Actually, Win9X CAN probably roughly be described as a 'shell on top of DOS' - Win9X would frequently and regularly drop the system down into 16-bit mode for various reasons, e.g. it could use DOS drivers if 32-bit drivers weren't available, and it very frequently would - in my experience most systems did. This is one of the reasons it was so unstable, because while in 16-bit mode the entire system is open game.
I recall using the Intel profiler on various Win98 systems back in the day, it had a utility that could tell you, and all the systems I tested spent a significant amount of their time (e.g. often 20% - 40%) in 16-bit mode - absurd for a "32-bit OS", and a complete joke.
Other kludgy 16-bit crap that showed through in that ugly line of OSs right through to Me were things like the Win16mutex, not to mention all the other 16-bit limitations floating around in the APIs, like the listbox control item count, the number of pixels on a GDI surface, and so on.
Win9X would also 'launch on top of' DOS, leaving it there all the time, and in the older versions you could even 'exit' back to DOS, or configure the system to remain in DOS without launching Windows. But the main clincher must be using DOS drivers. And actually even before Win9X was Win32s, 32-bit extensions to win3.1, which in fact just became Win95 after a few changes and a new look and feel.
But you just keep trying to rewrite history there buddy.
The 8-bit OS may be a reference to CP/M or QDOS, although that one may be a bit more iffy indeed (or I suspect there may be other versions of this joke floating around).
I'm the opposite, I generally become far more frugal when I have less money, and spend a lot more when I start seeing it pile up in the bank. Right now I'm in 'thrifty' mode. (That's not to say I don't have "downward spirals" though; I just engage in other self-destructive behaviour when I'm in them, like posting on/. a lot...)
If you want to continue spreading the myth that poor=stupid
Are you suggesting there is no correlation at all between how intelligent people are and how well they do in life financially? Or that there's no correlation between stupid buying habits and whether or not you end up poor? That's completely absurd, of course there must be. Or do you think it all boils down to luck?
A rich person buying a car isn't "stupid" if he/she can afford it. A poor person buying lots of movie tickets when they're on the breadline, is.
Pedophilia is defined as sexual attraction towards PRE-pubescent girls, I'm presuming GP post was referring to that. Once somebody hits puberty, they are a sexual being with sexual desires and exhibit physical characteristics that make them sexually attractive to (usually) the opposite sex - this is natural and has been going on for millions of years and we've evolved that way (although that doesn't mean everyone who hits puberty should suddenly be considered open game, we probably have to draw lines somewhere even above natural attraction for various other reasons.)
Even having said that though, I can remember having sexual feelings/desires quite long before puberty, e.g. being turned on by porn at around age 10 already. There must be *some* of those desires then already before puberty.
Re:You need to clarify your question
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Ethics In IT
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It doesn't matter whether it's a "US view" or "European view", it's a *universal* fact that a company that keeps deadwood around "for the good of the social fabric" is never, but never going to be able to make products as well or as cheap as companies that cut the deadwood, and as long as (NB NB) competition exists (*), those companies WILL die in the long run. Then you'll see how good a dead company is for the "social fabric". But believe it or not, having efficient companies is actually a GOOD thing for the economy, overall, because it frees human capital to create new wealth and open up new possibilities that did not exist before.
(*) Now socialists might use this to argue for government protection against competition, but it's a myth, there WILL ALWAYS be competition, in virtually any market --- it's a global economy, and if you want to be nice to unnecessary employees and keep paying them, it will be a frighteningly short amount of time before all your customers are buying the cheaper Asian equivalent products. (Hint, this is one reason why unemployment in Europe has been creeping up over the past few decades.)
Socialism works OK in Europe because by and large people have a work ethic and will likely be productive no matter where you put them, but it works ONLY in Europe, and even now amongst younger Europeans the culture has shifted from one of a work ethic to one of demanding handouts for doing nothing.
Are you saying that all claims, ever, should be entertained equally? Great, I posit that eating chocolate ice-cream causes pedophilia, I have no data, but sorry, I guess (by your standards) you aren't allowed to criticise that, you have to at least entertain the notion. Next I'll claim that driving a Ford causes pedophilia. Again, sorry, no data, but if you criticise the notion I'll accuse you of bias too. Come on, intuition and common sense have to step in at some point.
