Part of the vaunted S390 uptime comes not only from the overt reliability of the the hardware but also from the reliability of MVS itself. You don't necessarily get the same reliability from replacing MVS with Linux. Moreover if you consider not only uptime but MTTR you will find that in the S390 arena those figures come at the expense of years and years of practiced discipline, at knowing just how to find and fix things quickly and exploiting a well understood break/fix methodology to remediate the problem. This is not necessarily the case with S390 Linux now and would require some years of experience to get there.
It seems that S390 Linux best serves service providers who can bill out chunks of a box to whomever wants a particular service hosted there. If this is the case I'm left wondering why it makes any difference what OS runs under the covers of a hosted service? There are two cases that we have to consider.
One - somehow the service provider can offer a cheaper service because there are zero or near zero OS licencing costs. If look at maintenance, labor, hardware leasing, etc. Is the OS licence a significant enough to lower the overall cost model of a hosted service. True MVS can be expensive but we've already assumed that the expense would be allocated to many customers.
Two - are there applications that are not supported on MVS or AIX but are supported on Linux in this space where a service provider would host a commercial service for a customer? Gee - I can't think of one in the realm of the SAP's, UDB's, Oracle's, Lawson's, Webserver's, etc... Or alternatively are there applications that can be procured from the vendor for significantly less if they are licenced for Linux and not anything else? Perhaps but not likely.
In the end I can't how this makes a great deal of business sense however interesting it is to do technically. Having said that there is one exception - the case of development + migration. I can a see a case being made for developing code in some other Linux platform or in an instance on an LPAR and then more or less easily being able to test and migrate it to production on a similar Linux platform in the LPARs. Today for example when we have to develop something in UDB/DB2 on say NT or Linux on a PC and then have to move that code upstream to an S390 there is a whole basket of problems that you can't avoid. It is possible that S390 Linux would reduce or even eliminate those assuming the DB or applications vendors themselves write more or less unified code for any Linux platform and the developer doesn't have to think about things like IO performance, locking, security and whatnot.
1 Hits or bullies others. 2 Expresses uncontrolled anger. 3 Has unlawful possession and use of firearms. 4 Displays intense intolerance or prejudice. 5 Has excessive feelings of isolation and/or rejection. 6 Conveys violence in writings and/or drawings. 8 7 Uses drugs or alcohol on campus. 8 Makes threats. 9 Suddenly has bad grades or little interest in school. 10 Is easily angered by minor things.
How much you wanna bet that Win2001 or some such version will have the installation and packaging aspects of 'ready to run' built in. If I were cynical, which of course I'm not, I'd bet that MS will use VMWare technology to run Win2k in a VMWare session on Linux on a S/390 mainframe and then say...'see it's enterprise ready' !!!
Antitrust law doesn't do anything lightly. So whatr is a very likely outcome is some kind of modified final judgment. Something along the lines of establishing guidelines for future conduct, a blue ribbon panel to monitor MS for some number of years into the future and the threat of additional prosecution if the panel deems that the guidelines have been violated. If you think that they will pull down the great leader Bill's statue from the town square, loot the palace and delare a new republic you are delusional.
Big C or little c, RMS is closer to anarcho-syndicalism which in case you're curious doesn't say that there should be no laws and no order and everyone should do whatever they want. No it says that basically that there should not be large organizational entities be they governments or corporations that hold all of the power and the ability to divest themselves of that power. What you people are complaining about - "This is not freedom since I can't do what I want..." are implying what T. Jefferson a while back "...total freedom implies near total anarchy..." We've gone over this people. Make the code available to all for no charge. Distribute your changes into the distribution. Make money on the service, the documentation, the support. Hell even car dealerships understand this; make almost nothing on the vehicle and most of the profit comes through the serivice and parts desks. What is so freakin hard to understand?
Sure I could throw together an AMD K6-450, 128MB, 4.5B, 10/100BT machine with a 17" monitor a for about the same price +/- the shipping but that assumes that my time is worth $0.00. For the folks at home to get connected it sure sounds like enough. Of then I'd have to add some basic compatible desktop office type software, an IM of some kind that could get to AOL, some printer drivers, a modem so 6=1, half dozen=the other. If this netpliance works for what it works for it's great if you compare it to Rebel or Cobalt, etc. just on cost alone (for personal use low end web connections only.)
