Like Hillary or not, like Bill or not, at least Bill Clinton, in a noteworthy fashion, lives in New York. Some might say 'notorious fashion,' but nonetheless he gives the very visible appearance of being a New York resident.
Of course most Senators need to spend most of their time in Washington. I have no idea where Hillary spends her time when she's not there.
I got a 760MB 5.25" SCSI drive on the floor that I use as a doorstop. Pay the shipping, and you can hang that around your nect, if you want to make a retro fashion statement. Don't use a slipknot, though. For that matter, I've got a 8" floppy stapled to the wall, too.
>Having a functional browser on your server is not completely insane, especially in a small shop.
Don't you really mean for servers that have to be configured by GUI clients on the system console? Aren't we talking primarily Windows servers, then? I guess you could be talking a very small Unix/Linux colocation, where you don't have the space for an admin system.
That said, I'm looking forward to Xorg splitting the X client libs from the server. While I can administer my servers from a command line, sometimes I just prefer GUI clients. It's also tempting to just install X, and then damage the server so it can't start.
I think the free market can be a useful tool, but I don't worship it. IMHO, the current situation is a 'deep local minima,' meaning that without a big shakeup, it's just not going to get appreciably better. I don't expect these guys to wake up one day and say, "Gee, if we'd just sit down together and hammer out a good common standard, the market growth would be explosive, and everybody would be better off." Early online service providers were in a similar local minima, except that cheap, easy email bridging, and later web bridging pointed the escape path to become Internet service providers.
In our wonderful nation of extremes, seem to want to pigeonhole too many things into the extremes. So you contrast slugging it out in the market with out-of-touch committees coming up with X.500 and the OSI 7-layer taco. The Internet is somewhere in the middle, with drafts evolving based on practical experience, by people who have learned that sometimes working together... works.
Slightly different note... Sometimes 'good enough' is the enemy of better or best. But I think what is really happening with the market competition of Instant Messaging and music downloads has nothing at all to do with quality, and everything to do with lockin.
That's the other side of the gripe about American business. It seems to me that they're afraid to compete, so they want to FORCE people to be customers.
At the end of the day, I AM THE CUSTOMER. I don't like how they're doing business, I think it's short-sighted. Furthermore, if SOMEBODY will do business in what I consider to be an enlightened fashion, at a resonable (not necessarily the lowest) price, I'll take my business there. So far the market is disappointing me.
But we have to ask one question, given that pr0n IS the most successful business on the Internet...
Do pr0n sites use common, free, and accepted protocols, or do they each try and do it their own way, to the exclusion of others? AFAIK, and that isn't very far, they all use http, https, relatively vanilla html, jpg, and the like.
Remember the days of... CompuServe AOL GEnie Prodigy The Source
They all wanted to *own* the home computer connection market. Together they balkanized it so that it never reached critical mass. Only ONE thing changed this, SMTP and the 'Internet bridge.' I used to be on CompuServe, and remember when we could begin routing email out over the Internet bridge. The other (surviving) providers followed suit, and suddenly anyone could email anyone, and home computer connectivity had its first Killer App.
The Web followed that, and though Microsoft has tried mightily, they haven't quite managed to 0wn it, and it looks like that chance might well be gone. (If only because cellphones are now on steroids, viewing the web.)
Then, in spite of a set of open protocols describing IRC, we began seeing Instant Message Balkanization. AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc, etc, and of course none of them talk to each other. (Fortunately, GAIM talks to them all.) The idiots didn't learn!
Now we're hearing about a bunch of deliberately incompatible music download protocols emerging. For that matter, we've had a bunch of deliberately incompatible filesharing protocols, already. STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!
At about this point, I'm sick and tired of people telling me how stupid government is, and how the private sector can always do better. The Internet is the best counter-example. A government project put in place a series of non-owned, open protocols and standards, people came, and for the most part, it just works. Business, in its own-the-whole-pie mindset, denies critical mass to Instant Messaging and online music distribution. If the idiots could cooperate, they could all share a HUGE pie, each would have a bigger chunk of that pie than the whole pies they now have, and customers would be MUCH better off.
