Why the decision to represent years in a BCD format (1 digit per nibble)? Why
not represent the year as an 8-bit integer, offset from 1900?
Consistency with COBOL programming style, I imagine. "We" do the same thing in today's (or yesterday's) C runtime library.
When I was a young teen, I remember going into brain-lock trying to figure out the bizarre way TOPS-10, the main commercial OS for PDP-10s, encoded the date. It was something like:
(Year - 1968) x 192
+ (Month: 0=Jan, 1=Feb,...) x 31 + (Date - 1)
Finally I figured out that this allows a pretty long-term date to be compressed into a smaller word, compared to the more straightforward approach of having distinct fields of bits.
That is, it's a more-general form of numerical
radix systems we're familiar with. E.g. in decimal, each digit has ten times the value of the one to its right; in binary, it has two times the value; in base N, it has N times the value. In a situation where the number of possible states of each "digit", or discrete value to be encoded into a compound value, changes from digit to digit, then the N, or multiplier, as you go from right to left, becomes simply the number of possible states for the components to the right.
This approach reduces the storage requirements, makes I/O faster, and so on, but it's a low-level, assembly/machine-language hack that doesn't generalize well to first-, second-, or even third-generation languages.
So, many C programmers generally don't question the appropriateness of the inefficiency of this kind of structure:
struct tm { int tm_sec; int tm_min; int tm_hour; int tm_mday; int tm_mon; int tm_year; [...] }
After all, they're more interested in the ease of access to the essential components of the data they want, and are unlikely, except in special cases, to encode dates for storage using the kind of approach shown above as a means to reduce storage requirements, I/O bandwidth, etc.
This despite the fact that, with preprocessor macros and fairly clean coding, it would have been quite easy to provide a super-efficient coding as the "default" from the C library.
COBOL programmers having the main data type be PIC(however-many-digits) probably preferred it when all the data in a record was encoded the same way, rather than buying a little extra "time" beyond Y2K by dealing with the extra hassle of having binary data buried in the midst of BSD data.
(Think reviewing core dumps made by an OS that has no means to distinguish data types in your code and thus no means to choose which format to use to dump a particular word in memory.)
And the problems of throwing big-integer-style encoding into the mix -- a la using Julian dates, or, going even further, the number of days since 1900-01-01 or some similar base days, or yet further, the number of seconds since then -- include:
The bigger the integer can get, the bigger the wordsize the base machine/language combo must support. (PDP-8's were 12-bit; -11's were 16-bit; -1's were 18-bit; and so on.)
Though going to double-word arithmetic is an option, you either complicate the app-level programming, or you rely on interpreters and compilers to be bug-free handling that kind of math, after having completely committed your app to using it for something as critical as dates.
It's easier to build up "date precision" using simple building blocks than to have to go to completely new and different data types each time.
That is, it's easier, having started with a type "Year" that is Year-1970, say, encoded in 8 bits, to extend the precision by simply appending a datum representing the added precision -- say, a 16-bit Julian date, or two 8-bit bytes, the first being the month, the second being the date within the month.
If, instead, you always try to use a compressed format for whatever precision you need, then the encoding for a year/date/hour/minute/second combo is completely different from the encoding for any combo with more or less precision, when it comes down to the actual bits.
Again, that makes for all sorts of practical problems that even today's more "modren" development environments have probably not fully solved, especially when it comes down to debugging.
There's also an argument for simplicity in that, if the "source" for a date is specified as, e.g., MM/DD/YY, the format in which it is stored should faithfully store each value exactly as written, modulo clear range errors.
The advantage here is that disagreements among applications sharing data with regard to things like leap years won't lead so easily to unrecoverable dates, in terms of precision.
E.g. if the app that first sees MM/DD/YY converts to an internal Julian date, then transmits that date to another app (via, say, storage) by going back to MM/DD/YY, then a leap-year or similar bug in either input or output of that app will change the date.
As the date moves from app to app, it might change further due to similar bugs.
By the time the problem is found, since there's no actual record of the original source date, unless a precise history can be compiled for each date of exactly which versions, and thus bug "envelopes", of which applications the date has passed through, there's no way to reliably tweak the date back to its original value.
So when it comes to something as critical to financial applications as dates, it's not unreasonable to limit the sorts of optimizations to just a few that are entirely within the realm of "safe computing" for the time.
And, at that time, using two instead of four BCD digits to encode a datum was certainly safe, represented an important optimization, and gave them hardly any extra complexity to deal with for decades.
The same "bang" -- optimization vs. complexity resulting from using it -- couldn't be had by various methods that seem reasonably obvious to us now, as they did to many back then, given the practicalities of the computing environment of the time.
A private company tends to have
an owner/owners who understand (well, more than a shareholder, anyway) how things are actually going in the company. The managers don't have
the ownership screaming at them to cut costs (such as customer tech support, employee benefits, etc) every time the NASDAQ drops a hundredth
of a percent. I've worked in both kinds of companies, and I kept my eyes open.
My guess is you failed to keep your brain operating, too, because I've worked in both types of firms, and you're wrong.
The other poster is correct: private companies can certainly be just as sensitive to external pressures such as prices of publically traded stocks.
One difference between my experience in a private company (Numerix) and a public one (Pr1me) is that the management running the former did have ownership screaming at them to cut costs, primarily in order to sell at the highest price possible, which they felt would be easier if the cash-flow picture of the company looked "better" than if the actual productivity of its employees was improved.
At least, that was the explanation I received when I wondered, for the fifth time, in a meeting with my compiler-team management, why the company wouldn't spring for a few hundred dollars per modem to upgrade from 1200 baud to 2400 baud on their "mainframe", so us software developers, who already had shelled out $$ for 2400-baud modems months earlier to improve our productivity online (at Numerix someday, on other systems right away, like on BBSes), could experience the huge jump in productivity everyone knew would be possible.
Pr1me, on the other hand, was invested in largely by people who actually believed it was a "high-tech" company, so there was not nearly so much pressure to cut costs by restricting the productivity of the high-tech developers it employed.
Believe me, Numerix was very sensitive to the stock market, the oil market, and so on, not just for resale value, but for the ability to sell its products (minisupercomputers and related software). Didn't matter that it was privately held.
(In fact, my impression was that the fact that it was privately held contributed largely to the reasons it seemed to be run more like an old-style, beauracracy-laden manufacturing firm, despite never employing more than about 120 people, than the high-tech, get-in-on-the-ground-floor marvel it was billed as during my interviews and to most outsiders. I ran into less beauracracy trying to get things done at Pr1me, which employed on the order of, I think, tens of thousands.)
About 6 months or so after I left Numerix, it was sold to another company, Mercury. Not sure whether that was privately or publically held, offhand, but it doesn't matter -- they shut down product development, laid off the compiler staff and most others, thus squelching the competition the Numerix product line had given them, but continued to make $$ on service, so continued to employ some of those Numerix people for that purpose for awhile.
Anyway, there are so many clueless people running around who think completely wrong things about corporations, the stock market, investments, and such, and they comprise the vast majority of those who claim the "American system of capitalism is fundamentally flawed", in my opinion. (Yes, a few of those aren't clueless; and, yes, many who are clueless are still ardent capitalists, but easily made into pro-regulatory fanatics.)
About the only point you made with any true weight behind it is that a private company tends to have owners who understand the status of things within the company.
But that's largely a function of organizational complexity, which is closely tied to organizational size, which is, itself, closely tied to whether an organization can avail itself of public funds.
In other words, your statement has merit mainly because private companies (and obscure publically-traded ones) tend to be small, thus more transparent and easier to manage, so, yes, their "owners", whether public shareholders or private owners, to the extent they're interested, find it easier to keep track of what they're actually doing.
If you want to get an idea of how my view of the complexity/size/public-funding equation, such as it is, works in a completely different context, consider the differences between how organizations like the Red Cross and much smaller charities respond to emergencies large (2001-09-11) and small.
You'll discover (assuming you've been clued-in by the likes of O'Reilly) that the ability of those who "own" (not just manage, but hold a financial stake in, as in, contribute to) a charity to really understand the inner workings of one, especially when it comes to big, complicated issues, declines as the size, or mainly the complexity, of the organization itself increases.
That's why Americans who contributed to the so-called "9/11 fund" of the Red Cross were so baffled by that organization's apparent desire to redirect those funds to other needs, making for one vast publicity nightmare for that organization.
This despite an apparently clear and simple mandate for the Red Cross, compared to some charities, and especially any profit motive one would impute to an eeevil American corporation. That is, even though the Red Cross management could seemingly focus on a very specific set of goals, they couldn't manage the vast inflow of public monies and distribute them promptly, as advertised, to a fairly limited pool of recipients.
That's a heck of a lesson to those who believe the US Federal, or any of its State, Governments is made better having taken on the role of charity. If a charity has trouble handling doing its job, how can people believe that a government, already committed to core missions such as defending borders, printing money, writing laws, prosecuting criminals, imprisoning convicts, and so on, will do better at anything once it takes on yet more tasks that aren't part of its core mission -- tasks that, by themselves, overwhelm the most well-meaning beauracrats imaginable when they're literally swimming in vast piles of voluntarily contributed money?
I really wish more people would wake up to the issues of complexity management and understand that it isn't the "evils" of capitalism, corporatism, or even greed that doom us so much as the complexity we accept and put upon ourselves and others, via our choices -- including legislators we elect, who write arcane, self-serving laws for businesses and investors that, after centuries of accumulation with hardly ever any kind of cleaning-out, can be understood and exploited by only a handful of very brilliant, zealous men who are paid $Millions per year to do so.
Instead, so many people choose to ignore the vast, unnecessary complexity of the system they (and their forebears, usually anticapitalists to some degree or other) have imposed on the system, and blame the symptoms for the disease.
But the politicians they elect will continue to feast on the emotion-ridden desire for more laws, more complexity, more need to find rare expertise in navigating it, leading to even higher salaries for people who aren't contributing anything substantial to people's lives except navigating around an unnecessary sea of governmental regulation, and, in another few years, we'll go through the whole thing again, in a slightly modified form.
Sheesh, it's like reacting to tons of security flaws in Microsoft products by requiring MS programmers to use Hungarian notation in all its future software. Might make some people feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but if complexity management is the problem, you need to simplify (run GNU/Linux or OpenBSD or something, taken to a slight extreme), not increase complexity.
