The BSD license protects the closed-source programmer's rights.
Are you the troll on Obama futures at Intrade last night who finally had to admit that "his reality" was not "our reality" (only the feeling evaporated after a good night's sleep)?
Obviously there are many of us out in the world who are intelligent, articulate, well informed and passionate about open source who don't parse the issue this way. Imagine that. You do you just lump us under "delusional" and continue to double-down on Romney? Obama will lose because "the nation won't tolerate another four years of his demonstrated incompetence". Do you have anything constructive to add to this?
Why should sharing ideas be morally mandatory in a society where sharing the wealth isn't? If deep down you believe that both are mandatory (I doubt this would make you popular) why do you wish to start with making the sharing of ideas mandatory, leaving the question of wealth sharing for a future generation to solve? Wouldn't the solution for both problem go hand-in-hand?
A guest at EconTalk recently observed that the industrial world now has two distinct inflation rates: a low rate for downscale merchandise produced in China and retailed by BorgBoxes, and a higher rate for personal services (such as haircuts). The lower classes have greater exposure to the low inflation rate, the middle and upper middle class has greater exposure to the higher inflation rate, and the one percent are making out so well that the inflation rate is merely a pimple on a flea's backside (like the Princess and the Pea, this doesn't prevent them from whinging about it). Darn it to hell, having someone else clean the toilet gets more expensive every year! We'll see about that! There is the economic theory of trickle down, and then there are the moral sentiments of trickle down.
A related concept that cuts along the same grain is the distinction between public goods and private goods. Certain types of economic activity produce the greatest benefit when widely distributed at the least cost. This gives Big Pharma big ulcers. Whenever you market a benefit where a large group of people pay for a benefit that only a subpopulation receives (as is the case with Lipitor and every other blockbuster of that nature) you are operating within a socialist regime. Now you can say that if you don't know who benefits and who doesn't, everyone is paying for the same share of a prospective benefit, so what's the problem? The problem is that Big Pharma goes to an immense amount of trouble to ensure that the studies which validate the efficacy of a drug do so on the largest possible population where they can get a statistically significant effect. Do they wish to study a subgroup which receives ten times the benefit, but which is only ten percent as large (at less scale and cost)? Absolutely not. No pharmaceutical wants to develop a product where a small population is paying $500 a pill, unless it's a cancer ward or something else equally dire. Here's the beauty of the model: the FDA doesn't really regulate drug-drug interactions. Old people taking a dozen different meds in the hope of actually receiving benefit from a few of them are mostly taking the risks of drug-drug interactions upon their own shoulders. Not our problem, says Big Pharma. Not your problem, nods the FDA. If actually fatalities (or strokes or psychotic episodes) are reported and traced back to drug-drug interactions, word goes out to the dispensaries. Sometimes a particularly troublesome drug is actually yanked or locked behind the thickest bars (MOAI antidepressants, terfenadine). This is the ugly side of socialism run by capitalists.
Now if Cayce Pollard develops a piece of software for the benefit of professional beauticians to keep their favoured clientele one extra quarter step ahead of the relentless march of fashion, should she be obligated to share around her source code, just because? Is this your idea of a public good? Or is th
I spent some time watching the Intrade prediction market. The market in the presidential race was extremely distorted. There seemed to be some loss-eating Red whales holding the line at just under 70% for Obama while the polls remained open.
The individual state markets were far more sane, converging to 90% certainty in most of the swing states long before the mainstream media maps. They often went against established voting margins, factoring in the nature of the precincts reporting and yet to report.
States with mixed urban/rural populations usually swung toward Obama as more polls reported. Urban polling stations have more votes and take longer to count. The exception was Ohio which had a big margin for Obama in the pre-voting, but went much closer on the day.
Not only did Nate Silver predict the outcome, but the biggest spike on his graph appears to be the outcome obtained (20% probability assigned to the simulation result where Obama wins with 332 electoral votes).
I don't know, maybe literacy in math ain't such a bad thing, after all.
Excellent responses, especially about open hardware.
I came to the same conclusion about Ubuntu myself. I only hear rumours about how they participate with upstream behind the scenes. You can't always judge these things by the intensity of wailing. Everyone thinks their cause is the right cause.
What I could see about Canonical with my own eyes is how they approach communication with their user base, and from this one can draw fairly reliable conclusions about the nature of the beast. Their decision to adopt Unity was bold and disruptive and in no small measure pushed upon them by the decisions of others (here's looking at you, Gnome). It was pretty obvious to any thinking person that the early editions of Unity were an unmitigated disaster for the dual-monitor, multidesk-wielding power user.
Did Canonical warn me about running the upgrade from a version of Ubuntu well suited and tuned to my needs (10.10) to a version that would have set me back to the tablet-chiseled stone age? No. Not in any channel. There was no communication, there was no transition plan.
I would have been happy to read an open letter from Shuttleworth suggesting that "a few of our power users might wish to hole out in another distribution until we bridge the chasm with our new approach". I'm mature. I realize they don't have infinite resources, and sometimes you make bold decisions or wither on the vine. It would have been inconvenient, but soon forgiven.
I'm not the least bit mature about pressing "upgrade" only to discover that the direction was decisively "down" and like Buttercup at the bottom of the gully, it's hell to pay to scramble back to where you were moments before.
Any kind of decent outward-facing logic within the community would have arranged for Unity to come out immediately *after* an LTS release, with a plan to have a usable multihead desktop by the release of the next LTS edition. I found the communication from Canonical appalling over this transition. And it's exactly symptomatic of what Perens is saying: they serve their own interests most of all. Ultimately they care more about "share" than "community". These overlap, but it's not as much as a win-win for the rest of the open source community as we wished to think five years ago.
It's extremely disappointing, because good communication doesn't need to cost much.
The problem, though, is that it's no panacea on the other side of the fence. Debian suffered a crisis of leading up to the Sarge release which culminated in a release delay of thirty-five months. (It's not even like the highway that helpful advises "No gas station next 200 miles".) It should have been called Debian Sperm. A sperm whale will gestate for up to 19 months. No, that doesn't work. A female sperm whale could almost pump out a pair of pups over the same time span.
I was following the internal Debian politics peripherally. I recall a bit part of the problem as a rapid desire not to favour the x86 architecture over any other architecture. Prudence would have pumped out an x86 midterm release (Sag) to at least keep the LAMP stack consistent with the right www millennium. Developing on top of backports or testing is not desirable in a startup company with critical release dates. More than once, backports turned a 70 hour week into an 80 hour week. There's a top ten entry on How to Win Friends and Influence People.
This is a flip-side story where a necessary long-term consensus holds hostage a subgroup of your strongest proponents. And for what reason?
I wonder sometimes if it might not have been a bad thing for Debian to be out of the front-line spotlight for five years. It's a community built around putting purity first, users second. In the long run, purity might be the best thing for users. One needs to recognize, though, that the churn associated with the early pursuit of purity can be one of the worst user experiences of all. I wish it had been better managed.
Most of the world forgot about Samuel Chalfant, but the late 19th century dental profession learned from their bitter experience in what they considered the Vulcanite rubber patent reign of terror. They collectively positioned themselves so they could no longer be milked by any profiteering patent holders.
I greatly enjoy 99% Invisible. Some people might have heard about through their recent (and highly successful) Kickstarter campaign. Worth checking out.
Another approach is to form a certification society. I know a person who was involved in the politics to set this up:
Next you have to convince business that anyone lacking your shiny credential is a contagious scab. Internally, you need to wield the threat against your membership to revoke certification if anyone appears to be setting too low a price on their labours.
