Anyone who truly understands ECC knows that DRDRAM just isn't a good fit in a server, even with Interleaved Data Mode.
As for the Pentium IV, Intel has now garnered a definite track record for doing it wrong the first time. It started up with the crippled 486SX and it's complete CPU replacement masquerading as a 387-like FPU, the 487SX. Next up was the 5V room heater disguised as a Pentium. Then we got to the Pentium Pro, which was great for a real OS like OS/2 or Linux, but absolutely stunk on the dominant Win3 or Win95 platforms.
Even aside from being 'Designed for DRDRAM', the Pentium IV is a rather peaky beast. On some things it absolutely flies, but on others it's slower than an older CPU half its speed. It doesn't appear well balanced.
Look for Pentium IV.1 in another year or less. It will be better balanced, may have the SMT there's so much buzz about, and we'll see whether it's still 'Designed for DRDRAM'.
Back in the early-mid 70's people were taking two 6800 CPUs, wiring them out-of-phase, and essentially building tightly-coupled SMP systems. We didn't really have threading in those days, or else the correct OS could have made such a system SMT, instead.
But someone else was designing another CPU, called the COPS. They looked at this well-known out-of-phase 6800 technique, and realized that their design basically used clock-up for fetch/decode, and clock-down for execute. During each half-cycle, half the CPU was sitting idle.
So they doubled the registers, using the fetch/decode unit with one register-set during clock-down and the other register-set during clock-up. The execute unit worked in the converse fashion, alternating register sets. A dual CPU on a single chip for the cost of a second register set and a little control/arbitration logic. They didn't attempt any sophisticated contention-prevention, leaving that up to the software. This was mid-late 70's.
With more modern software, COPS might have been the first SMT. I don't know the timeframe of the CDC6000, whether it beats mid-late 70's or not.
IIRC, a Supreme Court decision back around the turn of the last century granted corporations the same rights and status as people. I don't know the case, but it involved a strike and possibly a Union. The Court decided that the "rights" of the business were being compromised, and order the workers back on the job. Nor do I remember enough if the workers were underpaid, overworked, or subjected to undue hazard. But given the era, I suspect all three.
Come back to the present, and look at the topic of campaign finance reform. A key argument against it seems to be that in this context money=speech, and corporations have the same rights to free speech as people. In this case, that means the right to donate large sums of money. This argument has met with some success, though I don't know the whole track record.
On the converse side, if a person had knowingly sold a known lethal product while denying any such problems with it, I suspect the penalty wouldn't stop at a fine, even a hefty one. If there were further proof of deliberate misinformation on a continuing and systematic basis, and the deaths were in the thousands or more, I wouldn't be surprised to see Murder-1 charged.
I've heard that a corporation can be de-chartered, the equivalent of a death sentence. I've never heard of it being applied.
When you add this and the superior (life+95 vs life+75) copyright rights of corportations, it's clear that in the Orwellian sense, they are more equal than us.
I get chips designed, and fooling with Linux isn't stopping that, or even slowing it down. This is adding a little extra, on my own. Besides, I have usually had some tool responsibilities, as well.
I see the future heading toward commodity PC hardware. With no preventive action now, corporate suits try to move things toward Windows. My job now is done on Unix, so I see some attempts at Linux migration as preventive precaution.
So you want me to go do my chip design work on some form of Windows, then?
I'm trying to get the chip design job moved to commodity PC hardware, using Linux. Guess what, we may be able to program our way out of a paper bag, but that's not the job at hand. I need to spend my time on my primary job, not settling glibc incompatibilities.
Windows is starting to become practical for chip design, but the opportunity for Linux is still wide open - for a while. Last time I tried building the gEDA suite, I had to give up after a while - there just wan't time to get all the library issues resolved.
> When OH When will cable modems become available in my city?!
It's fun to look in on the cable newsgroup and see how badly it sucks, then go look on the DSL newsgroup and see how badly IT sucks.
My conclusion, the grass probably isn't any greener on the other side of the cable/DSL fence. Don't jump over based on any sort of generalized hearsay, whatsoever. Before changing, talk to someone who has been using the service for a while, somewhere near your area. My cable provider has some problems, and some of their service techs may be clueless, but the service is decent enough, and they do have some good service techs, so at the moment, I'm not inclined to jump.