I hear it leaked fuel like a sill on he runway, it needed to expand with friction heat just to seal up! Unbelievable speed and altitude.
Being probably my favorite aircraft since sometime in the '70s, I've paid some attention to information such as TV documentaries on it, for what that's worth.
It not only leaked fuel on the runway, it leaked it well into and beyond takeoff. It therefore had to be refueled shortly after takeoff, that is, while in flight.
Moreover, flying it slowly enough to refuel it (the refueling plane had to fly at top speed) was not an easy matter.
The SR-71 is one of many examples of how practical engineering often demands solutions that are inelegant and inefficient except when they're performing their intended function.
I.e. the SR-71's intended function was to fly very fast, very high, not to take off and land in a nice, comfy, low-maintenance fashion. So to make the former happen, they sacrificed the latter.
Oh, the other "cool" thing I remember about a documentary I watched on the SR-71 was that it always had a special companion vehicle (or whatever they called it) to manage the runway taxi process.
It was a Chevrolet Camaro! Almost made me decide to not sell mine last year, but I did anyway. If I'd kept it, I might have given up my personal prohibition on bumper stickers and done up a customized one saying "My other vehicle is an SR-71 Blackbird".
(At least I can say the sound system in my Camaro blew away anything ever deployed in the SR-71/Camaro combinations. I sure miss that system, much moreso than the drive itself. Sigh.)
You say that most liberals aren't rational, and yet conservatives constantly rail against the intellectualism of the left-wing. I'd be interested to hear your comment on that.
That's an excellent point, because for a long time my impression was that liberals, or left-wingers, were distinctly more intellectual than their counterparts on the right.
Since I found myself "instinctively", and usually rationally, preferring the prescriptions of the right over the left (especially at the national, i.e. US, level, and moreso in socioeconomic and governmental structure issues than in social issues), there seemed to be a tension between "I think X, and I believe I'm intelligent and rational" and "People I believe are intellectual disagree with X".
After lots of consideration, I've come to the tentative conclusion that what left-wingers are primarily isn't so much intellectual as pseudo-intellectual -- that is, they'll happily engage in long, intellectual-sounding explanations for why the believe something or other, but when examined rationally, their arguments fall apart.
I have some pet theories why this happens, and why both left-wingers and religious-fundie-type right-wingers go all irrational when they try to defend their views, but the upshot is, just because someone is an intellectual, even a genuine one, does not mean their attempts to justify exerting some kind of government-enforced influence on other peoples' lives will necessarily be based exclusively on rational lines of thought. (It's mainly an issue of complexity management, just as "I choose to not make Bob leave the house" is inherently a less-complex choice than "Bob must leave the house", but that's a whole 'nother topic.)
Now, I realize that right-wingers have their intellectual heavy-weights (Buckley, for example) who can go on and on sounding like pseudo-intellectuals, if not genuine ones.
But, as long as they stick to explaining why they're not in favor of some government imposition on other peoples' freedoms, I find they tend to put forward more rational arguments, and when they don't, I find their irrationality somewhat less offensive.
(Both "I choose to make Bob leave the house because Bob is a pink elephant" and "Bob must leave the house because he's a pink elephant" can be equally irrational vis-a-vis the claim that Bob is a pink elephant and the "logic" of applying that to the choice the speaker makes, but the former is, to me, much less offensive because the conclusion, as far as it goes, is less offensive to the principle of individual liberty. Not that its irrationality shouldn't be defended against at all, but that it is less important to defend against, e.g. point out, such irrationality than against the sort represented by the latter statement, which represents a direct threat to Bob's liberty.)
In summary: conservatives railing against the intellectualism of the left-wing are best interpreted (that is, if you're looking for their highest motives) as railing against ivory-tower-style academic arguments against individual liberty.
(And, yes, I often find intellectual arguments in favor of some right-wing positions such as corporate, or business-model, protectionism of various sorts -- DMCA, for example -- to be similarly irrational and pseudo-intellectual attacks on individual liberty.)
"Rational"/"common-sense" as conservatives often say, is in my opinion in fact populism.
I try to not mix up rationality with common sense. I've often had "common-sense" opinions of mine vanish utterly when I followed my highest sense of rational thinking. And I tend to have a visceral reaction against populism, which I think tends to counter its negative influences on rationality most of the time, more or less.
(E.g. this pledge-is-unconstitutional thing: as much as I had the desire to punch the guy who brought the lawsuit on the face when I saw him answering questions on CNN and Fox, my rationality forced me to basically agree with him on every issue. Especially during E.D. Hill's questioning on Fox and Friends, which was quite aggressive regarding his daughter, as tempted as I was to say "you go girl!" for populist reasons, I found his responses, while unconvincing from a populist point of view, to be reasoned, and E.D.'s line of questioning to be, frankly, irrelevant to the issue of whether the federal government should, through its institutions of education, even simply lead a recitation of a pledge including the words "under God" despite allowing anyone to not say those words or the entire pledge.)
And the posters on here labeling CNN as left-wing seem more than a bit deluded. I've had to stop watching them, because whenever they bring on pundits, they get one centrist to advocate the leftist view, and at least one, often a whole gaggle, of hard-core conservatives, some which I consider lunatic fringe. CNN seems hell-bent on out-Foxing Fox, which have long had the same policies. If you're gonna bring on Falwell et al, you better bring on someone equally leftist if you want real (not fake) balance.
I don't know about that, because I don't watch CNN much, especially these days. It wouldn't surprise me that they're quickly scrambling to get "lunatic fringe" people, though, because those were the types they tended to get to "represent the Right" before Fox ever came along. Ditto for ABC, CBS, NBC.
One of the most effective things Fox did for me, especially in my first year or so watching, was bring the actual leaders of left-wing organizations onto shows like "Hannity and Colmes" and let them say what they would.
Now, left-wing media tended to offer more along the lines of smooth-talking spokespeople who would soft-pedal the extreme-left line (on, say, abortion or gun control).
But, in my experience, extremists on the left are put into positions of power (consider Donna Brazile, Al Gore's campaign chief, or whatever, during his 2000 campaign), while extremists on the right tend to be relegated to obscure organizations that don't represent the central body of thought on the right.
Anyway, listening to H&C interviewing Presidents and other luminaries of the "reproductive-rights left" on the partial-birth-abortion issue was a revelation, since they ended up (sometimes accidentally) confirming what right-wingers had been claiming, in contradistinction to what left-wing spinners had long claimed, about what the issues really involved.
For example, the abortion lobby long claimed, in general public view anyway, that a partial-birth abortion was almost always the result of some medical necessity -- that it wasn't so much the abortion that was the objective, rather, the solving of some medical condition that necessitated the abortion.
After all, that's the basis of the sentiment behind phrases like "it should be solely a decision made by a woman and her doctor" -- why include the doctor in that statement, unless the implication is that the doctor played a key role in choosing an abortion?
(Consider the phrase "buying an SUV is a choice between a mother and her family's insurance agent", which implies, as it fairly would, that it's up to the mother, with input from an insurance agent who has information on accident survivability for various sorts of cars, to decide whether to pay extra, in terms of capital, on-going fuel, and environmental exprenses to gain the safety of an SUV. Such a phrase would serve as an excellent defense against the anti-SUV crowd, just as has done the abortion phrase.)
So, in this H&C episode, the pro-abortion representative was basically following this line, when, after more questions about the issue, she basically said the following:
"Look, a woman goes to a doctor and says 'I want to have an abortion'..."
That was a stunning admission of what really happens -- it isn't the doctor (most of the time anyway) who says "If you don't have an abortion, something bad will happen to you physically, and partial-birth is now your only choice", it's the mother who decides she doesn't want the baby; the doctor is a mere "hired hand".
(The SUV equivalent of the actual meaning of the pro-abortion quote would therefore be much more along the lines of: "buying an SUV is a choice between a mother and her mechanic". Far less convincing, eh?)
That admission was so stunning that I rewound the tape and showed it to my wife two or three times to make sure she, too, understood what was being admitted here.
H&C has also had other priceless moments, like the young woman who'd organized a protest against the show because of its "conservative bent" or something, who, when asked questions about the issues, ended up admitting she had no clue, she was just the organizer. This despite her initial demeanor of being fully behind the protest!
The priceless moment continued as they went to break, when I heard the poor woman say, over audio only, something along the lines of:
"Well, that didn't go too well!"
So, yes, you might well be right CNN is picking a bunch of lunatic-fringe right-wingers to represent the body of right-wing thought, because that would be exactly the sort of intellectually dishonest thing a left-wing outlet might do. (H&C I don't put in the same category, because of the nature of the show; if you're talking about one of CNN's equivalent shows, then I'd say it isn't in the same category of misrepresentation either. H&C has certainly had looney-fringe right-wingers as well. Some of them are very cute, to be honest, but they're rather unpersuasive, even embarrassing.)
But I honestly would be surprised if Fox ever had headline summaries like what I saw on CNN's Headline News sometime last August, summing up a hate crime that had occurred in Texas:
Texas Hate
Hmm, so a hate crime in Texas means "Texas Hate", eh? Can you imagine them running one saying "Arkansas Hate", or "New York Hate", given CNN's love of the Clintons, at least compared to Bush?
Sure, I haven't done a comprehensive study of such headlines and captions, but given the left-wing media's campaign to associate GWBush with Texas-style "hate" (which the NAACP crowned with its "Bush killed my father again" ad during the 2000 campaign) and supposed drooling over executing people, it's unsurprising that their producers, editors, and so on would leap at the chance to continue associating "hate crimes" with Texas, something they might well have given up bothering about had Al Gore won the White House by then.
As another example of this sort of subtle media bias (by which I mean that it's almost certainly a bias the people who exhibit it might not be aware of, only possibly one that they're willingly engage in) was an NBC Today segment I saw sometime back in the March-May 2001 timeframe.
It was billed, going to commercial, about being another indication of parental problems with children's sports, and this was in the wake of the hockey-dad death, so anyone watching who had a clue would have expected something like an fight among parents.
Sure enough, the show comes back on, more "worrisome"-sounding intro, then the inevitable jiggly-camera video of a baseball field with voiceover about the "incident".
