> However, Monad is obviously a way that Microsoft is trying to catch-up with the powerful scripting ability of *nix shells.
I think MS just thought it would be funny to release something that would "have to be" called "Gonad" if it was copied and release in open source! (Hmmm, or maybe Gnunad?!)
> I was really just pointing out that there are unofficial routes to get hold of drivers.
Right. My point is that since 3dfx went out of business, noone seems to be maintaining those drivers or updating them for new versions of Windows. My experience with "unofficial" drivers for the card pretty much demonstrated this to me - hopefully others are more successful than I was.
XFree, on the other hand, does continue to support 3dfx's cards and most likely will as long as there is demand. The reason they can is because the source code for the driver is available, (presumably) unlike that of the Windows driver.
Tried them on WinXP? I don't recall where I got the driver when I last tried, but the driver I used claimed to be for XP and did not work well for me at all. All kinds of garbage and artifacts showed up when using it for several 3d games.
Luckily I found a good deal on a PCI Radeon and I was back in business. (The Voodoo 3 continues to serve me just fine in XFree as they continue to support, since they can.)
> If it can solve the problems Linux has on the desktop, namely incredibly poor software installation and ugly graphics, it might have a chance.
Pick some random bit of hardware out of your junk drawer, and some random desktop machine. Wipe the disk. Try to install windows. Can't find the driver floppy or CD for the hardware? Go to the website and see if there are drivers for the version of windows you have.
If you're lucky you'll find it. If you're not - let's say you have a Voodoo 3 card - you're SOL. There is no "modprobe " and no chance for it. You don't even have the opportunity to write your own or pay someone too.
> If it brings the war to an end faster, demoralizes the enemy, helps your side, etc.
Plus think infrastructure. It's hard to keep making ammo if you don't have people to work in the factories, people to fix power lines, grow food, etc. One of the key reasons that the US was able to fare so well in WWII is because of the manufacturing base and local resources we had/have available. (Supposedly after Pearl Harbor some Japanese general said something about "waking a sleeping bear" knowing what our response could be, even without a large Navy/Air Force at that moment.)
And this is one thing that I have to wonder about as we watch all of our manufacturing capability disappear and give it all to the lowest bidder. "Hello, China, Mexico - I'd like to order 250 Stealth Bombers please." Oops, better hope you're not fighting with whoever makes your weapons or their subsystems, or holds whatever resource you need to make them yourself. "Hi Middle East, I know we're currently bombing the crap out of you but I would like to order 10B barrels of crude oil please." Probably easier to acquire those resources now, huh?
Not that it matters, but... Supposedly our missles sit in silos without being programmed for targets. (Well, actually targetted to the middle of the ocean or something like that.) The programming for a real target takes something like 30 seconds, and every missle probably has a list of real targets ready to go at all times.
On the other hand, what I have read is that Soviet missles were programmed at all times for major targets - think New York, LA, etc. No additional programming needed, if you push the "fire" button it's off to whereever.
This distinction probably does not matter at all, but I find it to be an interesting difference in "philosophy" if it's true.
> I don't think you're overstating the horrors of biological warfare, but I think you may > be underestimating the horrors of nuclear warfare.
Who said it's either/or? I'm thinking the strategy could have been destroy the big cities with nukes, weakening the surviving population with radiation and environmental decay... Then in the second wave spread smallpox to finish off many of the survivors.
> Sorry, am I the only one here who doesn't think a virus for which a vaccine exists is a worse > threat than an H-bomb?
Well, if a vaccine exists you'd be right. There was an article in some magazine I read - Discover, Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum, or possibly Newsweek, a few years back about the USSR's now-defunct bioweapons program. There were some US scientists who visited one of the main labs where the work had taken place. They were looking at some large apparatus where they would test biological agents on various animals and the US scientist asked if he could take samples from inside of this thing. The Russian scientist giving the tour said something like "I would let you but your vaccinations would be no good on some of the strains of smallpox tested in there." The article also talked about how much of this stuff they had manufactured - I recall the measurement being in tons...
