Are you aware of these 535 people called "Congress"? They negotiate and pass bills. The President just signs or vetoes them.
That's not accurate either. The President via the OMB basically drafts the federal budget. Since the executive branch runs the bureaucracy it knows what resources are necessary to make a program successful. So even when Congress is against the President there's a limit to how effectively they can force their will. Congress can easily kill programs they don't like by defunding them but it's much harder for them to force the executive to run a program effectively when the executive wants to kill it.
Palm's issue, was that the "Pre" was to late to the smart phone market, by then, Apple was already with iPhone. When I had my Palm, and my cellphone, I kept wondering why the two were not melded. My wonderment lasted over two years.
So if it was so difficult, why not break Palm OS to make it work on phones.
Never heard of the Treo? Palm was selling smart phones since 2003 when they acquired Treo from Handspring. But I don't think it was ever successful. Blackberry devices were more efficient and by the time the iPhone came out they had switched to Windows Mobile.
The installed binaries built from the ports tree are not automagicly updated with the standard OS patches, this is why many people chose NOT to build from the ports tree and instead chose to use the binary package installer pkg tool such that the packages are then updated automaticly by the FreeBSD team as opposed to the user having to re-fresh the ports tree and manulay rebuild every package that gets an update.
I call bullshit. Binary packages have never been up to date on FreeBSD. Anybody knows anything about FreeBSD knows to use the ports tree. Especially for something that takes 2 seconds to build. The ports tree since yesterday has had the NetBSD workaround which is even safer than GNU's own since it disables the vulnerable (and hardly used) functionality entirely. (Who intentionally imports shell functions from the environment?) While we're going to be updating our Linux systems yet again for GNU's next attempt at fixing this.
FreeBSD isn't even vulnerable to begin with./bin/sh is Almquist shell.
Pakistan was founded as a Muslim state, and it is not a reasonable expectation for it to work against Islam in Afghanistan by supporting the heretical idea of secular government.
Not accurate. Pakistan was founded as a secular nation. Their motivations in Afghanistan are all about power and control. Pakistan had militarily supported the Taliban against the Northern Alliance in the 90s, and so now that the Northern Alliance runs the government they ally themselves with India instead of Pakistan.
The only reason Islamabad gave the US the time of day in the past was to obtain arms to use against its mortal enemy India which was buddies with the Soviets during the Cold War.
The US came to India first. They wanted to be able to put missiles in India aimed at the Soviets. But India wanted to be neutral. Pakistan saw this and decided to ally with the US for money and arms to use against India. After China invaded India and gifted land to Pakistan, India gave up on neutrality and joined with the Soviets.
India would be wise to make buddies with the US after the US-Pak relationship collapses. If it comes to war, US assets could help India take out Pak nukes which are a menace to civilization.
It's never that simple. There have been several wars. And India always wins. Pakistan wants Kashmir because that's where the water is. There's not enough to go around so Indian dams cause the Pakistani rivers to run dry. They are so desperate for it that they constantly send their soldiers over the border posing as Kashmiri freedom fighters to fight and die. Like North Korea they are a doomed nation with nothing left to use. So they continue to terrorize out of spite. Even before both sides had deployed nuclear weapons, India had always stopped short of invading Pakistan because they see no use in trying to occupy it.
The closed source drivers haven't supported the X1400 in a while. The old versions that do don't run on any recent distros because of kernel incompatibilities.
It's not a hardware problem. We have lots of T60s at work and they all the same problem in Ubuntu 10.04. The open source driver support for the 1400 is not good. I have to disable most of Compiz to avoid glitches. ATI's closed source driver worked a little better in some ways but they dropped support for those chipsets and the old drivers don't work on current kernels.
As far as spaceflight being dangerous, so is flight of any kind in general. So I take it that you never fly commercial airliners and believe they should be shut down as well due to safety issues? And it wasn't risky in the 1920's just when commercial aviation was starting out?
You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that people in general are unwilling to risk or their lives or that progress is possible without risking life. I'm saying that there's currently no sustainable business model around manned space flight for commercial use. Sending people into space does not solve a business problem. There are a few very rich and brave individuals willing to go into space for personal reasons. Not a sufficient market right now. You won't find many VCs willing to invest in such a company. They will certainly not turn a profit any time soon. But it is something that government space agencies invest in. I'm not saying we shouldn't let the private industry take over more of the design and manufacturing of spacecraft. Or that NASA is doing a terrific job. But removing NASA as a customer will make things a lot worse.
When aviation was starting out, we had a few entrepreneurs that were able to take the risks and build an industry themselves. They didn't need much funding and this liberated them. Space travel seems to be a lot more expensive for individuals to embark upon without large amounts of external funding. That's the fundamental difference in my mind. But perhaps, as you say, it really isn't all that expensive if you approach it correctly.
As far as a "zero tolerance" of fatalities, I certainly don't see that from NASA...
I meant private industry in this case. A high risk of death is something that makes manned spaceflight unprofitable for the private industry right now. It's hard to get repeat business when your customer dies! The private industry has to deal with the lawsuits resulting from fatalities. That's much less of an issue for NASA.
Also, NASA isn't the "only customer"...
But you're not a customer unless you can afford to pay. There are plenty of window shoppers, but the cost isn't going to go down if you lose your existing customers.
I just think we're better off with NASA bumbling towards something than not having them trying at all. They consume a relatively small part of the federal budget and tend to deliver a better return on investment than most other things the government spends on.
Non-military space flight isn't the proper role of government anyway.
Space flight would not exist if it wasn't for the governments of the Soviet Union and United States. Government funds deep research into science and technology because private industry will not. Private investors require short term return on investment. I don't know what your definition of "proper" is based on, but there's the reality of how things work. This is how things work today, and this is how most modern technology has come about.
I'll be the first to admit that some aspects of "privatization of government" simply don't make sense. Private security guards instead of police, and a private "security patrol" instead of military units...essentially the classical "mercenaries" is just insane. These by their very nature really require some sort of governmental "authority" in order to not only enforce decisions made by government employees in this sort of position, but to also keep people in these positions from abusing their authority.
