Tech won't really be in a bubble unless there's a mindset of irrational exuberance in the general public.
Right, and in this current climate, the irrational exuberance seems to be limited to web developers (web 2.0, ajax, etc). So there isn't too much to worry about. Just a lot of smart people wasting their time trying to immitate desktop applications in a browser.
I don't really know much about the stock market, but I do know a bit about technology. And something that I have noticed which is similar to the late 90's bubble is an irrational belief in hype. This time around the hype is about anything that carries the label "Web 2.0." More specifically, anything that uses "AJAX." Far too many people seem to think that traditional software vendors are going to be put out of business by any schmuck who can manage to immitate a desktop application (or more laughably, an OS) in a browser. I've noticed a general unwillingness to stop and seriously consider whether or not anyone would actually WANT to run an office suite in a web browser, for example.
Fortunately, I don't see nearly the same kind of money changing hands as in the last bubble. Most of it seems to be "grass roots" kind of stuff. So perhaps the hype will just die down with fewer bankruptsies when the dust settles.
I think the 386SX only had a 16bit memory bus (although still 32bit internally). Similar to the way the 8088 was an 8086 (16bit) with an 8bit bus. The 486SX was the one that was "screwed up" in the factory by having its math coprocessor disabled (available in the 486DX).
There's a bit more design elements going into a PS3 than just the raw pixel pushing. I still don't see many FPS games on a PC that can do let 4 players play on the same computer screen.
How many PC gamers WANT to do that? Especially on a 17" monitor.
There is nothing necessarily communistic about unions. I mean, insofar as communism is a form of government. It doesn't really have anything to do with government. All a union means is that you are banding together with fellow workers to ensure fair treatment.
That said, there is a time to unionize and a time to disband unions. There have been times in US history when it was absolutely necessary to unionize to force management to treat (and pay) employees fairly. Most modern unions are superfluous and serve no real function other than to protect incompetence and laziness (and sometimes force a company into bankruptsy).
I don't think there is a good case for an IT union. Most IT workers that I know make a pretty decent living even if they do sometimes work long hours. And a good IT worker has his pick of jobs. It isn't like working on an assembly line where one worker is about as good as another.
Only if you consider writing resumes yours. Getting votes is what gets them the job, but it isn't part of the job.
But i'm not up for rehire every 1-4 years. And even still, the reality is that I have to do things that make my employer happy or I lose my job. Just like a politicians have to do things that make the people happy. Sometimes I can do teh Right Thing(tm) but not if it appears to waste time or otherwise go against my employer's wishes.
The discussion about the dissolution of democracy was in 2004. I dimly remember that Bush won and he's busy implementing it according to his plans now.
Sad, indeed.
In the USA??? You've gotta be kidding me. Americans don't want to be educated. They want to drive their SUV to their suburban home and spend the evening with TV and beer. I'd bet a years wage that anyone who can guarantee them that for the rest of their lifes would win every election by a huge margin.
Why would you expect politicians, on the whole, to be any better?
More related to the thread, Intellij is an example of Swing Application that is responsive and has the same look and feel on multiple platforms (specifically, any platform that runs Java 1.4).
Same look and feel on multiple platforms is exactly why I refuse to use Java applications as a general rule. Well, that and the majority of Java desktop apps are unresponsive and SLOW. Azureus, for example, on a Mac is just painful. If I am using OS X, I want my applications to look and feel like Cocoa applications. If I am running GNOME, I want all programs to use gtk+. KDE, qt. Windows, well, whatever the look/feel of the month is.
As far as I am concerned, Java is an utter failure on the desktop.
The actual effect of this on child abuse will be too low to measure (i.e. within the statistical error margin). But that isn't the effect the law makers care about one inch. The effect on their votes will be higher than the child abuse effect, and that is the one they worry about.
I hate to say it, but isn't getting votes their job? I mean, this is a democracy and they are only in office (presumably) because people vote for them. It would seem that the problem, in this case, is the people. People need to be more educated about the nature of child molestation and who perpretrates it so that they WON'T vote for politicians who make such lame moves.