Let's not forget that the basic premise of both Joy's and Kurtzweil's belief systems is grounded in the paranoid, however well educated, philosophy of the Unabomber. By this reasoning wouldn't it be likely that sentient technology would eventually become just as paranoid as we claim to be. I for one don't need to argue against a fundamentally disturbed world-view. Why bother? How can you debate with fear, arrogance and meglomania?
Is it not equally likely that some sentient technology could be the health care and social workers of the future? Can't progress also nurture? We view technology as inherently evil if we can't control it but is that not itself a patently arrogant, evil, paranoid point of view? If complexity is the enemy of human evolution then our subjigation is inevitable, yes? Does technology distort the ecosystems it exists in? Yes it does. People have had and have used this ability for ~9,000 years since they first domesticated animals and directed streams. Both of those things are hard to do well and can lead to unintended results.
In fact any cheap effective portable technology can be abused, can overwhelm us. Take paper money for example. A great conceptual leap in communal economics and also the easiest way to launder money, avoid taxes and steal.
In the end though this article is about what happens inside a dynamic system when you introduce a new factor that has no competition. It doesn't take a Bill Joy to get to the back of that one, does it? Let's not forget as long we're drawing biologic analogies, that over 99% of all species, ever, are now dead. Systems became unbalanced and eventually righted themselves. What they became was something different than before. In fact virologists always know this since the most destructive virluent strains burn themselves out more rapidly because they are too toxic for their hosts to help them propagate.
I despair that the best we can come up with is after all, despair.
The problem will not be that any one dotcom goes in the tank. The reall downside will be the effect of the talking heads on CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg suddenly spouting about the collapse of the dotcom economy and driving EVERYTHING ELSE down as well. Since much of the market is driven by ignorance, fear, herd mentality, rumors and the like, the net effect will be that if someday the news figures out that NOT making any money and NOT having any prospect of making money in the future is actually a BAD business model and therefore such and such company's stock needs to be corrected 70 or 80% the companies that actually make or earn SOMETHING will get pounded as well. There's nothing like the feeling of complete hopelessness when I hear that some dotcom that doesn't actually do anything suddenly drops a few billion in value which sends all of the traders back to sell off pretty much everything at random whether it makes sense or not.
There is no monolithic "IBM" where Yahweh speaks and it is word. The origins of this effort were that many of the product houses went off and started their Linux porting/development efforts on their own and through some process, call it artesian plumbing, the mandarins began to see that it was Good. Plus it helped that customers started asking about Freenix in the context of paying $$$$ to either/or IBM & MS for WinNT, AIX, what have you. So then the word went forth that IBM would become the Linux supplier of choice because (insert your particular motivational statement here). Plus it helps that Red Hat is down the street from most of the IBM SW product houses in RTP.
And because it was good and the minions could identify with it strenuously, the personal systems group began uttering the word which was to preload Linux on high end desktops for which you already pay a great deal of support dollars since they're typically deployed in a corporate environment. And not to be seen as Amakelites, the server group say 'Oyez and it is good to be rid of our OS groups so we can get paid w/o having to kick back to them.' Plus it doesn't hurt the support organizations to be able to unbundle the support costs from the cost of the OS itself.
So in effect what you can do is reduce the up front price of a PC based server which already sells for a premium, eliminate a portion of your internal chargeback to some other division to give you periodic updates and fixes per The Corporate Licence anc collect the support fees yourself and make more money or at least lose less than you did before.
You can sell that same customer a bevy of products that run over Freenix that you sold them and you support for them, the upfront sunk cost is lower and the customer empty suits are busy congratulating themselves over their latest cost reduction.
I mean didn't they learn their lesson sinking 10 billion (that's 1x10E10, 10 freaking zeros) down the PC OS rathole? Isn't this a page from MS's own rulebook? Embrace and extend?, Give it away and charge for the support?
Plus there's even a hidden incentive for the hardware groups to push new models that are Freenixable and they can start to accelerate the customer migrations from older hardwear that does not support Freenix, like most PC servers and RS/6000's.