There also tends to be a lot of pressure for members to confirm prior judgments and not embarrass each other.
I know of cases where Professional Agrologists (P.Ag.) are involved in the decision process of whether to take land out of a land reserve. One can imagine the moral hazard here. The politician hires his friend, the friend (P.Ag.) writes a favourable view, opponents object, a "neutral" agrologist is summoned whose heart is in the right place, but one who nevertheless won't remain a P.Ag. for long unless wording any difference with the politician's friend (P.Ag.) very carefully.
Gatekeeper organizations tend to acquire an ugly face as a corrupt private-sector nanny state. They might also be good for your profession, but it's no free lunch.
This is a long, but compelling read (for the most part).
And their response is still a guiding light to me. They said, "If you can come back to us with a test that captures everyone so that we can all stop, you can expect us to support it. But if you come back with a test that only captures a quarter of the people, and those quarter are punished but then they're replaced by another quarter and the problem keeps going, don't expect us to support it.
This is the problem with unions, professional associations, and certifications. There are always more people out there who aspire to take on power within these organizations with the purpose to abuse it. It might only be 25% of the people involved in responsible positions, but it changes the dynamics for everyone involved. And you can't simply bust them out, because they breed like flies.
Another factor to bear in mind in the equilibrium dynamics of American presidential elections is that the increasingly large sums of campaign money tend to come from a rapacious sort of person (both sides of the fence) who prides himself on his hard-nosed business logic.
Aspirant to the Podium: Mr Illustrious and Magnanimous Moneybags, we need your support! MIMM: Harrumph! What's my ROI? AttP: A mere $5 million contribution could be the difference between winning and losing the state of Ohio. And Ohio could put us over the bar in a very tight election. And we'll remember your timely contribution with most special and extreme favour. MIMM: Spelled with "u"? I thought we drowned those people in Boston harbour. AttP: No "u". MIMM: Well then, sign me up. AttP: We need to hit very hard before the next round of polling on Tuesday morning. MIMM: A whole day for such a trifling sum? Not before the bank slams the wicket shut fifteen minutes from now? Aid: If you could... we'd be so much more grateful than whatever level of gratitude previously implied.
Exit at a brisk walk mahogany office with cheque in hand.
Aid: Acting in my college play was the best thing I did. AttP: What play was that? Aid: The Producers. AttP: Ah, you had ambition. I sat around watching re-runs of Fawlty Towers. Aid: That works, too. AttP: Lead the way, Max. Aid: After you, Fawlty.
If it weren't a horse race, no cheques from the fat men with cigars.
But winning the battle won't win the war. Mr. Obama will be weakened by the divisive campaign; the electorate is bitterly split, and he will find Congress harder to work with.
It's hard to win a war you're not fighting. If anything, both parties are deeply enmeshed in the resistance movement. There's no white horse waiting to gallop over the horizon to rescue America from two-party gridlock politics. It's not an accident that the equilibrium is carefully titrated to minor victories. How much does it cost to achieve a landslide? An extra half billion dollars? What's the marginal return of a landslide victory over squeaking into office?
The trailing candidate can usually find a divisive issue to rally support from some hard-line group or another. It will keep the polls close enough that a major stumble by your adversary down the stretch could propel you over the bar (at which point you'll regret your small constituency hard-line allies and will immediately busy yourself with the unctuous politics of handing out Associate Producer credits to your purported entourage to mollify and distract). In short, if you aren't getting any, you can always sleep with the fat girl, then hope like hell to shake her loose if your fortunes improve. When image matters, nobody goes without.
The hardest promises to keep are the mutually incompatible promises to hard-line cliques you're ass kissing to remain respectable in the polls. Centrist candidates chew off fewer arms the morning after.
Rootstrikers is one of a number of organizations actually fighting this war against divisive, bitterly-split government. It begins with campaign finance reform, and continues with the diminishment of lobbyism.
If you think the current electoral process is about making America governable, you're smoking a crack pipe.
The bottom line is they sell in the high end of the market, where people spend money
Once Android's long tail integrates to more than Apple's gated community (as it must if Apple holds firm on price), Android application development begins to take front seat to iOS applications, eating away at the prestige of Apple having the largest buffet.
Those of us with the True Faith have received our OpenBSD 2.5 CDs and T-Shirt in the mail, and give thanks to our Lord Theo, even though he's a total prick.
Funny you should say that. I'm that guy. The prick has its uses, after all. There was a bad patch in the late 1990s where pretty much every operating system had dropped the soap bar. Only it didn't exactly work like that. They reached over to hand you the soap, dropped it in a clumsy handoff, then left you (the end user) to bend over and fetch it again. Repeatedly, all the while promising new and improved soap bar for the next communal shower. Being rogered by total strangers gives me a rash. All hail, King Prick.
It's funny you should say that because it's now end of days for my trusty OpenBSD box. It's really pf that I depend upon these days and that runs just fine under FreeBSD (minus a few fringe features). Since my file server now runs ZFS under FreeBSD, I decided to consolidate to one fewer method of system update. My brain is old and tired now.
King Prick fathered OpenSSH and packet filter as used by pfSense. Pretty fair achievements, asshole or not.
What I'd give for Theo to fork Android if Google persists in their current security model of forcing me to vet every application I refuse to load--again and again if I can't recall my previous verdict. That's a model that pretty much guarantees that even the most paranoid pre-coffee cold-shower control freak will eventually drop the soap. And this is a shower room where everyone kisses and tells.
I regard the desktop crowd as the people who scrub their junk a little too vigorously and then check themselves in the nearest mirror still dripping from final rinse. The stakes here are a little different. That behaviour gives me a rash too, but it's a different kind of rash.
I've never aspired to a computer desktop covered with soapy self-admiring widgets. I guess XFCE is the equivalent of soaping oneself modestly in the communal shower while maintaining eye contact with the ceiling tiles. Old fashioned or not, there's a case to be made.
I see what you did there. You're a 10 digit Slashdot ID sent back from the future by the Society of Meme Preservation as part of their MMC Centennial retrospective.
Microsoft was good at something once upon a time. It was akin to charging a man a fee to have sex with your own wife, but let's not go there. It was a cool place to work (if you had a high tolerance for stomach meds) because one morning you would wake up and the tooth fairy would have replaced your non-vested shares with a vintage Jaguar and wood paneled yacht. This was before Steve Jobs redefined coolness as a black turtleneck sweater. Then one day the Microsoft tooth fairy retired to the great Ponzi Valhala. The company had become too big and hidebound for the share price to double every other year. Increasingly they had to compensate the best talent with the best salary. This rapidly compounded their downturn.
Word went around "you know, a man shouldn't have to pay a tax to Microsoft in order to have sex with his own wife". Governments woke up and decided they shouldn't have the entirety of their electronic work product locked up in undocumented file formats. The old adversaries they could bully were long gone. They were now locked in combat with Sony in the living room, Apple in the den, LAMP in the server farm, Oracle in the back office, Firefox/Apache on the cloud, RIM/Nokia in mobile, IBM/Peoplesoft in the boardroom. The last bastion to fall was Exchange Server. Exchange Server was Bill's parting gift to Steve Ballmer bearing the inscription "Sorry I tampered with the videotape. -- Bill"
Worst of all, newlyweds stopped having sex every 15 minutes. The PC platform had matured, and the old upgrade cycles were not as rapid as they had once been.
