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Interestingly, the Chinese word for learning, 学 (xue) also means to imitate/to mimic.
I am confused, how else can you learn by NOT imitate?
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Did Windows clone the Mac UI right down to the color and pixel and then replace the Apple logo? I think the bashing here is well-deserved, above and outside the discussion of whether China has a demonstrated economy of copying (it does). Also, there's a special place in hell for people who can't just come out and call a clone a clone.
I agree with your first paragraph, but "a special place in hell"?
Are you questioning the meaning of this phrase or its applicability? If the former, then it is a reference to Dante's The Divine Comedy. If the latter, then in The Inferno, there is a special place reserved for thieves and betrayers. In a way, if you are a hacker and you blatantly rip-off the work of another member of the community, you are betraying said community. So the innermost circle of hell is reserved for you with Brutus, Cassius and Judus.
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I agree with your first paragraph, but "a special place in hell"?
I'm not sure why the question mark here. Are you questioning the meaning of this phrase or its applicability? If the former, then it is a reference to Dante's The Divine Comedy. If the latter, then in The Inferno, there is a special place reserved for thieves and betrayers. In a way, if you are a hacker and you blatantly rip-off the work of another member of the community, you are betraying said community. So the inn…
Wikipedia: "The traitors [who are suffering in the deepest circle of Hell - me] are distinguished from the "merely" fraudulent in that their acts involve betraying a special relationship of some kind. There are four concentric zones (or "rounds") of traitors, corresponding, in order of seriousness, to betrayal of family ties, betrayal of community ties, betrayal of guests, and betrayal of liege lords. (...) the traitors are frozen in a lake of ice known as Cocytus, with each group encased in ice to progressively greater depths."
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Wow. Is this "everything I need to know about Germany, I learned from Fox News"? Let me pick apart the pieces 1) 20k minimum for startups You're confusing a few things here. The costs to form a company depend on what kind of legal form you want it to have. What you're talking about is the GmbH (basically a LLC), where you actually need 25k of capital. This is by far not the only form a company can take. If you just w…
Concerning the 35 hrs/week: it is the legal duration for work above which you are supposed to pay a higher hourly rate. It is NOT a maximum, and many people work more than 35 hrs/week (the figures for working hours are pretty similar between France, UK and Germany, with UK having the lower on average IIRC, but I cannot find the figure ATM).
But yes, it seems to hover around 40 hours for most countries. Strangely even for France, where this is bordering on the illegal... Found an old page where the Brits are complaining that they're working more than the average, don't know how they filtered the results to get to that conclusion. The Swiss do seem to live up to their industrious stereotype, though...
Never heard about a 35+ pay hike in Germany, though. Considering that there's no minimum hourly wage and most people are paid fixed salaries anyway, this wouldn't even get you very much. Sounds more like a result of collective bargaining than a federal law.
[1]: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/product_...
Some other important look-and-feel clones: Windows (copying MacOS) Lotus 1-2-3 (copying VisiCalc) GNU/Linux (copying Unix) Gosling Emacs (copying ITS and Multics Emacs), which eventually became GNU Emacs Excel (copying Lotus 1-2-3, to the point that VisiCalc slash commands still work in Excel last time I tried them about five years ago) OpenOffice (copying Microsoft Office) C compilers everywhere (copying the origina…
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its clever because not every us startup works without localisation everywhere. ebay/groupon and to a certain degree facebook need localization and if they arent able to get this fast clones will appear and people will flock to these clones because the idea is great but the us company is incapable/unwilling to cater to different markets than the us fast enough. it seems as if other markets are only an afterthought.
> it seems as if other markets are only an afterthought. As someone living in Canada, I can't tell you how frustrating it is to see great companies not servicing their neighbors to the North. Examples: Amazon Mechanical Turk, Google Checkout, Google Voice, Braintree, WePay.
Some other important look-and-feel clones: Windows (copying MacOS) Lotus 1-2-3 (copying VisiCalc) GNU/Linux (copying Unix) Gosling Emacs (copying ITS and Multics Emacs), which eventually became GNU Emacs Excel (copying Lotus 1-2-3, to the point that VisiCalc slash commands still work in Excel last time I tried them about five years ago) OpenOffice (copying Microsoft Office) C compilers everywhere (copying the origina…
Heh did you really just claim that all C compilers "copied" the original C compiler?
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Heh did you really just claim that all C compilers "copied" the original C compiler?
I certainly did. In many cases, notably GCC, they copied it all the way down to its command-line options and error-message formats. If C compilers had color gradients, they'd've copied them too. Fortunately, at the time, we didn't have to contend with the fucking intellectual enclosurists who thought that things like user interface look-and-feel should be owned by somebody.
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Heh, that may be a factor, but I doubt it's the main one. Lots of American HN users seem to be pretty Liberal in their political outlook, and that's fine. But consider Germany, with a welfare state that looks after you from cradle to grave. If you want to start a startup there then you'd better have your EUR 20,000 in capital minimum, and you'd better do all the paperwork and comply with all the regulations and have…
Wow. Is this "everything I need to know about Germany, I learned from Fox News"? Let me pick apart the pieces 1) 20k minimum for startups You're confusing a few things here. The costs to form a company depend on what kind of legal form you want it to have. What you're talking about is the GmbH (basically a LLC), where you actually need 25k of capital. This is by far not the only form a company can take. If you just w…
You don't have to watch Fox News to know that Europe puts more obstacles in the way of entrepreneurs.
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I certainly did. In many cases, notably GCC, they copied it all the way down to its command-line options and error-message formats. If C compilers had color gradients, they'd've copied them too. Fortunately, at the time, we didn't have to contend with the fucking intellectual enclosurists who thought that things like user interface look-and-feel should be owned by somebody.
I don't think that's the same at all. The hallmark of a compiler isn't its command line arguments, it's the output. I think you would have more than a little difficulty arguing that all C compilers produce the same output.
It's true that new compilers often try to produce the same effect with more efficient generated code, just as web sites might strive to produce the same visual output more quickly.