There are all sorts of industry statistics gathered that simply aren't convenient for the particular industry. The fact that this number doesn't seem to be around seems to me to be a disqualifier. You can't claim that the number of trees is bogus and the real measure is standing board feet when standing board feet numbers aren't kept by anybody and are thus unmeasurable.
Like so many environmentalist scare stories/statistics, it evaporates on closer inspection. I'm a fair guy and would be willing to change my mind with actual evidence but this is just unacceptably weak to be designated evidence.
Now on space resource extraction, you're quite correct that rockets don't have it in them to reduce orbital costs to a level that would realistically provide for space resource extraction. I'd suggest you look up The Fountains of Paradise instead of 2001 for a better inspiration. The space elevator described there has been used as an engineering exercise by many, many people and it's pretty well thought out, only needing the right material to be discovered.
That material, single walled carbon nanotubes, was first discovered in a lab in 1991 (I believe in Japan). In the past year, they've gone from tiny fibers that you need a microscope to see to visible fibers measured in centimeters and from fiber expoxy concentrations of lumpy 1-5% nanotubes to an evenly spread concentration of 60% that can be created in unlimited spools. Now it's possible that we went from 5% to 60% and never go further, we'll never get to the 90% level that's going to be strong enough to actually make that elevator.
Considering the astonishing progress made in the last year (both in manufacturing and reducing the price to manufacture), a great deal of it in the last 6 months, you will forgive me for not quenching my optimism in dark negativism.
An elevator company is already organized and working on developing all the necessary technology to make the elevator a reality and which will put lift prices at the $100-200/kg range, an area which will permit the lofting of microwave beaming solar power satellites, mining, and factory tools. Obviously, getting things down is much cheaper that lifting because all you have is a braking problem.
The biggest problem will be a huge shortage of capital followed by the problem of massive dislocation of economies. It'll also bring a cleaner environment while enhancing everybody's standard of living.
Disruptive technologies like the elevator (and it's somewhat more expensive cousin, the railgun launch system) happen more and more often as population rises and more 'one in a million' geniuses exist simultaneously. I'm mindful of the lesson of Henri Coanda who, in 1910, flew the world's first jet airplane (the jet engine depends on the Coanda principle). A lack of capital and freedom drove him to Paris from his native Romania and he never did gather the funds to bring us to the jet age. A lack of capital, a lack of economic growth means more ideas than necessary will die stillborn.
That's what really frustrates me about social redistribution programs and punitive solutions to pollution problems, they tend to stifle economic growth and capital formation. We're going to need every $ we can get to manage the transition that's coming, both out of oil (which big oil has signalled by being quite happy with GWB's push for hydrogen) and into space resource extraction, generation, and manufacturing.
I see one major application that would really drive Mac OS X into the mainstream, home servers.
Imagine a smart house that had 802.11x base stations distributed for good network coverage, had a broadband connection, had VoIP with PBX capabilities, let you log in and run sessions in either OS X or via multiple virtual Windows sessions, and was dead simple to use. With the jump to a 64 bit chip and the ability to greatly improve performance via SMP, you could roll these computers out in middle/upper new home construction and just roll the technology into the mortgage. Virus worries are going to really handicap Windows in this arena and the need to support all levels of technological savvy and education will hamper Linux. Mac OS X has the potential to rule this market in the making.
I think that there are other markets for 64 bit computing but home servers are probably the biggest untapped one.
Of course I was referring to iSight and had a small brain freeze. The fact remains that Apple knows how to ride, and create, trends.
The iMac proved that you *don't* have to be mainstream to create a mainstream market. There were hardly any USB peripherals out before the iMac came out. Afterwards there was a torrent of USB product releases.
The G5 is gathering pre-orders at record numbers and will likely be a high volume launch. With Apple obviously shifting over to SATA it'll move the laggards into thinking it's safe to shift over to the new technology. Sales are picking up right now as Apple orders more and more drives due to the massive amount of pre-orders coming in.
Now the Athlon64 sounds like a very nice chip, and with an even-handed Windows-64 out, it might have a decent effect. Before you start crowing how AMD is going to be the best, it's important to take a look at some MS OS history. Remember when Windows ran on x86, MIPS, Alpha, and PPC? Everything that wasn't x86 sucked and were just bandaids for companies with hardware who were going over to x86 but didn't want to junk their current stuff right away.
Will MS make Windows 64 for Opteron as good as Windows 64 for Itanium? I suppose it's possible that Microsoft has turned over a new leaf but I wouldn't count on it.
Meanwhile, Apple will put its full resources into optimizing OS X and apps for 64 bits. AMD can't do that and are vulnerable to becoming irrelevant to the Windows mass market if Windows-64/AMD sucks compared to Windows-64/Intel.
Now AMD could try to shift people into Linux but that's a very hard sell for a chip maker to pull off.
Funny, we both share the same reason we continue this so far pointless conversation.
The AIDS crisis led to an unprecedented politicization of public health. The health officials wanted to close those bath houses down for years after AIDS had been spotted and were prevented by homosexual activists crying discrimination. Your memory is playing tricks with you if you think otherwise. And yes, larger numbers of infections create a larger probability that there will be a mutation but small populations can get completely wiped out by a pathogen because there's not enough variation in the small population to ensure that enough will survive to carry the species forward.
