I think we can safely assumes that flies, roaches and certain kinds of bacteria will prosper in 100.000 years. Humans, well if we do prosper, we'll likely be entirely new species because we're bound to eventually figure out that our biological evolution is far too slow in comparison to cultural evolution, and compensate with genertic engineering likely becoming an entirely different species in process.
Hibernate the machine - copy RAM contents to a file on hard drive, shut down the machine. On bootup, file is loaded back into RAM. Takes only marginally longer on system with reasonably fast hard drives, and allows complete shut down of the machine. You can have your 30 sec full boot up without having to pay SSD premiums.
Downside is that some programs don't like it and break, but these have been fewer and fewer as time passed.
Actually bloody revolution has almost always been a part of it, and in the past has been relatively more bloody due to people being much more accustomed to death. Especially back when medicine was in it's infancy, and predators still ate people in significant numbers. The thing with modern West, is that it'll far more likely go down the route of Rome, with slow, rotting collapse on itself. The bloody part will then come when division has been clear enough and people will start fighting each other for scraps, or when outsiders simply come and pillage/extract revenge on it, just like it happened in Rome.
Honestly though, I don't understand why people look at this as a purely bad thing. The cycle of death and rebirth is essentially a part of nature itself, as old must die to make way for new. USA wouldn't have been born if not for a bloody war against colonial masters. USA and modern West wouldn't have a French Revolution-style constitution without bloody French Revolution and it's revolutionaries. From the ashes of old, new empire always rises, and in many cases it brings humanity forward in the process.
The only people who can view this cycle as "pessimistic" are ones who know that they are on the "winning" side now and are very likely to be on "losing side" when wealth re-balancing will happen. It's worth noting that in general when such re-balancing happens, vast majority of people benefit from it in the long run, and losers are in a very small minority due to concentration of wealth and power.
Which is why I agree with the argument that we're still very far from the critical point in the cycle. We're fairly clearly headed there, but we're still likely decades away at least.
You forgot the extremely obvious #3: A realist with solid grasp on history and no illusions in line with "humanity is great force for good, and democracy is the best ruling system ever!".
Humans certainly have a great degree of control of how they live their own lives. By extension all but very few on top have any control over how world works, just like a grand machine doesn't really get a major impact if one of atoms that form it's structure suddenly dies to radioactive decay. I'm not certain how you can "reject my understanding of subject matter" when your entire argument is essentially summed in these words: "I _believe_ it will be different this time". You have NOTHING to base this belief on except belief itself. I have several thousands of years of DOCUMENTED history to back mine, and several tens of thousands of assumed history based on significant amount of evidence and not really countered by any decent historian.
Let me give you a great example, based on your claims of our "major achievements" on just how ridiculous your beliefs are in light of history: "women can vote. slavery is abolished. the middle class has risen to take power".
Yet we have: 1. Constant reports of legitimized slavery in Western countries by UN which has taken forms of everything from prostitution to working for essentially no wages (also look at 3.). Even more outside Western countries. Religious communities which have essentially slaves under different names. Etc.
2. Women voting rights (and rights in general) are still far below those of men in vast majority of the world (read: everywhere, but the gap differs based on location). In the west, any improvements of right of women are massively fleeting and directly linked to financial superiority over other regions. In has been systemically observed that when crises hit, women are the first to get laid off to stay home with children. In many countries, including but not limited to Germany, France and Japan women are culturally EXPECTED to leave work to have children and then stay home with them if their husband makes enough money. It is also observed that empowered women have significantly lower birth rate, essentially getting squeezed out over generations by those in more "traditional" circumstances who have much better birth rate. There is a very good example of this in modern Israel, high birth rate of orthodox jews in comparison to general populace has taken their marginal political power and turned them into a powerhouse - they now have a foreign minister who is a member of their party, and somewhere between 15 and 20% of soldiers drafted into army are now treating the Palestine conflict as a "holy war" rather then "war for survival". As a result, any advanced made in this field can be maintained only as long as financial superiority holds. When reset happens (looking at many African countries with their constant revolutions is a great example) women are very quickly pushed back into traditional roles.
