Hm, well if you weren't so gestapo and close minded you'd understand I was more or less referring to dependance.
Could you please explain exactly how you happen to know that I'm so "gestapo and close minded"? Or will you retract your public lies about my character?
Right now, a linux system is typically gnu libc. Hence it relies on GNU. See my point here?
Nope, not in the least. You said people were using Linux before GNU, not using GNU before Linux. You were about as near 100% wrong as is possible. Now you're saying Linux systems rely on GNU libc. How does that make any point, other than that GNU does not depend on Linux but Linux depends on GNU?
Just because it uses utilities or whatever doesn't mean jack, and it is because of zealots like yourself that make me cringe at the RMS-tangents that enforce Linux is not an
operating system.
Again, exactly what evidence do you have to support your lie that I am a "zealot"? Do you always smear those who correct your misstatements of the historical record? What a wonderful example of ad hominem attack!
Meanwhile, I have yet to hear of anyone producing a useful Linux kernel without using GCC. That's been a huge dependency Linux has had on GNU that is nowhere near reflected by (more social and PR) dependencies GNU has had on Linux at any time in its history.
Bull shit.
You are the one posting it, not I.
Linux is not an operating system it is a kernel.
Exactly. It's the Linux kernel, plus many Linux-specific utilities, plus many GNU utilities, that form a useful system. (Many would point out that since "useful" nowadays means networking and windowing, there need to be BSD utilities, X, etc. I tend to agree, but don't feel strongly about it.)
GNU is, well.. it's just a bunch of applications and libraries. It's not an operating system either.
GNU, as architected and designed, is in fact an operating system. On top of most any reasonable kernel, it becomes an operating system, just not an entirely GNU one.
(RMS chose not to pursue writing a GNU kernel when presented with that option back around 1988. He chose to direct the pertinent volunteer resource towards writing a GNU Fortran compiler, based on the notion that there was greater likelihood of a free kernel coming from outside the GNU universe than the same happening vis-a-vis Fortran. That turned out to be true, though it had the effect of lessening "credit" in GNU's favor throughout the large universe of kernel users and directing it, in favor of GNU, towards the much smaller, but rather distinct, universe of Fortran users. I.e. just as many Linux users, sometimes totally clueless about the extent to which Linux' history depended on the pre-existence of GNU and RMS' advocacy (including the GPL), dismiss GNU today, there's a substantial audience within the Fortran universe that thinks anything "free" is due to GNU, when in fact programs like f2c and its libf2c library owe very little now, and nothing originally, to GNU.)
Linux is more of an operating system then GNU, because you can get Linux running quite functionally without GNU software.
Not that I'm aware of; can you provide links to useful Linux distributions built without GCC and GNU libc?
But, as I pointed out, when/if that's true, then if you call the non-GNU variant a Linux system, you're confusing things; why not call it a FOO/Linux system, to distinguish it from GNU/Linux? (My feeling is, "Linux", for the most part, captures all that's needed in most contexts, but there are some contexts, such as porting applications written in C, where the underlying kernel is not as important to success as the underlying C compiler, libaries, etc.)
Am I bashing GNU? No.
Oh, of course not. You're just smearing someone who points out your historical blunders with terms like "gestapo", "close-minded", "zealot", etc. But, no, you're not bashing GNU itself. Sure, I understand that. I'm sure everyone does!
[...]Linux is far more of a contribution on both a social level and technical than GNU in my opinion, and until firm evidence is provided otherwise, and not the incessant "RMS
said this!" crap that his blind followers spew constantly.
You might be correct about the first part, but, frankly, based on my short encounter with you so far, your opinion doesn't mean squat to me. Start showing more respect for the facts and less of a tendency to smear other peoples' character, maybe you'll change my mind...but you sure have started your relationship with me by digging a very deep hole!
RMS is a hippie, that is the bottom line. He has a idealistic approach -- but c'mon. This is capitalism, and his approach is just like communism. A great system if you kill all the greed. Hell, I'm greedy. I code for money. I enjoy it.
There's really not much I can say to add to what I've already said about that self-delusional line of reasoning, here on/. and for many years on gnu.misc.discuss.
Linus Torvalds understands that, RMS still thinks that people will understand the errors of their ways and just get along.
You correctly identify a line of thinking associated with many, but in my experience RMS is not one of them to any surprising degree (and, IMO, Torvalds is, in his own ways, just as much prone to that line of thinking).
Until then, I run Linux.. I have GNU utilities that I use on a daily basis. Unfortunately, I think I am so strongly opposed to RMS because of his incessant desire to promote
calling it "GNU/Linux" and in that desire often times coming across as either an asshole, or an idiot. Sometimes both.
I suggest that, in this thread, it is neither RMS nor myself who have come across in the ways you describe....
It is a shame because the man is brilliant.. but brilliance doesn't win by itself. You have to have a degree of common sense, and I think that is where RMS is failing miserably at.
Whereas you demonstrate a great degree of common sense, rewarding those who correct your misstatements of history by smearing them personally and professionally. I'm sure we all have much to learn from your shining example.
My best argument for this is that people were using linux before it came with GNU stuff. People weren't using GNU before it came with Linux
If that's your "best argument", you're neck-deep in buffalo dung, my friend, for that argument is exactly backwards.
Many of us were not only working on GNU software before Linux, we were using it, on a reasonably wide variety of underlying kernels -- SunOS, AIX (or whatever ran on RS/6000's in those days), and so on.
And I'm pretty sure when I started running Linux 0.96pl2 or whatever patch level it was, it already came with GNU utilities.
If there was indeed a time when Linux came without GNU stuff, the number of people using it was probably less than.1% of the number of people who were already using GNU software without the Linux kernel running underneath!
Until people use GNU/Hurds as much as Linux.. I'm calling it Linux.
Not that I insist you change your mind now that you've been given a clue about GNU/Linux history...but you might want to consider either calling it GNU/Linux sooner, or maybe when (or if) people use Linux with non-GNU tools in greater numbers (and this has long been "threatened", anyway)...
...or you might consider waiting to call it GNU/Linux until after we see whether the FSF calls their future OS "GNU/Hurd" or simply "The Hurd".
If the FSF uses "Hurd" to denote both the kernel and the OS, that certainly suggests it's okay to use "Linux" to denote the whole GNU+Linux(+otherstuff) OS. But if they call it "GNU/Hurd", they'll be risking suggesting that "Hurd" is no more a creation of Project GNU (or the FSF) than is Linux, as well as implying a useful system could be put together out of the Hurd kernel plus non-GNU utilities (and these are, respectively, false and true), which might be too risky for them. (Then again, maybe the GNU toolchain will be considered ubiquitous by the time the Hurd gets widespread usage?)
In the meantime, the fact that RMS couldn't get through a slashdot interview (or response), in which he continued his attempts to promote the "GNU/Linux" name on the basis that honesty in naming is important, without himself resorting to "name games" to smear George W. Bush, calling him by the invented nickname "shrub", strongly suggests that RMS doesn't have sufficient moral authority to persuade anyone to use "GNU/Linux" over "Linux", even if he has many other good arguments for such a choice.
But, in case I have any moral authority (which does not seem likely to me), I do prefer "GNU/Linux" to denote the class of OS that combines the Linux kernel with GCC, glibc, and other GNU utilities, without denoting anything about a windowing system, graphics capabilities, or all that much about networking, etc., FWIW. And I still wish, or recommend, that Linus would decide to wean Linux off its dependency on GCC, which, last I checked, was quite excessive, leading to too many cases where Linux depends on being compiled by a particular version of GCC, and making it harder for a true non-GNU Linux OS to develop.
You can always assign new passwords to the users and hash them for storage
In a/.-like context, that sounds like a recipe for a DoS attack. Just keep clicking on the icon that says "send me my password" after entering your victim's username, and he won't be able to log in using the newly generated password (after receiving the email) before you've clicked again.
Not that there aren't workarounds for that specific scenario, but the general problem remains -- the legitimate user loses access to a service because an illegitimate user tells the system "I forgot my password". Not all legitimate users have access to their email at all times they may wish to access said service. (If they did, repeat the problem for access to the email system, which would require a password for remote access just like the service in question, such as/., does.)
The GPL has its place (and is a good thing IMO). But please don't try to tell me that it is the solution to the IT industry's ills.
I'd suggest that "consumers" of software "demanding" GPL'ed software might produce some very good results, but that's a substantive difference from a suggestion I won't make, that trying to convince developers to GPL everything would solve much. I've felt, for many years, that the majority of benefits of attributes of the GPL (source availability, etc.) are best realized by having them demanded from, rather than foisted upon, users of software.
As far as anyone claiming the GPL is "the solution to the IT industry's ills" -- please don't take such claims seriously, they are probably being made by blindly enthusiastic "followers" of the FSF, Project GNU, Linux, whatever. I don't recall RMS's own writings about his expectations for the GPL making any such claims -- more that the GPL is a means to a (GPL-free, or at least GPL-unnecessary) end.
I will say that it's possible I made claims approaching that kind of blind rah-rah stance maybe 5-8 years ago, but as I've worked on GNU software over the years, it's become clear to me that the GPL is, neither alone nor even as the exclusive license in combination with other approaches, not the solution to the IT industry's ills.
Having said that, it is my opinion that if the IT industry and consumers of its product took its ills seriously and made informed long-term decisions regarding how to tackle them,
the GPL could become nearly, if not entirely, ubiquitous -- in that users might well demand source to software so consistently, everything might as well be GPL'ed, as the advantages of alternate OSS licenses tend to disappear as the opportunity to exploit their differences vis-a-vis the GPL is reduced (by users insisting on source).
And I should say that's what I mean by "demanding GPL'd software" on the part of consumers of software above -- they don't really have a reason to insist on the GPL per se. But if they insist on source code, the freedom to rebuild the binaries (if any) from scratch (complete working source) and use those instead, the freedom to have the code reviewed by outsiders without permission from the copyright holder, and so on -- things that IMO would make a lot of sense in a robust IT industry (one focused on quality rather than short-term profit and the "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" mindset) -- then producers of software might as well distribute under the GPL anyway. Other licenses either won't meet the requirements of the market (and thus won't earn the huge incomes they presently do), or will permit freedoms that the market won't permit to be exploited (e.g. what's the use of being able to distribute a proprietary binary of FreeBSD if nobody in their right mind would accept it without source?).
This is the side of the equation most of those who argue about GPL vs. BSD vs. proprietary seem to completely miss. They talk as if they're members of an elite that gets to choose how software is deployed. But if the market decides software will come with (useful) source code (for example), all their arguing and predicting will prove about as useful as those who decided that DivX (the DVD variant) was the One True Way to distribute movies for rental and/or purchase.
(Point being that, sure, the DivX people could continue producing DivX discs until the end of time, if they're willing to expend the resources doing so. But they figured out -- too late by most measures -- that the market wouldn't sufficiently reward them for doing it. So I'm not saying no proprietary, or BSD, or MIT X, software would get produced in this proposed future of mine -- just that there'd be so little reward in doing so vs. producing GPL software, it'd be "in the noise".)
Frankly, I'm so "out of the loop" these days, I have hardly any clue as to whether this message is sinking in to the end-user community except perhaps for a few small niches. I.e. whether GNU/Linux is gaining acceptance primarily because it comes with source, I can't really tell, but my impression is, no, it's mainly because it's fairly solid, has a lot of momentum (translates into support, buzzword compliance, etc.) behind it, isn't Microsoft, etc.
But I can pretty much guarantee that there are a few shops of significance out there that are already, or are seriously considering, making GPL-like source availability a requirement for new software acquisitions, simply because history (as well as logic) shows that when you don't have the source to your software, you've handed part of your business over to an outsider -- one not particularly interested in your success. (Or, the software doesn't do anything all that important, in which case, why buy it in the first place?)
Whether those few shops, whoever/wherever they are, will form the seeds of a software-consumer "revolution", or just remain fairly reliable bulwarks against the inevitable future Internet and general computing outages that we now experience due largely to having a computing infrastructure designed with the assumption that source is not available, remains to be seen.
You asked how communism and Korea come in to relevance. Well North Korea, because it's communist. And communism? The GPL is
communism at its best
Nice attempt at a backtrack. The GPL can be claimed to be, at most (in any legitimate sense), like choosing to live on a commune in the United States, expecting others who choose to live there to pitch in and live by the rules, etc. Kinda like a family or a church, except not usually sharing genetic heritage or religious beliefs.
That you chose instead to compare GPL enthusiasts to the totalitarian regime that rules North Korea and its starving masses shows your true colors, IMO.
As far as "communism at its best", I really doubt the GPL is that. There's no implication that prolific coders be forced to write to the specs produced by those who are less prolific but are in need, for example.
(And thank God for that!)
I'm pretty sure most of what I say about the GPL above applies just as well to the other well-known OSS licenses (MIT X, BSD?, AL, etc.), by the way.
And, yes, I got bored defending the GPL and those using it against ludicrously ignorant charges of "communist" many years ago, but can't resist rising to the defense on rare occasion. As an ardent anti-Communist, it's long been embarrassing to have to do this at all, since I'd like to think that people who oppose communism (the use of governing bodies to enforce wealth redistribution) do so thoughtfully and so without yielding to the temptation to smear others with the "communist" label. But that's a fond wish that'll probably never come true, since smearing people and groups is de riguer in even the highest offices in our land (e.g. Al Gore's telling African-Americans that Republicans don't want to count them in the census).
I believe the first black hole we detected (again, assuming black holes exist), was Cygnus X-1 (or cygnus something), and we detected it by the x-rays it gave off.
Yes, it was Cygnus X-1, but it's since been absorbed by RedHat V2.
I believe he means "State Of The Art", i.e. cutting-edge.
Reminds me of the first time I heard that phrase. I was calling Digital to ask about the cost of a PDP-8/I (or/L or/E perhaps), and the saleswoman kept saying "we don't sell that model anymore, we sell only state-of-the-art computers".
