What is needed is to do some of the worst songs ever like those were done and see if improves the worst ones.
There's a word for that. It's called jazz.
Of course, a song doesn't have to be bad to work in jazz, but whether a not a song is good is not really a major factor. In Billie Holiday's early recordings they didn't let her use any good songs. She had to make do with Tin Pan Alley's rubbish. Ella Fitzgerald transformed "A Tisket a Tasket" into an American classic. In cold blood, "Every Day I Have the Blues" isn't much better than the Songsmith infomercial, but Joe Williams made it swing.
Of course every single earmark will be in the system. The agencies who disburse the money can't buy a box of paper clips without being able to point to a line in the budget authorizing the purchase.
The problem is in the second part: who is responsible for the earmark. True, "all spending bills have to originate in the House," but this doesn't mean much when bills can be mysteriously and anonymously altered in the reconciliation process, with earmarks nobody has ever heard of being inserted in the middle of the night before the bill comes up for a vote.
It's not just that the legislative branch has managed to muck with the Constitutional division of powers between the houses, they've developed ways of legislating and budgeting in secret. This isn't just a subversion of Constitutional divisions of power, it's a subversion of the whole rationale for representative democracy.
I've always wondered why proponents of term limits even bother. Even if we change the faces, we don't know what they're up to or who they're working for. Everything term limit proponents hope to gain by term limits can be achieved, and more, by simply requiring every public act of elected officials to be a matter of conveniently accessible public record. Until that happens we aren't electing public officials, we're electing rulers.
But this is a start. People using it will see the pork, and when they run into the stone wall trying to find out where it came from, they'll complain. Right now, they know there's stuff in there to complain about, but they can't get started because they don't know what it is.
But what we really need is a version tracking and autentication system for federal legislation to complement it.
It'd work like this.
You go onto the President's budget website and discover, say, a a hundred thousand dollar grant to some local company to study the effect of interpretive dance on crop growth. Where did it come from? Well, the budget site tells you it was an earmark in the 2010 transportation bill. How did it get into that?
Well, you go to Congress's legislation site, and find that the earmark was in the final bill, but not the initial house bill. The earmark was inserted the night before the bill went to a final vote, and the digital signature belongs to an aid in Senator Blowhard's office.
Transparency isn't just publishing data. It's establishing accountability by making everything traceable.
The technology to do this isn't exotic. The system resembles the kind of version control systems that even small software development teams can install and put in place. Commercial, off the shelf document and workflow management systems that could handle this for an enterprise the size of Congress have been in existence for at least twenty years, to my personal knowledge.
It would be amazing if putting such a system in place cost would more than ten or twenty million dollars. Even if it cost a hundred million, how much money would it save, even just in the first year? Could we even put a price on how much less corrupt government would be?
Any reasonable definition of "useful" is predicated on precision. A tape measure is useful when measuring for drapes, but not when machining parts for clocks.
I once worked at a place that had dumb terminals that were going on five years old that were seriously flaky because of the capacitors. I managed to fix the situation by telling the users that when they turned off the terminal at the end of the day, they should set the entire thing upside down. The idea was to use gravity to redistribute enough of the electrolyte so that the dielectric performance was improved. It worked like a charm, although I got a unfortunate reputation for being something of a mad scientist. People who couldn't remember my name would refer to me as "that guy who had us turn our computers upside down because of those jelly-roll things."
So although it is a long shot, it might be worth storing the things upside down. In part this might counteract the migration of electrolyte that has occurred over the years, and when they unpack the thing and set it upright, it will counteract any migration of electrolyte that occurred during storage -- presuming any is left.
I wonder whether sealing the circuit boards in wax might help with the outgassing problem. There's an epoxy that is specifically designed for pouring over circuits, but wax could be undone after the capsule was opened -- although it would be messy.
In any case, the first step you should take is to restore the computers to as close to perfect working order as possible. You could desolder the capacitors and install brand new, high quality replacements. Also pay attention to connectors that need replacement. Then you should prepare the computers for storage. Speaking of connectors, it might be best to unplug as many connectors as possible, to prevent metal-to-metal reactions. Disassemble everything, leaving clear instructions about how to put them back together again.
The hard disks are bound to be a problem. Assuming the motherboard and power supply survive, I'd include a variety of media: CD-ROM, CF Card (yes, I know it's a long shot), maybe even 5" floppies with FreeDOS. Since you probably don't want to encourage kids to mess with VDTs, I'm not sure what you should do about preserving the CRTs. I'd consider an inexpensive LCD panel or maybe even one of those USB LED displays and set the computer up to display a welcome message if it boots up at all.
It occurs to me that it might be worth making the time capsule airtight, adding valves to it, then purging and pressurizing it (slightly) with a inert gas. Other than the shell, you could probably get most of what you need form a welding supply store. Purging the air of water, oxygen and miscellaneous pollutants would reduce the chemical degradation of the equipment. Pressurizing it might retard the outgassing problem for a few years. Although it is unlikely that the capsule would remain pressurized after decades, you'd have to put a warning on it if you don't want some future person to blow their head off. You probably should put a warning on the capsule anyway; I agree with the other poster who noted that after several decades, you could end up with a box of gaseous poisons, and I don't think people will become more careful about this sort of thing. They might be used to a world in which pollutants are more carefully regulated and recycled.
You could include a seal that the openers would break, with instructions to do outdoors and to give it a few hours for any contaminants to disperse.
Finally, there's a lot of educational value simply in researching the problem. Students should contact curators at museums which preserve and display antiquities, or which collect old technology.
I think bringing in foreign tech workers is fine. The problem is sending them back home.
By the logic that says that bringing foreign tech workers into the US is bad for US tech workers, a software engineer would be better off looking for a job in Flint, Michigan than San Jose, California, because there are so many software engineers in San Jose. The problem with this reasoning is that the number of software engineers in San Jose attracts companies there, and those companies create jobs. Having other engineers around means you get a smaller proportion slice of a much, much larger pie. And the very best engineers don't just consume jobs, the create new industries.
The real fault with the H1B program is that it is structured in a way that encourages companies to offshore jobs. You bring a cohort of junior engineers in from India, have them gain experience in your field and product, then you kick them back to Banagalore, a ready made outsourcing team. Making employers shed H1Bs will only accelerate the loss of US jobs, giving US workers a larger proportion of a much, much smaller pie.
One thing we have to bear in mind is that Netbooks don't have to run Linux to be disruptive to Microsoft. They can be disruptive to Microsoft running Windows.
Microsoft gained its financial preeminence in the 80s. This was a time of exponential adoption. In that decade, roughly speaking, companies went from typewriters to putting computers on everyone's desks. This was a time when piracy was rife, but it didn't really matter because there was not so much a rising tide as a flood going on.
In the 90s, Microsoft successfully negotiated (against my expectations, I'll admit) a reasonably soft landing as the era of exponential expansion wound down. Having a monopoly, of course, was a big part of this. They even successfully managed the paradigm change of the Internet, in the short term.
But one thing that was clear to many of us over ten years ago was that if the general phenomenon of Moore's Law continued indefinitely, it would strangle Microsoft's operating system profits. At the end of the 80s, a "decent" computer cost the equivalent of maybe three or four thousand current era dollars. Within that retail price, there was a lot of room for Microsoft to charge profit. However, what would happen when computers cost less than the then unthinkable level of $500? The prices Microsoft charged for its operating system back then would be a huge fraction of the retail price.
That's why netbooks are disruptive. Linux does't have to run on them to cut Microsoft's margins. Microsoft has to cut its margins to prevent Linux from running on them. It's protecting its low end flank, so that developers and users don't start jumping ship en masse. Even so, they are less successful at keeping Linux out of the netbook area than they'd like. They've cut their prices enough to prevent serious damage in the immediate future, but not enough to keep the thin end of the wedge out.
If there's one thing that watching this industry for twenty years has taught me, is watch the high end edge of the low end. Once things start to move there, we aren't looking at the end of the beginning any longer; we're looking at the beginning of the end.
But Newtonian physics is not wrong. It's limited in its useful scope. However, that useful scope happens to be vast. Indeed usefulness within a limited, well-defined scope might well serve as a definition of a scientific theory. Here "scope" means a set of phenomena, and "usefulness" means the ability to draw inferences from a set of facts in the scope that will correctly predict other facts within that scope.
Newton's theory of gravitation's usefulness doesn't extend to the range of phenomena that the modern theories of quantum physics and relativity cover. It should be noted of relativity and quantum physics that as yet, neither works where the other works. So by any definition of the word "wrong" that includes Newtonian physics, all of modern physics would have to be called "wrong" as well.
