One other thing, when our gradual rewrites of old code reach the point where everything is fully expressed as objects, then the burden of rewrites and maintenance should be drastically reduced forever after. Isn't that the promise of objects? Expandability? Adaptability? Any large application well founded on objects should be able to morph itself into any future application one little bit at a time.
The answer is "No, for all practical purposes". The most widely-used OOP languages are not much more than structs-with-function-pointers with some syntactic sugar on top. May as well just use C and pass function pointers around like the Linux kernel does. The "real" OOP languages are not as widely deployed as Java or C++, and the skillset is definitely not everywhere. Furthermore, OOP solutions work well when systems can be thought of that way, and not all systems should be.
The real "problem" is that spaghetti code to cover the corner cases must creep in over a product's lifetime, and the knowledge about how (and when) to refactor that code is dependent on experience with the system the code is tied to.
But I'll bite: how do you specify that a measurement falls between 2.2ml and 2.4ml using significant figures?
The answer is you use the right instrument for the job. When you report 2.3 you know that it's 2.3 +- 0.01 and you report it as 2.3 . If you're being generous you can report 2.32 so that others can reduce their own roundoff errors. If you used a 0.1mL instrument and needed 0.1mL accuracy, you made a mistake.
In your example, I would report 2.3 . It's exactly what you said: 2.3 +- 0.1 .
Sigs figs are a moron's answer to the problem of representing precision, and they do nothing but create confusion and introduce unnecessary round-off error.
What the hell are you talking about? Significant figures "introduce" round-off error? Please, round-off error comes from the lack of digits (base 2 or otherwise) to represent abstract mathematical entities in real hardware. Significant figures are just one way to stay within the precision error bar.
And they are trivial to use, and make a lot of real-world sense, as in "one can't realistically measure the volume of a drop of water by looking at the change in height of local sea level and measuring it with a tape measure, no matter what base your numbers are in or how many digits your calculator can display; your measuring tool is not accurate enough to see the difference".
Take a numerical analysis course, please. Your equations will thank you.
Yeah, I've already taken two of those from two different majors. How about you take a CompSci Computer Organization course (or whatever it's called now, where you "create" a microprocessor with ALU) and get used to doing base-n floating point by hand.
What lead you to believe that the numbers supplied (10000000 & 0.00000001) were not accurate to the supplied number of digits?
The missing decimal point on the first operand is a big clue. "100" is not the same as "100." . In the real world, the missing decimal point turns 10000000 into "1 x 10^8" . And when someone starts talking about calculators, every number turns into a real-world number, even for those that use BCD representation internally.
Open any of the handbooks of physical properties such as those from CRC Press and you'll see entries like "323400", "323400.", and "3230000" where the insignificant digits are in a different typeface like "32300oo" .
Your reasoning sounds like either a know it all student or a bucket chemist:)
Graduate-level engineering student who knows the difference between "10", "1.0 x 10^1" and "10.0". Not to belabor the point, it just irritated me. I expect even mathematicians to know that once you start punching digits into a keyboard you're in real numbers land.
No, the correct answer is 10000000. Each term has only one significant figure, so after truncating to the correct precision you get the calculator's displayed answer. Although many calculators will have the inaccurate figure (10000000.00000001) rounded to the nearest base-2 floating point in memory and a long-enough fixed-point format will display it.
Now, if you had said 10000000.00000000 + 0.00000001, then the correct answer would indeed be 10000000.00000001.
Does anyone still use a vt100 as their primary computer, except to prove a point? No. No, they do not.
*ahem* See http://vt100.net/ . Or comp.terminals . Plenty of people still use VT100's and their successors.
And other people (like me) still write terminal emulators that have to behave like VT100's, or things like TradeWars 2002 won't work right.
^H and ^W were used on Usenet long before Linux was around. In fact, one can say that Linux is the odd man out in the Unix-like world with it's insistence that backspace means DEL (0x7F, ^?) rather than BACKSPACE (0x08, ^H).
I can't ignore quark theory when doing atomic physics work and retain my credibility anymore than I can claim "god says X so do Y" while ignoring parts of the Bible or the Koran or the Popol-Vuh I happen to dislike. I mean - do you people see the problem with this at all?
Different domains entirely.
Religions mostly assume that a spiritual force is present in the universe, is sometimes directly palpable (but not testably so), and is definitely beyond full human comprehension. The religious texts are snapshots in history of the words of people who claim to be close to this force, and are useful as guides to get in tune with it. But they are not the only path to that force. Many Christians I know say that they directly experience the presence of Jesus or God in helping them understand their lives and make decisions, and they liken the Bible as a letter from Jesus and God that was downsampled from HDTV and mixed in with the daily news: history, political propaganda, metaphor, message, and message interpretation. Much like the black magic books of Raistlin from Dragonlance, there is an outside "key" to understanding the Bible: living your life and gaining experience.
Perhaps I'm not explaining it well, I know it sounds like hand-wavy "you have to be religious to get it" crap. But spirituality is not testable, and you can't put logical clauses together to derive immutable conclusions. That kind of thing I leave to philosophy, where logic is an appropriate tool to develop an ironclad moral code. Religion (for me anyway) doesn't set out to "prove" the whats and wherefores and such of where we come from and what we should do about it. One can't really take any one of the main religious texts and run an analysis on it to figure out what it says and then discard the text that doesn't belong (even though most denominations try to do just that).
America is simply doing what it always does, going through the motions of trying to find a balance of values that appeals to its people. Those values may not be your values, but they're really no different than ever. It's a balance that can never truly be attained, though, so you will see things shift back and forth periodically. We are just at the extreme edge of one of those shifts right now, but from a historical viewpoint I really don't see that this is anything unusual.
I think you're wrong, and I cite a much older source than you: Scott Nearing, author of _The Making of a Radical_ (1972). Nearing was born in 1883 and says in his autobiography that before WWI hundreds of thousands of Americans were keenly interested in the political debates shaping the country, especially during the unionization drives and the Soviet revolution. With the advent of radio, television, and print mass media however Nearing says that public opinion swung hard right and stayed there ever since, and that community interest in politics evaporated with the new post-WWII economy. (Nearing didn't live to see the post-Reagan era, but if he had he would probably have compared it to Hitler in the 1930's but without the cultural will for world domination. Americans are still fundamentally insular.) In the 1920's people were seriously thinking about massive welfare programs and direct wealth redistribution (Robin Hood schemes), and were even willing to redo the Constitution. Hell even Nixon was going to institute national health care. But we are so far to the right these days that Nixon would be unelectable for either party.
I think the pendulum was shoved rightwards around 1910 with the rise of radio, recovered about halfway back in the 1960's, and then went even further right. I think consolidated mass media combined with some unforseen physiological effects of television watching made this possible, and the only way to break it is to reduce the amount of television people watch regularly, and since that is unlikely to happen we're going to slide down and stay there for a few hundred years.
What he's saying is that kids can easily type "http://1.2.3.4" and reach the same place as "http://hugeyams.com". The only way to prevent that is to see if there is a DNS record linking 1.2.3.4 to hugeyams.com and putting up a denial messagebox if so.
But this breaks for four main reasons:
1) DNS names can map to one or many IP addresses. "hugeyams.com" might be a server farm, or a mapping that changes every night. The mapping isn't 1-to-1, it isn't constant, and you can't rely on your information being current with broken caching servers out there.
2) "1.2.3.4" could be a single server hosting thousands of "separate sites" including hugeyams.com and aclu.org. Block one and seriously violate the constitutionally-protected speech of the other (political speech trumps all other speech).
3) A huge number of IP addresses do not have the right DNS name mappings (PTR to CNAME records in the in-addr.arpa domain), or they may have no PTR record at all. ('Net history: at one time the only incentive at all to fix this was to get access to the download site for the 128-bit encryption version of Netscape.) Getting 100% of the 'Net admins to maintain PTR records is practically impossible.
4) Even if a PTR record exists, the web site owner has no control of it, the ISP of their hosting company does. What you (as a porn operator) pay $50/year to call "hugeyams.com" they might call "39876fb-box55-eth1.sf.us.bigassisp.net" .
So even if ".xxx" is adopted as a TLD it can be trivially bypassed by disregarding DNS, and forcing everyone to use DNS is practically impossible and could break lots of other low-level things too.
It seems to me as if the "future" is waiting for another kick, the sort of boot-in-the-pants that we saw twice in the last century. Right now, it's stuck. There are a lot of real Buck Rogers-style things that could be going on if only people seriously thought they were possible, if only there was a spark that could get us up and moving again. But that's not going to happen on its own, we need to figure out how to move again.
I for one don't want a Buck Rogers-style future. Or Blade Runner, or Star Trek (except for the cheap economy part). I'd be happy with two acres of land and plenty of time to myself to grow things on it that taste like real food. A space station would be "nice", but I'd rather have a sane economic system and liberty and justice for all (not just rich white Westerners and their puppets).
I used to read sci-fi. LOTS of it. Then history, then current events, then some 19th-Century lit, then sociology and anthropology. Sci-fi is small potatoes compared to the real world. I used to think something like this: "Things are generally OK and just need small changes. Life isn't fair, but with enough hard work one can make up for circumstances of birth. Racism is mostly over with now; war is bad but can usually be avoided; time is steadily fixing the problems we inherited. People are generally good and only disagree because they don't know all the facts." In the world of Gordon Dickson's _The Final Encyclopedia_, I imagined myself on the side of Hal Mayne: we need to get out there and keep expanding, warts and all.
Now I'm James Child-of-God. The world hasn't changed significantly since the Dark Ages except in dress. People are generally good, but they disagree for real reasons that can't just be glossed over with rationalization. The economy has divided wealth more than it has created it, and we are much further from a world where technology could be used to provide the fundamentals to everyone. With one small wave of the hand the injustices that fund our lifestyle (foreign sweatshops, rigged money markets, the petrodollar, exploited immigrant laborers) become some other country's mismanaged economy.
Back to point: we've had plenty of technological advance but precious little improvement socially for dealing with a finite Earth carrying billions of people who disagree for fine reasons of their own. It's time for a breather and a slower pace of change. We need to spread the knowledge around and give it time to subvert our existing institutions (which still date from the colonial mindset). It isn't "waa waa poor people need love too" whining but acknowledgement of human social contraints. Every civilization needs its resting times, and this feels like ours to me.
We'll get back to space eventually, but I'm not all that disappointed that I'll miss it.
