Re:Microsoft can't do anything about free..
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 1
If you're a big enough customer, MSFT may be interested in hearing from you. They do get *inundated* with feature requests, and some get acted upon.
Yeah, and if you presented a really cool patch, assuming that it didn't completely hose reliability, to Linus (like hot-swappable CPU support) do you really think that he'd ignore it? More to the point, there is strong evidence that it is possible to support cool features that haven't been merged into the main Linux kernel until they do get merged. Most major vendors have done just that with USB and PCMCIA support, several of them have done it with ReiserFS, etc. After some time proving that those features were worthwhile, they've now all been merged into the main kernel source.
But you're SOL if you opt for a smaller company which then decides it wants to get out of the OS-vending business, or folds entirely. Switching vendors? Welcome to reinstall land; switching between even two RPM-based distros can be horribly painful because they won't use the same names (the names tracked by the dependency database) for the same packages, or put files in the same places, or include compatible libraries, or so forth... even mixing between SuSE and RHAT packages doesn't work that well.
And this is ever so much more painful that migrating from NT 4.0 to Win2000, right? With Linux, you may have some trouble if your vendor goes under. With Windows, you are going to have some trouble when MS decides that it's time to extract some extra money by forcing you to upgrade to a new, incompatible version of the OS. I fail to see the difference except that I have some hope of using a Linux distribution like Debian that is a community supported system that won't be going out of business anytime soon.
Are you kidding? The solitaires available on Gnome at least are vastly better than the ones on Windows. The low quality of the graphics on Windows card games is always a bit of a shock to me on the rare occasions when I reboot into Windows. Plus Aisleriot has about a zillion solitaire variations beyond what's available in Windows solitaire. Built in games are one of the few areas where the common Linux desktops have a clear advantage that even diehard Windows users are willing to admit.
Re:Microsoft can't do anything about free..
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 3
They can ask for such things as support for hot-swappable components, or whatever, but they cannot demand
or compel it.
And how, pray tell, is this different from buying from a closed source vendor like MS? It's not as though my company can go to Microsoft and demand that they implement feature X in the next service pack, or at least not demand it and expect it to happen. With Free Software, at least, you can develop it yourself and implement it if it really is crucial. You are correct that it may not be merged into the main source, but again that's not as big an issue as you think. If it's a big enough problem that a closed source company would actually integrate it into their produce, the chances are that, given the code to do it, an open source project will maintain it, too. That's particularly true if the company is willing to devote some minimal resources to maintaining that bit of code in the source tree.
Linux development can be community driven, but that may not be good enough for customers with specific needs that aren't currently focused on by said community.
Again, this is true, but you could just as easily replace Linux with [closed source company of choice] and the concept wouldn't really change. If there's not a market for it, there's not a market for it and you'll have to pay the costs of maintaining it yourself, whether that's in the form of custom built closed source software from a commercial company or paying your own developers to maintain a fork from an open source project.
Except that there's a difference. MS has a clear record of pulling out negative advertizing whenever they feel a competitor is getting close. Note that I didn't say that their FUD was unjustified, incorrect, etc.- only that it represented what many people feel is typical action on their part. I only said that MS launching a campaign to discredit a competitor was a strong indication that they saw that competitor as a strategic risk. As other posters have pointed out, this is hardly a radical business practice; it's natural for a company to focus their marketing attention on their biggest and/or most dangerous competitor. The point is that the launching FUD against Linux is confirmation that that MS now views Linux that way.
Lately, Microsoft has vacillated between dismissing Linux entirely and seeing it as a vast and looming threat on the competitive landscape.
That's not Microsoft vacillating. That's MS's typical FUD machine in action. They've decided that Linux is a serious threat, so now they're trying to undermine it with vague fears. This is typical Microsoft in action. The more they fear a competitor's product, the more they try to dismiss it publically as a credible product, claim that its suppliers are going into the tank, etc. Vigorous blasting by MS is just evidence that it really is a threat.
They said that it runs at 500 MHz when it's plugged in, but that they drop to 300 MHz to save power when unplugged. Perhaps you're the one who needs to read the whole article.