If I've properly understood any book I've ever read written by a lost soul possessed of an MBA, no sane business person would risk sacrificing one of the fattest cash cows in the history of business on the altar of transformation leadership.
Steve Jobs honed his knackers in the school of looming foreclosure. You remember that don't you. They teach it in Meme Preservation 501, do they not, on cloud campus Courseratops? No wait, that's cross-listed with the graduate degree program. Perhaps you've yet to enroll.
I've never found terribly difficult to put the warts of the two big parties into one-to-one correspondence. Same warts, different wart hairs. Over the past decade or two, one especially large wart on the Republican side increasingly stands apart and alone: their raging mania to abolish the concept of non-partisan politics.
I listen to political podcasts which frequently point out an outstanding and effective tradition of non-partisanship among the Republican ranks during the 1960s and 1970s that has subsequently withered on the vine. I doubt their forebears would be proud of how the party has evolved on this particular issue.
When the Democrats are elected, there are many hard-core Republicans who increasingly refuse to concede their right to govern as the elected government, and who believe that obstructing every possible Democratic initiative is their gift to humanity. Actually, their gift to humanity would be allowing the elected government to actually govern, if you really believe in democracy after all.
At the time of Lincoln, few people identified themselves as Americans. If you asked a person on the street he would say "I'm a Virginian" especially if he was a Virginian.
Republicans are all Virginians these days. They aren't Americans. They're Republicans. There is either a Virginian in the White House, or they consider the country to be under the control of infidels to be resisted by any method permitted in love or warfare.
This is a tragic evolution of the American nation promulgated by traitors to the founding fathers.
Or you could just not install any applications that ask for those permissions is that so hard?
Yes, absolutely, this is harder than it looks. Pay attention much? The problem is related to the phenomena of Decision fatigue.
Every time I go back to the Crap Store, my searches come up with applications I've already reviewed and rejected. Applications that in fact violate my express policy over which invasive permissions I'm willing to concede (let's not call it "grant") relative to the benefits derived.
Here's how it ought to work. Once I decide that messing with my address book is totally verboten, I should never again see an application listed in my app searches that requires this permission. I barely even know that such applications exist. The most I'll accept is "1520 search results screened out by your security profile".
People don't hold up well having to make the same decision day after day, week after week. Even if you succeed by force of will it's costing you a mental resource that could have be used instead to, for example, negotiate a better mortgage on your house or serve fewer years in prison.
"The technology" turns out to be called "asymmetric multilevel outphasing". No wonder the submission was too embarrassed to include this tidbit. Small problem, though. Nerds don't omit.
Hell, I had a 14" Daytek by Daewoo tube monitor that could handle 1600x1200 in 1996. It's disappointing that it hasn't gotten better.
No it didn't. The electronics would show a picture when fed such a signal, but the phosphor wasn't adequate to show all the pixels. I had a monitor in 1991 which would take 1600x1200 interlaced. The displayed picture wasn't worth a damn *and* it gave you headaches. It worked best 768x1024. Yeah, I've *always* written rows x columns. Just yesterday I learned that the qubit value 1 represents boolean false. In small white text in the top corner of the David Deutsch lecture was written "Don't shoot me. It wasn't my idea." or something to that effect. First you need the idiot to get it wrong. Then you need all the idiots to follow along. It's 25x80 in text mode, then its magically 800x600 in graphics mode, with no change between portrait and landscape. The windowing layer might be x,y but for me the device specification is only ever rows,columns.
IIRC to display clear pixels on a CRT, the pixel needs to be about 30% larger than the rated dot pitch.
The real tragedy of 100 dpi displays is not whether they display decent small fonts, but whether they show decent small fonts at any desired size. They don't. Some sizes look good, some look horrific. Around the transition between single pixel strokes and double pixel strokes lies ugliness to a higher power.
We're calculating lost downloads, now? And I thought lost sales due to piracy was a stupid metric...
Surprise, you thought right. Your thinking today, however, is a different matter. You do realize that it's impossible to discuss causal relationships in any meaningful way without projecting counterfactuals. Sometimes you have a projectable baseline, sometimes you don't. Many times the causes of things are a hazy guess. It's only regret that's 20-20.
The problem with the music industry's desire to claim every download as a "lost sale" is that there were a lot of download donkeys out there downloading every song on the planet just for the hell of it: adolescent hoarding behaviour to piss off The Man. Few of these people were prepared to pay $30 for a CD of any description, or a dollar a tune, or even a nickel.
I tend to keep a lot of my crappy photographs. It doesn't cost much to keep them around, and you never know if there might be something of value you don't realize until later. (Did we remember to rotate the tires? Oh hell, this old photo of the dog fetching a stick with the truck in the background tells me we didn't.) If a 1000 crappy photos cost me $5 a year to archive I'd probably dump the majority. Hoarding on the margin does not translate into giant revenue streams.
In the Mozilla situation, one might presume that anyone downloading Firefox as their initial default browser was at least going to give it a fair spin (this can be a short as two minutes, but probably averages at least an hour).
Unfortunately, given the proliferation of shovel-ware we can deduce that first encounters are sticky regardless of intrinsic worth or quality. In the real world we have special senses to determine when we've stepped in something we should scrape off our shoe at the first opportunity. On the net, people are forced to use their brains, with woefully uneven results. Ideally, people would gravitate to the best solution placing far less reliance on the first kiss, but that's not how most humans roll.
Slashdot has been drifting into the Betteridge bayou full speed ahead for some time now. If the story has no story, then the contributed commentary mainly consists of recycled navel lint. If any fool comes along who actually has something to say, it will drown in the din.
I think it was Bombeck who once had a quip that conversation consists of talking and preparing to talk. This is what happens on a conversation forum which begins knee deep in brackish backwash. If the story has no story, there's no reason to listen to any other contribution beyond identifying a suitable launch opportunity for a hasty rewording of your party line.
I mean, everyone loves the opportunity to burnish yesterday's tweet. Off-hand remarks don't come along every day. When you have one, why not use it again?
Dawkins is my least favorite of the four horsemen (Hitch later amended the number to five, citing another crusader I had not yet heard of). Dawkins just can't seem to downplay his innate astringency. He's the Jynnan Tonnyx at the end of creation, where Hitch is the Caife Gaelach. I prefer one drink more than the other, but in a pinch, I'd drink from either well.
Part of the problem is that he treats religious belief as a Gordian Knot to be severed with a brilliant sword stroke. The reality is that loosening the bonds by degrees often works better. He seems not to connect with people whose self-esteem is based on some other principle than subtracting falsehood. Persuasion often works better when you help people to move towards.
Intrinsic Dignity's website www.goodnewsclubs.info critically reviews Good News Club's curriculum, including the inclusion in its last 5-year curriculum cycle (2006-2011) of over 5000 references to sin, over 1000 references to each of the themes of obedience and punishment, and for its shaming of children as being born sinful and worthy of death and hell.
I personally despise the doctrine of original sin. It's a blatant attack on self-esteem. Dawkins seems mild as milk compared to the God these people defend.
A failure to increase performance would inevitably stall a growing array of industries that have fed off the falling cost of computer chips.
Actually, no. Micro-architecture could continue to evolve without die shrinks (likely toward a proliferation of specialized units) and software could also evolve. Probably both for a decade or so, before the shrink stall becomes a fed stall. A feature of Moore's Law rarely expressed is that software lags architecture, and architecture lags die size.
