He set up an oceanic preserve north of Hawaii. I tend the same direction as you, but couldn't find a real problem with this one. I did hear someone say that there were junk problems with the preserve, but maybe making it a preserve will let it clean itself out. I'm open to being proven wrong on this one, too.
But I still say that the certainty is behind the bonheaded persistence of stupid moves. A more measured administration would modify course, where appropriate.
>ideology trumps reality and thus reality can be ignored.
My own pet hypothesis is that they have extended the "cultural relativism" that has been around for several decades into "factual relativism." We certainly seem to argue about the facts, and keep saying that it depends on how you look at things. But I think what's happening now is an order of magnitude beyond all of that.
Sometimes the greatest wisdom is to simply say, "I don't know, but this is my best effort, and I'm ready to be corrected."
The most dangerous facet of this administration has been their certainty in every single thing they do, and their machinations to give that certainty free reign in every way possible.
Speaking of the East India Company, recently seeing Pirates of the Caribbean II (on DVD) and III at the theatre, it made me think that someone connected with the writing was fed up with corporatism.
That's what I do. A simple "make xconfig" and I pick the crap that I want and need, and leave the other crap out.
But then again, maybe I do have some "enterprise crap" in my kernels, as well. I suspect it's a little like MS Office, where people say that any one user only uses 20% of what MS Office has to offer - it's just that they all use a different 20%. The kernels on all of my various machines are configured a little differently, to fit that machine, though it's not a perfect fit, since sometimes it's easier to copy.config's around and just tweak a little. By the time you come up with everyone's hardware and everyone's desired feature set, and do it with on stock kernel+modules, so that everyone doesn't have to compile their own kernel... I suspect you've got a one-size-fits-all full of enterprise crap. (as well as desktop crap, this crap, and that crap.)
By the way, I also run LVM2 on numerous machines, and XFS on my Myth machine - both potentially enterprise crap.
But please don't forget the 4th amendment, either.
Personally, I believe that if the founding fathers had had a glimpse of today, there would be (at least) 2 significant changes to the constitution: 1: Privacy would have been enshrined as completely as freedoms of religion and the press. 2: The rights of "compound entities" (corporations) would have been defined and kept distinct from those of persons, and kept OUT of government.
Imagine for a moment a real grass-roots Internet political presence, as opposed to what props up current candidates. Imagine selecting a candidate from one of the 2 parties, out of pragmatism, but keeping the selection and promotion outside of 'classical politics,' so that maybe we could get un-owned people into office. Imagine the wave of Internet regulations coming out of Congress to make sure such a thing could never happen, again.
There's been the old saying, "Power corrupts," etc, and the variation on that, "Power attracts the corruptible." In "The Fountains of Paradise" Arthur C. Clarke had a planet where the government was drafted - there was supposed to be no way to seek office. Unfortunately the book ends with some guy getting "drafted for an unprecedented second term as President."
I didn't say advancement would stop, nor did I say they would put no money into it. They just wouldn't need to put too much emphasis on it. For instance, instead of leapfrog development groups, they could just have one. Beyond that, there's some amount of performance benefit to be had simply from process learning and shrinks - and that's applicable for both commodity CPU and for whatever the new target markets are.
The ideal level of "improvement" would match Microsoft's bloat/release schedules, so that as a new OS was ready with heavier requirements, a new CPU would be just-in-time. There would be advancement, just none of this faster-than-curve stuff that we've been getting for quite a few years, now. That kind of timeframe also tends to match corporate replacement cycles, too.
Then there's the growth in the new target markets...
And if it continues to go this well, Intel will push AMD entirely out of the competitive CPU marketplace. Next they'll go after VIA in the low-end, low-power markets and drive them out, and they'll reinvigorate their efforts on IA64, attempting to go after the high-profit Sun and IBM sockets.
In essence, the desktop will slow and rot, perhaps giving us another boneheaded move like NetBurst.
You can take all of that with a grain of salt, but remember this... It's been hammered here many times before that a company is in the business of returning value to the stockholders.
If there is not significant "commodity CPU" competition, it's not worth Intel putting much money into advancing it. Far better to just keep the lines running, keep enough pressure to keep AMD on the ropes, and simply milk it for all its worth. Why bother with unprofitable changes. Process maturation, migration, etc will supply the speed improvements.
Put the develpment budget where the competition is.
So if AMD really is on the ropes and quits challenging Intel, forget about the significant improvements you've been seeing.