People talk about upstream pipes being better for DSL than for cable, but I suspect that DSL ISPs are just as capable of oversubscribing their pipes as cable.
As bad as you think Verizon is, at least the ISP and the last mile are under the same company. I'm sure there's internal fingerpointing, but one company is responsible to you, and has to resolve that. If you had a different ISP, and Verizon had the last mile, they'd point fingers at each other forever.
About the only allure of DSL to me is the more reasonable AUP - cable 'discourages' running your own servers.
Usually, one good way to do this is "providing an mutually acceptable quality of product or service at a mutually acceptable price in competition in the free market."
But you can often make more money, more easily, by buying up the competition, or running it out of business, then essentially force the consumers to buy your product. Your 'limiting price' then is no longer set by competition, but rather by the barrier of entry cost for someone else to become competition. This is usually a much higher number.
Alternatively, you can keep the price static, and reduce the product. (ie: cut your service) It amounts to pretty much the same thing.
We still have a local ISP here in Vermont, SoverNet. We used to have another local ISP, Together Net, which was bought by OneMain, which was bought by EarthLink. Unfortunately, in order for me to get Bandwidth, SoverNet was not an option, so I'm with an evil corporation.
Never said that. Sometimes you have to fight, knowing you're going to lose. The other way is to lose the argument in such a way that others start to lose, too. Maybe if you can make enough people lose with you, then they will get concerned, too.
As long as this is a 'Geek issue', we're going nowhere. The biggest benefit to us is that Hollywood has whetted their appetite, and are now going after general recording rights - and in a way that's going to hit time-shifters and commercial-zappers. Now maybe Joe Sixpak is going to be on our side.
we have to look at the amount of money involved here, and realize that the current administrateion seems to e planning to run the government, 'like a corporation.' There's good and bad to that, and I think we're about to see the bad.
Regardless of the merits of the arguments, I expect to see money win, here. I regret having become somewhat cynical about this.
Nor do I expect anything better out of the Supreme Court, any more.
Power them with nuclear fusion
on
Plastic Valley?
·
· Score: 2
Another technology that's been 10-15 years away...
The mind naturally weakens in some areas after 40, but it makes up for it in others. Being able to pick a tool that can help you make up for thoses losses is a strength, in my book.
Never used ML. Hardware engineer, by trade. Got it back when compsci was starting to emerge as a separate field from EE and Math.
and no mention of strong typing, Ada, or the like.
Not even an "Ada was a babe" thread.
Clearly, strong typing isn't everything. But neither is any other single component of software development. You need an arsenal of tools to do the job right, beginning with your brain, and you need to know how to use them.
But a weakly typed language takes a whole slew of potential errors and makes finding them a matter of human diligence, debugging, and auxiliary tools like lint.
As if having the ordinary problems of teenage kids wasn't bad enough, now am I going to have to worry about them joining the Drummers, as well as the more mundane problems of alcohol, drugs, smoking, gangs, car accidents, etc.
There's a difference. Adding 2MB of cache on the PIII involves adding extra silicon, packaging, etc. They truly do have a higher cost, though I won't argue that the Xeon price rose more than the cost did.
With the Celeron, 133MHz bus technology is already here, and in all likelihood, all currently produced parts are capable of running it. Consider that the early 300MHz Celeron ran a 66MHz bus, and we're talking double or more of that, now.
Once the cache moved onto the chip with PIII, the difference between PIII and Celeron became pure (dying) package legacy, marketing, and selective crippling.
I suspect the Celeron and PIII are the same die, perhaps with crippling fuses or bond pads on the former. Anyone know for sure?
What about the fact that this is only a rather passe' 100MHz bus, instead of 133MHz. Others have mentioned the DDR/double-pumped bus issue, but at least that one's new and AMD, not Intel. By now, PC100 is downright OLD, and PC133 is the norm.
Intel is clearly protecting the PIII by not enabling Celeron with PC133.
Patents are easier to have overturned in the first year after being issued. "We, the Open Source Community," should have some sort of watchdog effort pointed at the USPTO to keep track of new stuff being issued, that really isn't new. Then we could go after it.
My pet peeve is the silly hierarchical package display. You have to figure out exactly where in the hierarchy the developer chose to stick the silly thing. Often a package can logically go in one of several places, and it seems that almost as often, yet a different place was chosen.
