IBM and Microsoft were jointly developing OS/2 when the famous "divorce" happened. At that time each went their own way with the code. Microsoft created NT 3.1 and IBM gave us OS/2 2.0. Each company obviously made drastic changes to the code and rewrote much of it, but that doesn't change the fact that each has a common source. Xenix was not Microsoft's first product. Their first product was a Basic interpreter for the Altair 8800. From there they went on to create other language products. Dos they bought from Tim Patterson in 79-80. Xenix was their version of unix which ran on a 286. They later sold it to SCO becoming SCO Xenix and eventually evolving into SCO Unix which you still have today. I've often heard the claim that NT is based off unix, most likely becuase it claims posix compliance. I think anyone can see that a product being compliant (somewhat in NT's case) with a standard created from unix is not the same as that product being derived from unix.
I'm from the state of Tennessee, which if you are not familiar with it has a culture where guns are prevalent. Never, ever, ever did I fear going to school because of guns. There were some places I didn't go to, but it was not because of guns, rather it was the because of the people who were there guns or no guns.
Dictators arise from within and guns are the insurance policy that prevents that from happening. Dictators use force and the threat of force to maintain power and the gun in the hand of the common man makes that threat much more difficult to carry out. Nuclear warheads are not the same thing as a gun because their purpose is not the same. Guns put power in the hands of the people, thereby maintaining democracy. Nuclear warheads put vast ammounts of destructive power in the hands of those who use them. Guns have a relatively minor ammount of destructive power. A gun gives the exact ammount of power that each person needs to have a functional democracy. A nuclear weapon puts an astronmical ammount of power in the hands of one person, and it serves no political purpose. Guns stabilize a society while nuclear weapons would destabilize it because the 1/100th of a percent of the population who is nuts would use them. Timothy McVeigh didn't need a gun to kill all those innocents in Oklahoma, so please don't make the mistake of seeing guns as the only instrument of violence availabe.
So which country are you from that is so great and such a peaceful and serene place to live? You mention that the "state" where you live has the monopoly on the use of violence. I'd be willing to bet that it has a history of using it against its own people, because that is usually the outcome. Guns maintain democracy because it is power, not political ideology, which forms the basis of any government. Those who have the power rule. Guns are what give the common man power and are the final insurance against tyrrany. Guns being an instrument of violence, promote violence. But I would still rather there be a few nut cases running around occassionally going off than live in fear of well trained thugs who are the only ones with guns. Guns are evil, but as long as the gun is a source of power, it is a necessary evil that those who would seek to hold power must have them. The alternative is an eventual police state. Democracy is not the normal state of human affairs. Most often the powerful few rule the many. You may live in a country that has democracy without the ability of the people to directly defend that democracy, but it is a fragile democracy and will not endure.
Look up the word, hell look them both up. Sometimes they are interchangable, but not as the word is used in the constitution. If you have any doubts about that read some of the things that jefferson wrote about an armed citizenry.
Does it mean you can't defend yourself? Well it hasn't stopped people from fucking with you has it? Don't let people push you around. Even if they are bigger than you, never back down. Defend yourself aggressively and consistently and no one will mess with you because you will have earned their respect. Even if they kick the shit out of you, they won't come back for more if you put up a good fight. Work out, build your body, study martial arts, there are many things you can do to get yourself into a position where people don't start shit with you just for fun. Fuck the schools policy as well. If teacher can't protect you, he has no right to prevent you from protecting yourself.
Academic success isn't the same as intelligence. Nor is there only one type of intelligence. If by smart you mean someone whose main focus in life is academics, and who doesn't have good social skills, that person is definitely going to be picked on. But most intelligent people are not like that. I was one of the popular people in high school and most of my friends were very intelligent. We made very good grades and I at least had SAT scores that would make any propellerhead proud. There is this strange cultural connection between intelligence and nerdiness for some reason. Intelligent people tend to do better socially, not worse.
You might want to look up the meaning of the word militia, especially as it was used in colonial days. You might also do well to read some of the writings of Jefferson and Madison if you've any doubts as to what the second amendment means. An armed citizenry is the ultimate protection against tyrrany. It was true back then and its doubly true today.
