In crovira's world, investors buy shares in companies which then make profits for the investors - without needing any employees to do useful work in the process. Perhaps it is all done by "automation", or by juggling numbers and words cleverly so as to get paid for virtually no work. This is certainly the way many people on the "business" side of industry would like things to be.
In the real world, nothing of value appears spontaneously. Nor is it created magically when a bunch of people in suits sit down around a table, drink coffee, and show each other PowerPoint presentations. At some point, believe it or not, a person who has actually done some hard work - and, often, thought quite a lot - makes a new discovery. Contrary to widespread belief, this process of invention usually requires a team, although that may not be a group of people working together, in the same place, at the same time, for the same organization. Instead, creative teams may span generations and continents, linked only by their common interest in a given set of problems and their desire to communicate and cooperate.
IMHO, the "normal" (healthy) model of enterprise is where investors lend money to entrepreneurs, who fund and otherwise support creative working people to invent new techniques and make useful things. Ideally, the rewards are shared in some reasonable proportion between the investors, the managers, the inventors, the other workers, the accountants, etc.
As in all natural systems, every successful strategy generates its complement of imitators and parasites. Thus the business world has its quota of people who are only in it for the money - as m uch, and as quickly, as possible. They manage to cream it off by imitating the appearance and activities of people who really create wealth for all of us. Unfortunately, our defences against these parasites are quite poor. Mostly we revere and adulate them; from time to time, when the abuse becomes too unmistakable, we go right overboard and send a few wretched CEOs and CFOs to prison for decades, when all they have done is to perfect the process thousands of others continue to practice.
Needless to say, companies that profit from their employees' expertise without investing a single cent in training them are behaving parasitically in that respect. It's a fine example of the tragedy of the commons, where every bcompany complains bitterly that "if we train people, they immediately go and work for other companies that pay them more". Maybe they shuld consider hiring the best people they can find, training them well, and then paying them enough to keep them on board. A few do, but not enough.
Shortly after the ACL mechanism in the VMS filesystem was enhanced, giving much greater (optional) granularity, I was sent to diagnose a server that was grinding to a halt. The problem was due to the disks filling up rapidly, because the company's security folks had gone to town and set ACLs on just about everything. What with the extra header space, and the logfiles, they increased their disk space requirement by about 50 percent.
That wouldn't happen nowadays, unless someone was foolishly mean about buying disk space, because it is so cheap. But massive security checks also consume lots of processor cycles, which are less cheap. Worst of all, the more elaborate anything gets - including a security scheme - the more likely it is to contain mistakes and inconsistencies itself.
Since I'm not the entrepreneurial type, I'll give this idea away to anyone who can make it work. (Unless it already exists, which wouldn't be too surprising). Put a microprocessor and a small display into an electric plug, measure power consumption, and make the figures available in some convenient way. Ideally it would be like a pedometer - zero the device, start using your TV or whatever, then after an hour or so check and see how much power you used, and how many W/hr that represents.
The user interface presents some difficulty, but if watches and mobile phones can be programmed as they are with tiny fiddly buttons, this could be too. Alternatively, it could incorporate something like a USB memory stick that could be carried to a PC and upload numbers for analysis by companion software or a simple spreadsheet.
It would be really neat to know exactly how much power your cooker takes to bake a meal for four, but that poses another problem: what if the power cable is hard-wired into the wall? Maybe some kind of induction circuit would work. The overall effect of a device like this would be to lessen the difference between phone bills, which can be itemized to show just where your money is going, and electricity bills, which can't.
"There are plenty of people who argue that Churchill (at least) and possibly FDR knew perfectly well about the impending attack and did nothing".
In light of the facts cited in other replies, it is hard not to believe this. But I feel we should make the extra effort and apply Hanlon's Razor.
Even more astonishing, to my mind, is that the Japanese had demonstrated exactly the same pattern of behaviour 37 years previously, when they kicked off the Russo-Japanese War by launching a devastating attack on the Russian Far East Fleet before declaring war. The Japanese won that war handily, much to the amused approval of Britain and the USA - which supplied most of their ships, and enjoyed the spectacle of a plucky little oriental nation kicking the hated Russians round the block. Nobody protested about Japan's sneak attack on Port Arthur, which was delivered three hours before the Japanese ultimatum and more than 24 hours before either side declared war. Pearl Harbor was largely a cross between the Port Arthur attack and the British air raid on Taranto in November 1940, but on a far larger scale.
Maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but it has always irked me that search engines take money from Web site owners.Surely a proper search engine should accept a query and provide the best list of hits it can find, based on some impartial algorithm? Once people start paying search engines to rank their pages higher than would otherwise be the case, isn't the whole system fatally compromised? That is, you can never be sure whether the page you are looking at would have come to your attention if X had not paid Y to make it so.
Of course, this is just one of the myriad ways in which the Web gets distorted when people start seeking to make money out of it. TBL invented it, and gave it away for nothing - a broad hint, which of course cut no ice with the commercial classes. Fortunately, large swathes of the Web - such as Slashdot and Wikipedia - are still relatively untouched by commercialism, but every year it gets harder to be sure that the information you read is not being promoted by someone with an agenda.
Quite apart from the objective question of how useful a meeting is, there is an orthogonal dimension: whether a given person is temperamentally suited to meetings.
It seems to me that extraverts (who tend to predominate in sales, marketing, and the upper strata of management) are obviously going to enjoy the atmosphere of a meeting far more than introverts (who tend to predominate in programming and other nose-to-the-metal jobs). Other things being equal, an extravert actually gains energy from being with a bunch of other people, whereas an introvert may feel her will to live gradually draining away.
Disclaimer: this is a broad generalization, and there are plenty of exceptions - introverted sales stars, extraverted developers, etc. That actually confuses the issue even further, as the extraverted developer may be the one who enjoys meetings and can't see what the rest of the team are bellyaching about.
"...yesterday's doomsdayers are silent because they were wrong. Today's will be silent tomorrow -- they'll be wrong, too".
Now there's a fine specimen of closed-minded, blinkered, ideological non-thinking for you. If you start from the premise that everything is always going to be fine, you are going to keep coming out with statements like that. Many religions teach that "God will provide"; as Paul Ehrlich noted long ago, however, we may not like *what* God provides. Prevention is better than cure, which is what Lovelock is saying. (By the way, if you were 83 and had been ignored up till now, you might get a little outspoken too).
There are physical limits, although we don't know what many of them are. The further you push those limits, the worse trouble you are going to be in. People mock Malthus for his "simple-minded" warning about population exceeding the means of subsistence. Malthus' warnings have not come true YET, because of technical improvements such as better crops. But population cannot keep growing forever within an environment of fixed size and fixed (or dwindling) natural resources. What's more, the further it grows without serious trouble, the worse the trouble will be when it eventually turns up. Think of a steam boiler going over-pressure. You might argue that "X lbs per square inch is the rated safe limit, and we're now at 2X and nothing has happened - so everything is fine". But the real message is "we are standing next to a bomb, which is certain to go off soon".
Mrs Thatcher was making a valid and much-needed point. Like many other abstractions, "society" has come to be thought of as a real thing. "Society is responsible for..." "Society must prevent..", etc. But if no single individual does a thing, it won't be done by "society" any more than it will be done by Father Christmas. It's the old story of "everyone", "someone", and "no one".
Computer people - especially hackers - are so accustomed to dealing with abstractions all the time that they are prone to forget that many people do not fully grasp the difference between abstract concepts and real things. Another good example is "human rights". These are a great idea, as long as you understand that when I say "I have a right to free speech", everyone realizes that means that they have a duty not to beat me up when I say things they dislike. But nowadays some ill-educated, lazy, or just downright foolish people have started to talk as if they had "rights" the same way they have arms and legs. Jeremy Bentham famously criticized that sort of thinking when he said "Natural rights is nonsense, and imprescriptable natural rights is nonsense upon stilts" (or words to that effect). His point was that it is quite ambitious enough to say that I have a right to free speech, but to pretend that no one can take that right away is sheer fantasy.
"Problem is, you still have to go inside without first blowing the house up because you can't just afford killing everything that moves".
Sometimes it works out that way, sometimes the other way. Remember the dozens of houses that were destroyed because of the reliable intelligence that Saddam was in them? And yet he is still alive today.
