If conceived of today evolution would be termed an "emergent phenomenon". The primary principle of evolution is "good enough". If it works, it works - that is all that is required. There is no planning, no intentional process.
In genetic algorithms, this is termed the "fitness function" by which each of the various solutions is evaluated and the best used to create a new "generation" of randomly combined and mutated solutions. Picking the fitness function is one of the hardest parts of genetic algorithms, as not only does it define what a good answer is, it also often introduces biases as to what the designer of the fitness function thinks the "correct" solution should look like.
Nature's fitness function is a great one: "Survive and reproduce". Accomplish that, and you were a good solution to the problem of life. No bias, no pre-conceived notion of what the answer should be. Thus from this viewpoint it is no surprise that nature has amazing diversity and also adaptations that no human trying to solve the same problem would have ever thought of.
Personally, I think a better term than "survival of the fittest" (if true, then why did bad eyesight genes survive?) would instead be "survival of the sufficiently fit" (bad eyesight is okay as long as you can still find food and a mate). It's the pop-culture level of knowledge based around slogans like that one that drive many of the misconceptions about evolution.
Because this is Hollywood, and the thought of making a movie without any stars whose names they can slap on the posters terrifies them. Why would anyone go to see an animated movie with a bunch of voice actors they've never heard of? Because it would be a better movie? Ridiculous!
This isn't Japan, where voice acting is considered a career unto itself and there are celebrities known for nothing but their voice acting. Sadly.
Still, there are actors in the States who can voice act well enough, and I think Keither is one of them.
Now, we know that sellers, in general, charge as much as they can get for their products. Therefore, Intel could not double its price for ALL of the OEMs. Why? Because if Intel could, it would already be doing so. It's true that if only one OEM stands up to Intel, then that OEM could fall, but if all of the OEMs stood up to Intel, they would be calling Intel's bluff.
Right, the doubling of price could not be more than a threat to keep them from using AMD. But it would still be brutally effective due to one very important fact:
AMD cannot supply the entire processor market, or even most of it. This was even more true back before Fab 30 came online. At that time they could not have attained more than 20% marketshare even if the demand was there. Thus a mass defection away from Intel was physically impossible.
So no matter what, the majority of OEMs will be getting the majority of their product from Intel, so paying double the price would be crippling. If even one large OEM played Intel's game then they would easily crush the ones who didn't, so the others would have to play game too. Dell has been playing Intel's game all along, so if Intel tried this gambit, the other OEMs would have the choice of either playing Intel's game or handing the majority of their own marketshare to Dell.
AMD is not succeding against Intel so much due to the "invisible hand of the market", as much as Intel has made some colossal mistakes in the recent past.
Sure, some of them incredibly huge, like the whole IA-64 fiasco. These are normal parts of being a business and being a monopoly certainly doesn't make Intel immune to them. It does however make them much more resiliant than any other company would be, and any other company would have to abandon some of Intel's more foolish stragies much sooner. Still, it is clearly costing them today as AMD has been able to reap some benefit from Intel's slip up. You may be right that Intel has been too accustomed to their position and has difficulty in a competitive market, but do not count them out.
The question I as myself is, why with the impeding launch of Woodcrest and Conroe is Dell NOW using AMD in there future servers? Would not the past two years of AMD superiority have been the ideal time to make this transition?
I think the basic reason is corporate inertia and stubborness. They made their fortune being Intel-only, and switching sounds like putting that fortune-making strategy in jeopardy. By the time they turn themselves around, it seems as though Intel may be poised to regain the performance lead. I have to say this is typical.
The other reason may have to do with the anti-trust suit AMD is filing. The conspiracy theory version says Dell is using AMD just to make Intel's case look better, but I doubt it since Dell is being subpoenaed and if this fact came out it would be worse for Intel. The non-conspiracy version is just that Intel is actually straightening up their act (they aren't Microsoft, they aren't so arrogant as to think they can do whatever they want while the trial is going on), and thus Dell isn't getting such sweet deals anymore.
The third reason may be that this is all a way to show Intel that Dell is really serious about their long-standing threat to use AMD. If Intel is successfull defending against the lawsuit, and sufficiently greases Dell's palms, then we may see Dell kill off their AMD lines with a press release along the lines of customer demand being insufficent.
But I guess if people keep yapping on about how a government-enforced corporate oligarchy is actually a free market, Orwell-style, then some folks will actually end up believing the bullshit....
Speaking of Orwell, I'm just wondering what makes you think Intel's monopoly was government enforced. Or does this just flow naturally from the assumption that monopolies only exist if they are government enforced, and thus since Intel is a monopoly it must be government enforced?
You know, nobody has ever tried the type of anarchy that Libertarian extremists like dada advocate. Well that's not really true; they've been tried, but they almost instantly degenerate into a much less desireable form of kleptocracy.
But continue claiming that the obvious flaws and failings of a free market only exist because the government is there, even if the government had nothing to do with the actual market failing in question. You sound just like the Communists who claim that the real problem is that there's never been a real Communist state. Which, like your statement, is both true and irrelevent.
Intel wasn't a monopoly, they were just a very aggressive company with a great marketing system, great support, great products and happy customers.
I won't argue against the description in the last half of this sentence, but you are on a dangerous crack/heroine mix if you think Intel wasn't a monopoly in desktop PC processors.
As I said many times (I wish I could dial back to quote my old posts), Intel's future would be as shortlived as IBMs was, as Atari's was, as GM's was -- there is no need to start screaming anti-trust! anti-trust! when a company you don't like seems like they'll never fall. I said Intel would have its down days, just as I say today that someone will beat Microsoft fair and square some day, too.
I wouldn't light the candles on your "The market's Invisible Hand has proven me right!" cake yet.
First, what even makes you think this vindicates your "not a monopoly, market corrects itself magically" position? This is not the first time Intel has layed off workers. This is not the first time they have had a large downturn in revenue.
