Interesting that you didn't provide any benchmarks.
The "video editing" benchmark compares very different products on the two platforms-- one not supported at all by the maker, one highly optimized.
And SPEC is a set of benchmarks, you chose the one where the PowerPC looks worst... ignorign the fact that when it comes to FP operations, or the instruction mix of a modern app, the results would be much different.
How can BSD be dead when Apple ships more BSD systems every year than Linux has in its entire history??
Really, though, these comparitive unix arguments are just silly.
Above the kernel, everyone has vi, emacs, gcc, curl, et al. Inside the kernel everyone has access to the open source kernels and so anything competitively advantageous will eventually make it to the other kernels.
Sure, there's a difference in the kernels, some being better than others at some tasks-- but really, to users, its unix, unix, unix, unix.
*UNIX* in all its flavors, is taking over the world... one Mac, one PC, one Workstation, one Server at a time.
When microsoft is the alternative, why squabble over kernel flavors?
Thing is, nobody is ever going to convince a PC bigot that the PowerPC is a faster chip, they just cant' get the MHz out of their mind.
And nobody is going to convince a Mac fan that the Pentium is a bigger chip- the benchmark "standards" are so obviously contrived to distort the situation...
And nobody accepts applications resutls-- avid isn't optimized for the mac, PC people think nobody uses photoshop.
But if you look at the architecture, the physics, and the hardware, rather than relying on benchmarks, its obivous which ship provides higher performance for less cost.
that's one of the great features of the PowerPC, much smaller area, making it much cheaper to manufacture.
If Motorola isn't getting at least a factor of 4 price edge, then their process really is behind... the pentium is a much much harder chip to manufacture.
I really do believe those advocating higher taxation are socialists. I know they don't think they are socialists, but that seems to be because they haven't studied socialism.
I'd be interested in hearing what you think their ideology really is--that would be a useful cluebat for me if I'm wrong.
I used to be a liberal, and I became one because I wanted the protection of human rights to be paramount. I'm an objectivist now because I want the protection of human rights to be paramount.
In theory my liberal background should make it easier to convince liberals that if they really w3ant to protect human rights, they need to be consistent about it... but that has not been a total success.
With experience I've discovered that a large segment of the liberal population is not the way I used to be-- they are entitlement people. One way or another, they profit from the extraction and redistribution of this wealth, either by working for the state or getting state funding-- so when they say "but what about the children/poor/sick" they're quite literally talking to protect their paycheck-- but have buried this motivation so deeply that they can't even recognize it. And of course, opposing the children/poor/sick is just plain evil.
So there are the misguided (like I used to be) who want to protect some human rights but not all. There are those with their hand in the till. Is there a third category of liberals?
Yep. And one thing that the opposition to Rand's ideas often mis is that half the time its corporations who are the evildoers, not just government.
I suspect its the liberal anti-corporate bias that makes them forget that half the bad guys in Atlas Shrugged were companies that couldn't compete and so they sought government intervention.
And, of course, there is the propaganda process that occurs during the novel- the constant cries for "how could we have known they would attack the world trade center" and "we must all pull together" and "we're doing this for your protection" as the grip on airports grows tighter.
I'm sure this is a common methodology for any society that goes towards tyranny-- these appeals should be expected-- but the parallels between the book and right now are pretty cool.
Since I was responding on a specific issue, I didn't lay out the broadness of my position.
So, let me clarify: Any Just society, must take as its primacy- its original principle for organization-- the defense of human rights.
By this statement, the UK is not a Just society, and the US has lost its way (as the bill of rights is no longer consistently enforced.)
In both cases politics have swayed the government away form enforcing human rights. This is an example of majority rule hurting the minorities by taking away their human rights.
Therefore you must not only have a constitution (As we have and you don't) but must have it be strong enough that it cannot be diluted (as it has for us, while you may be going the other way.)
So, the "american experiment" has not been a complete success.
It also seems to me that these rights have to be enshrined at the beginning-- if they are not, then corporations and politicians will find them inconvenient and work to dismantle them.... which eventually leads to bloody revolution when they have been dismantled too much. (Which is why gun ownership is one of the human rights-- without it, you cannot defend yourself against a dictatorial government.)
What if there were a major scandle in your House of Commons, and the monarchy re-asserted itself? And then said monarchy had a king who was a tyrant, in control of the armed forces and moving to a dictatorship. How would you revolt, if you have no guns? I'm sure this seems farfetched, because the monarchy is weak right now and y'all are not want to go back to one, but in 50 years, a lot could change.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. Both corporations may act evilly and governments may as well. In the US clearly the government is the group acting wiht impunity-- corporations are destroyed if the act illegally and people discover it. But the government is getting away with bloody murder (quite literally in fact.)
The response to this has been better written than I could achieve, so I quote it for you:
"...just listen to anyprophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice-- run. Run faster than from the plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where' there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that its your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself-- that will be the man who's not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries." -- The Fountainhead
Bullshit. I've yet to meet a single objectivist who advocates this line of thinking.
This is your prejudice, pure and simple.
Furthermore, it is quite contrary to the explicit writings.
Objectivism, unlike religions, is not some mystical idea that requires a priest to interpret it-- it is there in black and white. You do not get to misrepresent it.
Ever notice that the Ayn Rand Institute and the Objectivist Center are both charities? This isn't just to avoid taxes, and its not hypocrisy as some idiot on another forum claimed. Its because they do non-profit work.
Nothing in objectivism says that working for something other than money is wrong-- only that working against your best interests is wrong. If you love gardening, great, spending money on it is not wrong.