On trees, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just ask for documentation. I googled standing board feet and didn't find much anything pro or con so far but I didn't go much beyond page 3 of the google stats (normally, I don't have to).
I did go back on the Hitler/Catholic thing and found I misread. There, that's what happens when I make a mistake, I admit it. It'd be nice if you do the same.
On comparative advantage, you're making a great error. We have plenty of oil in this country. It's just cheaper to extract somebody else's oil so we import. We also export too where we can make money at it. A lot of Alaskan oil goes to Japan because it's cheaper to ship there and buy Venezuelan oil for slightly less money and import it. You asked why we import oil, timber, etc, because it's cheaper to do so, not because we couldn't become a self-sufficient autarky if we really wanted to.
Every country starts out at the bottom of the economic ladder and doesn't give a damn about pollution. As they grow wealthy they start caring. The sure-fire solution for stopping pollution is to enrich the population so that they have the money to insist on pollution controls in their country.
Big polluters either have to reform when the local population won't let them pollute anymore or they have to leave. Eventually they'll run out of places to run to and then they'll be forced to clean up their act. There *is* no other solution than economic growth and wealth creation.
The problem is that social resdistribution schemes are universal in their effect at slowing down growth and reducing incentives to innovate. We'll all end up trading with each other in a healthy system and as low cost sources of material are used up we'll go progressively up the ladder to higher cost sources until the declining cost of space transport hits that key point where the low-cost source is the asteroid belt, the moon, mars, or some other celestial body and we're pretty well set for several centuries thereafter.
This resource shortage that's got you sick to death is a short term problem. With the progress on carbon nanotubes accellerating unbelievably fast, I expect space extraction will become a reality in my lifetime and yours (they're currently projecting about 20 years from now). We just have to grow our economy as fast as possible until then so there will be enough capital to manage that great transition.
an article on hardware and no mention whatsoever of Apple/Macintosh? The iMac kick started the USB peripheral market. It's likely that the PPC 970 will validate 64bit desktop computing. The G5 Macs will help push SATA into the mainstream and the iLook will push a variety of hardware into mainstream computing because mac users will laugh at PC users who don't have these features and whatever else PC users fight about they refuse to be laughed at by macheads.
Here's another thing that will save the hardware industry, the home server. But that won't be the open source community saving the hardware industry but the construction industry rolling in $10k servers into new construction home mortgages and making sure that the line stays current for the next couple of decades.
G5s and other chips that can do SMP achieve that capability through a trade-off. The Intel developers who did the P4 accepted the other side of the bargain, better single chip performance in exchange for not being able to dual chip. That's a valid design choice but don't expect a similarly priced single CPU system to be chosen over a better performing dual CPU setup merely because 'chip for chip' the single chip is better. The dual system will be better overall and will get bought.
Pardon me, though, if I believe Intel's docs over your assertion that P4 speeds are rising rapidly. They're supposed to get a.2Ghz in the next six months and another.2Ghz speed bump the six months after. That's a.4Ghz bump in a year. IBM says they'll do 2.5x that and bump a full 1Ghz in the next 12 months. You have to come to the conclusion that IBM is lying and overstating their progress or Intel is lying and understating it to maintain your position.
I'll believe Intel at their word because they've been generaly good about hitting their roadmap targets and not going ahead or behind them but IBM's progress statements have been a bit off on the PPC 970. They promised us a 1.8Ghz chip at this time and delivered a 2Ghz chip. At that rate, in 12 months we're not going to get 3.6Ghz P4 v 3.0Ghz PPC970 but 3.6Ghz P4 v. 3.3Ghz PPC970. What a calamity... for Intel.
As for 10.3, I'm pretty comfortable with 10.2 right now and am likely to stick. If I didn't need 10.2 for one application I desired, I would have stuck with 10.1 and hopped to 10.3. You know, my corporate Windows clients do the exact same thing, upgrading every other MS OS upgrade cycle. Apple chose an early release strategy and those of us who wanted to go along for the ride paid the $ price for it. But a lot of mac users are still on OS 8-9 and haven't jumped into the OS X pool. I expect that the G5 introduction with G4s becoming very cheap will lead a lot of people to come into the 10.3 cycle and they'll upgrade again around 10.5 or 10.6. It's the nature of the beast. As long as they can run their apps, they're happy and OS X is getting to the point where you don't have to get every upgrade to have a very good computing experience right where you are.
But what's keeping MS from shipping *its* next OS? They've been on a new OS every two years cycle since forever. Now they're taking longer. If Apple's to be criticized for innovating too frequently (wow, what a slam) isn't MS vulnerable to the opposite charge, leaving its users stuck in the mud? You can't get their new technologies at any price. They're all being saved up for Longhorn.
Um, when the VP in charge of the Office division of MS says they're purposefully letting people pirate their stuff in an interview so they can up sales figures without having to go through a price cut, that's more than just an individual belief. It's a corporate admission of cynicism and hypocricy.
Yet you still come back because, at heart, you know I'm not the caricature you paint me to be. You're stuck in your set piece battles. We're running out of old growth forests! But you ignore that the US has more trees now than when the Indians had exclusive run of the place. We're running out of oil! But you ignore that for the first time alternative energy in the form of hydrogen is starting to be an economically practical alternative in more and more cases. And the idea that overpopulation of anything other than gay bath houses gave rise to AIDS in the US is delusion (Africa's different, but that's a pathology of bad govt. not too many people).
