He pushed them aside by killing development systems (VB6,FoxPro), introducing new technologies with the promise of how critical they were to the future (Silverlight), and allowing the crown jewels of Windows development, the Win32 API, to slowly become more irrelevant with endless layers of cruft built on top (eg..net, although a wonderful system, becomes more and more incompatible with the underlying OS; eg. GDI+).
Microsoft started open sourcing a lot of their developer frameworks etc (ASP.Net MVC in 2012, Entity Framework in 2013 etc) and we saw fairly large shifts in developer conferences and support
By your own words, we can infer that Ballmer's middle-empire period required large shifting from where it was to what it became.
Ballmer wasn't bad; his jumping around on stage shouting "Developers!" showed that he knew what the true value of Windows was: the external developers who wrote Win32 code for retail products or company-internal developers. However, his middle-empire stage was a shift to focusing on selling to enterprise customers. This isn't a bad things by itself, but by taking his eye off the "Developer!" ball and focusing elsewhere, he guaranteed that plenty of developers went elsewhere. For example, with the death of VB plenty of developers shifted to Java rather than.net. The fact that it needed a large shift in support shoes just how far developers had slipped in Microsoft's priority.
It's interesting to see how Nadella is shifting the focus again and broadening it (Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi, for example). Time will tell if Nadella is simply being an anti-Ballmer or if this glasnost is signs of a more fundamental shift in the way Microsoft does business. I hope it's the latter.
They fell for a number of reasons - any one of which they could have shrugged off, but they all came at once.
Well... "at once" over the course of several hundred years.
loyalty to the empire strained by imposed religious reformation to some strange new monotheistic cult
That strained the Senate far more than the general populace, who were quite happy accepting yet one more god.
and then all that during a succession crisis which left the empire fragmented and unable to muster up a unified response.
If you're going to say the succession crisis caused the collapse in the latter years of the empire, you need to explain why the succession crisis didn't cause the same problems during the Crisis of the Third Century.
you can't find a single year and declare the empire ceased to exist here.
September 4, 476 was the official end of the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire lasted 1,000 years after that, when it fell to the Ottomans.
But back to September 4, 476. Odoacer turfs out Romulus Augustulus and sends the robes etc. to Emperor Zeno, saying that they were no longer required. Now, granted the western empire was in ruins at this point in time, but this date is the accepted date for the end of the empire.
... empire built on constant expansion ran out of new land to invade for tribute
That's not even remotely true of the latter empire. The later republic was certainly built upon constant expansion; however the Varian Disaster in 9 AD put a northern border that the empire didn't grow beyond. Trajan had the greatest territory expansion, this was mainly to the east; and his reign ended in 117 AD; long before 476 or even the crisis of the third century. Hadrian consolidated the new frontiers but didn't push past them.
There's no one factor that lead to the collapse, and the collapse itsself was a slow process
That's not quite true. The prime factors are the rising of the Sasanian Empire, a collapse in tax revenue, and loss of the growing areas in Northern Africa.
The rise of the Sasanian Empire caused the empire to move northern border troops to the east. The now porous northern border allowed the Germanic tribes to start to invade; the Germanic tribes themselves were being pushed out of their lands by the Huns. The Germanic tribes moved along Gaul and Spain, and crossed into Africa, capturing the the fertile regions there. Meanwhile, other Germanic tribes at first started ransacking cities and towns, but soon discovered it was much easier to offer to defend the towns and rule. These Roman towns and cities then directed their tax revenue to the Germanic rulers, depriving Rome of much-needed funds. As the funds for the armies declined, so did the armies. Roman tax collectors were not only unwelcome, but forced out of these new Germanic areas.
The Western and Eastern emperors agreed that recapturing North Africa was a prime concern, and mounted probably the largest military force ever seen to do just that. But before the fleet could sail, Atilla the Hun started his 10 year rampage, diverting Roman attention to this new menace.
Following Atilla's death, there simply wasn't the money to raise an army to retake North Africa, and the Western Empire effectively ceased functioning around 410 AD, with the empire formally coming to an end on September 4, 476 when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus and declared himself ruler of Italy.
My brother works for the Australian Patent Office, so I've no idea how much of this translates to the USPTO. I asked him this very question a few years ago.
When a patent application comes in, the initial examiner is the newest, most lowly graded person in the office with a huge caseload. They, to a degree, depend on the submitter to have taken the steps to validate the uniqueness of the patent; however there is research done as well to validate the submission.
