Does the phrase "Ownership Society" mean anything to you? Look it up on Google.
Much of the current problems stem from the fact that, in the absence of any effective regulation, it was possible to create financial instruments that could be used to sell mortgage investments to third parties as absolutely safe AAA rated securities when many of the mortgages were issued to people who could not possibly afford them.
And who were the people who were consistently against regulation and, working from positions of power, did their level best to dismantle existing regulations and undermine the enforcement of any that remained?
The fact that large herbivorous dinosaurs, such as Triceratops, developed significant defensive capabilities suggests that large predators existed and were important.
There is more to this than meets the eye. Most modern processors are set up to run at a fixed multiple of the memory bus speed. If you are trying to squeeze extra performance out of your system by overclocking the cpu, you are also overclocking your memory. A popular strategy for building a system that is fast and cheap is to buy a value processor with a good reputation for overclockability. However, one risk is that you may find that your overclock is severely limited by the speed that the memory will operate reliably at. Consequently, to improve your odds, you might spring for "premium" memory that is reported to also be highly overclockable. In this case, a niche market memory manufacturer can benefit a great deal from some positive reviews on hardware web sites for their supposedly premium memory.
Your claims of resistance in postwar Germany and Japan are bogus.
Also, the motivation for resistance would be pretty weak - after all the US occupation forces were the only thing holding the Russians back.
Actually, the motivation for multicore processors is to reduce power consumption, or at least to limit the growth in processor power consumption that has been seen in the last decade. Intel's plans to introuced P4s with clock rates of 4 GHz and higher foundered, in large part, on the greatly increased power consumption that was required. The idea of the dual and multi-core processors is that a relatively small sacrifice in the clock speed for an individual core can result in a large reduction in power consumption. This results from the reduction in operating voltage that is possible at the slightly reduced clock rate and the additional reductions are possible if the deaign of the core is optimized for the lower clock rate. With the reduced power consumption, the performance gain of using two or more cores more than offsets the loss in performance that would have resulted from the lower clock rate.
The Walkman style players depended on technical innovations such as high efficiency electric motors for the tape drive mechanism. The simple repackaging of an old style cassette player without the loudspeaker into a Walkman sized player would not have produced a viable product because the battery life and/or size would have been unacceptable. The development of the Walkman involved a great deal of skillful and innovative engineering work involving a host of design trade-offs. The breakthrough wasn't just a case of someone in marketting coming up with an idea along the lines of "lets make a really portable music player".
We are really talking about a variation of a existing products whose only reason for not existing is that they aren't feasible to make because the technology needed to implement them doesn exist. I fail to see how this amounts to any kind of real contribution.
To develop complex systems, there is no substitute for having adequate resources. When you are forced to do things on the cheap, you will inevitably end up cutting corners.
Electric heating is not efficient if you examine the problem from a systems perspective. There are substantial inefficiencies in generating the electricity (by converting heat to mechanical energy and then converting the mechanical energy to electricity) and, to a lesser extent, in distributing it. For a given amount of electricity, you will only get a fraction of the heat that was used to generate it.
Actually, I 've heard something quite different. That is, studies of the Hiroshima survivors understated the effect of radiation because they were using a control group from an area close enough to be significantly affected by fallout.
Nuclear energy plants are costly and time consuming to construct. Furthermore,there is the cost of the distributing the hydrogen. It's a panacea to think that the hydrogen economy will allow the extravagant usage of energy to continue as if nothing has changed.
Realistically, the days of large and heavy vehicles powered by engines of >200 hp (such as typical SUVs) are numbered.
Re:It's a standard part of the evolutionary curve
on
The Paradox of Choice
·
· Score: 1
There is much truth in these comments. To give a few examples, when the IBM PC came out, there were aready numerous different personal computers available, most of which were not compatible ith each other. The IBM PC became the standard not because it was better than the others, but because it was a safe choice. There was a arge well respected company behiind it, and you had a reasonable expectation that you would be able to get useful software (apparently, many of the other machines were developed with software as an afterthought).