I like xrpm, which gives a flat view of installed packages or rpms in a directory. A long list, but no hiding in odd mislabeled corners.
Unfortunately, my RH 6.2 has 'aged' too much. I'm seeing too many things that pretty much require me to turn it into RH 7 with prerequisites, so I may as well take the faster route. Then get the updates on, etc.
RPM is handy for a user, as opposed to a developer. Though I try to understand more of the nuts and bolts of what's happening, my computer is more of a tool than a programming machine.
I know the reference was to the babe, not the language. But when a thread on software reliability came up, I figured it was a reasonable place to see or say something about Ada - the language. Setting the threshold down (maybe I should have gone to 0) to scan for " ada" I found only the reference to the babe.
Maybe this in itself says something about why software sucks.
Cruising at +1, and on this topic, I'm a little surprised to find that this was the only reference to Ada.
Ada gets a bad rap for it's roots in government, its verbosity, and the rather straitjacket nature of strict typing. But guess what... it wasn't designed for rapid programming, or to make programming easy. Ada was designed for the 20+ year lifetime that code may well have after it's put into use.
The same things that slow the start of coding help the lifetime and maintenance. It takes the willingness to accept some discipline and take a longer-term view.
Think of the people who never thought their code would survive to Y2K.
Imbedded DRAM latency
on
IBMs CMOS 9S
·
· Score: 1
They've pretty much stripped the latency down, almost to the cell-level factors I spoke of. Plus those imbedded DRAMs are quite a bit smaller than the 256Mb stuff seen in commodity SDRAM today. Remember that imbedded DRAM doesn't need big off-chip drivers, doesn't need multiplexed addresses, doesn't even need multiplexed data input and output. Some amount of conventional access time comes from all the stuff added to make a DRAM talk to other chips over a small number of pins.
Say you purchase some property, occupy and improve it for a while, and then 'abandon' it. There is a thing known as 'squatters rights'. If someone lives on that property for a certain amount of time and improves it, and you do nothing about it, they can legally take over possession.
Or from another angle, if you let your property get run down, the others in the neighborhood may object, because it hurts their property value. You may find youself in court, to either shape up or sell.
Re:First likely use of this...
on
IBMs CMOS 9S
·
· Score: 4
The IBMlogic and DRAM processes are somewhat separated because they are drive by different needs. DRAM is driven almost exclusively by density and cost. Logic is driven by performance and wirability. The big sharing point between the two is in the photolithography development.
Incidentally, DRAM is unlikely to move into SOI any time soon, because the raw wafers have too many defects. For ordinary circuits that class of defects doesn't really matter, but when you're trying to store fewer than 50,000 electrons for 64,000,000 nS, they can kill.
DRAM is much better off in bulk or epi silicon, rather than SOI. Besides, there's so much density and cost pressure that relatively crude, slow devices are used. Even if one wanted to pay for faster transistors, it wouldn't do you much good. The paramount need to shut off the switch into the DRAM cell (so it can hold that 0 or 1) means that particular transistor *can't* be optimized for performance, and that one link can quickly become the performance-dominating factor. In other words, it isn't terribly cost-effective for an ordinary DRAM to pay for fast transistors.
Cell phones have been stunted in the US for years because everyone here has a case of Microsoft-envy. They all want to set and own standards, and use them to lock out the comptetition.
So far nobody has been able to set a clear standard and accomplish this, and nobody is willing to deploy the future without having a lock-in. Therefore we're still waiting for what Europe has had for years.
There has been quite a bit of talk about end-to-end on Slashdot, recently. The Internet only happened the way it did BECAUSE IT WAS NOT DONE BY FOR-PROFIT INSTITUTIONS. Had the Internet been done for-profit originally, it would not be end-to-end. It would probably resemble The Source, or the old Compuserve, the old Prodigy, or the old AOL. The ones of those who didn't adapt to the Internet aren't with us, any more. This is the same phenomena at work as with wireless, and even high-speed wired communications. Beyond that, those same forces are at work trying to undermine the open end-to-end Internet we have, today.
Either:
We have some corporations in us and other places that don't understand the free market,
Or:
The free market really isn't the solution to all the world's problems. Perhaps the free market is really like a big hammer, looking at the world like a bunch of nails. But then, we really don't want more government, either...
Slashdot Mirror
and give me a clue what Black and White is all about, and why the ASPCA will hate it?
