MAD is good, it gave us the most peaceful and prosperous time in human history. Like it not MAD was the most successful peace program the world has ever known. All you have to do is go to any of the body count web sites that track death tolls before and after the cold war to see why. Yeah, people will keep talking about it, because nuclear weapons worked for keeping the peace.
The problem with someone like North Korea having nukes is that MAD won't work with them, they aren't rational enough. The same thing can be said for Iran, the country is led by a death cult that/wants/ large scale death. Contrast those countries with Pakistan and India which hate each other with a passion and have each other locked into their own MAD scenario.
It's not an apology, it's a statement of fact, MAD works and the body count is tens of millions in it's favor.
You hit the nail on the head about how to kill the x86 and that is why I said it can't be done. The big thing today is that computer prices have fallen far enough I don't see how you could ever pull this off at today's prices.
Your also exactly right about your Mac points, which is something that would be difficult to do again. People like to speculate about ARM being the architecture for Mac, but I just can't see that happening in the next several years.
I thought of that, but then decided there are too many of them scattered about, including - in orbit - to ever be able to nuke them from orbit and be sure. I'm not sure if we have enough nukes world wide to actually perform that feat.
Perhaps someone with more time can calculate how wide of a surface area we can wipe out with an EMP, divide that by the populated surface with a density greater than x and come up with an answer?
Because the world runs on legacy software, and that legacy software runs on a legacy platform called x86. The answer is really that simple.
You can come up with a superior platform for power (ARM), it has been done and it worked really well on phones where there wasn't a large legacy base of software already in place. You can come up with a superior platform for 64 bit processing (Itanium), it has been done and it worked really well in a very limited marked (servers that handled large databases). However that market was too limited and large lawsuits have been filed to try to get out of that market.
Other examples abound and have been made, the payoff to whoever could succeed would be in the billions of dollars (Even the Chinese are trying their own homegrown CPU architecture). Every single one of them that has tried to enter the desktop market has failed though for the simple reason that it couldn't emulate x86.
Even Microsoft would dearly love to get out of the x86 business, the payoff in terms of killing legacy software support and selling all new software would be huge (hello Surface RT). I think you'll notice that sales of Microsoft RT products have all been a dismal failure with manufactures declining to make new products as fast as they can.
Until you can build a chip that can emulate x86 and support a different architecture and do so more cost effectively than just an x86 chip x86 will live. You can't kill it, Intel can't kill it, AMD can't kill it, Microsoft can't kill it and you sure as hell can't nuke it from orbit. It's embedded in billions of computers and software programs worldwide, and that is a zombie army that you just can't fight.
What they actually did was say they would support allowing you to unlock your phone only after it was paid for / off of contract. That is not at all the same thing as saying they are supporting a ban on cell phone locking and the story submission is misleading at best.
Your two year old cell phone could be unlocked and transferred to another carrier under their proposal, not your current cell phone that your actually using (if your the average smart phone user). For most people that have a modern cell phone the White House initiative is nothing more than feel good words in the air.
DRM is properly thought of as Digital Restrictions Management, instead of Digital Rights Management. A good example of a previous DRM that implemented something like this is the limited edition DVD like disks that were being several years back. They were pushed by Disney and called Flexplay and only made for a couple years.
Remember DRM is all about restricting how something is used, even if that restriction requires the destruction of the devices. Many tamper resistant crypto chips will self destruct instead of letting a user access their data without restriction.
When I was a youth the idea that there were other planets in other solar systems was pure science fiction. Now we can an at least semi credible chance we we can actually directly see a planet in the making. At times like this I wish I was an astronomer instead for a living. I think this has got to be the golden age of astronomy that we are in now.
Think about it, we are in the age when books written, with good intentions, by well respected figures from even twenty years ago are so far out of date that they should not be used anymore. We have learned so much in the last twenty years it makes me wonder if we will ever again see a period of time like this in the future.
Most environments I have worked consider best practice one release cycle or service pack behind the current production release cycle. In other words with Win 8 out you run Win 7 and the previous version of Office and so on. This is done explicitly to allow time for bugs to be worked out and to allow products to mature and stabilize.