Imagine that there was a religious sect based on the propositions of quantum physics. It adherents would surely regard relativity as heresy, and point to many ways that relativity was "false". In fact, they'd have solid, empirical proof that relativity was "wrong".
What's broken here is the notion that science somehow deals with the truth of theories. This notion is so far off track that it isn't even "wrong"; it's just confused. The very concept of an absolute truth is inherently unscientific. How could you possibly know you had absolute truth? You could unify all the known branches off physics, but that wouldn't prove you know everything there is to know about the subject. In Galileo's time, physics was synonymous with mechanics. Any unified theory of physics in that time would miss entire branches of physics that have been discovered since then.
We've lost sight of this, but what Newton essentially did was to unify the physics of his day. His three laws of motion summarize a vast amount of that physics, in that the predict phenomena as apparently different as the trajectory of a cannon ball and Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Newton's laws remain "true" for every area of application that existed in his day. That they don't work for things like modern solid state physics or cosmology is undeniable, but thinking this matters misses the point.
Some years ago, there was a popular recording of humpback whale "songs". It's marvelous, and surprising that humans have an artistic response to whale communication. It's wonderful that that response leads people to be interested in whales, to appreciate their beauty and majesty. But if we lose sight of the fact that the whales communicate for their own reasons, not to entertain us, then the whole human cultural phenomenon becomes a farce.
So, it is fine and good to find religious inspiration in science, as Baruch Spinoza did. But imposing religious ideas like absolute truth on science misses the thing which makes science science: a focus on empirical usefulness rather than "truth".
Perhaps we should talk less of a theory's "truth" as a theory's "scope". Completely untrue theories would have an empty scope. All other theories have different scopes of utility.
Well, the special thing about swapping is that literally any number of processes could be waiting for a piece of physical memory.
The really dysfunctional behavior on vm launch didn't exist in earlier betas of Vista. I expect that it was somehow introduced during the process of tweaking a little performance out of the "average case". Or it may have been the net effect of several tweaks to the virtual memory system, maybe optimistically extending the page file in hopes that swapping out a modest number of pages will fix the out of memory problem.
One thing is certain: the original Vista's choice of pages to swap out was pretty broken. Until I determined the problem was pagefile fragmentation, I found a few gigs of Readyboost RAM was a huge help, which indicates to me that the OS was repeatedly needing pages it had recently swapped out. After the problem had been fixed, the impact of ReadyBoost was significantly reduced.
I don't think it is the case that every version of Windows blocks for every kind of seek, otherwise it would severely cripple database servers running on it. However, in "showcase" situations, there is always a team of MS engineers who make mysterious tweaks to the registry to alter system behaviors. This is kind of like swapping between the CFQ and Deadline scheduler in Linux, except that the choice is documented. It's not delivered with the assumption that one size fits all.
Thank you for your very clear thoughts on this matter.
What's confusing is that the address space of processes and the physical memory addressable by the CPU happen to be the same. I just got in the habit, many years ago, of sizing swap equal to the maximum physical memory, and as a practical it's always worked well for me. I seldom use anything more than a fraction of my maximum swap space, but of course that's the last thing I'd ever want to happen.
It's likely that sizing swap to something like 24% (as you suggest) of real memory would work just as well nearly always. The launching of a virtual machine is probably one of the few exceptions, especially on operating systems poorly suited for that kind of thing. Also, as a developer, I often start big processes that I generally don't want running all the time, like commercial database servers.
In any case, I don't think virtual memory has ever been a substitute for RAM, although I remember when it first became available it was often touted that way. It's more of a way of addressing inefficient allocations of memory without burdening programmers with figuring out what is really needed when.
The suggestion elsewhere that an open source version of the dock might be called "SpackleMonkey" is apropos. If you patch leaky paradigms often enough, they begin to resemble each other: big balls of spackle.
For me, the pre-OS X version of the Mac were about as good as things get. It was like those Japanese sedans that are alike as peas in a pod because their design was very task centered. I have found OSX just as annoying as Windows. Although it looks fabulous, it does so at the expense of getting in the way.
This is the down side of Jobs' recreation of Apple. It is no longer a computer company. Yes, its still a user interface leader on its music players, but it's focus is on doing an impressive job on fine details. That works fine for iPods, but it doesn't work for computers, which users ask so much more of. The Dock is a prime example of a clever, obtrusive solution to a problem which had been handled with quiet competence before. In its jolly, gleaming, bouncy default state, it hogs huge amounts of real estate, jiggling and wiggling and generally calling attention to itself whereas everything it does was accomplished in less space, with less obtrusiveness in older versions of the operating system. You can tone it down, reduce it, and hide it, but aside from the fact it pops out when you don't want it, the Dock was designed to work best when it's just sitting there with a few big, fat icons. I do admire the magnification effect, which is a clever bit of UI spackle, but it would have been better to make it easy to launch/select with smaller widgets.
The key, pre OSX user interface principle that Apple followed was deference to the user, and one aspect of that is that when the user arranges things a certain way, they should stay that way. This, of course, is impossible when you combine the functions of launching and switching. Once you've gone down that route, you've thrown away the user's ability to put launch functions where he can find them without thinking. To my way of thinking, anything that takes a user's attention away from what he wants to do is bad.
After using OSX for about a year, I've concluded I'd rather use Vista, although it's frustratingly paternalistic, insisting on doing things on my behalf because it thinks it knows better. No, I don't want you to automatically install an udpate and reboot at 3AM by default, ruining a calculation that has been running for two days. But once you've fought it into a workable configuration, and thrown enough hardware at it, you can live with it.
It's not that I'm anti-Apple. Their iPod user interfaces are clearly superior. While iTunes has serious defects, there's no question they're light years ahead on making the whole music store to player business work. They're just no longer a company that produces a great computer user interface, from the perspective of somebody who spends well over a thousand hours a year working on a computer. Gnome, KDE and Xfce are all better to work with on if you have to do complex things, hour after hour.
One thing that happened to me, although this probably isn't the poster's problem, is that my pagefile got fragmented. So far as I know, this is the only problem that can be truly said to be unique to Windows. I have no idea why Windows puts its backing store in the filesystem. Surely the overhead of going through the filesystem is unnecessary. Perhaps it is a leacy of a time when the ratio of disk space to physical RAM was smaller, and having a growable swap space was desirable. I've never found dynamically growable swap something I've ever wanted in Unix.
In any case if you want to talk about brain damaged behavior, the way my pagefile got fragmented was that I run virtual machines for development purposes. This behavior has since been fixed (either by MS or VMWare) but launching the first virtual machine on Vista used to nearly crash the system for about ten minutes. What was happening was that Vista had used all the "unneeded" RAM for its various hare brained optimizations, and when you suddenly ask for one GB of virtual memory space it went into an epileptic fit trying to swap all that memory it was using out.
Now here's the really brain damaged part: I ended up (I discovered) with over a hundred thousand fragments in my pagefile.
How is that even possible?
The nearest I can guess is that Windows must, in its desperation to free up RAM with a full page file, take pages of memory and stuff them into the first free bit of space on the filesystem it can. This isn't a problem in Unix, where you just grab (I guess) the first appropriately sized piece of disk off a heap. While I suppose it might be possible for some kind of fragmentation to occur in a Unix swap partition, it's inherently an ephemeral problem that would tend to fix itself as the memory situation improves. In Windows, the problem persists even after you reboot.
When you run several virtual machines, you will swap unless you've got way more RAM than is normal for most users; more than many systems will accept in any case. I was mystified as to why my virtual machine performance, which I was extremely pleased with initially, became utter rubbish after a few months of usage, until I thought to check the pagefile. Ironically, dropping the pagefile altogether greatly enhanced the performance of the system, perhaps because it became more parsimonious with virtual memory space. Adding the pagefile back in, initialized to 4GB, fixed things.
So now, when I get a new Windows machine, I just do what I've always done in Unix: I set the pagefile system right at the start to something like twice the maximum physical memory I think I'll ever install. This leaves a margin of error for unexpected changes, like problems with updated virtual memory algorithms. It may be that most people seldom if ever need a backing store at all with current memory sizes, I do, and in any case at current disk prices 8GB of disk costs less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
One thing that occurs to me is that it would be even better to mimic Unix by creating a separate swap partition for the pagefile. It would have to be formatted of course, but if there's some kind of I/O crisis going on in the virtual memory system, this would at least tend to isolate it from the data in the real filesystems.