The web site certainly didn't seem too informative, or perhaps it's flash movie lasted longer than my attention span.
Anyone who truly understands ECC knows that DRDRAM just isn't a good fit in a server, even with Interleaved Data Mode.
As for the Pentium IV, Intel has now garnered a definite track record for doing it wrong the first time. It started up with the crippled 486SX and it's complete CPU replacement masquerading as a 387-like FPU, the 487SX. Next up was the 5V room heater disguised as a Pentium. Then we got to the Pentium Pro, which was great for a real OS like OS/2 or Linux, but absolutely stunk on the dominant Win3 or Win95 platforms.
Even aside from being 'Designed for DRDRAM', the Pentium IV is a rather peaky beast. On some things it absolutely flies, but on others it's slower than an older CPU half its speed. It doesn't appear well balanced.
Look for Pentium IV.1 in another year or less. It will be better balanced, may have the SMT there's so much buzz about, and we'll see whether it's still 'Designed for DRDRAM'.
Back in the early-mid 70's people were taking two 6800 CPUs, wiring them out-of-phase, and essentially building tightly-coupled SMP systems. We didn't really have threading in those days, or else the correct OS could have made such a system SMT, instead.
But someone else was designing another CPU, called the COPS. They looked at this well-known out-of-phase 6800 technique, and realized that their design basically used clock-up for fetch/decode, and clock-down for execute. During each half-cycle, half the CPU was sitting idle.
So they doubled the registers, using the fetch/decode unit with one register-set during clock-down and the other register-set during clock-up. The execute unit worked in the converse fashion, alternating register sets. A dual CPU on a single chip for the cost of a second register set and a little control/arbitration logic. They didn't attempt any sophisticated contention-prevention, leaving that up to the software. This was mid-late 70's.
With more modern software, COPS might have been the first SMT. I don't know the timeframe of the CDC6000, whether it beats mid-late 70's or not.
IIRC, a Supreme Court decision back around the turn of the last century granted corporations the same rights and status as people. I don't know the case, but it involved a strike and possibly a Union. The Court decided that the "rights" of the business were being compromised, and order the workers back on the job. Nor do I remember enough if the workers were underpaid, overworked, or subjected to undue hazard. But given the era, I suspect all three.
Come back to the present, and look at the topic of campaign finance reform. A key argument against it seems to be that in this context money=speech, and corporations have the same rights to free speech as people. In this case, that means the right to donate large sums of money. This argument has met with some success, though I don't know the whole track record.
On the converse side, if a person had knowingly sold a known lethal product while denying any such problems with it, I suspect the penalty wouldn't stop at a fine, even a hefty one. If there were further proof of deliberate misinformation on a continuing and systematic basis, and the deaths were in the thousands or more, I wouldn't be surprised to see Murder-1 charged.
I've heard that a corporation can be de-chartered, the equivalent of a death sentence. I've never heard of it being applied.
When you add this and the superior (life+95 vs life+75) copyright rights of corportations, it's clear that in the Orwellian sense, they are more equal than us.
I get chips designed, and fooling with Linux isn't stopping that, or even slowing it down. This is adding a little extra, on my own. Besides, I have usually had some tool responsibilities, as well.
I see the future heading toward commodity PC hardware. With no preventive action now, corporate suits try to move things toward Windows. My job now is done on Unix, so I see some attempts at Linux migration as preventive precaution.
So you want me to go do my chip design work on some form of Windows, then?
I'm trying to get the chip design job moved to commodity PC hardware, using Linux. Guess what, we may be able to program our way out of a paper bag, but that's not the job at hand. I need to spend my time on my primary job, not settling glibc incompatibilities.
Windows is starting to become practical for chip design, but the opportunity for Linux is still wide open - for a while. Last time I tried building the gEDA suite, I had to give up after a while - there just wan't time to get all the library issues resolved.
I don't know if SoverNet does DSL, or not. But I'm 43,000 feet from my CE, so it's cable or sub-33.6 dialup for me.
> When OH When will cable modems become available in my city?!
It's fun to look in on the cable newsgroup and see how badly it sucks, then go look on the DSL newsgroup and see how badly IT sucks.