I had no idea what she was talking about. I was just a kid who really, really wanted the computer in the pictures on the computer books he'd been programming from (and imagining sysadmining from -- the sysadmin guide for TSS/8 being my first such guide, and being my first big "fantasy book" ever;-) for awhile.
It is really just amazing what we're now able to buy and install in our homes, computer-wise, and make available to friends all around the world to use in various ways.
Fortunately, I don't lose so much sleep over the possibilities as I did as a young teenager...!
[VAX] was the foundation for processor architectures like 68K.
And, elsewhere in this thread, someone said the VAX was the model for 386 protected mode.
I don't know for sure, but in both cases I wonder if the people are making statements based on a cursory reading of history rather than actual historical documents (or people, such as the original architects)?
Reason being, before the 68K, aka 68000, there was the 68C, aka 6800, which predated the VAX.
I'd guess that the 6800 was strongly influenced by the PDP-11, which also influenced the VAX, and that the 68000 was strongly influenced by the 6800, probably moreso than by the VAX.
(Historical note: a friend of mine built a homebrew 6800 system, later permanently (thank God;-) borrowing my KSR-33 teletype with built-in acoustic coupler to serve as a console, no later than early 1977, before VAXen were on the market AFAIK.)
Similarly, the 386 protected mode could have been largely inspired by the VAX.
But, given its obvious ISA-level relationship to Pr1me and older Honeywell hardware (a relationship that predated the VAX as well), and the fact that Pr1mes had already evolved a ring-protection system to mimic another (old) Honeywell line (the computers designed for Multics, not the 516 or whatever the Pr1me 200 was built to emulate)...
...I wouldn't be surprised to find out the designers of 386 protected mode paid only passing attention to the pertinent components of the VAX architecture.
VAX code was very small because of the insideous instruction set shoved upon us. VAX was designed for this, small compiled code,...
Funny, but I saw things differently back in the '80s, and still do.
IMO, the VAX ISA was not designed for compact code as much as for CISC "elegance" -- stuff like orthagonality, consistent addressing modes, etc.
From what I heard and saw, VAX code wasn't nearly as tight as similar code compiled for a Pr1me 400 series (roughly the same general architecture).
Generally, I found the VAX to be more like a Motorola 68000 (M68K), whereas the P400 was more like an x86, with its prefix codes, "unbalanced" ISA, etc.
(I'm not implying one design was based on another in a timeline or anything; the core of the P400 instruction set, which locked in the characteristics I'm referring to here, preceded basically everything else listed above by many years.)
Personally I found writing VAX code to be easier than writing P400 (or x86) code, though my level of expertise was certainly highest on the P400. Too much stuff to remember, weird corner cases, etc.
And I've found writing SPARC code quite easy and fun too, though IMO they got the SUBtract instruction wrong (shoulda been SUBtract Reverse, i.e. SUBR -- really, how often do you need to add exactly 2^N to a register, where N is 12 or 13 or something, I forget offhand, compared to wanting to subtract a register from a constant value, which I've often wanted to do in one instruction?).
Actually the SPARC's probably the easiest processor for which I've written code that runs nearest maximum speed without lots of careful analysis. It is to the m68K/VAX what the HP PA-RISC is to x86/P400 -- something of a spiritual sibling, focusing on elegance and simplicity over code density (where the PA-RISC beats it out, I would think).
But writing 128-bit VLIW code is my favorite for achieving bare-to-the-metal maximum performance via careful flow analysis, etc.;-)
Excellent post. I have only a few off-hand observations to add.
My impression of IA-64/EPIC, based on some reading of the docs, is that it's VLIW redesigned so it can scale up or down quite a large range of implementations.
(I say something about this on my linuxexpo web page (see my site), and that's over a year old.)
Basically, VLIW design can be (roughly) thought of as focusing on the question "given chip process design circa <insert two-or-so-year period>, and problem space <type of software being targeted>, and assuming very clever compilers, what's the optimal ISA we can implement?"
(Note that it doesn't take into account long-term viability of the ISA that gets produced, because the idea is that, with very clever compilers, when you get to the next generation of chip/process design, you instantiate a new ISA based on asking that question again, recompile, and, viola, you've got "optimal results" absent previous-ISA baggage. Ah, dreams.)
EPIC seems to augment the question with "and that scales across a fairly wide range of potential chip sizes and processes".
So, e.g. on the 128-bit VLIW machines I used to deal with, there were reasonably decent low-end chip designs that couldn't viably handle the ISA, because too much stuff would have to go off-chip (like, say, the register file maybe;-).
Whereas simpler designs, 16-bit or even 32-bit CISC or RISC, could fit on such chips, blowing the doors off a similarly-processed instantiation of that 128-bit VLIW.
A good amount of the logic you talk about in your article strikes me as being unnecessary for low-end applications.
E.g. the register renaming, the huge multi-port register file (a huge file is needed, but not so hugely multiported), the logic that attempts to figure out what the dependencies are, etc. -- these all strike me as being necessary only for medium-to-large-scale (vis-a-vis the high-level ISA) implementations.
My impression is that early Alphas, e.g. 20264 or 20266 or whatever, were intentionally done as low-end implementations. But they didn't attract a lot of attention. Even though the (well-done, IMO) ISA allowed for a great deal of scaling up, as the 21264 and 21264 are apparently proving (my 21264 is "mothballed", sadly), there isn't enough "groundswell" to make it popular. Perhaps not coming out with more of a barn-burner chip -- shooting higher than the basic ISA implementation -- is partly responsible for this.
I'm thinking that the only way EPIC, IA64 in particular, ends up looking good is if it's popular and implemented across a wide spectrum of chips, from low to high end.
That way, code that's already compiled to the ISA can, in theory (and perhaps in practice too), be optimized for mid-level to high-end chips, and still run pretty well on the low end.
Similarly, code that's "mundanely generated" might run about as well on the low end as the highly-optimized stuff anyway, but could still get worthwhile boosts being moved, without recompiling, up the chain.
That's a nice dream, if it's what they have in mind, but there are a couple of problems.
One, any information that is able to be encoded into ISA-level instructions that helps a variety of implementations of an architecture make their own decisions how to implement them represents ISA space (and usually other resources) that can't be used in a way that's optimal for a given implementation -- one that didn't have to accommodate the "wide-range" ISA (like EPIC).
E.g. if you reserve in the ISA a bit that says "please serialize between previous and next op" so a faster chip can know when to do dependency analysis before assuming parallel execution will work, that's a bit that a low-end chip, which is going to serialize it anyway, won't need.
Also e.g. if you reserve bits and fields for all sorts of optimization hints, so mid-level chips can do a better job of guessing, not only do you hurt low-end chips that won't use them, but you hurt high-end chips that have either enough logic to do at least that good a job of guessing at runtime anyway or have otherwise rendered most of the compile-time guessing redundant (e.g. by reducing latencies on branches, memory loads, whatever).
In both cases, these bits in the ISA could, on chips that don't really benefit from them, have served to boost performance in some other fashion. E.g. a low-end chip might want hints about L1/L2 cache issues, or maybe just a more compact ISA so it holds more instructions in Icache. Whereas a high-end chip might want hints about completely different things, or maybe just a way to specify what some new ALU can do in parallel with everything else!
Two, notice the Catch-22 in my statement about how EPIC/IA64 might look good. It has to be popular and run across a wide variety of architectures to show how good it really is (to the market, anyway), but how does it get popular until the market knows how good it is?
HP/Intel seems to be taking the approach of doing their best to "mandate" its popularity -- by making a real commitment to the architecture, including ensuring Linux runs out it from the outset, making good (great?) compilers (including OSS ones -- not sure how SGI Pro64 fits into this) available, etc.
But while they struggle to popularize this "epic" ISA by planting many seeds far and wide, and, at the same time, proving its value by rolling out an increasingly-wide array of implementations (in terms of performance), they do risk giving competitors opportunities to make inroads targeting shorter-term strategies.
And, in the longer run that IA64 seems targeted towards, will ISA compatibility across implementations be nearly as important as it was when this strategy was formulated and adopted, what, five or so years ago?
If so, then assuming IA64 is not much more or less "correct" an ISA for the longer haul than the competitions' designs for their shorter outlooks, Intel perhaps can afford (fiscally speaking) to remain committed to an ISA that might seem like a dinosaur roaming around slowly while clever early mammals expand into a bunch of niches for awhile, until that day comes when the dinosaur's strengths are visible -- applications compiled to IA64 will have longer useful lifetimes compared to those compiled to upstart ISAs, they'll scale better across a wide range of machines, etc.
But what works against this is the increasing viability of the ISA-ignorant code base out there, by which I mean code distributed as source, bytecodes, whatever, and which cares little for the underlying ISA to meet its performance goals.
That viability is increased by things like:
Increased deployment of Open Source software
Better compiler technology, encouraging less use of ISA-specific tactics (assembly coding being the extreme) for performance
Increased awareness of the pitfalls of investing in, or developing, ISA-specific applications (this applies especially to the comparatively huge "market" of in-house software)
The mere existence of IA64, which tells everyone that even the "King" realizes that the one-time "only" ISA (the 1980s Unix equivalent of the VAX ISA), the IA32, will someday pass away as a viable platform for many
That last item is kinda like what Y2K did for two-digit year encoding. After all, similar mind-sets, priorities, etc. lead to that as to doing ISA-specific, e.g. IA32-specific, platform development.
Yet it seems Y2K didn't cause a lot of people to resort to "1900/2000" solutions. I.e. we don't see a lot of cases (that I know of anyway) where the developers said "okay, the old code was for 1900, the new code supports 2000, and includes some 1900->2000 conversion utilities, but it's still all two-digit stuff".
No, it seems most Y2K issues were handled by finally going the full four (or more!) digits, so the problem wouldn't come up again in 2100.
If so much effort (US$Billions) was put into keeping the problem from resurfacing in another hundred years, that suggests the industry (those who decide what platforms to target for their software, whether for distribution or use in-house) will respond, to a significant extent, to the IA32->IA64 transition with less of an "okay, let's retarget everything to IA64" attitude and more of a "hmm, IA64 might get us 10-20 years of viability, that's too short for the investment we have to make, let's go the extra distance, get away from ISA-specific tactics, and pick a strategy that gives us flexibility in choosing IA64 vs. IA32 vs. Alpha vs. whatever at a suitably fine-grained level".
To the extent the industry adopts that model, the advantages of EPIC decrease, while the disadvantages remain the same.
It's also interesting to note the strong feedback among the other items.
In particular, consider how the success of Open Source (mainly GNU/Linux -- GCC specifically) came about soon enough to cause HP/Intel to openly "target" OSS so it could join the IA64 revolution.
Now, that helps promote IA64 acceptance.
But it also allows competitors, who want to produce better, "one-off" ISAs using whatever IA64-like techniques are appropriate, to do so without losing all that Open Source software, and even without necessarily having to do much high-end compiler development!
I.e. to the extent OSS compiles code well for IA64, it can be fairly easily modified to compile code well for a one-off ISA that doesn't have all the baggage of IA64 but does do some of the sophisticated stuff.
So OSS popularity led to IA64 "openness", which could well lead to better compiler technology being available/affordable for arbitrary ISAs that are VLIW or RISC subsets of IA64, and that could encourage the third item above, in that more "users" of code bases will realize they'd spend less $$ to get performance if they could just recompile for the ISA de jour (from AMD, Compaq, whoever).
I'm not saying IA64 represents taking a risky path, since I don't know the percentages -- could be anywhere from 10% to 90% chance of success for all I know.
But, of course, a huge amount of $$ and energy is being put into IA64, so it is, indeed, a "big risk" to say the least.
Research needs to be conducted AGGRESSIVELY in ALL area[s]...
Reminds me of an explanation I was given regarding how to create the "perfect program" for a given specification -- one that meets the spec and is 100% optimal.
Basically, treat the executable-image file format, the one that you'll instantiate as the ultimate goal (the program), as an arbitrary-length integer bounded by the maximum size it can reach and still be useful on the target machine. (Think of RAM, or core, as an arbitrary-length integer, if that makes it simpler.)
For all integer values between 0 and that maximum, run the program that results on a representative set of all possible inputs and test the program's outputs (stdout and stderr, if you like) while monitoring its performance.
After making sure a given program passes the tests, record its "scores" in terms of speed of execution and other metrics you care about.
(If this is being done sequentially, you can, of course, shortcut the process as you go, just as you can shortcut any sample program as soon as it fails a test.)
At the end of the process, you pick the program (represented by a single large integer) that best suits your requirements based on the performance metrics recorded for it.
The best part is, you don't have to do any coding, besides some high-level specifications! It's simple, and nearly 100% guaranteed to work every time!
Oh, one minor problem...for anything of substance, the process will take vastly longer than the remaining useful time in our universe! Other than that....
So, yes, by all means, research aggressively in all areas if you like.
As long as you (and others who hold to your ideals) pay the bills rather than forcing the rest of us to do so -- which means do not attempt to convince any government (or use other extract-funding-via-force methods) to help fund your efforts -- go right ahead.
And while you're funding this infinitely difficult endeavor, we're all sure you'll happily share the results with all of us, because, as you say, "what about what people NEED", and we're all people, even the ones who don't contribute to your cause!
Let's see you get a job without money, clean clothes and a place to sleep and clean up. Seriously, try it. Go out and dumpster dive to find some old rags that might keep a person half-ass warm in the winter, let them get nice and dirty, don't wash or shave for at least two weeks, and go out and get one of these "trivial to find" jobs. Jobs are like many other things in a capitalist society: easy to get for the people who already have them.
I'd be more interested in seeing you go find people in this condition and successfully employ them to do useful work for the present minimum wage.
When you succeed at doing that in more than 10% of the cases, get back to us.
In the meantime, you can maybe explain to us why it's smart for someone who wants a job to "go out and dumpster-dive", wear rags, let them get dirty, and don't wash or shave for at least two weeks.
Or are you seriously suggesting that these people have no public facilities available to them that provide methods whereby they can keep themselves clean if they chose to?