Nothing in objectivism would call a legless man "lazy" for not walking--- that you suggest such a thing shows the desperation on your part.
Ergo, the cripple must be lazy for not rising from his wheelchair and walking,
Please don't bother making up words to put in Ayn Rand's mouth-- she's written enough that her position is quite clear.
I've already responded on this line of thinking, pointing out that it is quite false, and blatently dishonest on your part.
Objectivists would have libraries, support for the needy, etc. They just wouldn't use the misery of others to rob you at gunpoint.
Furthermore, I've seen no evidence that anyone is prevented from being a hero-- if you cannot walk, you don't get to be a long distance runner, that's true. But its not true that only long distance runners are valuable-- as you assume.
Or, put another way, you would have everyone- including the able-bodied, the disabled, those with advantages, and those without-- prevented from achieving thier highest goals simply because life is not fair? How can that be justified? (If you think this is not what you are advocating, I suspect you are missing some of the economics involved.)
And, at the same time- I've yet to meet a disabled person who wants to be treated as someone who is unable to achieve greatness in life-- as you seem to think.
Hell, the very idea that there are people in the world who don't have issues to overcome in their life is part of the fascist fantasy-- if you're poor, you have to overcome the poverty. If you're rich, you have to overcome a different set of problems.
The only reason I've identified that few people take rand seriously, is that there is a wide spread drug addiction in society. It isn't the opiate of chemicals, but of the mysticism of self-sacrifice. The idea that if you can be seen to be "helping others" the fact that you are a complete failure in life is ok. Many people realize its easier to just try and get others to support them, than to actually work for a living.
Interestingly, people with physical disability, rarely have to overcome this addiction, so its ironic that you would focus on that. They seem to be the most objectivist to begin with-- they actually WANT to reach their highest achievement.
I don't consider the "SPEC benchmarks" to be a very good citation-- there are a variety of benchmarks in SPEC, and they certainly don't reflect the instruction mix of modern applications.
For instance, penitums are really good at doing integer calculations but very poor at floating point, yet almost all applications that are CPU INTENSIVE use floating point. Yet Spec gives integer a much higher rating, and generally ignores floating point optimizations that are used in real world situations.
It costs billions to change the process of a chip.
Yes and no. It costs billions to develop new processes, or to build a new fabrication plant.
But it doesn't cost that much to move a chip from one process to another-- quite a lot less in fact. Intel, Motorola and IBM regularly develop chips for one process and move them to other processes and feature sizes.
Plus the cost isn't for one chip, or even one model of chip, but for a whole line-- in other words these costs are borne by not just the processors but the GPUs, network processors and any other chip that the company in question makes. all of them benefit by the process improvements.
I'm not sure Motorola has the size to make this investment, but IBM definitely does, and AMD *has* to-- even if it can't afford it.
I have examined her logic carefully, and I have not found any faults with it.
The statement that her conclusions are not supported by her statements are not true. However, since many people take things that are not true as "obvious", like "Corporations pollute america too much, it must be stopped!" and ignore the fact that the largest polluter (both in seriousness of damage and amount of damage) is the federal government-- you get a lot of nonsense when you try to talk rationally to them about environmentalism.
I have no idea what contradictions you see. I'm happy to address any you bring up-- please pick one, the one that most shows the error in thinking that Objectivism is based on and I'll address it.
I made a switch after reading Atlash Shurgged. Prior to that I was a liberal, afterwards I spent a bit over a year reading every criticism of objectivism I could find on the net (there's a lot of it) and I could find no rational problems with it (most of it amounts to either nit-picking of words, which interestingly when I looked them up in dictionaries proved to be wrong. She does actually use words correctly, but people often connotate false ideas of what they mean, despite the dictionary definition.)... and a whole lot of basic repetitions (taken as presumptive fact) of the philosophy she so clearly destroys in her analysis in Atlas Shrugged.
That you say the vast majority of people cannot live up to their potential startles me-- do you really believe that? Any free man, can live up to his potential-- and Rand is clear to idolize even the guy who flips hamburgers for a living who's living up to his potential, and making the best hamburgers *he* can make. As well as artists who never make a dime, nor reach achieve acclaim for their music. A major sub-plot involves a guy who gets acclaim and realizes that it is meaningless- it is merely his pleasure that denotes the value he seeks.
On the contrary-- her compassion extends to the whole of humanity-- far more so that the common philosophies who oppose her. That was my point. The bible is a propaganda piece constructed to get people to give their money to a central beuracracy.
Atlas Shrugged is a propaganda piece designed to get people to give money to the people who they think really need it... and to teach those people to fish, rather than hand out fish.
I disagree with some of the conclusions Rand came to in her personal life. But I can find no problems, rationally, with her philosophy.
If you have them, please share some, or the most compelling one. From what I can tell, you misunderstood, or misread, bringing your own prejudices in. (A conclusion I am coming to only from your statements about compassion.)
Of course, any group of people who are confident are "Rabid".
Come on, at least admit you have a prejudice and probably subscribe to some self hating ideology that makes anyone speaking rationally about self interest seem rabid.
That you repeatedly use the term "worshippers" to imply that this is some sort of religion shows the true nature of your objection: bigotry.
It is not a religion, and we both know it. You know enough about it though to know just how offensive it would be to call it a religion, and so you do so.
No, the issue is not her "worshippers" but your own prejudice.
Apparently you don't want to examine your philosophy in the light of a possibly superior one.
I understand, I resisted reading the book for years. Finally I relented to read it in order to prove the person who suggested it to me wrong. And what I discovered was that I was the one who was wrong.