I dislike polititians as much as the next guy, but the fact is that it is their job to work the political system. It is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Even in the most uncorrupt environment, politics suck. I know I dont' want to deal with it. There are peopel who get off on that crap (politicians). Let them deal with it. If you don't like lhow they deal with it, don't vote for them.
No, there is still a difference between Dems and Reps. I believe the quote goes something like "Democrats are the tax and spend party. Republicans are the spend and spend party." From the Daily Show, perhaps?
Disease hits. Disease kills 50% of non-immune population. We apply all our formidable technology to a vaccine. Lets say the remaining 50% consists of 20% immune and 80% non-immune (i.e. now 20% is immune, whereas before 10% was). That 80% nonimmune gets vaccinated.
Now everyone's back to the same baseline. There's no more evolutionary pressure.
Ok, but the same percent is still naturally immune since vaccines don't pass to offspring. There is no "undoing" in this situation. The selection just stops. Or rather, it is delayed until a time when people stop being vaccinated for whatever reason.
You started it. The bottom line is that any time you depart from a pure meritocracy you weaken evolutionary pressures. Socialism and neo-liberalism represent the effort to do away with all meritocracy, and thus are the complete undoing of most evolutionary pressures.
I am not goign to get into a political debate. If you have not, please read the Wikipedia article regarding Social Darwinism. It explains the nature of Social Darwinism and its rather tenuous and controvertial link to biological evolution. What it comes down to is that, although some analogies can be drawn between the social darwinism and biological evolution, they are not the same thing and one does not necessarily have a direct influence on the other.
Most biological evolution is slowed to a near standstill given a stable environment and large populations which are not geographically isolated
I agree, those are large factors too. But we aren't all that connected. Most countries are still largely monocultures, with several large and obvious exceptions.
I don't know what this has to do with what I said above. You're not even talking about evolution as far as I can tell.
You might want to rethink your stance on evolution as it related to social governments.
You mean confuse biological evolution with social darwinism? No. I will not.
A government killing certain large swaths of population is strong selective breeding. I don't know if I'd call that evolution, but it certainly interferes (or skews) any sort of natural evolution.
Depends on the scale and how much the selected trait is tied to genetics. If I decide to eliminate all Germans, for example, that will probably not affect the gene pool much besides making it smaller. If I pick a particular genetic trait such as eye color, and destroy people with that trait globally, it could have an effect, but not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Either way, I'd be much more concerned with the moral implcations of genocide rather than the evolutionary consequenses.
I'm not particularly advocating that position. I'm more pointing out that because that position is widely rejected, human evolution has slowed to a near standstill.
Most biological evolution is slowed to a near standstill given a stable environment and large populations which are not geographically isolated. Whether or not a population accepts the tenets of social darwinism is largely irrelevent. You are very confuse about what evolution is and how it works.
And you just said exactly what I said. Third world countries with large lower social classes have higher birth rates. We are saying the same thing.
You said we all reproduce at roughly the same rate. NOw you are saying there is a notable differetial. You also apply a value judgement on "lower classes" by suggesting that they are less suited or fit. We are not saying the same thing. I don't want to have any part in your social darwinism. That crap all but disappeared after WWII and I'd rather keep it that way.
I'll give you that there are some potential evolutionary forces there. They don't seem very strong. If we find a cure or vacciene for those diseases, it'll undo all the evolution anyway.
"Undo?" The only way to undo evolution would be to go back in time. Evolution might converge on a past genetic state (extremely unlikely), but it can never be undone.
No, I'm realistic enough to know that if any positive evolution became apparent, the liberals would immediately work to end it, and make everyone "equal" again. (Don't take that to mean I'm conservative, I'm not).
Oh boy. Now you are mixing evolution and politics.
Sure it is. The ONLY way for a species to survive is to reproduce. Once an organism is finished reproducing evolution has no more use for it.
You are talking about evolution as if it were an organism with a will. It is not. It is just a process. It is the goal of individual *organism* to reproduce. The net result of many organisms trying to reproduce, coupled with imperfect inheritance and selection, is evolution. I repeat, evolution has no goal.
