If they made money by laying you off, you are a thief.
I was the guy they hired under the table to pull the hard drives for the bankruptcy court in the end- I stuck it out BEYOND bankruptcy...besides, I didn't say the COMPANY made money doing this, I said the PHB made money off of the stock market doing this. Two totally separate things.
It was my team underneath me that they laid off- after which I didn't have the resources needed to complete the project.
How did sabotaging the project enable him to buy a car?
Stock Markets are short sighted. He released a press statement that he was cutting costs, which caused a one-day bubble that allowed him to sell his shares for the 20k of profit to buy the car. The entire managment of that company was doing similar pointless, minimum profit, stock games.
Uhm, isn't that about a 20K car? That's just about the saddest car a middle age guy could buy, that and a Ford Mustang. You can rest easy knowing he got absolutely no ass as a result of that car.
I would have rested easier knowing that we had actually shipped the product before he and the rest of the PHBs drove it into bankruptcy.
When adjusted for inflation, I stopped being paid well for doing what I like about 8 years into the industry. Since then, my wages adjusted for inflation have been falling.
And also affords one the challenge of dying alone and retiring without kids. There are tradeoffs for everything- if I could get by without being a consultant I would in a heartbeat.
Does the good outweigh the bad? How would you deal with lazy workers, and people getting promotions simply for seniority and not skill? Those are both MAJOR complaints people have with unions. In my experience with them I found those issues to be true.
Unfortuneately the converse is also true. My last private industry job I had to deal with senior people being let go for asking for raises so fast that we couldn't debug the code that had been released into the market a week before I started. There's a lot to be said for keeping people around for seniority and keeping them happy- they're the ones who have to go back to Big Bertha to repair code that they wrote in 1965 before you were born. In other words- that's a pretty immature and petty complaint you're calling major there- and it's one that can cause the failure of a company.
Dude - did you really just say "Mazda Miata" as an example of luxury car?
It was to the PHB who fired 3 programmers off my team and sabotaged my project just before delivery to take advantage of the stock bubble bounce to buy one.
You know how I fight the big companies? If the job sucks or I don't think I am being treated fairly, I quit, simple as that. Let your feet do the talking and get the hell out of there.
Good for you being able to avoid responsibility to the point where you can- I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for.
The fact is, when the PHBs numbers aren't going to be favorable, then your job may be on the chopping block. But with the same sentiment, when it comes times for initial salary negotiations, take the gloves off, and _fight for every penny_. When the going gets tough, and your team may be part of the downsizing, be sure that you've accounted for such job insecurity/risk.
You're not worth every penney- you're worth the $2.50/hr your job can be done in India for.
And seeing the truth about what management thinks of IT (basically that you're all a bunch of losers who failed to get your MBA and deserve to be treated like shit), I won't work for a non-union shop ever again. Keeping your job on merits is fine- until you find out that they reward your hard work by kicking you out with as few $$$ as possible, so that they can justify their million-dollar McMansions and pools and Mazda Miatas.
Sounds like you've got it planned out pretty good. The key word in the first paragraph though is "defencible". Small communities cannot defend themselves against large nations. Implementing something like this on a small scale only works so long as it's being done in a free nation, which maintains a powerfull military. As soon as you lose that protection, someone's going to come by and show you how THEY think you should live.
The other alternative, of course, is to find a place where the geography works with you. Also, those large armies depend heavily on oil at present time; which is a major problem if we have truly hit peak oil. The same thing that will eventually stop international shipping is the same thing that will eventually stop your large nations from existing at all.
And I don't quite get what basic freedoms such as freedom of speech or freedom of association have to do with climate.
Quite a bit- more than can be put into a JE. I suggest you study the lifestyle of the Inuit, the Bedouin, the Australian Aborigene, and the Kwakiutal for the answers to that question. They've each come up with a different set of rules that is carefully tuned through several millenia for a given climate.
Hot or cold, dry or wet, the climate isn't going to change my ability to speak, nor should it.