That seems like a good point, but think about it for a second. There weren't millions of people there when the cities were built - building a city is a gradual process. For example, you could have one engineer build a road a year for 20 years, but we could have destroyed those roads in one day. But today they need the 20 roads due to the number of people there right now, so they can't wait 20 years.
They (and we, and their neighbors) need the area to be stable as quickly as possible or the region will be even more chaotic than it is currently. (Watch what happens in Pakistan if the Kurds revolt if you want to see a real mess.) Bombing the heck out of them and walking away would definitely make for a less stable middle east than not bombing them would have, or rebuilding should. (There's still a fair chance that it will be less stable than it was, that's a good argument for not bombing them in the first place... But that is too late.)
> Losing your house and then paying the guy who wrecked it to help rebuild it is so much more intelligent than.....
> hiring an exterminator?
Well, in this case the house is already gone. Are we charging individual Iraqis to rebuild? I don't think we are. In fact, I recall a big issue in the news about the cost that we are paying to rebuild Iraq, to the tune of $87B. So I don't think that MOST of the money is coming even from Iraqi oil. (Some is, except that terrorists keep making it hard to pump oil.)
So, is it immoral (now that the infrastructure is damaged) to reach into our own pockets and pay US contractors to rebuild it? The guy who says "pay Iraqis to do it" is right, but... Who's going to qualify them to do the jobs. If Joe Blow Iraqi walks up and says "I'm a pipefitter, I'll work for $x/hour" who is going to oversee him? Some pencil-pushing US government official? Would you have any clue if someone was doing a good job building a pipeline, wiring a building, pouring cement, building a road?
I think you're going to need some people with "domain knowledge" on the ground over there. If you have some way of qualifying Iraqis for these positions as well, then more power to you and them... For all I care, give them the money to start a company as long as they can scale up quick enough. (Is the banking system in place? Will the payroll be handled efficiently? It's not an easy task.) But don't act like this is a simple problem with a simple solution.
I might not be happy with the war, the motivations for starting it, with Haliburton, or the current US administration... But I can see the need for some significant US involvement in the rebuilding now that the damage is done.
Is it moral to not rebuild the infrastructure of societies in need of rebuilding? Is it somehow more moral to bomb the crap out of them and leave them in squalor than it would be to bomb the crap out of them and then help rebuild? (Given that we have already bombed the crap out of them, you can't say we shouldn't.)
I think the immorality of the companies you list would be in falsely charging US taxpayers for things that they did not do, not the simple fact that they are rebuilding Iraq for a price. If they were doing it at a fair rate there would be no moral issue at all in my mind.
Establishing a fair rate is an interesting problem on days like today when a contractor's head gets cut off for no apparent reason. What sort of hourly rate do you need to put yourself in that position? Perhaps we should be civil enough to rebuild Iraq for free, but if noone qualified signs up for that job, is it immoral to do it at an hourly rate? An interesting question...
2. Slap forehead, keep woody install CD in CD-Rom drive, reboot, read help by pressing F-whatever it says. 3. Instead of hitting return to boot, follow the directions you found in the help and do "bf24" at the prompt to boot into 2.4 4. Hopefully that gets you going...
I'm not saying woody is perfect - i've had to install PCI ethernet cards too many times because the default kernel won't do modern integrated ones... But it does support 2.4.18 which is much better than 2.2.
All of your points make sense. What it comes down to in my mind is that if you can make cheap electricity (or some other form of usable energy) to produce ethanol efficiently (sensible energy inputs), then why not just use that electricity to run stuff directly? If your answer is that energy storage in the form of ethanol is better than that of batteries, I could see that. I don't think that was the original poster's point though.
> Biological photosynthesis has a net thermodynamic efficiency of 0.3% = 3E(-3).
That speaks volumes of the efficiency of converting plants into fuel compared with using sunlight directly in some way.
> Compare this to 10-30% efficiency for photovoltaic.
That is the efficiency once they are produced. My understanding is that creating them is chemically dirty and energy intense, which means you don't see a net gain for several years after producing them, if ever. (I.e. they have to be deployed for long enough and in a good location, maintained, etc. for the net to go greater than zero.)
Having said all of this, if we put more effort into deploying solar today (even using photovoltaics), then the economy of scale and the big carrot of profit margin will drive the cost of production down, which should mean increased efficiency... Right now photovoltaics could be the answer.