I realized a long time ago that if I could gain a 50% speed increase by rewriting a critical application loop in assembly language, it generally wasn't worth the bother. The next processor architecture would mess up you clever clock-count calculations. The effort was almost always better invested in satisfying feature demand as PCs became more capable. Not only does the architectures improve, but so does the cleverness of your compiler (not including your hand-polished asm). If the software people actually knew that die shrinks were a thing of the past, it would make sense to be more aggressive in the choice of algorithms and execution regimes. They might even be well paid to indulge in premature optimizations postponed, since this would become the main avenue to sustaining performance gains.
There might be more pressure to bet on the right horse, which could thin the herd. Competence gradients tend to have this effect.
America is already short a trillion dollars of "special handouts" that could have been saved had "the heavy regulation of business" actually been in effect. After Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and J.P. Morgan all declare insolvency (we all agree on contract law) there would be "no anarchy to speak of" whatsoever as 60 million people are visited and calmed by Hayekian angels during their sugar-plum post-employment revenge fantasies.
In principle, I'm totally into Libertarianism. You go first.
Healthcare could be a hell of a lot cheaper if the government stayed the hell out of it and unsupervised free enterprise doesn't collude to roger the consumer over a barrel. If their original business model was regulatory capture, you think that will change because you cross out the government term? The government already does a rather poor job of enforcing its monopoly on collusion.
Nearly every business given its choice would source its inputs from a non-collusive market and sell into a collusive market. There's a huge business opportunity if you have the balls to break a non-collusive market, and buy up all the pieces. All of this leads to a decrease in business certainty within the business environment. This has no impact on business efficiency...
In studies of corruption levels, societies where graft is consistent and predictable do fairly well, even if the graft is fairly significant. Economies where you have no way of knowing the magnitude of the next shakedown tend to spiral down the drain pipe. The worst economies want more government (which would help them become good economies) and the best economies want less government (which will help the wealthy retire to private islands) leaving the schmucks behind to execute effectively in a wild-west business environment. This goes well for a while.
I know its been 'heralded' for too long, but we are actually seeing a shift in the primary use of computers. PCs, like it or not are fast heading towards niche status.
You mean like The Beatles after Kurt Cobain? People under the age of 25 have this peculiar habit of assigning anything that's not the automatic topic of conversation to niche status. Such as the internal combustion engine in the era of alternative energy. Gasoline is pretty niche these days. And this is almost true: it will never again be the locus of the next big thing.
The 109,000-horsepower WÃrtsilÃ-Sulzer RTA96-C, which first set sail in the Emma Mærsk in 2006, weighs in at a rotund 2,300 tons, and it's 44-feet tall and 90-feet long.
When do you think they'll ship their last unit? When do you think you'll next walk into your local Walmart, and not a single item in the store was shipped from China in a cargo ship powered by this engine, or its near relatives? When do you think that most of what you find if your local Walmart was not transported by such an engine? But if your Mercedes SUV no longer sports an internal combustion engine, then I guess internal combustion is niche.
When do you think that mobile application development will be 90% self-hosted? Ever? Pretty soon we'll grow our first pate de foie gras in a yeast vat, and the year after someone on Slashdot will describe the livestock industry as "niche", while "70% of agricultural land and 30% of the global land area" are still used for livestock production and dimpled by cloven hoof prints.
One could also describe earthworms as "niche", if one means by niche so super important that humanity itself is the afterthought in this equation. To describe generalists and their draught horses as "niche" buggers the word so badly its rectum flops out. Niche is not the antonym to lemming predilections.
This won't impress the Babylonians until we get to 60 + 17.
that old canard about x86 complexity
on
Apple, ARM, and Intel
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The old 80386 based on the "complex" x86 instruction set had 275,000 transistors. Intel is now making chips with 2.6 billion transistors and somehow what they once implemented as one functional unit within a budget of 0.000275 billion transistors is holding them back?
Certainly they would rather do a few things differently had they been worried about 2013 back in 1978. Transistor count is the least of the matter. What buggers up x86 is the number of active transistors handling the instruction stream at each instruction cycle. There's no way to align variable-length instructions without active transistors (regardless of whether the transistors involved amount to a wart on a small toe of a juvenile mosquito).
The x86 story bugs the hell out of me. Considered how well it actually held up for 45 years (and counting) it's one of the ugly duckling success stories of all time (hint: it wasn't so ugly after all).
It was also a founding member of the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. I'm concerned his posthumous aura will continue to glow with the uplift of falsehood. He should be credited more for what he accomplished than the lies he polished to get there.
It wasn't just Steve, it was the entire RISC consortium manufacturing an Achilles heel out of whole cloth. Far closer to the truth of the matter is that x86 has a much higher design cost than an orthogonal clean-sheet alternative. The design cost was a small multiple. Intel's resources were a large multiple. It didn't go well for RISC. The much vaunted DEC Alpha had a metal connect layer for single-cycle carry-add propagation that forever segregated it from the mass-consumer price point. It was the instruction set. No, it was the instruction set aided by a titanium stent.
Also, the RISC design advantage does not extend to the memory cache and system bus design. These are a bear to design well for any instruction set. The RISC people moaned about the exceptional Pentium Pro performance level on server workloads (it was the first memory bus from Intel that didn't totally suck). Well, Intel broke into the server market with their crappy old x86 instruction set by grafting it onto a titanium alloy cache hierarchy and bus controller (with multiple dies grafted into the same chip package at enormous expense). Cache latency and branch prediction absolutely dwarf instruction set as the big thing to worry about since around this time. If Steve hadn't grabbed onto the inferiority of CISC around this time, it might have died a timely death.
In low power applications, ARM has a real advantage, enough to win a huge market share at race-to-the-bottom price points. How much does the cost of a CPU influence a handset? How much everything else? I've put $300 Intel CPUs in $2000 boxes. I've put $250 Intel CPUs in $1000 boxes. I've put $60 CPUs in $500 boxes. A $16 CPU in a phone that retails for $600 for just a few months, before landing in the discount bin? I'm sure Intel wants a huge slice of that.
One reason Intel has held their ground is that the Cortex-A15 (out-of-order superscalar multiprocessor) is starting to look a lot like the old Pentium Pro. Sure the instruction set is modern and clean (though it took ARM surprisingly long to come up with the mixed 16/32 bit instruction encoding format due to misguided ideological purity; how many active transistors does it take to determine whether the next 32 bit chunk from the instruction stream is one lump or two? More or less than the number of active transistors in the icache devoted to storing common instructions bloated to 32 bits just because?). But all the rest of the issues are pretty much the same: branch prediction stalls, cache snooping, and memory path latency.
From Intel's perspective, an ugly instruction set is good for business. (Then they went on a jag thinking that if ugly is good, atrocious is better, and the Itanium was hatched with a jackhammer from a mastodon egg.)
After another three die shrinks, when half the processor implements on-demand power management, and most of the other half provides task-specialized execution units, is the instruction set going to matter a hill of beans for anything other than legacy lock-in?
For as long as I've known the game, in the playoffs, the game continues until a winner is achieved through normal game play. By 3OT deep into the second round, it's more about survival than winning. That's why the diehards persist in their love of the sport.
Only the regular season (so far) was goat ****ed by network television to violate the principle of zero-sumness. NHL head office is working hard (when they work at all) to make the game more of crap shoot. They don't want a never-ending succession of dynasties and threepeats. They want every franchise (good or bad--excepting Toronto) to have a shot at the cup every year. The problem with rewarding talent is that your loser franchises go bankrupt. Eventually every sport goes kayfabe if there's enough money involved. Cycling, wrestling, boxing, sumo, college football, the list goes on.
