Oh, but marketing messages are like those pictures where you see one picture but then look at it again and it's another one altogether.
If you were trying to promote Linux this way, you'd be a moron to say Linux is for quick things and Windows for intensive things. You'd say, Linux is agile and efficient but you can have Windows too because they (The Man, you know) makes you.
But in any case promoting Windows is not what this is about. I don't know about Dell, but Asus doesn't even brand it's quickstart Linux environment as "linux". It'd probably be the kiss of death because IT or purchasing would have conniptions -- possibly both. It's all about getting to your email while you're waiting to board the plane sort of thing. Of course, that's what the God supposedly made Blackberries for, but there's something to be said for having a real browser on a real machine with a keyboard attached. Safari on the iPhone comes close, of course.
Still, if for some reason you're stuck on an island with wifi, and the tide is rising so quickly you're going to drown if you can't communicate, then it's kind of like security blanket to know you can have a complete, self-contained communication package at your fingertips in under ten seconds fro the get-go. Apparently that kind of scenario figures in some people's nightmares.
Actually, I have an Asus F8VA-C1 machine that has this feature. The Linux environment is specially optimized to boot in about eight seconds from the point you hit the switch. It provides a basic suite of applications (real ones, like FireFox and Skype). Shutdown is just as quick, or you can choose to exit Linux and start Windows without doing a machine reset/POST.
If you hit the button for Linux and instantly change your mind, you can just immediately exit Linux to Vista and it doesn't make any significant difference to the total Vista boot time, although that's not saying much.
In any case, this kind of environment is not designed to be used as you suggest, with some apps residing on Linux and some on Windows. It's designed as an alternative for situations like when you're in the airport about to board and want to check your email. I actually kept my "Splashtop" partition, even though I promptly replaced Vista with 64 bit Ubuntu. What kind fo a moron ships 32 bit Vista on a machine with 4GB of RAM installed?
Well, not to meta-nitpick or anything, but I'm sure Access would have sold Palm a new license if Palm had been willing to pay anything like it must be paying to get a whole new OS.
Still, in the era of $300 laptops, I wonder how cheaply some Chinese company could sell a knock off of the old Palm m505. For a lot of people, that pretty much was all the PDA they really needed. PDAs got powerful and converged partly because the companies built around selling PDAs were built around selling expensive, high margin items. If you could buy such a device for, say $29.99, it would sell. Add bluetooth and the ability to dial a number of common phones out of the addressbook, and you'd have something.
You try shoehorning qt or gtk onto a 68000 running at 16MHz with 128K of memory.
If I recall, it wasn't any worse than any other API of comparable ability capable of running on similar hardware. It was idisyncratic of course because it wasn't Win32 which only seemed normal because so many people had to deal with it, and it didn't have the luxury modern frameworks do of burning processor time and call stack in order to provide an orthogonal model with close one to to one correspondence between what you saw on the screen and the objects you manipulate to make it happen.
Anything new you have to learn is a pain in the ass.
I think we have to judge an API like this by its results. A lot of people managed to develop a lot of applications for a lot of users, and by in large those applications were useful, functional and stable.
Still, I think that the direction palm is going from an API standpiont is good. They've lost the developer mindshare war, so having a totally foreign API and application model is a luxury they can't afford. It sounds like they're doing the right thing on PIM data synchronization too. It's a scandal how you can't get a decent shared calendar on a mobile device without buying Exchange.
On the other hand, I wish they would still offer non-converged devices. I realize it doesn't signify anything from a marketing standpoint, but I'd run out and buy a Pre right now if I could get it without the phone. I already have a phone, and I really hate having my PIM tied to my cell provider.
Darwin's ideas are, in point of fact, a species of orthodoxy, just like creationism. The important thing to remember is that religion and science deal with new ideas in precisely opposite ways.
If a creationist theologian examines the notion that man is descended from other apes, he refers to the assertions of his orthodoxy, and sees that God created Adam on the seventh day, and therefore rejects this new idea. If an anthropologist examines the idea that such and such a hominid was an ancestor of man, then he sets out to prove that the notion is inconsistent with known fact. He sets out, in effect, to prove that evolution did not happen in this case.
The statistician's name for this notion is "the null hypothesis". In setting out to prove an idea, you set out to disprove the null hypothesis. In this game, the null hypothesis is considered innocent until proven guilty: any reasonable grounds whatsoever for accepting the null hypothesis is allowed. If under those slanted rules, the null hypotheses fails, then the idea must be considered consistent with all the facts currently in hand.
Scientific theories perform some of the same functions as religious dogmas in casual reasoning. They can, of course, be wrong and this wrongness can temporarily slow scientific progress. But when it comes down to real work, the core function of a scientific theory is completely opposite to that of religious dogma. Scientific theories are not touchstones; they are sources of ideas to disprove as null hypotheses. The published empirical data are the touchstone against which the scientist sets out to crush the tenets of scientific theory, if he can. If he fails, then he has advance scientific knowledge.
It is their reliability as sources of failing null hypotheses that makes scientific theories practically useful to researchers. The reason a scientist, in his gut, reacts against creationism is he is sure that he will set out to disprove it and succeed.
Now the notion that we've made a religious fetish of Darwin reflect a fundamental misunderstanding about how the differences between theology and science. Scientists are not necessarily philosophers of science, so when they are invited to a debate by theologians, they often unconsciously slip into arguing on theological grounds, or they simply fail to communicate because neither side has any intellectual context for understanding the other, and neither side is aware of this.
If theologians new how scientific theories are actually used they'd be less anxious to seek the imprimatur of the scientific community.
Well, I sort of agree, but I don't think about this quite the way you do.
At the bottom of this is not some secret Apple thought control project. At the bottom of this is a simple truth anybody who has ever been in business with open eyes knows: it is expensive to get customers. A direct corollary of this is that sales to existing customers are more profitable than sales to new customers.
So, the vendor's strategy is always simple: everything you do is oriented to establishing a relationship with a customer and using that relationship to repeatedly sell, sell, sell. A customer's strategy is different. He doesn't care if the vendor makes more profit or less, he just wants the cheapest prices in the long term. This means he has no interest in a relationship with the vendor unless the vendor does something to make it worthwhile. Generally, its a nuisance for the consumer to keep having to evaluate whether his relationship with a vendor is still worthwhile.
Still, is it so bad for a vendor to offer a product only to certain of his customers? If its based purely on what those customer have bought in the past, I don't think so. When you buy your copy of Mac OSX, you know that running it on Apple hardware is part of the deal, so you can't say they "forced" you to do anything.