That said, I won't argue that government isn't stupid, just that they have no monopoly on stupidity. Sometimes, and the Internet is the poster child for this, government can do things right and business can do things wrong.
IMHO, the real issue is that most content providers don't want IPv6, and most ISPs don't want it either, for largely the same reason.
IPv6 keeps alive the original spirit of the Internet - end-to-end. The network is dumb, the endpoints are smart. Even if there may be a lot of intelligence built into the network, it's purpose is to look dumb, and simply deliver packets from one end to another.
That's not the way the Internet has been heading. Unfortunately, the Internet is being driven toward a smart-broadcast model, where there are content providers and content consumers. It's two-way to the extent that the consumers can specify what they want from the providers. Business types also like the idea of smarter routing, so "premium" customers can get their packets routed ahead of us rabble. You know, buzzwords like "differentiation" and "value-add pricing" apply here.
It's also worth noting that most people do only two true end-to-end activities, in the original spirit of the Internet - email and filesharing. Now we find email under assault by spam, and we're approaching the point where some people would accept ANYTHING to stop it. I fear that unfortunately, that solution may well be some sort of client-server or content provider based system. As for filesharing, we know what The Powers That Be (??AA) think of that. So from those points of view, true end-to-end *should* be deprecated in favor of client/server.
As for the ISP side, the smart-broadcast model suits them just fine. Smart users who want true end-to-end are just a pain in the neck. Perhaps IPv6 could simplify things for the ISP, but that would be at the end of a long migration process. It would certainly take longer than on quarter, and ISPs couldn't see that far into the future, for the cost savings.
Just sit right back, and you'll hear a tale, A tale of a fateful trip. That started from this tropic port, Aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty sailing man, The skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day, For a three hour tour, A three hour tour.
(past nauseum)
There's got to be something about the memory works, and the way songs go into our brains. I suspect it's partly residue of our pre-literate cultural and biological heritage. The good old days, when history was oral, memorized, and in verse, not prose.
Actually, the Constitution has specific provisions for two-thirds majority in the Senate, in certain cases. The fear of the Founding Fathers was also known as "The Tyranny of the Majority," where a simple majority could get their way in every matter, ignoring the needs and wishes of a large minority. Such tyranny, although "democratic," produces an unstable country. Back in 1865, a large minority in the South thought a simple majority in the North was telling them too much how to manage their lives - and their slaves' lives.
Bad example, because IMHO in that case the majority was right. But on the other side of the issue, we did have a Civil War over it.
I'd just like to have a GLSA notice that there is a problem, that they know about it, and are working on it. Oh, it would also be good if they would suggest a workaround, like you have. (Thank you, very much.) I have the Win-box fully updated, and for the moment use that for the more general web, and the Gentoo box sticks to safe sites.
I'm not really a font fiend, so I'll probably drop the freetype and build mozilla as ~x86, as oldosadmin suggests. I need to check the syntax and see if I can set just 1.7.3 to ~x86, so when they come out with 1.7.3-r1 as stable, I can get back to the stable package. That's for when I forget to fiddle my package.keywords.
Won't argue about CBS, but I will note that in all of this one other thing has been lost... There's not clear and specific refutation of the service gaps, or even alternate version of what happened during those times.
But this isn't even a central election issue. It and swifties and the like are largely distractions from the real issues.
But last I checked, earlier today, they STILL didn't have stable releases of Mozilla 1.7.3 and Mozilla-Firefox 1.0PRE to build from source. They did have binary releases, but the source releases were still ~x86.
I'd also feel better if the GLSA (Gentoo Linux Security Advisory) about Mozilla would get out there.
The difference was that on Solaris there were so few people that 'viewing' actually became a substitute for direct contact. Asimov didn't consider the possible effects of subsetting your friends in this situation, though he certainly had 'us' and 'them'.