Change that to read benchmarks instead of real applications and you might be right. When you start talking about real applications, where you actually do the same thing again and again rather than switching tasks as fast as possible, a lot of the performance disadvantages of the Crusoe go away.
That said, I'm not terribly worried either way. My workplace still uses PII 400 based desktops, and I have a PII 366 laptop, and they seem to be just fine for everyday use in a business setting. PIII 300 class performance is likely to be plenty for most applications anyway. It's not like you're going to be trying to set Seti@home records or do heavy-duty compilation work on your laptop.
While it does have low power consumption, it's not exactly brimming with processor power. To get below 1 watt, they have to drop the speed of a PIII to just 300 MHz. Of course that's still plenty to run office programs or an mp3 player, but it's hardly revolutionary.
More importantly, it's not possible to have long-term standard of living increase at a faster rate than productivity. Every good and service must be produced before it can be consumed, so total consumption can't be greater than total production, and average consumption can't be greater than average production. That means that raising average production per unit of labor (i.e. productivity) is the only way to raise average consumption per unit of labor (i.e. standard of living). It's such a simple concept it's amazing that more people don't understand it.
Asteroid mining sounds great, but it's likely to be of much less practical significance for terrestrials than people have let on. It's not as though we're exactly running short on ore for the most commonly used metals, like iron and aluminum. We're even doing pretty well for some not-so-common minerals like copper, silver, gold, magnesium, and the like. Remember that the geological processes that have shaped the earth have had a chance to significantly enrich those metals in some areas (i.e. ore bodies), which will not be true of asteroids. About the only metals for which asteroid mining has much promise (for the earthbound, at least) are the ones like the platinum group where those geological processes tend to deplete the crust. Asteroid mining will be great for space exploration because it will eliminate the need to haul materials out of a gravity well, but it's unlikely to be of great utility on earth.
Not really. The problem with WWI was that the Allies were so tired out from the war that they agreed to an Armistice before completely crushing the Germans. Germany proper had not really been fought over, much less occupied. The Allies tried to impose harsh terms at Versailles, but they hadn't really crushed the Germans, so the terms didn't stick. If they had been willing to pay the price in blood of forcing their way into Germany and occupying the whole country, WWII probably wouldn't have happened. Just take a look at WWII itself; Germany, Italy, and Japan were all thoroughly crushed and have not been at all eager to fight anyone since.
the usefulness, effectivness or feasability of a Missle Defense System isn't the issue. the first discussion that must occur is
whether or not building a MD System is ethical. i believe the answer to that question is "No, it is not ethical."
I respectfully disagree. It is worth discussing both whether the system is ethical and whether or not it would work, since both are necessary before proceeding. If anything we should discuss whether it will work first, since that is a technical issue that at least in theory we should be able to decide fairly conclusively. Ethical issues, OTOH, are much more a matter of opinion, so we're not likely to arrive at general agreement on which to make a decision. IOW, we aren't going to decide based on ethics, so practical considerations will inevitably be involved and we might as well get started on them now.
Your arguement is that we do nothing at all to defend ourselves-- my arguement is that we DO something.
But you're missing the most important point, which is that doing something costs money. A lot of money. We have poured billions and billions of dollars into missile defense since Reagan first proposed it and gotten basically nothing out of it. And even if we did get something from it, it wouldn't actually do any good, because it can be avoided by smuggling a weapon into the country on a ship, truck, train, airplane, etc. So instead of pouring our money down a bottomless pit, we should spend it on something that actually has a chance of doing the country some good.
That could be tax relief, social programs, basic science research, education, national debt reduction, or the like. Any one of those is likely to result in more net good for the country. Or if you don't want to take it away from defense spending you could put it into conventional forces, better intelligence against rogue states and terrorist organizations that you're so worried about, or biological threat detection research (which actually has some promise). Any of those programs would probably help national security more than NMD. Or you could put it into foreign aid and diplomacy so that there are fewer people out there pissed off enough to try blowing us up. That would probably be a more effective threat reduction than NMD.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the best victory is one in which you crush your opponent and convince him never to try you again. A lightning victory between near equals is rarely long lived. The loser tends to retire, lick his wounds, and try again in a few years.