Using this terahertz stuff, soldiers could limit themselves to destroying only the buildings that have living creatures (or moving machines) inside them. No longer will they need to level entire towns and villages. Think of the savings!
I didn't stipulate a handgun or rifle. Armour-piercing shot are fired from anti-tank guns, which have recoil mechanisms and muzzle brakes that absorb the recoil.
I don't know about teflon-coated bullets, but if you get hit by an armor-piercing shot (not shell, strictly) the kinetic energy will kill you whether it penetrates your armor or not. Those things will slice clean through 6 inches or more of the strongest steel, and if one didn't penetrate your armor it would simply accelerate your whole body at a lethal rate. There are physical limits to what can reasonably be done to protect a human being who is not sheltered by a vehicle or building.
I would not kid you: the Lincoln quote is authentic. There was quite a lot of difference between 1812 and 1838; look up the growth in US population, territory, and potential armed force. After all, just 23 years later, the Union forces put forth quite remarkable power, and the Confederates likewise. United, they would probably have been a match for any army. (The final campaigns of the Civil War bear an uncanny resemblance to those of World War I, with armoured warships, machine guns, trench systems, and massive artillery barrages). Moreover, Britain's naval power was at a peak in 1812, while the USA's was just beginning to ramp up. Lastly - and I guess I am down to picking nits here - the British sacked Washington, which is accessible by sea. They never got anywhere near the Blue Ridge or the Ohio.
But the real point of the quote does not lie in its objective truth. Lincoln was a bullshitter, and a world-class one at that, and he was certainly exaggerating - a little patriotic bragging never harmed a politician's prospects. The key is that (like Benjamin Franklin before him) he believed the USA would be destroyed, if at all, from within.
Seen in historical context, the current trend towards government regulation of every little detail of people's lives is a result of ever-growing population density and ever-higher expectations. When people lived on farms a mile apart, privacy was automatic. We didn't need a "right to privacy", any more than we need a "right to breathe" - we just enjoyed it. As population density increases, and we get crammed together in cities (and on highways, aircraft, and other forms of transport) privacy becomes a lot less feasible - if only because a lot of people can watch and listen to you most of the time. It's the old story of balancing rights against duties. When we say "I have a right to privacy", we are also saying "Everyone else has a duty to respect my privacy". If it becomes difficult, inconvenient, or even impossible for them to perform that duty, my right is attenuated accordingly.
The other big factor militating against privacy is the mounting complexity and sophistication of our culture, and the rising expectations most of us have. We want convenience and low prices, so we often sacrifice our right to privacy by filling in forms to get supermarket loyalty cards and suchlike. And, of course, most of us expect to be safe from terrorist attacks - so we hasten (in Ben Franklin's cutting words) to "give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety".
To be honest, with computer and communication technology progressing as it is, millions of people sharing relatively small living areas, and staedily growing expectations of quality of life, I don't see any chance of turning back the tide. Within a few decades, life in most civilised countries is going to make 1984 look like the Stone Age. We won't be able to cough without our underwear informing on us to our medical insurers, or think without being scanned and intuited by ubiquitous machines. Think tailored hologram commercials, like those portrayed in "Blade Runner", that are not only tightly customised for each individual, but do a perpetual Sherlock Holmes mind-reading number on us (at machine speeds). Now imagine what governments will do with that technology... Anyone for the cold sleep ship to Procyon?
"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide".
- Abraham Lincoln; The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume I, "Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum,of Springfield, Illinois (January 27, 1838), p. 109.
"It's the fact that IBM gave all the work on their Thinkpads and Thinkcenters to someone else, period".
Well, 25 years ago they gave the PC software business away in return for no consideration at all - zero dollars. What took them so long to give away their small remaining slice of the far less profitable hardware business?
I'm reminded of Groucho Marx's comment about club membership - but in IBM's case it's more like "I wouldn't want to own any huge profitable business that I invented".
"...pick standards you want that are important, pick features, make standard, and FREEZE IT"
Nice idea, with about as much hope of success as the equally good idea of freezing requirements for in-house applications. Developers have had to adopt agile methods because their customers, stakeholders, etc. seemingly won't tolerate freezing requirements. And standards keep churning because vendors - who drive most standards efforts - keep trying to get one up on their competitors.
