On the bright side, that's not what it happened. Sony was already recalling the batteries, Apple had already paved the way, and all that was left for Dell was the formality of asking people to ship back the batteries and forward them to Sony. In the end it's _Sony_'s recall, not Dell's, and Sony is paying all the expenses for it.
Dell is just an intermediary in that operation, and would have more to lose if they didn't take part. The choice being (A) recall the batteries at exactly 0 (ZERO) dollars own cost, and look good and caring in the process, and (B) refuse Sony's money and come out looking like a prick to your customers... Dell's choice was obvious. It didn't need the "blogosphere" to make that choice.
Noone really gives a fuck about the "blogosphere" at the moment, other than small groups of mutually-backpatting bloggers polishing each other's statue. They'll love taking credit for stuff like this, but it wasn't their doing. And more importantly, traditional media was never in any danger from them yet. Traditional media faces its own hurdles, but the blogosphere doesn't even come close to being a problem.
So to answer your question: yes, there'll be plenty of traditional media left. And on the bright side, chances are that "blogosphere" will still be all noise and no bit, so we won't need anyone (traditional media or someone else) to defend us from its mob rule.
- Apple is the underdog, holding onto a tiny percentage of a market dominated by Wintel machines
- Dell is the top dog, the biggest OEM in the Wintel arena
So, of course, Dell must be evil and crap just because it's the top dog. And conversely Apple must be lawful good and pure technical excellence just because it's the underdog.
Well, yes, actually most of those are free with raytracing, including the texturing, lighting, bump-mapping is doable too, and so on. Not that sure about pixel shading, since nowadays that isn't used to mean just phong or gouraud shading. What is meant nowadays are shader programs which are run for each pixel. E.g., the water effects in most games, or the depth of field effects in COH are such programs. I believe you wouldn't get those for free with raytracing.
Sure, you could get for free _most_ effects that are solved with pixel-shader programs nowadays, such as waves on a lake. But I can still think of other uses which wouldn't come for free with raytracing.
But anyway, it was meant as a joke. I was just mocking the game industry's reliance on releasing the same things over and over again, with just one more eye-candy technique thrown in. And the fact that nowadays most publishers don't even discuss gameplay any more when they hype their game, but instead just try to dazzle you with millions of pretty screenshots. (Who cares if it has no gamplay? Just look at all those pretty bump maps! Doesn't that just make you want to buy it.)
It was basically just saying "yup, I wouldn't be surprised if someone just remade Asteroids verbatim, only with pretty 3D graphics." (Ray-traced or not.)
1. GPUs are already massively parallel things. If you think of way back in the days of 1 pipeline GPUs and cards, each extra pipeline is, in a way, like an additional core. We're already at the point where cards act like a 16 or 24 core chip, for all practical reasons. (Or 4x that if you run two 7950 GTXs in SLI.)
Graphics problems are by definition massively parallel. They're essentially doing the same (simple) set of operations on many many pixels. Unlike CPUs where "multiple pipelines" means you get to split a single stream of instructions across them, while "multiple cores" means actually executing several threads at the same time, GPUs don't have that distinction. Each pipeline processes one "thread": that for one pixel.
I.e., as "multi-core" hype goes, the GPUs are actually ahead. I don't need to wait for Intel's 8 core chips sometime in the future, when Nvidia can do 96 cores right here and now, and do that cheaper. Partially _because_ they don't have to also be a general-purpose CPU, applicable to everything from games to databases. So they can pack more specialized units per square inch. They've also sold whatever issues of concurrent access, caching, etc, are involved in graphics problems.
2. GPUs can and do also solve a lot of problems via dedicated hardware, rather than having to program them to even find the pixel in a texture. There are programmable things like pixel and vertex shaders, yes, but also a lot of things like texturing or filtering or T&L nowadays are solved _much_ faster by hard-wired dedicated units. They're units which just have to do one thing well and quickly, and actually do it, churning one pixel per clock cycle.
Even if we move to raytracing, I'd expect much the same to apply. Sure, instead of building an image starting from the triangles, we'll start from the screen pixels and find the triangles they intersect. But conceptually it's still the same kind of operation that's (A) massively parallel, and (B) can have many parts that are hard-wired for maximum speed.
E.g., finding the intersection of a pixel with a surface, and finding out what pixel value is there, is basically one such operation which can be served just as well by a fast hard-wired unit. Reflections and refractions? Ditto. You don't _need_ a user program running on a general purpose CPU to do those.
So basically on the whole, while I can understand why Intel is searching feverishly for a reason why you'd want 8 cores in your home computer, I can't understand why would any end-user actually want to move those operations back onto the CPU. The GPUs do that stuff better, and will keep on doing that stuff better.
Just imagine the possibilities. Imagine moving your ship among asteroids that aren't just outlines, but fully texture-mapped bump-mapped gloss-mapped anti-aliased anisotropic-filtered self-shadowed pixel-shaded, and with lens-flare and bloom effects to boot. And rendered in HDR too!
I smell a winner. Let's now flood the review sites with 120 screenshots (see, in that one there are _two_ large asteroids)and we could have a bestseller.
Well, there were studies around saying that the average job satisfaction and happiness in IT was IIRC lower than anywhere else, including the garbage truck people. So it kinda makes me wonder if you're happy just generically because you're doing something else, or, perchance, it's just moving out of _IT_ that does the trick.
Reminds me of a story I've read sometime ago. It went something like this:
A guy was employed in a factory. He'd sit there with a screwdriver, and two cups on a chain would come down from a hole in the ceiling, one of them containing two weird shape pieces of metal and a screw. So he'd take them, fasten them together with the supplied screw, place them in the other cup, and both would go back up to the next floor. Presumably to the next step in the assembly line.
So the guy does his job well for years, and fastens such metal pieces by the thousands a day. Which earns him a promotion to the next floor. Not much of a promotion, really, since it's at the same assembly line, but it pays a little better.
So he's shown to his seat at the next floor, given a screwdriver and shown what he has to do. Two cups would be raised on a chain through a hole in the floor, one containing two pieces fastened with a screw. He'd have to unscrew it and place the pieces and the screw in the other cup, at which point they'd descend back through the hole in the floor.
What really worries me are the metaphors mixed in the same sentence in the summary. So we should expect headaches, but not a silver bullet to solve them? I'm just having a mild headache at the moment, and just the thought of curing it with a bullet seems... somehow not that tempting;)
America is fast becoming a sociopathic culture, my friend.
American culture _is_ a cult of the sociopaths already, because it's the sociopaths that are given free hand to run the propaganda machine. So they glorify their own position and paint it like they're the unsung heroes, the ones who made America great, etc. And the common men and women end up believing that, since that's what they've been spoon-fed since birth. It becomes a badge of honour to basically take a weird "well I admire them for shafting me, and want to be shafted more" self-defeating attitude, and call people names if they dare argue for more empathy.
And the most perverse ways they can shape you is to get you to think "but, really, the rest of us are no better." E.g., as an unrelated example, kleptocracies all over the world stay in power by letting their citizens steal just a little too. So everyone who stole maybe 1$ worth of office supplies or took a 10$ bribe (in those countries it can be a lot), thinks it's just normal and it's "no worse than the rest of us" when the prime minister steals 1,000,000$ from the treasury or takes a 10,000,000$ bribe to let someone else plunder the country.
In America the means and culture is different from that, of course, but the damage has already been done the moment you look at the Ken Lays, Bernie Ebbers and the like and honestly think "it's just representative of the rest of us."
There are mild cases and there are severe ones, the mild ones are far more common than you might think, and are evident everywhere from the local used car lot to the upper management of large corporations.
About 1% of the population are psychopaths, as in, over 30 APD score. So, yes, that's pretty common. If you're in a town with, say, 100,000 inhabitants, you probably have 1000 fully psychopathic people in there.
Note also that sociopaths can get worse over time, if they find themselves in a situation that rewards their bad behavior (or at least doesn't discourage it.)
