That means that we can estimate the effects of skill, aggravation and frequency separately, but the effects of urgency, complexity and importance can't be separated from one another.
I'm pretty sure there's some deep, philosophical meaning to that.
In toto, this is not an Internet tax but just a closure of a gap for those people who have abolished their TV set in order to get the TV stream via http.
So, let me make sure I've got this straight:
A) Germans pay a tax on their TVs, probably to pay for the government-run broadcast TV stations, and
B) this is just a silly attempt to gouge a few thousand kids who can't afford to have both a TV and a computer.
I can't tell from the 'fish translation what the purpose of this is: is it a tax to pay for copying copyrighted materials, is it a tax on receivers, like the British pay for their TVs, to pay for German equivalent of the BBC, or what? And what is a GEZ?
The one thing I'm sure of, after reading the article, is that the Germans are grumpy about it. After all, the 'fish says: ``Against the Pl? the Ministerpr?denten had moved violent resistance from economics and politics. Of course, since that's a Bablefish translation, I'm probably completely wrong.
How about some of you German slashdotters filling us in?
it won't do me any good to write my congressman.... he's in the pocket of the industry.
my attempts to contact him about recognizing and codifying fair use have been met with what i can anti-consumer rhetoric.
By all means, keep writing to him, on paper (email is a waste of time), but don't stop there. Write letters to the editors of all the newspapers in his district, explaining briefly what he's doing to you all and why it's bad. If you can get a couple of column-inches on the letters-to-the-editor page, you can bet that his staffers will see it, and show him. All the money in the world doesn't do a congress-critter any good if it won't buy enough votes, and they will welch on a big contributor like the RIAA if that's what it takes to stay in office.
One interesting note... I mentioned the savebetamax campaign and he knew nothing about it... his aid admitted that they had received 'a few calls' on the topic... either they were lying... or not enough calls were made it seems.
Unless you can get enough callers on a single issue to shut down the Capitol Hill switchboards (yes, it has happened!), you don't have enough calls to matter.
If you want to make an impact, write. Write on paper, put it in an envelope, address it, put on a stamp and mail it. The congress-critters know that if you are willing to go to that much trouble, you just might be willing to go to the trouble to vote. Calls and emails are just background noise.
... Reuters, Al-Jazeera, Haaretz, and Xinhua... If they're all saying roughly the same thing, that probably reflects reality.
Maybe. I suppose it's hard to imagine them all agreeing on the same lie? But maybe they all got their story from the same ``eyewitness'' (who happened to be shooting of his mouth in the bar where the reporters hang out), and maybe this eyewitness was lying.
If there's serious divergence, there's probably major spin control going on somewhere.
Yes, but where? Any one of them could lie, or all of them could be lying. When China is angry with the U.S., Xinhua will probably parrot any crap that Al-Jazeera spouted, as long as it is anti-U.S., so I wouldn't assume that the majority is always right.
This is where Korean News comes in handy: they're so far out in la-la-land that you never have to wonder if they're telling the truth.
>>I know that foreign companies which sell their imports below average cost here can attract big tarrifs that way
>To be upheld by the WTO, the foreign companies have to be selling their exports below the price they are charging in their domestic market. Merely producing things at a lower cost is not dumping in and of itself.
Sorry, I mis-spoke. U.S. law used to say something along the lines of: Foreign companies which sold stuff here below their average cost to make things over there were dumping. Obviously, many companies which were setting the monopoly price in their home market and here were accused of dumping, because their monopoly price here (well above marginal cost) was below their average cost.
That sentence you quoted didn't get that point across.
"Dumping", selling a product below cost in order to force your competitors out of business, is illegal for good reasons.
Are you sure about that? Can you quote me the relevant law? I know that foreign companies which sell their imports below average cost here can attract big tarrifs that way[1]. I suspect that a monopolist who did that would have legal troubles[2]. But is it illegal for Joe's Lemonade Stand to sell lemonade below cost? I don't think so: stupidity isn't illegal in the U.S. If a company which cannot be convicted of monopoly choses to give away its shareholder's capital, I think that the only ones who can complain are the shareholders.