Turned out, as far as I can recall, there was no video on the incident itself -- the jiggly-camera stuff was all made up for the segment!
But, still, what was the "incident"?
Well, turns out that two teams played a game, and some parents complained that there weren't enough participants on the winning team's side or something.
So the officials looked up the rules, decided the game was nil, and had it played again.
Yup, that's right, the "incident" consisted entirely of a bunch of little kids having to play an extra game!! Stop the presses! What horror! Think of the children!!
Oh, sure, they covered some "feelings" expressed by some parents, I'll bet, but the incident was blown so out of proportion.
So, why, I wondered, given all the potential incidents of actual parental misbehavior in sports, would NBC Today devote a whole fear-and-trembling, isn't-this-getting-out-of-control segment to such a trivial incident, one that I'm sure every child (given their age) understood as nothing more than "Gee, I get to play in an extra game!"?
Then it hit me: this wasn't baseball, it wasn't softball, it was T-ball.
That's right, it was T-ball, the same sport that, shortly before, President Bush had brought to national attention by inviting young children (the only kind who play T-ball) to play on the White House lawn, or somewhere "nifty" like that.
Does that prove the producers looked for an opportunity to "smear" the "pure-Americana" impression of T-ball a bit as a result of Bush getting some positive press for welcoming it (as versus Clinton's "I wanna look hotter for the girls" jogging track;-) onto White House property?
Hardly. But it's consistent with the behavior of left-wing media outlets I've observed over the years, of choosing how to slant, flavor, and spice their reporting to suit their personal politics.
(Around this same time, sitting in a waiting room, I heard Matt Lauer make some kind of over-the-top exclamation regarding the increased cost of calls to 411 that actually made me laugh out loud, to the consternation of others in the room. You mean you might be paying 75 cents more for that call to 411 than you thought?! Stop the presses! Of course, whether Matt Lauer would express similar outrage over the amount of one's paycheck that is quietly removed by the federal government via your fellow employees -- an activity (withholding) that led to mass murder here in Massachusetts, and which is completely unnecessary for the IRS to collect adequate revenues, is left for you to consider for yourself.)
As just another example, I remember Katie Couric, during the 1996 Presidential election cycle, asking Bob Dole the leading question "Do you believe [former Surgeon General] Koop has been brainwashed [regarding the 'evils' of second-hand cigarette smoke]?", and Bob Dole answering "A bit".
Did NBC cover that story accurately? Well, you tell me whether saying "Bob Dole claims the former Surgeon General has been brainwashed!", which is what they ran with for some days after the interview, is an accurate and fair representation of what he actually said in the context of Katie's leading question. "He's been brainwashed!" sounds, to me, like a more potentially lunatic statement than "I think he's been a bit brainwashed regarding this particular issue", which is what he actually said, and which, in context, is basically semantically identical to "I believe he's bought into a party line without sufficient critical analysis".
(As an aside, President Bush saying "States like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea constitute an axis of evil" in fact does not include the people of those nations in the "axis of evil" -- states being governments. But how many people were made aware of the distinction in the press coverage afterwards? Maybe Bush said something different at another time, but not that I've heard.)
In summary: you can't base your analysis of "bias" on pure numbers of "analysts", or representatives, of various viewpoints in issues. As my earlier post explained, you have to examine how fairly the various viewpoints are presented, including how consistently they're each explored in depth, both positively and negatively. Choosing a passionate advocate for a position is orthagonal to choosing a lunatic advocate for it; the former might actually convince lots of people, the latter will probably just scare them away from that position.
Left-wingers, especially Marxists, have understood the importance of distorting public perceptions via the press for decades, and choosing extremists to present views opposing them is just one of their tactics.
What do people think about the attitudes of hackers there ?
Well, if you don't already know, then we're not about to tell you -- go away and RTFM!!
(Does that answer your question?;-)
Re:Left-wing media a financial failure?
on
Salon in Dire Straits
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Does political orientation give a business an advantage in a Capitalistic society?
Speaking for myself as a "media consumer", what gives an outlet an advantage competing for my interest are rationalism and fairness.
I listen to Rush, I watch Fox News, and I also (still) occasionally pick up on other, more traditional, "liberal" outlets.
The difference for me isn't just that I tend to agree more with Rush or with the Fox commentators, though that helps some, because there have been other "right-wing" sources that turned me off completely (can't recall the "loudmouth" guy, who died a year or so ago, that kinda paved the way for Rush, Mancow, etc., but he's an example, as is "700 Club", of sources with which I might agree politically but can't stomach).
What makes the difference for me is that when I get my news from what, today, are considered "right-wing" sources, I find it rare that I later discover some crucial bit of information was left out of my "feed" later on.
Whereas the "left-wing" sources tend to conveniently forget, neglect, or overlook important data, nevermind that they're constantly bashing and/or labeling the right in the first place. (For example, conveniently omitting the fact that Bush's 2001-era "ban on stem cell research" was really just a ban on federal funding of research that'd inherently involve destroying viable human embryos. As another example, I suspect the recent headlines "Federal Court Rules Pledge of Allegiance is Unconstitutional" is overly hysterical, that they really just ruled that a teacher leading a recital of it is unconstitutional -- a rare example of an hysterically inflated and/or misinformed summary that helps the right more than the left!)
I remember why I first listened to Rush. I'd heard his name mentioned by Roger Ailes in a meeting relating to media in Boston, and, quite literally, in this crowd of supposedly open-minded elite liberal media types, there was hissing. That was back around 1990 or so, maybe?
Around the same time, an unsuccessful sequel sitcom called "The New WKRP" had an episode involving a Rush-clone character named, IIRC, "Lash Rambaugh", which tried to be even-handed about the visceral, "he must be stopped" reaction among the radio-station hands when they learned this character was gaining air time on their precious station.
What got my attention was that a) I was basically being indoctrinated to hate Rush, primarily through the unstated, but nevertheless clear, implication that he was himself a hater, a neo-Nazi, whatever, and that b) no actual evidence was being supplied of what he actually said on a typical show.
(The WKRP episode was particularly stunning in how it omitted any actual reference to any actual offensive thing this Lash Rambaugh guy said; at least, that's how I remember it.)
So I thought, hey, I'm a Christian, theoretically I shouldn't immediately sign up as a "Rush hater" as if I'm protecting women, babies, and minorities by spreading the "hate-Rush gospel" until I've listened to the guy (and read his book(s)) myself, so I can speak to the issues myself.
Upshot? I quickly discovered what a convincing, willing, campaign of whispered lies the anti-Rush activists were fomenting (and still foment today, though I suspect most of them are simply uninformed haters of all things right-wing simply on auto-pilot, displaying less intelligence, thoughtfulness, and willingness to reconsider than Rosie O'Donnell).
Because while Rush was, and is, bombastic, sometimes arrogant, and dynamic, he's also one of the most truly humble and fair-minded political commentators I've ever heard.
Don't believe me? Consider this: he doesn't believe he knows better than you how you should spend your money, what kind of car you should buy, with what sort (or gender) person you should sleep, what drugs you should or shouldn't take, whether you should own a gun, where you should send your kids to school, and so on.
Except to the extent he offers his advice on these matters, he so rarely advocates actual laws to impose his views on people, it strikes me that, as bombastic as he is, he really doesn't think nearly as much as himself as, say, Bill O'Reilly, who thinks people should be forced by government, when they buy cars, to choose higher-mileage ones even if they themselves have good reasons to buy, say, an SUV.
Now, is that politically conservative or libertarian of Rush? Sure. But it's nowhere near the hatred that he was billed as having, and his most controversial remarks (mostly regarding warring on other countries and stuff, I'd say) don't compare to the daily grind of anti-choice venom coming from left-wing media outlets, which assume that few Americans know enough to decide what to buy, what to eat, how much to save, etc. for themselves, but somehow, in some way, can be expected to properly elect people to two of three branches of a federal government that'll make all these decisions for them in toto.
And I've heard Rush and Fox commentators (such as E. D. Hill, previously Donahey) sum up the liberal viewpoint on an issue so much more clearly and coherently that I've sometimes actually felt myself agreeing with it, compared to left-wing outlets, which so steadfastly refuse to provide a balanced, rational, both-or-more-sides set of views on an issue, that I usually assume their views must be wrong, if they can't back them up by stating them fairly.
In short: I believe the left-wing media is failing because they follow the left-wing political approach of denigrating the ability of the average individual to consider and sort through information themselves in a rational way, and to learn, through feedback, experience, and so on how to improve their own ability to engage in that very process, and I believe the "right-wing media" is succeeding because they value the ability of their viewers to understand at least the basics (and, yes, TV doesn't tend to explore topics in much details, I admit) of various sides of the issues and therefore make more-informed decisions on their own.
In cases where I've kept fairly careful, objective track of how specific issues are covered among the media outlets, I've found that the "right-wing" ones that are getting all the attention lately simply present a more complete picture of the issues and how the different sides see the story than the "left-wing" ones that are dying.
What that means to me is, if I pay attention only to left-wing media, sure, I can ultimately become convinced that all right-wingers are rich white hating corporate types who must be defeated at all costs, but I'll be stunned, in a discussion with an actual rational right-winger who gets his news from other sources, to learn stuff I had no idea was the case -- that my left-wing "feeders" decided I was better off not knowing, yet that undercuts some or all of my arguments.
But if I pay attention only to "right-wing" media, there's much less likelihood that, in a discussion with a left-winger, they'll bring up some crucial point that my "feeders" chose to not make me aware of. (Oh, in my experience, they'll try, but usually I've found that they're either making stuff up out of whole cloth, or greatly exaggerating some trivial thing, as in "Remember the October Surprise!" or "But it was Reagan who foisted crack cocaine on urban America!".)
And while it certainly doesn't hurt that I feel less personally insulted by Rush/FOX/etc than by NYTimes/CNN/NBC/etc based on my opinions, the fact is that, even in cases where I disagree equally with a given outlet, the former are much less likely to make me feel insulted by doing so than the latter. (Bill O'Reilly being an excellent counterexample: "Republicans don't want Americans to drive higher-mileage cars", he was saying about a year ago, based on the fact that Republicans were leaning, compared to Democrats, more towards individual choice in that matter; hardly a case of actively preventing anyone from choosing an 80mpg Honda over a 10mpg SUV, and a counterexample to his claim of having a "No Spin Zone". I'm picking on Bill because I happen to admire his work on his TV show overall, and am grateful for his zealousness in taking on many sacred cows, such as the charity beauracracies post-09-11.)