Really, the whole circa-'80s myth of the homeless has worn thin, partly (in the USA) because of the election of Bill Clinton (the media stopped paying attention to the issue, mostly, after that; before that they paid a lot of attention, since it was an anti-Reagan/Bush issue) and partly because people finally started studying the homeless, asking real questions (as I've done when I've given 'em rides) and taking the answers seriously (meaning, the way one takes an answer like "the dog ate my homework" from a 12-year-old, rather than emotionally, which would mean "oh, how awful for you, we must do away with dogs and/or homework").
My guess is that once we, as a society, finally get our heads out of the clouds regarding the homeless, a substantial-enough fraction of them will find the lack of handouts and guilt-based sympathy sufficient to motivate them to take care of themselves once again.
Then we'll find it much easier to deal with those who remain who are truly homeless, out of luck, whatever, due to problems they can't possibly deal with on their own.
My impression is that latter portion is a small minority of the present population.
Of course, I would argue that engineering a properly designed system cannot be DONE with open source. The whole premise of open source is not doing design, but hacking code without DOING design. This premise is very well documented by ESR in the Cathedral and the Bazaar and in the Unix Philospohy by Gancarz.
For a prooperly engineered system you need discipline, and you need rigid standards. You don't just hack code together, and if you do you'll just get another system just as bad as Unix. Good engineering is premised on good design, and the bazaar skips this step. Good engineering is a cathedral. It's not a matter of coding, it's a matter of discipline, design, and standards.
Your concerns would be more substantial if you'd stop confusing (as I've seen you do before) "open source" with "bazaar-style development", and "bazaar-style development" with "bad engineering".
They are each entirely orthagonal. Just as proprietary development, as such, never assures good engineering, neither open-source nor bazaar-style development, specifically, assures bad engineering.
After all, several highly visible open-source projects were developed cathedral-style, and are considered very good in terms of quality (perhaps "category-beaters"): GNU Emacs and GCC come to mind.
I used the "cathedral" approach to develop g77, also to assure quality, even before I understood it as a "cathedral" model, and after I did, I often resisted "bazaar-style" attempts to "improve" it when I felt they didn't, or wouldn't, meet the quality criteria I tried to uphold for it. (Failures being due to my own personal failings, at least mostly, not the fact that g77 was open-sourced! See my GNU Fortran (g95) page for more info.)
Certainly I agree with your implication that much open-source/bazaar-developed software, including some widely celebrated, is developed to a lower standard of engineering quality than should be the case for products of their ilk.
But the fault is not that they're open source, or developed bazaar-style. Those are "features" that allow many more developers to participate, with less up-front investment overall, for better or worse (depending on the quality of the developers, and especially their "developments", e.g. patches, as allowed by the project maintainers).
As far as these three concepts being entirely orthagonal, what I said above is not quite true...
...because I'm generally of the opinion that there's insufficient quality assurance of a public software product if that product is not open-sourced.
That is, without the public being able to view, modify, and try out the source code for a public software product (whether it's a distribution, like Windows or Linux, or the software running a public web site like slashdot.org or etrade.com), I don't see how anyone can claim their public quality assurance can reach the same high level that it (theoretically) could if it was open-sourced.
Of course, opponents of open-sourcing have long argued that without up-front investments of capital, quality is not affordable.
That may be true, but IMO the more pertinent issue is that only via open-sourcing can everyone determine for themselves whether the up-front investments that have been made have indeed resulted in a product of sufficient quality.
So it often amuses me to see people like yourself essentially (as you appear to do) prefer to blindly trust some corporation to produce quality software on the theory that they had the money to do it, instead of insisting on the product being open-sourced so you don't have to trust it, and can look at the code instead, discuss it with friends, muck around with it to see how robust, extensible, stable, etc. it is, and so on.
Because, in the end, as much as you liked VAX/VMS, in the short time I worked on that type of system, it crashed many more times than Linux has ever crashed on me (about 10 years using Linux versus maybe 3 using VAX/VMS).
And when I found a bug in the Linux kernel (long ago), I reported it and it got fixed very quickly. (Probably because I provided a patch.) I found it only because I happened to be looking through the source code, not because I actually ran into the bug! (It involved fouling up group-protections of files in one place, IIRC.)
But when I ran into a bug in VMS, it took a long time to demonstrate it sufficiently as a bug to my management so I could view the source on microfiche, track it down, and then send it to the Black Hole of DEC. To my knowledge, it was never fixed. (It involved random hangs while doing straightforward, but asynchronous, I/O to normal text files. That got me much better performance on a text-to-PostScript converter I'd written, but I had to back it down to using synch I/O, thanks to the bug.)
Had VMS been open-sourced, not only would I have been more easily able to find and fix that bug and get it out to others...
...but you would still be able to use VMS on many different kinds of hardware, today, instead of (presumably, as I do for TOPS-10 and especially ITS;-) bemoaning its "loss" to the community.
Whereas those shops that committed to Unix in the early '70s on the basis that it was lean, mean, and came with source code are still able to preserve a substantial portion of that investment by using *BSD and Linux systems, which support a dizzying array of hardware (CPUs and other components), allowing people to pick the hardware that best suits their present needs.
So, open source is not a panacea, neither is bazaar-style development (despite ESR's tendency to write as if it is), but they aren't inherently going to do anything but improve quality over the long run, since quality includes viability of investment in technologies over time as a component.
In that case, it might actually be better than the GPL, in the fact that CORBA and other related remote-use tricks which don't constitute distribution wouldn't hold water, right?
If I understand your meaning, then I'd say the Plan 9 license might indeed prevent such things, but then again might not, and in either case I'm not sure I'd call it "better".
In one corner: the desire to have more software be open source, or maybe just more open-source software.
In the other corner: the desire to have more freedom, in that the author of a program gets to be the one who decides the licensing for that program.
"CORBA and other related remote-use tricks" fall into a gray area between one author's freedom to ensure his program remains open-source (via a license like the GPL) and another author's freedom to keep his program proprietary (or under a license that conflicts with the GPL, anyway).
If the former program offers such an interface, or can be (freely) extended to offer one, and the latter uses it, the result can be that both authors get what they want, or at least what they are legally entitled to.
But, in the case of true "tricks", the former author is denied access to the source code of distributed derivations of his program.
And in the case of relying overmuch on legal (copyright) constraints to prevent such tricks, the latter author is denied freedom to choose licensing that conflicts with the GPL.
So, because it's a big grey area, I didn't get into it in my example -- I kept that simple.
RMS (and the FSF) seems to generally lean towards favoring the former (GPL-ing) programmer, but not so far as to favor a license that removes the freedom from the latter sort of programmer (at least in cases where he doesn't distribute his program), or the freedom of another programmer who takes a "free" program and makes only local (undistributed) modifications.
I generally agree with this line of reasoning. Though, the "people", i.e. the government they elect, have the right to decide whether the public airwaves will be regulated not just in terms of broadcasting but in terms of reception, so there is some wriggle room there.
I just think it's more fair to expect those who broadcast -- even by wireless phone -- to meet stringent standards than to do so of those who receive broadcasts. Put the burdens on those who choose to exploit the public airwaves than on those who merely listen in, is my general leaning.
Maybe the USA's choice of restricting reception is based substantially on a pro-corporate mind-set in Congress and the White House -- "we can't have people listening in to cell calls without the threat of punishment, else our cell-phone companies wouldn't earn so much short-term profit!"?
It pretty much always bugs me when corporations expect government to regulate and otherwise bail them out when the corporations choose to deploy (or just use) weak technologies or expect inadequate business plans to pay off handsomely. (Ref DeCSS, DAT tax, etc.)
(Yeah, I'm a Republican, but one with a strong Libertarian, and engineering, streak. I don't just "want" smaller government for some personal sense of freedom; I believe anything much bigger than a minimal government will fail at its core mission. Leave it to the corporations to use technologies that preserve privacy, and to consumers and citizens to be alert to privacy issues and choose technologies accordingly, is my general outlook. After all, just as many corporate officers and their lawyers seem to believe they're entitled to huge profits despite poor business plans and/or execution, many citizens believe they're entitled to health care, food, housing, a nice early retirement, etc. -- all at someone else's expense, if necessary. Our nation started selling off its peoples' freedoms long before the War on Drugs, even before the War on Poverty -- seems like the New Deal was the first big jump from self-sufficiency to government-enforced collective inter-dependence. In that environment, it's not surprising corporations, run by many of these same citizens in a country still enjoying a great deal of entrepeneurial spirit, would adopt similar views, and even see them as important to defending the USA's viability for business entities in the face of rising confiscation to meet the increasing entitlements. No, these views are not popular; I post them not to debate, having heard all the counter-arguments, but to give them the occasional airing they deserve in contexts where similar issues are argued in a simpler context. I realize most everyone here will argue for preserving the liberties to which they're accustomed, and for preserving their entitlements as well -- that's not news here or pretty much anywhere else. So, governments -- US, Canadian, or otherwise -- are therefore patted on the back for making "good decisions" almost exclusively in cases where they do not choose to permit individual citizens to make those decisions for themselves. This discussion of the impliciations of the FBI activities is therefore a welcome change of pace!)
f you aren't doing anything wrong, why do you care if they install cameras in your house? If you aren't doing anything wrong, why do you care if they install microphones in your bedroom?
These days, if "they" have installed all that equipment in your house, you had better be doing something "wrong"...
...else the ratings will go down, the advertisers will pull out, and the equipment will be removed!
(Okay, maybe not so much "wrong" but "naughty".;-)
The really amazing thing is, America's founding fathers saw this very thing coming. The 4th amendment was not an after thought. It was put in to deliberately undermine tyranny within the nation they were building.
Ditto the 1st amendment, which we're all exercising here...
...and the 2nd amendment, which probably a substantial percentage of us not only refuse to exercise, but are only too willing to concede to obtain "security" -- the exact sort of security the FBI is promising to provide by doing these kinds of things.
Not that I'm convinced there are violations of the 4th amendment going on here! Maybe there are, I don't know offhand. But those reacting negatively to this story should carefully consider whether they really wish to view the 2nd amendment as allowing the government any ability to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This right is written, IMO, much more succinctly and with less opportunity for semantic revisionism than at least some portions of the 1st and 4th. (Consider how variable is the practical meaning of "unreasonable", which is used in the 4th, versus "right", used in the 2nd. Or how the right to assemble is apparently limited to cases where the assembly petitions the government in the 1st. If that latter wording was interpreted as strictly as some interpret the 2nd, that'd mean two or three people do not have the right under the 1st amendment to get together unless the government recognized that they were preparing a petition considered by that government to be valid! There's a comma before "and" fortunately; just as there's one after "State" in the 2nd, both physically and, more pertinently, semantically.)
Yes, the "preamble" to the 2nd amendment confuses some people, but if you're right (and I believe you are) that the founders meant to ensure we could throw off tyrannical government (after all, isn't that exactly what they wrote was their, and our, duty in the Declaration of Independence?), it's no longer possible for me to accept that "security of a free State" somehow means "preservation of a (possibly tyrannical) government" -- that the right to keep and bear arms extended only to those the government approved as members of its militia ("military", as some would have it today) -- especially since I can't see how such an amendment would even be necessary in a document designed to limit, rather than merely authorize, that very government!
More and more I'm convinced that the true genius of the USA is its grounding in the core concept that the people, themselves, are ultimately responsible for their own safety, security, and governance. However, I'm continuing to think about and research these issues, perhaps to someday post some material on my web site, since they pertain not just to human government, but to designing large-scale systems (software and otherwise) as well.
Say you take program FOO's source code and modify it for your own use. I.e. you might compile the modified version, use the resulting binary, maybe even distribute the output of running that binary (program) to others, but you do not distribute the modifications, the modified source, or the resulting binary to anyone else.
If you received program FOO from someone else, they might require you to distribute the modifications (or the modified source) to others under these circumstances, depending on the license you accepted as a condition for acquiring the program in the first place.
The GPL makes no such requirement. I.e. you can make all the "local" modifications you like, and as long as you don't redistribute them in any form, you don't have to distribute your modifications as source.
What RMS appears to be saying is that the Plan 9 license does require you to send back your changes to program FOO to the "Original Contributor".
Whether he's correct, I won't suggest for myself. I suggest you read the pertinent license(s) for yourself.
don't call it violence, unless you want to denounce the boston tea party.
Exactly whose property was being destroyed in the Boston Tea Party?
If it was the property of those who were doing the destroying, then it wasn't violence at all.
If it wasn't their property, then it was destruction of someone else's property. That's certainly not non-violence.
But my point isn't that a modest destruction of a bit of someone else's property is equivalent to murder.
It's that the wholesale revolution advocated by the poster, involving the taking of other peoples' property (factories, farms, etc.) by force, will inevitably involve the use of violence, and he knows that, counter-claims notwithstanding.
the cops in seattle were beating people, tear gassing, and pepper spraying them a full two hours before any windows were broken.
Think about it.
I have thought about it, and that situation illustrates my point perfectly.
As far as I know, there is no evidence that the Seattle police were ordered to commit violent acts wholesale against the protesters.
No, what happened there is what often happens when people (in this case the protesters) willingly choose to stress the "system" to drive their point home.
In that case, the Seattle police force was widely recognized as having been poorly prepared for such a test. (Maybe not as poorly prepared as the LA police force during the 1990s, though.)
And if you're right about the police-force violence occurring before any protester violence, doesn't that suggest what is likely to happen across the USA if the widespread revolution, including the wholesale taking of property, occurs -- that it is going to trigger a response that make the Seattle police force look like muppets in repose?
So you must decide whether the anarchists were responding to the behavior of the police (who were criticized by those who considered them too slow and unforceful in their response, in terms of truly "securing" the area -- maybe Seattle residents wouldn't deal with this concern by taking up arms, especially seeing as they didn't perceive the protests as a direct threat, but I can promise you much of the mid and south west USA populace will)...
