Does everything a society does as a collective have to have a direct positive effect on the economy? If that were the case we would not have things like parks.
Life isn't entirely about making money. Businesses are mostly about making money, and big changes cost money. It makes sense for a society to occasionally spend a bunch of money to completely restructure something (put in an interstate highway system for instance), because it is something that will benefit people in the long run even though it may kill some businesses now.
Ubiquitous ultra-highspeed network infrastructure is one of those things. Instead of multiple companies maintaining several seperate networks of aging technology, those companies can now provide their service over one new, better network. It will disrupt many existing business models, but it also simplifies things and opens up possibilities for new businesses.
There is no guarentee that something better won't be available in 5 years. Something better probably will be available. But how long do you keep running that 90Mhz Pentium before you upgrade?
Version 7 is the current public release. They are taking orders for D8, which is Delphi.Net, but we don't expect to see it until the end of the quarter.
Delphi.Net appears to mostly be a migration path to Borlands C# Builder (which appears very nice, so far). In this Delphi department, most of us would love to just switch to C# right now, but we have Delphi products to maintain, so Delphi.Net appears to be the path.
BTW, you know those heat shrink baggies that lots of software products come in, that you have to open to copy the software, and that have to be intact in order to return the product?
They are really cheap, and you can get them online.
Humans in general need something to rival with, or they'll make it up.
I agree that rivalry and competition are important, but not that these are things that necessarily break up a large society. In fact, properly directed they are probably one of the more powerful ways to bond people together. Sports fans don't (normaly) hate the other team or its fans.
The same is largely true of religions. The 'them' isn't to be hated and feared, but to be helped and indoctrinated.
My main point is that any design for communist government (or any government for the people) should aim to reinforce, exploit and spread natural human social tendancies that are conducive to harmonious behavior and minimize those that are destructive. A government can't reasonably make a 'be nice' law, but it can encourage social organization that encourages peoples natural tendancy to want to help those people whom they think of as 'us'.
That may sound obvious, but it seems that at least one particularly large government in the western hemisphere has lost sight of the big picture, that government should provide long-term, forward-thinking strategy, allowing the nation to succeed in the near and far future. Perhaps that is a result of the managment requirements of such a large country excceding the capability of the organizational design of the government (IOW, too many details are being handled at the top level, so strategy planning is hampered or non-existant).
Whats really sad is that you automaticly assume that 'having safer airports' refers to terrorism, as if that is the only thing that makes airports dangerous.
Additionally, its expensive to develop and test radiation hardened processors, so when you have one that works, you tend to stick with it. In 1998 Intel announced that a rad-hard pentium was to be developed and licensed for government use, but I never heard anything new about it. I wonder what happened to that project.
As of 5 years ago Intel had produced about 5 different rad-hard processors for space use. I suppose other manufacturers have their own offerings too.
I haven't heard anyone mention this yet, so I'll just throw it out.
I've read that humans seem to have a built-in social grouping size of around 75-150 individuals. Groups this size tend to feel like communities where people are more likely to be altruistic, but groups that exceed this size tend to break down into 'us' and 'them', where people are less inclined to help out 'them'.
Accordingly, small communes (or those that employ techniques that frequently reinforce the 'default' social grouping size) are more likely to be successful.
If this is true, it seems that in order for a communist nation to succeed, it must organize its people into groups that take advantage of this scale.
Many religions seem to employ this technique, maintaining small, closely knit groups of people who meet frequently so that they maintain their internal bonds. They also share their ideology and rituals with other similar groups so that the 'them' factor is much reduced. Members moving to other groups do not feel alienated because much of their surroundings (rituals, decorations and general atmosphere of the group) is very similar.
I'm not suggesting that a nation that desires to be communist must necessarily be religious, just that it may be more successful if its people are organized and managed in a way that takes advantage of peoples natural social instincts. Most societies now rely on the emergent, self-organization of its people, which may or may not be the best way. Once a society has settled into a stable pattern (perhaps a pattern that is good for a small, new country expanding into new frontiers), it may be very difficult for it to reorganize into another (one that is good for an established country with advanced technology and vastly more people), particularly if features of the society have been codified into law, so that new generations must deliberately remove obstacles to change before change can happen.