Finally, as one last example of left-wing media bias, consider how it celebrated moderately successful left-wing commentators and talk-show hosts over the last 10 years, such as Rosie O'Donnell, the hosts of The View, Jay Leno, David Letterman, and so on, making sure we all knew just what was So Wonderful about all of them.
Now compare that coverage to that of Rush, one of the most successful broadcasters in the history of any form of media, and ask yourself this:
Based on what the "media watchers" have chosen to tell you, who is more likely to have an African American guest-host his show: David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, or Rush Limbaugh?
I'm pretty sure the answer is Rush Limbaugh, based on frequency of use of Dr. (Professor?) Walter Williams, one of the funniest men on radio.
But you won't hear that from the people who, in this very thread, bash Rush based not on listening to him and telling the truth about what he says, but based on advocating their narrow-minded political agenda. And they'll happily let any claims about Rush being "racist" slide right by mere "facts" such as his current marriage being presided over by an African American.
And, yes, I've proven the effectiveness of relying more on "right-wing" media than left-wing media in discussions I've had with people more or less liberal, conservative, etc. than myself. I've had an otherwise-well-informed, intelligent, left-wing/anarchist teacher/lawyer tell me straight out Rush was a racist, only, after my countering with some facts, that what he means is that Rush advocates positions that aren't in line with the NAACP, for one example. (The look on the guy's face when I later complained about the Clinton/Reno record of oppressing poor white Christian populations such as the Branch Davidians and the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez was priceless: this guy really believed in his liberalism, in the little guy, and he just hadn't yet put it all together until I pointed it out! I learned more about his views, of course, but he had few surprises for me, other than his high-for-a-liberal level of rationality.)
(An example of Walter Williams humor: contemplating whether the federal government should even mandate education for children at all, prompted by a caller to consider how far such a requirement should go, he concludes, paraphrased, "I'm in favor of mandating and funding a child's education through third grade, because, by then, he's learned enough to read the sign on my lawn that says 'Private Property -- KEEP OUT'!".;-)
In summary: it isn't the politics so much as the completeness of the picture at a given depth that, for me, determines the usefulness of a media outlet. (I tend to believe left-wing politics intrinsically involves deceit by its elites, based on its structural characteristics and history, but I don't need to be sure of this to reasonably assess the completeness of a given media presentation and have tried to put this belief, or speculation, aside as a possible bias.)
I don't think I can possibly claim I'm representative of any portion of Americans or others, however.
"Linux is Dead", MSNBC Concludes
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Is Linux Dead?
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Who needs Katie Couric when we have/.?
Re:Pablo? Come to Florida honey, we miss you.
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Pet Bugs?
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So I didn't know that C supported integer math expressions.
Here's a true story you might enjoy. When my dad was teaching me PDP-8 assembler (I was about 12 at the time, so that was really cool), he told me about his early experiences writing code for the -8 (maybe the -5, actually) as a salesman for Digital.
There were the historical challenges, of course:
Write the assembly code down by hand.
Hand-assemble the assembly code into machine code by hand.
Convert the machine code into the coding system needed by the paper-tape loader of choice (RIM, BIN, names like that come to mind, but I don't have my old -8 books handy at the moment), by hand
Find a teletype, turn on the paper-tape punch, and punch the codes.
Feed the tape into a PDP-8 (after making sure it is on and has the appropriate loader entered, e.g. via the control panel).
Okay, so far, so good, pretty much everyone has to go through that at the time, since whacking out a Fortran compiler over a weekend wasn't considered possible.
But my dad said he made things a lot more difficult for himself by not really understanding that, in the first place, those assembly-code mnemonics turned into machine code simply represented numbers in memory -- numbers that could be entered directly into the initial memory image if needed as initial data values, for example.
The upshot? Until he was clued in, my dad's early PDP-8 assembly code contained lots of extra instructions that'd gin up constants by clearing the accumulator (CLA), incrementing it (INC, I think), shifting it (ARL?), and so on, then storing them in memory for later use by the program he really wanted to write in the first place.
Presumably that was a modest source of bugs itself -- can you imagine not being able to trust that a simple concept like "add 4 to A" might be misprogrammed by yourself such that 4 was actually 2, or 8, or something?
(My own misunderstanding, roughly corresponding to his, was specifically that the opcode mnemonics, such as TAD, DCA, JMP, JMS, ISZ, and so on, corresponded to specific values, 3-bit ones for the opcode field in those cases, only in the context of PDP-8 assembly language. I'd already learned BASIC on the -10, and understood that "10 GOTO 20" was stored as a sequence of ten 7-bit bytes, a "coding system" that worked for BASIC code as well as any other text -- context-specific encoding wasn't a concept I'd learned at that point, at least not as a concept per se. So, when taught the -8 assembly language, I spent far too many mindcycles trying to understand what might happen if, instead of coding TAD, I coded TAE, and how three ASCII 7-bit, or even 6-bit, characters could fit into 3 opcode bits! When I finally understood what was going on, it was one of those "AHA!" moments, like when I first grokked recursion studying the PDP-10 assembly code commonly used to print values in decimal.)
I didn't see people trying to crash the system just to see the bomb animation.
Really? I've seen people doing that, and done it myself, by simply using the computer for hours on end. That approach just didn't work so well on the Mac.
But it worked great for Windows, so it's worth a try.
Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 also includes more than 300 UNIX utilities and tools that behave exactly as they would on UNIX systems, plus a software development kit (SDK) that supports over 1900 UNIX APIs and migration tools such as make, rcs, yacc, lex, cc, c89, nm, strip, gbd, as well as the gcc, g++, and g77 compilers.
What's "gbd" -- the GNU BeDugger?
And are they really distributing these products, or just the underlying "UNIX APIs and migration tools" upon which they depend?
Kinda scary to think I've written software distributed by Microsoft!
There is a big difference between a VLIW processor and a CISC processor. VLIW is basically a way of carrying out processing more efficiently than CISC, trading off instruction word length and a kind of nanocompiler which works out how to rearrange instructions (and uses a cache of external memory for the rescheduled instructions, btw) for complex decoding hardware and logic for identifying register and pipeline status.
I worked (as a technical writer and compiler developer on) a series of VLIW machines (the Numerix NMX-432, -332, and -464).
To my knowledge, there was no "nanocompiler" that rearranged instructions on the fly, nor was there an external cache that stored the rearranged instructions. I'm 100% sure there was no such thing in the hardware/microcode combo that made up the basic machine ("CPU").
So I'm trying to figure out what you're talking about. Can you give any examples of VLIW machines that do (or did) this kind of on-the-fly rearranging of instructions?
Now, if you're talking about a VLIW machine running software or microcode that emulates a CISC-like instruction set, that's certainly possible, but I wouldn't call that combination a "VLIW machine", rather a CISC-system emulator that happens to have a VLIW machine under the hood.
Or, maybe you're saying it's the CISC machine that has the nanocompiler -- in which case, no, CISC machines do not inherently have those, though Out-Of-Order (OoO) ones could be said to have them, and maybe some also have the cache you speak of.
That (latter) interpretation of your statement seems more feasible, actually, now that I think of it. In which case, I'm not sure I'd call the decoding hardware in a typical VLIW "complex" compared to CISC -- one of the main thrusts of VLIW was to avoid much in the way of instruction-decoding logic, since such logic can be on the critical path in terms of instruction execution, yet is not in any way important to the purpose of the program (i.e. the set of instructions being executed) itself. I.e. instruction decode is, simply, overhead, though it can serve to optimize instruction-stream bandwidth and size (the main advantage for CISC that persists to this day, from what I can tell).
(Lest this confuse anybody: I'm not saying instruction decode is unimportant to executing a program. Obviously, once a program is represented as a series of instructions for a CPU, then some kind of instruction decoder is needed to execute them -- a more complex decoder for CISC, a less-complex one for RISC, and a trivial, though possibly "wide", one for LIW and VLIW. At a higher level, though, programs are better viewed as, for example, dataflow diagrams -- two values "flow" from variables A and B into the inputs of an adder, the output of the adder "flows" into variable C, hence "c = a + b;" is implemented. Viewed this way, the program itself has no need for instruction decoding per se, as long as the data flows from and to memory and is processed through arithmetic logic units (ALUs). So the issue becomes how best to "encode" these flows in a manner that represents a reasonably optimal combination of hardware and software complexity, instruction decode time, and so on. CISC is an approach that makes the instructions take up, overall, less memory and, therefore, require less bandwidth between the instruction memory and the CPU, at the expense of a more complex and time-consuming instruction decode; RISC simplifies the decode but typically requires more memory for the instructions; VLIW goes further down that path, getting about as far away from an "ADD A, B, C" instruction as you can reasonably get. Oh, there are things called dataflow machines that might be even further away, but I don't know anything about those.)
You haven't really offered a very compelling argument.
You don't know what you're talking about. Sorry, but it's true.
you are simply arguing buggy whips are preferable to steering wheels despite the dominance of the automobile. Seems rather pointless and you certainly have no facts to back this position up.
I made no such argument. Besides, the GUI is not nearly as advanced, compared to the CLI, as steering wheels are to buggy whips.
"user choice" and "blind users" are limited examples. You are now arguing that Microsoft should make an OS which works well for 5% of the user population, but creates challenges for the remaining 95%.
No I'm not.
you do so by claiming an OS which works well for 95% of the population but challenges 5% is a dumb idea.
No, I didn't make such a claim. You don't seem to have even read my post.
Sorry, but you don't even understand the issues in the first place, so there's no point in continuing this discussion.
. . . integrating the GUI into the operating system was a dumb idea
Oh yeah, because you just know most users are plenty comfortable with the command line.
You're confusing two issues: one, whether to provide a GUI (more generally, whether to provide one or more GUIs along with other user-selectable interfaces); two, whether to integrate a particular GUI with a general-purpose-computing operating system.
The latter is at least a questionable decision, and probably a dumb idea. The former is more like what Unix (and maybe VAX/VMS, MIT's ITS, and others) have long offered: user choice, with a simple, generic interface layer offered by the OS itself.