So let me get to the point here: is being able to use MacOS worth having a relationship with Apple? Well, unless you really need Apple only software, unless you can't live without iPhoto or GarageBand, I'd say no. Having used Mac OSX, Gnome on Ubuntu, Vista and Xp more or less equally over the last two years, OSX a nice desktop OS, but it is nothing special. It's nicer than Vista on an underpowered machine, which is not saying much. But if it is better than Gnome, it's not so much better that it is worth worrying about whether what you are doing is moral. Ten years ago, I was a huge Apple fan, and maybe when Mac OSX came out they had a bit of an edge, but I don't see any edge today.
So my take on this is is that I'm not even going to think about setting up a Hackintosh, becauset he deal Apple is offering is so lackluster it's not even worth my while to consider wheter it would be moral to do so. It's nice software, but it comes with strings, and there's other nice software out there with no strings. In that situation, it's like choosing between a slice of Lemon Meringue for free and Key Lime for $20. Some people would shell out $20 for the Key Lime without batting an eye. Others will rage at the iniquity of charging $20 for a slice of pie. Some may spend their days dreaming up schemes for getting a free slice of Key Lime. But I'm not even sure I like Key Lime better then Lemon Meringue, so I'll just take the free slice and move on with my life.
Now if Apple puts out an OS that is so splendid I'm really tempted to spend a day screwing around installing it on a Hackintosh, then I'll probably just buy another Mac.
Well, cybernetics came into widespread use meaning the study of feedback and control systems.
Computers obviously have considerable applications to many modern control applications. However, it was premature in the 80's and 90's to refer to anything computer related as "cyber-". The case may somewhat different today, particularly in regard to security.
A system's property of "security" is not inherent in the security of its parts, it is not in any way shape or form the sum of the security of its parts. A secure system may include some insecure components, and an insecure system may contain nothing but secure components. Therefore it is possible to argue that security is truly a cybernetic phenomenon, in which we try to keep the system in some kind of defined state (including defined states of knowledge and ignorance on the part of its participants).
That' said, people who use the prefix "cyber-" to refer to anything related to computers are morons.
Without any doubt, Will Dunham's Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics ought to top your list. If a student has any mathematics in his soul, this book will speak to it.
Technically, the book only requires only the most rudimentary geometry, algebra and trig to follow. I'd guess that students who have taken pre-algebra and are mathematically inclined should not only be able to follow it, but get a great deal from it. The strength of this book is that it strips the didactic shell from mathematics, laying bare its essential fascination: the struggle of an individual mind to find that one insight that will bring the solution to a problem within its grasp.
Well, possibly. Personally, I find the idea of every application abandoning ship and going for its own way of organizing functions precisely what was wrong with open source software ten years ago. It bothers me that the most recent versions of Explorer have an unique user interface for now good reason. By contrast, Firefox has a conservative user interface; Safari does as well, with certain unusual touches that are nonetheless completely intuitive.
What's interesting about Office is the way that it's user interface, although a major break with the old Multiple Document Interface, is still driven by technical decisions made as far back as Windows 1.0. For one thing,it would appear that events are still routed through an application's main window, so you need to have a window for the application to exist, even if you no longer want to have an MDI style user interface.
Indeed, I tried a recent edition of OpenSUSE; while I can see what the KDE developers are shooting for (which to some degree overlaps some of the better UI ideas in Vista), it's definitely not ready for prime time. Also, the most recent OpenSUSE had a lot of integration problems with bleeding edge stuff. For one thing, KDE4 and pulseaudio kept stepping on each others' feet.
So, I'll stay away from OpenSUSE. There are plenty of more conservative and reliable choices.
Really, what sets apart distros these days are how well they manage package dependencies/conflicts and how close they are to the bleeding edge. Being close to the bleeding edge tends to mean more conflict.
It demonstrates one simple, incontrovertable fact that is absolute poision to Microsoft's business model: operating systems aren't all that important.
Oh,back in the day, when you couldn't shoehorn a real operating system onto a machine with a sixteen bit address bus, it was a given that operating systems for personal computers were horribly inadequate. Every time a new version of the operating system came out, it'd take advantage of something that was now affordable on a desktop that never had been before. So you looked forward to an OS release as a release from some piece of pain or another. So an operating system release was a big deal.
We are in the era of diminishing returns when it comes to new OS releases. Oh, they maybe handle new version of hardware that are marginally better than they old hardware, like Sata vs. ATA, or going back farther in time, more convenient support for things like wifi. And, of course, the OS developers fix mistakes they made way back in the old days.
The problem for MS is trying to drum up the old excitement (with its influx of cash), like when we went from Windows 2 to Windows 3, which made it easy to run more than one application at a time (which was not a concern back when you'd only had 256K of RAM). You've got to add features and treat them like they're revolutionary.
Ubuntu is not without its problems, the biggest of which is getting to work on notebook hardware whose manufacturers consider getting the BIOS to work with Windows getting the job "done". But, once you get it running, you don't sit down to work at your computer and say, "gee I'm working on Ubuntu." Good Linux distros fade into the background, where they belong. Operating systems are just packages of functionality which make it easy for you to get at your data and manipulate it with your preferred tools.
What's scary about a distro like Ubuntu is that it doesn't compete against Windows. That's how Microsoft has won for years, when competitors look at MS products and decide they have to follow Microsoft's lead, even if they were first. With each new Linux distro release, you don't get an attempt to revolutionize the desktop experience. What you you do get the same experience you had yesterday, with a few problems sorted out and a couple of modest refinements. In contrast, with each new version of Windows, MS seems to scrape the bottom of the change barrel a bit deeper, down to renaming and shifting around control panel applets so there's absolutely no way you could mistakenly think you didn't get an upgrade.
Of course, MS has a great deal of opportunity for just fixing the mistakes of the past, which is a good thing. Vista could have been the best Windows ever, except it had too many competing agendas. Windows 7 is shaping up to be the kind of incremental release on Vista that we're used to in the Linux world, and by contrast it will seem wonderful with the XP to Vista transition.
We already can drop weapons from on high. So can a lot of the countries. Pretty soon second string regional powers like Iran will be able to as well. Nobody is talking about that.
It's not the stuff on the ground that this concerns, it's the stuff in space that so much of humanity depends on for things like communication and weather tracking. And the US is a disproportionate beneficiary of this, when compared to countries who are just getting into the orbital club.
To generalise wildly, countries with large military R&D spending and manufacturing tend not to be good at consumer products.
There's no evidence to support such a broad generalization. For example, the country that brought you the Stealth Bomber also designed the iPod.
That doesn't mean that spending more on defense than all the other countries on the planet put together does not have an impact on our general competitiveness, but that impact is complex. For example, high tech military R&D encourages people to go into engineering. On the other hand, the firms or divisions of firms doing military engineering aren't doing much directly relevant to consumer products, and the practices aren't very transferable to consumer products. On the other hand to the other hand, military R&D and engineering supports infrastructure useful to all kinds of R&D and engineering, such as engineering schools and basic research.