Yes, well, it's not PC to say, but a minimum wage economy will always be at a competitive disadvantage to an economy without minimum wage. (Of course there are other variables, but this is a huge one.) Minimum wage is evil. It doesn't make people wealthier, not even at the lowest ends of the earning spectrum (as it makes every single product more expensive)... e.g. consider Malaysia, no minimum wage, 3% unemployment, yet even the poorest of the poor have cellphones. The trick is to demand heavy competition in every nook and cranny of the economy.
Yeah, sorry, I was actually talking about the treadmill idea there, not the knee thing, in response a question about it. I didn't mean these knee things might be used to generate any meaningful amount of energy, I realise it's not much power.
Like anything that generates power humans need an energy source / fuel, our "fuel" is food, so one factor in the cost (energywise and financially and resource-wise) of producing and distributing that fuel if one wants to make any meaningful comparisons.
Nonetheless you are looking at *a* possible power source, sure.
If someone burns fat to run that treadmill then you're using stored energy, like a battery. If someone keeps thin then they have to eat more to run on that treadmill. Of course exercise is good for you so there's nothing wrong with that to a degree, but if you only end up with a situation where people are just eating more in order to generate electricity via the gym you might not be better off (e.g. it might be more efficient to use the extra land required for say small solar plants instead). Still, it would be better not to waste the treadmill energy which people are going to expend anyway.
I realise banks reinvest the money. Which allows e.g. more people to lend money to start companies, which is good for the economy except in bubbles. But from what I've heard US saving rates are very low. They're high in China. It doesn't seem to me though that this alone explains why people 'feel poorer' - I think a lot of that extra wealth is squandered badly (or corruptly) instead of spent wisely.
If it becomes cheaper to buy on credit, for whatever reason, that is dangerous. (I'm also not American btw but the same general economic patterns have occurred in every 'Western' country worldwide.) In my country we have (government-protected) huge banking cartels who fix prices and as a result, high charges and lousy "savings" interest rates that are lower than inflation, resulting in a situation where for almost every normal citizen, it's better to "spend now" than "save" and watch ur wealth evaporate. Combined with that is a "must have a huge house and fancy car and lots of shiny stuff" culture, so people buy a lot on credit.
Yeah, the only thing worse than a Ron Paul "fanboy" is a moron who talks about him as being a "cult" and any follower a "fanboy" - meaningless manipulatory zealous rhetoric designed only to stigmatise the only sensible campaign because retards are averse to people who actually say intelligent things instead of being hypnotised by personalities and swayed by drivel like "ooh fanboy this, cult that", and about as mature as calling someone a poopyhead.
Come on, it's pathetic, I'm surprised you weren't modded troll because that's what your post obviously was, there wasn't one iota of an intelligent rational argument to be seen anywhere in your post (e.g. rationally debunking his arguments).
Ask him if he would have gone to a place like Starbucks to buy coffee when he was your age. Or if he paid someone else to change the oil and do simple repairs on the car.
You don't know shit about what I spend my money on, so everyone stop making false assumptions. I don't even go out anymore. I own one old car. I have one small old cheap TV with poor sound and get no extra pay channels. I very rarely buy CDs. I do my own yard work, own housecleaning. Etc. I don't play games. I spent literally nothing on Xmas gifts this Xmas. 0. My house is much smaller than my dad's was at this age. But well done for basing your entire argument on 300 or so false assumptions. Yeah, I'm SO much better off - puh-lease.
One difference between me and my dad is that he spent 20 odd years paying his mortgage while I've been putting extra money into mine continually to pay it off much faster (nearly there), I don't want to spend 20 years in debt. But what you get for the price is still much much less. He also had four kids and a wife to pay for and still managed to save for our university educations.
I've never bought a new car. I bought mine second-hand.
Have you tried subjecting yourself to the same level of technology and entertainment he afforded?
Matter of fact, yes. I have very little. Anyway, it doesn't take a genius to see that house prices are one of the main reasons for this problem, not iPods and flat-screen TVs.