I'm sure that even if there were such a law, the fact that software is a complementary good to IBM's hardware would go a long way to establish IBM's good intentions, and get them out of trouble.
[1] Unfortunately, that's because our legislators are too stupid to be able to distinguish between monopoly pricing and attempts to run american businesses out of business. This is a standard homework problem in micro economics.
[2] As another reply pointed out, MS, who is a convicted monopolist, seems to have gotten away with pricing Internet Exploder at $0.00, far below the cost, which they bore entirely themselves.
one of the number one reasons i don't like debian is that packages in the stable branch are typically full point releases behind! have you seen the version of vi in their stable branch? holy, say hello to the 90's please!
When Debian says ``stable'', they don't mean ``the operating system never crashes'', that's almost a given with Linux. What they mean is ``your system software never changes'' and ``everything works together''. Part of the ``never changes'' thing is that eventually, your system winds up a full point behind the current release. It still works the same as it ever did, while the guy who upgraded to the latest release has introduced a new source of problems to his box.
Debian stable is meant for people who want an up-to-date machine, with all the latest patches, and the same softwear versions as when they first installed! It's great for servers.
Debian testing has the latest and greatest stuff in it (well, OK, it gets a few weeks behind sometimes). That means that sometimes things don't play well together, and sometimes new, unexpected bugs creep in. For a typical desktop, this sort of thing isn't a problem. For a ``has to be up all the time'' server, this possibility would be bad news.
Debian Unstable doesn't mean ``the system crashes a lot'', it means that the system changes a lot. There are new versions of various programs coming in all the time, and some of them are broken, or break other packages. Still, you always have the latest and greatest software at your sometimes-bleeding fingertips. Debian Unstable seems to be a lot like I remember Mandrake 6.1 being: some things work far better than in the competition, some things don't work at all, and sometimes strange things happen. The difference from that old Mandrake is that it's possible to install software, and the problems get fixed without waiting for a point release.
Running a mix of testing and unstable, I have emacs 21.2.1, vi 6.1.320, gcc 3.3.2, and so on. That's not quite the '90s.
I'm a little suprised that the robot from Lang's Metropolis didn't get a nod, guess that whole "introduced the term 'robot into the lexicon" thing just doesn't go as far as it used to.
Actually, that was done by Karl Capek, a Czechoslovak Science Fiction writer, in the story RUR Rossum's Universal Robots, in 1920. It seems that ``robot'' was Czech for ``worker'', and Capek gave it its curent meaning.
You seem to assume there are only three types of jobs, those that could be done by a computer, those that involve programming computers to do the first, and those that are "wholly creative, and could be done without a computer at all."
But many jobs involve the use of computers as an implement, to communicate, to do word processing, to recieve information, to make trades, orders, etc, but could not be done by a machine. That is the distinction, that while plenty of jobs need a machine, they could not be done by the machine.
Yes. Those jobs are in my third, wholly creative category, aren't they? They may require communications, word processing[1], placing trades, usw., but those are all functions which can be done by single-purpose machines, like telephones and word processors. If a computer happens to provide some of those services, the user need not be aware of it.
I think that I largely agree with the article. The author says:
Things can only get worse. As our society becomes ever more dependent on information technology, the gulf between those who understand computers and those who don't will get wider and wider. In 50 years, perhaps much less, the ability to read and write code will be as essential for professionals of every stripe as the ability to read and write a human language is today. If your children's children can't speak the language of the machines, they will have to get a manual job - if there are any left.
I'm seeing this already in my field (statistics). There are statistical packages which give their purchasers the illusion that they can perform a statistical analysis. They can't. The users can push the buttons, and get results, but they can't know whether the results make any sense, and they often don't. I can use these statistical packges, and have some chance of getting sensible results, but I often wind up writing programs to analyse data despite having several of these available to me. The programs manipulate data, automate repetitive steps, test results, and sometimes, implement methods which haven't yet made it into the packages. Statistics is changing rapidly, and there are a lot of useful things which may never show up in SAS and SPSS.