There are viruses because most people don't know or care about them. With 1.4zillion winboxes out there you have fertile ground to plant viruses not because of the sheer numbers but because out of that 1.4 zillion, ~1.38zillion endpoints are used by people who don't know, don't care, aren't planning to learn anything about computers. They use office suites and internet access and chat clients and play games. So you have 95% of all users who spend 95% of their computer time doing just this.
Viruses don't spread because of obscure nefarious hard to solve technical problems. They spread because nothing appears on people's radar screens until a week solid of tv news reporting about something. And the result is you have a population that breaks into roughly 2 groups:
1 group who really doesn't have a clue and probably wouldn't be directly effected much by a virus anyway.
1 group who think they know everything and claim, usually out loud, very loud, that they've got it all under control and aren't interested in listening to you explain to them what's going on.
So if 60% of all desktops were Freenix (pick your own #) and that 60% were deployed into the general population then you would start to see Freenix viruses. One more thing to consider though is access. In rough terms, because of how the infrastructure works broadband access is at least technologically available to 2 demographics:
The wealthy or near-wealthy because this where the wires, CO's and cables go.
The lower middle class or working poor because this is exactly the old infrastructure that ADSL runs over (no fiber need apply, thank you)
So you're left with 2 groups of customers that fit the criteria of not caring about, or deluding themselves that they are immune from viruses and other security attacks. And broadband will give these populations the ability to wreak and to succumb to all sorts of havoc.
Unless you were willing to spend a boatload of cash to run SAS on a mainframe you had to be very very patient running it on a high end PC or a Unix box. SAS always had the mindset that while they make awfully good SW they weren't going to dumb it down in order to run effectively on cheap hardware. Well now that HW is fast and cheap you can finally have a SAS environment that's just as complex as that on the big iron. If nothing else this spells the end of running SAS on its own LPAR.
Ok so the mechanics and fairness of collecting taxes is not well thought out. Use the FCC Teleopoly model and collect taxes at the Federal level and disburse them back to the States. By any other name the access fees, surcharges, universal fees, etc. are flat amount taxes, levies, whatever you want to call them. One way to do this would be to build in a gaggle of fees to your basic connection. True it would unfairly tax those who don't purchase G&S but so what. You're phone usage is already taxed no matter how much you use it and what you use it for. What about freeISP's and freeEmail you say? Tax them anyway; 0$ service + X$ Internet levy. Or tax the hardware itself. Not fair you say? Maybe you'll never connect to the net and why should you pay a levy? Who cares. I'm taxed to build roads I'll never drive on. I'm taxed to safely treat water I'll never drink. I'm taxed to send satellites to Mars. What's your point?? There are all kinds of imputed taxes you pay where the base rate is already built into the price: taxes on gasoline aren't rung seperately but there they are.
Compared to the private effort in the US which claims that they will be something like 95% by the end of this year. Those results of course will only be available to paying partners
You'll be better off for it and so will everyone else. There must be some way you could organize an informal class perhaps with teacher sponsorship. Honestly if this where you are today what could they possibly teach you about anything at all? Back in the dark ages when I was learning computers in middle school circa 1974 we just asked for time on the high school's PDP8 and they gave it to us off-hours. Even got a middle school teacher to car-pool several of us. The MS and HS math program really didn't have much of a clue about what to teach or how. I doubt that this has fundamentally changed in 25 years since by my own reckoning schools should be UNRECOGNIZABLE to me after a quarter century and they're not. Therefore what they do and how they teach hasn't changed or improved much either. Anyway I'd recommend that you pick up some books, crack em open and do it yourself.
1. Humans do not control the environment. Assuming that not being able to control the environment is extinction, is false. We are not the center of the universe. 2. Every step on the evolutionary chain could be a spur. This means that not all variations in the chain are guaranteed survival over the long run. There is a great deal of evidence that at any time the best suited life form is not the next step in the best suited life form of the next evolutionary step. 3. To assume a either a crypto-moral purpose or to assume that any 'genetic' technology will therefore run rampant over everything else is false. From the smallest viruses to the largest animals the most aggressive, the most virulent, the most succssful variations tend to burn themselves out because they are either too specialized or they are too 'toxic' to their surroundings. If they do not burn themselves out then they are limited in the total population that they themselves can support. 4. To state that if human beings change or are changed by their environment over time is therefore extinction flies in the face of what evolution actually is. If 80,000 years from now we are different, then we are different now from the point of view of our decendants. If they call themselves "human", fine. If not, so what.
