It'd take a pretty big leap of logic to get from what I said to there. All I said was that we don't have any information on what the world would look like without patents
It wasn't a leap of logic, it was actually an analogy.
You are, effectively, saying we can't know anything about anything, until we've go through it. The same could be argued for property rights, murder, etc. If you have no other point than to argue that nobody can know anything, your argument is worthless.
In theory, software (solid-state digital circuits) has huge advantages over hardware. Software offers extreme flexibility, no wear-and-tear, etc. If it worked as well as it should, in theory, there wouldn't be mechanical linkages just about anywhere, anymore. All the controls in your car would be electric, and a significant portion of your car's engine would be gone (no more cam shaft). The same would be true of most everything... If not replacing significant numbers of mechanical components, at least using software to precisely control it, and getting much better efficiency as a result. Yes, your refrigerator, microwave, etc. could all greatly benefit from software control.
There are just two big problems that have made software control a non-starter.
First is customization. Put a spring in the mechanics of an engine, and I can replace it with a shorter/longer/stronger/weaker spring. I can heat it up to weaken it, grind it down, etc... With software, you are given a black box, binary-only, with no documentation on how it works, and definitely no common interface to access and modify it. So every time car companies add another function to their cars' onboard computers, and take away mechanical systems, there's extreme resistance, as buyers know they're out of the loop, and if they want to adjust anything, or if something should go wrong, they can only take it to the select few company-blessed shops, which have paid the necessary bribes to get enough info to do just a few basic things with the onboard computer. And you're entirely screwed if you want more changes than that, because the company doesn't WANT you to, and without man millions of dollars on the line, you're not even a blip on their radar.
Despite what many believe, cost is almost never a problem. For low cost products, low-end micro-controllers can be found for pennies, and even cheaper are the basic I/O elements like thermistors, power meters, transistors, relays, etc. Yet even the dirt cheap processors sold today can do many millions of calculations per second, far faster than could be needed for damn near any products.
Second, and perhaps more important, is reliability. Computer hardware is EXTREMELY reliable. You can go buy a dirt cheap commodity CPU, RAM and MOBO, and be pretty damn sure it will run for 20 years without a SINGLE error. The only big exception to this is power supplies... a marginal one, not supplying enough power will cause a crash, but that generallyonly happens in the case of the cheapest no-name junk. What's more, go up a small step to a high quality MOBO, ECC RAM, redundant PSUs, UPS, etc., and you'll never ever see a hardware-induced glitch.
The reliability problem comes ENTIRELY from poor software, and mostly commonly available kernels, at that. People don't want to believe that, but the facts are that computers are 100% pure math machines, and math is 100% accurate. A computer will do exactly what you tell it to do, but most people are trying to program their computer through several million lines of indirection... If you write, in hex, a simple loop with a bit of processing, a computer will run it error-free, from here until doomsday, but programing a complex system in hex is much too hard, and human programmers aren't perfect enough to do so.
The only real possibility to ensure reliability with reasonable development time is something very much like a micro-kernel. You need a tiny bit (a few hundred KBs) of EXTREMELY-thoroughly audited code, that can very strictly manage memory, do strict input and bounds checking, carefully manage communications between independent modules of code, instantly tear-down and restart any bit of code which shows the slightest signs of an error, and also strictly ensuring real-time operation.
I'm not endorsing any product here. The fact is nothing like this exists. That is why we aren't seeing mechanical systems having components being replaced by software as quickly as they can be redesigned. Open source operating systems
By way of comparison, the 1 GHz AMD Geode runs on about 1 watt of power, and ARM processors can get by for even less.
That's a really terrible comparison...
First off, your power figures on AMD Geodes are entirely wrong. The only 1GHz Geode I was able to find is the "AMD Geode(TM) NX 1500@6W," and beyond 6 being a lot bigger than 1, is much lower than the actual wattage rating anyhow, it's just like that 1500 PR number. For comparison the AMD Geode LX 800@0.9W processor is actually 500MHz, and operates at a TDP of 3.6W and 1.8W typical.