The organism is out of the cycle, and has no remaning impact on spreading genetic material.
That just isn't true. Non-reproducing organisms can and do act as a selective force for other organisms.
For Evolution to work an unfit specimen would have to to die BEFORE it could pass it's genetic material on to the next generation.
How do you define an "unfit" specimen? The phrase "survival of the fittest" is actually a rather obsolete phrase generally associated with social darwinism and not so much biological evolution.
I thought you said laws and technology favored, or at least protected, "retards."
We all pretty much reproduce at the same rate.
Who is "we," exactly? Last time I checked, birth rates in so called first world countries are quite a bit lower on average than in other places.
Lower social classes with subsequent lower intelligence and lower suitability generally reproduce slightly more, a weak evolutionary pressure
Wow, now you are intoroducing social class bias. You've left the realm of science almost completely by this point. How about those damn immigrants? OBviously less suited, but they keep having babies. Bastards!
There is no natural selection, period.
Really? How about malaria survival in the tropics? How abotu HIV? Turns out that some people with HIV (although somewhat rare) never develope AIDS. Those are just a couple of examples. There is also sexual selection going on.
I think perhaps you are naively expecting to see blatant evolution happening within your lifetime. Analyzing a timespan of 100 years or so isn't going to produce spectacular results. Also, rapid evolution doesn't happen in times of relative environmental stability. If global warming turns out to be as disasterous as some suspect, we might see a more rapid evolution of humans but even then it might not be so obvious. It would be rather like staring at the hour hand of a clock.
Actually, evolution has a VERY specific goal Reproduction.
Reproduction is a mechanism of evolution, not the goal.
Evolution is 'survival of the fittest'. The organism with the traits most likely to allow it to reproduce is the one that survives.
As long as you recognize that the "fittest" isn't always the fastest, smartest, or strongest. For example, what if being fast and strong means that an animal burns calories too quickly and is unable to survive long periods of drought.
And because we don't have any laws against retards, cripples, or other evolutionary unsuitables from reproducing, and we protect them with our technology, there's no meaningful evolution anymore.
Wrong. You sound like a social darwinist (and a Nazi), which has almost nothing to do with real evolution. Evolutionary theory does not place any intrinsic value on any particular group within a population. As long as some people reproduce more successfully than others, evolution is happening. If humans evolve into "retards," that would still be evolution.
I find myself a bit puzzled by what this thing's actually supposed to do for me. Given that there are currently no applications that require it (because since it's not actually shipping yet, it would be the kiss of death), then supporting the PbysX can make no difference to the actual gameplay --- because any games need to be able to run on machines without it. This means all it'll be good for is eye candy. Is it really worth spending money on the PhysX so you can get slightly prettier explosions, when instead you can spend the same amount of money on a better GPU or CPU so you'll get prettier everything?
Well, if you've already maxed out your CPU (where upgrading would mean new motherboard and RAM) and you already have a good GPU, why not consider getting a physics processor to give new games an extra kick? I know i'd consider it with my current system. I just got Oblivion and I am running with a a good GPU but the bare minimum CPU, I think offloading the physics from the CPU would speed the game up nicely without having to gut my machine.
I'm not exactly a hardcore gamer, but I know those guys will do anything to sqeeze some extra performance out of games. Sometimes it can mean the difference between kicking ass and becoming brick mortar.
Certainly there would eventually need to be some kind of standard DirectX abstraction for physics . I would not bet on vendors agreeing one by themselves. Anyone know if Microsoft has any plans on a physics API?
Wow, navigation system. What a luxury. I just keep an atlas in my back seat. Love the user interface! Ya know, for a systems administrator, I sure am low tech. I don't even own a cell phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Tech won't really be in a bubble unless there's a mindset of irrational exuberance in the general public.
Right, and in this current climate, the irrational exuberance seems to be limited to web developers (web 2.0, ajax, etc). So there isn't too much to worry about. Just a lot of smart people wasting their time trying to immitate desktop applications in a browser.
