O! say can you see by the dawn's early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming. Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming. And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep, Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream: 'Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion, A home and a country should leave us no more! Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave: And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand Between their loved home and the war's desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.' And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
I know I'm supposed to hate the DHS because they're a bunch of evil government bureaucrats that want to take away our rights. But aren't I also supposed to hate the the ACLU because they're a bunch of stupid liberal do-gooders who sue you for discriminating against left-handed dwarfs?
I agree with you on almost every point. But your arguments just don't apply here.
All the things you want people to do would indeed make a difference. It would eliminate the global warming problem, make the planet more livable, push the "peak oil" crisis back a century or two, improve the lives of billions of people, and a lot of other good stuff. So getting people to make these changes is indeed a worthwhile goal. What it is not is a way to make "economics of scarcity" obsolete.
Come to think of it, the whole relationship is backwards. If you could wave a magic wand and totally change the way the economic system works, all these other problems would be trivial to solve. Alas, no such magic wand exists. Indeed, attempts to build one have had tragic results.
As another comment suggest, producing water is easy if you have power.
Right, and we're also facing a scarcity of that. Especially if you consider greenhouse gases uncool. Or are you in denial about global warming too?
All these clever little schemes for finding alternative ways to do things are certainly worth doing. I'll even admit that technology might someday move us beyond the "scarcity economy". But the notion that we could accomplish it in the near future just by changing our priorities is a Roddenberryish daydream.
"Post scarcity". Is that geekspeak for "technology will fix everything"?
If you figure out a way for technology to eliminate the scarcity of something as simple as water, then I will begin to take this concept seriously. Until then, it's more Wired Magazine nonsense, totally disconnected from the real world.
(they're being good open source citizens and releasing mods they've made to open source code -- good for them!)
It's not really about citizenship. It's about not being sued. In organizations I've worked in, engineers have so much to do that tasks they consider low-priority (like reviewing product documentation, and releasing modifications to open source products) tend to fall through the cracks. As a tech writer, it's part of my job to be an asshole about getting developers to review what I write. Same goes for our lawyers: they have to be assholes about getting developers to comply with legal stuff, including the open source releases.
So now they have an unprofitable hardware division that also happens to be in a pond that is getting smaller every day due to Intel.
Sun makes commodity computers too. They haven't marketed them very effectively because the sales organization is still in a Sparc-uber-alles mindset. Despite this, some of Sun's biggest profit centers are in the x64 arena.
Some of these products are pretty cool. This beast squeezes 8 Intel-compatible CPUs into a 4 rack-unit space, something nobody else can do. This one does the same with 48 terabytes of disk. This blade module squeezes four Nehalem processors into an absurdly small space and and been generating tons of orders from people looking to build huge HPC clusters. And of course there are the usual 1U and 2U systems.
Oracle is saying they can squeeze $1.5 billion in profit out of Sun in the first year. Assuming that this isn't BS, the only way they can do this is by drastically boosting hardware sales. Which is actually doable, with better marketing (including more emphasis on systems people actually want to buy) and sales, and access to Oracle's huge sales channels. (Oracle has more sales people than Sun has employees.) In any case, that scenario makes a lot more sense than the common assumption that they're dropping $5 billion just to acquire some not very profitable software assets.
I'm confused. Are you disagreeing with me or not? Because you seem to have just said that they won't shut down the hardware operation. Which is what I'm arguing.
90% of annual revenues does not equal 90% of value to Oracle.
Maybe not, but it's worth something. The other 10% is worth pretty close to nothing to Oracle. Yeah, it's "high margin" (when it makes a profit at all), but in dollar terms it's hardly worth Oracle's time, never mind $5 billion in cash.
So all the people back in the 70s who spent are their time making cables had their heads up their asses? Wonder how the computer revolution even happened...
You should tear up your law degree and demand your five dollars back. Whether impersonation is illegal or not depends entirely on what you do when you're impersonating. I know, because my name is Barrack Obama, and I'm going to have the FBI arrest you if you don't stop writing these stupid posts.
If "making a fool of yourself" means getting your facts wrong, then you're a major clown. The big issue with UHF reception is usually not the quality of your antenna. UHF doesn't go through objects as easily as VHF, so living in the "shadow" of a hill or big building can eliminate your reception.
How wimpy. Real assholes don't need to cover their ears and sing silly tunes. They just proclaim how stupid, evil, and gullible their opponents are. And if anybody complains about this ad hominem rhetoric they say "Oh, lighten up!". Much more satisfying, because that way you establish your TOTAL SUPERIORITY.
What? I've got terminals from the 70s with 25-pin RS-232 connectors that work fine with modern PCs with standard wiring. So you're off by about a decade and a half there...
Did you actually do any wiring during that period? Did you work with a pre-IBM PC ever? I did.
