That they killed Floyd. Man, that just crushed my whole life. I haven't been right since... that shaky, almost annoying robot, so brave so suddenly, about to go into that room. Planetfall, you broke my soul.
Do you also prefer people from other countries not buying USA products?
Yes, of course. I would like to see the British making cars and aircraft again, for example. I think that, we've reached a point where there's no reason every country could not have its own manufacturing industry. Keep natural resources trading, let ideas flow freely among nations, but let everyone handle their own manufacturing. You get all the benefits and information exchange of free trade, but without all the social upheaval. This whole arbitrary linking of information flows with physical plant seems rather silly. Perhaps you could have an IP auction that was completely decoupled from manufacturing system... I don't know but, its a form of tying and its not efficient.
I wrote a stupid shooter called Independent. It's pretty fun - a bottom moving spaceship blasts a bunch of things dropping from the sky. It uses 3d graphics but runs fine on a corporate Dell Latitude D610. Go to http://mightyware.com/independent.htm and help yourself. The registration code is 1138 (after the famous movie). Heck, I'm not selling it, so, if anyone wants it, go ahead and download and mirror.
After 30 years of reading science news, I'm not holding my breath for cancer. The facts are pretty much the same. If you get small cell lung cancer, you have a 90% chance of dying. John Wayne died of it, and if you get it, you will too.
Bone cancer, pancreatic cancer, all of those are pretty much fatal as well.
Others are not so fatal, but early treatment matters. Breast cancer is one. If you get a cancer that you can and do survive, you'll probably have lifelong health problems as a result, as much from the treatment as the cancer itself, and you won't ever really be completely cured.
This is why we need a better "theory of everything". The problem is that all the knowledge that we have accumulated is like so much trivia. There's not nearly enough abstraction where the universe is distilled down to a few essential rules that can easily applied to everything. It's not so much a problem of physics, really, as it is with pure mathematics. Physicists discover what works and how things work, but I think ultimately we want to take seriously and fund seriously mathematics as its own research discipline, so we can get that kind of abstraction that we need.
You know it may be true that the Genius incorporates the work of others, but, there's usually a piece of insight that they arrive at, sometimes exhaustingly, that other people simply cannot grasp or see and in fact will even argue with the line of thought right up until it is proved.
Groups tend to push people down to a common denominator of thought. You eliminate the pursuit of "wild ideas" and get locked into dogma, and wind up accomplishing nothing. Could a committee have made the insight to invent the calculus and use it then to explain the laws of motion? I don't think so. In fact, the committee of the day more or less threw its hands up at the problem and delegated it to Newton.
Please show me the committee that could have delivered Beethoven's 9th, A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall, Newton's Principia, Einstein's Relativity, and other number of breakthroughs great and small. It doesn't exist.
90% of all programming today is a bunch of business people that see programming as well, satisfying the construction of a design according to their prototypes. That Apple actually encourages the creative aspects of programming, as you suggest, is actually even -BETTER- than what I wrote. That Jobs actually takes the time to get baked and find something he can sell, well, is doing more than 90% of all other software company CEOs do... and that's why he's a billionare, and others are not.
For some reason I have this vision of a frenetic and baked Steve Jobs coming up with this "awesome" concept for a U/I, rattling off orders to developers by the dozens. Somehow Apple makes it work, and to perfection. Developers lives are shattered, Jobs is triumph, and the result is probably going to be pretty excellent.
Particularly in Democracies, and is more likely antithetical to them. Be careful that whatever short term secrets you might secure in the future are not obtained by the terrible mortgage of a future empire.
I would say Obama could kill the Army's Future Combat System, the F-35, the DDG(X) (or whatever it is), the hopelessly mismanaged Littoral Combat Ship, and come out far, far ahead of killing anything NASA does.
FCS is stupid, replacing the M1 tank, with, what, a tank that sucks? The F-22 is a better aircraft than the F-35 for Air Superiority and its flying right now and the Navy already just bought a bunch of SuperHornets. The DDG(X) is just a colossal procurement disaster and the Littoral Combat Ship is so bad even the Navy condemns it.
Look, I like Ares / Constellation but, Obama will soon be the President and NASA works for him. If Obama says no Ares, then, there is no Ares, and if anyone at NASA doesn't like it, then, they can pound sand or find another job.