(For just one example why GUI integration into an OS is "dumb": ask some of your blind friends how long and expensive it was for them to obtain proficiency with the "user-friendly" Windows or Mac OSes vs. systems where the GUI was optional, like Unix, VAX/VMS, and even MS-DOS.)
Re:Change the data: change the conclusion
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Data Quality Act
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...those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience..." C. S. Lewis
That's the one I was thinking of! Though the others people have posted are great too.
Re-read the post I originally replied to. A businessman will stop lying once he's made a profit, but a bureaucrat will never stop lying?? What kind of lame-ass naivety is that?
Why don't you re-read the post (I'm assuming you're referring to mine):
a business man, having made his profit, will have no further incentive to lie to the public
I didn't say he will stop lying; just that his incentive to lie (which is inherently risky) drops off as his profits increase (i.e. his desires are satiated).
As far as "lame-ass naivety", why don't you re-read the post to which I replied in the first place, which had this gem:
With all the flaws bureaucracy has, I would still trust a bureaucrat to be considerably more reliable and truthful in an analysis that affected the viability of any particular product or industry than any of the proponents of said industry.
Rememeber, at the end of the day, a civil servant is there to serve us.
Now that's naive, something only the very young and very foolish believe -- roughly on the order of believing in the Tooth Fairy, in my opinion and experience.
But if you insist on believing in the unassailable integrity of the beauracrat, whose power to impose his lies on the public (and even deny their right to contradict him) stems from government might, over the profiteering businessman who is (as the Enron/Arthur Andersen debacle shows) quickly devalued in a free market as soon as his lies are exposed, go right ahead, enjoy your lollipop.
Slashdot Mirror
Consistency with COBOL programming style, I imagine. "We" do the same thing in today's (or yesterday's) C runtime library.
When I was a young teen, I remember going into brain-lock trying to figure out the bizarre way TOPS-10, the main commercial OS for PDP-10s, encoded the date. It was something like:
Finally I figured out that this allows a pretty long-term date to be compressed into a smaller word, compared to the more straightforward approach of having distinct fields of bits.That is, it's a more-general form of numerical radix systems we're familiar with. E.g. in decimal, each digit has ten times the value of the one to its right; in binary, it has two times the value; in base N, it has N times the value. In a situation where the number of possible states of each "digit", or discrete value to be encoded into a compound value, changes from digit to digit, then the N, or multiplier, as you go from right to left, becomes simply the number of possible states for the components to the right.
This approach reduces the storage requirements, makes I/O faster, and so on, but it's a low-level, assembly/machine-language hack that doesn't generalize well to first-, second-, or even third-generation languages.
So, many C programmers generally don't question the appropriateness of the inefficiency of this kind of structure:
After all, they're more interested in the ease of access to the essential components of the data they want, and are unlikely, except in special cases, to encode dates for storage using the kind of approach shown above as a means to reduce storage requirements, I/O bandwidth, etc.This despite the fact that, with preprocessor macros and fairly clean coding, it would have been quite easy to provide a super-efficient coding as the "default" from the C library.
COBOL programmers having the main data type be PIC(however-many-digits) probably preferred it when all the data in a record was encoded the same way, rather than buying a little extra "time" beyond Y2K by dealing with the extra hassle of having binary data buried in the midst of BSD data.
(Think reviewing core dumps made by an OS that has no means to distinguish data types in your code and thus no means to choose which format to use to dump a particular word in memory.)
And the problems of throwing big-integer-style encoding into the mix -- a la using Julian dates, or, going even further, the number of days since 1900-01-01 or some similar base days, or yet further, the number of seconds since then -- include:
-
-
-
So when it comes to something as critical to financial applications as dates, it's not unreasonable to limit the sorts of optimizations to just a few that are entirely within the realm of "safe computing" for the time.The bigger the integer can get, the bigger the wordsize the base machine/language combo must support. (PDP-8's were 12-bit; -11's were 16-bit; -1's were 18-bit; and so on.)
Though going to double-word arithmetic is an option, you either complicate the app-level programming, or you rely on interpreters and compilers to be bug-free handling that kind of math, after having completely committed your app to using it for something as critical as dates.
It's easier to build up "date precision" using simple building blocks than to have to go to completely new and different data types each time.
That is, it's easier, having started with a type "Year" that is Year-1970, say, encoded in 8 bits, to extend the precision by simply appending a datum representing the added precision -- say, a 16-bit Julian date, or two 8-bit bytes, the first being the month, the second being the date within the month.
If, instead, you always try to use a compressed format for whatever precision you need, then the encoding for a year/date/hour/minute/second combo is completely different from the encoding for any combo with more or less precision, when it comes down to the actual bits.
Again, that makes for all sorts of practical problems that even today's more "modren" development environments have probably not fully solved, especially when it comes down to debugging.
There's also an argument for simplicity in that, if the "source" for a date is specified as, e.g., MM/DD/YY, the format in which it is stored should faithfully store each value exactly as written, modulo clear range errors.
The advantage here is that disagreements among applications sharing data with regard to things like leap years won't lead so easily to unrecoverable dates, in terms of precision.
E.g. if the app that first sees MM/DD/YY converts to an internal Julian date, then transmits that date to another app (via, say, storage) by going back to MM/DD/YY, then a leap-year or similar bug in either input or output of that app will change the date.
As the date moves from app to app, it might change further due to similar bugs.
By the time the problem is found, since there's no actual record of the original source date, unless a precise history can be compiled for each date of exactly which versions, and thus bug "envelopes", of which applications the date has passed through, there's no way to reliably tweak the date back to its original value.
And, at that time, using two instead of four BCD digits to encode a datum was certainly safe, represented an important optimization, and gave them hardly any extra complexity to deal with for decades.
The same "bang" -- optimization vs. complexity resulting from using it -- couldn't be had by various methods that seem reasonably obvious to us now, as they did to many back then, given the practicalities of the computing environment of the time.
My guess is you failed to keep your brain operating, too, because I've worked in both types of firms, and you're wrong.
The other poster is correct: private companies can certainly be just as sensitive to external pressures such as prices of publically traded stocks.
One difference between my experience in a private company (Numerix) and a public one (Pr1me) is that the management running the former did have ownership screaming at them to cut costs, primarily in order to sell at the highest price possible, which they felt would be easier if the cash-flow picture of the company looked "better" than if the actual productivity of its employees was improved.
At least, that was the explanation I received when I wondered, for the fifth time, in a meeting with my compiler-team management, why the company wouldn't spring for a few hundred dollars per modem to upgrade from 1200 baud to 2400 baud on their "mainframe", so us software developers, who already had shelled out $$ for 2400-baud modems months earlier to improve our productivity online (at Numerix someday, on other systems right away, like on BBSes), could experience the huge jump in productivity everyone knew would be possible.
Pr1me, on the other hand, was invested in largely by people who actually believed it was a "high-tech" company, so there was not nearly so much pressure to cut costs by restricting the productivity of the high-tech developers it employed.
Believe me, Numerix was very sensitive to the stock market, the oil market, and so on, not just for resale value, but for the ability to sell its products (minisupercomputers and related software). Didn't matter that it was privately held.
(In fact, my impression was that the fact that it was privately held contributed largely to the reasons it seemed to be run more like an old-style, beauracracy-laden manufacturing firm, despite never employing more than about 120 people, than the high-tech, get-in-on-the-ground-floor marvel it was billed as during my interviews and to most outsiders. I ran into less beauracracy trying to get things done at Pr1me, which employed on the order of, I think, tens of thousands.)
About 6 months or so after I left Numerix, it was sold to another company, Mercury. Not sure whether that was privately or publically held, offhand, but it doesn't matter -- they shut down product development, laid off the compiler staff and most others, thus squelching the competition the Numerix product line had given them, but continued to make $$ on service, so continued to employ some of those Numerix people for that purpose for awhile.
Anyway, there are so many clueless people running around who think completely wrong things about corporations, the stock market, investments, and such, and they comprise the vast majority of those who claim the "American system of capitalism is fundamentally flawed", in my opinion. (Yes, a few of those aren't clueless; and, yes, many who are clueless are still ardent capitalists, but easily made into pro-regulatory fanatics.)
About the only point you made with any true weight behind it is that a private company tends to have owners who understand the status of things within the company.
But that's largely a function of organizational complexity, which is closely tied to organizational size, which is, itself, closely tied to whether an organization can avail itself of public funds.
In other words, your statement has merit mainly because private companies (and obscure publically-traded ones) tend to be small, thus more transparent and easier to manage, so, yes, their "owners", whether public shareholders or private owners, to the extent they're interested, find it easier to keep track of what they're actually doing.
If you want to get an idea of how my view of the complexity/size/public-funding equation, such as it is, works in a completely different context, consider the differences between how organizations like the Red Cross and much smaller charities respond to emergencies large (2001-09-11) and small.
You'll discover (assuming you've been clued-in by the likes of O'Reilly) that the ability of those who "own" (not just manage, but hold a financial stake in, as in, contribute to) a charity to really understand the inner workings of one, especially when it comes to big, complicated issues, declines as the size, or mainly the complexity, of the organization itself increases.
That's why Americans who contributed to the so-called "9/11 fund" of the Red Cross were so baffled by that organization's apparent desire to redirect those funds to other needs, making for one vast publicity nightmare for that organization.
This despite an apparently clear and simple mandate for the Red Cross, compared to some charities, and especially any profit motive one would impute to an eeevil American corporation. That is, even though the Red Cross management could seemingly focus on a very specific set of goals, they couldn't manage the vast inflow of public monies and distribute them promptly, as advertised, to a fairly limited pool of recipients.
That's a heck of a lesson to those who believe the US Federal, or any of its State, Governments is made better having taken on the role of charity. If a charity has trouble handling doing its job, how can people believe that a government, already committed to core missions such as defending borders, printing money, writing laws, prosecuting criminals, imprisoning convicts, and so on, will do better at anything once it takes on yet more tasks that aren't part of its core mission -- tasks that, by themselves, overwhelm the most well-meaning beauracrats imaginable when they're literally swimming in vast piles of voluntarily contributed money?
