Painfully Subjective Review I'll just out and say it -- Ken Mingis is just looking for bells & whistles. He's not in search of the 'best' operating system,
You are correct, however the implication that looking for the "best" OS would have been less subjective is laughable. Any search for the "best" operating system is inherently subjective, because "best" is a totally subjective criteria.
Any time I see a review where someone is looking for the 'best' anything, where two solutions exist, is not going to be objective. If it was objective, then it would need to explain why both things exist -- which implies that there are people who find both of them to be the best, respectively (otherwise why would they be using it?).
Frankly, I didn't find his review objective, but I'll take blatant over veiled subjectivity any day. It's not like he tried to hide where he was coming from, or give it much of a journalistic, authoritative overtone; he just stated his opinion.
As someone with a similar background to the reviewer, his statements were valuable to me. Sometimes, a variety of biased but straightforward reviews can be far more elucidating than a probably-biased but totally opaque one. At least with something like this, I can say "okay, so he's coming to this from the perspective of a Mac user, meaning he probably thinks the way OS X works is generally OK..." etc.
As does alot of the world not in the united states but still grounded under it's definition of right and wrong is why can't a foreign self governing nation control its own airspace and space space. If I built a spy satellite and orbitted it over the united states I would be a terrorist and bombed in seconds. Why the difference for china?
Actually, no. China has any number of satellites in LEO or MEO, which orbit over the United States. They don't (for obvious reasons) disclose which are their spy satellites, but I assume that they have them.
It's common knowledge that the Soviets had spy satellites which orbited over the U.S., just as they knew we had ones that orbited over them. Pretty much any country with launch capability probably has spy satellites of some sort or another.
Nobody shoots down each other's spy satellites, because it would be an act of war; the U.S. would have to retaliate and pretty soon we'd just have a whole lot of orbiting debris in orbit, and everyone would be blind. For the sake of stability, it's better to just let things go -- everyone knows that the other guys have satellites, and with some careful observation can figure out when they pass overhead. Sometimes it's even useful to let the other side have that capability (e.g., after various arms-reduction treaties, the U.S. would leave the cut-up bombers in the middle of the desert, so that the Russian satellites could see them and verify that they were destroyed).
The Chinese are playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship here; if they start shining lights at U.S. satellites, spy sats or otherwise, than the U.S. is probably going to start shining stuff right back. It would be easily to escalate by accident.
My feeling is that the Chinese are really only doing this to tweak the U.S.; they're just saying "hey, we see you!" and "we could disable you if we wanted to!" It would be insanity for them to start doing it on a regular basis.
Messing around with other people's satellites is right up there with messing around with other nations' submarine cables. You just don't do it; everyone basically knows that you could, but it would be unproductive. The end result is that everyone's cables would get cut, and nothing would be gained.
The theory of MAD applies to a lot more than just nuclear war.
Percentage of native English speakers worldwide by country: U.S. - 67.2% U.K. - 16.9% CAN - 5.8% AUS - 4.5% Other - 5.5% (Ironically, the source of the data is from a British Council report.)
So even if the U.S. is the only country that uses "color," it's still by far the most common spelling. More generally, American English is, by any realistic measure, the principle dialect of the English language in use today; bitching and moaning about it won't make it any less true.
However I have a hypothetical question that came to mind. What if it became clear that the ideals of Western society were counterproductive to its survival? As in, what happens when you start to see your way of live being subsumed by a more aggressive culture, because of strongly-held beliefs that prevent the response that would prevent the takeover?
I'm not saying that such a situation exists at present, but what if it really was an "existential struggle" in the literal sense of one culture systematically destroying the fabric of the other, and the one being destroyed was at a grave disadvantage because of self-imposed limitations that were not symmetric?
One argument would suggest that the only correct course of action is to maintain those beliefs to the grave; even if in holding them it ensures the destruction of one's culture by another. I'm not sure this is really a practical suggestion. This implies that there is nothing to your culture besides this belief -- nothing at all -- because you can't carry on if you betray it. Plus, it also implies that once given up, the belief can't be reinstated later; i.e., that the moral high ground, once lost, can never be re-ascended.
Like I said, I'm not into the Book of Revelation school of foreign policy, but I think it's an interesting philosophical question as to what various cultures would do when really threatened with being put to the bayonet as a result of their hesitance to do something morally reprehensible; I think it would be very rare indeed for any group to not compromise itself.
... and mac-heads. That's not meant to be flamebait. Apple makes a good looking computer, and that's important to their users.
On the contrary: Apple could make a computer shaped like a giant turd (and depending on who you ask, has from time to time gone down this road) and people would still buy it in droves.
Within six months, PC case manufacturers in Taiwan would be making barebones lookalikes, shaped vaguely but not quite exactly like Apple's turds, and onward the world would merrily go.
(Disclaimer: I'm typing this on an iBook right now -- but don't ever assume that Apple's users tell it where to go; Apple tells its users what's cool. When they made a portable that looked like a toilet seat, you damn well bet people bought it.)
Um, "tyranny of the super-majority" was meant to be ironic; that is democratic: if enough people want something badly enough, any democratic system must give it to them. In the current U.S. system, it could happen via Constitutional amendments followed by legislation.
Certainly one could create a system that would be a limited democracy, where there was no way, even if all but one person in the country wanted something done, that it could happen -- a Constitutional Republic where the Constitution was fixed and there was no mechanism for amendments, perhaps; but this would be, in my opinion, less democratic than a U.S.-type system where the entire government can be changed if enough of a super-majority desires it.
Any good government should protect a minority group from the majority, but there is a certain limit to how big a minority group must be, before it becomes protected: if that minority is smaller than the number of people required to block a super-majority, then it effectively is unprotected. For example, if pedophilia was currently legal, but widely detested, it's likely that a small number of pedophiles would be unable to prevent an abolition of their rights by the majority, because they wouldn't have the votes required to block it. (I'm making an assumption here that pedophiles are a far fringe group; whether this is actually true I'm not sure, but work with me here.) This isn't undemocratic, even though it does represent an oppression of a minority by the majority. When a minority group gets suitably small, it's not a 'legitimate minority' any more: they're just criminals.
When people speak of the 'tyranny of the majority,' at least in my experience, they speak really of the 'tyranny of 51%.' That is to say, a tyranny where a single person or very small group of people (the 1%) can have an un-deserved influence on the system. Nobody really speaks or cares about the 'tyranny of 99.99999%.' At that point, it's probably not likely to be viewed as tyrannical oppression anymore, but just sensible lawmaking versus criminals.
Ideally, the size of the supermajority required to oppress a minority group should be just smaller than the number of people needed to overthrow the government completely. This ensures that rather than Revolution, the government is changed via peaceful means; if you make the required supermajority any larger than this, then your government will just collapse.
Too bad it's going to get a lot more of our service members tortured after capture in retribution and give the terrorist networks even more recruiting fodder.
The second part of your comment might have merit, in that the new stance might provide propaganda for terrorist recruitment (but really, it's not like there's a shortage), however, if you don't think that anyone in uniform is at risk of being tortured to death if captured anyway, you're sorely mistaken.
The only reason more people aren't tortured and executed after capture is because the terrorists know they're more useful alive (and on TV) than dead. I doubt it has anything to do with any high-minded moral feelings on the point of the Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, or the occasional Al Qaeda cell. If any of them are seemingly obeying the Geneva Convention, it's purely coincidental.