-matthew
I don't really know much about the stock market, but I do know a bit about technology. And something that I have noticed which is similar to the late 90's bubble is an irrational belief in hype. This time around the hype is about anything that carries the label "Web 2.0." More specifically, anything that uses "AJAX." Far too many people seem to think that traditional software vendors are going to be put out of business by any schmuck who can manage to immitate a desktop application (or more laughably, an OS) in a browser. I've noticed a general unwillingness to stop and seriously consider whether or not anyone would actually WANT to run an office suite in a web browser, for example.
Fortunately, I don't see nearly the same kind of money changing hands as in the last bubble. Most of it seems to be "grass roots" kind of stuff. So perhaps the hype will just die down with fewer bankruptsies when the dust settles.
Just my $3.
-matthew
Get it? Current... Power.
I think the 386SX only had a 16bit memory bus (although still 32bit internally). Similar to the way the 8088 was an 8086 (16bit) with an 8bit bus. The 486SX was the one that was "screwed up" in the factory by having its math coprocessor disabled (available in the 486DX).
-matthew
There's a bit more design elements going into a PS3 than just the raw pixel pushing. I still don't see many FPS games on a PC that can do let 4 players play on the same computer screen.
How many PC gamers WANT to do that? Especially on a 17" monitor.
-matthew
I choose opportunity over communism.
There is nothing necessarily communistic about unions. I mean, insofar as communism is a form of government. It doesn't really have anything to do with government. All a union means is that you are banding together with fellow workers to ensure fair treatment.
That said, there is a time to unionize and a time to disband unions. There have been times in US history when it was absolutely necessary to unionize to force management to treat (and pay) employees fairly. Most modern unions are superfluous and serve no real function other than to protect incompetence and laziness (and sometimes force a company into bankruptsy).
I don't think there is a good case for an IT union. Most IT workers that I know make a pretty decent living even if they do sometimes work long hours. And a good IT worker has his pick of jobs. It isn't like working on an assembly line where one worker is about as good as another.
-matthew
Only if you consider writing resumes yours. Getting votes is what gets them the job, but it isn't part of the job.
But i'm not up for rehire every 1-4 years. And even still, the reality is that I have to do things that make my employer happy or I lose my job. Just like a politicians have to do things that make the people happy. Sometimes I can do teh Right Thing(tm) but not if it appears to waste time or otherwise go against my employer's wishes.
The discussion about the dissolution of democracy was in 2004. I dimly remember that Bush won and he's busy implementing it according to his plans now.
Sad, indeed.
In the USA??? You've gotta be kidding me. Americans don't want to be educated. They want to drive their SUV to their suburban home and spend the evening with TV and beer. I'd bet a years wage that anyone who can guarantee them that for the rest of their lifes would win every election by a huge margin.
Why would you expect politicians, on the whole, to be any better?
-matthew
More related to the thread, Intellij is an example of Swing Application that is responsive and has the same look and feel on multiple platforms (specifically, any platform that runs Java 1.4).
Same look and feel on multiple platforms is exactly why I refuse to use Java applications as a general rule. Well, that and the majority of Java desktop apps are unresponsive and SLOW. Azureus, for example, on a Mac is just painful. If I am using OS X, I want my applications to look and feel like Cocoa applications. If I am running GNOME, I want all programs to use gtk+. KDE, qt. Windows, well, whatever the look/feel of the month is.
As far as I am concerned, Java is an utter failure on the desktop.
-matthew
The actual effect of this on child abuse will be too low to measure (i.e. within the statistical error margin). But that isn't the effect the law makers care about one inch. The effect on their votes will be higher than the child abuse effect, and that is the one they worry about.
I hate to say it, but isn't getting votes their job? I mean, this is a democracy and they are only in office (presumably) because people vote for them. It would seem that the problem, in this case, is the people. People need to be more educated about the nature of child molestation and who perpretrates it so that they WON'T vote for politicians who make such lame moves.
I dislike polititians as much as the next guy, but the fact is that it is their job to work the political system. It is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Even in the most uncorrupt environment, politics suck. I know I dont' want to deal with it. There are peopel who get off on that crap (politicians). Let them deal with it. If you don't like lhow they deal with it, don't vote for them.