I'd be far more worried about trained thugs with guns coming and shooting me in the head for my convictions than I'll ever be about nutcases who occasionally go off. Guns are evil, their sole use is the causation of death. But there is no way to un-invent the gun. It is here to stay and there will always be those who understand its power and who would seek to use it to enslave others. An armed citizen is the ultimate protection against tyrrany because as long as the common man can defend himself and his country, no domestic enemy can easily sieze power. We live in a very fragile democracy, one which is has decayed in many ways from the image envisioned by those who founded this country. The political process is mostly a sham. It matters little who you vote for because all of them to a greater or lesser degree are owned by those who paid to have them elected. But if the worst should ever happen and the government were to become an enemy of the people it was meant to serve, armed citizens will fight to protect their freedom and many will die for it. Political power doesn't come from the ballot box, it comes from the end of a gun.
What happened up there is a horrible unthinkable thing that makes no sense to anyone. The question of why they did it can never be answered. But that does not stop people from trying to find simple easily describable causes. I've often said that the intelligence of a group is inversely proportional to the number of its members. People latch on to the idea that computers made them do it or video games or any number of other things because these ideas are being spread around and promoted by the media. The media does this not because these are rational concerns, but because they sell more newspapers and get more viewers to watch CNN. Any search for the truth has to start at the center of the situation and move outwards from there. The center in this case is the two gunmen. Obviously they were into things that anyone would consider dark and sinister, but does that mean that there is a cause and effect relationship at work? Did they go psycho from the material or were they nuts to begin with and their interest in it simply another symptom? In my opinion there are some people in this world who are basically bad seeds. Now they may never go off like this but the potential is always there. Things which promote violence and death can set them off. But most people are not like that at all. You could show snuff films to the average person for weeks and never elicit any desire from them to commit violent acts. Show the same things to a nut case like this for half an hour and he'll be bouncing off the walls. Some people are just messed up and we shouldn't go blaming the things that were in their environment as the cause for their actions because these same things would cause no such behavior in a normal person.
Someone out there wrote the compilers which generate the RISC optimized code. I see far too many people out there thinking in terms of what they can get by with knowing, rather than seeking to know as much as they can. Obviously you can't know everything about everything, but you should try to know as much as you can about the things you do study and know something about as many different things as you can. I've met many people who were considered to be Guru's but who didn't know a damn thing about anything outside their specialty. Some people consider me to be a guru and it is in no small part due to the fact that I know something about just about everything computer wise. I can hold my own in discussions with software developers, hardware engineers, Mac freaks, Amiga lovers, networking experts, MCSE's etc. I don't know everything, but the wide range of what I do know comes in very handy and I can't tell you how many times something I learned while studying one thing was applicable to a vastly different thing later on. Understanding the instruction set of a processor gives you an insight into how that machine really works, it may be a subtle insight, but it can and will make a difference. Someone has to create the compilers that 99% of the rest of the developers will use. Last time I checked IBM and Motorola weren't developing GCC. Someone in the community has to understand these chips on that level, otherwise GCC and other free development tools will quickly become obsolete.
I recently read something about Redhat's lukewarm embrace of the linux standard base (LSB) project. The CEO of Redhat expressed concerns that it would become a vehicle for their competitors to "catch up" with redhat. This really makes me question where they are coming from. It's one thing to see Microsoft as your competitor, or SCO, or Sun. But its quite another thing to see Debian or Slackware in the same light. The similarities between distributions eclipse any differences, usually by a wide margin. The LSB is simply an attempt to ensure that certain key similarities are maintained to ensure that software written in compliance with it will run accross all distributions. Why should Redhat fear this? The best reason I can think of is money. Money that goes towards purchasing Debian or Openlinux does not go into their pockets, even though they do recieve the indirect benefit that one more person is using linux which potentially increases their sales in the long run. Linux was developed within a community based on trust and cooperation. If it is to succeed that community must endure. If money becomes too much of a consideration and goal, linux will fragment the same way unix did. This helps no one in the long run. Money is important, and Redhat should make all the money they can. But when a situation arises where money can be made but only at the expense of the community which created the product redhat sells, that community must be preserved. This is a war for freedom, make no mistake. Bill Gates would love to see the day when Microsoft was the only option and anyone who owned a computer was forced to run Windows. Superior software, which is beyond his ability to destroy or buy out, is the best solution. This type of software, of which linux is but one example, will be far more effective at solving the Microsoft problem than anything the Justice Department can ever do. But that software will only emerge within an open community of many people working towards a common goal. What I fear is that Redhat will damage that community simply for greater market share and increased profits.