If by "standard wiring" you mean a cable that will connect a PC's 9-pin serial port to a terminal's 25-pin port, you're referring to something that did not exist in 70s. The only standard cable for RS-232 was 25-pin straight through. Technically "standard", but in practical terms a border case, since you usually didn't want to carry all 25 pins for most purposes. Especially when you had to serve terminals in another building, which was pretty common with time-sharing systems. So figuring out how your DEC or Zylog or Convergent system (I dealt with all three) could get a serial connection to a terminal or serial printer was often non-trivial, because each of these had their own pinouts.
The usual 3 pins did 99% of everything.
In the IBM (and compatible) implementation, yes. That's standard now, but in 1983 it was just another proprietary implementation.
Joe Campbell write a 200-page book on the problems you faced connecting two random RS-232 devices. Trust me, it was non-trivial.
Ha! Before IBM decided that printer ports had to be female, it was very easy to accidentally plug your modem into the parallel port. Good way to destroy a modem.
Wasn't the Plus designed to operate both on LPT and SCSI? Or is that what you were saying?
The PCjr's serial port, monitor port, joystick ports, keyboard port, and others used different connectors from the IBM PC. In fact they were not only non-standard connectors, but completely proprietary connectors that couldn't be found on any other computer.
People, this is 1983. All connectors were "non-standard". Nowadays we're used to a standard connector and pinout for RS-232 and parallel ports on the back of PCs. But in 1983, exactly one model of computer used them: the IBM PC. It didn't more than a couple years for people to realize that the only way to compete with the IBM PC was to be extremely compatible with it. But when the PC Jr. came out, everybody (especially IBM) used business and sales models that paid no attention to the idea that computers and their components could be commodified.
Small qualification: the use of 25-pin D-shaped connectors with specific pinouts was part of the RS-232 standard. But 25-conductor, straight-across cables cost, and you actually didn't need most of those signals for typical applications. So making cables that would connect some random computer to some random modem or serial printer was a serious black art. There was even a book on the subject.
(Jerry Pournelle once wrote that he used internal modems because he could never remember the pinouts he needed to make cables. But by the time he wrote this, RS-232 pinouts had been standardized and cheap pre-made modem cables were in all the stores. Pournelle is the original know-it-all ignoramus computer pundit.)
Parallel printer cables were even worse. They all used the Centronic de-facto standard on the printer side. But to save money, everybody used 25-pin D connectors at the computer side, and the way the 36 Centronics signals mapped to those 25 computer pins was different for every manufacturer. It took IBM to standardize the pinout, and also to standardize making the printer connector female so you didn't accidentally plug a modem into it.
The only requirement to generate EMPs is a nuclear weapon - the bigger the better.
Well, there are other ways, but I don't think they're close to being implemented yet.
Now as for doing it with nukes: here's a discussion I participated in a while back. It forced me to do some reading on the subject, and I made an interesting discovery. If you hope to do even minimal damage, you have to have at least a 1 megaton device. That's not easy. In fact, only five countries have managed to build 1-megaton bombs. And guess what? Iran isn't one of them.
And to actually implement a real back-to-the-stone-age scenario, you'd actually need bombs that are much bigger. Such bombs have been built and detonated, but they're physically huge. Not suitable for mounting on an ICBM. Which, BTW, Iran doesn't have the technology for either.
You really need a big industrial base to build this kind of technology. Outside of Russian and China, all such countries are allied with the U.S. Some smaller countries have built nukes (India, Pakistan, South Africa, probably Israel, maybe North Korea), but none with a yield of more than 50 kilotons. That's about 5% of the yield needed for even marginal EMP warfare.
The Iranian's best weapon against the US is economic manipulation of oil.
True. Or Al Qaida's for that matter. If ObL had any sense, he wouldn't have his minions setting off truck bombs and flying airplanes into buildings. He'd be scattering radioactive dust over the Strait of Hormuz.
Nobody is calling for substantial outside help (that I've heard of), like asking us to invade Iran to help a revolution.
Actually, that seems to be more or less what Newt Gingrich is advocating. I don't think he's actually used the word "invade", but the codes he's using really do come to that. He keeps comparing Obama's attempt to engage with Iran with Churchill's attempts to appease Hitler. That's not very different from saying that just as Britain eventually had to fight Germany, the U.S. will eventually have to fight Iran, and the sooner the better.
Particularly disturbing is his claim that Iran is close to developing EMP weapons that could quickly destroy all advanced electronics in the U.S., reducing us to a stone-age economy. Aside from his total lack of evidence, it's hard to see how that's even possible outside a country with a lot more advanced technology than Iran has.
Slashdot Mirror
O! say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming.
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming.