There's probably at least a score of "other hands" to consider in a generalization like that.
I would venture one alternative explanation. This explanation doesn't explain everything, but it is certainly worth thinking about. The fact that we spend so much money on defense technology reflects our affluence. We are so wealthy that we buy the military equivalent of luxury goods. A Honda Accord is for most situations perfectly adequate for commuting, but many people who can afford it prefer a Mercedes. Likewise, we might not necessarily need one all weather ultra-flexible (and complex) defense system where two cheaper ones might do, but whether or not it is truly cost-effective, there is no doubt that the more complex system is a tour de force.
The relevance to consumer products is this: they're expensive to make in a country that can afford a bomber that can fly from the US Midwest to the Middle East to 100,000 lb of ordnance. And in consumer goods, while you can make lots of money with luxury niche products, the greatest gross figures are in catering to the masses.
It is always the high end of the low end that you have to watch, which is why Linux equipped Netbooks are such a threat to Microsoft's monopoly. It's not doom, it's just a beachhead on the edge of their profitable territory that they can neither afford to occupy, nor leave unoccupied.
Possibly, of course. We can't prove the non-existence of something, after all.
The question is, where is the evidence that Obama thinks this way? Just because you can arrive at the conclusion "we oughtn't pursue space weapons" from the premise "owning a weapon makes you a bully" doesn't mean that the premise is logically necessary. A->B does not imply B->A.
Sure, but... I actually think they're on the right track.
I once worked for a guy who loved hardware. He spent altogether too much time scheming about ways to get new and bigger hardware. I used to keep myself in beer by betting him when he announced the next hardware acquisition he was going definitely going get into the budget. The thing was, when he did succeed, by the time the machine came in it was no longer impressive. I used to tell him, time and time again, "hardware is just incipient trash."
I know a scientist who had a reputation making field season in which she discovered a new infectious agent that crosses between humans and primates in Africa. She then had her laptop and all her backups stolen while she was in the bush.
The lesson of these stories is this: what matters is data. Hardware, even software are just ways of getting at the data and working with it more efficiently. Well, mostly more efficiently.
From the standpoint that data is paramount and hardware and software are necessary junk, a lot of things look different. For example the convergence of phones, PDAs and media players. There's nothing wrong with a converged device, in fact it's just a convenient way to access a variety of data without having to wear a Batman style utility belt. But convergence is not a logical endpoint because causes almost as many problems for the user at it solves. What drives convergence is not that convergence is the best possible architecture for all users , all the time, but it gives manufacturers an excuse to continue making profitably expensive devices as the price of hardware continues to fall.
The iPhone shows the limitations of convergence. This may seem strange, because the iPhone seems like the ultimate argument for convergence. But convergence is just an implementation detail for a limited range of use cases. Apple knows this, they just don't talk about it because it's part of their secret architectural sauce. What really matters is making it easy to move data around. In the long term, the iTunes store represents customer lock-in, which is why it works only with the iPod and the iPod works only with it. And note how while the iPhone is a remarkably good value, the cables to connect it to a decent video monitor are shamelessly expensive. Once you've bought the iPhone itself, which is a bargain, you're going feel you need that $50 collection of $0.25 worth of plastic, copper and labor.
What should happen is that users should have personal networks, anchored by a device like this that is so cheap it's hardly worth stealing, and so tiny it hardly counts as carrying something. The converged phone is simply a terminal which connects user interface to data to network. If you are settling down to do some extended work, then a tablet or notebook takes over the user interface functions.
What matters is having access to data and being able to manipulate it conveniently and easily. What system vendors do is they get you close to that point, then find profitable ways to get between you and your data. Apple's brazen cables (well, shameless cables) are actually relatively benign: you pay Apple and they go away. Watching your videos on your living room TV doesn't involve and ongoing relationship with Apple. In contrast, the wireless carriers are a total pain because they want to charge tariffs on data access. You're continually finding that you have to use their applications and their services. Why should anyone pay for picture mail service if they have a device with an operating system and TCP/IP stack in it?
Of course, the carriers are really schizophrenic about Internet access. People want Internet access, but they do their best to sell them pricey and kludgey substitutes. SMS has to be a huge money maker for them, but any instant messaging service is far better from the use
The reasons geeks think this way is that they think everything but the hardware is free, starting with the labor of assembly and testing, certainly, but also support, distribution marketing, even packaging. If I were starting out to build a computer, it wouldn't even have a case, and it would ship as a box of loose parts and wires, like the good old Altair.
Well, yes obviously. But being able to place something in orbit is probably the most significant milestone on the road to being able to place a warhead any place on the planet. Once you achieve that, then terrestrial distances are not a barrier.
In fact, the Sputnik rocket was simply one of several prototype variants of the R-7 rocket, the world's first ICBM. The Sputnik launches were in essence part of the testing program for that missile, which had its first successful flight a little more than a month before Sputnik 1. The Sputnik rocket was little more than a shortened version of that rocket.
For historical reference, the timeline looks like this:
May 15, 1957: First launch test of prototype R-7 fails, traveling only 400km.
August 21, 1957: on third attempt, R-7 prototype makes first successful flight of 6000km.
October 4, 1957: Sputnik launched on slightly shorter, lighter version of successful R-7 prototype.
December 15, 1959: An R-7 is deployed, becoming the world's first operational ICBM.
Total time from achieving Earth Orbit to Functional ICBM: 26 months.
Well, some people are just square pegs that don't benefit from the usual treatment.
The late Henry Stommel became a full professor at Harvard and later MIT with only a Bachelor's degree in mathematics. Of course, he was one of those intellectual freaks of nature who stroll into a field of study and discover all kinds of really fundamental stuff that everybody else somehow missed. WW2 interrupted his graduate career, and by the time it would have been an obviously pointless charade put him through a PhD program.
How about, while we're at it, we stop telling the little brats and their brats about how special they all are and instead start sending the message that it takes hard work and dedication to amount to anything in this world?
Well, I'll tell you the problem with that idea. Telling people anything of that nature is pointless. Every American has heard "a penny saved is a penny earned," and most surely understand that thrift and spending restraint (economic ironies aside) are personally beneficial. But how many of them put that into practice?
That's what makes education hard. It's more than putting true information into naive eyes and ears. Yes, knowing who Ben Franklin was and what he said and did is an important component of education. But that doesn't make you a Ben Franklin.
This kind of obsession about the message indoctrination is political education, not practical education. It doesn't matter whether the message is "everybody is special" (which is true) or "your actions have consequences" (which is also true). Only a politician or somebody who gives politicians too much credence could think those ideas are are somehow mutually exclusive.