3. Middle class rise to power is absolutely nothing new. For example that's how Rome was built. In this regard, it also makes a great example on how Rome collapsed: middle class was slowly pushed out of power by slaves on working front from below, and squeezed dry by rich class from above. We have essentially the same socioeconomic situation brewing in the West as we speak, with cheap gastarbeiters working slave wages and hours destroying middle class from below, while rich class continues the financial squeeze from above shrinking the middle class. Just like it happened in Rome. And when middle class finally cannot take the strain and shrinks too far, modern West will likely join Rome in the history books as yet another empire that got killed not by outside forces, but simply rot from inside and collapsed on itself.
On the last note: our argument is likely pointless. You have very little facts available to support your hypothesis of "optimistic outcome" of modern Western empire(s) - the likelihood of me missing any historic evidence on th
Open ANY history book that looks at more then a few years of history. Start reading. You'll find that regardless of the focus of said book, one thing will always be a constant: the never ending cycle of concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands, followed by bloody revolution that redistributes power into much larger amount of hands, following by once again concentrating the power in the hands of a few.
This is a constant for human society from tribal ages. We're talking tens of thousands years at LEAST. The form that power takes has been changing over time, but the way it works, the way it's used and the way it's distributed has not. To break this cycle, you'd need a completely new sociological approach - something humanity has not been able to develop throughout its history, and not for a lack of trying. I think 100:1 for status quo is a very safe bet here, and even something in realm of 10000:1 would still be pretty safe seeing just how little we have progressed in terms of actual sociological basis for our thinking from stone age. Bloodless wealth redistribution revolutions largely do not work simply because those in power will be willing to shed blood to keep the power.
Essentially your only real claim is that we're simply not at the point where it would benefit enough people to revolt, and here we will easily agree - the real argument here would be that we've passed the crossroads where we could try something new instead of the cycle as there is now enough power in few enough hands to render further concentration of power unstoppable in practice.
Your claim doesn't really address the cycle of concentration of power, nor the inevitable bloody redistribution once the critical point is passed. It only claims that we're not beyond the point where revolution becomes easily visible. In this regard, USA is no different then hundreds of other empires that existed throughout the history.
100USD for a unit? What, they use rented millionaire's yachts to ship them?
You may want to find out how much it costs to bundle and ship things here. Then take about 1/3 off that number. You'll get the sum needed to pay to ship the item back. Add to that the non-existent costs for getting a sweatshop scrapper company, and take the profit out of ever increasing price of precious metals you extract from it.
If you do this business en masse rather then ship individual computers, your cost will be a very small fraction of 100USD quote you're giving.
If they're taking a loss, they're not apple. Normal apple shines at playing the market.
I suspect they already have a scrapping company in China ready to receive parts, and we do know that several tens of percent of cargo ship capacity going from West to China is empty because of trade deficit.
Not "50-100 most popular titles in retail", but "50-100 most popular among those who emulate".
In most cases it's a pretty good guess that whatever you're playing is also played by many others. There are obviously exceptions to this, and it's quite possible that you are among the small minority that really does need games that no one else plays.
There's also an issue of people hacking roms themselves to get them to work with zsnes. Many of the huge torrented libraries you find on the net in fact include such versions of games.
That's not luck. As author notes in the article, popular speed-focused emulator have game-specific hacks for about 50-100 most popular titles, that enable them to work "good enough".
We can measure if it gives him an "unfair" advantage. I.e. similar to doping, it will clearly make him better in some way that normal athlete without it cannot achieve.
If you ever had N9 in your hands, you'd know that no, it's not. Hardware needed to make N9 run like it does didn't exist four years ago and neither did software stack that advanced.
Seriously, find a friend with the said phone and try it before you moan about it being late.
The last quarterly was a great example of your CEO deciding to scuttle the company, and how long it takes from him blowing up scuttling charges placed in all the right places to ship actually starting to sink.
Funnily, I've played with N9, and it feels superior on W7 HTC phones that nokia design guys had in may in about every way. The old pre-Elop strategy of symbian for low end and meego/harmattan for high end would have likely meant nokia would have been still very much #1 and head and shoulders above everyone else in mobile phone market. But that's all water under the bridge now.