Two wrongs do not make a right in this matter. I know there are some Republicans who are furious over the various insubordinations in government that took place under Bush. Well, just because they did it does not give us a right to do it. What's more important is to preserve civilian rule of government, elected by the people and for the people, and the people chose Obama. Everyone in the executive branch now has to do what he says, not just Democrats.
Remember too that Apple really misfired in the OS wars because OS 7x were of a conceptually similar design to Windows 3.1. There wasn't genuine pre-emptive multitasking, real protected memory, and so forth. Apple read Windows 95 as a graphics threat and responded to with an abortive Copland project, but what really hurt Apple was Windows NT 4.0, which put the 95 shell onto a fairly solid Windows NT kernel. The low point for Apple Operating systems came when the then CEO of Apple was publicly ridiculed at a developer's conference for noting that while Copland did not have pre-emption or true task isolation, they would just "add that in"... Copland never saw the light of day.
For all of his faults as a "user" person and a techno-illiterate, Jobs actually saw that the lack of a superior techie underpinning hurt Apple's image as a techy leader. SO, as soon as he was back in the driver's seat at Apple, he went topshelf, bought Next, put MacOS on top of a Unix, and thus was born OS/X.
Fortunately for Apple, this worked out pretty well, for two reasons. For one, the emergence of Linux breathed a lot of a new life into Unix and suddenly what Microsoft argued was a dying platform became very much alive. Secondly, Jobs always executes whatever he does very well, and, while he couldn't compete with Windows on -every- feature, he could certainly get a shell with plenty of polish.
From there, it was onto some gimmicky cases for Mac, and that's when Apple really started to roll. But the thing that really got moving was the applications that came with Mac. There was always Adobe, of course, as the ruling third party, but MS came up with a decent Office port. This time, Apple went out and came up with a pretty novel suite of home products, and, some interesting professional graphics products as well. But of that home suite, there was this vision of the Mac as a center of a service. Sure, iTunes is very famous, but how many Mac owners actually used that iBook application to actually make a photo scrapbook, spend the bucks and have Apple dropship a hardbound book to whoever you want it. That was also pretty darned cool.
Looks like the site has been slashdotted... time for everyone's Carl Sagan impression to describe the meltdown: "Millions and millions of connections..."
So, if Apple has more money in the bank than Microsoft and has more money in the bank than Dell's market cap, exactly why should Apple change its strategy to be more like Dell?
one would think apple would have learned from their past mistake of a less closed platform overtaking them and nearly sending the company down the drain
Apple went down the drain more from the clones. Look, Apple's whole thing is about the entire consumer experience from store to computer hardware to boot. It always has been and hopefully always will be. To say that Apple should just be like Microsoft, is kinda crazy. Apple doesn't have the money to compete with Microsoft or Dell and so the real brand differentiator is that they have an entirely different business model.
The best way to keep the jobs where you are is to make damn good software, and convince your management with your products that you are worth every penny they pay.
There's no convincing them of anything and people that believe otherwise are just delusional. I used to agree with you, but for the most, management doesn't care. Corporations have no loyalty to you or your country, so why should you be loyal to them? Do you seriously think that there is any quid pro quo between you and a company? Dude, that's just silly.
My point was that you were missing the fact that slashdot is not entirely composed of Americans. So your question "who cares" should raise a couple of "I dos"
They aren't NATO, so, their opinions are irrelevant to me. What I'm looking to do is help western programmers understand that they need to focus on themselves first, and whatever happens to third world is not a first world problem any more.
Mmmm, let's see... The Indians for starters? The corporate world that depends on them and the on the quality of their code?
That's not your problem, now is it. The triangle looks like this. The corporate world is on top. You are on one leg, and the Indians are at the bottom. Once that code is handed off to the Indians, you will get kicked out, so, like, why help that? Who are you more loyal to, the Indians, the corporation, or your own family, country and community. I guarantee you that nothing you do to the corporation will change their attitudes about the outsourcing and that the loyalties of the Indians will be first to their family, community and country, so why not do the same as what everyone else is doing? SO you can feel good about being the idiot that falls on the sword so a corporation can get richer while an Indian takes your job?
I can imagine a generation coming out of school believing that "free software" is somehow illegal or immoral. Nicely taught to pay the "computer tax" to Microsoft, which is the only solution.
