And here I was under the impression that it was MacArthur's tactics that won the Pacific war! Oh boy is there egg on my face!
Besides MacArthur and Patton, the US has had very few original military thinkers this century. This is why you guys heavily favour aerial bombardment as a tactic. It's something the chinese are counting upon when developing scenarios for possible engagements with the US, as well as the apparent US squeamishness about casualties.
Panama doesn't dount as a major engagement, you lost vietnam, and you haven't won the Korean war yet, either. So my statement about US inability to win wars still stands. My points about the gulf war were made to indicate the level of overwhelming involvement the US needs in order to win.
And, despite your apparent military knowledge, you know nothing about the global arms trade. Prior to the mid-sixties and early seventies, selling arms overseas was widely considered unacceptable. It was the US that made the global arms trade the biggest industry in the world. It is certainly the biggest earner in the US, accounting for a full quarter of your GDP.
You really need to check your facts. Libya is one of the earlist examples of sanctions causing nations to become arms dealers. They have a long history of selling armaments. Israel's arms industry began after the French imposed brief sanctions. Over 27 third world countries are dealing armaments. At least eleven sell fighter aircraft. This is a state of affairs that has come into being since the US entered arms trading.
I'm afraid it's still a weak analogy, no matter how you make it. You have to prove that the book I mentioned is in the same class as the ones you have. You can't do this without at least leafing through the book. By your argument, anything that has ever been written in a book is subject to intense suspicion, sight unseen, on the grounds that some people were wrong in print once.
I do recommend that you read it if you ever have the chance. It's a well written polemic, and very enlightening, even if you don't agree with his conclusions.
Besides that, thanks for understanding that I am not making moral judgements or statements, merely discussing the causes of the tragedy.
It makes me far more informed than you. I can tell the difference between "garbage" and non-garbage far better than you can. I can also think for myself and decide what makes sense and what doesn't. You probably still think copyright violation is justified.
Second paragraph not worth responding to. If you're going to imply that I made an appeal to authority in your forst paragraph, don't make a weak analogy in your second. It makes you look stupid.
I don't think you got what you deserved. I do think this is not surprising, and you brought it on yourselves. "Deserved" doesn't enter into it.
You should read John Ralston Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards". He might not be 100% correct, but it is incredibly well-referenced, and little of what I said falls far from his assessment of the global situation.
I can't imagine why not. Gives online life a little frisson. Even if you just sign up a throwaway account, it's good to give these people continuity in their flaming. It's a catharsis thing for them. You might even be saving livesd by giving them someone to strike out at harmlessly online!
As the baader meinhof boys said, "The greater the atrocity, the greater the value." You are utterly naive if you don't understand why the killing of innocents is justified to these people, and far preferable to the killing of soldiers.
Yes, I mourn for the loss of life. But not greatly. I've lost too many family members these past two years to feel sincere grief for strangers. This incident is only outstanding for it's location and it photogenic nature. It will not be helped by me pretending to be touched, like the drama queens who are flooding this site. The reactions I'm seeing are the reactions of people whose lives have made them so numb, that when a major incident takes place they feel alive again, and begin to crave more disaster.
Did you know it is a common practice in parts of Africa to crack holes in fuel pipelines to steal petroleum? Did you know that this often results in huge explosions? These explosions often kill thousands -- literally thousands -- of africans. If I go through my life feeling soulful grief for those whose lives are foreshortened by incomprehensible catastrophe, I will be paralysed.
Innocent people die. Get used to it. The US has never been squeamish about murdering innocents. Over 2000 civilians died in Panama.
We've been asking for this ever since delta force. It isn't US complacency that caused this. That's like saying the we lost Vietnam because we defeated ourselves -- a self-serving lie to avoid addressing the fact that a few terrorists from Allah knows where got the better of us by hijacking planes using knives.