One question I don't know the answer to is whether on 32 bit windows with 4GB of RAM, there is any benefit to having a pagefile at all, given that RAM is larger than the usable virtual memory space, accounting for the addresses lost to memory mapped I/O. You can use PAE, but that seems kind of pointless to me. If you need it you should upgrade to 64 bit. But I don't know enough about how hardware support for virtualization works and interacts with the host operating system to say whether there might be any benefit when running virtual machines.
after years of users asking for an intrinsic outline mode, OO still doesn't have one?
Now before somebody jumps in with the suggestion of using Navigator, I'm aware this feature exists and while it is useful, it isn't even close to a substitute, even for an extrinsic outliner. Even laying aside the fact you can't collapse and expand paragraphs, you can't compose in the Navigator. You can only reorganize what is already there.
It's like OO has a waterfall model for document construction, where you generate a rough draft organization, then use the navigator to reorganize the preexisting headings. If you don't write the way OO wants you to write, you're SOL.
Interleaving composition and organization, with direct manipulation, is what outlining is all about. You are working on a section, are realize this bit needs a section of its own some place else. I'll admit that Navigator is close, but it doesn't provide that direct manipulation experience so critical to making outliners a natural way to compose. It's doable, but clunky; the reason people love outlining is that it is a tool that gets out of the way of the thought process.
It's the very closeness of what OO does have that makes that lack of this feature incomprehensible. Clearly, the pieces needed for the model are all there. Microsoft put them all together over ten years ago. So what is it with OpenOffice? Is there a patent of some kind that 's holding them back? Does outlining violate some kind of subtle user interface requirement? Or is it just a mental block on the part of the developers?
If there is one white person cracking racist jokes at everybody else's expense, and he has no particular position of authority over them, while it's undesirable, it's hardly worth worrying about. It's just stupidity, against whom the gods themselves contend in vain.
The one right most people seem to think they have, is the one that can't exist in a world in which stupidity exists: the right not to feel offended.
In an odd way, I don't really think this kind of humor is about death, because people really don't want to think about death. It's just taboo violation humor, like talking about sex, or flaunting bigoted language. Death just serves as something that makes people feel uncomfortable and which you're supposed to be very circumspect when talking about. In a way it would be better if it were about death, or at least more educational, if you will.
What really matters -- or I should say what ought to matter -- is whether the humor is clever or stupid. I say ought to because it's really, really futile to get yourself worked up over the stupidity of others. There's just too much of it. You only get bent out of shape when it gets drawn to your attention, but if you were really being aware, you'd realize whatever it is, it's just a drop in the ocean, a single electron in the Universe of stupidity.
Which is why I can't be bothered by priggishness about offensive humor. Oh, I draw exceptions for things like cracking racist jokes when there's just one black person in the group. There's good, practical reasons for being against that. I don't worry about a single white guy in a group of black guys who tells racist jokes either, because there's nothing more to be done in that situation above what he's doing himself.
Well, it was Roosevelt's policy to go off of the Gold Standard, so you have to credit him with that.
With respect to employment, you are right. As I said, GDP doesn't tell the whole story, although it tells an important part of one. In 1933, it was not humanly possible to get employers, burned by years of economic contraction. . That was the reason for all the various alphabet soup agencies -- to do something about the surplus labor. The employment market was not going self-correct in a matter of months, or even several years. Since the programs didn't eliminate the labor surplus, they can't reasonably be argued to have delayed any natural correction in the labor markets... at least not by much. In the meantime they staved off social disruption and desperation, because somebody was doing something. And if producing weapons to be expended on people in other countries was the magic that restored the employment economy, then one can't reasonably argue that having one crew dig a ditch in the morning and another fill it in the afternoon was the wrong kind of thing to do. If it was all defense spending then there ought to have been more government spending on programs, whether or not they produced anything that private individuals were going to buy or benefit from.
In any case, the pre-war Republicans were isolationists anyway. Their laissez faire attitude extended to German military aggression in Europe. It's fair to say that Roosevelt was hostile both to Germany and Japan's geopolitical ambitions, and if a Republican had been in power US entry into the war would have been delayed, if it ever took place.
In the end the important thing about the programs was that somebody was trying something. In the miasma of learned helplessness, Roosevelt got the country marching more or less in one direction. It might not have been the shortest possible direction out of the mess, but it was shorter than having people lay down and die, or worse yet get up and kill.
That's pragmatic leadership. Didn't you ever wonder how people didn't know they had a president who couldn't walk, or even stand up on his own? There was no room in their heads for that image, because FDR was doing so many things. The things didn't have to work according to some academic economic theory. None of that matters if businesses and financial institutions are being sacked by mobs with brickbats and molotov cocktails.
That research dates from the era when John Maynard Keynes was still out of fashion.;-)
You can tell by the faith in the unerring, benevolent effectiveness of the market's "self-correcting forces". Which is not to say that markets don't self-correct, over a sufficiently long timescale, when every grain of human economic irrationality to the contrary has been ground into dust. Keynes, like Socrates, was not so much brilliant at being right was being brilliant at figuring out how wrong conventional wisdom is.
2007 was probably the high water mark of the post Reagan anti-Keynes movement that believed that government intervention only slowed down the market's marvelous rapid self-correction powers. Somehow, though, those powers didn't work for Hoover, but nobody wants to talk about him.
Well, first let me start off by saying you are exactly right in saying George W. Bush's administration was exemplary when it came to helping the transition to Obama.
However, you may not be aware that many if not all of the stories of Clinton adminsitration vandalism were fabricated. The GSA, which administers the resources in question, found no evidence for any of the allegations. Likewise, the GAO, a congressional agency, initially found no support for any of the allegations. It reopened its investigation under political pressure from Bob Barr, and eventually revised its opinion to $15,000, not $250,000.
Furthermore, even this lower figure is based on Bush staff recollections. For example, there is no actual documentation that the "historic doorknobs" bearing the presidential seal actually existed; in fact there was no mention of these anywhere until after the investigation was reopened by the Republican Congress.
But of course, that is not proof that such doorknobs didn't exist, or that Clinton staffers didn't steal them. It just means even the $15,000 figure is hard to document. And there is no evidence at all for stories like the Clinton staffers defecating on desks. Since this would have to have been cleaned up, it certainly would have left a paper trail.
Make of that what you will, but even the Republican's own investigation showed that the claims were at the very least wildly exaggerated.
Well, FDR actually began to put the US on a wartime economic footing well before Pearl Harbor. Perl Harbor, as everybody knows, was Dec 7, 1941. Lend-Lease started nine months earlier.
Furthermore, real GDP growth had resumed by the end of FDR's first term.
In 1929, GDP was at an all time high of 101.4 billion dollars. Subsequently, under the Hoover administration it fell each of the next four consecutive years to a low of 68.3 billion 1929 dollars in 1933. That was the first year of FDR's presidency, which of course took place largely under a Hoover budget and Hoover economic policies.
From 1934 on, under Roosevelt budgets, GDP growth resumed, with the exception of 1938. The exception in 1938 was because 1937 was an outlier, with a GDP of 103.9 billion. Leaving that aside, growth through the first two terms of Roosevelt's administration was consistently on the order of 7.2 billion/yr, reaching 126.2 billion in 1941. This compares favorably to the 4.1 billion/yr of the roaring twenties. Note that ll this was before the war, given that Dec 7 was rather late to have any effect on economic figures for that year.
Now the initial effect of WW2 was a reduction in GDP. GDP resumed growth the next year, and continued to grow throughout WW2, but soared after the conclusion of the war, from 130.2 billion dollars to 151.9 billion the following year (adjusted to 1929 dollars).
So, yes, it was Roosevelt that turned around the Great Depression. Of course, GDP doesn't tell the whole story: WW2 certainly helped establish full employment.
The idea that Roosevelt's economic reputation was due to the "luck" of WW2 happening during his administration is a Republican fairy tale. They hated him, because he fixed what they broke. They hated his pragmatism, which made him in their eyes a class traitor. Anything less than undiluted laissez faire capitalism they called "socialism". They didn't see that Roosevelt was a capitalist. By addressing the legitimate economic concerns of ordinary people, he saved American capitalism, and kept the myopic, brain dead plutocrats from being lined up against the wall and shot in an American Bolshevik revolution.
Most of all, they hated him because he demonstrated that what G.K. Chesterton said about aristocracy applied to them:
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
Well, no question, the girls were being foolish. Fourteen years old is too young to realize that they aren't just flashing some skin to some boys that they are interested in. They are releasing nude pictures of themselves into the wild which very possibly will remain in circulation for the rest of their lives, and come back to haunt them. If they're eighteen, fine and good, but not fourteen.
