There appears to be more lock-in than you mention...
The native Vista APIs appear to have become.NET, version 3. Essentially, cross-platform development has to go back to the drawing board, perhaps even start from scratch. This may well force developers to decide, "Vista-only" or take the time and effort, including time-to-market of crafting a new portability layer. In other words, if they try to be cross-platform, their Vista-era products are going to be late.
Theoretically, Mono would be in the best position to adapt to this. But many of us thing that Mono is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Perhaps that's another reason to keep KDE around. (besides peoples' preferences) A good argument could be made that Microsoft could shut down Mono, and presumably GNOME right after, by enforcing patents.
Sorry, but you're spouting the "Old Slashdot Meme" here, that Microsoft is a frequently anti-competitive company which uses it's monopoly position in the OS and Office environments to maintain that position and sell other products.
The "New Slashdot Meme" is that Microsoft is an oft-maligned, but innovative company with a robust research and development organization, and all-in-all they bring needed, well-received products to the market. That they have few/no viable competitors is because their products are, by and large, simply better for most uses/users.
I'll bet there's an interesting political battle going on inside Intel over the release of discrete graphics chips.
On the one hand, it's probably clear that the CPU groups of both Intel and AMD understand Linux, Open Source, and have enough of the "got religion" involved to behave in the right way. Since the graphics group is growing up inside a CPU company, the don't have the ATI/nVidia "closed religion," or at least not in a big enough way to wag the CPU-oriented dog. In this light, it's pretty obvious that SOMEONE inside Intel knows that if/when they bring out a decent open-source capable graphics card, it's going to sweep its way through Linux purchases. I for one would be ready to put my money where my mouth is, though it all depends on my purchasing schedule.
On the other hand, even recognizing the value of an open source graphics solution and its appeal to the Linux crowd, there are no doubt forces inside Intel that would like to see it kept tied to Intel CPUs and chipsets.
The real question is whether Intel would rather see an Intel graphics solution working with an AMD CPU, or gamble that they can grab the whole kit'n'kaboodle by keeping things tied.
As an aside, it's also pretty clear that though AMD may understand Open Source on the CPU side, that understanding hasn't jumped the fence to the ATI side, yet.
*********************
The strongest message we can send is to buy discrete Intel graphics cards with Open Source drivers, if/when they become available. Buy them discretely or buy them in whatever systems we buy. Vote with our $$$.
Well now that you mention it, couldn't similar terms apply to newscasts?
Imagine if Dan Rather were still in the business, he could post DMCA takedown notices based on quoting one of his metaphors. ("an election lead shakier than a bowl of cafeteria jello" or something like that) I'm sure other newsmen still in the business have similarly distinctive styles equally ripe for DMCA takedowns.
Good for fixing things after the fact. Better when used to originate a decent partitioning setup. I don't believe LVM is used on Linux base installs or what preinstalls exist.
It's not even the growing time that's the problem. On/. people practically worship the Saturn V, and bemoan the fact that the real knowledge isn't in the blueprints, it was in the now-retired people who were able to turn those blueprints into a functioning rocket.
Farming's the same. While books and study may be valuable to farming, you don't learn it from a book. You learn it from doing it, and you learn it by working for someone who already does it.
What if your ex-farmers decide that they like holding jobs with mere overtime, instead of the intense full-life thing called farming? Plus, a farm is a bizarre collection of resources built up over years or decades, much of it junk, but the oddest things that also turn out to be useful. You don't purchase and equip a new farm the way you would a new datacenter.
>I think I'd prefer it in a single place far from me.
It's got to be in SOMEBODY'S back yard.
In Vermont, the town where Vermont Yankee is located gets a substantial tax break. You either pay people to take the "icky back yard things" or you find some disenfranchised powerless people in your population and force them to have it.
>I've seen a lot of systems, *nix and Windows where proper partitioning of drives hasn't happened.
You've just hit my biggest argument against preloaded Linux. It's not even possible to do it "right," because the right way varies by anticipated usage. Though I guess I've done a number of systems with / (root),/boot, swap, and/home as a pretty decent desktop setup.
About a month or 2 back, a slip of the fingers turned my root filesystem into a linux swap partition.
Google was my friend. Shortly I learned more about backup superblocks, how to run "mkfs.ext3 -n" to do a dummy mkfs and find out where my backup superblocks are, and "fsck.ext3 -b nnn" to repair the filesystem using the backup superblock.