I'm not quite so extreme as is the author: my thind category, the wholly creative workers, will probably be the largest category of workers in 100 years, and those people will not be doing much programming, though many of them will know how.
One reason that last statement, about many knowing how, isn't as silly as it sounds is that languages will be getting higher-level, and will economise the programmer's time rather than the machine's time to a much greater extent than is true today.
I predict that in 100 years, programs will look a lot like today's pseudo-code.
Computer... multi-purpose? A dweezlish affectation. Doesn't have to be that way. Computers are dirt cheap, pad're... like socket-wrenches only moreso!! THROW_AWAYS !! Different task == different computer with "different" being defined by appropriate human_factors.
Sure. I think I see your point, and I think that I agree with it. I don't think your point contradicts mine. My idea was that if your job really doesn't require programming, then either:
1) you can be replaced by a programmed system, or
2) you are doing something totally creative, which could be done without a computer.
In case (2), some programmer may well make a more-or-less single purpose system which will do things which can't be done (or can't be done efficiently) by hand. E.g., word processors, GIS, usw.
I'm not saying this because I think that it'll happen someday, I'm saying it because it's happening now. Switchboard operators are being replaced by touchtone menu systems, data entry clerks are being replaced by bubble sheets and electronic reporting, warehousemen are being replaced by little robots and relational databases, inventory clerks are being replaced by RFID tags, and on and on.
Imagine that in 1930, somebody said that the controls presented to drivers don't map well enough to the function of cars, and that in the future people would have to know how every drivetrain component works in order to drive or face losing the ability to use public roads.
Am I missing something here?
Maybe you are.
The car, in 1930 and today, is a simple, single-purpose artifact. However complex it may be under the hood, it goes places and takes you along. The driver needs to steer, and control speed. That's it. To suggest that the driver CANNOT use it without being able to understand, repair and adjust every component is pretty silly.
The computer is a non-specialized, multipurpose artifact. A programmer can make it into a very expensive word processor, or a very expensive ledger, or a very expensive sliderule, or a very expensive map, or... To suggest that the operator must be able to provide at least some of the instructions the computer needs, in order to make full use of it to accomplish his job, doesn't seem entirely silly.
Any job which requires no creativity (for want of a less fuzzy word) can be done by a computer without any human intervention. For example, if you are simply entering data and running programs A, B and C, a better system could enter the data and run the programs without you.
I would say that any worker using a computer who can do his job without doing ANY programming could be replaced by a slightly better program than the one he is ``operating''. The only exceptions would be people doing jobs which are wholly creative, and could be done without a computer at all (e.g., writers, who could use pencil and paper).
Furthermore, the complexity in a car is not irreducible. A battery, an electric motor, some wheels... it would be possible to make a car that the average driver could understand. There is nothing there beyond the moving parts. The car is not valued because of its complexity, but because it gets you places.
In contrast, the complexity of the computer is irreducible. Even if it were physically simple and comprehensible (and really, it is), the software is arbitrarily complex, to the extent that we have a new field of science to study it. It's is this complexity which makes the computer valuable.
If you're using Visual studio.NET, it sounds as if your job description is ``Run (and write) Windows programs.'' Better stick to Windows for that.
I can't talk about Gimp and such because I don't do images. As for messing about with the OS, Debian has filled the bill nicely for me. Each time I get online, I type ``apt-get update;apt-get -u upgrade''. My system is always up to date, and I never have to do any system administration tasks beyond that.
The day when I can stick an expansion card into a Linux system and have it simply work is the day I consider using it, not before.
Actually, that is one of the great advantages to Linux. Whatever I plug in just works. Kudzu finds it, loads the drivers, and away I go. When I put in a PCI card modem, I did have to use the wizard (setup dialog in kppp) to configure it. When that card died, I had to configure the ISA replacement modem the same way (it wound up on a different serial port, because I switched some other stuff around while I was in there). I have a Windows game machine for the children (no modem, no NIC, no viruses), and it's a huge hassle to deal with any hardware changes on it. We just got a new machine for them with XP. From what I've heard, it will be easier to simply replace the machine than to upgrade or repair the hardware.