Most submissions are done by patent lawyers with as much obfuscation as possible, and if it's outside of the examiner's area is much more likely to get through, as the examiner has to try and decipher what is going on. If the submitter claims no prior art and words the submission carefully enough, it's likely to get through.
With an appear, it goes much higher up the chain and diverts to someone with more specialized knowledge for further assessment. As you can probably guess, it takes longer and costs much more to get this review happening.
So, there are fundamental problems with the process in that it assumes honesty on the part of the submitter. If they set out to deceive, as Personal Audio seems to have done, it's a long and costly process to undo it.
Anytime you hear the word "culture" in Quebec, watch out. It has a much more ominous overtone there than in most of the rest of the world.
What do you mean by this? Are you referring to their insistence on being more French than the French (eg. Stop signs say 'Arret' in Quebec, but 'Stop' in France), or something else?
I think BBC may take the opportunity to just clean house and bring in a new set of 3 hosts. The chemistry that those 3 had was great, so just lugging in a new replacement with the 2 remaining would be a disaster. But it could work with a set of 3 completely new hosts.
Doubt it. Top Gear Australia tried that; belly-flop. Then they replaced the prime host. Relaunch; belly-flop.
Other implementations of the show (eg. To Gear US) diverged greatly from the original concept to keep a viewership.
There may be a BBC motoring show, with three presenters, but if it tries to be Top Gear it'll probably fail. Look at Final Gear; it's actually a more informative show than Top Gear, but almost nobody knows about it.
Sorry to see Jezza go, but the BBC did the right thing.
100% agree. This 'fail fast' crap is extremely narrow-minded. We didn't get to the moon by failing fast. We got to the moon by trying like hell to get it right. Failing faster would have led to 100 different aborted attempts at the first sign of trouble in a design. All the approaches had many failure modes that had to be worked through diligently. At what point do you declare failure vs. work through a problem?
You need to go study the Apollo missions in more detail. And how about chasing down NASA footage of the spectacular rocket fails from the late 50's / early 60's. NASA had monumental failures whilst chasing the moon.
Let's not forget Apollo 1.
Yes, NASA tried really hard to get it right. And when reality interfered with those plans, they figured out where their expectations didn't work out, learned and moved on (SA1.. SA5; AS101.. AS105; AS201.. AS203; Apollo 4.. Apollo 6). Then they staged the moon shots to validate plans: first to LEO (Apollo 7), then moon orbital (Apollo 8), LM seperation (Apollo 9), LM decent / ascent (Apollo 5 / Apollo 10)... and once all those trial runs had happened, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
So to address your point of "Failing faster would have led to 100 different aborted attempts at the first sign of trouble in a design", NASA had 20 launches of the Saturn launch system before declaring it man-rated; and in particular Apollo 6 suffered from pogo vibrations that needed a design change.
NASA failed fast. They had the resources to keep going. We all remember July 20, 1969, either because we watched it live (I was 2 at the time) or because we've seen it / read about it. It's easy to forget the 10 years of testing and failure prior to that, because it's all so long ago.
The reason, not excuse, to execute someone is simple, they've executed someone else themselves.
So the State, having decided that murder is illegal, resorts to murder as "punishment". That is hypocrisy of the highest order.
The problem with the death penalty is that you can't undo a mistake. Innocent people have been executed before; DNA evidence is getting people released from Death Row (see, for example, Anthony Apanovitch).
In cases where guilt is 100% proven beyond all shadow of a doubt, there is still the moral issue of the State, which represents the people, being party to murder when the State (ie. the people and the laws they have agreed to live by) forbids it.
Instead of people being terminated quickly, painlessly and with no suffering, now they are fully aware of the end of their life as it happens. This is clearly a much better solution.
The bolding is mine. Under what system of ethics do you follow where killing a person and ensuring their suffering right up until they die is viewed as a better solution?
What happens when a person commits a particularly horrendous crime? Suppose it takes around 20 minutes for lethal injections to work; how long would you have them suffer? The whole 20 minutes? Longer?
I'm sorry you're too simple minded to understand that some people are not worth letting live, but thats the reality of it..
In whose opinion? That may be your reality; it certainly isn't mine.