Second, what is the only reason you could come close to saying that Intel has lost their monopoly position? AMD.
Who would not exist were it not for the restraints placed on Intel by anti-trust laws? AMD.
It would have been so easy for Intel to kill off AMD if they could have used their position with impunity. They could have "cut off the air supply" of AMD in a way that would have made Bill Gates weep. Microprocessors are not like operating systems. There is a very real and very expensive investment in manufacturing facilities necessary. If Intel had, say, given the OEMs the ultimatum to stop selling AMD or pay double for Intel parts after AMD had built and bought the equipment for their Fab 30 in Dresden but before it started shipping parts for revenue, AMD would have gone bankrupt in a year. Some OEMs may have defected, but not enough to keep AMD's afloat. AMD had neither the marketshare nor the market credibility nor the manufacturing capacity to be a replacement for Intel. Ergo, they would have gone with Intel. Bye, bye, AMD. Bye, bye, dada's smug assurance that the market sorts everything out.
Even as it was, limited as they were by their fear of anti-trust action (and I interned there; believe me Intel was definitely scared of anti-trust action and made a point of listing all the things they'd like to do but can't because of it), Intel still used their position to hurt AMD. They have been giving sweetheart deals and cooperative marketing dollars to OEMs based not on how many Intel parts were sold, but on how few non-Intel parts were sold. That's literally anti-competitive.
It's great to think that the consumer will simply choose an alternative if some dominant force becomes too abusive. The reality is that they can only choose an alternative if one exists, and they will not shift instantly. If they don't shift fast enough to keep that alternative alive, the alternative goes away and then where are you? That's right: back in monopoly land.
I know you think that all monopolies can only exist if they are government enforced, but reality says that monopolies can exist and be quite stable for a long time, and that the very nature of their power allows them to make their position more stable. I will even hypothetically grant that eventually any monopoly must fail, but "Eventually may recover from years or decades of horrible stagnation" is not a great advertisement for the Laisse Faire system. The fact is that monopolies are both a stable point and broken corner case of free markets, and having reasonable restrictions on the actions of monopolies is a good thing -- because it grants the little upstart who otherwise could be easily and legally crushed a chance to build up and face off against the behemoth. Alternatives don't just spring from the ether and they don't just sustain themselves on their impassioned belief in the free market. Especially not in an industry with barriers to entry as large as microprocessors.
Sorry, but Intel is a perfect example of why anti-trust is a good thing.
Just because it's fairly obvious that getting used to a controller and accepting it as "normal" means it's a good controller doesn't make stating that either boiler plate or whoring. It's just the facts.
He says the controller now is about as exciting as analog joypad input - can't really imagine going without it but nothing you really are thinking about when you use it everyday.
Sounds perfect. I wouldn't want it any other way. Any other way would imply that the controller was difficult to get used to. Just like the first use of an analog controller in Mario 64 seemed weird and exciting just on its own, pretty soon I got used to it and was more interested in how I could make mario run around than specifically thinking about the analog controller.
If the result of the Wii is that in the subsequent generation people consider motion-sensitive 3D-positioned controls to be both as fundamental and mundane as analog joysticks are today, then I don't think you could call it anything but a smashing success.
We could have a whole class of people created in test tubes, deprived of meaningful human contact and trained just to look at thousands of images per minute, all day every day.
Why use test tube babies when you can just use Slashdotters?
That's not entirely true. We have the right to make a copy for backup purposes, and to make any incidental copies necessary for the normal usage of the work (so you aren't violating copyright by copying a program from the HD to RAM).
Now if he meant "make a copy of the CD, and sell that copy (or sell the original and keep the copy)" then that would in fact be illegal... Sentence structure and pronouns don't make it clear what he meant.
But yes, we do have the right to make copies. We do not have the right to distribute copies/derivatives. That's what copyright prohibits (and a few other things, but that's the most important one).
They also existed in the Netherlands, not the US. We had to drag it out of it's original context and consider it in our own, a context for which it was never intended. Our reaction and subsequent demands to pull these ads makes less sense than the demands of some Muslims that a Danish newspaper should be punished for printing those Mohammed cartoons.
That's a good point. I honestly don't know nearly enough about the Netherlands to understand how the race issue would be viewed there, but clearly different enough that it isn't the hot-button issue it is here.
I'm not trying to deny that racism exists.
I see that now. I replied to you because I do see a lot of "race is no issue at all" posts in this topic, but you seemed like the most reasonable proponent.
You seem to have a decent attitude about the whole race issue, ad yet you automatically identified the black woman as African instead of just as European, like the white woman.
I was referring to ancestry (and thus the history of relevent racial conflicts), not nationality, so yes I identified the curly-haired black woman as African. I suppose the white woman could be from north Asia as well, but you get my drift.
I myself live in a major city in the American Midwest - I work near downtown, and a trip 15 minutes from my home can take me into some very rural areas. I get to see racial issues on a very regular basis, and man do they ever exist.
I hear ya. It always bothers me when I hear someone -- always white and sheltered -- say racism doesn't exist when what they mean is they never see people of other races and thus never have to confront the issue. Thus in a way this topic is one I myself am 'hypersensitive' about. BTW, perchance you're talking about Chicago? I can't imagine anyone living in or near that town who isn't aware of these things.
I'm looking forward to a time when a black person and a white person can truly hate each other with every fiber of their body, and not have race be the slightest cause of it. Yeah, maybe it's a little way off, but it's closer than you might think.
*snif* That's such a touching take on Dr. King's dream. Heh. But yeah, I myself who grew up in a black neighborhood with mostly black friends have hated and been hated without race being the cause, though even still our relative races innevitably came up. That's the real tragedy, and will probably take longer to go away.
I guess my point is that the only reason that race is an issue in these ads is because some people took it entirely out of context and made it an issue.
I see your point and agree, so this is a nit, but racism is an issue because it was taken out of context; I really can't imagine that race was not intended to be an issue (or theme or whatever un-charged word you prefer) in the piece by the artist.