Let's see. Grandparent talks about problems with technology solving a non-existent problem. Parent claims that we will need things like thunderbolt because we won't have any slots in a desktop - we'll just have everything hooked up on one type wonderful cable, so you end up having one hell of a mess of devices hooked up to main board with one type of super fast cable.
I note that progress has been heading in the EXACT OPPOSITE DIRECTION, and use laptops as example of a system that handles everything through slotting rather then cabling. Child post rages that I'm wrong, and claims that users do in fact want small PCs like popular modern laptops... which have no cables in them, only slots.
Ouch?
Then again, your post history said more about you then anything else. Keep on trolling young padawan.
You couldn't because in modern olympics, the differences between top athletes are extremely small and close to pushing boundaries of "humanly possible".
In other words, your error margin with brute calculus would be too large to decide between the top athletes due to measurement problems and such. If you doubt this, look at sprinting. Nowadays things like world records are decided by, and I kid you not, how close the tailwind comes to maximum allowed.
It would stupid because there's more then enough cables in a desktop already. If anything, we need LESS of cable solutions and more slots. Look up at what's missing inside laptops in comparison to desktops. Yeah.
Grandparent is exactly correct. This is a technology looking for a solution, or more correctly for a problem to fix. Because there simply isn't one at the moment.
Not really. The claim is that he is currently losing not because he doesn't have an advantage, but because he's simply not in as good of a shape as other runners. This is at least partially true, there are known cases of him qualifying through some tourneys when being clearly out of shape (not in the pre-competition training process, some trainers call the state "heavy" I believe). Even world's best athletes would have problems qualifying while in this state.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we can safely assumes that flies, roaches and certain kinds of bacteria will prosper in 100.000 years. Humans, well if we do prosper, we'll likely be entirely new species because we're bound to eventually figure out that our biological evolution is far too slow in comparison to cultural evolution, and compensate with genertic engineering likely becoming an entirely different species in process.
It's funny just how easy it was to predict your behaviour and write it down in my previous post. Before it actually occured.
Hibernate the machine - copy RAM contents to a file on hard drive, shut down the machine. On bootup, file is loaded back into RAM. Takes only marginally longer on system with reasonably fast hard drives, and allows complete shut down of the machine. You can have your 30 sec full boot up without having to pay SSD premiums.
Downside is that some programs don't like it and break, but these have been fewer and fewer as time passed.
Actually bloody revolution has almost always been a part of it, and in the past has been relatively more bloody due to people being much more accustomed to death. Especially back when medicine was in it's infancy, and predators still ate people in significant numbers. The thing with modern West, is that it'll far more likely go down the route of Rome, with slow, rotting collapse on itself. The bloody part will then come when division has been clear enough and people will start fighting each other for scraps, or when outsiders simply come and pillage/extract revenge on it, just like it happened in Rome.
Honestly though, I don't understand why people look at this as a purely bad thing. The cycle of death and rebirth is essentially a part of nature itself, as old must die to make way for new. USA wouldn't have been born if not for a bloody war against colonial masters. USA and modern West wouldn't have a French Revolution-style constitution without bloody French Revolution and it's revolutionaries. From the ashes of old, new empire always rises, and in many cases it brings humanity forward in the process.
The only people who can view this cycle as "pessimistic" are ones who know that they are on the "winning" side now and are very likely to be on "losing side" when wealth re-balancing will happen. It's worth noting that in general when such re-balancing happens, vast majority of people benefit from it in the long run, and losers are in a very small minority due to concentration of wealth and power.
Which is why I agree with the argument that we're still very far from the critical point in the cycle. We're fairly clearly headed there, but we're still likely decades away at least.
So you didn't read my arguments at all, did you? Can't say it's unexpected.
You forgot the extremely obvious #3: A realist with solid grasp on history and no illusions in line with "humanity is great force for good, and democracy is the best ruling system ever!".
Humans certainly have a great degree of control of how they live their own lives. By extension all but very few on top have any control over how world works, just like a grand machine doesn't really get a major impact if one of atoms that form it's structure suddenly dies to radioactive decay.