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
I know I'm supposed to hate the DHS because they're a bunch of evil government bureaucrats that want to take away our rights. But aren't I also supposed to hate the the ACLU because they're a bunch of stupid liberal do-gooders who sue you for discriminating against left-handed dwarfs?
I've never eaten gold, but people do, so it can't taste that bad. Making soup out of it is a bit much, though.
Fixed your title for you.
I agree with you on almost every point. But your arguments just don't apply here.
All the things you want people to do would indeed make a difference. It would eliminate the global warming problem, make the planet more livable, push the "peak oil" crisis back a century or two, improve the lives of billions of people, and a lot of other good stuff. So getting people to make these changes is indeed a worthwhile goal. What it is not is a way to make "economics of scarcity" obsolete.
Come to think of it, the whole relationship is backwards. If you could wave a magic wand and totally change the way the economic system works, all these other problems would be trivial to solve. Alas, no such magic wand exists. Indeed, attempts to build one have had tragic results.
As another comment suggest, producing water is easy if you have power.
Right, and we're also facing a scarcity of that. Especially if you consider greenhouse gases uncool. Or are you in denial about global warming too?
All these clever little schemes for finding alternative ways to do things are certainly worth doing. I'll even admit that technology might someday move us beyond the "scarcity economy". But the notion that we could accomplish it in the near future just by changing our priorities is a Roddenberryish daydream.
Inquiring minds want to know!
"Post scarcity". Is that geekspeak for "technology will fix everything"?
If you figure out a way for technology to eliminate the scarcity of something as simple as water, then I will begin to take this concept seriously. Until then, it's more Wired Magazine nonsense, totally disconnected from the real world.
That was perfectly good SGML. You really don't want to use XML when you're coding by hand.
(they're being good open source citizens and releasing mods they've made to open source code -- good for them!)
It's not really about citizenship. It's about not being sued. In organizations I've worked in, engineers have so much to do that tasks they consider low-priority (like reviewing product documentation, and releasing modifications to open source products) tend to fall through the cracks. As a tech writer, it's part of my job to be an asshole about getting developers to review what I write. Same goes for our lawyers: they have to be assholes about getting developers to comply with legal stuff, including the open source releases.
So now they have an unprofitable hardware division that also happens to be in a pond that is getting smaller every day due to Intel.
Sun makes commodity computers too. They haven't marketed them very effectively because the sales organization is still in a Sparc-uber-alles mindset. Despite this, some of Sun's biggest profit centers are in the x64 arena.
Some of these products are pretty cool. This beast squeezes 8 Intel-compatible CPUs into a 4 rack-unit space, something nobody else can do. This one does the same with 48 terabytes of disk. This blade module squeezes four Nehalem processors into an absurdly small space and and been generating tons of orders from people looking to build huge HPC clusters. And of course there are the usual 1U and 2U systems.
Oracle is saying they can squeeze $1.5 billion in profit out of Sun in the first year. Assuming that this isn't BS, the only way they can do this is by drastically boosting hardware sales. Which is actually doable, with better marketing (including more emphasis on systems people actually want to buy) and sales, and access to Oracle's huge sales channels. (Oracle has more sales people than Sun has employees.) In any case, that scenario makes a lot more sense than the common assumption that they're dropping $5 billion just to acquire some not very profitable software assets.
I'm confused. Are you disagreeing with me or not? Because you seem to have just said that they won't shut down the hardware operation. Which is what I'm arguing.
90% of annual revenues does not equal 90% of value to Oracle.
Maybe not, but it's worth something. The other 10% is worth pretty close to nothing to Oracle. Yeah, it's "high margin" (when it makes a profit at all), but in dollar terms it's hardly worth Oracle's time, never mind $5 billion in cash.
True. But Sun also make Nehalem servers. And lately Nehalem has been getting a lot more interest.
Right. Spend $5 billion dollars for a company and then shut down 90% of it.
So all the people back in the 70s who spent are their time making cables had their heads up their asses? Wonder how the computer revolution even happened...
You should tear up your law degree and demand your five dollars back. Whether impersonation is illegal or not depends entirely on what you do when you're impersonating. I know, because my name is Barrack Obama, and I'm going to have the FBI arrest you if you don't stop writing these stupid posts.
If "making a fool of yourself" means getting your facts wrong, then you're a major clown. The big issue with UHF reception is usually not the quality of your antenna. UHF doesn't go through objects as easily as VHF, so living in the "shadow" of a hill or big building can eliminate your reception.
How wimpy. Real assholes don't need to cover their ears and sing silly tunes. They just proclaim how stupid, evil, and gullible their opponents are. And if anybody complains about this ad hominem rhetoric they say "Oh, lighten up!". Much more satisfying, because that way you establish your TOTAL SUPERIORITY.
What? I've got terminals from the 70s with 25-pin RS-232 connectors that work fine with modern PCs with standard wiring. So you're off by about a decade and a half there...