However bottom line is that Windows lets me get work done that would be far harder to do on the other platforms.
If your job description is: ``Run MS Windows programs.'', or the equivalent, then I don't doubt a bit what you're saying.
If your job is to work with data, to produce structured documents, et cetera, then you'll be shocked to find just how much harder it is to try to do things the Windows way on Unix, or the Unix way on Windows.
The two OS's are quite different. I think that KDE and Gnome have done the computer-literate a disservice: they make Linux look a lot like Windows. The capable Windows user switches to Linux, and finds that it's harder to do the familiar tasks the familiar, Windows way. He then claims that the Linux guys must be ``Freakin zellots [sic]''. If Linux didn't look so much like the nightmare from Redmond, that competent Windows user would assume that a new platform required new ways of doing things, and would learn the easy ways to do things on the new platform, rather than finding that the easiest way to do things on Windows just doesn't work out well on Linux and saying ``Freaking zealots! Linux sucks!''
In short, Linux and Windows are different, and what works best on one isn't going to work best on the other. If you use either the way it was intended, you'll be fairly happy with the results (give or take a few viruses and application crashes).
Rocket technology aiming at supersonic suborbital flights built by privateers using off-the-shelf components? Sounds more like Darwin Awards, especially after you take a look at the level of technology.
When you consider that we went to the moon with Sixties technology, designed by guys (girls didn't do engineering back then) with slide rules, I don't think that the technology level poses an obstacle.
How do they even know that their rocket is aerodynamically stable?
I'll bet that Burt Rutan knows. He's designed some of the most impressive light aircraft in the world, some of them jet propelled.
Building robust, real-time control systems to adjust the attitude during flight at a sub-millisecond rate can't be that easy either.
If NASA engineers could do it almost 50 years ago, using cardboard, string and slide rules, I suspect that most any electrical engineer could do it today.
The problem is, that while a Peltier gets one side VERY cold, the other side gets VERY hot. [snip] The fact is, a Peliter would only make things WORSE as far as "cooling things quietly" goes.
I think I disagree with you on this. The Peltier junction will indeed get quite hot. You get the most heat transfer with the biggest thermal gradient, so that higher temperature should make any given airflow more effective at carrying away energy. Thus I'd expect that you could use a quieter fan if your CPU had a Peltier junction to ``concentrate'' the heat.
All that assumes that the Peltier doesn't add any heat on its own, which doesn't sound very plausible. Still, I could easily imagine that the extra efficient heat transfer could more than make up for the bit of extra heat which needed to be dissapated.
I'm sure that the reason you never see this done is that the folks who spend big bucks on cooling are overclockers who want more cooling, rather than less noise. You probably won't see this on production machines because the air comeing off a setup like this would be hot enough to do damage. If a company is going to go with an expensive setup, they'll probably go with one which doesn't concentrate the heat and start fires.
we'd be good to go....if someone plugged the OS X interface on top of Linux.
[snip]
1) the stability of linux
2) the price-point of linux
3) the beauty of the Aqua interface
there'd be no reason to ever own a windows machine again.
You're right, and Apple knows it. It'll never happen, because Apple also knows that there'd be no reason to ever own an Apple machine again[1].
This would be like OSX on ix86: it could be the death of Apple. You might think that there's a way for them to do it safely, but I doubt that the big cheeses at Apple agree strongly enough to gamble their company on it.
[1] Yes, many Apple loyalists would still buy Apple for the nifty hardware and low-hassle experience. They certainly wouldn't get any NEW customers this way; people who were interested in a do-it-yourself solution would put this on non -Applehardware.
It wouldn't be cheap, but neither is an Apple.