War is more about getting the opposing government to do what you want, rather than getting the opposing population to do
what you want. The latter always requires torture and slaughter.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the opposing population really wants to do what you want, but their government is oppressing them and keeping them from doing it. In that case you just have to get rid of the opposing government to achieve your aims. A special case of this is wars in which the enemy population is less committed to war than their leadership; partway through the war the population really wants peace but the government hasn't given up yet and drives them to keep fighting longer than they want. This is because leadership often has more to lose in a war than the population at large. After all, these days we often want to try government leaders for war crimes, which tends to harden them and make them that much less inclined to give up, while decent treatment of capitulated civilian populations is now expected.
A national missile defense system WOULD work, however. They may send 'fake' missiles for us to shoot down, but at least the system is in place in case of a surprise attack or an unprovoked attack.
Well, despite over a decade of trying they have yet to come up with one that can shoot down a non-surprise attack by a single missile that doesn't use anything much in the way of decoys, countermeasures, etc. That makes me question whether or not it would really work.
It's only intent was to defend against rogue states or terrorists.
Yeah, like a rogue state or terrorist would actually use a missile. They'd just smuggle the the bomb into the country and plant it near their target. It's not as though doing so would be very difficult at all, and all that trillion dollar technology will prove completely useless. It's a total boondoggle.
Simple. You only have to convince them that they will be slaughtered in order to convince them to give up some things. If I still have my wonder toys that let me blow you up without getting a scratch, and you don't have them, you're in a world of hurt. You might very well be willing to give up some concessions to stay alive.
Limited war in which the goal is to gain concessions- a slice of disputed territory, ransom for prisoners, etc.- has been more popular through history than wars of annihilation. Of course that only works if both sides agree to fight that way, but they do it's generally better for all involved in the long run.
Or, if you're really vicious (and are willing to waste some bandwidth) you could redirect their spider into a dynamically generated infinite web trap. Basically, you always send their spider a dynamically generated page that has a whole bunch of links to other "pages" on your site, plus random keywords and metatags. The system I saw used a series of nested virtual directories to prevent accidental duplication, so that directory/a would have files a.html, b.html,..., and all of the links in a.html would be to/a/a/*.html, etc. The spider can keep following the links forever because they're dynamically generated, so it gets trapped in an infinite search of your site. Any user who follows one of the links from the site, though, would be directed to a page explaining how evil Alta-Vista is.
Plus, don't you think it would be much easier if people actually didn't try to cheat search engines?
Yeah, and it would be great if nobody stole money and gave to charity, too. It just isn't going to happen. Any system that is A) valuable and B) depends on everyone behaving honestly is doomed to failure. You're never going to get people to stop cheating the search engines as long as doing so is both possible and beneficial to the cheaters. The plain fact is that manipulating the system works, and people are going to keep doing it as long as it keeps working. The only solution is to develop a system that is not easily manipulated.
5) The number of times a particular page is linked to.
)7) The number of times the linking page is linked.
Perhaps you should try looking at Google, a search engine that actually uses these in a clever way as the key part of its ranking system. It's remarkably effective at finding relevant information and at avoiding the kinds of simple manipulation you complain about. Other ranking schemes (like GoTo.com's straight pay for placement system) are also relatively resistant to manipulation. I think that the long term solution is going to be natural selection; search engines that are easy to manipulate to give lousy results will go out of business and leave behind the ones that are actually useful.
Personally, I think that it would be great that if there was an editing team that would simply delete misrepresented pages.
Good luck. The latest versions of Google include over 1 billion pages. Manual sifting for poorly labeled ones just plain isn't an option if your primary goal is comprehensiveness.
You'd better not say that too loud, or the "Perl is incomprehensible line noise" crowd will have fits. Of course they'd probably be happy to say that to find some of the really awful, unmaintainable garbage you should just look here.
I think that the nature of invention has long been misunderstood. There's a tendency to look at a technological breakthrough and see the incremental improvement that put a concept over the top, rather than long buildup to that point. The credit goes to the person who brought an idea into prominance, rather than the people who laid the groundwork. In that sense it's rather odd that the Soviets were as eager to promote their national hero as the true inventor of whatever as anyone, given the Marxist view of history as the result of broad trends rather than individual initiative.