You don't live in a dynamic world but a static world and that makes you see things both better and worse than they are.
Your fundamental unfairness is exposed when you tout Hitler's supposed Catholicism as a black mark on religion but claim it's unfair that Stalin's atheism should be marked against that system. Stalin cynically used Orthodoxy as much as Hitler cynically used Islam when he raised two muslim SS battalions.
You claim I have neither the knowledge nor the intelligence to judge you. Fine, if you want to have your little fantasies about me, be my guest but you might want to read up on comparative advantage. Feel free to be a little ashamed when you find I'm right.
Ah atheistic tolerance and respect. I've come to expect it.
Hitler was an asshole, a bad economist, a vegetarian and an animal rights activist as well as a coprophiliac. Just because he killed 6 million jews and about and another 6 million other people in death camps doesn't mean that his economic system of govt. control with the form of private ownership is out of bounds for comparison, much as you might not like it.
Oh, and for pure bloody evil, he's #2 on the hit parade of 20th century evil. Stalin beats him out by a long shot and, guess what, he was an atheist. So stand down from your moral high horse, your ethical atheism produced the bloodiest tyrants in the history of the world, 100 million dead over the course of the 20th century.
You might try looking at Uganda's anti-AIDS crusade that is the most effective program in Africa. Their 3 pronged program puts abstinence and fidelity as the #1 and 2 things you should do, unlike the all condoms all the time liberal orthodoxy and whadda ya know, fewer people die there because of it. Condoms are included as a backup for those who can't manage to control themselves but the idea that STDs are cured by the use of a little latex is just a dangerous delusion.
Now getting on to the subject of useless mouths (now there's something hitlerian for you), free people produce more from less resource usage and tend to generate more innovations, all other things being equal.
Your apartment analogy is flawed because renters can't upgrade facilities, they can't open up the empty apartments next door, and they can't build a new, more adequate building. In the real world, people do this all the time.
A vibrant, growing, increasingly wealthy society is going to spend some of that energy to solve the problems of pollution. If you did straight line projections, you could predict that we'd all be in the dark because we'd have run out of whale oil by now. Look around, the oil age is coming to an end. In a few decades we're going to be beaming solar power down to earth via laser or microwave and creating much, much cleaner power. Human innovation is aimed at cleaner and cleaner power sources. Space transportation projects like the space elevator will end up opening huge new raw materials resources, and the world will continue to become a cleaner place if it can become a freer place.
There's working to extract resources from a mine and just taking everything and shipping it over the border. The German economy was desperate for money and resources because it simply was horribly mismanaged due to government control of the economy. Resource stripping in this sense is what barbarian hordes do so, yes, it was worse.
I suggest you take a look at CalPERS and their insistance of being activist shareholders. No matter what noble sounding mush comes out of the left's mouth, the reality will be govt control of the private economy through massive share buying. You guys blew your credibility with the lies told to get the Great Society programs passed.
Your final paragraph exposes your economic ignorance. Try googling up comparative advantage. You can have an adequate supply of resources and be the most efficient producer but it still pays to specialize and let others produce certain items. Congrats, you just failed ECO101.
You have got to cut down on that bad crack. Altivec is generally acknowledged at the one shining star extracted from the entire Motorola mess. It's a much better implementation when you have code optimized for it (competing with code optimixed for Intel/AMD's version of SIMD).
10.1->10.1.1->10.1.2->10.1.3->10.1.4->10.1.5->10.2 = how many service packs?
For the recent past you're correct, Macs have been on the slow side. That seems to be changing and PC fanatics seem to be just as much in denial. Anybody with 3 brain cells can read a roadmap and IBM's performance is highly encouraging, actually progressing faster than their announcements. Unless Intel comes out with some impressive progress faster than their own roadmaps, they're going to clearly be slower in 2004 on every measurement. The doubt will be gone.
The price on the client side is generally the same until you add in the server side. Then clients get more expensive. An Apple server generally is CAL free for $999 (you *can* get a 10 client version for half that). A Windows server serving file and print makes you get a CAL for each machine that accesses it. If you have a server application like Exchange on the box, you need a second CAL (priced differently) to access that program. Each server has their own CAL and the money keeps rolling into MS.
Microsoft does this every time they want to juice sales figures in a disappointing product. They even condone piracy by telling their distributors to stop checking for student IDs when selling educational versions of Office apps (that's straight from an interview with the Office division VP).
You might have been able to do it, but you also might have just fed into the MS myth of "everybody pirates our stuff".
Intel's roadmap puts 3.2 out now, 3.4 in 6 months and 3.6 in 6 months thereafter. IBM's roadmap puts the PPC 970 (G5) at 3Ghz in 12 months. the last time they made a prediction, they were supposed to be at 1.8Ghz at this time.
The reality is that we're going to be talking about 3Ghz G5 v 3.6Ghz P4. What AMD is going to push the Athlon to in the next year, I don't know.