I agree Sony appologizing for this was silly, just like Nike appologizing for showing a woman outrunning (humiliatingly) a would-be attacker was silly. This whole thing should never have come up... though it does serve as a decent non-threatening springboard for discussions about race issues. That's why hypersensitivity doesn't bother me much -- the side of racial tension that makes you roll your eyes is vastly preferable to the one that involves oppression and violence.
Oh, but the fact that they are of different races means it's insensitive. You wouldn't have a problem with the ad if it were two persons of the same race and gender.
Um, yes, obviously. Or two races who had never had any kind of conflict, say Hawaiians and Arabs. That's called "context" and it's important. These ads don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in our world in which one race dominating, slaying, and enslaving another has been one of the continual themes of history. The ad itself pairs two races who have had such a history even up to today. That's significant. That can't be ignored.
This hypersensitivity is actually serving to perpetuate racist views. It is forcing people to consider race as an issue when people really shouldn't have to.
Race is an issue in many places in the world, and pretending otherwise is not going to make it go away. Racism and racial tensions exist in many parts of the world, and black vs white racial tension and racism exist here in the United States. Anyone who says it isn't is in denial or living somewhere where they don't have to deal with it.
Race is an issue in these ads. This is just undeniable. Racial tension is also an issue. Sony can talk about "color" in the abstract sense of their PSPs as much as they want. These women aren't just white and black, they're European and African. Going at each other. Racial tension? Yes.
But is it racism? I'd certainly say not. If you look at the whole series, it actually looks very passionate. They may be aggressive and combative, but they practically end up on top of each other. As someone else pointed out, the ad is basically about sex. Aggressive sex, but that doesn't make it hateful. Do you think interracial lovers sometimes feed off the racial tension between them? Certainly. In that sense the series is almost cathartic. The artist was using the implied tension towards their goal.
So is hypersensitivity the problem here? Yeah, probably. It's a bit much to call the ads 'racist', though with the "White is coming" tagline and news articles only showing the white-gripping-black billboard, I can see how people would get the wrong impression. Remember though that like most kinds of hypesensitivity this arose from "over-stimulation" from actual racism and racial violence.
Is hypersensitivity perpetuating racism? Well, somewhat perhaps. I had an aquaintence once get mad at me for making reference to the fact that she's black. That act of sensitivity certainly made me more self-conscious of race, but we got along fine after that. I've had another aquantence tell me that he hated having black people around and thought we should deport them back to Africa. Dropped him like a bad habit, of course, but what about when he has kids? My point is -- to whatever extent hypersensitivity perpetuates racism, actual racism perpetuates racism much, much more.
So I suppose I'm going to have to come out in the middle on this issue. No, they aren't racist and the reactions were overblown. Yes, race is an issue in the ads and pretending otherwise is just avoidance or ignorance or whatever. In any event I don't feel sorry for Sony because appology or no they're getting exactly what they wanted from the ad.
But otherwise, yeah, you're right. Taken -out- of the context of the ads, and without the unfortunate "White is coming" tagline, they actually make for a pretty good art series that doesn't look racist, actually the opposite. I don't know if the artist intended them to be ordered as such, but if you start with the one with them squaring off and snarling at each other, followed by the white woman grabbing the other woman's face in what's both an aggressive and intimite gesture, followed by the white woman more supine with the black woman over her. Looks like two people who perhaps don't like each other or are just aggressive like that but are attracted to each other succumbing to their passions.
Now obviously this doesn't eliminate the fact that race is an element of these pictures, and the racial tension that is implied. But of course a piece of art that involves racial tension is not necessarily racist. Just as the women's anger and tension seems to be leading up to a sensual release, so too are the racial tensions that the viewer is going to be seeing and feeling. Very provacative.
Sadly, it is in the context of an ad, and with the unfortunate tagline, and really was just a bad idea on Sony's part. Er, other than it being a ridiculously successful advertisement, of course.
In retrospect, no matter what their motives or realizations were, I f*cking hate marketing and all forms of it.
Yeah, same here.
I guarantee you that despite whatever appology the PR flak gave, their marketing department is throwing a fucking party right now. This ad is nothing but a success for them.
I nominate "Star Trek Collections" as a new unit of storage measurement! Quick, somebody work out the conversion into the standard libraries' of congress.
Hope is alway a good thing but sometimes reality must butt in. Who is going to make plans based on an 80% chance of a product being available?
Nobody, of course. But the hope -- the purpose of this announcement and basically every other Vista announcement in the past two years -- is to get people to hold off making plans until Vista is actually complete. Because if they made those plans now, or last year, or the year before, then they may not involve a Microsoft OS.
So long as Microsoft can maintain the belief that Vista might be coming out soon and that when it does it might be the greatest thing since Jesus Wafers, then they're okay.
Oops, I should be careful of this, I didn't mean to imply he wasn't an asshole. Lots of geniuses -- and non-geniuses who can nontheless be respected -- are assholes. You don't have to respect him for his personal life to respect him for his work.
Or let me put it this way: everything I'm talking about and that you say "trivializes" Japan were the actual factors that our government and military were discussing when deciding to drop the bomb. So if you think "steel cojones" is all you need to say to justify the bomb and none of the other factors I discuss are important, well, Harry Truman, his cabinet, and the leaders of the military disagreed with you.
In particular, General McArthur disagreed with you. Say whatever you want about him and his later career; he faced and defeated Japan militarily in the Pacific theatre, and then successfully lead them into becoming a peaceful democracy in the reconstruction. I think it's safe to say that McArthur understood the Japanese as "steel cojones" warriors and their "outlook on life" as well as anyone in the West did. And he believed that we could have ended the war weeks earlier simply by accepting a conditional surrender that allowed the Emperor to remain, and that dropping the bomb was militarily unnecessary.