It's interesting to consider whether the concept of patents, in which an inventor is allowed to profit greatly from his inventions, has contributed to the heroic view of invention or was a product of it. It certainly motivates inventors to try to claim as much of an invention as their as they can possibly get away with!
This is actually a pretty serious problem; it turns out that server farms are a major part of the increased power consumption that's driving the electrical crunch. The worst part is that computer power consumption is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many servers packed into such a small space that their air conditioning costs are actually huge; IIRC they use more electricity for AC than to run the computers. If you can cut the power consumption of the computer it pays back double or more because you can cut your AC costs, too, and probably capital costs for backup power. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that switching to low power consumption chips could wind up saving money overall over a period of a year or two just on decreased electrical usage.
Not meaning to flame, but aren't you advocating groupthink? You are saying that to publicly question the current scientific
majority is wrong. The scientific majority isn't always correct, and questioning it is what sparks further research that
eventually proves one side or the other.
You are correct that it's wrong to advocate mindless groupthink where adherence to the majority opinion is mandatory. But there's a big difference between rejecting groupthink and advocating the opinion of a small minority without letting the public even know that it is the view of only a tiny minority. Note that the original poster is not advocating silencing the minority in an appropriate venue for discussions of this type, such as scientific journals.
I think that last point is crucial. The museum is intended to be primarily an educational institution, rather than a research one. It is right and proper for discussion of controversial issues, even ones which the majority views as largely settled, to take place in an appropriate professional venue. Museums, educational and news media, schools, and the like are not the places in which these issues should be hashed out. Those places have a responsability to present generally accepted scientific views, or at the very least present both the mainstream view and the minority view (and in that case probably with some idea of their relative popularity and which side is advancing its opinion). Presenting the minority view only, as thought the issue has been settled and the current minority view "won", is grossly dishonest and is precisely counter to the goal of education. The sad thing is that a controversy like this can actually serve as an excellent educational opportunity to demonstrate how scientific ideas develop and the museum missed it.
Actually, I think that my best teacher was my High School swimming coach. Unlike a lot of coaches, he understood that the value of competitive sports was in the discipline and fitness that you picked up trying to win, rather than winning itself. He was willing to sit anyone who broke training rules, even the best athletes on the team for the most important meet of the year. I learned more about the value of setting goals and hard work from him than from all of my other teachers combined.
It's more that both of them need serious computing power than that they're thinking about biowarfare. Bioinformatics has the potential to use truly monstrous amounts of processing power. Assembling a genome that's been shotgun sequenced is going to require serious computational horsepower, and Celera wants to start pumping out genomes left and right. Annotating the things is also going to be pretty brutal, although with a few genomes as roadmaps this may be a bit less trouble. Any way you slice it, though, you're talking about needing massive number crunching power, and nobody knows more about that kind of things right now than the nuke simulation boys at Sandia, who are currently being encouraged to branch out and do more than weapons development. It's a reasonable match.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and if you presented a really cool patch, assuming that it didn't completely hose reliability, to Linus (like hot-swappable CPU support) do you really think that he'd ignore it? More to the point, there is strong evidence that it is possible to support cool features that haven't been merged into the main Linux kernel until they do get merged. Most major vendors have done just that with USB and PCMCIA support, several of them have done it with ReiserFS, etc. After some time proving that those features were worthwhile, they've now all been merged into the main kernel source.
And this is ever so much more painful that migrating from NT 4.0 to Win2000, right? With Linux, you may have some trouble if your vendor goes under. With Windows, you are going to have some trouble when MS decides that it's time to extract some extra money by forcing you to upgrade to a new, incompatible version of the OS. I fail to see the difference except that I have some hope of using a Linux distribution like Debian that is a community supported system that won't be going out of business anytime soon.
Are you kidding? The solitaires available on Gnome at least are vastly better than the ones on Windows. The low quality of the graphics on Windows card games is always a bit of a shock to me on the rare occasions when I reboot into Windows. Plus Aisleriot has about a zillion solitaire variations beyond what's available in Windows solitaire. Built in games are one of the few areas where the common Linux desktops have a clear advantage that even diehard Windows users are willing to admit.