One thing to remember is that the scaling problems that plagued the G4 where a Motorola problem. IBM's G3's were clocked so fast they had to be kept out of Apple's line because they threatened to outrace the G4s. Also, you might not be aware but IBM was originally scheduled to be at 1.8Ghz not 2.0 Ghz. that's about 10% faster than originally projected. A 10% faster scaling G5 chip would be 3.3Ghz when Intel is at 3.6Ghz according to their roadmaps assuming current trends continue (Intel on schedule, IBM exceeding expectations).
Tell you what, let's split up Intel's market share 2:1 Athlon:PPC, how's that for fair?
Some applications are going to do better with the G5, no doubt others will be speedier on the Athlon. From what I can gather, over the next 12 months, the G5 will go from 2Ghz->3Ghz, Intel will go from 3.2Ghz->3.6Ghz but I don't know what the Athlon's are roadmapped for. If the 2Ghz is competitive with today's Athlon and the roadmap (IBM's roadmap this time, not Motorola's) has the G5 ramping up speed significantly faster than the Athlon, it makes sense for people in a certain part of their upgrade cycle to go to G5 even though today's Athlon might be faster.
I better back off? What are you going to do, blackball me from the atheist's barbecue? Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and some protestant denominations all decry abortion as the taking of a human life. Some of them (certainly not Catholics exclusively) don't believe in birth control as a matter of doctrine. Orthodox Christians, for example, permit it only on the basis of a special pleading that it's just too hard. But you don't go after pro-life sentiment, you go after Catholics. What an ignorant bigot you are.
Europe, not generally considered a hellhole of overpopulation has approximately 10x the population density of the US. We could have well over 2 billion people in the US before we approached EU population densities. The idea that a doubling every 54 years is somehow unsustainable for centuries is just delusional.
What's more delusional is the refusal to look at the facts of the current pay as you go retirement system. The New Deal politicians bought our grandparents votes with their grandchildren's money. The Ponzi race was on and we're all ultimately the losers. 1.3% growth in population doesn't cut it to generate enough new cash to pay for senior retirements that last longer each year. The pyramid is just too narrow.
The economics of fascism (private ownership with government control) doesn't get much study compared to their well documented human rights abuses but that doesn't mean that referring to it is out of bounds. Hitler went on his fast expansionist tear through Europe because he did an immense economic shell game with the German economy. The only way out of imminent collapse was invasion and resource stripping. The heart of the problem was substituting government judgement for private judgement over what should be funded, what should not be.
This problem is at the heart of what is wrong with your suggested solution. You may be uncomfortable with the fact that hitlerian economics is a great case study of what is wrong with your proposal but that's the reality.
One other thing, economic growth ends up funding all sorts of desires but one of them that consistently crops up is that the poor are too hungry to care about a clean environment. They starve before they get cancer in general. As people get wealthier, environmental consciousness arises. The faster we grow the US and the world economy, the more people will care about the environment and the more effort will be expended to reduce the average pollution per $ of GDP. Redistributionist schemes slow down economic growth and we end up with poorer countries that are also dirtier. People have two hands as well as a mouth and in a free society produce more than they consume on average.
Then you should have said so as it is not a gallon of ink but a gallon of ink with a lot of expensive and highly marked up plastic and electronics wrapped around it. I like the lasermonks site but if I had a high volume print operation I'd work with a CFS system.
Silly fellow, we produce goods at the most efficient rate of pollution around. Pretty much everybody else creates more dirt per $ of GDP than the US. If you don't measure it that way but just by pure amounts, everybody should emulate the economic policies of Vatican City which produces the least pollutants of all.
It's more like a lot of places really place high taxes on their gas. Iraq is going to cost $70B this year. That's a considerable amount less than would be collected in taxes if gasoline was $4-5/gallon as it is in the EU. We don't invade every year.
You're just a foaming leftist conspiracy theorist.
Social Security started out with a retirement age of 65 when the average life expectency was somewhat below 65. Now we have a life expectancy almost at 80 and a retirement age that is slowly going up to 67. This creates two pressures, that more people live to retire and they collect benefits longer. We're currently at the point of 1 retiree to 3 workers and moving to the point of 1 retiree to 2 workers. To get back to the ratio available when SS was founded, we'd need to have massive population growth, not piddly 1.3% growth.
Immigration is only keeping us from slowly shrinking as native born birth rates continue to drop. In any case, somebody's got to have those babies somewhere so there still remains a state interest in promoting heterosexuality over homosexuality.
The left was legislatively dominant in the 60s when the Great Society legislation was passed. There was no work requirement and none around for the next 30 years. It was only when the Republicans finally wrenched Congress away from Democratic control were reform bills allowed to be sent to the President's desk. No matter what else you could say about Bill Clinton, he had a limited appetite for bucking the American people who supported welfare reform in massive numbers. His core party members squeeled like stuck pigs and are, to this day, working to undo the reforms.
You know, there is a massive history of government control of economic institutions, it's called the history of international and national socialism. Turning us into a nazi state via govt. buying up the market wouldn't do any better than just going leninist. It would be funny if it weren't so sad that your best idea for reform is Hitler's failed economic program of private ownership and government control of companies.
Individual choice over our money is one key to keeping our freedom. You just don't seem to get it though.
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There are all sorts of industry statistics gathered that simply aren't convenient for the particular industry. The fact that this number doesn't seem to be around seems to me to be a disqualifier. You can't claim that the number of trees is bogus and the real measure is standing board feet when standing board feet numbers aren't kept by anybody and are thus unmeasurable.