In your case of IE 6 the most likely culprit is that they have large amounts of software that are hard coded to depend on IE 6. The cost of upgrading the in-house software to a more current version can well run into the millions of dollars and that is enough to keep large agencies from upgrading. Microsoft etc are trying to force companies and enterprises to upgrade anyways as the push back is incredible. The behind the scenes push back and on this issue is far larger than you probably would ever imagine.
To put an idea on scale of the IE 6 issue, consider it on par with many agencies that still have code running on cobol on mainframes. It's years out of date, nobody trains new programmers on how to work with anymore but the cost of upgrading is enough that no one wants to actually get of the known old bad system on to the new.
Just because someone else is doing something and they have a popular product does not mean that everything they do is a good idea. Rapid release cycles are a prime example of this as they are extremely antagonistic to enterprise / corporate environments. These environments like something called stability and they are far more interested in a predictable and bug free experience that the latest shiny new thing.
In addition to issues of stability there are also issues of management, when you have a rapid release cycle it is a strain on your IT department as they have to devote a/lot/ more time proportionally to a given product than they otherwise would. Time means money and that means costs and a desire to switch to something that doesn't require constant babysitting.
Time spent by staff learning what changed in/this/ cycle versus the previous one from a few months ago is time that could have been spent on other things. Employees constantly need hand holding on the latest changes and that requires a lot of time. Nobody likes that and it means that the staff that support the product start to resent the product and want it gone.
Attention whore products are ones that irritate everyone and that is a/really/ bad thing if you want your product to stay in that environment. This is an epically stupid idea and one that needs to be relegated the dustbin of history sooner than later.
Ah yes, because standing by and doing nothing while innocents are being slaughtered somehow lets you claim a clear conscious. Dictators and tyrants count on people like you to turn a blind eye to atrocities and genocide as it lets them get away with murder by the million.
Clean hands you have there, keep that chin up and remember useful idiots like yourself are as indispensable to mass murders like Stalin, Milosevic, Assad etc as their own armies. Carry on with pride, job well done, no blood on your hands at all. How's that Syria thing working out for you?
Because the period of MAD was the most peaceful period in human history. Look at the body count websites before and after the cold war and you can see the chilling effect MAD had on war and genocide.
Local wars were local and not world wide in scale. Nuclear weapons are terrible, conventional arms have them outclassed in every real world measure like body counts though.
Google should know better than to gimp the storage! Nice netbook, looks like it could be useful right up until you get to the point about storage. 32 GB for the base model or 64 GB for the upgrade model. It has a nice screen, I like that, but in the real world most people don't live in the cloud, they live off their hard drive!!!!
Google, quite being cheap and give people a hard drive that isn't the same spec I would have gotten from a model 5 years ago, okay? Just because you live in the cloud, just because your users utilize the cloud, doesn't mean that your users live in the cloud. Why is this so hard to understand?
My point is that people are inherently lazy and as such not too likely to wash their bags out the way they are supposed too. That is why studies on these bags tend to find they are about as filthy as keyboards. I'm not arguing that people are being forced to use these bags, I'm arguing that human nature is to be lazy and since you can't use plastic bags the net effect is that most people will end up using filthy cloth bags.
If people are using filthy cloth bags than it makes sense that such an unsanitary container could naturally increase the risk of people getting sick. I'm talking about human nature, how people operate in the real world, not how people are supposed to operate. I've never argued that if people weren't lazy that this could be averted.
We've known for some time that reusable grocery bags were like keyboards - absolutely filthy. If you force people to use unsanitary containers to carry their food it only makes sense that their could be a corresponding increase in the risk of infection.
Think about it, we have food sanitation standards for stores, we have medical sanitation standards for good reasons that can both be enforced when someone is supervising someone else. Remove the supervisor and people fall back to laziness because that is human nature. Logically, is there really any other expected outcome?
I think this passes the sniff test and should be tested more to see if it has merit. I say this as someone who originally supported the idea of the ban and still supports banning things like Styrofoam cups. Science needs to be put in front of emotion and allowed to run the course.
That would be an incredible deal actually to gain a market edge. How many countless billions have been invested into space programs before this with very costly lessons learned? For a 2.5% loss you gain insight into an entirely knew market in a very complex environment. That means the next time you do this your almost certainly making a profit off of the lessons learned from the first time. I live in Minnesota where we have a great deal of mining in the northern part of the state.