And how, pray tell, is this different from buying from a closed source vendor like MS? It's not as though my company can go to Microsoft and demand that they implement feature X in the next service pack, or at least not demand it and expect it to happen. With Free Software, at least, you can develop it yourself and implement it if it really is crucial. You are correct that it may not be merged into the main source, but again that's not as big an issue as you think. If it's a big enough problem that a closed source company would actually integrate it into their produce, the chances are that, given the code to do it, an open source project will maintain it, too. That's particularly true if the company is willing to devote some minimal resources to maintaining that bit of code in the source tree.
Again, this is true, but you could just as easily replace Linux with [closed source company of choice] and the concept wouldn't really change. If there's not a market for it, there's not a market for it and you'll have to pay the costs of maintaining it yourself, whether that's in the form of custom built closed source software from a commercial company or paying your own developers to maintain a fork from an open source project.
Except that there's a difference. MS has a clear record of pulling out negative advertizing whenever they feel a competitor is getting close. Note that I didn't say that their FUD was unjustified, incorrect, etc.- only that it represented what many people feel is typical action on their part. I only said that MS launching a campaign to discredit a competitor was a strong indication that they saw that competitor as a strategic risk. As other posters have pointed out, this is hardly a radical business practice; it's natural for a company to focus their marketing attention on their biggest and/or most dangerous competitor. The point is that the launching FUD against Linux is confirmation that that MS now views Linux that way.
From the article:
That's not Microsoft vacillating. That's MS's typical FUD machine in action. They've decided that Linux is a serious threat, so now they're trying to undermine it with vague fears. This is typical Microsoft in action. The more they fear a competitor's product, the more they try to dismiss it publically as a credible product, claim that its suppliers are going into the tank, etc. Vigorous blasting by MS is just evidence that it really is a threat.
They said that it runs at 500 MHz when it's plugged in, but that they drop to 300 MHz to save power when unplugged. Perhaps you're the one who needs to read the whole article.
Change that to read benchmarks instead of real applications and you might be right. When you start talking about real applications, where you actually do the same thing again and again rather than switching tasks as fast as possible, a lot of the performance disadvantages of the Crusoe go away.
That said, I'm not terribly worried either way. My workplace still uses PII 400 based desktops, and I have a PII 366 laptop, and they seem to be just fine for everyday use in a business setting. PIII 300 class performance is likely to be plenty for most applications anyway. It's not like you're going to be trying to set Seti@home records or do heavy-duty compilation work on your laptop.
While it does have low power consumption, it's not exactly brimming with processor power. To get below 1 watt, they have to drop the speed of a PIII to just 300 MHz. Of course that's still plenty to run office programs or an mp3 player, but it's hardly revolutionary.
More importantly, it's not possible to have long-term standard of living increase at a faster rate than productivity. Every good and service must be produced before it can be consumed, so total consumption can't be greater than total production, and average consumption can't be greater than average production. That means that raising average production per unit of labor (i.e. productivity) is the only way to raise average consumption per unit of labor (i.e. standard of living). It's such a simple concept it's amazing that more people don't understand it.
Asteroid mining sounds great, but it's likely to be of much less practical significance for terrestrials than people have let on. It's not as though we're exactly running short on ore for the most commonly used metals, like iron and aluminum. We're even doing pretty well for some not-so-common minerals like copper, silver, gold, magnesium, and the like. Remember that the geological processes that have shaped the earth have had a chance to significantly enrich those metals in some areas (i.e. ore bodies), which will not be true of asteroids. About the only metals for which asteroid mining has much promise (for the earthbound, at least) are the ones like the platinum group where those geological processes tend to deplete the crust. Asteroid mining will be great for space exploration because it will eliminate the need to haul materials out of a gravity well, but it's unlikely to be of great utility on earth.