No, they just would pay for Linux... nothing is free, you know.
Then, the B-team takes it over and can't figure out what the heck it does. The code is then doomed to painful process of continuous decay
The B-Team is, in the corporate world, in India, so who the hell cares what happens to it. I think programmers in the West (EU+USA), need to start thinking about what gets them the most features now, and leave legacy issues off to the offshore teams. Clever designs, chopping out the comments, all those "bad rules" that are so ruthlessly enforced to make our corporate masters happy, and for what? To make you perform less productively in terms of features / lines of code? When you will people wake up and realize that dumbing down your code to make up for people with lower skillsets is just a euphemism for sending your job to some guy in India with an MS Cert making $2 an hour. If they want you to train them, then train them, and get paid for it. But don't sit there and not deliver features when they are going to use a bunch of wizards and total crap offshore to argue they do more features than you. Throw the triple pointer at them and inline assembly at them and let them f-- it up.
Well, that's the thing, is that, the sloppy geek who also made himself a billionaire is kind of a statement of fact. Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Bill Joy, Steve Wozniak, none of those guys are going to win the cover of GQ, none are really "team" players, and all of them make more money than all of us on this forum combined, and I'm sure that they've had their fair share of pizza.
Except for the 'enemy combatant' nonsense Bush II arrogated for himself.
Even that's not a "wide" power. When I'm talking "wide" power, I'm talking about a Hitlerian edict to round up and hang a few hundred people on a dime and then dial up some popcorn and giggle at them in home movies.
You have to remember, that, at his peak, the Fuhrer was flat out killing ten times as many people as there are in Gitmo, every day. That's a good fascist.
The real question is, would you say Stalin was a fascist more than a communist? I mean, yeah, he went through the motion of the five year plans and the whole communist enterprise... and he had a greater degree of economic control than even the Nazis had over their industry... but, he was a strongman, had absolute power, went less in favor of the idea of global communism and more in favor of mother russia (there's the nationalism), and followed it up with loads of killing.
I'd say the most recent fascist out there might be Saddam? Mubarak in Egypt? Can't decide.
Fascism is defined by extreme nationalism and a disregard for basic human rights
Facism is an undemocratic military model applied to the entire state. Each person is a soldier of the state and the thought is that this would be more efficient, as armies were thought to be efficient. It follows that there is an extreme nationalism and disregard for human rights, largely because the view of the state as a single giant army generally leads to wars.
SO... you have a giant state, everyone is a soldier, and from the top on down, and there is no accountability or information flows from the bottom up. Everything is strictly top down. This arrangement has nothing to do with who owns what corporation, or even the entire state owning everything. It is the combination of the lack of citizen powers, the lack of accountability, the view of the entire state as an army, all culminating in absolute power for a leader who assumes the legislative, executive and judicial powers, that makes a facist state.
While its certainly vogue to claim that the USA is going fascist (when Bush was in office-I'm sure we'll here equally ridiculous claims about Obama going communist once he's sworn in), the dividing line here is that Bush does not have the legislative and judiciary power in his hands. Granted, the American President does have a great deal of power relative to the divided system of President and Prime Minister in parliamentary systems, but, he's still limited constitutionally in that he cannot spend money or wage wars without the approval of the Congress, and he has little say in the process of amending the US Constitution. And, in any case, he's only allowed to serve two terms, must be elected and then re-elected and then he's done.
By contrast, Hitler was both the head of state, and the prime minister. After the "Enabling Act" passed the Reichstag, Hitler was legally allowed to do -anything-. He could arbitrarily declare war on another country, which no US President could do. He could also set budgets and manage the spending of the Reich, which no US President could do. And, he had wide powers of arrest and harrasment that a US President does not have.
Perhaps the easy way to test a dictatorship would be to see what happens to the dictators enemies. Presently, in the USA, the political enemies of the President wind up getting rich and famous, whereas in NAZI Germany, they wound up in Dachau, assuming they were not all executed in the various purges that took place as Hitler gained power.
Slashdot Mirror
That they killed Floyd. Man, that just crushed my whole life. I haven't been right since... that shaky, almost annoying robot, so brave so suddenly, about to go into that room. Planetfall, you broke my soul.