Redhat is not selling linux itself, they are selling the convenience of a prepackaged distribution on CD, which if I understand the GPL you can then legally make copies of. This guy is just upset because linux is eating into his market share. Anger and resentment are behind his statements, not objective consideration.
Of course that's probably peak theoretical, not real world peformance which would be about half that, but still! This thing has numbers that would hang with a supercomputer a few years ago.
IBM had this problem years ago. Their programmers were evaluated on how many thousands of lines of code they put out. This caused problems because programmers were encouraged to bloat their code. I think that if you were to look at how many projects or modules to a project an american programmer completes in a year, you'd have a much different picutre. The best code is usually not the fattest.
Linux as we all know runs very well on single processor machines. It also runs well on 2 processor SMP systems. But above that the principle of diminishing marginal returns begins to kick in hard. NT simply makes better use of resources on SMP systems than linux currently does. This is not suprising since few linux devlopers own a 4-way SMP system whereas Microsoft can buy all they could ever want. This is a rigged study. Apple pulls similar tricks when they compare their G3 systems to x86 machines. If Mindcraft were to compare Linux and NT on a single or dual processor machine I'm sure the results would be quite different. As SMP systems become more affordable and commonplace I'm sure that linux will catch up and likely surpass NT in this area. Microsoft claims that NT will scale up to 32 processors but the truth is that it begins to decay rapidly above 4 processors and so the version which is supposed to work with more than 4 processors is rare and not commonly available. Mindcraft would do well to throw Solaris into this comparison, but they won't do that because NT would get it's clock cleaned.
Inventions and developments with the potential to improve society are almost always accompanied by those who will espouse them as being The Solution for difficult and as of yet unsolved social problems. Those who do this generally make some poor assumptions. They see the problems as being static rather than dynamic. They attempt to deal with the symptoms of this problem in its current form, rather than with the underlying causes. When this happens the problem is not solved but only mutates into another form. Incorrectly attributing a small number of component causes to a complex and wide ranging problem is exactly what it sounds like the author is doing. Solar power is primarily useful as a supplement to existing fuel sources. I have not read the book, but the description of it leads me to believe that he advocates solar power on the small scale such as each house running off its own solar cells. You cannot collect more energy from a solar cell than what the sun is hitting it with. Solar power can be used to generate enough electricity to power houses, but it requires a power station where the sun s rays are focused using mirrors onto a tank of water. The water boils and the steam is used to rotate a turbine. This requires the same nonexistent infrastructure that other forms of electrical also power need. Create the infrastructure, then talk about how you re going to make use of it. Then comes the question of who is going to pay for it to be created. During the great depression, FDR created the Tennessee Valley Authority to bring electrical power to that region of the country and thereby stimulate the economy. The united states had enough resources to make this happen and more importantly we had a stable government with a leader who was working to make things better. The countries that are most in need of this new infrastructure rarely have one of these, let alone all three. It is the chaos in these regions more than the poverty which creates the most problems though. The author talks about spreading the wealth more equitably, which may be nothing but Marxist nonsense but I m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Wealth is the domain of those who produce it. Adequate opportunity to create wealth could be called a fundamental right. Those who take advantage of the opportunity will have wealth. Those who don t will not. The end result of this is far more equitable than arbitrarily dividing the wealth among all regardless of whether they contributed to its creation. What developing nations need is the opportunity create wealth. This is the problem the author is most likely trying to address. This problem is real but solutions such as these which cannot be implemented are not solutions at all. Instead they are problems of nearly the same magnitude. The problems developing nations face are complex and dynamic. New technologies are just as likely to exacerbate these problems as they are to solve them. Technology raises the standard of living for the societies which possess it which effectively lowers the standard for societies which do not. Genetic engineering has more potential for this than either internet access or abundant electrical power. Genetic engineering may allow us to improve the very individuals from which our society is formed. Imagine if the average IQ in the industrialized world were to climb 40 or more points. That s almost the same as the rest of the world slipping 40 points. Something similar to this is already happening right now, its known as brain drain. It s the tendency for the best and brightest from poorer countries to emigrate to other places where they can have better lives. We get them and places like India lose them. The internet is similar to electrical power, it requires an infrastructure to deliver it which limits its penetration into poorer countries. Here in the united states this infrastructure exists and is constantly being improved. Other countries aren t so lucky. Satellite based internet access is in the works but the connection equipment is so expensive it doesn t offer a solution for poorer countries either. Ultimately the book sounds like the work of a left wing idealist who does not understand that there is no motivation on the part of the haves to do anything about the plight of the have nots. Its not that we are cold hearted and would not want to help. Our problem stems from the psychological need to have a problem to solve. If we don t have anything to handle or a problem to solve, we will create one. But we don t deal with the harshness of life on a daily basis. I m tired, need sleep....