There are probably a few hundred other reasons as well....
I'm sure IG Farben chemists said the same thing
on
Database Nation
·
· Score: 1
"..hey we're developing rat poison. If they use it on people it's not our problem."
Yes you do have the option of not working on something that is unethical, immoral, illegal or destructive. You do not have the right to cop out or to ignore the ramifications of what you do, no matter how glittery the prize. No one is asking you to take a moral stand for the rest of us, but it is incumbent upon all of us to understand that being a cog in a machine does is not an excuse.
Ok I'll stop now.
Except that PHB's will think this is a GOOD thing
on
Database Nation
·
· Score: 1
It's not the one big eye in the sky. It's the clerical minions that just push the paper onward, executing policy, cataloging the data, pushing the clipboard'd forms under your nose. Most of my management would either not care or think that monitoring everyone all the time for everything is good if it allows them to follow a procedure w/o lifting a finger.
BTW if you think this is not really a big deal. A fellow in the US recently lost a slip+fall case against a grocery chain because of the past record of his having purchased alchohol that was logged on his discount card.
What's all the noise about. Putting up an embedded system has to be much more reliable by definition. You wouldn't/couldn't easily get to fix an embedded system otherwise so having a very very reliable core is an absoute necessity. Making one on Linux can only be a good thing as opposed to any of the other special purpose smokestacks used today like.....Java???? (uh maybe that's a bad analogy.)
Nobody cares about the hardware provided at maximum cost from the lowest bidder. No what's important is we now have a mandate and a process by which to watch and listen - pretty much w/o restraint under the aegis of 'it's just real good for us to do this, please remain calm'.
The smaller the chip the lower the power the lower the heat the lower the resistance and the faster the chip. Also shorter run lengths so that is a big factor as well. For example a computer with an end to end switching speed of 1 nanosecond would require a max wire runlength from any point to any point could not exceed ~1ft.
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I think it was Jean duc DuPlessis, Cardinal Richelieu. One Machiavellian bastard if there ever was one.
Part of the vaunted S390 uptime comes not only from the overt reliability of the the hardware but also from the reliability of MVS itself. You don't necessarily get the same reliability from replacing MVS with Linux. Moreover if you consider not only uptime but MTTR you will find that in the S390 arena those figures come at the expense of years and years of practiced discipline, at knowing just how to find and fix things quickly and exploiting a well understood break/fix methodology to remediate the problem. This is not necessarily the case with S390 Linux now and would require some years of experience to get there.
It seems that S390 Linux best serves service providers who can bill out chunks of a box to whomever wants a particular service hosted there. If this is the case I'm left wondering why it makes any difference what OS runs under the covers of a hosted service? There are two cases that we have to consider.
One - somehow the service provider can offer a cheaper service because there are zero or near zero OS licencing costs. If look at maintenance, labor, hardware leasing, etc. Is the OS licence a significant enough to lower the overall cost model of a hosted service. True MVS can be expensive but we've already assumed that the expense would be allocated to many customers.
Two - are there applications that are not supported on MVS or AIX but are supported on Linux in this space where a service provider would host a commercial service for a customer? Gee - I can't think of one in the realm of the SAP's, UDB's, Oracle's, Lawson's, Webserver's, etc... Or alternatively are there applications that can be procured from the vendor for significantly less if they are licenced for Linux and not anything else? Perhaps but not likely.
In the end I can't how this makes a great deal of business sense however interesting it is to do technically. Having said that there is one exception - the case of development + migration. I can a see a case being made for developing code in some other Linux platform or in an instance on an LPAR and then more or less easily being able to test and migrate it to production on a similar Linux platform in the LPARs. Today for example when we have to develop something in UDB/DB2 on say NT or Linux on a PC and then have to move that code upstream to an S390 there is a whole basket of problems that you can't avoid. It is possible that S390 Linux would reduce or even eliminate those assuming the DB or applications vendors themselves write more or less unified code for any Linux platform and the developer doesn't have to think about things like IO performance, locking, security and whatnot.
1 Hits or bullies others.
2 Expresses uncontrolled anger.
3 Has unlawful possession and use of firearms.
4 Displays intense intolerance or prejudice.
5 Has excessive feelings of isolation and/or
rejection.