Besides which, it is true that progress is fastest when there is a seemingly chaotic froth of ever-changing methods. It drives users and developers nuts, costs huge sums of money, forces everyone to "waste" lots of time and attention on learning new stuff all the time... but in the long run, it moves the state of the art on in a hurry. As Churchill said about democracy, it's absolutely the worst system apart from all the others ever tried. We're not smart enough to far plan ahead successfully (i.e. beyond next year).
"Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud".
Mind you, I think Sturgeon was a bit generous with that 90%; I would put it a bit higher than that. The nice thing about blogs is that even 1% of the number of active bloggers is far more than most of us can begin to cope with. So, perhaps for the first time ever, there is more than enough first-rate, relevant, well-informed, interesting, useful, timely comment to be had. We are in the envious position of being able to pick and choose from the best! Woohoo, etc.
Almost all bloggers have their off-days, but that should be expected both from human nature and from the informal, top-of-the-head nature of the medium.
Bosses often follow their private agenda
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Security's Shaky State
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I recall talking with a very experienced, capable security expert who had founded a company (and was CEO). The remark that sticks in my mind was along the lines of, "No one can make much money in this business, because customer executives never buy the security their company needs - they buy the very minimum to avoid being successfully sued for negligence if the shit hits the fan".
"Or - something like that" is the bottom line. The trouble with reasoning like Dark Paladin's is that it is linear, and only explores a single strand of causality. Nothing wrong with that - it's the way all our minds work, and we can't really do much better yet. But it means that we inevitably fail, almost always, to understand how complex systems will react to changed inputs. The tendency is to get very excited about certain (fairly obvious) causal chains, and completely overlook others that may be far more important. Then, when things turn out nothing like what was predicted, we lament "Oh - this system's behavior is counterintuitive!" (Translation: we are not smart enough to understand it, and we are not even smart enough to realize that we can't understand it).
At the moment, about the only reliable way we have of finding out what the changed behavior will be is to wait and see how the system actually responds. Too bad that, with climate change, we are messing with the basis of our continued existence. People are steamed about temperatures rising 5 degrees and sea levels rising a few meters? What I want to know is, are those changes self-limiting, linear, or exponential? Our chances of finding out what it's like living on Venus, from personal experience, are low, but I'm not so sure about our great grandchildren.
It's distressing that so much of the (borderline technically competent) media unthinkingly regurgitate the Microsoft line. But don't be surprised! Ever check out Microsoft's PR ("education") budget? It's bigger than almost every other software company's total revenue! (From memory, the total "education" budget for the first two years of.NET was $2 billion). They keep tabs on the most influential journalists all round the world, bringing them in to events where they get flattered, fed and watered, and spoonfed the latest technical information (and future plans). They also get given plenty of "boilerplate" material that they can use to fill out their articles. It's the massiveness and consistency of this "media education" effort that makes it so effective. After a while, many journalists practically lose their ability to form independent judgements and do their own unbiased research. Those abilities atrophy, because it's so much easier to write an article about "what Microsoft VP or developer so-and-so told me over dinner in Redmond".
1. Windows costs more per unit than Linux (actually, much, much more; and the difference increases the more servers you install).
2. Windows and Linux are close enough in functionality and other qualities that people can argue the odds for ever.
3. Yet Windows is supposed to sell more units than Linux, which is approximately as good and cheaper? (and which gets much cheaper the more units you want)
Maybe I'd better dust off that bridge: looks like there are lots more potential customers out there.
"Apparently you are not allowed to actually keep track of TCO, you are just supposed to read about it in gartner reports."
That shouldn't surprise anyone. All the big analysts are way too smart to announce figures for anything that can, or will, actually be measured. If they did, someone would have a chance to prove them wrong. Gartner's ideal is for PHBs to say "we don't need to measure those numbers, because Gartner told us what they are". Selling data under those conditions is the perfect business: a big, regular revenue stream, and no possible comebacks.
Slashdot Mirror
In crovira's world, investors buy shares in companies which then make profits for the investors - without needing any employees to do useful work in the process. Perhaps it is all done by "automation", or by juggling numbers and words cleverly so as to get paid for virtually no work. This is certainly the way many people on the "business" side of industry would like things to be.