Like so many environmentalist scare stories/statistics, it evaporates on closer inspection. I'm a fair guy and would be willing to change my mind with actual evidence but this is just unacceptably weak to be designated evidence.
Now on space resource extraction, you're quite correct that rockets don't have it in them to reduce orbital costs to a level that would realistically provide for space resource extraction. I'd suggest you look up The Fountains of Paradise instead of 2001 for a better inspiration. The space elevator described there has been used as an engineering exercise by many, many people and it's pretty well thought out, only needing the right material to be discovered.
That material, single walled carbon nanotubes, was first discovered in a lab in 1991 (I believe in Japan). In the past year, they've gone from tiny fibers that you need a microscope to see to visible fibers measured in centimeters and from fiber expoxy concentrations of lumpy 1-5% nanotubes to an evenly spread concentration of 60% that can be created in unlimited spools. Now it's possible that we went from 5% to 60% and never go further, we'll never get to the 90% level that's going to be strong enough to actually make that elevator.
Considering the astonishing progress made in the last year (both in manufacturing and reducing the price to manufacture), a great deal of it in the last 6 months, you will forgive me for not quenching my optimism in dark negativism.
An elevator company is already organized and working on developing all the necessary technology to make the elevator a reality and which will put lift prices at the $100-200/kg range, an area which will permit the lofting of microwave beaming solar power satellites, mining, and factory tools. Obviously, getting things down is much cheaper that lifting because all you have is a braking problem.
The biggest problem will be a huge shortage of capital followed by the problem of massive dislocation of economies. It'll also bring a cleaner environment while enhancing everybody's standard of living.
Disruptive technologies like the elevator (and it's somewhat more expensive cousin, the railgun launch system) happen more and more often as population rises and more 'one in a million' geniuses exist simultaneously. I'm mindful of the lesson of Henri Coanda who, in 1910, flew the world's first jet airplane (the jet engine depends on the Coanda principle). A lack of capital and freedom drove him to Paris from his native Romania and he never did gather the funds to bring us to the jet age. A lack of capital, a lack of economic growth means more ideas than necessary will die stillborn.
That's what really frustrates me about social redistribution programs and punitive solutions to pollution problems, they tend to stifle economic growth and capital formation. We're going to need every $ we can get to manage the transition that's coming, both out of oil (which big oil has signalled by being quite happy with GWB's push for hydrogen) and into space resource extraction, generation, and manufacturing.
I see one major application that would really drive Mac OS X into the mainstream, home servers.
Imagine a smart house that had 802.11x base stations distributed for good network coverage, had a broadband connection, had VoIP with PBX capabilities, let you log in and run sessions in either OS X or via multiple virtual Windows sessions, and was dead simple to use. With the jump to a 64 bit chip and the ability to greatly improve performance via SMP, you could roll these computers out in middle/upper new home construction and just roll the technology into the mortgage. Virus worries are going to really handicap Windows in this arena and the need to support all levels of technological savvy and education will hamper Linux. Mac OS X has the potential to rule this market in the making.
I think that there are other markets for 64 bit computing but home servers are probably the biggest untapped one.
Of course I was referring to iSight and had a small brain freeze. The fact remains that Apple knows how to ride, and create, trends.
The iMac proved that you *don't* have to be mainstream to create a mainstream market. There were hardly any USB peripherals out before the iMac came out. Afterwards there was a torrent of USB product releases.
The G5 is gathering pre-orders at record numbers and will likely be a high volume launch. With Apple obviously shifting over to SATA it'll move the laggards into thinking it's safe to shift over to the new technology. Sales are picking up right now as Apple orders more and more drives due to the massive amount of pre-orders coming in.
Now the Athlon64 sounds like a very nice chip, and with an even-handed Windows-64 out, it might have a decent effect. Before you start crowing how AMD is going to be the best, it's important to take a look at some MS OS history. Remember when Windows ran on x86, MIPS, Alpha, and PPC? Everything that wasn't x86 sucked and were just bandaids for companies with hardware who were going over to x86 but didn't want to junk their current stuff right away.
Will MS make Windows 64 for Opteron as good as Windows 64 for Itanium? I suppose it's possible that Microsoft has turned over a new leaf but I wouldn't count on it.
Meanwhile, Apple will put its full resources into optimizing OS X and apps for 64 bits. AMD can't do that and are vulnerable to becoming irrelevant to the Windows mass market if Windows-64/AMD sucks compared to Windows-64/Intel.
Now AMD could try to shift people into Linux but that's a very hard sell for a chip maker to pull off.
Funny, we both share the same reason we continue this so far pointless conversation.
The AIDS crisis led to an unprecedented politicization of public health. The health officials wanted to close those bath houses down for years after AIDS had been spotted and were prevented by homosexual activists crying discrimination. Your memory is playing tricks with you if you think otherwise. And yes, larger numbers of infections create a larger probability that there will be a mutation but small populations can get completely wiped out by a pathogen because there's not enough variation in the small population to ensure that enough will survive to carry the species forward.
On trees, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just ask for documentation. I googled standing board feet and didn't find much anything pro or con so far but I didn't go much beyond page 3 of the google stats (normally, I don't have to).
