Obviously performance can be bought with clock speed, IPC, or a combination of both. Pentium-4 was an extreme exercise in clock speed, and usually extremes wind up having problems of one sort or another. Pentium-4 had 2 problems - the "peaky" performance was handled by better compilers and by ramping the clock speed up enough so the valleys were fast enough. But the thermal problems were its downfall.
IA64 eventually did deliver decent performance. But the cost was incredible. Had Intel been simply going after that level of performance, they could have done it much more cheaply, quickly, and effectively. But you only have to look at the IP shell games they and HP played to realize that being clone-proof was the primary drive, not performance. That also meant that the architecture had to be sufficiently different that they could keep it completely fenced in.
EVERY company in a market dominating spot like Intel eventually gets tied up in self-absorbed internal goals that don't necessarily mesh with the marketplace. That says nothing bad about their engineering teams at all - it just says that when a company is far enough ahead of the competition that the competition isn't really pushing it any more, internal pressures come to bear that can produce odd-looking results. This tendency usually gets corrected, as it has in Intel's case. But there's no guarantee that it won't happen again.
One could argue that some of the same is happening with Microsoft, because their prime competitor has become their own install base. They have to keep persuading people to buy something new to replace something that they've already got that still works. Then they have to make the new product different enough to the customer feels that they're getting something for their money, but the more different, the more disruptive, etc.
Perhaps because every comment made in public may come back to haunt you someday in court. The prudent manager or attorney is very circumspect about public statements. I suspect that in the end game, SCO will learn just a little bit about this area of conduct.
He was wrong in some details, but correct on the basic point. Intel's real failing point was after Pentium-III. At that point, 2 things happened. First, the marketers gained too much power, and pushed the "market metric," clock speed, with the resulting NetBurst architecture of the Pentium4, which has been abandoned. Second, Intel pursued the IA-64, which was really a combination of an academic nifty idea with marketers' desires to be clone-proof, but with the consequence of leaving delivering value to the customer a lower priority.
In other words in the Pentium-4 generation, Intel delivered a marketer-driven (marketer, not market driven) architecture with sub-par engineering, and was distracted by the internal desires for IA-64.
>Come on, who can name a single astronaut since they ended Apollo?
You really shouldn't put a challenge like this on Slashdot. Wrong audience.
Robert Crippen and John Young - flew the first space shuttle flight, though I believe John Young also flew on both Apollo and Gemini, not sure about Crippen.
Sally Ride - first American woman in space.
Judy Resnick - Hometown (Akron, Ohio) woman killed on Challenger. Crista McAuliffe - New Hampshire schoolteacher also killed on Challenger.
Shannon Lucid - Spent a looooong time on either Mir or ISS.
"Pinky" Nelson - Prominent role in fixing a satellite, I believe the Solar Max.
Then without knowing the names, we have the Hawaiian astronaut who died on Challenger, and had an Enterprise-D (fictional) shuttle (Okuzu?) named after him. There's also diaper-woman who recently made the news.
I know it's not a very long list, but you did say, "one".
The whole Internet thing is and was really just a farce - it never existed...
That's because the US has a Free Market, and the Free Market does everything RIGHT!!
So things were just hunky-dory with computer data communications before the Government-infested Internet came along and upset the apple cart. There were plenty of competitive services like The Source, Compu$erve, AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, and the like. Oh, I almost forgot about MSN and Advantis. They all interoperated just fine, and exchanged data with no difficulties whatsoever. Telecommunications lines were ubiquitous and cable penetration was increasing, so every household had all the bandwidth and access it needed, and many had carrier choice.
Let's get this straight. The ONLY reason the Internet succeeded and the rest of those names are dust (or completely changed) is because it was NEUTRAL!
One of those unappreciated facts is the the Free Market also only works with free flow of information. In order to be a proper customer, you have to know sufficient information about the suppliers' products. So you have to go back to the first piece of sarcasm in this post, "the US has a Free Market" and realize that it all went off into left field, right there. THE US DOES NOT HAVE A FREE MARKET. Nor is the first problem preventing Free Market with government regulations of the limiting nature. Rather it's because US suppliers almost always act to restrict the flow of information.