And ARM processors are a worthless comparison as well... While they may sport relatively impressive MHz ratings, the slowest Geodes, or other AMD/Intel CPUs vastly underclocked (to whatever milliwatt level) will easily blow them away in performance.
The power consumption problem is due more to the fact that compensating for this difference in speed requires a large SRAM cache on the die.
The cache certainly contributes, but power consumption figures on larger/smaller cache models don't bear-out that it is as significant as you suggest.
The key to reducing CPU power consumption is to use lower-latency memories, which require smaller on-die caches for a given performance level.
GREAT! So now we've gotten rid of that power-sucking 2MBs of cache on the chip, and replaced it with 2,048MBs of high-speed, power-sucking RAM on the motherboard.
Wait - that never happened so you can't *possibly* have any evidence to support your point.
Absolutely right. You've just proven that property rights should be abolished, since people are going to continue making things, even though they'll just be stolen.
They talk at the urinals, they fart and laugh about it infront of each other, they tell each other stories about whatever girls they brought home from the bar, and [...]
You can claim sexism all you want, but there are PLENTY of men that aren't rude slobs out there, and also don't get involved in such behavior, yet do just fine. I don't know where you're talking about, but in fact, for every job I've had, such behavior would be considered highly unprofessional, and decidedly NOT benefitial to your career, even if your boss is involved.
While you're talking about the "boy's club" you could just as well be talking about drinking, or many other questionable activities. You don't get promoted by being as bad as the guy who's one small step above you... Maybe it'll work in tiny, informal companies, but not anywhere professional.
Preditor/prey ratios also indicate that they were warm blooded.
...And the massive size of the largest dinosaurs entirely precludes the possibility of being warm blooded, lest they have to eat for more hours than there is in a day to maintain their weight.
I think the problem is that "news" in the US is just crap. Americans now prefer crap over facts.
A common sentiment, but completely wrong. NEWS today is as good as it has ever been.
The whole problem is that pop-culture, entertainment crap TV shows get to call themselves "NEWS" without any repercussions. I've long thought about taking any TV show that perhaps incidentally mentions a current event, and claiming that it's "NEWS" to avoid otherwise-required ratings.
If you want crap, you turn on CNN/MSNBC/FOX/etc. If you want NEWS, you have to tune in to CBS/ABC/NBC at 4:30am. I've watched plenty of hours of BBC News and I can tell you without a doubt that American NEWS is much better, even today.
Aircraft deaths do not even make the list. How can something that accounts for less then 0.1% of all accidental deaths be called "unsafe"?
You're confused on so many levels...
First, the 787 isn't flying yet, so that 0.1% DOES NOT include what is being calling unsafe.
Second, no matter how safe some category of product is, if a new product is released which kills twice as many people, that product is unsafe, even if the now-increased number of deaths are statistically insignificant.
How many children have been killed or injured by lead paint on their toys? Not many? Does that make lead paint okay or safe?
you could just use one position to enter a number [...] to 0009.
Umm, what?... I had you up until there... you DO realize that '0' is, in fact, a number, don't you? Did you perhaps mean to put spaces there, instead of zeros?
Energy is a difficult problem. However, the development of future power sources like solar, wind, and nuclear is happening in the US, as are the world's large installations, so we're well positioned for the not very distant future. Besides that, nobody seems to be complaining that China is a large importer of energy and materials... it certainly hasn't slowed them down.
Rapidly rising prices of foreign goods may someday bring back American industry, but that is a generation away. We have too few engineers and no manufacturing infrastructure. We will have to train a whole new class of workers and build many new factories. This doesn't happen overnight.
That's incredibly, laughably wrong. In 2005, the US was the #1 manufacturer in the world BY FAR, almost 2X ahead of #2 (China was a distant #4). We have the best trained engineers anywhere, and a great many of them. There is absolutely no shortage of infrastructure either, unless perhaps you're talking about one specific field, and even that I'd doubt.