Still, when it comes to NASA and building the next version of a transportation system, this is something that governments, particularly the U.S. Federal Government, has a miserable track record on delivering. And something which "private industry" has a very long and well established record of providing at a very reasonable price along with excellent performance. NASA isn't in the commercial passenger airline industry, why should they be doing the same thing for spaceflight?
Because there's no money in manned spaceflight. And it's extremely dangerous. NASA is the only one who's willing to spend the money and take the risks. We've had a hundred years to figure out how to fly planes, and the technology behind commercial airliners is utterly stagnant so there are no new risks. Hence reliable. The Concorde tended to explode, which we "rectified" by giving up on traveling faster than the speed of sound.
More to the point, travel to and from the Earth to Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) is hardly cutting edge in terms of discovering how it can be done, if it can be done, or what the environment is like to even be there as an astronaut. This isn't science, this is engineering and mass-produced manufacturing technology. The Ares I spacecraft can't even really be called "cutting edge", other than some of the components are going to be a couple of generations more up-to-date than what NASA had in the 1960s...especially with things like replacing the Apollo Guidance Computer and using new composite materials for the structure of the spacecraft. But those were developed outside of NASA and nothing that NASA is doing now is really being innovative other than putting these existing technologies together. And even that isn't really new either, if you consider some of the private spacecraft manufacturers in the USA alone.
There's a difference between chucking a satellite into LEO and sending astronauts up and *down*. Satellite are pretty damn big and are designed to withstand shock and turbulence. Even still, they sometimes break and sometimes rockets explode. Those are acceptable risks. But human beings are very fragile. And there's zero tolerance for fatalities in space. They don't do anything particularly useful when they get into space. Plus we need to send them back down safely, which is really hard. And to top it off there's only one customer: NASA. All in all, a very unprofitable venture. Even if you manage to pull it off, you're more than likely to be sued into bankruptcy once someone dies in space.
If on the next time you go on a flight across the world somewhere, would you be willing to fly in an airplane that was operated by the European Union (not just one country in Europe) and built by the lowest bid contractor that bribed EU officials to get the contract? That is what you get from NASA (substituting the EU with USA federal government). It might work, but it might crash 1%-5% of the time too... again like the Space Shuttle does. Not a good track record to compare against.
Again, it's really an apples and oranges comparison. Private spacecraft manufacturers are nowhere close to sending humans into space. Even though Apollo technology is 40 years old, we basically forgot all of it so we're starting over rebuilding the infrastructure that we destroyed. When there's only one customer (NASA), there's not enough critical mass to create a competitive industry. Without competition and volume, there's not going to be reliability. Either
2) It's a mistake to equivocate the government having no manned spaceflight capability with the United States having no manned spaceflight capability. Private spaceflight will go forth unimpeded, and if you think humans are going to colonize space via NASA, well, evidence since 1969 (and analogous events hundreds of years prior), political science, and economics say this is highly unlikely. The US wasn't truly colonized by governments, but people looking to strike it rich. Government bureaucrats don't make good explorers or entrepreneurs, just good exploiters.
Except that the technology to build those first ships that sailed to the Americas was already long established. And there was a justifiable reason for spending the money to go there: to find a better sea route to the East. And even still, those initial expeditions to the Americas were funded by governments.
Sending people into space is a different story. There's no money to be made in manned space travel now or in the near future. It's too expensive to send people into space and we don't have the technology to exploit the solar system. Perhaps after decades of research and many trillions of dollars of funding that will change. Some of that will surely be a result of private investment to solve problems unrelated to manned space travel. But a large amount of that investment would be for solving the problems unique to manned space travel, with no hope of recouping the cost for decades. There's no terrestrial application for a sealed manned vehicle that carries enough fuel to travel millions of miles in a vacuum. Private investors expect to see profits in a reasonable amount of time.
While I agree that there is less understanding now of some of the basic things like memory allocation, at the same time there have been important gains in other aspects.
Back in the days when everyone was writing in C, understanding memory allocation was a given. But students spent so much time struggling with getting it right that they often never got to understand how to properly design code. The C programmers of the day were often the Fortran and assembly language programmers of the past. They would have very good low level understanding, but were still in the procedural programming mindset. They were used to worrying about the overhead of calling functions. It was very common to see multiple pages of code for a single function and thousands of lines of code per C file. Very few people knew how to write reusable code. They had enough trouble trying to reimplement and debug the same data structures every time.
Once upon a time we could afford to do that. When the software industry was young, the software was simpler and the relative time to market was less. We no longer have the luxury of letting everyone write their own lists, queues, and hash tables. And when multiprocessor CPUs are the norm, we can't afford to let everyone struggle with race conditions when they don't add synchronization around their hand written data structures. Java isn't perfect. It can't completely replace C++ or C. But when you can use it, it gives you an amazing amount of prewritten code. If you need a hash table that is thread safe and automatically uses multiple locks to allow multiple simultaneous writers, all you have to do is create a ConcurrentHashMap. That's something that took good C programmers a significant amount of time to write and test. And then waste more time debugging and fixing it when there's a customer found bug in it.
But certainly the flipside of having a language so easy to use is that it's very easy for programmers to do incredibly efficient things without the software technically breaking. Back when I was taking intro data structures in C++, you passed the assignment if your code worked. The teachesr didn't have time to dock you for writing slow code. And they didn't have time to read the code to grade on design. Essentially you only had enough time to debug and fix all your memory corruptions. (And this was at a top college). But you were well aware of where you were allocating and deallocating so discipline was required. What's the bar today? Will they actually look to see if students are allocating in a tight loop and killing the GC? I suspect not.
He wasn't lazy though. He worked his ass off to become a dentist.
Well, then you are justifiably proud of him. I won't bore you with details but my father also pulled himself out of the poverty without any help from any government. But he was inspired by someone, and the one he was inspired by was inspired by someone else. Ultimately without inspiration and drive it doesn't matter what help you get, you won't get very far up the ladder. Some are inspired by family members, some who don't have family members to look up to get inspired by their teachers. Sometimes you need an outside source.
So I do not think shoes are a requirement.