Of course, speaking of the Boomers, I fear that my generation (I'm 28) might be one of those unlucky historical examples of one which didn't get to do jack shit because they were so busy catering to the needs of their wealthy elders while trying to patch up the disasterous debts they left us.
That's been true of most generations. I think we feel it more because we're disconnected from our neighbors too much on a personal level yet tied together globally at an abstract level. We are exposed more to the sordid state of affairs via television and Internet, yet we can't integrate with our neighbors and create our own safe zones. The unsocial loner used to be weird, now it's all of us. So we feel burdened more.
But I don't hate my elders too much for it. They were manipulated too, yet they rose up once and changed a lot. We've still got plenty to do that can make a fun life for ourselves.
Is it just me, or does anyone else not care to remember BBSes? I ran several in my day, and the internet does everything they do, better.
Half and half. I loved the client-side part of it enough to clone Qmodem 4.x and use it all the time at work. (I work with buoys running an embedded Linux on PC/104 hardware.) I think for interactive text-mode stuff BBSes were more advanced than the current Internet. For example, transferring files across multiple firewalls that you can ssh through is hard without Zmodem or Kermit -- see Sourceforge for a number of zmodem-over-ssh solutions for that. Also, at low speeds (less than 14.4k) BBSes ruled. And the community aspects were nice.
OTOH I like Usenet a lot more than Fidonet because of its coverage and depth -- Google groups goes a long way in finding fixes for obscure technical problems. The community-ish WWW sites (LiveJournal, MySpace, Match.com, etc.) are a lot better at getting people connected than BBSes, and eBay, Amazon, and Wikipedia rock.
(God do I miss tradewars though).
I'm still playing:) Find yourself one of the many telnet'able BBSes and join a game. You'd be surprised how much better 3.x is over TW 2.09g, and the newer helpers are amazing (but I still play manually).
The point of the boom of the 90's was the opportunities were there for those with the desire to become skilled. In many skilled sectors wages did in fact go up in response to the limited labor pool.
Disagree on two main counts. First: For the unskilled who were long past high school the opportunities weren't there, so training wasn't an option. A couple anecdotes: a mother of three who was trained in computers and had a good job for MCI until the dot-bomb, after which she lost everything with the mass layoffs all around her; a father of two who kept upgrading his skills (from printer repair to computer training consulting to business owner) who nonetheless lost his business and found his technical certs worthless. We can't just wave our hands and say "train for better jobs!" when the existing jobs run out.
Second: More importantly, the economy of the 90's depended largely on our abusing cheap labor to make our goods. We cannot talk about the West's prosperity without including the sweatshops doing our dirty work for essentially "free". Where is the tide that lifts the boats in Malaysia, Indonesia, Honduras, China, etc.? They are now integral parts of our economy but reap far less benefit from it.
My main point is that at the height of mercantilist power we still have huge portions of society living in relative poverty. The only nations that seem to do better either implement significant wealth redistribution schemes or have populations so small that most can get by on the natural resources around them. We've not yet figured out how to make the mercantilist system provide improved life for all, which was the original point of allowing businesses leave to compete with each other (Adam Smith).
Poor people are not necessarily lazy. Some just do not understand the options available. We should increase job training availability, provide workforce experience.
I've been hearing about the glorious market economy that will lift all boats, and my books talk about it from over three hundred years ago, yet I fail to see it anywhere. Our technology has improved, yes; certain slices of Western society benefit, yes; but the price paid by the rest of the world offsets this.
But let's pretend that only our own economy counts. Suppose everyone is fully trained: where will the jobs come from to employ us all? We obviously can't just all sell beads to each other or be musicians. Will major employers ever on their own decide to re-invest their profits into salary increases to stimulate the economy further?
But there also is a significant portion who are just not motivated.
What is *wrong* about lack of motivation, or having *zero* ambition? (Besides that they starve of course.)
If they choose not to gain meaningful skills, then yes, they only have themselves to blame. Unskilled labor has less economic value than skilled labor. They contribute less to the overall economy, and therefore should expect less. You don't need a degree to be skilled, become an electrician, welder, gain some sort of skill that makes you a greater contributor and therefore more desirable for employment.
Ah I think I see now:
1. All people need XYZ to live. 2. We can give all people XYZ at minor cost to people thanks to technology. 3. If people have XYZ, they will want ABC. 4. ABC costs a lot, and can't be delivered to all people. 5. Therefore we should give no one XYZ.
Is that about it? Because my response is this:
5. We give all people XYZ and retain the economy of all-things-not-XYZ so that people can compete and earn more to achieve ABC. 6. Some people will be happy with XYZ. Some will want ABC. We let the future sort it out. 7....because we will eventually reach a point where XYZ is essentially free but only a few people can afford ABC at all.
You're still stuck in the Econ 101 supply-and-demand mentality: someone out there has to hire you or you starve
the funding is divided along racial lines (the 'poor black school' vs the 'rich white school')
Not so much racial but economic lines. It's not rich white school vs poor black school.
Speak for AZ only. In my home town in Texas, the same school district with two high schools spent $1.4 million more (on teacher salaries and extracurricular activities) at the white high school than the black-and-hispanic school. Raleigh, North Carolina: same thing. New York city: same thing.
Most importantly, the problems with the public school system are that the economy is not strong enough to employ high school graduates at a living wage (forcing them to choose between college or dropping out to the underclass)
That's a cop-out, since the same problems existed in the booming economy of the 90's.
The "booming economy of the 90's" wasn't a boom to the 50% of the country we call "unskilled" workers. "Full employment" wasn't: wages at the bottom didn't go up in response to a limited labor supply. We have *never* had an economy capable of employing the majority of unskilled labor at a living wage. Even the heyday of unions didn't do it.
They should be learning meaningful skills and getting workforce experience, preparing them for life.
Right, let's skip on to what you're really saying: "poor people are lazy, they wasted their time in school and can only blame themselves for not having good jobs".
Of course, there is another solution to Social Security: drop our insistence on the work ethic and give everyone in the country enough money to purchase food and basic housing, and keep that Basic Income Guarantee (Google the BIG idea if you wish) adjusted for the cost of those items.
Great, so increase the burden on those willing to work; add to that wage inflation, since why would I work unless I get more money than sitting at home? Of course maybe you can't get a job because offshoring has become even more attractive given the high labor costs and taxes. Crime won't go away, people will have the basic necessities, but still will want luxuries.
You're still stuck in the Econ 101 supply-and-demand mentality: someone out there has to hire you or you starve. That's not the only way to organize an economy, and relatively speaking it's still a very new experiment whose success is still being debated. A hundred years ago it was called wage slavery.
We've got the technology to provide the basics of life to the entire planet, and each year it gets even easier. Insisting on the mercantilist system pushes us to a future in which relatively few people control everything (Blade Runner). Adjusting to a future where work is an option and not a requirement leads to the Federation (Star Trek). Which would you rather live in?
There is no real difference between people at different strata of society. Rich people, poor people, all are still people and thinking about and treating them differently is wrong. Right now we hate the poor, calling them lazy, and insist that they should be punished into behaving better (unfair crime laws, judicial system only available to the rich, crappy schools, etc.) yet we worship the rich, offering them huge incentives if only they'll do nice things for us once in a while. We use the lure of the corporate to gloss over the glaring inconsistency: if you work hard enough, you might get rich someday. Then we play up the statistically insignificant winners in the system as proof that it works. When all the while the rich (who are mostly descended from the illegitimate rich of yesteryear) further consolidate their power and subvert the legislative process.
I enjoy work, but it's not my life anymore. I've been outsourced once already, I've done the career change, and I've spent time outside the materialist system and just talked to people. I've got enough job credentials to pull down six figures in the right places, and the ruthlessness to get anywhere I wa
Private schools tend to give better education than public because they can kick the bad kids out, and have higher standards.
They won't kick out the bad kids of rich parents though, so those kids are free to get A's from "exceptional schools" for substandard work.
The problem with public schools is that every child has a right to education, promoting mediocrity. Rather than spending resources on students that can excel and get greater return on the investment, those resources are spent on getting remedial students to mediocrity.
The problems are much more complex than that. Here's a few of many things wrong with public schools: they promote conformity over learning to maintain control; loud parents of bad kids get their way; the funding is divided along racial lines (the 'poor black school' vs the 'rich white school'); funding based on standardized test performance has turned the curriculum into 'teaching to the test'; teachers don't get paid well enough to support themselves (though they are expected to work twice as hard in their jobs as everyone else); political forces are engaged in battles over religion, crime, pregnancy, computers, technology, etc., instead of education.
Most importantly, the problems with the public school system are that the economy is not strong enough to employ high school graduates at a living wage (forcing them to choose between college or dropping out to the underclass) and American culture is sharply anti-intellectual.
Medicare is a goverment-free market kludge, that's just screwed up all the way around.
Medicare/Medicaid pay for 40% of total medical services in this country. Unfortunately both Smith and Keynesian economic models fail to model medicine because the demand is infinite (no one will pass on life-saving surgery because it's too expensive).
Social security is a publicly subsidized pyramid scheme.
Sigh. Another verbatim repeat of Republican hate radio.
Calling it a "pyramid scheme" is wrong on a few counts. First, there is no "money" in the Social Security system; there's nothing being saved by you for cashing in later by you. Also, increasing the population of workers does not increase the payout to retirees. Finally, the tax itself is very regressive so only middle-class and below are effectively paying for it; increasing the income cap so that the top 10% pay at the same rate as we all are now would "fix it" for sure, but obviously hate radio doesn't mention that.
Social security was originally a bargain between young and old implemented during the Depression. We (as a society) wouldn't let old people starve to death just because jobs were hard to find for them. Before it was enacted most old people lived in the homes of their children and were a huge drain on family finances; after the money started flowing they were able to move out into their own homes and now a twenty-year retirement is part and parcel of the American Dream.
I would gladly vote to eliminate Social Security if the problems it addresses were really fixed, but they aren't. Old people couldn't save for retirement in the first half of the 20th century and their children couldn't save through the second half. Until our market system is capable of employing a real majority of our population at living wages, long enough for them to save for retirement, we can't scrap the program.
Of course, there is another solution to Social Security: drop our insistence on the work ethic and give everyone in the country enough money to purchase food and basic housing, and keep that Basic Income Guarantee (Google the BIG idea if you wish) adjusted for the cost of those items. Allow anyone to drop out of work for as long as they wish. I think with such a system we would discover that those who continue working will enjoy themselves even more without the deadweight, the basic necessities could be maintained with mostly-automated factories, and those who aren't working would spend most of their time en
1) The ability to find the size of a filesystem without resorting to JNI to execute stat_vfs(). http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id =4057701 Claims to be fixed but fix is irrelevant until our J2EE app server upgrades to that version -- Sun's fix is scheduled for release in 2Q 2006.
