So in other words, you've taken one data point - the existence of Slashdot, and concluded based on:
1989: Slashdot didn't exist. 1999: Slashdot did exist. 2009: Slashdot did exist.
That progress has slowed.
When Slashdot gets wiped out next year, I look forward to:
2019: Slashdot doesn't exist - progress has gone backwards!
I know Slashdot is great, but it isn't the be all and end all!
Yes, from 1989 to 1999 we had the web, widespread availability of the Internet (over dialup), and computers which were just the same only faster.
But from 1999 to 2009, we've had the widespread availability of broadband, cheap laptops and netbooks, vast developments in phones (basically hand held computers) and mobile Internet access, digital cameras that store thousands of photographs, and you can now carry your entire music collection on a tiny device.
(Before any pedant points it out - yes some of those things developed from technology that existed before 1999, but the OP is talking about widespread availability, and mature products. Otherwise, we might as well point out that the Internet and ethernet existed before 1989 too, so there was better choice than a BBS over dial-up, or we might as well claim that Slashdot is only an incremental improvement over a BBS.)
So come on - give us something that is "non-incremental" progress?
I bet you you can't. Just about all technological developments rely on some earlier development. Furthermore, genuinely new developments don't come about instantly, but require several developments to come together, usually over a period of decades.
The fact that the computer revolution has taken decades hardly means it isn't a revolution! By this reasoning, the Industrial Revolution was nothing significant, because the changes at the later part of the 19th Century were just "incremental" improvements from the earlier part. But that misses the point - that as a whole, there was still dramatic change and progress.
Where are our light based computers? Where are out bio based computers? Silicon?!? That's soooo 20th century.
You're just throwing buzzwords - what do these computers do, that is fundamentally different to today's computers?
TCP/IP and ethernet are decades old. We're just at a gigabit? We should be at terabyte bandwidth in our homes. And it should be cheap - $5/month.
Now who's talking about incremental progress? If we had these, you'd be first in line to criticise that it's merely doing the same thing faster or cheaper - "incremental" progress.
And you are conflating the existence of technology, with widespread availability. Yes, ethernet is decades old, but how many people had access back then? Many people still didn't have TV back in the 1950s (and of course, if we did live in the 1950s, you'd be pointing out how the TV was decades old technology, and concluding therefore that progress had slowed...)
Or we could go back to last century, and note how widespread availability of cars and phones came decades after their invention.
The point is that going from invention to widespread use always takes time - and there is no evidence of it being slower today, if anything I'd say it's faster (we went from invention of the web and hardly anyone having Internet access, to almost everyone in developed countries having it, in 10 years).
All the above and MORE if progress kept at its pace from the 1960s.
Can you tell me what the rate of progress for Internet bandwidth in homes was, back in the 1960s, please?
But phones and cars existed in 1898! The phone was invented in the 1870s, and cars were first produced by Benz in 1888.
What happened is that they became more widely available between 1898 and 1914 - which is just like how computers and mobile phones were existing technology that became more widely available from 1993 to 2009.
How many people had a mobile phone in 1993? And to claim mobiles and computers are only "re-implementation"s, you might as well handwave cars away, saying they're only an improvement over horses.
And whilst I'm commenting, TFA is very misleading to compare his 53 year life span to his Grandmother's 80 year life span. That's about 50% longer!
The correct comparison for 1956 to now should be 1880 to 1933.
Or alternatively, we should be looking at the difference from 1929 to now, or from 1956 to 2036.
The iPhone is just a smaller version of the Memex predicted by Vannevar Bush
The issue is doing it, not predicting it. (And I think you mean the Internet, which contrary to what some think around here, did exist before the Iphone came along.)
In fact, it's worth noting that just about every single party except Labour is now opposing them: Lib Dems, Greens, UKIP.
If we had a more proportional system (and look at the recent EU elections to see what the outcome of a PR election might look more like), there'd be no chance of ID cards. But they can be pushed through by a Government with 30something % of the vote (and about 20something % of the population, IIRC).