I guess to put things another way, for security, you don't put your faith, trust, and expectations in the software running on the computer, or in the computer itself.
Until we have sentient machines, to 'trust' them is to anthropomorphize them. Or like HAL, to distrust them, too.
The deserving target of faith, trust, and expectations are the *people* supplying the software and hardware, and administering the end result.
Perhaps that's one reason I tend to trust Open Source more, because usually I have at least some visibility into the *people* behind it. Though I've never met Linus, or any of the others in that ballpark, I've at least read their writings and seen their exchanges. I know at least a little about them, as people. That's hard to get with proprietary software.
There's something FAR more important about security than the code, the number of eyeballs looking at it, or even the skill of those eyeballs.
Trust. More specifically doing away with Trust.
I had a minor epiphany yesterday, read about Microsoft's DRM efforts, and realizing what may be fundamentally wrong with their security. IMHO, Microsoft believes that bad security is due to bugs, and that if they can squash their bugs, they will be able to have secure code, AND be able to TRUST the computer that their code is operating on. I'll even let them consider an insecure algorithm a bug, for the sake of this discussion. I think they really believe they can eventually ship sufficiently bug-free code to be considered Trustworthy in execution.
Contrast that with the attitude toward security that has grown in the Open Source arena. No matter how good you get, bugs will *always* be found. No matter how secure you think your system is, *someone* can always get in. Finally, you have to consider *all* avenues of attack, not just the technical/cracking ones.
Some descendents of these attitudes: Without physical control, the rest of the security is worthless. Human engineering is probably the biggest security hole. Consider security as a value proposition, in two ways: 1: Can I make it sufficiently expensive that they'll attack someone else, instead of me? 2: How much do I want to spend on security, and how do I balance that with a recovery plan? Security isn't a "nail it down, once" thing, it's a process, and includes evolution. Bugs will happen, so put security in layers, to try and eliminate single-point-of-failure issues.
It's not so much the code, or the eyeball count, or the specific eyeballs. It's the attitude.
I liked better your comment under the subthread, "Re:Soap Operas, Movies, TV Series..." where people actually feel that they are accomplishing something with their online presence.
My son (18) was somewhat addicted to political discourse on a website dedicated to "Magic the Gathering," perhaps moreso that the Magic, itself. By the end of Summer, my wife and I were tugging him back into the real world, though of mixed feelings because we do foster his growing political awareness. Developing political awareness while debating on a blog may have some traits of accomplishment to it, but IMHO the dinner table and conversations face to face are better.
The wording wasn't actually intentional. But as I was typing the sentence, I noticed it - and decided to leave it in, anyway. Sorry for inflicting the pain, but maybe you're one of "them," anyway. (remark needs context for humor)
No. I'm merely saying that we all need to be more tolerant of others. Period. There's a spectrum between, "I'm not very fond of quite a few people who live nearby," and "Quite a few of the people who live nearby are sh*theads." It's not an issue of how we treat our friends, it's an issue of how we treat people who are not our friends. It's the mere act of splitting our neighbors into "us" and "them" that I'm objecting to. That is a dangerous thing, because it is always easier to mistreat "them," be it verbally, physically, or legally.
When my mom and dad were kids, they worked on the farm. (29 hours a day, etc, etc) But they played with nearby kids. When I was a kid, I mostly played with nearby kids, but my parents drove me to a few friends' houses. (and vice versa) My kids played with a few neighborhood kids, but mostly we drove them to friends' houses. (and vice versa)
Do you see a trend here?
In the old days, we adapted and adjusted to the people around us. We are progressing toward simply finding people like us, so we don't have to adapt and adjust. The widespread availability of the car was probably a driving factor in this. But even as we are more choosey about our friends, we have to retain the same set of acquaintances, because there are after all the limitations of the physical world.