...or that those anarchists would have committed that violent destruction of property regardless of the behavior of the Seattle police (which strikes me as more likely, based on sketchy knowledge, such as the impression that the anarchists were well-organized).
The former interpretation shows that the anarchic revolution described in this thread will trigger vastly more violent response and then counter-response by the anarchists.
The latter shows that its the anarchists who were intent on initiating some level of violence (in this case, force in the destruction of private property, collectively owned by innocent citizens here and worldwide).
There's no question in my mind that the level of violence anarchists would initiate in the kind of revolution proposed in this thread would greatly exceed that displayed in Seattle.
Indeed, when the "revolution" happens, the response of US citizens is going to involve a great deal of defense of property via the use of force, and the anarchists who are plotting that revolution know that full well, and they certainly aren't planning to become "martyrs" for their cause.
Therefore, it's a reasonable conclusion that they intend to commit widespread violence themselves, if necessary, to achieve their tactical goals of seizing factories, farms, files, and so on.
Even if the "leadership" (and there really can't be any such thing in a genuine anarchic revolution, can there?;-) totally foreswears violence in the planning and execution stages...
...it's almost 100% guaranteed that they'll have less control over their revolutionary minions than Bill Clinton had over those Seattle police officers who panicked and started throwing tear gas everywhere.
As far as I know, the closest thing to a truly peaceful revolution by masses of people was the one that brought down the Berlin Wall.
And I'm pretty sure that was accomplished not with threats of violence or counter-violence, but with prayer, candles, and the experience of enduring violence and threats thereof coming from a communist regime.
In these discussions of how anarchists will overthrow the system, I see no mention whatsoever of prayer and candles, though I haven't researched the pertinent literature.
And as this thread shows, the tactical goal of the revolution is the seizing of other peoples' property, mainly, not the peaceful overthrow of a violent regime.
So there's no question in my mind -- the anarchic revolution will be bloody, as every revolution the poster identified as a positive indicator of the potential success (he left out the Berlin Wall) was bloody, AFAIK. Innocent people will die at the hands of anarchists, just as innocent people died at the hands of the Clinton/Reno Justice Department at Waco (at the behest of a gun-control-crazy US citizenry, which willingly allows such a level of anti-gun hysteria to exist in law enforcement that when it is stressed, innocent people do die, which apparently Americans consider acceptable when it comes to restricting the Second Amendment), and innocent people have died at the hands of often-poorly-trained, panicky police officers who mistook wallets and the like for guns. Under stress, people make mistakes, and people wielding force make mistakes often involving the deaths of innocents. Training them better is part of the solution; not creating those stressful situations (e.g. not fomenting property-seizing revolution) is another.
The anarchic revolution is not designed to change hearts -- as I said in the very beginning, it's a technology-based revolution, one designed to use technical means to change a system that is fundamentally rooted in human nature, in the apparent belief that those elements of human nature will not re-assert themselves post-revolution. (I don't mean only modern technology, of course; maybe I should say "material means".)
That distinguishes it from the Berlin Wall protests, as I understand them to have been.
Instead of changing hearts, you're planning on breaking things. Just as thugs and armies have done for millenia. And no matter how carefully you try to restrict the behavior of your cohorts, the scope and breadth of the operation you're planning will definitely result in innocent victims, due to the inevitability of the system you've put together acting in extreme ways when it is stressed.
Just like with a well-engineered aircraft, where the quality is not evident just in the smooth ride experienced in good weather, but in how well the craft stands up to the stresses of bad weather, revolutions, systems of governance, and so on are not best judged by how they cope when the populace largely agrees with them, but when the populace is in "violent disagreement" with them.
The fact that the Seattle police chief wasn't assassinated, ditto so many other political and corporate chiefs wielding power and control over people in the USA over the past several decades, despite "ruling" over a highly diverse culture including substantially independence-minded subcultures (willing to take up arms in various situations), suggests that, on the whole, this "system", despite its many flaws, is reasonably able to respond and adjust to disagreements between those in power and those who feel out of it.
(Not that there isn't lots of stress and anger out there, I realize, just that this system offers a variety of ways for people to improve their lot, and the lot of others, independent of approval from the government/corporate axis. So it's rather silly to attack either government or corporations, when it's so easy to fix whatever actual problems you think you see on your own.)
That's also a big reason why the defense against the anarchic revolution will be so much more vigorous than you imagine -- all those Muslims and Jews and Protestant Christians and Catholics and Atheists and Buddhists and Hindu across the USA, who you might think are ready to attack each other at the moment they see the "police state" crumbling, are instead much more likely to defend this land that has given them the common, free ability to make their way in life, raise their children (largely, if they can afford home schooling anyway;-) as they see fit, etc., and they'll defend that not only for themselves, but for others, who might be their mortal enemies back in their ancestral lands.
Trust me, if you're going to count on taking their property, you're going to plan on committing mass murder. (With some 50% or more of Americans owning stock, you'll have a hard time limiting your revolution to the taking of only privately-owned corporate property.)
And we, the citizens of the USA, however disgusted we might be with the White House, Congress, or the Supreme Court, or even the tedious blandness of McDonald's hamburgers, are prepared for the mass murder planned by the anarchists, in more areas of the USA than you imagine, Seattle notwithstanding.
Why do you think mass murder would be necessary for the following to occur?
I didn't say it would be necessary, just that it'd be so likely that it'd be nearly inevitable.
If you claim you're going to do this without violence, then that's very nice, but I don't see why you don't just take the route I explained in my original response to your post, which advocated a non-violent response -- to which you responded with a more full, clearly violent, agenda to explain why your approach was better!
Let's take your claims one by one, which I note exclude the idea of destroying other people's files (which is almost certainly impossible to do without at least planning on committing violence):
General strikes - The workers simply stop working. If the people in power insist on forcing them to work, that is fascism and slavery. Who has the moral high ground, then?
This ("workers simply stop working") has already happened, of course. As long as there are people willing to replace them in their jobs, it isn't a big problem, except when (e.g. union thugs) commit violence to prevent those people free access to such jobs. How does your plan for "general strikes" account for this possibility? If you claim "everyone will participate", then there's nothing to overthrow anyway, really. More than likely, you'll have a minority striking, in situations where enough people are willing to replace them. Then, like the UPS strike, there'll be places where violence against those people will be committed.
Given the inevitability of this scenario in the USA, since it happens pretty much every time, how is it you're not advocating violence when you're advocating bringing about a situation that would inevitably result in violence against innocent people by people who support your cause?
(BTW, I agree corporations used to use violence to deal with the striking workers. And, for some government-controlled jobs, which the workers voluntarily agreed to take, that still happens by proxy. But this doesn't generally involve committing violence against innocent people -- rather threatening it against people who agreed to work under certain circumstances, then broke that agreement. I'm not fond of such agreements, when they hold the threat of violence, but at least they agreed to it. Workers seeking new employment where others have left are comparatively innocent, yet they are the targets of the strikers. Targeting ranges from calling them "scabs" to beating them up with baseball bats to outright murder.)
Liberating political prisoners - Simple. All you need is enough guards who sympathise with the situation.
We already have that. It's called the Clinton/Reno Justice Department. It's not part of a revolution per se, more like political patronage.
Again, though, if the guards sympathise and release prisoners, those prisoners will have to deal with the populace, which, in the USA (at least mostly), is armed, and might not agree they're "political" prisoners.
Remember, the purpose of a justice system isn't so much to keep criminals locked up. It's to provide a means whereby those seeking revenge will be otherwise accommodated to allow the State to impose some kind of punishment. The ultimate arbiters of justice on earth are the people, as well as nature itself.
Convince the justice system to break its promise with the populace, and the agreement ends -- revenge could rear its ugly head, and not after jury trials, appeals, or even indictments.
But you still have the problem with the 3 or 4 guards who actually insist on doing their jobs, which have fed their families, because they promised to do those jobs. When they stand in the way of the other guards, what is to be done with them? In some cases, the answer will be "kill them -- they're standing in the way of the revolution".
Workers taking over factories - They work there already, no? This happens pretty often all over the world. Sometimes it works, usually the workers get violently attacked by hired thugs or the police (is there a difference?). Once again, who has the moral high ground?
In a country where the workers could easily band together and buy the factory, the owners of that property -- the stockholders, including your grandparents, the neighbors down the street, etc. -- have the moral high ground. They committed no offense by owning a piece of that factory per se. If the workers don't like the conditions, they can buy the factory (from the company), buy the company, leave and work somewhere else, etc. It's called "choice", and it's a staple of the US economy, despite being under constant attack (often by those who consider themselves "pro-choice").
And, have you carefully reviewed the track record of those other examples you mention? How much better have conditions, production, etc. been since the workers took those factories by force?
If they're not doing as well, then some workers could easily be lured into working for some other factory not yet taken over for more money. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, so to speak.
If they're doing better, then why don't the workers help the owners of their factories learn from the lessons of the taken-over factories that have been successful?
Farmers redistributing land - Destroy records of ownership, and this can be done very non-violently. Does the CEO of Maxxam corporation really know exactly what lands he owns?
Yes, I can assure you, he can and will track it down. Again, you're assuming you have the moral high ground when you use violence or even theft to steal someone else's property, even though you have the means to simply buy that property in an up-front transaction, especially given that you're assuming you have legions of comrades-in-arms agreeing with you.
If they're so willing to do this by violence, why not demonstrate the validity of their collectivist tendencies, pool their resources, buy what they need, and take the next few decades to build something so much better with that property than the previous capitalist owners could have?
That'll do so much more for your "cause" than any amount of violence. After all, it's what's sold millions of people on the advantages of property rights, rule of law, individual liberties, etc., despite all the flaws evident in such systems.
Mass protests are occurring - Protests are, by nature, non-violent. It's only the government response that is violent.
A laughable comment, given the violence committed by masked people (called -- incorrectly? -- "anarchists" by the media) in the Seattle protests. You really don't know much about history, do you, if you think only government response to protest is violent, and all else is non-violent? (O course, I agree government response often is violent; it's the proposition that it's 100% responsible for that violence with which I disagree. Exactly which part of the government response to the recent LA "celebrations" of the Lakers victory caused those cars to burn?)
Creating mutual aid organizations - It's very obvious that doing this is not violent.
Agreed.
I think your problem is that you've grown up in a culture of violence, one that insists that every problem be solved with a violent response.
Perhaps it's just that I've grown up in a culture in which violence on the part of communists, socialists, and anarchists is generally praised by the cultural elite. I think I know what to expect, and I'm aware of a variety of responses, with varying degrees of effectiveness and appropriateness. And I am reasonably aware of the extent to which innocents get caught up in the violence -- I don't consider four innocent students to be killed at Kent State to be both the numerical and moral equivalent of the tens of millions of innocents killed by communist regimes in this century, but I'm in the minority in that view, I suppose.
Think outside the box,
Oh, I can quite assure you I do!
...the best way to topple the system is with a population that refuses to passively be a part of it.
We're in agreement here, since the most important requirement for the US government, as envisioned by its Founding Fathers, is that a significant portion (if not a majority) insist on being actively a part of that system.
In fact, I'll go so far as to say the most opportunity you have for success in toppling the US system -- which is vastly more than the Federal and State governments combined -- is to increase the sort of apathy among the populace that has been increasingly evident over the past decade or so.
So, will the widespread taking of property across the USA increase, or decrease, apathy on the part of US citizens loyal to its founding precepts? You tell me what you think. For myself, I'll just say that my only reason to suggest you consider another course of action is your own value as a living human being; I don't really fear what you claim will happen, because if it did start happening, the apathy I see as an enemy of freedom would dissolve pretty quickly IMO.
And another thing, as global capitalism increases it's stranglehold on the planet, you'll see a large backlash.
It is not capitalism per se of which I'm speaking favorably. Capitalism is, in the sense I mean, the "default" state of humankind pretty much since it discovered agriculture, as far as I can guess. (Hunting and gathering surely involved some degree of ownership, of personal hunting tools by people, and of groves during gathering by a tribe. But I am guessing it was the huge investment agriculture required for "payoff" that really made it important to define and protect one's "property", to give seeds and shoots, which might have been very appetizing to hungry hunter-gatherers, time to come to full fruition.)
If you're really refering to "corporatism", then I suggest the "backlash" you see coming will be more a hodgepodge of changing lifestyles, consumer choices, and so on, rather than a complete, utter revolution, of the sort you seem to speak.
After all, it's the very adaptability of the "modern" society that protects it. The more a populace is able and willing to participate actively in the system (compare Taiwan and South Korea, versus other Southeast Asia nations, in how they coped with the recent economic downturn in that area), the more it's able to make non-violent, non-dislocative adjustments in its course as problems (ranging from communist threats to "corporatism run amok") come to light.
So I don't know whether by "global capitalism strangling the planet" you mean "fascist governments enlaving the population", which is more like Marxism, or "more and more people having a wider array of choices as to how and where to work, what to buy, how to live", which is more like the USA. Maybe the answer is somewhere in between?
The hope of anarchists is that this means liberation and freedom, as opposed to a series of fascist dictatorships.
Amen to that.
Oh, I do remember one strong impression I gained during my reading of the initial parts of the Anarchist FAQ.
It was that while I didn't agree with anarchy as a system, I did find myself thinking more people should be anarchists.
That is, I agreed with the idea that we shouldn't bow and scrape to those in power, worship heirarchies, etc.
But not necessarily with the idea that we should seek to impose the abolition of such heirarchies on others.
And I believe the best way to accomplish that is through education and the feedback of success and failure that the US economy general allows to flourish. (No, I don't particularly care for government propping up corporations by doing their dirty work, and, yes, sometimes I fantasize about some kind of revolution to eliminate that sort of thing quickly and "easily". But I know the difference between fantasy and reality; between killing one's enemy, and loving one's enemy; and which is more successful in practice.)
Having worked in or near a variety of corporate environments, as well as one or two institutional ones, directly or second-hand, I've observed that "anarchic people", or, more precisely, those who have limited usefulness for heirarchy, seem to rise to higher positions of power as time marches on. They're less aware of heirarchy, position, etc., more alert to good ideas coming from anywhere, anyone, anytime.