Did you actually do any wiring during that period? Did you work with a pre-IBM PC ever? I did.
If by "standard wiring" you mean a cable that will connect a PC's 9-pin serial port to a terminal's 25-pin port, you're referring to something that did not exist in 70s. The only standard cable for RS-232 was 25-pin straight through. Technically "standard", but in practical terms a border case, since you usually didn't want to carry all 25 pins for most purposes. Especially when you had to serve terminals in another building, which was pretty common with time-sharing systems. So figuring out how your DEC or Zylog or Convergent system (I dealt with all three) could get a serial connection to a terminal or serial printer was often non-trivial, because each of these had their own pinouts.
The usual 3 pins did 99% of everything.
In the IBM (and compatible) implementation, yes. That's standard now, but in 1983 it was just another proprietary implementation.
Joe Campbell write a 200-page book on the problems you faced connecting two random RS-232 devices. Trust me, it was non-trivial.
Ha! Before IBM decided that printer ports had to be female, it was very easy to accidentally plug your modem into the parallel port. Good way to destroy a modem.
Wasn't the Plus designed to operate both on LPT and SCSI? Or is that what you were saying?
The PCjr's serial port, monitor port, joystick ports, keyboard port, and others used different connectors from the IBM PC. In fact they were not only non-standard connectors, but completely proprietary connectors that couldn't be found on any other computer.
People, this is 1983. All connectors were "non-standard". Nowadays we're used to a standard connector and pinout for RS-232 and parallel ports on the back of PCs. But in 1983, exactly one model of computer used them: the IBM PC. It didn't more than a couple years for people to realize that the only way to compete with the IBM PC was to be extremely compatible with it. But when the PC Jr. came out, everybody (especially IBM) used business and sales models that paid no attention to the idea that computers and their components could be commodified.
Small qualification: the use of 25-pin D-shaped connectors with specific pinouts was part of the RS-232 standard. But 25-conductor, straight-across cables cost, and you actually didn't need most of those signals for typical applications. So making cables that would connect some random computer to some random modem or serial printer was a serious black art. There was even a book on the subject.
(Jerry Pournelle once wrote that he used internal modems because he could never remember the pinouts he needed to make cables. But by the time he wrote this, RS-232 pinouts had been standardized and cheap pre-made modem cables were in all the stores. Pournelle is the original know-it-all ignoramus computer pundit.)
Parallel printer cables were even worse. They all used the Centronic de-facto standard on the printer side. But to save money, everybody used 25-pin D connectors at the computer side, and the way the 36 Centronics signals mapped to those 25 computer pins was different for every manufacturer. It took IBM to standardize the pinout, and also to standardize making the printer connector female so you didn't accidentally plug a modem into it.
Well, there are other ways, but I don't think they're close to being implemented yet.
Now as for doing it with nukes: here's a discussion I participated in a while back. It forced me to do some reading on the subject, and I made an interesting discovery. If you hope to do even minimal damage, you have to have at least a 1 megaton device. That's not easy. In fact, only five countries have managed to build 1-megaton bombs. And guess what? Iran isn't one of them.
And to actually implement a real back-to-the-stone-age scenario, you'd actually need bombs that are much bigger. Such bombs have been built and detonated, but they're physically huge. Not suitable for mounting on an ICBM. Which, BTW, Iran doesn't have the technology for either.
You really need a big industrial base to build this kind of technology. Outside of Russian and China, all such countries are allied with the U.S. Some smaller countries have built nukes (India, Pakistan, South Africa, probably Israel, maybe North Korea), but none with a yield of more than 50 kilotons. That's about 5% of the yield needed for even marginal EMP warfare.
The Iranian's best weapon against the US is economic manipulation of oil.
True. Or Al Qaida's for that matter. If ObL had any sense, he wouldn't have his minions setting off truck bombs and flying airplanes into buildings. He'd be scattering radioactive dust over the Strait of Hormuz.
Nobody is calling for substantial outside help (that I've heard of), like asking us to invade Iran to help a revolution.
Actually, that seems to be more or less what Newt Gingrich is advocating. I don't think he's actually used the word "invade", but the codes he's using really do come to that. He keeps comparing Obama's attempt to engage with Iran with Churchill's attempts to appease Hitler. That's not very different from saying that just as Britain eventually had to fight Germany, the U.S. will eventually have to fight Iran, and the sooner the better.
Particularly disturbing is his claim that Iran is close to developing EMP weapons that could quickly destroy all advanced electronics in the U.S., reducing us to a stone-age economy. Aside from his total lack of evidence, it's hard to see how that's even possible outside a country with a lot more advanced technology than Iran has.
With all the C64 hacking going on, I'm surprised you can't just plug a flash drive into the thing. Or would that take all the fun out of it?