I think you're close to the truth here. This smells more like a ploy by desperate hardware manufacturers to get Microsoft to bow out of direct competition with them and deliver a real desktop OS like Win7. The hardware manufacturers would then agree to 'forget about' Android and Google and all that. No harm, no foul.
Putting a real Linux OS on the desktop would be the next step if the hardware manufacturers get the royal shove-off from Microsoft, as that has the potential to offer some actual value to the end users in terms of functionality and price-point. But I doubt the hardware manufacturers really want to go there. They just want Microsoft to bend over a bit.
What's really interesting about this phenomenon is that it isn't a generational thing. Like you, I think it involves a much deeper level of human psychology or even mental physiology. When I was growing up 50 some-odd years ago this sort of constant-on connection just wasn't possible and I rarely saw it practiced. Today, there are a sizable number of people--even in my generation or older--who seem to be addicted to this sort of constant contact. I see senior citizens in the grocery store calling their SO to confirm what brand of toothpaste to buy. Older wives calling their husbands about some routine question that could be better handled with lmgtfy.com. Yes, it's a bit more blatantly obvious among the younger crowd, but I also know some young folks who disdain the entire thing. I actually feel sorry for them. My family, friends and coworkers know that I'm famously difficult to reach most times and chalk it up to my being a grumpy old curmudgeon with no technological savvy (even though I know how to design and build that smartphone they're wasting time with and occasionally have to show them how to root it). The younger ones who refuse to be tethered 24/7, however, are treated as if they have some sort of mental defect.
Another 1859 Carrington event would be really interesting, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in banal chatter and were suddenly silenced. I wonder if the race would survive.
I also program on embedded Linux OS's, and I follow your philosophy. However, on those occasions when my vehicle stopped on the road, knowing that 'fuel, air and spark at the right time in the right proportion' is the key has always gotten me home. Admittedly, that happened much more often with my '67 Camaro and 650 Triumph than my modern vehicles. Fortunately modern cars are more reliable, as your only option today is to call for help because the odds of a problem being in some seriously overpriced proprietary POS computer module is approaching 100%.
As for the knowledge being a useless distraction during a normal commute, well, I had a co-worker once whose car caught on fire and burned up (after she'd coasted to a stop on the side of the road and gotten out fortunately) because she didn't have any clue what the red 'Oil Pressure' light that had been illuminated for the preceding five minutes of her commute meant. I admit, I smile and laugh a little inside when I see out-of-the-area folks head off down dirt roads around here because their smartphone app told them it was a shortcut. Different era. Different tools. Same human foibles. Same results.
GUIs and command lines are the same principle. Sure, use what works best for you at the moment, but make sure you understand and have access to the other when necessary and appropriate. Otherwise, your cluelessness will leave you stranded someday.
You are, of course, correct, but you fail at the human element. I've been using command lines since the early 1980s, and I've been around programmers long enough to know their limitations. Like a hammer, they're a powerful tool when used correctly. Like a hammer, it's a weapon of destruction when used in the wrong hands. Where your argument fails is when you make the assumption that some programmers, after they see the proper use of a hammer for coding, will follow suit and start hammering out great code. Wrong. All you've given them is a weapon of destruction. These are the same folks who will erase days of work with one misplaced asterisk as they don't back-up (or check-in) often either, among a number of other grievous habits...and all of these bad habits are amplified with this new way of hitting code. The good programmers have already heard of hammers, have googled how to use them, and know when (and when not) to use them. The others are best left to their GUIs as the resulting carnage is less severe.
It happens occasionally here in the Southwest U.S. that European tourists forget they can drive for eleven hours and not see anyone, or anything. Including a petrol station.
So it is important to try to walk the middle line -making observations about the current situation without casting blame or making guesses about how the project got to that state (although it may be obvious when you look at the principals and the agenda).
In my experience, it is *always* obvious when you look at the principals and the agenda how the project got screwed up. You're right though--diplomacy often requires walking the middle path.
Actually, I think more OSS project developers should do something like this. This is what I do all the time on my projects. If the software is working but 1) you're getting burned out, 2) you want to re-write it from scratch, 3) you're wandering off on some tangent, 4) real life happens, well, STOP.