Further, the fleet-of-foot organizations (NPOs, corporations, even governments) seem to flourish to the degree they throw off the shackles of artificial heirarchy. (I won't go into what that is vs. natural heirarchy. As a simple example, having a corporate spokesman is more like a natural heirarchy, having a reserved parking space for each VP is more like an artificial one.)
I also would agree that much progress is to be made.
Where we disagree, apparently, is that you believe the system is fundamentally flawed and must be violently overthrown, even if the violence can be limited to the taking of property (and, again, that's tricky in a country like the US where the response to such taking is likely to be violent).
I believe the system is about as well designed for self-correction as any that has been proposed, and much better than most, and that it is already "correcting" itself regarding the worship of heirarchy, power, money, position, etc.
Globalism presumably introduces more risks, because though the US culture might be heading in a positive direction, as other cultures become increasingly part of the underlying structure often called "capitalism" (erroneous or not), they can, in my experience, tend to worship the kind of heirarchical, or vertical, view of "worth" that we're presently throwing off.
(Compare "Japan, Inc." in the '80s, and the threat it supposedly represented to the non-government-directed US economy. Which "won"? Who is most quickly trying to copy the other? As a more humorous example, in the US, we're long since tired of super-hero characters in general, from Superman to Schwarzenegger, local adjustments notwithstanding, but they're still big in some cultures.)
But that isn't true for all cultures. In some cultures, "bigness" isn't worshipped as much as it was in the USA in the '50s.
In any case, it's the variety ("diversity") of all those cultures that offers the most promise of globalization, of the ability to more freely trade ideas and products with people across national boundaries.
There are dangers (in globalism, but also in isolationism, etc.) too. But I won't be easily persuaded to throw away that freedom to trade just to gain a sense of security, and it'll be very hard to persuade me to eliminate that freedom for others even if I'll be praised as a "hero" for doing so.
Your assumption states 250 million drivers other than those in the US.
No, his assumption does not state that.
He was responding to someone who claimed M > C, where M = number of people who walk on the moon and C = number of people driving cars.
He was pointing out that, given even a conservative estimate of C -- which, in this case, would be a low value -- that was unlikely to be the case.
You just jumped in, probably having been taught to look for any evidence of "Americentrism" and jump on it publically rather than actually think and comprehend for yourself, and attacked the facts he posted to support the notion that his conservative estimate for C was probably quite low.
In other words, you beat him up for setting to low a limit on C on the basis that he set too high a limit on one of its components (the portion of C represented by drivers outside the USA).
In fact, he set (and implied) no upper limit on the number of drivers of cars outside the USA. So he can't be accused of Americentrism on this basis. Just as someone who says "I think there are more than 500 computers in the world, because I know for a fact there are 250 here in my home town, so, assuming we have no more than half of the world's computers here..." is guilty of actually believing his town has half of the world's computers.
Thanks for the blast from the past, though -- it's USENET all over again, which is why I gave up reading (and posting) there -- too many people who'd rather smear others in public than carefully consider whether it's deserved -- the geek version of "shoot first, ask questions later".
Slashdot Mirror
Could you please explain exactly how you happen to know that I'm so "gestapo and close minded"? Or will you retract your public lies about my character?
Nope, not in the least. You said people were using Linux before GNU, not using GNU before Linux. You were about as near 100% wrong as is possible. Now you're saying Linux systems rely on GNU libc. How does that make any point, other than that GNU does not depend on Linux but Linux depends on GNU?
Again, exactly what evidence do you have to support your lie that I am a "zealot"? Do you always smear those who correct your misstatements of the historical record? What a wonderful example of ad hominem attack!
Meanwhile, I have yet to hear of anyone producing a useful Linux kernel without using GCC. That's been a huge dependency Linux has had on GNU that is nowhere near reflected by (more social and PR) dependencies GNU has had on Linux at any time in its history.
You are the one posting it, not I.
Exactly. It's the Linux kernel, plus many Linux-specific utilities, plus many GNU utilities, that form a useful system. (Many would point out that since "useful" nowadays means networking and windowing, there need to be BSD utilities, X, etc. I tend to agree, but don't feel strongly about it.)
GNU, as architected and designed, is in fact an operating system. On top of most any reasonable kernel, it becomes an operating system, just not an entirely GNU one.
(RMS chose not to pursue writing a GNU kernel when presented with that option back around 1988. He chose to direct the pertinent volunteer resource towards writing a GNU Fortran compiler, based on the notion that there was greater likelihood of a free kernel coming from outside the GNU universe than the same happening vis-a-vis Fortran. That turned out to be true, though it had the effect of lessening "credit" in GNU's favor throughout the large universe of kernel users and directing it, in favor of GNU, towards the much smaller, but rather distinct, universe of Fortran users. I.e. just as many Linux users, sometimes totally clueless about the extent to which Linux' history depended on the pre-existence of GNU and RMS' advocacy (including the GPL), dismiss GNU today, there's a substantial audience within the Fortran universe that thinks anything "free" is due to GNU, when in fact programs like f2c and its libf2c library owe very little now, and nothing originally, to GNU.)
Not that I'm aware of; can you provide links to useful Linux distributions built without GCC and GNU libc?
But, as I pointed out, when/if that's true, then if you call the non-GNU variant a Linux system, you're confusing things; why not call it a FOO/Linux system, to distinguish it from GNU/Linux? (My feeling is, "Linux", for the most part, captures all that's needed in most contexts, but there are some contexts, such as porting applications written in C, where the underlying kernel is not as important to success as the underlying C compiler, libaries, etc.)
Oh, of course not. You're just smearing someone who points out your historical blunders with terms like "gestapo", "close-minded", "zealot", etc. But, no, you're not bashing GNU itself. Sure, I understand that. I'm sure everyone does!
You might be correct about the first part, but, frankly, based on my short encounter with you so far, your opinion doesn't mean squat to me. Start showing more respect for the facts and less of a tendency to smear other peoples' character, maybe you'll change my mind...but you sure have started your relationship with me by digging a very deep hole!
There's really not much I can say to add to what I've already said about that self-delusional line of reasoning, here on /. and for many years on gnu.misc.discuss.
You correctly identify a line of thinking associated with many, but in my experience RMS is not one of them to any surprising degree (and, IMO, Torvalds is, in his own ways, just as much prone to that line of thinking).
I suggest that, in this thread, it is neither RMS nor myself who have come across in the ways you describe....
Whereas you demonstrate a great degree of common sense, rewarding those who correct your misstatements of history by smearing them personally and professionally. I'm sure we all have much to learn from your shining example.
If that's your "best argument", you're neck-deep in buffalo dung, my friend, for that argument is exactly backwards.
Many of us were not only working on GNU software before Linux, we were using it, on a reasonably wide variety of underlying kernels -- SunOS, AIX (or whatever ran on RS/6000's in those days), and so on.
And I'm pretty sure when I started running Linux 0.96pl2 or whatever patch level it was, it already came with GNU utilities.
If there was indeed a time when Linux came without GNU stuff, the number of people using it was probably less than .1% of the number of people who were already using GNU software without the Linux kernel running underneath!
Not that I insist you change your mind now that you've been given a clue about GNU/Linux history...but you might want to consider either calling it GNU/Linux sooner, or maybe when (or if) people use Linux with non-GNU tools in greater numbers (and this has long been "threatened", anyway)...
If the FSF uses "Hurd" to denote both the kernel and the OS, that certainly suggests it's okay to use "Linux" to denote the whole GNU+Linux(+otherstuff) OS. But if they call it "GNU/Hurd", they'll be risking suggesting that "Hurd" is no more a creation of Project GNU (or the FSF) than is Linux, as well as implying a useful system could be put together out of the Hurd kernel plus non-GNU utilities (and these are, respectively, false and true), which might be too risky for them. (Then again, maybe the GNU toolchain will be considered ubiquitous by the time the Hurd gets widespread usage?)
In the meantime, the fact that RMS couldn't get through a slashdot interview (or response), in which he continued his attempts to promote the "GNU/Linux" name on the basis that honesty in naming is important, without himself resorting to "name games" to smear George W. Bush, calling him by the invented nickname "shrub", strongly suggests that RMS doesn't have sufficient moral authority to persuade anyone to use "GNU/Linux" over "Linux", even if he has many other good arguments for such a choice.
But, in case I have any moral authority (which does not seem likely to me), I do prefer "GNU/Linux" to denote the class of OS that combines the Linux kernel with GCC, glibc, and other GNU utilities, without denoting anything about a windowing system, graphics capabilities, or all that much about networking, etc., FWIW. And I still wish, or recommend, that Linus would decide to wean Linux off its dependency on GCC, which, last I checked, was quite excessive, leading to too many cases where Linux depends on being compiled by a particular version of GCC, and making it harder for a true non-GNU Linux OS to develop.
No.
In a /.-like context, that sounds like a recipe for a DoS attack. Just keep clicking on the icon that says "send me my password" after entering your victim's username, and he won't be able to log in using the newly generated password (after receiving the email) before you've clicked again.
Not that there aren't workarounds for that specific scenario, but the general problem remains -- the legitimate user loses access to a service because an illegitimate user tells the system "I forgot my password". Not all legitimate users have access to their email at all times they may wish to access said service. (If they did, repeat the problem for access to the email system, which would require a password for remote access just like the service in question, such as /., does.)
I'd suggest that "consumers" of software "demanding" GPL'ed software might produce some very good results, but that's a substantive difference from a suggestion I won't make, that trying to convince developers to GPL everything would solve much. I've felt, for many years, that the majority of benefits of attributes of the GPL (source availability, etc.) are best realized by having them demanded from, rather than foisted upon, users of software.
As far as anyone claiming the GPL is "the solution to the IT industry's ills" -- please don't take such claims seriously, they are probably being made by blindly enthusiastic "followers" of the FSF, Project GNU, Linux, whatever. I don't recall RMS's own writings about his expectations for the GPL making any such claims -- more that the GPL is a means to a (GPL-free, or at least GPL-unnecessary) end.
I will say that it's possible I made claims approaching that kind of blind rah-rah stance maybe 5-8 years ago, but as I've worked on GNU software over the years, it's become clear to me that the GPL is, neither alone nor even as the exclusive license in combination with other approaches, not the solution to the IT industry's ills.
Having said that, it is my opinion that if the IT industry and consumers of its product took its ills seriously and made informed long-term decisions regarding how to tackle them, the GPL could become nearly, if not entirely, ubiquitous -- in that users might well demand source to software so consistently, everything might as well be GPL'ed, as the advantages of alternate OSS licenses tend to disappear as the opportunity to exploit their differences vis-a-vis the GPL is reduced (by users insisting on source).
And I should say that's what I mean by "demanding GPL'd software" on the part of consumers of software above -- they don't really have a reason to insist on the GPL per se. But if they insist on source code, the freedom to rebuild the binaries (if any) from scratch (complete working source) and use those instead, the freedom to have the code reviewed by outsiders without permission from the copyright holder, and so on -- things that IMO would make a lot of sense in a robust IT industry (one focused on quality rather than short-term profit and the "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" mindset) -- then producers of software might as well distribute under the GPL anyway. Other licenses either won't meet the requirements of the market (and thus won't earn the huge incomes they presently do), or will permit freedoms that the market won't permit to be exploited (e.g. what's the use of being able to distribute a proprietary binary of FreeBSD if nobody in their right mind would accept it without source?).
This is the side of the equation most of those who argue about GPL vs. BSD vs. proprietary seem to completely miss. They talk as if they're members of an elite that gets to choose how software is deployed. But if the market decides software will come with (useful) source code (for example), all their arguing and predicting will prove about as useful as those who decided that DivX (the DVD variant) was the One True Way to distribute movies for rental and/or purchase.
(Point being that, sure, the DivX people could continue producing DivX discs until the end of time, if they're willing to expend the resources doing so. But they figured out -- too late by most measures -- that the market wouldn't sufficiently reward them for doing it. So I'm not saying no proprietary, or BSD, or MIT X, software would get produced in this proposed future of mine -- just that there'd be so little reward in doing so vs. producing GPL software, it'd be "in the noise".)
Frankly, I'm so "out of the loop" these days, I have hardly any clue as to whether this message is sinking in to the end-user community except perhaps for a few small niches. I.e. whether GNU/Linux is gaining acceptance primarily because it comes with source, I can't really tell, but my impression is, no, it's mainly because it's fairly solid, has a lot of momentum (translates into support, buzzword compliance, etc.) behind it, isn't Microsoft, etc.
But I can pretty much guarantee that there are a few shops of significance out there that are already, or are seriously considering, making GPL-like source availability a requirement for new software acquisitions, simply because history (as well as logic) shows that when you don't have the source to your software, you've handed part of your business over to an outsider -- one not particularly interested in your success. (Or, the software doesn't do anything all that important, in which case, why buy it in the first place?)
Whether those few shops, whoever/wherever they are, will form the seeds of a software-consumer "revolution", or just remain fairly reliable bulwarks against the inevitable future Internet and general computing outages that we now experience due largely to having a computing infrastructure designed with the assumption that source is not available, remains to be seen.
Nice attempt at a backtrack. The GPL can be claimed to be, at most (in any legitimate sense), like choosing to live on a commune in the United States, expecting others who choose to live there to pitch in and live by the rules, etc. Kinda like a family or a church, except not usually sharing genetic heritage or religious beliefs.
That you chose instead to compare GPL enthusiasts to the totalitarian regime that rules North Korea and its starving masses shows your true colors, IMO.
As far as "communism at its best", I really doubt the GPL is that. There's no implication that prolific coders be forced to write to the specs produced by those who are less prolific but are in need, for example.
(And thank God for that!)
I'm pretty sure most of what I say about the GPL above applies just as well to the other well-known OSS licenses (MIT X, BSD?, AL, etc.), by the way.