However, as I have already stated, military concerns vis a vis the surrender of Japan were not the only issues that influenced the decision. Like it or not, that's historical fact.
So please abandon the simplistic revisionist history that does nothing but make it easier to feel good about WWII. It is still possible to have an accurate and nuanced view of history and agree with the dropping of the bomb; the difference being that you don't turn an incredibly difficult moral dilemna into a childish "we must beat the bogeyman" scenario with only one valid choice. The real world isn't like that, in WWII Japan or in a future scenario where the lessons of WWII will be invaluable.
You ignore every salient detail of the situation, and then say I'm trivializing Japan. You're trivializing the entire war, Japan included. Their steel cohones are not in question; they were proven beyond doubt during the Pacific campaign that nevertheless ended with their navy providing low-cost homes to fish. Their outlook on life included loyalty to the Emperor -- this is why allowing the Emperor to remain as head of State, even if he had no real power, was important enough to make the main concession for surrender -- and a coup by the officer corps would thus have failed if it had succeeded. But it didn't succeed in the first place, the officer corps may not have wanted to surrender but they represented neither the government nor the people of Japan, and when the Emperor said lay down your arms, the people did.
You're trivializing Japan by thinking their "outlook on life" starts and ends with the kamikaze, and this alone defines the decision to bomb.
Whatever. He's saying that it may be difficult or impossible to conduct an actual experiment that could distinguish between the possibilities of why this energy exists for hundreds of years. That doesn't make it faith, it makes it theoretical physics. Just like Relativity was until we could fly a plane at high altitude with an atomic clock and actually measure time dilation.
We're talking crazy physics here. We're talking about the boundary between quantum mechanics and relativistic gravity, two things that have on their own been vexing us for the last century. Conducting experiments about these kinds of things is extremely difficult because we're talking about either huge energies or or tiny energies, things that are at the very boundary of what we can measure, much less create. Assuming an actual experiment has even been conceived of, they often are completely out of bounds of today's technology. I heard some time ago about a proposed experiment that could help verify some predictions of string theory, and it involved building a superconducting ring in space weighing hundreds of thousands of tons.
We aren't going to be doing that any time soon. So does that make it faith? Only if they start saying that string theory is the One True Way and no matter any experiment ever performed it is still true. More likely it will just remain what it is -- unverified hypothesis -- until we are actually abe to do the experiment. In the meantime, cut the theoretical physicists some slack.
I swear, the idiotic creationism/evolution debate has screwed with everyone's heads in ways I wouldn't have predicted.
The notion that we didn't need to exploit every means at our disposal to fight the Japanese is simply direspectful to the Japanese. They were a highly motivated and highly sophisticated enemy. They were (and still are) a force to be reckoned with. Second guessers tend to gloss over this.
While in the general sense of the war at large I can wholeheartedly agree, you are the one glossing over the specific circumstances involved when the decision to use the bomb was being made. Specifically: 1) Germany had already lost, thus closing an entire front of the war and freeing the Allied forces to focus on Japan. 2) Nearly all of Japan's land aquisitions in Asia had been rolled back. 3) The Japanese navy had been annihilated, and all of their significant bases through the Pacific had been captured. 4) The above combined allowed the Allied fleet to attack the island of Japan with impunity from the sea and air. If Japan was such a force to be reckoned with, where was the retaliation for the firebombing of Tokyo? The answer is that they could not retaliate; they did not have the capability. And with no allies remaining, and a naval blockade around the country to boot, they could not aquire it.
So all that remained was to end the war by getting Japan to surrender. That's not an easy thing to do, sure, but with the enemy nearly defeated and with all potential for offense gone, the "we need to exploit every means to win" just doesn't hold. There were in fact several options: 1) Nuke a city or two. If they went off, pretty much a sure thing. Not even the Japanese believed they could survive losing a whole city to a single bomb. Obviously this is the way we went, and obviously it worked. 2) Demonstration of nukes off-shore. Probably would have worked, but the "you will lose a city for every one of these we drop" message wouldn't have been quite as immediate, and with our limited supply this was a gamble. While this option was heavily lobbied for by some cabinet members, it was rejected as a bluff we couldn't afford to make. 3) Land invasion. In this case, "force to be reckoned with" would have certainly applied to be sure. This was a very scary option, and the one usually juxtaposed to the bomb in order to make the bomb look like the kinder option. However what I've seen of discussions regarding this show that while a plan was drawn up it was not in serious running as an option. Much like (though obviously to a lesser extent) our currently existing plans for the invasion of Canada, this was a contingency not a fore-runner option. 4) Conditional surrender. Japan actually made an offer of conditional surrender, but we dropped the nukes without attempting to even learn what terms they wanted. It appears as though the main concession they wanted was to keep an at least ceremonial role for their Emperor in order to save face, which McArhtur ended up giving them anyway. There are various arguments why conditional surrender was less desireable, but it was an option. Sadly one that was considered even less than invasion. 5) Wait for Russia to declare war on Japan. Our joint chiefs were certain that once Russia entered the war, Japan would surrender unconditionally -- not even the Japanese believed they could resist the combined might of the U.S. and Russian war machines. Of course at this point they would be surrendering to both us and the Russians, which has it's own negative side. This possibility seems to have weighed heavily on the decision to end the war ASAP by using the bomb. Remember that WWII rolled directly into the Cold War, with Russia and the U.S. emerging from the war as the top powers in the world. Option 1 thus had the additional advantage -- which you'll notice had nothing to do with Japan -- of demonstrating our new super-weapon to the Russians.
I'm not saying that the decision was easy, I'm not saying the decision to drop the bombs was wrong. I'm saying it's complex, there were in fact more options available to us, the actual reasons for pic
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If conceived of today evolution would be termed an "emergent phenomenon". The primary principle of evolution is "good enough". If it works, it works - that is all that is required. There is no planning, no intentional process.