I've been marking up the Project Gutenberg etexts using LaTeX for several years now. I can typeset an Oz book, or one of the Tom Swift books, in about 15 minutes. I have put about a week into typsetting ``The Voyage of the Beagle'', and no end in sight. I was able to typeset a translation of the bible in about one week, but it was sloppy work, and I wasn't satisfied.
Lyx is nice, but I don't think that it really speeds things up. I can't imagine that Lyx could speed things up at all on a Tom Swift.
Members of the Lisp family, such as Common Lisp, elisp and Scheme, definitely aren't the only languages which fill the bill, but they are the only ones I am at all familiar with.
So far as I know, the Lisp family is the only element of this class of languages which is >>30 years old. That means that there are people who've been writing large, production systems with Lisp for their entire careers. Lisp is time-tested for serious use.
When Ross and Ihaka (spelling?) started to write R, they began with a Scheme interpreter, and simply wrote the code to change its syntax to the S syntax, which is standard, infix, no-parentheses-except-around-function-arguments. In Scheme, that's simple, because it's a lisp (sort of).
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mispelled ``sick''.
With an intro like that, it's got to be a joke. I suppose that if you search here, you'll find that missing punchline. Maybe this is it?
Q: What's the difference between mathematics and economics
A: Mathematics is incomprehensible; economics just doesn't make any sense.
So, when we're trying to estimate the parameters, we take logs and get:
log(U+C+I) + log(10-S) - log20 + logA - log(1-sin(F/10))
That means that we can estimate the effects of skill, aggravation and frequency separately, but the effects of urgency, complexity and importance can't be separated from one another.
I'm pretty sure there's some deep, philosophical meaning to that.
Dude, steam is hot water.
What do you want to bet that it does no such thing?
So, let me make sure I've got this straight:
A) Germans pay a tax on their TVs, probably to pay for the government-run broadcast TV stations, and
B) this is just a silly attempt to gouge a few thousand kids who can't afford to have both a TV and a computer.
Do I have it right?
The one thing I'm sure of, after reading the article, is that the Germans are grumpy about it. After all, the 'fish says: ``Against the Pl? the Ministerpr?denten had moved violent resistance from economics and politics. Of course, since that's a Bablefish translation, I'm probably completely wrong.
How about some of you German slashdotters filling us in?
By all means, keep writing to him, on paper (email is a waste of time), but don't stop there. Write letters to the editors of all the newspapers in his district, explaining briefly what he's doing to you all and why it's bad. If you can get a couple of column-inches on the letters-to-the-editor page, you can bet that his staffers will see it, and show him. All the money in the world doesn't do a congress-critter any good if it won't buy enough votes, and they will welch on a big contributor like the RIAA if that's what it takes to stay in office.
Unless you can get enough callers on a single issue to shut down the Capitol Hill switchboards (yes, it has happened!), you don't have enough calls to matter.
If you want to make an impact, write. Write on paper, put it in an envelope, address it, put on a stamp and mail it. The congress-critters know that if you are willing to go to that much trouble, you just might be willing to go to the trouble to vote. Calls and emails are just background noise.
Maybe. I suppose it's hard to imagine them all agreeing on the same lie? But maybe they all got their story from the same ``eyewitness'' (who happened to be shooting of his mouth in the bar where the reporters hang out), and maybe this eyewitness was lying.
If there's serious divergence, there's probably major spin control going on somewhere.
Yes, but where? Any one of them could lie, or all of them could be lying. When China is angry with the U.S., Xinhua will probably parrot any crap that Al-Jazeera spouted, as long as it is anti-U.S., so I wouldn't assume that the majority is always right.
This is where Korean News comes in handy: they're so far out in la-la-land that you never have to wonder if they're telling the truth.
If you're recently married, you should read these; they've all worked for me on occasion.
10. "No,"
This could well mean ``NO''.
9. "Maybe,"
That's a definte ``yes''. See number 2.
8. "I have a headache,"
Not a problem, you're interested in the other end. See number 2.
7. "It's that time of the month,"
Reply: We can take a shower afterwards.