I did go back on the Hitler/Catholic thing and found I misread. There, that's what happens when I make a mistake, I admit it. It'd be nice if you do the same.
On comparative advantage, you're making a great error. We have plenty of oil in this country. It's just cheaper to extract somebody else's oil so we import. We also export too where we can make money at it. A lot of Alaskan oil goes to Japan because it's cheaper to ship there and buy Venezuelan oil for slightly less money and import it. You asked why we import oil, timber, etc, because it's cheaper to do so, not because we couldn't become a self-sufficient autarky if we really wanted to.
Every country starts out at the bottom of the economic ladder and doesn't give a damn about pollution. As they grow wealthy they start caring. The sure-fire solution for stopping pollution is to enrich the population so that they have the money to insist on pollution controls in their country.
Big polluters either have to reform when the local population won't let them pollute anymore or they have to leave. Eventually they'll run out of places to run to and then they'll be forced to clean up their act. There *is* no other solution than economic growth and wealth creation.
The problem is that social resdistribution schemes are universal in their effect at slowing down growth and reducing incentives to innovate. We'll all end up trading with each other in a healthy system and as low cost sources of material are used up we'll go progressively up the ladder to higher cost sources until the declining cost of space transport hits that key point where the low-cost source is the asteroid belt, the moon, mars, or some other celestial body and we're pretty well set for several centuries thereafter.
This resource shortage that's got you sick to death is a short term problem. With the progress on carbon nanotubes accellerating unbelievably fast, I expect space extraction will become a reality in my lifetime and yours (they're currently projecting about 20 years from now). We just have to grow our economy as fast as possible until then so there will be enough capital to manage that great transition.
an article on hardware and no mention whatsoever of Apple/Macintosh? The iMac kick started the USB peripheral market. It's likely that the PPC 970 will validate 64bit desktop computing. The G5 Macs will help push SATA into the mainstream and the iLook will push a variety of hardware into mainstream computing because mac users will laugh at PC users who don't have these features and whatever else PC users fight about they refuse to be laughed at by macheads.
Here's another thing that will save the hardware industry, the home server. But that won't be the open source community saving the hardware industry but the construction industry rolling in $10k servers into new construction home mortgages and making sure that the line stays current for the next couple of decades.
G5s and other chips that can do SMP achieve that capability through a trade-off. The Intel developers who did the P4 accepted the other side of the bargain, better single chip performance in exchange for not being able to dual chip. That's a valid design choice but don't expect a similarly priced single CPU system to be chosen over a better performing dual CPU setup merely because 'chip for chip' the single chip is better. The dual system will be better overall and will get bought.
.2Ghz in the next six months and another .2Ghz speed bump the six months after. That's a .4Ghz bump in a year. IBM says they'll do 2.5x that and bump a full 1Ghz in the next 12 months. You have to come to the conclusion that IBM is lying and overstating their progress or Intel is lying and understating it to maintain your position.
Pardon me, though, if I believe Intel's docs over your assertion that P4 speeds are rising rapidly. They're supposed to get a
I'll believe Intel at their word because they've been generaly good about hitting their roadmap targets and not going ahead or behind them but IBM's progress statements have been a bit off on the PPC 970. They promised us a 1.8Ghz chip at this time and delivered a 2Ghz chip. At that rate, in 12 months we're not going to get 3.6Ghz P4 v 3.0Ghz PPC970 but 3.6Ghz P4 v. 3.3Ghz PPC970. What a calamity... for Intel.
As for 10.3, I'm pretty comfortable with 10.2 right now and am likely to stick. If I didn't need 10.2 for one application I desired, I would have stuck with 10.1 and hopped to 10.3. You know, my corporate Windows clients do the exact same thing, upgrading every other MS OS upgrade cycle. Apple chose an early release strategy and those of us who wanted to go along for the ride paid the $ price for it. But a lot of mac users are still on OS 8-9 and haven't jumped into the OS X pool. I expect that the G5 introduction with G4s becoming very cheap will lead a lot of people to come into the 10.3 cycle and they'll upgrade again around 10.5 or 10.6. It's the nature of the beast. As long as they can run their apps, they're happy and OS X is getting to the point where you don't have to get every upgrade to have a very good computing experience right where you are.
But what's keeping MS from shipping *its* next OS? They've been on a new OS every two years cycle since forever. Now they're taking longer. If Apple's to be criticized for innovating too frequently (wow, what a slam) isn't MS vulnerable to the opposite charge, leaving its users stuck in the mud? You can't get their new technologies at any price. They're all being saved up for Longhorn.
Um, when the VP in charge of the Office division of MS says they're purposefully letting people pirate their stuff in an interview so they can up sales figures without having to go through a price cut, that's more than just an individual belief. It's a corporate admission of cynicism and hypocricy.
Yet you still come back because, at heart, you know I'm not the caricature you paint me to be. You're stuck in your set piece battles. We're running out of old growth forests! But you ignore that the US has more trees now than when the Indians had exclusive run of the place. We're running out of oil! But you ignore that for the first time alternative energy in the form of hydrogen is starting to be an economically practical alternative in more and more cases. And the idea that overpopulation of anything other than gay bath houses gave rise to AIDS in the US is delusion (Africa's different, but that's a pathology of bad govt. not too many people).