So far the anecdotal answer seems to be "not enough", since otherwise they would surely already have done it.
If Cinderella's coach was going to turn into a pumpkin, it would surely have already happened before the clock struck twelve.
You're suggesting that at the exact moment when it becomes effective to do so, all the Google data centers turn into immersive pumpkins, so the non-existence of such is a perfect correlate with its viability, since any friction around the decision is inconceivable.
What did you make of the Vizzini scene in Princess Bride? Any clues, or are you still struggling?
"The problem is, corruption has reared its ugly head." : When does that not happen to some extent?
Slashdot is rapidly becoming the eternal September of "Dog Bites Man". Read any story submission. Does it continue to explain how emotional outrage of the moment is any different today than yesterday?
Why yes, it does, and it's a catastrophe: there hasn't been 600 slashdot comments extactly the same as last week's posted since midnight.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you the troll on Obama futures at Intrade last night who finally had to admit that "his reality" was not "our reality" (only the feeling evaporated after a good night's sleep)?
Obviously there are many of us out in the world who are intelligent, articulate, well informed and passionate about open source who don't parse the issue this way. Imagine that. You do you just lump us under "delusional" and continue to double-down on Romney? Obama will lose because "the nation won't tolerate another four years of his demonstrated incompetence". Do you have anything constructive to add to this?
Why should sharing ideas be morally mandatory in a society where sharing the wealth isn't? If deep down you believe that both are mandatory (I doubt this would make you popular) why do you wish to start with making the sharing of ideas mandatory, leaving the question of wealth sharing for a future generation to solve? Wouldn't the solution for both problem go hand-in-hand?
A guest at EconTalk recently observed that the industrial world now has two distinct inflation rates: a low rate for downscale merchandise produced in China and retailed by BorgBoxes, and a higher rate for personal services (such as haircuts). The lower classes have greater exposure to the low inflation rate, the middle and upper middle class has greater exposure to the higher inflation rate, and the one percent are making out so well that the inflation rate is merely a pimple on a flea's backside (like the Princess and the Pea, this doesn't prevent them from whinging about it). Darn it to hell, having someone else clean the toilet gets more expensive every year! We'll see about that! There is the economic theory of trickle down, and then there are the moral sentiments of trickle down.
A related concept that cuts along the same grain is the distinction between public goods and private goods. Certain types of economic activity produce the greatest benefit when widely distributed at the least cost. This gives Big Pharma big ulcers. Whenever you market a benefit where a large group of people pay for a benefit that only a subpopulation receives (as is the case with Lipitor and every other blockbuster of that nature) you are operating within a socialist regime. Now you can say that if you don't know who benefits and who doesn't, everyone is paying for the same share of a prospective benefit, so what's the problem? The problem is that Big Pharma goes to an immense amount of trouble to ensure that the studies which validate the efficacy of a drug do so on the largest possible population where they can get a statistically significant effect. Do they wish to study a subgroup which receives ten times the benefit, but which is only ten percent as large (at less scale and cost)? Absolutely not. No pharmaceutical wants to develop a product where a small population is paying $500 a pill, unless it's a cancer ward or something else equally dire. Here's the beauty of the model: the FDA doesn't really regulate drug-drug interactions. Old people taking a dozen different meds in the hope of actually receiving benefit from a few of them are mostly taking the risks of drug-drug interactions upon their own shoulders. Not our problem, says Big Pharma. Not your problem, nods the FDA. If actually fatalities (or strokes or psychotic episodes) are reported and traced back to drug-drug interactions, word goes out to the dispensaries. Sometimes a particularly troublesome drug is actually yanked or locked behind the thickest bars (MOAI antidepressants, terfenadine). This is the ugly side of socialism run by capitalists.
Now if Cayce Pollard develops a piece of software for the benefit of professional beauticians to keep their favoured clientele one extra quarter step ahead of the relentless march of fashion, should she be obligated to share around her source code, just because? Is this your idea of a public good? Or is th
I spent some time watching the Intrade prediction market. The market in the presidential race was extremely distorted. There seemed to be some loss-eating Red whales holding the line at just under 70% for Obama while the polls remained open.
The individual state markets were far more sane, converging to 90% certainty in most of the swing states long before the mainstream media maps. They often went against established voting margins, factoring in the nature of the precincts reporting and yet to report.
States with mixed urban/rural populations usually swung toward Obama as more polls reported. Urban polling stations have more votes and take longer to count. The exception was Ohio which had a big margin for Obama in the pre-voting, but went much closer on the day.
Not only did Nate Silver predict the outcome, but the biggest spike on his graph appears to be the outcome obtained (20% probability assigned to the simulation result where Obama wins with 332 electoral votes).
I don't know, maybe literacy in math ain't such a bad thing, after all.
Excellent responses, especially about open hardware.
I came to the same conclusion about Ubuntu myself. I only hear rumours about how they participate with upstream behind the scenes. You can't always judge these things by the intensity of wailing. Everyone thinks their cause is the right cause.
What I could see about Canonical with my own eyes is how they approach communication with their user base, and from this one can draw fairly reliable conclusions about the nature of the beast. Their decision to adopt Unity was bold and disruptive and in no small measure pushed upon them by the decisions of others (here's looking at you, Gnome). It was pretty obvious to any thinking person that the early editions of Unity were an unmitigated disaster for the dual-monitor, multidesk-wielding power user.
Did Canonical warn me about running the upgrade from a version of Ubuntu well suited and tuned to my needs (10.10) to a version that would have set me back to the tablet-chiseled stone age? No. Not in any channel. There was no communication, there was no transition plan.
I would have been happy to read an open letter from Shuttleworth suggesting that "a few of our power users might wish to hole out in another distribution until we bridge the chasm with our new approach". I'm mature. I realize they don't have infinite resources, and sometimes you make bold decisions or wither on the vine. It would have been inconvenient, but soon forgiven.
I'm not the least bit mature about pressing "upgrade" only to discover that the direction was decisively "down" and like Buttercup at the bottom of the gully, it's hell to pay to scramble back to where you were moments before.
Any kind of decent outward-facing logic within the community would have arranged for Unity to come out immediately *after* an LTS release, with a plan to have a usable multihead desktop by the release of the next LTS edition. I found the communication from Canonical appalling over this transition. And it's exactly symptomatic of what Perens is saying: they serve their own interests most of all. Ultimately they care more about "share" than "community". These overlap, but it's not as much as a win-win for the rest of the open source community as we wished to think five years ago.
It's extremely disappointing, because good communication doesn't need to cost much.
The problem, though, is that it's no panacea on the other side of the fence. Debian suffered a crisis of leading up to the Sarge release which culminated in a release delay of thirty-five months. (It's not even like the highway that helpful advises "No gas station next 200 miles".) It should have been called Debian Sperm. A sperm whale will gestate for up to 19 months. No, that doesn't work. A female sperm whale could almost pump out a pair of pups over the same time span.
I was following the internal Debian politics peripherally. I recall a bit part of the problem as a rapid desire not to favour the x86 architecture over any other architecture. Prudence would have pumped out an x86 midterm release (Sag) to at least keep the LAMP stack consistent with the right www millennium. Developing on top of backports or testing is not desirable in a startup company with critical release dates. More than once, backports turned a 70 hour week into an 80 hour week. There's a top ten entry on How to Win Friends and Influence People.
This is a flip-side story where a necessary long-term consensus holds hostage a subgroup of your strongest proponents. And for what reason?