6. "It's your turn to change diapers," ...
As soon as the littel bugger is asleep
5. "My mother's coming to the house tomorrow,"
Reply: Then we'd better get it out of our systems tonight!
4. "Did you take out the trash?,"
Reply: I'll tell you as soon as we're done.
3. "I just want to cuddle,"
Reply: We can cuddle before, during and after.
2. "Could you give me a backrub?,"
You're in luck, bucko! That's the best sort of foreplay.
1. "Yeah, that's what we need, another kid,"
Reply: If he gets through the condom, we'll name him Houdini.
>To be upheld by the WTO, the foreign companies have to be selling their exports below the price they are charging in their domestic market. Merely producing things at a lower cost is not dumping in and of itself.
Sorry, I mis-spoke. U.S. law used to say something along the lines of: Foreign companies which sold stuff here below their average cost to make things over there were dumping. Obviously, many companies which were setting the monopoly price in their home market and here were accused of dumping, because their monopoly price here (well above marginal cost) was below their average cost.
That sentence you quoted didn't get that point across.
Are you sure about that? Can you quote me the relevant law? I know that foreign companies which sell their imports below average cost here can attract big tarrifs that way[1]. I suspect that a monopolist who did that would have legal troubles[2]. But is it illegal for Joe's Lemonade Stand to sell lemonade below cost? I don't think so: stupidity isn't illegal in the U.S. If a company which cannot be convicted of monopoly choses to give away its shareholder's capital, I think that the only ones who can complain are the shareholders.
I'm sure that even if there were such a law, the fact that software is a complementary good to IBM's hardware would go a long way to establish IBM's good intentions, and get them out of trouble.
[1] Unfortunately, that's because our legislators are too stupid to be able to distinguish between monopoly pricing and attempts to run american businesses out of business. This is a standard homework problem in micro economics.
[2] As another reply pointed out, MS, who is a convicted monopolist, seems to have gotten away with pricing Internet Exploder at $0.00, far below the cost, which they bore entirely themselves.
When Debian says ``stable'', they don't mean ``the operating system never crashes'', that's almost a given with Linux. What they mean is ``your system software never changes'' and ``everything works together''. Part of the ``never changes'' thing is that eventually, your system winds up a full point behind the current release. It still works the same as it ever did, while the guy who upgraded to the latest release has introduced a new source of problems to his box.
Debian stable is meant for people who want an up-to-date machine, with all the latest patches, and the same softwear versions as when they first installed! It's great for servers.
Debian testing has the latest and greatest stuff in it (well, OK, it gets a few weeks behind sometimes). That means that sometimes things don't play well together, and sometimes new, unexpected bugs creep in. For a typical desktop, this sort of thing isn't a problem. For a ``has to be up all the time'' server, this possibility would be bad news.
Debian Unstable doesn't mean ``the system crashes a lot'', it means that the system changes a lot. There are new versions of various programs coming in all the time, and some of them are broken, or break other packages. Still, you always have the latest and greatest software at your sometimes-bleeding fingertips. Debian Unstable seems to be a lot like I remember Mandrake 6.1 being: some things work far better than in the competition, some things don't work at all, and sometimes strange things happen. The difference from that old Mandrake is that it's possible to install software, and the problems get fixed without waiting for a point release.
Running a mix of testing and unstable, I have emacs 21.2.1, vi 6.1.320, gcc 3.3.2, and so on. That's not quite the '90s.
Actually, that was done by Karl Capek, a Czechoslovak Science Fiction writer, in the story RUR Rossum's Universal Robots, in 1920. It seems that ``robot'' was Czech for ``worker'', and Capek gave it its curent meaning.
But many jobs involve the use of computers as an implement, to communicate, to do word processing, to recieve information, to make trades, orders, etc, but could not be done by a machine. That is the distinction, that while plenty of jobs need a machine, they could not be done by the machine.
Yes. Those jobs are in my third, wholly creative category, aren't they? They may require communications, word processing[1], placing trades, usw., but those are all functions which can be done by single-purpose machines, like telephones and word processors. If a computer happens to provide some of those services, the user need not be aware of it.