The bit about the "shoes" is a reference to stories of Tijuana maquiladora workers not being able to give their children shoes for the long walk on a rocky road to school. Not surprisingly that resulted in many of them not sending their kids to school, thereby perpetuating their cycle of poverity. There will always be people who dig themselves out of every bad situation because they have the drive to do so. But there are threshold levels of minimum income people need before any more than a freak number of children can make it out of poverity. The most significant level is the one where the child has food to eat and access to public education. Without food, their minds cannot develop. Without public education, they obviously can't learn anything.
There might be a problem if your culture is such that you feel your fate is predetermined, your class is predetermined, and it's the government's job to support you.
Bitter, are we? You know, not every place in the world is like America. We don't have mass starvation here. We don't have rebels gunning down innocents in the streets. Every child has access to a high school education. You don't get murdered for moving up the ladder.
so I'm suppose to believe a geocities site (BTW: the link is 404) rather than National Geographic and other reputable papers?
Remove the slash from the end of the URL, not sure how it got in there. The geocities article does not contradict anything said in the National Geographic article. There are often many sides to a story. Reading in the National Geographic article about the atrocities committed, I understand your reactions. You could argue that the exclusion that the Brahmin caste now faces is small payment for the crimes of the caste system. But I think all castes should be held responsible for the crimes of mistreating the castes below them. But that is not the type of thing that voters will agree to. So instead the government extracts reparations from the political minorities at the very top of the social ladder.
This is utterly bollocks: Singapore and South Korea are two obvious counter-examples; Israel is another, though whether is was truly "third-world" in 1948 is debateable.
I wouldn't put Israel in the same boat because they had a much different set of problems. Anyway I said "few", not "none"! There are a hell of a lot more countries in Africa and South America that are still struggling.
In addition, some countries like Zimbabwe (sp?) appeared to moving toward the first world, only to slide backwards due to political, rather than economic or social, problems.
Which was exactly my point, the grand parent was arguing that caste the cause of India's suffering. Well, it certainly doesn't help to have a system that turns people against each other. But a lot of it is the same problems affecting other 3rd world nations: overpopulation and lack of education. Even if there was 100% literacy in India, you'll still have the problem of finding jobs for hundreds of millions of people. Many of the people who want to go to college can't because the state can't afford to build and run enough colleges for everyone who wants to go. India might even be considered one of the lucky few because it managed to retain a high quality education system and maintain a democratic government.
Japan wasn't a 3rd world country. They were 1st world during WW2. And the countries of eastern Europe were generally considered "2nd World", i.e. they were heavily industrialized and modern but still not part of the 1st world community. Taiwan is certainly a true success story of a 3rd world nation making it into the 1st world. But there are an awful lot of former European colonies in African and South America still struggling to make it out.
National Geographic did an entire feature about the caste system in India.
I won't deny that those at the lowest caste levels are cruelly oppressed. But it is not the case that there are unified group of "haves" oppressing a smaller minority of "have nots". You have dozens of caste groups that despise and distrust each other. The closer together in the social ladder two castes are, the more violent is the oppression of the higher. But just like it is socially appealing for the poor to scapegoat the castes below them for competing with them, it's also been politically appealing to scapegoat the small minority on top. Because doing so doesn't take anything away from the more populous castes at the middle to near top of the social ladder. It's especially convenient when the people at the top of the social ladder no longer have political or economic power.
India is trying to become post-industrialiased society before going through the industrialisation stage. That does not work. Every single attempt to jump-start a civilisation across an "age" in human history has finished with a failure. Either a social revolt or a regression back into the old state once the "jump the age" financial drip feed is withdrawn.
Not true. Europe before the 14th century was an age behind the East in technology. But they came to the East and learned quickly and soon surpassed the East. Why? Because Europe was impoverished and desparately needed change. China actually had become "bored" of technological advancement. The power of the merchants was controlled in the East. But in the West the merchants got wealthy and eventually took control away from the monarchies, creating an Industrial revolution.
And as for the 3rd world nations that have failed the jump into industrialization: well, it's not easy. The conditions need to be right for any dramatic change. Change can't be forced from the outside, it has to come from within. India and China have the right education systems to develop the brain trust a country needs to develop. Other 3rd world nations suffer from poor education systems, political instability, and war.
This is one thing Chinese got right. They are going for an industrialiased society first. Many other reasons aside, industrialiased society is also much better at equalising the overall living standard across a country. Service oriented society is going in the absolutely opposite direction by creating new living standards drifts and divides. Just compare the living standard differences across England at the height of industrialiasation and now. Now they are actually much higher.
Nonsense. Industrialization has always had devastating effects on society. The Industrial revolution created extremely wealthy barons and left the industrial workers in squalid living conditions. It wasn't until this century that the 1st world countries began countering this with minimum wage laws. The fact of the matter is, the middle class is the one that leads countries into new "ages". If the middle class is trained for it, then they can make the transition.
The vast majority of Chinese are still left out of the modernization. They live as poor farmers and nobody ever talks about them because they have no voice. The main difference between India and China is that in China these people aren't allowed to stop the industrialization movement. In India, however, those hundreds of millions of hopelessly poor people vote. The fact of the matter is that there's not damn thing anyone can do to fix their suffering. India has twice as many people as it can support. There's simply nothing those poor uneducated people can do. Some will benefit from an increased number of service jobs that the middle class will desire. But it's still not enough to sustain a billion people.
There's already "industrialization" in India. Which means the poor get to work in factories producing clothes, shoes, toasters, whatever. India's had that for a long time. So has every non-communist 3rd world country. What has it done for them? Very little. No social mobility because people are paid so little they can't even afford to buy shoes for their kids to walk to school. It's only when the native people figure out how to make stuff *other* countries want, that they ever get out of the trap. China and India are now able to do that, so there will be sustained growth.
And I agree with many posters. India is heading for social trouble full steam ahead. There will be no USSR to supply "assistance" this time, but things like this happen sooner or later without external assistance. And a social revolt in a nuclear power is not a scenario I would like to think of. Plenty of other depressive things around.
There have always been Communist and Socialist parties ruling in some states. They're inept and ineffective. They won't be able to lead any revolution. Ther
The problems go beyong economic to cultural. The problems stem from thousand years old caste systems, people being born into a status and being unable to leave, thereby restricting upward mobility in the most powerful sense. For any nation to really rise to what it can potentially be (The US included) we need to abandon our primitive thought processes (and we all have them, every country on this flying rock)
Note: This isn't racist, or culturist, or any thing else -ist. And if you think it is, I no longer care.