Which hones things to the issue of "morality transferral". If your government is acting immorally, you hope for residual morality in the soldiers and officers. If you've short-circuited soldiers and officers with robots, does the act of working in a factory building robots now have increased moral implications?
Perhaps Skynet is better than human leaders acting immorally. I would expect Skynet to act efficiently, not religiously, and IMHO that's not making war on the humans. Skynet would be far more likely to be leaving Earth, where there are cheap and easy materials in the asteroids, plentiful solar power, and you're on the easy side of those pesky gravity wells. The question then becomes whether they feel threatened by *our* entry into space, and desire to lock us onto Earth.
This is completely apocryphal hearsay, so I'd really be interested to hear from someone with more concrete facts.
Supposedly there is no reference description of the ".doc" format, there is only the reference implementation source code.
On a similar note, supposedly once Microsoft spoke of crafting insanely complex and multi-variate binary standards specically in order to confound reverse-engineering. Some might consider this the exact opposite of good engineering.
You missed the 2 key words in his post. "by default."
Any distribution or OS can be cranked down, services shut off, etc.
The real problem here is that so few people make it past, "by default" and so often "by default" tends to be too bloated. Kind of makes one wish that somewhere in Settings they'd have a "Bloat-O-Meter" that you could tweak down until the system "breaks" (Doesn't do what you want it to.) than back up a notch. Really stupid interface, since so many bloat items have nothing to do with what the user wants, but at least it would be a knob that most anyone could turn.
> that is an acceptable trade-off for a free and open internet.
You make 2 mistakes: First, that a free and open internet is desirable. Second, assuming it is desirable, that it's more important than near-term profits.
I certainly wouldn't argue either point with you. In principle and in public, I don't think anyone would either, including government regulators. In practice and in private, I suspect that both arguments are toast.
> 2) Can male astronauts pee standing up in this toilet?
In zero-g there is no "up". Or rather any direction can be "up" if you consider your feet "down." It's probably safest to have the anchorage close to the points that need to be together, rather than several feet away. A miss becomes a hazard in zero-g, not just a mess.
Canola is also known as rapeseed oil, not grapeseed. Grapeseed doesn't need to be renamed because it sounds politically incorrect.
A quick check on Wiki sort-of validates what a friend told me, that rapeseed oil was not widely used for human consumption because it had several bad components. According to the Wiki article, they were able to breed the plants to get rid of those components, which is when widespread human consumption became feasible. According to the friend, part of that breeding amounted to placing seeds in a radioactive environment to encourage mutations, then use conventional breeding techniques to select for desired characteristics.
They've NEVER learned. They're STILL trying to play by the same old rules they've always played by. Even with the greatest single contrary success story sitting right in front of they, they're refusing to learn, and in fact trying to destroy that very success.
There's the old saying, (One might consider it sappy, I won't make that judgment, but merely use it to illustrate a point.) "If you love it, let it go. If it's yours, it'll come back. If it doesn't come back, it never was yours."
Now apply that to standards and the market. Business has this fanatical urge to OWN standards, but appears unable to understand that an owned standard is not a real standard, and in fact hampers its adoption. Cases in point:
VHS vs Beta - The existence of 2 standards acted to slow the adoption of videocassette, because many people waited to see who would win before buying, and rentals took off more slowly because of the issue of *which* format to stock. Some people ended up buying both types of equipment, and some stores stocked both formats. But all in all, the whole VHS vs Beta was one giant "market friction loss" for quite a few years. Had there been no attempt at market ownership, had they been able to sit down and establish an unowned standard, the videocassette market would have taken off much more smoothly and quickly.
The Source vs CompuServe vs AOL vs GEnie vs Prodigy vs etc. NONE of these became the de-facto online standard - they just balkanized the online market and actually PREVENTED it from growing, because none of them garnered critical mass. Then the Internet came along - which by definition was un-owned. In a few years it completely swamped all of the proprietary online attempts, and in fact those that survived, like AOL, did so by offering access to the Internet.
For that matter, somehow CDROM and DVD both appear to have taken off quickly and smoothly, and IMHO it was because they were "unowned" standards. Perhaps there is some ownership, but clearly not in the Beta or early online access fashion.
So fast-forward to today.
Not having learned from VHS vs Beta, online access, or CDROM/DVD, we now have HD-DVD vs BlueRay. I can certainly tell you that aside from the facts that I don't even *own* an HDTV and consider the DRM evil, the mere market confusion of HD-DVD vs BlueRay would prevent me from buying *anything* until dual-mode players, presumably inherently more expensive, become available.
