"and if you are wandering why a gamer macbook when there is so little mac games, remember that you can just install winxp... hell, apple could even bundle winxp with this machine..."
They could leave OS X out, and put a pair of super original, innovative glowing alien eyes in the middle of the Apple logo to make it look all cool and sinister. Gee, a Windows gaming laptop with a special case -- I wonder why nobody else has thought of that?
"Some apps slow down due to the larger memory footprint."
And the need to process bigger pointers. These often need to be moved to and from memory, which means potential latency problems; while caches obviously help here, 64-bit data takes up twice as much space, meaning that the effective capacity of the cache is reduced, and therefore its potential hit-rate.
In real terms therefore, as you say, what benefits one sees depends on the applications that are being used. I've seen figures in the +/- 15% range for various types of general purpose programs -- some benefit, some lose, and it isn't necessarily related to particular app categories, but how each individual program has been coded. However, much greater speed-ups can be seen for things like databases running on systems with 64GB RAM where all data and indexes can be kept in memory instead of paged from disk, scientific software that manipulates huge data-sets, graphics software which must process very large images (or groups of related images), etc. One does however need a _lot_ of RAM and applications that have been written to use it for handling big chunks of data before realizing any really significant gains, so for most laptops and indeed desktops that are hardware-limited to 4GB RAM or less, or bigger systems running re-compiled 32-bit software, "64-bit" will essentially be a marketing buzz-word used in epsilon-geek "my computer's better than your computer" pissing contests.
"Zilog probobably had a similar processor available based on the Z80 but if IBM had used it we would still have the same issues in the present."
Zilog's 16-bit offering (the Z8000 series) unfortunately wasn't compatible with the Z80 in either op-codes or assembly language, and this undoubtedly had an adverse effect on its adoption (or rather, lack thereof). The Z80 used an enhanced version of Intel's 8080 instruction set, and Zilog felt that this was not a suitable basis for a 16-bit CPU, so they designed a completely new one for the Z8000 that included a number of advanced features, perhaps the most intriguing of which was the ability to "re-map" pairs of 16-bit registers to act like a single 32-bit or even 64-bit one. Those who used it reckoned that it was a very well designed CPU with the exception of its use of segmented memory which, like the 8086, was composed of 64KB pages, although the Z8000 could address a maximum of 8MB (at least in its Z8001 incarnation) compared to the 8086's 1MB.
In the end though, the Z8000's lack of compatibility with existing software together with launch delays caused by technical problems sealed its fate as a computer CPU. By the time it became available in any significant numbers, both the 68000 and 80286 had appeared, with 16MB "flat" memory addressing capabilities (although the 80286 required a special mode that was rarely used due to its incompatibility with MS/PC-DOS). It did however find a notable "second life" as an embedded controller, and was still manufactured in various forms until 1995 -- indeed, Zilog still make a CMOS "son of Z8000" called the Z16C00 series. Note also that several of its peripheral chips such as serial communications controllers (SCC) were and still are very successful indeed.
"Here's the funny thing, though: Objective-C is supposed to be like SmallTalk... and SmallTalk has garbage collection!"
Which is why Brad Cox's original StepStone Objective-C also had garbage collection. This is not therefore something Apple have added to the language, but a standard feature that should have been in their version from the beginning.
"Much has been lost over the ages do to secrecy, which is one of the things patents are supposed to prevent, you can't patent something without disclosure."
Most of the common practices from the past that were lost had nothing to do with guild secrecy, but are actually a combination of the following factors:
1) Few craftsmen were literate, and they were hardly likely to pay scribes (who were very expensive) to write manuals that none of their potential apprentices could read. 2) Craft techniques are much easier to demonstrate than write about, especially when illustrative pictures have to be hand drawn rather than photographed. 3) Only those who practiced a craft had any real interest in it anyway. 4) Those few who did document crafts tended not to do so in a form that is useful to us. I have a Roman cookery book, and the recipes in it are little more than ingredient lists, with no real description of how to actually cook them. 5) Only a tiny fraction of written materials from the past of any kind have survived, and these are often in the form of fragments rather than entire texts.
So even if there had been (for example) an ancient Greek patent system, it's unlikely that much of it would be available to us, and little of what was would be intact enough to be of any help. Unless of course one believes that archaeologists can meaningfully fill in the blanks in something that says: "To make a good.. take three.... add... heat until... now leave.. nights.. Four slaves and... The apprentice can now apply... then place in abundant clean water until cold.