I am still worried that Conservatives will back down on their plans - in particular, that they might claim to scrap the compulsory card, but it will still remain for anyone wanting a passport (since under the current plans, the passport will be combined with the ID card, and there'll be no way to get a passport on its own anymore), or they'll scrap just the card, and keep the database.
I'll remember that one - next time someone criticises Windows, we can just say: Good Lord, you're always whinging about that shit. Get over yourself already, Microsoft doesn't cater to your crowd and no-one owes you a free state-of-the-art computer.
But no one does say that. Why is it considered good that Apple aren't interested in providing an OS that people want, but when Microsoft have some trivial feature missing, that's considered fair game to say that therefore, OS X is better than all other platforms?
He's not whinging - if you hadn't noticed, this entire story is about a comparison between Windows and two other OSs, so I think people posting about which they think is better, and why, is very much relevant. His reasoning is certainly far more of a contribution to the debate than your whinging.
Indeed, XP is fine, but that goes for OS X - what does it offer for the price (which is not $29 as the article ludicrously asserts - that's just an upgrade price from the most recent version of OS X, so you need the full price, plus a Mac to go with it, which don't come cheap), that isn't available on any other OS?
Except that's an upgrade price. And the upgrade from Tiger is $169.
What about all the service packs that MS give out for free? The point is that it's unfair to compare - Windows has major jumps (with corresponding price) occasionally, but has many intermediate increases offered for free. OS X OTOH has had more regular updates, that cost money, but each update costs less. So which costs more overall, if you'd been an upgrader since say, Windows 2000 versus the first version of OS X?
I mean, come on - everytime someone points out that the Windows upgrades are free, we get no end of people coming out the woodwork telling us that you can't compare the different upgrade styles. So where are all those people now?
How much does OS X costs buying new, compared to Windows?
To give the point to Apple, and claim the price is $29, shows that CW are just part of the same pro-Apple bias in the media (presumably because of the traditional use of Macs in the niche of DTP), rendering the whole article worthless.
It is also meaningless to claim "It's the best of times if you're a lover of operating systems", when it's not like people have any real choice in what OS they can install on what computer. I might as well claim it's the best of times because you can also buy AmigaOS.
An organization is merely a group of people... saying they are somehow magically responsible for things those people didn't do is nonsense.
But in law, the organisation is not.
No one is claiming the individuals are responsible - on the contrary, with limited liability, they are not. But the company, as an organisation, will still be liable, no matter who is employed. So the question here is, should the "British Government" be an organisation in such a sense?
(The only exception is criminal cases where employees are responsible - in which case, it is specific to them, and not the organisation).
I still don't see a difference - last time I looked, lots of people claimed it wasn't torture, and they justify it with their belief these people are guilty.
It always cracks me up when the PC-Gaming/DirectX/Direct3D crowd starts howling on about how abut how OpenGL is dead
Yet no one has done this in the entire thread - do you have a reference that you are referring to, or are you just trying to start a flamewar by making up a straw man?
Perhaps the perfect answer to both is that we switch to binary. Thus the answer to your question is simply 100000000000000000000000000000000.
I see it now: OS X 10.7 "Tabby Cat" edition will hail a breaththrough in the debate, by reporting all memory sizes, and in fact all numbers altogether, for consistency, in binary.
"There's no need for all these complicated extra digits, which our research has shown just confuses new users", said Jobs, "The average user will have no need for any keys except '0' and '1'". This will also allow newly designed Apple keyboards that do away with the unnecessary buttons.
Yes, just as it's easier to think that the computer you're buying has 4.294967296 GB of memory....
On that note, I see that online they are still advertising their Macs' RAM in the 1024x definition. So how does the new OS X report memory? If it uses one for RAM, and one for hard drives etc, that's going to be rather inconsistent and confusing. If it's inconsistent with what they and RAM sellers advertise, that's also going to be confusing for people.
But you could make that argument for any website - "You have to pay the The Times newspaper, so I would expect them to require payment for their website". Instead they rely on ads, just as the BBC does for those it thinks are coming from outside the UK (although sometimes it gets this wrong).