Absolutely it should if what you speak reduces the ability of the tribe to survive. It's all evolutionary- survival of the fittest. Your idea of a free society does not match that of the Bedouin Arab, nor that of the Inuit- but then again, their idea of a free society doesn't match yours too well either.
And, ofcourse, cultures which do not respect basic freedoms not only treat their own people in an inhumane manner, but are much more likely to come over and disturb your utopian society too.
Ah, but you see, what I'm going for isn't a utopian society- just an evolved one. And what constitutes "basic freedoms" is something entirely different in a desert dust storm or an arctic blizzard than it is in temperate zone America.
If the villiage next to yours beleives it's allright to kidnap and rape your daughter, I'm sure you won't just stand idly by and say "well, they have to define their own rights...".
Which brings us back to the defensible borders part....ideally, the person from the neighboring villiage should expect the death penalty for tresspassing in that situation.
Other than that, I find myself actually being quite attracted to your ideas. But I still think your monicker is totaly unsuitable:) There's verry little that's Marxist about you.
Well, maybe I can bring that back a bit. You see, Karl Marx was a plagerist- he and I get our ideas from the same basic place: The Christian Bible. Specifically the Book of Acts, chapters 4 & 5. The idea that the economy is in fact an artifact, an invention, no different than a wheel or a hammer- and that the economy should serve man, rather than man serving the economy. This differs from the classical capitalists, who believe that the economy is an abstract concept in it's own right that needs no engineering and will exist regardless of what we do in it's current shape.
But I'm by no means the first to make the connection between the two- wikipedia has a great article on Distributism that I linked to earlier in the thread, and the writings of GK Chesterton and Dorthy Day.
So how do you propose we go about changing the gloabal political structure?
I'm beginning to think that, in short, is the wrong goal entirely. Instead of changing the GLOBAL political structure, what we need to do is change our LOCAL political structures. Create defensible, small communities that are ready for the end of mass long distance transportation- and are ready for public short-distance transportation services. Make sure those communities have everything they need locally. Empower citizens to make decisions for themselves- clear up to trade tarrifs and kicking large corporations out of the community when appropriate. Attract a large variety of artisan-inventors, people who can build anything out of anything. But most importantly keep it small- because once you're dealing on a daily basis with people you don't know and don't care about, your primary purpose becomes your own good rather than the good of the community. I personally think that's where the inefficiency in capitalism (and most certainly Lenin/Stalin's version of totalitarian communism) comes in- it removes the human friendships from the equation, destroying trust and loyalty.
Especially when we're having problems just getting people to accept the idea of basic universal human freedoms.
Has it ever occured to you perhaps the reason we don't have basic universal human freedoms is because some of those freedoms make no sense given the climates people have to live in? Each community should be allowed to define it's own human freedom- each community needs to tune it's own culture to the demands of the environment.
Remember, an idea is no good if it's not practical. Implementing your system would be, I fear, even more difficult than achieveing the utopian marxist society. Although in the field of finite mathematics, when you start seing such ludicrously high numbers the diference between them tends to be irrelevant since both are so improbable as to effectively be impossible.
If I was trying to implement it on a wide scale, I'd agree. But I see no way to implement such a thing on a wide scale without punitive tariffs and violent protectionism; it is entirely possible that it can't even be implemented locally without such things. But we won't know until we make the investment and TRY- create the microfabricators and nanofactories we need, get our own houses off the grid or at least to grid neutral, make pledges to find out where we buy things from and simply refuse to buy from communities that don't share our values. This has to be consumer driven- industry driven solutions will never fit the local climate.
As for finite mathematics- well the key is to keep it small. Subsidarity and Solidarity first, trade outside the community only for grave need.
That's what we used to call being a nomad. Wandering around, living off the land.
You might want to look at it again, it's somewhat more civilized than that. Think Feudalism and Guilds- small scale distributed manufacturing and local knowledge brokers, trade with your immediate neighbors first, trade outside your community only for what you can't make for yourselves.