In the real world, nothing of value appears spontaneously. Nor is it created magically when a bunch of people in suits sit down around a table, drink coffee, and show each other PowerPoint presentations. At some point, believe it or not, a person who has actually done some hard work - and, often, thought quite a lot - makes a new discovery. Contrary to widespread belief, this process of invention usually requires a team, although that may not be a group of people working together, in the same place, at the same time, for the same organization. Instead, creative teams may span generations and continents, linked only by their common interest in a given set of problems and their desire to communicate and cooperate.
IMHO, the "normal" (healthy) model of enterprise is where investors lend money to entrepreneurs, who fund and otherwise support creative working people to invent new techniques and make useful things. Ideally, the rewards are shared in some reasonable proportion between the investors, the managers, the inventors, the other workers, the accountants, etc.
As in all natural systems, every successful strategy generates its complement of imitators and parasites. Thus the business world has its quota of people who are only in it for the money - as m uch, and as quickly, as possible. They manage to cream it off by imitating the appearance and activities of people who really create wealth for all of us. Unfortunately, our defences against these parasites are quite poor. Mostly we revere and adulate them; from time to time, when the abuse becomes too unmistakable, we go right overboard and send a few wretched CEOs and CFOs to prison for decades, when all they have done is to perfect the process thousands of others continue to practice.
Needless to say, companies that profit from their employees' expertise without investing a single cent in training them are behaving parasitically in that respect. It's a fine example of the tragedy of the commons, where every bcompany complains bitterly that "if we train people, they immediately go and work for other companies that pay them more". Maybe they shuld consider hiring the best people they can find, training them well, and then paying them enough to keep them on board. A few do, but not enough.
But there are tradeoffs here, as always.
Shortly after the ACL mechanism in the VMS filesystem was enhanced, giving much greater (optional) granularity, I was sent to diagnose a server that was grinding to a halt. The problem was due to the disks filling up rapidly, because the company's security folks had gone to town and set ACLs on just about everything. What with the extra header space, and the logfiles, they increased their disk space requirement by about 50 percent.
That wouldn't happen nowadays, unless someone was foolishly mean about buying disk space, because it is so cheap. But massive security checks also consume lots of processor cycles, which are less cheap. Worst of all, the more elaborate anything gets - including a security scheme - the more likely it is to contain mistakes and inconsistencies itself.
Since I'm not the entrepreneurial type, I'll give this idea away to anyone who can make it work. (Unless it already exists, which wouldn't be too surprising). Put a microprocessor and a small display into an electric plug, measure power consumption, and make the figures available in some convenient way. Ideally it would be like a pedometer - zero the device, start using your TV or whatever, then after an hour or so check and see how much power you used, and how many W/hr that represents.
The user interface presents some difficulty, but if watches and mobile phones can be programmed as they are with tiny fiddly buttons, this could be too. Alternatively, it could incorporate something like a USB memory stick that could be carried to a PC and upload numbers for analysis by companion software or a simple spreadsheet.
It would be really neat to know exactly how much power your cooker takes to bake a meal for four, but that poses another problem: what if the power cable is hard-wired into the wall? Maybe some kind of induction circuit would work. The overall effect of a device like this would be to lessen the difference between phone bills, which can be itemized to show just where your money is going, and electricity bills, which can't.
"There are plenty of people who argue that Churchill (at least) and possibly FDR knew perfectly well about the impending attack and did nothing".
In light of the facts cited in other replies, it is hard not to believe this. But I feel we should make the extra effort and apply Hanlon's Razor.
Even more astonishing, to my mind, is that the Japanese had demonstrated exactly the same pattern of behaviour 37 years previously, when they kicked off the Russo-Japanese War by launching a devastating attack on the Russian Far East Fleet before declaring war. The Japanese won that war handily, much to the amused approval of Britain and the USA - which supplied most of their ships, and enjoyed the spectacle of a plucky little oriental nation kicking the hated Russians round the block. Nobody protested about Japan's sneak attack on Port Arthur, which was delivered three hours before the Japanese ultimatum and more than 24 hours before either side declared war. Pearl Harbor was largely a cross between the Port Arthur attack and the British air raid on Taranto in November 1940, but on a far larger scale.