Again, US suppliers almost always act to restrict the flow of information. Talk about a few mechanisms... First there are gag orders on lawsuits, so we can't really know liability issues of some of their products. Next, there is refusal to communicate and interoperate. The line about AOL, Compu$erve, et al was obvious sarcasm, because NONE of them exchanged information until they did it through the Internet. For that matter, Microsoft's pretending.doc and.xls are standards, while in fact they are completely closed is another Free Market aberration. The lock-in they represent prevents consumers from choosing the best word processor or spreadsheet, rather without significant expertise and effort they have to choose the brand where they first put their data. Come to think of it, Microsoft's (and Intel's) licensing agreements are another example of restricted information. In general, people have no idea whatsoever what the costs of OS or CPUs are, because those details are hidden from them.
So reading as I write, I'll have to assert that the Free Market simply CANNOT exist without regulations, in practice.
First, it's in the suppliers' self interest to restrict information as much as possible, first off permitting only "good" information out, and second using information to lock-in their customers. Second, in the short-term, short-term self-interest will always win out over long-term self interest. Besides that, if short-term self interest garners sufficient benefits in the short-term, it's entirely possible to destroy the competitor who takes long-term self interests into account. In this situation there is no long-term, merely one short-term after another. (IMHO that's what we're locked into, today)
So IMHO if Net Neutrality is cast aside, at least in the US the Internet will turn into the Balkanized pile of crap that was AOL, Compu$erve, et al so many years ago. Furthermore having surrendered what the Internet was really about when it started, the US will accelerate its competitive decline in the world marketplace and communities.
Then let him have it *either* way. If he's a member of the Executive, then he's subject to Bush's directive on record keeping in the Executive branch. If he's a member of the Legislative, then he isn't. BUT - if he's a member of the Legislative and not the Executive, then he gives up Executive privilege, and needs to surrender the information on the Energy Task Force done early in the first term.
Maybe he has a leg to stand on to choose where he stands. But I strongly suspect that there's no leg to stand on to pick and choose powers and responsibilities as if from a Chinese take-out menu. (I'll take this power, and that power, but don't want either of those limitations...)
The Soviet economy was already broken. Star Wars merely accelerated the realization that it was broken - and forced them to realize it, too.
I'm not so sure the rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 80s was such a good thing, either. Look at the mess formerly known as Yugoslavia, or the uncertain fate of nuclear assets, for instance. IMHO a slower, more measured breakup would have been better. But the whole thing was already under sufficient stress that the first visible crack would have caused the rapid breakup, and it just couldn't happen any slower.
The AC peer post suggests that turning the firewall off is not "default" and is not fair.
I used to believe firmly in firewalls, but I've come around to the OpenBSD point of view. If you NEED a firewall, you've got a problem. A firewall should be ONLY for defense-in-depth. The OS+services should be secure without one, then you add a firewall for that extra bit of coverage. That way, if there's a day-0 exploit for your OS+services, the firewall will protect you. If there's a day-0 exploit for your firewall, the OS+services are secure. As long as you keep both patched, you need aligned day-0 exploits in both firewall and OS+services in order to get cracked, and that's the product of 2 unlikely events, far more unlikely.
Of course most exploits are really human engineering, anyway. (Click this link)
If workers are "interchangeable parts," as the article seems to suggest, then from the company's point of view, it's best if your work IS your life. So what if you burn out early, there's a class-load of graduates every year, plus stragglers or over-achievers at mid-year.
In other words, you have to set your limits, because many employers will be happy to take all they can get from you, without thought to the future.
Unfortunately, in an employment situation like we have now in the US, there is little-to-no disincentive for employers to put workers on the burnout track, as a matter of course.
I am not a government contractor, but I have worked on projects for which there was a "field returns program." When part(s) came back, we figured out what happened, why they failed in field, and how to make it never-happen-again.
Which led me to think about weapons systems. Imagine a part which only needs to work for a few minutes, or maybe only a few seconds. Plus at the end of that short service life it destroys itself. No such thing as field returns.
Which then let me to think about our "precision missiles and bombs," and how often it seems that they go awry. Since at the end of a "mission" they're destroyed, how is one to know how well the electronics functioned? How is one to know if that stuff is really mil-spec hardened, or just re-badged commercial? Seems like it might be an opportunity for "Chinese quality control." (Reference to recent pet food, toothpaste, kids' toys, etc.)