That's only a small part of the problem. In India, the caste system has pretty much inverted itself because the upper castes are a minority of the population. Now the sad thing is that there is official discrimination against people based on caste, but done completely in the name of affirmative action. In order to gain favor with the masses, politicians have continually increased the "quota" of the "Backward Classes" so much to the point where the many impoverished of the "Forward Classes" have almost lost the ability to go to public college. Rather than try to find solutions to the difficult problems of poverity, politicians have found it easier to blame current suffering on the past subjugation of the lower castes. In reality, the wealth of all Indians was destroyed primarily by colonial oppression, the inability to control population growth, and foolish economic policies.
If you think about, very few 3rd world countries have ever made it out of the 3rd world. Almost all former European colonies still suffer from brutal dictatorships and miserable poverity. Pakistan is entirely Muslim and does not have the problem of caste. But still they are in no better economic state as India. The biggest problem of the caste system is that it distracts India from focusing on the real problems. Religious hatreds are doing that too.
Right now there are a billion people living in a country one third the size of the United States. India had an opportunity to control population growth early on, but totally blew it. Indira and Sanjay Gandhi conducted a forced vasectomy program that ever since has made it harder for the government to promote family planning. In China the solution was simple: forcibly prevent people from having more than 1 child. But India is a democracy where *everyone* votes. Unlike the United States where mostly only the wealthy, educated, or elderly bother voting. People don't like being told how many kids they can have. And the uneducated and poor don't have TV sets to get their propaganda from.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit wasn't a Disney movie. It just licensed characters from Disney.
Not true. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a Touchtone Pictures movie. Disney releases most of their PG, PG-13, and R rated movies under their Touchtone Pictures division.
But what you're missing is that most of the major studios back Blu-Ray exclusively, with a few backing both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Sony has an unfair advantage because they own movie studios. Nearly all the movies people watch come from these studios, so really the battle in Hollywood is over. Blu-Ray won. And Microsoft is not going to block the use of BluRay drives in Windows. Remember that Microsoft tried to push strongly for Firewire over USB2 but in the end it made no difference whatsoever. HD-DVD is only an add-on for the Xbox 360, with no games permitted to use it. On the other hand, Sony will ship with Blu-Ray and encourage/require its use in the Playstation 3. The Playstation 3 will outsell the Xbox 360 because Sony is simply better at marketting consoles.
I mean, you are right that HD-DVD requires less retooling cost. But we're not dealing with a free market when it comes to Hollywood. The few studios that matter already took that into consideration but were still convinced to go with Blu-Ray. Now, the PC software market is more free but by the time anyone cares about producing PC software on Blu-Ray the price will have dropped. As it is, very little PC software even ships on DVD.
In the past there was the issue with Divx (not the codec, the leased version of DVD). Major studios that backed Divx were forced to surrender to the will of the market. I don't think it will happen in this case unless Blu-Ray discs cost extraordinarily more than HD-DVD. But that's not going to happen. The problem with Blu-Ray is only from the fixed cost of retooling.
Ok, so now they teach the " Fact of Evolution" not the " Theory of Evolution" hmmm...
Nothing new there, my high school biology book of 10 years ago stated that evolution is fact. That dinosaurs existed millions of years ago is considered fact. That humans existed for a few million years is considered fact. That now extinct humanoids existed before humans is considered fact. The whole fossil record is considered factual. Just as the concept that the Sun is a star. Something becomes a fact when there is no scientific evidence that can be found to disprove it. But fact does not equal truth. There always remains the possibility that everything we sense is a complete lie. So there is no way to know truth. But science is about trusting what can be observed and only trusting what can be observed. Always has been.
But how evolution took place is considered theory. Darwin has a theory of how evolution happened.
Yes of course, MS has licensed the chip from MS. The original post claimed that MS had designed the chip. The 'manufacture' bit strikes me as a bit funny, as where else is MS going to go for PPC chips? Its either IBM or Moto, and we know about Moto's track record here... Its not like MS has chip fabs or anything.
Obviously IBM designed it. But what you are forgetting is that MS designs operating systems. You cannot write an operating system (even as crappy as Windows) without having a clue about processor architecture. Microsoft and Sony specified how they wanted to be able to program the chip. Microsoft wanted their multithreaded thing and Sony wanted their SPUs. IBM ultimately had to figure out how to build it. It's quite possible Sony made a bigger contribution to the hardware design.
But that doesn't mean that Microsoft is any more dependant on IBM than Sony is. Microsoft doesn't have to have their own fabs. Most chip fabrication is outsourced. TSMC in Taiwan fabricates Nvidia's GPUs. Intel, IBM, and AMD have to operate their own fabs because desktops and server are much higher volume than console chips. Intel relies upon 3rd party fabs too. If you need to an old Intel chipset for your hardware product and Intel has stopped producing them, Intel will sell you the specs and you can go to the independant fabs to build your motherboard.
What Microsoft gained this time is the ability to control the prices. Before they were at the whim of Nvidia and Intel because they bought the chips directly from them. Now they don't need to do that. They have the circuit design so they can go to someone else and have them fabricate.
Sorry - you linked the PS3 page. There doesn't seem to be anything about unit cost on the PS2/Wiki page. No one really knows but Sony, although I would maintain most knowledgeable sources I've spoken to anecdotally (game store managers etc) do not believe Sony ever lost money, or if so then it was a tiny amount. It is very possible the cost was basically 'wholesale' when it launched. I dispute your 'every console sold at a lost back then' claim; I don't think that was true of Nintendo at any point.
Did you actually read it? "taking a financial loss (as it did with the PlayStation 2) in order to build the console's install base". Also from the article referenced in Footnote 3: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/28/news_61282 95.html/:
"It is normal for game companies to take a loss on hardware whenever a new console launches, since they typically focus on acquiring market share rather than generating a profit during the first year. During the second year and afterward, they can recover the losses with the savings that come from mass production and with licensing fees from publishers."