I also saw an article in Discover last year about a solar solution that drove a stirling engine and was quoting good efficiency numbers and cost/kW. The nice thing about this one is that it is mostly a machining problem rather than a chemical etching process, meaning it should be possible to do it very cleanly.
Either of these solutions widely deployed would be an improvement over the continued use of fossil fuels IMHO.
> We have plenty of corn ( and soy ) to make ethenol to drive our cars and trucks..
Do I get more energy out of ethanol than it takes to produce it? According to this guy, I do not.
The thing that really bugs me about ethanol, biodiesel, etc is that they are really inefficient versions of solar power. I'd like to see "direct" solar power in some form. Photovoltaics probably aren't going to cut it, I think we need to develop some plants that have wires coming out of them or something;-)
Of course, I cannot seem to find it on the online version but I believe the May 2004 issue has a one-pager about it saying that this is a myth. Someone conducted a bunch of experiments and could not come up with a scenario where a cell phone could ignite gaslone vapors...
> Ever notice how in C and C++, you can't refer to an undeclared type, even if it is declared later in the file?
You could "fix" this feature of C/C++ inside a single file by doing a two pass compilation, but since there is no mapping from function name to file name you cannot fix it in general without doing something very radical. (Scan all source files to build a symbol table, require each function be in its own file, or something else really ugly.)
A C++ compiler could enforce it's own file-naming standard for classes (like Java) and then it would know where to look for class and method definitions when it sees them for the first time. Such a compiler would be non-compliant with the standard of course.
> And I mean absolutely static. No new methods. No changes to the comments. No nothing. (In fact, I doubt there are even 1% of people who want this, once they give it some thought.)
Ummm, even in C/C++ you can change comments in an interface and it won't break its linkage. You cannot, of course, add methods to a class, change signatures, etc. without breaking the interface.
But again, just looking at Java, I _think_ you could add methods to an interface and old users of the library would continue to function without recompilation. (You definitely can't modify signatures in existing methods.) This is because the Java Virtual Machine does resolution of class and method names at runtime - it does a symbolic lookup the first time it uses a class or method.
In languages like C/C++ the compiler generates calls to functions and methods using fixed offsets that are calculated at compilation time. Move one offset and suddenly your library is incompatible.
I tend to agree with the first poster that having the capability to define separate interfaces and implementations is a nice feature in a language. I don't know that it should be forced down your throat, but having the capability is nice.
I agree with you that we're entering the age of the global economy, and most of what you say about global economics. Basic economics teaches exactly what will happen. Wages will rise elsewhere, and probably decline here until an equilibrium is reached. Overall the average will most likely rise, but right now the high end of the average is here in the US (and some other places like Europe, Australia, etc) and the average here could go down a whole bunch while the world average rises.
My only real issue with globalization from as it is happening today is that everyone is competing with each other, but not playing by the same rules. In the US and other "modern" countries, we have environmental policies, laws about working conditions, etc. that many third-world countries do not have. That artificially lowers their costs or artificially increases ours, depending on how you look at it.
Is the answer to this issue to create new regulations barring trade from countries without these basic protections? That goes against the ideals of free trade... Free market theory would tell you that eventually the environmental and safety issues that matter will cause prices to increase... For example, if you kill your labor force through a bad environment or poor safety practices, then the labor market tightens up and wages increase and overall costs increase.
Of course, if you've got a government that has absolute power over the population, then free market rules might not apply. If someone holds a gun to your head and tells you to go work in some dangerous factory for next to nothing, chances are you will do it.
Maybe then the real important issue is for all countries of the world to have some basic human rights. I don't think this is the case right now.
I'm not sure how to cause this to happen (probably bombing the crap out of the rest of the world won't work too well) other than to try and purchase goods taking into account where they were made. I'm not saying to buy stuff made only in , but perhaps it's worth looking at more than just price when making buying decisions
For my kid's sake I wish there was an easier way to transition to a more global economy. But even if we could suddenly make everyone as prosperous as the US, it wouldn't work since that would require four Earth's worth of resources. I agree that there will be "interesting" times ahead for the US.