Actually, no, they don't get worse. They just can drop the facade and do all the bad things that they've always wanted to do anyway.
You're probably not going to be able to tell if your local shopkeeper is unable to empathize with another person... he can still be a perfectly good businessman and do all the right things to make that business successful.
Just because they're outstanding at disguising it, doesn't make the problem any less so. And actually you _can_ tell who's a psychopath if you spend enough time with them, because they slip up all the time. They disguise themselves well from strangers, yes, but if you spend enough time in their presence (employee, friend, family member, etc), for most of them you end up wondering "my god, how the fuck can he/she be so heartless?" because they slip up and show their callous, uncaring side at the moments where you'd expect the most compassion.
There's a reason why the medical definition says "superficial, glib charm" and not just "charm". They're charming only as long as you have little contact with them. Spend enough time in one's presence, and you'll change your opinion from "charming fellow" to mild bewilderment at their occasional displays of complete lack of a heart. Even if you end up admiring them, you'll know that they're different.
Basically just because they can wear sheep clothing convincingly, still just makes them wolves in sheep clothing, _not_ sheep just like the rest of us. And if you spend enough time looking at one, you start seeing the seams on that sheep skin they're wearing.
But anyway, look, if you even think stuff like "we're no better" or "we're guilty of this and that" (e.g., of dumping elders into nursing homes) then you're _not_ the same as them. Those people would think it's _normal_ to step on corpses on their way up, and will _never_ feel guilt
Well, it's sorta like this: As I was saying, it's a two-way street and a vicious circle. They too can be manipulated, and _are_ manipulated. I'm not saying that it's only the western media and leaders that paint a distorted demonized version of Arabs, but also the other way around: Arab media and leaders that paint a distorted demonized version of the western world.
Just as you seem to extrapolate the position of an extremist minority as being representative of Arabs as a whole, because that's what the media feeds you, so they too are goaded into extrapolating the position of a few loud bible-thumping rednecks as representative of America and indeed the western world as a whole. Just as you can be fed selected articles from their media as "substantial support" that Arabs are extremists, they too can be fed selected articles from bible-thumping christian extremists or pseudo-patriotic anti-arab Faux News as "substantial support" that the whole western-world are christian extremists and hell-bent on exterminating the Arabs.
Which just keeps the vicious circle going. Each anti-arab bible-thumping speech or article over here just generates more extremists over there, and viceversa those extremists' speeches and actions there just help to reinforce the beliefs and actions of bible-thumping nutcases on this side. That's how a vicious circle goes.
And such a vicious circle can only be defused if you calm _both_ sides down. As long as side A keeps being manipulated into shouting slogans against the other, side B's politicians will use those as "substantial support" to manipulate their people against side A. The only way to defuse that is to get _both_ sides to just shut up for once.
And I honestly think that _both_ sides started understanding _all_ that the others are saying, not just the hand-picked pieces that the politicians use in their propaganda, then _both_ sides might start calming down a bit. Westerners would start seeing that, in fact, plenty of Arabs and Arab media don't give a fuck about what God or government you choose, and conversely Arabs would start seeing that in fact most Westerners aren't bible-thumping banner-waving anti-arab crusaders.
As you can see, I'm not singling out the western side at all, and I'm not saying that the Arabs are pure saints. All I'm saying is that both sides are, you know, _humans_. With all the good and the bad stuff that that means. And both are basically manipulated by self-serving politicians. And that if they started actually understanding each others, as opposed to getting their news filtered by those self-servig politicians, they might just become harder to manipulate. Again, that goes for both.
Very true, which is why I put the Rice Boy link in there. Still, those are either teenagers or, well, they may be middle-aged men, but they're not upper-middle class as the GGP post implied. If I look at what upper-middle-class folks drive when they want a status symbol car, for example at what my team mates drive, I see two sports-y BMWs, a Mercedes and one even drives a nice Jaguar. Of course, some just don't go for an expensive car at all, so there are a ton of family cars or small cheap cars too in the parking lot. A couple of well paid managers drive Skodas, for example, which are pretty good cars at a low price, thanks to being manufactured cheaply in the Czech republic.
But I've yet to see a single car in the parking lot with a fake wing, fake 4 inch exhaust or fake disk brakes. Those who want to look sportsy just get a real fast car, and those who don't, don't.
Oh yes, it used to do all sorts of crap like that. Here's one more: their Privacy Guard (or whatever it was called) was so dead-set on protecting me from cookies that I couldn't even use most sites that required login. E.g., FilePlanet went schizophrenic and thought I'm at the same time logged in and _not_ logged in.
The cliques in small towns are a very real thing. And there is corruption, show-business decisions on election years, and all the other evils. We can aggree there very quickly.
Still, I don't know... it's hard to explain without writing a whole tome, but the "soviet" system was different even from those. It was merely a bureaucracy taking and implementing orders from above. They didn't actually have the authority of taking even those decisions that you describe there, corrupt and self-serving as they might be.
Basically think of it this way: at least in the western world if you move upwards (larger city, county, state level), people start actually showing some autonomy. E.g., there has been at least a state which decided to tell Bush and his oil-baron friends "nope, we don't allow oil drilling off our shores." In the "soviet" system, those councils were basically completely impotent to do something like that, because their job depended solely on the whim of those superiors.
And you couldn't just move to a larger city to escape the problem, since (A) even something the size of Moskow or Beijing was run exactly the same, and (B) you might have needed the party's approval to move around anyway.
I guess it's one of those cases that are hard to explain to people who haven't actually seen or read a lot about a dictatorship in action. People tend to draw all sorts of parallels to the local problems they did experience first hand, but a lot of time those parallels can be pretty deceiving.
Let's just say that "council-rule" there was just a facade, an empty pretense just like "People's Republic of China" or "German Democratic Republic" or such. Basically if a country has to put words like those in its name, that's your cue that it isn't. Regardless of what its name said, the USSR was _not_ ruled by local councils, not even by local cliques, but in a top-down pyramid-like hierarchy, just like basically a corporation.
That's in the end all I'm saying at this time. It's not necessarily about whether it was good or evil, nor about what economic theories might have applied there. Just that translating it as "council system" would have been pretty misleading to a western world citizen.
Spyware has a conotation of being, you know, about _spying_ on the user. Malware implies some malicious intent. Etc. That's stuff which not only doesn't cover all the crap out there (e.g., yes, how about stuff that keeps nagging me after I thought I uninstalled it?), but also is attackable -- and indeed attacked -- in courts on technicality grounds. You get people like Claria/Gator sending legal nastygrams around just because they're prepared to argue in court about some technicality in that classification.
"Badware", while maybe it does sound like a kindergarten word, tends to convey the broader meaning and not get bogged in such lexical arguments. It doesn't imply malicious _intent_ or have to fit any definition of spying or whatever else these fucktards argue in court. It's just "bad".
And, frankly, as an end-user I don't care why or with what intent it was written like that. E.g., if a toolbar or anti-virus is a nightmare to uninstall and leaves components running after I uninstalled it, it's "bad". I don't care if it's like that by malice or if Hanlon's Razor applies. ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.") It's just "bad" and they better clean up their act.
To give a personal example, I had an experience like that with one of those MacAffee all-in-one security packages. An older version, but annoying anyway. Among the many problems it had, picture this: so when installing I installed it on D:, to free space on C:. But the first update installed itself in the default directory in C: anyway. But here's the stupid part: it also let the original version from D: running at the same time, so I had two anti-viruses running at the same time, slowing my machine to a crawl. So I uninstall it. Ok, it uninstalled the newly installed one from C:, but left the old one still installed and still running. Only this time without an uninstall, so I had to manually edit the registry and remove files to get rid of it.
I'm sure that Hanlon's Razor fully applies there. It was no malice, there was no intention to spy, it's just written by the cheapest incompetent monkeys. But it's "bad" anyway. So "Badware" seems to fit that just nicely.