Kids don't think about the extent of the consequences of their actions. That's why we don't let 14 year olds drive cars, for example. It is true that you can't prevent kids from doing things that have lifelong consequences, however taking reasonable steps to prevent and discourage such steps is just sensible.
That said, charging these kids with one of the biggest hot button crimes in the book makes a travesty of the purpose of the laws: to protect kids. Only a legalistic blockhead would do something like that. Now the notoriety will follow these girls to the end of their lives, which is in a way worse than the pictures.
The sensible and effective response is to simply meet with the parents of the children involved. That's a kind of lifelong consequence of a sort; they'll never be able to think back on the incident without burning with embarrassment. However, that's a healthy kind of discomfort. It wouldn't stem from feeling vulnerable now, but feeling smarter than they were then.
The biggest problem with Vista was that they underestimated the minimal hardware requirements by a factor of two.
I'm currently using a laptop with a 2.53 Ghz duo, the latest and greatest intel chipset and ati graphics card, and 4GB of RAM. I find Vista quite acceptable on this hardware, after finding it unacceptable on a 1.66Ghz Duo/2GB of RAM. I'm using Vista because for now Linux support of this new hardware is still pretty poor, so the normal situation for me is turned on its head: my Vista user experience on this machine is actually better than my Linux user experience. I'll probably switch to Linux once the hardware support improves, because I like the selection of software available, but for now I'm actually happy with Vista on this machine.
I believe that a lot of issues are magnified in a context of a machine that can't really run the operating system. For example, now that the machine I am using is very responsive under Vista, I don't find the UAC prompts so annoying.
On top of that, or perhaps because of that, the system is extremely aggressive about trying to squeak out small optimizations. As a programmer, my experience is that you can only get so much out of this kind of tweaking, and that sometimes you pay when you run into the unexpected.
One problem I had was that I was running virtual machines on Vista, and the sudden demand for another GB of RAM when the system had aggressively grabbed "unused" RAM for minor optimizations brought about severe thrashing. What's worse is that the system apparently dealt pretty stupidly with it, trying to swap out the memory it was using a little at a time, and extending the page file by a small amount. Eventually, I discovered that the pagefile had something on the order of a hundred thousand fragments! Dropping the pagefile actually improved performance. Allocating a new, large pagefile corrected this problem.
Vista is clearly a fairly large reorganization of the Windows codebase, and I think the fundamental changes are largely positive. For example, early on in my Vista testing, I had the audio system on my old laptop crash. Awful noise was coming out of the speakers, but everything else was fine. I was able to save my work and reboot the machine. I was actually favorably impressed by this: good design isolates problems, and in older version of Windows this sort of thing would have been a definite BSOD. It's not quite as good as being able to shutdown the audio system and reload the drivers on the fly, but I'll mark the containment of the problem as excellent and the response to the problem as acceptable.
However, the result of this kind of major reworking is that you end up using more resources. It happened with the early versions of Mac OSX. However, since Apple was selling the hardware, the coordination was better because there were fewer competing agendas. They only delivered it new on machines that were truly capable. Over time, the operating system became more efficient, probably through the kind of tidying one does as one maintains. Things like PreFetch and ReadyBoost are fine, but they're no substitute for quality, and quality takes time. Because quality takes time, It's OK to release an OS that is not as efficient as you can eventually make it, in my opinion, as long as you don't misrepresent what it really needs.
As of 2007, the NSA program is perfectly legal, accoring to the court. It does not necessarily mean that the program has always been legal. In fact, it's pretty likely that it violated a number of statues, and that's what's technically important here.
The powers of the President to wage war and to protect national security are subject to Congressional oversight and regulation. While most people are aware that the Constitution names the President "Commander in Chief", the powers granted to him are significantly less than those of a military dictator, even with respect to the policy and management of the military. For example officer commissions are approved by the senate Although this is largely a pro forma affair. Indeed every aspect of running and employing the military is subject to Congressional regulation.
This is important because in US Constitutional law, there is no explicit right of personal privacy, and the exact extent of the implicit right of privacy (under the Ninth Amendment) is not perfectly clear. If the Executive Branch is empowered to do something, that means it is up to Congress to see to it that it does not violate the Ninth Amendment.
It is largely due to Congress's power regulate Executive functions that we have many restrictions on wiretapping at all. While the reach of the Fourth Amendment has been considerably widened by court opinions in the 20th Century (e.g., Katz v. US) for criminal investigation, intelligence investigation inherently requires a violation of the "expectation of privacy", something that Katz says can only be done with a warrant in criminal cases.
So, if Congress says the President can intercept phone calls for intelligence purposes, it seems probable that this will be treated by the courts as constitutional. If that's not the case, it is Congress that has failed in its duty to safeguard Americans from the Executive Branch.
Treason is almost never charged. In the two hundred and twenty years since the US Constitution went into effect, the grand total of treason indictments: less than 40. Number of convictions: even less. Minimally, history has shown that we can run a country successfully without much use of the charge of "treason"; I'd say we probably could get by without that particular charge at all.
The framers seem to have been ambivalent about treason. It's mentioned in the Constitution, but in a way that suggests that they saw treason as a charge which invites political misuse. In order to convict somebody of treason, there has to be an overt act that is witnessed by two people or confessed by the guilty party. Furthermore, they are anxious to avoid treason as an pretext for seizing property, or disinheriting or disenfranchising relatives.
Treason, in the sense described by the constitution, is a political crime. What does it mean to "adhere to the enemies" of the United States, given that the President or a majority of Congress can name anybody they please as "enemies"? Is the government of Iran an enemy of the United States? How about the people of Iran? What about people who simply favor rapprochement with Iran? Can they be considered enemies as well? If Iran is an enemy, is aiding somebody sympathetic to the interests of Iran aiding, albeit indirectly, and enemy of the US?
The framers were wise in trying to make political crime an awkward crime to prosecute. I'd go further though, and make the trial of political crimes explicitly political. I think that it is perfectly feasible, given that treason cases come at a rate of about one every six years, to require a procedure similar to that used for impeachment. A person guilty of treason should be indicted by the House, and tried by the Senate, but I'd also add the restriction that he must be convicted by a supermajority of 60 Senators, and with the assent of the President.
It may be that treason has an inevitable place in our consciousness as a kind of horrendous crime of malicious and destructive disloyalty, whether we want it there or not. Even if we think that the government should not try people for political crimes, it is important that provisions be made for trying political crimes. The procedure be there, so that other charges are not politicized.
If someone is truly guilty of an act of supreme, depraved disloyalty, then it should be possible to attract support for conviction across a majority of the political spectrum. If it is not possible to get a majority of the people's representatives to support conviction, then the act cannot reasonably be considered treason. It is important to keep such a politically oriented charge out of the hands of any small number of people.
Well,the distros are supposed do all the heavy lifting for you when it comes to compatibility. Otherwise we'd all do Linux from Scratch.
KDE 4 is standard in OpenSUSE 11.1, which was released in mid December. In theory, this should mean that KDE 4 is the best tested, best integrated option for that distro. It should be the path of least resistance for any user with that distro. If the distro switches to KDE 4 and pulseaudio as defaults, then they really ought to work together by default with pretty much a click-through installation. If they don't, then they should default to alsa or KDE 3.5.
I'm posting a review soon of OpenSUSE on my blog. In a nutshell, I think it does a good job on some things, like hardware support, but it has a very shaky, bleeding edge beta-ish feel to it. This is a bit of a surprise, because when I used SUSE in the pre-Novell days, it was a very solid, no nonsense distro. If I want bleeding edge I'll download the tarballs myself, thank you very much.
I'd think that Novell would want to keep that kind of solid, no surprises user experience, that they'd want to position SUSE as a solid, reliable, no surprises business distro. Instead, it feels more like a hobbyist/enthusiast distro than something from a major software vendor. In fact I've used hobbyist distros that were more solid than OpenSUSE 11.1.
Still, with my relatively new hardware, I'm kind of screwed. I've kept the original hard disk with Vista on it, and to tell you the truth, Vista is quite pleasant to use on a machine with 2.53GHz dual core processor, 4GB of RAM, and latest and greatest chipset and mobile GPU, and 7200 RPM SATA disk. And I have to say I absolutely hated Vista on my older machine that had 2GB of RAM and 1.66GHz Core Duo. Vista was not as efficient as it could have been when it was released, but Microsoft really screwed itself by not setting the bar high enough for "Vista Ready" and "Vista Capable" certification.
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There's a word for that. It's called jazz.