I really wish more people would wake up to the issues of complexity management and understand that it isn't the "evils" of capitalism, corporatism, or even greed that doom us so much as the complexity we accept and put upon ourselves and others, via our choices -- including legislators we elect, who write arcane, self-serving laws for businesses and investors that, after centuries of accumulation with hardly ever any kind of cleaning-out, can be understood and exploited by only a handful of very brilliant, zealous men who are paid $Millions per year to do so.
Instead, so many people choose to ignore the vast, unnecessary complexity of the system they (and their forebears, usually anticapitalists to some degree or other) have imposed on the system, and blame the symptoms for the disease.
But the politicians they elect will continue to feast on the emotion-ridden desire for more laws, more complexity, more need to find rare expertise in navigating it, leading to even higher salaries for people who aren't contributing anything substantial to people's lives except navigating around an unnecessary sea of governmental regulation, and, in another few years, we'll go through the whole thing again, in a slightly modified form.
Sheesh, it's like reacting to tons of security flaws in Microsoft products by requiring MS programmers to use Hungarian notation in all its future software. Might make some people feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but if complexity management is the problem, you need to simplify (run GNU/Linux or OpenBSD or something, taken to a slight extreme), not increase complexity.
Being probably my favorite aircraft since sometime in the '70s, I've paid some attention to information such as TV documentaries on it, for what that's worth.
It not only leaked fuel on the runway, it leaked it well into and beyond takeoff. It therefore had to be refueled shortly after takeoff, that is, while in flight.
Moreover, flying it slowly enough to refuel it (the refueling plane had to fly at top speed) was not an easy matter.
The SR-71 is one of many examples of how practical engineering often demands solutions that are inelegant and inefficient except when they're performing their intended function.
I.e. the SR-71's intended function was to fly very fast, very high, not to take off and land in a nice, comfy, low-maintenance fashion. So to make the former happen, they sacrificed the latter.
Oh, the other "cool" thing I remember about a documentary I watched on the SR-71 was that it always had a special companion vehicle (or whatever they called it) to manage the runway taxi process.
It was a Chevrolet Camaro! Almost made me decide to not sell mine last year, but I did anyway. If I'd kept it, I might have given up my personal prohibition on bumper stickers and done up a customized one saying "My other vehicle is an SR-71 Blackbird".
(At least I can say the sound system in my Camaro blew away anything ever deployed in the SR-71/Camaro combinations. I sure miss that system, much moreso than the drive itself. Sigh.)
It got into the air, didn't it?
What, he hasn't sold those, too?
Wow, you really don't like lawyers, do you?
You mean the more people search Gnutella, the faster it gets?
Gimme some!!
That's an excellent point, because for a long time my impression was that liberals, or left-wingers, were distinctly more intellectual than their counterparts on the right.
Since I found myself "instinctively", and usually rationally, preferring the prescriptions of the right over the left (especially at the national, i.e. US, level, and moreso in socioeconomic and governmental structure issues than in social issues), there seemed to be a tension between "I think X, and I believe I'm intelligent and rational" and "People I believe are intellectual disagree with X".
After lots of consideration, I've come to the tentative conclusion that what left-wingers are primarily isn't so much intellectual as pseudo-intellectual -- that is, they'll happily engage in long, intellectual-sounding explanations for why the believe something or other, but when examined rationally, their arguments fall apart.
I have some pet theories why this happens, and why both left-wingers and religious-fundie-type right-wingers go all irrational when they try to defend their views, but the upshot is, just because someone is an intellectual, even a genuine one, does not mean their attempts to justify exerting some kind of government-enforced influence on other peoples' lives will necessarily be based exclusively on rational lines of thought. (It's mainly an issue of complexity management, just as "I choose to not make Bob leave the house" is inherently a less-complex choice than "Bob must leave the house", but that's a whole 'nother topic.)
Now, I realize that right-wingers have their intellectual heavy-weights (Buckley, for example) who can go on and on sounding like pseudo-intellectuals, if not genuine ones.
But, as long as they stick to explaining why they're not in favor of some government imposition on other peoples' freedoms, I find they tend to put forward more rational arguments, and when they don't, I find their irrationality somewhat less offensive.
(Both "I choose to make Bob leave the house because Bob is a pink elephant" and "Bob must leave the house because he's a pink elephant" can be equally irrational vis-a-vis the claim that Bob is a pink elephant and the "logic" of applying that to the choice the speaker makes, but the former is, to me, much less offensive because the conclusion, as far as it goes, is less offensive to the principle of individual liberty. Not that its irrationality shouldn't be defended against at all, but that it is less important to defend against, e.g. point out, such irrationality than against the sort represented by the latter statement, which represents a direct threat to Bob's liberty.)
In summary: conservatives railing against the intellectualism of the left-wing are best interpreted (that is, if you're looking for their highest motives) as railing against ivory-tower-style academic arguments against individual liberty.
(And, yes, I often find intellectual arguments in favor of some right-wing positions such as corporate, or business-model, protectionism of various sorts -- DMCA, for example -- to be similarly irrational and pseudo-intellectual attacks on individual liberty.)
I try to not mix up rationality with common sense. I've often had "common-sense" opinions of mine vanish utterly when I followed my highest sense of rational thinking. And I tend to have a visceral reaction against populism, which I think tends to counter its negative influences on rationality most of the time, more or less.
(E.g. this pledge-is-unconstitutional thing: as much as I had the desire to punch the guy who brought the lawsuit on the face when I saw him answering questions on CNN and Fox, my rationality forced me to basically agree with him on every issue. Especially during E.D. Hill's questioning on Fox and Friends, which was quite aggressive regarding his daughter, as tempted as I was to say "you go girl!" for populist reasons, I found his responses, while unconvincing from a populist point of view, to be reasoned, and E.D.'s line of questioning to be, frankly, irrelevant to the issue of whether the federal government should, through its institutions of education, even simply lead a recitation of a pledge including the words "under God" despite allowing anyone to not say those words or the entire pledge.)
I don't know about that, because I don't watch CNN much, especially these days. It wouldn't surprise me that they're quickly scrambling to get "lunatic fringe" people, though, because those were the types they tended to get to "represent the Right" before Fox ever came along. Ditto for ABC, CBS, NBC.
One of the most effective things Fox did for me, especially in my first year or so watching, was bring the actual leaders of left-wing organizations onto shows like "Hannity and Colmes" and let them say what they would.
Now, left-wing media tended to offer more along the lines of smooth-talking spokespeople who would soft-pedal the extreme-left line (on, say, abortion or gun control).
But, in my experience, extremists on the left are put into positions of power (consider Donna Brazile, Al Gore's campaign chief, or whatever, during his 2000 campaign), while extremists on the right tend to be relegated to obscure organizations that don't represent the central body of thought on the right.
Anyway, listening to H&C interviewing Presidents and other luminaries of the "reproductive-rights left" on the partial-birth-abortion issue was a revelation, since they ended up (sometimes accidentally) confirming what right-wingers had been claiming, in contradistinction to what left-wing spinners had long claimed, about what the issues really involved.
For example, the abortion lobby long claimed, in general public view anyway, that a partial-birth abortion was almost always the result of some medical necessity -- that it wasn't so much the abortion that was the objective, rather, the solving of some medical condition that necessitated the abortion.
After all, that's the basis of the sentiment behind phrases like "it should be solely a decision made by a woman and her doctor" -- why include the doctor in that statement, unless the implication is that the doctor played a key role in choosing an abortion?
(Consider the phrase "buying an SUV is a choice between a mother and her family's insurance agent", which implies, as it fairly would, that it's up to the mother, with input from an insurance agent who has information on accident survivability for various sorts of cars, to decide whether to pay extra, in terms of capital, on-going fuel, and environmental exprenses to gain the safety of an SUV. Such a phrase would serve as an excellent defense against the anti-SUV crowd, just as has done the abortion phrase.)
So, in this H&C episode, the pro-abortion representative was basically following this line, when, after more questions about the issue, she basically said the following:
That was a stunning admission of what really happens -- it isn't the doctor (most of the time anyway) who says "If you don't have an abortion, something bad will happen to you physically, and partial-birth is now your only choice", it's the mother who decides she doesn't want the baby; the doctor is a mere "hired hand".
(The SUV equivalent of the actual meaning of the pro-abortion quote would therefore be much more along the lines of: "buying an SUV is a choice between a mother and her mechanic". Far less convincing, eh?)
That admission was so stunning that I rewound the tape and showed it to my wife two or three times to make sure she, too, understood what was being admitted here.
H&C has also had other priceless moments, like the young woman who'd organized a protest against the show because of its "conservative bent" or something, who, when asked questions about the issues, ended up admitting she had no clue, she was just the organizer. This despite her initial demeanor of being fully behind the protest!
The priceless moment continued as they went to break, when I heard the poor woman say, over audio only, something along the lines of:
So, yes, you might well be right CNN is picking a bunch of lunatic-fringe right-wingers to represent the body of right-wing thought, because that would be exactly the sort of intellectually dishonest thing a left-wing outlet might do. (H&C I don't put in the same category, because of the nature of the show; if you're talking about one of CNN's equivalent shows, then I'd say it isn't in the same category of misrepresentation either. H&C has certainly had looney-fringe right-wingers as well. Some of them are very cute, to be honest, but they're rather unpersuasive, even embarrassing.)
But I honestly would be surprised if Fox ever had headline summaries like what I saw on CNN's Headline News sometime last August, summing up a hate crime that had occurred in Texas:
Hmm, so a hate crime in Texas means "Texas Hate", eh? Can you imagine them running one saying "Arkansas Hate", or "New York Hate", given CNN's love of the Clintons, at least compared to Bush?
Sure, I haven't done a comprehensive study of such headlines and captions, but given the left-wing media's campaign to associate GWBush with Texas-style "hate" (which the NAACP crowned with its "Bush killed my father again" ad during the 2000 campaign) and supposed drooling over executing people, it's unsurprising that their producers, editors, and so on would leap at the chance to continue associating "hate crimes" with Texas, something they might well have given up bothering about had Al Gore won the White House by then.
As another example of this sort of subtle media bias (by which I mean that it's almost certainly a bias the people who exhibit it might not be aware of, only possibly one that they're willingly engage in) was an NBC Today segment I saw sometime back in the March-May 2001 timeframe.