2) Erroneous OutOfMemoryErrors being thrown under Solaris on Sun JDK (1.2.x, 1.3.x) for our J2EE app (lots of EJBs): http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id =4390238 Had to use the workaround described in the bug. We encountered the bug and could faithfully reproduce it two years after it was closed as "not reproducible".
3) JDK 1.2.2: HttpURLConnection.getErrorStream() returned null because the Sun developer never implemented the method. I had to re-implement an HTTP client just to have this function (and to avoid other problems in the API such as throwing FileNotFoundException for 404's).
4) JVM for our app server (1.2.2, 1.3.1) on linux cored when DISPLAY was exported over ssh.
5) JVM 1.3.x cored on Solaris when using DBCS Japanese locale. 1.2.x cored when DBCS X11 fonts were missing.
We tended to see new reproducible JVM crash cases (server side only, J2EE, 1.2.x, 1.3.x, IBM and Sun JVMs, AIX Linux Solaris Windows) about once a month. Sometimes it was the mix in with native database drivers and app server plugins, other times DBCS locales, many times just J2EE long-lived server having to do weird desktop-isms (chart generation was a huge pain before Headless AWT).
Currently the doubling rate for knowledge in most scientific fields is between 18 and 24 months. Do you know what that means?
Quantize "knowledge" and show me how "doubling knowledge" leads to "unpredictable future", because AFAICT you're doing the same thing as the doomsayers, waving your hands and talking about "The future is unknowable! The future is unpredictable! Technology will fix it!" How is that any different from H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and all the other Victorian-Era thinkers predicting sentient mechanical automatons?
It means, for example, that in the next two years we'll learn as much about computer science as we have in all of previous human history combined.
Right, and as a computer science degree holder I can categorically say that in two years computers will still behave much as they did in 1995, which is much as Apple Macs did in 1988. Things get better but it takes a lot of research. We have OCR now that works well enough to defeat captchas, but no decent handwriting recognition in common use. We've got voice recognition coming along, but no operating systems out there you can talk to ala the starship Enterprise computer.
This is true of most scientific or technical fields. It's a real phenomenon that's getting more and more attention as time goes by because it doesn't seem to be stumbling into any roadblocks (i.e., predicted plateaus).
The thermodynamics textbook I'm using was first published about 40 years ago. It's currently on its 7th edition, and so far as anyone can tell it hasn't been substantially updated since the 4th edition (1987). It covers 90% of what most chemical engineering professionals need to get by in the field. Most of the knowledge in the book was learned before 1930 and it's still difficult for most students to get through. I can't say our "knowledge of thermo" is doubling if graduate-level students are lucky to have half the understanding that Gibbs, Duhem, Carnot, et al possessed a hundred years ago.
Knowledge isn't alive unless living people understand it and use it. And the far reaches of some of these disciplines are receeding past where a single human mind can get there in only a decade or so of secondary study.
Ultimately what it means is that only a fool would predict the next 40 years based on the last 40 years.
Right, but I was basing it more on the last *400* years, not 40. Technology takes time to incorporate into daily life and lots of people resist. "Knowing something" is a far cry from actually doing it, society has to be ready. We rapidly adopted Teflon-coated pans because it was an obvious benefit, but we haven't seen the need to switch en masse to HDTV because regular TV is good enough. The Greeks had iron, steam engines and some understanding of static electricity, but they also had slaves available to do most the grunt work and saw no need to build engines.
technological improvement *is not a linear progression but an asymptotic one*.
Ah right. You're predicting Verner Vinge's Singularity Event: a day will come when we know everything and suddenly humanity-as-we-knew-it will no longer exist.
No crap. I just had to re-install Debian from an old Woody CD, then dist-upgrade over modem...took DAYS. And the new xine in Sarge is quite pretty, but it barfs on my DVDs because as consumers we let Hollywood dictate their terms on the new video format. Next item is installing mplayer so I can play a damn movie without FBI warning, ads, or menu BS.
However, I also tried (and failed due to hardware problems, go figure) installing Win2k from MSDN media on a different computer and to my surprise there was no way to watch DVD from Windows Media Player 9. Nope, apparently DVD playback requires a third-party something or other that PowerDVD automatically installs.
The phone infrastructure, they did get into and, at least in the USA, it took legal action to break that monopoly.
They were given a legal monopoly to do it, i.e. it wasn't a competitive venture at all.
I also believe that most of the history of the railway system development was in fact a case of private companies at work.
Robber barons. Massive federal grants for the transcontinental railroad. Federal soldiers to break strikes.
Electricity production and distribution, again, was a case of private enterprise. (Including such trivia as Edison selling light bulbs under the production cost, to create a market for them and demand for electricity.)
Private utility companies, granted monopoly power and guaranteed pricing markups. In some areas (Tennessee Valley for example) no corporations wanted to open up shop at all.
Education too. I believe there are a ton of private schools, high schools, and universities which are basically run as private companies or foundations. Plus, companies routinely pay to educate/specialize their workers.
Right, but the point is that in 1870 the literacy rate of the country was at most 80%, with only 20% of blacks able to read in any language. Where was the private system, that could be easily justified by the increase in productivity? One would think that industrial company A would subsidize a school run by company B to improve their workforce, but they didn't.
Nowadays public universities do the lion's share of basic research using a mix of government and corporate money and corporates turn that into salable products.
In a lot of those cases government intervention was needed to make the owner play fair (break a monopoly, nationalize a vital resource, etc) but they weren't really built by the government or anything.
They were mostly funded by the government, reaped the benefits of government-sponsored research, were given legal monopolies to prevent competition, and didn't have to share their institutional expertise after the systems were established. Oh yeah, and real people who paid for their homes with their own labor were eminent-domained from their land to make room for the corporate-owned infrastructure.
Where it gets fuzzier are things which are basically for the good of society as a whole, rather than for a clear-cut ROI.
Not really. When 911 happened, the major airlines begged for money and got it, even though several smaller carriers (like Southwest Airlines) ran a profit despite the attack.
Basically I'm not saying you're wrong as a whole. Quite the opposite. Companies do invest in things which look like they'll bring a guaranteed profit, and generally stay away from funding the common good of society.
I think we disagree a bit more than it seems at first glance. I think most corporates will only fund things that guarantee profit in the short and medium term at the expense of the long term, that such action is irrational with respect to Economics 101, AND that even those investments wouldn't happen without market-distorting money from the public treasury.
Or to use another example. I can't recall which sci-fi author coined the idea (books are at home), but basically they said "the one sure way to guarantee a new moon landing would be to offer a multi-billion-dollar prize for the first private company to get there". I think that if even such a prize was offered, no company would rise to the occasion on their own. Offer the prize in baby steps along the way, with a DoD-style contract and guaranteed minimum profits (regardless of outcome), and they would do it for sure.
Call me odd if you wish. I've worked for both municipal government (engineering and negotiating contracts with PUCs) and Fortune-100 corporation, and in both cases short-sighted is the order of the day.
If 20 billion USD was all it takes to [ do something interesting ], that is, cheaper than [ the existing way ], some corporation would already do that.
No they wouldn't. Corporations can only invest in projects that have basically guaranteed outcomes; they are extremely risk-averse. A security risk manager at a megacorp told me just a few weeks ago that their corporate discipline is very tight: if it can't make at least 12% profit, it is not invested in.
Hindsight is 20/20. Given hindsight, the "free" market failed to fund a lot of profitable ventures: the interstate rail and highway systems, the secondary education system, the power grid, the communications infrastructure. It's amazing how much development will only occur if the government pays through the nose for it in the form of tax breaks (Detriot's Pole City, airlines, trucking, agribusiness, etc.) or pork (DoD spending, NSF grants, etc.). Yet we persist in this thinking, contrary to history, that corporations will innovate at every opportunity.
For all we know in the next 20 or 30 years nanotechnology will be used to turn iron and copper atoms into gold, palladium, and irridium.
I'm in school (again, 2nd career) to study nanotech, and believe me it won't change the elements like that. However it could be used one day to mine the landfills and re-create the oil fields given enough energy (sunlight).
If we get enough time to develop it that is. We need huge increases in solar panel efficiency and decades of research into safely manipulating (in a mechanical sense) atoms to form the molecules we want. And we also need huge increases in computing power to model hundred-mole structures that might each have hundreds of atoms in each molecule: we're talking 10^25 to 10^30 particles to make one useful device.
All chicken-little scenarios rely on a massive technological freeze that defies all common sense, not to mention every scrap of historical data since the Industrial Revolution. We can confidently say that technology will continue to improve, and that the period of doubling will continue to decline, for the foreseeable future; and that what we can imagine in the next 20 or 30 or 40 years will be dwarfed by what is actually accomplished.
Well, let's look at what has actually happened in the last 40 years, shall we?
We still use cars with combustion engines for most transportation. The technology has not drastically improved.
We still use television. The technology has improved a lot (very little of a brand-new HDTV flat-screen television is the same idea as the vacuum-tube versions) but we still use them the same way.
We still live (most of us) in or near large cities, only some of which have good (e.g. not buses) mass-transit systems.
We still derive most of our electrical power from fossil-fuel-burning plants.
About the only significant technological changes are consumer electronics (computers, Internet, portable audio/video, cell phones) and plastics (used everywhere, revolutionary in medicine).
We've been on the verge of other groundbreaking technologies for the last fifty years that have not really delivered. No "clean energy" fusion. No moon base or materials delivered from space. And now with nano we talk about better chemotherapy, better computer displays, and better data storage, i.e. better versions of what we already have.
We're decades away (at least) from the kind of breakthroughs you're relying on to save us all from resource competition problems. I've lived my entire life in the shadow of these "the future will fix our problems" predictions that have not measured up. I think it's time to stop pinning our hopes on the unknown future.
...no one, including you or me, can make even the vaguest predictions as to what will be possible in 20 years.
I make the following predictions about life in the year 2025:
Most of us will still be living in and near cities with population greater than 100,000.
We will drive our own cars (gas/electric hybrid) on asphalt streets, listen to FM radio, and talk on cell phones. We won't run red lights due to the automated cameras.
We will shop at Walmart superstores and trendy malls.