Do you also prefer people from other countries not buying USA products?
Yes, of course. I would like to see the British making cars and aircraft again, for example. I think that, we've reached a point where there's no reason every country could not have its own manufacturing industry. Keep natural resources trading, let ideas flow freely among nations, but let everyone handle their own manufacturing. You get all the benefits and information exchange of free trade, but without all the social upheaval. This whole arbitrary linking of information flows with physical plant seems rather silly. Perhaps you could have an IP auction that was completely decoupled from manufacturing system... I don't know but, its a form of tying and its not efficient.
I wrote a stupid shooter called Independent. It's pretty fun - a bottom moving spaceship blasts a bunch of things dropping from the sky. It uses 3d graphics but runs fine on a corporate Dell Latitude D610. Go to http://mightyware.com/independent.htm and help yourself. The registration code is 1138 (after the famous movie). Heck, I'm not selling it, so, if anyone wants it, go ahead and download and mirror.
After 30 years of reading science news, I'm not holding my breath for cancer. The facts are pretty much the same. If you get small cell lung cancer, you have a 90% chance of dying. John Wayne died of it, and if you get it, you will too.
Bone cancer, pancreatic cancer, all of those are pretty much fatal as well.
Others are not so fatal, but early treatment matters. Breast cancer is one. If you get a cancer that you can and do survive, you'll probably have lifelong health problems as a result, as much from the treatment as the cancer itself, and you won't ever really be completely cured.
This is why we need a better "theory of everything". The problem is that all the knowledge that we have accumulated is like so much trivia. There's not nearly enough abstraction where the universe is distilled down to a few essential rules that can easily applied to everything. It's not so much a problem of physics, really, as it is with pure mathematics. Physicists discover what works and how things work, but I think ultimately we want to take seriously and fund seriously mathematics as its own research discipline, so we can get that kind of abstraction that we need.
. And since they probably won't hand the keys to the LHC(once its repaired) to some upstart grad student with a new theory,
Why not hand the keys of the thing over to the kids every now and then? Maybe that's the problem? Last time I checked, the kids pay taxes for it too.
You know it may be true that the Genius incorporates the work of others, but, there's usually a piece of insight that they arrive at, sometimes exhaustingly, that other people simply cannot grasp or see and in fact will even argue with the line of thought right up until it is proved.
Groups tend to push people down to a common denominator of thought. You eliminate the pursuit of "wild ideas" and get locked into dogma, and wind up accomplishing nothing. Could a committee have made the insight to invent the calculus and use it then to explain the laws of motion? I don't think so. In fact, the committee of the day more or less threw its hands up at the problem and delegated it to Newton.
Please show me the committee that could have delivered Beethoven's 9th, A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall, Newton's Principia, Einstein's Relativity, and other number of breakthroughs great and small. It doesn't exist.
90% of all programming today is a bunch of business people that see programming as well, satisfying the construction of a design according to their prototypes. That Apple actually encourages the creative aspects of programming, as you suggest, is actually even -BETTER- than what I wrote. That Jobs actually takes the time to get baked and find something he can sell, well, is doing more than 90% of all other software company CEOs do... and that's why he's a billionare, and others are not.
For some reason I have this vision of a frenetic and baked Steve Jobs coming up with this "awesome" concept for a U/I, rattling off orders to developers by the dozens. Somehow Apple makes it work, and to perfection. Developers lives are shattered, Jobs is triumph, and the result is probably going to be pretty excellent.
Apple is back.
Particularly in Democracies, and is more likely antithetical to them. Be careful that whatever short term secrets you might secure in the future are not obtained by the terrible mortgage of a future empire.
I would say Obama could kill the Army's Future Combat System, the F-35, the DDG(X) (or whatever it is), the hopelessly mismanaged Littoral Combat Ship, and come out far, far ahead of killing anything NASA does.
FCS is stupid, replacing the M1 tank, with, what, a tank that sucks? The F-22 is a better aircraft than the F-35 for Air Superiority and its flying right now and the Navy already just bought a bunch of SuperHornets. The DDG(X) is just a colossal procurement disaster and the Littoral Combat Ship is so bad even the Navy condemns it.
Look, I like Ares / Constellation but, Obama will soon be the President and NASA works for him. If Obama says no Ares, then, there is no Ares, and if anyone at NASA doesn't like it, then, they can pound sand or find another job.