When someone murders another innocent being, plans it out, does the execution and shows no remorse at all (all of these things are the requirement for the death penalty in most places)... and it happens to be your loved ones... then get back to me on your high and mighty horse, until then... stop pretending you're so enlightened. You aren't, you're just naive and selfish and ignorant of reality.
How many people go on to live better and more fulfilled lives knowing that this person is dead? Retribution is a very natural, normal emotional response. That doesn't mean it's the healthiest response.
Help me out here. Full disclosure: I'm an AGW skeptic.
The amount of light that you'd have to reflect to counter even the most extreme climate change models is so minor that it is unlikely to be noticeable with the human eye
So for years we've been told that solar variation is too small to cause the climatic changes we see, correct? [Disclosure: I agree with this statement]
So I don't follow this logic: if the change required is so small, how does that compare to solar irradiation changes that we can see and measure (which, btw, are also very small)? And if the changes required are of equal magnitude... how do we come to the conclusion that solar variation isn't the cause of climate change in the first place?
I'd rather have us fuck with Mother Nature after a decade of exhaustive research, debate, and cost benefit analysis
I refer you to the calicivirus experiment in Australia for a truly scary example of exhaustive research, debate and cost-benefit analysis that didn't quite work out as intended.
Rabbit haemorrhagic disease, also known as calicivirus, was trialed in Australia to eliminate the rabbit population. Calicivirus can only infect rabbits; there is no interspecies transmission or carrier.
The trial was conducted on Wardang Island, some 2.4 miles off the coast of South Australia in Spencer Gulf. The island was already loaded with rabbits that were cut off from the mainland, and there was no known way for any of these rabbits to cross the water.
In 1991, the virus was introduced to the island. By 1995 it had spread to the mainland, killing 10 million rabbits within 8 weeks of it’s arrival. Those that were left developed immunity.
So, we have an isolated island with a virus that can only be transmitted within a single species; said species can’t swim; certainly not the two miles. Yet, unintended and unforeseen consequences of this carefully planned, carefully modeled and (apparently) highly contained in a very controlled area that was heavily policed by AQIS went horribly awry and made the rabbit plague in Australia much worse, but managed to wipe out huge numbers of pets rabbits..
We can't get it right on the small scale; how do we know we'll get it right on the planetary scale?
Is your point that the salt science was influenced by grant money? Was there a big, rich anti-salt lobby that wanted to destroy salt companies?
There doesn't have to be an anti-anything lobby for fraudulent research to take place. Good old Noble Cause will suffice. Have you heard of Debendox, marketed as Bendectin in the US?
Back in 1961, Dr William McBride wrote about a large number of birth defects in children whose mother was prescribed Thalidomide. He showed that Thalidomide messes up the DNA of dividing cells (which makes it an ideal candidate as an anti-cancer drug, but that's another story). Flushed with funds, grants and awards, he set up Foundation 41to investigate birth defects.
In 1981, he published a paper claiming that Debendox caused birth defects, and went along as an expert witness in the subsequent lawsuits. The problem was, he falsified his results, and when that story broke he lost essentially everything. But he didn't fake his results for the money, prestige, awards or anything like that. He faked his results because he truly believed he was doing the right thing by doing so.
I know that's not the point you were making... but people do bad stuff because they believe the outcomes justify it, not simply because they can make a quick buck.
In the occasional fit of nostalgia for when life was simpler, cleaner and only occasionally interrupted with a Guru Meditation, I'll boot up an Amiga emulation. It's simpler, cleaner, faster... and utterly frustrating if I want to do anything remotely "modern" with it. Like, you know, browse the web or something. Then I need to be running Workbench 3.something, with a TCP stack etc.
That's me, with an Amiga. Choose your own nostalgia and try.
Operating Systems have got more complex simply because we expect more of them.
... when you consider the ZX81 chess was written in Z80 assembler whereas this is in x86 asm and although both have variable sized instructions the x86 will on average be larger.
Why do you say that?
My understanding (and if I'm wrong feel free to correct) is that the Z-80 is a bastard clone of an 8080. So, byte-for-byte there should be no difference between the two (if you keep the x86 in real mode). BIOS calls and the need to implement the boot sector code add some guff to the x86, of course, which makes RSI's achievement that much more impressive.
... when you consider the ZX81 chess was written in Z80 assembler whereas this is in x86 asm and although both have variable sized instructions the x86 will on average be larger.