And, yes, I got bored defending the GPL and those using it against ludicrously ignorant charges of "communist" many years ago, but can't resist rising to the defense on rare occasion. As an ardent anti-Communist, it's long been embarrassing to have to do this at all, since I'd like to think that people who oppose communism (the use of governing bodies to enforce wealth redistribution) do so thoughtfully and so without yielding to the temptation to smear others with the "communist" label. But that's a fond wish that'll probably never come true, since smearing people and groups is de riguer in even the highest offices in our land (e.g. Al Gore's telling African-Americans that Republicans don't want to count them in the census).
Absolutely! ;-)
Yes, it was Cygnus X-1, but it's since been absorbed by RedHat V2.
I believe he means "State Of The Art", i.e. cutting-edge.
Reminds me of the first time I heard that phrase. I was calling Digital to ask about the cost of a PDP-8/I (or /L or /E perhaps), and the saleswoman kept saying "we don't sell that model anymore, we sell only state-of-the-art computers".
I had no idea what she was talking about. I was just a kid who really, really wanted the computer in the pictures on the computer books he'd been programming from (and imagining sysadmining from -- the sysadmin guide for TSS/8 being my first such guide, and being my first big "fantasy book" ever ;-) for awhile.
It is really just amazing what we're now able to buy and install in our homes, computer-wise, and make available to friends all around the world to use in various ways.
Fortunately, I don't lose so much sleep over the possibilities as I did as a young teenager...!
And, elsewhere in this thread, someone said the VAX was the model for 386 protected mode.
I don't know for sure, but in both cases I wonder if the people are making statements based on a cursory reading of history rather than actual historical documents (or people, such as the original architects)?
Reason being, before the 68K, aka 68000, there was the 68C, aka 6800, which predated the VAX.
I'd guess that the 6800 was strongly influenced by the PDP-11, which also influenced the VAX, and that the 68000 was strongly influenced by the 6800, probably moreso than by the VAX.
(Historical note: a friend of mine built a homebrew 6800 system, later permanently (thank God ;-) borrowing my KSR-33 teletype with built-in acoustic coupler to serve as a console, no later than early 1977, before VAXen were on the market AFAIK.)
Similarly, the 386 protected mode could have been largely inspired by the VAX.
But, given its obvious ISA-level relationship to Pr1me and older Honeywell hardware (a relationship that predated the VAX as well), and the fact that Pr1mes had already evolved a ring-protection system to mimic another (old) Honeywell line (the computers designed for Multics, not the 516 or whatever the Pr1me 200 was built to emulate)...
Funny, but I saw things differently back in the '80s, and still do.
IMO, the VAX ISA was not designed for compact code as much as for CISC "elegance" -- stuff like orthagonality, consistent addressing modes, etc.
From what I heard and saw, VAX code wasn't nearly as tight as similar code compiled for a Pr1me 400 series (roughly the same general architecture).
Generally, I found the VAX to be more like a Motorola 68000 (M68K), whereas the P400 was more like an x86, with its prefix codes, "unbalanced" ISA, etc.
(I'm not implying one design was based on another in a timeline or anything; the core of the P400 instruction set, which locked in the characteristics I'm referring to here, preceded basically everything else listed above by many years.)
Personally I found writing VAX code to be easier than writing P400 (or x86) code, though my level of expertise was certainly highest on the P400. Too much stuff to remember, weird corner cases, etc.
And I've found writing SPARC code quite easy and fun too, though IMO they got the SUBtract instruction wrong (shoulda been SUBtract Reverse, i.e. SUBR -- really, how often do you need to add exactly 2^N to a register, where N is 12 or 13 or something, I forget offhand, compared to wanting to subtract a register from a constant value, which I've often wanted to do in one instruction?).
Actually the SPARC's probably the easiest processor for which I've written code that runs nearest maximum speed without lots of careful analysis. It is to the m68K/VAX what the HP PA-RISC is to x86/P400 -- something of a spiritual sibling, focusing on elegance and simplicity over code density (where the PA-RISC beats it out, I would think).
But writing 128-bit VLIW code is my favorite for achieving bare-to-the-metal maximum performance via careful flow analysis, etc. ;-)
My impression of IA-64/EPIC, based on some reading of the docs, is that it's VLIW redesigned so it can scale up or down quite a large range of implementations.
(I say something about this on my linuxexpo web page (see my site), and that's over a year old.)
Basically, VLIW design can be (roughly) thought of as focusing on the question "given chip process design circa <insert two-or-so-year period>, and problem space <type of software being targeted>, and assuming very clever compilers, what's the optimal ISA we can implement?"
(Note that it doesn't take into account long-term viability of the ISA that gets produced, because the idea is that, with very clever compilers, when you get to the next generation of chip/process design, you instantiate a new ISA based on asking that question again, recompile, and, viola, you've got "optimal results" absent previous-ISA baggage. Ah, dreams.)
EPIC seems to augment the question with "and that scales across a fairly wide range of potential chip sizes and processes".
So, e.g. on the 128-bit VLIW machines I used to deal with, there were reasonably decent low-end chip designs that couldn't viably handle the ISA, because too much stuff would have to go off-chip (like, say, the register file maybe ;-).
Whereas simpler designs, 16-bit or even 32-bit CISC or RISC, could fit on such chips, blowing the doors off a similarly-processed instantiation of that 128-bit VLIW.
A good amount of the logic you talk about in your article strikes me as being unnecessary for low-end applications.
E.g. the register renaming, the huge multi-port register file (a huge file is needed, but not so hugely multiported), the logic that attempts to figure out what the dependencies are, etc. -- these all strike me as being necessary only for medium-to-large-scale (vis-a-vis the high-level ISA) implementations.
My impression is that early Alphas, e.g. 20264 or 20266 or whatever, were intentionally done as low-end implementations. But they didn't attract a lot of attention. Even though the (well-done, IMO) ISA allowed for a great deal of scaling up, as the 21264 and 21264 are apparently proving (my 21264 is "mothballed", sadly), there isn't enough "groundswell" to make it popular. Perhaps not coming out with more of a barn-burner chip -- shooting higher than the basic ISA implementation -- is partly responsible for this.
I'm thinking that the only way EPIC, IA64 in particular, ends up looking good is if it's popular and implemented across a wide spectrum of chips, from low to high end.
That way, code that's already compiled to the ISA can, in theory (and perhaps in practice too), be optimized for mid-level to high-end chips, and still run pretty well on the low end.
Similarly, code that's "mundanely generated" might run about as well on the low end as the highly-optimized stuff anyway, but could still get worthwhile boosts being moved, without recompiling, up the chain.
That's a nice dream, if it's what they have in mind, but there are a couple of problems.
One, any information that is able to be encoded into ISA-level instructions that helps a variety of implementations of an architecture make their own decisions how to implement them represents ISA space (and usually other resources) that can't be used in a way that's optimal for a given implementation -- one that didn't have to accommodate the "wide-range" ISA (like EPIC).
E.g. if you reserve in the ISA a bit that says "please serialize between previous and next op" so a faster chip can know when to do dependency analysis before assuming parallel execution will work, that's a bit that a low-end chip, which is going to serialize it anyway, won't need.
Also e.g. if you reserve bits and fields for all sorts of optimization hints, so mid-level chips can do a better job of guessing, not only do you hurt low-end chips that won't use them, but you hurt high-end chips that have either enough logic to do at least that good a job of guessing at runtime anyway or have otherwise rendered most of the compile-time guessing redundant (e.g. by reducing latencies on branches, memory loads, whatever).
In both cases, these bits in the ISA could, on chips that don't really benefit from them, have served to boost performance in some other fashion. E.g. a low-end chip might want hints about L1/L2 cache issues, or maybe just a more compact ISA so it holds more instructions in Icache. Whereas a high-end chip might want hints about completely different things, or maybe just a way to specify what some new ALU can do in parallel with everything else!
Two, notice the Catch-22 in my statement about how EPIC/IA64 might look good. It has to be popular and run across a wide variety of architectures to show how good it really is (to the market, anyway), but how does it get popular until the market knows how good it is?
HP/Intel seems to be taking the approach of doing their best to "mandate" its popularity -- by making a real commitment to the architecture, including ensuring Linux runs out it from the outset, making good (great?) compilers (including OSS ones -- not sure how SGI Pro64 fits into this) available, etc.
But while they struggle to popularize this "epic" ISA by planting many seeds far and wide, and, at the same time, proving its value by rolling out an increasingly-wide array of implementations (in terms of performance), they do risk giving competitors opportunities to make inroads targeting shorter-term strategies.
And, in the longer run that IA64 seems targeted towards, will ISA compatibility across implementations be nearly as important as it was when this strategy was formulated and adopted, what, five or so years ago?
If so, then assuming IA64 is not much more or less "correct" an ISA for the longer haul than the competitions' designs for their shorter outlooks, Intel perhaps can afford (fiscally speaking) to remain committed to an ISA that might seem like a dinosaur roaming around slowly while clever early mammals expand into a bunch of niches for awhile, until that day comes when the dinosaur's strengths are visible -- applications compiled to IA64 will have longer useful lifetimes compared to those compiled to upstart ISAs, they'll scale better across a wide range of machines, etc.
But what works against this is the increasing viability of the ISA-ignorant code base out there, by which I mean code distributed as source, bytecodes, whatever, and which cares little for the underlying ISA to meet its performance goals.
That viability is increased by things like:
- Increased deployment of Open Source software
- Better compiler technology, encouraging less use of ISA-specific tactics (assembly coding being the extreme) for performance
- Increased awareness of the pitfalls of investing in, or developing, ISA-specific applications (this applies especially to the comparatively huge "market" of in-house software)
- The mere existence of IA64, which tells everyone that even the "King" realizes that the one-time "only" ISA (the 1980s Unix equivalent of the VAX ISA), the IA32, will someday pass away as a viable platform for many
That last item is kinda like what Y2K did for two-digit year encoding. After all, similar mind-sets, priorities, etc. lead to that as to doing ISA-specific, e.g. IA32-specific, platform development.Yet it seems Y2K didn't cause a lot of people to resort to "1900/2000" solutions. I.e. we don't see a lot of cases (that I know of anyway) where the developers said "okay, the old code was for 1900, the new code supports 2000, and includes some 1900->2000 conversion utilities, but it's still all two-digit stuff".
No, it seems most Y2K issues were handled by finally going the full four (or more!) digits, so the problem wouldn't come up again in 2100.
If so much effort (US$Billions) was put into keeping the problem from resurfacing in another hundred years, that suggests the industry (those who decide what platforms to target for their software, whether for distribution or use in-house) will respond, to a significant extent, to the IA32->IA64 transition with less of an "okay, let's retarget everything to IA64" attitude and more of a "hmm, IA64 might get us 10-20 years of viability, that's too short for the investment we have to make, let's go the extra distance, get away from ISA-specific tactics, and pick a strategy that gives us flexibility in choosing IA64 vs. IA32 vs. Alpha vs. whatever at a suitably fine-grained level".
To the extent the industry adopts that model, the advantages of EPIC decrease, while the disadvantages remain the same.
It's also interesting to note the strong feedback among the other items.
In particular, consider how the success of Open Source (mainly GNU/Linux -- GCC specifically) came about soon enough to cause HP/Intel to openly "target" OSS so it could join the IA64 revolution.
Now, that helps promote IA64 acceptance.
But it also allows competitors, who want to produce better, "one-off" ISAs using whatever IA64-like techniques are appropriate, to do so without losing all that Open Source software, and even without necessarily having to do much high-end compiler development!
I.e. to the extent OSS compiles code well for IA64, it can be fairly easily modified to compile code well for a one-off ISA that doesn't have all the baggage of IA64 but does do some of the sophisticated stuff.
So OSS popularity led to IA64 "openness", which could well lead to better compiler technology being available/affordable for arbitrary ISAs that are VLIW or RISC subsets of IA64, and that could encourage the third item above, in that more "users" of code bases will realize they'd spend less $$ to get performance if they could just recompile for the ISA de jour (from AMD, Compaq, whoever).
I'm not saying IA64 represents taking a risky path, since I don't know the percentages -- could be anywhere from 10% to 90% chance of success for all I know.
But, of course, a huge amount of $$ and energy is being put into IA64, so it is, indeed, a "big risk" to say the least.
Reminds me of an explanation I was given regarding how to create the "perfect program" for a given specification -- one that meets the spec and is 100% optimal.
Basically, treat the executable-image file format, the one that you'll instantiate as the ultimate goal (the program), as an arbitrary-length integer bounded by the maximum size it can reach and still be useful on the target machine. (Think of RAM, or core, as an arbitrary-length integer, if that makes it simpler.)
For all integer values between 0 and that maximum, run the program that results on a representative set of all possible inputs and test the program's outputs (stdout and stderr, if you like) while monitoring its performance.
After making sure a given program passes the tests, record its "scores" in terms of speed of execution and other metrics you care about.
(If this is being done sequentially, you can, of course, shortcut the process as you go, just as you can shortcut any sample program as soon as it fails a test.)
At the end of the process, you pick the program (represented by a single large integer) that best suits your requirements based on the performance metrics recorded for it.
The best part is, you don't have to do any coding, besides some high-level specifications! It's simple, and nearly 100% guaranteed to work every time!
Oh, one minor problem...for anything of substance, the process will take vastly longer than the remaining useful time in our universe! Other than that....
So, yes, by all means, research aggressively in all areas if you like.
As long as you (and others who hold to your ideals) pay the bills rather than forcing the rest of us to do so -- which means do not attempt to convince any government (or use other extract-funding-via-force methods) to help fund your efforts -- go right ahead.
And while you're funding this infinitely difficult endeavor, we're all sure you'll happily share the results with all of us, because, as you say, "what about what people NEED", and we're all people, even the ones who don't contribute to your cause!
I'd be more interested in seeing you go find people in this condition and successfully employ them to do useful work for the present minimum wage.
When you succeed at doing that in more than 10% of the cases, get back to us.
In the meantime, you can maybe explain to us why it's smart for someone who wants a job to "go out and dumpster-dive", wear rags, let them get dirty, and don't wash or shave for at least two weeks.