There was recently talk about reopening some of the mines and the estimates to profitability were several years. This was in an area with a history of mining, proven materials, ready access, a trained workforce and on and on.
By way of point, Microsoft, which has decades of experience in the computer software (and hardware) business is just now being estimated that they will start to make a profit on their x-box division with the X-box 720. This is a good decade and several billion dollars that before they started to break even.
The people who invest in these things know that it isn't simple, could take years to pay off and will probably involve multiple failures along the way. Remember the people who have money to invest in something like this in the space have practice investing in things on the ground.
That is the only honest answer that there is. As long as artificial monopolies like 'regions' are tolerated it will only continue. There is no valid reason why software or other companies should be able to use globalism for cheaper labor whilst denying consumers globalism for cheaper products. I don't see how things are going to change until world governments start demanding better treatment though.
Why are textbooks 1/10th the cost in Indonesia? Why couldn't I buy Top Gear in the US for years when it was available for cheap overseas in the discount bin? Why are Corvette's twice the price in Europe? The list goes on and the answer come back to artificial monopolies charging more because they can. Introduce competition, make grey market imports legal, demand manufacturers honor warranties regardless of the country of origin, allow people to buy software in any country regardless of where they live etc......
Pick a subject, any subject, the reality of that subject is politically incorrect to someone, somewhere. You are politically incorrect to your ancestors just as your descendants will condemn you for being politically incorrect. I say this and it doesn't matter who you, what your culture is, where you live, your religion (or lack of religion) what your values are, what your accomplishments are or any other given thing. History is politically incorrect and it will remain that way because that is human nature.l
Articles like this are rage mongering and professional trolling deserve to admonished. A little more tolerance by society would go a lot longer to ease race / religious / gender / etc relations that mongering articles like this ever will. It's why MLK was so popular and the like's of Jessie Jackson can never get past 3rd rate achievers. It's the difference between trolling for dollars and dreaming of tolerance.
True enough on what you have said. The sad thing is Edison/was/ a genius and did invent quite a few things on his own. He didn't need to steal ideas from other people like he did in order to be one of the greatest inventors in history.
Unfortunately he was an incredible asshole and went ahead and stole other peoples ideas anyways. I have heard it said that Edison was histories first great patent troll, and I think you could make a fair argument for that.
Good comparison, makes me wonder if history will come through or not. Tesla eventually started to get his due in society but it took decades and many school children are still taught to treat Edison as a hero.
Does anyone want to see something historically accurate? Do you really want to see Jobs portrayed accurately?
It will never happen because the hero worship that is going to sell this movie would die if people knew the real Steve Jobs. You know the guy that stole other peoples ideas, actively suppressed worker wages, humiliated employees and random people he met, screwed over Steve Jobs, refused his own daughter for years, tore apart people's life work, disrespected other companies intellectual property and then started World War P.
You could fill this thread with war stories from the people that Steve Jobs burned. That's now what's going to sell this movie at this time, give it a few years and someone might be willing to do so, but until the idol worship tempers down it simply wont sell.
Want to get real about this and show this isn't just the same old story of employers refusing to pay living wages to Americans and paying a pittance to people who come over her on H1B?
Tie the cap to wages and benefits that are being earned for each given field. If there is truly a shortage of 'database administrators' than the average pay of 'database administrators' will have risen as the market worked it's magic. For every 10% they want to raise the H1B visa rate they need show that the market has raised the average pay of a certain job by 10%.
Let the market do it's work, quite outsourcing the kinds of jobs that government is in every other scenario/desperate/ to create and let those who want to come here come here.
One more thing, if the best an brightest want to become true immigrants and not simply take our jobs we should encourage that. Make a fast track to citizenship that is tied with the H1B. Allow someone on H1B to fastrack the citizenship process and then terminate the visa of anyone that doesn't earn their citizenship within that given amount of time. Now instead of having 'foreigners' taking jobs, we have the best and brightest becoming Americans and having a personal vested interest that they otherwise would never have.