Allow me to play the Devil's Advocate a bit further for a moment:
Take a think right now to the tactics used throughout much of the Civil War. Seems pretty ridiculous, doesn't it? I mean, lines of people, just blasting away at each other? Almost criminally negligent, in retrospect -- but those were the established tactics, and they were employed up until (and arguably, well beyond -- they should have been obsolete with the introduction of the rifle) when they were impossible to maintain anymore. Since then, tactics and strategy moved on, and now it seems bizarre that people would have chosen to wear uniforms in bright colors, or choose a cleared field for an infantry battle instead of a forest, or engage at a stone's throw instead of the maximum effective range of their organic weapons, as current tactics would dictate (if in the defense).
I believe that in a generation or two, people will look back on the tactics used in the great wars of the 20th century and by the major powers in the 21st as similarly antiquated. I mean, wearing uniforms? So the enemy can identify you? Idiotic. Refusal to use civilians to mask one's forces will be seen as something quaint; like wearing blaze orange (or bright red) on a battlefield in 1944. The battle dress of the 21st century warrior won't be "woodland" or "ACU digital" (those are carryovers; legacies from a more civilized age, perhaps), but the clothing of the civilian populace. The standard tactics and maneuvers won't be 'Platoon Attack' or 'Knock Out Bunkers,' but 'Creating a Mass Casualty Incident' and 'Propaganda Creation 101.'
Every time that the methods of war have shifted dramatically, it has been those most successful with the previous generation of tactics that have been the most resistant to change, and who have consequently suffered the most. "Terrorism" isn't some new bogeyman that we can make go away; any more than people who thought the machine gun was uncivilized and barbaric could just snap their fingers and return themselves to a world of cavalry charges and infantry squares. It's the new standard: we just haven't realized it yet.
Sending more troops and equipment to Iraq and Afghanistan today is about as strategically sound as the generals in the Battle of the Somme sending their troops 'over the top' again and again, into the waiting machine guns. Today, we send our troops, in their well-marked vehicles and uniforms, out to be cut down by IEDs and snipers. War has changed, and probably not for the better, if you liked the 20th century idea of war being something between soldiers and armies that can be drawn on a map or modeled on a sand table. Terrorism is the new war, and the Geneva Convention is about as relevant to that as the Code of Chivalry was to someone trying to keep their feet from rotting off in a trench in 1918.
I agree with you; I think our political system is in desperate need of reform, and not just a few simple Band-Aids.
However, with the current two-party structure, riders do serve a semi-legitimate, or at least useful, purpose: they provide a way for a minority to torpedo a bill that really shouldn't get passed, preventing a "tyranny of the majority." It doesn't prevent a 'tyranny of the super-majority,' because riders can be defeated through parliamentary procedure, but that's democracy for you.
It's important when we look at legal procedure, that we don't "streamline" the system too much: sometimes, things that look like terribly stupid ideas (and probably are), are the only things holding back a torrent of terrible legislation. Riders are a double-edged sword in this way; they allow a minority to get things passed that otherwise wouldn't have enough votes -- an obviously undemocratic outcome, and prone to abuse -- but it also works as a blocking maneuver. Sometimes, it can be possible to stop a legislative juggernaut by attaching an impossible-to-pass rider.
Removing something like this, particularly in the current atmosphere, where other safeguards like filibusters are also on the block, could potentially be disastrous. It could lead to seesaw legislation, with each successive Congress undoing the one before it and then going further in the opposite direction, without any way to stop it. In physics terms, filibusters and poison-pill riders act as drag or friction on a pendulum, which is constantly having energy put into it. Were it not for these outlets, the whole thing could easily oscillate out of control.
More generally, I've recently been doing a lot of reading about the history of the U.S. financial markets in the mid to late-19th century, and there are a lot of parallels with recent history, although the timelines today are significantly compressed versus what they once then.
Over and over again, after a major technological development, there exists a period of -- for lack of a better term (and why not, it's a good term) -- "irrational exuberance;" a bubble. And then the bubble will burst, which depending on the severity of the bubble can mean a selling panic, and then things will even out and start climbing again towards the next bubble. This happened with canals and canal bonds, and then again with railroads. (Actually railroad stocks bubbled and burst several times over; you think people would have learned the first few times.) I'm sure if you look, you can find other parallels after periods of revolutionary technological development.
Computers and the internet, looked at as another form of infrastructure improvement (just as the canals were, and the internet, and to a less dramatic extent highways), followed the same pattern and created the same bubble and burst. Now that it's come and gone, we can start the real work, which is using the new technology to actually do productive work. The gains of the market during the bubble weren't real, but the ones made during the less dramatic climbs between bubbles are.
The reasons for the bubbles are not really financial as much as psychological (if you can separate the two). They're driven, predominantly, by greed and non-rational thinking: people get blinded by the idea of returns and pour their money into something that can't possibly continue forever, and each time when it crashes, they act surprised, as if their situation was somewhat unique.
The Dot-Com crash wasn't unique. Enron wasn't unique. Sure, the absolute values are bigger, because the economy is bigger than any time in the past, but the pain isn't new.
Just a correction: I don't know what I was thinking; of course there are 20 and 30 year Bonds, issued in 1985 and previously, that would thus still be on the market; those would still have call options. However, I think the majority of the current public debt is on more recently issued paper, and thus isn't callable. If you read the source article in my above post, they say that callable T-paper isn't that common.
Anyway, blame that on my brain being asleep.
I suppose it would be possible for the Chinese to slowly trade in all their more recently bought paper for 20 and 30 year Bonds that would have call options, and then exercise the options all at once, but I'm not sure how much optionable paper is out there and what the Treasury has in assets at any given time, and what the response would be. It could just be that the Treasury would refuse to allow them to exercise the options all at once, and the effect would be minimal. Everyone understands that the Treasury (like any bank) doesn't have enough cash on hand to pay all its outstanding debts at once; so if the Chinese tried, and were denied, it wouldn't necessarily make other U.S. paper worthless -- that the Treasury can't pay off a huge quantity of debt at once doesn't really affect its long-term profitability.
The vast majority of U.S. public debt is in the form of Treasury Notes, Bills, and Bonds which do not have call provisions. No Fed paper has been issued with call provisions since 1985 (source). Since to the best of my knowledge, the longest bond issues in 85 were 10-year Bonds, they should have all matured right now (and aren't paying interest, so there's no reason why the Chinese or anyone else would be holding on to them).
If you have un-matured, post-1985 T-Bill, and you want money for it right now, you can try to sell it to somebody else, but you can't just to go the Treasury and demand money for it, if it's not yet mature. At best they're just going to laugh at you.
This "they'll call in their debts" nonsense has to stop; it just doesn't work that way in reality. China could do some nasty things to the U.S. if they decided to manipulate the bond market (by say dumping all the U.S. Federal paper they have), and the U.S. could mess up things terribly by not making interest payments on paper held by the Chinese central bank, or invalidating it completely; either would be the economic equivalent of nuclear war. People might talk about it once in a while when things get diplomatically ugly, but no sane person considers it. Everyone just has too much to lose -- nobody (except perhaps a few terrorists and other fringe groups on each side) wants to be responsible for setting the clock on the world back to October 29, 1929, and that's what would happen if the U.S. didn't service its debt, or if the Chinese started gaming the financial markets by dumping their U.S. paper. No matter how much the governments of China and the U.S. might disagree, the people that matter in both countries really like making money.