I find it interesting that you use use loaded terms like "sophmoric" and "rabid" and "worshippers". And provide no rational reason to question the philosophy.
My position stands-- I'm happy to address any issues you might find with it, but in order to do that you'll have to read it, or at least read the "Galt speaks" chapter. Until then, what I'm responding to is merely prejudice on your part.
Firewire as an "Apple innovation" when it is really an expression of industry-wide trends.
Firewire IS an Apple invention. Firewire was invented by apple, and released to the IEEE standards process. Firewire is a trademark of Apple, and was employed on apple hardware before Sony adopted it.
USB is quite different- it is not a fast serial bus (not even 2.0 is even, as its not close to firewire speed).
Firewire is a clear, in FACT, Apple invention. To claim you were using it as a "General term" is silly.
That's too bad-- what that hatred boils down to is self hatred.
When rand says you should live for yourself, to strive for achievement-- in your own terms. (Note many of her heros achieve this without being financially successful, hell a guy flipping burgers is presented as a human ideal in one chapter).
Yet the anti-corporate ideology is one of hating humans, and hating yourself. Where success- in any form, artistic, financial- is to be despised, because it "MUST" come at the expense of others.
A idea that is economically silly, but who's agenda is clear: the breeding of people who will be submissive sheep to those in power.
Ayn Rand, however, forgot that humans need to care and believe, and her Objectivist society is completely uncaring. If you don't or can't work, you will drop off the bottom and society will forget you and let you die. There is no safety net.
You're quite wrong on this. Objectivists are rather caring people-- in fact, its one of the core parts of the belief system. It is, after all, based on cherishing life.
Reardon gave money and support to his family, to his brother who hated him, even to people who's only goal was to DESTROY him. The later not out of caring for them- they were evil- but out of caring for Dagny.
The difference is Marx, and most liberals think that people should be enslaved for the benefit of others-- that they should be coerced at gunpoint to "care" for them by providing the "safety net" you speak of.
Objectivists, however, think that people should freely choose to give money to help those they wish to-- and they are a generous group of people.
In the liberal society, if my sister's farm is destroyed, I am still compelled to give %50 of my money to the government, none of which will go to help her family. In an Objectivist society, I would have the freedom to give that money to my sister, or to put it into my business, which thus employs more people, creates more jobs, and fights poverty, of if I'm not a business owner, to the charity of my choice. OR, if I'm not wealthy enough to have a surplus, into the long term viability of my own economic life, lessening the possibility at my old age I would come to depend on others.
You take that away, and you force me to be more likely to need money when I am unable to work, not support my sister, not help grow the economy with the money, or any of the other uses to which I could put that money-- all of which are better for society.
The ironic thing is that the source of poverty in this society is the damage to the economy and the poor's self esteem that the "War on poverty" has done. ITs one of those "give a man a fish" things-- the feds give out fish left and right, but no fishing poles.
Its unfortunate that you, and so many others, have this picture of objectivism. Its ironic that the twin towers- pillars of capitalism in a literal sense- caused people to care for those who died and the companies that were damaged for only a little while, and now we're back on the same old mantra of hating corporation (and thus people).
Marx cared not for anyone, and Marxism is the worship of tyranny and slavery, by sheep who are unable to tell that they're being taken. Objectivism is the worship of your own self ideal.
And who's self ideal does not include helping others?
Bill Gates for all his moral problems is doing far more for the poor in the world than much larger and richer federal government. Gates is a fair example of an objectivist (though when taking over the software industry he acted more like Orren Boyle-- an error on his part, he thinks he's Hank Reardon) and look what he's doing with his money.
No, the issue is not about whether objectivists believe in caring for other people- they do.
The issue is whether you should be forced at gunpoint to work for another person-- to GIVE UP your life for that person. That's what altruism is.
You haven't shown me anywhere that it doesn't make sense-- I think you misread it, or misunderstood it.
The central question is not should one care for others-- thruout the book heros care for others-- but should one be forced to sacrifice your life for others, against your will?
How can you call it compassion when you employ a gun to create it? (and thats what any taxation that doesn't go to support the person being taxed is-- "charity" at the point of a gun.)
It was in the late 70s, on Vandenburg AFB in California (the west coast missle base.)
It was going rather fast.
Eventually, when the Stealth Fighter was announced, I concluded that that was what I actually saw.
It was very fast, very quiet, and flying low- quite startling. It didn't get enough of a look to recognize it as an airplane (As the stealth is obviously an airplane when you see one stopped)...
but I didn't decide it was a spacecraft either.
Ahh, the days of getting up at 6 am and watching simultaneous dual-minutman launches.
I read today that the reason guys wear baseball caps backwards is that it makes it much easier to give blowjobs. IS that why I see all those young boys with backwards baseball caps?
Sure gay people use apples. That should be a clue- if you want to be manly too, switch to a Mac!
Additionally, the size of the Mac user base has steadily eroded
I don't think you can say this. I'm aware of no information that expresses the size of the mac user base.
you often see the "%5 of the market" figure, but that is actually %5 of NEW PC SALES, (so it ignores the fact that People turn their PCs over every 18 moths, but macs are performance competitive a lot longer) oh, and these numbers also ignore most mac sales. So even saying "%5 of new sales" is a lie-- they count Dell, Ingram Micro and CompUSA. They ignore the Apple store, the Apple stores, and the hundreds or thousands of independent apple dealers around the world.
Put a better way, Apple has %5 of the Intel PC market- - because that's the market they count-- and of those people, %5 of the pcs they sell are actually apples!