"Furthermore, I challenge your assertion that you could go 29 entire days without rebooting. Even if you let the machine just sit there, it would crash before 2 weeks passed."
A lot depended on the hardware it was running on, or rather, the drivers for whatever hardware it was running on. I saw Win95 setups on apparently identical machines from the same manufacturer, and it was rock solid on some (until a less than entirely well-behaved app was launched, i.e. any Win95 app!), and fell over whenever somebody looked at it on others. Then one would discover that the "identical" machines were bought in batches three months apart, and the newer ones had a revised motherboard with a couple of apparently trivial chip changes, but the same drivers, and those drivers periodically decided that they didn't like something on the newer board. The manufacturer would thus update their drivers, and advise that the update be applied to all machines of that model, after which the previously unstable machines would be fine, and the ones that worked before started to misbehave.
So while the majority of Win95 machines were indeed unstable, some lucky people with certain hardware / driver combinations were able to run it over extended periods without any problems. Note that these were not necessarily systems which shipped with it, as some of those were the worst offenders stability-wise (same with Win98, which initially seemed to have had even more stability problems than Win95).
"As does capitalism, which you attempt to reference with your solipsistic 'supply and demand' reference. Artists have as much a right to make a living from their work as does anyone else who works for a living, including yourself."
Capitalism does not confer any rights beyond that of individuals being able to own property (capital) which is theirs to do with as they wish, within confines that the capitalist system imposes by its nature, so owning a gun for example does not mean one is free to shoot anything or anyone, because damaging or destroying the property of others infringes on their rights as owners (and this includes their lives and bits of their bodies, which they also own). No form of capital has any intrinsic value beyond what others are willing to pay for it, and that includes work, which is simply another form of capital -- the only "right" a worker has under a capitalist system is therefore to receive the amount of capital from others that they're willing to exchange for that work, or not doing it at all, in which case no capital exchange takes place (i.e. you get nothing).
What then would be the role of copyrights under a capitalist system? Actually, none at all, because they use the threat of force to prevent the natural tendency of markets to place less value on desirable commodities that are scarce than equally desirable ones which are plentiful. Why something is plentiful has no relevance, only the fact that it is, and using non-market forces to change this is profoundly anti-capitalist, while measures such as DRM that make it more technically more difficult difficult for others to "manufacture" an equivalent would be quite acceptable.
Note that patents are equally anti-capitalist because they again use non-market forces to maintain a temporary artificial monopoly. Trademarks on the other hand are something that serves to identify market entities, so infringing on them would be an attempt to artificially manipulate markets by pretending to be someone or something else instead of simply releasing one's own product or service that competes on its own merits (doing what IBM does better than them is fine, but pretending to be IBM isn't).
All of the above makes it rather ironic that the so-called capitalist US is determined to force countries like China and Russia to adopt "IP" protection measures that are intended to prevent that most capitalist of phenomena, i.e. home-grown entrepreneurs producing easily manufactured products more cheaply than overseas competitors!
It isn't that there is no argument, but rather that it has become one of perspectives and definitions that will inevitably end up as an increasingly pointless exercise in hair splitting that will benefit neither ourselves or anybody else.
""feudal societies" suck... and so do systems where anything other than your individual abilities and decisions dictate your place in said system."
I think that most societies suck for those at the bottom of the heap, and are rather wonderful for the ones near the top of it. However, feudal systems could not have worked for so long if they didn't have some benefits for everyone, because various peasant revolts in different countries demonstrated quite conclusively that the weapons wielded by a noble weren't that much more effective than the often quite fearsome tools used by serfs, who outnumbered the nobility and their necessarily small standing armies (you can't maintain lots of soldiers in a pre-industrial agrarian society whose agricultural techniques aren't particularly efficient) by at least 50 to 1. And while it is true that the nobility held individual serfs in utter contempt, they were also aware of the fact that serfs collectively were a vital part of the system, so anybody foolish enough to kill too many while putting down a revolt would be faced with a rapidly collapsing economy and a long-term famine so severe that everybody including the king would have a hard time finding enough to eat for many years.
"I would go so far as to narrow the scope. It isn't 'nerds' in general that exhibit the described viewpoint. It is that curious subculture of nerds known as 'slashbots.'"
Agreed. I should indeed have been more specific.