We bitch constantly here on Slashdot about how our government is run by corporate interests -- do you really think those people would let the country default on its bonds, and collapse the economy overnight? Hello? There could be people starving to death and eating each other on the streets of New York City, and they'd be demanding that the debt be serviced first.
I could see some reasons why it would be useful. Suppose you made incremental backups of your mind -- for the same reason you make them of a filesystem: in case of damage.
Suppose you suffered some great psychological trauma, something so severe that it rendered you unable to function normally in society. Rather than being institutionalized, or living a reduced quality of life, you could restore your mental and psychological state to how it existed at the time of the backup.
I don't think you'd want to do it very often; it wouldn't be something you'd want to do every day, but I could see it having applications. The effect would be as if you had the memory 'snapshot' taken, and then suddenly woke up after some span of time, without remembering anything that took place in the middle. You'd probably have to have a lot of therapy to bring you to terms with whatever might have happened in the interim, but it would have to be less traumatic than experiencing it "in person."
Of course, this all depends on the assumption that you could "restore" a person's mind to a previous state using only some stored information, which I'm not sure is possible. I think it's entirely possible that there's a lot more hardware/software interaction than we're imagining; that when a person endures a certain amount of psychological trauma, there are actual subtle physiological changes in the brain which might prevent a restoration to a previous state. Who knows -- maybe the result after restoration would be so unstable that it wouldn't be worth doing. But if it did, and you had enough data storage capacity to allow anyone who wanted to to make regular "snapshots" to restore to, it could be hugely beneficial.
My computer belongs to me, and I have the right to read anything that gets written to its RAM
I wish that were still true. Under the DMCA, and beginning with lots of previous bad laws that included non-circumvention clauses, you can't make a blanket statement like that. You could easily be "circumventing" someone's DRM, and that's illegal, except under some exceptional circumstances (like for research, interoperability, etc.).
We would have been a lot better off if we had not started making a lot of crappy laws specific to technology, and just let the old common law ideas of property see us through; if I own the computer, I should be able to do anything I want to it -- a sort of informational Castle Doctrine. If your electromagnatic waves end up on my property, I should be able to monitor them and do whatever I like with the resulting electrical charges coming off the antenna.
Similarly, most "computer crimes" could be adequately covered by traditional causes of action both in tort or criminal law. If I hack into your computer, that's trespass to chattels; if I steal or delete your data, it's larceny; botnetting it could be unlawful conversion. It's just old crimes being perpetrated in slightly different ways -- there's no 'new crime' being committed.
One of the fundamental errors of modern lawmaking over the last few decades is the assumption that computers 'change everything,' and require all sorts of odd new laws. They do not. In fact, had we just taken a step back in the 1980s and considered what was going on, and let the judges work it out within the framework of existing law, we'd probably be in less of a pickle now than we are. Once the floodgates were open for new "technology laws," they haven't stopped. Now, with each Congress, the situation gets worse and worse, and closer to one of negative informational liberty ("what can I do with my computer that's not illegal?").
Of course, leaving things alone would have required that we had a government that was more concerned about making good laws than in appeasing the telecommunications, cable TV, and content monopolies. Fat chance, really.
I found one claim in there particularly interesting:
We shouldn't forget despite all this that Windows Vista remains the largest concerted software project in human history. The types of software management issues being dealt with by Windows leaders are hard problems, problems that no other company has solved successfully. The solutions to these challenges are certainly not trivial.
I wonder...why is that, exactly? Why is Vista such a massive project?
It's a serious question. I mean, it's not like they're building HAL-9000 here. It's an OS. A microcomputer OS. Which really, as far as I can tell, doesn't do a whole lot more than a bunch of other OSes that are on the market already. What does it do that's so much more complex, fundamentally, than what OS X does? Or Linux? Or any number of other OSes? Why, exactly, is it such a freaking huge project?
If the size estimates I'm reading are accurate, at 50 MLOC, Vista is still smaller than OS X at 80 MLOC (comparisons to Linux are tougher because when someone says "Debian has 160 MLOC," it's not clear if that's just the base system or including all the applications or what). Admittedly, OS X borrowed a lot of code from NeXT, but Microsoft has a lot of code they could steal from previous Windows versions and other projects. If they chose not to, then that was a conscious management decision on their part.
If this guy's characterization of Vista development is true, they have more problems than a slipped schedule; they need to be asking why the damn thing has turned into that much of an epic project in the first place. This is not like IBM building the S/360 here; they're not wandering that far off into uncharted, never-before-attempted territory, based on every description of Vista I've ever seen or heard of. Yet they're making it that much of an effort, either by choice or mismanagement.
Vista, Linux, OS X: it does the same thing. Ultimately, they're both ways of managing the filesystem and the computer's hardware resources, and presenting those resources to programs in a standard manner on one end, and presenting a GUI to the user on the other. Sure, they're different ways of doing things, but they're all solutions to the same basic problem. It's even the same hardware resources and architecture that they're supposed to manage -- it's not as though the premise of each is that different.
Frankly if what that article says is true, Vista might have a second, more dubious distinction: the most wasted effort ever spent on a project since the Russians built that expensive lawn ornament.
If this guy did see the source code and was able to reverse engineer it, Microsoft ought to offer him a job. Apparently, they need the help.
(Office of Craig Barrett, Intel CEO, circa 2010...)
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of semiconductors in this country. The Core Duo was the processor to own. Then the other guy came out with a quad-core processor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Core Octa. That's eight cores and an co-processor. For cryptography. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to ten cores. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling eight cores and a co-processor. Cryptography or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to eighty cores.
Sure, we could go to sixteen cores next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, eight worked out pretty well, and sixteen is the next logical step after eight. So let's play it safe. Let's make a faster memory controller and call it the Core DecaOct Extreme Edition Pro. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-core game. Are they the best a geek can get? Fuck, no. Intel is the best a geek can get.
What part of this don't you understand? If four cores is good, and eight cores is better, obviously eighty cores would make us the best fucking processor that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the processor game by clinging to the single-processor industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, eighty cores is the biggest chance of all.
Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick seventy-two more cores in there. I don't care how. Make the cores so small they're not functional. Put some on the leads. I don't care if they have to cram the last ten cores in on the other side of the die, just do it!
People said we couldn't go to four. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Eighty's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at NVidia, working on fucking GPUs. Vertex shaders, my white ass!
I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which Intel is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, eighty cores, sweet Jesus in heaven.
Interesting. I hadn't paid much attention to it (can you tell?) other than getting it working and being pleased with its performance.
I guess I'm a little unclear as to the real difference between a "2D" and "3D" card anymore, then. The Quadro4 is advertised as being for 2D work, particularly CAD and graphics stuff: although now that I'm rereading the sales blurbs, it says "optimized for 2D performance..." So I guess that just means that it does do some hardware 3D acelleration, just not much, because it's optimized for precision rather than throughput?
I once read something that said that some cards implement more of the OpenGL instruction set than others do, but I can't find any substantiation of this. Just makes me more interested in seeing a real comparison sometime that included some of the [advertised as] "2D" cards compared to the [advertised as] "3D" cards, for non-gaming and graphics use.
There must be some advantage, otherwise why do products like the newer Quadro4s or Wildcats? Somebody must think that they're superior.
As to Retrobox, their stock fluctuates pretty dramatically. Some weeks they might be just chock full of workstations and servers, other times it can be pretty dismal. The machine that I got was a single-proc (P4) HP xw5000, which is certified as being RHEL-certified. That was actually why I bought it versus something else; at least I knew the hardware wouldn't be too Linux-unfriendly. With 512MB, a 40GB drive and the video card, I think it was around $280. (This was almost a year ago.) I've also heard that they sometimes have really good deals on pizzabox servers, but I've never come up with a good reason to buy one.