I would say that malice toward conservatives is well-matched by malice toward liberals. In fact, it seems to me that with its early threads in Spiro Agnew's "radiclibs" label, reaching more open expression during the Reagan years, turning "liberal" into an Anti-American epithet and insult has reached its peak during the current administration. (Even Clinton was "somewhere to the right of" Nixon.)
Under this kind of treatment it's understandable that liberals would respond in kind. It's not the Christian thing to do, but it's understandable. Of course it's not the Christian thing to do to have made the attacks in the first place.
It's a pendulum, it swings back and forth, with a period measured in decades. I think in the past few years, it slammed the peg and is starting to fall the other way.
Some of us wish it wouldn't oscillate so hard, and bang the end-stops so violently.
So you're claiming to be a real conservative, a Goldwater Conservative - as opposed to a gun-owning, SUV-driving Bush supporter?
My brother holds that my family lives by the Conservative principles we were raised on, but in today's political spectrum that makes us Liberals. Pay your bills. Live within your means. Mind your own business, and your own conduct. If you make a mistake, admit it, and correct it.
Just trying to find the right place to say, in my best Warren Stevens imitation, "Beware monsters from the id!!"
More seriously, at the moment this looks like tapping a Morse code key with a bucket of water. We're making great strides with finer-grained input devices, but this really isn't much of an output interface. Makes me think of the science fiction story, "Faces", author forgotten. I also recently read about grafting new senses onto people. The nifty one I like was directional sense. They added a string of cellphone-like vibrators on a belt around the waist, and set things up so the North-facing one would vibrate. After a while the wearer quite noticing the vibrations consciously and developed a subconscious directional sense. Even better, this sense became fully integrated to enhance map and distance skills. "Where's home?" "That way, (points correct direction) about xx miles." (identifies correct distance)
*** SPOILER ***
"Faces" Guy is injured, needs many prosthetics, including a face, and is unhappy with the many attempts. By the end of the story, he's a brain in a mechanical body, and the nerves once used for his face now handle control and feedback for a whole new host of sensors/effectors.
I was initially being facetious, but now that I think about it, I've seen this in print, before. Microsoft wants to be THE value proposition of the modern PC. A while back, when the $100 laptop was just a twinkle in someone's eye and before Vista, Microsoft was complaining about how hardware cost too much.
Microsoft desperately wants to be a Universal Non-Commodity. They've actually succeeded at doing it for decades now. But I can't see it continuing indefinitely, the phrase "Universal Non-Commodity" simply highlights the oxymoronic nature of it all.
Maybe I'm picking on you unfairly, because your post sounded like other opinions I've heard...
There are those who consider the existence of previous wrongs adequate permission for the current administration to do those same things, without criticism.
I don't happen to agree with that opinion. I think of it more as, "We goofed on this before, let's try extra hard not to do it again."
Theoretically the Constitution was supposed to put in place checks and balances, so we could get good government out of flawed people. To avoid the car analogy, let's look at it with the computer security analogy...
I used to be a firm believer in the firewall as a necessity. Then I learned about OpenBSD, and the fact that a properly configured, properly updated system should need no firewall. Then I learned about Zero-Day exploits and defense-in-depth, and that with a properly configured and updated system PLUS a firewall, you need an alignment of Zero-Day flaws in both layers in order to get cracked. But perhaps it's mostly moot, because there are more security problems due to human engineering than any amount of software engineering.
To carry the analogy to politics...
With Good Men/Women in government, there's not need for checks and balances. With real/flawed (we're ALL flawed, in one way or another) men/women in government, we need checks and balances. The key then becomes "flaw alignment", as with the firewall and application. You need a flaw in the firewall that aligns with the hole in the application, in order to get cracked. Unfortunately, flaw alignment is all too common in government, and it revolves around power and money.
I've also heard, rather than power corrupts, power attracts the corruptible.
Since I mentioned money, I have to say that whatever else you may believe about Ronald Reagan, he did one TERRIBLE thing to the United States:
"Ronald Reagan loosed the Hounds of Greed."