"'Nerds in general' actually defy any narrow categorization. I know of nerds who specialize in all kinds of different ways, i.e. 'Calibration Equipment Nerds' and 'vintage gasoline engine Nerds.'"
Again, you are right. I've met butterfly and moth breeding nerds and nerds who have steamrollers, gigantic pipe organs rescued from cinemas, or become Romans or Vikings at the weekend. Each is as fanatical about his subject as any Slashdotter, and will harp on endlessly about it whenever the opportunity presents itself, but unlike Slashdotters, they know they have a minority interest that few share, and don't assume that those who think differently are stupid or ignorant.
"I think we have a misunderstanding... I didn't think we were literally talking about feudalism... I thought you were making an analogy and calling our current society a feudalist type society..."
OK, fair enough. Note though that anybody who suggested that modern Western democracies are even remotely like feudal societies would be displaying a profound ignorance of one or the other, because feudalism is a system where one's "starting position" in society is a matter of birthright rather than individual merit. Thus, while a person of noble birth could become a more important (and wealthy) noble by performing great deeds, political manoeuvering, and even outright murder, the best a serf could hope for was that one of his children might be big, strong, and notable enough to be selected for training as part of his lord's personal retinue, where he would not only be fed, housed, and clothed far better than his parents, but also have the opportunity to distinguish himself and earn his freedom.
"I was still talking about forced equality in terms of pay/jobs, etc."
Which is precisely why I mentioned forced inequality, and cited feudal societies as examples.
"I'm not going to argue that surfdom was a good thing... it was slavery controlled by a few tyrants and pseudo spirituality"
Spirituality, pseudo or otherwise, is not a prerequisite for a feudal society. Mediaeval Japan for example was in every way feudal, yet it had two major religions (Shinto and Buddhism) and there was no requirement for the peasantry to follow the same one as their lord, or for that matter any religion at all. It also wasn't technically slavery, because serfs were not bought and sold as commodities, but were simply considered to be a part of the land they lived and worked on. This meant that serfdom was actually worse than slavery in some respects because a serf had no individual financial worth to act as a disincentive for severely mistreating or even killing him / her (serfs were not of course allowed to kill each-other, but were expected to treat other serfs with the same respect they showed to the rest of their lord's property such as buildings, livestock, trees, crops, and tools).
" I think it's an example of forced equality... and represents and extreme example of exactly what I'm arguing against."
It is not forced equality because unlike the totalitarian socialist systems that grew up during the 20th century, there was no attempt to pretend that any of the often quite complex strata in a feudal society was in any way equal to those either below or above it -- indeed, the differences in wealth and power between each of them was a notable source of pride that would be openly flaunted whenever an opportunity to do so arose. Profound, deep, and largely irrevocable Inequality was not therefore merely an aspect of feudal societies, but the very foundation on which they and the institutions within them were based, and is one of several key factors that defines them.
Agreed in full. And by the same token, communism is about communal ownership of property, and any definition beyond that is someone's radical ideology.
Enunciating clearly with short pauses between each word generally helps quite a lot, just as it does when talking to foreigners with limited fluency in a language.
" 98% of the population is brutally repressed? I think that's the situation under forced equality.. when what makes you an individual is basically taken from you."
I suggest you do some reading on feudal societies, and the opportunities for individuality that were open to serfs, who made up the vast bulk of the people who lived in them.
"Your argument seems to ignore the fact that in between the top 10% and bottom 10% is where everyone else lives. Just because there is some suffering doesn't mean the entire system is broken... You can't please all the people all the time."
Your ignorance of the way feudal societies were organised is astonishing. Serfs made up 98% of the population, and were uniformly and equally at the bottom. They owned nothing, had no wages, no freedom of movement, and worked from the moment they could walk until they died in early middle-age to produce quotas for their owners. If there was a surplus, they got to eat, otherwise they starved, and they couldn't supplement their diet by hunting because every living thing (including them) on the land they occupied belonged to its owner, who would deal severely with anybody that killed and ate (i.e. stole) something without express permission. Shelter was a hut they built themselves from whatever was lying around, which was in most cases mud and grass in Northern Europe: they weren't allowed to cut down trees for their own building projects because trees belonged to the land-owner, and firewood had to be gathered from the ground on designated common land -- if there wasn't any, they shivered and hoped for a brisk wind to blow some twigs to the ground the next day.