It was billed, going to commercial, about being another indication of parental problems with children's sports, and this was in the wake of the hockey-dad death, so anyone watching who had a clue would have expected something like an fight among parents.
Sure enough, the show comes back on, more "worrisome"-sounding intro, then the inevitable jiggly-camera video of a baseball field with voiceover about the "incident".
Turned out, as far as I can recall, there was no video on the incident itself -- the jiggly-camera stuff was all made up for the segment!
But, still, what was the "incident"?
Well, turns out that two teams played a game, and some parents complained that there weren't enough participants on the winning team's side or something.
So the officials looked up the rules, decided the game was nil, and had it played again.
Yup, that's right, the "incident" consisted entirely of a bunch of little kids having to play an extra game!! Stop the presses! What horror! Think of the children!!
Oh, sure, they covered some "feelings" expressed by some parents, I'll bet, but the incident was blown so out of proportion.
So, why, I wondered, given all the potential incidents of actual parental misbehavior in sports, would NBC Today devote a whole fear-and-trembling, isn't-this-getting-out-of-control segment to such a trivial incident, one that I'm sure every child (given their age) understood as nothing more than "Gee, I get to play in an extra game!"?
Then it hit me: this wasn't baseball, it wasn't softball, it was T-ball.
That's right, it was T-ball, the same sport that, shortly before, President Bush had brought to national attention by inviting young children (the only kind who play T-ball) to play on the White House lawn, or somewhere "nifty" like that.
Does that prove the producers looked for an opportunity to "smear" the "pure-Americana" impression of T-ball a bit as a result of Bush getting some positive press for welcoming it (as versus Clinton's "I wanna look hotter for the girls" jogging track ;-) onto White House property?
Hardly. But it's consistent with the behavior of left-wing media outlets I've observed over the years, of choosing how to slant, flavor, and spice their reporting to suit their personal politics.
(Around this same time, sitting in a waiting room, I heard Matt Lauer make some kind of over-the-top exclamation regarding the increased cost of calls to 411 that actually made me laugh out loud, to the consternation of others in the room. You mean you might be paying 75 cents more for that call to 411 than you thought?! Stop the presses! Of course, whether Matt Lauer would express similar outrage over the amount of one's paycheck that is quietly removed by the federal government via your fellow employees -- an activity (withholding) that led to mass murder here in Massachusetts, and which is completely unnecessary for the IRS to collect adequate revenues, is left for you to consider for yourself.)
As just another example, I remember Katie Couric, during the 1996 Presidential election cycle, asking Bob Dole the leading question "Do you believe [former Surgeon General] Koop has been brainwashed [regarding the 'evils' of second-hand cigarette smoke]?", and Bob Dole answering "A bit".
Did NBC cover that story accurately? Well, you tell me whether saying "Bob Dole claims the former Surgeon General has been brainwashed!", which is what they ran with for some days after the interview, is an accurate and fair representation of what he actually said in the context of Katie's leading question. "He's been brainwashed!" sounds, to me, like a more potentially lunatic statement than "I think he's been a bit brainwashed regarding this particular issue", which is what he actually said, and which, in context, is basically semantically identical to "I believe he's bought into a party line without sufficient critical analysis".
(As an aside, President Bush saying "States like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea constitute an axis of evil" in fact does not include the people of those nations in the "axis of evil" -- states being governments. But how many people were made aware of the distinction in the press coverage afterwards? Maybe Bush said something different at another time, but not that I've heard.)
In summary: you can't base your analysis of "bias" on pure numbers of "analysts", or representatives, of various viewpoints in issues. As my earlier post explained, you have to examine how fairly the various viewpoints are presented, including how consistently they're each explored in depth, both positively and negatively. Choosing a passionate advocate for a position is orthagonal to choosing a lunatic advocate for it; the former might actually convince lots of people, the latter will probably just scare them away from that position.
Left-wingers, especially Marxists, have understood the importance of distorting public perceptions via the press for decades, and choosing extremists to present views opposing them is just one of their tactics.
Well, if you don't already know, then we're not about to tell you -- go away and RTFM!!
(Does that answer your question? ;-)
Speaking for myself as a "media consumer", what gives an outlet an advantage competing for my interest are rationalism and fairness.
I listen to Rush, I watch Fox News, and I also (still) occasionally pick up on other, more traditional, "liberal" outlets.
The difference for me isn't just that I tend to agree more with Rush or with the Fox commentators, though that helps some, because there have been other "right-wing" sources that turned me off completely (can't recall the "loudmouth" guy, who died a year or so ago, that kinda paved the way for Rush, Mancow, etc., but he's an example, as is "700 Club", of sources with which I might agree politically but can't stomach).
What makes the difference for me is that when I get my news from what, today, are considered "right-wing" sources, I find it rare that I later discover some crucial bit of information was left out of my "feed" later on.
Whereas the "left-wing" sources tend to conveniently forget, neglect, or overlook important data, nevermind that they're constantly bashing and/or labeling the right in the first place. (For example, conveniently omitting the fact that Bush's 2001-era "ban on stem cell research" was really just a ban on federal funding of research that'd inherently involve destroying viable human embryos. As another example, I suspect the recent headlines "Federal Court Rules Pledge of Allegiance is Unconstitutional" is overly hysterical, that they really just ruled that a teacher leading a recital of it is unconstitutional -- a rare example of an hysterically inflated and/or misinformed summary that helps the right more than the left!)
I remember why I first listened to Rush. I'd heard his name mentioned by Roger Ailes in a meeting relating to media in Boston, and, quite literally, in this crowd of supposedly open-minded elite liberal media types, there was hissing. That was back around 1990 or so, maybe?
Around the same time, an unsuccessful sequel sitcom called "The New WKRP" had an episode involving a Rush-clone character named, IIRC, "Lash Rambaugh", which tried to be even-handed about the visceral, "he must be stopped" reaction among the radio-station hands when they learned this character was gaining air time on their precious station.
What got my attention was that a) I was basically being indoctrinated to hate Rush, primarily through the unstated, but nevertheless clear, implication that he was himself a hater, a neo-Nazi, whatever, and that b) no actual evidence was being supplied of what he actually said on a typical show.
(The WKRP episode was particularly stunning in how it omitted any actual reference to any actual offensive thing this Lash Rambaugh guy said; at least, that's how I remember it.)
So I thought, hey, I'm a Christian, theoretically I shouldn't immediately sign up as a "Rush hater" as if I'm protecting women, babies, and minorities by spreading the "hate-Rush gospel" until I've listened to the guy (and read his book(s)) myself, so I can speak to the issues myself.
Upshot? I quickly discovered what a convincing, willing, campaign of whispered lies the anti-Rush activists were fomenting (and still foment today, though I suspect most of them are simply uninformed haters of all things right-wing simply on auto-pilot, displaying less intelligence, thoughtfulness, and willingness to reconsider than Rosie O'Donnell).
Because while Rush was, and is, bombastic, sometimes arrogant, and dynamic, he's also one of the most truly humble and fair-minded political commentators I've ever heard.
Don't believe me? Consider this: he doesn't believe he knows better than you how you should spend your money, what kind of car you should buy, with what sort (or gender) person you should sleep, what drugs you should or shouldn't take, whether you should own a gun, where you should send your kids to school, and so on.
Except to the extent he offers his advice on these matters, he so rarely advocates actual laws to impose his views on people, it strikes me that, as bombastic as he is, he really doesn't think nearly as much as himself as, say, Bill O'Reilly, who thinks people should be forced by government, when they buy cars, to choose higher-mileage ones even if they themselves have good reasons to buy, say, an SUV.
Now, is that politically conservative or libertarian of Rush? Sure. But it's nowhere near the hatred that he was billed as having, and his most controversial remarks (mostly regarding warring on other countries and stuff, I'd say) don't compare to the daily grind of anti-choice venom coming from left-wing media outlets, which assume that few Americans know enough to decide what to buy, what to eat, how much to save, etc. for themselves, but somehow, in some way, can be expected to properly elect people to two of three branches of a federal government that'll make all these decisions for them in toto.
And I've heard Rush and Fox commentators (such as E. D. Hill, previously Donahey) sum up the liberal viewpoint on an issue so much more clearly and coherently that I've sometimes actually felt myself agreeing with it, compared to left-wing outlets, which so steadfastly refuse to provide a balanced, rational, both-or-more-sides set of views on an issue, that I usually assume their views must be wrong, if they can't back them up by stating them fairly.
In short: I believe the left-wing media is failing because they follow the left-wing political approach of denigrating the ability of the average individual to consider and sort through information themselves in a rational way, and to learn, through feedback, experience, and so on how to improve their own ability to engage in that very process, and I believe the "right-wing media" is succeeding because they value the ability of their viewers to understand at least the basics (and, yes, TV doesn't tend to explore topics in much details, I admit) of various sides of the issues and therefore make more-informed decisions on their own.
In cases where I've kept fairly careful, objective track of how specific issues are covered among the media outlets, I've found that the "right-wing" ones that are getting all the attention lately simply present a more complete picture of the issues and how the different sides see the story than the "left-wing" ones that are dying.
What that means to me is, if I pay attention only to left-wing media, sure, I can ultimately become convinced that all right-wingers are rich white hating corporate types who must be defeated at all costs, but I'll be stunned, in a discussion with an actual rational right-winger who gets his news from other sources, to learn stuff I had no idea was the case -- that my left-wing "feeders" decided I was better off not knowing, yet that undercuts some or all of my arguments.
But if I pay attention only to "right-wing" media, there's much less likelihood that, in a discussion with a left-winger, they'll bring up some crucial point that my "feeders" chose to not make me aware of. (Oh, in my experience, they'll try, but usually I've found that they're either making stuff up out of whole cloth, or greatly exaggerating some trivial thing, as in "Remember the October Surprise!" or "But it was Reagan who foisted crack cocaine on urban America!".)