I was back running in less than an hour, including google time. Repairing an accidental mkswap on top of ext3 is actually one of the easier things to fix.
On the other hand, having a system and procedures that made it possible to kill regular and backup data that way, and storing unconfirmed tapes, is clearly not a good idea. Whenever I burn a CD/DVD, I take the few extra minutes and verify it right away. If the backup tape was only a few months old, odds are it was improperly written, as opposed to degraded. They should check their other backup tapes.
Perhaps BNF was his hindsight-ful reaction to having written Fortran.
Has anyone read a biography on Backus? I know Erwin Schroedinger once said of quantum mechanics, "I don't like it, and I regret ever having had anything to do with it." (or something like that)
Curious that you bring up that particular release of DOS.
Prior to that, there was MSDOS 3.3, which was the mainstream for a stagnatingly, staggeringly long time. MSDOS 4 had a limited release, which didn't count, nor did IBM DOS 4. I don't remember how long it was, but it sure seemed like MSDOS 3.3 was it for years.
Then Digital Research came along with DRDOS 5, which brought out the features that some other poster on this thread mentioned. At the time, it represented real innovation. MSDOS 5 was pretty much catch-up, though since they controlled the "standard" they could do more interesting things with compression.
That timeframe also saw the introduction of AARD into Windows, about as evil a piece of code as ever existed, up to then.
The moment it became clear that it was a giant flash thingy that appeared to be a time-consuming guided presentation, I closed it. Maybe that was an unfair first impression, but sometimes first impressions can be important, and this was one of them.
It also characterizes me and some reasons why I use Linux - I like choice and control.
Go to the web site, and there is one choice presented, and it appears that they have taken control of the presentation. I don't like that, and it's generally one of the things I don't like about Microsoft. (Street address of "One Microsoft Way" and all the net innuendo that springs from that.) Had they given me some choice at the front panel, other than "We control the horizontal, We control the vertical" I might have spent a little more time there. Perhaps I'm biased, perhaps I'm inclined to view facts in a way that reinforces my bias, I'll grant that. But at first blush, this site certainly does nothing to contradict my biases.
Oh, another reason I use Linux is because I believe in diversity, choice and competition in the marketplace. I also used OS/2 way back when. Please tell me how there's any way that converting me to a Microsoft user in today's marketplace increases diversity, choice and competition. (Maybe in some obscure future that has become a netBSD monoculture, in spite of what Netcraft says, moving to Microsoft would constitute diversity, choice, and competition.)
I presume you're joking but just in case you're not - you are aware of at least 2 reasons they launch from Florida?
1: About as far south as you can easily get on the continental US, to get speed benefit out of the Earth's rotation. None at the poles, about 1000mph at the equator, IIRC about 800mph at KSC. That's why the French and British launch at the north end of South America, and why HG Wells launched from Stone Hill in Florida, not that far from KSC, in "From Earth to the Moon." It's also part of why Russian rockets tend to be such workhorses - they're equatorially disadvantaged, and even at that Baikanaur isn't in Russia, I believe it's in one of the 'stans.
2: Before it was KSC, they were having a lot of bad days trying to launch unmanned rockets. It was really handy having lots of ocean downrange, rather than risk having their problems fall on populated areas. Maybe they are reliable enough to launch from the west today, but that's not where they started and grew.
As an aside to both points, it's worth noting that Vandenberg, the former second Shuttle launch site is rather in the middle of nowhere. The fact that Vandenberg is further north than KSC also drove the design of the Shuttle into bad directions, according to some. I once read that the possibility of Vandenberg operation is what drove the large delta wings, rather than something simpler and lighter that could have been used for Florida/Edwards. In that context, there were some NASA types really upset that the Air Force drove the Shuttle design in a direction that they didn't want, where it is today. THEN the Air Force turned around and decided they didn't like it, after having (according to some) sabotaged its design.
Anonymity is really, really thorny, and to pretend it's anything else is to deny reality.
The good side of anonymity: The ability to seek information without fearing repercussions for having sought it. The ability to give "anonymous tips," again without fear of repercussions.
The bad side of anonymity: DDOS and other general nastiness. The ability to give intentionally incorrect malicious "anonymous tips" without fear of repercussions.
There's far more than just those, but even those are powerful arguments on both sides of the issue.