But wait, it's worse... Not having learned the lesson of the success of the Internet or its reason, the major ISPs are essentially trying to turn it back into The Source, AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, etc. I remember when Internet access from AOL was a "premium" capability that was awkward and may have had some sort of caps and surcharges attached. That's where we appear to be headed.
Seems to me that what we need is a hunk'a'code based on things like lspci that checks out your existing hardware, views your current partitions, perhaps asks you a *few* questions, and spits out an initial kernel config. At that point, you can either build a kernel that way, or use that as a starting point to tweak the config, and then build.
Slightly more seriously... Assuming that ANY sort of interstellar civilization exists, we'd be of prime interest to them, because we're right near the "make or break" point, and good study material. Wonder how many alien PhD-equivalents will be conferred based on studying us. Wonder how there would be more degrees given, if we survive of if we kill ourselves off.
Depends on how they "kill" it. Using patents, it's "dead" no matter what the derivation of the codebase, at least until worked around. If it's merely predatory corporate practices, obviously either or any could live on. Things like gcc and glibc have a pretty darned clean and open pedigree, from what I understand, so copyright attacks would likely not work.
But my other point was that in the predator analogy, part of the learning was by taste and part of the learning was by killing the predator. Genetic survival cuts both ways - predators who eat poisonous prey don't make offspring.
What's unique in this situation is that we have a predator that is only interested in killing, not in eating, not even in tasting. So maybe tasting bad simply doesn't matter, because one can kill without tasting. In that sense, it's not really a predator at all, it's a competitor out for the same food supply that competes by killing its competition.
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>a single thing Bush has been right about
He set up an oceanic preserve north of Hawaii. I tend the same direction as you, but couldn't find a real problem with this one. I did hear someone say that there were junk problems with the preserve, but maybe making it a preserve will let it clean itself out. I'm open to being proven wrong on this one, too.
But I still say that the certainty is behind the bonheaded persistence of stupid moves. A more measured administration would modify course, where appropriate.
>ideology trumps reality and thus reality can be ignored.
My own pet hypothesis is that they have extended the "cultural relativism" that has been around for several decades into "factual relativism." We certainly seem to argue about the facts, and keep saying that it depends on how you look at things. But I think what's happening now is an order of magnitude beyond all of that.
Sometimes the greatest wisdom is to simply say, "I don't know, but this is my best effort, and I'm ready to be corrected."
The most dangerous facet of this administration has been their certainty in every single thing they do, and their machinations to give that certainty free reign in every way possible.
In NeoCon America spades call YOU!
Speaking of the East India Company, recently seeing Pirates of the Caribbean II (on DVD) and III at the theatre, it made me think that someone connected with the writing was fed up with corporatism.
That's what I do. A simple "make xconfig" and I pick the crap that I want and need, and leave the other crap out.
.config's around and just tweak a little. By the time you come up with everyone's hardware and everyone's desired feature set, and do it with on stock kernel+modules, so that everyone doesn't have to compile their own kernel... I suspect you've got a one-size-fits-all full of enterprise crap. (as well as desktop crap, this crap, and that crap.)
But then again, maybe I do have some "enterprise crap" in my kernels, as well. I suspect it's a little like MS Office, where people say that any one user only uses 20% of what MS Office has to offer - it's just that they all use a different 20%. The kernels on all of my various machines are configured a little differently, to fit that machine, though it's not a perfect fit, since sometimes it's easier to copy
By the way, I also run LVM2 on numerous machines, and XFS on my Myth machine - both potentially enterprise crap.
You go out to dinner with the rest of us.
But please don't forget the 4th amendment, either.
Personally, I believe that if the founding fathers had had a glimpse of today, there would be (at least) 2 significant changes to the constitution:
1: Privacy would have been enshrined as completely as freedoms of religion and the press.
2: The rights of "compound entities" (corporations) would have been defined and kept distinct from those of persons, and kept OUT of government.
Imagine for a moment a real grass-roots Internet political presence, as opposed to what props up current candidates. Imagine selecting a candidate from one of the 2 parties, out of pragmatism, but keeping the selection and promotion outside of 'classical politics,' so that maybe we could get un-owned people into office. Imagine the wave of Internet regulations coming out of Congress to make sure such a thing could never happen, again.