Now I think we must remember two things. First, the "self esteem movement" is a dead horse, and has been for years. Anybody who listens to kids at all knows that while they crave a pat on the pack as much as anybody, they know when they deserve it and they know when its BS. The only people who are still talking about it either live in a place that hires poorly educated, unprofessional and clueless teachers, or they long for the pendulum to swing the other way, back to the day when education was a simple matter of a Teacher propounding Truth to passive, credulous students. The two phenomena are in my opinion correlated.
The second thing is that the self esteem movement, while misguided, was useful in its way. Further educational progress, I believe, depends on moving from a model in which students are treated as uniform vessels into which information can be poured with reproducible effect, to one which realizes that students are complex individuals with different cognitive talents and varied educational histories. Getting the most out of each student will ultimately require measuring those things and determining what works best.
"Everyone is special," isn't a solution to the problem of education. It's a direction in which education can seek the next marginal improvement in performance.
Nursery platitudes are nearly always true in a certain way, yet contradict each other. An education that includes critical thinking should enable one to do more than pick which naive certainties to believe.
Well, all that stuff about education being more complicated than it looks... let's take that as given.
On the other hand, if you want innovation, you can't be afraid of failure. There was a time, after all, when universal, compulsory primary education was controversial. This ought to give us some perspective on what "success" and "failure" means in the context of a 150 years of universal public education in this country, and the perennial attempts to "reform" it. The important thing to remember that "success" and "failure" are these days are about margins.
If you step back and imagine what the country would be like without universal education, and compare that to what we have now, it's clear that universal education is a smashing success. This is not to deny that there are underperforming schools, but we've been politically conditioned to think of education as failed, because it doesn't do everything we imagine it could. It's like a poker game that politicians play (with our money). "The schools are doing everything they can." Well, that's a safe bet, but then the natural thing to do is to see that "not everything" and raise it to "crisis", then to see "crisis" and raise it to "failing".
We become so emotionally overwrought with political tussling, we get into a kind of all or nothing mindset in which certain modest changes are seen as do-or-die necessities to save education by their proponents, and are equally seen as the doom of 150 years of educational progress by their opponents.
Take charter schools. It is true that charter school parents are somewhat more satisfied than their district run counterparts, however there doesn't seem to be very much measurable difference between charter school students and system students. On the flip side, the system advocates predictions of doom haven't come true. Personally, I have a sneaking suspicion that both classes of schools try a bit harder because they have to justify their existence, which is good. But it's not the only way to motivate people.
All or nothing thinking clouds our judgment. I went to a meeting recently for parents of "gifted" kids (I hate that term). There was a great deal of heat about the math program the school system bought. It was supposedly flexible to adapt to students of different abilities, but parents felt it had "failed". Well, my daughter scores at least three sigmas over the mean in math assessment tests. It's not reasonable for me to demand that the school throw out all their texts and workbooks because they don't meet her needs. I'd be satisfied if they just cut down on the amount of drill, which is OK, in reasonable amounts but which this student doesn't need as much of. What she needs is more time to pursue enrichment, which the school system doesn't even have to provide.. Unfortunately, all to often the reward for completing your work quickly and accurately in these test-driven days is to get more of the same work. The school system doesn't even really need to provide enrichment. My teachers used to send me down to the library when I'd finished the work, and I used that time to do things like get my ham radio license, at no expense to the school.
This is an example of what I'm talking about. Schools are much more reform minded now, which is good, as long as expectations are realistic and reasonable. Overall, I'd say schools have been improving, through dint of long struggle. The controversial math program is far better than anything I ever heard of in the post-Sputnik days, but it just has to be used intelligently and flexibly. There is a sense of helplessness in the face of a crisis nobody knows how to address -- because (with exceptions noted) -- it largely doesn't exit. This is counterproductive because nobody wants to be seen as not using up every minute of a student's time and every once of their effort, regardless of whether that is beneficial or not. In time, I believe the testing hyster
No, my analogy actually says none of those things, because I'd expected the economic policies of the prior administration to end in disaster, and I was aware that there was a housing bubble, although I'd be lying if I said I'd been perspicacious enough to connect the two.
The salient point of the analogy is that swift action is needed to stabilize the patient.
Yes, I agree, the correct term is deflation.
In any case, we agree the problem has been built up over the last several decades. It's not just Bush's fault; I wouldn't even say it's primarily his fault, although he made it worse. Aside from moving the country towards fiscal insolvency, the reaction to the growing crisis was ineffectual. Don't get me wrong, I think Hank Paulson is a decent guy, but he was trying to be agile and flexible, but what Wall Street really needed was stability.
In a way it's ironic that John Snow left, in part, because his brokers had invested some of his money in Fannie and Freddie's securities (like everybody else did, directly or indirectly). I don't think that was a substantive ethical violation, although the rule is sound and divesting should be sufficient. The problem is that I think that was a really bad time to switch leadership at Treasury. A few lonely analysts were sounding the alarm as early as 2004, and 2007 was when the leading edge of the crisis was obvious for everyone to see, which means 2006 was a bad time for a new secretary to be learning the ropes. In part that may account the way Paulson always seemed to be a step behind developments.
That's why I don't like the politics of political vendetta. As long as Bush was president, I wasn't going to get policies I approved of, although Paul O'Neill might have made a difference if he hadn't stuck his hand in the Iraq meat grinder. But as long as the policies were going to be Bush policies, it doesn't really help the country to have a secretary who's still learning the names on the organization chart.
Where we really disagree is the treatment (a cure is not to be hoped for). If we were talking in 1998, I'd agree completely with you. Right now we're very obviously past a tipping point. There's nothing in my opinion, that government can do to to stop things from getting worse. The question is how much worse and for how long? That's the only thing we can affect.
Keeping on our highly misleading metaphor, it is often said that the difference between medicine and poison is dosage... But it should also be said that the difference is timing. Stimulus packages are inflationary in their effect. In an economy with full employment, inflation under control, and steady growth you need it like a healthy person needs a shot of (to mix a medical metaphor) digitalis. Austerity measures are more like a shot of curare -- just the stuff for poisoned arrows or treating severe tetanus.
It's the context that makes it a poison on one hand or a medicine on the other. Belt tightening would have been the best possible thing when the private sector was producing full employment, regular growth with modest inflation. Unfortunately that's not how the politics of budgeting works: when growth is strong we feel easy about spending, even though it pushes the economy in an inflationary direction. When times are tough, the government sector contracts (stimulus notwithstanding; state government is about 6% of GDP, smaller than Federal spending, but larger than Federal discretionary spending).
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Oh, but marketing messages are like those pictures where you see one picture but then look at it again and it's another one altogether.