A healthy person will expect to live to 90 years old. Nerve-related diseases will be treatable with 80% success rate; heart surgery will be rare with microsurgery capable of fixing most issues; organ transplants will be somewhat common with better drugs to prevent rejection. Broken legs will still take six weeks to heal.
China will control Taiwan and have the largest and best manufacturing facilities in the world. Europe will have a constitution. The West will have a sluggish economy, but people will still have electricity and talk about how uncouth their children are.
Microsoft will have about 60% of the desktop market. Most applications in stores will install and run on Windows Whatever, Mac OS X Whatever, and Linux Wha
As far as I know it takes a lot less time to become a good windows admin than a good unix one.
I can pick up a book from 1992 about Unix administration and see that most of the material is still valid./etc/passwd (and/etc/shadow) is where users are listed, I can delete them or change their names using 'deluser' or 'chfn', etc. After a couple days of tinkering, I got my first Linux system (Slackware circa 1994) up and running and was reasonably confident on security and what it was doing. Easy things: installing software, adding and deleting users, setting up network services, adding hard drives, writing shell/Perl scripts to automate unusual tasks.
Now Windows. With each new release, the system settings have changed drastically. Setting up networking in Windows XP is not at all like Windows 95: the screens are different, the actual values are buried somewhere deep in the registry. When the system fails it provides almost no useable explanation. Network security is much harder to get right because so much more is exposed and so many broken applications expect to run as Administrator.
I've been administering just my own desktop for the last six years and feel pretty confident about what's going on and why and that I haven't been rooted. I think to reach the same level of comfort with Windows would take at least 18 months of full-time work and probably most of an MCSE prep. My friends who went the Windows route have told me quite a few horror stories over the years of automating NT 4 and Win2k desktops and how even large organizations have to commit years more time to get the same results as their Unix groups.
When I looked for a platform to get into 6 years ago, I took a lot of things into account. The main factor for me was this: Who will be giving me the best returns on my time investment? I decided to become a Microsoft platform developer, and I haven't been sorry.
I used to be a Windows developer too, mostly VB/VBA but some Win32 C. I switched to Linux in 1999 because I was working with a lot of Unix web servers and haven't regretted it at all. The last three jobs I've been the only Unix developer on multi-platform projects and it's been a good niche. I force my colleagues to alter their designs in ways that Windows-only developers never think of (like 'preserve case in filenames'). Economically it's done well for me, I am currently finishing a project with an embedded PC/104 device that runs TinyLinux for scientific data collection.
More personally, I feel like the code I write for myself really is free, that I can count on it being around and working when I someday retire and relax a bit. That's a really nice feeling for me, much like when I moved away from Turbo Pascal for DOS (which I knew would someday die out) to ANSI C back in 1993.
Development is the name of the game.
Exactly, as long as we remain employed and generally happy, who cares which system we use? Power to the developers!:)
Before 1492, nobody in the civilized part of the world knew about America. Thus, it is possible to say that Columbus discover America.
Incorrect. The 'civilized part of the world' (which you seem to forget included China, India, Persia, and Central and South America at that time) was aware that the world was round and knew its diameter rather well. Multiple passages had been made across the Atlantic, Columbus was just the first European government-sponsored explorer and he was under a requirement to find some riches. His second expedition was outfitted for full invasion. Read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" for plenty of historically-backed details about Columbus.
Before "Windows", computers were toys (C64->Amiga) or business, education or research. Thus, it's possible to say that some Pioneering took place.
Were you even around in those days? Before Windows we had DesqView, GEM, TopView and others capable of multitasking PC hardware, all competing with Apple's multitasking Mac hardware. VGA-based applications for DOS were quite common (Lotus, Quattro, WordPerfect) and supported mouse, joystick, and sound (games). Windows 3.0 made the features easier to get to, but the MSDOS environment was just as capable of "real computing", and in fact was preferred in cases where speed mattered a great deal. Lotus 123 on DOS with a math co-processor (you use to have to buy those separate) stomped all the Windows spreadsheets for raw computing power; WordPerfect 5.1 has basically never been surpassed for speed, but then again it was written mostly in assembly language.
Funny you call these non-Intel computers 'toys'. They had hardware multitasking, networking, multimedia, SCSI RAID, etc. In 1993 the Amiga beat the hell out of the 486 systems with its 4096 colors (compared to VGA's 256), superior sound, and far superior floating point.
Before theese events, people didn't know better. That doesn't mean that better existed or exists now..
In both of your examples, plenty of people knew better.
Credit where credit is due. This hurts to say, as I am definately more ~/ on unix..
The credit in this case is that in the late 80's and early 90's, Microsoft did a reasonable job putting "good enough" software in the hands of millions of people. WordPerfect 5.x for DOS stomped Word 2.x for Windows, but WinWord had WYSIWYG and did alright. By 1995 I could look for the Microsoft logo and know that the product would install in a straightforward manner, do what it was advertised to do, and generally just work. The user manual tended to be OK too. Office 97 Professional, Visual Studio 97, Internet Explorer 4.0 -- not bad, not all that bloated.
Unfortunately the trend to add more features has continued past the point of usefulness while long-standing bugs remain unfixed (example: try scanning a 8.5x11 photo at 600dpi into Photo Editor). When I see the Microsoft logo today I shy away from a package that puts too many gee-wiz features up front that get in the way of what I'm trying to accomplish. The manuals can't fit into small books anymore, half of the OS-level help isn't helpful (boils down to 'call your OEM help line'), and it takes half a day to install anything large what with the.NET pre-requisites, Windows/Office Update, and product activation. I just did that with VS.NET 2003 and wasted a day turning off features and hunting though menus until I could compile Win32 C code as easily as VS97 used to.
There's no *good* way of delivering commercial software to a Linux system. (I know, I've tried.)
Not true, I know of several solutions:
1) InstallShield Multi-Platform. Works on AIX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows. Lays down a JVM, but what the hey. Will also put in entries in the RPM database, dunno about dpkg.
2) Autopackage. Covered by another poster.
3) Standalone.deb and.rpm files that conform to Debian Policy and LSB, respectively. Double-click to install, all is fine.
4) Standalone binary tarball (installer optional), like Mozilla.
5) Custom installer that wraps RPM, like IBM DB2. Despite the RPM, I've installed DB2 on Debian and Slackware using the same instructions as Solaris.
6) Third-party repositories. Probably the *worst* idea from the commercial company's standpoint because of the overhead involved.
For cases #3, #5, and #6, vendors are dependent on the underlying distro not screwing dependencies. For all cases vendors are dependant on libraries in/lib and/usr/lib being compatible (i.e. DB2 6.x required a really old glibc that newer distros lack). But these problems are the same as in Windows. Old Visual Basic and Borland C apps often break on Windows XP because some of the.dlls are missing. There's a whole network of web sites making the old.dlls available for just this issue.
I think that commercial software already has what it needs to co-exist well with open-source operating systems. As more companies get used to supporting Unix-like OSes (like IBM), the user experience will improve and the OS maintainers will be more diligent about backwards compatibility.
Seriously, Linux is essentially Unix when you're talking installation and support issues. The big boys have been shipping databases, ERP, CRM, giant app servers, etc. etc. to Unix for decades. Just about every admin knows how to symlink between/usr/local/bin/foo and/opt/vendorname/foo_bar/bin/foo , adding that to the Linux installer is easy. And most all commercial software goes away with 'rm -rf/opt/vendorname/foo_bar' -- a.k.a. "drag it to the trash can".
Of course not. But a single Windows PE or.NET binary can run on Win9x, WinNT, WinXP, or Vista, so effectively they're "the same".
Wrong. The Win32 API has changed a great deal between Win9x and WinXP, I can write a trivial program that will work fine on XP but fail on 95/98.
Game developers did not have to support every graphic card in Windows ? You got to be kidding.
No, you have got to be ignorant. Game developers on Windows don't need to know anything at all about the graphics card, and never have: Microsoft have provided abstractions (first WinG, then DirectX) which mean that only the graphics card makers need to know how the graphics card does stuff, while the game makers just write to the API and it all works.
That's not entirely true. DirectX is not a part of the underlying "OS", it's an add-on. (One can also use OpenGL or Glide to program the hardware.) Claiming that I can write a game using DirectX 8.x features and it will run on Win9x (no DirectX), WinNT (DirectX 3.x), etc. isn't true, unless I bundle it with my game (as many do). I could just as easily claim that Java is the write-once-run-everywhere platform because after downloading the JVM you can run a.jar file.
On a side note, professional games often have to go a bit beyond the vanilla DirectX API to make a playable game. Many many cards have bugs in their driver implementation so certain features have to be disabled to make things work, it's not at all a trivial "put it in and everything will be OK". (Remember the S3 Virge?)
I suggest you try learning what you're talking about before spouting off - it'll save you looking such an idiot when you're completely wrong about everything you say.
Geez, take a chill pill. You sound like frickin' Avril Lavigne or something. Go write some POSIX C code for a while and come back to Win32 and see just how "standard" it really is.
Rands philosophy doesn't in any way, shape or form reject morality OR charity - in fact, she never addresses what we would call 'true charity' in ANY of her books, including "The Virtue of Selfishness". It's simply of no interest to her, nor is it objectionable.
Precisely. It's of no interest to her, hasn't been talked about, and hence her 'philosophy' is drivel. "True charity" is everywhere, just as "false charity" is. Setting yourself up to be the one who labels charity work as "true" or "false" is also invalid: no one has enough information to judge other people's thoughts. A philosophy has to work even in the absence of perfect information.
You'd know that if you'd actually read the material in question, but it appears that like so many others who chant the "Ayn Rand is EVILLLL!" mantra you haven't bothered.
Yeah, well I *have* read most of her stuff. I tried to apply it to my real life; people thought I was really weird trying to be telepathic and infer all sorts of facts about them, always seeking the serious core of any discussion, and talking in terms of relative worth. Some of my friends eventually asked me to define something, anything in absolute terms, and then they proceeded in quick fashion to dismantle it. I soon stopped inferring and started listening around me. Amazing how human we all are afterall. Re-reading her works a couple years later, I kept shaking my head at how far off the real world she is. Raping a woman because you secretly know that's what she really wants? Having New York go dark because no one is left who is capable of keeping power plants running? Working your way up from laborer to owner in only twenty years? And that's just the fiction. Arguments in the nonfiction are about whether or not you should "suppress" your emotions. Puh-leeze.