Personally I have a theory that the rise of feminism left households with so much more disposable income that it became a driver for house inflation. Since I'm single, tough for me. Of course that wealth must "go" somewhere still - to realtors - saved in banks etc., but then where?
I think another issue is that many people today buy all that junk on credit. Can people really afford all that stuff, or are they lending money to pay for it? I hate and avoid debt so I won't buy something unnecessary on credit.
I don't own any of those things except a cellphone, and my computer is my work's computer. But keep making false assumptions to "prove a point". Even if I did, those things would be a drop in the bucket next to where property prices have gone, for example. When you graduate and stop living with your parents and go out into the real world you will learn what cost of living is. Could I have negotiated myself into better-earning positions? Sure. But the point is that most people just 30 years ago did NOT have to be one of those privileged few who could do that, most people far more readily had a better quality of life.
This isn't a symptom of squalor or poverty in Europe, it's mainly a result of history; most cities are very old, and particularly in the city centers the streets were laid out long before cars existed. And space was very limited not just because of higher population density / less land, but because for much of Europe's history, cities had to have big walls around them because of frequest ongoing conflicts/attacks, making everyone pile up into smaller spaces. And because things used to be built with really solid, heavy stone, there's no sense tearing down many of those structures, many of those buildings just stand for centuries. Also, Europeans grow up like that, so they're used to it. I imagine when the US has over 1000 years of history behind it, some parts may start looking a bit like that too, as space becomes ever more limited.
Europe does have high taxes and 'too much socialism' especially from a US perspective, but on the other hand, the European culture / work ethic is more "well-suited" to that. I think that's changing though with the younger generations, who seem to be lazier and more demanding, so Europe may have to become a bit more "right".
You are really missing his point entirely. Stop, stop, stop. Let me try give you a concrete example: I do similar work to my dad. At my age my dad was able to support a family of several kids and buy a reasonable sized house. I live on my own and can only afford a much smaller place.
Look around in the real world - this is a common pattern for just about EVERYONE. THINGS ARE GETTING HARDER. I can see this with my very own eyes, or are you trying to convince me that somehow I indeed have it 'better' than my folks? You have to work much harder/longer to be able to afford the same amount of 'stuff'. Also in the older days usually only the male worked, now it takes two working professionals as a couple to be able to get a similar amount of household wealth. We get less "wealth" for the same amount of work, when intuitively it should be the opposite due to leaps in technology.
3rd world countries are complete irrelevant to this, unless you're suggesting that somehow that is where my wealth is going now.
And it doesn't occur to you that keeping the price at hundreds of thousands of dollars will ENSURE that absolutely nobody *except* big corporations will be able to afford that data. Nice. How is that better? Big business actually *likes* barriers that make it harder for smaller players (man on the street) from being able to enter their markets, Einsten.
The Internet itself came out of a publicly funded government initiative. It's an interesting case, as it's obviously incredibly useful to businesses, so it's worth pondering why the private sector didn't 'get there first' (although I'm sure it would have eventually). (Hmm... OTOH, it's almost one of those useless 'what if' questions, as one could argue that if government had lower taxes instead of doing that research, companies would have had more money for R&D, and might have been able to come up with it even earlier.) But the Internet isn't something useful internally to a company on its own, so there may be less incentive for a single company to fund something like that; it's a bit like roads in that it's only useful once lots of people have access. I can imagine if a company had funded the R&D for the Internet, they would've probably tried to make the protocols proprietary and/or try get licensing fees for every instance of use.
The best (and most entertaining) essay/book I've read on this topic is Less than Words Can Say... it makes a compelling argument for clear, direct and precise language usage. I wholly recommend it (it's free online). Most importantly, as some of the responders to your post have failed to realise, there is a very big difference between "dumbing down" your language use, and making it clearer. Frivolous excess 'business' or bureaucratic verbiage usually *is* actually dumbing down the language in a different way as it makes meaning more opaque, even while giving the superficial appearance of intelligence and insight. Learning to recognize the difference is so critical our future actually depends on it.
Myself, my favourite ice-cream flavour is chocolate, I pretty much choose it every time:) But I don't claim it's the "best". I think what I meant was, I'll never really know if there's some other flavour out there that I might like much better than chocolate, simply because I don't generally bother to try other flavours.