Slashdot Mirror
MAD is good, it gave us the most peaceful and prosperous time in human history. Like it not MAD was the most successful peace program the world has ever known. All you have to do is go to any of the body count web sites that track death tolls before and after the cold war to see why. Yeah, people will keep talking about it, because nuclear weapons worked for keeping the peace.
The problem with someone like North Korea having nukes is that MAD won't work with them, they aren't rational enough. The same thing can be said for Iran, the country is led by a death cult that /wants/ large scale death. Contrast those countries with Pakistan and India which hate each other with a passion and have each other locked into their own MAD scenario.
It's not an apology, it's a statement of fact, MAD works and the body count is tens of millions in it's favor.
You hit the nail on the head about how to kill the x86 and that is why I said it can't be done. The big thing today is that computer prices have fallen far enough I don't see how you could ever pull this off at today's prices.
Your also exactly right about your Mac points, which is something that would be difficult to do again. People like to speculate about ARM being the architecture for Mac, but I just can't see that happening in the next several years.
I thought of that, but then decided there are too many of them scattered about, including - in orbit - to ever be able to nuke them from orbit and be sure. I'm not sure if we have enough nukes world wide to actually perform that feat.
Perhaps someone with more time can calculate how wide of a surface area we can wipe out with an EMP, divide that by the populated surface with a density greater than x and come up with an answer?
Because the world runs on legacy software, and that legacy software runs on a legacy platform called x86. The answer is really that simple.
You can come up with a superior platform for power (ARM), it has been done and it worked really well on phones where there wasn't a large legacy base of software already in place. You can come up with a superior platform for 64 bit processing (Itanium), it has been done and it worked really well in a very limited marked (servers that handled large databases). However that market was too limited and large lawsuits have been filed to try to get out of that market.
Other examples abound and have been made, the payoff to whoever could succeed would be in the billions of dollars (Even the Chinese are trying their own homegrown CPU architecture). Every single one of them that has tried to enter the desktop market has failed though for the simple reason that it couldn't emulate x86.
Even Microsoft would dearly love to get out of the x86 business, the payoff in terms of killing legacy software support and selling all new software would be huge (hello Surface RT). I think you'll notice that sales of Microsoft RT products have all been a dismal failure with manufactures declining to make new products as fast as they can.
Until you can build a chip that can emulate x86 and support a different architecture and do so more cost effectively than just an x86 chip x86 will live. You can't kill it, Intel can't kill it, AMD can't kill it, Microsoft can't kill it and you sure as hell can't nuke it from orbit. It's embedded in billions of computers and software programs worldwide, and that is a zombie army that you just can't fight.
What they actually did was say they would support allowing you to unlock your phone only after it was paid for / off of contract. That is not at all the same thing as saying they are supporting a ban on cell phone locking and the story submission is misleading at best.
Your two year old cell phone could be unlocked and transferred to another carrier under their proposal, not your current cell phone that your actually using (if your the average smart phone user). For most people that have a modern cell phone the White House initiative is nothing more than feel good words in the air.
DRM is properly thought of as Digital Restrictions Management, instead of Digital Rights Management. A good example of a previous DRM that implemented something like this is the limited edition DVD like disks that were being several years back. They were pushed by Disney and called Flexplay and only made for a couple years.
Remember DRM is all about restricting how something is used, even if that restriction requires the destruction of the devices. Many tamper resistant crypto chips will self destruct instead of letting a user access their data without restriction.
When I was a youth the idea that there were other planets in other solar systems was pure science fiction. Now we can an at least semi credible chance we we can actually directly see a planet in the making. At times like this I wish I was an astronomer instead for a living. I think this has got to be the golden age of astronomy that we are in now.
Think about it, we are in the age when books written, with good intentions, by well respected figures from even twenty years ago are so far out of date that they should not be used anymore. We have learned so much in the last twenty years it makes me wonder if we will ever again see a period of time like this in the future.
Most environments I have worked consider best practice one release cycle or service pack behind the current production release cycle. In other words with Win 8 out you run Win 7 and the previous version of Office and so on. This is done explicitly to allow time for bugs to be worked out and to allow products to mature and stabilize.
In your case of IE 6 the most likely culprit is that they have large amounts of software that are hard coded to depend on IE 6. The cost of upgrading the in-house software to a more current version can well run into the millions of dollars and that is enough to keep large agencies from upgrading. Microsoft etc are trying to force companies and enterprises to upgrade anyways as the push back is incredible. The behind the scenes push back and on this issue is far larger than you probably would ever imagine.
