At every level of government, from your local municipality to the state level to the feds, record deficits are being set. Your state taxes are almost certainly going to rise in the next two years. sorry, something has to give, and I elect Buck Rodgers.
The other alternative is to tax the citizenry into oblivion and turn the US into the very Russia it is seeking to get money from.
The fastest computer in the world will always be limited to how quickly data may be fed to it. One way or another, a human will have to direct this operation
The world is full of semi-autonomous computing systems. Your example from "math class" is a total non-sequitur.
Yes there is no spectrum scarcity in the sense that more signals can't be broadcast, but you need the government's permission to do so. That is the entire point! The government has dedicated spectrum to services that are dying or don't need it. If the free market was allowed to allocate some of this space, UHF stations for one would sell out in a second to newer network services.
The fact that there is huge tracts of underutilized spectrum is why the government needs to get out of the auction buziness.
Posters on this board clearly have no clue how the spectrum is divided so they should probably stop replying to my original comment.
The portions of the spectrum dedicated to very low useage services and the military is the reason you cannot have better wireless services. PERIOD. Why do you think people are having such a hassle with ultrawideband???
one company would have ended with a de-facto monopoly on the spectrum.
That's what you ALREADY HAVE. The feds have monpolized this space and auction it off to special interests. Broadcast spectrum for educational channels alone take up an absurd amount of UNUSED spectrum.
At least the free market would allocate space to services that people want! Right now the services people want occupy a few slivers of the spectrum. Take a look at how the spectrum is divided up before you make any more uninformed comments.
Your federal government could easily solve this problem by re-allocating the spectrum to the technologies set to use it in the future. Right now an large portion is still dedicated to UHF television. Of course they can't let the free market take a stab at it any time soon, because they have already priced future spectrum auction proceeds into the Federal budget.
Cell phones are but one service that is starved in spectrum allocation. If the government was to let the free market allocate the spectrum, an entire new universe of wireless network services could become available.
The cornerstone of our loegal code and our constitution is that you do not have to demonstrate to the government that you are innocent of crimes. I'm not saying that the presumption of innocence precludes government IDs, but it does mean that law abiding citizens should not have to carry a piece of paper to prove they are law abiding.
Using an obscure, outdated toolkit may get you a sense of security, but you often have a harder time hiring programmers at competitive salaries. People with obscure skills charge more. This is but one reason why many firms use the prevailing language (however it became prevailing is another issue) - because they need to aim at the widest possible hiring pool.
Added to which, using outdated hardware is never an option in industry. You must write to you user's platform.
First, Ocaml is one in a loooooong line of lanugage that claiming to be safer than C/C++ while simultaneously claiming to be faster. I have not seen one new language in the last five years NOT claim to (in "some cases") be faster than C/C++, yet they never can back this claim up in the average case.
Now how many Ocaml coders are there out there? Five thousand? Actually that number is probably generous. Just fess up that no one cares about this language regardless of its benefits. Its added to the list of Lisp, Haskell, and all of the other languages that could save the world if we just adopted them.
Even then, Ocaml does nothing to secure the monstrous existing C/C++ code base.
When coders run out of answers, they often resort to blanket claims of utopia delivered by a mysterious and obscure language.
While I have taken this out of context, its not worthwhile to dispense with systems coding issues - thats exactly where most security problems start and need to be stopped. Anyone can be safe in a sandbox.
There is no economic incentive for Microsoft to write efficient code with a small memory footprint.
If programmer P1 can modestly abuse resources to get a program out the door faster than programmer P2 who takes the time to be miserly with ssystem resources, P1 will win and P2 will end up working for P1.
Programs use more RAM because its there and its cheap and that makes it easier for programmers to use higher level toolkits to crank out code more quickly. We have the resources, why not use them??
I'd suggest stearing clear of that phrase if your intention is to indicate that something is "good". It's also completes with things like "The market rewards skilled con men who disappear before you realize you've been rooked" and "The market rewards CEOs who destroy a company's long term future to boost short term stock value so he can cash out and retire."
If you are writing code to make money, by definition an abstraction is good if your product sells.
This argument is so tired. The downfall of programming is now due to people who can't/don't write C. Twenty years before that the downfall of programming was C programmers who couldn't/wouldn't write assembler.
The market rewards abstractions because they help create high level tools that get products on the market faster. Classic case in point is WordPerfect. They couldn't get their early assembler-based product out on a competitive schedule with Word or other C based programs.
Yes it would be nice to get back to 'first principles' and address machine resources directly, but its impossible to deliver a product to the marketplace in a meaningul timeframe using this method, particularly when Moore's law blurs the gains anyway - crap runs fast enough.