My conclusion, the grass probably isn't any greener on the other side of the cable/DSL fence. Don't jump over based on any sort of generalized hearsay, whatsoever. Before changing, talk to someone who has been using the service for a while, somewhere near your area. My cable provider has some problems, and some of their service techs may be clueless, but the service is decent enough, and they do have some good service techs, so at the moment, I'm not inclined to jump.
People talk about upstream pipes being better for DSL than for cable, but I suspect that DSL ISPs are just as capable of oversubscribing their pipes as cable.
As bad as you think Verizon is, at least the ISP and the last mile are under the same company. I'm sure there's internal fingerpointing, but one company is responsible to you, and has to resolve that. If you had a different ISP, and Verizon had the last mile, they'd point fingers at each other forever.
About the only allure of DSL to me is the more reasonable AUP - cable 'discourages' running your own servers.
to make money.
Usually, one good way to do this is "providing an mutually acceptable quality of product or service at a mutually acceptable price in competition in the free market."
But you can often make more money, more easily, by buying up the competition, or running it out of business, then essentially force the consumers to buy your product. Your 'limiting price' then is no longer set by competition, but rather by the barrier of entry cost for someone else to become competition. This is usually a much higher number.
Alternatively, you can keep the price static, and reduce the product. (ie: cut your service) It amounts to pretty much the same thing.
We still have a local ISP here in Vermont, SoverNet. We used to have another local ISP, Together Net, which was bought by OneMain, which was bought by EarthLink. Unfortunately, in order for me to get Bandwidth, SoverNet was not an option, so I'm with an evil corporation.
> So we shouldn't fight? pooey
Never said that. Sometimes you have to fight, knowing you're going to lose. The other way is to lose the argument in such a way that others start to lose, too. Maybe if you can make enough people lose with you, then they will get concerned, too.
As long as this is a 'Geek issue', we're going nowhere. The biggest benefit to us is that Hollywood has whetted their appetite, and are now going after general recording rights - and in a way that's going to hit time-shifters and commercial-zappers. Now maybe Joe Sixpak is going to be on our side.
we have to look at the amount of money involved here, and realize that the current administrateion seems to e planning to run the government, 'like a corporation.' There's good and bad to that, and I think we're about to see the bad.
Regardless of the merits of the arguments, I expect to see money win, here. I regret having become somewhat cynical about this.
Nor do I expect anything better out of the Supreme Court, any more.
Another technology that's been 10-15 years away...
for the last 30 years, or so.
The mind naturally weakens in some areas after 40, but it makes up for it in others. Being able to pick a tool that can help you make up for thoses losses is a strength, in my book.
Never used ML. Hardware engineer, by trade. Got it back when compsci was starting to emerge as a separate field from EE and Math.
and no mention of strong typing, Ada, or the like.
Not even an "Ada was a babe" thread.
Clearly, strong typing isn't everything. But neither is any other single component of software development. You need an arsenal of tools to do the job right, beginning with your brain, and you need to know how to use them.
But a weakly typed language takes a whole slew of potential errors and makes finding them a matter of human diligence, debugging, and auxiliary tools like lint.
As if having the ordinary problems of teenage kids wasn't bad enough, now am I going to have to worry about them joining the Drummers, as well as the more mundane problems of alcohol, drugs, smoking, gangs, car accidents, etc.
There's a difference. Adding 2MB of cache on the PIII involves adding extra silicon, packaging, etc. They truly do have a higher cost, though I won't argue that the Xeon price rose more than the cost did.
With the Celeron, 133MHz bus technology is already here, and in all likelihood, all currently produced parts are capable of running it. Consider that the early 300MHz Celeron ran a 66MHz bus, and we're talking double or more of that, now.
Once the cache moved onto the chip with PIII, the difference between PIII and Celeron became pure (dying) package legacy, marketing, and selective crippling.
I suspect the Celeron and PIII are the same die, perhaps with crippling fuses or bond pads on the former. Anyone know for sure?
What about the fact that this is only a rather passe' 100MHz bus, instead of 133MHz. Others have mentioned the DDR/double-pumped bus issue, but at least that one's new and AMD, not Intel. By now, PC100 is downright OLD, and PC133 is the norm.
Intel is clearly protecting the PIII by not enabling Celeron with PC133.
Patents are easier to have overturned in the first year after being issued. "We, the Open Source Community," should have some sort of watchdog effort pointed at the USPTO to keep track of new stuff being issued, that really isn't new. Then we could go after it.
We can all be Stupid Patent Police, every one.