> Will not compile on GCC 2.95.. That really limits its use a lot doesnt it?
Limiting oneself to gcc 2.95.x is very painful. It's C++ support is lacking in several areas - namespace support is lacking, exception support is lacking, template support is missing some features, and the C++ standard library is totally standards non-compliant. Anyone doing any serious C++ development that can move to g++ >= 3.2 should do so. (There are lots of situations where this isn't an option, of course.)
Neal Stephenson is a Debian user. See for yourself. I once saw a quote that he liked Debian because of the huge number of bugs in the database. (He liked that Debian is open - not that it has a huge number of bugs;-))
> You'll probably only be able to get timing resolution near that of the OS tick interrupt interval, right?
Only if you do it using a hardware resource under control of the OS and do polling. Even the parallel port can generate interrupts to the OS. Add a microcontroller and/or some custom hardware and the OS doesn't come into play except for display.
I know this is not what you asked and is probably out of most hobbiest budgets, but I'll mention it anyways as it could help someone. A project we did here absolutely required a scope, and we considered a logic analyzer as highly desirable but not strictly necessary. We had a budget of around $5k - significant but not really that big when you start pricing this stuff.
It had been a while since I shopped for this stuff and I happily found that Agilent (used to be HP) has what they call "mixed signal scopes". Specifically, we purchased a 54622D. It's 100MHz 2 channel oscillscope, but then it's also got a 16 channel logic analyzer built in. (See full specs here.) We purchased it used for around $2600. To get that price we had to play two of the used dealers against each other a little bit. We have been really happy with it so far. $2600 is quite a bit more than $500, but you do get both a scope and a small logic analyzer for that... It's got a built in serial interface and floppy, and it's more portable than dragging a computer around. Take care, and good luck with your quest!
I'm thinking 100 years ago the sound of a steam engine freaked out the locals, their farm animals, etc. I think that the speculation about "it's just unfamiliar" is probably dead on.
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> However, Monad is obviously a way that Microsoft is trying to catch-up with the powerful scripting ability of *nix shells.
I think MS just thought it would be funny to release something that would "have to be" called "Gonad" if it was copied and release in open source! (Hmmm, or maybe Gnunad?!)
> The cause was a hardware problem, true, but fs should not be a toast because of it.
;-)
When you develop software that is immune to hardware failure, be sure to let us all know
> I was really just pointing out that there are unofficial routes to get hold of drivers.
Right. My point is that since 3dfx went out of business, noone seems to be maintaining those drivers or updating them for new versions of Windows. My experience with "unofficial" drivers for the card pretty much demonstrated this to me - hopefully others are more successful than I was.
XFree, on the other hand, does continue to support 3dfx's cards and most likely will as long as there is demand. The reason they can is because the source code for the driver is available, (presumably) unlike that of the Windows driver.
Tried them on WinXP? I don't recall where I got the driver when I last tried, but the driver I used claimed to be for XP and did not work well for me at all. All kinds of garbage and artifacts showed up when using it for several 3d games.
Luckily I found a good deal on a PCI Radeon and I was back in business. (The Voodoo 3 continues to serve me just fine in XFree as they continue to support, since they can.)
> If it can solve the problems Linux has on the desktop, namely incredibly poor software installation and ugly graphics, it might have a chance.
Pick some random bit of hardware out of your junk drawer, and some random desktop machine. Wipe the disk. Try to install windows. Can't find the driver floppy or CD for the hardware? Go to the website and see if there are drivers for the version of windows you have.
If you're lucky you'll find it. If you're not - let's say you have a Voodoo 3 card - you're SOL. There is no "modprobe " and no chance for it. You don't even have the opportunity to write your own or pay someone too.
What, with the Earth upside down and all there should be a huge market for it!
> If it brings the war to an end faster, demoralizes the enemy, helps your side, etc.
Plus think infrastructure. It's hard to keep making ammo if you don't have people to work in the factories, people to fix power lines, grow food, etc. One of the key reasons that the US was able to fare so well in WWII is because of the manufacturing base and local resources we had/have available. (Supposedly after Pearl Harbor some Japanese general said something about "waking a sleeping bear" knowing what our response could be, even without a large Navy/Air Force at that moment.)