The code works. Leave it alone. Don't break it. Don't touch it. Take a breather. Meditate about something else. Read a good book. Don't start typing in more code until you're relaxed and refreshed and eager. If you're still excited about the code you've probably already been thinking about it and have changed the architecture in your mind half a dozen times, and have already iterated on a much better solution than the abomination you would have hacked up in a hurry earlier. Good. If you'd rather move on that's fine too, just announce it's over and let someone else pick it up if they're interested.
Way too many developers are like manic bridge builders--they build a perfectly fine and functional wooden bridge across a river, but then decide they should have built it in concrete with twice as many lanes. They destroy the old functional bridge by driving concrete pilings through it and get the new bridge built halfway across the river before running out of drive, materials, or both. The end result is yet another project plunging into obscurity. Don't do that.
The dream world you live in is actually the current state of the State of California. California has a bicameral legislature with a house and a senate, just like Washington D.C., but both elected by population. The result is exactly as others have pointed out--the urban areas run roughshod over the rural areas like the one I live in. The courts adjudicate the law, they don't write it, and in a state where the Constitution can be amended as easily as a whiteboard 'equal justice' is more like 'mob rule'. Why do I suspect your 'minority rights' don't include the right to own and use a gun, follow my religious conscious, or run my own business as I see fit?
Give me a penny for every deserving genius who got overlooked, cut down before his time, ignored, ridiculed or had a famous result named after someone else because his name come last in sort order on the journal paper and I could buy a country. Give me two cents for every obnoxious jerk, marketing hack, or talentless wannabe that became rich and famous because shit happens and I could end world poverty. Welcome to real life.
No it's not too weak. That's the exact slippery slope argument the OP warned against, and the only reason I have a huge problem with what the NSA is doing. First they come after the child molesters. Then the rapists. Then the drug dealers. Then the marijuana users. Then whatever the current crime de jour is. The crimes you mention are domestic matters. There are plenty of government agencies in that domain, FBI, DEA, ATF, state, local police etc. All of those agencies have (or are supposed to have) checks and balances and must operate in the open and under Constitutional limitations. The NSA is not subject to open scrutiny due to its national security intelligence role.
I am 110% in agreement with the OP. By your argument, the CIA would also be expected to act if they came across a conspiracy to commit a domestic physical offense. Hell, the CIA is probably *causing* the physical offense. The role of the NSA is closer to that of the CIA than the FBI, and their activities should be conducted accordingly. NSA intelligence should be as admissible for domestic crimes as CIA intelligence, ie, not at all, other than for prosecutions under the federal war powers as noted by the OP. Furthermore, given the easily misused nature of NSA activities, any misapplication to domestic activities *should* taint the entire prosecution as a deterrent to all such misuse.
Every new black hole we discover is simply the remnant of another alien civilization that found that last great filter, believing they were about to test their first warp drive.
Wrong. It has an impact on the CPI (consumer price index) in the U.S., and the percent change in the CPI is the inflation rate. See http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpifaccomp.htm
This has nothing whatsoever to do with PCs suddenly becoming more expensive due to 'inflation'. It's a technical measure of how the U.S. government statistical 'proves' a computer costs less because it's more powerful than last years model, even if, in real dollars, the actual selling price is identical in both years. You might also note that 'core CPI' doesn't include gasoline (or food) costs, so your car example also fails.
Actually, what the rich folks do in many places is tear down the previous owner's mansion because the bathroom decor is out of style and then rebuild it from the ground up. So add construction work to your list.
Yes, but you are missing a fundamental point. A mobile device 20 years from now probably will help you design 3D objects faster and better than the most powerful workstation you can buy today. As an input device it's superior even today. However, the workstation you can buy 20 years from now will still blow that futuristic mobile device out of the water for raw number-crunching. It's simple physics. If I can cram a 256-core i7000 into that mobile device and render a Blender movie in 10 seconds on it without it burning up, I can cram 128 256-core i7000s into a larger liquid-cooled workstation and render that movie in 100 milliseconds. That extra performance does matter in many applications, and unless the mobile device implements some Tardis-style space-time magic that bypasses the current laws of thermodynamics it will always lose to a larger device when raw power is being expended.