As a licence payer, I want it to be free for everyone. I want the generally-good news coverage to be available for all. And if I see a good article, I want to be able to link it for others to see.
So this is why CPUs have been quadrupling in speed every 18 months, whilst the number of transisters double.
Oh wait, they haven't.
This is my point - you can make wild assumptions and claims about how you think it should be possible to gain extra kinds of performance, but unless you post actual evidence, there is no way you can assume you can get a 2x factor out of each one independently (as opposed to smaller speed ups which may add up to, at most, a 2x factor in total).
Sure it's hypothetically possible, but you need to show evidence rather than assuming it.
Have CPUs/GPUs been increasing in speed by 4x every 18 months rather than 2x? If not, what will change for it to happen in future? (In fact, for 570x in 6 years, you need a doubling of speed every less than 8 months...)
Alternatively, you could optimize the architecture of the microprocessors so as to require less clock cycles per opcode which would translate into an efficiency increase independent of either transistor size or clock frequency.
Less clock cycles per instruction has been a trend, but I believe that this has just been one way of using "extra" transisters. Indeed, as I say, using extra transisters for more cores is only a recent trend, AIUI because getting more speed from a single core using extra transisters is becoming harder. But no one's been able to magic greater than 2x performance in speed from 2x the number of transisters, at least not over any kind of period - do you have any counter-examples?
We shouldn't punish either person in your analogy, because the only possible harm is to themselves. Now what if instead, the system somehow meant that them walking out caused someone else to die, and that they knew this was a risk in advance. Consider also that this was a public area (and not say, private land), where the Government had decided setting this rule about lightning storms was worthwhile in order to prevent innocent people from dying. Are you still so sure?
I agree that caution must be taken for things that "might" result, such as people who say drugs need to be illegal. However, in those cases, there are plenty of people where the probability of doing something bad is zero (and the resultant crime itself requires a willful act). With driving, the bad effects of drink, and probably texting, can be shown to effect everyone, and the only distinction is pure luck.
Moreover, no additional willful intent is required to go on to kill someone - the only willful intent was the drink driving or texting in the first place. Consider, is it fair to criminalise someone when it was just pure luck that the death happened? I would argue that it's actually fairer to treat everyone the same here.
Also there is more argument for criminalising things that are not broad bans - so, you are still free to drink, you are still free to drive (at separate times), hell, you are even free to drink drive on private roads. But if you want to do so on public roads, it's fair that you abide by some rules.
I mean, would you argue that people should only be done for driving offences (red lights, speeding, not using lights, driving on the wrong side of the road etc) if an actual accident occurs?
The problem with fines is that there's no easy answer either way - doing it as a simple percentage of income or assets means that a repeatedly criminal who's unemployed and has no assets (and let's imagine a case where his crimes are things like assault or vandalism, so it's not a case of someone stealing to buy food or whatever) gets fined 50p, where as a well paid person, or a say pensioner who's built up a stash of savings from 40 years of work, gets fined thousands for a minor offence.
Calculating assets is also a problem. Should a home be taken into account, so that they have to remortgage it? A house isn't an asset than can be given up - OTOH if it isn't taken into account, then that's unfair to someone who hasn't yet bought a house, but has spent years saving up a deposit for one.
I'd say it should be related to income and/or some notion of assets, but not anywhere near to the extent of being a simple linear relationship.
Community service does have a huge advantage here - everyone is forced to do exactly the same amount of punishment, no matter how much they earn or have.
Slashdot Mirror
So in other words, you've taken one data point - the existence of Slashdot, and concluded based on:
1989: Slashdot didn't exist.
1999: Slashdot did exist.
2009: Slashdot did exist.
That progress has slowed.
When Slashdot gets wiped out next year, I look forward to:
2019: Slashdot doesn't exist - progress has gone backwards!
I know Slashdot is great, but it isn't the be all and end all!
Yes, from 1989 to 1999 we had the web, widespread availability of the Internet (over dialup), and computers which were just the same only faster.