You can't beterribly bright if you think 6 billion people could live on this planet in such a manner.
I think if we had 8 billion people, each family could still have 4.5 acres of arable land if we were sufficiently decentralized and used crops that fit the environment. And that modern permaculture/ambient energy techniques pioneered in the Pacific Northwest would allow you to grow all the food and energy you need on that 4.5 acres. Cities aren't neccessary to have a population of 8 billion people- intelligent choices ARE. Right now we're making some stupendously short-sighted and stupid choices with our food and energy usage. A good point is what's happening in the Americas right now- cheap subsidized corn from the United States has ripped the market out from under Latin American farms- who fight back by raising cheap subsidized fruit. We waste tons of fuel in ships and jets to ship corn south and fruit north- when in reality the climates are similar enough that we could be raising that food right next to the people who are eating it. And in so doing, you've got fruit farmers in the United States going out of business, and illegal aliens coming from the south who have lost their jobs farming corn, and for what? So that you can have out-of-season food in your supermarket?
The free market has become stupid and inefficient- more choice available for less human good.
Unfortunately, the Earth's current carrying capacity is proportional to our energy consumption. This "shortfall" will be borne by the poor, either in death or dramatically lower quality of life.
Maybe- Maybe not. We don't actually know what would happen if we applied what we now know of genetics and organic chemistry to native plants and native food/energy production. We're too busy centralizing wealth to ask the correct questions. But if centralization of wealth becomes impossible- if the only thing that can be traded across borders is knowledge because energy is so much cheaper to ship than mass- then it could get VERY interesting. Myself, I'm planting Camas bulbs- in case onions and potatos and grains are no longer available.
You monicker and your statements stand in absolute opposition to eachother. You obviously fail to realize that Marx was a proponent of Industrialization and Capitalims because he strongly beleived that only a capitalist economy could be strong and productive enough to provide the sort of wealth neccesary for a transition into Communism. Transfer from the rich to the poor indeed. Have you not the slightest bit of common sense?
Marx is where I START, not where I END. I hack. I hack systems. Communism is just another form of capitalism that replaces the rich with the state. Distributism on the other hand spreads the wealth out, decentralizes it- what every hacker should be for.
I'm not a Marx fan at all, nor do I have anything but contempt for communism, yet even I know that much about the man. Either change your name, or read some of his writings.
I have- you apparently have not read my profile if you stop with just the first word.
Sounds like good news either way to a Distributist like me. Industrialization has just been one long transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, hidden behind cheap goods made available by economies of scale. This will repair itself about the same time that Cottage Industry and small-scale production starts up again because long-haul shipping will disappear.
Chances are option #2- just like when the guy who wrote "Thank you for not smoking" asked the lobbyist why she did what she did "It's a way to pay the mortgage". Pretty bad that we're in a culture where there are so few jobs that those who are good at sales have to work on commission and be total assholes- but that's what you get for outsourcing almost everything else a person can do to earn a living. They take the job because they have to- they're paid on commission to convince them to set asside their ethics for bigger sales.
After such an investigation both parties tend to want the violator to be legit so having access to a sales department (or being within one) does help that make that easier afterwards.
The problem is she wasn't satisfied with the same evidence the BSA would have been. The BSA would have taken the evidence of the audit, ran off to check it against Microsoft's records, and be done with it. She rejected the evidence and tried to send a SPY into his organization.
True enough- all these chips are still being manufactured. I hadn't actually thought about my PDA fitting into this idea- not even the old Hitachi SH-3 Windows CE 1.0 machine I have at home.
Actually, the video/graphics processor was the main CPU in the heart of that beast, right?