This was caused by our arrogant overseas policies. We've treated that corner of the world like our personal whipping boy for five decades, made belligerent demands, and destabilized the area with our political manipulations. We've painted an uncomplimentary picture of their people and their religion in our media, and we wonder why there are a few pissed off muslims about.
To top it off, we take massive military action, demand reparations, impose sanctions without the approval of the UN, commit war crimes, of which some of our highest leaders have been found guilty (Dick Cheney is an indicted war criminal! So is Bush sr., Norman Schwarzkopf and Dan Quayle.)
Moral outrage from us is inappropriate. We should be extending the olive branch to these people. This was the act of men driven to extremes by our arrogance. It was not the act of fundamentalists with an irrational hatred of us. Their hatred was indeed quite rational.
I actually saw Richard Stallman give a talk on linux 3 years ago when I was at Georgia tech. He discussed how the software project had grown from inauspicious roots as a terminal emulater that Linus had written in C to becoming an OS, based in Andrew Tannenbaum's xenix microkernel.
Of course, the time was ripe for a project like this, since Andrew wasn't willing to accept any patches to his system, effectively preventing the inclusion of virtual memory, multitasking and a useful filesystem. Stallman made the point that any usable ase for an OS would have been successsful at that point, as long as the developer was willing to accept people's additions. Linus just happened to be in the right place at the right time
It's funny to think that, had RMS had more foresight, we'd all be using HURD today, and Linus would be an unknown doctoral student/graduate at Helsinki university!
Even if you are writing a minuscule app for your own use, that could not conceivably have any use for anyone else, you should always adhere to the following rules:
Use autoconf and automake. I don't care if there's nothing to configure. Do it.
Try and place as much code into libraries as possible. Modularization is good. Use libtool religiously
Try and test your code on as many unixes as possible. For this reason, I have every NSD, and linux kernel major on my machine. It is unthinkable to assume that if someone who wants to use your program on a platform you didn't test for would be willing to fix your code and send you the patches. Open Source just doesn't work that way
Ager's core assumption is that liberty is a vital attribute of the individual. Even John Stuart Mill did not go so far. JSM was willing to concede the right of the government to take preventative measures, especially in a society so overcome with crime that entire neighbourhoods resemble a different, much more dangerous nation than the rest of the city they are in.
If you relax for a moment, the belief that individual liberty is a universal right -- an assumption that has by no means been proven fait accompli, you will see that these camera's provide an a priori benefit to society. Criminals cannot wander free in our streets and malls with these around.
Let's stop and think about the children for a second. I believe that if we as a free society were to register all known pedophiles in a national database with pictures, this system could ipso facto provide massive benefits for the endangered young of our nation.
I can not in good faith oppose pro bono publico a system which almost guarantees safety for my children. I do not trust the mettle of anyone who does not agree with this.
I don't care if LISP runs 500 times as fast as Java. It has a massively restricted API. People don't base their language choice on speed anymore. FORTRAN is still twice as fast as C, but everyone still uses C, for two reasons: FORTRAN is harder to learn, and C has more libraries.
Java's great strength is that it has a huge set of APIs, all in a unified form, making programming a less repetitive and painful experience. Java is for people who understand that recoding the same search tree three hundred times is not going to make them richer, cooler or a better programmer. LISP is for people with time to waste.
It's a linux virus, in case you hadn't picked that up. Of course it's bad. What's more, it could be used to infect other unixes. This makes every download untrustworthy.
I'm sure I don't need to point out that when code red struck windows machines, it was the end of the line for MS, according to slashdot, but now that a linux worm is making the rounds, it's "not that bad". If this site were any more biased, we'd have to read it with our heads tilted.
I do not think anything I have written constitutes hypocrisy. You may have some silly and self-serving ideas about how commercial software is made. I can see that these are most likely based on hearsay from the likewise inexperienced geek community.
My experience of commercial software development is that it is done according to certain proven methods, which generally result in stable, working software, that the target market can use.