Every once in a while I do try a different flavour, and it usually falls far short of chocolate, so I've just "learned" that it's better to just stick with chocolate:) Doesn't *really* make sense, of course, as the results of trying random flavour X doesn't really have predictive power for trying random flavour Y.
... other advantages, if a client fails, you just replace it and in literally five minutes the user can be up and running exactly as before with their entire desktop exactly as it was - no hours or days of downtime as a new system has to be set up. Furthermore they can also move from any machine to another in the office, log into their profile and voila there's their desktop. Throw VPN into that, and mobile users can access their desktops anywhere.
Linux/Unix have so much *potential* to blow Windows out the water as an office desktop system that it's sad that its powerful capabilities are not being marketed better.
What's more, none of these features are new, all this capability is more than ten years old. Yet MS slowly continues to implement their own bloated crappy "equivalent" functionality, markets the hell out of it as something amazing and mind-blowingly new and innovative and visionary (roaming blah blah access your e-mail anywhere this-and-that), and everyone thinks MS invented something fantastic. Unix has little hope, it's incredibly powerful, years ahead of its time almost, but hardly anyone knows it exists.
Honestly, any modern computer *should* be able to handle basic office apps and have some hard disk / network accessing in the background now and then and barely feel it. Heck, a ten-year old computer should. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but it seems like nobody knows how to write software anymore that isn't insanely bloated.
Somebody else posed the question of why all these computers even need hard disks at all. I think that's an excellent point; I don't see any reason why most office computers shouldn't just be thin clients or at least running apps straight off a single server. I've been mulling over trying this out in our office, e.g. letting a new admin person use a Linux desktop running off the Linux server with OpenOffice etc. It just feels to me more like 'how the world should be', not this crazy idea of every single desktop requiring 2GB RAM, beefy graphics hardware, big hard disks etc. for e.g. bloated crap Vista + Office 2007, the inefficiency of it all if you look at the scale of this, globally, I'm sure makes baby Jesus cry. The majority of office desktops shouldn't *need* to be anything more than something like the Asus EEE these days - cheap little disposable pieces of crap, with localised Linux servers doing the work and storing the real documents. This has many other advantages, you don't need to do all this admin work replicating these software setups, updating them all, everyone's documents are on the server in neat little home folders so they're easy to backup, harder to lose via viruses etc. or 'my hard disk crashed' or other nonsense, harder for people to 'lose' their documents somewhere on their local system with a trillion silly folders on it to host the bloated OS etc.
Well sure, if you put it that way... from the submitter's description combined with the comment, I had this mental image of 100 full desktops with monitors and people working away on them doing office-y stuff in his mom's basement:) If this was a private cluster, apart from costing a small fortune, it would solve his problem and make his question irrelevant, as there are solutions available.
Indeed, power will be a problem, if you assume 300kW per system (i.e. with monitors) that's 30kW! Plus a few switches. Headless machines I suppose you might get away with, I don't know, 15kW I guess.
One problem is that in a typical game, graphics is about the only thing that can be scaled quite dramatically (frame rate and quality-wise) without 'making it a different game', so to speak. If you made use of multi-cores to, say, have much better AI or physics, then you would effectively be *relying* on having multiple cores, because if the game were to run on a single-core system, you couldn't exactly have different, 'worse' physics for those users (the best you can try do is sacrifice a little more of the graphics quality) - that would mean the game literally played *differently*, something you want to avoid. This is especially true for network games (although to some extent one would use some kind of level-of-detail physics model and let the network system compensate as the server does the 'real' physics and the clients just try keep up with that).
There is also quite some additional complexity involved in parallelising all these tasks. Your AI and physics for example are not exactly two separate things, they play off one another, and it needs to remain deterministic, you don't want the physics to change randomly depending on when one core happened to finish processing something relative to the other just by chance. Again, offloading graphics to a separate core can at least be easier.
So until multiple cores become an expected minimum requirement for games (this may be the case for some games already, I don't keep a close eye these days), as long as devs still sell to single-core users, I don't see games as being likely to go overboard in taking advantage of it.