My pet peeve is the silly hierarchical package display. You have to figure out exactly where in the hierarchy the developer chose to stick the silly thing. Often a package can logically go in one of several places, and it seems that almost as often, yet a different place was chosen.
I like xrpm, which gives a flat view of installed packages or rpms in a directory. A long list, but no hiding in odd mislabeled corners.
Unfortunately, my RH 6.2 has 'aged' too much. I'm seeing too many things that pretty much require me to turn it into RH 7 with prerequisites, so I may as well take the faster route. Then get the updates on, etc.
RPM is handy for a user, as opposed to a developer. Though I try to understand more of the nuts and bolts of what's happening, my computer is more of a tool than a programming machine.
I know the reference was to the babe, not the language. But when a thread on software reliability came up, I figured it was a reasonable place to see or say something about Ada - the language. Setting the threshold down (maybe I should have gone to 0) to scan for " ada" I found only the reference to the babe.
Maybe this in itself says something about why software sucks.
Cruising at +1, and on this topic, I'm a little surprised to find that this was the only reference to Ada.
Ada gets a bad rap for it's roots in government, its verbosity, and the rather straitjacket nature of strict typing. But guess what... it wasn't designed for rapid programming, or to make programming easy. Ada was designed for the 20+ year lifetime that code may well have after it's put into use.
The same things that slow the start of coding help the lifetime and maintenance. It takes the willingness to accept some discipline and take a longer-term view.
Think of the people who never thought their code would survive to Y2K.
They've pretty much stripped the latency down, almost to the cell-level factors I spoke of. Plus those imbedded DRAMs are quite a bit smaller than the 256Mb stuff seen in commodity SDRAM today. Remember that imbedded DRAM doesn't need big off-chip drivers, doesn't need multiplexed addresses, doesn't even need multiplexed data input and output. Some amount of conventional access time comes from all the stuff added to make a DRAM talk to other chips over a small number of pins.
Say you purchase some property, occupy and improve it for a while, and then 'abandon' it. There is a thing known as 'squatters rights'. If someone lives on that property for a certain amount of time and improves it, and you do nothing about it, they can legally take over possession.
Or from another angle, if you let your property get run down, the others in the neighborhood may object, because it hurts their property value. You may find youself in court, to either shape up or sell.
The IBMlogic and DRAM processes are somewhat separated because they are drive by different needs. DRAM is driven almost exclusively by density and cost. Logic is driven by performance and wirability. The big sharing point between the two is in the photolithography development.
Incidentally, DRAM is unlikely to move into SOI any time soon, because the raw wafers have too many defects. For ordinary circuits that class of defects doesn't really matter, but when you're trying to store fewer than 50,000 electrons for 64,000,000 nS, they can kill.
DRAM is much better off in bulk or epi silicon, rather than SOI. Besides, there's so much density and cost pressure that relatively crude, slow devices are used. Even if one wanted to pay for faster transistors, it wouldn't do you much good. The paramount need to shut off the switch into the DRAM cell (so it can hold that 0 or 1) means that particular transistor *can't* be optimized for performance, and that one link can quickly become the performance-dominating factor. In other words, it isn't terribly cost-effective for an ordinary DRAM to pay for fast transistors.
Cell phones have been stunted in the US for years because everyone here has a case of Microsoft-envy. They all want to set and own standards, and use them to lock out the comptetition.
So far nobody has been able to set a clear standard and accomplish this, and nobody is willing to deploy the future without having a lock-in. Therefore we're still waiting for what Europe has had for years.
There has been quite a bit of talk about end-to-end on Slashdot, recently. The Internet only happened the way it did BECAUSE IT WAS NOT DONE BY FOR-PROFIT INSTITUTIONS. Had the Internet been done for-profit originally, it would not be end-to-end. It would probably resemble The Source, or the old Compuserve, the old Prodigy, or the old AOL. The ones of those who didn't adapt to the Internet aren't with us, any more. This is the same phenomena at work as with wireless, and even high-speed wired communications. Beyond that, those same forces are at work trying to undermine the open end-to-end Internet we have, today.
Either:
We have some corporations in us and other places that don't understand the free market,
Or:
The free market really isn't the solution to all the world's problems. Perhaps the free market is really like a big hammer, looking at the world like a bunch of nails. But then, we really don't want more government, either...