In genetic algorithms, this is termed the "fitness function" by which each of the various solutions is evaluated and the best used to create a new "generation" of randomly combined and mutated solutions. Picking the fitness function is one of the hardest parts of genetic algorithms, as not only does it define what a good answer is, it also often introduces biases as to what the designer of the fitness function thinks the "correct" solution should look like.
Nature's fitness function is a great one: "Survive and reproduce". Accomplish that, and you were a good solution to the problem of life. No bias, no pre-conceived notion of what the answer should be. Thus from this viewpoint it is no surprise that nature has amazing diversity and also adaptations that no human trying to solve the same problem would have ever thought of.
Personally, I think a better term than "survival of the fittest" (if true, then why did bad eyesight genes survive?) would instead be "survival of the sufficiently fit" (bad eyesight is okay as long as you can still find food and a mate). It's the pop-culture level of knowledge based around slogans like that one that drive many of the misconceptions about evolution.
Because this is Hollywood, and the thought of making a movie without any stars whose names they can slap on the posters terrifies them. Why would anyone go to see an animated movie with a bunch of voice actors they've never heard of? Because it would be a better movie? Ridiculous!
This isn't Japan, where voice acting is considered a career unto itself and there are celebrities known for nothing but their voice acting. Sadly.
Still, there are actors in the States who can voice act well enough, and I think Keither is one of them.
Now, we know that sellers, in general, charge as much as they can get for their products. Therefore, Intel could not double its price for ALL of the OEMs. Why? Because if Intel could, it would already be doing so. It's true that if only one OEM stands up to Intel, then that OEM could fall, but if all of the OEMs stood up to Intel, they would be calling Intel's bluff.
Right, the doubling of price could not be more than a threat to keep them from using AMD. But it would still be brutally effective due to one very important fact:
AMD cannot supply the entire processor market, or even most of it. This was even more true back before Fab 30 came online. At that time they could not have attained more than 20% marketshare even if the demand was there. Thus a mass defection away from Intel was physically impossible.
So no matter what, the majority of OEMs will be getting the majority of their product from Intel, so paying double the price would be crippling. If even one large OEM played Intel's game then they would easily crush the ones who didn't, so the others would have to play game too. Dell has been playing Intel's game all along, so if Intel tried this gambit, the other OEMs would have the choice of either playing Intel's game or handing the majority of their own marketshare to Dell.
What do you think they would have done?
AMD is not succeding against Intel so much due to the "invisible hand of the market", as much as Intel has made some colossal mistakes in the recent past.
Sure, some of them incredibly huge, like the whole IA-64 fiasco. These are normal parts of being a business and being a monopoly certainly doesn't make Intel immune to them. It does however make them much more resiliant than any other company would be, and any other company would have to abandon some of Intel's more foolish stragies much sooner. Still, it is clearly costing them today as AMD has been able to reap some benefit from Intel's slip up. You may be right that Intel has been too accustomed to their position and has difficulty in a competitive market, but do not count them out.
The question I as myself is, why with the impeding launch of Woodcrest and Conroe is Dell NOW using AMD in there future servers? Would not the past two years of AMD superiority have been the ideal time to make this transition?
I think the basic reason is corporate inertia and stubborness. They made their fortune being Intel-only, and switching sounds like putting that fortune-making strategy in jeopardy. By the time they turn themselves around, it seems as though Intel may be poised to regain the performance lead. I have to say this is typical.
The other reason may have to do with the anti-trust suit AMD is filing. The conspiracy theory version says Dell is using AMD just to make Intel's case look better, but I doubt it since Dell is being subpoenaed and if this fact came out it would be worse for Intel. The non-conspiracy version is just that Intel is actually straightening up their act (they aren't Microsoft, they aren't so arrogant as to think they can do whatever they want while the trial is going on), and thus Dell isn't getting such sweet deals anymore.
The third reason may be that this is all a way to show Intel that Dell is really serious about their long-standing threat to use AMD. If Intel is successfull defending against the lawsuit, and sufficiently greases Dell's palms, then we may see Dell kill off their AMD lines with a press release along the lines of customer demand being insufficent.
But I guess if people keep yapping on about how a government-enforced corporate oligarchy is actually a free market, Orwell-style, then some folks will actually end up believing the bullshit....
Speaking of Orwell, I'm just wondering what makes you think Intel's monopoly was government enforced. Or does this just flow naturally from the assumption that monopolies only exist if they are government enforced, and thus since Intel is a monopoly it must be government enforced?
You know, nobody has ever tried the type of anarchy that Libertarian extremists like dada advocate. Well that's not really true; they've been tried, but they almost instantly degenerate into a much less desireable form of kleptocracy.
But continue claiming that the obvious flaws and failings of a free market only exist because the government is there, even if the government had nothing to do with the actual market failing in question. You sound just like the Communists who claim that the real problem is that there's never been a real Communist state. Which, like your statement, is both true and irrelevent.
Which I don't get, because who honestly gives a flying fuck about karma?
Intel wasn't a monopoly, they were just a very aggressive company with a great marketing system, great support, great products and happy customers.
I won't argue against the description in the last half of this sentence, but you are on a dangerous crack/heroine mix if you think Intel wasn't a monopoly in desktop PC processors.
As I said many times (I wish I could dial back to quote my old posts), Intel's future would be as shortlived as IBMs was, as Atari's was, as GM's was -- there is no need to start screaming anti-trust! anti-trust! when a company you don't like seems like they'll never fall. I said Intel would have its down days, just as I say today that someone will beat Microsoft fair and square some day, too.
I wouldn't light the candles on your "The market's Invisible Hand has proven me right!" cake yet.
First, what even makes you think this vindicates your "not a monopoly, market corrects itself magically" position? This is not the first time Intel has layed off workers. This is not the first time they have had a large downturn in revenue.
Second, what is the only reason you could come close to saying that Intel has lost their monopoly position? AMD.
Who would not exist were it not for the restraints placed on Intel by anti-trust laws? AMD.