Not really. The problem with WWI was that the Allies were so tired out from the war that they agreed to an Armistice before completely crushing the Germans. Germany proper had not really been fought over, much less occupied. The Allies tried to impose harsh terms at Versailles, but they hadn't really crushed the Germans, so the terms didn't stick. If they had been willing to pay the price in blood of forcing their way into Germany and occupying the whole country, WWII probably wouldn't have happened. Just take a look at WWII itself; Germany, Italy, and Japan were all thoroughly crushed and have not been at all eager to fight anyone since.
I respectfully disagree. It is worth discussing both whether the system is ethical and whether or not it would work, since both are necessary before proceeding. If anything we should discuss whether it will work first, since that is a technical issue that at least in theory we should be able to decide fairly conclusively. Ethical issues, OTOH, are much more a matter of opinion, so we're not likely to arrive at general agreement on which to make a decision. IOW, we aren't going to decide based on ethics, so practical considerations will inevitably be involved and we might as well get started on them now.
But you're missing the most important point, which is that doing something costs money. A lot of money. We have poured billions and billions of dollars into missile defense since Reagan first proposed it and gotten basically nothing out of it. And even if we did get something from it, it wouldn't actually do any good, because it can be avoided by smuggling a weapon into the country on a ship, truck, train, airplane, etc. So instead of pouring our money down a bottomless pit, we should spend it on something that actually has a chance of doing the country some good.
That could be tax relief, social programs, basic science research, education, national debt reduction, or the like. Any one of those is likely to result in more net good for the country. Or if you don't want to take it away from defense spending you could put it into conventional forces, better intelligence against rogue states and terrorist organizations that you're so worried about, or biological threat detection research (which actually has some promise). Any of those programs would probably help national security more than NMD. Or you could put it into foreign aid and diplomacy so that there are fewer people out there pissed off enough to try blowing us up. That would probably be a more effective threat reduction than NMD.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the best victory is one in which you crush your opponent and convince him never to try you again. A lightning victory between near equals is rarely long lived. The loser tends to retire, lick his wounds, and try again in a few years.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the opposing population really wants to do what you want, but their government is oppressing them and keeping them from doing it. In that case you just have to get rid of the opposing government to achieve your aims. A special case of this is wars in which the enemy population is less committed to war than their leadership; partway through the war the population really wants peace but the government hasn't given up yet and drives them to keep fighting longer than they want. This is because leadership often has more to lose in a war than the population at large. After all, these days we often want to try government leaders for war crimes, which tends to harden them and make them that much less inclined to give up, while decent treatment of capitulated civilian populations is now expected.
Well, despite over a decade of trying they have yet to come up with one that can shoot down a non-surprise attack by a single missile that doesn't use anything much in the way of decoys, countermeasures, etc. That makes me question whether or not it would really work.
Yeah, like a rogue state or terrorist would actually use a missile. They'd just smuggle the the bomb into the country and plant it near their target. It's not as though doing so would be very difficult at all, and all that trillion dollar technology will prove completely useless. It's a total boondoggle.
Simple. You only have to convince them that they will be slaughtered in order to convince them to give up some things. If I still have my wonder toys that let me blow you up without getting a scratch, and you don't have them, you're in a world of hurt. You might very well be willing to give up some concessions to stay alive.
Limited war in which the goal is to gain concessions- a slice of disputed territory, ransom for prisoners, etc.- has been more popular through history than wars of annihilation. Of course that only works if both sides agree to fight that way, but they do it's generally better for all involved in the long run.
Or, if you're really vicious (and are willing to waste some bandwidth) you could redirect their spider into a dynamically generated infinite web trap. Basically, you always send their spider a dynamically generated page that has a whole bunch of links to other "pages" on your site, plus random keywords and metatags. The system I saw used a series of nested virtual directories to prevent accidental duplication, so that directory /a would have files a.html, b.html, ..., and all of the links in a.html would be to /a/a/*.html, etc. The spider can keep following the links forever because they're dynamically generated, so it gets trapped in an infinite search of your site. Any user who follows one of the links from the site, though, would be directed to a page explaining how evil Alta-Vista is.