Of course, a song doesn't have to be bad to work in jazz, but whether a not a song is good is not really a major factor. In Billie Holiday's early recordings they didn't let her use any good songs. She had to make do with Tin Pan Alley's rubbish. Ella Fitzgerald transformed "A Tisket a Tasket" into an American classic. In cold blood, "Every Day I Have the Blues" isn't much better than the Songsmith infomercial, but Joe Williams made it swing.
Of course every single earmark will be in the system. The agencies who disburse the money can't buy a box of paper clips without being able to point to a line in the budget authorizing the purchase.
The problem is in the second part: who is responsible for the earmark. True, "all spending bills have to originate in the House," but this doesn't mean much when bills can be mysteriously and anonymously altered in the reconciliation process, with earmarks nobody has ever heard of being inserted in the middle of the night before the bill comes up for a vote.
It's not just that the legislative branch has managed to muck with the Constitutional division of powers between the houses, they've developed ways of legislating and budgeting in secret. This isn't just a subversion of Constitutional divisions of power, it's a subversion of the whole rationale for representative democracy.
I've always wondered why proponents of term limits even bother. Even if we change the faces, we don't know what they're up to or who they're working for. Everything term limit proponents hope to gain by term limits can be achieved, and more, by simply requiring every public act of elected officials to be a matter of conveniently accessible public record. Until that happens we aren't electing public officials, we're electing rulers.
But this is a start. People using it will see the pork, and when they run into the stone wall trying to find out where it came from, they'll complain. Right now, they know there's stuff in there to complain about, but they can't get started because they don't know what it is.
But what we really need is a version tracking and autentication system for federal legislation to complement it.
It'd work like this.
You go onto the President's budget website and discover, say, a a hundred thousand dollar grant to some local company to study the effect of interpretive dance on crop growth. Where did it come from? Well, the budget site tells you it was an earmark in the 2010 transportation bill. How did it get into that?
Well, you go to Congress's legislation site, and find that the earmark was in the final bill, but not the initial house bill. The earmark was inserted the night before the bill went to a final vote, and the digital signature belongs to an aid in Senator Blowhard's office.
Transparency isn't just publishing data. It's establishing accountability by making everything traceable.
The technology to do this isn't exotic. The system resembles the kind of version control systems that even small software development teams can install and put in place. Commercial, off the shelf document and workflow management systems that could handle this for an enterprise the size of Congress have been in existence for at least twenty years, to my personal knowledge.
It would be amazing if putting such a system in place cost would more than ten or twenty million dollars. Even if it cost a hundred million, how much money would it save, even just in the first year? Could we even put a price on how much less corrupt government would be?
Any reasonable definition of "useful" is predicated on precision. A tape measure is useful when measuring for drapes, but not when machining parts for clocks.
I agree about caps.
I once worked at a place that had dumb terminals that were going on five years old that were seriously flaky because of the capacitors. I managed to fix the situation by telling the users that when they turned off the terminal at the end of the day, they should set the entire thing upside down. The idea was to use gravity to redistribute enough of the electrolyte so that the dielectric performance was improved. It worked like a charm, although I got a unfortunate reputation for being something of a mad scientist. People who couldn't remember my name would refer to me as "that guy who had us turn our computers upside down because of those jelly-roll things."
So although it is a long shot, it might be worth storing the things upside down. In part this might counteract the migration of electrolyte that has occurred over the years, and when they unpack the thing and set it upright, it will counteract any migration of electrolyte that occurred during storage -- presuming any is left.
I wonder whether sealing the circuit boards in wax might help with the outgassing problem. There's an epoxy that is specifically designed for pouring over circuits, but wax could be undone after the capsule was opened -- although it would be messy.
In any case, the first step you should take is to restore the computers to as close to perfect working order as possible. You could desolder the capacitors and install brand new, high quality replacements. Also pay attention to connectors that need replacement. Then you should prepare the computers for storage. Speaking of connectors, it might be best to unplug as many connectors as possible, to prevent metal-to-metal reactions. Disassemble everything, leaving clear instructions about how to put them back together again.
The hard disks are bound to be a problem. Assuming the motherboard and power supply survive, I'd include a variety of media: CD-ROM, CF Card (yes, I know it's a long shot), maybe even 5" floppies with FreeDOS. Since you probably don't want to encourage kids to mess with VDTs, I'm not sure what you should do about preserving the CRTs. I'd consider an inexpensive LCD panel or maybe even one of those USB LED displays and set the computer up to display a welcome message if it boots up at all.
It occurs to me that it might be worth making the time capsule airtight, adding valves to it, then purging and pressurizing it (slightly) with a inert gas. Other than the shell, you could probably get most of what you need form a welding supply store. Purging the air of water, oxygen and miscellaneous pollutants would reduce the chemical degradation of the equipment. Pressurizing it might retard the outgassing problem for a few years. Although it is unlikely that the capsule would remain pressurized after decades, you'd have to put a warning on it if you don't want some future person to blow their head off. You probably should put a warning on the capsule anyway; I agree with the other poster who noted that after several decades, you could end up with a box of gaseous poisons, and I don't think people will become more careful about this sort of thing. They might be used to a world in which pollutants are more carefully regulated and recycled.
You could include a seal that the openers would break, with instructions to do outdoors and to give it a few hours for any contaminants to disperse.
Finally, there's a lot of educational value simply in researching the problem. Students should contact curators at museums which preserve and display antiquities, or which collect old technology.
I think bringing in foreign tech workers is fine. The problem is sending them back home.
By the logic that says that bringing foreign tech workers into the US is bad for US tech workers, a software engineer would be better off looking for a job in Flint, Michigan than San Jose, California, because there are so many software engineers in San Jose. The problem with this reasoning is that the number of software engineers in San Jose attracts companies there, and those companies create jobs. Having other engineers around means you get a smaller proportion slice of a much, much larger pie. And the very best engineers don't just consume jobs, the create new industries.
The real fault with the H1B program is that it is structured in a way that encourages companies to offshore jobs. You bring a cohort of junior engineers in from India, have them gain experience in your field and product, then you kick them back to Banagalore, a ready made outsourcing team. Making employers shed H1Bs will only accelerate the loss of US jobs, giving US workers a larger proportion of a much, much smaller pie.
One thing we have to bear in mind is that Netbooks don't have to run Linux to be disruptive to Microsoft. They can be disruptive to Microsoft running Windows.
Microsoft gained its financial preeminence in the 80s. This was a time of exponential adoption. In that decade, roughly speaking, companies went from typewriters to putting computers on everyone's desks. This was a time when piracy was rife, but it didn't really matter because there was not so much a rising tide as a flood going on.
In the 90s, Microsoft successfully negotiated (against my expectations, I'll admit) a reasonably soft landing as the era of exponential expansion wound down. Having a monopoly, of course, was a big part of this. They even successfully managed the paradigm change of the Internet, in the short term.
But one thing that was clear to many of us over ten years ago was that if the general phenomenon of Moore's Law continued indefinitely, it would strangle Microsoft's operating system profits. At the end of the 80s, a "decent" computer cost the equivalent of maybe three or four thousand current era dollars. Within that retail price, there was a lot of room for Microsoft to charge profit. However, what would happen when computers cost less than the then unthinkable level of $500? The prices Microsoft charged for its operating system back then would be a huge fraction of the retail price.
That's why netbooks are disruptive. Linux does't have to run on them to cut Microsoft's margins. Microsoft has to cut its margins to prevent Linux from running on them. It's protecting its low end flank, so that developers and users don't start jumping ship en masse. Even so, they are less successful at keeping Linux out of the netbook area than they'd like. They've cut their prices enough to prevent serious damage in the immediate future, but not enough to keep the thin end of the wedge out.
If there's one thing that watching this industry for twenty years has taught me, is watch the high end edge of the low end. Once things start to move there, we aren't looking at the end of the beginning any longer; we're looking at the beginning of the end.
But Newtonian physics is not wrong. It's limited in its useful scope. However, that useful scope happens to be vast. Indeed usefulness within a limited, well-defined scope might well serve as a definition of a scientific theory. Here "scope" means a set of phenomena, and "usefulness" means the ability to draw inferences from a set of facts in the scope that will correctly predict other facts within that scope.
Newton's theory of gravitation's usefulness doesn't extend to the range of phenomena that the modern theories of quantum physics and relativity cover. It should be noted of relativity and quantum physics that as yet, neither works where the other works. So by any definition of the word "wrong" that includes Newtonian physics, all of modern physics would have to be called "wrong" as well.
Imagine that there was a religious sect based on the propositions of quantum physics. It adherents would surely regard relativity as heresy, and point to many ways that relativity was "false". In fact, they'd have solid, empirical proof that relativity was "wrong".