If you were trying to promote Linux this way, you'd be a moron to say Linux is for quick things and Windows for intensive things. You'd say, Linux is agile and efficient but you can have Windows too because they (The Man, you know) makes you.
But in any case promoting Windows is not what this is about. I don't know about Dell, but Asus doesn't even brand it's quickstart Linux environment as "linux". It'd probably be the kiss of death because IT or purchasing would have conniptions -- possibly both. It's all about getting to your email while you're waiting to board the plane sort of thing. Of course, that's what the God supposedly made Blackberries for, but there's something to be said for having a real browser on a real machine with a keyboard attached. Safari on the iPhone comes close, of course.
Still, if for some reason you're stuck on an island with wifi, and the tide is rising so quickly you're going to drown if you can't communicate, then it's kind of like security blanket to know you can have a complete, self-contained communication package at your fingertips in under ten seconds fro the get-go. Apparently that kind of scenario figures in some people's nightmares.
Actually, I have an Asus F8VA-C1 machine that has this feature. The Linux environment is specially optimized to boot in about eight seconds from the point you hit the switch. It provides a basic suite of applications (real ones, like FireFox and Skype). Shutdown is just as quick, or you can choose to exit Linux and start Windows without doing a machine reset/POST.
If you hit the button for Linux and instantly change your mind, you can just immediately exit Linux to Vista and it doesn't make any significant difference to the total Vista boot time, although that's not saying much.
In any case, this kind of environment is not designed to be used as you suggest, with some apps residing on Linux and some on Windows. It's designed as an alternative for situations like when you're in the airport about to board and want to check your email. I actually kept my "Splashtop" partition, even though I promptly replaced Vista with 64 bit Ubuntu. What kind fo a moron ships 32 bit Vista on a machine with 4GB of RAM installed?
Well, not to meta-nitpick or anything, but I'm sure Access would have sold Palm a new license if Palm had been willing to pay anything like it must be paying to get a whole new OS.
Still, in the era of $300 laptops, I wonder how cheaply some Chinese company could sell a knock off of the old Palm m505. For a lot of people, that pretty much was all the PDA they really needed. PDAs got powerful and converged partly because the companies built around selling PDAs were built around selling expensive, high margin items. If you could buy such a device for, say $29.99, it would sell. Add bluetooth and the ability to dial a number of common phones out of the addressbook, and you'd have something.
I guess that's settled.
In Boston right of way goes the first driver to flip the bird.
You try shoehorning qt or gtk onto a 68000 running at 16MHz with 128K of memory.
If I recall, it wasn't any worse than any other API of comparable ability capable of running on similar hardware. It was idisyncratic of course because it wasn't Win32 which only seemed normal because so many people had to deal with it, and it didn't have the luxury modern frameworks do of burning processor time and call stack in order to provide an orthogonal model with close one to to one correspondence between what you saw on the screen and the objects you manipulate to make it happen.
Anything new you have to learn is a pain in the ass.
I think we have to judge an API like this by its results. A lot of people managed to develop a lot of applications for a lot of users, and by in large those applications were useful, functional and stable.
Still, I think that the direction palm is going from an API standpiont is good. They've lost the developer mindshare war, so having a totally foreign API and application model is a luxury they can't afford. It sounds like they're doing the right thing on PIM data synchronization too. It's a scandal how you can't get a decent shared calendar on a mobile device without buying Exchange.
On the other hand, I wish they would still offer non-converged devices. I realize it doesn't signify anything from a marketing standpoint, but I'd run out and buy a Pre right now if I could get it without the phone. I already have a phone, and I really hate having my PIM tied to my cell provider.
Darwin's ideas are, in point of fact, a species of orthodoxy, just like creationism. The important thing to remember is that religion and science deal with new ideas in precisely opposite ways.
If a creationist theologian examines the notion that man is descended from other apes, he refers to the assertions of his orthodoxy, and sees that God created Adam on the seventh day, and therefore rejects this new idea. If an anthropologist examines the idea that such and such a hominid was an ancestor of man, then he sets out to prove that the notion is inconsistent with known fact. He sets out, in effect, to prove that evolution did not happen in this case.
The statistician's name for this notion is "the null hypothesis". In setting out to prove an idea, you set out to disprove the null hypothesis. In this game, the null hypothesis is considered innocent until proven guilty: any reasonable grounds whatsoever for accepting the null hypothesis is allowed. If under those slanted rules, the null hypotheses fails, then the idea must be considered consistent with all the facts currently in hand.
Scientific theories perform some of the same functions as religious dogmas in casual reasoning. They can, of course, be wrong and this wrongness can temporarily slow scientific progress. But when it comes down to real work, the core function of a scientific theory is completely opposite to that of religious dogma. Scientific theories are not touchstones; they are sources of ideas to disprove as null hypotheses. The published empirical data are the touchstone against which the scientist sets out to crush the tenets of scientific theory, if he can. If he fails, then he has advance scientific knowledge.
It is their reliability as sources of failing null hypotheses that makes scientific theories practically useful to researchers. The reason a scientist, in his gut, reacts against creationism is he is sure that he will set out to disprove it and succeed.
Now the notion that we've made a religious fetish of Darwin reflect a fundamental misunderstanding about how the differences between theology and science. Scientists are not necessarily philosophers of science, so when they are invited to a debate by theologians, they often unconsciously slip into arguing on theological grounds, or they simply fail to communicate because neither side has any intellectual context for understanding the other, and neither side is aware of this.
If theologians new how scientific theories are actually used they'd be less anxious to seek the imprimatur of the scientific community.
Well, I sort of agree, but I don't think about this quite the way you do.
At the bottom of this is not some secret Apple thought control project. At the bottom of this is a simple truth anybody who has ever been in business with open eyes knows: it is expensive to get customers. A direct corollary of this is that sales to existing customers are more profitable than sales to new customers.
So, the vendor's strategy is always simple: everything you do is oriented to establishing a relationship with a customer and using that relationship to repeatedly sell, sell, sell. A customer's strategy is different. He doesn't care if the vendor makes more profit or less, he just wants the cheapest prices in the long term. This means he has no interest in a relationship with the vendor unless the vendor does something to make it worthwhile. Generally, its a nuisance for the consumer to keep having to evaluate whether his relationship with a vendor is still worthwhile.
Still, is it so bad for a vendor to offer a product only to certain of his customers? If its based purely on what those customer have bought in the past, I don't think so. When you buy your copy of Mac OSX, you know that running it on Apple hardware is part of the deal, so you can't say they "forced" you to do anything.