I wonder sometimes if it might not have been a bad thing for Debian to be out of the front-line spotlight for five years. It's a community built around putting purity first, users second. In the long run, purity might be the best thing for users. One needs to recognize, though, that the churn associated with the early pursuit of purity can be one of the worst user experiences of all. I wish it had been better managed.
Proposed solution: Be l
From Vulcanite Dentures
I greatly enjoy 99% Invisible. Some people might have heard about through their recent (and highly successful) Kickstarter campaign. Worth checking out.
Another approach is to form a certification society. I know a person who was involved in the politics to set this up:
Get certified by the Editors' Association of Canada!
Next you have to convince business that anyone lacking your shiny credential is a contagious scab. Internally, you need to wield the threat against your membership to revoke certification if anyone appears to be setting too low a price on their labours.
There also tends to be a lot of pressure for members to confirm prior judgments and not embarrass each other.
I know of cases where Professional Agrologists (P.Ag.) are involved in the decision process of whether to take land out of a land reserve. One can imagine the moral hazard here. The politician hires his friend, the friend (P.Ag.) writes a favourable view, opponents object, a "neutral" agrologist is summoned whose heart is in the right place, but one who nevertheless won't remain a P.Ag. for long unless wording any difference with the politician's friend (P.Ag.) very carefully.
Gatekeeper organizations tend to acquire an ugly face as a corrupt private-sector nanny state. They might also be good for your profession, but it's no free lunch.
This is a long, but compelling read (for the most part).
Lance Armstrong Case: Dr. Michael Ashenden on EPO
This is the problem with unions, professional associations, and certifications. There are always more people out there who aspire to take on power within these organizations with the purpose to abuse it. It might only be 25% of the people involved in responsible positions, but it changes the dynamics for everyone involved. And you can't simply bust them out, because they breed like flies.
Another factor to bear in mind in the equilibrium dynamics of American presidential elections is that the increasingly large sums of campaign money tend to come from a rapacious sort of person (both sides of the fence) who prides himself on his hard-nosed business logic.
Aspirant to the Podium: Mr Illustrious and Magnanimous Moneybags, we need your support! ... we'd be so much more grateful than whatever level of gratitude previously implied.
MIMM: Harrumph! What's my ROI?
AttP: A mere $5 million contribution could be the difference between winning and losing the state of Ohio. And Ohio could put us over the bar in a very tight election. And we'll remember your timely contribution with most special and extreme favour.
MIMM: Spelled with "u"? I thought we drowned those people in Boston harbour.
AttP: No "u".
MIMM: Well then, sign me up.
AttP: We need to hit very hard before the next round of polling on Tuesday morning.
MIMM: A whole day for such a trifling sum? Not before the bank slams the wicket shut fifteen minutes from now?
Aid: If you could
Exit at a brisk walk mahogany office with cheque in hand.
Aid: Acting in my college play was the best thing I did.
AttP: What play was that?
Aid: The Producers.
AttP: Ah, you had ambition. I sat around watching re-runs of Fawlty Towers.
Aid: That works, too.
AttP: Lead the way, Max.
Aid: After you, Fawlty.
If it weren't a horse race, no cheques from the fat men with cigars.
It's hard to win a war you're not fighting. If anything, both parties are deeply enmeshed in the resistance movement. There's no white horse waiting to gallop over the horizon to rescue America from two-party gridlock politics. It's not an accident that the equilibrium is carefully titrated to minor victories. How much does it cost to achieve a landslide? An extra half billion dollars? What's the marginal return of a landslide victory over squeaking into office?
The trailing candidate can usually find a divisive issue to rally support from some hard-line group or another. It will keep the polls close enough that a major stumble by your adversary down the stretch could propel you over the bar (at which point you'll regret your small constituency hard-line allies and will immediately busy yourself with the unctuous politics of handing out Associate Producer credits to your purported entourage to mollify and distract). In short, if you aren't getting any, you can always sleep with the fat girl, then hope like hell to shake her loose if your fortunes improve. When image matters, nobody goes without.
The hardest promises to keep are the mutually incompatible promises to hard-line cliques you're ass kissing to remain respectable in the polls. Centrist candidates chew off fewer arms the morning after.
Rootstrikers is one of a number of organizations actually fighting this war against divisive, bitterly-split government. It begins with campaign finance reform, and continues with the diminishment of lobbyism.
If you think the current electoral process is about making America governable, you're smoking a crack pipe.
Once Android's long tail integrates to more than Apple's gated community (as it must if Apple holds firm on price), Android application development begins to take front seat to iOS applications, eating away at the prestige of Apple having the largest buffet.
It's a nice middle game and a lousy end game.
Funny you should say that. I'm that guy. The prick has its uses, after all. There was a bad patch in the late 1990s where pretty much every operating system had dropped the soap bar. Only it didn't exactly work like that. They reached over to hand you the soap, dropped it in a clumsy handoff, then left you (the end user) to bend over and fetch it again. Repeatedly, all the while promising new and improved soap bar for the next communal shower. Being rogered by total strangers gives me a rash. All hail, King Prick.
It's funny you should say that because it's now end of days for my trusty OpenBSD box. It's really pf that I depend upon these days and that runs just fine under FreeBSD (minus a few fringe features). Since my file server now runs ZFS under FreeBSD, I decided to consolidate to one fewer method of system update. My brain is old and tired now.
1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan
King Prick fathered OpenSSH and packet filter as used by pfSense. Pretty fair achievements, asshole or not.
What I'd give for Theo to fork Android if Google persists in their current security model of forcing me to vet every application I refuse to load--again and again if I can't recall my previous verdict. That's a model that pretty much guarantees that even the most paranoid pre-coffee cold-shower control freak will eventually drop the soap. And this is a shower room where everyone kisses and tells.
I regard the desktop crowd as the people who scrub their junk a little too vigorously and then check themselves in the nearest mirror still dripping from final rinse. The stakes here are a little different. That behaviour gives me a rash too, but it's a different kind of rash.
I've never aspired to a computer desktop covered with soapy self-admiring widgets. I guess XFCE is the equivalent of soaping oneself modestly in the communal shower while maintaining eye contact with the ceiling tiles. Old fashioned or not, there's a case to be made.
I see what you did there. You're a 10 digit Slashdot ID sent back from the future by the Society of Meme Preservation as part of their MMC Centennial retrospective.
Microsoft was good at something once upon a time. It was akin to charging a man a fee to have sex with your own wife, but let's not go there. It was a cool place to work (if you had a high tolerance for stomach meds) because one morning you would wake up and the tooth fairy would have replaced your non-vested shares with a vintage Jaguar and wood paneled yacht. This was before Steve Jobs redefined coolness as a black turtleneck sweater. Then one day the Microsoft tooth fairy retired to the great Ponzi Valhala. The company had become too big and hidebound for the share price to double every other year. Increasingly they had to compensate the best talent with the best salary. This rapidly compounded their downturn.
Word went around "you know, a man shouldn't have to pay a tax to Microsoft in order to have sex with his own wife". Governments woke up and decided they shouldn't have the entirety of their electronic work product locked up in undocumented file formats. The old adversaries they could bully were long gone. They were now locked in combat with Sony in the living room, Apple in the den, LAMP in the server farm, Oracle in the back office, Firefox/Apache on the cloud, RIM/Nokia in mobile, IBM/Peoplesoft in the boardroom. The last bastion to fall was Exchange Server. Exchange Server was Bill's parting gift to Steve Ballmer bearing the inscription "Sorry I tampered with the videotape. -- Bill"
Worst of all, newlyweds stopped having sex every 15 minutes. The PC platform had matured, and the old upgrade cycles were not as rapid as they had once been.