When some company starts laying some people off, and some jobs go over-seas, people get scared, overreact, and blow things way out of proportion. The fear that the US is can't manufacture anything is just that, irrational fear, not at all based in reality.
So, it's a good thing that Ubuntu is easy to use. Us techies who want to "stray beyond the defaults" will find the way to do it anyway.
IMHO, it is an incredibly stupid strategy to make it difficult for advanced users to do things. Even the simplest user may find that something doesn't work and either explore it themselves, or call in someone else. In such cases, layers of obscurity and indirection, just because it's easier for the "friendly" tools to do things that way, makes like miserable for the user.
It also makes them miss out, if things are out of place, or otherwise difficult to handle the normal (advanced) way. They miss out on the possibility of getting just slightly more advanced... Everybody has some repetitive task they'd like to automate, and if/when they learn just enough to write a script, they'll find out their chosen system makes like difficult, and then you either live with an essentially crippled system, or you must make a big jump to other systems that are more for advanced users.
A user-friendly system has to be user-friendly across a large range of tasks, not just focus on the computer illiterate, and leave them to their own devices when they no longer fit that narrow category. If I'm wrong, why is OS X so much more popular than it's predecessors? Did they really make it easier to do basic tasks in OS X? Did eye candy really draw that many users?...or is it that the Unix underpinnings gave more freedom to advanced users to do what they want to do, and all the associated benefits with it?
Also, the relative unpopularity of MacOS (v9 and previous) does pretty strongly refute your claim that 90% of people want the simplest system possible, because it doesn't get any more mind-numbingly simple than MacOS was.
Didn't Frank Herbert describe something just like this in Dune?
Yes, and? It's not like it was an unimaginable idea, or he was remotely the first guy to think of creating pain by directly stimulating nerves.
Hey, you know what would be good? A device that fully and instantly incapacitates people, without doing any physical damage to them. No be sure and mention I described it in the future when someone finally does the hard work of figuring out how the hell to make it work.
I would like to take a moment to applaud this new direction the US Army has taken as of late. Nothing restores my faith in American more quickly than a standing policy of systematically punishing every journalist within reach, with any and all exotic weaponry available.
So you're saying you want the BSD license to be fixed so that it is less free than what it is now? You admit that it provides too much freedom?
Not at all. The advertising clause is an obscure restriction that absolutely NOBODY would ever run afoul of. Instead of that, you could insert a clause that forbids everyone from using the software for 5 minutes on the day that the Sun explodes... The sole benefit of both clauses is to make covered code GPL incompatible.
I'm going to ignore the rest of your straw men and trolling. Goodbye.
Long ago, people were all upset when Microsoft did the ole embrace and extend thing with Kerberos. I haven't heard much about that for years. Has it been a problem for anyone?
After so much screaming, Microsoft backed down and made their changes available and open.
After all, it isn't his music anymore, he signed those rights away. He can't give permission to steal it.
Artists still retain rights over their live performances. Several popular acts do give people permission to record their concerts, and widely share them. Sites like etree wouldn't even exist otherwise. Reznor certainly could do the same.
Unfortunately, we are in the scenario where an artist that people will listen to (read: popular) got that way because of the RIAA and the industry they are in...
A great many bands you've heard of got extremely popular while signed with a small, independent label. The Offspring's EP Smash would be the best example, as it sold 14 million copies. When they signed with a large, RIAA label, their sales only went down from there (still huge though).
Once they are out of that contract, the general population won't really care about them (read: Pearl Jam, Prince) and they will kind of fade away.
Pearl Jam is still doing extremely well. And even if they weren't you still wouldn't have a point, as they're signed with Sony Records.
I'd say that anything without which the system would be unusable deserves credit. In general, the distro, GNU, and Linux.