But from 1999 to 2009, we've had the widespread availability of broadband, cheap laptops and netbooks, vast developments in phones (basically hand held computers) and mobile Internet access, digital cameras that store thousands of photographs, and you can now carry your entire music collection on a tiny device.
(Before any pedant points it out - yes some of those things developed from technology that existed before 1999, but the OP is talking about widespread availability, and mature products. Otherwise, we might as well point out that the Internet and ethernet existed before 1989 too, so there was better choice than a BBS over dial-up, or we might as well claim that Slashdot is only an incremental improvement over a BBS.)
Indeed - and I'm amused at the irony of people posting here on the Internet, to tell us how things haven't changed much since the 50s.
Perhaps they should throw their computer out the window, and start up a conversation with their next door neighbour about topics of interest instead.
So come on - give us something that is "non-incremental" progress?
I bet you you can't. Just about all technological developments rely on some earlier development. Furthermore, genuinely new developments don't come about instantly, but require several developments to come together, usually over a period of decades.
The fact that the computer revolution has taken decades hardly means it isn't a revolution! By this reasoning, the Industrial Revolution was nothing significant, because the changes at the later part of the 19th Century were just "incremental" improvements from the earlier part. But that misses the point - that as a whole, there was still dramatic change and progress.
Where are our light based computers? Where are out bio based computers? Silicon?!? That's soooo 20th century.
You're just throwing buzzwords - what do these computers do, that is fundamentally different to today's computers?
TCP/IP and ethernet are decades old. We're just at a gigabit? We should be at terabyte bandwidth in our homes. And it should be cheap - $5/month.
Now who's talking about incremental progress? If we had these, you'd be first in line to criticise that it's merely doing the same thing faster or cheaper - "incremental" progress.
And you are conflating the existence of technology, with widespread availability. Yes, ethernet is decades old, but how many people had access back then? Many people still didn't have TV back in the 1950s (and of course, if we did live in the 1950s, you'd be pointing out how the TV was decades old technology, and concluding therefore that progress had slowed...)
Or we could go back to last century, and note how widespread availability of cars and phones came decades after their invention.
The point is that going from invention to widespread use always takes time - and there is no evidence of it being slower today, if anything I'd say it's faster (we went from invention of the web and hardly anyone having Internet access, to almost everyone in developed countries having it, in 10 years).
All the above and MORE if progress kept at its pace from the 1960s.
Can you tell me what the rate of progress for Internet bandwidth in homes was, back in the 1960s, please?
But phones and cars existed in 1898! The phone was invented in the 1870s, and cars were first produced by Benz in 1888.
What happened is that they became more widely available between 1898 and 1914 - which is just like how computers and mobile phones were existing technology that became more widely available from 1993 to 2009.
How many people had a mobile phone in 1993? And to claim mobiles and computers are only "re-implementation"s, you might as well handwave cars away, saying they're only an improvement over horses.
And whilst I'm commenting, TFA is very misleading to compare his 53 year life span to his Grandmother's 80 year life span. That's about 50% longer!
The correct comparison for 1956 to now should be 1880 to 1933.
Or alternatively, we should be looking at the difference from 1929 to now, or from 1956 to 2036.
The iPhone is just a smaller version of the Memex predicted by Vannevar Bush
The issue is doing it, not predicting it. (And I think you mean the Internet, which contrary to what some think around here, did exist before the Iphone came along.)
In fact, it's worth noting that just about every single party except Labour is now opposing them: Lib Dems, Greens, UKIP.
If we had a more proportional system (and look at the recent EU elections to see what the outcome of a PR election might look more like), there'd be no chance of ID cards. But they can be pushed through by a Government with 30something % of the vote (and about 20something % of the population, IIRC).
I am still worried that Conservatives will back down on their plans - in particular, that they might claim to scrap the compulsory card, but it will still remain for anyone wanting a passport (since under the current plans, the passport will be combined with the ID card, and there'll be no way to get a passport on its own anymore), or they'll scrap just the card, and keep the database.