So let me get to the point here: is being able to use MacOS worth having a relationship with Apple? Well, unless you really need Apple only software, unless you can't live without iPhoto or GarageBand, I'd say no. Having used Mac OSX, Gnome on Ubuntu, Vista and Xp more or less equally over the last two years, OSX a nice desktop OS, but it is nothing special. It's nicer than Vista on an underpowered machine, which is not saying much. But if it is better than Gnome, it's not so much better that it is worth worrying about whether what you are doing is moral. Ten years ago, I was a huge Apple fan, and maybe when Mac OSX came out they had a bit of an edge, but I don't see any edge today.
So my take on this is is that I'm not even going to think about setting up a Hackintosh, becauset he deal Apple is offering is so lackluster it's not even worth my while to consider wheter it would be moral to do so. It's nice software, but it comes with strings, and there's other nice software out there with no strings. In that situation, it's like choosing between a slice of Lemon Meringue for free and Key Lime for $20. Some people would shell out $20 for the Key Lime without batting an eye. Others will rage at the iniquity of charging $20 for a slice of pie. Some may spend their days dreaming up schemes for getting a free slice of Key Lime. But I'm not even sure I like Key Lime better then Lemon Meringue, so I'll just take the free slice and move on with my life.
Now if Apple puts out an OS that is so splendid I'm really tempted to spend a day screwing around installing it on a Hackintosh, then I'll probably just buy another Mac.
Well, cybernetics came into widespread use meaning the study of feedback and control systems.
Computers obviously have considerable applications to many modern control applications. However, it was premature in the 80's and 90's to refer to anything computer related as "cyber-". The case may somewhat different today, particularly in regard to security.
A system's property of "security" is not inherent in the security of its parts, it is not in any way shape or form the sum of the security of its parts. A secure system may include some insecure components, and an insecure system may contain nothing but secure components. Therefore it is possible to argue that security is truly a cybernetic phenomenon, in which we try to keep the system in some kind of defined state (including defined states of knowledge and ignorance on the part of its participants).
That' said, people who use the prefix "cyber-" to refer to anything related to computers are morons.
Without any doubt, Will Dunham's Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics ought to top your list. If a student has any mathematics in his soul, this book will speak to it.
Technically, the book only requires only the most rudimentary geometry, algebra and trig to follow. I'd guess that students who have taken pre-algebra and are mathematically inclined should not only be able to follow it, but get a great deal from it. The strength of this book is that it strips the didactic shell from mathematics, laying bare its essential fascination: the struggle of an individual mind to find that one insight that will bring the solution to a problem within its grasp.
Well, possibly. Personally, I find the idea of every application abandoning ship and going for its own way of organizing functions precisely what was wrong with open source software ten years ago. It bothers me that the most recent versions of Explorer have an unique user interface for now good reason. By contrast, Firefox has a conservative user interface; Safari does as well, with certain unusual touches that are nonetheless completely intuitive.
What's interesting about Office is the way that it's user interface, although a major break with the old Multiple Document Interface, is still driven by technical decisions made as far back as Windows 1.0. For one thing,it would appear that events are still routed through an application's main window, so you need to have a window for the application to exist, even if you no longer want to have an MDI style user interface.
Indeed, I tried a recent edition of OpenSUSE; while I can see what the KDE developers are shooting for (which to some degree overlaps some of the better UI ideas in Vista), it's definitely not ready for prime time. Also, the most recent OpenSUSE had a lot of integration problems with bleeding edge stuff. For one thing, KDE4 and pulseaudio kept stepping on each others' feet.
So, I'll stay away from OpenSUSE. There are plenty of more conservative and reliable choices.
Really, what sets apart distros these days are how well they manage package dependencies/conflicts and how close they are to the bleeding edge. Being close to the bleeding edge tends to mean more conflict.
Better yet, pay the bonuses in "toxic assets".
It demonstrates one simple, incontrovertable fact that is absolute poision to Microsoft's business model: operating systems aren't all that important.
Oh,back in the day, when you couldn't shoehorn a real operating system onto a machine with a sixteen bit address bus, it was a given that operating systems for personal computers were horribly inadequate. Every time a new version of the operating system came out, it'd take advantage of something that was now affordable on a desktop that never had been before. So you looked forward to an OS release as a release from some piece of pain or another. So an operating system release was a big deal.
We are in the era of diminishing returns when it comes to new OS releases. Oh, they maybe handle new version of hardware that are marginally better than they old hardware, like Sata vs. ATA, or going back farther in time, more convenient support for things like wifi. And, of course, the OS developers fix mistakes they made way back in the old days.
The problem for MS is trying to drum up the old excitement (with its influx of cash), like when we went from Windows 2 to Windows 3, which made it easy to run more than one application at a time (which was not a concern back when you'd only had 256K of RAM). You've got to add features and treat them like they're revolutionary.
Ubuntu is not without its problems, the biggest of which is getting to work on notebook hardware whose manufacturers consider getting the BIOS to work with Windows getting the job "done". But, once you get it running, you don't sit down to work at your computer and say, "gee I'm working on Ubuntu." Good Linux distros fade into the background, where they belong. Operating systems are just packages of functionality which make it easy for you to get at your data and manipulate it with your preferred tools.
What's scary about a distro like Ubuntu is that it doesn't compete against Windows. That's how Microsoft has won for years, when competitors look at MS products and decide they have to follow Microsoft's lead, even if they were first. With each new Linux distro release, you don't get an attempt to revolutionize the desktop experience. What you you do get the same experience you had yesterday, with a few problems sorted out and a couple of modest refinements. In contrast, with each new version of Windows, MS seems to scrape the bottom of the change barrel a bit deeper, down to renaming and shifting around control panel applets so there's absolutely no way you could mistakenly think you didn't get an upgrade.
Of course, MS has a great deal of opportunity for just fixing the mistakes of the past, which is a good thing. Vista could have been the best Windows ever, except it had too many competing agendas. Windows 7 is shaping up to be the kind of incremental release on Vista that we're used to in the Linux world, and by contrast it will seem wonderful with the XP to Vista transition.
We already can drop weapons from on high. So can a lot of the countries. Pretty soon second string regional powers like Iran will be able to as well. Nobody is talking about that.
It's not the stuff on the ground that this concerns, it's the stuff in space that so much of humanity depends on for things like communication and weather tracking. And the US is a disproportionate beneficiary of this, when compared to countries who are just getting into the orbital club.
Like ... freshly caught Cornish pixies.
There, I said it. I feel so dirty. I'm such a geek, and not even a cool geek who builds robots and stuff like that.
There's no evidence to support such a broad generalization. For example, the country that brought you the Stealth Bomber also designed the iPod.