Speaking as an upper-middle-class middle-age man with disposable income... oh, gawd, these bling cases make me want to puke. So I'm not even convinced that they're targetting people like me.
I mean, seriously, if I want to willy-wave, I might go buy something expensive and over-performing. Like, I don't know, I might get a second X1900 XTX and run them in SLI... err... CrossFire (TM) for benchmark sake. But it seems utterly stupid to buy a case which just _looks_ high-tech and funky, but doesn't actually _do_ anything for the performance.
It's, if you will, the computer-equivalent of Rice Boys and their sheet iron wings and fake disk brakes. Something that's just a sad attempt at _looking_ fast, without actually being so.
And just like those, I'm drawing blanks as to who their target market actually is. _Maybe_ kids, ok. But middle-aged men? I can't imagine many upper-middle-class middle-aged men actually wanting such a monstrosity in their room. We're talking people who, precisely because they have the disposable income, can have a nicely decorated home. Would anyone actually want a case looking like a cross between a funky toy and a bad acid trip next to their expensive furniture? Why?
Plus, as with those cars, if you actually _are_ rich, you can just buy the real thing. People with lots of disposable income just buy an expensive car. They don't just take the cheapest Honda and tack a wing and fake disk brakes on it. When you can actually afford a fast car, you don't go and try to make an el-cheapo one just _look_ fast. And in this case, if I can just build a computer that actually _is_ fast and high-tech, I don't need a sad clown case that only _looks_ "high-tech".
So who is the real target for these cases? People with a really bad case of mid-life crisis, maybe? Or what?
Mostly I'll aggree with what you're saying, but sometimes that word is simply not translatable like that.
E.g., anyone who's been in the USSR can tell you that their "sovyets" weren't anything like your city council. The word does mean "council" all right, and the meaning of "USSR" indeed does mean "union of council-run republics". Yet the meaning and how they worked in practice were fundamentally different from what a western-world city council operates.
The communist elite were not like your average elected councilmen, but more like a feudal aristocracy. Or in a perverted sense, it actually resembles the organization and hierarchy of a giant corporation. (So if anything, communism was just an illustration of what happens when a corporation isn't accountable or responsible for anything.)
The ones far enough at the top were pretty much above the law, and indeed had free run to change the law as they saw fit. (The USSR constitution was changed several times, and permanently was just a description of the current status quo, rather than actually placing any limits on those in power.) They were in no way bound to please or represent their citizens. They were just a self-serving non-elected aristocracy, really.
And moving down the hierarchy pyramid, the lower officials and councils (e.g., city councils) had relatively little power, couldn't really take any meaningful decisions of their own, and could be replaced by their superiors on a whim. Again, note the important difference there: they weren't elected or replaced by the people of that town, but by their superiors in the party hierarchy. They took their orders from above, and reported to those above, which is quite the opposite of the (admittedly utopic idealist) notion of a council in a democracy. And they had no power or incentive to oppose those above.
Basically, think of it this way: let's say that someone wanted to build an, I don't know, ammonium nitrate factory right in the middle of your town. In a western democracy the city or state council could say, basically, "whoa, guys, that factory stinks of ammonia to high heavens. Put a filter on it. NOW." Or they could say that since that thing is explosive in case of a fire, please kindly build it outside the town. Stuff like that, hopefully for the good of the town.
In the USSR or indeed all of Eastern Europe, the order would just come from above "build a factory without filters THERE" and that would be it. The _only_ feedback that the "city council" was supposed to give there was "yes, SIR!" That's it. Raising any objection to a superior's decision was just a sure way to get fired and replaced with someone who does say "yes, SIR!" Possibly even judged as a traitor and saboteur, if you really got that superior annoyed enough.
So to end this already huge rant, their "councils" didn't work like any western-world city council, and translating it as "council system" or "council-run" would have been even more misleading. They were anything _but_ run by what westerners would call a "council".
Yes, sociopaths are excellent actors, rise to the top, and are ridiculously common at top management levels.
No, I don't think they reflect the rest of the population. Yes, everyone scores 2-3 points on an APD test (Antisocial-Personality Disorder, i.e., sociopathy/psychopathy.) But these guys are the 1% of the population that scores over 30. They're above even the average of criminals in the worst prisons. They're _that_ completely incapable of any empathy.
At that point, it's not just a minor difference of scales, it becomes a fundamental difference from the rest of us. The rest of us do some minor slip-up or naughty thing and feel guilty about it for a week. These guys do it consistently and see nothing wrong with it at all.
Such actions are expected of young, dumb fanboys. They are a little weird coming from the CEO of a major multinational corporation.
Well, it's the same Sun who spent a few years in a public display of schizophrenia about, say, Linux or OSS. They'd give a "we love Linux dearly" or "we love OSS dearly" speech or PR statement, followed the next day (or even in the same day) by, basically, "Linux is teh suck. Noone use it on productive servers!!! kthxbye" or "Proprietary software FTW!!!" Did they think people have that short memory, or what?
Or the same Sun which during the same years had, as the _only_ sale strategy, foaming at the mouth about how MS is evil, MS must die, buy our servers to help kill MS. Forget about explaining to the customer what those servers will do for _them_. Nah. No siree, bob. It's a charity drive to help kill MS, see;)
Now admittedly, that was Scott McNealy, but it seems that in the meantime that kind of rabid lunacy has become the norm at Sun.
It has been said many times that corporations taken as a whole are like psychopaths. Well, it's refreshing that Sun is different then. Sun is the village idiot running around with pencils up his nose and laughing himself silly after writing "COCK" in chalk on a wall. It's like watching the corporate equivalent of someone getting Alzheimer's and dementia in their old age. It's sad, really.
On the contrary. People fear the most that which they don't understand. And most importantly, self-serving politicians have a far easier time telling you lies about stuff you don't know and don't understand.
If I were to post here that the internet is evil and run by little imps hauling your packets through tubes, probably everyone on Slashdot would immediately know that it's bullshit. But try it with bullshit like that the Koran demands terrorism/paedophilia/whatever-scare-of-the-month, and even a lot of educated people might just believe it. It doesn't, btw. I've read a translation, and it's no worse than any other religion. But that's just the point: once you _can_ understand what the others _are_ saying, and in what context the phrases were said that the politicians try to agitate you with, it becomes a lot harder for someone to come and present them as demons to you.
Or let's put it this way: when was the last time you saw someone in the USA wanting to go to war with Canada or the UK? I mean, heck, you understand what they're saying all right. If understanding all the evil stuff they're saying would want people to go to war, you'd have more of a Casus Beli agains those than against Iraq by now. But in practice, once you do understand them, it turns out that they're people just like you.
It's easier for someone to pick one extremist Arab loonie out of context, and mis-represent it as being representative of Arabs as a whole, and you might even believe it because you have no clue what the other Arabs are saying. Maybe they are saying the same things after all, right? Even if you've travelled there once or twice, who knows what evil things they were saying around you in that language of theirs, right? (Actually, wrong.)
Whereas even if someone would cherry-pick one or two loonies from the UK or Canada (every country has theirs), there'll be _plenty_ of people who were there, understood what those people were saying, read some Canadian news agency's website, maybe watched some Canadian TV station if they're close to the border. They'll immediately point out, basically, "wtf, that's one isolated nutcase that noone else takes seriously. That't _not_ what the rest of Canada is thinking."
And that goes both ways, btw. It's also easier for some Arabs to get hyped up against the Americans or Israel or whatever, when they don't really understand the language, the country, or the culture. Don't think that the small minority that throws bombs and whatnot are the intellectual elite there. It's the people who don't know any better, and are the easiest manipulated.
