You don't get it. Sure, in the 70's we were using assembler and in the 80s we used C. Still there were enough things left to be done that it made little difference and there still are.
For example, as computers become more and more ubiquitous a higher degree of reliability will be required. My guess is that it would take somewhere between 1,000-100,000 man years each to make Windows/Office/OpenOffice/<favourite application here> mission critical.
And we will need them to be mission critical. The Navy is now running on them.
The photos of so many human bones. There's no chance in HELL these would be allowed to be left about after all this time.
About ten years back there was an article in the Atlantic monthly about heaps upon heaps of exposed bones in a field just outside Stalingrad, IIRC. The author concluded a priori that it would have taken too long to bury them either during war, or right after during the reconstruction. Hence they were likely to still be exposed, if truly so many people had died in that battle. Lo and behold, the piles of bones were there.
My friends in the Chicago area say they get tons of applications for each job posting they have, but very few candidates (if any) are qualified for the job. I hear similar stories from the New York area: lots of people who know how to write a simple program in Java but none that you could possibly hire as a team manager.
All those poor folks have been secretly investing in new corporations and hiring people.
Actually, precisely because they already own the companies and stocks they are likelier to park their extra cash, say, in Euros which has gone up almost 50% in the last year (that's where my rich friends have been telling me to do with my hard earned 401-k funds, btw).
On the other hand a poor SOB on minimum wage has a laundry list a mile long of basic needs that need to be taken care of, and will spend their money right away, thus creating an increase in consumption which leads to an increase in investment.
Re:Why I think Kerry is a worse choice than Bush
on
Pre-Election Discussion
·
· Score: 2, Informative
We also had intelligence indicating that Saddam still had WMD.
Actually we did not. The CIA has said so time and time again.
Speaking of world respect, the Economist has no respect for Kerry either.
Yet, they decided that overall Kerry was the better choice. That should tell you something. There is no love lost between Kerry and the Economist, yet they still think he's better than Bush.
Now, let's get on to the economy. I realize that Bush's policies aren't the best, but I do have a couple of points to make. First, the president really doesn't have that much direct control over the economy.
Agreed. One of the few places where the president can have an impact is in tax policy. What did he do in that regard? he gave a tax break to the wealthy who are the least likely to reinvest the money on the economy.
However, in all those issues, I don't see Kerry doing a better job than Bush, and, in most, I see him doing a much worse job.
So you mean to say that Kerry will give bigger tax breaks to rich people thus making the deficit bigger? From Gerald Ford ownwards the democratic administrations have reduced the deficit, the republican administrations have increased it. At what point does this record becomes relevant?
An innovation: proof by bold tagging. Why are we so positive god exists? because Traa wrote it in bold letters.... Ah I see know. I'm convinced, Allah does exist!
So I don't think that this was a 'problem left behind', as much as a problem which is just now becoming solvable.
This problem was solvable forty years ago, had we been willing to spend $1 billion on it, as we did building the latest bevatron back then. If you look at where physics has gone since the end of the cold war you'd see a shift away from particle physics and back to more traditional physics.
It's amazing how many basic problems were left behind in the multibillion race to find the latest useless particle.
It's not that understanding particle physics is not useful. What bugs me it that it was done at the cost of neglecting other equally important areas of physics.
Everything else, leave to industry. A free market economy can make far better decisions about how to spend money than can politicans.
Except for things such as defense which are public goods. In particular, advanced theoretical knowledge is a public good. At least part of space exploration (say Titan mission) is a public good and hence has to be financed by government money or not at all.
This is yet another case of a Kerry republican. In all, there have been over two dozen publications which endorsed Bush for president in 2000 and this time around are behind Kerry. In contrast, half a dozen newspapers have gone the opposite way, that is, from endorsing Gore in 2000 to endorsing Bush in 2004.
I believe history won't be kind on the 43rd president of the USA. He had the support of the entire world post-9/11, plus the largest fiscal surplus ever and he blew away both of them in less than three years.
It is a flip-flop. Whenever Kerry has a nuanced opinion, Bush calls it a flip-flop. What is good for the goose is good for the gander and this is a Bush flip-flop.
Except that there are as many Democrats defecting to Republicans as there are Republicans defecting to Democrats, at least in my experience.
Actually the polls say this is not the case. The core constituencies have moved little, with a bit more republicans moving democrat than the other way, but still the cores were remarkably static.
The Democrats are not particularly motivated,
On the contrary, democrats are particularly pissed since many of them believe either that Bush stole the election in 2000 or on the basis of the Iraq fiasco.
Which kind of begs the question as to how we ended up with a couple of clowns to choose from in the first place.