Greed existed prior to the Reagan administration, and attempting to deny the power of greed is probably the greatest fallacy of Communism. But prior to Reagan, GREED (as opposed to simply greed) was frowned upon, as being kind of piggish. During Reagan's terms, "Greed is Good!" came out, unchecked. Perhaps it was a corruption of his spirit, but those who espoused it felt they were following him.
For myself, "greed is". To deny it is silly, and doomed. To embrace it is foolish. In the middle is to realize that greed is a powerful motivator and can be channeled to achieve great results. But it's a terrible master.
Last year our whole family went to see John Dean speak. (Quite good, I'm waiting for his third book - the first 2 are just raise blood pressure.)
During Q&A my wife asked if the "easy" press coverage during the Bush years reflected some sort of conspiracy - that perhaps the media wanted a Republican administration so they could keep consolidating, for instance.
Dean said that at one point he went looking, expecting to find such a conspiracy - and didn't. What he found instead was such attention to money that there was no time left for true investigative journalism. Watergate wouldn't have happened today, because Woodward & Bernstein would never have had the time to chase down the blind alleys until they found the real story. No doubt they'd be taken off of that and put on something important, like Paris Hilton's driving record and religious background.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's only effective for your relatives. Maybe you've been spit out, but you're still dead.
At this point the analogy to OSS breaks down, because in this case the predator is after the kill, not the meal.
Ms. Dr. Evik sez, "One Meeelion Dollars! Well OK, how about $416,000?"
So you're really saying rather than "security by obscurity", how about "security by threat of Gitmo"?
Obviously performance can be bought with clock speed, IPC, or a combination of both. Pentium-4 was an extreme exercise in clock speed, and usually extremes wind up having problems of one sort or another. Pentium-4 had 2 problems - the "peaky" performance was handled by better compilers and by ramping the clock speed up enough so the valleys were fast enough. But the thermal problems were its downfall.
IA64 eventually did deliver decent performance. But the cost was incredible. Had Intel been simply going after that level of performance, they could have done it much more cheaply, quickly, and effectively. But you only have to look at the IP shell games they and HP played to realize that being clone-proof was the primary drive, not performance. That also meant that the architecture had to be sufficiently different that they could keep it completely fenced in.
EVERY company in a market dominating spot like Intel eventually gets tied up in self-absorbed internal goals that don't necessarily mesh with the marketplace. That says nothing bad about their engineering teams at all - it just says that when a company is far enough ahead of the competition that the competition isn't really pushing it any more, internal pressures come to bear that can produce odd-looking results. This tendency usually gets corrected, as it has in Intel's case. But there's no guarantee that it won't happen again.
One could argue that some of the same is happening with Microsoft, because their prime competitor has become their own install base. They have to keep persuading people to buy something new to replace something that they've already got that still works. Then they have to make the new product different enough to the customer feels that they're getting something for their money, but the more different, the more disruptive, etc.
Perhaps because every comment made in public may come back to haunt you someday in court. The prudent manager or attorney is very circumspect about public statements. I suspect that in the end game, SCO will learn just a little bit about this area of conduct.
He was wrong in some details, but correct on the basic point. Intel's real failing point was after Pentium-III. At that point, 2 things happened. First, the marketers gained too much power, and pushed the "market metric," clock speed, with the resulting NetBurst architecture of the Pentium4, which has been abandoned. Second, Intel pursued the IA-64, which was really a combination of an academic nifty idea with marketers' desires to be clone-proof, but with the consequence of leaving delivering value to the customer a lower priority.
In other words in the Pentium-4 generation, Intel delivered a marketer-driven (marketer, not market driven) architecture with sub-par engineering, and was distracted by the internal desires for IA-64.
>Come on, who can name a single astronaut since they ended Apollo?
You really shouldn't put a challenge like this on Slashdot. Wrong audience.
Robert Crippen and John Young - flew the first space shuttle flight, though I believe John Young also flew on both Apollo and Gemini, not sure about Crippen.
Sally Ride - first American woman in space.
Judy Resnick - Hometown (Akron, Ohio) woman killed on Challenger.
Crista McAuliffe - New Hampshire schoolteacher also killed on Challenger.