Not understanding each other is basically a vicious circle, as violence goes. There'll be plenty of self-serving manipulators on both sides willing to translate only the conveniently belicose parts of what the others say. One loonie on side A says "let's bomb side B!" Everyone there laughs in his face, but on side B someone finds it convenient to translate only that as "look what side A says." Now someone on side B says, "oh yeah? let's see how cocky they'd be when they get a load of cruise missiles on their capital!" And someone on side A finds convenient to translate that, but ommit in what context it was said. Lather, rinse, repeat.
So if anything, starting to understand each other might just put a bit of a brake on that vicious circle.
Actually, here's one thing that I've noticed that turns off a lot of brains. Otherwise perfectly good and functioning brains too. Greed.
Yep, greed. Wave the prospect of undeserved gains, and large enough gains at that, in front of someone, and you'd be surprised how many people basically get an emergency shutdown of their higher brain levels. Healthy skepticism, critical thinking, even elementary logic fly out the window, as they choose to rather believe in a "reality" where they'll get their big reward.
It doesn't explain "I love you", but you can see this in pyramid schemes, nigerian 419 scams, stock market spam, or market bubbles. (E.g., the dot-com bubble.)
Look at the dot-com bubble, and you see that in full effect. The mirage of riding the train (and soon to be train-wreck) of a dot-com to its peak and make a ton of money by dumping its shares before it goes downhill, caught a lot of people. It kept going well past the point where it was bleeding obvious that 99% of dot-coms invariably go bankrupt. Yet people kept investing in the worst of them, in companies where it was bleeding obvious that the owners have no clue, no plan and blow all the money on pure money-sinks just because they can. The mirage was simply too tempting to resist.
I even personally know two people -- and nice people too, who didn't deserve what they got in the process -- who invested everything they had, and a bunch of borrowed money too, in starting their own dot-com. With no other business plan than "but people will give us hundreds of millions at the IPO, just like they gave Yahoo!!!" It was already during the decline of the dot-com bubble, and it was bleeding obvious already what will happen and how it won't work. But greed clouded their mind -- and the minds of some VC they did find -- to the point where there was no talking them out of it.
What they got out of it? Nowadays they ride the bus to work, because they're so deep in debt that they still can't afford a car.
(And if you feel like chiming in with some variant of "ha ha, poetic justice, they got ruined by their own greed"... normally I'd even aggree, but knowing these people personally I can't help feeling a bit of pity for them.)
Or you can see that in pyramid schemes. In the 90's, as the western world was swept by the dot-com madness, the newly freed Eastern Europe was swept by a wave of pyramid schemes. Not just the chain letter types, but whole companies were formed on the promise of, basically, "Give us your money and we'll give you 5 times as much from the next ones giving us their money." It must have been bleeding obvious to anyone with half a brain that the exponential progression will run out of idiots fast, but the mirage of free money was so great that people chose to believe that surely they'll get theirs riiight before the thing crashes. A lot of people sold their houses, cars, etc, to dump their money into such scams.
Among the consequences of that, IIRC, the revolts in Albania were traceable to such a scam which left an insane percentage of the population poor, homeless and indebted to hell and back. Is it sad, or what?
Short story: this is what you get when ivory-tower nerds get a glimpse of what everyone else knew all along.
Long story: As you said, yes, IRL everyone knew that locks aren't "secure", and won't keep a determined thief out. Locks aren't even a deterrent. They're a bit of a delay and mostly a "if we catch you past this point, we'll throw your sorry arse in jail" marker. The deterrent is the law. If you went through all the trouble of climbing over the fence (or lockpicking the gate) and lockpicking the door too, we have all the proof we need of intent, and we'll throw your arse in jail.
IRL it's not even possible to make something 100% burglar-proof. Even if you had a 100% burglar-proof lock, someone could break a window instead, or hack down the door, or whatever.
IRL that's our security concept, and it worked for maybe 10,000 years. People don't even expect anything to be more secure, computers included. See all the SF settings where people find it natural that a computer from 10,000 years in the future can be hacked by just shooting the keyboard, or that a high-tech computer-controlled door can be defeated with two wires and a PDA. Or by just shooting the control pannel, Star Wars style.
Now enter the ivory tower of OCPD computer nerds, and trying to apply boolean rules to a RL that's made of continuums, and to problems that are more of a min-max problem than if-then-else binary constructs. In their world, either you're 100% secure or you're 100% unprotected and not even trying. Either something is 100% lock, deterrent, judge and jurry rolled into one, or it's crap. And, oh, unless you 100% secured your property or computer or you're an idiot. You see the kind on/. every day.
So now one of those basically just discovered, "whaaaat? you mean RL locks have exploits and can be hacked?? and people just put up with that and didn't patch them yet???" It runs contrary to their whole (utopic) mental model. So of course they'll make a big fuss out of it, and think they've discovered some secret that noone else knew.
Take a deep breath, engage the brains before typing and all that.
1. I don't know about you, but when I have my inbox full of "I love you" messages from the whole fucking marketting department, most of them guys too... I get... suspicious, to say the least. Even without knowing how the computer works or doesn't, it's something out of the extraordinary enough to be worth at least a "WTF??" thought, you know.
2. There were people who _knew_ about the "I love you" virus, or get told about scams, spam, etc, and still do it anyway. I don't know about you, but I'd file those squarely under "retarded".
3. The way the computer is "supposed" to work is good and fine, and we could even aggree mostly, but in the meantime this is how it _does_ work IRL. Fantasy and "the way it's supposed to work" are that-away, reality is in the other direction. You can't just live in a fantasy world where computers just work. RL won't go away just because you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge it.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of people seem to attempt just that: to ignore reality and hope that it will just get away. They wear their "I don't know anything about this tech crap" attitude like a badge of honour, and outright refuse to learn even the basics of how to use their computers. And seem to think that if they steadfastly refuse to read any "Do you want to do this?" dialog, the computer would somehow get a clue and turn into something that it isn't. It doesn't work that way.
To give you an almost 1-to-1 analogy: It's as stupid as thinking that if you refuse to believe in veneral diseases or pregnancy, you're exempt from them. Yes, in an ideal world, sex between perfect strangers would be safe and just work without risks. In the real world, however, those problems do exist. It's that simple. You can't change reality by simply refusing to acknowledge it.
It's as stupid as thinking that if you steadfastly believe that cars are trivial to drive, then you can just jump into one without learning to drive first. Yes, in an ideal SF world, cars would be 100% safe, would require no skill to get you from point A to point B, and never cause any injury or property damage. In the real world, they're not. You can't switch to fantasy rules by just believing in them hard enough.
4. An even more abject category are those who just refuse to use their time to learn anything, because they know that the nerd next door (or everyone in their address book, in the case of viruses) has nothing better to do than clean up after them. I find that highly offensive and anti-social. It's like shitting in the middle of the room, just because you're sure that your janitor neighbour must love moping up shit, so you'll just ask him to come over and do that.
5. Straw men are not a substitute for logic or for elementary reading and comprehension skills. Learn to read, and maybe to answer to what was written there, not to whatever the voices in your head say. In the message you're answering to:
* _nowhere_ does it say that they should install Linux. They can stick to Windows, MacOS, OS/2 or whatever the fuck floats their boat, for all I care.
* _nowhere_ do I ask of them to _love_ computers. For all I can be arsed to care, they can hate it with a Sith-like passion, if they chose to. But if they do choose to use it, it would still be nice to learn at least the elementary basics and behave responsibly. Just like (I hope) they don't just jump in a car without a license and plough through a school.
Reminds me of the "I love you" virus, and all the idio... erm... computer-illiterate people who opened it because they genuinely thought that their boss/secretary/whole-fucking-department sent them a genuine love declaration. Or all the viruses that get opened because someone really thought that their long lost cousin Amir N'gbendu from Nigeria sent them a porn-video/incredible-investment-opportunity-sprea dsheets/whatever. Conveniently packed in an.exe file. It must be a self-extracting zip, really. Would your long lost cousin lie to you?
So being that some people _are_ that gullible, I wonder how many actually went and wrote their will, said goodbye to their loved ones, and arranged their own funerals, after reading "you're going to die in 7 days" in an email.