If you can deal with not having much of a warranty (or a Windows OEM license) and don't mind waiting a little while to get your system (they refurbish stuff after you order it, apparently, so be prepared to wait two weeks in some cases), you can sometimes get some nice deals.
Talk about bang-for-your-MB: while 6GB of video might only get me a season of TV episodes, 6GB of ebooks, suitably compressed, are probably more text than most people read in a great portion of their lives.
How much trading would you do of that? I mean, once you've acquired the entire Library of Congress, what would a ebook-warez kiddie do? Start in on the foreign-language ebooks? ("Dood...I just, like, totally got this hot copy of The Da Vinci Code...in Urdu. How sick is that?") Would people brag about how many Human Lifetimes Worth (HLW?) of written material they have?
I guess anything that gets kids involved in literature is a good thing... even if they never un-rar it.
This is true, but HTML (at least basic HTML, the kind you might use when formatting an eBook) is pretty trivial to parse and turn into RTF. There are any number of tools out there that do it.
Changing an HTML document to PDF is similarly trivial, although usually you end up with a simulated printed page, which might or might not be what you want.
I'm not sure what the hardware and software on this thing are like, but if it's even slightly open so that people can write third-party applications for it, I'd expect to see, if not a full-fledged HTML rendering engine, than at least a file converter that would dump it to some other format.
Personally, although I find the concept of e-ink and an ebook reader to be an intriguing one (I would read a lot more ebooks if it didn't mean either reading them on a backlit LCD or printing them out; neither of which are very attractive options), I'm going to hold out until I find one that's going to really be a swiss-army knife. But then again, I've never been an early adopter; I only got my first digital camera in 2004.
Well, since they don't get to vote in California (at least, I don't think they do yet), that's pretty much irrelevant to the Proposition vote.
I can pretty much guarantee that if voters in Connecticut could figure out a way to drop their gas prices and make people in Massachusetts pay for it, they'd be flocking to the polls to support it. Or any other state versus any other state, for that matter.
At some point, I think schemes like that would be struck down by the USSC as a violation of the sole authority of the Federal government to regulate interstate commerce (Ogden vs Gibbons and all that). I could think of some extreme scenarios where a state could impose internal taxes along with price-control rules, and effectively manipulate the markets in other states. Can't imagine the Federal Gov't would like that, although I'm not saying that the current Proposition necessarily goes there.
I think California's response would be that since the tax is on oil exploration within the State, that it's within their authority to regulate, and the product is being sold on the open market so it's everyone else's decision whether they want to buy it at the increased price or not.
The whole aspect of price-control is interesting, though; I'd like to see exactly how they plan on keeping the oil companies from raising prices. I suspect it's difficult or nearly impossible to do over time, unless they want to fix the price of gasoline and regulate the market completely (and that seems to be a guaranteed way of ensuring supply shortages).
As someone who doesn't live in California, I hope this passes just because it'll be interesting to watch, and the money going into alternative fuels and energy will be a good thing. However, if I lived in California, I'm not sure I'd be quite so enthused -- I'd be taking a very close look at how they planned on making sure I didn't get stuck with the bill for all this at the pump.
Well, if you cut taxes proportionally, since they pay the most in (as a result of our "progressive" system), they would tend to get the biggest cut.
Frankly I don't see how the so-called "progressive" system has any basis in fairness. I can see why someone who makes more should pay a greater absolute dollar amount, but not a higher percentage. If everyone pays 20% or something, and I make $20k and you make $500k, then you'll end up paying far more in taxes than I do. That difference is at least justifiable: if you make more money then you have more to lose, so in some way you're 'getting more' from government -- if it were to disappear, the rich would fall harder than the poor. However how this justifies a higher marginal rate for income I fail to understand, and frankly I find the attempts at justification ("well, they can afford it...") disgusting. Almost everyone could afford to pay more in taxes, assuming they're not starving to death; that doesn't mean it's justified.
In the long run this might actually be a good thing for California. If it encourages oil to be consumed from the Middle East or Venezuela first, then it just means that oil is still in the ground to be pumped out and sold later, when the price will probably be higher. Given the rate at which oil prices have risen and will probably rise in the future (well ahead of the rest of the market), keeping the oil in the ground for later probably isn't a bad investment. However, it's not one that most companies would make, because they're too focused on short-term profitability.
By making it economically unfeasible to use the oil now, Californians might be unwittingly doing themselves a favor: they'll suffer now, but once the oil elsewhere is gone and they're all that's left (of easily extractable reserves), it's fat city.
The only exception to this would be if there was some plan to take the money that would be gained from pumping and selling that oil now, and doing something with it that would be more profitable than just leaving it in the ground until the price goes up. Given the way that both industry and government squander cash, I suspect this is unlikely. Whatever they're going to make by selling it now will probably just be blown on stuff that has little or no lasting impact.
I don't think anyone is talking about being this strict at the current time.
It would be shooting Free Software in the foot; in striking the delicate balance between software freedom and programmer freedom, you don't want to go too far in either direction. Saying "no ROMs" would be going too far in the 'software freedom' direction, at the expense of the programmer/designer's freedom. I doubt that the benefits of GPL code are convincing enough to make most designers take this tradeoff.
Obviously, we eliminate some programmer freedom in the GPL already, by making it a copyleft. You don't have the option, if you want to use GPL code, of just releasing binaries and not source code. Thus, as a programmer, some of your 'freedom' is taken away in order to give the users and other programmers more. However, many people feel that this tradeoff is worthwhile; it's worth it to them to make their changes public, in order to utilize the body of work that's out there. To somebody like Linksys or TiVO, it's a value proposition.
At some point in the future (a hypothetical "GPL5," as you said), the FOSS community might be standing on such a mountain of code that it would make sense to leverage this in a way that would encourage the development of more open, easily hackable systems. In other words, they could make a license that would prohibit the use of non-removable burned ROMs, or mandate an open architecture, and hardware designers might be OK with it: the tradeoff of not being able to use ROMs, would be outweighed by the benefit of using the hypothetical GPL5ed code.
It's all about what kind of leverage you have to work with. Right now, with competition from vxWorks and the like, I don't think there's enough GPLed software to make hardware designers radically change their designs for more openness. They'd just design things the way they want (closed, proprietary) and find some other software solution. But perhaps at some future date, this wouldn't be the case; maybe over time, FOSS would be so far superior in some areas to what's available on the closed market, that it would be possible to effectively use this as a bludgeon in order to force open hardware and open standards.
I wouldn't be against this in the slightest. I don't think it's in any way hypocritical to force designers to use an open architecture, if this is the best outcome for users; on the "user freedom" versus "programmer freedom" spectrum, bookended with GPL at the user and and BSD somewhere closer to the programmer end (and proprietary binaries at the extreme end), I'm firmly on the user end of things. Anything we can do to produce hardware and software that is more transparent and more functional to the end user, I am in favor of, even if in doing so we have to beat some embedded-systems designers with the metaphorical 2x4 of a GPL-type license.
Slashdot Mirror
Painfully Subjective Review
I'll just out and say it -- Ken Mingis is just looking for bells & whistles. He's not in search of the 'best' operating system,
You are correct, however the implication that looking for the "best" OS would have been less subjective is laughable. Any search for the "best" operating system is inherently subjective, because "best" is a totally subjective criteria.