6 Conveys violence in writings and/or drawings.
8
7 Uses drugs or alcohol on campus.
8 Makes threats.
9 Suddenly has bad grades or little interest in
school.
10 Is easily angered by minor things.
Kind of broad - eh?
How much you wanna bet that Win2001 or some such version will have the installation and packaging aspects of 'ready to run' built in. If I were cynical, which of course I'm not, I'd bet that MS will use VMWare technology to run Win2k in a VMWare session on Linux on a S/390 mainframe and then say...'see it's enterprise ready' !!!
Antitrust law doesn't do anything lightly. So whatr is a very likely outcome is some kind of modified final judgment. Something along the lines of establishing guidelines for future conduct, a blue ribbon panel to monitor MS for some number of years into the future and the threat of additional prosecution if the panel deems that the guidelines have been violated. If you think that they will pull down the great leader Bill's statue from the town square, loot the palace and delare a new republic you are delusional.
Big C or little c, RMS is closer to anarcho-syndicalism which in case you're curious doesn't say that there should be no laws and no order and everyone should do whatever they want. No it says that basically that there should not be large organizational entities be they governments or corporations that hold all of the power and the ability to divest themselves of that power. What you people are complaining about - "This is not freedom since I can't do what I want..." are implying what T. Jefferson a while back "...total freedom implies near total anarchy..." We've gone over this people. Make the code available to all for no charge. Distribute your changes into the distribution. Make money on the service, the documentation, the support. Hell even car dealerships understand this; make almost nothing on the vehicle and most of the profit comes through the serivice and parts desks. What is so freakin hard to understand?
Sure I could throw together an AMD K6-450, 128MB, 4.5B, 10/100BT machine with a 17" monitor a for about the same price +/- the shipping but that assumes that my time is worth $0.00. For the folks at home to get connected it sure sounds like enough. Of then I'd have to add some basic compatible desktop office type software, an IM of some kind that could get to AOL, some printer drivers, a modem so 6=1, half dozen=the other. If this netpliance works for what it works for it's great if you compare it to Rebel or Cobalt, etc. just on cost alone (for personal use low end web connections only.)
Let's not forget that the basic premise of both Joy's and Kurtzweil's belief systems is grounded in the paranoid, however well educated, philosophy of the Unabomber. By this reasoning wouldn't it be likely that sentient technology would eventually become just as paranoid as we claim to be. I for one don't need to argue against a fundamentally disturbed world-view. Why bother? How can you debate with fear, arrogance and meglomania?
Is it not equally likely that some sentient technology could be the health care and social workers of the future? Can't progress also nurture? We view technology as inherently evil if we can't control it but is that not itself a patently arrogant, evil, paranoid point of view? If complexity is the enemy of human evolution then our subjigation is inevitable, yes? Does technology distort the ecosystems it exists in? Yes it does. People have had and have used this ability for ~9,000 years since they first domesticated animals and directed streams. Both of those things are hard to do well and can lead to unintended results.
In fact any cheap effective portable technology can be abused, can overwhelm us. Take paper money for example. A great conceptual leap in communal economics and also the easiest way to launder money, avoid taxes and steal.
In the end though this article is about what happens inside a dynamic system when you introduce a new factor that has no competition. It doesn't take a Bill Joy to get to the back of that one, does it? Let's not forget as long we're drawing biologic analogies, that over 99% of all species, ever, are now dead. Systems became unbalanced and eventually righted themselves. What they became was something different than before. In fact virologists always know this since the most destructive virluent strains burn themselves out more rapidly because they are too toxic for their hosts to help them propagate.
I despair that the best we can come up with is after all, despair.
The problem will not be that any one dotcom goes in the tank. The reall downside will be the effect of the talking heads on CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg suddenly spouting about the collapse of the dotcom economy and driving EVERYTHING ELSE down as well. Since much of the market is driven by ignorance, fear, herd mentality, rumors and the like, the net effect will be that if someday the news figures out that NOT making any money and NOT having any prospect of making money in the future is actually a BAD business model and therefore such and such company's stock needs to be corrected 70 or 80% the companies that actually make or earn SOMETHING will get pounded as well. There's nothing like the feeling of complete hopelessness when I hear that some dotcom that doesn't actually do anything suddenly drops a few billion in value which sends all of the traders back to sell off pretty much everything at random whether it makes sense or not.