Nowadays it's even easier to break it down. Just Google for "Objectivism critique" and in the first three sentences on any of the lengthy rebuttals is everything anyone needs to dismantle it. Rand can't answer absolute questions, she can't solve the Prisoner's Dilemma (which all other major philosophies nailed thousands of years ago), she didn't live up to her own published ideas (continuing a long-term affair that devestated her marriage), and her most vocal adherents all come from the same demographic (wiping out the claim that her philosophy works for everyone).
If you can't beat the New Testament at providing a meaning for life and handbook for living it, you're still an amateur.
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One other thing, when our gradual rewrites of old code reach the point where everything is fully expressed as objects, then the burden of rewrites and maintenance should be drastically reduced forever after. Isn't that the promise of objects? Expandability? Adaptability? Any large application well founded on objects should be able to morph itself into any future application one little bit at a time.
The answer is "No, for all practical purposes". The most widely-used OOP languages are not much more than structs-with-function-pointers with some syntactic sugar on top. May as well just use C and pass function pointers around like the Linux kernel does. The "real" OOP languages are not as widely deployed as Java or C++, and the skillset is definitely not everywhere. Furthermore, OOP solutions work well when systems can be thought of that way, and not all systems should be.
The real "problem" is that spaghetti code to cover the corner cases must creep in over a product's lifetime, and the knowledge about how (and when) to refactor that code is dependent on experience with the system the code is tied to.
But I'll bite: how do you specify that a measurement falls between 2.2ml and 2.4ml using significant figures?
The answer is you use the right instrument for the job. When you report 2.3 you know that it's 2.3 +- 0.01 and you report it as 2.3 . If you're being generous you can report 2.32 so that others can reduce their own roundoff errors. If you used a 0.1mL instrument and needed 0.1mL accuracy, you made a mistake.
In your example, I would report 2.3 . It's exactly what you said: 2.3 +- 0.1 .
Sigs figs are a moron's answer to the problem of representing precision, and they do nothing but create confusion and introduce unnecessary round-off error.
What the hell are you talking about? Significant figures "introduce" round-off error? Please, round-off error comes from the lack of digits (base 2 or otherwise) to represent abstract mathematical entities in real hardware. Significant figures are just one way to stay within the precision error bar.
And they are trivial to use, and make a lot of real-world sense, as in "one can't realistically measure the volume of a drop of water by looking at the change in height of local sea level and measuring it with a tape measure, no matter what base your numbers are in or how many digits your calculator can display; your measuring tool is not accurate enough to see the difference".
Take a numerical analysis course, please. Your equations will thank you.
Yeah, I've already taken two of those from two different majors. How about you take a CompSci Computer Organization course (or whatever it's called now, where you "create" a microprocessor with ALU) and get used to doing base-n floating point by hand.
What lead you to believe that the numbers supplied (10000000 & 0.00000001) were not accurate to the supplied number of digits?
:)
The missing decimal point on the first operand is a big clue. "100" is not the same as "100." . In the real world, the missing decimal point turns 10000000 into "1 x 10^8" . And when someone starts talking about calculators, every number turns into a real-world number, even for those that use BCD representation internally.
Open any of the handbooks of physical properties such as those from CRC Press and you'll see entries like "323400", "323400.", and "3230000" where the insignificant digits are in a different typeface like "32300oo" .
Your reasoning sounds like either a know it all student or a bucket chemist
Graduate-level engineering student who knows the difference between "10", "1.0 x 10^1" and "10.0". Not to belabor the point, it just irritated me. I expect even mathematicians to know that once you start punching digits into a keyboard you're in real numbers land.
10000000 + 0.00000001 ?
The correct answer is 10000000.00000001
No, the correct answer is 10000000. Each term has only one significant figure, so after truncating to the correct precision you get the calculator's displayed answer. Although many calculators will have the inaccurate figure (10000000.00000001) rounded to the nearest base-2 floating point in memory and a long-enough fixed-point format will display it.
Now, if you had said 10000000.00000000 + 0.00000001, then the correct answer would indeed be 10000000.00000001.
Does anyone still use a vt100 as their primary computer, except to prove a point? No. No, they do not.
*ahem* See http://vt100.net/ . Or comp.terminals . Plenty of people still use VT100's and their successors.
And other people (like me) still write terminal emulators that have to behave like VT100's, or things like TradeWars 2002 won't work right.
^H and ^W were used on Usenet long before Linux was around. In fact, one can say that Linux is the odd man out in the Unix-like world with it's insistence that backspace means DEL (0x7F, ^?) rather than BACKSPACE (0x08, ^H).
I can't ignore quark theory when doing atomic physics work and retain my credibility anymore than I can claim "god says X so do Y" while ignoring parts of the Bible or the Koran or the Popol-Vuh I happen to dislike. I mean - do you people see the problem with this at all?
Different domains entirely.
Religions mostly assume that a spiritual force is present in the universe, is sometimes directly palpable (but not testably so), and is definitely beyond full human comprehension. The religious texts are snapshots in history of the words of people who claim to be close to this force, and are useful as guides to get in tune with it. But they are not the only path to that force. Many Christians I know say that they directly experience the presence of Jesus or God in helping them understand their lives and make decisions, and they liken the Bible as a letter from Jesus and God that was downsampled from HDTV and mixed in with the daily news: history, political propaganda, metaphor, message, and message interpretation. Much like the black magic books of Raistlin from Dragonlance, there is an outside "key" to understanding the Bible: living your life and gaining experience.
Perhaps I'm not explaining it well, I know it sounds like hand-wavy "you have to be religious to get it" crap. But spirituality is not testable, and you can't put logical clauses together to derive immutable conclusions. That kind of thing I leave to philosophy, where logic is an appropriate tool to develop an ironclad moral code. Religion (for me anyway) doesn't set out to "prove" the whats and wherefores and such of where we come from and what we should do about it. One can't really take any one of the main religious texts and run an analysis on it to figure out what it says and then discard the text that doesn't belong (even though most denominations try to do just that).
America is simply doing what it always does, going through the motions of trying to find a balance of values that appeals to its people. Those values may not be your values, but they're really no different than ever. It's a balance that can never truly be attained, though, so you will see things shift back and forth periodically. We are just at the extreme edge of one of those shifts right now, but from a historical viewpoint I really don't see that this is anything unusual.
I think you're wrong, and I cite a much older source than you: Scott Nearing, author of _The Making of a Radical_ (1972). Nearing was born in 1883 and says in his autobiography that before WWI hundreds of thousands of Americans were keenly interested in the political debates shaping the country, especially during the unionization drives and the Soviet revolution. With the advent of radio, television, and print mass media however Nearing says that public opinion swung hard right and stayed there ever since, and that community interest in politics evaporated with the new post-WWII economy. (Nearing didn't live to see the post-Reagan era, but if he had he would probably have compared it to Hitler in the 1930's but without the cultural will for world domination. Americans are still fundamentally insular.) In the 1920's people were seriously thinking about massive welfare programs and direct wealth redistribution (Robin Hood schemes), and were even willing to redo the Constitution. Hell even Nixon was going to institute national health care. But we are so far to the right these days that Nixon would be unelectable for either party.
I think the pendulum was shoved rightwards around 1910 with the rise of radio, recovered about halfway back in the 1960's, and then went even further right. I think consolidated mass media combined with some unforseen physiological effects of television watching made this possible, and the only way to break it is to reduce the amount of television people watch regularly, and since that is unlikely to happen we're going to slide down and stay there for a few hundred years.
What he's saying is that kids can easily type "http://1.2.3.4" and reach the same place as "http://hugeyams.com". The only way to prevent that is to see if there is a DNS record linking 1.2.3.4 to hugeyams.com and putting up a denial messagebox if so.
But this breaks for four main reasons:
1) DNS names can map to one or many IP addresses. "hugeyams.com" might be a server farm, or a mapping that changes every night. The mapping isn't 1-to-1, it isn't constant, and you can't rely on your information being current with broken caching servers out there.
2) "1.2.3.4" could be a single server hosting thousands of "separate sites" including hugeyams.com and aclu.org. Block one and seriously violate the constitutionally-protected speech of the other (political speech trumps all other speech).
3) A huge number of IP addresses do not have the right DNS name mappings (PTR to CNAME records in the in-addr.arpa domain), or they may have no PTR record at all. ('Net history: at one time the only incentive at all to fix this was to get access to the download site for the 128-bit encryption version of Netscape.) Getting 100% of the 'Net admins to maintain PTR records is practically impossible.
4) Even if a PTR record exists, the web site owner has no control of it, the ISP of their hosting company does. What you (as a porn operator) pay $50/year to call "hugeyams.com" they might call "39876fb-box55-eth1.sf.us.bigassisp.net" .
So even if ".xxx" is adopted as a TLD it can be trivially bypassed by disregarding DNS, and forcing everyone to use DNS is practically impossible and could break lots of other low-level things too.
Technically, a bad idea. Socially, a stupid one.
It seems to me as if the "future" is waiting for another kick, the sort of boot-in-the-pants that we saw twice in the last century. Right now, it's stuck. There are a lot of real Buck Rogers-style things that could be going on if only people seriously thought they were possible, if only there was a spark that could get us up and moving again. But that's not going to happen on its own, we need to figure out how to move again.
I for one don't want a Buck Rogers-style future. Or Blade Runner, or Star Trek (except for the cheap economy part). I'd be happy with two acres of land and plenty of time to myself to grow things on it that taste like real food. A space station would be "nice", but I'd rather have a sane economic system and liberty and justice for all (not just rich white Westerners and their puppets).
I used to read sci-fi. LOTS of it. Then history, then current events, then some 19th-Century lit, then sociology and anthropology. Sci-fi is small potatoes compared to the real world. I used to think something like this: "Things are generally OK and just need small changes. Life isn't fair, but with enough hard work one can make up for circumstances of birth. Racism is mostly over with now; war is bad but can usually be avoided; time is steadily fixing the problems we inherited. People are generally good and only disagree because they don't know all the facts." In the world of Gordon Dickson's _The Final Encyclopedia_, I imagined myself on the side of Hal Mayne: we need to get out there and keep expanding, warts and all.
Now I'm James Child-of-God. The world hasn't changed significantly since the Dark Ages except in dress. People are generally good, but they disagree for real reasons that can't just be glossed over with rationalization. The economy has divided wealth more than it has created it, and we are much further from a world where technology could be used to provide the fundamentals to everyone. With one small wave of the hand the injustices that fund our lifestyle (foreign sweatshops, rigged money markets, the petrodollar, exploited immigrant laborers) become some other country's mismanaged economy.