What sort of onboard computer facilities is the x86 version able to use? I assume the ZX81 version would made used calls to various pre-defined routines in the 8K OS/BASIC ROM (safe to say it would have been absolutely impossible to do in 1KB without that), so it isn't "cheating" for the x86 version to do the same... but it does make it hard to compare if the x86 BIOS or other firmware is far more sophisticated and includes routines that the ZX81 version would have had to implement itself (i.e. within the already constrained space).
Have a look at the ASM for the ZX-81 code. Keep in mind that ROM calls are in the 0..8192 range, and there was no documentation of the system like there is of a modern BIOS today (yes, I'm aware of Ian Logan's Understanding your ZX81 ROM; that book was an introduction to writing assembly on a ZX81, not a ROM dump). From looking at the ZX81 asm (having to stretch my brain to remember Z-80 syntax), it looks to me that the code is completely self-contained. It picks up the display file address (who remembers 2A 0C 40?) from the system variables, but that's ok; all software had to do that. But the rest of the code only calls internal routines.
A ZX-81 ROM does less than you probably think it does.
Star Wars 'ethos' is front and center via the Force, so its harder for JJ to lens flare away the central theme of the story (balance of Light and Dark).
Lightsaber battles with lens flares. Lots of lightsaber battles. And put lens flares on the lightsabre exhaust ports. And the X-Wings speeding over the water; those water droplets surely must interact with light to cause lens flares.
Slashdot Mirror
How did Ballmer push developers aside?
He pushed them aside by killing development systems (VB6,FoxPro), introducing new technologies with the promise of how critical they were to the future (Silverlight), and allowing the crown jewels of Windows development, the Win32 API, to slowly become more irrelevant with endless layers of cruft built on top (eg. .net, although a wonderful system, becomes more and more incompatible with the underlying OS; eg. GDI+).
Microsoft started open sourcing a lot of their developer frameworks etc (ASP.Net MVC in 2012, Entity Framework in 2013 etc) and we saw fairly large shifts in developer conferences and support
By your own words, we can infer that Ballmer's middle-empire period required large shifting from where it was to what it became.
Ballmer wasn't bad; his jumping around on stage shouting "Developers!" showed that he knew what the true value of Windows was: the external developers who wrote Win32 code for retail products or company-internal developers. However, his middle-empire stage was a shift to focusing on selling to enterprise customers. This isn't a bad things by itself, but by taking his eye off the "Developer!" ball and focusing elsewhere, he guaranteed that plenty of developers went elsewhere. For example, with the death of VB plenty of developers shifted to Java rather than .net. The fact that it needed a large shift in support shoes just how far developers had slipped in Microsoft's priority.
It's interesting to see how Nadella is shifting the focus again and broadening it (Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi, for example). Time will tell if Nadella is simply being an anti-Ballmer or if this glasnost is signs of a more fundamental shift in the way Microsoft does business. I hope it's the latter.
They fell for a number of reasons - any one of which they could have shrugged off, but they all came at once.
Well... "at once" over the course of several hundred years.
loyalty to the empire strained by imposed religious reformation to some strange new monotheistic cult
That strained the Senate far more than the general populace, who were quite happy accepting yet one more god.
and then all that during a succession crisis which left the empire fragmented and unable to muster up a unified response.
If you're going to say the succession crisis caused the collapse in the latter years of the empire, you need to explain why the succession crisis didn't cause the same problems during the Crisis of the Third Century.
you can't find a single year and declare the empire ceased to exist here.
September 4, 476 was the official end of the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire lasted 1,000 years after that, when it fell to the Ottomans.
But back to September 4, 476. Odoacer turfs out Romulus Augustulus and sends the robes etc. to Emperor Zeno, saying that they were no longer required. Now, granted the western empire was in ruins at this point in time, but this date is the accepted date for the end of the empire.
... empire built on constant expansion ran out of new land to invade for tribute
That's not even remotely true of the latter empire. The later republic was certainly built upon constant expansion; however the Varian Disaster in 9 AD put a northern border that the empire didn't grow beyond. Trajan had the greatest territory expansion, this was mainly to the east; and his reign ended in 117 AD; long before 476 or even the crisis of the third century. Hadrian consolidated the new frontiers but didn't push past them.
There's no one factor that lead to the collapse, and the collapse itsself was a slow process
That's not quite true. The prime factors are the rising of the Sasanian Empire, a collapse in tax revenue, and loss of the growing areas in Northern Africa.