Cows do not, and never have, existed "in harmony with their natural environment".
I know that, which is why I didn't say that cows do that. I said that returning large amounts of nutrients is probably not the most energy efficent way to build meat.
Depends on what you mean by inefficient. They extract what nutrients it makes biological sense to do so. What is returned to the soil in the field (helping to grow new grass) contains nutrients that other parts of the bio-system uses. This is probably less than optimal if you are trying to manufacturing cow meat instead of robust, self-reproducing organisims that exist in harmony with their natural environment.
For manufacturing cow meat one would really prefer electric powered cow muscle that could be grown right in the consumer packaging, then sterilized so the consumer can't easily grow their own cow meat.
Are we going to get another ice age because we use the solar energy to light a bulb instead of warming the planet or drier because less water will evaporate?
No, almost all of it turns into heat at the end anyway, turning it into electricity and moving a car around with it before it turns into heat just makes it more useful to us.
Now, if we put orbital collectors up or plate the moon with solar collectors and then transmit that energy to the Earth, then we will be adding more energy to the planet, in effect, we would be making the sun a tiny bit brighter. Probably not enough to have an environmental impact, maybe.
the result is Japan will start putting these in place all over the world
Great, as long as someone is doing it right, its cool with me.
People always want their 'team' to be the one to accomplish something first (man in orbit, moon base, whatever), but I'm not into sports and teams and such, I dont' care who does it first, as long as they do it successfully and make a Discovery channel special about how they did it, its cool with me.
Maybe he is thinking of the personal sheild that was traded to a foriegn engineer for a look at their old Empire reactors? It was supposed to run out of power in a couple of months.
You come across kind of strongly, so I'm not sure if you are trolling or not, but either way you have some good points.
I watch TV differently than most people. I watch only the shows I've chosen (scifi mostly), maybe three shows total. I always mute the commercials and divert my attention from the screen (commercials grate on my nerves, I see only their pathetic attempts to influence me and too little product info (the exception being car lots usually, the only product you almost always see with a price )).
I agree regarding wonderment at peoples ability to actually sit there and watch commercials. I also agree regarding free time. I like to think of TV like candy. Its a nice treat now and again, but should not be consumed regularly.
Regarding children. I have a son that the doctors call ADD. I don't know much about ADD, but I can tell you he acts exactly like I did when I was his age, so I think I know what that condition, whatever it is, is like. I was lucky my parents didn't even have a telivision around for many years, got us a 13" black and white set until I was in middle school, and finally got a VCR when I was getting to high school. Never had cable, never had a game console. Did have a TRS-80 with a compiler.
If you are going to let your kids vegge with something, make it a computer without an internet connection.
I think its pretty reasonable to believe that Jesus existed and was in fact a highly charismatic fellow who probably was quite religious. I expect he had a dozen or so very close (though possibly not particularly strong critical thinkers) followers who belived that he was who he claimed to be. I'm sure his deeds grew with every re-telling, and he gained a large following. I thing that he was crucified, but taken down before he died[nb], whereupon he recovered and with the help of some friends, escaped to somewhere else, possibly Europe.
[nb] : The Romans were really good at crucifing people, they had lots of practice. However, I'm sure the guards could be bribed, and we are talking about a pretty well known guy with extremely devoted followers. Coming up with a way to get him down before he actually died would probably not have been difficult.
The meta-information on files should be held by the filesystem, not tied to the file
As a user of file sharing applications, I'd have to disagree. Currently people are using long filenames as meta information holders, representing the file's content, publisher type and etc. This is difficult to manage and very much sub-optimal. I really think that all files should have an alternate stream or resource fork or whatever that contains meta information about the file, including things like whether or not it contains executable code. The operating system can then know if it is supposed to be able to execute such files, and whether or not it allows the user to execute new files without a warning is up to the sytem.