Yeah, and it would be great if nobody stole money and gave to charity, too. It just isn't going to happen. Any system that is A) valuable and B) depends on everyone behaving honestly is doomed to failure. You're never going to get people to stop cheating the search engines as long as doing so is both possible and beneficial to the cheaters. The plain fact is that manipulating the system works, and people are going to keep doing it as long as it keeps working. The only solution is to develop a system that is not easily manipulated.
Perhaps you should try looking at Google, a search engine that actually uses these in a clever way as the key part of its ranking system. It's remarkably effective at finding relevant information and at avoiding the kinds of simple manipulation you complain about. Other ranking schemes (like GoTo.com's straight pay for placement system) are also relatively resistant to manipulation. I think that the long term solution is going to be natural selection; search engines that are easy to manipulate to give lousy results will go out of business and leave behind the ones that are actually useful.
Good luck. The latest versions of Google include over 1 billion pages. Manual sifting for poorly labeled ones just plain isn't an option if your primary goal is comprehensiveness.
You'd better not say that too loud, or the "Perl is incomprehensible line noise" crowd will have fits. Of course they'd probably be happy to say that to find some of the really awful, unmaintainable garbage you should just look here.
I think that the nature of invention has long been misunderstood. There's a tendency to look at a technological breakthrough and see the incremental improvement that put a concept over the top, rather than long buildup to that point. The credit goes to the person who brought an idea into prominance, rather than the people who laid the groundwork. In that sense it's rather odd that the Soviets were as eager to promote their national hero as the true inventor of whatever as anyone, given the Marxist view of history as the result of broad trends rather than individual initiative.
It's interesting to consider whether the concept of patents, in which an inventor is allowed to profit greatly from his inventions, has contributed to the heroic view of invention or was a product of it. It certainly motivates inventors to try to claim as much of an invention as their as they can possibly get away with!
This is actually a pretty serious problem; it turns out that server farms are a major part of the increased power consumption that's driving the electrical crunch. The worst part is that computer power consumption is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many servers packed into such a small space that their air conditioning costs are actually huge; IIRC they use more electricity for AC than to run the computers. If you can cut the power consumption of the computer it pays back double or more because you can cut your AC costs, too, and probably capital costs for backup power. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that switching to low power consumption chips could wind up saving money overall over a period of a year or two just on decreased electrical usage.
You are correct that it's wrong to advocate mindless groupthink where adherence to the majority opinion is mandatory. But there's a big difference between rejecting groupthink and advocating the opinion of a small minority without letting the public even know that it is the view of only a tiny minority. Note that the original poster is not advocating silencing the minority in an appropriate venue for discussions of this type, such as scientific journals.
I think that last point is crucial. The museum is intended to be primarily an educational institution, rather than a research one. It is right and proper for discussion of controversial issues, even ones which the majority views as largely settled, to take place in an appropriate professional venue. Museums, educational and news media, schools, and the like are not the places in which these issues should be hashed out. Those places have a responsability to present generally accepted scientific views, or at the very least present both the mainstream view and the minority view (and in that case probably with some idea of their relative popularity and which side is advancing its opinion). Presenting the minority view only, as thought the issue has been settled and the current minority view "won", is grossly dishonest and is precisely counter to the goal of education. The sad thing is that a controversy like this can actually serve as an excellent educational opportunity to demonstrate how scientific ideas develop and the museum missed it.
Actually, I think that my best teacher was my High School swimming coach. Unlike a lot of coaches, he understood that the value of competitive sports was in the discipline and fitness that you picked up trying to win, rather than winning itself. He was willing to sit anyone who broke training rules, even the best athletes on the team for the most important meet of the year. I learned more about the value of setting goals and hard work from him than from all of my other teachers combined.
It's more that both of them need serious computing power than that they're thinking about biowarfare. Bioinformatics has the potential to use truly monstrous amounts of processing power. Assembling a genome that's been shotgun sequenced is going to require serious computational horsepower, and Celera wants to start pumping out genomes left and right. Annotating the things is also going to be pretty brutal, although with a few genomes as roadmaps this may be a bit less trouble. Any way you slice it, though, you're talking about needing massive number crunching power, and nobody knows more about that kind of things right now than the nuke simulation boys at Sandia, who are currently being encouraged to branch out and do more than weapons development. It's a reasonable match.