-matthew
No, there is still a difference between Dems and Reps. I believe the quote goes something like "Democrats are the tax and spend party. Republicans are the spend and spend party." From the Daily Show, perhaps?
-matthew
Disease hits. Disease kills 50% of non-immune population. We apply all our formidable technology to a vaccine. Lets say the remaining 50% consists of 20% immune and 80% non-immune (i.e. now 20% is immune, whereas before 10% was). That 80% nonimmune gets vaccinated.
Now everyone's back to the same baseline. There's no more evolutionary pressure.
Ok, but the same percent is still naturally immune since vaccines don't pass to offspring. There is no "undoing" in this situation. The selection just stops. Or rather, it is delayed until a time when people stop being vaccinated for whatever reason.
You started it. The bottom line is that any time you depart from a pure meritocracy you weaken evolutionary pressures. Socialism and neo-liberalism represent the effort to do away with all meritocracy, and thus are the complete undoing of most evolutionary pressures.
I am not goign to get into a political debate. If you have not, please read the Wikipedia article regarding Social Darwinism. It explains the nature of Social Darwinism and its rather tenuous and controvertial link to biological evolution. What it comes down to is that, although some analogies can be drawn between the social darwinism and biological evolution, they are not the same thing and one does not necessarily have a direct influence on the other.
-matthew
Most biological evolution is slowed to a near standstill given a stable environment and large populations which are not geographically isolated
I agree, those are large factors too. But we aren't all that connected. Most countries are still largely monocultures, with several large and obvious exceptions.
I don't know what this has to do with what I said above. You're not even talking about evolution as far as I can tell.
You might want to rethink your stance on evolution as it related to social governments.
You mean confuse biological evolution with social darwinism? No. I will not.
A government killing certain large swaths of population is strong selective breeding. I don't know if I'd call that evolution, but it certainly interferes (or skews) any sort of natural evolution.
Depends on the scale and how much the selected trait is tied to genetics. If I decide to eliminate all Germans, for example, that will probably not affect the gene pool much besides making it smaller. If I pick a particular genetic trait such as eye color, and destroy people with that trait globally, it could have an effect, but not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Either way, I'd be much more concerned with the moral implcations of genocide rather than the evolutionary consequenses.
-matthew
Good question. You'd think they would require some kind of court order. Maybe the BSA threatens to sue.
-matthew
I'm not particularly advocating that position. I'm more pointing out that because that position is widely rejected, human evolution has slowed to a near standstill.
Most biological evolution is slowed to a near standstill given a stable environment and large populations which are not geographically isolated. Whether or not a population accepts the tenets of social darwinism is largely irrelevent. You are very confuse about what evolution is and how it works.
-matthew
We is the entire human race.
And you just said exactly what I said. Third world countries with large lower social classes have higher birth rates. We are saying the same thing.
You said we all reproduce at roughly the same rate. NOw you are saying there is a notable differetial. You also apply a value judgement on "lower classes" by suggesting that they are less suited or fit. We are not saying the same thing. I don't want to have any part in your social darwinism. That crap all but disappeared after WWII and I'd rather keep it that way.
I'll give you that there are some potential evolutionary forces there. They don't seem very strong. If we find a cure or vacciene for those diseases, it'll undo all the evolution anyway.
"Undo?" The only way to undo evolution would be to go back in time. Evolution might converge on a past genetic state (extremely unlikely), but it can never be undone.
No, I'm realistic enough to know that if any positive evolution became apparent, the liberals would immediately work to end it, and make everyone "equal" again. (Don't take that to mean I'm conservative, I'm not).
Oh boy. Now you are mixing evolution and politics.
-matthew
You may want to have a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_darwinism
This is what you are talking about. It is not the same as biological evolution.
-matthew
Sure it is. The ONLY way for a species to survive is to reproduce. Once an organism is finished reproducing evolution has no more use for it.
You are talking about evolution as if it were an organism with a will. It is not. It is just a process. It is the goal of individual *organism* to reproduce. The net result of many organisms trying to reproduce, coupled with imperfect inheritance and selection, is evolution. I repeat, evolution has no goal.