Nope, the 16-bit TMS9900 was the main CPU, but the video/graphics processor was given the most memory (the main CPU only had 256 BYTES of memory dedicated to it's processing- 128 words- but could read/write indirectly the 16kbytes attached to the TMS9100A VPU). In addition to that- the sound processor had 128 bytes of dedicated memory (just enough for those insipid little songs that came with the games cartridges- you could just load up the memory with sound data and instruct the sound processor to play it in a continuous loop forever); the peripherial processing unit (a TMS9901 chip) had a 1k buffer that was split between keyboard, joysticks, and tape output; the math co-processor had a whopping 16 1-word registers for a total of 32 bytes of memory.
The really stupid bit was that use of the Video memory as Main Memory- it forced EVERY memory read/write from the CPU to go through the VPU, which slowed the 4Mhz 16-bit processor down to the equivalent of a 1Mhz 8-bit. Got a little bit better with the Minimemory cartridge (but that still had to go through the VPU, they didn't call it a GRAM cartidge for nothing) or with the Peripherial Expansion Box and the 32k Memory Expansion Card (which had it's own memory managing processor that addressed memory by Words instead of Bytes, thus allowing the CPU to finally grab 2 bytes on a read or write cycle).
I only had the "mini memory" cartridge, and no good documentation, so I never learned a whole lot about the different things I could do with the TI. I really wanted the Editor/Assembler... later, I graduated to a CoCo3 with it's Assembler - that 6809 was a dream to program on.... (and since the Basic wasn't interpreted 6 ways to Sunday, Basic applications actually ran FAST!)
I actually stuck with the TI architecture through the 1988 sell-off-to-South-Africa of the Myarc Geneve 9640 (the 32 bit version). But I admit, the 68xx series was much easier to program in Assembly on- a single processor with only 3 registers instead of registers up the wazoo and a CPU that is limited to accessing memory through OTHER peripherial processing units. That and only half the slow speed of TI-Basic was due to the fact it was programed in GPL, which itself was an interpreted language, that had to be line-by-line assembled into the VPU's native machine code, which then fed the memory to the CPU for actual processing. The other half was that there was only an 8-bit data bus between the CPU and VPU; thus strangling the power of the CPU.
Which is why I suggested buying them in threes- most of the computers of this time period had three basic circuit boards in them: Keyboard, Power, Motherboard. IF you're lucky and don't have any hand-patched RevB boards, these three boards are usually interchangeable with a little work even without a tech manual of any sort; and by buying three units, you can usually cobble together one working machine between the three.
But I agree- some of these are INCREDIBLY hard to find even one of- your Compucolor is almost as rare as a TI-99/8 or a TI-99/2.
One of them. The TI-99/4A did as well- and then they gunked it up by abstracting BASIC behind two levels of interpreters. If you were lucky enough to have the Editor/Assembler Cartridge and learn 16-bit Assembly, you quickly found out that the darned thing actually had 4 sub processors (Graphics/Video, Mathematical, Sound, Memory/Peripherial) with their own memory spaces, and that almost every peripherial you added to it added a small amount of memory + another processor. If you were intelligent about it, you could have several tasks going on at once, all managed by the CPU.
Depends on how you look at it- 1976-1979 certainly had the big names come in (Commodore Pet, Vic 20 & 64; TI-99/4 and/4a, Apple I, II, II+, IIe, Altair, the Tandy Radio Shack series, and of course, who can forget the precursor to the BBC micro, the Timex Sinclair Z80?), all of which were TECHNICAL leaps forward. But the real explosion came in with the merging of the Home Video Game Industry with the Home Computer industry: Coleco Adam; Atari 400, 800, 1600. And of course the business machines from IBM and Compaq both came out in 1980, as did a variety of "luggable" CPM machines. Plastic boxes in department stores were the start of the real Home Computer and Personal Computer, as opposed to the Micro Computer for hobbyists and businesses that could afford the expense and schools.
But certainly, I'd cut it off at about 1986 or so- almost everything since then has been Windows, Mac, or Linux, the choice in platforms as far as hardware is concerned is almost dead.
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If they made money by laying you off, you are a thief.
I was the guy they hired under the table to pull the hard drives for the bankruptcy court in the end- I stuck it out BEYOND bankruptcy...besides, I didn't say the COMPANY made money doing this, I said the PHB made money off of the stock market doing this. Two totally separate things.