If I've properly understood any book I've ever read written by a lost soul possessed of an MBA, no sane business person would risk sacrificing one of the fattest cash cows in the history of business on the altar of transformation leadership.
Steve Jobs honed his knackers in the school of looming foreclosure. You remember that don't you. They teach it in Meme Preservation 501, do they not, on cloud campus Courseratops? No wait, that's cross-listed with the graduate degree program. Perhaps you've yet to enroll.
I've never found terribly difficult to put the warts of the two big parties into one-to-one correspondence. Same warts, different wart hairs. Over the past decade or two, one especially large wart on the Republican side increasingly stands apart and alone: their raging mania to abolish the concept of non-partisan politics.
I listen to political podcasts which frequently point out an outstanding and effective tradition of non-partisanship among the Republican ranks during the 1960s and 1970s that has subsequently withered on the vine. I doubt their forebears would be proud of how the party has evolved on this particular issue.
When the Democrats are elected, there are many hard-core Republicans who increasingly refuse to concede their right to govern as the elected government, and who believe that obstructing every possible Democratic initiative is their gift to humanity. Actually, their gift to humanity would be allowing the elected government to actually govern, if you really believe in democracy after all.
At the time of Lincoln, few people identified themselves as Americans. If you asked a person on the street he would say "I'm a Virginian" especially if he was a Virginian.
Republicans are all Virginians these days. They aren't Americans. They're Republicans. There is either a Virginian in the White House, or they consider the country to be under the control of infidels to be resisted by any method permitted in love or warfare.
This is a tragic evolution of the American nation promulgated by traitors to the founding fathers.
Yes, absolutely, this is harder than it looks. Pay attention much? The problem is related to the phenomena of Decision fatigue.
Every time I go back to the Crap Store, my searches come up with applications I've already reviewed and rejected. Applications that in fact violate my express policy over which invasive permissions I'm willing to concede (let's not call it "grant") relative to the benefits derived.
Here's how it ought to work. Once I decide that messing with my address book is totally verboten, I should never again see an application listed in my app searches that requires this permission. I barely even know that such applications exist. The most I'll accept is "1520 search results screened out by your security profile".
People don't hold up well having to make the same decision day after day, week after week. Even if you succeed by force of will it's costing you a mental resource that could have be used instead to, for example, negotiate a better mortgage on your house or serve fewer years in prison.
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
My inability to define half the applications at the Crap Store by rote as candy-coated virii is a travesty of actualized self-determination.
"The technology" turns out to be called "asymmetric multilevel outphasing". No wonder the submission was too embarrassed to include this tidbit. Small problem, though. Nerds don't omit.
Empathy represses analytic thought, and vice versa
Even for nerds it turns out that dog paddling through life in the default network generates more discussion forum page views. Somewhere a kitten dies.
No it didn't. The electronics would show a picture when fed such a signal, but the phosphor wasn't adequate to show all the pixels. I had a monitor in 1991 which would take 1600x1200 interlaced. The displayed picture wasn't worth a damn *and* it gave you headaches. It worked best 768x1024. Yeah, I've *always* written rows x columns. Just yesterday I learned that the qubit value 1 represents boolean false. In small white text in the top corner of the David Deutsch lecture was written "Don't shoot me. It wasn't my idea." or something to that effect. First you need the idiot to get it wrong. Then you need all the idiots to follow along. It's 25x80 in text mode, then its magically 800x600 in graphics mode, with no change between portrait and landscape. The windowing layer might be x,y but for me the device specification is only ever rows,columns.
IIRC to display clear pixels on a CRT, the pixel needs to be about 30% larger than the rated dot pitch.
The real tragedy of 100 dpi displays is not whether they display decent small fonts, but whether they show decent small fonts at any desired size. They don't. Some sizes look good, some look horrific. Around the transition between single pixel strokes and double pixel strokes lies ugliness to a higher power.
Surprise, you thought right. Your thinking today, however, is a different matter. You do realize that it's impossible to discuss causal relationships in any meaningful way without projecting counterfactuals. Sometimes you have a projectable baseline, sometimes you don't. Many times the causes of things are a hazy guess. It's only regret that's 20-20.
The problem with the music industry's desire to claim every download as a "lost sale" is that there were a lot of download donkeys out there downloading every song on the planet just for the hell of it: adolescent hoarding behaviour to piss off The Man. Few of these people were prepared to pay $30 for a CD of any description, or a dollar a tune, or even a nickel.
I tend to keep a lot of my crappy photographs. It doesn't cost much to keep them around, and you never know if there might be something of value you don't realize until later. (Did we remember to rotate the tires? Oh hell, this old photo of the dog fetching a stick with the truck in the background tells me we didn't.) If a 1000 crappy photos cost me $5 a year to archive I'd probably dump the majority. Hoarding on the margin does not translate into giant revenue streams.
In the Mozilla situation, one might presume that anyone downloading Firefox as their initial default browser was at least going to give it a fair spin (this can be a short as two minutes, but probably averages at least an hour).
Unfortunately, given the proliferation of shovel-ware we can deduce that first encounters are sticky regardless of intrinsic worth or quality. In the real world we have special senses to determine when we've stepped in something we should scrape off our shoe at the first opportunity. On the net, people are forced to use their brains, with woefully uneven results. Ideally, people would gravitate to the best solution placing far less reliance on the first kiss, but that's not how most humans roll.
Slashdot has been drifting into the Betteridge bayou full speed ahead for some time now. If the story has no story, then the contributed commentary mainly consists of recycled navel lint. If any fool comes along who actually has something to say, it will drown in the din.
I think it was Bombeck who once had a quip that conversation consists of talking and preparing to talk. This is what happens on a conversation forum which begins knee deep in brackish backwash. If the story has no story, there's no reason to listen to any other contribution beyond identifying a suitable launch opportunity for a hasty rewording of your party line.
I mean, everyone loves the opportunity to burnish yesterday's tweet. Off-hand remarks don't come along every day. When you have one, why not use it again?
Dawkins is my least favorite of the four horsemen (Hitch later amended the number to five, citing another crusader I had not yet heard of). Dawkins just can't seem to downplay his innate astringency. He's the Jynnan Tonnyx at the end of creation, where Hitch is the Caife Gaelach. I prefer one drink more than the other, but in a pinch, I'd drink from either well.
Part of the problem is that he treats religious belief as a Gordian Knot to be severed with a brilliant sword stroke. The reality is that loosening the bonds by degrees often works better. He seems not to connect with people whose self-esteem is based on some other principle than subtracting falsehood. Persuasion often works better when you help people to move towards.
I personally despise the doctrine of original sin. It's a blatant attack on self-esteem. Dawkins seems mild as milk compared to the God these people defend.
Actually, no. Micro-architecture could continue to evolve without die shrinks (likely toward a proliferation of specialized units) and software could also evolve. Probably both for a decade or so, before the shrink stall becomes a fed stall. A feature of Moore's Law rarely expressed is that software lags architecture, and architecture lags die size.
I realized a long time ago that if I could gain a 50% speed increase by rewriting a critical application loop in assembly language, it generally wasn't worth the bother. The next processor architecture would mess up you clever clock-count calculations. The effort was almost always better invested in satisfying feature demand as PCs became more capable. Not only does the architectures improve, but so does the cleverness of your compiler (not including your hand-polished asm). If the software people actually knew that die shrinks were a thing of the past, it would make sense to be more aggressive in the choice of algorithms and execution regimes. They might even be well paid to indulge in premature optimizations postponed, since this would become the main avenue to sustaining performance gains.