Back to point: we've had plenty of technological advance but precious little improvement socially for dealing with a finite Earth carrying billions of people who disagree for fine reasons of their own. It's time for a breather and a slower pace of change. We need to spread the knowledge around and give it time to subvert our existing institutions (which still date from the colonial mindset). It isn't "waa waa poor people need love too" whining but acknowledgement of human social contraints. Every civilization needs its resting times, and this feels like ours to me.
We'll get back to space eventually, but I'm not all that disappointed that I'll miss it.
Of course, speaking of the Boomers, I fear that my generation (I'm 28) might be one of those unlucky historical examples of one which didn't get to do jack shit because they were so busy catering to the needs of their wealthy elders while trying to patch up the disasterous debts they left us.
That's been true of most generations. I think we feel it more because we're disconnected from our neighbors too much on a personal level yet tied together globally at an abstract level. We are exposed more to the sordid state of affairs via television and Internet, yet we can't integrate with our neighbors and create our own safe zones. The unsocial loner used to be weird, now it's all of us. So we feel burdened more.
But I don't hate my elders too much for it. They were manipulated too, yet they rose up once and changed a lot. We've still got plenty to do that can make a fun life for ourselves.
Is it just me, or does anyone else not care to remember BBSes? I ran several in my day, and the internet does everything they do, better.
:) Find yourself one of the many telnet'able BBSes and join a game. You'd be surprised how much better 3.x is over TW 2.09g, and the newer helpers are amazing (but I still play manually).
Half and half. I loved the client-side part of it enough to clone Qmodem 4.x and use it all the time at work. (I work with buoys running an embedded Linux on PC/104 hardware.) I think for interactive text-mode stuff BBSes were more advanced than the current Internet. For example, transferring files across multiple firewalls that you can ssh through is hard without Zmodem or Kermit -- see Sourceforge for a number of zmodem-over-ssh solutions for that. Also, at low speeds (less than 14.4k) BBSes ruled. And the community aspects were nice.
OTOH I like Usenet a lot more than Fidonet because of its coverage and depth -- Google groups goes a long way in finding fixes for obscure technical problems. The community-ish WWW sites (LiveJournal, MySpace, Match.com, etc.) are a lot better at getting people connected than BBSes, and eBay, Amazon, and Wikipedia rock.
(God do I miss tradewars though).
I'm still playing
The point of the boom of the 90's was the opportunities were there for those with the desire to become skilled. In many skilled sectors wages did in fact go up in response to the limited labor pool.
...because we will eventually reach a point where XYZ is essentially free but only a few people can afford ABC at all.
Disagree on two main counts. First: For the unskilled who were long past high school the opportunities weren't there, so training wasn't an option. A couple anecdotes: a mother of three who was trained in computers and had a good job for MCI until the dot-bomb, after which she lost everything with the mass layoffs all around her; a father of two who kept upgrading his skills (from printer repair to computer training consulting to business owner) who nonetheless lost his business and found his technical certs worthless. We can't just wave our hands and say "train for better jobs!" when the existing jobs run out.
Second: More importantly, the economy of the 90's depended largely on our abusing cheap labor to make our goods. We cannot talk about the West's prosperity without including the sweatshops doing our dirty work for essentially "free". Where is the tide that lifts the boats in Malaysia, Indonesia, Honduras, China, etc.? They are now integral parts of our economy but reap far less benefit from it.
My main point is that at the height of mercantilist power we still have huge portions of society living in relative poverty. The only nations that seem to do better either implement significant wealth redistribution schemes or have populations so small that most can get by on the natural resources around them. We've not yet figured out how to make the mercantilist system provide improved life for all, which was the original point of allowing businesses leave to compete with each other (Adam Smith).
Poor people are not necessarily lazy. Some just do not understand the options available. We should increase job training availability, provide workforce experience.
I've been hearing about the glorious market economy that will lift all boats, and my books talk about it from over three hundred years ago, yet I fail to see it anywhere. Our technology has improved, yes; certain slices of Western society benefit, yes; but the price paid by the rest of the world offsets this.
But let's pretend that only our own economy counts. Suppose everyone is fully trained: where will the jobs come from to employ us all? We obviously can't just all sell beads to each other or be musicians. Will major employers ever on their own decide to re-invest their profits into salary increases to stimulate the economy further?
But there also is a significant portion who are just not motivated.
What is *wrong* about lack of motivation, or having *zero* ambition? (Besides that they starve of course.)
If they choose not to gain meaningful skills, then yes, they only have themselves to blame. Unskilled labor has less economic value than skilled labor. They contribute less to the overall economy, and therefore should expect less. You don't need a degree to be skilled, become an electrician, welder, gain some sort of skill that makes you a greater contributor and therefore more desirable for employment.
Ah I think I see now:
1. All people need XYZ to live.
2. We can give all people XYZ at minor cost to people thanks to technology.
3. If people have XYZ, they will want ABC.
4. ABC costs a lot, and can't be delivered to all people.
5. Therefore we should give no one XYZ.
Is that about it? Because my response is this:
5. We give all people XYZ and retain the economy of all-things-not-XYZ so that people can compete and earn more to achieve ABC.
6. Some people will be happy with XYZ. Some will want ABC. We let the future sort it out.
7.
You're still stuck in the Econ 101 supply-and-demand mentality: someone out there has to hire you or you starve
the funding is divided along racial lines (the 'poor black school' vs the 'rich white school')
Not so much racial but economic lines. It's not rich white school vs poor black school.
Speak for AZ only. In my home town in Texas, the same school district with two high schools spent $1.4 million more (on teacher salaries and extracurricular activities) at the white high school than the black-and-hispanic school. Raleigh, North Carolina: same thing. New York city: same thing.
Most importantly, the problems with the public school system are that the economy is not strong enough to employ high school graduates at a living wage (forcing them to choose between college or dropping out to the underclass)
That's a cop-out, since the same problems existed in the booming economy of the 90's.
The "booming economy of the 90's" wasn't a boom to the 50% of the country we call "unskilled" workers. "Full employment" wasn't: wages at the bottom didn't go up in response to a limited labor supply. We have *never* had an economy capable of employing the majority of unskilled labor at a living wage. Even the heyday of unions didn't do it.
They should be learning meaningful skills and getting workforce experience, preparing them for life.
Right, let's skip on to what you're really saying: "poor people are lazy, they wasted their time in school and can only blame themselves for not having good jobs".
Of course, there is another solution to Social Security: drop our insistence on the work ethic and give everyone in the country enough money to purchase food and basic housing, and keep that Basic Income Guarantee (Google the BIG idea if you wish) adjusted for the cost of those items.
Great, so increase the burden on those willing to work; add to that wage inflation, since why would I work unless I get more money than sitting at home? Of course maybe you can't get a job because offshoring has become even more attractive given the high labor costs and taxes. Crime won't go away, people will have the basic necessities, but still will want luxuries.
You're still stuck in the Econ 101 supply-and-demand mentality: someone out there has to hire you or you starve. That's not the only way to organize an economy, and relatively speaking it's still a very new experiment whose success is still being debated. A hundred years ago it was called wage slavery.
We've got the technology to provide the basics of life to the entire planet, and each year it gets even easier. Insisting on the mercantilist system pushes us to a future in which relatively few people control everything (Blade Runner). Adjusting to a future where work is an option and not a requirement leads to the Federation (Star Trek). Which would you rather live in?
There is no real difference between people at different strata of society. Rich people, poor people, all are still people and thinking about and treating them differently is wrong. Right now we hate the poor, calling them lazy, and insist that they should be punished into behaving better (unfair crime laws, judicial system only available to the rich, crappy schools, etc.) yet we worship the rich, offering them huge incentives if only they'll do nice things for us once in a while. We use the lure of the corporate to gloss over the glaring inconsistency: if you work hard enough, you might get rich someday. Then we play up the statistically insignificant winners in the system as proof that it works. When all the while the rich (who are mostly descended from the illegitimate rich of yesteryear) further consolidate their power and subvert the legislative process.
I enjoy work, but it's not my life anymore. I've been outsourced once already, I've done the career change, and I've spent time outside the materialist system and just talked to people. I've got enough job credentials to pull down six figures in the right places, and the ruthlessness to get anywhere I wa
Private schools tend to give better education than public because they can kick the bad kids out, and have higher standards.
They won't kick out the bad kids of rich parents though, so those kids are free to get A's from "exceptional schools" for substandard work.
The problem with public schools is that every child has a right to education, promoting mediocrity. Rather than spending resources on students that can excel and get greater return on the investment, those resources are spent on getting remedial students to mediocrity.
The problems are much more complex than that. Here's a few of many things wrong with public schools: they promote conformity over learning to maintain control; loud parents of bad kids get their way; the funding is divided along racial lines (the 'poor black school' vs the 'rich white school'); funding based on standardized test performance has turned the curriculum into 'teaching to the test'; teachers don't get paid well enough to support themselves (though they are expected to work twice as hard in their jobs as everyone else); political forces are engaged in battles over religion, crime, pregnancy, computers, technology, etc., instead of education.
Most importantly, the problems with the public school system are that the economy is not strong enough to employ high school graduates at a living wage (forcing them to choose between college or dropping out to the underclass) and American culture is sharply anti-intellectual.
Medicare is a goverment-free market kludge, that's just screwed up all the way around.
Medicare/Medicaid pay for 40% of total medical services in this country. Unfortunately both Smith and Keynesian economic models fail to model medicine because the demand is infinite (no one will pass on life-saving surgery because it's too expensive).
Social security is a publicly subsidized pyramid scheme.
Sigh. Another verbatim repeat of Republican hate radio.
Calling it a "pyramid scheme" is wrong on a few counts. First, there is no "money" in the Social Security system; there's nothing being saved by you for cashing in later by you. Also, increasing the population of workers does not increase the payout to retirees. Finally, the tax itself is very regressive so only middle-class and below are effectively paying for it; increasing the income cap so that the top 10% pay at the same rate as we all are now would "fix it" for sure, but obviously hate radio doesn't mention that.
Social security was originally a bargain between young and old implemented during the Depression. We (as a society) wouldn't let old people starve to death just because jobs were hard to find for them. Before it was enacted most old people lived in the homes of their children and were a huge drain on family finances; after the money started flowing they were able to move out into their own homes and now a twenty-year retirement is part and parcel of the American Dream.
