than tinker with the externally-sourced OS's memory management routines, but the anecdote is weak evidence that it might have been a hardware distinction at one point.
Even in the days of print publications, the publisher would seek revenues from advertisers, subscribers, and they would sell their subscriber data. (On top of that, many would have contests and special offers which probed for deeper data about the readership.) In some sense, the subscriber data was more shallow. In other senses, it was more valuable.
I get what you're saying about shooting themselves in the foot, and I'm sure there will be options for corporate clients that will treat the data collected confidentially while not displaying advertising. I also doubt that option will be available (in any official sense) to individuals much as it isn't available (in any official sense) to users of Windows. For the most part, people won't care. Those who would care are those who are sensitive enough about their privacy that they wouldn't use these services in the first place, or are wealthy enough to be sensitive about their privacy that they would could pay for services that would make real guarantees.
I would argue that only makes sense if there is some consistency in the icon through time. There were four major changes in representation in the icons, and the change in contrast/colour between the first and second icons is sufficient to suggest a fifth representation in my mind.
Pages, which is a word processor. I could only figure that out from the 5th and 6th icons, which are breaking the cardinal rule about having text in the icon.
Personally, I wouldn't be able to figure out what the first three icons are for without the context of the other icons. The first two icons are meaningless. The third icon vaugly represents a pen drawing a line, which would lead me to think it is a drawing program. The fourth program would allow me to identify it as word processor, and is my favourite. The rest are identifiable as well.
Microsoft office isn't much better but at least there were consistent elements between versions to make them easier to identify for experienced users who are upgrading. I couldn't say the same for Apple's icons. LibreOffice's icons make it easier to identify each program, even if they aren't the prettiest.
Microsoft's icons (until their most recent Liquid Glass redesign) were probably the best attempt at abstract but still useful to a new user. The Excel icon looked like a grid, Word had lines, PowerPoint a pie chart. They're not perfect, but it's interesting to see the new ones that have just less detailed and are a little more blobby, or melted.
If I recall correctly, QWERTY was designed to minimize jamming. The myth is that it was designed to slow people down.
Whether it does slow people down, as a side effect, is not as well established since, as another person pointed out, typing speed isn't the bottleneck for most people. Learning the layout and figuring out what to write is. On top of that, most of the claims for faster layouts come from marketing materials. It doesn't mean they are wrong, but there is a vested interest.
If there was a demonstrably much faster input method for most users, I suspect it would have been adopted long ago.
My take is: you're welcome to the party, but don't be surprised if someone shows you the door when you pull out the drugs. It ain't our type of fun.
I understand various reasons why people are pushing for the adoption of open source software, but it will be counterproductive if it brings the problems of the commercial software world with them.
While I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, exceptions that we rarely hear about because they are smaller companies that don't monopolise our attention, it is important to realize that capitalism is just a high level theory. It says things that sound good. over a long enough time period and a large enough samples it may be roughly correct. Yet it has no value over short time periods, small samples, or when it's underlying assumptions are violated.
That last bit is particularly important, even though it probably isn't applicable to Nova Launcher. Everything from the asymmetry of information, to anti-competitive actions of the business itself, to regulation will disrupt those assumptions.
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