As for the "where necessary," I was at a security-oriented meeting last week, and brought up the fact that we don't really have a specific legal framework in place for key escrow. What's to stop Joe Shmoe from setting up "Joe's Key Escrow Shop" and what sets up his relationship to the Law, police requests, subpoenas, etc? Then again, if key escrow were to be split into 2 agents, where's the legal framework to make sure those 2 agents are kept legally and financially independent, etc? The issues of an "identity broker" necessary for "anonymity where prudent, and accountability where necessary" are pretty much the same as key escrow.
Another issue may be "sanitizing" your video. With SD perhaps people in the background were safely unrecognizable, whereas with HD you may need model releases (or whatever passes) because there's enough extra resolution/detail to identify. Same for "product placement" types of concerns.
> Low budget filmmaking is no more expensive in HD than SD.
Wrong.
Maybe the electronics and media aren't significantly more expensive, but those aren't where the real expenses are. Back in the old pre-HD days Hollywood was griping about upcoming HD, because of the secondary implications.
Makeup needs to be more carefully done. As someone else mentioned, every pore in the skin, and that includes every bit of makeup, including flaws. The makeup lines at the edges of the Klingon forehead that didn't show on SD media if you weren't zoomed in close, now do show in HD.
Set construction quality needs to be higher, fewer corners cut. What was conveniently hidden behind SD now shows in HD.
It's the secondaries, the things that also chew a lot of time to do right, and they're NOT on the digital compound price decline curve.
> What is interesting is that, in fact, dictators are only kept in power by the will of the people (or at least the lack of the will to get rid of > them). Under Hitler, for instance, the majority of the German population were quite well off and ignored the fact that their wealth came from >the belongings stolen from those in concentration camps and alot of the work was done by slave labour (ie those in the concentration camps).
I would suspect that much of the time dictators are accepted because the current state, and thus the demonstrated alternative, is chaos. Witness the rise of the Islamic Courts in Somalia and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In both cases a repressive regime came in, but they delivered on the promise of stopping the chaos.
An inherent danger of a democracy is that it is rather chaos-prone. It takes a special kind of populace to make a democracy work, because they have to buy into the democracy and understand that they have to repress their own chaotic urges. One could call them sheep, because they submit to something other than raw strength and fear of death, but I'd prefer to call them enlightened, because they understand the benefits of buy-in and buy-in behavior. By the same token, it may not be possible to build a democracy without that buy-in behavior. How to get there is the question, but I suspect it may initially call for a repressive regime that at least maintains order. Then the repression needs to be released at a rate that allows buy-in to develop. Of course by that definition, how the heck did the US emerge?
Glad someone else said it, because if you hadn't, I would.
But let's take your first sentence, because that's where the real beef is, and reflects reality. I suspect Microsoft would rather nobody see the first 2 sentences, and feels that the use of "legitimately" is absolutely correct.
This is the point that is missing from the debate, that ODF does NOT exclude Microsoft from participating, it merely excludes them from excluding others.
I can name one right off the top of my head, somewhere close to 1000 years ago - the Anasazi. The piece I heard on the radio spoke of them over-harvesting their woodlands, and the water table dropped, turning the area into a desert which still hasn't recovered. I've heard other reports ranging from the area always was a desert to it was arid, and they turned it to desert. However all reports agree on a massive die-off. (Not 100%, there are still descendants of Anasazi represented in current tribes.)
Oops, got another. Easter Island, another case of timber over-harvesting, though the final mechanism was not desertification.
A couple of other examples - the Great Plagues of Europe in the middle ages. Not really environmental tampering, but an over-concentration of people in urban areas was certainly a significant factor.
All of these were obviously in the past, and local. But then again, back then everything was local. It's only been slightly over a century or so that we've accumulated the potential to think globally and affect things globally. Again, even with nukes we can't "destroy the world," but we can certainly destroy our ability to continue our comfortable civilization on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless of course it's a "Conservative Think Tank." One could argue whether or not today that term is an oxymoron.
I always felt I was a moderate. As I get older and learn more, I'm beginning to believe I'm a Goldwater Conservative. Today that makes me a Liberal.
A co-worker, referring to some of our employer's policies, used the phrase, "Stepping over dollars to pick up nickels."
Seems applicable here, too.
There appears to be more lock-in than you mention...