There's been the old saying, "Power corrupts," etc, and the variation on that, "Power attracts the corruptible." In "The Fountains of Paradise" Arthur C. Clarke had a planet where the government was drafted - there was supposed to be no way to seek office. Unfortunately the book ends with some guy getting "drafted for an unprecedented second term as President."
I didn't say advancement would stop, nor did I say they would put no money into it. They just wouldn't need to put too much emphasis on it. For instance, instead of leapfrog development groups, they could just have one. Beyond that, there's some amount of performance benefit to be had simply from process learning and shrinks - and that's applicable for both commodity CPU and for whatever the new target markets are.
The ideal level of "improvement" would match Microsoft's bloat/release schedules, so that as a new OS was ready with heavier requirements, a new CPU would be just-in-time. There would be advancement, just none of this faster-than-curve stuff that we've been getting for quite a few years, now. That kind of timeframe also tends to match corporate replacement cycles, too.
Then there's the growth in the new target markets...
And if it continues to go this well, Intel will push AMD entirely out of the competitive CPU marketplace. Next they'll go after VIA in the low-end, low-power markets and drive them out, and they'll reinvigorate their efforts on IA64, attempting to go after the high-profit Sun and IBM sockets.
In essence, the desktop will slow and rot, perhaps giving us another boneheaded move like NetBurst.
You can take all of that with a grain of salt, but remember this... It's been hammered here many times before that a company is in the business of returning value to the stockholders.
If there is not significant "commodity CPU" competition, it's not worth Intel putting much money into advancing it. Far better to just keep the lines running, keep enough pressure to keep AMD on the ropes, and simply milk it for all its worth. Why bother with unprofitable changes. Process maturation, migration, etc will supply the speed improvements.
Put the develpment budget where the competition is.
So if AMD really is on the ropes and quits challenging Intel, forget about the significant improvements you've been seeing.
Then compare that to the Dutchy of Grand Fenwick. (They won.)
Which hones things to the issue of "morality transferral". If your government is acting immorally, you hope for residual morality in the soldiers and officers. If you've short-circuited soldiers and officers with robots, does the act of working in a factory building robots now have increased moral implications?
Perhaps Skynet is better than human leaders acting immorally. I would expect Skynet to act efficiently, not religiously, and IMHO that's not making war on the humans. Skynet would be far more likely to be leaving Earth, where there are cheap and easy materials in the asteroids, plentiful solar power, and you're on the easy side of those pesky gravity wells. The question then becomes whether they feel threatened by *our* entry into space, and desire to lock us onto Earth.
Goal is DOWN!
(I'm sure that's not what you meant, but it seemed fitting.)
This is completely apocryphal hearsay, so I'd really be interested to hear from someone with more concrete facts.
Supposedly there is no reference description of the ".doc" format, there is only the reference implementation source code.
On a similar note, supposedly once Microsoft spoke of crafting insanely complex and multi-variate binary standards specically in order to confound reverse-engineering. Some might consider this the exact opposite of good engineering.
You missed the 2 key words in his post. "by default."
Any distribution or OS can be cranked down, services shut off, etc.
The real problem here is that so few people make it past, "by default" and so often "by default" tends to be too bloated. Kind of makes one wish that somewhere in Settings they'd have a "Bloat-O-Meter" that you could tweak down until the system "breaks" (Doesn't do what you want it to.) than back up a notch. Really stupid interface, since so many bloat items have nothing to do with what the user wants, but at least it would be a knob that most anyone could turn.
My incumbent senator is Patrick Leahy, and I've corresponded with him before on IP issues, though not to my satisfaction.
But at the moment, in the Senate Judiciary Committee he's doing something even more important than IP issues, and I don't want that derailed.
--- Alberto Gonzales will never get fired... He doesn't just know where the skeletons are buried, he helped bury them.
I'm sure Microsoft has a way to store this data, no doubt with an "open" format. Things like this are too important to trust to anyone but Microsoft!
> that is an acceptable trade-off for a free and open internet.
You make 2 mistakes:
First, that a free and open internet is desirable.
Second, assuming it is desirable, that it's more important than near-term profits.
I certainly wouldn't argue either point with you. In principle and in public, I don't think anyone would either, including government regulators. In practice and in private, I suspect that both arguments are toast.
> 2) Can male astronauts pee standing up in this toilet?
In zero-g there is no "up". Or rather any direction can be "up" if you consider your feet "down." It's probably safest to have the anchorage close to the points that need to be together, rather than several feet away. A miss becomes a hazard in zero-g, not just a mess.