It was my team underneath me that they laid off- after which I didn't have the resources needed to complete the project.
How did sabotaging the project enable him to buy a car?
Stock Markets are short sighted. He released a press statement that he was cutting costs, which caused a one-day bubble that allowed him to sell his shares for the 20k of profit to buy the car. The entire managment of that company was doing similar pointless, minimum profit, stock games.
Uhm, isn't that about a 20K car? That's just about the saddest car a middle age guy could buy, that and a Ford Mustang. You can rest easy knowing he got absolutely no ass as a result of that car.
I would have rested easier knowing that we had actually shipped the product before he and the rest of the PHBs drove it into bankruptcy.
We get paid well for doing what we like.
When adjusted for inflation, I stopped being paid well for doing what I like about 8 years into the industry. Since then, my wages adjusted for inflation have been falling.
And also affords one the challenge of dying alone and retiring without kids. There are tradeoffs for everything- if I could get by without being a consultant I would in a heartbeat.
Does the good outweigh the bad? How would you deal with lazy workers, and people getting promotions simply for seniority and not skill? Those are both MAJOR complaints people have with unions. In my experience with them I found those issues to be true.
Unfortuneately the converse is also true. My last private industry job I had to deal with senior people being let go for asking for raises so fast that we couldn't debug the code that had been released into the market a week before I started. There's a lot to be said for keeping people around for seniority and keeping them happy- they're the ones who have to go back to Big Bertha to repair code that they wrote in 1965 before you were born. In other words- that's a pretty immature and petty complaint you're calling major there- and it's one that can cause the failure of a company.
Dude - did you really just say "Mazda Miata" as an example of luxury car?
It was to the PHB who fired 3 programmers off my team and sabotaged my project just before delivery to take advantage of the stock bubble bounce to buy one.
the laziest, whiniest, least productive member of the group
Translation- the person most likely to bring an AK-47 to work and blow your responsibility-avoiding head off.
You know how I fight the big companies? If the job sucks or I don't think I am being treated fairly, I quit, simple as that. Let your feet do the talking and get the hell out of there.
Good for you being able to avoid responsibility to the point where you can- I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for.
The fact is, when the PHBs numbers aren't going to be favorable, then your job may be on the chopping block. But with the same sentiment, when it comes times for initial salary negotiations, take the gloves off, and _fight for every penny_. When the going gets tough, and your team may be part of the downsizing, be sure that you've accounted for such job insecurity/risk.
You're not worth every penney- you're worth the $2.50/hr your job can be done in India for.
And seeing the truth about what management thinks of IT (basically that you're all a bunch of losers who failed to get your MBA and deserve to be treated like shit), I won't work for a non-union shop ever again. Keeping your job on merits is fine- until you find out that they reward your hard work by kicking you out with as few $$$ as possible, so that they can justify their million-dollar McMansions and pools and Mazda Miatas.
Sounds like you've got it planned out pretty good. The key word in the first paragraph though is "defencible". Small communities cannot defend themselves against large nations. Implementing something like this on a small scale only works so long as it's being done in a free nation, which maintains a powerfull military. As soon as you lose that protection, someone's going to come by and show you how THEY think you should live.
:) There's verry little that's Marxist about you.
The other alternative, of course, is to find a place where the geography works with you. Also, those large armies depend heavily on oil at present time; which is a major problem if we have truly hit peak oil. The same thing that will eventually stop international shipping is the same thing that will eventually stop your large nations from existing at all.
And I don't quite get what basic freedoms such as freedom of speech or freedom of association have to do with climate.
Quite a bit- more than can be put into a JE. I suggest you study the lifestyle of the Inuit, the Bedouin, the Australian Aborigene, and the Kwakiutal for the answers to that question. They've each come up with a different set of rules that is carefully tuned through several millenia for a given climate.
Hot or cold, dry or wet, the climate isn't going to change my ability to speak, nor should it.