Two wrongs do not make a right in this matter. I know there are some Republicans who are furious over the various insubordinations in government that took place under Bush. Well, just because they did it does not give us a right to do it. What's more important is to preserve civilian rule of government, elected by the people and for the people, and the people chose Obama. Everyone in the executive branch now has to do what he says, not just Democrats.
Remember too that Apple really misfired in the OS wars because OS 7x were of a conceptually similar design to Windows 3.1. There wasn't genuine pre-emptive multitasking, real protected memory, and so forth. Apple read Windows 95 as a graphics threat and responded to with an abortive Copland project, but what really hurt Apple was Windows NT 4.0, which put the 95 shell onto a fairly solid Windows NT kernel. The low point for Apple Operating systems came when the then CEO of Apple was publicly ridiculed at a developer's conference for noting that while Copland did not have pre-emption or true task isolation, they would just "add that in"... Copland never saw the light of day.
For all of his faults as a "user" person and a techno-illiterate, Jobs actually saw that the lack of a superior techie underpinning hurt Apple's image as a techy leader. SO, as soon as he was back in the driver's seat at Apple, he went topshelf, bought Next, put MacOS on top of a Unix, and thus was born OS/X.
Fortunately for Apple, this worked out pretty well, for two reasons. For one, the emergence of Linux breathed a lot of a new life into Unix and suddenly what Microsoft argued was a dying platform became very much alive. Secondly, Jobs always executes whatever he does very well, and, while he couldn't compete with Windows on -every- feature, he could certainly get a shell with plenty of polish.
From there, it was onto some gimmicky cases for Mac, and that's when Apple really started to roll. But the thing that really got moving was the applications that came with Mac. There was always Adobe, of course, as the ruling third party, but MS came up with a decent Office port. This time, Apple went out and came up with a pretty novel suite of home products, and, some interesting professional graphics products as well. But of that home suite, there was this vision of the Mac as a center of a service. Sure, iTunes is very famous, but how many Mac owners actually used that iBook application to actually make a photo scrapbook, spend the bucks and have Apple dropship a hardbound book to whoever you want it. That was also pretty darned cool.
I wish I would have bought their stock back then.
Looks like the site has been slashdotted... time for everyone's Carl Sagan impression to describe the meltdown: "Millions and millions of connections..."
So, if Apple has more money in the bank than Microsoft and has more money in the bank than Dell's market cap, exactly why should Apple change its strategy to be more like Dell?
one would think apple would have learned from their past mistake of a less closed platform overtaking them and nearly sending the company down the drain
Apple went down the drain more from the clones. Look, Apple's whole thing is about the entire consumer experience from store to computer hardware to boot. It always has been and hopefully always will be. To say that Apple should just be like Microsoft, is kinda crazy. Apple doesn't have the money to compete with Microsoft or Dell and so the real brand differentiator is that they have an entirely different business model.
The best way to keep the jobs where you are is to make damn good software, and convince your management with your products that you are worth every penny they pay.
There's no convincing them of anything and people that believe otherwise are just delusional. I used to agree with you, but for the most, management doesn't care. Corporations have no loyalty to you or your country, so why should you be loyal to them? Do you seriously think that there is any quid pro quo between you and a company? Dude, that's just silly.
My point was that you were missing the fact that slashdot is not entirely composed of Americans. So your question "who cares" should raise a couple of "I dos"
They aren't NATO, so, their opinions are irrelevant to me. What I'm looking to do is help western programmers understand that they need to focus on themselves first, and whatever happens to third world is not a first world problem any more.
Mmmm, let's see... The Indians for starters? The corporate world that depends on them and the on the quality of their code?
That's not your problem, now is it. The triangle looks like this. The corporate world is on top. You are on one leg, and the Indians are at the bottom. Once that code is handed off to the Indians, you will get kicked out, so, like, why help that? Who are you more loyal to, the Indians, the corporation, or your own family, country and community. I guarantee you that nothing you do to the corporation will change their attitudes about the outsourcing and that the loyalties of the Indians will be first to their family, community and country, so why not do the same as what everyone else is doing? SO you can feel good about being the idiot that falls on the sword so a corporation can get richer while an Indian takes your job?