And this is one thing that I have to wonder about as we watch all of our manufacturing capability disappear and give it all to the lowest bidder. "Hello, China, Mexico - I'd like to order 250 Stealth Bombers please." Oops, better hope you're not fighting with whoever makes your weapons or their subsystems, or holds whatever resource you need to make them yourself. "Hi Middle East, I know we're currently bombing the crap out of you but I would like to order 10B barrels of crude oil please." Probably easier to acquire those resources now, huh?
Not that it matters, but... Supposedly our missles sit in silos without being programmed for targets. (Well, actually targetted to the middle of the ocean or something like that.) The programming for a real target takes something like 30 seconds, and every missle probably has a list of real targets ready to go at all times.
On the other hand, what I have read is that Soviet missles were programmed at all times for major targets - think New York, LA, etc. No additional programming needed, if you push the "fire" button it's off to whereever.
This distinction probably does not matter at all, but I find it to be an interesting difference in "philosophy" if it's true.
> I don't think you're overstating the horrors of biological warfare, but I think you may
> be underestimating the horrors of nuclear warfare.
Who said it's either/or? I'm thinking the strategy could have been destroy the big cities with nukes, weakening the surviving population with radiation and environmental decay... Then in the second wave spread smallpox to finish off many of the survivors.
> Sorry, am I the only one here who doesn't think a virus for which a vaccine exists is a worse
> threat than an H-bomb?
Well, if a vaccine exists you'd be right. There was an article in some magazine I read - Discover, Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum, or possibly Newsweek, a few years back about the USSR's now-defunct bioweapons program. There were some US scientists who visited one of the main labs where the work had taken place. They were looking at some large apparatus where they would test biological agents on various animals and the US scientist asked if he could take samples from inside of this thing. The Russian scientist giving the tour said something like "I would let you but your vaccinations would be no good on some of the strains of smallpox tested in there." The article also talked about how much of this stuff they had manufactured - I recall the measurement being in tons...
That seems like a good point, but think about it for a second. There weren't millions of people there when the cities were built - building a city is a gradual process. For example, you could have one engineer build a road a year for 20 years, but we could have destroyed those roads in one day. But today they need the 20 roads due to the number of people there right now, so they can't wait 20 years.
They (and we, and their neighbors) need the area to be stable as quickly as possible or the region will be even more chaotic than it is currently. (Watch what happens in Pakistan if the Kurds revolt if you want to see a real mess.) Bombing the heck out of them and walking away would definitely make for a less stable middle east than not bombing them would have, or rebuilding should. (There's still a fair chance that it will be less stable than it was, that's a good argument for not bombing them in the first place... But that is too late.)
> Losing your house and then paying the guy who wrecked it to help rebuild it is so much more intelligent than.....
> hiring an exterminator?
Well, in this case the house is already gone. Are we charging individual Iraqis to rebuild? I don't think we are. In fact, I recall a big issue in the news about the cost that we are paying to rebuild Iraq, to the tune of $87B. So I don't think that MOST of the money is coming even from Iraqi oil. (Some is, except that terrorists keep making it hard to pump oil.)
So, is it immoral (now that the infrastructure is damaged) to reach into our own pockets and pay US contractors to rebuild it? The guy who says "pay Iraqis to do it" is right, but... Who's going to qualify them to do the jobs. If Joe Blow Iraqi walks up and says "I'm a pipefitter, I'll work for $x/hour" who is going to oversee him? Some pencil-pushing US government official? Would you have any clue if someone was doing a good job building a pipeline, wiring a building, pouring cement, building a road?
I think you're going to need some people with "domain knowledge" on the ground over there. If you have some way of qualifying Iraqis for these positions as well, then more power to you and them... For all I care, give them the money to start a company as long as they can scale up quick enough. (Is the banking system in place? Will the payroll be handled efficiently? It's not an easy task.) But don't act like this is a simple problem with a simple solution.
I might not be happy with the war, the motivations for starting it, with Haliburton, or the current US administration... But I can see the need for some significant US involvement in the rebuilding now that the damage is done.