This is an important distinction. The desktop PC *is* dying quickly, and Windows along with it. Almost no one buys cheap Celeron-style PCs anymore--that functionality has been subsumed by iShiny devices. However, high-end *workstation* PCs will continue to be a strong market that tablets will never touch, simply because the laws of thermodynamics limit how much power can be dissipated in a given volume.
The problem is that your miniature supercomputer is going to require a heat sink the size of your briefcase / backpack with any technology currently known or likely to arrive any time soon. Thermodynamics is a harsh mistress.
As an engineer for 25 years, I do find that I use 'scopes less and less. That's not because 'scopes are less useful today. It's because the ratio of hardware effort to software effort on the typical project has gone from 10:1 to 1:10 in that same time frame. Building circuits out of discrete TTL on PCBs made using Bishop tape and writing 500 bytes of assembly code is (was) a different world than slapping a Raspberry Pi on a quick-turn PCB with an I/O driver chip and then firing up the C++ compiler. When you need a 'scope you need a 'scope, and no other tool will do the job as well. You just don't need it as often--as a percentage of the overall development time--for most projects these days.
Someday you'll discover the magic of virtual machines.
Every computer I've owned for the past 25 years, from an old MS-DOS 6 XT machine to a recent Scientific Linux build, are all running happily in VMs on my Gentoo workstation. With their applications intact, too. My last Windows box was a Windows 2000 machine, still happily running today as a VM.
Your 12 year old MS OS is probably long past its expiration date and likely harvesting viruses like a tuna trawler if it's on the Internet. The combination of FOSS and VMs frees me from the planned obsolescence of a MS OS and their modern desire to report in to Redmond on a regular basis.
Slashdot Mirror
You're asking a lot from a High Schooler.
I've always preferred "The enemy of my enemy is an even bigger enemy", as that's usually how it works out.
I think you're close to the truth here. This smells more like a ploy by desperate hardware manufacturers to get Microsoft to bow out of direct competition with them and deliver a real desktop OS like Win7. The hardware manufacturers would then agree to 'forget about' Android and Google and all that. No harm, no foul.
Putting a real Linux OS on the desktop would be the next step if the hardware manufacturers get the royal shove-off from Microsoft, as that has the potential to offer some actual value to the end users in terms of functionality and price-point. But I doubt the hardware manufacturers really want to go there. They just want Microsoft to bend over a bit.
Oh dear. It appears you have 'The Knack'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmYDgncMhXw
What's really interesting about this phenomenon is that it isn't a generational thing. Like you, I think it involves a much deeper level of human psychology or even mental physiology. When I was growing up 50 some-odd years ago this sort of constant-on connection just wasn't possible and I rarely saw it practiced. Today, there are a sizable number of people--even in my generation or older--who seem to be addicted to this sort of constant contact. I see senior citizens in the grocery store calling their SO to confirm what brand of toothpaste to buy. Older wives calling their husbands about some routine question that could be better handled with lmgtfy.com. Yes, it's a bit more blatantly obvious among the younger crowd, but I also know some young folks who disdain the entire thing. I actually feel sorry for them. My family, friends and coworkers know that I'm famously difficult to reach most times and chalk it up to my being a grumpy old curmudgeon with no technological savvy (even though I know how to design and build that smartphone they're wasting time with and occasionally have to show them how to root it). The younger ones who refuse to be tethered 24/7, however, are treated as if they have some sort of mental defect.
Another 1859 Carrington event would be really interesting, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in banal chatter and were suddenly silenced. I wonder if the race would survive.
Lots of truth there. Wish I had mod points.
I also program on embedded Linux OS's, and I follow your philosophy. However, on those occasions when my vehicle stopped on the road, knowing that 'fuel, air and spark at the right time in the right proportion' is the key has always gotten me home. Admittedly, that happened much more often with my '67 Camaro and 650 Triumph than my modern vehicles. Fortunately modern cars are more reliable, as your only option today is to call for help because the odds of a problem being in some seriously overpriced proprietary POS computer module is approaching 100%.