I can imagine a generation coming out of school believing that "free software" is somehow illegal or immoral. Nicely taught to pay the "computer tax" to Microsoft, which is the only solution.
No, they just would pay for Linux... nothing is free, you know.
Then, the B-team takes it over and can't figure out what the heck it does. The code is then doomed to painful process of continuous decay
The B-Team is, in the corporate world, in India, so who the hell cares what happens to it. I think programmers in the West (EU+USA), need to start thinking about what gets them the most features now, and leave legacy issues off to the offshore teams. Clever designs, chopping out the comments, all those "bad rules" that are so ruthlessly enforced to make our corporate masters happy, and for what? To make you perform less productively in terms of features / lines of code? When you will people wake up and realize that dumbing down your code to make up for people with lower skillsets is just a euphemism for sending your job to some guy in India with an MS Cert making $2 an hour. If they want you to train them, then train them, and get paid for it. But don't sit there and not deliver features when they are going to use a bunch of wizards and total crap offshore to argue they do more features than you. Throw the triple pointer at them and inline assembly at them and let them f-- it up.
Well, that's the thing, is that, the sloppy geek who also made himself a billionaire is kind of a statement of fact. Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Bill Joy, Steve Wozniak, none of those guys are going to win the cover of GQ, none are really "team" players, and all of them make more money than all of us on this forum combined, and I'm sure that they've had their fair share of pizza.
Except for the 'enemy combatant' nonsense Bush II arrogated for himself.
Even that's not a "wide" power. When I'm talking "wide" power, I'm talking about a Hitlerian edict to round up and hang a few hundred people on a dime and then dial up some popcorn and giggle at them in home movies.
You have to remember, that, at his peak, the Fuhrer was flat out killing ten times as many people as there are in Gitmo, every day. That's a good fascist.
The real question is, would you say Stalin was a fascist more than a communist? I mean, yeah, he went through the motion of the five year plans and the whole communist enterprise... and he had a greater degree of economic control than even the Nazis had over their industry... but, he was a strongman, had absolute power, went less in favor of the idea of global communism and more in favor of mother russia (there's the nationalism), and followed it up with loads of killing.
I'd say the most recent fascist out there might be Saddam? Mubarak in Egypt? Can't decide.
Fascism is defined by extreme nationalism and a disregard for basic human rights
Facism is an undemocratic military model applied to the entire state. Each person is a soldier of the state and the thought is that this would be more efficient, as armies were thought to be efficient. It follows that there is an extreme nationalism and disregard for human rights, largely because the view of the state as a single giant army generally leads to wars.
SO... you have a giant state, everyone is a soldier, and from the top on down, and there is no accountability or information flows from the bottom up. Everything is strictly top down. This arrangement has nothing to do with who owns what corporation, or even the entire state owning everything. It is the combination of the lack of citizen powers, the lack of accountability, the view of the entire state as an army, all culminating in absolute power for a leader who assumes the legislative, executive and judicial powers, that makes a facist state.
While its certainly vogue to claim that the USA is going fascist (when Bush was in office-I'm sure we'll here equally ridiculous claims about Obama going communist once he's sworn in), the dividing line here is that Bush does not have the legislative and judiciary power in his hands. Granted, the American President does have a great deal of power relative to the divided system of President and Prime Minister in parliamentary systems, but, he's still limited constitutionally in that he cannot spend money or wage wars without the approval of the Congress, and he has little say in the process of amending the US Constitution. And, in any case, he's only allowed to serve two terms, must be elected and then re-elected and then he's done.
By contrast, Hitler was both the head of state, and the prime minister. After the "Enabling Act" passed the Reichstag, Hitler was legally allowed to do -anything-. He could arbitrarily declare war on another country, which no US President could do. He could also set budgets and manage the spending of the Reich, which no US President could do. And, he had wide powers of arrest and harrasment that a US President does not have.
Perhaps the easy way to test a dictatorship would be to see what happens to the dictators enemies. Presently, in the USA, the political enemies of the President wind up getting rich and famous, whereas in NAZI Germany, they wound up in Dachau, assuming they were not all executed in the various purges that took place as Hitler gained power.
They do disallow certain opcodes. They don't allow at least some computed jumps and they don't allow ret, and they don't allow int or syscall.