What goes around, comes around.
Maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but it has always irked me that search engines take money from Web site owners.Surely a proper search engine should accept a query and provide the best list of hits it can find, based on some impartial algorithm? Once people start paying search engines to rank their pages higher than would otherwise be the case, isn't the whole system fatally compromised? That is, you can never be sure whether the page you are looking at would have come to your attention if X had not paid Y to make it so.
Of course, this is just one of the myriad ways in which the Web gets distorted when people start seeking to make money out of it. TBL invented it, and gave it away for nothing - a broad hint, which of course cut no ice with the commercial classes. Fortunately, large swathes of the Web - such as Slashdot and Wikipedia - are still relatively untouched by commercialism, but every year it gets harder to be sure that the information you read is not being promoted by someone with an agenda.
Quite apart from the objective question of how useful a meeting is, there is an orthogonal dimension: whether a given person is temperamentally suited to meetings.
It seems to me that extraverts (who tend to predominate in sales, marketing, and the upper strata of management) are obviously going to enjoy the atmosphere of a meeting far more than introverts (who tend to predominate in programming and other nose-to-the-metal jobs). Other things being equal, an extravert actually gains energy from being with a bunch of other people, whereas an introvert may feel her will to live gradually draining away.
Disclaimer: this is a broad generalization, and there are plenty of exceptions - introverted sales stars, extraverted developers, etc. That actually confuses the issue even further, as the extraverted developer may be the one who enjoys meetings and can't see what the rest of the team are bellyaching about.
"...yesterday's doomsdayers are silent because they were wrong. Today's will be silent tomorrow -- they'll be wrong, too".
Now there's a fine specimen of closed-minded, blinkered, ideological non-thinking for you. If you start from the premise that everything is always going to be fine, you are going to keep coming out with statements like that. Many religions teach that "God will provide"; as Paul Ehrlich noted long ago, however, we may not like *what* God provides. Prevention is better than cure, which is what Lovelock is saying. (By the way, if you were 83 and had been ignored up till now, you might get a little outspoken too).
There are physical limits, although we don't know what many of them are. The further you push those limits, the worse trouble you are going to be in. People mock Malthus for his "simple-minded" warning about population exceeding the means of subsistence. Malthus' warnings have not come true YET, because of technical improvements such as better crops. But population cannot keep growing forever within an environment of fixed size and fixed (or dwindling) natural resources. What's more, the further it grows without serious trouble, the worse the trouble will be when it eventually turns up. Think of a steam boiler going over-pressure. You might argue that "X lbs per square inch is the rated safe limit, and we're now at 2X and nothing has happened - so everything is fine". But the real message is "we are standing next to a bomb, which is certain to go off soon".
"I thought playboy.com was drivel when I was a young lad...but over the course of about 5 years, that all changed".
It changed from drivel to drool, right?
Mrs Thatcher was making a valid and much-needed point. Like many other abstractions, "society" has come to be thought of as a real thing. "Society is responsible for..." "Society must prevent..", etc. But if no single individual does a thing, it won't be done by "society" any more than it will be done by Father Christmas. It's the old story of "everyone", "someone", and "no one".
Computer people - especially hackers - are so accustomed to dealing with abstractions all the time that they are prone to forget that many people do not fully grasp the difference between abstract concepts and real things. Another good example is "human rights". These are a great idea, as long as you understand that when I say "I have a right to free speech", everyone realizes that means that they have a duty not to beat me up when I say things they dislike. But nowadays some ill-educated, lazy, or just downright foolish people have started to talk as if they had "rights" the same way they have arms and legs. Jeremy Bentham famously criticized that sort of thinking when he said "Natural rights is nonsense, and imprescriptable natural rights is nonsense upon stilts" (or words to that effect). His point was that it is quite ambitious enough to say that I have a right to free speech, but to pretend that no one can take that right away is sheer fantasy.
"Problem is, you still have to go inside without first blowing the house up because you can't just afford killing everything that moves".
Sometimes it works out that way, sometimes the other way. Remember the dozens of houses that were destroyed because of the reliable intelligence that Saddam was in them? And yet he is still alive today.