I think that I largely agree with the article. The author says:
I'm seeing this already in my field (statistics). There are statistical packages which give their purchasers the illusion that they can perform a statistical analysis. They can't. The users can push the buttons, and get results, but they can't know whether the results make any sense, and they often don't. I can use these statistical packges, and have some chance of getting sensible results, but I often wind up writing programs to analyse data despite having several of these available to me. The programs manipulate data, automate repetitive steps, test results, and sometimes, implement methods which haven't yet made it into the packages. Statistics is changing rapidly, and there are a lot of useful things which may never show up in SAS and SPSS.I'm not quite so extreme as is the author: my thind category, the wholly creative workers, will probably be the largest category of workers in 100 years, and those people will not be doing much programming, though many of them will know how.
One reason that last statement, about many knowing how, isn't as silly as it sounds is that languages will be getting higher-level, and will economise the programmer's time rather than the machine's time to a much greater extent than is true today. I predict that in 100 years, programs will look a lot like today's pseudo-code.
Sure. I think I see your point, and I think that I agree with it. I don't think your point contradicts mine. My idea was that if your job really doesn't require programming, then either:
1) you can be replaced by a programmed system, or
2) you are doing something totally creative, which could be done without a computer.
In case (2), some programmer may well make a more-or-less single purpose system which will do things which can't be done (or can't be done efficiently) by hand. E.g., word processors, GIS, usw.
I'm not saying this because I think that it'll happen someday, I'm saying it because it's happening now. Switchboard operators are being replaced by touchtone menu systems, data entry clerks are being replaced by bubble sheets and electronic reporting, warehousemen are being replaced by little robots and relational databases, inventory clerks are being replaced by RFID tags, and on and on.
Am I missing something here?
Maybe you are.
The car, in 1930 and today, is a simple, single-purpose artifact. However complex it may be under the hood, it goes places and takes you along. The driver needs to steer, and control speed. That's it. To suggest that the driver CANNOT use it without being able to understand, repair and adjust every component is pretty silly.
The computer is a non-specialized, multipurpose artifact. A programmer can make it into a very expensive word processor, or a very expensive ledger, or a very expensive sliderule, or a very expensive map, or ... To suggest that the operator must be able to provide at least some of the instructions the computer needs, in order to make full use of it to accomplish his job, doesn't seem entirely silly.
Any job which requires no creativity (for want of a less fuzzy word) can be done by a computer without any human intervention. For example, if you are simply entering data and running programs A, B and C, a better system could enter the data and run the programs without you.
I would say that any worker using a computer who can do his job without doing ANY programming could be replaced by a slightly better program than the one he is ``operating''. The only exceptions would be people doing jobs which are wholly creative, and could be done without a computer at all (e.g., writers, who could use pencil and paper).
Furthermore, the complexity in a car is not irreducible. A battery, an electric motor, some wheels ... it would be possible to make a car that the average driver could understand. There is nothing there beyond the moving parts. The car is not valued because of its complexity, but because it gets you places.
In contrast, the complexity of the computer is irreducible. Even if it were physically simple and comprehensible (and really, it is), the software is arbitrarily complex, to the extent that we have a new field of science to study it. It's is this complexity which makes the computer valuable.
I can't talk about Gimp and such because I don't do images. As for messing about with the OS, Debian has filled the bill nicely for me. Each time I get online, I type ``apt-get update;apt-get -u upgrade''. My system is always up to date, and I never have to do any system administration tasks beyond that.
The day when I can stick an expansion card into a Linux system and have it simply work is the day I consider using it, not before.
Actually, that is one of the great advantages to Linux. Whatever I plug in just works. Kudzu finds it, loads the drivers, and away I go. When I put in a PCI card modem, I did have to use the wizard (setup dialog in kppp) to configure it. When that card died, I had to configure the ISA replacement modem the same way (it wound up on a different serial port, because I switched some other stuff around while I was in there). I have a Windows game machine for the children (no modem, no NIC, no viruses), and it's a huge hassle to deal with any hardware changes on it. We just got a new machine for them with XP. From what I've heard, it will be easier to simply replace the machine than to upgrade or repair the hardware.