The organism is out of the cycle, and has no remaning impact on spreading genetic material.
That just isn't true. Non-reproducing organisms can and do act as a selective force for other organisms.
For Evolution to work an unfit specimen would have to to die BEFORE it could pass it's genetic material on to the next generation.
How do you define an "unfit" specimen? The phrase "survival of the fittest" is actually a rather obsolete phrase generally associated with social darwinism and not so much biological evolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_darwinism
-mathew
There's nothing favoring retards.
I thought you said laws and technology favored, or at least protected, "retards."
We all pretty much reproduce at the same rate.
Who is "we," exactly? Last time I checked, birth rates in so called first world countries are quite a bit lower on average than in other places.
Lower social classes with subsequent lower intelligence and lower suitability generally reproduce slightly more, a weak evolutionary pressure
Wow, now you are intoroducing social class bias. You've left the realm of science almost completely by this point. How about those damn immigrants? OBviously less suited, but they keep having babies. Bastards!
There is no natural selection, period.
Really? How about malaria survival in the tropics? How abotu HIV? Turns out that some people with HIV (although somewhat rare) never develope AIDS. Those are just a couple of examples. There is also sexual selection going on.
I think perhaps you are naively expecting to see blatant evolution happening within your lifetime. Analyzing a timespan of 100 years or so isn't going to produce spectacular results. Also, rapid evolution doesn't happen in times of relative environmental stability. If global warming turns out to be as disasterous as some suspect, we might see a more rapid evolution of humans but even then it might not be so obvious. It would be rather like staring at the hour hand of a clock.
-matthew
Actually, evolution has a VERY specific goal Reproduction.
Reproduction is a mechanism of evolution, not the goal.
Evolution is 'survival of the fittest'. The organism with the traits most likely to allow it to reproduce is the one that survives.
As long as you recognize that the "fittest" isn't always the fastest, smartest, or strongest. For example, what if being fast and strong means that an animal burns calories too quickly and is unable to survive long periods of drought.
-matthew
And because we don't have any laws against retards, cripples, or other evolutionary unsuitables from reproducing, and we protect them with our technology, there's no meaningful evolution anymore.
Wrong. You sound like a social darwinist (and a Nazi), which has almost nothing to do with real evolution. Evolutionary theory does not place any intrinsic value on any particular group within a population. As long as some people reproduce more successfully than others, evolution is happening. If humans evolve into "retards," that would still be evolution.
-matthew
I find myself a bit puzzled by what this thing's actually supposed to do for me. Given that there are currently no applications that require it (because since it's not actually shipping yet, it would be the kiss of death), then supporting the PbysX can make no difference to the actual gameplay --- because any games need to be able to run on machines without it. This means all it'll be good for is eye candy. Is it really worth spending money on the PhysX so you can get slightly prettier explosions, when instead you can spend the same amount of money on a better GPU or CPU so you'll get prettier everything?
Well, if you've already maxed out your CPU (where upgrading would mean new motherboard and RAM) and you already have a good GPU, why not consider getting a physics processor to give new games an extra kick? I know i'd consider it with my current system. I just got Oblivion and I am running with a a good GPU but the bare minimum CPU, I think offloading the physics from the CPU would speed the game up nicely without having to gut my machine.
I'm not exactly a hardcore gamer, but I know those guys will do anything to sqeeze some extra performance out of games. Sometimes it can mean the difference between kicking ass and becoming brick mortar.
-matthew
Certainly there would eventually need to be some kind of standard DirectX abstraction for physics . I would not bet on vendors agreeing one by themselves. Anyone know if Microsoft has any plans on a physics API?
-matthew
Perhaps if the "Data Ready" acted as an interrupt rather than a passive line that is polled.
-matthew
Wow, navigation system. What a luxury. I just keep an atlas in my back seat. Love the user interface! Ya know, for a systems administrator, I sure am low tech. I don't even own a cell phone.
-matthew
Damn it. Just when I had built a "better mouse trap" they come out with better mice. Well, back to the drawing board.
-matthew