Using this terahertz stuff, soldiers could limit themselves to destroying only the buildings that have living creatures (or moving machines) inside them. No longer will they need to level entire towns and villages. Think of the savings!
If it struts like a Fascist and blusters like a Fascist...
I didn't stipulate a handgun or rifle. Armour-piercing shot are fired from anti-tank guns, which have recoil mechanisms and muzzle brakes that absorb the recoil.
I don't know about teflon-coated bullets, but if you get hit by an armor-piercing shot (not shell, strictly) the kinetic energy will kill you whether it penetrates your armor or not. Those things will slice clean through 6 inches or more of the strongest steel, and if one didn't penetrate your armor it would simply accelerate your whole body at a lethal rate. There are physical limits to what can reasonably be done to protect a human being who is not sheltered by a vehicle or building.
I would not kid you: the Lincoln quote is authentic. There was quite a lot of difference between 1812 and 1838; look up the growth in US population, territory, and potential armed force. After all, just 23 years later, the Union forces put forth quite remarkable power, and the Confederates likewise. United, they would probably have been a match for any army. (The final campaigns of the Civil War bear an uncanny resemblance to those of World War I, with armoured warships, machine guns, trench systems, and massive artillery barrages). Moreover, Britain's naval power was at a peak in 1812, while the USA's was just beginning to ramp up. Lastly - and I guess I am down to picking nits here - the British sacked Washington, which is accessible by sea. They never got anywhere near the Blue Ridge or the Ohio.
But the real point of the quote does not lie in its objective truth. Lincoln was a bullshitter, and a world-class one at that, and he was certainly exaggerating - a little patriotic bragging never harmed a politician's prospects. The key is that (like Benjamin Franklin before him) he believed the USA would be destroyed, if at all, from within.
Seen in historical context, the current trend towards government regulation of every little detail of people's lives is a result of ever-growing population density and ever-higher expectations. When people lived on farms a mile apart, privacy was automatic. We didn't need a "right to privacy", any more than we need a "right to breathe" - we just enjoyed it. As population density increases, and we get crammed together in cities (and on highways, aircraft, and other forms of transport) privacy becomes a lot less feasible - if only because a lot of people can watch and listen to you most of the time. It's the old story of balancing rights against duties. When we say "I have a right to privacy", we are also saying "Everyone else has a duty to respect my privacy". If it becomes difficult, inconvenient, or even impossible for them to perform that duty, my right is attenuated accordingly.
The other big factor militating against privacy is the mounting complexity and sophistication of our culture, and the rising expectations most of us have. We want convenience and low prices, so we often sacrifice our right to privacy by filling in forms to get supermarket loyalty cards and suchlike. And, of course, most of us expect to be safe from terrorist attacks - so we hasten (in Ben Franklin's cutting words) to "give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety".
To be honest, with computer and communication technology progressing as it is, millions of people sharing relatively small living areas, and staedily growing expectations of quality of life, I don't see any chance of turning back the tide. Within a few decades, life in most civilised countries is going to make 1984 look like the Stone Age. We won't be able to cough without our underwear informing on us to our medical insurers, or think without being scanned and intuited by ubiquitous machines. Think tailored hologram commercials, like those portrayed in "Blade Runner", that are not only tightly customised for each individual, but do a perpetual Sherlock Holmes mind-reading number on us (at machine speeds). Now imagine what governments will do with that technology... Anyone for the cold sleep ship to Procyon?
"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide".
- Abraham Lincoln; The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume I, "Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum,of Springfield, Illinois (January 27, 1838), p. 109.
"It's the fact that IBM gave all the work on their Thinkpads and Thinkcenters to someone else, period".
Well, 25 years ago they gave the PC software business away in return for no consideration at all - zero dollars. What took them so long to give away their small remaining slice of the far less profitable hardware business?
I'm reminded of Groucho Marx's comment about club membership - but in IBM's case it's more like "I wouldn't want to own any huge profitable business that I invented".