But what about 10.6? If it can't run that, then it's not comparable to his PC that can still run Windows 7.
I'll remember that one - next time someone criticises Windows, we can just say: Good Lord, you're always whinging about that shit. Get over yourself already, Microsoft doesn't cater to your crowd and no-one owes you a free state-of-the-art computer.
But no one does say that. Why is it considered good that Apple aren't interested in providing an OS that people want, but when Microsoft have some trivial feature missing, that's considered fair game to say that therefore, OS X is better than all other platforms?
He's not whinging - if you hadn't noticed, this entire story is about a comparison between Windows and two other OSs, so I think people posting about which they think is better, and why, is very much relevant. His reasoning is certainly far more of a contribution to the debate than your whinging.
Indeed, XP is fine, but that goes for OS X - what does it offer for the price (which is not $29 as the article ludicrously asserts - that's just an upgrade price from the most recent version of OS X, so you need the full price, plus a Mac to go with it, which don't come cheap), that isn't available on any other OS?
Or $10 if you bought a mac after June 15th of this year. :)
By that logic, Windows 7 is free, because people got free upgrades with their Vista PCs.
Except that's an upgrade price. And the upgrade from Tiger is $169.
What about all the service packs that MS give out for free? The point is that it's unfair to compare - Windows has major jumps (with corresponding price) occasionally, but has many intermediate increases offered for free. OS X OTOH has had more regular updates, that cost money, but each update costs less. So which costs more overall, if you'd been an upgrader since say, Windows 2000 versus the first version of OS X?
I mean, come on - everytime someone points out that the Windows upgrades are free, we get no end of people coming out the woodwork telling us that you can't compare the different upgrade styles. So where are all those people now?
How much does OS X costs buying new, compared to Windows?
To give the point to Apple, and claim the price is $29, shows that CW are just part of the same pro-Apple bias in the media (presumably because of the traditional use of Macs in the niche of DTP), rendering the whole article worthless.
It is also meaningless to claim "It's the best of times if you're a lover of operating systems", when it's not like people have any real choice in what OS they can install on what computer. I might as well claim it's the best of times because you can also buy AmigaOS.
An organization is merely a group of people... saying they are somehow magically responsible for things those people didn't do is nonsense.
But in law, the organisation is not.
No one is claiming the individuals are responsible - on the contrary, with limited liability, they are not. But the company, as an organisation, will still be liable, no matter who is employed. So the question here is, should the "British Government" be an organisation in such a sense?
(The only exception is criminal cases where employees are responsible - in which case, it is specific to them, and not the organisation).
I still don't see a difference - last time I looked, lots of people claimed it wasn't torture, and they justify it with their belief these people are guilty.
And if it's a mental illness, why was it illegal?
an American like Stephen Hawking
Indeed - and it's a jolly good jobs these fellows weren't British, otherwise the National Health Service would've killed them!
Wait - you hate Turing because of the persecution he received?
I'm not an AC fan. Individually they can be okay, but very annoying in groups.
Can anything??
It always cracks me up when the PC-Gaming/DirectX/Direct3D crowd starts howling on about how abut how OpenGL is dead
Yet no one has done this in the entire thread - do you have a reference that you are referring to, or are you just trying to start a flamewar by making up a straw man?
Perhaps the perfect answer to both is that we switch to binary. Thus the answer to your question is simply 100000000000000000000000000000000.
I see it now: OS X 10.7 "Tabby Cat" edition will hail a breaththrough in the debate, by reporting all memory sizes, and in fact all numbers altogether, for consistency, in binary.
"There's no need for all these complicated extra digits, which our research has shown just confuses new users", said Jobs, "The average user will have no need for any keys except '0' and '1'". This will also allow newly designed Apple keyboards that do away with the unnecessary buttons.
The problem isn't the definition, it's that OS's and hardware manufacturers have been using different definitions.
Not so simple - RAM is still hardware that uses the 1024x definition; it's hard drive manufacturers that changed the definition.
Changing the OS's reporting to the hard drive's definition will then only lead to an inconsistency with RAM!