There are positive feedback mechanisms involved in this evolution. Once an OS is accepted as a widely used standard, people will develop software for it, further reinforcing its position in the marketplace.
Generally, with technologies where there are economies of scale (manufacturing of cars, microchips, computers software,...), the natural evolution is for the vendors with marginal market presence to leave the market or be absorbed by their competitors, especially during economic downturns. This happened with automobiles and aircraft; in the first decades there was an amazingly large number of manufacturers who sought success, most of whom are now pretty much forgotten. There are only a relatively few large scale automobile and aircraft manufacturers, and those that do exist avoid unnecessary duplication. For example, GM is dropping the Oldsmobile line (which targeted pretty much the same niche as Buick) and, like others, now uses the same basic family of engines across its various product lines (it used to be that each product line had its own engines, some of which were even identical in size and configuration (such as the Chev and Olds 350 ci V8 engines), but different in detailed design).
You are missing the point. Broadband access is urgently required infrastructure for the Telescreens. We are over 20 years behind schedule - they were supposed to be ready by 1984!!! And the current financial stringency in the Dept. of Homeland Security, is needed to free up funds for the Telescreeens and the contractors who will monitor them.
One of the wonderful things about the old Bell Labs was that it was really a quasi-public research organization where there wasn't the pressure to focus on incremental development or play Intellectual Property games. The transistor was licenced on nominal terms (i.e., they didn't put out submarine patents and lie in wait for victims to sue). Another example, the Bell Systems Technical Journal, was a first rate research publication. Papers in this journal contributed immensely to the understanding of areas such as information theory and signal processing. One of the things that made for good R&D was that Bell could afford to do fundamental R&D on a scale that meant that multiple paths could be followed, with researchers benefiting from each others work. Also, Bell had problems and application requirements that were good starting points for further exploration.
Unfortunately, even universities are being adversely affected by recent trends. They are now falling into the IP games tar pit and succumbing to the lure of doing short term incremental R&D for a few dollars. Furthermore, open literature technical publications are, to an increasing extent, being devalued by the need to strain material to fit a propaganda mold (i.e., fullfill marketting purposes) and/or the authors withholding information needed to properly understand and/or assess the work (i.e., protection of IP).
I think the point is that an inventor should attempt to at least market his invention to someone who can implement it rather than simply lying low in ambush waiting for someone else to market soemthing vaguely similar.
This fits with my corollary to Murphy's Law - the more important the matter to be decided, the less information will be used to make it. In the limit, for matters of extreme importance, large amounts of disinformation (i.e., negative information) are used.
You are talking about a natural monopoly - nobody is going to build a second set of power lines to deliver power to your house. Also, the networks are all interconnected - as actually happened, a failing network can (and will) pull the others down.
So, even if you are willing to pay more for higher reliability, you don't have that option (short of moving/emigrating).
Actually Microsoft has gotten away with quite a few things, though perhaps not quite involving the destruction of hardware:
-when W2K was introduced, many users found that, after upgrading existing computers with it; their scanners, modems and other peripherals wouldn't work (and in some cases the manufacturers never did release new drivers)
-when media player 7 was introduced, some limited CD writing software from Adaptec/Roxio was included. If you just happened to have Easy CD Creator 3.5 running under Windows 2K, you wound up doing a reinstall of the OS. Roxio denied liability on the grounds that, if you had Easy CD Creator 3.5 running on Windows 2K, you were using a patch (originally from them) that had been withdrawn on the release of the next version and it was your fault for not upgrading. Microsoft, for its part never accepted any blame.
Incidentally, you could stop the Media Player 7 installer from installing the CDRW component, but you had to be very dilligent about this. Every few weeks it seemed, you would be prompted if you wanted an update and if you agreed, it would try to install the CRDW sw component even if you didn't have a CDRW.