This might have been true in 2000, when it wasn't clear which candidate was less inspired: Bush or Gore. This time around Bush has had a chance at it and good or bad we know where he stands. The same can be said about Kerry with his long and distinguished record in Vietnam, in the antiwar protest, as a DA and a senator.
Kerry and Bush stand for two very different visions of how to make America safe for the next decade, and how much debt burden our children will have. Well meaning people might disagree about which one is the right one, but to claim that they are "similar clowns" is disingenous at best.
I've been following elections for over 20 years in over six countries and various states. In that time I've learned two things (a) generally polls are eerily accurate (ignore them at your own peril) and (b) every so often there are certain elections which one can tell, almost from the get go, that previous historical norms won't apply and hence polls will mispredict the outcome.
The 2004 presidential election is one of those elections in which participation rate of voters will be way out of the norm, on the coat-tails of the 2000 stalemate and the strong anti-Bush feeling from the democrats.
Using historical data, Bush is slightly ahead as reported by the Stanford poll or electoral-vote.com. If we correct the data assuming a slightly higher participation for the democrats, the polls give an edge to Kerry of 284 electoral votes vs 254 for Bush.
You don't get it. They are both buggy. That is why you have to split hairs about vulnerabilities... Plus read my other posting on this thread about sendmail and apache, if you want to talk about "obscure" software bugs that can be remotely exploited.
But hey, don't let the facts get on the way of your prejudices.
A quick sample from a google search for "linux vulnerability root":
Vulnerabilities have been identified in "unzip" and GNU "tar" Commands.... DAMAGE: A local unprivileged user may be able to gain unauthorized root access and/or overwrite any file on the system.
or
EXtremail is a free pop3/smtp mail server for Unix. EXtremail versions 1.1.3 through 1.1.9 for Linux are vulnerable to a format string attack, caused by user-supplied input for a fprintf()statement in the flog() function. A remote attacker can supply specially-crafted strings to certain commands to gain root privileges on the system.
Here are some KDE related ones
KTVision version 0.1.1 in some Linux distributions could allow a local attacker to launch a symlink attack. KTVision creates temporary files with predictable file names. A local attacker could use this vulnerability to create a symbolic link in KTVision to gain root privileges. By default, KTVision is installed setuid root
and
The K Desktop Environment (KDE) provides an integrated graphical desktop environment for UNIX workstations. As a part of this environment, it supplies its own PPP implementation (kppp) and its own screen locking environment (klock), both of which are installed setuid root. Both of these programs have numerous security vulnerabilities which can expose the computer to a root compromise by a local user.
Does this mean we've all been wrong about Microsoft products?
Actually yes. People here always talk about Microsoft products being buggier than the average, without any evidence to back it up beyond their own prejudices.
They use to laugh at the "much inferior" IE code, until the mozilla project got started and it turned out Netscape had the inferior code base.
OSSers used to laugh at the "bloat" of the windows source code.... until Linux got to have a decent user interface that is, and guess what? source code size is comparable to Windows.
There are many reasons to loathe the evil empire (monopolistic bully for one), but buggy code is not one of them. That is just something OSSers tell each other to feel better about what they do.
MS Linux exists, and has existed, for a while. It'll appear whenever there's a business need for it.
You really need to read Clayton Christensen's book. In it he describes how the old technology company keeps on asking its customers "do you need this new technology (e.g. Linux)" and the customers keep on saying no, we don't, because the new technology is so disruptive that it comes with its own set of customers.
For example while M$ is busy asking corporate IT if they want Linux and OpenOffice instead of WinXP and MS Office, and they keep on hearing that no, they don't.
Meanwhile average joe blow keeps on buying RIM blacberry's at a rate of a million per quarter, and suddenly you have a widely deployed platform. And yes, it turns out joe blow does want Linux and OpenOffice in his blackberry.
So the "business need" never arose. M$ customers never asked for it. It was the non-customers who took over.
While I think this is encouraging, I feel that it's a little alarmist: Microsoft still have an incredible monopoly. Of you non-techie friends (if you have any unconverted) how many *don't* run Windows?
Disruptive technologies creep on you very fast. One day they are laggards offering much inferior products and competing against well established monopolies, and then a few years later the old monopoly is gone and the new technology has taken over.
All your comments above applied equally to IBM. They had an incredible monopoly and you would have been hard pressed to find a non-IBM shop in the mid-80s. Yet here we are, twenty years later with Micrsoft being the dominant monopoly.
For writing letters, you really want to have a decent keyboard, and for spreadsheets, something that is larger than a 5" screen is probably a very good idea as well.
Now you are making the same mistake as DEC and other such companies described by Clayton in his book: "how could the PC ever replace mainframes? it doesn't have enough memory, it has no access to tapes where all the data resides" etc.