I do not think it hypocritical to point out that the opposite is true of Open Source projects. You simply cannot do decent software design over a network yet. Teleconferencing is bringing us closer to that possibility, but it will be years before it is ready, and many Open Source developers are dirt poor from giving all their code away for free and investing in companies that used the Open Source "model". Hence they cannot afford broadband.
You can either listen to my experience, and assess the truth of my words from an unbiased perspective, or you can continue following the slashdot herd, because it's the only contact you have with the software world, therefore it's all you know. If you take the time to see thhat what I say is true, you'll thank me for it. If you don't, you'll regret it in a few years, when you do eventually wake up to yourself.
Petty namecalling is no way to make a serious point. Please think harder next time you decide to call someone a hypocrite.
Open Source is not a business model. You can tell, because Open Source includes no realistic methods of making a profit. The goal of business is profit. Open Source cannot profit. Therefore, Open Source is not a business model.
What OS is, is a software development model that has been overhyped and overused. It is not a particularly good software development model, and it owes it's success not to a proven record of stable software, but to one or two well-written pieces of code and a lot of misplaced self-righteousness about "community".
Open Source development has proven time and time again, even in it's most successsful project, that it cannot provide sound design. The design stage of a major piece of software is the most crucial, and should not be neglected. In Open Source, it is not only neglected, it is almost completely ignored, so everyone can get to the coding. Just look at the linux kernel!
Unlike serious software development models, such as the boehm spiral model, open source does not provide a methodology for deisgn, programming, testing and debugging. In fact, testing in the Open Source model is done by releasing your code and waiting for it to break for lots of people. This is another reason why Open Source is not a business model. No serious business model includes the willingness to release incomplete products.
Open Source is a fairy story. Open Source is a naive dream of a few aging nerds. Open Source is a failing software development method. Open Source is not a business model.
Even austrians have come to despise the.au domain. No self-respecting web host is willing to deal with sites in that domain, and this has been reflected in the unwillingness of users visit.au sites. I, for instance, have never visited that domain.
Everybody knows that austrian culture is decadent and decaying, like all european countries.
Austrians are just wannabe germans who can't get it together to build a decent car, and buckled under when Hitler sneezed in their direction. I don't care what happens to their pathetic domain, and neither should you.
Don't you think it's time to grow up? I know you people think sci-fi-fantasy is the most engaging form of entertainment available, and real literature is kinda fruity, but I'm sick of being marginalised by your unenlightened attitudes.
The Lord of the Rings is widely considered to have been the most shallow and unimpressive work of fiction of the previous century. To the literary community, it represents mediocrity. It is a children's story, and I have no respect for any adult who reads it. Eminem has more depth.
Once again, the company with the most resources, experience, and capital has secured their lead. Did you really think AMD was capable of competing?
I'm afraid it's time for all the AMD fanatics to admit that the story of David and Goliath simply doesn't apply to the corporate technology world. The biggest will always win, if only because they are more capable of supporting their management bloat problem. Look at IBM vs. DEC. DEC has suffered a two decade long slow death, from being the most beloved and innovative minicomputer manufacturer, to being an unwanted subsidiary of a PC manufacturer, to finally being eliminated. AMD is heading for the same chopping block.
The key to understanding the difference between intel and AMD, is to realise that intel doesn't have to run flat out all the time to put the best chip on the market. They're big enough to coast, and take a break sometimes. AMD needs every minute of developer time they can get just to keep up! Sooner or later, AMD just exhausts it's resources and slips back into the low-end slot, where it belongs. Also remember, intel can weather a lot more damage to their markets than AMD. AMD doesn't have much of a war chest.
My advice to everyone here is to realise that there are no prizes given for rooting for the underdog. It doesn't benefit you if AMD "wins", and you shouldn't even be thinking in those terms. While the intel architecture dominates the low-end computing market, intel will be the market leader. Accept it, or mourn it. You can't change it by wishing.