"...pick standards you want that are important, pick features, make standard, and FREEZE IT"
Nice idea, with about as much hope of success as the equally good idea of freezing requirements for in-house applications. Developers have had to adopt agile methods because their customers, stakeholders, etc. seemingly won't tolerate freezing requirements. And standards keep churning because vendors - who drive most standards efforts - keep trying to get one up on their competitors.
Besides which, it is true that progress is fastest when there is a seemingly chaotic froth of ever-changing methods. It drives users and developers nuts, costs huge sums of money, forces everyone to "waste" lots of time and attention on learning new stuff all the time... but in the long run, it moves the state of the art on in a hurry. As Churchill said about democracy, it's absolutely the worst system apart from all the others ever tried. We're not smart enough to far plan ahead successfully (i.e. beyond next year).
"Some blogs are excellent, but most are crap..."
Sturgeon's Law applies here, as everywhere else:
"Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud".
Mind you, I think Sturgeon was a bit generous with that 90%; I would put it a bit higher than that. The nice thing about blogs is that even 1% of the number of active bloggers is far more than most of us can begin to cope with. So, perhaps for the first time ever, there is more than enough first-rate, relevant, well-informed, interesting, useful, timely comment to be had. We are in the envious position of being able to pick and choose from the best! Woohoo, etc.
Almost all bloggers have their off-days, but that should be expected both from human nature and from the informal, top-of-the-head nature of the medium.
I recall talking with a very experienced, capable security expert who had founded a company (and was CEO). The remark that sticks in my mind was along the lines of, "No one can make much money in this business, because customer executives never buy the security their company needs - they buy the very minimum to avoid being successfully sued for negligence if the shit hits the fan".
"Or - something like that" is the bottom line. The trouble with reasoning like Dark Paladin's is that it is linear, and only explores a single strand of causality. Nothing wrong with that - it's the way all our minds work, and we can't really do much better yet. But it means that we inevitably fail, almost always, to understand how complex systems will react to changed inputs. The tendency is to get very excited about certain (fairly obvious) causal chains, and completely overlook others that may be far more important. Then, when things turn out nothing like what was predicted, we lament "Oh - this system's behavior is counterintuitive!" (Translation: we are not smart enough to understand it, and we are not even smart enough to realize that we can't understand it).
At the moment, about the only reliable way we have of finding out what the changed behavior will be is to wait and see how the system actually responds. Too bad that, with climate change, we are messing with the basis of our continued existence. People are steamed about temperatures rising 5 degrees and sea levels rising a few meters? What I want to know is, are those changes self-limiting, linear, or exponential? Our chances of finding out what it's like living on Venus, from personal experience, are low, but I'm not so sure about our great grandchildren.
It's distressing that so much of the (borderline technically competent) media unthinkingly regurgitate the Microsoft line. But don't be surprised! Ever check out Microsoft's PR ("education") budget? It's bigger than almost every other software company's total revenue! (From memory, the total "education" budget for the first two years of .NET was $2 billion). They keep tabs on the most influential journalists all round the world, bringing them in to events where they get flattered, fed and watered, and spoonfed the latest technical information (and future plans). They also get given plenty of "boilerplate" material that they can use to fill out their articles. It's the massiveness and consistency of this "media education" effort that makes it so effective. After a while, many journalists practically lose their ability to form independent judgements and do their own unbiased research. Those abilities atrophy, because it's so much easier to write an article about "what Microsoft VP or developer so-and-so told me over dinner in Redmond".
So the story is:
1. Windows costs more per unit than Linux (actually, much, much more; and the difference increases the more servers you install).
2. Windows and Linux are close enough in functionality and other qualities that people can argue the odds for ever.
3. Yet Windows is supposed to sell more units than Linux, which is approximately as good and cheaper? (and which gets much cheaper the more units you want)
Maybe I'd better dust off that bridge: looks like there are lots more potential customers out there.
"Apparently you are not allowed to actually keep track of TCO, you are just supposed to read about it in gartner reports."
That shouldn't surprise anyone. All the big analysts are way too smart to announce figures for anything that can, or will, actually be measured. If they did, someone would have a chance to prove them wrong. Gartner's ideal is for PHBs to say "we don't need to measure those numbers, because Gartner told us what they are". Selling data under those conditions is the perfect business: a big, regular revenue stream, and no possible comebacks.