By this logic Afghanistan under the Taliban or Iraq under Saddam must have been wonderful democracies. With all those guns and other weapons around, surely a despotic regime couldn't possibly have lasted in either country.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the phrase "Ownership Society" mean anything to you? Look it up on Google. Much of the current problems stem from the fact that, in the absence of any effective regulation, it was possible to create financial instruments that could be used to sell mortgage investments to third parties as absolutely safe AAA rated securities when many of the mortgages were issued to people who could not possibly afford them. And who were the people who were consistently against regulation and, working from positions of power, did their level best to dismantle existing regulations and undermine the enforcement of any that remained?
Actually, assuming the altitude is referenced to sea level, the figure would be slightly higher over Death valley.
This is a serious insult. I'm sure that the former Iraqi Minister of Information will greatly resent being associated with SCO.
Actually, Ford had a major fight with an early (and successful) patent troll.
http://www.bpmlegal.com/wselden.html
The fact that large herbivorous dinosaurs, such as Triceratops, developed significant defensive capabilities suggests that large predators existed and were important.
There is more to this than meets the eye. Most modern processors are set up to run at a fixed multiple of the memory bus speed. If you are trying to squeeze extra performance out of your system by overclocking the cpu, you are also overclocking your memory. A popular strategy for building a system that is fast and cheap is to buy a value processor with a good reputation for overclockability. However, one risk is that you may find that your overclock is severely limited by the speed that the memory will operate reliably at. Consequently, to improve your odds, you might spring for "premium" memory that is reported to also be highly overclockable. In this case, a niche market memory manufacturer can benefit a great deal from some positive reviews on hardware web sites for their supposedly premium memory.
Your claims of resistance in postwar Germany and Japan are bogus. Also, the motivation for resistance would be pretty weak - after all the US occupation forces were the only thing holding the Russians back.
Actually, the motivation for multicore processors is to reduce power consumption, or at least to limit the growth in processor power consumption that has been seen in the last decade. Intel's plans to introuced P4s with clock rates of 4 GHz and higher foundered, in large part, on the greatly increased power consumption that was required. The idea of the dual and multi-core processors is that a relatively small sacrifice in the clock speed for an individual core can result in a large reduction in power consumption. This results from the reduction in operating voltage that is possible at the slightly reduced clock rate and the additional reductions are possible if the deaign of the core is optimized for the lower clock rate. With the reduced power consumption, the performance gain of using two or more cores more than offsets the loss in performance that would have resulted from the lower clock rate.
The Walkman style players depended on technical innovations such as high efficiency electric motors for the tape drive mechanism. The simple repackaging of an old style cassette player without the loudspeaker into a Walkman sized player would not have produced a viable product because the battery life and/or size would have been unacceptable. The development of the Walkman involved a great deal of skillful and innovative engineering work involving a host of design trade-offs. The breakthrough wasn't just a case of someone in marketting coming up with an idea along the lines of "lets make a really portable music player".
We are really talking about a variation of a existing products whose only reason for not existing is that they aren't feasible to make because the technology needed to implement them doesn exist. I fail to see how this amounts to any kind of real contribution.
To develop complex systems, there is no substitute for having adequate resources. When you are forced to do things on the cheap, you will inevitably end up cutting corners.
Electric heating is not efficient if you examine the problem from a systems perspective. There are substantial inefficiencies in generating the electricity (by converting heat to mechanical energy and then converting the mechanical energy to electricity) and, to a lesser extent, in distributing it. For a given amount of electricity, you will only get a fraction of the heat that was used to generate it.
Also, it will solve the problem of Florida election irregularities.
Actually, I 've heard something quite different. That is, studies of the Hiroshima survivors understated the effect of radiation because they were using a control group from an area close enough to be significantly affected by fallout.
Nuclear energy plants are costly and time consuming to construct. Furthermore,there is the cost of the distributing the hydrogen. It's a panacea to think that the hydrogen economy will allow the extravagant usage of energy to continue as if nothing has changed. Realistically, the days of large and heavy vehicles powered by engines of >200 hp (such as typical SUVs) are numbered.