There is no monolithic "IBM" where Yahweh speaks and it is word. The origins of this effort were that many of the product houses went off and started their Linux porting/development efforts on their own and through some process, call it artesian plumbing, the mandarins began to see that it was Good. Plus it helped that customers started asking about Freenix in the context of paying $$$$ to either/or IBM & MS for WinNT, AIX, what have you. So then the word went forth that IBM would become the Linux supplier of choice because (insert your particular motivational statement here). Plus it helps that Red Hat is down the street from most of the IBM SW product houses in RTP.
And because it was good and the minions could identify with it strenuously, the personal systems group began uttering the word which was to preload Linux on high end desktops for which you already pay a great deal of support dollars since they're typically deployed in a corporate environment. And not to be seen as Amakelites, the server group say 'Oyez and it is good to be rid of our OS groups so we can get paid w/o having to kick back to them.' Plus it doesn't hurt the support organizations to be able to unbundle the support costs from the cost of the OS itself.
So in effect what you can do is reduce the up front price of a PC based server which already sells for a premium, eliminate a portion of your internal chargeback to some other division to give you periodic updates and fixes per The Corporate Licence anc collect the support fees yourself and make more money or at least lose less than you did before.
You can sell that same customer a bevy of products that run over Freenix that you sold them and you support for them, the upfront sunk cost is lower and the customer empty suits are busy congratulating themselves over their latest cost reduction.
I mean didn't they learn their lesson sinking 10 billion (that's 1x10E10, 10 freaking zeros) down the PC OS rathole? Isn't this a page from MS's own rulebook? Embrace and extend?, Give it away and charge for the support?
Plus there's even a hidden incentive for the hardware groups to push new models that are Freenixable and they can start to accelerate the customer migrations from older hardwear that does not support Freenix, like most PC servers and RS/6000's.
Can I get a witness?!
the Home Depot near my home has them @ every cash register
There are viruses because most people don't know or care about them. With 1.4zillion winboxes out there you have fertile ground to plant viruses not because of the sheer numbers but because out of that 1.4 zillion, ~1.38zillion endpoints are used by people who don't know, don't care, aren't planning to learn anything about computers. They use office suites and internet access and chat clients and play games. So you have 95% of all users who spend 95% of their computer time doing just this.
Viruses don't spread because of obscure nefarious hard to solve technical problems. They spread because nothing appears on people's radar screens until a week solid of tv news reporting about something. And the result is you have a population that breaks into roughly 2 groups:
1 group who really doesn't have a clue and probably wouldn't be directly effected much by a virus anyway.
1 group who think they know everything and claim, usually out loud, very loud, that they've got it all under control and aren't interested in listening to you explain to them what's going on.
So if 60% of all desktops were Freenix (pick your own #) and that 60% were deployed into the general population then you would start to see Freenix viruses. One more thing to consider though is access. In rough terms, because of how the infrastructure works broadband access is at least technologically available to 2 demographics:
The wealthy or near-wealthy because this where the wires, CO's and cables go.
The lower middle class or working poor because this is exactly the old infrastructure that ADSL runs over (no fiber need apply, thank you)
So you're left with 2 groups of customers that fit the criteria of not caring about, or deluding themselves that they are immune from viruses and other security attacks. And broadband will give these populations the ability to wreak and to succumb to all sorts of havoc.
Unless you were willing to spend a boatload of cash to run SAS on a mainframe you had to be very very patient running it on a high end PC or a Unix box. SAS always had the mindset that while they make awfully good SW they weren't going to dumb it down in order to run effectively on cheap hardware. Well now that HW is fast and cheap you can finally have a SAS environment that's just as complex as that on the big iron. If nothing else this spells the end of running SAS on its own LPAR.