What's broken here is the notion that science somehow deals with the truth of theories. This notion is so far off track that it isn't even "wrong"; it's just confused. The very concept of an absolute truth is inherently unscientific. How could you possibly know you had absolute truth? You could unify all the known branches off physics, but that wouldn't prove you know everything there is to know about the subject. In Galileo's time, physics was synonymous with mechanics. Any unified theory of physics in that time would miss entire branches of physics that have been discovered since then.
We've lost sight of this, but what Newton essentially did was to unify the physics of his day. His three laws of motion summarize a vast amount of that physics, in that the predict phenomena as apparently different as the trajectory of a cannon ball and Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Newton's laws remain "true" for every area of application that existed in his day. That they don't work for things like modern solid state physics or cosmology is undeniable, but thinking this matters misses the point.
Some years ago, there was a popular recording of humpback whale "songs". It's marvelous, and surprising that humans have an artistic response to whale communication. It's wonderful that that response leads people to be interested in whales, to appreciate their beauty and majesty. But if we lose sight of the fact that the whales communicate for their own reasons, not to entertain us, then the whole human cultural phenomenon becomes a farce.
So, it is fine and good to find religious inspiration in science, as Baruch Spinoza did. But imposing religious ideas like absolute truth on science misses the thing which makes science science: a focus on empirical usefulness rather than "truth".
Perhaps we should talk less of a theory's "truth" as a theory's "scope". Completely untrue theories would have an empty scope. All other theories have different scopes of utility.
Well, the special thing about swapping is that literally any number of processes could be waiting for a piece of physical memory.
The really dysfunctional behavior on vm launch didn't exist in earlier betas of Vista. I expect that it was somehow introduced during the process of tweaking a little performance out of the "average case". Or it may have been the net effect of several tweaks to the virtual memory system, maybe optimistically extending the page file in hopes that swapping out a modest number of pages will fix the out of memory problem.
One thing is certain: the original Vista's choice of pages to swap out was pretty broken. Until I determined the problem was pagefile fragmentation, I found a few gigs of Readyboost RAM was a huge help, which indicates to me that the OS was repeatedly needing pages it had recently swapped out. After the problem had been fixed, the impact of ReadyBoost was significantly reduced.
I don't think it is the case that every version of Windows blocks for every kind of seek, otherwise it would severely cripple database servers running on it. However, in "showcase" situations, there is always a team of MS engineers who make mysterious tweaks to the registry to alter system behaviors. This is kind of like swapping between the CFQ and Deadline scheduler in Linux, except that the choice is documented. It's not delivered with the assumption that one size fits all.
Thank you for your very clear thoughts on this matter.
What's confusing is that the address space of processes and the physical memory addressable by the CPU happen to be the same. I just got in the habit, many years ago, of sizing swap equal to the maximum physical memory, and as a practical it's always worked well for me. I seldom use anything more than a fraction of my maximum swap space, but of course that's the last thing I'd ever want to happen.
It's likely that sizing swap to something like 24% (as you suggest) of real memory would work just as well nearly always. The launching of a virtual machine is probably one of the few exceptions, especially on operating systems poorly suited for that kind of thing. Also, as a developer, I often start big processes that I generally don't want running all the time, like commercial database servers.
In any case, I don't think virtual memory has ever been a substitute for RAM, although I remember when it first became available it was often touted that way. It's more of a way of addressing inefficient allocations of memory without burdening programmers with figuring out what is really needed when.
The suggestion elsewhere that an open source version of the dock might be called "SpackleMonkey" is apropos. If you patch leaky paradigms often enough, they begin to resemble each other: big balls of spackle.
For me, the pre-OS X version of the Mac were about as good as things get. It was like those Japanese sedans that are alike as peas in a pod because their design was very task centered. I have found OSX just as annoying as Windows. Although it looks fabulous, it does so at the expense of getting in the way.
This is the down side of Jobs' recreation of Apple. It is no longer a computer company. Yes, its still a user interface leader on its music players, but it's focus is on doing an impressive job on fine details. That works fine for iPods, but it doesn't work for computers, which users ask so much more of. The Dock is a prime example of a clever, obtrusive solution to a problem which had been handled with quiet competence before. In its jolly, gleaming, bouncy default state, it hogs huge amounts of real estate, jiggling and wiggling and generally calling attention to itself whereas everything it does was accomplished in less space, with less obtrusiveness in older versions of the operating system. You can tone it down, reduce it, and hide it, but aside from the fact it pops out when you don't want it, the Dock was designed to work best when it's just sitting there with a few big, fat icons. I do admire the magnification effect, which is a clever bit of UI spackle, but it would have been better to make it easy to launch/select with smaller widgets.
The key, pre OSX user interface principle that Apple followed was deference to the user, and one aspect of that is that when the user arranges things a certain way, they should stay that way. This, of course, is impossible when you combine the functions of launching and switching. Once you've gone down that route, you've thrown away the user's ability to put launch functions where he can find them without thinking. To my way of thinking, anything that takes a user's attention away from what he wants to do is bad.
After using OSX for about a year, I've concluded I'd rather use Vista, although it's frustratingly paternalistic, insisting on doing things on my behalf because it thinks it knows better. No, I don't want you to automatically install an udpate and reboot at 3AM by default, ruining a calculation that has been running for two days. But once you've fought it into a workable configuration, and thrown enough hardware at it, you can live with it.
It's not that I'm anti-Apple. Their iPod user interfaces are clearly superior. While iTunes has serious defects, there's no question they're light years ahead on making the whole music store to player business work. They're just no longer a company that produces a great computer user interface, from the perspective of somebody who spends well over a thousand hours a year working on a computer. Gnome, KDE and Xfce are all better to work with on if you have to do complex things, hour after hour.
One thing that happened to me, although this probably isn't the poster's problem, is that my pagefile got fragmented. So far as I know, this is the only problem that can be truly said to be unique to Windows. I have no idea why Windows puts its backing store in the filesystem. Surely the overhead of going through the filesystem is unnecessary. Perhaps it is a leacy of a time when the ratio of disk space to physical RAM was smaller, and having a growable swap space was desirable. I've never found dynamically growable swap something I've ever wanted in Unix.
In any case if you want to talk about brain damaged behavior, the way my pagefile got fragmented was that I run virtual machines for development purposes. This behavior has since been fixed (either by MS or VMWare) but launching the first virtual machine on Vista used to nearly crash the system for about ten minutes. What was happening was that Vista had used all the "unneeded" RAM for its various hare brained optimizations, and when you suddenly ask for one GB of virtual memory space it went into an epileptic fit trying to swap all that memory it was using out.
Now here's the really brain damaged part: I ended up (I discovered) with over a hundred thousand fragments in my pagefile.
How is that even possible?
The nearest I can guess is that Windows must, in its desperation to free up RAM with a full page file, take pages of memory and stuff them into the first free bit of space on the filesystem it can. This isn't a problem in Unix, where you just grab (I guess) the first appropriately sized piece of disk off a heap. While I suppose it might be possible for some kind of fragmentation to occur in a Unix swap partition, it's inherently an ephemeral problem that would tend to fix itself as the memory situation improves. In Windows, the problem persists even after you reboot.
When you run several virtual machines, you will swap unless you've got way more RAM than is normal for most users; more than many systems will accept in any case. I was mystified as to why my virtual machine performance, which I was extremely pleased with initially, became utter rubbish after a few months of usage, until I thought to check the pagefile. Ironically, dropping the pagefile altogether greatly enhanced the performance of the system, perhaps because it became more parsimonious with virtual memory space. Adding the pagefile back in, initialized to 4GB, fixed things.
So now, when I get a new Windows machine, I just do what I've always done in Unix: I set the pagefile system right at the start to something like twice the maximum physical memory I think I'll ever install. This leaves a margin of error for unexpected changes, like problems with updated virtual memory algorithms. It may be that most people seldom if ever need a backing store at all with current memory sizes, I do, and in any case at current disk prices 8GB of disk costs less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
One thing that occurs to me is that it would be even better to mimic Unix by creating a separate swap partition for the pagefile. It would have to be formatted of course, but if there's some kind of I/O crisis going on in the virtual memory system, this would at least tend to isolate it from the data in the real filesystems.
One question I don't know the answer to is whether on 32 bit windows with 4GB of RAM, there is any benefit to having a pagefile at all, given that RAM is larger than the usable virtual memory space, accounting for the addresses lost to memory mapped I/O. You can use PAE, but that seems kind of pointless to me. If you need it you should upgrade to 64 bit. But I don't know enough about how hardware support for virtualization works and interacts with the host operating system to say whether there might be any benefit when running virtual machines.
after years of users asking for an intrinsic outline mode, OO still doesn't have one?