As for the knowledge being a useless distraction during a normal commute, well, I had a co-worker once whose car caught on fire and burned up (after she'd coasted to a stop on the side of the road and gotten out fortunately) because she didn't have any clue what the red 'Oil Pressure' light that had been illuminated for the preceding five minutes of her commute meant. I admit, I smile and laugh a little inside when I see out-of-the-area folks head off down dirt roads around here because their smartphone app told them it was a shortcut. Different era. Different tools. Same human foibles. Same results.
GUIs and command lines are the same principle. Sure, use what works best for you at the moment, but make sure you understand and have access to the other when necessary and appropriate. Otherwise, your cluelessness will leave you stranded someday.
You are, of course, correct, but you fail at the human element. I've been using command lines since the early 1980s, and I've been around programmers long enough to know their limitations. Like a hammer, they're a powerful tool when used correctly. Like a hammer, it's a weapon of destruction when used in the wrong hands. Where your argument fails is when you make the assumption that some programmers, after they see the proper use of a hammer for coding, will follow suit and start hammering out great code. Wrong. All you've given them is a weapon of destruction. These are the same folks who will erase days of work with one misplaced asterisk as they don't back-up (or check-in) often either, among a number of other grievous habits...and all of these bad habits are amplified with this new way of hitting code. The good programmers have already heard of hammers, have googled how to use them, and know when (and when not) to use them. The others are best left to their GUIs as the resulting carnage is less severe.
It happens occasionally here in the Southwest U.S. that European tourists forget they can drive for eleven hours and not see anyone, or anything. Including a petrol station.
So it is important to try to walk the middle line -making observations about the current situation without casting blame or making guesses about how the project got to that state (although it may be obvious when you look at the principals and the agenda).
In my experience, it is *always* obvious when you look at the principals and the agenda how the project got screwed up. You're right though--diplomacy often requires walking the middle path.
Actually, I think more OSS project developers should do something like this. This is what I do all the time on my projects. If the software is working but 1) you're getting burned out, 2) you want to re-write it from scratch, 3) you're wandering off on some tangent, 4) real life happens, well, STOP.
The code works. Leave it alone. Don't break it. Don't touch it. Take a breather. Meditate about something else. Read a good book. Don't start typing in more code until you're relaxed and refreshed and eager. If you're still excited about the code you've probably already been thinking about it and have changed the architecture in your mind half a dozen times, and have already iterated on a much better solution than the abomination you would have hacked up in a hurry earlier. Good. If you'd rather move on that's fine too, just announce it's over and let someone else pick it up if they're interested.
Way too many developers are like manic bridge builders--they build a perfectly fine and functional wooden bridge across a river, but then decide they should have built it in concrete with twice as many lanes. They destroy the old functional bridge by driving concrete pilings through it and get the new bridge built halfway across the river before running out of drive, materials, or both. The end result is yet another project plunging into obscurity. Don't do that.
The dream world you live in is actually the current state of the State of California. California has a bicameral legislature with a house and a senate, just like Washington D.C., but both elected by population. The result is exactly as others have pointed out--the urban areas run roughshod over the rural areas like the one I live in. The courts adjudicate the law, they don't write it, and in a state where the Constitution can be amended as easily as a whiteboard 'equal justice' is more like 'mob rule'. Why do I suspect your 'minority rights' don't include the right to own and use a gun, follow my religious conscious, or run my own business as I see fit?
Give me a penny for every deserving genius who got overlooked, cut down before his time, ignored, ridiculed or had a famous result named after someone else because his name come last in sort order on the journal paper and I could buy a country. Give me two cents for every obnoxious jerk, marketing hack, or talentless wannabe that became rich and famous because shit happens and I could end world poverty. Welcome to real life.
No it's not too weak. That's the exact slippery slope argument the OP warned against, and the only reason I have a huge problem with what the NSA is doing. First they come after the child molesters. Then the rapists. Then the drug dealers. Then the marijuana users. Then whatever the current crime de jour is. The crimes you mention are domestic matters. There are plenty of government agencies in that domain, FBI, DEA, ATF, state, local police etc. All of those agencies have (or are supposed to have) checks and balances and must operate in the open and under Constitutional limitations. The NSA is not subject to open scrutiny due to its national security intelligence role.