Ok so the mechanics and fairness of collecting taxes is not well thought out. Use the FCC Teleopoly model and collect taxes at the Federal level and disburse them back to the States. By any other name the access fees, surcharges, universal fees, etc. are flat amount taxes, levies, whatever you want to call them. One way to do this would be to build in a gaggle of fees to your basic connection. True it would unfairly tax those who don't purchase G&S but so what. You're phone usage is already taxed no matter how much you use it and what you use it for. What about freeISP's and freeEmail you say? Tax them anyway; 0$ service + X$ Internet levy. Or tax the hardware itself. Not fair you say? Maybe you'll never connect to the net and why should you pay a levy? Who cares. I'm taxed to build roads I'll never drive on. I'm taxed to safely treat water I'll never drink. I'm taxed to send satellites to Mars. What's your point?? There are all kinds of imputed taxes you pay where the base rate is already built into the price: taxes on gasoline aren't rung seperately but there they are.
Compared to the private effort in the US which claims that they will be something like 95% by the end of this year. Those results of course will only be available to paying partners
You'll be better off for it and so will everyone else. There must be some way you could organize an informal class perhaps with teacher sponsorship. Honestly if this where you are today what could they possibly teach you about anything at all? Back in the dark ages when I was learning computers in middle school circa 1974 we just asked for time on the high school's PDP8 and they gave it to us off-hours. Even got a middle school teacher to car-pool several of us. The MS and HS math program really didn't have much of a clue about what to teach or how. I doubt that this has fundamentally changed in 25 years since by my own reckoning schools should be UNRECOGNIZABLE to me after a quarter century and they're not. Therefore what they do and how they teach hasn't changed or improved much either. Anyway I'd recommend that you pick up some books, crack em open and do it yourself.
1. Humans do not control the environment. Assuming that not being able to control the environment is extinction, is false. We are not the center of the universe.
2. Every step on the evolutionary chain could be a spur. This means that not all variations in the chain are guaranteed survival over the long run. There is a great deal of evidence that at any time the best suited life form is not the next step in the best suited life form of the next evolutionary step.
3. To assume a either a crypto-moral purpose or to assume that any 'genetic' technology will therefore run rampant over everything else is false. From the smallest viruses to the largest animals the most aggressive, the most virulent, the most succssful variations tend to burn themselves out because they are either too specialized or they are too 'toxic' to their surroundings. If they do not burn themselves out then they are limited in the total population that they themselves can support.
4. To state that if human beings change or are changed by their environment over time is therefore extinction flies in the face of what evolution actually is. If 80,000 years from now we are different, then we are different now from the point of view of our decendants. If they call themselves "human", fine. If not, so what.
There are probably a few hundred other reasons as well....
"..hey we're developing rat poison. If they use it on people it's not our problem."
Yes you do have the option of not working on something that is unethical, immoral, illegal or destructive. You do not have the right to cop out or to ignore the ramifications of what you do, no matter how glittery the prize. No one is asking you to take a moral stand for the rest of us, but it is incumbent upon all of us to understand that being a cog in a machine does is not an excuse.
Ok I'll stop now.
It's not the one big eye in the sky. It's the clerical minions that just push the paper onward, executing policy, cataloging the data, pushing the clipboard'd forms under your nose. Most of my management would either not care or think that monitoring everyone all the time for everything is good if it allows them to follow a procedure w/o lifting a finger.
BTW if you think this is not really a big deal. A fellow in the US recently lost a slip+fall case against a grocery chain because of the past record of his having purchased alchohol that was logged on his discount card.
What's all the noise about. Putting up an embedded system has to be much more reliable by definition. You wouldn't/couldn't easily get to fix an embedded system otherwise so having a very very reliable core is an absoute necessity. Making one on Linux can only be a good thing as opposed to any of the other special purpose smokestacks used today like.....Java???? (uh maybe that's a bad analogy.)
I guess this is what Bill G means when he says he is the chief architect. Er..... chief lobbyist. Uh.... chief investment litigator.
So you'll just get it from somewhere else. Hell, type the source code out and fax it to some nonrestricted country.
In the real world it's the bottom of the food chain and you are tied to a specific vendor.
Nobody cares about the hardware provided at maximum cost from the lowest bidder. No what's important is we now have a mandate and a process by which to watch and listen - pretty much w/o restraint under the aegis of 'it's just real good for us to do this, please remain calm'.
The smaller the chip the lower the power the lower the heat the lower the resistance and the faster the chip. Also shorter run lengths so that is a big factor as well. For example a computer with an end to end switching speed of 1 nanosecond would require a max wire runlength from any point to any point could not exceed ~1ft.