That doesn't mean that spending more on defense than all the other countries on the planet put together does not have an impact on our general competitiveness, but that impact is complex. For example, high tech military R&D encourages people to go into engineering. On the other hand, the firms or divisions of firms doing military engineering aren't doing much directly relevant to consumer products, and the practices aren't very transferable to consumer products. On the other hand to the other hand, military R&D and engineering supports infrastructure useful to all kinds of R&D and engineering, such as engineering schools and basic research.
There's probably at least a score of "other hands" to consider in a generalization like that.
I would venture one alternative explanation. This explanation doesn't explain everything, but it is certainly worth thinking about. The fact that we spend so much money on defense technology reflects our affluence. We are so wealthy that we buy the military equivalent of luxury goods. A Honda Accord is for most situations perfectly adequate for commuting, but many people who can afford it prefer a Mercedes. Likewise, we might not necessarily need one all weather ultra-flexible (and complex) defense system where two cheaper ones might do, but whether or not it is truly cost-effective, there is no doubt that the more complex system is a tour de force.
The relevance to consumer products is this: they're expensive to make in a country that can afford a bomber that can fly from the US Midwest to the Middle East to 100,000 lb of ordnance. And in consumer goods, while you can make lots of money with luxury niche products, the greatest gross figures are in catering to the masses.
It is always the high end of the low end that you have to watch, which is why Linux equipped Netbooks are such a threat to Microsoft's monopoly. It's not doom, it's just a beachhead on the edge of their profitable territory that they can neither afford to occupy, nor leave unoccupied.
Possibly, of course. We can't prove the non-existence of something, after all.
The question is, where is the evidence that Obama thinks this way? Just because you can arrive at the conclusion "we oughtn't pursue space weapons" from the premise "owning a weapon makes you a bully" doesn't mean that the premise is logically necessary. A->B does not imply B->A.
Sure, but ... I actually think they're on the right track.
I once worked for a guy who loved hardware. He spent altogether too much time scheming about ways to get new and bigger hardware. I used to keep myself in beer by betting him when he announced the next hardware acquisition he was going definitely going get into the budget. The thing was, when he did succeed, by the time the machine came in it was no longer impressive. I used to tell him, time and time again, "hardware is just incipient trash."
I know a scientist who had a reputation making field season in which she discovered a new infectious agent that crosses between humans and primates in Africa. She then had her laptop and all her backups stolen while she was in the bush.
The lesson of these stories is this: what matters is data. Hardware, even software are just ways of getting at the data and working with it more efficiently. Well, mostly more efficiently.
From the standpoint that data is paramount and hardware and software are necessary junk, a lot of things look different. For example the convergence of phones, PDAs and media players. There's nothing wrong with a converged device, in fact it's just a convenient way to access a variety of data without having to wear a Batman style utility belt. But convergence is not a logical endpoint because causes almost as many problems for the user at it solves. What drives convergence is not that convergence is the best possible architecture for all users , all the time, but it gives manufacturers an excuse to continue making profitably expensive devices as the price of hardware continues to fall.
The iPhone shows the limitations of convergence. This may seem strange, because the iPhone seems like the ultimate argument for convergence. But convergence is just an implementation detail for a limited range of use cases. Apple knows this, they just don't talk about it because it's part of their secret architectural sauce. What really matters is making it easy to move data around. In the long term, the iTunes store represents customer lock-in, which is why it works only with the iPod and the iPod works only with it. And note how while the iPhone is a remarkably good value, the cables to connect it to a decent video monitor are shamelessly expensive. Once you've bought the iPhone itself, which is a bargain, you're going feel you need that $50 collection of $0.25 worth of plastic, copper and labor.
What should happen is that users should have personal networks, anchored by a device like this that is so cheap it's hardly worth stealing, and so tiny it hardly counts as carrying something. The converged phone is simply a terminal which connects user interface to data to network. If you are settling down to do some extended work, then a tablet or notebook takes over the user interface functions.
What matters is having access to data and being able to manipulate it conveniently and easily. What system vendors do is they get you close to that point, then find profitable ways to get between you and your data. Apple's brazen cables (well, shameless cables) are actually relatively benign: you pay Apple and they go away. Watching your videos on your living room TV doesn't involve and ongoing relationship with Apple. In contrast, the wireless carriers are a total pain because they want to charge tariffs on data access. You're continually finding that you have to use their applications and their services. Why should anyone pay for picture mail service if they have a device with an operating system and TCP/IP stack in it?
Of course, the carriers are really schizophrenic about Internet access. People want Internet access, but they do their best to sell them pricey and kludgey substitutes. SMS has to be a huge money maker for them, but any instant messaging service is far better from the use
The reasons geeks think this way is that they think everything but the hardware is free, starting with the labor of assembly and testing, certainly, but also support, distribution marketing, even packaging. If I were starting out to build a computer, it wouldn't even have a case, and it would ship as a box of loose parts and wires, like the good old Altair.
Well, yes obviously. But being able to place something in orbit is probably the most significant milestone on the road to being able to place a warhead any place on the planet. Once you achieve that, then terrestrial distances are not a barrier.
In fact, the Sputnik rocket was simply one of several prototype variants of the R-7 rocket, the world's first ICBM. The Sputnik launches were in essence part of the testing program for that missile, which had its first successful flight a little more than a month before Sputnik 1. The Sputnik rocket was little more than a shortened version of that rocket.
For historical reference, the timeline looks like this:
May 15, 1957: First launch test of prototype R-7 fails, traveling only 400km.
August 21, 1957: on third attempt, R-7 prototype makes first successful flight of 6000km.
October 4, 1957: Sputnik launched on slightly shorter, lighter version of successful R-7 prototype.
December 15, 1959: An R-7 is deployed, becoming the world's first operational ICBM.
Total time from achieving Earth Orbit to Functional ICBM: 26 months.
Well, some people are just square pegs that don't benefit from the usual treatment.
The late Henry Stommel became a full professor at Harvard and later MIT with only a Bachelor's degree in mathematics. Of course, he was one of those intellectual freaks of nature who stroll into a field of study and discover all kinds of really fundamental stuff that everybody else somehow missed. WW2 interrupted his graduate career, and by the time it would have been an obviously pointless charade put him through a PhD program.
How about, while we're at it, we stop telling the little brats and their brats about how special they all are and instead start sending the message that it takes hard work and dedication to amount to anything in this world?
Well, I'll tell you the problem with that idea. Telling people anything of that nature is pointless. Every American has heard "a penny saved is a penny earned," and most surely understand that thrift and spending restraint (economic ironies aside) are personally beneficial. But how many of them put that into practice?
That's what makes education hard. It's more than putting true information into naive eyes and ears. Yes, knowing who Ben Franklin was and what he said and did is an important component of education. But that doesn't make you a Ben Franklin.