Yes, just as it's easier to think that the computer you're buying has 4.294967296 GB of memory....
On that note, I see that online they are still advertising their Macs' RAM in the 1024x definition. So how does the new OS X report memory? If it uses one for RAM, and one for hard drives etc, that's going to be rather inconsistent and confusing. If it's inconsistent with what they and RAM sellers advertise, that's also going to be confusing for people.
But you could make that argument for any website - "You have to pay the The Times newspaper, so I would expect them to require payment for their website". Instead they rely on ads, just as the BBC does for those it thinks are coming from outside the UK (although sometimes it gets this wrong).
As a licence payer, I want it to be free for everyone. I want the generally-good news coverage to be available for all. And if I see a good article, I want to be able to link it for others to see.
So this is why CPUs have been quadrupling in speed every 18 months, whilst the number of transisters double.
Oh wait, they haven't.
This is my point - you can make wild assumptions and claims about how you think it should be possible to gain extra kinds of performance, but unless you post actual evidence, there is no way you can assume you can get a 2x factor out of each one independently (as opposed to smaller speed ups which may add up to, at most, a 2x factor in total).
Sure it's hypothetically possible, but you need to show evidence rather than assuming it.
Have CPUs/GPUs been increasing in speed by 4x every 18 months rather than 2x? If not, what will change for it to happen in future? (In fact, for 570x in 6 years, you need a doubling of speed every less than 8 months...)
Alternatively, you could optimize the architecture of the microprocessors so as to require less clock cycles per opcode which would translate into an efficiency increase independent of either transistor size or clock frequency.
Less clock cycles per instruction has been a trend, but I believe that this has just been one way of using "extra" transisters. Indeed, as I say, using extra transisters for more cores is only a recent trend, AIUI because getting more speed from a single core using extra transisters is becoming harder. But no one's been able to magic greater than 2x performance in speed from 2x the number of transisters, at least not over any kind of period - do you have any counter-examples?
We shouldn't punish either person in your analogy, because the only possible harm is to themselves. Now what if instead, the system somehow meant that them walking out caused someone else to die, and that they knew this was a risk in advance. Consider also that this was a public area (and not say, private land), where the Government had decided setting this rule about lightning storms was worthwhile in order to prevent innocent people from dying. Are you still so sure?
I agree that caution must be taken for things that "might" result, such as people who say drugs need to be illegal. However, in those cases, there are plenty of people where the probability of doing something bad is zero (and the resultant crime itself requires a willful act). With driving, the bad effects of drink, and probably texting, can be shown to effect everyone, and the only distinction is pure luck.
Moreover, no additional willful intent is required to go on to kill someone - the only willful intent was the drink driving or texting in the first place. Consider, is it fair to criminalise someone when it was just pure luck that the death happened? I would argue that it's actually fairer to treat everyone the same here.
Also there is more argument for criminalising things that are not broad bans - so, you are still free to drink, you are still free to drive (at separate times), hell, you are even free to drink drive on private roads. But if you want to do so on public roads, it's fair that you abide by some rules.
I mean, would you argue that people should only be done for driving offences (red lights, speeding, not using lights, driving on the wrong side of the road etc) if an actual accident occurs?
The problem with fines is that there's no easy answer either way - doing it as a simple percentage of income or assets means that a repeatedly criminal who's unemployed and has no assets (and let's imagine a case where his crimes are things like assault or vandalism, so it's not a case of someone stealing to buy food or whatever) gets fined 50p, where as a well paid person, or a say pensioner who's built up a stash of savings from 40 years of work, gets fined thousands for a minor offence.
Calculating assets is also a problem. Should a home be taken into account, so that they have to remortgage it? A house isn't an asset than can be given up - OTOH if it isn't taken into account, then that's unfair to someone who hasn't yet bought a house, but has spent years saving up a deposit for one.
I'd say it should be related to income and/or some notion of assets, but not anywhere near to the extent of being a simple linear relationship.
Community service does have a huge advantage here - everyone is forced to do exactly the same amount of punishment, no matter how much they earn or have.