So if your definition of "being and individual" is living in conditions worse than the livestock one tends (which, unlike the serf, has an intrinsic resale value, and thus the advantage of being fed in circumstances when serfs are left to starve), with no prospect of either you or your descendants ever attaining anything better no matter what your innate abilities may be, then yes, serfs had it pretty good. After all, they did get to live under a system without an "ism" in its name, and the people who treated them like lumps of shit had romantic-sounding titles, and got to live in castles and ride around in armour instead of standing there in a fur hat with a stern expression while rocket launchers and tanks parade past them.
So what you are saying is this: a society which brutally represses 98% of its population is a natural hierarchy if the people at the top of it call themselves kings and barons, but it is an unnatural one when they have titles such as Chairman and Member of the Supreme Soviet.
"I think what the average person wants to know, seriously, is WHY do corporate leaders think its okay to make billions, pay their lower scale employees minimum wage, and themselves millions upon millions. "
Because we let them do it. If everybody simply refused to work for or buy from companies who behave that way, or their employees (who vastly outnumber the bosses) hauled the entire board of directors out of their plush offices and lynched them, then you can be pretty sure that things would change very quickly indeed. But because we are basically a bunch of spineless pussies who do nothing more extreme than whine about things we don't like, the industry fat cats can shaft us any way they please in the full knowledge that we'll just come back for more.
Nobody has ever formed a true Marxist society because one of the defining attributes of Marxism is a complete absence of states with central governing bodies. Thus, while Marxists were often significant contributors to many 20th century revolutions, they tended to be rapidly gotten rid of by those for whom the definition of a "better world" was one where they were running things instead of somebody else. The end result was usually a form of totalitarian socialism (socialism is a bit like communism, but without the bits about not having states and governments that are so potentially inconvenient to wannabe rulers) that can be summed up as "From each according to his ability; to each according to his position in the government".
NB: I am no apologist for Marx, but the fact of the matter is that Americans in particular seem to believe that China, Cuba, North Korea and the old Soviet Union are or were communists, when in fact they have even less in common with communism than the mediaeval Catholic Church had to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Do they? The fact that shoplifting is a significant loss for most supermarkets would seem to indicate that paying for food is something that many criminals seem to avoid rather successfully.
"once again we see that the way Slashdot sees the world and the way the rest of the world sees the world are sometimes at quite unusual odds.."
That's because nerds in general have different sets of priorities from non-nerds, and Slashdot reflects this. Unfortunately, the Slashdot breed of nerd also seems unable to grasp the fact that nobody else in the world gives a hoot about the things that they think are important.
Some things people care about (in no particular order:
Their families Wages Being popular Sex The cost of living Medical care Crime, terrorism, and their justice system. Taxes Weather Stuff about famous people What's on TV
A sampling of things they do not care about at all (again, in no particular order):
DRM Linux drivers for various bits of computer hardware The GPL Software patents The iPod's inability to play Ogg-Vorbis files ICANN, and who runs it Richard Stallman The opinions of science fiction writers
"There was very little innovation in the original PC"
While this is true, you should read the linked article instead of what someone wrote in the Slashdot fragment, because it actually lists the top 20 most _influential_ products. And as the whole reason for it being there in the first place is the 25th anniversary of the IBM PC, the fact that the IBM PC is at the top of the list is not particularly surprising.
That's because (a) Google is still new, and (b) for huge numbers of non-nerds, web searching is just as new, if not newer than Google. It takes far more years than Google has existed for brand dilution through common usage to have an effect, and with the ephemeral and fast-moving nature of computing (and the Web in particular), by that time web searching as we know it will have probably ceased to exist except in places like the Smithsonian, where it will sit alongside card punches, paper tape readers, and the Apple-II as an example of the sort of stuff people had to put up with when computers were still so dumb that the unfortunates who used them had to operate the things.
"I think the vision systems such as those used in the Grand Challenge are comparable to those of a fly (even without the laser scanners)."
No, they are not. The primary system used to navigate that course was GPS -- there were only three notably short portions where sensors had to be used, and those were tunnels, which could have been dealt with by very simple mechanical feedback systems such as those found in some toys. I'm not saying they _were_ using such systems, merely that they could have used them, so the DARPA challenge did not require a functioning visual system of any sort to complete it.