Now add the Internet. It makes it more possible than ever to withdraw from the real world. To some extent, it even allows you to minimize interactions with real-world acquaintences. Now we can pick our friends AND, to a good extent, our actuaintances. Or at least, the Internet allows us to manipulate our focus more easily, ignoring or bashing those who do not fit our world-view.
I would submit that our interpersonal skills are atrophying as a result, and that one place it becomes evident is the current election cycle. When you pick your friends and acquaintances, it becomes easier to turn the world into "us" and "them," and that seems to be what the world has been about, the past few years.
*****
Virtual Universe? I don't WANT a virtual universe that looks just like the one I'm in. A brisk walk in the real universe at least gives me a little cardiovascular exercise and stimulates my other senses. The only thing that really interests me in the virtual universe would be places I can't go, for reasons of money, time, or accessability, or places that just don't or can't exist.
Because Intel had to revamp roadmap, and has no product.
Their Pentium4 with NetBurst Architecture has smashed into a brick wall.
Their IA-64, meant to destroy the Clones, never caught on very well, and any plans to penetrate the lower-end (but not low-end) have been cut off at the knees by X86-64.
The Pentium-M is a success, but was apparently meant to be a niche product. Suddenly it's being called on to become mainstream, and they're not ready for that.
They've got to show something to make them worthy of the future. They've reacted and revamped their roadmap, but their hand TODAY is rather weak. They've got to show that they're executing their new roadmap, and will deliver what customers want/need.
I suspect that to uncover the truth, you have to find out *exactly* what Intel said at the demo, and offered for publication. Then you have to analyze that for what they *didn't* say. I suspect that Intel didn't lie, but I also suspect that they were careful to omit some details. Neither of those can be gleaned from the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Like Hillary or not, like Bill or not,
at least Bill Clinton, in a noteworthy fashion, lives in New York. Some might say 'notorious fashion,' but nonetheless he gives the very visible appearance of being a New York resident.
Of course most Senators need to spend most of their time in Washington. I have no idea where Hillary spends her time when she's not there.
I got a 760MB 5.25" SCSI drive on the floor that I use as a doorstop. Pay the shipping, and you can hang that around your nect, if you want to make a retro fashion statement. Don't use a slipknot, though. For that matter, I've got a 8" floppy stapled to the wall, too.
If there were a Buzzword Bingo for general metaphors instead of technobabble, you'd have a winner, here.
>Having a functional browser on your server is not completely insane, especially in a small shop.
Don't you really mean for servers that have to be configured by GUI clients on the system console? Aren't we talking primarily Windows servers, then? I guess you could be talking a very small Unix/Linux colocation, where you don't have the space for an admin system.
That said, I'm looking forward to Xorg splitting the X client libs from the server. While I can administer my servers from a command line, sometimes I just prefer GUI clients. It's also tempting to just install X, and then damage the server so it can't start.
I think the free market can be a useful tool, but I don't worship it. IMHO, the current situation is a 'deep local minima,' meaning that without a big shakeup, it's just not going to get appreciably better. I don't expect these guys to wake up one day and say, "Gee, if we'd just sit down together and hammer out a good common standard, the market growth would be explosive, and everybody would be better off." Early online service providers were in a similar local minima, except that cheap, easy email bridging, and later web bridging pointed the escape path to become Internet service providers.
In our wonderful nation of extremes, seem to want to pigeonhole too many things into the extremes. So you contrast slugging it out in the market with out-of-touch committees coming up with X.500 and the OSI 7-layer taco. The Internet is somewhere in the middle, with drafts evolving based on practical experience, by people who have learned that sometimes working together... works.
Slightly different note... Sometimes 'good enough' is the enemy of better or best. But I think what is really happening with the market competition of Instant Messaging and music downloads has nothing at all to do with quality, and everything to do with lockin.
That's the other side of the gripe about American business. It seems to me that they're afraid to compete, so they want to FORCE people to be customers.