Slashdot Mirror
On the bright side, that's not what it happened. Sony was already recalling the batteries, Apple had already paved the way, and all that was left for Dell was the formality of asking people to ship back the batteries and forward them to Sony. In the end it's _Sony_'s recall, not Dell's, and Sony is paying all the expenses for it.
Dell is just an intermediary in that operation, and would have more to lose if they didn't take part. The choice being (A) recall the batteries at exactly 0 (ZERO) dollars own cost, and look good and caring in the process, and (B) refuse Sony's money and come out looking like a prick to your customers... Dell's choice was obvious. It didn't need the "blogosphere" to make that choice.
Noone really gives a fuck about the "blogosphere" at the moment, other than small groups of mutually-backpatting bloggers polishing each other's statue. They'll love taking credit for stuff like this, but it wasn't their doing. And more importantly, traditional media was never in any danger from them yet. Traditional media faces its own hurdles, but the blogosphere doesn't even come close to being a problem.
So to answer your question: yes, there'll be plenty of traditional media left. And on the bright side, chances are that "blogosphere" will still be all noise and no bit, so we won't need anyone (traditional media or someone else) to defend us from its mob rule.
Because, basically:
- Apple is the underdog, holding onto a tiny percentage of a market dominated by Wintel machines
- Dell is the top dog, the biggest OEM in the Wintel arena
So, of course, Dell must be evil and crap just because it's the top dog. And conversely Apple must be lawful good and pure technical excellence just because it's the underdog.
Well, yes, actually most of those are free with raytracing, including the texturing, lighting, bump-mapping is doable too, and so on. Not that sure about pixel shading, since nowadays that isn't used to mean just phong or gouraud shading. What is meant nowadays are shader programs which are run for each pixel. E.g., the water effects in most games, or the depth of field effects in COH are such programs. I believe you wouldn't get those for free with raytracing.
Sure, you could get for free _most_ effects that are solved with pixel-shader programs nowadays, such as waves on a lake. But I can still think of other uses which wouldn't come for free with raytracing.
But anyway, it was meant as a joke. I was just mocking the game industry's reliance on releasing the same things over and over again, with just one more eye-candy technique thrown in. And the fact that nowadays most publishers don't even discuss gameplay any more when they hype their game, but instead just try to dazzle you with millions of pretty screenshots. (Who cares if it has no gamplay? Just look at all those pretty bump maps! Doesn't that just make you want to buy it.)
It was basically just saying "yup, I wouldn't be surprised if someone just remade Asteroids verbatim, only with pretty 3D graphics." (Ray-traced or not.)
But mostly it was supposed to be just a joke.
Not only that, but also bear in mind that
1. GPUs are already massively parallel things. If you think of way back in the days of 1 pipeline GPUs and cards, each extra pipeline is, in a way, like an additional core. We're already at the point where cards act like a 16 or 24 core chip, for all practical reasons. (Or 4x that if you run two 7950 GTXs in SLI.)
Graphics problems are by definition massively parallel. They're essentially doing the same (simple) set of operations on many many pixels. Unlike CPUs where "multiple pipelines" means you get to split a single stream of instructions across them, while "multiple cores" means actually executing several threads at the same time, GPUs don't have that distinction. Each pipeline processes one "thread": that for one pixel.
I.e., as "multi-core" hype goes, the GPUs are actually ahead. I don't need to wait for Intel's 8 core chips sometime in the future, when Nvidia can do 96 cores right here and now, and do that cheaper. Partially _because_ they don't have to also be a general-purpose CPU, applicable to everything from games to databases. So they can pack more specialized units per square inch. They've also sold whatever issues of concurrent access, caching, etc, are involved in graphics problems.
2. GPUs can and do also solve a lot of problems via dedicated hardware, rather than having to program them to even find the pixel in a texture. There are programmable things like pixel and vertex shaders, yes, but also a lot of things like texturing or filtering or T&L nowadays are solved _much_ faster by hard-wired dedicated units. They're units which just have to do one thing well and quickly, and actually do it, churning one pixel per clock cycle.
Even if we move to raytracing, I'd expect much the same to apply. Sure, instead of building an image starting from the triangles, we'll start from the screen pixels and find the triangles they intersect. But conceptually it's still the same kind of operation that's (A) massively parallel, and (B) can have many parts that are hard-wired for maximum speed.
E.g., finding the intersection of a pixel with a surface, and finding out what pixel value is there, is basically one such operation which can be served just as well by a fast hard-wired unit. Reflections and refractions? Ditto. You don't _need_ a user program running on a general purpose CPU to do those.
So basically on the whole, while I can understand why Intel is searching feverishly for a reason why you'd want 8 cores in your home computer, I can't understand why would any end-user actually want to move those operations back onto the CPU. The GPUs do that stuff better, and will keep on doing that stuff better.
Just imagine the possibilities. Imagine moving your ship among asteroids that aren't just outlines, but fully texture-mapped bump-mapped gloss-mapped anti-aliased anisotropic-filtered self-shadowed pixel-shaded, and with lens-flare and bloom effects to boot. And rendered in HDR too!
I smell a winner. Let's now flood the review sites with 120 screenshots (see, in that one there are _two_ large asteroids)and we could have a bestseller.
Well, there were studies around saying that the average job satisfaction and happiness in IT was IIRC lower than anywhere else, including the garbage truck people. So it kinda makes me wonder if you're happy just generically because you're doing something else, or, perchance, it's just moving out of _IT_ that does the trick.
Reminds me of a story I've read sometime ago. It went something like this:
A guy was employed in a factory. He'd sit there with a screwdriver, and two cups on a chain would come down from a hole in the ceiling, one of them containing two weird shape pieces of metal and a screw. So he'd take them, fasten them together with the supplied screw, place them in the other cup, and both would go back up to the next floor. Presumably to the next step in the assembly line.
So the guy does his job well for years, and fastens such metal pieces by the thousands a day. Which earns him a promotion to the next floor. Not much of a promotion, really, since it's at the same assembly line, but it pays a little better.
So he's shown to his seat at the next floor, given a screwdriver and shown what he has to do. Two cups would be raised on a chain through a hole in the floor, one containing two pieces fastened with a screw. He'd have to unscrew it and place the pieces and the screw in the other cup, at which point they'd descend back through the hole in the floor.
What really worries me are the metaphors mixed in the same sentence in the summary. So we should expect headaches, but not a silver bullet to solve them? I'm just having a mild headache at the moment, and just the thought of curing it with a bullet seems... somehow not that tempting ;)
Lemme see, at this rate I'll need: 9 cores for the raytracer, 7 cores for the physics simulation, 5 for the AI, 3 for the OS, and of course
;)
One core to rule them all
One core to find them
One core to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them
American culture _is_ a cult of the sociopaths already, because it's the sociopaths that are given free hand to run the propaganda machine. So they glorify their own position and paint it like they're the unsung heroes, the ones who made America great, etc. And the common men and women end up believing that, since that's what they've been spoon-fed since birth. It becomes a badge of honour to basically take a weird "well I admire them for shafting me, and want to be shafted more" self-defeating attitude, and call people names if they dare argue for more empathy.
And the most perverse ways they can shape you is to get you to think "but, really, the rest of us are no better." E.g., as an unrelated example, kleptocracies all over the world stay in power by letting their citizens steal just a little too. So everyone who stole maybe 1$ worth of office supplies or took a 10$ bribe (in those countries it can be a lot), thinks it's just normal and it's "no worse than the rest of us" when the prime minister steals 1,000,000$ from the treasury or takes a 10,000,000$ bribe to let someone else plunder the country.
In America the means and culture is different from that, of course, but the damage has already been done the moment you look at the Ken Lays, Bernie Ebbers and the like and honestly think "it's just representative of the rest of us."