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Actually, Win9X CAN probably roughly be described as a 'shell on top of DOS' - Win9X would frequently and regularly drop the system down into 16-bit mode for various reasons, e.g. it could use DOS drivers if 32-bit drivers weren't available, and it very frequently would - in my experience most systems did. This is one of the reasons it was so unstable, because while in 16-bit mode the entire system is open game.
I recall using the Intel profiler on various Win98 systems back in the day, it had a utility that could tell you, and all the systems I tested spent a significant amount of their time (e.g. often 20% - 40%) in 16-bit mode - absurd for a "32-bit OS", and a complete joke.
Other kludgy 16-bit crap that showed through in that ugly line of OSs right through to Me were things like the Win16mutex, not to mention all the other 16-bit limitations floating around in the APIs, like the listbox control item count, the number of pixels on a GDI surface, and so on.
Win9X would also 'launch on top of' DOS, leaving it there all the time, and in the older versions you could even 'exit' back to DOS, or configure the system to remain in DOS without launching Windows. But the main clincher must be using DOS drivers. And actually even before Win9X was Win32s, 32-bit extensions to win3.1, which in fact just became Win95 after a few changes and a new look and feel.
But you just keep trying to rewrite history there buddy.
The 8-bit OS may be a reference to CP/M or QDOS, although that one may be a bit more iffy indeed (or I suspect there may be other versions of this joke floating around).
I'm the opposite, I generally become far more frugal when I have less money, and spend a lot more when I start seeing it pile up in the bank. Right now I'm in 'thrifty' mode. (That's not to say I don't have "downward spirals" though; I just engage in other self-destructive behaviour when I'm in them, like posting on /. a lot ...)
If you want to continue spreading the myth that poor=stupid
Are you suggesting there is no correlation at all between how intelligent people are and how well they do in life financially? Or that there's no correlation between stupid buying habits and whether or not you end up poor? That's completely absurd, of course there must be. Or do you think it all boils down to luck?
A rich person buying a car isn't "stupid" if he/she can afford it. A poor person buying lots of movie tickets when they're on the breadline, is.
Pedophilia is defined as sexual attraction towards PRE-pubescent girls, I'm presuming GP post was referring to that. Once somebody hits puberty, they are a sexual being with sexual desires and exhibit physical characteristics that make them sexually attractive to (usually) the opposite sex - this is natural and has been going on for millions of years and we've evolved that way (although that doesn't mean everyone who hits puberty should suddenly be considered open game, we probably have to draw lines somewhere even above natural attraction for various other reasons.)
Even having said that though, I can remember having sexual feelings/desires quite long before puberty, e.g. being turned on by porn at around age 10 already. There must be *some* of those desires then already before puberty.
It doesn't matter whether it's a "US view" or "European view", it's a *universal* fact that a company that keeps deadwood around "for the good of the social fabric" is never, but never going to be able to make products as well or as cheap as companies that cut the deadwood, and as long as (NB NB) competition exists (*), those companies WILL die in the long run. Then you'll see how good a dead company is for the "social fabric". But believe it or not, having efficient companies is actually a GOOD thing for the economy, overall, because it frees human capital to create new wealth and open up new possibilities that did not exist before.
(*) Now socialists might use this to argue for government protection against competition, but it's a myth, there WILL ALWAYS be competition, in virtually any market --- it's a global economy, and if you want to be nice to unnecessary employees and keep paying them, it will be a frighteningly short amount of time before all your customers are buying the cheaper Asian equivalent products. (Hint, this is one reason why unemployment in Europe has been creeping up over the past few decades.)
Socialism works OK in Europe because by and large people have a work ethic and will likely be productive no matter where you put them, but it works ONLY in Europe, and even now amongst younger Europeans the culture has shifted from one of a work ethic to one of demanding handouts for doing nothing.
Are you saying that all claims, ever, should be entertained equally? Great, I posit that eating chocolate ice-cream causes pedophilia, I have no data, but sorry, I guess (by your standards) you aren't allowed to criticise that, you have to at least entertain the notion. Next I'll claim that driving a Ford causes pedophilia. Again, sorry, no data, but if you criticise the notion I'll accuse you of bias too. Come on, intuition and common sense have to step in at some point.