Average people would consider their system unusable without a GUI. Also, there are non-GNU alternatives for every tool out there. Shall we call it Linux/BusyBox? And I know there's LOTS of BSD code in the kernel and elsewhere, so how about GNU/BSD/Linux?
When Linux was coming out, BSD was in a lot of legal trouble.
The lawsuit took two years to conclude (Jan 1994), long before Linux was at all popular. That doesn't change the fact that they could in fact use the BSD tools instead, just that maybe they'd rather not have at first.
It's also why there are different BSDs.
The lawsuit had nothing to do with it. FreeBSD was focusing entirely on x86, while NetBSD was dealing entirely with other non-x86 platforms. BSDi/SunOS/Digital/Ultrix/etc. obviously split because of their commercial nature.
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It wasn't a leap of logic, it was actually an analogy.
You are, effectively, saying we can't know anything about anything, until we've go through it. The same could be argued for property rights, murder, etc. If you have no other point than to argue that nobody can know anything, your argument is worthless.
You seem to not have read past the sentence you're quoting...
In theory, software (solid-state digital circuits) has huge advantages over hardware. Software offers extreme flexibility, no wear-and-tear, etc. If it worked as well as it should, in theory, there wouldn't be mechanical linkages just about anywhere, anymore. All the controls in your car would be electric, and a significant portion of your car's engine would be gone (no more cam shaft). The same would be true of most everything... If not replacing significant numbers of mechanical components, at least using software to precisely control it, and getting much better efficiency as a result. Yes, your refrigerator, microwave, etc. could all greatly benefit from software control.
There are just two big problems that have made software control a non-starter.
First is customization. Put a spring in the mechanics of an engine, and I can replace it with a shorter/longer/stronger/weaker spring. I can heat it up to weaken it, grind it down, etc... With software, you are given a black box, binary-only, with no documentation on how it works, and definitely no common interface to access and modify it. So every time car companies add another function to their cars' onboard computers, and take away mechanical systems, there's extreme resistance, as buyers know they're out of the loop, and if they want to adjust anything, or if something should go wrong, they can only take it to the select few company-blessed shops, which have paid the necessary bribes to get enough info to do just a few basic things with the onboard computer. And you're entirely screwed if you want more changes than that, because the company doesn't WANT you to, and without man millions of dollars on the line, you're not even a blip on their radar.
Despite what many believe, cost is almost never a problem. For low cost products, low-end micro-controllers can be found for pennies, and even cheaper are the basic I/O elements like thermistors, power meters, transistors, relays, etc. Yet even the dirt cheap processors sold today can do many millions of calculations per second, far faster than could be needed for damn near any products.
Second, and perhaps more important, is reliability. Computer hardware is EXTREMELY reliable. You can go buy a dirt cheap commodity CPU, RAM and MOBO, and be pretty damn sure it will run for 20 years without a SINGLE error. The only big exception to this is power supplies... a marginal one, not supplying enough power will cause a crash, but that generallyonly happens in the case of the cheapest no-name junk. What's more, go up a small step to a high quality MOBO, ECC RAM, redundant PSUs, UPS, etc., and you'll never ever see a hardware-induced glitch.
The reliability problem comes ENTIRELY from poor software, and mostly commonly available kernels, at that. People don't want to believe that, but the facts are that computers are 100% pure math machines, and math is 100% accurate. A computer will do exactly what you tell it to do, but most people are trying to program their computer through several million lines of indirection... If you write, in hex, a simple loop with a bit of processing, a computer will run it error-free, from here until doomsday, but programing a complex system in hex is much too hard, and human programmers aren't perfect enough to do so.
The only real possibility to ensure reliability with reasonable development time is something very much like a micro-kernel. You need a tiny bit (a few hundred KBs) of EXTREMELY-thoroughly audited code, that can very strictly manage memory, do strict input and bounds checking, carefully manage communications between independent modules of code, instantly tear-down and restart any bit of code which shows the slightest signs of an error, and also strictly ensuring real-time operation.