About 1% of the population are psychopaths, as in, over 30 APD score. So, yes, that's pretty common. If you're in a town with, say, 100,000 inhabitants, you probably have 1000 fully psychopathic people in there.
Actually, no, they don't get worse. They just can drop the facade and do all the bad things that they've always wanted to do anyway.
Just because they're outstanding at disguising it, doesn't make the problem any less so. And actually you _can_ tell who's a psychopath if you spend enough time with them, because they slip up all the time. They disguise themselves well from strangers, yes, but if you spend enough time in their presence (employee, friend, family member, etc), for most of them you end up wondering "my god, how the fuck can he/she be so heartless?" because they slip up and show their callous, uncaring side at the moments where you'd expect the most compassion.
There's a reason why the medical definition says "superficial, glib charm" and not just "charm". They're charming only as long as you have little contact with them. Spend enough time in one's presence, and you'll change your opinion from "charming fellow" to mild bewilderment at their occasional displays of complete lack of a heart. Even if you end up admiring them, you'll know that they're different.
Basically just because they can wear sheep clothing convincingly, still just makes them wolves in sheep clothing, _not_ sheep just like the rest of us. And if you spend enough time looking at one, you start seeing the seams on that sheep skin they're wearing.
But anyway, look, if you even think stuff like "we're no better" or "we're guilty of this and that" (e.g., of dumping elders into nursing homes) then you're _not_ the same as them. Those people would think it's _normal_ to step on corpses on their way up, and will _never_ feel guilt
Well, it's sorta like this: As I was saying, it's a two-way street and a vicious circle. They too can be manipulated, and _are_ manipulated. I'm not saying that it's only the western media and leaders that paint a distorted demonized version of Arabs, but also the other way around: Arab media and leaders that paint a distorted demonized version of the western world.
Just as you seem to extrapolate the position of an extremist minority as being representative of Arabs as a whole, because that's what the media feeds you, so they too are goaded into extrapolating the position of a few loud bible-thumping rednecks as representative of America and indeed the western world as a whole. Just as you can be fed selected articles from their media as "substantial support" that Arabs are extremists, they too can be fed selected articles from bible-thumping christian extremists or pseudo-patriotic anti-arab Faux News as "substantial support" that the whole western-world are christian extremists and hell-bent on exterminating the Arabs.
Which just keeps the vicious circle going. Each anti-arab bible-thumping speech or article over here just generates more extremists over there, and viceversa those extremists' speeches and actions there just help to reinforce the beliefs and actions of bible-thumping nutcases on this side. That's how a vicious circle goes.
And such a vicious circle can only be defused if you calm _both_ sides down. As long as side A keeps being manipulated into shouting slogans against the other, side B's politicians will use those as "substantial support" to manipulate their people against side A. The only way to defuse that is to get _both_ sides to just shut up for once.
And I honestly think that _both_ sides started understanding _all_ that the others are saying, not just the hand-picked pieces that the politicians use in their propaganda, then _both_ sides might start calming down a bit. Westerners would start seeing that, in fact, plenty of Arabs and Arab media don't give a fuck about what God or government you choose, and conversely Arabs would start seeing that in fact most Westerners aren't bible-thumping banner-waving anti-arab crusaders.
As you can see, I'm not singling out the western side at all, and I'm not saying that the Arabs are pure saints. All I'm saying is that both sides are, you know, _humans_. With all the good and the bad stuff that that means. And both are basically manipulated by self-serving politicians. And that if they started actually understanding each others, as opposed to getting their news filtered by those self-servig politicians, they might just become harder to manipulate. Again, that goes for both.
Very true, which is why I put the Rice Boy link in there. Still, those are either teenagers or, well, they may be middle-aged men, but they're not upper-middle class as the GGP post implied. If I look at what upper-middle-class folks drive when they want a status symbol car, for example at what my team mates drive, I see two sports-y BMWs, a Mercedes and one even drives a nice Jaguar. Of course, some just don't go for an expensive car at all, so there are a ton of family cars or small cheap cars too in the parking lot. A couple of well paid managers drive Skodas, for example, which are pretty good cars at a low price, thanks to being manufactured cheaply in the Czech republic.
But I've yet to see a single car in the parking lot with a fake wing, fake 4 inch exhaust or fake disk brakes. Those who want to look sportsy just get a real fast car, and those who don't, don't.
Oh yes, it used to do all sorts of crap like that. Here's one more: their Privacy Guard (or whatever it was called) was so dead-set on protecting me from cookies that I couldn't even use most sites that required login. E.g., FilePlanet went schizophrenic and thought I'm at the same time logged in and _not_ logged in.
In a sense, yes, since those states actually have a lot of autonomy and used to have even more.
The cliques in small towns are a very real thing. And there is corruption, show-business decisions on election years, and all the other evils. We can aggree there very quickly.
Still, I don't know... it's hard to explain without writing a whole tome, but the "soviet" system was different even from those. It was merely a bureaucracy taking and implementing orders from above. They didn't actually have the authority of taking even those decisions that you describe there, corrupt and self-serving as they might be.
Basically think of it this way: at least in the western world if you move upwards (larger city, county, state level), people start actually showing some autonomy. E.g., there has been at least a state which decided to tell Bush and his oil-baron friends "nope, we don't allow oil drilling off our shores." In the "soviet" system, those councils were basically completely impotent to do something like that, because their job depended solely on the whim of those superiors.
And you couldn't just move to a larger city to escape the problem, since (A) even something the size of Moskow or Beijing was run exactly the same, and (B) you might have needed the party's approval to move around anyway.
I guess it's one of those cases that are hard to explain to people who haven't actually seen or read a lot about a dictatorship in action. People tend to draw all sorts of parallels to the local problems they did experience first hand, but a lot of time those parallels can be pretty deceiving.
Let's just say that "council-rule" there was just a facade, an empty pretense just like "People's Republic of China" or "German Democratic Republic" or such. Basically if a country has to put words like those in its name, that's your cue that it isn't. Regardless of what its name said, the USSR was _not_ ruled by local councils, not even by local cliques, but in a top-down pyramid-like hierarchy, just like basically a corporation.
That's in the end all I'm saying at this time. It's not necessarily about whether it was good or evil, nor about what economic theories might have applied there. Just that translating it as "council system" would have been pretty misleading to a western world citizen.
Spyware has a conotation of being, you know, about _spying_ on the user. Malware implies some malicious intent. Etc. That's stuff which not only doesn't cover all the crap out there (e.g., yes, how about stuff that keeps nagging me after I thought I uninstalled it?), but also is attackable -- and indeed attacked -- in courts on technicality grounds. You get people like Claria/Gator sending legal nastygrams around just because they're prepared to argue in court about some technicality in that classification.
"Badware", while maybe it does sound like a kindergarten word, tends to convey the broader meaning and not get bogged in such lexical arguments. It doesn't imply malicious _intent_ or have to fit any definition of spying or whatever else these fucktards argue in court. It's just "bad".
And, frankly, as an end-user I don't care why or with what intent it was written like that. E.g., if a toolbar or anti-virus is a nightmare to uninstall and leaves components running after I uninstalled it, it's "bad". I don't care if it's like that by malice or if Hanlon's Razor applies. ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.") It's just "bad" and they better clean up their act.
To give a personal example, I had an experience like that with one of those MacAffee all-in-one security packages. An older version, but annoying anyway. Among the many problems it had, picture this: so when installing I installed it on D:, to free space on C:. But the first update installed itself in the default directory in C: anyway. But here's the stupid part: it also let the original version from D: running at the same time, so I had two anti-viruses running at the same time, slowing my machine to a crawl. So I uninstall it. Ok, it uninstalled the newly installed one from C:, but left the old one still installed and still running. Only this time without an uninstall, so I had to manually edit the registry and remove files to get rid of it.
I'm sure that Hanlon's Razor fully applies there. It was no malice, there was no intention to spy, it's just written by the cheapest incompetent monkeys. But it's "bad" anyway. So "Badware" seems to fit that just nicely.