The total addressable market-- that is, Macs out there in active use-- is much larger, probably %20.
Last time I had any reliable numbers, it was %30, but that was because they were the only company selling CDROM drives for computers and so you could look at the number of those sold and know how much market share apple had... so that would have been the early 90s.
I'm not saying I know what the TAM for Macs is, I'm just saying I've never seen any reliable figures, and the %5 one is clearly unreliable. ( But makes for good copy for those with "Apple is dying" stick who want to beat that dead horse.)
We all know that PowerPC chips get far more done in a given clock than x86 chips.
This was the great promise of the PowerPC, actually. By going to a superscalar Risc architecture, IBM and Motorola spent the effort to get a chip that really did more per clock.
The clock rate, however, is less of an engineering issue than a process issue. Intel has processes that increase their clock rate rather fast-- and so rather than re-engineering their processors (and paying the backwards compatibility penalty that apple paid when they switched from 68k to PPC) they have simply increased the clock rate and integrated more on chip cache, etc.
The thing is, this means that the PPC was at a very significant competitive advantage-- its really hard to beat architecture engineering, which the PPC has in spades, but pentiums lack. Design is hard. Process is easy. So, the Processes that Intel was using should have migrated to Motorola and IBM, and we should be seeing PowerPCs that run at 2GHz and leave no question as to the fact that the powerpc is much much faster.
So, the real question to my mind is-- why hasn't the process side of the house for PowerPCs kept up with intel? Certainly motorola and IBM have the know how, and they have the motivation-- competition with each other for the sizable sales to Apple, and the possibly even larger embedded and workstation markets.
I can think of two possibilities: 1) The increased complexity of a super scalar architecture on the order of the PPC makes timing more problematic and while process is there for higher speeds, the synconization of the clocks hitting all the subcomponents of hte processor at the same time is an issue. At these levels, the speed of light is a real factor when one signal goes a little further than the other, they arrive at the same place at different times due to the relative slowness it takes for the signal to go down the longer path.
2) Conflict. Motorola created Altivec and apple jumped all over it, and I don't believe IBM has a license to Altivec, giving motorola a bit of a monopoly. This combined with apple embracing altivec so much means that Motorola may not have sufficient incentive to grow the speeds. Plus, since the PowerPC has not had the widespred platform support that was expected-- NT for PPC has gone away, other Unix box makers aren't using it extensively, the market is smaller than was originally intended.
This creates quite a problem for apple. As long as they suffer from the perception- despite the reality-- that their processors are slower because people think MHz = speed-- they are going to have trouble not being seen as more expensive. Hell, even people who post here make this mistake.
So, I think Apple is planning something big. But it won't be a switch to x86, certainly as we know it.
I can imagine a couple possibilities: 1) Apple teams with AMD and brings the PPC instruction set to a future AMD processor that can handle it and the x86 instructions simultaneously. Gets AMD's process speeds, along with PPC compatibility running at native speeds (rather than emulated.) The downside is that IBM would have to agree to this, and its not clear what IBM's upside is-- unless IBM is part of the alliance and gets a competitive advantage to using this technology in its products (maybe low end power workstations)-- but still Motorola which controls altivec would have to be involved.
2) A new AIM partnership, this time its the AAIM partnership, all four companies collaborate on a new chip that will run OS X and Windows, IBM and Moto make PCs that dual boot, AMD gets Altivec and Power4 Multichip module technology, and IBM and Moto get AMD process technology, and IBM, Moto fab the chips for AMD. This gives IBM a weapon against windows, namely OSX, gives AMD the backing of two big competitors- IBM and Moto, along with a new customer, gives Moto a new jumpstart into the box making business that it gave up when Apple stopped subsidizing the clones industry.
3) The Death By Numbers Approach -- Apple goes to IBM and gets the four chip Power technology and migrates there from PowerPC, greatly increasing the volumes of these chips for IBM which is only currently using them in their servers and workstations. This drives down the costs, apple doesn't have to rewrite software (like quicktime) that was never part of the NeXT OS, and at the same time can emphatically claim the "fastest PCs in the world" title it now holds but nobody recognizes. Oh, and they sell them with 2 to 4 processor units per box.
4) Death By Numbers part 2-- apple starts shipping quad and 8 way PowerPCs running at moderate speeds, 1-2GHz using Motorola (or IBM) chips, and being competitive on price because the powerpc costs them so much less per cpu than Intel CPUs. Thus people will instinctively know that 8 1GHz CPUs are going to get a lot more done than one 3GHz intel cpu.
5) The Second Rebel Alliance-- Apple, AMD and Nvidia team up on an x86 processor that uses NVidea and AMD Hyper IO (or is it rapid io?) technology, and apple does go the x86 way..
The thing is, 5 seems least likely to me. apple has just migrated accross platforms for the second time-- the first was 68k to ppc, and the second is classic Mac to OS X. Applications have to be re-written.
Are they really going to ask their developers to re-write their apps yet again, in only a few years? I really doubt it.
So, I think there is a new processor architecture or solution coming-- I'm sure apple recognizes that the PPC has not given it the marketability it needs.
But I think that solution will be PPC compatible natively.
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Interesting that you didn't provide any benchmarks.
The "video editing" benchmark compares very different products on the two platforms-- one not supported at all by the maker, one highly optimized.
And SPEC is a set of benchmarks, you chose the one where the PowerPC looks worst... ignorign the fact that when it comes to FP operations, or the instruction mix of a modern app, the results would be much different.
The Photoshop comparisons are not unreasonable.