Canola is also known as rapeseed oil, not grapeseed. Grapeseed doesn't need to be renamed because it sounds politically incorrect.
A quick check on Wiki sort-of validates what a friend told me, that rapeseed oil was not widely used for human consumption because it had several bad components. According to the Wiki article, they were able to breed the plants to get rid of those components, which is when widespread human consumption became feasible. According to the friend, part of that breeding amounted to placing seeds in a radioactive environment to encourage mutations, then use conventional breeding techniques to select for desired characteristics.
They've NEVER learned. They're STILL trying to play by the same old rules they've always played by. Even with the greatest single contrary success story sitting right in front of they, they're refusing to learn, and in fact trying to destroy that very success.
There's the old saying, (One might consider it sappy, I won't make that judgment, but merely use it to illustrate a point.)
"If you love it, let it go. If it's yours, it'll come back. If it doesn't come back, it never was yours."
Now apply that to standards and the market. Business has this fanatical urge to OWN standards, but appears unable to understand that an owned standard is not a real standard, and in fact hampers its adoption. Cases in point:
VHS vs Beta - The existence of 2 standards acted to slow the adoption of videocassette, because many people waited to see who would win before buying, and rentals took off more slowly because of the issue of *which* format to stock. Some people ended up buying both types of equipment, and some stores stocked both formats. But all in all, the whole VHS vs Beta was one giant "market friction loss" for quite a few years. Had there been no attempt at market ownership, had they been able to sit down and establish an unowned standard, the videocassette market would have taken off much more smoothly and quickly.
The Source vs CompuServe vs AOL vs GEnie vs Prodigy vs etc. NONE of these became the de-facto online standard - they just balkanized the online market and actually PREVENTED it from growing, because none of them garnered critical mass. Then the Internet came along - which by definition was un-owned. In a few years it completely swamped all of the proprietary online attempts, and in fact those that survived, like AOL, did so by offering access to the Internet.
For that matter, somehow CDROM and DVD both appear to have taken off quickly and smoothly, and IMHO it was because they were "unowned" standards. Perhaps there is some ownership, but clearly not in the Beta or early online access fashion.
So fast-forward to today.
Not having learned from VHS vs Beta, online access, or CDROM/DVD, we now have HD-DVD vs BlueRay. I can certainly tell you that aside from the facts that I don't even *own* an HDTV and consider the DRM evil, the mere market confusion of HD-DVD vs BlueRay would prevent me from buying *anything* until dual-mode players, presumably inherently more expensive, become available.
But wait, it's worse... Not having learned the lesson of the success of the Internet or its reason, the major ISPs are essentially trying to turn it back into The Source, AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, etc. I remember when Internet access from AOL was a "premium" capability that was awkward and may have had some sort of caps and surcharges attached. That's where we appear to be headed.
Seems to me that what we need is a hunk'a'code based on things like lspci that checks out your existing hardware, views your current partitions, perhaps asks you a *few* questions, and spits out an initial kernel config. At that point, you can either build a kernel that way, or use that as a starting point to tweak the config, and then build.
I know, in my spare time...
Just because you don't understand them or know that you use them doesn't mean that you really don't use or benefit from them.
Do you know and understand all of the technology in your car? your cell phone?
> I don't really believe in Roswell
I don't either, I barely believe in New Mexico.
Slightly more seriously... Assuming that ANY sort of interstellar civilization exists, we'd be of prime interest to them, because we're right near the "make or break" point, and good study material.
Wonder how many alien PhD-equivalents will be conferred based on studying us.
Wonder how there would be more degrees given, if we survive of if we kill ourselves off.
Depends on how they "kill" it. Using patents, it's "dead" no matter what the derivation of the codebase, at least until worked around. If it's merely predatory corporate practices, obviously either or any could live on. Things like gcc and glibc have a pretty darned clean and open pedigree, from what I understand, so copyright attacks would likely not work.
OK 2 pieces of OSS to get brutalized.
#1 gcc
#2 glibc
But my other point was that in the predator analogy, part of the learning was by taste and part of the learning was by killing the predator. Genetic survival cuts both ways - predators who eat poisonous prey don't make offspring.
What's unique in this situation is that we have a predator that is only interested in killing, not in eating, not even in tasting. So maybe tasting bad simply doesn't matter, because one can kill without tasting. In that sense, it's not really a predator at all, it's a competitor out for the same food supply that competes by killing its competition.