There is much truth in these comments. To give a few examples, when the IBM PC came out, there were aready numerous different personal computers available, most of which were not compatible ith each other. The IBM PC became the standard not because it was better than the others, but because it was a safe choice. There was a arge well respected company behiind it, and you had a reasonable expectation that you would be able to get useful software (apparently, many of the other machines were developed with software as an afterthought). There are positive feedback mechanisms involved in this evolution. Once an OS is accepted as a widely used standard, people will develop software for it, further reinforcing its position in the marketplace. Generally, with technologies where there are economies of scale (manufacturing of cars, microchips, computers software, ...), the natural evolution is for the vendors with marginal market presence to leave the market or be absorbed by their competitors, especially during economic downturns. This happened with automobiles and aircraft; in the first decades there was an amazingly large number of manufacturers who sought success, most of whom are now pretty much forgotten. There are only a relatively few large scale automobile and aircraft manufacturers, and those that do exist avoid unnecessary duplication. For example, GM is dropping the Oldsmobile line (which targeted pretty much the same niche as Buick) and, like others, now uses the same basic family of engines across its various product lines (it used to be that each product line had its own engines, some of which were even identical in size and configuration (such as the Chev and Olds 350 ci V8 engines), but different in detailed design).
You are missing the point. Broadband access is urgently required infrastructure for the Telescreens. We are over 20 years behind schedule - they were supposed to be ready by 1984!!! And the current financial stringency in the Dept. of Homeland Security, is needed to free up funds for the Telescreeens and the contractors who will monitor them.
One of the wonderful things about the old Bell Labs was that it was really a quasi-public research organization where there wasn't the pressure to focus on incremental development or play Intellectual Property games. The transistor was licenced on nominal terms (i.e., they didn't put out submarine patents and lie in wait for victims to sue). Another example, the Bell Systems Technical Journal, was a first rate research publication. Papers in this journal contributed immensely to the understanding of areas such as information theory and signal processing. One of the things that made for good R&D was that Bell could afford to do fundamental R&D on a scale that meant that multiple paths could be followed, with researchers benefiting from each others work. Also, Bell had problems and application requirements that were good starting points for further exploration. Unfortunately, even universities are being adversely affected by recent trends. They are now falling into the IP games tar pit and succumbing to the lure of doing short term incremental R&D for a few dollars. Furthermore, open literature technical publications are, to an increasing extent, being devalued by the need to strain material to fit a propaganda mold (i.e., fullfill marketting purposes) and/or the authors withholding information needed to properly understand and/or assess the work (i.e., protection of IP).
I think the point is that an inventor should attempt to at least market his invention to someone who can implement it rather than simply lying low in ambush waiting for someone else to market soemthing vaguely similar.
This fits with my corollary to Murphy's Law - the more important the matter to be decided, the less information will be used to make it. In the limit, for matters of extreme importance, large amounts of disinformation (i.e., negative information) are used.
You are talking about a natural monopoly - nobody is going to build a second set of power lines to deliver power to your house. Also, the networks are all interconnected - as actually happened, a failing network can (and will) pull the others down. So, even if you are willing to pay more for higher reliability, you don't have that option (short of moving/emigrating).
Actually Microsoft has gotten away with quite a few things, though perhaps not quite involving the destruction of hardware: -when W2K was introduced, many users found that, after upgrading existing computers with it; their scanners, modems and other peripherals wouldn't work (and in some cases the manufacturers never did release new drivers) -when media player 7 was introduced, some limited CD writing software from Adaptec/Roxio was included. If you just happened to have Easy CD Creator 3.5 running under Windows 2K, you wound up doing a reinstall of the OS. Roxio denied liability on the grounds that, if you had Easy CD Creator 3.5 running on Windows 2K, you were using a patch (originally from them) that had been withdrawn on the release of the next version and it was your fault for not upgrading. Microsoft, for its part never accepted any blame. Incidentally, you could stop the Media Player 7 installer from installing the CDRW component, but you had to be very dilligent about this. Every few weeks it seemed, you would be prompted if you wanted an update and if you agreed, it would try to install the CRDW sw component even if you didn't have a CDRW.
By this logic Afghanistan under the Taliban or Iraq under Saddam must have been wonderful democracies. With all those guns and other weapons around, surely a despotic regime couldn't possibly have lasted in either country.