The rise of the Sasanian Empire caused the empire to move northern border troops to the east. The now porous northern border allowed the Germanic tribes to start to invade; the Germanic tribes themselves were being pushed out of their lands by the Huns. The Germanic tribes moved along Gaul and Spain, and crossed into Africa, capturing the the fertile regions there. Meanwhile, other Germanic tribes at first started ransacking cities and towns, but soon discovered it was much easier to offer to defend the towns and rule. These Roman towns and cities then directed their tax revenue to the Germanic rulers, depriving Rome of much-needed funds. As the funds for the armies declined, so did the armies. Roman tax collectors were not only unwelcome, but forced out of these new Germanic areas.
The Western and Eastern emperors agreed that recapturing North Africa was a prime concern, and mounted probably the largest military force ever seen to do just that. But before the fleet could sail, Atilla the Hun started his 10 year rampage, diverting Roman attention to this new menace.
Following Atilla's death, there simply wasn't the money to raise an army to retake North Africa, and the Western Empire effectively ceased functioning around 410 AD, with the empire formally coming to an end on September 4, 476 when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus and declared himself ruler of Italy.
My brother works for the Australian Patent Office, so I've no idea how much of this translates to the USPTO. I asked him this very question a few years ago.
When a patent application comes in, the initial examiner is the newest, most lowly graded person in the office with a huge caseload. They, to a degree, depend on the submitter to have taken the steps to validate the uniqueness of the patent; however there is research done as well to validate the submission.
Most submissions are done by patent lawyers with as much obfuscation as possible, and if it's outside of the examiner's area is much more likely to get through, as the examiner has to try and decipher what is going on. If the submitter claims no prior art and words the submission carefully enough, it's likely to get through.
With an appear, it goes much higher up the chain and diverts to someone with more specialized knowledge for further assessment. As you can probably guess, it takes longer and costs much more to get this review happening.
So, there are fundamental problems with the process in that it assumes honesty on the part of the submitter. If they set out to deceive, as Personal Audio seems to have done, it's a long and costly process to undo it.
Anytime you hear the word "culture" in Quebec, watch out. It has a much more ominous overtone there than in most of the rest of the world.
What do you mean by this? Are you referring to their insistence on being more French than the French (eg. Stop signs say 'Arret' in Quebec, but 'Stop' in France), or something else?
I think BBC may take the opportunity to just clean house and bring in a new set of 3 hosts. The chemistry that those 3 had was great, so just lugging in a new replacement with the 2 remaining would be a disaster. But it could work with a set of 3 completely new hosts.
Doubt it. Top Gear Australia tried that; belly-flop. Then they replaced the prime host. Relaunch; belly-flop.
Other implementations of the show (eg. To Gear US) diverged greatly from the original concept to keep a viewership.
There may be a BBC motoring show, with three presenters, but if it tries to be Top Gear it'll probably fail. Look at Final Gear; it's actually a more informative show than Top Gear, but almost nobody knows about it.
Sorry to see Jezza go, but the BBC did the right thing.
100% agree. This 'fail fast' crap is extremely narrow-minded. We didn't get to the moon by failing fast. We got to the moon by trying like hell to get it right. Failing faster would have led to 100 different aborted attempts at the first sign of trouble in a design. All the approaches had many failure modes that had to be worked through diligently. At what point do you declare failure vs. work through a problem?
You need to go study the Apollo missions in more detail. And how about chasing down NASA footage of the spectacular rocket fails from the late 50's / early 60's. NASA had monumental failures whilst chasing the moon.
Let's not forget Apollo 1.
Yes, NASA tried really hard to get it right. And when reality interfered with those plans, they figured out where their expectations didn't work out, learned and moved on (SA1 .. SA5; AS101 .. AS105; AS201 .. AS203; Apollo 4 .. Apollo 6). Then they staged the moon shots to validate plans: first to LEO (Apollo 7), then moon orbital (Apollo 8), LM seperation (Apollo 9), LM decent / ascent (Apollo 5 / Apollo 10)... and once all those trial runs had happened, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
So to address your point of "Failing faster would have led to 100 different aborted attempts at the first sign of trouble in a design", NASA had 20 launches of the Saturn launch system before declaring it man-rated; and in particular Apollo 6 suffered from pogo vibrations that needed a design change.
NASA failed fast. They had the resources to keep going. We all remember July 20, 1969, either because we watched it live (I was 2 at the time) or because we've seen it / read about it. It's easy to forget the 10 years of testing and failure prior to that, because it's all so long ago.