.NET, version 3. Essentially, cross-platform development has to go back to the drawing board, perhaps even start from scratch. This may well force developers to decide, "Vista-only" or take the time and effort, including time-to-market of crafting a new portability layer. In other words, if they try to be cross-platform, their Vista-era products are going to be late.
The native Vista APIs appear to have become
Theoretically, Mono would be in the best position to adapt to this. But many of us thing that Mono is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Perhaps that's another reason to keep KDE around. (besides peoples' preferences) A good argument could be made that Microsoft could shut down Mono, and presumably GNOME right after, by enforcing patents.
Sorry, but you're spouting the "Old Slashdot Meme" here, that Microsoft is a frequently anti-competitive company which uses it's monopoly position in the OS and Office environments to maintain that position and sell other products.
The "New Slashdot Meme" is that Microsoft is an oft-maligned, but innovative company with a robust research and development organization, and all-in-all they bring needed, well-received products to the market. That they have few/no viable competitors is because their products are, by and large, simply better for most uses/users.
I'll bet there's an interesting political battle going on inside Intel over the release of discrete graphics chips.
On the one hand, it's probably clear that the CPU groups of both Intel and AMD understand Linux, Open Source, and have enough of the "got religion" involved to behave in the right way. Since the graphics group is growing up inside a CPU company, the don't have the ATI/nVidia "closed religion," or at least not in a big enough way to wag the CPU-oriented dog. In this light, it's pretty obvious that SOMEONE inside Intel knows that if/when they bring out a decent open-source capable graphics card, it's going to sweep its way through Linux purchases. I for one would be ready to put my money where my mouth is, though it all depends on my purchasing schedule.
On the other hand, even recognizing the value of an open source graphics solution and its appeal to the Linux crowd, there are no doubt forces inside Intel that would like to see it kept tied to Intel CPUs and chipsets.
The real question is whether Intel would rather see an Intel graphics solution working with an AMD CPU, or gamble that they can grab the whole kit'n'kaboodle by keeping things tied.
As an aside, it's also pretty clear that though AMD may understand Open Source on the CPU side, that understanding hasn't jumped the fence to the ATI side, yet.
*********************
The strongest message we can send is to buy discrete Intel graphics cards with Open Source drivers, if/when they become available. Buy them discretely or buy them in whatever systems we buy. Vote with our $$$.
Well now that you mention it, couldn't similar terms apply to newscasts?
Imagine if Dan Rather were still in the business, he could post DMCA takedown notices based on quoting one of his metaphors. ("an election lead shakier than a bowl of cafeteria jello" or something like that) I'm sure other newsmen still in the business have similarly distinctive styles equally ripe for DMCA takedowns.
Good for fixing things after the fact. Better when used to originate a decent partitioning setup. I don't believe LVM is used on Linux base installs or what preinstalls exist.
>it takes months to produce most crops.
/. people practically worship the Saturn V, and bemoan the fact that the real knowledge isn't in the blueprints, it was in the now-retired people who were able to turn those blueprints into a functioning rocket.
It's not even the growing time that's the problem. On
Farming's the same. While books and study may be valuable to farming, you don't learn it from a book. You learn it from doing it, and you learn it by working for someone who already does it.
What if your ex-farmers decide that they like holding jobs with mere overtime, instead of the intense full-life thing called farming? Plus, a farm is a bizarre collection of resources built up over years or decades, much of it junk, but the oddest things that also turn out to be useful. You don't purchase and equip a new farm the way you would a new datacenter.
>I think I'd prefer it in a single place far from me.
It's got to be in SOMEBODY'S back yard.
In Vermont, the town where Vermont Yankee is located gets a substantial tax break. You either pay people to take the "icky back yard things" or you find some disenfranchised powerless people in your population and force them to have it.
>I've seen a lot of systems, *nix and Windows where proper partitioning of drives hasn't happened.
/boot, swap, and /home as a pretty decent desktop setup.
You've just hit my biggest argument against preloaded Linux. It's not even possible to do it "right," because the right way varies by anticipated usage. Though I guess I've done a number of systems with / (root),
About a month or 2 back, a slip of the fingers turned my root filesystem into a linux swap partition.
Google was my friend. Shortly I learned more about backup superblocks, how to run "mkfs.ext3 -n" to do a dummy mkfs and find out where my backup superblocks are, and "fsck.ext3 -b nnn" to repair the filesystem using the backup superblock.
I was back running in less than an hour, including google time. Repairing an accidental mkswap on top of ext3 is actually one of the easier things to fix.