I agree re not letting people do stupid stuff if it can easily be avoided. Too bad microsoft doesn't.
I understand what you are saying, but I disagree because the general population doesn't usually understand the difference between data files and the files that are the programs that operate on their data files.
All those mysterious.exe things are hidden away in that special 'program files' directory that has warnings all over it. From a regular users perspective, its 'under the hood' of their car, where they pay a professional to work. They click to get their computer to open their files, they edit their files using their computer (the part of it called 'photoshop' or 'word' or whatever), then the save their file. Thats it. They shouldn't have to care about what is 'executable' and what isn't.
Anyway, the.exe extension is just meta information about the file, same as the 'x' attribute in linux. The difference is just in if that meta info is sent with the file.
This stuff actually works pretty well if you let it, the problem is mostly a particular large software vender that thinks normal users should have email clients that can execute programs or scripts. Thats just a bad idea.
I find it kind of amusing that every time the subject of space exploration comes up many slashdotters say it should be done by someone other than the government (as if there is something stopping those others from doing it now), but when there is a story about mega-corporations (you know, the ones that would have the money and the motive to develop and use space technologies), slashdotters complain about them.
If you don't already have a solution, I would recommend giving Win2VNC a try. I have two computers that I work on regularly, and this allows me to treat them very much like a single dual head machine.
Its based on VNC, but instead of displaying an image of the remote computer on your screen, it sets up a single pixel wide border on your monitor and when the mouse moves onto that border, it starts sending all input over to the other machine. Its extremely fast because there is no image data coming back, you get to watch the real screen. Clipboard copies both ways, so other than dragging icons, it works almost exactly like a dual monitor setup.
It does not work well if one of the computers has dual monitors.
I think that the maximize feature is mostly useful for low-resolution screens. I've been running my resolution at 1600 to 2000 pixels wide for a few months, and I've found that the maximize button is useless.
It would be much better if the window manager or application could be configured to know a set of dimensions I like for given windows and provide me with buttons to go to those settings.
You know, I'd love to have multiple monitors on my desk at work, but the only way that is going to happen is if they are LCDs (there simply is not enough room to put two CRT's on my cube desk and have more than 6 inches between my eyeballs and the screen).
The problem is that I want an absolute minimum of a 1600 pixel wide display (I think thats WUXGA or something using the new alphabet soup), but the only way you can get such a display for less than a months salary (for normal mortals) is to buy an entire laptop.
Whats up with that? I can get a complete 1+Ghz laptop system with a 15.4 inch 1600 pixel wide LCD from Dell for about 2 grand, but I can't even find such an LCD stand alone, and the 1280 pixel wide LCDs are pushing 1500 bucks. WTF?
Seriously, its not like the students are doubling the amount of work they do every 18 months (at that age its more like a halfing). If they have the software they need to read their e-textbooks and do their labs and write reports, why upgrade?
If they want to teach the latest version of Word or whatever they could do that on lab computers (or a couple of terminal servers that the students connect to for the class).
The problem with insuring them is that the deductable has to be more than the street price for a stolen laptop.
There is a large university in San Antonio that issues laptops to its students with a $50 deductable. If the laptop is lost or stolen the student pays the $50 deductable and gets another one. Street price on them was around $250.
Doesn't take a genius of a student to subtract the two numbers and end up $200 richer after a police report and a couple of days.
Same thing goes for any kind of insured property though I suppose. Its just that when you have lots of kids with expensive laptops and even less good judgment than they have cash, it seems that the incidence of theft may be quite high.
With the numbers of these things they are talking about buying, I wonder if it would be cost effective for them to have a ruggedized design customized for them. Something that addresses the kinds of problems found in an middle-school academic environment (built in GPS and celluar devices for locating lost or stolen machines for instance).
Slashdot Mirror
Does everything a society does as a collective have to have a direct positive effect on the economy? If that were the case we would not have things like parks.