I am 110% in agreement with the OP. By your argument, the CIA would also be expected to act if they came across a conspiracy to commit a domestic physical offense. Hell, the CIA is probably *causing* the physical offense. The role of the NSA is closer to that of the CIA than the FBI, and their activities should be conducted accordingly. NSA intelligence should be as admissible for domestic crimes as CIA intelligence, ie, not at all, other than for prosecutions under the federal war powers as noted by the OP. Furthermore, given the easily misused nature of NSA activities, any misapplication to domestic activities *should* taint the entire prosecution as a deterrent to all such misuse.
Every new black hole we discover is simply the remnant of another alien civilization that found that last great filter, believing they were about to test their first warp drive.
Wrong. It has an impact on the CPI (consumer price index) in the U.S., and the percent change in the CPI is the inflation rate. See http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpifaccomp.htm
This has nothing whatsoever to do with PCs suddenly becoming more expensive due to 'inflation'. It's a technical measure of how the U.S. government statistical 'proves' a computer costs less because it's more powerful than last years model, even if, in real dollars, the actual selling price is identical in both years. You might also note that 'core CPI' doesn't include gasoline (or food) costs, so your car example also fails.
Actually, what the rich folks do in many places is tear down the previous owner's mansion because the bathroom decor is out of style and then rebuild it from the ground up. So add construction work to your list.
Yes, but you are missing a fundamental point. A mobile device 20 years from now probably will help you design 3D objects faster and better than the most powerful workstation you can buy today. As an input device it's superior even today. However, the workstation you can buy 20 years from now will still blow that futuristic mobile device out of the water for raw number-crunching. It's simple physics. If I can cram a 256-core i7000 into that mobile device and render a Blender movie in 10 seconds on it without it burning up, I can cram 128 256-core i7000s into a larger liquid-cooled workstation and render that movie in 100 milliseconds. That extra performance does matter in many applications, and unless the mobile device implements some Tardis-style space-time magic that bypasses the current laws of thermodynamics it will always lose to a larger device when raw power is being expended.
This is an important distinction. The desktop PC *is* dying quickly, and Windows along with it. Almost no one buys cheap Celeron-style PCs anymore--that functionality has been subsumed by iShiny devices. However, high-end *workstation* PCs will continue to be a strong market that tablets will never touch, simply because the laws of thermodynamics limit how much power can be dissipated in a given volume.
The problem is that your miniature supercomputer is going to require a heat sink the size of your briefcase / backpack with any technology currently known or likely to arrive any time soon. Thermodynamics is a harsh mistress.
Mary Shelley wrote an excellent book on just this topic. Fascinating reading. You should look it up.
Excellent response. Wish I had mod points.
As an engineer for 25 years, I do find that I use 'scopes less and less. That's not because 'scopes are less useful today. It's because the ratio of hardware effort to software effort on the typical project has gone from 10:1 to 1:10 in that same time frame. Building circuits out of discrete TTL on PCBs made using Bishop tape and writing 500 bytes of assembly code is (was) a different world than slapping a Raspberry Pi on a quick-turn PCB with an I/O driver chip and then firing up the C++ compiler. When you need a 'scope you need a 'scope, and no other tool will do the job as well. You just don't need it as often--as a percentage of the overall development time--for most projects these days.
Wow. That's the same technique I use inadvertently in a lot of my circuits.
Someday you'll discover the magic of virtual machines.
Every computer I've owned for the past 25 years, from an old MS-DOS 6 XT machine to a recent Scientific Linux build, are all running happily in VMs on my Gentoo workstation. With their applications intact, too. My last Windows box was a Windows 2000 machine, still happily running today as a VM.
Your 12 year old MS OS is probably long past its expiration date and likely harvesting viruses like a tuna trawler if it's on the Internet. The combination of FOSS and VMs frees me from the planned obsolescence of a MS OS and their modern desire to report in to Redmond on a regular basis.