I'm not endorsing any product here. The fact is nothing like this exists. That is why we aren't seeing mechanical systems having components being replaced by software as quickly as they can be redesigned. Open source operating systems
That's a really terrible comparison...
First off, your power figures on AMD Geodes are entirely wrong. The only 1GHz Geode I was able to find is the "AMD Geode(TM) NX 1500@6W," and beyond 6 being a lot bigger than 1, is much lower than the actual wattage rating anyhow, it's just like that 1500 PR number. For comparison the AMD Geode LX 800@0.9W processor is actually 500MHz, and operates at a TDP of 3.6W and 1.8W typical.
And ARM processors are a worthless comparison as well... While they may sport relatively impressive MHz ratings, the slowest Geodes, or other AMD/Intel CPUs vastly underclocked (to whatever milliwatt level) will easily blow them away in performance.
The cache certainly contributes, but power consumption figures on larger/smaller cache models don't bear-out that it is as significant as you suggest.
GREAT! So now we've gotten rid of that power-sucking 2MBs of cache on the chip, and replaced it with 2,048MBs of high-speed, power-sucking RAM on the motherboard.
EBay has several sellers with Geode+Mobo combos to be found.
The mobos, though can be any Socket A that can supply the extra-low voltages needed.
Absolutely right. You've just proven that property rights should be abolished, since people are going to continue making things, even though they'll just be stolen.
You're right. It IS always cheaper to steal. But we rarely hear economists and businesspeople talk about the economic loss that property laws bring.
I'm quite certain that you are wrong.
"Not protected speech" is a long way from "indiscriminately shot on sight".
That's the big "if" there... It's one thing if she was running towards a crowd, but quite another walking up to a rep and asking a normal question.
She should have been detained, but the cops still overreacted.
You can claim sexism all you want, but there are PLENTY of men that aren't rude slobs out there, and also don't get involved in such behavior, yet do just fine. I don't know where you're talking about, but in fact, for every job I've had, such behavior would be considered highly unprofessional, and decidedly NOT benefitial to your career, even if your boss is involved.
While you're talking about the "boy's club" you could just as well be talking about drinking, or many other questionable activities. You don't get promoted by being as bad as the guy who's one small step above you... Maybe it'll work in tiny, informal companies, but not anywhere professional.
2005 Manufacturing:
USA $1.79 Trillion
Japan $990 Billion
As reported by CBS News on Dec 06th, 2006
A common sentiment, but completely wrong. NEWS today is as good as it has ever been.
The whole problem is that pop-culture, entertainment crap TV shows get to call themselves "NEWS" without any repercussions. I've long thought about taking any TV show that perhaps incidentally mentions a current event, and claiming that it's "NEWS" to avoid otherwise-required ratings.
If you want crap, you turn on CNN/MSNBC/FOX/etc. If you want NEWS, you have to tune in to CBS/ABC/NBC at 4:30am. I've watched plenty of hours of BBC News and I can tell you without a doubt that American NEWS is much better, even today.
You're confused on so many levels...
First, the 787 isn't flying yet, so that 0.1% DOES NOT include what is being calling unsafe.
Second, no matter how safe some category of product is, if a new product is released which kills twice as many people, that product is unsafe, even if the now-increased number of deaths are statistically insignificant.
How many children have been killed or injured by lead paint on their toys? Not many? Does that make lead paint okay or safe?
Umm, what?... I had you up until there... you DO realize that '0' is, in fact, a number, don't you? Did you perhaps mean to put spaces there, instead of zeros?
Energy is a difficult problem. However, the development of future power sources like solar, wind, and nuclear is happening in the US, as are the world's large installations, so we're well positioned for the not very distant future. Besides that, nobody seems to be complaining that China is a large importer of energy and materials... it certainly hasn't slowed them down.