To put an idea on scale of the IE 6 issue, consider it on par with many agencies that still have code running on cobol on mainframes. It's years out of date, nobody trains new programmers on how to work with anymore but the cost of upgrading is enough that no one wants to actually get of the known old bad system on to the new.
As you put it, the devil you know.
Just because someone else is doing something and they have a popular product does not mean that everything they do is a good idea. Rapid release cycles are a prime example of this as they are extremely antagonistic to enterprise / corporate environments. These environments like something called stability and they are far more interested in a predictable and bug free experience that the latest shiny new thing.
In addition to issues of stability there are also issues of management, when you have a rapid release cycle it is a strain on your IT department as they have to devote a /lot/ more time proportionally to a given product than they otherwise would. Time means money and that means costs and a desire to switch to something that doesn't require constant babysitting.
Time spent by staff learning what changed in /this/ cycle versus the previous one from a few months ago is time that could have been spent on other things. Employees constantly need hand holding on the latest changes and that requires a lot of time. Nobody likes that and it means that the staff that support the product start to resent the product and want it gone.
Attention whore products are ones that irritate everyone and that is a /really/ bad thing if you want your product to stay in that environment. This is an epically stupid idea and one that needs to be relegated the dustbin of history sooner than later.
Ah yes, because standing by and doing nothing while innocents are being slaughtered somehow lets you claim a clear conscious. Dictators and tyrants count on people like you to turn a blind eye to atrocities and genocide as it lets them get away with murder by the million.
Clean hands you have there, keep that chin up and remember useful idiots like yourself are as indispensable to mass murders like Stalin, Milosevic, Assad etc as their own armies. Carry on with pride, job well done, no blood on your hands at all. How's that Syria thing working out for you?
Because the period of MAD was the most peaceful period in human history. Look at the body count websites before and after the cold war and you can see the chilling effect MAD had on war and genocide.
Local wars were local and not world wide in scale. Nuclear weapons are terrible, conventional arms have them outclassed in every real world measure like body counts though.
Google should know better than to gimp the storage! Nice netbook, looks like it could be useful right up until you get to the point about storage. 32 GB for the base model or 64 GB for the upgrade model. It has a nice screen, I like that, but in the real world most people don't live in the cloud, they live off their hard drive!!!!
Google, quite being cheap and give people a hard drive that isn't the same spec I would have gotten from a model 5 years ago, okay? Just because you live in the cloud, just because your users utilize the cloud, doesn't mean that your users live in the cloud. Why is this so hard to understand?
My point is that people are inherently lazy and as such not too likely to wash their bags out the way they are supposed too. That is why studies on these bags tend to find they are about as filthy as keyboards. I'm not arguing that people are being forced to use these bags, I'm arguing that human nature is to be lazy and since you can't use plastic bags the net effect is that most people will end up using filthy cloth bags.
If people are using filthy cloth bags than it makes sense that such an unsanitary container could naturally increase the risk of people getting sick. I'm talking about human nature, how people operate in the real world, not how people are supposed to operate. I've never argued that if people weren't lazy that this could be averted.
We've known for some time that reusable grocery bags were like keyboards - absolutely filthy. If you force people to use unsanitary containers to carry their food it only makes sense that their could be a corresponding increase in the risk of infection.
Think about it, we have food sanitation standards for stores, we have medical sanitation standards for good reasons that can both be enforced when someone is supervising someone else. Remove the supervisor and people fall back to laziness because that is human nature. Logically, is there really any other expected outcome?
I think this passes the sniff test and should be tested more to see if it has merit. I say this as someone who originally supported the idea of the ban and still supports banning things like Styrofoam cups. Science needs to be put in front of emotion and allowed to run the course.
That would be an incredible deal actually to gain a market edge. How many countless billions have been invested into space programs before this with very costly lessons learned? For a 2.5% loss you gain insight into an entirely knew market in a very complex environment. That means the next time you do this your almost certainly making a profit off of the lessons learned from the first time. I live in Minnesota where we have a great deal of mining in the northern part of the state.