Life isn't entirely about making money. Businesses are mostly about making money, and big changes cost money. It makes sense for a society to occasionally spend a bunch of money to completely restructure something (put in an interstate highway system for instance), because it is something that will benefit people in the long run even though it may kill some businesses now.
Ubiquitous ultra-highspeed network infrastructure is one of those things. Instead of multiple companies maintaining several seperate networks of aging technology, those companies can now provide their service over one new, better network. It will disrupt many existing business models, but it also simplifies things and opens up possibilities for new businesses.
There is no guarentee that something better won't be available in 5 years. Something better probably will be available. But how long do you keep running that 90Mhz Pentium before you upgrade?
Delphi is up to version 8
.Net, but we don't expect to see it until the end of the quarter.
.Net appears to mostly be a migration path to Borlands C# Builder (which appears very nice, so far). In this Delphi department, most of us would love to just switch to C# right now, but we have Delphi products to maintain, so Delphi.Net appears to be the path.
Version 7 is the current public release. They are taking orders for D8, which is Delphi
Delphi
BTW, you know those heat shrink baggies that lots of software products come in, that you have to open to copy the software, and that have to be intact in order to return the product?
They are really cheap, and you can get them online.
Humans in general need something to rival with, or they'll make it up.
I agree that rivalry and competition are important, but not that these are things that necessarily break up a large society. In fact, properly directed they are probably one of the more powerful ways to bond people together. Sports fans don't (normaly) hate the other team or its fans.
The same is largely true of religions. The 'them' isn't to be hated and feared, but to be helped and indoctrinated.
My main point is that any design for communist government (or any government for the people) should aim to reinforce, exploit and spread natural human social tendancies that are conducive to harmonious behavior and minimize those that are destructive. A government can't reasonably make a 'be nice' law, but it can encourage social organization that encourages peoples natural tendancy to want to help those people whom they think of as 'us'.
That may sound obvious, but it seems that at least one particularly large government in the western hemisphere has lost sight of the big picture, that government should provide long-term, forward-thinking strategy, allowing the nation to succeed in the near and far future. Perhaps that is a result of the managment requirements of such a large country excceding the capability of the organizational design of the government (IOW, too many details are being handled at the top level, so strategy planning is hampered or non-existant).
Whats really sad is that you automaticly assume that 'having safer airports' refers to terrorism, as if that is the only thing that makes airports dangerous.
Additionally, its expensive to develop and test radiation hardened processors, so when you have one that works, you tend to stick with it. In 1998 Intel announced that a rad-hard pentium was to be developed and licensed for government use, but I never heard anything new about it. I wonder what happened to that project.
As of 5 years ago Intel had produced about 5 different rad-hard processors for space use. I suppose other manufacturers have their own offerings too.
I haven't heard anyone mention this yet, so I'll just throw it out.
I've read that humans seem to have a built-in social grouping size of around 75-150 individuals. Groups this size tend to feel like communities where people are more likely to be altruistic, but groups that exceed this size tend to break down into 'us' and 'them', where people are less inclined to help out 'them'.
Accordingly, small communes (or those that employ techniques that frequently reinforce the 'default' social grouping size) are more likely to be successful.
If this is true, it seems that in order for a communist nation to succeed, it must organize its people into groups that take advantage of this scale.
Many religions seem to employ this technique, maintaining small, closely knit groups of people who meet frequently so that they maintain their internal bonds. They also share their ideology and rituals with other similar groups so that the 'them' factor is much reduced. Members moving to other groups do not feel alienated because much of their surroundings (rituals, decorations and general atmosphere of the group) is very similar.
I'm not suggesting that a nation that desires to be communist must necessarily be religious, just that it may be more successful if its people are organized and managed in a way that takes advantage of peoples natural social instincts. Most societies now rely on the emergent, self-organization of its people, which may or may not be the best way. Once a society has settled into a stable pattern (perhaps a pattern that is good for a small, new country expanding into new frontiers), it may be very difficult for it to reorganize into another (one that is good for an established country with advanced technology and vastly more people), particularly if features of the society have been codified into law, so that new generations must deliberately remove obstacles to change before change can happen.