There might be more pressure to bet on the right horse, which could thin the herd. Competence gradients tend to have this effect.
America is already short a trillion dollars of "special handouts" that could have been saved had "the heavy regulation of business" actually been in effect. After Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and J.P. Morgan all declare insolvency (we all agree on contract law) there would be "no anarchy to speak of" whatsoever as 60 million people are visited and calmed by Hayekian angels during their sugar-plum post-employment revenge fantasies.
In principle, I'm totally into Libertarianism. You go first.
Healthcare could be a hell of a lot cheaper if the government stayed the hell out of it and unsupervised free enterprise doesn't collude to roger the consumer over a barrel. If their original business model was regulatory capture, you think that will change because you cross out the government term? The government already does a rather poor job of enforcing its monopoly on collusion.
Nearly every business given its choice would source its inputs from a non-collusive market and sell into a collusive market. There's a huge business opportunity if you have the balls to break a non-collusive market, and buy up all the pieces. All of this leads to a decrease in business certainty within the business environment. This has no impact on business efficiency ...
In studies of corruption levels, societies where graft is consistent and predictable do fairly well, even if the graft is fairly significant. Economies where you have no way of knowing the magnitude of the next shakedown tend to spiral down the drain pipe. The worst economies want more government (which would help them become good economies) and the best economies want less government (which will help the wealthy retire to private islands) leaving the schmucks behind to execute effectively in a wild-west business environment. This goes well for a while.
You mean like The Beatles after Kurt Cobain? People under the age of 25 have this peculiar habit of assigning anything that's not the automatic topic of conversation to niche status. Such as the internal combustion engine in the era of alternative energy. Gasoline is pretty niche these days. And this is almost true: it will never again be the locus of the next big thing.
When do you think they'll ship their last unit? When do you think you'll next walk into your local Walmart, and not a single item in the store was shipped from China in a cargo ship powered by this engine, or its near relatives? When do you think that most of what you find if your local Walmart was not transported by such an engine? But if your Mercedes SUV no longer sports an internal combustion engine, then I guess internal combustion is niche.
When do you think that mobile application development will be 90% self-hosted? Ever? Pretty soon we'll grow our first pate de foie gras in a yeast vat, and the year after someone on Slashdot will describe the livestock industry as "niche", while "70% of agricultural land and 30% of the global land area" are still used for livestock production and dimpled by cloven hoof prints.
One could also describe earthworms as "niche", if one means by niche so super important that humanity itself is the afterthought in this equation. To describe generalists and their draught horses as "niche" buggers the word so badly its rectum flops out. Niche is not the antonym to lemming predilections.
This won't impress the Babylonians until we get to 60 + 17.
The old 80386 based on the "complex" x86 instruction set had 275,000 transistors. Intel is now making chips with 2.6 billion transistors and somehow what they once implemented as one functional unit within a budget of 0.000275 billion transistors is holding them back?
Certainly they would rather do a few things differently had they been worried about 2013 back in 1978. Transistor count is the least of the matter. What buggers up x86 is the number of active transistors handling the instruction stream at each instruction cycle. There's no way to align variable-length instructions without active transistors (regardless of whether the transistors involved amount to a wart on a small toe of a juvenile mosquito).
The x86 story bugs the hell out of me. Considered how well it actually held up for 45 years (and counting) it's one of the ugly duckling success stories of all time (hint: it wasn't so ugly after all).
It was also a founding member of the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. I'm concerned his posthumous aura will continue to glow with the uplift of falsehood. He should be credited more for what he accomplished than the lies he polished to get there.
It wasn't just Steve, it was the entire RISC consortium manufacturing an Achilles heel out of whole cloth. Far closer to the truth of the matter is that x86 has a much higher design cost than an orthogonal clean-sheet alternative. The design cost was a small multiple. Intel's resources were a large multiple. It didn't go well for RISC. The much vaunted DEC Alpha had a metal connect layer for single-cycle carry-add propagation that forever segregated it from the mass-consumer price point. It was the instruction set. No, it was the instruction set aided by a titanium stent.
Also, the RISC design advantage does not extend to the memory cache and system bus design. These are a bear to design well for any instruction set. The RISC people moaned about the exceptional Pentium Pro performance level on server workloads (it was the first memory bus from Intel that didn't totally suck). Well, Intel broke into the server market with their crappy old x86 instruction set by grafting it onto a titanium alloy cache hierarchy and bus controller (with multiple dies grafted into the same chip package at enormous expense). Cache latency and branch prediction absolutely dwarf instruction set as the big thing to worry about since around this time. If Steve hadn't grabbed onto the inferiority of CISC around this time, it might have died a timely death.
In low power applications, ARM has a real advantage, enough to win a huge market share at race-to-the-bottom price points. How much does the cost of a CPU influence a handset? How much everything else? I've put $300 Intel CPUs in $2000 boxes. I've put $250 Intel CPUs in $1000 boxes. I've put $60 CPUs in $500 boxes. A $16 CPU in a phone that retails for $600 for just a few months, before landing in the discount bin? I'm sure Intel wants a huge slice of that.
One reason Intel has held their ground is that the Cortex-A15 (out-of-order superscalar multiprocessor) is starting to look a lot like the old Pentium Pro. Sure the instruction set is modern and clean (though it took ARM surprisingly long to come up with the mixed 16/32 bit instruction encoding format due to misguided ideological purity; how many active transistors does it take to determine whether the next 32 bit chunk from the instruction stream is one lump or two? More or less than the number of active transistors in the icache devoted to storing common instructions bloated to 32 bits just because?). But all the rest of the issues are pretty much the same: branch prediction stalls, cache snooping, and memory path latency.
From Intel's perspective, an ugly instruction set is good for business. (Then they went on a jag thinking that if ugly is good, atrocious is better, and the Itanium was hatched with a jackhammer from a mastodon egg.)
After another three die shrinks, when half the processor implements on-demand power management, and most of the other half provides task-specialized execution units, is the instruction set going to matter a hill of beans for anything other than legacy lock-in?
For as long as I've known the game, in the playoffs, the game continues until a winner is achieved through normal game play. By 3OT deep into the second round, it's more about survival than winning. That's why the diehards persist in their love of the sport.
Only the regular season (so far) was goat ****ed by network television to violate the principle of zero-sumness. NHL head office is working hard (when they work at all) to make the game more of crap shoot. They don't want a never-ending succession of dynasties and threepeats. They want every franchise (good or bad--excepting Toronto) to have a shot at the cup every year. The problem with rewarding talent is that your loser franchises go bankrupt. Eventually every sport goes kayfabe if there's enough money involved. Cycling, wrestling, boxing, sumo, college football, the list goes on.
If Cinderella's coach was going to turn into a pumpkin, it would surely have already happened before the clock struck twelve.
You're suggesting that at the exact moment when it becomes effective to do so, all the Google data centers turn into immersive pumpkins, so the non-existence of such is a perfect correlate with its viability, since any friction around the decision is inconceivable.
What did you make of the Vizzini scene in Princess Bride? Any clues, or are you still struggling?
Slashdot is rapidly becoming the eternal September of "Dog Bites Man". Read any story submission. Does it continue to explain how emotional outrage of the moment is any different today than yesterday?
Why yes, it does, and it's a catastrophe: there hasn't been 600 slashdot comments extactly the same as last week's posted since midnight.