Absolutely it should if what you speak reduces the ability of the tribe to survive. It's all evolutionary- survival of the fittest. Your idea of a free society does not match that of the Bedouin Arab, nor that of the Inuit- but then again, their idea of a free society doesn't match yours too well either.
And, ofcourse, cultures which do not respect basic freedoms not only treat their own people in an inhumane manner, but are much more likely to come over and disturb your utopian society too.
Ah, but you see, what I'm going for isn't a utopian society- just an evolved one. And what constitutes "basic freedoms" is something entirely different in a desert dust storm or an arctic blizzard than it is in temperate zone America.
If the villiage next to yours beleives it's allright to kidnap and rape your daughter, I'm sure you won't just stand idly by and say "well, they have to define their own rights...".
Which brings us back to the defensible borders part....ideally, the person from the neighboring villiage should expect the death penalty for tresspassing in that situation.
Other than that, I find myself actually being quite attracted to your ideas. But I still think your monicker is totaly unsuitable
Well, maybe I can bring that back a bit. You see, Karl Marx was a plagerist- he and I get our ideas from the same basic place: The Christian Bible. Specifically the Book of Acts, chapters 4 & 5. The idea that the economy is in fact an artifact, an invention, no different than a wheel or a hammer- and that the economy should serve man, rather than man serving the economy. This differs from the classical capitalists, who believe that the economy is an abstract concept in it's own right that needs no engineering and will exist regardless of what we do in it's current shape.
But I'm by no means the first to make the connection between the two- wikipedia has a great article on Distributism that I linked to earlier in the thread, and the writings of GK Chesterton and Dorthy Day.
So how do you propose we go about changing the gloabal political structure?
I'm beginning to think that, in short, is the wrong goal entirely. Instead of changing the GLOBAL political structure, what we need to do is change our LOCAL political structures. Create defensible, small communities that are ready for the end of mass long distance transportation- and are ready for public short-distance transportation services. Make sure those communities have everything they need locally. Empower citizens to make decisions for themselves- clear up to trade tarrifs and kicking large corporations out of the community when appropriate. Attract a large variety of artisan-inventors, people who can build anything out of anything. But most importantly keep it small- because once you're dealing on a daily basis with people you don't know and don't care about, your primary purpose becomes your own good rather than the good of the community. I personally think that's where the inefficiency in capitalism (and most certainly Lenin/Stalin's version of totalitarian communism) comes in- it removes the human friendships from the equation, destroying trust and loyalty.
Especially when we're having problems just getting people to accept the idea of basic universal human freedoms.
Has it ever occured to you perhaps the reason we don't have basic universal human freedoms is because some of those freedoms make no sense given the climates people have to live in? Each community should be allowed to define it's own human freedom- each community needs to tune it's own culture to the demands of the environment.
Remember, an idea is no good if it's not practical. Implementing your system would be, I fear, even more difficult than achieveing the utopian marxist society. Although in the field of finite mathematics, when you start seing such ludicrously high numbers the diference between them tends to be irrelevant since both are so improbable as to effectively be impossible.
If I was trying to implement it on a wide scale, I'd agree. But I see no way to implement such a thing on a wide scale without punitive tariffs and violent protectionism; it is entirely possible that it can't even be implemented locally without such things. But we won't know until we make the investment and TRY- create the microfabricators and nanofactories we need, get our own houses off the grid or at least to grid neutral, make pledges to find out where we buy things from and simply refuse to buy from communities that don't share our values. This has to be consumer driven- industry driven solutions will never fit the local climate.
As for finite mathematics- well the key is to keep it small. Subsidarity and Solidarity first, trade outside the community only for grave need.
That's what we used to call being a nomad. Wandering around, living off the land.
You might want to look at it again, it's somewhat more civilized than that. Think Feudalism and Guilds- small scale distributed manufacturing and local knowledge brokers, trade with your immediate neighbors first, trade outside your community only for what you can't make for yourselves.