Shannon Lucid - Spent a looooong time on either Mir or ISS.
"Pinky" Nelson - Prominent role in fixing a satellite, I believe the Solar Max.
Then without knowing the names, we have the Hawaiian astronaut who died on Challenger, and had an Enterprise-D (fictional) shuttle (Okuzu?) named after him. There's also diaper-woman who recently made the news.
I know it's not a very long list, but you did say, "one".
The whole Internet thing is and was really just a farce - it never existed...
.doc and .xls are standards, while in fact they are completely closed is another Free Market aberration. The lock-in they represent prevents consumers from choosing the best word processor or spreadsheet, rather without significant expertise and effort they have to choose the brand where they first put their data. Come to think of it, Microsoft's (and Intel's) licensing agreements are another example of restricted information. In general, people have no idea whatsoever what the costs of OS or CPUs are, because those details are hidden from them.
That's because the US has a Free Market, and the Free Market does everything RIGHT!!
So things were just hunky-dory with computer data communications before the Government-infested Internet came along and upset the apple cart. There were plenty of competitive services like The Source, Compu$erve, AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, and the like. Oh, I almost forgot about MSN and Advantis. They all interoperated just fine, and exchanged data with no difficulties whatsoever. Telecommunications lines were ubiquitous and cable penetration was increasing, so every household had all the bandwidth and access it needed, and many had carrier choice.
Let's get this straight. The ONLY reason the Internet succeeded and the rest of those names are dust (or completely changed) is because it was NEUTRAL!
One of those unappreciated facts is the the Free Market also only works with free flow of information. In order to be a proper customer, you have to know sufficient information about the suppliers' products. So you have to go back to the first piece of sarcasm in this post, "the US has a Free Market" and realize that it all went off into left field, right there. THE US DOES NOT HAVE A FREE MARKET. Nor is the first problem preventing Free Market with government regulations of the limiting nature. Rather it's because US suppliers almost always act to restrict the flow of information.
Again, US suppliers almost always act to restrict the flow of information. Talk about a few mechanisms... First there are gag orders on lawsuits, so we can't really know liability issues of some of their products. Next, there is refusal to communicate and interoperate. The line about AOL, Compu$erve, et al was obvious sarcasm, because NONE of them exchanged information until they did it through the Internet. For that matter, Microsoft's pretending
So reading as I write, I'll have to assert that the Free Market simply CANNOT exist without regulations, in practice.
First, it's in the suppliers' self interest to restrict information as much as possible, first off permitting only "good" information out, and second using information to lock-in their customers.
Second, in the short-term, short-term self-interest will always win out over long-term self interest. Besides that, if short-term self interest garners sufficient benefits in the short-term, it's entirely possible to destroy the competitor who takes long-term self interests into account. In this situation there is no long-term, merely one short-term after another. (IMHO that's what we're locked into, today)
So IMHO if Net Neutrality is cast aside, at least in the US the Internet will turn into the Balkanized pile of crap that was AOL, Compu$erve, et al so many years ago. Furthermore having surrendered what the Internet was really about when it started, the US will accelerate its competitive decline in the world marketplace and communities.
Then let him have it *either* way. If he's a member of the Executive, then he's subject to Bush's directive on record keeping in the Executive branch. If he's a member of the Legislative, then he isn't. BUT - if he's a member of the Legislative and not the Executive, then he gives up Executive privilege, and needs to surrender the information on the Energy Task Force done early in the first term.
Maybe he has a leg to stand on to choose where he stands. But I strongly suspect that there's no leg to stand on to pick and choose powers and responsibilities as if from a Chinese take-out menu. (I'll take this power, and that power, but don't want either of those limitations...)
The Soviet economy was already broken. Star Wars merely accelerated the realization that it was broken - and forced them to realize it, too.
I'm not so sure the rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 80s was such a good thing, either. Look at the mess formerly known as Yugoslavia, or the uncertain fate of nuclear assets, for instance. IMHO a slower, more measured breakup would have been better. But the whole thing was already under sufficient stress that the first visible crack would have caused the rapid breakup, and it just couldn't happen any slower.
The AC peer post suggests that turning the firewall off is not "default" and is not fair.
