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541.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
If I recall the story correctly, the government sold at a price that had been suggested to them by many highly paid financial services consultants. The fact that the pricing was wrong may or may not have been avoidable, but one of the basic
542.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
You talk about "they" as if government is a single group of people. The fact that the NHS is still fundamentally paper based, in 2016, is exactly the kind of problem that leads politicians to want more use of the private sector. I
543.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
You realise the UK has a large deficit, right? And taxes are comparable to other western countries. The NHS will never not be broke. Your position is typical of the British left but is entirely meaningless: the government could go into Gree
544.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
Scotland can do this partly because it is heavily subsidised by the English. If the subsidies vanished I think NHS Scotland's performance would be significantly worse.
545.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
Services like the NHS are money pits: no matter how much money they are given they will always be broke, and given the total lack of accountability inherent in the system there will always be regulations trying to improve their efficiency.
546.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
No it isn't. Contractors milking their customers isn't an inefficient introduced by privatisation: as brightshiny pointed out, the entirely state employed people were even worse. Contractors milking their clients is something that
547.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
Because it's possible for the efficiencies gained to be larger than the profits. For that you normally need competition to keep profits in check. Governments are quite bad at 'designing' markets to have adequate levels of com
548.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
The NHS is dripping with profit, everywhere. The staff make profits. If they weren't making profits then someone would assess how much they needed to live and pay their bills and that'd be the amount they got paid. In practice the
549.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
Yes, exactly. Driverless trains are not technically reaching for the sky, yet deployment doesn't happen anyway due to social factors.
550.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
https://github.com/dmlloyd/openjdk/tree/jdk9/jdk9/hotspot/sr...
551.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
Facebook and Twitter are in competition. And I think you underestimate the complexity of a project like Facebook. It started small, but back then people's expectations were much lower. If Facebook started charging for its services or
552.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
The NYT publishes a steady stream of articles like this one and it's difficult to take them seriously because they are always such blatantly biased propaganda efforts. A representative sample: Other countries, notably Israel and the U
553.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
Er, either prices float to their natural level and there's no problem (i.e. Uber's profits are reasonable), or a competitor comes along. Come on, keep some perspective. Uber is a taxi app. We're not talking about a Manhatten
554.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
Exactly. There's another possibility that nobody really likes to think about: automated trucking won't even start for decades or more. The railway industry is a good example of this. Trains run on dedicated pathways with hardly an
555.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
It doesn't really make sense. Banditry requires someone to threaten. If there's no driver and the machine is locked in transit anyway, then all you need are doors where time to cut them open is greater than time for police to arri
556.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
"Bad driver" has a wider meaning than "has a criminal record".
557.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
Spinup of the JVM is 50 msec or so, for a hello world. Perhaps it's been a while since you tried running a small program on it? I can see why you might think the JVM starts slowly if you only ever run huge programs on it.
558.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
I think you didn't understand Chris' post. C2 is the HotSpot Server compiler. It definitely does not use LLVM anywhere.
559.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
You'd have to unionize globally though, and that'd be very hard. The incentives to undercut a unionised workforce are massive. Yes there's been some outsourcing but I also know many companies that are squeamish about remote w
560.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
Perhaps this is a geographical problem. I've always had paid time off, sick time etc as a working programmer. But I have been working in Europe. I know Americans get less sick time and vacation time but I'm pretty sure it's
561.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
Working conditions for programmers though have become amazingly good without unions or government intervention, just through competition for workers. See the perk inflation in Silicon Valley in the Google years, or just wage inflation in ge
562.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
But robots don't burn bread. Their ongoing input costs are only a tiny fraction of a human's, that's why people buy robots even though their up front cost is usually much higher than hiring a person.
563.
by zigzigzag 10y ago
Why is this voted down? To build a new OS from scratch takes a huge effort. If you're going to do it then you should really try to advance the state of the art in big ways. An obvious way to do that is to use memory safe / managed