You can't beterribly bright if you think 6 billion people could live on this planet in such a manner.
I think if we had 8 billion people, each family could still have 4.5 acres of arable land if we were sufficiently decentralized and used crops that fit the environment. And that modern permaculture/ambient energy techniques pioneered in the Pacific Northwest would allow you to grow all the food and energy you need on that 4.5 acres. Cities aren't neccessary to have a population of 8 billion people- intelligent choices ARE. Right now we're making some stupendously short-sighted and stupid choices with our food and energy usage. A good point is what's happening in the Americas right now- cheap subsidized corn from the United States has ripped the market out from under Latin American farms- who fight back by raising cheap subsidized fruit. We waste tons of fuel in ships and jets to ship corn south and fruit north- when in reality the climates are similar enough that we could be raising that food right next to the people who are eating it. And in so doing, you've got fruit farmers in the United States going out of business, and illegal aliens coming from the south who have lost their jobs farming corn, and for what? So that you can have out-of-season food in your supermarket?
The free market has become stupid and inefficient- more choice available for less human good.
Unfortunately, the Earth's current carrying capacity is proportional to our energy consumption. This "shortfall" will be borne by the poor, either in death or dramatically lower quality of life.
Maybe- Maybe not. We don't actually know what would happen if we applied what we now know of genetics and organic chemistry to native plants and native food/energy production. We're too busy centralizing wealth to ask the correct questions. But if centralization of wealth becomes impossible- if the only thing that can be traded across borders is knowledge because energy is so much cheaper to ship than mass- then it could get VERY interesting. Myself, I'm planting Camas bulbs- in case onions and potatos and grains are no longer available.
You monicker and your statements stand in absolute opposition to eachother. You obviously fail to realize that Marx was a proponent of Industrialization and Capitalims because he strongly beleived that only a capitalist economy could be strong and productive enough to provide the sort of wealth neccesary for a transition into Communism. Transfer from the rich to the poor indeed. Have you not the slightest bit of common sense?
Marx is where I START, not where I END. I hack. I hack systems. Communism is just another form of capitalism that replaces the rich with the state. Distributism on the other hand spreads the wealth out, decentralizes it- what every hacker should be for.
I'm not a Marx fan at all, nor do I have anything but contempt for communism, yet even I know that much about the man. Either change your name, or read some of his writings.
I have- you apparently have not read my profile if you stop with just the first word.
Sounds like good news either way to a Distributist like me. Industrialization has just been one long transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, hidden behind cheap goods made available by economies of scale. This will repair itself about the same time that Cottage Industry and small-scale production starts up again because long-haul shipping will disappear.
You've been reading BOFH I see....
Chances are option #2- just like when the guy who wrote "Thank you for not smoking" asked the lobbyist why she did what she did "It's a way to pay the mortgage". Pretty bad that we're in a culture where there are so few jobs that those who are good at sales have to work on commission and be total assholes- but that's what you get for outsourcing almost everything else a person can do to earn a living. They take the job because they have to- they're paid on commission to convince them to set asside their ethics for bigger sales.
After such an investigation both parties tend to want the violator to be legit so having access to a sales department (or being within one) does help that make that easier afterwards.
The problem is she wasn't satisfied with the same evidence the BSA would have been. The BSA would have taken the evidence of the audit, ran off to check it against Microsoft's records, and be done with it. She rejected the evidence and tried to send a SPY into his organization.
True enough- all these chips are still being manufactured. I hadn't actually thought about my PDA fitting into this idea- not even the old Hitachi SH-3 Windows CE 1.0 machine I have at home.
Actually, the video/graphics processor was the main CPU in the heart of that beast, right?