Is it moral to not rebuild the infrastructure of societies in need of rebuilding? Is it somehow more moral to bomb the crap out of them and leave them in squalor than it would be to bomb the crap out of them and then help rebuild? (Given that we have already bombed the crap out of them, you can't say we shouldn't.)
I think the immorality of the companies you list would be in falsely charging US taxpayers for things that they did not do, not the simple fact that they are rebuilding Iraq for a price. If they were doing it at a fair rate there would be no moral issue at all in my mind.
Establishing a fair rate is an interesting problem on days like today when a contractor's head gets cut off for no apparent reason. What sort of hourly rate do you need to put yourself in that position? Perhaps we should be civil enough to rebuild Iraq for free, but if noone qualified signs up for that job, is it immoral to do it at an hourly rate? An interesting question...
> 1. 2.2 kernel
2. Slap forehead, keep woody install CD in CD-Rom drive, reboot, read help by pressing F-whatever it says.
3. Instead of hitting return to boot, follow the directions you found in the help and do "bf24" at the prompt to boot into 2.4
4. Hopefully that gets you going...
I'm not saying woody is perfect - i've had to install PCI ethernet cards too many times because the default kernel won't do modern integrated ones... But it does support 2.4.18 which is much better than 2.2.
All of your points make sense. What it comes down to in my mind is that if you can make cheap electricity (or some other form of usable energy) to produce ethanol efficiently (sensible energy inputs), then why not just use that electricity to run stuff directly? If your answer is that energy storage in the form of ethanol is better than that of batteries, I could see that. I don't think that was the original poster's point though.
> Biological photosynthesis has a net thermodynamic efficiency of 0.3% = 3E(-3).
That speaks volumes of the efficiency of converting plants into fuel compared with using sunlight directly in some way.
> Compare this to 10-30% efficiency for photovoltaic.
That is the efficiency once they are produced. My understanding is that creating them is chemically dirty and energy intense, which means you don't see a net gain for several years after producing them, if ever. (I.e. they have to be deployed for long enough and in a good location, maintained, etc. for the net to go greater than zero.)
Having said all of this, if we put more effort into deploying solar today (even using photovoltaics), then the economy of scale and the big carrot of profit margin will drive the cost of production down, which should mean increased efficiency... Right now photovoltaics could be the answer.
I also saw an article in Discover last year about a solar solution that drove a stirling engine and was quoting good efficiency numbers and cost/kW. The nice thing about this one is that it is mostly a machining problem rather than a chemical etching process, meaning it should be possible to do it very cleanly.
Either of these solutions widely deployed would be an improvement over the continued use of fossil fuels IMHO.
> We have plenty of corn ( and soy ) to make ethenol to drive our cars and trucks..
;-)
Do I get more energy out of ethanol than it takes to produce it? According to this guy, I do not.
The thing that really bugs me about ethanol, biodiesel, etc is that they are really inefficient versions of solar power. I'd like to see "direct" solar power in some form. Photovoltaics probably aren't going to cut it, I think we need to develop some plants that have wires coming out of them or something
Of course, I cannot seem to find it on the online version but I believe the May 2004 issue has a one-pager about it saying that this is a myth. Someone conducted a bunch of experiments and could not come up with a scenario where a cell phone could ignite gaslone vapors...
> Ever notice how in C and C++, you can't refer to an undeclared type, even if it is declared later in the file?
You could "fix" this feature of C/C++ inside a single file by doing a two pass compilation, but since there is no mapping from function name to file name you cannot fix it in general without doing something very radical. (Scan all source files to build a symbol table, require each function be in its own file, or something else really ugly.)
A C++ compiler could enforce it's own file-naming standard for classes (like Java) and then it would know where to look for class and method definitions when it sees them for the first time. Such a compiler would be non-compliant with the standard of course.
> And I mean absolutely static. No new methods. No changes to the comments. No nothing. (In fact, I doubt there are even 1% of people who want this, once they give it some thought.)
Ummm, even in C/C++ you can change comments in an interface and it won't break its linkage. You cannot, of course, add methods to a class, change signatures, etc. without breaking the interface.