There was recently talk about reopening some of the mines and the estimates to profitability were several years. This was in an area with a history of mining, proven materials, ready access, a trained workforce and on and on.
By way of point, Microsoft, which has decades of experience in the computer software (and hardware) business is just now being estimated that they will start to make a profit on their x-box division with the X-box 720. This is a good decade and several billion dollars that before they started to break even.
The people who invest in these things know that it isn't simple, could take years to pay off and will probably involve multiple failures along the way. Remember the people who have money to invest in something like this in the space have practice investing in things on the ground.
That is the only honest answer that there is. As long as artificial monopolies like 'regions' are tolerated it will only continue. There is no valid reason why software or other companies should be able to use globalism for cheaper labor whilst denying consumers globalism for cheaper products. I don't see how things are going to change until world governments start demanding better treatment though.
Why are textbooks 1/10th the cost in Indonesia? Why couldn't I buy Top Gear in the US for years when it was available for cheap overseas in the discount bin? Why are Corvette's twice the price in Europe? The list goes on and the answer come back to artificial monopolies charging more because they can. Introduce competition, make grey market imports legal, demand manufacturers honor warranties regardless of the country of origin, allow people to buy software in any country regardless of where they live etc......
Pick a subject, any subject, the reality of that subject is politically incorrect to someone, somewhere. You are politically incorrect to your ancestors just as your descendants will condemn you for being politically incorrect. I say this and it doesn't matter who you, what your culture is, where you live, your religion (or lack of religion) what your values are, what your accomplishments are or any other given thing. History is politically incorrect and it will remain that way because that is human nature.l
Articles like this are rage mongering and professional trolling deserve to admonished. A little more tolerance by society would go a lot longer to ease race / religious / gender / etc relations that mongering articles like this ever will. It's why MLK was so popular and the like's of Jessie Jackson can never get past 3rd rate achievers. It's the difference between trolling for dollars and dreaming of tolerance.
Fair point, he was equal opportunity, he screwed over everybody.
In the great word of Homer Simpson.
D'oh!
That's really neat to see someone succeed like that in a scientific field. Kudo's for your father.
True enough on what you have said. The sad thing is Edison /was/ a genius and did invent quite a few things on his own. He didn't need to steal ideas from other people like he did in order to be one of the greatest inventors in history.
Unfortunately he was an incredible asshole and went ahead and stole other peoples ideas anyways. I have heard it said that Edison was histories first great patent troll, and I think you could make a fair argument for that.
Interesting, I will have to check this out.
Good comparison, makes me wonder if history will come through or not. Tesla eventually started to get his due in society but it took decades and many school children are still taught to treat Edison as a hero.
Does anyone want to see something historically accurate? Do you really want to see Jobs portrayed accurately?
It will never happen because the hero worship that is going to sell this movie would die if people knew the real Steve Jobs. You know the guy that stole other peoples ideas, actively suppressed worker wages, humiliated employees and random people he met, screwed over Steve Jobs, refused his own daughter for years, tore apart people's life work, disrespected other companies intellectual property and then started World War P.
You could fill this thread with war stories from the people that Steve Jobs burned. That's now what's going to sell this movie at this time, give it a few years and someone might be willing to do so, but until the idol worship tempers down it simply wont sell.
Want to get real about this and show this isn't just the same old story of employers refusing to pay living wages to Americans and paying a pittance to people who come over her on H1B?
Tie the cap to wages and benefits that are being earned for each given field. If there is truly a shortage of 'database administrators' than the average pay of 'database administrators' will have risen as the market worked it's magic. For every 10% they want to raise the H1B visa rate they need show that the market has raised the average pay of a certain job by 10%.
Let the market do it's work, quite outsourcing the kinds of jobs that government is in every other scenario /desperate/ to create and let those who want to come here come here.
One more thing, if the best an brightest want to become true immigrants and not simply take our jobs we should encourage that. Make a fast track to citizenship that is tied with the H1B. Allow someone on H1B to fastrack the citizenship process and then terminate the visa of anyone that doesn't earn their citizenship within that given amount of time. Now instead of having 'foreigners' taking jobs, we have the best and brightest becoming Americans and having a personal vested interest that they otherwise would never have.