Nope, the 16-bit TMS9900 was the main CPU, but the video/graphics processor was given the most memory (the main CPU only had 256 BYTES of memory dedicated to it's processing- 128 words- but could read/write indirectly the 16kbytes attached to the TMS9100A VPU). In addition to that- the sound processor had 128 bytes of dedicated memory (just enough for those insipid little songs that came with the games cartridges- you could just load up the memory with sound data and instruct the sound processor to play it in a continuous loop forever); the peripherial processing unit (a TMS9901 chip) had a 1k buffer that was split between keyboard, joysticks, and tape output; the math co-processor had a whopping 16 1-word registers for a total of 32 bytes of memory.
The really stupid bit was that use of the Video memory as Main Memory- it forced EVERY memory read/write from the CPU to go through the VPU, which slowed the 4Mhz 16-bit processor down to the equivalent of a 1Mhz 8-bit. Got a little bit better with the Minimemory cartridge (but that still had to go through the VPU, they didn't call it a GRAM cartidge for nothing) or with the Peripherial Expansion Box and the 32k Memory Expansion Card (which had it's own memory managing processor that addressed memory by Words instead of Bytes, thus allowing the CPU to finally grab 2 bytes on a read or write cycle).
I only had the "mini memory" cartridge, and no good documentation, so I never learned a whole lot about the different things I could do with the TI. I really wanted the Editor/Assembler... later, I graduated to a CoCo3 with it's Assembler - that 6809 was a dream to program on.... (and since the Basic wasn't interpreted 6 ways to Sunday, Basic applications actually ran FAST!)
I actually stuck with the TI architecture through the 1988 sell-off-to-South-Africa of the Myarc Geneve 9640 (the 32 bit version). But I admit, the 68xx series was much easier to program in Assembly on- a single processor with only 3 registers instead of registers up the wazoo and a CPU that is limited to accessing memory through OTHER peripherial processing units. That and only half the slow speed of TI-Basic was due to the fact it was programed in GPL, which itself was an interpreted language, that had to be line-by-line assembled into the VPU's native machine code, which then fed the memory to the CPU for actual processing. The other half was that there was only an 8-bit data bus between the CPU and VPU; thus strangling the power of the CPU.
Please don't. I have a Magnavox Headstart 300 from 1990. True it runs on DOS, but at least it is not Windows.
That ran Windows. You just need to find a copy of Windows 1.0 to run on it.
Which is why I suggested buying them in threes- most of the computers of this time period had three basic circuit boards in them: Keyboard, Power, Motherboard. IF you're lucky and don't have any hand-patched RevB boards, these three boards are usually interchangeable with a little work even without a tech manual of any sort; and by buying three units, you can usually cobble together one working machine between the three.
But I agree- some of these are INCREDIBLY hard to find even one of- your Compucolor is almost as rare as a TI-99/8 or a TI-99/2.
One of them. The TI-99/4A did as well- and then they gunked it up by abstracting BASIC behind two levels of interpreters. If you were lucky enough to have the Editor/Assembler Cartridge and learn 16-bit Assembly, you quickly found out that the darned thing actually had 4 sub processors (Graphics/Video, Mathematical, Sound, Memory/Peripherial) with their own memory spaces, and that almost every peripherial you added to it added a small amount of memory + another processor. If you were intelligent about it, you could have several tasks going on at once, all managed by the CPU.
Depends on how you look at it- 1976-1979 certainly had the big names come in (Commodore Pet, Vic 20 & 64; TI-99/4 and /4a, Apple I, II, II+, IIe, Altair, the Tandy Radio Shack series, and of course, who can forget the precursor to the BBC micro, the Timex Sinclair Z80?), all of which were TECHNICAL leaps forward. But the real explosion came in with the merging of the Home Video Game Industry with the Home Computer industry: Coleco Adam; Atari 400, 800, 1600. And of course the business machines from IBM and Compaq both came out in 1980, as did a variety of "luggable" CPM machines. Plastic boxes in department stores were the start of the real Home Computer and Personal Computer, as opposed to the Micro Computer for hobbyists and businesses that could afford the expense and schools.
But certainly, I'd cut it off at about 1986 or so- almost everything since then has been Windows, Mac, or Linux, the choice in platforms as far as hardware is concerned is almost dead.