Microsoft is trying to be a bully. The same rules we all learned as a child on the playground still apply, especially the one that says don't let _ANYONE_ push you around. I don't know who I have more hateful feelings toward, Microsoft or the wimps who didn't stand their ground. Especially to such a hollow threat. When these guys back down it effects everyone. Linux is a unique threat to Microsoft because it represents something they can't buy, and they can't get rid of it by bankrupting the company which produces it because linux itself is not produced by a company although many package and sell it. The typical weapons Gates employs are useless, so he must find other methods of attack. The very real threat exists that microsoft may begin going after the individuals who are creating and promoting linux. Don't think that they won't. Linux is a serious threat and Gates' personality is such that he sees any threat to his total domination as a cause for all out war. If you don't believe me I have one word for you: Netscape. Linux is not something that he will ignore, he will respond and that response will not be kind. When someone gives in like this when Microsoft doesn't have a leg to stand on in the first place it's like retreating your troops because the enemy jumped up and down and made noises that might be frightening to a small child. Gates is a bully and the simple rule is never back down.
It shouldn't be too hard to get the SCSI model up and running under linux or on a mac. This thing is perfect for backing up servers so I'm sure that the company has support for real operating systems like linux or the popular PC unix variants in the works if not already available. Ditto for Novell support. Anyone serious about running a reliable and fast server doesn't even use NT anyway.
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IBM and Microsoft were jointly developing OS/2 when the famous "divorce" happened. At that time each went their own way with the code. Microsoft created NT 3.1 and IBM gave us OS/2 2.0. Each company obviously made drastic changes to the code and rewrote much of it, but that doesn't change the fact that each has a common source. Xenix was not Microsoft's first product. Their first product was a Basic interpreter for the Altair 8800. From there they went on to create other language products. Dos they bought from Tim Patterson in 79-80. Xenix was their version of unix which ran on a 286. They later sold it to SCO becoming SCO Xenix and eventually evolving into SCO Unix which you still have today. I've often heard the claim that NT is based off unix, most likely becuase it claims posix compliance. I think anyone can see that a product being compliant (somewhat in NT's case) with a standard created from unix is not the same as that product being derived from unix.
I'm from the state of Tennessee, which if you are not familiar with it has a culture where guns are prevalent. Never, ever, ever did I fear going to school because of guns. There were some places I didn't go to, but it was not because of guns, rather it was the because of the people who were there guns or no guns.
Dictators arise from within and guns are the insurance policy that prevents that from happening. Dictators use force and the threat of force to maintain power and the gun in the hand of the common man makes that threat much more difficult to carry out. Nuclear warheads are not the same thing as a gun because their purpose is not the same. Guns put power in the hands of the people, thereby maintaining democracy. Nuclear warheads put vast ammounts of destructive power in the hands of those who use them. Guns have a relatively minor ammount of destructive power. A gun gives the exact ammount of power that each person needs to have a functional democracy. A nuclear weapon puts an astronmical ammount of power in the hands of one person, and it serves no political purpose. Guns stabilize a society while nuclear weapons would destabilize it because the 1/100th of a percent of the population who is nuts would use them. Timothy McVeigh didn't need a gun to kill all those innocents in Oklahoma, so please don't make the mistake of seeing guns as the only instrument of violence availabe.