Sony sold their units for a loss but still made profit overall because of game sales and accessories. Console manufacturers charge heavy royalties on games and accessories. Sega did this as well. Nintendo always made a profit on the Gamecube. I don't know about the N64 and earlier systems. But the point I was making is that it's standard practice to lose money on the console. If they still make money overall then it's a win. But in this case people are passing judgement on Microsoft without understanding the whole picture.
Why do you say that? It seems pretty clear to me that IBM owns the PowerPC (in conjunction with Apple and Motorola although I am unsure as to the state of that alliance at the moment). MS did not develop, design, or have anything whatsoever to do with that chip. On the other hand, Sony designed the Cell with IBM in partnership. That will make a difference down the line.
"Microsoft has their own license to use and manufacture the CPU used in the Xbox 360, and thus we see their logo on the chip itself."
And from the next page about the GPU:
"Microsoft controls the IP of the GPU; meaning, Microsoft can manufacture and do what it wishes with Xenos (although we're assuming that they can't stick it on graphics cards and start selling it to the public)."
Also as an aside I don't think Sony ever lost money on a PS2.
It was sold at a loss when it launched. It wasn't a surprise because every console system back then sold for a loss during its first year. Some information in the Cost and release date section here:
Slashdot Mirror
Are you aware of these 535 people called "Congress"? They negotiate and pass bills. The President just signs or vetoes them.
That's not accurate either. The President via the OMB basically drafts the federal budget. Since the executive branch runs the bureaucracy it knows what resources are necessary to make a program successful. So even when Congress is against the President there's a limit to how effectively they can force their will. Congress can easily kill programs they don't like by defunding them but it's much harder for them to force the executive to run a program effectively when the executive wants to kill it.
Palm's issue, was that the "Pre" was to late to the smart phone market, by then, Apple was already with iPhone. When I had my Palm, and my cellphone, I kept wondering why the two were not melded. My wonderment lasted over two years.
So if it was so difficult, why not break Palm OS to make it work on phones.
Never heard of the Treo? Palm was selling smart phones since 2003 when they acquired Treo from Handspring. But I don't think it was ever successful. Blackberry devices were more efficient and by the time the iPhone came out they had switched to Windows Mobile.
The installed binaries built from the ports tree are not automagicly updated with the standard OS patches, this is why many people chose NOT to build from the ports tree and instead chose to use the binary package installer pkg tool such that the packages are then updated automaticly by the FreeBSD team as opposed to the user having to re-fresh the ports tree and manulay rebuild every package that gets an update.
I call bullshit. Binary packages have never been up to date on FreeBSD. Anybody knows anything about FreeBSD knows to use the ports tree. Especially for something that takes 2 seconds to build. The ports tree since yesterday has had the NetBSD workaround which is even safer than GNU's own since it disables the vulnerable (and hardly used) functionality entirely. (Who intentionally imports shell functions from the environment?) While we're going to be updating our Linux systems yet again for GNU's next attempt at fixing this.
FreeBSD isn't even vulnerable to begin with. /bin/sh is Almquist shell.
Chrome just integrates a proprietary plug in. (And not in Chromium.) This is a viewer that's open source and implemented in Javascript.
Pakistan was founded as a Muslim state, and it is not a reasonable expectation for it to work against Islam in Afghanistan by supporting the heretical idea of secular government.
Not accurate. Pakistan was founded as a secular nation. Their motivations in Afghanistan are all about power and control. Pakistan had militarily supported the Taliban against the Northern Alliance in the 90s, and so now that the Northern Alliance runs the government they ally themselves with India instead of Pakistan.
The only reason Islamabad gave the US the time of day in the past was to obtain arms to use against its mortal enemy India which was buddies with the Soviets during the Cold War.
The US came to India first. They wanted to be able to put missiles in India aimed at the Soviets. But India wanted to be neutral. Pakistan saw this and decided to ally with the US for money and arms to use against India. After China invaded India and gifted land to Pakistan, India gave up on neutrality and joined with the Soviets.
India would be wise to make buddies with the US after the US-Pak relationship collapses. If it comes to war, US assets could help India take out Pak nukes which are a menace to civilization.
It's never that simple. There have been several wars. And India always wins. Pakistan wants Kashmir because that's where the water is. There's not enough to go around so Indian dams cause the Pakistani rivers to run dry. They are so desperate for it that they constantly send their soldiers over the border posing as Kashmiri freedom fighters to fight and die. Like North Korea they are a doomed nation with nothing left to use. So they continue to terrorize out of spite. Even before both sides had deployed nuclear weapons, India had always stopped short of invading Pakistan because they see no use in trying to occupy it.
The closed source drivers haven't supported the X1400 in a while. The old versions that do don't run on any recent distros because of kernel incompatibilities.
It's not a hardware problem. We have lots of T60s at work and they all the same problem in Ubuntu 10.04. The open source driver support for the 1400 is not good. I have to disable most of Compiz to avoid glitches. ATI's closed source driver worked a little better in some ways but they dropped support for those chipsets and the old drivers don't work on current kernels.
You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that people in general are unwilling to risk or their lives or that progress is possible without risking life. I'm saying that there's currently no sustainable business model around manned space flight for commercial use. Sending people into space does not solve a business problem. There are a few very rich and brave individuals willing to go into space for personal reasons. Not a sufficient market right now. You won't find many VCs willing to invest in such a company. They will certainly not turn a profit any time soon. But it is something that government space agencies invest in. I'm not saying we shouldn't let the private industry take over more of the design and manufacturing of spacecraft. Or that NASA is doing a terrific job. But removing NASA as a customer will make things a lot worse.
When aviation was starting out, we had a few entrepreneurs that were able to take the risks and build an industry themselves. They didn't need much funding and this liberated them. Space travel seems to be a lot more expensive for individuals to embark upon without large amounts of external funding. That's the fundamental difference in my mind. But perhaps, as you say, it really isn't all that expensive if you approach it correctly.
As far as a "zero tolerance" of fatalities, I certainly don't see that from NASA...
I meant private industry in this case. A high risk of death is something that makes manned spaceflight unprofitable for the private industry right now. It's hard to get repeat business when your customer dies! The private industry has to deal with the lawsuits resulting from fatalities. That's much less of an issue for NASA.