How can BSD be dead when Apple ships more BSD systems every year than Linux has in its entire history??
Really, though, these comparitive unix arguments are just silly.
Above the kernel, everyone has vi, emacs, gcc, curl, et al. Inside the kernel everyone has access to the open source kernels and so anything competitively advantageous will eventually make it to the other kernels.
Sure, there's a difference in the kernels, some being better than others at some tasks-- but really, to users, its unix, unix, unix, unix.
*UNIX* in all its flavors, is taking over the world... one Mac, one PC, one Workstation, one Server at a time.
When microsoft is the alternative, why squabble over kernel flavors?
And it costs less too!
Thing is, nobody is ever going to convince a PC bigot that the PowerPC is a faster chip, they just cant' get the MHz out of their mind.
And nobody is going to convince a Mac fan that the Pentium is a bigger chip- the benchmark "standards" are so obviously contrived to distort the situation...
And nobody accepts applications resutls-- avid isn't optimized for the mac, PC people think nobody uses photoshop.
But if you look at the architecture, the physics, and the hardware, rather than relying on benchmarks, its obivous which ship provides higher performance for less cost.
Well, compared to pentiums, they are tiny.
that's one of the great features of the PowerPC, much smaller area, making it much cheaper to manufacture.
If Motorola isn't getting at least a factor of 4 price edge, then their process really is behind... the pentium is a much much harder chip to manufacture.
I really do believe those advocating higher taxation are socialists. I know they don't think they are socialists, but that seems to be because they haven't studied socialism.
I'd be interested in hearing what you think their ideology really is--that would be a useful cluebat for me if I'm wrong.
I used to be a liberal, and I became one because I wanted the protection of human rights to be paramount. I'm an objectivist now because I want the protection of human rights to be paramount.
In theory my liberal background should make it easier to convince liberals that if they really w3ant to protect human rights, they need to be consistent about it... but that has not been a total success.
With experience I've discovered that a large segment of the liberal population is not the way I used to be-- they are entitlement people. One way or another, they profit from the extraction and redistribution of this wealth, either by working for the state or getting state funding-- so when they say "but what about the children/poor/sick" they're quite literally talking to protect their paycheck-- but have buried this motivation so deeply that they can't even recognize it. And of course, opposing the children/poor/sick is just plain evil.
So there are the misguided (like I used to be) who want to protect some human rights but not all. There are those with their hand in the till. Is there a third category of liberals?
Yep. And one thing that the opposition to Rand's ideas often mis is that half the time its corporations who are the evildoers, not just government.
I suspect its the liberal anti-corporate bias that makes them forget that half the bad guys in Atlas Shrugged were companies that couldn't compete and so they sought government intervention.
And, of course, there is the propaganda process that occurs during the novel- the constant cries for "how could we have known they would attack the world trade center" and "we must all pull together" and "we're doing this for your protection" as the grip on airports grows tighter.
I'm sure this is a common methodology for any society that goes towards tyranny-- these appeals should be expected-- but the parallels between the book and right now are pretty cool.
Since I was responding on a specific issue, I didn't lay out the broadness of my position.
So, let me clarify: Any Just society, must take as its primacy- its original principle for organization-- the defense of human rights.
By this statement, the UK is not a Just society, and the US has lost its way (as the bill of rights is no longer consistently enforced.)
In both cases politics have swayed the government away form enforcing human rights. This is an example of majority rule hurting the minorities by taking away their human rights.
Therefore you must not only have a constitution (As we have and you don't) but must have it be strong enough that it cannot be diluted (as it has for us, while you may be going the other way.)
So, the "american experiment" has not been a complete success.
It also seems to me that these rights have to be enshrined at the beginning-- if they are not, then corporations and politicians will find them inconvenient and work to dismantle them.
What if there were a major scandle in your House of Commons, and the monarchy re-asserted itself? And then said monarchy had a king who was a tyrant, in control of the armed forces and moving to a dictatorship. How would you revolt, if you have no guns? I'm sure this seems farfetched, because the monarchy is weak right now and y'all are not want to go back to one, but in 50 years, a lot could change.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. Both corporations may act evilly and governments may as well. In the US clearly the government is the group acting wiht impunity-- corporations are destroyed if the act illegally and people discover it. But the government is getting away with bloody murder (quite literally in fact.)
The response to this has been better written than I could achieve, so I quote it for you:
"...just listen to anyprophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice-- run. Run faster than from the plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where' there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that its your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself-- that will be the man who's not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries." -- The Fountainhead
Bullshit. I've yet to meet a single objectivist who advocates this line of thinking.
This is your prejudice, pure and simple.
Furthermore, it is quite contrary to the explicit writings.
Objectivism, unlike religions, is not some mystical idea that requires a priest to interpret it-- it is there in black and white. You do not get to misrepresent it.
Ever notice that the Ayn Rand Institute and the Objectivist Center are both charities? This isn't just to avoid taxes, and its not hypocrisy as some idiot on another forum claimed. Its because they do non-profit work.
Nothing in objectivism says that working for something other than money is wrong-- only that working against your best interests is wrong. If you love gardening, great, spending money on it is not wrong.
Nothing in objectivism would call a legless man "lazy" for not walking--- that you suggest such a thing shows the desperation on your part.
Ergo, the cripple must be lazy for not rising from his wheelchair and walking,
Please don't bother making up words to put in Ayn Rand's mouth-- she's written enough that her position is quite clear.
I've already responded on this line of thinking, pointing out that it is quite false, and blatently dishonest on your part.