Any time I see a review where someone is looking for the 'best' anything, where two solutions exist, is not going to be objective. If it was objective, then it would need to explain why both things exist -- which implies that there are people who find both of them to be the best, respectively (otherwise why would they be using it?).
Frankly, I didn't find his review objective, but I'll take blatant over veiled subjectivity any day. It's not like he tried to hide where he was coming from, or give it much of a journalistic, authoritative overtone; he just stated his opinion.
As someone with a similar background to the reviewer, his statements were valuable to me. Sometimes, a variety of biased but straightforward reviews can be far more elucidating than a probably-biased but totally opaque one. At least with something like this, I can say "okay, so he's coming to this from the perspective of a Mac user, meaning he probably thinks the way OS X works is generally OK..." etc.
As does alot of the world not in the united states but still grounded under it's definition of right and wrong is why can't a foreign self governing nation control its own airspace and space space. If I built a spy satellite and orbitted it over the united states I would be a terrorist and bombed in seconds. Why the difference for china?
Actually, no. China has any number of satellites in LEO or MEO, which orbit over the United States. They don't (for obvious reasons) disclose which are their spy satellites, but I assume that they have them.
It's common knowledge that the Soviets had spy satellites which orbited over the U.S., just as they knew we had ones that orbited over them. Pretty much any country with launch capability probably has spy satellites of some sort or another.
Nobody shoots down each other's spy satellites, because it would be an act of war; the U.S. would have to retaliate and pretty soon we'd just have a whole lot of orbiting debris in orbit, and everyone would be blind. For the sake of stability, it's better to just let things go -- everyone knows that the other guys have satellites, and with some careful observation can figure out when they pass overhead. Sometimes it's even useful to let the other side have that capability (e.g., after various arms-reduction treaties, the U.S. would leave the cut-up bombers in the middle of the desert, so that the Russian satellites could see them and verify that they were destroyed).
The Chinese are playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship here; if they start shining lights at U.S. satellites, spy sats or otherwise, than the U.S. is probably going to start shining stuff right back. It would be easily to escalate by accident.
My feeling is that the Chinese are really only doing this to tweak the U.S.; they're just saying "hey, we see you!" and "we could disable you if we wanted to!" It would be insanity for them to start doing it on a regular basis.
Messing around with other people's satellites is right up there with messing around with other nations' submarine cables. You just don't do it; everyone basically knows that you could, but it would be unproductive. The end result is that everyone's cables would get cut, and nothing would be gained.
The theory of MAD applies to a lot more than just nuclear war.
Hey dufus, 67.2% of English speakers worldwide say that you're wrong.
t s1997.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:English_dialec
Percentage of native English speakers worldwide by country:
U.S. - 67.2%
U.K. - 16.9%
CAN - 5.8%
AUS - 4.5%
Other - 5.5%
(Ironically, the source of the data is from a British Council report.)
So even if the U.S. is the only country that uses "color," it's still by far the most common spelling. More generally, American English is, by any realistic measure, the principle dialect of the English language in use today; bitching and moaning about it won't make it any less true.
On a personal level, I agree.
However I have a hypothetical question that came to mind. What if it became clear that the ideals of Western society were counterproductive to its survival? As in, what happens when you start to see your way of live being subsumed by a more aggressive culture, because of strongly-held beliefs that prevent the response that would prevent the takeover?
I'm not saying that such a situation exists at present, but what if it really was an "existential struggle" in the literal sense of one culture systematically destroying the fabric of the other, and the one being destroyed was at a grave disadvantage because of self-imposed limitations that were not symmetric?
One argument would suggest that the only correct course of action is to maintain those beliefs to the grave; even if in holding them it ensures the destruction of one's culture by another. I'm not sure this is really a practical suggestion. This implies that there is nothing to your culture besides this belief -- nothing at all -- because you can't carry on if you betray it. Plus, it also implies that once given up, the belief can't be reinstated later; i.e., that the moral high ground, once lost, can never be re-ascended.
Like I said, I'm not into the Book of Revelation school of foreign policy, but I think it's an interesting philosophical question as to what various cultures would do when really threatened with being put to the bayonet as a result of their hesitance to do something morally reprehensible; I think it would be very rare indeed for any group to not compromise itself.
I'll give you a hint: his name involves a tasty Mexican food product.
(And no, "chihuahua" is not a food product.)
... and mac-heads. That's not meant to be flamebait. Apple makes a good looking computer, and that's important to their users.
On the contrary: Apple could make a computer shaped like a giant turd (and depending on who you ask, has from time to time gone down this road) and people would still buy it in droves.
Within six months, PC case manufacturers in Taiwan would be making barebones lookalikes, shaped vaguely but not quite exactly like Apple's turds, and onward the world would merrily go.
(Disclaimer: I'm typing this on an iBook right now -- but don't ever assume that Apple's users tell it where to go; Apple tells its users what's cool. When they made a portable that looked like a toilet seat, you damn well bet people bought it.)
I think I know the house for you, then. Not sure what the availability is like -- and do you mind relocating to Vienna?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundertwasserhaus
Um, "tyranny of the super-majority" was meant to be ironic; that is democratic: if enough people want something badly enough, any democratic system must give it to them. In the current U.S. system, it could happen via Constitutional amendments followed by legislation.
Certainly one could create a system that would be a limited democracy, where there was no way, even if all but one person in the country wanted something done, that it could happen -- a Constitutional Republic where the Constitution was fixed and there was no mechanism for amendments, perhaps; but this would be, in my opinion, less democratic than a U.S.-type system where the entire government can be changed if enough of a super-majority desires it.
Any good government should protect a minority group from the majority, but there is a certain limit to how big a minority group must be, before it becomes protected: if that minority is smaller than the number of people required to block a super-majority, then it effectively is unprotected. For example, if pedophilia was currently legal, but widely detested, it's likely that a small number of pedophiles would be unable to prevent an abolition of their rights by the majority, because they wouldn't have the votes required to block it. (I'm making an assumption here that pedophiles are a far fringe group; whether this is actually true I'm not sure, but work with me here.) This isn't undemocratic, even though it does represent an oppression of a minority by the majority. When a minority group gets suitably small, it's not a 'legitimate minority' any more: they're just criminals.
When people speak of the 'tyranny of the majority,' at least in my experience, they speak really of the 'tyranny of 51%.' That is to say, a tyranny where a single person or very small group of people (the 1%) can have an un-deserved influence on the system. Nobody really speaks or cares about the 'tyranny of 99.99999%.' At that point, it's probably not likely to be viewed as tyrannical oppression anymore, but just sensible lawmaking versus criminals.
Ideally, the size of the supermajority required to oppress a minority group should be just smaller than the number of people needed to overthrow the government completely. This ensures that rather than Revolution, the government is changed via peaceful means; if you make the required supermajority any larger than this, then your government will just collapse.
Too bad it's going to get a lot more of our service members tortured after capture in retribution and give the terrorist networks even more recruiting fodder.
The second part of your comment might have merit, in that the new stance might provide propaganda for terrorist recruitment (but really, it's not like there's a shortage), however, if you don't think that anyone in uniform is at risk of being tortured to death if captured anyway, you're sorely mistaken.
The only reason more people aren't tortured and executed after capture is because the terrorists know they're more useful alive (and on TV) than dead. I doubt it has anything to do with any high-minded moral feelings on the point of the Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, or the occasional Al Qaeda cell. If any of them are seemingly obeying the Geneva Convention, it's purely coincidental.