The mistake you are making is that you are comparing today's incarnation of an ascending technology (blackberry) with a highly mature platform (PC). By the time the blackberry has gone through a few iterations it will come with holographic keyboard and retina-projection screen.
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You don't get it. Sure, in the 70's we were using assembler and in the 80s we used C. Still there were enough things left to be done that it made little difference and there still are.
For example, as computers become more and more ubiquitous a higher degree of reliability will be required. My guess is that it would take somewhere between 1,000-100,000 man years each to make Windows/Office/OpenOffice/<favourite application here> mission critical.
And we will need them to be mission critical. The Navy is now running on them.
The photos of so many human bones. There's no chance in HELL these would be allowed to be left about after all this time.
About ten years back there was an article in the Atlantic monthly about heaps upon heaps of exposed bones in a field just outside Stalingrad, IIRC. The author concluded a priori that it would have taken too long to bury them either during war, or right after during the reconstruction. Hence they were likely to still be exposed, if truly so many people had died in that battle. Lo and behold, the piles of bones were there.
My friends in the Chicago area say they get tons of applications for each job posting they have, but very few candidates (if any) are qualified for the job. I hear similar stories from the New York area: lots of people who know how to write a simple program in Java but none that you could possibly hire as a team manager.
All those poor folks have been secretly investing in new corporations and hiring people.
Actually, precisely because they already own the companies and stocks they are likelier to park their extra cash, say, in Euros which has gone up almost 50% in the last year (that's where my rich friends have been telling me to do with my hard earned 401-k funds, btw).
On the other hand a poor SOB on minimum wage has a laundry list a mile long of basic needs that need to be taken care of, and will spend their money right away, thus creating an increase in consumption which leads to an increase in investment.
We also had intelligence indicating that Saddam still had WMD.
Actually we did not. The CIA has said so time and time again.
Speaking of world respect, the Economist has no respect for Kerry either.
Yet, they decided that overall Kerry was the better choice. That should tell you something. There is no love lost between Kerry and the Economist, yet they still think he's better than Bush.
Now, let's get on to the economy. I realize that Bush's policies aren't the best, but I do have a couple of points to make. First, the president really doesn't have that much direct control over the economy.
Agreed. One of the few places where the president can have an impact is in tax policy. What did he do in that regard? he gave a tax break to the wealthy who are the least likely to reinvest the money on the economy.
However, in all those issues, I don't see Kerry doing a better job than Bush, and, in most, I see him doing a much worse job.
So you mean to say that Kerry will give bigger tax breaks to rich people thus making the deficit bigger? From Gerald Ford ownwards the democratic administrations have reduced the deficit, the republican administrations have increased it. At what point does this record becomes relevant?
An innovation: proof by bold tagging. Why are we so positive god exists? because Traa wrote it in bold letters.... Ah I see know. I'm convinced, Allah does exist!
RTFA, it refers to the incumbent party.
So I don't think that this was a 'problem left behind', as much as a problem which is just now becoming solvable.
This problem was solvable forty years ago, had we been willing to spend $1 billion on it, as we did building the latest bevatron back then. If you look at where physics has gone since the end of the cold war you'd see a shift away from particle physics and back to more traditional physics.
It's amazing how many basic problems were left behind in the multibillion race to find the latest useless particle.
It's not that understanding particle physics is not useful. What bugs me it that it was done at the cost of neglecting other equally important areas of physics.
Everything else, leave to industry. A free market economy can make far better decisions about how to spend money than can politicans.
Except for things such as defense which are public goods. In particular, advanced theoretical knowledge is a public good. At least part of space exploration (say Titan mission) is a public good and hence has to be financed by government money or not at all.
This is yet another case of a Kerry republican. In all, there have been over two dozen publications which endorsed Bush for president in 2000 and this time around are behind Kerry. In contrast, half a dozen newspapers have gone the opposite way, that is, from endorsing Gore in 2000 to endorsing Bush in 2004.
I believe history won't be kind on the 43rd president of the USA. He had the support of the entire world post-9/11, plus the largest fiscal surplus ever and he blew away both of them in less than three years.
It is a flip-flop. Whenever Kerry has a nuanced opinion, Bush calls it a flip-flop. What is good for the goose is good for the gander and this is a Bush flip-flop.
Erm, yeah, just like it played out in 2002?
I have no idea what specificially you are referring to, but certainly this political pundit did not consider the 2002 election in any way ahistorical.
Except that there are as many Democrats defecting to Republicans as there are Republicans defecting to Democrats, at least in my experience.
Actually the polls say this is not the case. The core constituencies have moved little, with a bit more republicans moving democrat than the other way, but still the cores were remarkably static.