I would gladly vote to eliminate Social Security if the problems it addresses were really fixed, but they aren't. Old people couldn't save for retirement in the first half of the 20th century and their children couldn't save through the second half. Until our market system is capable of employing a real majority of our population at living wages, long enough for them to save for retirement, we can't scrap the program.
Of course, there is another solution to Social Security: drop our insistence on the work ethic and give everyone in the country enough money to purchase food and basic housing, and keep that Basic Income Guarantee (Google the BIG idea if you wish) adjusted for the cost of those items. Allow anyone to drop out of work for as long as they wish. I think with such a system we would discover that those who continue working will enjoy themselves even more without the deadweight, the basic necessities could be maintained with mostly-automated factories, and those who aren't working would spend most of their time en
Plenty of times. Off the top of my head:
d =4057701 Claims to be fixed but fix is irrelevant until our J2EE app server upgrades to that version -- Sun's fix is scheduled for release in 2Q 2006.
d =4390238 Had to use the workaround described in the bug. We encountered the bug and could faithfully reproduce it two years after it was closed as "not reproducible".
1) The ability to find the size of a filesystem without resorting to JNI to execute stat_vfs(). http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_i
2) Erroneous OutOfMemoryErrors being thrown under Solaris on Sun JDK (1.2.x, 1.3.x) for our J2EE app (lots of EJBs): http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_i
3) JDK 1.2.2: HttpURLConnection.getErrorStream() returned null because the Sun developer never implemented the method. I had to re-implement an HTTP client just to have this function (and to avoid other problems in the API such as throwing FileNotFoundException for 404's).
4) JVM for our app server (1.2.2, 1.3.1) on linux cored when DISPLAY was exported over ssh.
5) JVM 1.3.x cored on Solaris when using DBCS Japanese locale. 1.2.x cored when DBCS X11 fonts were missing.
We tended to see new reproducible JVM crash cases (server side only, J2EE, 1.2.x, 1.3.x, IBM and Sun JVMs, AIX Linux Solaris Windows) about once a month. Sometimes it was the mix in with native database drivers and app server plugins, other times DBCS locales, many times just J2EE long-lived server having to do weird desktop-isms (chart generation was a huge pain before Headless AWT).
YMMV. Reliability has improved over time.
Currently the doubling rate for knowledge in most scientific fields is between 18 and 24 months. Do you know what that means?
Quantize "knowledge" and show me how "doubling knowledge" leads to "unpredictable future", because AFAICT you're doing the same thing as the doomsayers, waving your hands and talking about "The future is unknowable! The future is unpredictable! Technology will fix it!" How is that any different from H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and all the other Victorian-Era thinkers predicting sentient mechanical automatons?
It means, for example, that in the next two years we'll learn as much about computer science as we have in all of previous human history combined.
Right, and as a computer science degree holder I can categorically say that in two years computers will still behave much as they did in 1995, which is much as Apple Macs did in 1988. Things get better but it takes a lot of research. We have OCR now that works well enough to defeat captchas, but no decent handwriting recognition in common use. We've got voice recognition coming along, but no operating systems out there you can talk to ala the starship Enterprise computer.
This is true of most scientific or technical fields. It's a real phenomenon that's getting more and more attention as time goes by because it doesn't seem to be stumbling into any roadblocks (i.e., predicted plateaus).
The thermodynamics textbook I'm using was first published about 40 years ago. It's currently on its 7th edition, and so far as anyone can tell it hasn't been substantially updated since the 4th edition (1987). It covers 90% of what most chemical engineering professionals need to get by in the field. Most of the knowledge in the book was learned before 1930 and it's still difficult for most students to get through. I can't say our "knowledge of thermo" is doubling if graduate-level students are lucky to have half the understanding that Gibbs, Duhem, Carnot, et al possessed a hundred years ago.
Knowledge isn't alive unless living people understand it and use it. And the far reaches of some of these disciplines are receeding past where a single human mind can get there in only a decade or so of secondary study.
Ultimately what it means is that only a fool would predict the next 40 years based on the last 40 years.
Right, but I was basing it more on the last *400* years, not 40. Technology takes time to incorporate into daily life and lots of people resist. "Knowing something" is a far cry from actually doing it, society has to be ready. We rapidly adopted Teflon-coated pans because it was an obvious benefit, but we haven't seen the need to switch en masse to HDTV because regular TV is good enough. The Greeks had iron, steam engines and some understanding of static electricity, but they also had slaves available to do most the grunt work and saw no need to build engines.
technological improvement *is not a linear progression but an asymptotic one*.
Ah right. You're predicting Verner Vinge's Singularity Event: a day will come when we know everything and suddenly humanity-as-we-knew-it will no longer exist.
Unless you want to play DVDs
No crap. I just had to re-install Debian from an old Woody CD, then dist-upgrade over modem...took DAYS. And the new xine in Sarge is quite pretty, but it barfs on my DVDs because as consumers we let Hollywood dictate their terms on the new video format. Next item is installing mplayer so I can play a damn movie without FBI warning, ads, or menu BS.
However, I also tried (and failed due to hardware problems, go figure) installing Win2k from MSDN media on a different computer and to my surprise there was no way to watch DVD from Windows Media Player 9. Nope, apparently DVD playback requires a third-party something or other that PowerDVD automatically installs.
The phone infrastructure, they did get into and, at least in the USA, it took legal action to break that monopoly.
They were given a legal monopoly to do it, i.e. it wasn't a competitive venture at all.
I also believe that most of the history of the railway system development was in fact a case of private companies at work.
Robber barons. Massive federal grants for the transcontinental railroad. Federal soldiers to break strikes.
Electricity production and distribution, again, was a case of private enterprise. (Including such trivia as Edison selling light bulbs under the production cost, to create a market for them and demand for electricity.)
Private utility companies, granted monopoly power and guaranteed pricing markups. In some areas (Tennessee Valley for example) no corporations wanted to open up shop at all.
Education too. I believe there are a ton of private schools, high schools, and universities which are basically run as private companies or foundations. Plus, companies routinely pay to educate/specialize their workers.
Right, but the point is that in 1870 the literacy rate of the country was at most 80%, with only 20% of blacks able to read in any language. Where was the private system, that could be easily justified by the increase in productivity? One would think that industrial company A would subsidize a school run by company B to improve their workforce, but they didn't.
Nowadays public universities do the lion's share of basic research using a mix of government and corporate money and corporates turn that into salable products.
In a lot of those cases government intervention was needed to make the owner play fair (break a monopoly, nationalize a vital resource, etc) but they weren't really built by the government or anything.
They were mostly funded by the government, reaped the benefits of government-sponsored research, were given legal monopolies to prevent competition, and didn't have to share their institutional expertise after the systems were established. Oh yeah, and real people who paid for their homes with their own labor were eminent-domained from their land to make room for the corporate-owned infrastructure.
Where it gets fuzzier are things which are basically for the good of society as a whole, rather than for a clear-cut ROI.
Not really. When 911 happened, the major airlines begged for money and got it, even though several smaller carriers (like Southwest Airlines) ran a profit despite the attack.
Basically I'm not saying you're wrong as a whole. Quite the opposite. Companies do invest in things which look like they'll bring a guaranteed profit, and generally stay away from funding the common good of society.
I think we disagree a bit more than it seems at first glance. I think most corporates will only fund things that guarantee profit in the short and medium term at the expense of the long term, that such action is irrational with respect to Economics 101, AND that even those investments wouldn't happen without market-distorting money from the public treasury.
Or to use another example. I can't recall which sci-fi author coined the idea (books are at home), but basically they said "the one sure way to guarantee a new moon landing would be to offer a multi-billion-dollar prize for the first private company to get there". I think that if even such a prize was offered, no company would rise to the occasion on their own. Offer the prize in baby steps along the way, with a DoD-style contract and guaranteed minimum profits (regardless of outcome), and they would do it for sure.
Call me odd if you wish. I've worked for both municipal government (engineering and negotiating contracts with PUCs) and Fortune-100 corporation, and in both cases short-sighted is the order of the day.
Generally I agree with your post, except:
If 20 billion USD was all it takes to [ do something interesting ], that is, cheaper than [ the existing way ], some corporation would already do that.
No they wouldn't. Corporations can only invest in projects that have basically guaranteed outcomes; they are extremely risk-averse. A security risk manager at a megacorp told me just a few weeks ago that their corporate discipline is very tight: if it can't make at least 12% profit, it is not invested in.
Hindsight is 20/20. Given hindsight, the "free" market failed to fund a lot of profitable ventures: the interstate rail and highway systems, the secondary education system, the power grid, the communications infrastructure. It's amazing how much development will only occur if the government pays through the nose for it in the form of tax breaks (Detriot's Pole City, airlines, trucking, agribusiness, etc.) or pork (DoD spending, NSF grants, etc.). Yet we persist in this thinking, contrary to history, that corporations will innovate at every opportunity.
Otherwise good points all around.
I'm in school (again, 2nd career) to study nanotech, and believe me it won't change the elements like that. However it could be used one day to mine the landfills and re-create the oil fields given enough energy (sunlight).
If we get enough time to develop it that is. We need huge increases in solar panel efficiency and decades of research into safely manipulating (in a mechanical sense) atoms to form the molecules we want. And we also need huge increases in computing power to model hundred-mole structures that might each have hundreds of atoms in each molecule: we're talking 10^25 to 10^30 particles to make one useful device.
All chicken-little scenarios rely on a massive technological freeze that defies all common sense, not to mention every scrap of historical data since the Industrial Revolution. We can confidently say that technology will continue to improve, and that the period of doubling will continue to decline, for the foreseeable future; and that what we can imagine in the next 20 or 30 or 40 years will be dwarfed by what is actually accomplished.
Well, let's look at what has actually happened in the last 40 years, shall we?
About the only significant technological changes are consumer electronics (computers, Internet, portable audio/video, cell phones) and plastics (used everywhere, revolutionary in medicine).
We've been on the verge of other groundbreaking technologies for the last fifty years that have not really delivered. No "clean energy" fusion. No moon base or materials delivered from space. And now with nano we talk about better chemotherapy, better computer displays, and better data storage, i.e. better versions of what we already have.
We're decades away (at least) from the kind of breakthroughs you're relying on to save us all from resource competition problems. I've lived my entire life in the shadow of these "the future will fix our problems" predictions that have not measured up. I think it's time to stop pinning our hopes on the unknown future.