Allow me to play the Devil's Advocate a bit further for a moment:
Take a think right now to the tactics used throughout much of the Civil War. Seems pretty ridiculous, doesn't it? I mean, lines of people, just blasting away at each other? Almost criminally negligent, in retrospect -- but those were the established tactics, and they were employed up until (and arguably, well beyond -- they should have been obsolete with the introduction of the rifle) when they were impossible to maintain anymore. Since then, tactics and strategy moved on, and now it seems bizarre that people would have chosen to wear uniforms in bright colors, or choose a cleared field for an infantry battle instead of a forest, or engage at a stone's throw instead of the maximum effective range of their organic weapons, as current tactics would dictate (if in the defense).
I believe that in a generation or two, people will look back on the tactics used in the great wars of the 20th century and by the major powers in the 21st as similarly antiquated. I mean, wearing uniforms? So the enemy can identify you? Idiotic. Refusal to use civilians to mask one's forces will be seen as something quaint; like wearing blaze orange (or bright red) on a battlefield in 1944. The battle dress of the 21st century warrior won't be "woodland" or "ACU digital" (those are carryovers; legacies from a more civilized age, perhaps), but the clothing of the civilian populace. The standard tactics and maneuvers won't be 'Platoon Attack' or 'Knock Out Bunkers,' but 'Creating a Mass Casualty Incident' and 'Propaganda Creation 101.'
Every time that the methods of war have shifted dramatically, it has been those most successful with the previous generation of tactics that have been the most resistant to change, and who have consequently suffered the most. "Terrorism" isn't some new bogeyman that we can make go away; any more than people who thought the machine gun was uncivilized and barbaric could just snap their fingers and return themselves to a world of cavalry charges and infantry squares. It's the new standard: we just haven't realized it yet.
Sending more troops and equipment to Iraq and Afghanistan today is about as strategically sound as the generals in the Battle of the Somme sending their troops 'over the top' again and again, into the waiting machine guns. Today, we send our troops, in their well-marked vehicles and uniforms, out to be cut down by IEDs and snipers. War has changed, and probably not for the better, if you liked the 20th century idea of war being something between soldiers and armies that can be drawn on a map or modeled on a sand table. Terrorism is the new war, and the Geneva Convention is about as relevant to that as the Code of Chivalry was to someone trying to keep their feet from rotting off in a trench in 1918.
I agree with you; I think our political system is in desperate need of reform, and not just a few simple Band-Aids.
However, with the current two-party structure, riders do serve a semi-legitimate, or at least useful, purpose: they provide a way for a minority to torpedo a bill that really shouldn't get passed, preventing a "tyranny of the majority." It doesn't prevent a 'tyranny of the super-majority,' because riders can be defeated through parliamentary procedure, but that's democracy for you.
It's important when we look at legal procedure, that we don't "streamline" the system too much: sometimes, things that look like terribly stupid ideas (and probably are), are the only things holding back a torrent of terrible legislation. Riders are a double-edged sword in this way; they allow a minority to get things passed that otherwise wouldn't have enough votes -- an obviously undemocratic outcome, and prone to abuse -- but it also works as a blocking maneuver. Sometimes, it can be possible to stop a legislative juggernaut by attaching an impossible-to-pass rider.
Removing something like this, particularly in the current atmosphere, where other safeguards like filibusters are also on the block, could potentially be disastrous. It could lead to seesaw legislation, with each successive Congress undoing the one before it and then going further in the opposite direction, without any way to stop it. In physics terms, filibusters and poison-pill riders act as drag or friction on a pendulum, which is constantly having energy put into it. Were it not for these outlets, the whole thing could easily oscillate out of control.
Agreed.
More generally, I've recently been doing a lot of reading about the history of the U.S. financial markets in the mid to late-19th century, and there are a lot of parallels with recent history, although the timelines today are significantly compressed versus what they once then.
Over and over again, after a major technological development, there exists a period of -- for lack of a better term (and why not, it's a good term) -- "irrational exuberance;" a bubble. And then the bubble will burst, which depending on the severity of the bubble can mean a selling panic, and then things will even out and start climbing again towards the next bubble. This happened with canals and canal bonds, and then again with railroads. (Actually railroad stocks bubbled and burst several times over; you think people would have learned the first few times.) I'm sure if you look, you can find other parallels after periods of revolutionary technological development.
Computers and the internet, looked at as another form of infrastructure improvement (just as the canals were, and the internet, and to a less dramatic extent highways), followed the same pattern and created the same bubble and burst. Now that it's come and gone, we can start the real work, which is using the new technology to actually do productive work. The gains of the market during the bubble weren't real, but the ones made during the less dramatic climbs between bubbles are.
The reasons for the bubbles are not really financial as much as psychological (if you can separate the two). They're driven, predominantly, by greed and non-rational thinking: people get blinded by the idea of returns and pour their money into something that can't possibly continue forever, and each time when it crashes, they act surprised, as if their situation was somewhat unique.
The Dot-Com crash wasn't unique. Enron wasn't unique. Sure, the absolute values are bigger, because the economy is bigger than any time in the past, but the pain isn't new.
Just a correction: I don't know what I was thinking; of course there are 20 and 30 year Bonds, issued in 1985 and previously, that would thus still be on the market; those would still have call options. However, I think the majority of the current public debt is on more recently issued paper, and thus isn't callable. If you read the source article in my above post, they say that callable T-paper isn't that common.
Anyway, blame that on my brain being asleep.
I suppose it would be possible for the Chinese to slowly trade in all their more recently bought paper for 20 and 30 year Bonds that would have call options, and then exercise the options all at once, but I'm not sure how much optionable paper is out there and what the Treasury has in assets at any given time, and what the response would be. It could just be that the Treasury would refuse to allow them to exercise the options all at once, and the effect would be minimal. Everyone understands that the Treasury (like any bank) doesn't have enough cash on hand to pay all its outstanding debts at once; so if the Chinese tried, and were denied, it wouldn't necessarily make other U.S. paper worthless -- that the Treasury can't pay off a huge quantity of debt at once doesn't really affect its long-term profitability.
The vast majority of U.S. public debt is in the form of Treasury Notes, Bills, and Bonds which do not have call provisions. No Fed paper has been issued with call provisions since 1985 (source). Since to the best of my knowledge, the longest bond issues in 85 were 10-year Bonds, they should have all matured right now (and aren't paying interest, so there's no reason why the Chinese or anyone else would be holding on to them).
If you have un-matured, post-1985 T-Bill, and you want money for it right now, you can try to sell it to somebody else, but you can't just to go the Treasury and demand money for it, if it's not yet mature. At best they're just going to laugh at you.
This "they'll call in their debts" nonsense has to stop; it just doesn't work that way in reality. China could do some nasty things to the U.S. if they decided to manipulate the bond market (by say dumping all the U.S. Federal paper they have), and the U.S. could mess up things terribly by not making interest payments on paper held by the Chinese central bank, or invalidating it completely; either would be the economic equivalent of nuclear war. People might talk about it once in a while when things get diplomatically ugly, but no sane person considers it. Everyone just has too much to lose -- nobody (except perhaps a few terrorists and other fringe groups on each side) wants to be responsible for setting the clock on the world back to October 29, 1929, and that's what would happen if the U.S. didn't service its debt, or if the Chinese started gaming the financial markets by dumping their U.S. paper. No matter how much the governments of China and the U.S. might disagree, the people that matter in both countries really like making money.