The Democrats are not particularly motivated,
On the contrary, democrats are particularly pissed since many of them believe either that Bush stole the election in 2000 or on the basis of the Iraq fiasco.
Which kind of begs the question as to how we ended up with a couple of clowns to choose from in the first place.
This might have been true in 2000, when it wasn't clear which candidate was less inspired: Bush or Gore. This time around Bush has had a chance at it and good or bad we know where he stands. The same can be said about Kerry with his long and distinguished record in Vietnam, in the antiwar protest, as a DA and a senator.
Kerry and Bush stand for two very different visions of how to make America safe for the next decade, and how much debt burden our children will have. Well meaning people might disagree about which one is the right one, but to claim that they are "similar clowns" is disingenous at best.
I've been following elections for over 20 years in over six countries and various states. In that time I've learned two things (a) generally polls are eerily accurate (ignore them at your own peril) and (b) every so often there are certain elections which one can tell, almost from the get go, that previous historical norms won't apply and hence polls will mispredict the outcome.
The 2004 presidential election is one of those elections in which participation rate of voters will be way out of the norm, on the coat-tails of the 2000 stalemate and the strong anti-Bush feeling from the democrats.
Using historical data, Bush is slightly ahead as reported by the Stanford poll or electoral-vote.com. If we correct the data assuming a slightly higher participation for the democrats, the polls give an edge to Kerry of 284 electoral votes vs 254 for Bush.
You don't get it. They are both buggy. That is why you have to split hairs about vulnerabilities... Plus read my other posting on this thread about sendmail and apache, if you want to talk about "obscure" software bugs that can be remotely exploited.
But hey, don't let the facts get on the way of your prejudices.
and you really think linux has none of those either? ever heard of sendmail? or the bugs discovered in open/ssh? or apache?
or
Here are some KDE related ones
and
I could go on an on....
Does this mean we've all been wrong about Microsoft products?
Actually yes. People here always talk about Microsoft products being buggier than the average, without any evidence to back it up beyond their own prejudices.
They use to laugh at the "much inferior" IE code, until the mozilla project got started and it turned out Netscape had the inferior code base.
OSSers used to laugh at the "bloat" of the windows source code.... until Linux got to have a decent user interface that is, and guess what? source code size is comparable to Windows.
There are many reasons to loathe the evil empire (monopolistic bully for one), but buggy code is not one of them. That is just something OSSers tell each other to feel better about what they do.
There's no doubt that Kildall was one of the pioneers of the industry. He invented the first operating system for microcomputers in the early 1970s,
Writing a PC operating system (or a language interpreter for that matter) is developing software, not much new there to invent.
I can't think of anything more painful than running openoffice on a blackbury.
On today's blackberry. Five years from now it will directly project into your retina using a holographic keyboard....
MS Linux exists, and has existed, for a while. It'll appear whenever there's a business need for it.
You really need to read Clayton Christensen's book. In it he describes how the old technology company keeps on asking its customers "do you need this new technology (e.g. Linux)" and the customers keep on saying no, we don't, because the new technology is so disruptive that it comes with its own set of customers.
For example while M$ is busy asking corporate IT if they want Linux and OpenOffice instead of WinXP and MS Office, and they keep on hearing that no, they don't.
Meanwhile average joe blow keeps on buying RIM blacberry's at a rate of a million per quarter, and suddenly you have a widely deployed platform. And yes, it turns out joe blow does want Linux and OpenOffice in his blackberry.
So the "business need" never arose. M$ customers never asked for it. It was the non-customers who took over.
While I think this is encouraging, I feel that it's a little alarmist: Microsoft still have an incredible monopoly. Of you non-techie friends (if you have any unconverted) how many *don't* run Windows?
Disruptive technologies creep on you very fast. One day they are laggards offering much inferior products and competing against well established monopolies, and then a few years later the old monopoly is gone and the new technology has taken over.
All your comments above applied equally to IBM. They had an incredible monopoly and you would have been hard pressed to find a non-IBM shop in the mid-80s. Yet here we are, twenty years later with Micrsoft being the dominant monopoly.
For writing letters, you really want to have a decent keyboard, and for spreadsheets, something that is larger than a 5" screen is probably a very good idea as well.
Now you are making the same mistake as DEC and other such companies described by Clayton in his book: "how could the PC ever replace mainframes? it doesn't have enough memory, it has no access to tapes where all the data resides" etc.
The mistake you are making is that you are comparing today's incarnation of an ascending technology (blackberry) with a highly mature platform (PC). By the time the blackberry has gone through a few iterations it will come with holographic keyboard and retina-projection screen.
with their favourite mode of publication being the press release.