So which country are you from that is so great and such a peaceful and serene place to live? You mention that the "state" where you live has the monopoly on the use of violence. I'd be willing to bet that it has a history of using it against its own people, because that is usually the outcome. Guns maintain democracy because it is power, not political ideology, which forms the basis of any government. Those who have the power rule. Guns are what give the common man power and are the final insurance against tyrrany. Guns being an instrument of violence, promote violence. But I would still rather there be a few nut cases running around occassionally going off than live in fear of well trained thugs who are the only ones with guns. Guns are evil, but as long as the gun is a source of power, it is a necessary evil that those who would seek to hold power must have them. The alternative is an eventual police state. Democracy is not the normal state of human affairs. Most often the powerful few rule the many. You may live in a country that has democracy without the ability of the people to directly defend that democracy, but it is a fragile democracy and will not endure.
Look up the word, hell look them both up. Sometimes they are interchangable, but not as the word is used in the constitution. If you have any doubts about that read some of the things that jefferson wrote about an armed citizenry.
Does it mean you can't defend yourself? Well it
hasn't stopped people from fucking with you has it? Don't let people push you around. Even if they are bigger than you, never back down. Defend yourself aggressively and consistently and no one will mess with you because you will have earned their respect. Even if they kick the shit out of you, they won't come back for more if you put up a good fight. Work out, build your body, study martial arts, there are many things you can do to get yourself into a position where people don't start shit with you just for fun. Fuck the schools policy as well. If teacher can't protect you, he has no right to prevent you from protecting yourself.
Academic success isn't the same as intelligence. Nor is there only one type of intelligence. If by smart you mean someone whose main focus in life is academics, and who doesn't have good social skills, that person is definitely going to be picked on. But most intelligent people are not like that. I was one of the popular people in high school and most of my friends were very intelligent. We made very good grades and I at least had SAT scores that would make any propellerhead proud. There is this strange cultural connection between intelligence and nerdiness for some reason. Intelligent people tend to do better socially, not worse.
You might want to look up the meaning of the word militia, especially as it was used in colonial days. You might also do well to read some of the writings of Jefferson and Madison if you've any doubts as to what the second amendment means. An armed citizenry is the ultimate protection against tyrrany. It was true back then and its doubly true today.
I'd be far more worried about trained thugs with guns coming and shooting me in the head for my convictions than I'll ever be about nutcases who occasionally go off. Guns are evil, their sole use is the causation of death. But there is no way to un-invent the gun. It is here to stay and there will always be those who understand its power and who would seek to use it to enslave others. An armed citizen is the ultimate protection against tyrrany because as long as the common man can defend himself and his country, no domestic enemy can easily sieze power. We live in a very fragile democracy, one which is has decayed in many ways from the image envisioned by those who founded this country. The political process is mostly a sham. It matters little who you vote for because all of them to a greater or lesser degree are owned by those who paid to have them elected. But if the worst should ever happen and the government were to become an enemy of the people it was meant to serve, armed citizens will fight to protect their freedom and many will die for it. Political power doesn't come from the ballot box, it comes from the end of a gun.
What happened up there is a horrible unthinkable thing that makes no sense to anyone. The question of why they did it can never be answered. But that does not stop people from trying to find simple easily describable causes. I've often said that the intelligence of a group is inversely proportional to the number of its members. People latch on to the idea that computers made them do it or video games or any number of other things because these ideas are being spread around and promoted by the media. The media does this not because these are rational concerns, but because they sell more newspapers and get more viewers to watch CNN. Any search for the truth has to start at the center of the situation and move outwards from there. The center in this case is the two gunmen. Obviously they were into things that anyone would consider dark and sinister, but does that mean that there is a cause and effect relationship at work? Did they go psycho from the material or were they nuts to begin with and their interest in it simply another symptom? In my opinion there are some people in this world who are basically bad seeds. Now they may never go off like this but the potential is always there. Things which promote violence and death can set them off. But most people are not like that at all. You could show snuff films to the average person for weeks and never elicit any desire from them to commit violent acts. Show the same things to a nut case like this for half an hour and he'll be bouncing off the walls. Some people are just messed up and we shouldn't go blaming the things that were in their environment as the cause for their actions because these same things would cause no such behavior in a normal person.