You don't live in a dynamic world but a static world and that makes you see things both better and worse than they are.
Your fundamental unfairness is exposed when you tout Hitler's supposed Catholicism as a black mark on religion but claim it's unfair that Stalin's atheism should be marked against that system. Stalin cynically used Orthodoxy as much as Hitler cynically used Islam when he raised two muslim SS battalions.
You claim I have neither the knowledge nor the intelligence to judge you. Fine, if you want to have your little fantasies about me, be my guest but you might want to read up on comparative advantage. Feel free to be a little ashamed when you find I'm right.
Ah atheistic tolerance and respect. I've come to expect it.
Hitler was an asshole, a bad economist, a vegetarian and an animal rights activist as well as a coprophiliac. Just because he killed 6 million jews and about and another 6 million other people in death camps doesn't mean that his economic system of govt. control with the form of private ownership is out of bounds for comparison, much as you might not like it.
Oh, and for pure bloody evil, he's #2 on the hit parade of 20th century evil. Stalin beats him out by a long shot and, guess what, he was an atheist. So stand down from your moral high horse, your ethical atheism produced the bloodiest tyrants in the history of the world, 100 million dead over the course of the 20th century.
You might try looking at Uganda's anti-AIDS crusade that is the most effective program in Africa. Their 3 pronged program puts abstinence and fidelity as the #1 and 2 things you should do, unlike the all condoms all the time liberal orthodoxy and whadda ya know, fewer people die there because of it. Condoms are included as a backup for those who can't manage to control themselves but the idea that STDs are cured by the use of a little latex is just a dangerous delusion.
Now getting on to the subject of useless mouths (now there's something hitlerian for you), free people produce more from less resource usage and tend to generate more innovations, all other things being equal.
Your apartment analogy is flawed because renters can't upgrade facilities, they can't open up the empty apartments next door, and they can't build a new, more adequate building. In the real world, people do this all the time.
A vibrant, growing, increasingly wealthy society is going to spend some of that energy to solve the problems of pollution. If you did straight line projections, you could predict that we'd all be in the dark because we'd have run out of whale oil by now. Look around, the oil age is coming to an end. In a few decades we're going to be beaming solar power down to earth via laser or microwave and creating much, much cleaner power. Human innovation is aimed at cleaner and cleaner power sources. Space transportation projects like the space elevator will end up opening huge new raw materials resources, and the world will continue to become a cleaner place if it can become a freer place.
There's working to extract resources from a mine and just taking everything and shipping it over the border. The German economy was desperate for money and resources because it simply was horribly mismanaged due to government control of the economy. Resource stripping in this sense is what barbarian hordes do so, yes, it was worse.
I suggest you take a look at CalPERS and their insistance of being activist shareholders. No matter what noble sounding mush comes out of the left's mouth, the reality will be govt control of the private economy through massive share buying. You guys blew your credibility with the lies told to get the Great Society programs passed.
Your final paragraph exposes your economic ignorance. Try googling up comparative advantage. You can have an adequate supply of resources and be the most efficient producer but it still pays to specialize and let others produce certain items. Congrats, you just failed ECO101.
You have got to cut down on that bad crack. Altivec is generally acknowledged at the one shining star extracted from the entire Motorola mess. It's a much better implementation when you have code optimized for it (competing with code optimixed for Intel/AMD's version of SIMD).
I thought that P4s didn't do SMP which is why you see single P4 and dual Xeon comparisons.
10.1->10.1.1->10.1.2->10.1.3->10.1.4->10.1.5->10.2 = how many service packs?
For the recent past you're correct, Macs have been on the slow side. That seems to be changing and PC fanatics seem to be just as much in denial. Anybody with 3 brain cells can read a roadmap and IBM's performance is highly encouraging, actually progressing faster than their announcements. Unless Intel comes out with some impressive progress faster than their own roadmaps, they're going to clearly be slower in 2004 on every measurement. The doubt will be gone.
The price on the client side is generally the same until you add in the server side. Then clients get more expensive. An Apple server generally is CAL free for $999 (you *can* get a 10 client version for half that). A Windows server serving file and print makes you get a CAL for each machine that accesses it. If you have a server application like Exchange on the box, you need a second CAL (priced differently) to access that program. Each server has their own CAL and the money keeps rolling into MS.
Microsoft does this every time they want to juice sales figures in a disappointing product. They even condone piracy by telling their distributors to stop checking for student IDs when selling educational versions of Office apps (that's straight from an interview with the Office division VP).
You might have been able to do it, but you also might have just fed into the MS myth of "everybody pirates our stuff".
Intel's roadmap puts 3.2 out now, 3.4 in 6 months and 3.6 in 6 months thereafter. IBM's roadmap puts the PPC 970 (G5) at 3Ghz in 12 months. the last time they made a prediction, they were supposed to be at 1.8Ghz at this time.
The reality is that we're going to be talking about 3Ghz G5 v 3.6Ghz P4. What AMD is going to push the Athlon to in the next year, I don't know.
I think that NASA has requirements for computers that cost $10k sometimes. For a lot of things, the p series is too pricey.