I make the following predictions about life in the year 2025:
I don't disagree with most of your post but this:
/etc/passwd (and /etc/shadow) is where users are listed, I can delete them or change their names using 'deluser' or 'chfn', etc. After a couple days of tinkering, I got my first Linux system (Slackware circa 1994) up and running and was reasonably confident on security and what it was doing. Easy things: installing software, adding and deleting users, setting up network services, adding hard drives, writing shell/Perl scripts to automate unusual tasks.
:)
As far as I know it takes a lot less time to become a good windows admin than a good unix one.
I can pick up a book from 1992 about Unix administration and see that most of the material is still valid.
Now Windows. With each new release, the system settings have changed drastically. Setting up networking in Windows XP is not at all like Windows 95: the screens are different, the actual values are buried somewhere deep in the registry. When the system fails it provides almost no useable explanation. Network security is much harder to get right because so much more is exposed and so many broken applications expect to run as Administrator.
I've been administering just my own desktop for the last six years and feel pretty confident about what's going on and why and that I haven't been rooted. I think to reach the same level of comfort with Windows would take at least 18 months of full-time work and probably most of an MCSE prep. My friends who went the Windows route have told me quite a few horror stories over the years of automating NT 4 and Win2k desktops and how even large organizations have to commit years more time to get the same results as their Unix groups.
When I looked for a platform to get into 6 years ago, I took a lot of things into account. The main factor for me was this: Who will be giving me the best returns on my time investment? I decided to become a Microsoft platform developer, and I haven't been sorry.
I used to be a Windows developer too, mostly VB/VBA but some Win32 C. I switched to Linux in 1999 because I was working with a lot of Unix web servers and haven't regretted it at all. The last three jobs I've been the only Unix developer on multi-platform projects and it's been a good niche. I force my colleagues to alter their designs in ways that Windows-only developers never think of (like 'preserve case in filenames'). Economically it's done well for me, I am currently finishing a project with an embedded PC/104 device that runs TinyLinux for scientific data collection.
More personally, I feel like the code I write for myself really is free, that I can count on it being around and working when I someday retire and relax a bit. That's a really nice feeling for me, much like when I moved away from Turbo Pascal for DOS (which I knew would someday die out) to ANSI C back in 1993.
Development is the name of the game.
Exactly, as long as we remain employed and generally happy, who cares which system we use? Power to the developers!
Before 1492, nobody in the civilized part of the world knew about America. Thus, it is possible to say that Columbus discover America.
.NET pre-requisites, Windows/Office Update, and product activation. I just did that with VS.NET 2003 and wasted a day turning off features and hunting though menus until I could compile Win32 C code as easily as VS97 used to.
Incorrect. The 'civilized part of the world' (which you seem to forget included China, India, Persia, and Central and South America at that time) was aware that the world was round and knew its diameter rather well. Multiple passages had been made across the Atlantic, Columbus was just the first European government-sponsored explorer and he was under a requirement to find some riches. His second expedition was outfitted for full invasion. Read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" for plenty of historically-backed details about Columbus.
Before "Windows", computers were toys (C64->Amiga) or business, education or research. Thus, it's possible to say that some Pioneering took place.
Were you even around in those days? Before Windows we had DesqView, GEM, TopView and others capable of multitasking PC hardware, all competing with Apple's multitasking Mac hardware. VGA-based applications for DOS were quite common (Lotus, Quattro, WordPerfect) and supported mouse, joystick, and sound (games). Windows 3.0 made the features easier to get to, but the MSDOS environment was just as capable of "real computing", and in fact was preferred in cases where speed mattered a great deal. Lotus 123 on DOS with a math co-processor (you use to have to buy those separate) stomped all the Windows spreadsheets for raw computing power; WordPerfect 5.1 has basically never been surpassed for speed, but then again it was written mostly in assembly language.
Funny you call these non-Intel computers 'toys'. They had hardware multitasking, networking, multimedia, SCSI RAID, etc. In 1993 the Amiga beat the hell out of the 486 systems with its 4096 colors (compared to VGA's 256), superior sound, and far superior floating point.
Before theese events, people didn't know better. That doesn't mean that better existed or exists now..
In both of your examples, plenty of people knew better.
Credit where credit is due. This hurts to say, as I am definately more ~/ on unix..
The credit in this case is that in the late 80's and early 90's, Microsoft did a reasonable job putting "good enough" software in the hands of millions of people. WordPerfect 5.x for DOS stomped Word 2.x for Windows, but WinWord had WYSIWYG and did alright. By 1995 I could look for the Microsoft logo and know that the product would install in a straightforward manner, do what it was advertised to do, and generally just work. The user manual tended to be OK too. Office 97 Professional, Visual Studio 97, Internet Explorer 4.0 -- not bad, not all that bloated.
Unfortunately the trend to add more features has continued past the point of usefulness while long-standing bugs remain unfixed (example: try scanning a 8.5x11 photo at 600dpi into Photo Editor). When I see the Microsoft logo today I shy away from a package that puts too many gee-wiz features up front that get in the way of what I'm trying to accomplish. The manuals can't fit into small books anymore, half of the OS-level help isn't helpful (boils down to 'call your OEM help line'), and it takes half a day to install anything large what with the
There's no *good* way of delivering commercial software to a Linux system. (I know, I've tried.)
.deb and .rpm files that conform to Debian Policy and LSB, respectively. Double-click to install, all is fine.
/lib and /usr/lib being compatible (i.e. DB2 6.x required a really old glibc that newer distros lack). But these problems are the same as in Windows. Old Visual Basic and Borland C apps often break on Windows XP because some of the .dlls are missing. There's a whole network of web sites making the old .dlls available for just this issue.
/usr/local/bin/foo and /opt/vendorname/foo_bar/bin/foo , adding that to the Linux installer is easy. And most all commercial software goes away with 'rm -rf /opt/vendorname/foo_bar' -- a.k.a. "drag it to the trash can".
Not true, I know of several solutions:
1) InstallShield Multi-Platform. Works on AIX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows. Lays down a JVM, but what the hey. Will also put in entries in the RPM database, dunno about dpkg.
2) Autopackage. Covered by another poster.
3) Standalone
4) Standalone binary tarball (installer optional), like Mozilla.
5) Custom installer that wraps RPM, like IBM DB2. Despite the RPM, I've installed DB2 on Debian and Slackware using the same instructions as Solaris.
6) Third-party repositories. Probably the *worst* idea from the commercial company's standpoint because of the overhead involved.
For cases #3, #5, and #6, vendors are dependent on the underlying distro not screwing dependencies. For all cases vendors are dependant on libraries in
I think that commercial software already has what it needs to co-exist well with open-source operating systems. As more companies get used to supporting Unix-like OSes (like IBM), the user experience will improve and the OS maintainers will be more diligent about backwards compatibility.
Seriously, Linux is essentially Unix when you're talking installation and support issues. The big boys have been shipping databases, ERP, CRM, giant app servers, etc. etc. to Unix for decades. Just about every admin knows how to symlink between
Of course not. But a single Windows PE or .NET binary can run on Win9x, WinNT, WinXP, or Vista, so effectively they're "the same".
.jar file.
Wrong. The Win32 API has changed a great deal between Win9x and WinXP, I can write a trivial program that will work fine on XP but fail on 95/98.
Game developers did not have to support every graphic card in Windows ? You got to be kidding.
No, you have got to be ignorant. Game developers on Windows don't need to know anything at all about the graphics card, and never have: Microsoft have provided abstractions (first WinG, then DirectX) which mean that only the graphics card makers need to know how the graphics card does stuff, while the game makers just write to the API and it all works.
That's not entirely true. DirectX is not a part of the underlying "OS", it's an add-on. (One can also use OpenGL or Glide to program the hardware.) Claiming that I can write a game using DirectX 8.x features and it will run on Win9x (no DirectX), WinNT (DirectX 3.x), etc. isn't true, unless I bundle it with my game (as many do). I could just as easily claim that Java is the write-once-run-everywhere platform because after downloading the JVM you can run a
On a side note, professional games often have to go a bit beyond the vanilla DirectX API to make a playable game. Many many cards have bugs in their driver implementation so certain features have to be disabled to make things work, it's not at all a trivial "put it in and everything will be OK". (Remember the S3 Virge?)
I suggest you try learning what you're talking about before spouting off - it'll save you looking such an idiot when you're completely wrong about everything you say.
Geez, take a chill pill. You sound like frickin' Avril Lavigne or something. Go write some POSIX C code for a while and come back to Win32 and see just how "standard" it really is.
Rands philosophy doesn't in any way, shape or form reject morality OR charity - in fact, she never addresses what we would call 'true charity' in ANY of her books, including "The Virtue of Selfishness". It's simply of no interest to her, nor is it objectionable.
Precisely. It's of no interest to her, hasn't been talked about, and hence her 'philosophy' is drivel. "True charity" is everywhere, just as "false charity" is. Setting yourself up to be the one who labels charity work as "true" or "false" is also invalid: no one has enough information to judge other people's thoughts. A philosophy has to work even in the absence of perfect information.
You'd know that if you'd actually read the material in question, but it appears that like so many others who chant the "Ayn Rand is EVILLLL!" mantra you haven't bothered.
Yeah, well I *have* read most of her stuff. I tried to apply it to my real life; people thought I was really weird trying to be telepathic and infer all sorts of facts about them, always seeking the serious core of any discussion, and talking in terms of relative worth. Some of my friends eventually asked me to define something, anything in absolute terms, and then they proceeded in quick fashion to dismantle it. I soon stopped inferring and started listening around me. Amazing how human we all are afterall. Re-reading her works a couple years later, I kept shaking my head at how far off the real world she is. Raping a woman because you secretly know that's what she really wants? Having New York go dark because no one is left who is capable of keeping power plants running? Working your way up from laborer to owner in only twenty years? And that's just the fiction. Arguments in the nonfiction are about whether or not you should "suppress" your emotions. Puh-leeze.
Nowadays it's even easier to break it down. Just Google for "Objectivism critique" and in the first three sentences on any of the lengthy rebuttals is everything anyone needs to dismantle it. Rand can't answer absolute questions, she can't solve the Prisoner's Dilemma (which all other major philosophies nailed thousands of years ago), she didn't live up to her own published ideas (continuing a long-term affair that devestated her marriage), and her most vocal adherents all come from the same demographic (wiping out the claim that her philosophy works for everyone).
If you can't beat the New Testament at providing a meaning for life and handbook for living it, you're still an amateur.