It would have been so easy for Intel to kill off AMD if they could have used their position with impunity. They could have "cut off the air supply" of AMD in a way that would have made Bill Gates weep. Microprocessors are not like operating systems. There is a very real and very expensive investment in manufacturing facilities necessary. If Intel had, say, given the OEMs the ultimatum to stop selling AMD or pay double for Intel parts after AMD had built and bought the equipment for their Fab 30 in Dresden but before it started shipping parts for revenue, AMD would have gone bankrupt in a year. Some OEMs may have defected, but not enough to keep AMD's afloat. AMD had neither the marketshare nor the market credibility nor the manufacturing capacity to be a replacement for Intel. Ergo, they would have gone with Intel. Bye, bye, AMD. Bye, bye, dada's smug assurance that the market sorts everything out.
Even as it was, limited as they were by their fear of anti-trust action (and I interned there; believe me Intel was definitely scared of anti-trust action and made a point of listing all the things they'd like to do but can't because of it), Intel still used their position to hurt AMD. They have been giving sweetheart deals and cooperative marketing dollars to OEMs based not on how many Intel parts were sold, but on how few non-Intel parts were sold. That's literally anti-competitive.
It's great to think that the consumer will simply choose an alternative if some dominant force becomes too abusive. The reality is that they can only choose an alternative if one exists, and they will not shift instantly. If they don't shift fast enough to keep that alternative alive, the alternative goes away and then where are you? That's right: back in monopoly land.
I know you think that all monopolies can only exist if they are government enforced, but reality says that monopolies can exist and be quite stable for a long time, and that the very nature of their power allows them to make their position more stable. I will even hypothetically grant that eventually any monopoly must fail, but "Eventually may recover from years or decades of horrible stagnation" is not a great advertisement for the Laisse Faire system. The fact is that monopolies are both a stable point and broken corner case of free markets, and having reasonable restrictions on the actions of monopolies is a good thing -- because it grants the little upstart who otherwise could be easily and legally crushed a chance to build up and face off against the behemoth. Alternatives don't just spring from the ether and they don't just sustain themselves on their impassioned belief in the free market. Especially not in an industry with barriers to entry as large as microprocessors.
Sorry, but Intel is a perfect example of why anti-trust is a good thing.
Just because it's fairly obvious that getting used to a controller and accepting it as "normal" means it's a good controller doesn't make stating that either boiler plate or whoring. It's just the facts.
He says the controller now is about as exciting as analog joypad input - can't really imagine going without it but nothing you really are thinking about when you use it everyday.
Sounds perfect. I wouldn't want it any other way. Any other way would imply that the controller was difficult to get used to. Just like the first use of an analog controller in Mario 64 seemed weird and exciting just on its own, pretty soon I got used to it and was more interested in how I could make mario run around than specifically thinking about the analog controller.
If the result of the Wii is that in the subsequent generation people consider motion-sensitive 3D-positioned controls to be both as fundamental and mundane as analog joysticks are today, then I don't think you could call it anything but a smashing success.
We could have a whole class of people created in test tubes, deprived of meaningful human contact and trained just to look at thousands of images per minute, all day every day.
Why use test tube babies when you can just use Slashdotters?
Nice. I recommend replacing "darkness" with "fusion".
That's not entirely true. We have the right to make a copy for backup purposes, and to make any incidental copies necessary for the normal usage of the work (so you aren't violating copyright by copying a program from the HD to RAM).
Now if he meant "make a copy of the CD, and sell that copy (or sell the original and keep the copy)" then that would in fact be illegal... Sentence structure and pronouns don't make it clear what he meant.
But yes, we do have the right to make copies. We do not have the right to distribute copies/derivatives. That's what copyright prohibits (and a few other things, but that's the most important one).
Frankly, if this is the caliber of their reporting on these issues, I wouldn't bother wrapping fish with their paper.
Same here. There's nothing worse than a dead fish with an innacurate impression of copyright law.
They also existed in the Netherlands, not the US. We had to drag it out of it's original context and consider it in our own, a context for which it was never intended. Our reaction and subsequent demands to pull these ads makes less sense than the demands of some Muslims that a Danish newspaper should be punished for printing those Mohammed cartoons.
That's a good point. I honestly don't know nearly enough about the Netherlands to understand how the race issue would be viewed there, but clearly different enough that it isn't the hot-button issue it is here.
I'm not trying to deny that racism exists.
I see that now. I replied to you because I do see a lot of "race is no issue at all" posts in this topic, but you seemed like the most reasonable proponent.
You seem to have a decent attitude about the whole race issue, ad yet you automatically identified the black woman as African instead of just as European, like the white woman.
I was referring to ancestry (and thus the history of relevent racial conflicts), not nationality, so yes I identified the curly-haired black woman as African. I suppose the white woman could be from north Asia as well, but you get my drift.
I myself live in a major city in the American Midwest - I work near downtown, and a trip 15 minutes from my home can take me into some very rural areas. I get to see racial issues on a very regular basis, and man do they ever exist.
I hear ya. It always bothers me when I hear someone -- always white and sheltered -- say racism doesn't exist when what they mean is they never see people of other races and thus never have to confront the issue. Thus in a way this topic is one I myself am 'hypersensitive' about. BTW, perchance you're talking about Chicago? I can't imagine anyone living in or near that town who isn't aware of these things.
I'm looking forward to a time when a black person and a white person can truly hate each other with every fiber of their body, and not have race be the slightest cause of it. Yeah, maybe it's a little way off, but it's closer than you might think.
*snif* That's such a touching take on Dr. King's dream. Heh. But yeah, I myself who grew up in a black neighborhood with mostly black friends have hated and been hated without race being the cause, though even still our relative races innevitably came up. That's the real tragedy, and will probably take longer to go away.
I guess my point is that the only reason that race is an issue in these ads is because some people took it entirely out of context and made it an issue.