We bitch constantly here on Slashdot about how our government is run by corporate interests -- do you really think those people would let the country default on its bonds, and collapse the economy overnight? Hello? There could be people starving to death and eating each other on the streets of New York City, and they'd be demanding that the debt be serviced first.
I could see some reasons why it would be useful. Suppose you made incremental backups of your mind -- for the same reason you make them of a filesystem: in case of damage.
Suppose you suffered some great psychological trauma, something so severe that it rendered you unable to function normally in society. Rather than being institutionalized, or living a reduced quality of life, you could restore your mental and psychological state to how it existed at the time of the backup.
I don't think you'd want to do it very often; it wouldn't be something you'd want to do every day, but I could see it having applications. The effect would be as if you had the memory 'snapshot' taken, and then suddenly woke up after some span of time, without remembering anything that took place in the middle. You'd probably have to have a lot of therapy to bring you to terms with whatever might have happened in the interim, but it would have to be less traumatic than experiencing it "in person."
Of course, this all depends on the assumption that you could "restore" a person's mind to a previous state using only some stored information, which I'm not sure is possible. I think it's entirely possible that there's a lot more hardware/software interaction than we're imagining; that when a person endures a certain amount of psychological trauma, there are actual subtle physiological changes in the brain which might prevent a restoration to a previous state. Who knows -- maybe the result after restoration would be so unstable that it wouldn't be worth doing. But if it did, and you had enough data storage capacity to allow anyone who wanted to to make regular "snapshots" to restore to, it could be hugely beneficial.
My computer belongs to me, and I have the right to read anything that gets written to its RAM
I wish that were still true. Under the DMCA, and beginning with lots of previous bad laws that included non-circumvention clauses, you can't make a blanket statement like that. You could easily be "circumventing" someone's DRM, and that's illegal, except under some exceptional circumstances (like for research, interoperability, etc.).
We would have been a lot better off if we had not started making a lot of crappy laws specific to technology, and just let the old common law ideas of property see us through; if I own the computer, I should be able to do anything I want to it -- a sort of informational Castle Doctrine. If your electromagnatic waves end up on my property, I should be able to monitor them and do whatever I like with the resulting electrical charges coming off the antenna.
Similarly, most "computer crimes" could be adequately covered by traditional causes of action both in tort or criminal law. If I hack into your computer, that's trespass to chattels; if I steal or delete your data, it's larceny; botnetting it could be unlawful conversion. It's just old crimes being perpetrated in slightly different ways -- there's no 'new crime' being committed.
One of the fundamental errors of modern lawmaking over the last few decades is the assumption that computers 'change everything,' and require all sorts of odd new laws. They do not. In fact, had we just taken a step back in the 1980s and considered what was going on, and let the judges work it out within the framework of existing law, we'd probably be in less of a pickle now than we are. Once the floodgates were open for new "technology laws," they haven't stopped. Now, with each Congress, the situation gets worse and worse, and closer to one of negative informational liberty ("what can I do with my computer that's not illegal?").
Of course, leaving things alone would have required that we had a government that was more concerned about making good laws than in appeasing the telecommunications, cable TV, and content monopolies. Fat chance, really.
I found one claim in there particularly interesting:
I wonder...why is that, exactly? Why is Vista such a massive project?
It's a serious question. I mean, it's not like they're building HAL-9000 here. It's an OS. A microcomputer OS. Which really, as far as I can tell, doesn't do a whole lot more than a bunch of other OSes that are on the market already. What does it do that's so much more complex, fundamentally, than what OS X does? Or Linux? Or any number of other OSes? Why, exactly, is it such a freaking huge project?
If the size estimates I'm reading are accurate, at 50 MLOC, Vista is still smaller than OS X at 80 MLOC (comparisons to Linux are tougher because when someone says "Debian has 160 MLOC," it's not clear if that's just the base system or including all the applications or what). Admittedly, OS X borrowed a lot of code from NeXT, but Microsoft has a lot of code they could steal from previous Windows versions and other projects. If they chose not to, then that was a conscious management decision on their part.
If this guy's characterization of Vista development is true, they have more problems than a slipped schedule; they need to be asking why the damn thing has turned into that much of an epic project in the first place. This is not like IBM building the S/360 here; they're not wandering that far off into uncharted, never-before-attempted territory, based on every description of Vista I've ever seen or heard of. Yet they're making it that much of an effort, either by choice or mismanagement.
Vista, Linux, OS X: it does the same thing. Ultimately, they're both ways of managing the filesystem and the computer's hardware resources, and presenting those resources to programs in a standard manner on one end, and presenting a GUI to the user on the other. Sure, they're different ways of doing things, but they're all solutions to the same basic problem. It's even the same hardware resources and architecture that they're supposed to manage -- it's not as though the premise of each is that different.
Frankly if what that article says is true, Vista might have a second, more dubious distinction: the most wasted effort ever spent on a project since the Russians built that expensive lawn ornament.
If this guy did see the source code and was able to reverse engineer it, Microsoft ought to offer him a job. Apparently, they need the help.
(Office of Craig Barrett, Intel CEO, circa 2010...)
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of semiconductors in this country. The Core Duo was the processor to own. Then the other guy came out with a quad-core processor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Core Octa. That's eight cores and an co-processor. For cryptography. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to ten cores. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling eight cores and a co-processor. Cryptography or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to eighty cores.
Sure, we could go to sixteen cores next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, eight worked out pretty well, and sixteen is the next logical step after eight. So let's play it safe. Let's make a faster memory controller and call it the Core DecaOct Extreme Edition Pro. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-core game. Are they the best a geek can get? Fuck, no. Intel is the best a geek can get.
What part of this don't you understand? If four cores is good, and eight cores is better, obviously eighty cores would make us the best fucking processor that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the processor game by clinging to the single-processor industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, eighty cores is the biggest chance of all.
Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick seventy-two more cores in there. I don't care how. Make the cores so small they're not functional. Put some on the leads. I don't care if they have to cram the last ten cores in on the other side of the die, just do it!
People said we couldn't go to four. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Eighty's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at NVidia, working on fucking GPUs. Vertex shaders, my white ass!
I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which Intel is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, eighty cores, sweet Jesus in heaven.
[Apologies to the Onion.]
Interesting. I hadn't paid much attention to it (can you tell?) other than getting it working and being pleased with its performance.
p
I guess I'm a little unclear as to the real difference between a "2D" and "3D" card anymore, then. The Quadro4 is advertised as being for 2D work, particularly CAD and graphics stuff: although now that I'm rereading the sales blurbs, it says "optimized for 2D performance..." So I guess that just means that it does do some hardware 3D acelleration, just not much, because it's optimized for precision rather than throughput?
I once read something that said that some cards implement more of the OpenGL instruction set than others do, but I can't find any substantiation of this. Just makes me more interested in seeing a real comparison sometime that included some of the [advertised as] "2D" cards compared to the [advertised as] "3D" cards, for non-gaming and graphics use.
There must be some advantage, otherwise why do products like the newer Quadro4s or Wildcats? Somebody must think that they're superior.
As to Retrobox, their stock fluctuates pretty dramatically. Some weeks they might be just chock full of workstations and servers, other times it can be pretty dismal. The machine that I got was a single-proc (P4) HP xw5000, which is certified as being RHEL-certified. That was actually why I bought it versus something else; at least I knew the hardware wouldn't be too Linux-unfriendly. With 512MB, a 40GB drive and the video card, I think it was around $280. (This was almost a year ago.) I've also heard that they sometimes have really good deals on pizzabox servers, but I've never come up with a good reason to buy one.