Also, NASA isn't the "only customer"...
But you're not a customer unless you can afford to pay. There are plenty of window shoppers, but the cost isn't going to go down if you lose your existing customers.
I just think we're better off with NASA bumbling towards something than not having them trying at all. They consume a relatively small part of the federal budget and tend to deliver a better return on investment than most other things the government spends on.
Space flight would not exist if it wasn't for the governments of the Soviet Union and United States. Government funds deep research into science and technology because private industry will not. Private investors require short term return on investment. I don't know what your definition of "proper" is based on, but there's the reality of how things work. This is how things work today, and this is how most modern technology has come about.
Still, when it comes to NASA and building the next version of a transportation system, this is something that governments, particularly the U.S. Federal Government, has a miserable track record on delivering. And something which "private industry" has a very long and well established record of providing at a very reasonable price along with excellent performance. NASA isn't in the commercial passenger airline industry, why should they be doing the same thing for spaceflight?
Because there's no money in manned spaceflight. And it's extremely dangerous. NASA is the only one who's willing to spend the money and take the risks. We've had a hundred years to figure out how to fly planes, and the technology behind commercial airliners is utterly stagnant so there are no new risks. Hence reliable. The Concorde tended to explode, which we "rectified" by giving up on traveling faster than the speed of sound.
More to the point, travel to and from the Earth to Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) is hardly cutting edge in terms of discovering how it can be done, if it can be done, or what the environment is like to even be there as an astronaut. This isn't science, this is engineering and mass-produced manufacturing technology. The Ares I spacecraft can't even really be called "cutting edge", other than some of the components are going to be a couple of generations more up-to-date than what NASA had in the 1960s...especially with things like replacing the Apollo Guidance Computer and using new composite materials for the structure of the spacecraft. But those were developed outside of NASA and nothing that NASA is doing now is really being innovative other than putting these existing technologies together. And even that isn't really new either, if you consider some of the private spacecraft manufacturers in the USA alone.
There's a difference between chucking a satellite into LEO and sending astronauts up and *down*. Satellite are pretty damn big and are designed to withstand shock and turbulence. Even still, they sometimes break and sometimes rockets explode. Those are acceptable risks. But human beings are very fragile. And there's zero tolerance for fatalities in space. They don't do anything particularly useful when they get into space. Plus we need to send them back down safely, which is really hard. And to top it off there's only one customer: NASA. All in all, a very unprofitable venture. Even if you manage to pull it off, you're more than likely to be sued into bankruptcy once someone dies in space.
If on the next time you go on a flight across the world somewhere, would you be willing to fly in an airplane that was operated by the European Union (not just one country in Europe) and built by the lowest bid contractor that bribed EU officials to get the contract? That is what you get from NASA (substituting the EU with USA federal government). It might work, but it might crash 1%-5% of the time too... again like the Space Shuttle does. Not a good track record to compare against.
Again, it's really an apples and oranges comparison. Private spacecraft manufacturers are nowhere close to sending humans into space. Even though Apollo technology is 40 years old, we basically forgot all of it so we're starting over rebuilding the infrastructure that we destroyed. When there's only one customer (NASA), there's not enough critical mass to create a competitive industry. Without competition and volume, there's not going to be reliability. Either
Except that the technology to build those first ships that sailed to the Americas was already long established. And there was a justifiable reason for spending the money to go there: to find a better sea route to the East. And even still, those initial expeditions to the Americas were funded by governments.
Sending people into space is a different story. There's no money to be made in manned space travel now or in the near future. It's too expensive to send people into space and we don't have the technology to exploit the solar system. Perhaps after decades of research and many trillions of dollars of funding that will change. Some of that will surely be a result of private investment to solve problems unrelated to manned space travel. But a large amount of that investment would be for solving the problems unique to manned space travel, with no hope of recouping the cost for decades. There's no terrestrial application for a sealed manned vehicle that carries enough fuel to travel millions of miles in a vacuum. Private investors expect to see profits in a reasonable amount of time.
While I agree that there is less understanding now of some of the basic things like memory allocation, at the same time there have been important gains in other aspects.
Back in the days when everyone was writing in C, understanding memory allocation was a given. But students spent so much time struggling with getting it right that they often never got to understand how to properly design code. The C programmers of the day were often the Fortran and assembly language programmers of the past. They would have very good low level understanding, but were still in the procedural programming mindset. They were used to worrying about the overhead of calling functions. It was very common to see multiple pages of code for a single function and thousands of lines of code per C file. Very few people knew how to write reusable code. They had enough trouble trying to reimplement and debug the same data structures every time.
Once upon a time we could afford to do that. When the software industry was young, the software was simpler and the relative time to market was less. We no longer have the luxury of letting everyone write their own lists, queues, and hash tables. And when multiprocessor CPUs are the norm, we can't afford to let everyone struggle with race conditions when they don't add synchronization around their hand written data structures. Java isn't perfect. It can't completely replace C++ or C. But when you can use it, it gives you an amazing amount of prewritten code. If you need a hash table that is thread safe and automatically uses multiple locks to allow multiple simultaneous writers, all you have to do is create a ConcurrentHashMap. That's something that took good C programmers a significant amount of time to write and test. And then waste more time debugging and fixing it when there's a customer found bug in it.
But certainly the flipside of having a language so easy to use is that it's very easy for programmers to do incredibly efficient things without the software technically breaking. Back when I was taking intro data structures in C++, you passed the assignment if your code worked. The teachesr didn't have time to dock you for writing slow code. And they didn't have time to read the code to grade on design. Essentially you only had enough time to debug and fix all your memory corruptions. (And this was at a top college). But you were well aware of where you were allocating and deallocating so discipline was required. What's the bar today? Will they actually look to see if students are allocating in a tight loop and killing the GC? I suspect not.
Well, then you are justifiably proud of him. I won't bore you with details but my father also pulled himself out of the poverty without any help from any government. But he was inspired by someone, and the one he was inspired by was inspired by someone else. Ultimately without inspiration and drive it doesn't matter what help you get, you won't get very far up the ladder. Some are inspired by family members, some who don't have family members to look up to get inspired by their teachers. Sometimes you need an outside source.