I used to believe firmly in firewalls, but I've come around to the OpenBSD point of view. If you NEED a firewall, you've got a problem. A firewall should be ONLY for defense-in-depth. The OS+services should be secure without one, then you add a firewall for that extra bit of coverage. That way, if there's a day-0 exploit for your OS+services, the firewall will protect you. If there's a day-0 exploit for your firewall, the OS+services are secure. As long as you keep both patched, you need aligned day-0 exploits in both firewall and OS+services in order to get cracked, and that's the product of 2 unlikely events, far more unlikely.
Of course most exploits are really human engineering, anyway. (Click this link)
If workers are "interchangeable parts," as the article seems to suggest, then from the company's point of view, it's best if your work IS your life. So what if you burn out early, there's a class-load of graduates every year, plus stragglers or over-achievers at mid-year.
In other words, you have to set your limits, because many employers will be happy to take all they can get from you, without thought to the future.
Unfortunately, in an employment situation like we have now in the US, there is little-to-no disincentive for employers to put workers on the burnout track, as a matter of course.
I once saw a stunning weather device. It was a piece of rope tied to a tree branch. The instructions were nailed to the tree:
Weather Rope
If the rope is wet, it's raining.
If the rope is stiff, it's freezing.
If the rope is swinging, it's windy.
I forget the rest, there were at least a half dozen. But as google is my friend, here's the basic idea: http://www.engravingdragon.com/Page17.html
VM's fun for mail, fooling around, and doing a few other things.
But if you're after serious throughput, use MVS instead. Code JCL in your sleep.
I am not a government contractor, but I have worked on projects for which there was a "field returns program." When part(s) came back, we figured out what happened, why they failed in field, and how to make it never-happen-again.
Which led me to think about weapons systems. Imagine a part which only needs to work for a few minutes, or maybe only a few seconds. Plus at the end of that short service life it destroys itself. No such thing as field returns.
Which then let me to think about our "precision missiles and bombs," and how often it seems that they go awry. Since at the end of a "mission" they're destroyed, how is one to know how well the electronics functioned? How is one to know if that stuff is really mil-spec hardened, or just re-badged commercial? Seems like it might be an opportunity for "Chinese quality control." (Reference to recent pet food, toothpaste, kids' toys, etc.)
I would say that malice toward conservatives is well-matched by malice toward liberals. In fact, it seems to me that with its early threads in Spiro Agnew's "radiclibs" label, reaching more open expression during the Reagan years, turning "liberal" into an Anti-American epithet and insult has reached its peak during the current administration. (Even Clinton was "somewhere to the right of" Nixon.)
Under this kind of treatment it's understandable that liberals would respond in kind. It's not the Christian thing to do, but it's understandable. Of course it's not the Christian thing to do to have made the attacks in the first place.
It's a pendulum, it swings back and forth, with a period measured in decades. I think in the past few years, it slammed the peg and is starting to fall the other way.
Some of us wish it wouldn't oscillate so hard, and bang the end-stops so violently.
So you're claiming to be a real conservative, a Goldwater Conservative - as opposed to a gun-owning, SUV-driving Bush supporter?
My brother holds that my family lives by the Conservative principles we were raised on, but in today's political spectrum that makes us Liberals.
Pay your bills.
Live within your means.
Mind your own business, and your own conduct.
If you make a mistake, admit it, and correct it.
Just trying to find the right place to say, in my best Warren Stevens imitation, "Beware monsters from the id!!"
More seriously, at the moment this looks like tapping a Morse code key with a bucket of water. We're making great strides with finer-grained input devices, but this really isn't much of an output interface. Makes me think of the science fiction story, "Faces", author forgotten. I also recently read about grafting new senses onto people. The nifty one I like was directional sense. They added a string of cellphone-like vibrators on a belt around the waist, and set things up so the North-facing one would vibrate. After a while the wearer quite noticing the vibrations consciously and developed a subconscious directional sense. Even better, this sense became fully integrated to enhance map and distance skills. "Where's home?" "That way, (points correct direction) about xx miles." (identifies correct distance)
*** SPOILER ***
"Faces"
Guy is injured, needs many prosthetics, including a face, and is unhappy with the many attempts. By the end of the story, he's a brain in a mechanical body, and the nerves once used for his face now handle control and feedback for a whole new host of sensors/effectors.