I see your point and agree, so this is a nit, but racism is an issue because it was taken out of context; I really can't imagine that race was not intended to be an issue (or theme or whatever un-charged word you prefer) in the piece by the artist.
I agree Sony appologizing for this was silly, just like Nike appologizing for showing a woman outrunning (humiliatingly) a would-be attacker was silly. This whole thing should never have come up... though it does serve as a decent non-threatening springboard for discussions about race issues. That's why hypersensitivity doesn't bother me much -- the side of racial tension that makes you roll your eyes is vastly preferable to the one that involves oppression and violence.
Oh, but the fact that they are of different races means it's insensitive. You wouldn't have a problem with the ad if it were two persons of the same race and gender.
Um, yes, obviously. Or two races who had never had any kind of conflict, say Hawaiians and Arabs. That's called "context" and it's important. These ads don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in our world in which one race dominating, slaying, and enslaving another has been one of the continual themes of history. The ad itself pairs two races who have had such a history even up to today. That's significant. That can't be ignored.
This hypersensitivity is actually serving to perpetuate racist views. It is forcing people to consider race as an issue when people really shouldn't have to.
Race is an issue in many places in the world, and pretending otherwise is not going to make it go away. Racism and racial tensions exist in many parts of the world, and black vs white racial tension and racism exist here in the United States. Anyone who says it isn't is in denial or living somewhere where they don't have to deal with it.
Race is an issue in these ads. This is just undeniable. Racial tension is also an issue. Sony can talk about "color" in the abstract sense of their PSPs as much as they want. These women aren't just white and black, they're European and African. Going at each other. Racial tension? Yes.
But is it racism? I'd certainly say not. If you look at the whole series, it actually looks very passionate. They may be aggressive and combative, but they practically end up on top of each other. As someone else pointed out, the ad is basically about sex. Aggressive sex, but that doesn't make it hateful. Do you think interracial lovers sometimes feed off the racial tension between them? Certainly. In that sense the series is almost cathartic. The artist was using the implied tension towards their goal.
So is hypersensitivity the problem here? Yeah, probably. It's a bit much to call the ads 'racist', though with the "White is coming" tagline and news articles only showing the white-gripping-black billboard, I can see how people would get the wrong impression. Remember though that like most kinds of hypesensitivity this arose from "over-stimulation" from actual racism and racial violence.
Is hypersensitivity perpetuating racism? Well, somewhat perhaps. I had an aquaintence once get mad at me for making reference to the fact that she's black. That act of sensitivity certainly made me more self-conscious of race, but we got along fine after that. I've had another aquantence tell me that he hated having black people around and thought we should deport them back to Africa. Dropped him like a bad habit, of course, but what about when he has kids? My point is -- to whatever extent hypersensitivity perpetuates racism, actual racism perpetuates racism much, much more.
So I suppose I'm going to have to come out in the middle on this issue. No, they aren't racist and the reactions were overblown. Yes, race is an issue in the ads and pretending otherwise is just avoidance or ignorance or whatever. In any event I don't feel sorry for Sony because appology or no they're getting exactly what they wanted from the ad.
But otherwise, yeah, you're right. Taken -out- of the context of the ads, and without the unfortunate "White is coming" tagline, they actually make for a pretty good art series that doesn't look racist, actually the opposite. I don't know if the artist intended them to be ordered as such, but if you start with the one with them squaring off and snarling at each other, followed by the white woman grabbing the other woman's face in what's both an aggressive and intimite gesture, followed by the white woman more supine with the black woman over her. Looks like two people who perhaps don't like each other or are just aggressive like that but are attracted to each other succumbing to their passions.
Now obviously this doesn't eliminate the fact that race is an element of these pictures, and the racial tension that is implied. But of course a piece of art that involves racial tension is not necessarily racist. Just as the women's anger and tension seems to be leading up to a sensual release, so too are the racial tensions that the viewer is going to be seeing and feeling. Very provacative.
Sadly, it is in the context of an ad, and with the unfortunate tagline, and really was just a bad idea on Sony's part. Er, other than it being a ridiculously successful advertisement, of course.
In retrospect, no matter what their motives or realizations were, I f*cking hate marketing and all forms of it.
Yeah, same here.
I guarantee you that despite whatever appology the PR flak gave, their marketing department is throwing a fucking party right now. This ad is nothing but a success for them.
I nominate "Star Trek Collections" as a new unit of storage measurement! Quick, somebody work out the conversion into the standard libraries' of congress.
Hope is alway a good thing but sometimes reality must butt in. Who is going to make plans based on an 80% chance of a product being available?
Nobody, of course. But the hope -- the purpose of this announcement and basically every other Vista announcement in the past two years -- is to get people to hold off making plans until Vista is actually complete. Because if they made those plans now, or last year, or the year before, then they may not involve a Microsoft OS.
So long as Microsoft can maintain the belief that Vista might be coming out soon and that when it does it might be the greatest thing since Jesus Wafers, then they're okay.
Oops, I should be careful of this, I didn't mean to imply he wasn't an asshole. Lots of geniuses -- and non-geniuses who can nontheless be respected -- are assholes. You don't have to respect him for his personal life to respect him for his work.
Or let me put it this way: everything I'm talking about and that you say "trivializes" Japan were the actual factors that our government and military were discussing when deciding to drop the bomb. So if you think "steel cojones" is all you need to say to justify the bomb and none of the other factors I discuss are important, well, Harry Truman, his cabinet, and the leaders of the military disagreed with you.
In particular, General McArthur disagreed with you. Say whatever you want about him and his later career; he faced and defeated Japan militarily in the Pacific theatre, and then successfully lead them into becoming a peaceful democracy in the reconstruction. I think it's safe to say that McArthur understood the Japanese as "steel cojones" warriors and their "outlook on life" as well as anyone in the West did. And he believed that we could have ended the war weeks earlier simply by accepting a conditional surrender that allowed the Emperor to remain, and that dropping the bomb was militarily unnecessary.