Objectivists would have libraries, support for the needy, etc. They just wouldn't use the misery of others to rob you at gunpoint.
Furthermore, I've seen no evidence that anyone is prevented from being a hero-- if you cannot walk, you don't get to be a long distance runner, that's true. But its not true that only long distance runners are valuable-- as you assume.
Or, put another way, you would have everyone- including the able-bodied, the disabled, those with advantages, and those without-- prevented from achieving thier highest goals simply because life is not fair? How can that be justified? (If you think this is not what you are advocating, I suspect you are missing some of the economics involved.)
And, at the same time- I've yet to meet a disabled person who wants to be treated as someone who is unable to achieve greatness in life-- as you seem to think.
Hell, the very idea that there are people in the world who don't have issues to overcome in their life is part of the fascist fantasy-- if you're poor, you have to overcome the poverty. If you're rich, you have to overcome a different set of problems.
The only reason I've identified that few people take rand seriously, is that there is a wide spread drug addiction in society. It isn't the opiate of chemicals, but of the mysticism of self-sacrifice. The idea that if you can be seen to be "helping others" the fact that you are a complete failure in life is ok. Many people realize its easier to just try and get others to support them, than to actually work for a living.
Interestingly, people with physical disability, rarely have to overcome this addiction, so its ironic that you would focus on that. They seem to be the most objectivist to begin with-- they actually WANT to reach their highest achievement.
I don't consider the "SPEC benchmarks" to be a very good citation-- there are a variety of benchmarks in SPEC, and they certainly don't reflect the instruction mix of modern applications.
For instance, penitums are really good at doing integer calculations but very poor at floating point, yet almost all applications that are CPU INTENSIVE use floating point. Yet Spec gives integer a much higher rating, and generally ignores floating point optimizations that are used in real world situations.
Sorry, you don't get to claim that point "proven" when you entered the discussion using emotional language such as "worship" and "rabid".
I've repeatedly asked for a rational issue you have with the philosophy, but what I've gotten back is excuses, and religious terms.
Pointing that out does not make me out to be the one who is not being rational.
I've only ever seen apple use the %5 figure when they were JOKING.
"Now to get the other %95" is a clear joke to me, though most people seem not to get it.
They are playing on the perception that they have %5 of the market.
Anyway, the fact is that the %5 figure comes from a fundamentally flawed study of the marketplace, and I have not seen any better research.
It costs billions to change the process of a chip.
Yes and no. It costs billions to develop new processes, or to build a new fabrication plant.
But it doesn't cost that much to move a chip from one process to another-- quite a lot less in fact. Intel, Motorola and IBM regularly develop chips for one process and move them to other processes and feature sizes.
Plus the cost isn't for one chip, or even one model of chip, but for a whole line-- in other words these costs are borne by not just the processors but the GPUs, network processors and any other chip that the company in question makes. all of them benefit by the process improvements.
I'm not sure Motorola has the size to make this investment, but IBM definitely does, and AMD *has* to-- even if it can't afford it.
Yes, it is slow going at first. It took me a couple tries before I actually got into it.. but once you do, its a bit of a thriller to read.
And the payoff in improved weltanshaung is well worth the effort.
I like Soviet propaganda posters of the 30s too.
I have examined her logic carefully, and I have not found any faults with it.
The statement that her conclusions are not supported by her statements are not true. However, since many people take things that are not true as "obvious", like "Corporations pollute america too much, it must be stopped!" and ignore the fact that the largest polluter (both in seriousness of damage and amount of damage) is the federal government-- you get a lot of nonsense when you try to talk rationally to them about environmentalism.
I have no idea what contradictions you see. I'm happy to address any you bring up-- please pick one, the one that most shows the error in thinking that Objectivism is based on and I'll address it.
I made a switch after reading Atlash Shurgged. Prior to that I was a liberal, afterwards I spent a bit over a year reading every criticism of objectivism I could find on the net (there's a lot of it) and I could find no rational problems with it (most of it amounts to either nit-picking of words, which interestingly when I looked them up in dictionaries proved to be wrong. She does actually use words correctly, but people often connotate false ideas of what they mean, despite the dictionary definition.)
That you say the vast majority of people cannot live up to their potential startles me-- do you really believe that? Any free man, can live up to his potential-- and Rand is clear to idolize even the guy who flips hamburgers for a living who's living up to his potential, and making the best hamburgers *he* can make. As well as artists who never make a dime, nor reach achieve acclaim for their music. A major sub-plot involves a guy who gets acclaim and realizes that it is meaningless- it is merely his pleasure that denotes the value he seeks.
On the contrary-- her compassion extends to the whole of humanity-- far more so that the common philosophies who oppose her. That was my point. The bible is a propaganda piece constructed to get people to give their money to a central beuracracy.
Atlas Shrugged is a propaganda piece designed to get people to give money to the people who they think really need it... and to teach those people to fish, rather than hand out fish.
I disagree with some of the conclusions Rand came to in her personal life. But I can find no problems, rationally, with her philosophy.
If you have them, please share some, or the most compelling one. From what I can tell, you misunderstood, or misread, bringing your own prejudices in. (A conclusion I am coming to only from your statements about compassion.)
Of course, any group of people who are confident are "Rabid".
Come on, at least admit you have a prejudice and probably subscribe to some self hating ideology that makes anyone speaking rationally about self interest seem rabid.
That you repeatedly use the term "worshippers" to imply that this is some sort of religion shows the true nature of your objection: bigotry.
It is not a religion, and we both know it. You know enough about it though to know just how offensive it would be to call it a religion, and so you do so.