I'm not certain how you can "reject my understanding of subject matter" when your entire argument is essentially summed in these words: "I _believe_ it will be different this time".
You have NOTHING to base this belief on except belief itself. I have several thousands of years of DOCUMENTED history to back mine, and several tens of thousands of assumed history based on significant amount of evidence and not really countered by any decent historian.
Let me give you a great example, based on your claims of our "major achievements" on just how ridiculous your beliefs are in light of history: "women can vote. slavery is abolished. the middle class has risen to take power".
Yet we have:
1. Constant reports of legitimized slavery in Western countries by UN which has taken forms of everything from prostitution to working for essentially no wages (also look at 3.). Even more outside Western countries. Religious communities which have essentially slaves under different names. Etc.
2. Women voting rights (and rights in general) are still far below those of men in vast majority of the world (read: everywhere, but the gap differs based on location). In the west, any improvements of right of women are massively fleeting and directly linked to financial superiority over other regions. In has been systemically observed that when crises hit, women are the first to get laid off to stay home with children. In many countries, including but not limited to Germany, France and Japan women are culturally EXPECTED to leave work to have children and then stay home with them if their husband makes enough money. It is also observed that empowered women have significantly lower birth rate, essentially getting squeezed out over generations by those in more "traditional" circumstances who have much better birth rate. There is a very good example of this in modern Israel, high birth rate of orthodox jews in comparison to general populace has taken their marginal political power and turned them into a powerhouse - they now have a foreign minister who is a member of their party, and somewhere between 15 and 20% of soldiers drafted into army are now treating the Palestine conflict as a "holy war" rather then "war for survival".
As a result, any advanced made in this field can be maintained only as long as financial superiority holds. When reset happens (looking at many African countries with their constant revolutions is a great example) women are very quickly pushed back into traditional roles.
3. Middle class rise to power is absolutely nothing new. For example that's how Rome was built. In this regard, it also makes a great example on how Rome collapsed: middle class was slowly pushed out of power by slaves on working front from below, and squeezed dry by rich class from above. We have essentially the same socioeconomic situation brewing in the West as we speak, with cheap gastarbeiters working slave wages and hours destroying middle class from below, while rich class continues the financial squeeze from above shrinking the middle class. Just like it happened in Rome. And when middle class finally cannot take the strain and shrinks too far, modern West will likely join Rome in the history books as yet another empire that got killed not by outside forces, but simply rot from inside and collapsed on itself.
On the last note: our argument is likely pointless. You have very little facts available to support your hypothesis of "optimistic outcome" of modern Western empire(s) - the likelihood of me missing any historic evidence on th
Open ANY history book that looks at more then a few years of history. Start reading. You'll find that regardless of the focus of said book, one thing will always be a constant: the never ending cycle of concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands, followed by bloody revolution that redistributes power into much larger amount of hands, following by once again concentrating the power in the hands of a few.
This is a constant for human society from tribal ages. We're talking tens of thousands years at LEAST. The form that power takes has been changing over time, but the way it works, the way it's used and the way it's distributed has not. To break this cycle, you'd need a completely new sociological approach - something humanity has not been able to develop throughout its history, and not for a lack of trying. I think 100:1 for status quo is a very safe bet here, and even something in realm of 10000:1 would still be pretty safe seeing just how little we have progressed in terms of actual sociological basis for our thinking from stone age. Bloodless wealth redistribution revolutions largely do not work simply because those in power will be willing to shed blood to keep the power.
Essentially your only real claim is that we're simply not at the point where it would benefit enough people to revolt, and here we will easily agree - the real argument here would be that we've passed the crossroads where we could try something new instead of the cycle as there is now enough power in few enough hands to render further concentration of power unstoppable in practice.
Your claim doesn't really address the cycle of concentration of power, nor the inevitable bloody redistribution once the critical point is passed. It only claims that we're not beyond the point where revolution becomes easily visible. In this regard, USA is no different then hundreds of other empires that existed throughout the history.
Looking at known history of mankind, I think it's pretty safe to bet at least 100:1 against you. Sadly.