Speaking as an upper-middle-class middle-age man with disposable income... oh, gawd, these bling cases make me want to puke. So I'm not even convinced that they're targetting people like me.
I mean, seriously, if I want to willy-wave, I might go buy something expensive and over-performing. Like, I don't know, I might get a second X1900 XTX and run them in SLI... err... CrossFire (TM) for benchmark sake. But it seems utterly stupid to buy a case which just _looks_ high-tech and funky, but doesn't actually _do_ anything for the performance.
It's, if you will, the computer-equivalent of Rice Boys and their sheet iron wings and fake disk brakes. Something that's just a sad attempt at _looking_ fast, without actually being so.
And just like those, I'm drawing blanks as to who their target market actually is. _Maybe_ kids, ok. But middle-aged men? I can't imagine many upper-middle-class middle-aged men actually wanting such a monstrosity in their room. We're talking people who, precisely because they have the disposable income, can have a nicely decorated home. Would anyone actually want a case looking like a cross between a funky toy and a bad acid trip next to their expensive furniture? Why?
Plus, as with those cars, if you actually _are_ rich, you can just buy the real thing. People with lots of disposable income just buy an expensive car. They don't just take the cheapest Honda and tack a wing and fake disk brakes on it. When you can actually afford a fast car, you don't go and try to make an el-cheapo one just _look_ fast. And in this case, if I can just build a computer that actually _is_ fast and high-tech, I don't need a sad clown case that only _looks_ "high-tech".
So who is the real target for these cases? People with a really bad case of mid-life crisis, maybe? Or what?
Mostly I'll aggree with what you're saying, but sometimes that word is simply not translatable like that.
E.g., anyone who's been in the USSR can tell you that their "sovyets" weren't anything like your city council. The word does mean "council" all right, and the meaning of "USSR" indeed does mean "union of council-run republics". Yet the meaning and how they worked in practice were fundamentally different from what a western-world city council operates.
The communist elite were not like your average elected councilmen, but more like a feudal aristocracy. Or in a perverted sense, it actually resembles the organization and hierarchy of a giant corporation. (So if anything, communism was just an illustration of what happens when a corporation isn't accountable or responsible for anything.)
The ones far enough at the top were pretty much above the law, and indeed had free run to change the law as they saw fit. (The USSR constitution was changed several times, and permanently was just a description of the current status quo, rather than actually placing any limits on those in power.) They were in no way bound to please or represent their citizens. They were just a self-serving non-elected aristocracy, really.
And moving down the hierarchy pyramid, the lower officials and councils (e.g., city councils) had relatively little power, couldn't really take any meaningful decisions of their own, and could be replaced by their superiors on a whim. Again, note the important difference there: they weren't elected or replaced by the people of that town, but by their superiors in the party hierarchy. They took their orders from above, and reported to those above, which is quite the opposite of the (admittedly utopic idealist) notion of a council in a democracy. And they had no power or incentive to oppose those above.
Basically, think of it this way: let's say that someone wanted to build an, I don't know, ammonium nitrate factory right in the middle of your town. In a western democracy the city or state council could say, basically, "whoa, guys, that factory stinks of ammonia to high heavens. Put a filter on it. NOW." Or they could say that since that thing is explosive in case of a fire, please kindly build it outside the town. Stuff like that, hopefully for the good of the town.
In the USSR or indeed all of Eastern Europe, the order would just come from above "build a factory without filters THERE" and that would be it. The _only_ feedback that the "city council" was supposed to give there was "yes, SIR!" That's it. Raising any objection to a superior's decision was just a sure way to get fired and replaced with someone who does say "yes, SIR!" Possibly even judged as a traitor and saboteur, if you really got that superior annoyed enough.
So to end this already huge rant, their "councils" didn't work like any western-world city council, and translating it as "council system" or "council-run" would have been even more misleading. They were anything _but_ run by what westerners would call a "council".
Yes, sociopaths are excellent actors, rise to the top, and are ridiculously common at top management levels.
No, I don't think they reflect the rest of the population. Yes, everyone scores 2-3 points on an APD test (Antisocial-Personality Disorder, i.e., sociopathy/psychopathy.) But these guys are the 1% of the population that scores over 30. They're above even the average of criminals in the worst prisons. They're _that_ completely incapable of any empathy.
At that point, it's not just a minor difference of scales, it becomes a fundamental difference from the rest of us. The rest of us do some minor slip-up or naughty thing and feel guilty about it for a week. These guys do it consistently and see nothing wrong with it at all.
Well, it's the same Sun who spent a few years in a public display of schizophrenia about, say, Linux or OSS. They'd give a "we love Linux dearly" or "we love OSS dearly" speech or PR statement, followed the next day (or even in the same day) by, basically, "Linux is teh suck. Noone use it on productive servers!!! kthxbye" or "Proprietary software FTW!!!" Did they think people have that short memory, or what?
Or the same Sun which during the same years had, as the _only_ sale strategy, foaming at the mouth about how MS is evil, MS must die, buy our servers to help kill MS. Forget about explaining to the customer what those servers will do for _them_. Nah. No siree, bob. It's a charity drive to help kill MS, see
Now admittedly, that was Scott McNealy, but it seems that in the meantime that kind of rabid lunacy has become the norm at Sun.
It has been said many times that corporations taken as a whole are like psychopaths. Well, it's refreshing that Sun is different then. Sun is the village idiot running around with pencils up his nose and laughing himself silly after writing "COCK" in chalk on a wall. It's like watching the corporate equivalent of someone getting Alzheimer's and dementia in their old age. It's sad, really.
On the contrary. People fear the most that which they don't understand. And most importantly, self-serving politicians have a far easier time telling you lies about stuff you don't know and don't understand.
, and even a lot of educated people might just believe it. It doesn't, btw. I've read a translation, and it's no worse than any other religion. But that's just the point: once you _can_ understand what the others _are_ saying, and in what context the phrases were said that the politicians try to agitate you with, it becomes a lot harder for someone to come and present them as demons to you.
If I were to post here that the internet is evil and run by little imps hauling your packets through tubes, probably everyone on Slashdot would immediately know that it's bullshit. But try it with bullshit like that the Koran demands terrorism/paedophilia/whatever-scare-of-the-month
Or let's put it this way: when was the last time you saw someone in the USA wanting to go to war with Canada or the UK? I mean, heck, you understand what they're saying all right. If understanding all the evil stuff they're saying would want people to go to war, you'd have more of a Casus Beli agains those than against Iraq by now. But in practice, once you do understand them, it turns out that they're people just like you.
It's easier for someone to pick one extremist Arab loonie out of context, and mis-represent it as being representative of Arabs as a whole, and you might even believe it because you have no clue what the other Arabs are saying. Maybe they are saying the same things after all, right? Even if you've travelled there once or twice, who knows what evil things they were saying around you in that language of theirs, right? (Actually, wrong.)
Whereas even if someone would cherry-pick one or two loonies from the UK or Canada (every country has theirs), there'll be _plenty_ of people who were there, understood what those people were saying, read some Canadian news agency's website, maybe watched some Canadian TV station if they're close to the border. They'll immediately point out, basically, "wtf, that's one isolated nutcase that noone else takes seriously. That't _not_ what the rest of Canada is thinking."
And that goes both ways, btw. It's also easier for some Arabs to get hyped up against the Americans or Israel or whatever, when they don't really understand the language, the country, or the culture. Don't think that the small minority that throws bombs and whatnot are the intellectual elite there. It's the people who don't know any better, and are the easiest manipulated.
Not understanding each other is basically a vicious circle, as violence goes. There'll be plenty of self-serving manipulators on both sides willing to translate only the conveniently belicose parts of what the others say. One loonie on side A says "let's bomb side B!" Everyone there laughs in his face, but on side B someone finds it convenient to translate only that as "look what side A says." Now someone on side B says, "oh yeah? let's see how cocky they'd be when they get a load of cruise missiles on their capital!" And someone on side A finds convenient to translate that, but ommit in what context it was said. Lather, rinse, repeat.