However, as I have already stated, military concerns vis a vis the surrender of Japan were not the only issues that influenced the decision. Like it or not, that's historical fact.
So please abandon the simplistic revisionist history that does nothing but make it easier to feel good about WWII. It is still possible to have an accurate and nuanced view of history and agree with the dropping of the bomb; the difference being that you don't turn an incredibly difficult moral dilemna into a childish "we must beat the bogeyman" scenario with only one valid choice. The real world isn't like that, in WWII Japan or in a future scenario where the lessons of WWII will be invaluable.
You ignore every salient detail of the situation, and then say I'm trivializing Japan. You're trivializing the entire war, Japan included. Their steel cohones are not in question; they were proven beyond doubt during the Pacific campaign that nevertheless ended with their navy providing low-cost homes to fish. Their outlook on life included loyalty to the Emperor -- this is why allowing the Emperor to remain as head of State, even if he had no real power, was important enough to make the main concession for surrender -- and a coup by the officer corps would thus have failed if it had succeeded. But it didn't succeed in the first place, the officer corps may not have wanted to surrender but they represented neither the government nor the people of Japan, and when the Emperor said lay down your arms, the people did.
You're trivializing Japan by thinking their "outlook on life" starts and ends with the kamikaze, and this alone defines the decision to bomb.
Whatever. He's saying that it may be difficult or impossible to conduct an actual experiment that could distinguish between the possibilities of why this energy exists for hundreds of years. That doesn't make it faith, it makes it theoretical physics. Just like Relativity was until we could fly a plane at high altitude with an atomic clock and actually measure time dilation.
We're talking crazy physics here. We're talking about the boundary between quantum mechanics and relativistic gravity, two things that have on their own been vexing us for the last century. Conducting experiments about these kinds of things is extremely difficult because we're talking about either huge energies or or tiny energies, things that are at the very boundary of what we can measure, much less create. Assuming an actual experiment has even been conceived of, they often are completely out of bounds of today's technology. I heard some time ago about a proposed experiment that could help verify some predictions of string theory, and it involved building a superconducting ring in space weighing hundreds of thousands of tons.
We aren't going to be doing that any time soon. So does that make it faith? Only if they start saying that string theory is the One True Way and no matter any experiment ever performed it is still true. More likely it will just remain what it is -- unverified hypothesis -- until we are actually abe to do the experiment. In the meantime, cut the theoretical physicists some slack.
I swear, the idiotic creationism/evolution debate has screwed with everyone's heads in ways I wouldn't have predicted.
In other words you can't even intellectually recognize and work around your ingrained taboos.
;)
Sad, but common, you disgusting pork-eater.
The notion that we didn't need to exploit every means at our disposal to fight the Japanese is simply direspectful to the Japanese. They were a highly motivated and highly sophisticated enemy. They were (and still are) a force to be reckoned with. Second guessers tend to gloss over this.
While in the general sense of the war at large I can wholeheartedly agree, you are the one glossing over the specific circumstances involved when the decision to use the bomb was being made. Specifically:
1) Germany had already lost, thus closing an entire front of the war and freeing the Allied forces to focus on Japan.
2) Nearly all of Japan's land aquisitions in Asia had been rolled back.
3) The Japanese navy had been annihilated, and all of their significant bases through the Pacific had been captured.
4) The above combined allowed the Allied fleet to attack the island of Japan with impunity from the sea and air. If Japan was such a force to be reckoned with, where was the retaliation for the firebombing of Tokyo? The answer is that they could not retaliate; they did not have the capability. And with no allies remaining, and a naval blockade around the country to boot, they could not aquire it.
So all that remained was to end the war by getting Japan to surrender. That's not an easy thing to do, sure, but with the enemy nearly defeated and with all potential for offense gone, the "we need to exploit every means to win" just doesn't hold. There were in fact several options:
1) Nuke a city or two. If they went off, pretty much a sure thing. Not even the Japanese believed they could survive losing a whole city to a single bomb. Obviously this is the way we went, and obviously it worked.
2) Demonstration of nukes off-shore. Probably would have worked, but the "you will lose a city for every one of these we drop" message wouldn't have been quite as immediate, and with our limited supply this was a gamble. While this option was heavily lobbied for by some cabinet members, it was rejected as a bluff we couldn't afford to make.
3) Land invasion. In this case, "force to be reckoned with" would have certainly applied to be sure. This was a very scary option, and the one usually juxtaposed to the bomb in order to make the bomb look like the kinder option. However what I've seen of discussions regarding this show that while a plan was drawn up it was not in serious running as an option. Much like (though obviously to a lesser extent) our currently existing plans for the invasion of Canada, this was a contingency not a fore-runner option.
4) Conditional surrender. Japan actually made an offer of conditional surrender, but we dropped the nukes without attempting to even learn what terms they wanted. It appears as though the main concession they wanted was to keep an at least ceremonial role for their Emperor in order to save face, which McArhtur ended up giving them anyway. There are various arguments why conditional surrender was less desireable, but it was an option. Sadly one that was considered even less than invasion.
5) Wait for Russia to declare war on Japan. Our joint chiefs were certain that once Russia entered the war, Japan would surrender unconditionally -- not even the Japanese believed they could resist the combined might of the U.S. and Russian war machines. Of course at this point they would be surrendering to both us and the Russians, which has it's own negative side. This possibility seems to have weighed heavily on the decision to end the war ASAP by using the bomb. Remember that WWII rolled directly into the Cold War, with Russia and the U.S. emerging from the war as the top powers in the world. Option 1 thus had the additional advantage -- which you'll notice had nothing to do with Japan -- of demonstrating our new super-weapon to the Russians.
I'm not saying that the decision was easy, I'm not saying the decision to drop the bombs was wrong. I'm saying it's complex, there were in fact more options available to us, the actual reasons for pic