Todays market, more than ever, relies on support for a product and this is where Microsoft wins all the big corporate clients while Mozilla and other non coporapte sponsored rpoducts remain as basically toys used by tech saavy teens.
Has anyone EVER phoned Microsoft for tech support for IE? "Hey I was having a problem because IE kept crashing so I just picked up the phone and talked with their cheif engineer! Problem solved in just two minutes!!" Yeah right.
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla running on a PC. Never.
I see far more Chrylsers in the parking lot at work than Ferraris. That must mean Chryslers are better.
PVRs will obviously be subsumed into the TV unit itself...TiVo can only hope to save itself through a superior UI and programming service that it maybe can sell to cable providers.
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The other alternative is to tax the citizenry into oblivion and turn the US into the very Russia it is seeking to get money from.
I noticed that the default RH8 release does not explicitly indicate xft support, as one of the beta releases did. Any information on this?
But most importantly you need a benevolent dictator to enforce the enlightened design.
The world is full of semi-autonomous computing systems. Your example from "math class" is a total non-sequitur.
Yes. The free market would not give most of the spectrum to UHF TV, educational broadcasting, and the Catholic Church (not joking).
The free market would see to it that services that are actually IN DEMAND would get spectrum.
Don't worry about emergency systems - the military already has more spectrum than it can use.
The fact that there is huge tracts of underutilized spectrum is why the government needs to get out of the auction buziness.
If put to the free market, UHF stations would sell their spectrum in a minute.
The portions of the spectrum dedicated to very low useage services and the military is the reason you cannot have better wireless services. PERIOD. Why do you think people are having such a hassle with ultrawideband???
That's what you ALREADY HAVE. The feds have monpolized this space and auction it off to special interests. Broadcast spectrum for educational channels alone take up an absurd amount of UNUSED spectrum.
At least the free market would allocate space to services that people want! Right now the services people want occupy a few slivers of the spectrum. Take a look at how the spectrum is divided up before you make any more uninformed comments.
Cell phones are but one service that is starved in spectrum allocation. If the government was to let the free market allocate the spectrum, an entire new universe of wireless network services could become available.
The cornerstone of our loegal code and our constitution is that you do not have to demonstrate to the government that you are innocent of crimes. I'm not saying that the presumption of innocence precludes government IDs, but it does mean that law abiding citizens should not have to carry a piece of paper to prove they are law abiding.
It is a loss numerological translation for the name of the Roman Emperor Nero, who persecuted Christians with intense fervor.
And say what??? "Don't buy new hardware" ??? Good luck outspending Intel's advertising dept....and Dell's...and IBMs.
Added to which, using outdated hardware is never an option in industry. You must write to you user's platform.
High level languages are great for high level problems. Low level langauges are great for low level problems. Use the right tool.
Now how many Ocaml coders are there out there? Five thousand? Actually that number is probably generous. Just fess up that no one cares about this language regardless of its benefits. Its added to the list of Lisp, Haskell, and all of the other languages that could save the world if we just adopted them.
Even then, Ocaml does nothing to secure the monstrous existing C/C++ code base.
When coders run out of answers, they often resort to blanket claims of utopia delivered by a mysterious and obscure language.
?????
While I have taken this out of context, its not worthwhile to dispense with systems coding issues - thats exactly where most security problems start and need to be stopped. Anyone can be safe in a sandbox.
There is no economic incentive for Microsoft to write efficient code with a small memory footprint.
If programmer P1 can modestly abuse resources to get a program out the door faster than programmer P2 who takes the time to be miserly with ssystem resources, P1 will win and P2 will end up working for P1.
Programs use more RAM because its there and its cheap and that makes it easier for programmers to use higher level toolkits to crank out code more quickly. We have the resources, why not use them??
If you are writing code to make money, by definition an abstraction is good if your product sells.
The market rewards abstractions because they help create high level tools that get products on the market faster. Classic case in point is WordPerfect. They couldn't get their early assembler-based product out on a competitive schedule with Word or other C based programs.
Yes it would be nice to get back to 'first principles' and address machine resources directly, but its impossible to deliver a product to the marketplace in a meaningul timeframe using this method, particularly when Moore's law blurs the gains anyway - crap runs fast enough.
Not sure. Any more useful info would be nice.
Has anyone EVER phoned Microsoft for tech support for IE? "Hey I was having a problem because IE kept crashing so I just picked up the phone and talked with their cheif engineer! Problem solved in just two minutes!!" Yeah right.
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla running on a PC. Never.
I see far more Chrylsers in the parking lot at work than Ferraris. That must mean Chryslers are better.
PVRs will obviously be subsumed into the TV unit itself...TiVo can only hope to save itself through a superior UI and programming service that it maybe can sell to cable providers.