Someone out there wrote the compilers which generate the RISC optimized code. I see far too many people out there thinking in terms of what they can get by with knowing, rather than seeking to know as much as they can. Obviously you can't know everything about everything, but you should try to know as much as you can about the things you do study and know something about as many different things as you can. I've met many people who were considered to be Guru's but who didn't know a damn thing about anything outside their specialty. Some people consider me to be a guru and it is in no small part due to the fact that I know something about just about everything computer wise. I can hold my own in discussions with software developers, hardware engineers, Mac freaks, Amiga lovers, networking experts, MCSE's etc. I don't know everything, but the wide range of what I do know comes in very handy and I can't tell you how many times something I learned while studying one thing was applicable to a vastly different thing later on. Understanding the instruction set of a processor gives you an insight into how that machine really works, it may be a subtle insight, but it can and will make a difference. Someone has to create the compilers that 99% of the rest of the developers will use. Last time I checked IBM and Motorola weren't developing GCC. Someone in the community has to understand these chips on that level, otherwise GCC and other free development tools will quickly become obsolete.
I recently read something about Redhat's lukewarm embrace of the linux standard base (LSB) project. The CEO of Redhat expressed concerns that it would become a vehicle for their competitors to "catch up" with redhat. This really makes me question where they are coming from. It's one thing to see Microsoft as your competitor, or SCO, or Sun. But its quite another thing to see Debian or Slackware in the same light. The similarities between distributions eclipse any differences, usually by a wide margin. The LSB is simply an attempt to ensure that certain key similarities are maintained to ensure that software written in compliance with it will run accross all distributions. Why should Redhat fear this? The best reason I can think of is money. Money that goes towards purchasing Debian or Openlinux does not go into their pockets, even though they do recieve the indirect benefit that one more person is using linux which potentially increases their sales in the long run. Linux was developed within a community based on trust and cooperation. If it is to succeed that community must endure. If money becomes too much of a consideration and goal, linux will fragment the same way unix did. This helps no one in the long run. Money is important, and Redhat should make all the money they can. But when a situation arises where money can be made but only at the expense of the community which created the product redhat sells, that community must be preserved. This is a war for freedom, make no mistake. Bill Gates would love to see the day when Microsoft was the only option and anyone who owned a computer was forced to run Windows. Superior software, which is beyond his ability to destroy or buy out, is the best solution. This type of software, of which linux is but one example, will be far more effective at solving the Microsoft problem than anything the Justice Department can ever do. But that software will only emerge within an open community of many people working towards a common goal. What I fear is that Redhat will damage that community simply for greater market share and increased profits.
Redhat is not selling linux itself, they are selling the convenience of a prepackaged distribution on CD, which if I understand the GPL you can then legally make copies of. This guy is just upset because linux is eating into his market share. Anger and resentment are behind his statements, not objective consideration.
6.2 gigaflops....
Of course that's probably peak theoretical, not real world peformance which would be about half that, but still! This thing has numbers that would hang with a supercomputer a few years ago.
IBM had this problem years ago. Their programmers were evaluated on how many thousands of lines of code they put out. This caused problems because programmers were encouraged to bloat their code. I think that if you were to look at how many projects or modules to a project an american programmer completes in a year, you'd have a much different picutre. The best code is usually not the fattest.
Linux as we all know runs very well on single processor machines. It also runs well on 2 processor SMP systems. But above that the principle of diminishing marginal returns begins to kick in hard. NT simply makes better use of resources on SMP systems than linux currently does. This is not suprising since few linux devlopers own a 4-way SMP system whereas Microsoft can buy all they could ever want. This is a rigged study. Apple pulls similar tricks when they compare their G3 systems to x86 machines. If Mindcraft were to compare Linux and NT on a single or dual processor machine I'm sure the results would be quite different. As SMP systems become more affordable and commonplace I'm sure that linux will catch up and likely surpass NT in this area. Microsoft claims that NT will scale up to 32 processors but the truth is that it begins to decay rapidly above 4 processors and so the version which is supposed to work with more than 4 processors is rare and not commonly available. Mindcraft would do well to throw Solaris into this comparison, but they won't do that because NT would get it's clock cleaned.
Inventions and developments with the potential to improve society
are almost always accompanied by those who will espouse them as
being The Solution for difficult and as of yet unsolved social
problems. Those who do this generally make some poor
assumptions. They see the problems as being static rather than
dynamic. They attempt to deal with the symptoms of this problem
in its current form, rather than with the underlying causes.