Yes, well, it's not PC to say, but a minimum wage economy will always be at a competitive disadvantage to an economy without minimum wage. (Of course there are other variables, but this is a huge one.) Minimum wage is evil. It doesn't make people wealthier, not even at the lowest ends of the earning spectrum (as it makes every single product more expensive) ... e.g. consider Malaysia, no minimum wage, 3% unemployment, yet even the poorest of the poor have cellphones. The trick is to demand heavy competition in every nook and cranny of the economy.
Yeah, sorry, I was actually talking about the treadmill idea there, not the knee thing, in response a question about it. I didn't mean these knee things might be used to generate any meaningful amount of energy, I realise it's not much power.
Like anything that generates power humans need an energy source / fuel, our "fuel" is food, so one factor in the cost (energywise and financially and resource-wise) of producing and distributing that fuel if one wants to make any meaningful comparisons.
Nonetheless you are looking at *a* possible power source, sure.
If someone burns fat to run that treadmill then you're using stored energy, like a battery. If someone keeps thin then they have to eat more to run on that treadmill. Of course exercise is good for you so there's nothing wrong with that to a degree, but if you only end up with a situation where people are just eating more in order to generate electricity via the gym you might not be better off (e.g. it might be more efficient to use the extra land required for say small solar plants instead). Still, it would be better not to waste the treadmill energy which people are going to expend anyway.
I realise banks reinvest the money. Which allows e.g. more people to lend money to start companies, which is good for the economy except in bubbles. But from what I've heard US saving rates are very low. They're high in China. It doesn't seem to me though that this alone explains why people 'feel poorer' - I think a lot of that extra wealth is squandered badly (or corruptly) instead of spent wisely.
If it becomes cheaper to buy on credit, for whatever reason, that is dangerous. (I'm also not American btw but the same general economic patterns have occurred in every 'Western' country worldwide.) In my country we have (government-protected) huge banking cartels who fix prices and as a result, high charges and lousy "savings" interest rates that are lower than inflation, resulting in a situation where for almost every normal citizen, it's better to "spend now" than "save" and watch ur wealth evaporate. Combined with that is a "must have a huge house and fancy car and lots of shiny stuff" culture, so people buy a lot on credit.
Oh yes, another difference, I piss away a bit too much time on things like /. :)
Yeah, the only thing worse than a Ron Paul "fanboy" is a moron who talks about him as being a "cult" and any follower a "fanboy" - meaningless manipulatory zealous rhetoric designed only to stigmatise the only sensible campaign because retards are averse to people who actually say intelligent things instead of being hypnotised by personalities and swayed by drivel like "ooh fanboy this, cult that", and about as mature as calling someone a poopyhead.
Come on, it's pathetic, I'm surprised you weren't modded troll because that's what your post obviously was, there wasn't one iota of an intelligent rational argument to be seen anywhere in your post (e.g. rationally debunking his arguments).
Ask him if he would have gone to a place like Starbucks to buy coffee when he was your age. Or if he paid someone else to change the oil and do simple repairs on the car.
You don't know shit about what I spend my money on, so everyone stop making false assumptions. I don't even go out anymore. I own one old car. I have one small old cheap TV with poor sound and get no extra pay channels. I very rarely buy CDs. I do my own yard work, own housecleaning. Etc. I don't play games. I spent literally nothing on Xmas gifts this Xmas. 0. My house is much smaller than my dad's was at this age. But well done for basing your entire argument on 300 or so false assumptions. Yeah, I'm SO much better off - puh-lease.
One difference between me and my dad is that he spent 20 odd years paying his mortgage while I've been putting extra money into mine continually to pay it off much faster (nearly there), I don't want to spend 20 years in debt. But what you get for the price is still much much less. He also had four kids and a wife to pay for and still managed to save for our university educations.
I've never bought a new car. I bought mine second-hand.
Have you tried subjecting yourself to the same level of technology and entertainment he afforded?
Matter of fact, yes. I have very little. Anyway, it doesn't take a genius to see that house prices are one of the main reasons for this problem, not iPods and flat-screen TVs.