Did Bruce Sterling actually write his first article based on the number of webloggers he's had in his house? I count it as an article of pride that I've never had a weblogger within 100 meters of my house. Jesus, Bruce, way to impress me. How you gonna top that? Oh, you had a goth in your living room once. Hope you burned the couch after she left. Who the fuck calls herself Rebecca Blood, anyway? You know Jakob Neilson's partner? Wow. Shit. You know someone who knows someone who's marginally well known. I'm dumbstruck.
AMD does not offer the performance of intel. They cost less because they are inferior. The company that produces them is no more warm-hearted and morally upright than intel, unless you think exploiting mexican workers is morally supportable. Why is AMD the hackers choice?
AMD have been trailing for years in the chip wars, always a year or so behind intel with advancements and extensions to the architecture. It's always been clear that intel does the hacking, while AMD runs to keep up. Intel's new chips offer a drastic alteration in the way caching is used to improve execution speed. AMD's chips offer what intel's offered last year.
If slashdotters were really interested in performance, they would have placed more support behind the now-defunct alpha architecture. Even Sun's chips offer more bang per mhz. I've seen many derisive statements made on this site about pushing mhz over performance, but if people really believed these claims, they would abandon the x86 architecture in droves. If linux runs on any processor, why are we still running it on the bottom of the barrel?
x86 is a hacked together, patched up, overextended, overheated, underdesigned chip that should have been put out to pasture in '89. That it has persisted for 10 years past it's obseletion is a credit to intel's PR. AMD has reaped the benefits of this as well.
AMD have never made a move to befriend the hacker community, despite the levels of support they gain here. Indeed, their recent advertising stresses their compatibility with Windows XP. No mention whatsoever is made of linux. Yet they are still considered the geeks chip of choice!
AMD is a faceless multinational company, as globalist as Nike and as ruthless as intel. Their product is an obselete chip that is a consistent runner-up in it's division. Why, if we be geeks, do we choose the worse performer?
Slashdot Mirror
And here I was under the impression that it was MacArthur's tactics that won the Pacific war! Oh boy is there egg on my face!
Besides MacArthur and Patton, the US has had very few original military thinkers this century. This is why you guys heavily favour aerial bombardment as a tactic. It's something the chinese are counting upon when developing scenarios for possible engagements with the US, as well as the apparent US squeamishness about casualties.
Panama doesn't dount as a major engagement, you lost vietnam, and you haven't won the Korean war yet, either. So my statement about US inability to win wars still stands. My points about the gulf war were made to indicate the level of overwhelming involvement the US needs in order to win.
And, despite your apparent military knowledge, you know nothing about the global arms trade. Prior to the mid-sixties and early seventies, selling arms overseas was widely considered unacceptable. It was the US that made the global arms trade the biggest industry in the world. It is certainly the biggest earner in the US, accounting for a full quarter of your GDP.
You really need to check your facts. Libya is one of the earlist examples of sanctions causing nations to become arms dealers. They have a long history of selling armaments. Israel's arms industry began after the French imposed brief sanctions. Over 27 third world countries are dealing armaments. At least eleven sell fighter aircraft. This is a state of affairs that has come into being since the US entered arms trading.
I'm afraid it's still a weak analogy, no matter how you make it. You have to prove that the book I mentioned is in the same class as the ones you have. You can't do this without at least leafing through the book. By your argument, anything that has ever been written in a book is subject to intense suspicion, sight unseen, on the grounds that some people were wrong in print once.
I do recommend that you read it if you ever have the chance. It's a well written polemic, and very enlightening, even if you don't agree with his conclusions.
Besides that, thanks for understanding that I am not making moral judgements or statements, merely discussing the causes of the tragedy.
It makes me far more informed than you. I can tell the difference between "garbage" and non-garbage far better than you can. I can also think for myself and decide what makes sense and what doesn't. You probably still think copyright violation is justified.
Second paragraph not worth responding to. If you're going to imply that I made an appeal to authority in your forst paragraph, don't make a weak analogy in your second. It makes you look stupid.