Or are you seriously suggesting that these people have no public facilities available to them that provide methods whereby they can keep themselves clean if they chose to?
Really, the whole circa-'80s myth of the homeless has worn thin, partly (in the USA) because of the election of Bill Clinton (the media stopped paying attention to the issue, mostly, after that; before that they paid a lot of attention, since it was an anti-Reagan/Bush issue) and partly because people finally started studying the homeless, asking real questions (as I've done when I've given 'em rides) and taking the answers seriously (meaning, the way one takes an answer like "the dog ate my homework" from a 12-year-old, rather than emotionally, which would mean "oh, how awful for you, we must do away with dogs and/or homework").
My guess is that once we, as a society, finally get our heads out of the clouds regarding the homeless, a substantial-enough fraction of them will find the lack of handouts and guilt-based sympathy sufficient to motivate them to take care of themselves once again.
Then we'll find it much easier to deal with those who remain who are truly homeless, out of luck, whatever, due to problems they can't possibly deal with on their own.
My impression is that latter portion is a small minority of the present population.
Your concerns would be more substantial if you'd stop confusing (as I've seen you do before) "open source" with "bazaar-style development", and "bazaar-style development" with "bad engineering".
They are each entirely orthagonal. Just as proprietary development, as such, never assures good engineering, neither open-source nor bazaar-style development, specifically, assures bad engineering.
After all, several highly visible open-source projects were developed cathedral-style, and are considered very good in terms of quality (perhaps "category-beaters"): GNU Emacs and GCC come to mind.
I used the "cathedral" approach to develop g77, also to assure quality, even before I understood it as a "cathedral" model, and after I did, I often resisted "bazaar-style" attempts to "improve" it when I felt they didn't, or wouldn't, meet the quality criteria I tried to uphold for it. (Failures being due to my own personal failings, at least mostly, not the fact that g77 was open-sourced! See my GNU Fortran (g95) page for more info.)
Certainly I agree with your implication that much open-source/bazaar-developed software, including some widely celebrated, is developed to a lower standard of engineering quality than should be the case for products of their ilk.
But the fault is not that they're open source, or developed bazaar-style. Those are "features" that allow many more developers to participate, with less up-front investment overall, for better or worse (depending on the quality of the developers, and especially their "developments", e.g. patches, as allowed by the project maintainers).
As far as these three concepts being entirely orthagonal, what I said above is not quite true...
That is, without the public being able to view, modify, and try out the source code for a public software product (whether it's a distribution, like Windows or Linux, or the software running a public web site like slashdot.org or etrade.com), I don't see how anyone can claim their public quality assurance can reach the same high level that it (theoretically) could if it was open-sourced.
Of course, opponents of open-sourcing have long argued that without up-front investments of capital, quality is not affordable.
That may be true, but IMO the more pertinent issue is that only via open-sourcing can everyone determine for themselves whether the up-front investments that have been made have indeed resulted in a product of sufficient quality.
So it often amuses me to see people like yourself essentially (as you appear to do) prefer to blindly trust some corporation to produce quality software on the theory that they had the money to do it, instead of insisting on the product being open-sourced so you don't have to trust it, and can look at the code instead, discuss it with friends, muck around with it to see how robust, extensible, stable, etc. it is, and so on.
Because, in the end, as much as you liked VAX/VMS, in the short time I worked on that type of system, it crashed many more times than Linux has ever crashed on me (about 10 years using Linux versus maybe 3 using VAX/VMS).
And when I found a bug in the Linux kernel (long ago), I reported it and it got fixed very quickly. (Probably because I provided a patch.) I found it only because I happened to be looking through the source code, not because I actually ran into the bug! (It involved fouling up group-protections of files in one place, IIRC.)
But when I ran into a bug in VMS, it took a long time to demonstrate it sufficiently as a bug to my management so I could view the source on microfiche, track it down, and then send it to the Black Hole of DEC. To my knowledge, it was never fixed. (It involved random hangs while doing straightforward, but asynchronous, I/O to normal text files. That got me much better performance on a text-to-PostScript converter I'd written, but I had to back it down to using synch I/O, thanks to the bug.)
Had VMS been open-sourced, not only would I have been more easily able to find and fix that bug and get it out to others...
Whereas those shops that committed to Unix in the early '70s on the basis that it was lean, mean, and came with source code are still able to preserve a substantial portion of that investment by using *BSD and Linux systems, which support a dizzying array of hardware (CPUs and other components), allowing people to pick the hardware that best suits their present needs.
So, open source is not a panacea, neither is bazaar-style development (despite ESR's tendency to write as if it is), but they aren't inherently going to do anything but improve quality over the long run, since quality includes viability of investment in technologies over time as a component.
If I understand your meaning, then I'd say the Plan 9 license might indeed prevent such things, but then again might not, and in either case I'm not sure I'd call it "better".
In one corner: the desire to have more software be open source, or maybe just more open-source software.
In the other corner: the desire to have more freedom, in that the author of a program gets to be the one who decides the licensing for that program.
"CORBA and other related remote-use tricks" fall into a gray area between one author's freedom to ensure his program remains open-source (via a license like the GPL) and another author's freedom to keep his program proprietary (or under a license that conflicts with the GPL, anyway).
If the former program offers such an interface, or can be (freely) extended to offer one, and the latter uses it, the result can be that both authors get what they want, or at least what they are legally entitled to.
But, in the case of true "tricks", the former author is denied access to the source code of distributed derivations of his program.
And in the case of relying overmuch on legal (copyright) constraints to prevent such tricks, the latter author is denied freedom to choose licensing that conflicts with the GPL.
So, because it's a big grey area, I didn't get into it in my example -- I kept that simple.
RMS (and the FSF) seems to generally lean towards favoring the former (GPL-ing) programmer, but not so far as to favor a license that removes the freedom from the latter sort of programmer (at least in cases where he doesn't distribute his program), or the freedom of another programmer who takes a "free" program and makes only local (undistributed) modifications.
I generally agree with this line of reasoning. Though, the "people", i.e. the government they elect, have the right to decide whether the public airwaves will be regulated not just in terms of broadcasting but in terms of reception, so there is some wriggle room there.
I just think it's more fair to expect those who broadcast -- even by wireless phone -- to meet stringent standards than to do so of those who receive broadcasts. Put the burdens on those who choose to exploit the public airwaves than on those who merely listen in, is my general leaning.
Maybe the USA's choice of restricting reception is based substantially on a pro-corporate mind-set in Congress and the White House -- "we can't have people listening in to cell calls without the threat of punishment, else our cell-phone companies wouldn't earn so much short-term profit!"?
It pretty much always bugs me when corporations expect government to regulate and otherwise bail them out when the corporations choose to deploy (or just use) weak technologies or expect inadequate business plans to pay off handsomely. (Ref DeCSS, DAT tax, etc.)
(Yeah, I'm a Republican, but one with a strong Libertarian, and engineering, streak. I don't just "want" smaller government for some personal sense of freedom; I believe anything much bigger than a minimal government will fail at its core mission. Leave it to the corporations to use technologies that preserve privacy, and to consumers and citizens to be alert to privacy issues and choose technologies accordingly, is my general outlook. After all, just as many corporate officers and their lawyers seem to believe they're entitled to huge profits despite poor business plans and/or execution, many citizens believe they're entitled to health care, food, housing, a nice early retirement, etc. -- all at someone else's expense, if necessary. Our nation started selling off its peoples' freedoms long before the War on Drugs, even before the War on Poverty -- seems like the New Deal was the first big jump from self-sufficiency to government-enforced collective inter-dependence. In that environment, it's not surprising corporations, run by many of these same citizens in a country still enjoying a great deal of entrepeneurial spirit, would adopt similar views, and even see them as important to defending the USA's viability for business entities in the face of rising confiscation to meet the increasing entitlements. No, these views are not popular; I post them not to debate, having heard all the counter-arguments, but to give them the occasional airing they deserve in contexts where similar issues are argued in a simpler context. I realize most everyone here will argue for preserving the liberties to which they're accustomed, and for preserving their entitlements as well -- that's not news here or pretty much anywhere else. So, governments -- US, Canadian, or otherwise -- are therefore patted on the back for making "good decisions" almost exclusively in cases where they do not choose to permit individual citizens to make those decisions for themselves. This discussion of the impliciations of the FBI activities is therefore a welcome change of pace!)
These days, if "they" have installed all that equipment in your house, you had better be doing something "wrong"...
(Okay, maybe not so much "wrong" but "naughty". ;-)
Ditto the 1st amendment, which we're all exercising here...
Not that I'm convinced there are violations of the 4th amendment going on here! Maybe there are, I don't know offhand. But those reacting negatively to this story should carefully consider whether they really wish to view the 2nd amendment as allowing the government any ability to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This right is written, IMO, much more succinctly and with less opportunity for semantic revisionism than at least some portions of the 1st and 4th. (Consider how variable is the practical meaning of "unreasonable", which is used in the 4th, versus "right", used in the 2nd. Or how the right to assemble is apparently limited to cases where the assembly petitions the government in the 1st. If that latter wording was interpreted as strictly as some interpret the 2nd, that'd mean two or three people do not have the right under the 1st amendment to get together unless the government recognized that they were preparing a petition considered by that government to be valid! There's a comma before "and" fortunately; just as there's one after "State" in the 2nd, both physically and, more pertinently, semantically.)
Yes, the "preamble" to the 2nd amendment confuses some people, but if you're right (and I believe you are) that the founders meant to ensure we could throw off tyrannical government (after all, isn't that exactly what they wrote was their, and our, duty in the Declaration of Independence?), it's no longer possible for me to accept that "security of a free State" somehow means "preservation of a (possibly tyrannical) government" -- that the right to keep and bear arms extended only to those the government approved as members of its militia ("military", as some would have it today) -- especially since I can't see how such an amendment would even be necessary in a document designed to limit, rather than merely authorize, that very government!
More and more I'm convinced that the true genius of the USA is its grounding in the core concept that the people, themselves, are ultimately responsible for their own safety, security, and governance. However, I'm continuing to think about and research these issues, perhaps to someday post some material on my web site, since they pertain not just to human government, but to designing large-scale systems (software and otherwise) as well.
If you received program FOO from someone else, they might require you to distribute the modifications (or the modified source) to others under these circumstances, depending on the license you accepted as a condition for acquiring the program in the first place.
The GPL makes no such requirement. I.e. you can make all the "local" modifications you like, and as long as you don't redistribute them in any form, you don't have to distribute your modifications as source.
What RMS appears to be saying is that the Plan 9 license does require you to send back your changes to program FOO to the "Original Contributor".
Whether he's correct, I won't suggest for myself. I suggest you read the pertinent license(s) for yourself.
Exactly whose property was being destroyed in the Boston Tea Party?
If it was the property of those who were doing the destroying, then it wasn't violence at all.
If it wasn't their property, then it was destruction of someone else's property. That's certainly not non-violence.
But my point isn't that a modest destruction of a bit of someone else's property is equivalent to murder.
It's that the wholesale revolution advocated by the poster, involving the taking of other peoples' property (factories, farms, etc.) by force, will inevitably involve the use of violence, and he knows that, counter-claims notwithstanding.
I have thought about it, and that situation illustrates my point perfectly.
As far as I know, there is no evidence that the Seattle police were ordered to commit violent acts wholesale against the protesters.
No, what happened there is what often happens when people (in this case the protesters) willingly choose to stress the "system" to drive their point home.
In that case, the Seattle police force was widely recognized as having been poorly prepared for such a test. (Maybe not as poorly prepared as the LA police force during the 1990s, though.)
And if you're right about the police-force violence occurring before any protester violence, doesn't that suggest what is likely to happen across the USA if the widespread revolution, including the wholesale taking of property, occurs -- that it is going to trigger a response that make the Seattle police force look like muppets in repose?
So you must decide whether the anarchists were responding to the behavior of the police (who were criticized by those who considered them too slow and unforceful in their response, in terms of truly "securing" the area -- maybe Seattle residents wouldn't deal with this concern by taking up arms, especially seeing as they didn't perceive the protests as a direct threat, but I can promise you much of the mid and south west USA populace will)...
The former interpretation shows that the anarchic revolution described in this thread will trigger vastly more violent response and then counter-response by the anarchists.
The latter shows that its the anarchists who were intent on initiating some level of violence (in this case, force in the destruction of private property, collectively owned by innocent citizens here and worldwide).
There's no question in my mind that the level of violence anarchists would initiate in the kind of revolution proposed in this thread would greatly exceed that displayed in Seattle.
Indeed, when the "revolution" happens, the response of US citizens is going to involve a great deal of defense of property via the use of force, and the anarchists who are plotting that revolution know that full well, and they certainly aren't planning to become "martyrs" for their cause.
Therefore, it's a reasonable conclusion that they intend to commit widespread violence themselves, if necessary, to achieve their tactical goals of seizing factories, farms, files, and so on.
Even if the "leadership" (and there really can't be any such thing in a genuine anarchic revolution, can there? ;-) totally foreswears violence in the planning and execution stages...
As far as I know, the closest thing to a truly peaceful revolution by masses of people was the one that brought down the Berlin Wall.
And I'm pretty sure that was accomplished not with threats of violence or counter-violence, but with prayer, candles, and the experience of enduring violence and threats thereof coming from a communist regime.
In these discussions of how anarchists will overthrow the system, I see no mention whatsoever of prayer and candles, though I haven't researched the pertinent literature.
And as this thread shows, the tactical goal of the revolution is the seizing of other peoples' property, mainly, not the peaceful overthrow of a violent regime.