The death penalty should only be used when there is absolutely no doubt of guilt.
What about the mentally ill?
Horrific things happen with the mentally ill (bus passenger decapitates another, for example). Do they deserve the death penalty?
As if entombing someone alive is some kind of humanitarianism.
It's not... but at least it can be partially undone if mistakes are made.
Eh, the Central Park Jogger case is a great example of people being appropriately punished, just the reasoning is a bit off.
Being tried for murder when you were doing nothing of the sort is appropriate?
The guillotine .. It's fast, relatively painless
So several seconds of awareness and sensation (see here; SFW as it discusses the physiology) is perfectly acceptable to you?
I don't agree that the State murdering a person when the State has deemed murder illegal to be anything other than hypocrisy.
The reason, not excuse, to execute someone is simple, they've executed someone else themselves.
So the State, having decided that murder is illegal, resorts to murder as "punishment". That is hypocrisy of the highest order.
The problem with the death penalty is that you can't undo a mistake. Innocent people have been executed before; DNA evidence is getting people released from Death Row (see, for example, Anthony Apanovitch).
In cases where guilt is 100% proven beyond all shadow of a doubt, there is still the moral issue of the State, which represents the people, being party to murder when the State (ie. the people and the laws they have agreed to live by) forbids it.
Instead of people being terminated quickly, painlessly and with no suffering, now they are fully aware of the end of their life as it happens. This is clearly a much better solution.
The bolding is mine. Under what system of ethics do you follow where killing a person and ensuring their suffering right up until they die is viewed as a better solution?
What happens when a person commits a particularly horrendous crime? Suppose it takes around 20 minutes for lethal injections to work; how long would you have them suffer? The whole 20 minutes? Longer?
I'm sorry you're too simple minded to understand that some people are not worth letting live, but thats the reality of it..
In whose opinion? That may be your reality; it certainly isn't mine.
When someone murders another innocent being, plans it out, does the execution and shows no remorse at all (all of these things are the requirement for the death penalty in most places) ... and it happens to be your loved ones ... then get back to me on your high and mighty horse, until then ... stop pretending you're so enlightened. You aren't, you're just naive and selfish and ignorant of reality.
How many people go on to live better and more fulfilled lives knowing that this person is dead? Retribution is a very natural, normal emotional response. That doesn't mean it's the healthiest response.
If you thought it was easy to cure all the world's ills, wouldn't you expect it to of already happened?
The world doesn't stop on a dime, it takes time to switch to low CO2 technologies.
That's if you fix it at the consumption end.
At the supply end it take a few good armies to stop everyone digging it out of the ground and burning it.
How do you propose to power the army to get there and back?
Remember reruns?
Wasn't he Lucy's younger brother?
And so everyone who moved to Blackphone for security purposes... who's to say the same thing can't / didn't happen?
I need to start building a very big train.
Nah. Build a Big Bus instead.
Help me out here. Full disclosure: I'm an AGW skeptic.
The amount of light that you'd have to reflect to counter even the most extreme climate change models is so minor that it is unlikely to be noticeable with the human eye
So for years we've been told that solar variation is too small to cause the climatic changes we see, correct? [Disclosure: I agree with this statement]
So I don't follow this logic: if the change required is so small, how does that compare to solar irradiation changes that we can see and measure (which, btw, are also very small)? And if the changes required are of equal magnitude... how do we come to the conclusion that solar variation isn't the cause of climate change in the first place?
I assume you're referring to this: http://www.funnyzone.org/funny... (safe for work).
It would be a shame to see the trend reverse.
I'd rather have us fuck with Mother Nature after a decade of exhaustive research, debate, and cost benefit analysis
I refer you to the calicivirus experiment in Australia for a truly scary example of exhaustive research, debate and cost-benefit analysis that didn't quite work out as intended.
Rabbit haemorrhagic disease, also known as calicivirus, was trialed in Australia to eliminate the rabbit population. Calicivirus can only infect rabbits; there is no interspecies transmission or carrier.
The trial was conducted on Wardang Island, some 2.4 miles off the coast of South Australia in Spencer Gulf. The island was already loaded with rabbits that were cut off from the mainland, and there was no known way for any of these rabbits to cross the water.