Or maybe not, I dunno.
Cows do not, and never have, existed "in harmony with their natural environment".
I know that, which is why I didn't say that cows do that. I said that returning large amounts of nutrients is probably not the most energy efficent way to build meat.
Depends on what you mean by inefficient. They extract what nutrients it makes biological sense to do so. What is returned to the soil in the field (helping to grow new grass) contains nutrients that other parts of the bio-system uses. This is probably less than optimal if you are trying to manufacturing cow meat instead of robust, self-reproducing organisims that exist in harmony with their natural environment.
For manufacturing cow meat one would really prefer electric powered cow muscle that could be grown right in the consumer packaging, then sterilized so the consumer can't easily grow their own cow meat.
Are we going to get another ice age because we use the solar energy to light a bulb instead of warming the planet or drier because less water will evaporate?
No, almost all of it turns into heat at the end anyway, turning it into electricity and moving a car around with it before it turns into heat just makes it more useful to us.
Now, if we put orbital collectors up or plate the moon with solar collectors and then transmit that energy to the Earth, then we will be adding more energy to the planet, in effect, we would be making the sun a tiny bit brighter. Probably not enough to have an environmental impact, maybe.
the result is Japan will start putting these in place all over the world
Great, as long as someone is doing it right, its cool with me.
People always want their 'team' to be the one to accomplish something first (man in orbit, moon base, whatever), but I'm not into sports and teams and such, I dont' care who does it first, as long as they do it successfully and make a Discovery channel special about how they did it, its cool with me.
Maybe he is thinking of the personal sheild that was traded to a foriegn engineer for a look at their old Empire reactors? It was supposed to run out of power in a couple of months.
You come across kind of strongly, so I'm not sure if you are trolling or not, but either way you have some good points.
I watch TV differently than most people. I watch only the shows I've chosen (scifi mostly), maybe three shows total. I always mute the commercials and divert my attention from the screen (commercials grate on my nerves, I see only their pathetic attempts to influence me and too little product info (the exception being car lots usually, the only product you almost always see with a price )).
I agree regarding wonderment at peoples ability to actually sit there and watch commercials. I also agree regarding free time. I like to think of TV like candy. Its a nice treat now and again, but should not be consumed regularly.
Regarding children. I have a son that the doctors call ADD. I don't know much about ADD, but I can tell you he acts exactly like I did when I was his age, so I think I know what that condition, whatever it is, is like. I was lucky my parents didn't even have a telivision around for many years, got us a 13" black and white set until I was in middle school, and finally got a VCR when I was getting to high school. Never had cable, never had a game console. Did have a TRS-80 with a compiler.
If you are going to let your kids vegge with something, make it a computer without an internet connection.
where the hell is he
I'd say thats a pretty good guess.
I think its pretty reasonable to believe that Jesus existed and was in fact a highly charismatic fellow who probably was quite religious. I expect he had a dozen or so very close (though possibly not particularly strong critical thinkers) followers who belived that he was who he claimed to be. I'm sure his deeds grew with every re-telling, and he gained a large following. I thing that he was crucified, but taken down before he died[nb], whereupon he recovered and with the help of some friends, escaped to somewhere else, possibly Europe.
[nb] : The Romans were really good at crucifing people, they had lots of practice. However, I'm sure the guards could be bribed, and we are talking about a pretty well known guy with extremely devoted followers. Coming up with a way to get him down before he actually died would probably not have been difficult.
The meta-information on files should be held by the filesystem, not tied to the file
As a user of file sharing applications, I'd have to disagree. Currently people are using long filenames as meta information holders, representing the file's content, publisher type and etc. This is difficult to manage and very much sub-optimal. I really think that all files should have an alternate stream or resource fork or whatever that contains meta information about the file, including things like whether or not it contains executable code. The operating system can then know if it is supposed to be able to execute such files, and whether or not it allows the user to execute new files without a warning is up to the sytem.
I agree re not letting people do stupid stuff if it can easily be avoided. Too bad microsoft doesn't.