So I do not think shoes are a requirement.
The bit about the "shoes" is a reference to stories of Tijuana maquiladora workers not being able to give their children shoes for the long walk on a rocky road to school. Not surprisingly that resulted in many of them not sending their kids to school, thereby perpetuating their cycle of poverity. There will always be people who dig themselves out of every bad situation because they have the drive to do so. But there are threshold levels of minimum income people need before any more than a freak number of children can make it out of poverity. The most significant level is the one where the child has food to eat and access to public education. Without food, their minds cannot develop. Without public education, they obviously can't learn anything.
There might be a problem if your culture is such that you feel your fate is predetermined, your class is predetermined, and it's the government's job to support you.
Bitter, are we? You know, not every place in the world is like America. We don't have mass starvation here. We don't have rebels gunning down innocents in the streets. Every child has access to a high school education. You don't get murdered for moving up the ladder.
Remove the slash from the end of the URL, not sure how it got in there. The geocities article does not contradict anything said in the National Geographic article. There are often many sides to a story. Reading in the National Geographic article about the atrocities committed, I understand your reactions. You could argue that the exclusion that the Brahmin caste now faces is small payment for the crimes of the caste system. But I think all castes should be held responsible for the crimes of mistreating the castes below them. But that is not the type of thing that voters will agree to. So instead the government extracts reparations from the political minorities at the very top of the social ladder.
I wouldn't put Israel in the same boat because they had a much different set of problems. Anyway I said "few", not "none"! There are a hell of a lot more countries in Africa and South America that are still struggling.
In addition, some countries like Zimbabwe (sp?) appeared to moving toward the first world, only to slide backwards due to political, rather than economic or social, problems.
Which was exactly my point, the grand parent was arguing that caste the cause of India's suffering. Well, it certainly doesn't help to have a system that turns people against each other. But a lot of it is the same problems affecting other 3rd world nations: overpopulation and lack of education. Even if there was 100% literacy in India, you'll still have the problem of finding jobs for hundreds of millions of people. Many of the people who want to go to college can't because the state can't afford to build and run enough colleges for everyone who wants to go. India might even be considered one of the lucky few because it managed to retain a high quality education system and maintain a democratic government.
Japan wasn't a 3rd world country. They were 1st world during WW2. And the countries of eastern Europe were generally considered "2nd World", i.e. they were heavily industrialized and modern but still not part of the 1st world community. Taiwan is certainly a true success story of a 3rd world nation making it into the 1st world. But there are an awful lot of former European colonies in African and South America still struggling to make it out.
http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/mj002.h tml/
National Geographic did an entire feature about the caste system in India.
I won't deny that those at the lowest caste levels are cruelly oppressed. But it is not the case that there are unified group of "haves" oppressing a smaller minority of "have nots". You have dozens of caste groups that despise and distrust each other. The closer together in the social ladder two castes are, the more violent is the oppression of the higher. But just like it is socially appealing for the poor to scapegoat the castes below them for competing with them, it's also been politically appealing to scapegoat the small minority on top. Because doing so doesn't take anything away from the more populous castes at the middle to near top of the social ladder. It's especially convenient when the people at the top of the social ladder no longer have political or economic power.
Not true. Europe before the 14th century was an age behind the East in technology. But they came to the East and learned quickly and soon surpassed the East. Why? Because Europe was impoverished and desparately needed change. China actually had become "bored" of technological advancement. The power of the merchants was controlled in the East. But in the West the merchants got wealthy and eventually took control away from the monarchies, creating an Industrial revolution.
And as for the 3rd world nations that have failed the jump into industrialization: well, it's not easy. The conditions need to be right for any dramatic change. Change can't be forced from the outside, it has to come from within. India and China have the right education systems to develop the brain trust a country needs to develop. Other 3rd world nations suffer from poor education systems, political instability, and war.
This is one thing Chinese got right. They are going for an industrialiased society first. Many other reasons aside, industrialiased society is also much better at equalising the overall living standard across a country. Service oriented society is going in the absolutely opposite direction by creating new living standards drifts and divides. Just compare the living standard differences across England at the height of industrialiasation and now. Now they are actually much higher.
Nonsense. Industrialization has always had devastating effects on society. The Industrial revolution created extremely wealthy barons and left the industrial workers in squalid living conditions. It wasn't until this century that the 1st world countries began countering this with minimum wage laws. The fact of the matter is, the middle class is the one that leads countries into new "ages". If the middle class is trained for it, then they can make the transition.
The vast majority of Chinese are still left out of the modernization. They live as poor farmers and nobody ever talks about them because they have no voice. The main difference between India and China is that in China these people aren't allowed to stop the industrialization movement. In India, however, those hundreds of millions of hopelessly poor people vote. The fact of the matter is that there's not damn thing anyone can do to fix their suffering. India has twice as many people as it can support. There's simply nothing those poor uneducated people can do. Some will benefit from an increased number of service jobs that the middle class will desire. But it's still not enough to sustain a billion people.
There's already "industrialization" in India. Which means the poor get to work in factories producing clothes, shoes, toasters, whatever. India's had that for a long time. So has every non-communist 3rd world country. What has it done for them? Very little. No social mobility because people are paid so little they can't even afford to buy shoes for their kids to walk to school. It's only when the native people figure out how to make stuff *other* countries want, that they ever get out of the trap. China and India are now able to do that, so there will be sustained growth.
And I agree with many posters. India is heading for social trouble full steam ahead. There will be no USSR to supply "assistance" this time, but things like this happen sooner or later without external assistance. And a social revolt in a nuclear power is not a scenario I would like to think of. Plenty of other depressive things around.
There have always been Communist and Socialist parties ruling in some states. They're inept and ineffective. They won't be able to lead any revolution. Ther
That's only a small part of the problem. In India, the caste system has pretty much inverted itself because the upper castes are a minority of the population. Now the sad thing is that there is official discrimination against people based on caste, but done completely in the name of affirmative action. In order to gain favor with the masses, politicians have continually increased the "quota" of the "Backward Classes" so much to the point where the many impoverished of the "Forward Classes" have almost lost the ability to go to public college. Rather than try to find solutions to the difficult problems of poverity, politicians have found it easier to blame current suffering on the past subjugation of the lower castes. In reality, the wealth of all Indians was destroyed primarily by colonial oppression, the inability to control population growth, and foolish economic policies.