At the end of the day, I AM THE CUSTOMER. I don't like how they're doing business, I think it's short-sighted. Furthermore, if SOMEBODY will do business in what I consider to be an enlightened fashion, at a resonable (not necessarily the lowest) price, I'll take my business there. So far the market is disappointing me.
But we have to ask one question, given that pr0n IS the most successful business on the Internet...
Do pr0n sites use common, free, and accepted protocols, or do they each try and do it their own way, to the exclusion of others? AFAIK, and that isn't very far, they all use http, https, relatively vanilla html, jpg, and the like.
I think you've helped make my case.
Remember the days of...
CompuServe
AOL
GEnie
Prodigy
The Source
They all wanted to *own* the home computer connection market. Together they balkanized it so that it never reached critical mass. Only ONE thing changed this, SMTP and the 'Internet bridge.' I used to be on CompuServe, and remember when we could begin routing email out over the Internet bridge. The other (surviving) providers followed suit, and suddenly anyone could email anyone, and home computer connectivity had its first Killer App.
The Web followed that, and though Microsoft has tried mightily, they haven't quite managed to 0wn it, and it looks like that chance might well be gone. (If only because cellphones are now on steroids, viewing the web.)
Then, in spite of a set of open protocols describing IRC, we began seeing Instant Message Balkanization. AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc, etc, and of course none of them talk to each other. (Fortunately, GAIM talks to them all.) The idiots didn't learn!
Now we're hearing about a bunch of deliberately incompatible music download protocols emerging. For that matter, we've had a bunch of deliberately incompatible filesharing protocols, already. STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!
At about this point, I'm sick and tired of people telling me how stupid government is, and how the private sector can always do better. The Internet is the best counter-example. A government project put in place a series of non-owned, open protocols and standards, people came, and for the most part, it just works. Business, in its own-the-whole-pie mindset, denies critical mass to Instant Messaging and online music distribution. If the idiots could cooperate, they could all share a HUGE pie, each would have a bigger chunk of that pie than the whole pies they now have, and customers would be MUCH better off.
That said, I won't argue that government isn't stupid, just that they have no monopoly on stupidity. Sometimes, and the Internet is the poster child for this, government can do things right and business can do things wrong.
IMHO, the real issue is that most content providers don't want IPv6, and most ISPs don't want it either, for largely the same reason.
IPv6 keeps alive the original spirit of the Internet - end-to-end. The network is dumb, the endpoints are smart. Even if there may be a lot of intelligence built into the network, it's purpose is to look dumb, and simply deliver packets from one end to another.
That's not the way the Internet has been heading. Unfortunately, the Internet is being driven toward a smart-broadcast model, where there are content providers and content consumers. It's two-way to the extent that the consumers can specify what they want from the providers. Business types also like the idea of smarter routing, so "premium" customers can get their packets routed ahead of us rabble. You know, buzzwords like "differentiation" and "value-add pricing" apply here.
It's also worth noting that most people do only two true end-to-end activities, in the original spirit of the Internet - email and filesharing. Now we find email under assault by spam, and we're approaching the point where some people would accept ANYTHING to stop it. I fear that unfortunately, that solution may well be some sort of client-server or content provider based system. As for filesharing, we know what The Powers That Be (??AA) think of that. So from those points of view, true end-to-end *should* be deprecated in favor of client/server.
As for the ISP side, the smart-broadcast model suits them just fine. Smart users who want true end-to-end are just a pain in the neck. Perhaps IPv6 could simplify things for the ISP, but that would be at the end of a long migration process. It would certainly take longer than on quarter, and ISPs couldn't see that far into the future, for the cost savings.
Just sit right back,
and you'll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip.
That started from this tropic port,
Aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty sailing man,
The skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day,
For a three hour tour,
A three hour tour.
(past nauseum)
There's got to be something about the memory works, and the way songs go into our brains. I suspect it's partly residue of our pre-literate cultural and biological heritage. The good old days, when history was oral, memorized, and in verse, not prose.
How about them there Evil Terrororists?