"I doubt anybody has put much effort into fully replicating a fly's vision capabilities"
Then maybe they should instead of simply throwing CPU cycles at every problem. The interesting thing about insects (and the reason I've used them as examples) is that they have very little in the way of centralised processing, but are instead collections of largely autonomous systems that have most of the required functionality built into them locally. A fly's eye is not therefore merely a collection of lenses and light sensors that output signals for subsequent processing by a "brain", but something that also contains much of what in higher animals would constitute the visual cortex, and the same goes for most of the subsystems that make up the complete insect. This cooperating subsystem model means that insects can continue to operate for some time after sustaining levels of damage that would kill higher animals outright, because there don't have much in the way of critical systems whose failure results in instant shut down of the entire creature.
Note also that an insect's autonomous subsystems are analogue, because nature usually opts for the simplest solution that will work reliably, and would not therefore use DACs and ADCs connected to a CPU running software to do something that can be achieved by two transistors and a rheostat.
"I don't think insects have very robust intelligence at all"
By "robust solution" I meant robust in the mechanical sense, i.e. durable and able to continue operating after sustaining often massive amounts of damage.
It is doubtful that individual insects have anything resembling intelligence, because their capacity to learn is extremely limited, and appears to be non-existent in many species. Some of the hive organisms display more complex behaviour however, even though the individuals that make up the hive are often even simpler than most non-hive species.
"They're just expendable, and we don't care much when they do something stupid that gets them killed, or fail to achieve their goals."
All forms of life are equally expendable, because all of them die eventually from accident, disease, predation, or old age. Just because we like to think of ourselves as being less expendable than other creatures doesn't mean we are, because life exists solely as a gene perpetuation mechanism. Dragonflies have been successfully perpetuating their genes for around half a billion years, whereas the various members of the genus homo have been doing it for perhaps 1% of that time, and we already seem to be running into trouble. Which of the two is therefore better at achieving the singular goal that nature has set for both of us?
"Surely our simulated neural networks qualify as at least a beginning of modeling brain functionality"
They do indeed, just as logic gates are the beginning of computer functionality. There is however a big difference between emulating some of the hardware, and knowing how the original hardware is configured and programmed. This is one of the areas that's turning out to be far more difficult than people used to think would be the case.
"Mathematical computation functionality and memory has already far exceeded human capacity"
While humans (and indeed other far simpler animals) continue to leave computers in the dust for things like pattern recognition, spatial awareness, the ability to simultaneously and continu
And publicity, which Linux got in huge amounts during the Internet bubble of the late 1990s, when everybody was raving about anything that had young, hip people using the Internet to do stuff. Almost everyday, the media had various articles about pairs of 19 year-olds who'd become instant billionaires from people rushing to invest huge sums in their brilliant idea of using "The Internet!" to sell sandwiches at a loss. After all, so the reasoning went, young people understand "the Internet!" in diverse ways, so ideas that would have been laughed at in a more conventional setting were taken very seriously when accompanied by the magic words "young" and "Internet!".
Thus enter Linux, which was started by somebody young on "The Internet!", subsequently developed by a community of mostly young people over "The Internet!", and run by the young who used "The Internet!" to download it for free, after which they would do the kind of mysterious, magical things that the young did on "The Internet!". Given all those magical ingredients, it just had to be something great, so a bunch of startups run by hip, young people appeared to "make money" off something people could legally obtain for nothing, to the customary media fanfare that surrounded anything containing "young" and "The Internet!". Customers of the old IT giants thus started to ask about this Linux thing that they'd seen in Newsweek, and after being badly burned by their prior failure to foresee the collapse of the minicomputer market, they were determined not to lose those customers to some startup run by hip young people selling something that everyone, including the IT giants, could download complete with source code for free, and also get free help in adapting it to their own systems.
By contrast with all the hip youth and "Internetyness" surrounding Linux, the BSDs came from a time before the web existed (and the web was what most people meant when they said "The Internet!"), and tended to be maintained and used by crusty academics and fat middle-aged guys with beards and kaftans, both of whom were the very antithesis of youth and hipness. Linux mostly ran on young peoples' PCs who were happy to be filmed, photographed, and interviewed, whereas the BSDs tended to live on servers and multiuser systems crewed by alpha-geeks to whom the press were "suits" who must be avoided at all costs; Linux had a rebel culture that just begged to be described in terms like "exciting", "fast moving", and "grass-roots", and could produce eye-catching headlines such as "Could This Be Microsoft's Nemesis?", whereas BSD advocates droned on about maturity, stability, up-times, and other such (to the press) dull trivia, and thought Microsoft was "that company who made BASIC for CP/M. Are they still around? Haven't seen anything from them in years".