+1 Vinge reference
I understand what you are saying, but I disagree because the general population doesn't usually understand the difference between data files and the files that are the programs that operate on their data files.
.exe things are hidden away in that special 'program files' directory that has warnings all over it. From a regular users perspective, its 'under the hood' of their car, where they pay a professional to work. They click to get their computer to open their files, they edit their files using their computer (the part of it called 'photoshop' or 'word' or whatever), then the save their file. Thats it. They shouldn't have to care about what is 'executable' and what isn't.
.exe extension is just meta information about the file, same as the 'x' attribute in linux. The difference is just in if that meta info is sent with the file.
All those mysterious
Anyway, the
This stuff actually works pretty well if you let it, the problem is mostly a particular large software vender that thinks normal users should have email clients that can execute programs or scripts. Thats just a bad idea.
Most cable companies will be happy to sell you a 'commercial' account too, they'll turn off the port blocking.
Its not any faster, the customer service still sucks, and you don't get any more IP's, but you do get to pay three times as much.
I find it kind of amusing that every time the subject of space exploration comes up many slashdotters say it should be done by someone other than the government (as if there is something stopping those others from doing it now), but when there is a story about mega-corporations (you know, the ones that would have the money and the motive to develop and use space technologies), slashdotters complain about them.
Rather than try to solve the problem I just bought a third monitor.
If you don't already have a solution, I would recommend giving Win2VNC a try. I have two computers that I work on regularly, and this allows me to treat them very much like a single dual head machine.
Its based on VNC, but instead of displaying an image of the remote computer on your screen, it sets up a single pixel wide border on your monitor and when the mouse moves onto that border, it starts sending all input over to the other machine. Its extremely fast because there is no image data coming back, you get to watch the real screen. Clipboard copies both ways, so other than dragging icons, it works almost exactly like a dual monitor setup.
It does not work well if one of the computers has dual monitors.
I think that the maximize feature is mostly useful for low-resolution screens. I've been running my resolution at 1600 to 2000 pixels wide for a few months, and I've found that the maximize button is useless.
It would be much better if the window manager or application could be configured to know a set of dimensions I like for given windows and provide me with buttons to go to those settings.
You know, I'd love to have multiple monitors on my desk at work, but the only way that is going to happen is if they are LCDs (there simply is not enough room to put two CRT's on my cube desk and have more than 6 inches between my eyeballs and the screen).
The problem is that I want an absolute minimum of a 1600 pixel wide display (I think thats WUXGA or something using the new alphabet soup), but the only way you can get such a display for less than a months salary (for normal mortals) is to buy an entire laptop.
Whats up with that? I can get a complete 1+Ghz laptop system with a 15.4 inch 1600 pixel wide LCD from Dell for about 2 grand, but I can't even find such an LCD stand alone, and the 1280 pixel wide LCDs are pushing 1500 bucks. WTF?
Hmm. Why do they need to upgrade?
Seriously, its not like the students are doubling the amount of work they do every 18 months (at that age its more like a halfing). If they have the software they need to read their e-textbooks and do their labs and write reports, why upgrade?
If they want to teach the latest version of Word or whatever they could do that on lab computers (or a couple of terminal servers that the students connect to for the class).
The problem with insuring them is that the deductable has to be more than the street price for a stolen laptop.
There is a large university in San Antonio that issues laptops to its students with a $50 deductable. If the laptop is lost or stolen the student pays the $50 deductable and gets another one. Street price on them was around $250.
Doesn't take a genius of a student to subtract the two numbers and end up $200 richer after a police report and a couple of days.
Same thing goes for any kind of insured property though I suppose. Its just that when you have lots of kids with expensive laptops and even less good judgment than they have cash, it seems that the incidence of theft may be quite high.
With the numbers of these things they are talking about buying, I wonder if it would be cost effective for them to have a ruggedized design customized for them. Something that addresses the kinds of problems found in an middle-school academic environment (built in GPS and celluar devices for locating lost or stolen machines for instance).