That's incredibly, laughably wrong. In 2005, the US was the #1 manufacturer in the world BY FAR, almost 2X ahead of #2 (China was a distant #4). We have the best trained engineers anywhere, and a great many of them. There is absolutely no shortage of infrastructure either, unless perhaps you're talking about one specific field, and even that I'd doubt.
When some company starts laying some people off, and some jobs go over-seas, people get scared, overreact, and blow things way out of proportion. The fear that the US is can't manufacture anything is just that, irrational fear, not at all based in reality.
IMHO, it is an incredibly stupid strategy to make it difficult for advanced users to do things. Even the simplest user may find that something doesn't work and either explore it themselves, or call in someone else. In such cases, layers of obscurity and indirection, just because it's easier for the "friendly" tools to do things that way, makes like miserable for the user.
It also makes them miss out, if things are out of place, or otherwise difficult to handle the normal (advanced) way. They miss out on the possibility of getting just slightly more advanced... Everybody has some repetitive task they'd like to automate, and if/when they learn just enough to write a script, they'll find out their chosen system makes like difficult, and then you either live with an essentially crippled system, or you must make a big jump to other systems that are more for advanced users.
A user-friendly system has to be user-friendly across a large range of tasks, not just focus on the computer illiterate, and leave them to their own devices when they no longer fit that narrow category. If I'm wrong, why is OS X so much more popular than it's predecessors? Did they really make it easier to do basic tasks in OS X? Did eye candy really draw that many users?
Also, the relative unpopularity of MacOS (v9 and previous) does pretty strongly refute your claim that 90% of people want the simplest system possible, because it doesn't get any more mind-numbingly simple than MacOS was.
Yes, and? It's not like it was an unimaginable idea, or he was remotely the first guy to think of creating pain by directly stimulating nerves.
Hey, you know what would be good? A device that fully and instantly incapacitates people, without doing any physical damage to them. No be sure and mention I described it in the future when someone finally does the hard work of figuring out how the hell to make it work.
I would like to take a moment to applaud this new direction the US Army has taken as of late. Nothing restores my faith in American more quickly than a standing policy of systematically punishing every journalist within reach, with any and all exotic weaponry available.
Not at all. The advertising clause is an obscure restriction that absolutely NOBODY would ever run afoul of. Instead of that, you could insert a clause that forbids everyone from using the software for 5 minutes on the day that the Sun explodes... The sole benefit of both clauses is to make covered code GPL incompatible.
I'm going to ignore the rest of your straw men and trolling. Goodbye.
After so much screaming, Microsoft backed down and made their changes available and open.
Hmm... Coincidentally, that line sounds oddly familiar.
http://www.theaterhopper.com/vault/070523.jpg
Artists still retain rights over their live performances. Several popular acts do give people permission to record their concerts, and widely share them. Sites like etree wouldn't even exist otherwise. Reznor certainly could do the same.
A great many bands you've heard of got extremely popular while signed with a small, independent label. The Offspring's EP Smash would be the best example, as it sold 14 million copies. When they signed with a large, RIAA label, their sales only went down from there (still huge though).
Pearl Jam is still doing extremely well. And even if they weren't you still wouldn't have a point, as they're signed with Sony Records.
Thank you, I now have a new favorite term:
Stolen Advertising
After all, if you get something of value, and didn't pay for it, it must be stolen.
Average people would consider their system unusable without a GUI. Also, there are non-GNU alternatives for every tool out there. Shall we call it Linux/BusyBox? And I know there's LOTS of BSD code in the kernel and elsewhere, so how about GNU/BSD/Linux?
The lawsuit took two years to conclude (Jan 1994), long before Linux was at all popular. That doesn't change the fact that they could in fact use the BSD tools instead, just that maybe they'd rather not have at first.
The lawsuit had nothing to do with it. FreeBSD was focusing entirely on x86, while NetBSD was dealing entirely with other non-x86 platforms. BSDi/SunOS/Digital/Ultrix/etc. obviously split because of their commercial nature.