But again, just looking at Java, I _think_ you could add methods to an interface and old users of the library would continue to function without recompilation. (You definitely can't modify signatures in existing methods.) This is because the Java Virtual Machine does resolution of class and method names at runtime - it does a symbolic lookup the first time it uses a class or method.
In languages like C/C++ the compiler generates calls to functions and methods using fixed offsets that are calculated at compilation time. Move one offset and suddenly your library is incompatible.
I tend to agree with the first poster that having the capability to define separate interfaces and implementations is a nice feature in a language. I don't know that it should be forced down your throat, but having the capability is nice.
I agree with you that we're entering the age of the global economy, and most of what you say about global economics. Basic economics teaches exactly what will happen. Wages will rise elsewhere, and probably decline here until an equilibrium is reached. Overall the average will most likely rise, but right now the high end of the average is here in the US (and some other places like Europe, Australia, etc) and the average here could go down a whole bunch while the world average rises.
My only real issue with globalization from as it is happening today is that everyone is competing with each other, but not playing by the same rules. In the US and other "modern" countries, we have environmental policies, laws about working conditions, etc. that many third-world countries do not have. That artificially lowers their costs or artificially increases ours, depending on how you look at it.
Is the answer to this issue to create new regulations barring trade from countries without these basic protections? That goes against the ideals of free trade... Free market theory would tell you that eventually the environmental and safety issues that matter will cause prices to increase... For example, if you kill your labor force through a bad environment or poor safety practices, then the labor market tightens up and wages increase and overall costs increase.
Of course, if you've got a government that has absolute power over the population, then free market rules might not apply. If someone holds a gun to your head and tells you to go work in some dangerous factory for next to nothing, chances are you will do it.
Maybe then the real important issue is for all countries of the world to have some basic human rights. I don't think this is the case right now.
I'm not sure how to cause this to happen (probably bombing the crap out of the rest of the world won't work too well) other than to try and purchase goods taking into account where they were made. I'm not saying to buy stuff made only in , but perhaps it's worth looking at more than just price when making buying decisions
For my kid's sake I wish there was an easier way to transition to a more global economy. But even if we could suddenly make everyone as prosperous as the US, it wouldn't work since that would require four Earth's worth of resources. I agree that there will be "interesting" times ahead for the US.
> Will not compile on GCC 2.95.. That really limits its use a lot doesnt it?
Limiting oneself to gcc 2.95.x is very painful. It's C++ support is lacking in several areas - namespace support is lacking, exception support is lacking, template support is missing some features, and the C++ standard library is totally standards non-compliant. Anyone doing any serious C++ development that can move to g++ >= 3.2 should do so. (There are lots of situations where this isn't an option, of course.)
Neal Stephenson is a Debian user. See for yourself. I once saw a quote that he liked Debian because of the huge number of bugs in the database. (He liked that Debian is open - not that it has a huge number of bugs ;-))
> You'll probably only be able to get timing resolution near that of the OS tick interrupt interval, right?
Only if you do it using a hardware resource under control of the OS and do polling. Even the parallel port can generate interrupts to the OS. Add a microcontroller and/or some custom hardware and the OS doesn't come into play except for display.
I know this is not what you asked and is probably out of most hobbiest budgets, but I'll mention it anyways as it could help someone. A project we did here absolutely required a scope, and we considered a logic analyzer as highly desirable but not strictly necessary. We had a budget of around $5k - significant but not really that big when you start pricing this stuff.
It had been a while since I shopped for this stuff and I happily found that Agilent (used to be HP) has what they call "mixed signal scopes". Specifically, we purchased a 54622D. It's 100MHz 2 channel oscillscope, but then it's also got a 16 channel logic analyzer built in. (See full specs here.) We purchased it used for around $2600. To get that price we had to play two of the used dealers against each other a little bit. We have been really happy with it so far. $2600 is quite a bit more than $500, but you do get both a scope and a small logic analyzer for that... It's got a built in serial interface and floppy, and it's more portable than dragging a computer around. Take care, and good luck with your quest!
I'm thinking 100 years ago the sound of a steam engine freaked out the locals, their farm animals, etc. I think that the speculation about "it's just unfamiliar" is probably dead on.