I don't think you got what you deserved. I do think this is not surprising, and you brought it on yourselves. "Deserved" doesn't enter into it.
Does thinking work for you?
is NEVER any reason to kill thousands of INNOCENT CIVILIANS
I hope you said the same thing when US planes were carpet bombing Baghdad.
OK. Feel any better?
You should read John Ralston Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards". He might not be 100% correct, but it is incredibly well-referenced, and little of what I said falls far from his assessment of the global situation.
I can't imagine why not. Gives online life a little frisson. Even if you just sign up a throwaway account, it's good to give these people continuity in their flaming. It's a catharsis thing for them. You might even be saving livesd by giving them someone to strike out at harmlessly online!
As the baader meinhof boys said, "The greater the atrocity, the greater the value." You are utterly naive if you don't understand why the killing of innocents is justified to these people, and far preferable to the killing of soldiers.
Yes, I mourn for the loss of life. But not greatly. I've lost too many family members these past two years to feel sincere grief for strangers. This incident is only outstanding for it's location and it photogenic nature. It will not be helped by me pretending to be touched, like the drama queens who are flooding this site. The reactions I'm seeing are the reactions of people whose lives have made them so numb, that when a major incident takes place they feel alive again, and begin to crave more disaster.
Did you know it is a common practice in parts of Africa to crack holes in fuel pipelines to steal petroleum? Did you know that this often results in huge explosions? These explosions often kill thousands -- literally thousands -- of africans. If I go through my life feeling soulful grief for those whose lives are foreshortened by incomprehensible catastrophe, I will be paralysed.
Innocent people die. Get used to it. The US has never been squeamish about murdering innocents. Over 2000 civilians died in Panama.
We've been asking for this ever since delta force. It isn't US complacency that caused this. That's like saying the we lost Vietnam because we defeated ourselves -- a self-serving lie to avoid addressing the fact that a few terrorists from Allah knows where got the better of us by hijacking planes using knives.
This was caused by our arrogant overseas policies. We've treated that corner of the world like our personal whipping boy for five decades, made belligerent demands, and destabilized the area with our political manipulations. We've painted an uncomplimentary picture of their people and their religion in our media, and we wonder why there are a few pissed off muslims about.
To top it off, we take massive military action, demand reparations, impose sanctions without the approval of the UN, commit war crimes, of which some of our highest leaders have been found guilty (Dick Cheney is an indicted war criminal! So is Bush sr., Norman Schwarzkopf and Dan Quayle.)
Moral outrage from us is inappropriate. We should be extending the olive branch to these people. This was the act of men driven to extremes by our arrogance. It was not the act of fundamentalists with an irrational hatred of us. Their hatred was indeed quite rational.
I actually saw Richard Stallman give a talk on linux 3 years ago when I was at Georgia tech. He discussed how the software project had grown from inauspicious roots as a terminal emulater that Linus had written in C to becoming an OS, based in Andrew Tannenbaum's xenix microkernel.
Of course, the time was ripe for a project like this, since Andrew wasn't willing to accept any patches to his system, effectively preventing the inclusion of virtual memory, multitasking and a useful filesystem. Stallman made the point that any usable ase for an OS would have been successsful at that point, as long as the developer was willing to accept people's additions. Linus just happened to be in the right place at the right time
It's funny to think that, had RMS had more foresight, we'd all be using HURD today, and Linus would be an unknown doctoral student/graduate at Helsinki university!
Even if you are writing a minuscule app for your own use, that could not conceivably have any use for anyone else, you should always adhere to the following rules:
Ager's core assumption is that liberty is a vital attribute of the individual. Even John Stuart Mill did not go so far. JSM was willing to concede the right of the government to take preventative measures, especially in a society so overcome with crime that entire neighbourhoods resemble a different, much more dangerous nation than the rest of the city they are in.
If you relax for a moment, the belief that individual liberty is a universal right -- an assumption that has by no means been proven fait accompli, you will see that these camera's provide an a priori benefit to society. Criminals cannot wander free in our streets and malls with these around.