My daughter went to Europe last summer on a school-affiliated trip.
She discovered that she likes European soda, but doesn't like the US stuff.
Long Live Big Corn!!
How about putting some of the great uses into the name:
Windows General
Office
Admistration
Technical
Scientific
Engineering
and then you can also get the:
Command
eXchange
edition.
Wrong. Take the "second" out of that sentence.
I was initially being facetious, but now that I think about it, I've seen this in print, before. Microsoft wants to be THE value proposition of the modern PC. A while back, when the $100 laptop was just a twinkle in someone's eye and before Vista, Microsoft was complaining about how hardware cost too much.
Microsoft desperately wants to be a Universal Non-Commodity.
They've actually succeeded at doing it for decades now.
But I can't see it continuing indefinitely, the phrase "Universal Non-Commodity" simply highlights the oxymoronic nature of it all.
Good point, the distinction shouldn't be important, but is.
Maybe I'm picking on you unfairly, because your post sounded like other opinions I've heard...
There are those who consider the existence of previous wrongs adequate permission for the current administration to do those same things, without criticism.
I don't happen to agree with that opinion. I think of it more as, "We goofed on this before, let's try extra hard not to do it again."
Theoretically the Constitution was supposed to put in place checks and balances, so we could get good government out of flawed people. To avoid the car analogy, let's look at it with the computer security analogy...
I used to be a firm believer in the firewall as a necessity.
Then I learned about OpenBSD, and the fact that a properly configured, properly updated system should need no firewall.
Then I learned about Zero-Day exploits and defense-in-depth, and that with a properly configured and updated system PLUS a firewall, you need an alignment of Zero-Day flaws in both layers in order to get cracked.
But perhaps it's mostly moot, because there are more security problems due to human engineering than any amount of software engineering.
To carry the analogy to politics...
With Good Men/Women in government, there's not need for checks and balances.
With real/flawed (we're ALL flawed, in one way or another) men/women in government, we need checks and balances.
The key then becomes "flaw alignment", as with the firewall and application. You need a flaw in the firewall that aligns with the hole in the application, in order to get cracked.
Unfortunately, flaw alignment is all too common in government, and it revolves around power and money.
I've also heard, rather than power corrupts, power attracts the corruptible.
Since I mentioned money, I have to say that whatever else you may believe about Ronald Reagan, he did one TERRIBLE thing to the United States:
"Ronald Reagan loosed the Hounds of Greed."
Greed existed prior to the Reagan administration, and attempting to deny the power of greed is probably the greatest fallacy of Communism. But prior to Reagan, GREED (as opposed to simply greed) was frowned upon, as being kind of piggish. During Reagan's terms, "Greed is Good!" came out, unchecked. Perhaps it was a corruption of his spirit, but those who espoused it felt they were following him.
For myself, "greed is". To deny it is silly, and doomed. To embrace it is foolish. In the middle is to realize that greed is a powerful motivator and can be channeled to achieve great results. But it's a terrible master.
Last year our whole family went to see John Dean speak. (Quite good, I'm waiting for his third book - the first 2 are just raise blood pressure.)
During Q&A my wife asked if the "easy" press coverage during the Bush years reflected some sort of conspiracy - that perhaps the media wanted a Republican administration so they could keep consolidating, for instance.
Dean said that at one point he went looking, expecting to find such a conspiracy - and didn't. What he found instead was such attention to money that there was no time left for true investigative journalism. Watergate wouldn't have happened today, because Woodward & Bernstein would never have had the time to chase down the blind alleys until they found the real story. No doubt they'd be taken off of that and put on something important, like Paris Hilton's driving record and religious background.
You're absolutely RIGHT!!!
A third-party contractor deleted some email under Clinton, so Bush is now permitted to delete email at will, and it's OK.
Lincoln and Roosevelt spied on US citizens, so now Bush is allowed to, and it's OK.
Roosevelt put Japanese into internment camps during WWII, so now Bush is allowed to imprison citizens, and it's OK.
ANY sin committed by ANY President or administration is *precedent*, and that means that Bush can, too.
That means that Bush can get a blowjob from an intern, and it'll be OK.