Personally I have a theory that the rise of feminism left households with so much more disposable income that it became a driver for house inflation. Since I'm single, tough for me. Of course that wealth must "go" somewhere still - to realtors - saved in banks etc., but then where?
I think another issue is that many people today buy all that junk on credit. Can people really afford all that stuff, or are they lending money to pay for it? I hate and avoid debt so I won't buy something unnecessary on credit.
I don't own any of those things except a cellphone, and my computer is my work's computer. But keep making false assumptions to "prove a point". Even if I did, those things would be a drop in the bucket next to where property prices have gone, for example. When you graduate and stop living with your parents and go out into the real world you will learn what cost of living is. Could I have negotiated myself into better-earning positions? Sure. But the point is that most people just 30 years ago did NOT have to be one of those privileged few who could do that, most people far more readily had a better quality of life.
the far too narrow streets
This isn't a symptom of squalor or poverty in Europe, it's mainly a result of history; most cities are very old, and particularly in the city centers the streets were laid out long before cars existed. And space was very limited not just because of higher population density / less land, but because for much of Europe's history, cities had to have big walls around them because of frequest ongoing conflicts/attacks, making everyone pile up into smaller spaces. And because things used to be built with really solid, heavy stone, there's no sense tearing down many of those structures, many of those buildings just stand for centuries. Also, Europeans grow up like that, so they're used to it. I imagine when the US has over 1000 years of history behind it, some parts may start looking a bit like that too, as space becomes ever more limited.
Europe does have high taxes and 'too much socialism' especially from a US perspective, but on the other hand, the European culture / work ethic is more "well-suited" to that. I think that's changing though with the younger generations, who seem to be lazier and more demanding, so Europe may have to become a bit more "right".
You are really missing his point entirely. Stop, stop, stop. Let me try give you a concrete example: I do similar work to my dad. At my age my dad was able to support a family of several kids and buy a reasonable sized house. I live on my own and can only afford a much smaller place.
Look around in the real world - this is a common pattern for just about EVERYONE. THINGS ARE GETTING HARDER. I can see this with my very own eyes, or are you trying to convince me that somehow I indeed have it 'better' than my folks? You have to work much harder/longer to be able to afford the same amount of 'stuff'. Also in the older days usually only the male worked, now it takes two working professionals as a couple to be able to get a similar amount of household wealth. We get less "wealth" for the same amount of work, when intuitively it should be the opposite due to leaps in technology.
3rd world countries are complete irrelevant to this, unless you're suggesting that somehow that is where my wealth is going now.
And it doesn't occur to you that keeping the price at hundreds of thousands of dollars will ENSURE that absolutely nobody *except* big corporations will be able to afford that data. Nice. How is that better? Big business actually *likes* barriers that make it harder for smaller players (man on the street) from being able to enter their markets, Einsten.
The Internet itself came out of a publicly funded government initiative. It's an interesting case, as it's obviously incredibly useful to businesses, so it's worth pondering why the private sector didn't 'get there first' (although I'm sure it would have eventually). (Hmm ... OTOH, it's almost one of those useless 'what if' questions, as one could argue that if government had lower taxes instead of doing that research, companies would have had more money for R&D, and might have been able to come up with it even earlier.) But the Internet isn't something useful internally to a company on its own, so there may be less incentive for a single company to fund something like that; it's a bit like roads in that it's only useful once lots of people have access. I can imagine if a company had funded the R&D for the Internet, they would've probably tried to make the protocols proprietary and/or try get licensing fees for every instance of use.
The best (and most entertaining) essay/book I've read on this topic is Less than Words Can Say ... it makes a compelling argument for clear, direct and precise language usage. I wholly recommend it (it's free online). Most importantly, as some of the responders to your post have failed to realise, there is a very big difference between "dumbing down" your language use, and making it clearer. Frivolous excess 'business' or bureaucratic verbiage usually *is* actually dumbing down the language in a different way as it makes meaning more opaque, even while giving the superficial appearance of intelligence and insight. Learning to recognize the difference is so critical our future actually depends on it.
True, point taken.
:) But I don't claim it's the "best". I think what I meant was, I'll never really know if there's some other flavour out there that I might like much better than chocolate, simply because I don't generally bother to try other flavours.