Now before somebody jumps in with the suggestion of using Navigator, I'm aware this feature exists and while it is useful, it isn't even close to a substitute, even for an extrinsic outliner. Even laying aside the fact you can't collapse and expand paragraphs, you can't compose in the Navigator. You can only reorganize what is already there.
It's like OO has a waterfall model for document construction, where you generate a rough draft organization, then use the navigator to reorganize the preexisting headings. If you don't write the way OO wants you to write, you're SOL.
Interleaving composition and organization, with direct manipulation, is what outlining is all about. You are working on a section, are realize this bit needs a section of its own some place else. I'll admit that Navigator is close, but it doesn't provide that direct manipulation experience so critical to making outliners a natural way to compose. It's doable, but clunky; the reason people love outlining is that it is a tool that gets out of the way of the thought process.
It's the very closeness of what OO does have that makes that lack of this feature incomprehensible. Clearly, the pieces needed for the model are all there. Microsoft put them all together over ten years ago. So what is it with OpenOffice? Is there a patent of some kind that 's holding them back? Does outlining violate some kind of subtle user interface requirement? Or is it just a mental block on the part of the developers?
I'm looking at it pragmatically.
If there is one white person cracking racist jokes at everybody else's expense, and he has no particular position of authority over them, while it's undesirable, it's hardly worth worrying about. It's just stupidity, against whom the gods themselves contend in vain.
The one right most people seem to think they have, is the one that can't exist in a world in which stupidity exists: the right not to feel offended.
In an odd way, I don't really think this kind of humor is about death, because people really don't want to think about death. It's just taboo violation humor, like talking about sex, or flaunting bigoted language. Death just serves as something that makes people feel uncomfortable and which you're supposed to be very circumspect when talking about. In a way it would be better if it were about death, or at least more educational, if you will.
What really matters -- or I should say what ought to matter -- is whether the humor is clever or stupid. I say ought to because it's really, really futile to get yourself worked up over the stupidity of others. There's just too much of it. You only get bent out of shape when it gets drawn to your attention, but if you were really being aware, you'd realize whatever it is, it's just a drop in the ocean, a single electron in the Universe of stupidity.
Which is why I can't be bothered by priggishness about offensive humor. Oh, I draw exceptions for things like cracking racist jokes when there's just one black person in the group. There's good, practical reasons for being against that. I don't worry about a single white guy in a group of black guys who tells racist jokes either, because there's nothing more to be done in that situation above what he's doing himself.
Well, it was Roosevelt's policy to go off of the Gold Standard, so you have to credit him with that.
With respect to employment, you are right. As I said, GDP doesn't tell the whole story, although it tells an important part of one. In 1933, it was not humanly possible to get employers, burned by years of economic contraction. . That was the reason for all the various alphabet soup agencies -- to do something about the surplus labor. The employment market was not going self-correct in a matter of months, or even several years. Since the programs didn't eliminate the labor surplus, they can't reasonably be argued to have delayed any natural correction in the labor markets... at least not by much. In the meantime they staved off social disruption and desperation, because somebody was doing something. And if producing weapons to be expended on people in other countries was the magic that restored the employment economy, then one can't reasonably argue that having one crew dig a ditch in the morning and another fill it in the afternoon was the wrong kind of thing to do. If it was all defense spending then there ought to have been more government spending on programs, whether or not they produced anything that private individuals were going to buy or benefit from.
In any case, the pre-war Republicans were isolationists anyway. Their laissez faire attitude extended to German military aggression in Europe. It's fair to say that Roosevelt was hostile both to Germany and Japan's geopolitical ambitions, and if a Republican had been in power US entry into the war would have been delayed, if it ever took place.
In the end the important thing about the programs was that somebody was trying something. In the miasma of learned helplessness, Roosevelt got the country marching more or less in one direction. It might not have been the shortest possible direction out of the mess, but it was shorter than having people lay down and die, or worse yet get up and kill.
That's pragmatic leadership. Didn't you ever wonder how people didn't know they had a president who couldn't walk, or even stand up on his own? There was no room in their heads for that image, because FDR was doing so many things. The things didn't have to work according to some academic economic theory. None of that matters if businesses and financial institutions are being sacked by mobs with brickbats and molotov cocktails.
That research dates from the era when John Maynard Keynes was still out of fashion. ;-)
You can tell by the faith in the unerring, benevolent effectiveness of the market's "self-correcting forces". Which is not to say that markets don't self-correct, over a sufficiently long timescale, when every grain of human economic irrationality to the contrary has been ground into dust. Keynes, like Socrates, was not so much brilliant at being right was being brilliant at figuring out how wrong conventional wisdom is.
2007 was probably the high water mark of the post Reagan anti-Keynes movement that believed that government intervention only slowed down the market's marvelous rapid self-correction powers. Somehow, though, those powers didn't work for Hoover, but nobody wants to talk about him.
Well, first let me start off by saying you are exactly right in saying George W. Bush's administration was exemplary when it came to helping the transition to Obama.
However, you may not be aware that many if not all of the stories of Clinton adminsitration vandalism were fabricated. The GSA, which administers the resources in question, found no evidence for any of the allegations. Likewise, the GAO, a congressional agency, initially found no support for any of the allegations. It reopened its investigation under political pressure from Bob Barr, and eventually revised its opinion to $15,000, not $250,000.
Furthermore, even this lower figure is based on Bush staff recollections. For example, there is no actual documentation that the "historic doorknobs" bearing the presidential seal actually existed; in fact there was no mention of these anywhere until after the investigation was reopened by the Republican Congress.
But of course, that is not proof that such doorknobs didn't exist, or that Clinton staffers didn't steal them. It just means even the $15,000 figure is hard to document. And there is no evidence at all for stories like the Clinton staffers defecating on desks. Since this would have to have been cleaned up, it certainly would have left a paper trail.
Make of that what you will, but even the Republican's own investigation showed that the claims were at the very least wildly exaggerated.
Well, FDR actually began to put the US on a wartime economic footing well before Pearl Harbor. Perl Harbor, as everybody knows, was Dec 7, 1941. Lend-Lease started nine months earlier.
Furthermore, real GDP growth had resumed by the end of FDR's first term.
In 1929, GDP was at an all time high of 101.4 billion dollars. Subsequently, under the Hoover administration it fell each of the next four consecutive years to a low of 68.3 billion 1929 dollars in 1933. That was the first year of FDR's presidency, which of course took place largely under a Hoover budget and Hoover economic policies.
From 1934 on, under Roosevelt budgets, GDP growth resumed, with the exception of 1938. The exception in 1938 was because 1937 was an outlier, with a GDP of 103.9 billion. Leaving that aside, growth through the first two terms of Roosevelt's administration was consistently on the order of 7.2 billion/yr, reaching 126.2 billion in 1941. This compares favorably to the 4.1 billion/yr of the roaring twenties. Note that ll this was before the war, given that Dec 7 was rather late to have any effect on economic figures for that year.
Now the initial effect of WW2 was a reduction in GDP. GDP resumed growth the next year, and continued to grow throughout WW2, but soared after the conclusion of the war, from 130.2 billion dollars to 151.9 billion the following year (adjusted to 1929 dollars).
So, yes, it was Roosevelt that turned around the Great Depression. Of course, GDP doesn't tell the whole story: WW2 certainly helped establish full employment.
The idea that Roosevelt's economic reputation was due to the "luck" of WW2 happening during his administration is a Republican fairy tale. They hated him, because he fixed what they broke. They hated his pragmatism, which made him in their eyes a class traitor. Anything less than undiluted laissez faire capitalism they called "socialism". They didn't see that Roosevelt was a capitalist. By addressing the legitimate economic concerns of ordinary people, he saved American capitalism, and kept the myopic, brain dead plutocrats from being lined up against the wall and shot in an American Bolshevik revolution.
Most of all, they hated him because he demonstrated that what G.K. Chesterton said about aristocracy applied to them:
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
Harm being done?
Well, no question, the girls were being foolish. Fourteen years old is too young to realize that they aren't just flashing some skin to some boys that they are interested in. They are releasing nude pictures of themselves into the wild which very possibly will remain in circulation for the rest of their lives, and come back to haunt them. If they're eighteen, fine and good, but not fourteen.