One thing to remember is that the scaling problems that plagued the G4 where a Motorola problem. IBM's G3's were clocked so fast they had to be kept out of Apple's line because they threatened to outrace the G4s. Also, you might not be aware but IBM was originally scheduled to be at 1.8Ghz not 2.0 Ghz. that's about 10% faster than originally projected. A 10% faster scaling G5 chip would be 3.3Ghz when Intel is at 3.6Ghz according to their roadmaps assuming current trends continue (Intel on schedule, IBM exceeding expectations).
Like you said, time will tell.
Tell you what, let's split up Intel's market share 2:1 Athlon:PPC, how's that for fair?
Some applications are going to do better with the G5, no doubt others will be speedier on the Athlon. From what I can gather, over the next 12 months, the G5 will go from 2Ghz->3Ghz, Intel will go from 3.2Ghz->3.6Ghz but I don't know what the Athlon's are roadmapped for. If the 2Ghz is competitive with today's Athlon and the roadmap (IBM's roadmap this time, not Motorola's) has the G5 ramping up speed significantly faster than the Athlon, it makes sense for people in a certain part of their upgrade cycle to go to G5 even though today's Athlon might be faster.
I better back off? What are you going to do, blackball me from the atheist's barbecue? Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and some protestant denominations all decry abortion as the taking of a human life. Some of them (certainly not Catholics exclusively) don't believe in birth control as a matter of doctrine. Orthodox Christians, for example, permit it only on the basis of a special pleading that it's just too hard. But you don't go after pro-life sentiment, you go after Catholics. What an ignorant bigot you are.
Europe, not generally considered a hellhole of overpopulation has approximately 10x the population density of the US. We could have well over 2 billion people in the US before we approached EU population densities. The idea that a doubling every 54 years is somehow unsustainable for centuries is just delusional.
What's more delusional is the refusal to look at the facts of the current pay as you go retirement system. The New Deal politicians bought our grandparents votes with their grandchildren's money. The Ponzi race was on and we're all ultimately the losers. 1.3% growth in population doesn't cut it to generate enough new cash to pay for senior retirements that last longer each year. The pyramid is just too narrow.
The economics of fascism (private ownership with government control) doesn't get much study compared to their well documented human rights abuses but that doesn't mean that referring to it is out of bounds. Hitler went on his fast expansionist tear through Europe because he did an immense economic shell game with the German economy. The only way out of imminent collapse was invasion and resource stripping. The heart of the problem was substituting government judgement for private judgement over what should be funded, what should not be.
This problem is at the heart of what is wrong with your suggested solution. You may be uncomfortable with the fact that hitlerian economics is a great case study of what is wrong with your proposal but that's the reality.
One other thing, economic growth ends up funding all sorts of desires but one of them that consistently crops up is that the poor are too hungry to care about a clean environment. They starve before they get cancer in general. As people get wealthier, environmental consciousness arises. The faster we grow the US and the world economy, the more people will care about the environment and the more effort will be expended to reduce the average pollution per $ of GDP. Redistributionist schemes slow down economic growth and we end up with poorer countries that are also dirtier. People have two hands as well as a mouth and in a free society produce more than they consume on average.
Then you should have said so as it is not a gallon of ink but a gallon of ink with a lot of expensive and highly marked up plastic and electronics wrapped around it. I like the lasermonks site but if I had a high volume print operation I'd work with a CFS system.
Actually, a gallon of ink retails for $264.
Silly fellow, we produce goods at the most efficient rate of pollution around. Pretty much everybody else creates more dirt per $ of GDP than the US. If you don't measure it that way but just by pure amounts, everybody should emulate the economic policies of Vatican City which produces the least pollutants of all.
It's more like a lot of places really place high taxes on their gas. Iraq is going to cost $70B this year. That's a considerable amount less than would be collected in taxes if gasoline was $4-5/gallon as it is in the EU. We don't invade every year.
You're just a foaming leftist conspiracy theorist.
Social Security started out with a retirement age of 65 when the average life expectency was somewhat below 65. Now we have a life expectancy almost at 80 and a retirement age that is slowly going up to 67. This creates two pressures, that more people live to retire and they collect benefits longer. We're currently at the point of 1 retiree to 3 workers and moving to the point of 1 retiree to 2 workers. To get back to the ratio available when SS was founded, we'd need to have massive population growth, not piddly 1.3% growth.
Immigration is only keeping us from slowly shrinking as native born birth rates continue to drop. In any case, somebody's got to have those babies somewhere so there still remains a state interest in promoting heterosexuality over homosexuality.
The left was legislatively dominant in the 60s when the Great Society legislation was passed. There was no work requirement and none around for the next 30 years. It was only when the Republicans finally wrenched Congress away from Democratic control were reform bills allowed to be sent to the President's desk. No matter what else you could say about Bill Clinton, he had a limited appetite for bucking the American people who supported welfare reform in massive numbers. His core party members squeeled like stuck pigs and are, to this day, working to undo the reforms.
You know, there is a massive history of government control of economic institutions, it's called the history of international and national socialism. Turning us into a nazi state via govt. buying up the market wouldn't do any better than just going leninist. It would be funny if it weren't so sad that your best idea for reform is Hitler's failed economic program of private ownership and government control of companies.
Individual choice over our money is one key to keeping our freedom. You just don't seem to get it though.
Buy from the monks. Their prices are proof that the regular sellers are making a killing.