In 1991, the virus was introduced to the island. By 1995 it had spread to the mainland, killing 10 million rabbits within 8 weeks of it’s arrival. Those that were left developed immunity.
So, we have an isolated island with a virus that can only be transmitted within a single species; said species can’t swim; certainly not the two miles. Yet, unintended and unforeseen consequences of this carefully planned, carefully modeled and (apparently) highly contained in a very controlled area that was heavily policed by AQIS went horribly awry and made the rabbit plague in Australia much worse, but managed to wipe out huge numbers of pets rabbits..
We can't get it right on the small scale; how do we know we'll get it right on the planetary scale?
Is your point that the salt science was influenced by grant money? Was there a big, rich anti-salt lobby that wanted to destroy salt companies?
There doesn't have to be an anti-anything lobby for fraudulent research to take place. Good old Noble Cause will suffice. Have you heard of Debendox, marketed as Bendectin in the US?
Back in 1961, Dr William McBride wrote about a large number of birth defects in children whose mother was prescribed Thalidomide. He showed that Thalidomide messes up the DNA of dividing cells (which makes it an ideal candidate as an anti-cancer drug, but that's another story). Flushed with funds, grants and awards, he set up Foundation 41to investigate birth defects.
In 1981, he published a paper claiming that Debendox caused birth defects, and went along as an expert witness in the subsequent lawsuits. The problem was, he falsified his results, and when that story broke he lost essentially everything. But he didn't fake his results for the money, prestige, awards or anything like that. He faked his results because he truly believed he was doing the right thing by doing so.
I know that's not the point you were making... but people do bad stuff because they believe the outcomes justify it, not simply because they can make a quick buck.
There was a TV show in the UK a few years ago, Space Cadets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
In that show, only people utterly clueless about space were allowed. This seems like it could be a more "Truman Show" variant...
I do agree with you.
In the occasional fit of nostalgia for when life was simpler, cleaner and only occasionally interrupted with a Guru Meditation, I'll boot up an Amiga emulation. It's simpler, cleaner, faster... and utterly frustrating if I want to do anything remotely "modern" with it. Like, you know, browse the web or something. Then I need to be running Workbench 3.something, with a TCP stack etc.
That's me, with an Amiga. Choose your own nostalgia and try.
Operating Systems have got more complex simply because we expect more of them.
"2016 is a leap year."
So Windows 365.2425 then... and hope like crap no new FDIV bug shows up!
... when you consider the ZX81 chess was written in Z80 assembler whereas this is in x86 asm and although both have variable sized instructions the x86 will on average be larger.
Why do you say that?
My understanding (and if I'm wrong feel free to correct) is that the Z-80 is a bastard clone of an 8080. So, byte-for-byte there should be no difference between the two (if you keep the x86 in real mode). BIOS calls and the need to implement the boot sector code add some guff to the x86, of course, which makes RSI's achievement that much more impressive.
... when you consider the ZX81 chess was written in Z80 assembler whereas this is in x86 asm and although both have variable sized instructions the x86 will on average be larger.
What sort of onboard computer facilities is the x86 version able to use? I assume the ZX81 version would made used calls to various pre-defined routines in the 8K OS/BASIC ROM (safe to say it would have been absolutely impossible to do in 1KB without that), so it isn't "cheating" for the x86 version to do the same... but it does make it hard to compare if the x86 BIOS or other firmware is far more sophisticated and includes routines that the ZX81 version would have had to implement itself (i.e. within the already constrained space).
Have a look at the ASM for the ZX-81 code. Keep in mind that ROM calls are in the 0..8192 range, and there was no documentation of the system like there is of a modern BIOS today (yes, I'm aware of Ian Logan's Understanding your ZX81 ROM; that book was an introduction to writing assembly on a ZX81, not a ROM dump). From looking at the ZX81 asm (having to stretch my brain to remember Z-80 syntax), it looks to me that the code is completely self-contained. It picks up the display file address (who remembers 2A 0C 40?) from the system variables, but that's ok; all software had to do that. But the rest of the code only calls internal routines.
A ZX-81 ROM does less than you probably think it does.
Star Wars 'ethos' is front and center via the Force, so its harder for JJ to lens flare away the central theme of the story (balance of Light and Dark).
Lightsaber battles with lens flares. Lots of lightsaber battles. And put lens flares on the lightsabre exhaust ports. And the X-Wings speeding over the water; those water droplets surely must interact with light to cause lens flares.
'nuff said.