:) Doesn't *really* make sense, of course, as the results of trying random flavour X doesn't really have predictive power for trying random flavour Y.
Myself, my favourite ice-cream flavour is chocolate, I pretty much choose it every time
Every once in a while I do try a different flavour, and it usually falls far short of chocolate, so I've just "learned" that it's better to just stick with chocolate
... other advantages, if a client fails, you just replace it and in literally five minutes the user can be up and running exactly as before with their entire desktop exactly as it was - no hours or days of downtime as a new system has to be set up. Furthermore they can also move from any machine to another in the office, log into their profile and voila there's their desktop. Throw VPN into that, and mobile users can access their desktops anywhere.
Linux/Unix have so much *potential* to blow Windows out the water as an office desktop system that it's sad that its powerful capabilities are not being marketed better.
What's more, none of these features are new, all this capability is more than ten years old. Yet MS slowly continues to implement their own bloated crappy "equivalent" functionality, markets the hell out of it as something amazing and mind-blowingly new and innovative and visionary (roaming blah blah access your e-mail anywhere this-and-that), and everyone thinks MS invented something fantastic. Unix has little hope, it's incredibly powerful, years ahead of its time almost, but hardly anyone knows it exists.
Honestly, any modern computer *should* be able to handle basic office apps and have some hard disk / network accessing in the background now and then and barely feel it. Heck, a ten-year old computer should. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but it seems like nobody knows how to write software anymore that isn't insanely bloated.
Somebody else posed the question of why all these computers even need hard disks at all. I think that's an excellent point; I don't see any reason why most office computers shouldn't just be thin clients or at least running apps straight off a single server. I've been mulling over trying this out in our office, e.g. letting a new admin person use a Linux desktop running off the Linux server with OpenOffice etc. It just feels to me more like 'how the world should be', not this crazy idea of every single desktop requiring 2GB RAM, beefy graphics hardware, big hard disks etc. for e.g. bloated crap Vista + Office 2007, the inefficiency of it all if you look at the scale of this, globally, I'm sure makes baby Jesus cry. The majority of office desktops shouldn't *need* to be anything more than something like the Asus EEE these days - cheap little disposable pieces of crap, with localised Linux servers doing the work and storing the real documents. This has many other advantages, you don't need to do all this admin work replicating these software setups, updating them all, everyone's documents are on the server in neat little home folders so they're easy to backup, harder to lose via viruses etc. or 'my hard disk crashed' or other nonsense, harder for people to 'lose' their documents somewhere on their local system with a trillion silly folders on it to host the bloated OS etc.
Well sure, if you put it that way ... from the submitter's description combined with the comment, I had this mental image of 100 full desktops with monitors and people working away on them doing office-y stuff in his mom's basement :) If this was a private cluster, apart from costing a small fortune, it would solve his problem and make his question irrelevant, as there are solutions available.
Indeed, power will be a problem, if you assume 300kW per system (i.e. with monitors) that's 30kW! Plus a few switches. Headless machines I suppose you might get away with, I don't know, 15kW I guess.
One problem is that in a typical game, graphics is about the only thing that can be scaled quite dramatically (frame rate and quality-wise) without 'making it a different game', so to speak. If you made use of multi-cores to, say, have much better AI or physics, then you would effectively be *relying* on having multiple cores, because if the game were to run on a single-core system, you couldn't exactly have different, 'worse' physics for those users (the best you can try do is sacrifice a little more of the graphics quality) - that would mean the game literally played *differently*, something you want to avoid. This is especially true for network games (although to some extent one would use some kind of level-of-detail physics model and let the network system compensate as the server does the 'real' physics and the clients just try keep up with that).
There is also quite some additional complexity involved in parallelising all these tasks. Your AI and physics for example are not exactly two separate things, they play off one another, and it needs to remain deterministic, you don't want the physics to change randomly depending on when one core happened to finish processing something relative to the other just by chance. Again, offloading graphics to a separate core can at least be easier.
So until multiple cores become an expected minimum requirement for games (this may be the case for some games already, I don't keep a close eye these days), as long as devs still sell to single-core users, I don't see games as being likely to go overboard in taking advantage of it.