When this happens the problem is not solved but only mutates into
another form. Incorrectly attributing a small number of
component causes to a complex and wide ranging problem is exactly
what it sounds like the author is doing. Solar power is
primarily useful as a supplement to existing fuel sources. I
have not read the book, but the description of it leads me to
believe that he advocates solar power on the small scale such as
each house running off its own solar cells. You cannot collect
more energy from a solar cell than what the sun is hitting it
with. Solar power can be used to generate enough electricity to
power houses, but it requires a power station where the sun s
rays are focused using mirrors onto a tank of water. The water
boils and the steam is used to rotate a turbine. This requires
the same nonexistent infrastructure that other forms of
electrical also power need. Create the infrastructure, then talk
about how you re going to make use of it. Then comes the
question of who is going to pay for it to be created. During the
great depression, FDR created the Tennessee Valley Authority to
bring electrical power to that region of the country and thereby
stimulate the economy. The united states had enough resources to
make this happen and more importantly we had a stable government
with a leader who was working to make things better. The
countries that are most in need of this new infrastructure rarely
have one of these, let alone all three. It is the chaos in these
regions more than the poverty which creates the most problems
though. The author talks about spreading the wealth more
equitably, which may be nothing but Marxist nonsense but I m
going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Wealth is the domain
of those who produce it. Adequate opportunity to create wealth
could be called a fundamental right. Those who take advantage of
the opportunity will have wealth. Those who don t will not. The
end result of this is far more equitable than arbitrarily
dividing the wealth among all regardless of whether they
contributed to its creation. What developing nations need is the
opportunity create wealth. This is the problem the author is
most likely trying to address. This problem is real but
solutions such as these which cannot be implemented are not
solutions at all. Instead they are problems of nearly the same
magnitude. The problems developing nations face are complex and
dynamic. New technologies are just as likely to exacerbate these
problems as they are to solve them. Technology raises the
standard of living for the societies which possess it which
effectively lowers the standard for societies which do not.
Genetic engineering has more potential for this than either
internet access or abundant electrical power. Genetic
engineering may allow us to improve the very individuals from
which our society is formed. Imagine if the average IQ in the
industrialized world were to climb 40 or more points. That s
almost the same as the rest of the world slipping 40 points.
Something similar to this is already happening right now, its
known as brain drain. It s the tendency for the best and
brightest from poorer countries to emigrate to other places where
they can have better lives. We get them and places like India
lose them. The internet is similar to electrical power, it
requires an infrastructure to deliver it which limits its
penetration into poorer countries. Here in the united states
this infrastructure exists and is constantly being improved.
Other countries aren t so lucky. Satellite based internet access
is in the works but the connection equipment is so expensive it
doesn t offer a solution for poorer countries either. Ultimately
the book sounds like the work of a left wing idealist who does
not understand that there is no motivation on the part of the
haves to do anything about the plight of the have nots. Its not
that we are cold hearted and would not want to help. Our problem
stems from the psychological need to have a problem to solve. If
we don t have anything to handle or a problem to solve, we will
create one. But we don t deal with the harshness of life on a
daily basis. I m tired, need sleep....
Microsoft is trying to be a bully. The same rules we all learned as a child on the playground still apply, especially the one that says don't let _ANYONE_ push you around. I don't know who I have more hateful feelings toward, Microsoft or the wimps who didn't stand their ground. Especially to such a hollow threat. When these guys back down it effects everyone. Linux is a unique threat to Microsoft because it represents something they can't buy, and they can't get rid of it by bankrupting the company which produces it because linux itself is not produced by a company although many package and sell it. The typical weapons Gates employs are useless, so he must find other methods of attack. The very real threat exists that microsoft may begin going after the individuals who are creating and promoting linux. Don't think that they won't. Linux is a serious threat and Gates' personality is such that he sees any threat to his total domination as a cause for all out war. If you don't believe me I have one word for you: Netscape. Linux is not something that he will ignore, he will respond and that response will not be kind. When someone gives in like this when Microsoft doesn't have a leg to stand on in the first place it's like retreating your troops because the enemy jumped up and down and made noises that might be frightening to a small child. Gates is a bully and the simple rule is never back down.
What a profound and insightful thing to say. Surely you are one of the sages of our time.
It shouldn't be too hard to get the SCSI model up and running under linux or on a mac. This thing is perfect for backing up servers so I'm sure that the company has support for real operating systems like linux or the popular PC unix variants in the works if not already available. Ditto for Novell support. Anyone serious about running a reliable and fast server doesn't even use NT anyway.