So if anything, starting to understand each other might just put a bit of a brake on that vicious circle.
Actually, here's one thing that I've noticed that turns off a lot of brains. Otherwise perfectly good and functioning brains too. Greed.
Yep, greed. Wave the prospect of undeserved gains, and large enough gains at that, in front of someone, and you'd be surprised how many people basically get an emergency shutdown of their higher brain levels. Healthy skepticism, critical thinking, even elementary logic fly out the window, as they choose to rather believe in a "reality" where they'll get their big reward.
It doesn't explain "I love you", but you can see this in pyramid schemes, nigerian 419 scams, stock market spam, or market bubbles. (E.g., the dot-com bubble.)
Look at the dot-com bubble, and you see that in full effect. The mirage of riding the train (and soon to be train-wreck) of a dot-com to its peak and make a ton of money by dumping its shares before it goes downhill, caught a lot of people. It kept going well past the point where it was bleeding obvious that 99% of dot-coms invariably go bankrupt. Yet people kept investing in the worst of them, in companies where it was bleeding obvious that the owners have no clue, no plan and blow all the money on pure money-sinks just because they can. The mirage was simply too tempting to resist.
I even personally know two people -- and nice people too, who didn't deserve what they got in the process -- who invested everything they had, and a bunch of borrowed money too, in starting their own dot-com. With no other business plan than "but people will give us hundreds of millions at the IPO, just like they gave Yahoo!!!" It was already during the decline of the dot-com bubble, and it was bleeding obvious already what will happen and how it won't work. But greed clouded their mind -- and the minds of some VC they did find -- to the point where there was no talking them out of it.
What they got out of it? Nowadays they ride the bus to work, because they're so deep in debt that they still can't afford a car.
(And if you feel like chiming in with some variant of "ha ha, poetic justice, they got ruined by their own greed"... normally I'd even aggree, but knowing these people personally I can't help feeling a bit of pity for them.)
Or you can see that in pyramid schemes. In the 90's, as the western world was swept by the dot-com madness, the newly freed Eastern Europe was swept by a wave of pyramid schemes. Not just the chain letter types, but whole companies were formed on the promise of, basically, "Give us your money and we'll give you 5 times as much from the next ones giving us their money." It must have been bleeding obvious to anyone with half a brain that the exponential progression will run out of idiots fast, but the mirage of free money was so great that people chose to believe that surely they'll get theirs riiight before the thing crashes. A lot of people sold their houses, cars, etc, to dump their money into such scams.
Among the consequences of that, IIRC, the revolts in Albania were traceable to such a scam which left an insane percentage of the population poor, homeless and indebted to hell and back. Is it sad, or what?
Well, it's sorta like this:
/. every day.
Short story: this is what you get when ivory-tower nerds get a glimpse of what everyone else knew all along.
Long story: As you said, yes, IRL everyone knew that locks aren't "secure", and won't keep a determined thief out. Locks aren't even a deterrent. They're a bit of a delay and mostly a "if we catch you past this point, we'll throw your sorry arse in jail" marker. The deterrent is the law. If you went through all the trouble of climbing over the fence (or lockpicking the gate) and lockpicking the door too, we have all the proof we need of intent, and we'll throw your arse in jail.
IRL it's not even possible to make something 100% burglar-proof. Even if you had a 100% burglar-proof lock, someone could break a window instead, or hack down the door, or whatever.
IRL that's our security concept, and it worked for maybe 10,000 years. People don't even expect anything to be more secure, computers included. See all the SF settings where people find it natural that a computer from 10,000 years in the future can be hacked by just shooting the keyboard, or that a high-tech computer-controlled door can be defeated with two wires and a PDA. Or by just shooting the control pannel, Star Wars style.
Now enter the ivory tower of OCPD computer nerds, and trying to apply boolean rules to a RL that's made of continuums, and to problems that are more of a min-max problem than if-then-else binary constructs. In their world, either you're 100% secure or you're 100% unprotected and not even trying. Either something is 100% lock, deterrent, judge and jurry rolled into one, or it's crap. And, oh, unless you 100% secured your property or computer or you're an idiot. You see the kind on
So now one of those basically just discovered, "whaaaat? you mean RL locks have exploits and can be hacked?? and people just put up with that and didn't patch them yet???" It runs contrary to their whole (utopic) mental model. So of course they'll make a big fuss out of it, and think they've discovered some secret that noone else knew.
Take a deep breath, engage the brains before typing and all that.
1. I don't know about you, but when I have my inbox full of "I love you" messages from the whole fucking marketting department, most of them guys too... I get... suspicious, to say the least. Even without knowing how the computer works or doesn't, it's something out of the extraordinary enough to be worth at least a "WTF??" thought, you know.
2. There were people who _knew_ about the "I love you" virus, or get told about scams, spam, etc, and still do it anyway. I don't know about you, but I'd file those squarely under "retarded".
3. The way the computer is "supposed" to work is good and fine, and we could even aggree mostly, but in the meantime this is how it _does_ work IRL. Fantasy and "the way it's supposed to work" are that-away, reality is in the other direction. You can't just live in a fantasy world where computers just work. RL won't go away just because you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge it.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of people seem to attempt just that: to ignore reality and hope that it will just get away. They wear their "I don't know anything about this tech crap" attitude like a badge of honour, and outright refuse to learn even the basics of how to use their computers. And seem to think that if they steadfastly refuse to read any "Do you want to do this?" dialog, the computer would somehow get a clue and turn into something that it isn't. It doesn't work that way.
To give you an almost 1-to-1 analogy: It's as stupid as thinking that if you refuse to believe in veneral diseases or pregnancy, you're exempt from them. Yes, in an ideal world, sex between perfect strangers would be safe and just work without risks. In the real world, however, those problems do exist. It's that simple. You can't change reality by simply refusing to acknowledge it.
It's as stupid as thinking that if you steadfastly believe that cars are trivial to drive, then you can just jump into one without learning to drive first. Yes, in an ideal SF world, cars would be 100% safe, would require no skill to get you from point A to point B, and never cause any injury or property damage. In the real world, they're not. You can't switch to fantasy rules by just believing in them hard enough.
4. An even more abject category are those who just refuse to use their time to learn anything, because they know that the nerd next door (or everyone in their address book, in the case of viruses) has nothing better to do than clean up after them. I find that highly offensive and anti-social. It's like shitting in the middle of the room, just because you're sure that your janitor neighbour must love moping up shit, so you'll just ask him to come over and do that.
5. Straw men are not a substitute for logic or for elementary reading and comprehension skills. Learn to read, and maybe to answer to what was written there, not to whatever the voices in your head say. In the message you're answering to:
* _nowhere_ does it say that they should install Linux. They can stick to Windows, MacOS, OS/2 or whatever the fuck floats their boat, for all I care.
* _nowhere_ do I ask of them to _love_ computers. For all I can be arsed to care, they can hate it with a Sith-like passion, if they chose to. But if they do choose to use it, it would still be nice to learn at least the elementary basics and behave responsibly. Just like (I hope) they don't just jump in a car without a license and plough through a school.
Reminds me of the "I love you" virus, and all the idio... erm... computer-illiterate people who opened it because they genuinely thought that their boss/secretary/whole-fucking-department sent them a genuine love declaration. Or all the viruses that get opened because someone really thought that their long lost cousin Amir N'gbendu from Nigeria sent them a porn-video/incredible-investment-opportunity-sprea dsheets/whatever. Conveniently packed in an .exe file. It must be a self-extracting zip, really. Would your long lost cousin lie to you?
So being that some people _are_ that gullible, I wonder how many actually went and wrote their will, said goodbye to their loved ones, and arranged their own funerals, after reading "you're going to die in 7 days" in an email.