On the other hand, having a system and procedures that made it possible to kill regular and backup data that way, and storing unconfirmed tapes, is clearly not a good idea. Whenever I burn a CD/DVD, I take the few extra minutes and verify it right away. If the backup tape was only a few months old, odds are it was improperly written, as opposed to degraded. They should check their other backup tapes.
Perhaps BNF was his hindsight-ful reaction to having written Fortran.
Has anyone read a biography on Backus? I know Erwin Schroedinger once said of quantum mechanics, "I don't like it, and I regret ever having had anything to do with it." (or something like that)
Curious that you bring up that particular release of DOS.
Prior to that, there was MSDOS 3.3, which was the mainstream for a stagnatingly, staggeringly long time. MSDOS 4 had a limited release, which didn't count, nor did IBM DOS 4. I don't remember how long it was, but it sure seemed like MSDOS 3.3 was it for years.
Then Digital Research came along with DRDOS 5, which brought out the features that some other poster on this thread mentioned. At the time, it represented real innovation. MSDOS 5 was pretty much catch-up, though since they controlled the "standard" they could do more interesting things with compression.
That timeframe also saw the introduction of AARD into Windows, about as evil a piece of code as ever existed, up to then.
>We'll give you the fix in "a future release".
I think you've got this wrong, shouldn't it be, "We'll SELL you the fix in "a future release"."
The moment it became clear that it was a giant flash thingy that appeared to be a time-consuming guided presentation, I closed it. Maybe that was an unfair first impression, but sometimes first impressions can be important, and this was one of them.
It also characterizes me and some reasons why I use Linux - I like choice and control.
Go to the web site, and there is one choice presented, and it appears that they have taken control of the presentation. I don't like that, and it's generally one of the things I don't like about Microsoft. (Street address of "One Microsoft Way" and all the net innuendo that springs from that.) Had they given me some choice at the front panel, other than "We control the horizontal, We control the vertical" I might have spent a little more time there. Perhaps I'm biased, perhaps I'm inclined to view facts in a way that reinforces my bias, I'll grant that. But at first blush, this site certainly does nothing to contradict my biases.
Oh, another reason I use Linux is because I believe in diversity, choice and competition in the marketplace. I also used OS/2 way back when. Please tell me how there's any way that converting me to a Microsoft user in today's marketplace increases diversity, choice and competition. (Maybe in some obscure future that has become a netBSD monoculture, in spite of what Netcraft says, moving to Microsoft would constitute diversity, choice, and competition.)
Let me rephrase you're point less subtly and with less information.
When big steel and small car meet, big steel "wins". (That is, if the term "wins" can be used here.)
The presence of so many big steel cars means that small cars are no longer safe.
>It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Do the eyes turn blue-in-blue, also?
I presume you're joking but just in case you're not - you are aware of at least 2 reasons they launch from Florida?
1: About as far south as you can easily get on the continental US, to get speed benefit out of the Earth's rotation. None at the poles, about 1000mph at the equator, IIRC about 800mph at KSC. That's why the French and British launch at the north end of South America, and why HG Wells launched from Stone Hill in Florida, not that far from KSC, in "From Earth to the Moon." It's also part of why Russian rockets tend to be such workhorses - they're equatorially disadvantaged, and even at that Baikanaur isn't in Russia, I believe it's in one of the 'stans.
2: Before it was KSC, they were having a lot of bad days trying to launch unmanned rockets. It was really handy having lots of ocean downrange, rather than risk having their problems fall on populated areas. Maybe they are reliable enough to launch from the west today, but that's not where they started and grew.
As an aside to both points, it's worth noting that Vandenberg, the former second Shuttle launch site is rather in the middle of nowhere. The fact that Vandenberg is further north than KSC also drove the design of the Shuttle into bad directions, according to some. I once read that the possibility of Vandenberg operation is what drove the large delta wings, rather than something simpler and lighter that could have been used for Florida/Edwards. In that context, there were some NASA types really upset that the Air Force drove the Shuttle design in a direction that they didn't want, where it is today. THEN the Air Force turned around and decided they didn't like it, after having (according to some) sabotaged its design.
Anonymity is really, really thorny, and to pretend it's anything else is to deny reality.
The good side of anonymity:
The ability to seek information without fearing repercussions for having sought it.
The ability to give "anonymous tips," again without fear of repercussions.