No, the issue is not her "worshippers" but your own prejudice.
Apparently you don't want to examine your philosophy in the light of a possibly superior one.
I understand, I resisted reading the book for years. Finally I relented to read it in order to prove the person who suggested it to me wrong. And what I discovered was that I was the one who was wrong.
I find it interesting that you use use loaded terms like "sophmoric" and "rabid" and "worshippers". And provide no rational reason to question the philosophy.
My position stands-- I'm happy to address any issues you might find with it, but in order to do that you'll have to read it, or at least read the "Galt speaks" chapter. Until then, what I'm responding to is merely prejudice on your part.
Firewire as an "Apple innovation" when it is really an expression of industry-wide trends.
Firewire IS an Apple invention. Firewire was invented by apple, and released to the IEEE standards process. Firewire is a trademark of Apple, and was employed on apple hardware before Sony adopted it.
USB is quite different- it is not a fast serial bus (not even 2.0 is even, as its not close to firewire speed).
Firewire is a clear, in FACT, Apple invention. To claim you were using it as a "General term" is silly.
That's too bad-- what that hatred boils down to is self hatred.
When rand says you should live for yourself, to strive for achievement-- in your own terms. (Note many of her heros achieve this without being financially successful, hell a guy flipping burgers is presented as a human ideal in one chapter).
Yet the anti-corporate ideology is one of hating humans, and hating yourself. Where success- in any form, artistic, financial- is to be despised, because it "MUST" come at the expense of others.
A idea that is economically silly, but who's agenda is clear: the breeding of people who will be submissive sheep to those in power.
Ayn Rand, however, forgot that humans need to care and believe, and her Objectivist society is completely uncaring. If you don't or can't work, you will drop off the bottom and society will forget you and let you die. There is no safety net.
You're quite wrong on this. Objectivists are rather caring people-- in fact, its one of the core parts of the belief system. It is, after all, based on cherishing life.
Reardon gave money and support to his family, to his brother who hated him, even to people who's only goal was to DESTROY him. The later not out of caring for them- they were evil- but out of caring for Dagny.
The difference is Marx, and most liberals think that people should be enslaved for the benefit of others-- that they should be coerced at gunpoint to "care" for them by providing the "safety net" you speak of.
Objectivists, however, think that people should freely choose to give money to help those they wish to-- and they are a generous group of people.
In the liberal society, if my sister's farm is destroyed, I am still compelled to give %50 of my money to the government, none of which will go to help her family. In an Objectivist society, I would have the freedom to give that money to my sister, or to put it into my business, which thus employs more people, creates more jobs, and fights poverty, of if I'm not a business owner, to the charity of my choice. OR, if I'm not wealthy enough to have a surplus, into the long term viability of my own economic life, lessening the possibility at my old age I would come to depend on others.
You take that away, and you force me to be more likely to need money when I am unable to work, not support my sister, not help grow the economy with the money, or any of the other uses to which I could put that money-- all of which are better for society.
The ironic thing is that the source of poverty in this society is the damage to the economy and the poor's self esteem that the "War on poverty" has done. ITs one of those "give a man a fish" things-- the feds give out fish left and right, but no fishing poles.
Its unfortunate that you, and so many others, have this picture of objectivism. Its ironic that the twin towers- pillars of capitalism in a literal sense- caused people to care for those who died and the companies that were damaged for only a little while, and now we're back on the same old mantra of hating corporation (and thus people).
Marx cared not for anyone, and Marxism is the worship of tyranny and slavery, by sheep who are unable to tell that they're being taken. Objectivism is the worship of your own self ideal.
And who's self ideal does not include helping others?
Bill Gates for all his moral problems is doing far more for the poor in the world than much larger and richer federal government. Gates is a fair example of an objectivist (though when taking over the software industry he acted more like Orren Boyle-- an error on his part, he thinks he's Hank Reardon) and look what he's doing with his money.
No, the issue is not about whether objectivists believe in caring for other people- they do.
The issue is whether you should be forced at gunpoint to work for another person-- to GIVE UP your life for that person. That's what altruism is.
You haven't shown me anywhere that it doesn't make sense-- I think you misread it, or misunderstood it.
The central question is not should one care for others-- thruout the book heros care for others-- but should one be forced to sacrifice your life for others, against your will?
How can you call it compassion when you employ a gun to create it? (and thats what any taxation that doesn't go to support the person being taxed is-- "charity" at the point of a gun.)
I saw one of these as well.
It was in the late 70s, on Vandenburg AFB in California (the west coast missle base.)
It was going rather fast.
Eventually, when the Stealth Fighter was announced, I concluded that that was what I actually saw.
It was very fast, very quiet, and flying low- quite startling. It didn't get enough of a look to recognize it as an airplane (As the stealth is obviously an airplane when you see one stopped)...
but I didn't decide it was a spacecraft either.
Ahh, the days of getting up at 6 am and watching simultaneous dual-minutman launches.
MMM Twinkies. Tasty.
I read today that the reason guys wear baseball caps backwards is that it makes it much easier to give blowjobs. IS that why I see all those young boys with backwards baseball caps?
Sure gay people use apples. That should be a clue- if you want to be manly too, switch to a Mac!
Additionally, the size of the Mac user base has steadily eroded
I don't think you can say this. I'm aware of no information that expresses the size of the mac user base.
you often see the "%5 of the market" figure, but that is actually %5 of NEW PC SALES, (so it ignores the fact that People turn their PCs over every 18 moths, but macs are performance competitive a lot longer) oh, and these numbers also ignore most mac sales. So even saying "%5 of new sales" is a lie-- they count Dell, Ingram Micro and CompUSA. They ignore the Apple store, the Apple stores, and the hundreds or thousands of independent apple dealers around the world.