Hide your messages in spam with steganography and broadcast them. This way, traffic-flow-based techniques won't work.
By this premise, the DHS has a valid and critical reason to go after spam and zombies.
Actually, the Constitution has specific provisions for two-thirds majority in the Senate, in certain cases. The fear of the Founding Fathers was also known as "The Tyranny of the Majority," where a simple majority could get their way in every matter, ignoring the needs and wishes of a large minority. Such tyranny, although "democratic," produces an unstable country. Back in 1865, a large minority in the South thought a simple majority in the North was telling them too much how to manage their lives - and their slaves' lives.
Bad example, because IMHO in that case the majority was right. But on the other side of the issue, we did have a Civil War over it.
There's actually a third possibility... CBS is showing fabricated evidence, but the fabrication reflects the truth.
But it's all a distraction from the issues.
I'd just like to have a GLSA notice that there is a problem, that they know about it, and are working on it. Oh, it would also be good if they would suggest a workaround, like you have. (Thank you, very much.) I have the Win-box fully updated, and for the moment use that for the more general web, and the Gentoo box sticks to safe sites.
I'm not really a font fiend, so I'll probably drop the freetype and build mozilla as ~x86, as oldosadmin suggests. I need to check the syntax and see if I can set just 1.7.3 to ~x86, so when they come out with 1.7.3-r1 as stable, I can get back to the stable package. That's for when I forget to fiddle my package.keywords.
Won't argue about CBS, but I will note that in all of this one other thing has been lost... There's not clear and specific refutation of the service gaps, or even alternate version of what happened during those times.
But this isn't even a central election issue. It and swifties and the like are largely distractions from the real issues.
But last I checked, earlier today, they STILL didn't have stable releases of Mozilla 1.7.3 and Mozilla-Firefox 1.0PRE to build from source. They did have binary releases, but the source releases were still ~x86.
I'd also feel better if the GLSA (Gentoo Linux Security Advisory) about Mozilla would get out there.
The difference was that on Solaris there were so few people that 'viewing' actually became a substitute for direct contact. Asimov didn't consider the possible effects of subsetting your friends in this situation, though he certainly had 'us' and 'them'.
I guess to put things another way, for security, you don't put your faith, trust, and expectations in the software running on the computer, or in the computer itself.
Until we have sentient machines, to 'trust' them is to anthropomorphize them. Or like HAL, to distrust them, too.
The deserving target of faith, trust, and expectations are the *people* supplying the software and hardware, and administering the end result.
Perhaps that's one reason I tend to trust Open Source more, because usually I have at least some visibility into the *people* behind it. Though I've never met Linus, or any of the others in that ballpark, I've at least read their writings and seen their exchanges. I know at least a little about them, as people. That's hard to get with proprietary software.
There's something FAR more important about security than the code, the number of eyeballs looking at it, or even the skill of those eyeballs.
Trust. More specifically doing away with Trust.
I had a minor epiphany yesterday, read about Microsoft's DRM efforts, and realizing what may be fundamentally wrong with their security. IMHO, Microsoft believes that bad security is due to bugs, and that if they can squash their bugs, they will be able to have secure code, AND be able to TRUST the computer that their code is operating on. I'll even let them consider an insecure algorithm a bug, for the sake of this discussion. I think they really believe they can eventually ship sufficiently bug-free code to be considered Trustworthy in execution.
Contrast that with the attitude toward security that has grown in the Open Source arena. No matter how good you get, bugs will *always* be found. No matter how secure you think your system is, *someone* can always get in. Finally, you have to consider *all* avenues of attack, not just the technical/cracking ones.
Some descendents of these attitudes:
Without physical control, the rest of the security is worthless.
Human engineering is probably the biggest security hole.
Consider security as a value proposition, in two ways:
1: Can I make it sufficiently expensive that they'll attack someone else, instead of me?
2: How much do I want to spend on security, and how do I balance that with a recovery plan?