If you can deal with not having much of a warranty (or a Windows OEM license) and don't mind waiting a little while to get your system (they refurbish stuff after you order it, apparently, so be prepared to wait two weeks in some cases), you can sometimes get some nice deals.
Unfortunately, the inventory-search part of their web site is down today.
http://www.retrobox.com/rbwww/home/search_menu.as
By the way, why does every freaking campaign ad in California have a firefighter in it?
Because it's the best way to get both the "homeland security" voter and the "san francisco bathhouse" voter?
Talk about bang-for-your-MB: while 6GB of video might only get me a season of TV episodes, 6GB of ebooks, suitably compressed, are probably more text than most people read in a great portion of their lives.
... even if they never un-rar it.
How much trading would you do of that? I mean, once you've acquired the entire Library of Congress, what would a ebook-warez kiddie do? Start in on the foreign-language ebooks? ("Dood...I just, like, totally got this hot copy of The Da Vinci Code...in Urdu. How sick is that?") Would people brag about how many Human Lifetimes Worth (HLW?) of written material they have?
I guess anything that gets kids involved in literature is a good thing
This is true, but HTML (at least basic HTML, the kind you might use when formatting an eBook) is pretty trivial to parse and turn into RTF. There are any number of tools out there that do it.
Changing an HTML document to PDF is similarly trivial, although usually you end up with a simulated printed page, which might or might not be what you want.
I'm not sure what the hardware and software on this thing are like, but if it's even slightly open so that people can write third-party applications for it, I'd expect to see, if not a full-fledged HTML rendering engine, than at least a file converter that would dump it to some other format.
Personally, although I find the concept of e-ink and an ebook reader to be an intriguing one (I would read a lot more ebooks if it didn't mean either reading them on a backlit LCD or printing them out; neither of which are very attractive options), I'm going to hold out until I find one that's going to really be a swiss-army knife. But then again, I've never been an early adopter; I only got my first digital camera in 2004.
Well, since they don't get to vote in California (at least, I don't think they do yet), that's pretty much irrelevant to the Proposition vote.
I can pretty much guarantee that if voters in Connecticut could figure out a way to drop their gas prices and make people in Massachusetts pay for it, they'd be flocking to the polls to support it. Or any other state versus any other state, for that matter.
At some point, I think schemes like that would be struck down by the USSC as a violation of the sole authority of the Federal government to regulate interstate commerce (Ogden vs Gibbons and all that). I could think of some extreme scenarios where a state could impose internal taxes along with price-control rules, and effectively manipulate the markets in other states. Can't imagine the Federal Gov't would like that, although I'm not saying that the current Proposition necessarily goes there.
I think California's response would be that since the tax is on oil exploration within the State, that it's within their authority to regulate, and the product is being sold on the open market so it's everyone else's decision whether they want to buy it at the increased price or not.
The whole aspect of price-control is interesting, though; I'd like to see exactly how they plan on keeping the oil companies from raising prices. I suspect it's difficult or nearly impossible to do over time, unless they want to fix the price of gasoline and regulate the market completely (and that seems to be a guaranteed way of ensuring supply shortages).
As someone who doesn't live in California, I hope this passes just because it'll be interesting to watch, and the money going into alternative fuels and energy will be a good thing. However, if I lived in California, I'm not sure I'd be quite so enthused -- I'd be taking a very close look at how they planned on making sure I didn't get stuck with the bill for all this at the pump.
While cutting taxes for the top 1%.
Well, if you cut taxes proportionally, since they pay the most in (as a result of our "progressive" system), they would tend to get the biggest cut.
Frankly I don't see how the so-called "progressive" system has any basis in fairness. I can see why someone who makes more should pay a greater absolute dollar amount, but not a higher percentage. If everyone pays 20% or something, and I make $20k and you make $500k, then you'll end up paying far more in taxes than I do. That difference is at least justifiable: if you make more money then you have more to lose, so in some way you're 'getting more' from government -- if it were to disappear, the rich would fall harder than the poor. However how this justifies a higher marginal rate for income I fail to understand, and frankly I find the attempts at justification ("well, they can afford it...") disgusting. Almost everyone could afford to pay more in taxes, assuming they're not starving to death; that doesn't mean it's justified.
In the long run this might actually be a good thing for California. If it encourages oil to be consumed from the Middle East or Venezuela first, then it just means that oil is still in the ground to be pumped out and sold later, when the price will probably be higher. Given the rate at which oil prices have risen and will probably rise in the future (well ahead of the rest of the market), keeping the oil in the ground for later probably isn't a bad investment. However, it's not one that most companies would make, because they're too focused on short-term profitability.
By making it economically unfeasible to use the oil now, Californians might be unwittingly doing themselves a favor: they'll suffer now, but once the oil elsewhere is gone and they're all that's left (of easily extractable reserves), it's fat city.
The only exception to this would be if there was some plan to take the money that would be gained from pumping and selling that oil now, and doing something with it that would be more profitable than just leaving it in the ground until the price goes up. Given the way that both industry and government squander cash, I suspect this is unlikely. Whatever they're going to make by selling it now will probably just be blown on stuff that has little or no lasting impact.
I don't think anyone is talking about being this strict at the current time.
It would be shooting Free Software in the foot; in striking the delicate balance between software freedom and programmer freedom, you don't want to go too far in either direction. Saying "no ROMs" would be going too far in the 'software freedom' direction, at the expense of the programmer/designer's freedom. I doubt that the benefits of GPL code are convincing enough to make most designers take this tradeoff.
Obviously, we eliminate some programmer freedom in the GPL already, by making it a copyleft. You don't have the option, if you want to use GPL code, of just releasing binaries and not source code. Thus, as a programmer, some of your 'freedom' is taken away in order to give the users and other programmers more. However, many people feel that this tradeoff is worthwhile; it's worth it to them to make their changes public, in order to utilize the body of work that's out there. To somebody like Linksys or TiVO, it's a value proposition.
At some point in the future (a hypothetical "GPL5," as you said), the FOSS community might be standing on such a mountain of code that it would make sense to leverage this in a way that would encourage the development of more open, easily hackable systems. In other words, they could make a license that would prohibit the use of non-removable burned ROMs, or mandate an open architecture, and hardware designers might be OK with it: the tradeoff of not being able to use ROMs, would be outweighed by the benefit of using the hypothetical GPL5ed code.
It's all about what kind of leverage you have to work with. Right now, with competition from vxWorks and the like, I don't think there's enough GPLed software to make hardware designers radically change their designs for more openness. They'd just design things the way they want (closed, proprietary) and find some other software solution. But perhaps at some future date, this wouldn't be the case; maybe over time, FOSS would be so far superior in some areas to what's available on the closed market, that it would be possible to effectively use this as a bludgeon in order to force open hardware and open standards.
I wouldn't be against this in the slightest. I don't think it's in any way hypocritical to force designers to use an open architecture, if this is the best outcome for users; on the "user freedom" versus "programmer freedom" spectrum, bookended with GPL at the user and and BSD somewhere closer to the programmer end (and proprietary binaries at the extreme end), I'm firmly on the user end of things. Anything we can do to produce hardware and software that is more transparent and more functional to the end user, I am in favor of, even if in doing so we have to beat some embedded-systems designers with the metaphorical 2x4 of a GPL-type license.