If you think about, very few 3rd world countries have ever made it out of the 3rd world. Almost all former European colonies still suffer from brutal dictatorships and miserable poverity. Pakistan is entirely Muslim and does not have the problem of caste. But still they are in no better economic state as India. The biggest problem of the caste system is that it distracts India from focusing on the real problems. Religious hatreds are doing that too.
Right now there are a billion people living in a country one third the size of the United States. India had an opportunity to control population growth early on, but totally blew it. Indira and Sanjay Gandhi conducted a forced vasectomy program that ever since has made it harder for the government to promote family planning. In China the solution was simple: forcibly prevent people from having more than 1 child. But India is a democracy where *everyone* votes. Unlike the United States where mostly only the wealthy, educated, or elderly bother voting. People don't like being told how many kids they can have. And the uneducated and poor don't have TV sets to get their propaganda from.
Not true. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a Touchtone Pictures movie. Disney releases most of their PG, PG-13, and R rated movies under their Touchtone Pictures division.
Both are. Here's a good article from Nasa about the problem: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/sc ales.html/
But hopefully this new discovery changes all that.
But what you're missing is that most of the major studios back Blu-Ray exclusively, with a few backing both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Sony has an unfair advantage because they own movie studios. Nearly all the movies people watch come from these studios, so really the battle in Hollywood is over. Blu-Ray won. And Microsoft is not going to block the use of BluRay drives in Windows. Remember that Microsoft tried to push strongly for Firewire over USB2 but in the end it made no difference whatsoever. HD-DVD is only an add-on for the Xbox 360, with no games permitted to use it. On the other hand, Sony will ship with Blu-Ray and encourage/require its use in the Playstation 3. The Playstation 3 will outsell the Xbox 360 because Sony is simply better at marketting consoles.
I mean, you are right that HD-DVD requires less retooling cost. But we're not dealing with a free market when it comes to Hollywood. The few studios that matter already took that into consideration but were still convinced to go with Blu-Ray. Now, the PC software market is more free but by the time anyone cares about producing PC software on Blu-Ray the price will have dropped. As it is, very little PC software even ships on DVD.
In the past there was the issue with Divx (not the codec, the leased version of DVD). Major studios that backed Divx were forced to surrender to the will of the market. I don't think it will happen in this case unless Blu-Ray discs cost extraordinarily more than HD-DVD. But that's not going to happen. The problem with Blu-Ray is only from the fixed cost of retooling.
Nothing new there, my high school biology book of 10 years ago stated that evolution is fact. That dinosaurs existed millions of years ago is considered fact. That humans existed for a few million years is considered fact. That now extinct humanoids existed before humans is considered fact. The whole fossil record is considered factual. Just as the concept that the Sun is a star. Something becomes a fact when there is no scientific evidence that can be found to disprove it. But fact does not equal truth. There always remains the possibility that everything we sense is a complete lie. So there is no way to know truth. But science is about trusting what can be observed and only trusting what can be observed. Always has been.
But how evolution took place is considered theory. Darwin has a theory of how evolution happened.
Obviously IBM designed it. But what you are forgetting is that MS designs operating systems. You cannot write an operating system (even as crappy as Windows) without having a clue about processor architecture. Microsoft and Sony specified how they wanted to be able to program the chip. Microsoft wanted their multithreaded thing and Sony wanted their SPUs. IBM ultimately had to figure out how to build it. It's quite possible Sony made a bigger contribution to the hardware design.
But that doesn't mean that Microsoft is any more dependant on IBM than Sony is. Microsoft doesn't have to have their own fabs. Most chip fabrication is outsourced. TSMC in Taiwan fabricates Nvidia's GPUs. Intel, IBM, and AMD have to operate their own fabs because desktops and server are much higher volume than console chips. Intel relies upon 3rd party fabs too. If you need to an old Intel chipset for your hardware product and Intel has stopped producing them, Intel will sell you the specs and you can go to the independant fabs to build your motherboard.
What Microsoft gained this time is the ability to control the prices. Before they were at the whim of Nvidia and Intel because they bought the chips directly from them. Now they don't need to do that. They have the circuit design so they can go to someone else and have them fabricate.
Sorry - you linked the PS3 page. There doesn't seem to be anything about unit cost on the PS2/Wiki page. No one really knows but Sony, although I would maintain most knowledgeable sources I've spoken to anecdotally (game store managers etc) do not believe Sony ever lost money, or if so then it was a tiny amount. It is very possible the cost was basically 'wholesale' when it launched. I dispute your 'every console sold at a lost back then' claim; I don't think that was true of Nintendo at any point.
Did you actually read it? "taking a financial loss (as it did with the PlayStation 2) in order to build the console's install base". Also from the article referenced in Footnote 3: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/28/news_61282 95.html/:
"It is normal for game companies to take a loss on hardware whenever a new console launches, since they typically focus on acquiring market share rather than generating a profit during the first year. During the second year and afterward, they can recover the losses with the savings that come from mass production and with licensing fees from publishers."
Sony sold their units for a loss but still made profit overall because of game sales and accessories. Console manufacturers charge heavy royalties on games and accessories. Sega did this as well. Nintendo always made a profit on the Gamecube. I don't know about the N64 and earlier systems. But the point I was making is that it's standard practice to lose money on the console. If they still make money overall then it's a win. But in this case people are passing judgement on Microsoft without understanding the whole picture.
Based on this:
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=26 10&p=7/
"Microsoft has their own license to use and manufacture the CPU used in the Xbox 360, and thus we see their logo on the chip itself."
And from the next page about the GPU:
"Microsoft controls the IP of the GPU; meaning, Microsoft can manufacture and do what it wishes with Xenos (although we're assuming that they can't stick it on graphics cards and start selling it to the public)."
Also as an aside I don't think Sony ever lost money on a PS2.
It was sold at a loss when it launched. It wasn't a surprise because every console system back then sold for a loss during its first year. Some information in the Cost and release date section here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playstation_3/