Let's stop and think about the children for a second. I believe that if we as a free society were to register all known pedophiles in a national database with pictures, this system could ipso facto provide massive benefits for the endangered young of our nation.
I can not in good faith oppose pro bono publico a system which almost guarantees safety for my children. I do not trust the mettle of anyone who does not agree with this.
I don't care if LISP runs 500 times as fast as Java. It has a massively restricted API. People don't base their language choice on speed anymore. FORTRAN is still twice as fast as C, but everyone still uses C, for two reasons: FORTRAN is harder to learn, and C has more libraries.
Java's great strength is that it has a huge set of APIs, all in a unified form, making programming a less repetitive and painful experience. Java is for people who understand that recoding the same search tree three hundred times is not going to make them richer, cooler or a better programmer. LISP is for people with time to waste.
It's a linux virus, in case you hadn't picked that up. Of course it's bad. What's more, it could be used to infect other unixes. This makes every download untrustworthy.
I'm sure I don't need to point out that when code red struck windows machines, it was the end of the line for MS, according to slashdot, but now that a linux worm is making the rounds, it's "not that bad". If this site were any more biased, we'd have to read it with our heads tilted.
I do not think anything I have written constitutes hypocrisy. You may have some silly and self-serving ideas about how commercial software is made. I can see that these are most likely based on hearsay from the likewise inexperienced geek community.
My experience of commercial software development is that it is done according to certain proven methods, which generally result in stable, working software, that the target market can use.
I do not think it hypocritical to point out that the opposite is true of Open Source projects. You simply cannot do decent software design over a network yet. Teleconferencing is bringing us closer to that possibility, but it will be years before it is ready, and many Open Source developers are dirt poor from giving all their code away for free and investing in companies that used the Open Source "model". Hence they cannot afford broadband.
You can either listen to my experience, and assess the truth of my words from an unbiased perspective, or you can continue following the slashdot herd, because it's the only contact you have with the software world, therefore it's all you know. If you take the time to see thhat what I say is true, you'll thank me for it. If you don't, you'll regret it in a few years, when you do eventually wake up to yourself.
Petty namecalling is no way to make a serious point. Please think harder next time you decide to call someone a hypocrite.
Open Source is not a business model. You can tell, because Open Source includes no realistic methods of making a profit. The goal of business is profit. Open Source cannot profit. Therefore, Open Source is not a business model.
What OS is, is a software development model that has been overhyped and overused. It is not a particularly good software development model, and it owes it's success not to a proven record of stable software, but to one or two well-written pieces of code and a lot of misplaced self-righteousness about "community".
Open Source development has proven time and time again, even in it's most successsful project, that it cannot provide sound design. The design stage of a major piece of software is the most crucial, and should not be neglected. In Open Source, it is not only neglected, it is almost completely ignored, so everyone can get to the coding. Just look at the linux kernel!
Unlike serious software development models, such as the boehm spiral model, open source does not provide a methodology for deisgn, programming, testing and debugging. In fact, testing in the Open Source model is done by releasing your code and waiting for it to break for lots of people. This is another reason why Open Source is not a business model. No serious business model includes the willingness to release incomplete products.
Open Source is a fairy story. Open Source is a naive dream of a few aging nerds. Open Source is a failing software development method. Open Source is not a business model.
The above poster has abused his +2 bonus to post an off-topic comment. Mod him down NOW!
Even austrians have come to despise the .au domain. No self-respecting web host is willing to deal with sites in that domain, and this has been reflected in the unwillingness of users visit .au sites. I, for instance, have never visited that domain.
Everybody knows that austrian culture is decadent and decaying, like all european countries.
Austrians are just wannabe germans who can't get it together to build a decent car, and buckled under when Hitler sneezed in their direction. I don't care what happens to their pathetic domain, and neither should you.