Kids don't think about the extent of the consequences of their actions. That's why we don't let 14 year olds drive cars, for example. It is true that you can't prevent kids from doing things that have lifelong consequences, however taking reasonable steps to prevent and discourage such steps is just sensible.
That said, charging these kids with one of the biggest hot button crimes in the book makes a travesty of the purpose of the laws: to protect kids. Only a legalistic blockhead would do something like that. Now the notoriety will follow these girls to the end of their lives, which is in a way worse than the pictures.
The sensible and effective response is to simply meet with the parents of the children involved. That's a kind of lifelong consequence of a sort; they'll never be able to think back on the incident without burning with embarrassment. However, that's a healthy kind of discomfort. It wouldn't stem from feeling vulnerable now, but feeling smarter than they were then.
The biggest problem with Vista was that they underestimated the minimal hardware requirements by a factor of two.
I'm currently using a laptop with a 2.53 Ghz duo, the latest and greatest intel chipset and ati graphics card, and 4GB of RAM. I find Vista quite acceptable on this hardware, after finding it unacceptable on a 1.66Ghz Duo/2GB of RAM. I'm using Vista because for now Linux support of this new hardware is still pretty poor, so the normal situation for me is turned on its head: my Vista user experience on this machine is actually better than my Linux user experience. I'll probably switch to Linux once the hardware support improves, because I like the selection of software available, but for now I'm actually happy with Vista on this machine.
I believe that a lot of issues are magnified in a context of a machine that can't really run the operating system. For example, now that the machine I am using is very responsive under Vista, I don't find the UAC prompts so annoying.
On top of that, or perhaps because of that, the system is extremely aggressive about trying to squeak out small optimizations. As a programmer, my experience is that you can only get so much out of this kind of tweaking, and that sometimes you pay when you run into the unexpected.
One problem I had was that I was running virtual machines on Vista, and the sudden demand for another GB of RAM when the system had aggressively grabbed "unused" RAM for minor optimizations brought about severe thrashing. What's worse is that the system apparently dealt pretty stupidly with it, trying to swap out the memory it was using a little at a time, and extending the page file by a small amount. Eventually, I discovered that the pagefile had something on the order of a hundred thousand fragments! Dropping the pagefile actually improved performance. Allocating a new, large pagefile corrected this problem.
Vista is clearly a fairly large reorganization of the Windows codebase, and I think the fundamental changes are largely positive. For example, early on in my Vista testing, I had the audio system on my old laptop crash. Awful noise was coming out of the speakers, but everything else was fine. I was able to save my work and reboot the machine. I was actually favorably impressed by this: good design isolates problems, and in older version of Windows this sort of thing would have been a definite BSOD. It's not quite as good as being able to shutdown the audio system and reload the drivers on the fly, but I'll mark the containment of the problem as excellent and the response to the problem as acceptable.
However, the result of this kind of major reworking is that you end up using more resources. It happened with the early versions of Mac OSX. However, since Apple was selling the hardware, the coordination was better because there were fewer competing agendas. They only delivered it new on machines that were truly capable. Over time, the operating system became more efficient, probably through the kind of tidying one does as one maintains. Things like PreFetch and ReadyBoost are fine, but they're no substitute for quality, and quality takes time. Because quality takes time, It's OK to release an OS that is not as efficient as you can eventually make it, in my opinion, as long as you don't misrepresent what it really needs.
Sure. You didn't have any problems. If you did, you probably could have fixed them yourself.
In a perfect world, that would be true of everybody, but on the list of things to fix about this world, it doesn't come very high on my list.
As of 2007, the NSA program is perfectly legal, accoring to the court. It does not necessarily mean that the program has always been legal. In fact, it's pretty likely that it violated a number of statues, and that's what's technically important here.
The powers of the President to wage war and to protect national security are subject to Congressional oversight and regulation. While most people are aware that the Constitution names the President "Commander in Chief", the powers granted to him are significantly less than those of a military dictator, even with respect to the policy and management of the military. For example officer commissions are approved by the senate Although this is largely a pro forma affair. Indeed every aspect of running and employing the military is subject to Congressional regulation.
This is important because in US Constitutional law, there is no explicit right of personal privacy, and the exact extent of the implicit right of privacy (under the Ninth Amendment) is not perfectly clear. If the Executive Branch is empowered to do something, that means it is up to Congress to see to it that it does not violate the Ninth Amendment.
It is largely due to Congress's power regulate Executive functions that we have many restrictions on wiretapping at all. While the reach of the Fourth Amendment has been considerably widened by court opinions in the 20th Century (e.g., Katz v. US) for criminal investigation, intelligence investigation inherently requires a violation of the "expectation of privacy", something that Katz says can only be done with a warrant in criminal cases.
So, if Congress says the President can intercept phone calls for intelligence purposes, it seems probable that this will be treated by the courts as constitutional. If that's not the case, it is Congress that has failed in its duty to safeguard Americans from the Executive Branch.
Answer: political posturing.
Treason is almost never charged. In the two hundred and twenty years since the US Constitution went into effect, the grand total of treason indictments: less than 40. Number of convictions: even less. Minimally, history has shown that we can run a country successfully without much use of the charge of "treason"; I'd say we probably could get by without that particular charge at all.
The framers seem to have been ambivalent about treason. It's mentioned in the Constitution, but in a way that suggests that they saw treason as a charge which invites political misuse. In order to convict somebody of treason, there has to be an overt act that is witnessed by two people or confessed by the guilty party. Furthermore, they are anxious to avoid treason as an pretext for seizing property, or disinheriting or disenfranchising relatives.
Treason, in the sense described by the constitution, is a political crime. What does it mean to "adhere to the enemies" of the United States, given that the President or a majority of Congress can name anybody they please as "enemies"? Is the government of Iran an enemy of the United States? How about the people of Iran? What about people who simply favor rapprochement with Iran? Can they be considered enemies as well? If Iran is an enemy, is aiding somebody sympathetic to the interests of Iran aiding, albeit indirectly, and enemy of the US?
The framers were wise in trying to make political crime an awkward crime to prosecute. I'd go further though, and make the trial of political crimes explicitly political. I think that it is perfectly feasible, given that treason cases come at a rate of about one every six years, to require a procedure similar to that used for impeachment. A person guilty of treason should be indicted by the House, and tried by the Senate, but I'd also add the restriction that he must be convicted by a supermajority of 60 Senators, and with the assent of the President.
It may be that treason has an inevitable place in our consciousness as a kind of horrendous crime of malicious and destructive disloyalty, whether we want it there or not. Even if we think that the government should not try people for political crimes, it is important that provisions be made for trying political crimes. The procedure be there, so that other charges are not politicized.
If someone is truly guilty of an act of supreme, depraved disloyalty, then it should be possible to attract support for conviction across a majority of the political spectrum. If it is not possible to get a majority of the people's representatives to support conviction, then the act cannot reasonably be considered treason. It is important to keep such a politically oriented charge out of the hands of any small number of people.
Well,the distros are supposed do all the heavy lifting for you when it comes to compatibility. Otherwise we'd all do Linux from Scratch.
KDE 4 is standard in OpenSUSE 11.1, which was released in mid December. In theory, this should mean that KDE 4 is the best tested, best integrated option for that distro. It should be the path of least resistance for any user with that distro. If the distro switches to KDE 4 and pulseaudio as defaults, then they really ought to work together by default with pretty much a click-through installation. If they don't, then they should default to alsa or KDE 3.5.
I'm posting a review soon of OpenSUSE on my blog. In a nutshell, I think it does a good job on some things, like hardware support, but it has a very shaky, bleeding edge beta-ish feel to it. This is a bit of a surprise, because when I used SUSE in the pre-Novell days, it was a very solid, no nonsense distro. If I want bleeding edge I'll download the tarballs myself, thank you very much.
I'd think that Novell would want to keep that kind of solid, no surprises user experience, that they'd want to position SUSE as a solid, reliable, no surprises business distro. Instead, it feels more like a hobbyist/enthusiast distro than something from a major software vendor. In fact I've used hobbyist distros that were more solid than OpenSUSE 11.1.
Still, with my relatively new hardware, I'm kind of screwed. I've kept the original hard disk with Vista on it, and to tell you the truth, Vista is quite pleasant to use on a machine with 2.53GHz dual core processor, 4GB of RAM, and latest and greatest chipset and mobile GPU, and 7200 RPM SATA disk. And I have to say I absolutely hated Vista on my older machine that had 2GB of RAM and 1.66GHz Core Duo. Vista was not as efficient as it could have been when it was released, but Microsoft really screwed itself by not setting the bar high enough for "Vista Ready" and "Vista Capable" certification.