Security isn't a "nail it down, once" thing, it's a process, and includes evolution.
Bugs will happen, so put security in layers, to try and eliminate single-point-of-failure issues.
It's not so much the code, or the eyeball count, or the specific eyeballs. It's the attitude.
I liked better your comment under the subthread, "Re:Soap Operas, Movies, TV Series..." where people actually feel that they are accomplishing something with their online presence.
/.
My son (18) was somewhat addicted to political discourse on a website dedicated to "Magic the Gathering," perhaps moreso that the Magic, itself. By the end of Summer, my wife and I were tugging him back into the real world, though of mixed feelings because we do foster his growing political awareness. Developing political awareness while debating on a blog may have some traits of accomplishment to it, but IMHO the dinner table and conversations face to face are better.
The same could be said of
Well, you've got a point there. IMHO most neighbor issues aren't quite as severe as yours.
The wording wasn't actually intentional. But as I was typing the sentence, I noticed it - and decided to leave it in, anyway.
Sorry for inflicting the pain, but maybe you're one of "them," anyway. (remark needs context for humor)
No. I'm merely saying that we all need to be more tolerant of others. Period. There's a spectrum between, "I'm not very fond of quite a few people who live nearby," and "Quite a few of the people who live nearby are sh*theads." It's not an issue of how we treat our friends, it's an issue of how we treat people who are not our friends. It's the mere act of splitting our neighbors into "us" and "them" that I'm objecting to. That is a dangerous thing, because it is always easier to mistreat "them," be it verbally, physically, or legally.
When my mom and dad were kids, they worked on the farm. (29 hours a day, etc, etc) But they played with nearby kids.
When I was a kid, I mostly played with nearby kids, but my parents drove me to a few friends' houses. (and vice versa)
My kids played with a few neighborhood kids, but mostly we drove them to friends' houses. (and vice versa)
Do you see a trend here?
In the old days, we adapted and adjusted to the people around us. We are progressing toward simply finding people like us, so we don't have to adapt and adjust. The widespread availability of the car was probably a driving factor in this. But even as we are more choosey about our friends, we have to retain the same set of acquaintances, because there are after all the limitations of the physical world.
Now add the Internet. It makes it more possible than ever to withdraw from the real world. To some extent, it even allows you to minimize interactions with real-world acquaintences. Now we can pick our friends AND, to a good extent, our actuaintances. Or at least, the Internet allows us to manipulate our focus more easily, ignoring or bashing those who do not fit our world-view.
I would submit that our interpersonal skills are atrophying as a result, and that one place it becomes evident is the current election cycle. When you pick your friends and acquaintances, it becomes easier to turn the world into "us" and "them," and that seems to be what the world has been about, the past few years.
*****
Virtual Universe? I don't WANT a virtual universe that looks just like the one I'm in. A brisk walk in the real universe at least gives me a little cardiovascular exercise and stimulates my other senses. The only thing that really interests me in the virtual universe would be places I can't go, for reasons of money, time, or accessability, or places that just don't or can't exist.
Never really watched Red Dwarf. How does it relate?
Because Intel had to revamp roadmap, and has no product.
Their Pentium4 with NetBurst Architecture has smashed into a brick wall.
Their IA-64, meant to destroy the Clones, never caught on very well, and any plans to penetrate the lower-end (but not low-end) have been cut off at the knees by X86-64.
The Pentium-M is a success, but was apparently meant to be a niche product. Suddenly it's being called on to become mainstream, and they're not ready for that.
They've got to show something to make them worthy of the future. They've reacted and revamped their roadmap, but their hand TODAY is rather weak. They've got to show that they're executing their new roadmap, and will deliver what customers want/need.
I suspect that to uncover the truth, you have to find out *exactly* what Intel said at the demo, and offered for publication. Then you have to analyze that for what they *didn't* say. I suspect that Intel didn't lie, but I also suspect that they were careful to omit some details. Neither of those can be gleaned from the article.