Version 1337 for the win?
100USD for a unit? What, they use rented millionaire's yachts to ship them?
You may want to find out how much it costs to bundle and ship things here. Then take about 1/3 off that number. You'll get the sum needed to pay to ship the item back. Add to that the non-existent costs for getting a sweatshop scrapper company, and take the profit out of ever increasing price of precious metals you extract from it.
If you do this business en masse rather then ship individual computers, your cost will be a very small fraction of 100USD quote you're giving.
If they're taking a loss, they're not apple. Normal apple shines at playing the market.
I suspect they already have a scrapping company in China ready to receive parts, and we do know that several tens of percent of cargo ship capacity going from West to China is empty because of trade deficit.
They're making money on this, or they're dumb.
Not "50-100 most popular titles in retail", but "50-100 most popular among those who emulate".
In most cases it's a pretty good guess that whatever you're playing is also played by many others. There are obviously exceptions to this, and it's quite possible that you are among the small minority that really does need games that no one else plays.
There's also an issue of people hacking roms themselves to get them to work with zsnes. Many of the huge torrented libraries you find on the net in fact include such versions of games.
Nothing new, same was done for speciality chips in SNES cartridges.
That's not luck. As author notes in the article, popular speed-focused emulator have game-specific hacks for about 50-100 most popular titles, that enable them to work "good enough".
We can measure if it gives him an "unfair" advantage. I.e. similar to doping, it will clearly make him better in some way that normal athlete without it cannot achieve.
Apple fanboys disagree with a lot of things. Many of these disagreements make no sense whatsoever. This would be one of them.
If you ever had N9 in your hands, you'd know that no, it's not. Hardware needed to make N9 run like it does didn't exist four years ago and neither did software stack that advanced.
Seriously, find a friend with the said phone and try it before you moan about it being late.
The last quarterly was a great example of your CEO deciding to scuttle the company, and how long it takes from him blowing up scuttling charges placed in all the right places to ship actually starting to sink.
Funnily, I've played with N9, and it feels superior on W7 HTC phones that nokia design guys had in may in about every way. The old pre-Elop strategy of symbian for low end and meego/harmattan for high end would have likely meant nokia would have been still very much #1 and head and shoulders above everyone else in mobile phone market. But that's all water under the bridge now.
No, the new brand of phones is called NoWin.
Let's see. Grandparent talks about problems with technology solving a non-existent problem. Parent claims that we will need things like thunderbolt because we won't have any slots in a desktop - we'll just have everything hooked up on one type wonderful cable, so you end up having one hell of a mess of devices hooked up to main board with one type of super fast cable.
I note that progress has been heading in the EXACT OPPOSITE DIRECTION, and use laptops as example of a system that handles everything through slotting rather then cabling. Child post rages that I'm wrong, and claims that users do in fact want small PCs like popular modern laptops... which have no cables in them, only slots.
Ouch?
Then again, your post history said more about you then anything else. Keep on trolling young padawan.
You couldn't because in modern olympics, the differences between top athletes are extremely small and close to pushing boundaries of "humanly possible".
In other words, your error margin with brute calculus would be too large to decide between the top athletes due to measurement problems and such. If you doubt this, look at sprinting. Nowadays things like world records are decided by, and I kid you not, how close the tailwind comes to maximum allowed.
If GDR sportswomen were your thing, you may want to just come out of the closet. /black humour
You may want to engage your brain and re-read my post. You're repeating my argument.
It would stupid because there's more then enough cables in a desktop already. If anything, we need LESS of cable solutions and more slots. Look up at what's missing inside laptops in comparison to desktops. Yeah.
Grandparent is exactly correct. This is a technology looking for a solution, or more correctly for a problem to fix. Because there simply isn't one at the moment.
Not really. The claim is that he is currently losing not because he doesn't have an advantage, but because he's simply not in as good of a shape as other runners. This is at least partially true, there are known cases of him qualifying through some tourneys when being clearly out of shape (not in the pre-competition training process, some trainers call the state "heavy" I believe). Even world's best athletes would have problems qualifying while in this state.