So there's no question in my mind -- the anarchic revolution will be bloody, as every revolution the poster identified as a positive indicator of the potential success (he left out the Berlin Wall) was bloody, AFAIK. Innocent people will die at the hands of anarchists, just as innocent people died at the hands of the Clinton/Reno Justice Department at Waco (at the behest of a gun-control-crazy US citizenry, which willingly allows such a level of anti-gun hysteria to exist in law enforcement that when it is stressed, innocent people do die, which apparently Americans consider acceptable when it comes to restricting the Second Amendment), and innocent people have died at the hands of often-poorly-trained, panicky police officers who mistook wallets and the like for guns. Under stress, people make mistakes, and people wielding force make mistakes often involving the deaths of innocents. Training them better is part of the solution; not creating those stressful situations (e.g. not fomenting property-seizing revolution) is another.
The anarchic revolution is not designed to change hearts -- as I said in the very beginning, it's a technology-based revolution, one designed to use technical means to change a system that is fundamentally rooted in human nature, in the apparent belief that those elements of human nature will not re-assert themselves post-revolution. (I don't mean only modern technology, of course; maybe I should say "material means".)
That distinguishes it from the Berlin Wall protests, as I understand them to have been.
Instead of changing hearts, you're planning on breaking things. Just as thugs and armies have done for millenia. And no matter how carefully you try to restrict the behavior of your cohorts, the scope and breadth of the operation you're planning will definitely result in innocent victims, due to the inevitability of the system you've put together acting in extreme ways when it is stressed.
Just like with a well-engineered aircraft, where the quality is not evident just in the smooth ride experienced in good weather, but in how well the craft stands up to the stresses of bad weather, revolutions, systems of governance, and so on are not best judged by how they cope when the populace largely agrees with them, but when the populace is in "violent disagreement" with them.
The fact that the Seattle police chief wasn't assassinated, ditto so many other political and corporate chiefs wielding power and control over people in the USA over the past several decades, despite "ruling" over a highly diverse culture including substantially independence-minded subcultures (willing to take up arms in various situations), suggests that, on the whole, this "system", despite its many flaws, is reasonably able to respond and adjust to disagreements between those in power and those who feel out of it.
(Not that there isn't lots of stress and anger out there, I realize, just that this system offers a variety of ways for people to improve their lot, and the lot of others, independent of approval from the government/corporate axis. So it's rather silly to attack either government or corporations, when it's so easy to fix whatever actual problems you think you see on your own.)
That's also a big reason why the defense against the anarchic revolution will be so much more vigorous than you imagine -- all those Muslims and Jews and Protestant Christians and Catholics and Atheists and Buddhists and Hindu across the USA, who you might think are ready to attack each other at the moment they see the "police state" crumbling, are instead much more likely to defend this land that has given them the common, free ability to make their way in life, raise their children (largely, if they can afford home schooling anyway ;-) as they see fit, etc., and they'll defend that not only for themselves, but for others, who might be their mortal enemies back in their ancestral lands.
Trust me, if you're going to count on taking their property, you're going to plan on committing mass murder. (With some 50% or more of Americans owning stock, you'll have a hard time limiting your revolution to the taking of only privately-owned corporate property.)
And we, the citizens of the USA, however disgusted we might be with the White House, Congress, or the Supreme Court, or even the tedious blandness of McDonald's hamburgers, are prepared for the mass murder planned by the anarchists, in more areas of the USA than you imagine, Seattle notwithstanding.
I didn't say it would be necessary, just that it'd be so likely that it'd be nearly inevitable.
If you claim you're going to do this without violence, then that's very nice, but I don't see why you don't just take the route I explained in my original response to your post, which advocated a non-violent response -- to which you responded with a more full, clearly violent, agenda to explain why your approach was better!
Let's take your claims one by one, which I note exclude the idea of destroying other people's files (which is almost certainly impossible to do without at least planning on committing violence):
This ("workers simply stop working") has already happened, of course. As long as there are people willing to replace them in their jobs, it isn't a big problem, except when (e.g. union thugs) commit violence to prevent those people free access to such jobs. How does your plan for "general strikes" account for this possibility? If you claim "everyone will participate", then there's nothing to overthrow anyway, really. More than likely, you'll have a minority striking, in situations where enough people are willing to replace them. Then, like the UPS strike, there'll be places where violence against those people will be committed.
Given the inevitability of this scenario in the USA, since it happens pretty much every time, how is it you're not advocating violence when you're advocating bringing about a situation that would inevitably result in violence against innocent people by people who support your cause?
(BTW, I agree corporations used to use violence to deal with the striking workers. And, for some government-controlled jobs, which the workers voluntarily agreed to take, that still happens by proxy. But this doesn't generally involve committing violence against innocent people -- rather threatening it against people who agreed to work under certain circumstances, then broke that agreement. I'm not fond of such agreements, when they hold the threat of violence, but at least they agreed to it. Workers seeking new employment where others have left are comparatively innocent, yet they are the targets of the strikers. Targeting ranges from calling them "scabs" to beating them up with baseball bats to outright murder.)
We already have that. It's called the Clinton/Reno Justice Department. It's not part of a revolution per se, more like political patronage.
Again, though, if the guards sympathise and release prisoners, those prisoners will have to deal with the populace, which, in the USA (at least mostly), is armed, and might not agree they're "political" prisoners.
Remember, the purpose of a justice system isn't so much to keep criminals locked up. It's to provide a means whereby those seeking revenge will be otherwise accommodated to allow the State to impose some kind of punishment. The ultimate arbiters of justice on earth are the people, as well as nature itself.
Convince the justice system to break its promise with the populace, and the agreement ends -- revenge could rear its ugly head, and not after jury trials, appeals, or even indictments.
But you still have the problem with the 3 or 4 guards who actually insist on doing their jobs, which have fed their families, because they promised to do those jobs. When they stand in the way of the other guards, what is to be done with them? In some cases, the answer will be "kill them -- they're standing in the way of the revolution".
In a country where the workers could easily band together and buy the factory, the owners of that property -- the stockholders, including your grandparents, the neighbors down the street, etc. -- have the moral high ground. They committed no offense by owning a piece of that factory per se. If the workers don't like the conditions, they can buy the factory (from the company), buy the company, leave and work somewhere else, etc. It's called "choice", and it's a staple of the US economy, despite being under constant attack (often by those who consider themselves "pro-choice").
And, have you carefully reviewed the track record of those other examples you mention? How much better have conditions, production, etc. been since the workers took those factories by force?
If they're not doing as well, then some workers could easily be lured into working for some other factory not yet taken over for more money. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, so to speak.
If they're doing better, then why don't the workers help the owners of their factories learn from the lessons of the taken-over factories that have been successful?
Yes, I can assure you, he can and will track it down. Again, you're assuming you have the moral high ground when you use violence or even theft to steal someone else's property, even though you have the means to simply buy that property in an up-front transaction, especially given that you're assuming you have legions of comrades-in-arms agreeing with you.
If they're so willing to do this by violence, why not demonstrate the validity of their collectivist tendencies, pool their resources, buy what they need, and take the next few decades to build something so much better with that property than the previous capitalist owners could have?
That'll do so much more for your "cause" than any amount of violence. After all, it's what's sold millions of people on the advantages of property rights, rule of law, individual liberties, etc., despite all the flaws evident in such systems.
A laughable comment, given the violence committed by masked people (called -- incorrectly? -- "anarchists" by the media) in the Seattle protests. You really don't know much about history, do you, if you think only government response to protest is violent, and all else is non-violent? (O course, I agree government response often is violent; it's the proposition that it's 100% responsible for that violence with which I disagree. Exactly which part of the government response to the recent LA "celebrations" of the Lakers victory caused those cars to burn?)
Agreed.
Perhaps it's just that I've grown up in a culture in which violence on the part of communists, socialists, and anarchists is generally praised by the cultural elite. I think I know what to expect, and I'm aware of a variety of responses, with varying degrees of effectiveness and appropriateness. And I am reasonably aware of the extent to which innocents get caught up in the violence -- I don't consider four innocent students to be killed at Kent State to be both the numerical and moral equivalent of the tens of millions of innocents killed by communist regimes in this century, but I'm in the minority in that view, I suppose.
Oh, I can quite assure you I do!
We're in agreement here, since the most important requirement for the US government, as envisioned by its Founding Fathers, is that a significant portion (if not a majority) insist on being actively a part of that system.
In fact, I'll go so far as to say the most opportunity you have for success in toppling the US system -- which is vastly more than the Federal and State governments combined -- is to increase the sort of apathy among the populace that has been increasingly evident over the past decade or so.
So, will the widespread taking of property across the USA increase, or decrease, apathy on the part of US citizens loyal to its founding precepts? You tell me what you think. For myself, I'll just say that my only reason to suggest you consider another course of action is your own value as a living human being; I don't really fear what you claim will happen, because if it did start happening, the apathy I see as an enemy of freedom would dissolve pretty quickly IMO.
It is not capitalism per se of which I'm speaking favorably. Capitalism is, in the sense I mean, the "default" state of humankind pretty much since it discovered agriculture, as far as I can guess. (Hunting and gathering surely involved some degree of ownership, of personal hunting tools by people, and of groves during gathering by a tribe. But I am guessing it was the huge investment agriculture required for "payoff" that really made it important to define and protect one's "property", to give seeds and shoots, which might have been very appetizing to hungry hunter-gatherers, time to come to full fruition.)
If you're really refering to "corporatism", then I suggest the "backlash" you see coming will be more a hodgepodge of changing lifestyles, consumer choices, and so on, rather than a complete, utter revolution, of the sort you seem to speak.
After all, it's the very adaptability of the "modern" society that protects it. The more a populace is able and willing to participate actively in the system (compare Taiwan and South Korea, versus other Southeast Asia nations, in how they coped with the recent economic downturn in that area), the more it's able to make non-violent, non-dislocative adjustments in its course as problems (ranging from communist threats to "corporatism run amok") come to light.
So I don't know whether by "global capitalism strangling the planet" you mean "fascist governments enlaving the population", which is more like Marxism, or "more and more people having a wider array of choices as to how and where to work, what to buy, how to live", which is more like the USA. Maybe the answer is somewhere in between?
Amen to that.
Oh, I do remember one strong impression I gained during my reading of the initial parts of the Anarchist FAQ.
It was that while I didn't agree with anarchy as a system, I did find myself thinking more people should be anarchists.
That is, I agreed with the idea that we shouldn't bow and scrape to those in power, worship heirarchies, etc.
But not necessarily with the idea that we should seek to impose the abolition of such heirarchies on others.
And I believe the best way to accomplish that is through education and the feedback of success and failure that the US economy general allows to flourish. (No, I don't particularly care for government propping up corporations by doing their dirty work, and, yes, sometimes I fantasize about some kind of revolution to eliminate that sort of thing quickly and "easily". But I know the difference between fantasy and reality; between killing one's enemy, and loving one's enemy; and which is more successful in practice.)
Having worked in or near a variety of corporate environments, as well as one or two institutional ones, directly or second-hand, I've observed that "anarchic people", or, more precisely, those who have limited usefulness for heirarchy, seem to rise to higher positions of power as time marches on. They're less aware of heirarchy, position, etc., more alert to good ideas coming from anywhere, anyone, anytime.
Further, the fleet-of-foot organizations (NPOs, corporations, even governments) seem to flourish to the degree they throw off the shackles of artificial heirarchy. (I won't go into what that is vs. natural heirarchy. As a simple example, having a corporate spokesman is more like a natural heirarchy, having a reserved parking space for each VP is more like an artificial one.)
I also would agree that much progress is to be made.
Where we disagree, apparently, is that you believe the system is fundamentally flawed and must be violently overthrown, even if the violence can be limited to the taking of property (and, again, that's tricky in a country like the US where the response to such taking is likely to be violent).
I believe the system is about as well designed for self-correction as any that has been proposed, and much better than most, and that it is already "correcting" itself regarding the worship of heirarchy, power, money, position, etc.
Globalism presumably introduces more risks, because though the US culture might be heading in a positive direction, as other cultures become increasingly part of the underlying structure often called "capitalism" (erroneous or not), they can, in my experience, tend to worship the kind of heirarchical, or vertical, view of "worth" that we're presently throwing off.
(Compare "Japan, Inc." in the '80s, and the threat it supposedly represented to the non-government-directed US economy. Which "won"? Who is most quickly trying to copy the other? As a more humorous example, in the US, we're long since tired of super-hero characters in general, from Superman to Schwarzenegger, local adjustments notwithstanding, but they're still big in some cultures.)
But that isn't true for all cultures. In some cultures, "bigness" isn't worshipped as much as it was in the USA in the '50s.
In any case, it's the variety ("diversity") of all those cultures that offers the most promise of globalization, of the ability to more freely trade ideas and products with people across national boundaries.
There are dangers (in globalism, but also in isolationism, etc.) too. But I won't be easily persuaded to throw away that freedom to trade just to gain a sense of security, and it'll be very hard to persuade me to eliminate that freedom for others even if I'll be praised as a "hero" for doing so.
No, his assumption does not state that.
He was responding to someone who claimed M > C, where M = number of people who walk on the moon and C = number of people driving cars.
He was pointing out that, given even a conservative estimate of C -- which, in this case, would be a low value -- that was unlikely to be the case.
You just jumped in, probably having been taught to look for any evidence of "Americentrism" and jump on it publically rather than actually think and comprehend for yourself, and attacked the facts he posted to support the notion that his conservative estimate for C was probably quite low.
In other words, you beat him up for setting to low a limit on C on the basis that he set too high a limit on one of its components (the portion of C represented by drivers outside the USA).
In fact, he set (and implied) no upper limit on the number of drivers of cars outside the USA. So he can't be accused of Americentrism on this basis. Just as someone who says "I think there are more than 500 computers in the world, because I know for a fact there are 250 here in my home town, so, assuming we have no more than half of the world's computers here..." is guilty of actually believing his town has half of the world's computers.
Thanks for the blast from the past, though -- it's USENET all over again, which is why I gave up reading (and posting) there -- too many people who'd rather smear others in public than carefully consider whether it's deserved -- the geek version of "shoot first, ask questions later".
Well, look what the band "Guns 'n' Roses" did for roses!
Before the band, nobody cared about roses.
Now, every guy gets 'em for his girlfriend for Valentine's Day!