Don't you think it's time to grow up? I know you people think sci-fi-fantasy is the most engaging form of entertainment available, and real literature is kinda fruity, but I'm sick of being marginalised by your unenlightened attitudes.
The Lord of the Rings is widely considered to have been the most shallow and unimpressive work of fiction of the previous century. To the literary community, it represents mediocrity. It is a children's story, and I have no respect for any adult who reads it. Eminem has more depth.
Once again, the company with the most resources, experience, and capital has secured their lead. Did you really think AMD was capable of competing?
I'm afraid it's time for all the AMD fanatics to admit that the story of David and Goliath simply doesn't apply to the corporate technology world. The biggest will always win, if only because they are more capable of supporting their management bloat problem. Look at IBM vs. DEC. DEC has suffered a two decade long slow death, from being the most beloved and innovative minicomputer manufacturer, to being an unwanted subsidiary of a PC manufacturer, to finally being eliminated. AMD is heading for the same chopping block.
The key to understanding the difference between intel and AMD, is to realise that intel doesn't have to run flat out all the time to put the best chip on the market. They're big enough to coast, and take a break sometimes. AMD needs every minute of developer time they can get just to keep up! Sooner or later, AMD just exhausts it's resources and slips back into the low-end slot, where it belongs. Also remember, intel can weather a lot more damage to their markets than AMD. AMD doesn't have much of a war chest.
My advice to everyone here is to realise that there are no prizes given for rooting for the underdog. It doesn't benefit you if AMD "wins", and you shouldn't even be thinking in those terms. While the intel architecture dominates the low-end computing market, intel will be the market leader. Accept it, or mourn it. You can't change it by wishing.
To read the rest of the above comment, bend over backwards and stick your head inside your own ass. No offense intended.
Is "weed out"
"I wish that they would have bought Be (beos) and open sourced the operating system. They would have made money hand over fist selling distro disks. "
You mean like redhat does? I think you've actually concocted a business plan more certain of failure than their previous one!
Did Bruce Sterling actually write his first article based on the number of webloggers he's had in his house? I count it as an article of pride that I've never had a weblogger within 100 meters of my house. Jesus, Bruce, way to impress me. How you gonna top that? Oh, you had a goth in your living room once. Hope you burned the couch after she left. Who the fuck calls herself Rebecca Blood, anyway? You know Jakob Neilson's partner? Wow. Shit. You know someone who knows someone who's marginally well known. I'm dumbstruck.
AMD does not offer the performance of intel. They cost less because they are inferior. The company that produces them is no more warm-hearted and morally upright than intel, unless you think exploiting mexican workers is morally supportable. Why is AMD the hackers choice?
AMD have been trailing for years in the chip wars, always a year or so behind intel with advancements and extensions to the architecture. It's always been clear that intel does the hacking, while AMD runs to keep up. Intel's new chips offer a drastic alteration in the way caching is used to improve execution speed. AMD's chips offer what intel's offered last year.
If slashdotters were really interested in performance, they would have placed more support behind the now-defunct alpha architecture. Even Sun's chips offer more bang per mhz. I've seen many derisive statements made on this site about pushing mhz over performance, but if people really believed these claims, they would abandon the x86 architecture in droves. If linux runs on any processor, why are we still running it on the bottom of the barrel?
x86 is a hacked together, patched up, overextended, overheated, underdesigned chip that should have been put out to pasture in '89. That it has persisted for 10 years past it's obseletion is a credit to intel's PR. AMD has reaped the benefits of this as well.
AMD have never made a move to befriend the hacker community, despite the levels of support they gain here. Indeed, their recent advertising stresses their compatibility with Windows XP. No mention whatsoever is made of linux. Yet they are still considered the geeks chip of choice!
AMD is a faceless multinational company, as globalist as Nike and as ruthless as intel. Their product is an obselete chip that is a consistent runner-up in it's division. Why, if we be geeks, do we choose the worse performer?
Post hoc ergo proctor hoc.
Nothing like trying to look clever and coming off looking like a dickhead, is there?