This kind of obsession about the message indoctrination is political education, not practical education. It doesn't matter whether the message is "everybody is special" (which is true) or "your actions have consequences" (which is also true). Only a politician or somebody who gives politicians too much credence could think those ideas are are somehow mutually exclusive.
Now I think we must remember two things. First, the "self esteem movement" is a dead horse, and has been for years. Anybody who listens to kids at all knows that while they crave a pat on the pack as much as anybody, they know when they deserve it and they know when its BS. The only people who are still talking about it either live in a place that hires poorly educated, unprofessional and clueless teachers, or they long for the pendulum to swing the other way, back to the day when education was a simple matter of a Teacher propounding Truth to passive, credulous students. The two phenomena are in my opinion correlated.
The second thing is that the self esteem movement, while misguided, was useful in its way. Further educational progress, I believe, depends on moving from a model in which students are treated as uniform vessels into which information can be poured with reproducible effect, to one which realizes that students are complex individuals with different cognitive talents and varied educational histories. Getting the most out of each student will ultimately require measuring those things and determining what works best.
"Everyone is special," isn't a solution to the problem of education. It's a direction in which education can seek the next marginal improvement in performance.
Nursery platitudes are nearly always true in a certain way, yet contradict each other. An education that includes critical thinking should enable one to do more than pick which naive certainties to believe.
Well, all that stuff about education being more complicated than it looks ... let's take that as given.
On the other hand, if you want innovation, you can't be afraid of failure. There was a time, after all, when universal, compulsory primary education was controversial. This ought to give us some perspective on what "success" and "failure" means in the context of a 150 years of universal public education in this country, and the perennial attempts to "reform" it. The important thing to remember that "success" and "failure" are these days are about margins.
If you step back and imagine what the country would be like without universal education, and compare that to what we have now, it's clear that universal education is a smashing success. This is not to deny that there are underperforming schools, but we've been politically conditioned to think of education as failed, because it doesn't do everything we imagine it could. It's like a poker game that politicians play (with our money). "The schools are doing everything they can." Well, that's a safe bet, but then the natural thing to do is to see that "not everything" and raise it to "crisis", then to see "crisis" and raise it to "failing".
We become so emotionally overwrought with political tussling, we get into a kind of all or nothing mindset in which certain modest changes are seen as do-or-die necessities to save education by their proponents, and are equally seen as the doom of 150 years of educational progress by their opponents.
Take charter schools. It is true that charter school parents are somewhat more satisfied than their district run counterparts, however there doesn't seem to be very much measurable difference between charter school students and system students. On the flip side, the system advocates predictions of doom haven't come true. Personally, I have a sneaking suspicion that both classes of schools try a bit harder because they have to justify their existence, which is good. But it's not the only way to motivate people.
All or nothing thinking clouds our judgment. I went to a meeting recently for parents of "gifted" kids (I hate that term). There was a great deal of heat about the math program the school system bought. It was supposedly flexible to adapt to students of different abilities, but parents felt it had "failed". Well, my daughter scores at least three sigmas over the mean in math assessment tests. It's not reasonable for me to demand that the school throw out all their texts and workbooks because they don't meet her needs. I'd be satisfied if they just cut down on the amount of drill, which is OK, in reasonable amounts but which this student doesn't need as much of. What she needs is more time to pursue enrichment, which the school system doesn't even have to provide.. Unfortunately, all to often the reward for completing your work quickly and accurately in these test-driven days is to get more of the same work. The school system doesn't even really need to provide enrichment. My teachers used to send me down to the library when I'd finished the work, and I used that time to do things like get my ham radio license, at no expense to the school.
This is an example of what I'm talking about. Schools are much more reform minded now, which is good, as long as expectations are realistic and reasonable. Overall, I'd say schools have been improving, through dint of long struggle. The controversial math program is far better than anything I ever heard of in the post-Sputnik days, but it just has to be used intelligently and flexibly. There is a sense of helplessness in the face of a crisis nobody knows how to address -- because (with exceptions noted) -- it largely doesn't exit. This is counterproductive because nobody wants to be seen as not using up every minute of a student's time and every once of their effort, regardless of whether that is beneficial or not. In time, I believe the testing hyster
No, my analogy actually says none of those things, because I'd expected the economic policies of the prior administration to end in disaster, and I was aware that there was a housing bubble, although I'd be lying if I said I'd been perspicacious enough to connect the two.
The salient point of the analogy is that swift action is needed to stabilize the patient.
Yes, I agree, the correct term is deflation.
In any case, we agree the problem has been built up over the last several decades. It's not just Bush's fault; I wouldn't even say it's primarily his fault, although he made it worse. Aside from moving the country towards fiscal insolvency, the reaction to the growing crisis was ineffectual. Don't get me wrong, I think Hank Paulson is a decent guy, but he was trying to be agile and flexible, but what Wall Street really needed was stability.
In a way it's ironic that John Snow left, in part, because his brokers had invested some of his money in Fannie and Freddie's securities (like everybody else did, directly or indirectly). I don't think that was a substantive ethical violation, although the rule is sound and divesting should be sufficient. The problem is that I think that was a really bad time to switch leadership at Treasury. A few lonely analysts were sounding the alarm as early as 2004, and 2007 was when the leading edge of the crisis was obvious for everyone to see, which means 2006 was a bad time for a new secretary to be learning the ropes. In part that may account the way Paulson always seemed to be a step behind developments.
That's why I don't like the politics of political vendetta. As long as Bush was president, I wasn't going to get policies I approved of, although Paul O'Neill might have made a difference if he hadn't stuck his hand in the Iraq meat grinder. But as long as the policies were going to be Bush policies, it doesn't really help the country to have a secretary who's still learning the names on the organization chart.
Where we really disagree is the treatment (a cure is not to be hoped for). If we were talking in 1998, I'd agree completely with you. Right now we're very obviously past a tipping point. There's nothing in my opinion, that government can do to to stop things from getting worse. The question is how much worse and for how long? That's the only thing we can affect.
Keeping on our highly misleading metaphor, it is often said that the difference between medicine and poison is dosage... But it should also be said that the difference is timing. Stimulus packages are inflationary in their effect. In an economy with full employment, inflation under control, and steady growth you need it like a healthy person needs a shot of (to mix a medical metaphor) digitalis. Austerity measures are more like a shot of curare -- just the stuff for poisoned arrows or treating severe tetanus.
It's the context that makes it a poison on one hand or a medicine on the other. Belt tightening would have been the best possible thing when the private sector was producing full employment, regular growth with modest inflation. Unfortunately that's not how the politics of budgeting works: when growth is strong we feel easy about spending, even though it pushes the economy in an inflationary direction. When times are tough, the government sector contracts (stimulus notwithstanding; state government is about 6% of GDP, smaller than Federal spending, but larger than Federal discretionary spending).