And while it certainly doesn't hurt that I feel less personally insulted by Rush/FOX/etc than by NYTimes/CNN/NBC/etc based on my opinions, the fact is that, even in cases where I disagree equally with a given outlet, the former are much less likely to make me feel insulted by doing so than the latter. (Bill O'Reilly being an excellent counterexample: "Republicans don't want Americans to drive higher-mileage cars", he was saying about a year ago, based on the fact that Republicans were leaning, compared to Democrats, more towards individual choice in that matter; hardly a case of actively preventing anyone from choosing an 80mpg Honda over a 10mpg SUV, and a counterexample to his claim of having a "No Spin Zone". I'm picking on Bill because I happen to admire his work on his TV show overall, and am grateful for his zealousness in taking on many sacred cows, such as the charity beauracracies post-09-11.)
Finally, as one last example of left-wing media bias, consider how it celebrated moderately successful left-wing commentators and talk-show hosts over the last 10 years, such as Rosie O'Donnell, the hosts of The View, Jay Leno, David Letterman, and so on, making sure we all knew just what was So Wonderful about all of them.
Now compare that coverage to that of Rush, one of the most successful broadcasters in the history of any form of media, and ask yourself this:
I'm pretty sure the answer is Rush Limbaugh, based on frequency of use of Dr. (Professor?) Walter Williams, one of the funniest men on radio.
But you won't hear that from the people who, in this very thread, bash Rush based not on listening to him and telling the truth about what he says, but based on advocating their narrow-minded political agenda. And they'll happily let any claims about Rush being "racist" slide right by mere "facts" such as his current marriage being presided over by an African American.
And, yes, I've proven the effectiveness of relying more on "right-wing" media than left-wing media in discussions I've had with people more or less liberal, conservative, etc. than myself. I've had an otherwise-well-informed, intelligent, left-wing/anarchist teacher/lawyer tell me straight out Rush was a racist, only, after my countering with some facts, that what he means is that Rush advocates positions that aren't in line with the NAACP, for one example. (The look on the guy's face when I later complained about the Clinton/Reno record of oppressing poor white Christian populations such as the Branch Davidians and the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez was priceless: this guy really believed in his liberalism, in the little guy, and he just hadn't yet put it all together until I pointed it out! I learned more about his views, of course, but he had few surprises for me, other than his high-for-a-liberal level of rationality.)
(An example of Walter Williams humor: contemplating whether the federal government should even mandate education for children at all, prompted by a caller to consider how far such a requirement should go, he concludes, paraphrased, "I'm in favor of mandating and funding a child's education through third grade, because, by then, he's learned enough to read the sign on my lawn that says 'Private Property -- KEEP OUT'!". ;-)
In summary: it isn't the politics so much as the completeness of the picture at a given depth that, for me, determines the usefulness of a media outlet. (I tend to believe left-wing politics intrinsically involves deceit by its elites, based on its structural characteristics and history, but I don't need to be sure of this to reasonably assess the completeness of a given media presentation and have tried to put this belief, or speculation, aside as a possible bias.)
I don't think I can possibly claim I'm representative of any portion of Americans or others, however.
Here's a true story you might enjoy. When my dad was teaching me PDP-8 assembler (I was about 12 at the time, so that was really cool), he told me about his early experiences writing code for the -8 (maybe the -5, actually) as a salesman for Digital.
There were the historical challenges, of course:
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Okay, so far, so good, pretty much everyone has to go through that at the time, since whacking out a Fortran compiler over a weekend wasn't considered possible.Write the assembly code down by hand.
Hand-assemble the assembly code into machine code by hand.
Convert the machine code into the coding system needed by the paper-tape loader of choice (RIM, BIN, names like that come to mind, but I don't have my old -8 books handy at the moment), by hand
Find a teletype, turn on the paper-tape punch, and punch the codes.
Feed the tape into a PDP-8 (after making sure it is on and has the appropriate loader entered, e.g. via the control panel).
But my dad said he made things a lot more difficult for himself by not really understanding that, in the first place, those assembly-code mnemonics turned into machine code simply represented numbers in memory -- numbers that could be entered directly into the initial memory image if needed as initial data values, for example.
The upshot? Until he was clued in, my dad's early PDP-8 assembly code contained lots of extra instructions that'd gin up constants by clearing the accumulator (CLA), incrementing it (INC, I think), shifting it (ARL?), and so on, then storing them in memory for later use by the program he really wanted to write in the first place.
Presumably that was a modest source of bugs itself -- can you imagine not being able to trust that a simple concept like "add 4 to A" might be misprogrammed by yourself such that 4 was actually 2, or 8, or something?
(My own misunderstanding, roughly corresponding to his, was specifically that the opcode mnemonics, such as TAD, DCA, JMP, JMS, ISZ, and so on, corresponded to specific values, 3-bit ones for the opcode field in those cases, only in the context of PDP-8 assembly language. I'd already learned BASIC on the -10, and understood that "10 GOTO 20" was stored as a sequence of ten 7-bit bytes, a "coding system" that worked for BASIC code as well as any other text -- context-specific encoding wasn't a concept I'd learned at that point, at least not as a concept per se. So, when taught the -8 assembly language, I spent far too many mindcycles trying to understand what might happen if, instead of coding TAD, I coded TAE, and how three ASCII 7-bit, or even 6-bit, characters could fit into 3 opcode bits! When I finally understood what was going on, it was one of those "AHA!" moments, like when I first grokked recursion studying the PDP-10 assembly code commonly used to print values in decimal.)
Really? I've seen people doing that, and done it myself, by simply using the computer for hours on end. That approach just didn't work so well on the Mac.
But it worked great for Windows, so it's worth a try.
So what? You use GNU/Linux; isn't that enough in life?
Priorities. Learn 'em, live 'em, love 'em.
What's "gbd" -- the GNU BeDugger?
And are they really distributing these products, or just the underlying "UNIX APIs and migration tools" upon which they depend?
Kinda scary to think I've written software distributed by Microsoft!
Quote? Link?
(It's news to me!)
Get a faster computer with more memory.
I worked (as a technical writer and compiler developer on) a series of VLIW machines (the Numerix NMX-432, -332, and -464).
To my knowledge, there was no "nanocompiler" that rearranged instructions on the fly, nor was there an external cache that stored the rearranged instructions. I'm 100% sure there was no such thing in the hardware/microcode combo that made up the basic machine ("CPU").
So I'm trying to figure out what you're talking about. Can you give any examples of VLIW machines that do (or did) this kind of on-the-fly rearranging of instructions?
Now, if you're talking about a VLIW machine running software or microcode that emulates a CISC-like instruction set, that's certainly possible, but I wouldn't call that combination a "VLIW machine", rather a CISC-system emulator that happens to have a VLIW machine under the hood.
Or, maybe you're saying it's the CISC machine that has the nanocompiler -- in which case, no, CISC machines do not inherently have those, though Out-Of-Order (OoO) ones could be said to have them, and maybe some also have the cache you speak of.
That (latter) interpretation of your statement seems more feasible, actually, now that I think of it. In which case, I'm not sure I'd call the decoding hardware in a typical VLIW "complex" compared to CISC -- one of the main thrusts of VLIW was to avoid much in the way of instruction-decoding logic, since such logic can be on the critical path in terms of instruction execution, yet is not in any way important to the purpose of the program (i.e. the set of instructions being executed) itself. I.e. instruction decode is, simply, overhead, though it can serve to optimize instruction-stream bandwidth and size (the main advantage for CISC that persists to this day, from what I can tell).
(Lest this confuse anybody: I'm not saying instruction decode is unimportant to executing a program. Obviously, once a program is represented as a series of instructions for a CPU, then some kind of instruction decoder is needed to execute them -- a more complex decoder for CISC, a less-complex one for RISC, and a trivial, though possibly "wide", one for LIW and VLIW. At a higher level, though, programs are better viewed as, for example, dataflow diagrams -- two values "flow" from variables A and B into the inputs of an adder, the output of the adder "flows" into variable C, hence "c = a + b;" is implemented. Viewed this way, the program itself has no need for instruction decoding per se, as long as the data flows from and to memory and is processed through arithmetic logic units (ALUs). So the issue becomes how best to "encode" these flows in a manner that represents a reasonably optimal combination of hardware and software complexity, instruction decode time, and so on. CISC is an approach that makes the instructions take up, overall, less memory and, therefore, require less bandwidth between the instruction memory and the CPU, at the expense of a more complex and time-consuming instruction decode; RISC simplifies the decode but typically requires more memory for the instructions; VLIW goes further down that path, getting about as far away from an "ADD A, B, C" instruction as you can reasonably get. Oh, there are things called dataflow machines that might be even further away, but I don't know anything about those.)
You don't know what you're talking about. Sorry, but it's true.
I made no such argument. Besides, the GUI is not nearly as advanced, compared to the CLI, as steering wheels are to buggy whips.
No I'm not.
No, I didn't make such a claim. You don't seem to have even read my post.
Sorry, but you don't even understand the issues in the first place, so there's no point in continuing this discussion.
Noodle?
Noggin?
Naugehyde?
Natalie Portman?
Naughtiness?
Numinosity?
You're confusing two issues: one, whether to provide a GUI (more generally, whether to provide one or more GUIs along with other user-selectable interfaces); two, whether to integrate a particular GUI with a general-purpose-computing operating system.
The latter is at least a questionable decision, and probably a dumb idea. The former is more like what Unix (and maybe VAX/VMS, MIT's ITS, and others) have long offered: user choice, with a simple, generic interface layer offered by the OS itself.
(For just one example why GUI integration into an OS is "dumb": ask some of your blind friends how long and expensive it was for them to obtain proficiency with the "user-friendly" Windows or Mac OSes vs. systems where the GUI was optional, like Unix, VAX/VMS, and even MS-DOS.)
That's the one I was thinking of! Though the others people have posted are great too.
Why don't you re-read the post (I'm assuming you're referring to mine):
I didn't say he will stop lying; just that his incentive to lie (which is inherently risky) drops off as his profits increase (i.e. his desires are satiated).
As far as "lame-ass naivety", why don't you re-read the post to which I replied in the first place, which had this gem:
Now that's naive, something only the very young and very foolish believe -- roughly on the order of believing in the Tooth Fairy, in my opinion and experience.
But if you insist on believing in the unassailable integrity of the beauracrat, whose power to impose his lies on the public (and even deny their right to contradict him) stems from government might, over the profiteering businessman who is (as the Enron/Arthur Andersen debacle shows) quickly devalued in a free market as soon as his lies are exposed, go right ahead, enjoy your lollipop.
In that case...