If your job description is: ``Run MS Windows programs.'', or the equivalent, then I don't doubt a bit what you're saying.
If your job is to work with data, to produce structured documents, et cetera, then you'll be shocked to find just how much harder it is to try to do things the Windows way on Unix, or the Unix way on Windows.
The two OS's are quite different. I think that KDE and Gnome have done the computer-literate a disservice: they make Linux look a lot like Windows. The capable Windows user switches to Linux, and finds that it's harder to do the familiar tasks the familiar, Windows way. He then claims that the Linux guys must be ``Freakin zellots [sic]''. If Linux didn't look so much like the nightmare from Redmond, that competent Windows user would assume that a new platform required new ways of doing things, and would learn the easy ways to do things on the new platform, rather than finding that the easiest way to do things on Windows just doesn't work out well on Linux and saying ``Freaking zealots! Linux sucks!''
In short, Linux and Windows are different, and what works best on one isn't going to work best on the other. If you use either the way it was intended, you'll be fairly happy with the results (give or take a few viruses and application crashes).
When you consider that we went to the moon with Sixties technology, designed by guys (girls didn't do engineering back then) with slide rules, I don't think that the technology level poses an obstacle.
How do they even know that their rocket is aerodynamically stable?
I'll bet that Burt Rutan knows. He's designed some of the most impressive light aircraft in the world, some of them jet propelled.
Building robust, real-time control systems to adjust the attitude during flight at a sub-millisecond rate can't be that easy either.
If NASA engineers could do it almost 50 years ago, using cardboard, string and slide rules, I suspect that most any electrical engineer could do it today.
I think I disagree with you on this. The Peltier junction will indeed get quite hot. You get the most heat transfer with the biggest thermal gradient, so that higher temperature should make any given airflow more effective at carrying away energy. Thus I'd expect that you could use a quieter fan if your CPU had a Peltier junction to ``concentrate'' the heat.
All that assumes that the Peltier doesn't add any heat on its own, which doesn't sound very plausible. Still, I could easily imagine that the extra efficient heat transfer could more than make up for the bit of extra heat which needed to be dissapated.
I'm sure that the reason you never see this done is that the folks who spend big bucks on cooling are overclockers who want more cooling, rather than less noise. You probably won't see this on production machines because the air comeing off a setup like this would be hot enough to do damage. If a company is going to go with an expensive setup, they'll probably go with one which doesn't concentrate the heat and start fires.
[snip]
1) the stability of linux
2) the price-point of linux
3) the beauty of the Aqua interface
there'd be no reason to ever own a windows machine again.
You're right, and Apple knows it. It'll never happen, because Apple also knows that there'd be no reason to ever own an Apple machine again[1].
This would be like OSX on ix86: it could be the death of Apple. You might think that there's a way for them to do it safely, but I doubt that the big cheeses at Apple agree strongly enough to gamble their company on it.
[1] Yes, many Apple loyalists would still buy Apple for the nifty hardware and low-hassle experience. They certainly wouldn't get any NEW customers this way; people who were interested in a do-it-yourself solution would put this on non -Apple hardware. It wouldn't be cheap, but neither is an Apple.
Lyx is nice, but I don't think that it really speeds things up. I can't imagine that Lyx could speed things up at all on a Tom Swift.
So far as I know, the Lisp family is the only element of this class of languages which is >>30 years old. That means that there are people who've been writing large, production systems with Lisp for their entire careers. Lisp is time-tested for serious use.
When Ross and Ihaka (spelling?) started to write R, they began with a Scheme interpreter, and simply wrote the code to change its syntax to the S syntax, which is standard, infix, no-parentheses-except-around-function-arguments. In Scheme, that's simple, because it's a lisp (sort of).