Put a better way, Apple has %5 of the Intel PC market- - because that's the market they count-- and of those people, %5 of the pcs they sell are actually apples!
The total addressable market-- that is, Macs out there in active use-- is much larger, probably %20.
Last time I had any reliable numbers, it was %30, but that was because they were the only company selling CDROM drives for computers and so you could look at the number of those sold and know how much market share apple had... so that would have been the early 90s.
I'm not saying I know what the TAM for Macs is, I'm just saying I've never seen any reliable figures, and the %5 one is clearly unreliable. ( But makes for good copy for those with "Apple is dying" stick who want to beat that dead horse.)
We all know that PowerPC chips get far more done in a given clock than x86 chips.
This was the great promise of the PowerPC, actually. By going to a superscalar Risc architecture, IBM and Motorola spent the effort to get a chip that really did more per clock.
The clock rate, however, is less of an engineering issue than a process issue. Intel has processes that increase their clock rate rather fast-- and so rather than re-engineering their processors (and paying the backwards compatibility penalty that apple paid when they switched from 68k to PPC) they have simply increased the clock rate and integrated more on chip cache, etc.
The thing is, this means that the PPC was at a very significant competitive advantage-- its really hard to beat architecture engineering, which the PPC has in spades, but pentiums lack. Design is hard. Process is easy. So, the Processes that Intel was using should have migrated to Motorola and IBM, and we should be seeing PowerPCs that run at 2GHz and leave no question as to the fact that the powerpc is much much faster.
So, the real question to my mind is-- why hasn't the process side of the house for PowerPCs kept up with intel? Certainly motorola and IBM have the know how, and they have the motivation-- competition with each other for the sizable sales to Apple, and the possibly even larger embedded and workstation markets.
I can think of two possibilities:
1) The increased complexity of a super scalar architecture on the order of the PPC makes timing more problematic and while process is there for higher speeds, the synconization of the clocks hitting all the subcomponents of hte processor at the same time is an issue. At these levels, the speed of light is a real factor when one signal goes a little further than the other, they arrive at the same place at different times due to the relative slowness it takes for the signal to go down the longer path.
2) Conflict. Motorola created Altivec and apple jumped all over it, and I don't believe IBM has a license to Altivec, giving motorola a bit of a monopoly. This combined with apple embracing altivec so much means that Motorola may not have sufficient incentive to grow the speeds. Plus, since the PowerPC has not had the widespred platform support that was expected-- NT for PPC has gone away, other Unix box makers aren't using it extensively, the market is smaller than was originally intended.
This creates quite a problem for apple. As long as they suffer from the perception- despite the reality-- that their processors are slower because people think MHz = speed-- they are going to have trouble not being seen as more expensive. Hell, even people who post here make this mistake.
So, I think Apple is planning something big. But it won't be a switch to x86, certainly as we know it.
I can imagine a couple possibilities:
1) Apple teams with AMD and brings the PPC instruction set to a future AMD processor that can handle it and the x86 instructions simultaneously. Gets AMD's process speeds, along with PPC compatibility running at native speeds (rather than emulated.) The downside is that IBM would have to agree to this, and its not clear what IBM's upside is-- unless IBM is part of the alliance and gets a competitive advantage to using this technology in its products (maybe low end power workstations)-- but still Motorola which controls altivec would have to be involved.
2) A new AIM partnership, this time its the AAIM partnership, all four companies collaborate on a new chip that will run OS X and Windows, IBM and Moto make PCs that dual boot, AMD gets Altivec and Power4 Multichip module technology, and IBM and Moto get AMD process technology, and IBM, Moto fab the chips for AMD. This gives IBM a weapon against windows, namely OSX, gives AMD the backing of two big competitors- IBM and Moto, along with a new customer, gives Moto a new jumpstart into the box making business that it gave up when Apple stopped subsidizing the clones industry.
3) The Death By Numbers Approach -- Apple goes to IBM and gets the four chip Power technology and migrates there from PowerPC, greatly increasing the volumes of these chips for IBM which is only currently using them in their servers and workstations. This drives down the costs, apple doesn't have to rewrite software (like quicktime) that was never part of the NeXT OS, and at the same time can emphatically claim the "fastest PCs in the world" title it now holds but nobody recognizes. Oh, and they sell them with 2 to 4 processor units per box.
4) Death By Numbers part 2-- apple starts shipping quad and 8 way PowerPCs running at moderate speeds, 1-2GHz using Motorola (or IBM) chips, and being competitive on price because the powerpc costs them so much less per cpu than Intel CPUs. Thus people will instinctively know that 8 1GHz CPUs are going to get a lot more done than one 3GHz intel cpu.
5) The Second Rebel Alliance-- Apple, AMD and Nvidia team up on an x86 processor that uses NVidea and AMD Hyper IO (or is it rapid io?) technology, and apple does go the x86 way..
The thing is, 5 seems least likely to me. apple has just migrated accross platforms for the second time-- the first was 68k to ppc, and the second is classic Mac to OS X. Applications have to be re-written.
Are they really going to ask their developers to re-write their apps yet again, in only a few years? I really doubt it.
So, I think there is a new processor architecture or solution coming-- I'm sure apple recognizes that the PPC has not given it the marketability it needs.
But I think that solution will be PPC compatible natively.
I read it. That was what it was about to me- in spite of the doublespeak society that we live in.
There's a reason some things are ambiguous in novels.