The bad side of anonymity:
DDOS and other general nastiness.
The ability to give intentionally incorrect malicious "anonymous tips" without fear of repercussions.
There's far more than just those, but even those are powerful arguments on both sides of the issue.
As for the "where necessary," I was at a security-oriented meeting last week, and brought up the fact that we don't really have a specific legal framework in place for key escrow. What's to stop Joe Shmoe from setting up "Joe's Key Escrow Shop" and what sets up his relationship to the Law, police requests, subpoenas, etc? Then again, if key escrow were to be split into 2 agents, where's the legal framework to make sure those 2 agents are kept legally and financially independent, etc? The issues of an "identity broker" necessary for "anonymity where prudent, and accountability where necessary" are pretty much the same as key escrow.
This appears to be somewhat related to string theory, though I'm sure someone more versed in the art can tell me how I'm not even wrong on this point.
But in a more layman sense, there appear to be some string concepts at work here, but with one subtle difference... It looks provable.
Do you do significant amounts of makeup?
Another issue may be "sanitizing" your video. With SD perhaps people in the background were safely unrecognizable, whereas with HD you may need model releases (or whatever passes) because there's enough extra resolution/detail to identify. Same for "product placement" types of concerns.
> Low budget filmmaking is no more expensive in HD than SD.
Wrong.
Maybe the electronics and media aren't significantly more expensive, but those aren't where the real expenses are. Back in the old pre-HD days Hollywood was griping about upcoming HD, because of the secondary implications.
Makeup needs to be more carefully done. As someone else mentioned, every pore in the skin, and that includes every bit of makeup, including flaws. The makeup lines at the edges of the Klingon forehead that didn't show on SD media if you weren't zoomed in close, now do show in HD.
Set construction quality needs to be higher, fewer corners cut. What was conveniently hidden behind SD now shows in HD.
It's the secondaries, the things that also chew a lot of time to do right, and they're NOT on the digital compound price decline curve.
> What is interesting is that, in fact, dictators are only kept in power by the will of the people (or at least the lack of the will to get rid of
> them). Under Hitler, for instance, the majority of the German population were quite well off and ignored the fact that their wealth came from
>the belongings stolen from those in concentration camps and alot of the work was done by slave labour (ie those in the concentration camps).
I would suspect that much of the time dictators are accepted because the current state, and thus the demonstrated alternative, is chaos. Witness the rise of the Islamic Courts in Somalia and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In both cases a repressive regime came in, but they delivered on the promise of stopping the chaos.
An inherent danger of a democracy is that it is rather chaos-prone. It takes a special kind of populace to make a democracy work, because they have to buy into the democracy and understand that they have to repress their own chaotic urges. One could call them sheep, because they submit to something other than raw strength and fear of death, but I'd prefer to call them enlightened, because they understand the benefits of buy-in and buy-in behavior. By the same token, it may not be possible to build a democracy without that buy-in behavior. How to get there is the question, but I suspect it may initially call for a repressive regime that at least maintains order. Then the repression needs to be released at a rate that allows buy-in to develop. Of course by that definition, how the heck did the US emerge?
Glad someone else said it, because if you hadn't, I would.
But let's take your first sentence, because that's where the real beef is, and reflects reality. I suspect Microsoft would rather nobody see the first 2 sentences, and feels that the use of "legitimately" is absolutely correct.
This is the point that is missing from the debate, that ODF does NOT exclude Microsoft from participating, it merely excludes them from excluding others.
Yes.
I can name one right off the top of my head, somewhere close to 1000 years ago - the Anasazi. The piece I heard on the radio spoke of them over-harvesting their woodlands, and the water table dropped, turning the area into a desert which still hasn't recovered. I've heard other reports ranging from the area always was a desert to it was arid, and they turned it to desert. However all reports agree on a massive die-off. (Not 100%, there are still descendants of Anasazi represented in current tribes.)
Oops, got another. Easter Island, another case of timber over-harvesting, though the final mechanism was not desertification.
A couple of other examples - the Great Plagues of Europe in the middle ages. Not really environmental tampering, but an over-concentration of people in urban areas was certainly a significant factor.
All of these were obviously in the past, and local. But then again, back then everything was local. It's only been slightly over a century or so that we've accumulated the potential to think globally and affect things globally. Again, even with nukes we can't "destroy the world," but we can certainly destroy our ability to continue our comfortable civilization on it.