I thus think that changing the name of the BSDs would have no effect, because the nature of the culture surrounding them means that even if we could go back to those bubble years with a snappy new name, they would still be a pre-Internet(!) technology that lacks a young Linux Torvalds to act as a poster-child for the way that a combination of youth and "The Internet!" were going to build a world where huge wads of money fell from the skies without the need for dull, pre-Internet things like viable business plans. And while Linus never claimed that Linux would make any money at all for anyone (including himself), headlines such as "Creator of Linux says "It's kind of OK now, and will probably get better"" would inevitably accompanied by stories where interviewed CEOs of IT companies told us about all the money they were investing in it, and how the huge losses it was making now would become equally huge profits...
Slashdot Mirror
"and if you are wandering why a gamer macbook when there is so little mac games, remember that you can just install winxp... hell, apple could even bundle winxp with this machine..."
They could leave OS X out, and put a pair of super original, innovative glowing alien eyes in the middle of the Apple logo to make it look all cool and sinister. Gee, a Windows gaming laptop with a special case -- I wonder why nobody else has thought of that?
"Some apps slow down due to the larger memory footprint."
And the need to process bigger pointers. These often need to be moved to and from memory, which means potential latency problems; while caches obviously help here, 64-bit data takes up twice as much space, meaning that the effective capacity of the cache is reduced, and therefore its potential hit-rate.
In real terms therefore, as you say, what benefits one sees depends on the applications that are being used. I've seen figures in the +/- 15% range for various types of general purpose programs -- some benefit, some lose, and it isn't necessarily related to particular app categories, but how each individual program has been coded. However, much greater speed-ups can be seen for things like databases running on systems with 64GB RAM where all data and indexes can be kept in memory instead of paged from disk, scientific software that manipulates huge data-sets, graphics software which must process very large images (or groups of related images), etc. One does however need a _lot_ of RAM and applications that have been written to use it for handling big chunks of data before realizing any really significant gains, so for most laptops and indeed desktops that are hardware-limited to 4GB RAM or less, or bigger systems running re-compiled 32-bit software, "64-bit" will essentially be a marketing buzz-word used in epsilon-geek "my computer's better than your computer" pissing contests.
"Zilog probobably had a similar processor available based on the Z80 but if IBM had used it we would still have the same issues in the present."
Zilog's 16-bit offering (the Z8000 series) unfortunately wasn't compatible with the Z80 in either op-codes or assembly language, and this undoubtedly had an adverse effect on its adoption (or rather, lack thereof). The Z80 used an enhanced version of Intel's 8080 instruction set, and Zilog felt that this was not a suitable basis for a 16-bit CPU, so they designed a completely new one for the Z8000 that included a number of advanced features, perhaps the most intriguing of which was the ability to "re-map" pairs of 16-bit registers to act like a single 32-bit or even 64-bit one. Those who used it reckoned that it was a very well designed CPU with the exception of its use of segmented memory which, like the 8086, was composed of 64KB pages, although the Z8000 could address a maximum of 8MB (at least in its Z8001 incarnation) compared to the 8086's 1MB.
In the end though, the Z8000's lack of compatibility with existing software together with launch delays caused by technical problems sealed its fate as a computer CPU. By the time it became available in any significant numbers, both the 68000 and 80286 had appeared, with 16MB "flat" memory addressing capabilities (although the 80286 required a special mode that was rarely used due to its incompatibility with MS/PC-DOS). It did however find a notable "second life" as an embedded controller, and was still manufactured in various forms until 1995 -- indeed, Zilog still make a CMOS "son of Z8000" called the Z16C00 series. Note also that several of its peripheral chips such as serial communications controllers (SCC) were and still are very successful indeed.
"Here's the funny thing, though: Objective-C is supposed to be like SmallTalk... and SmallTalk has garbage collection!"
Which is why Brad Cox's original StepStone Objective-C also had garbage collection. This is not therefore something Apple have added to the language, but a standard feature that should have been in their version from the beginning.
"#8 Nobody seems to know how to write .NET programs well
this is not even wrong, just completely content-free."
And from what I've seen, not many people know how to write Java programs well either.
"Much has been lost over the ages do to secrecy, which is one of the things patents are supposed to prevent, you can't patent something without disclosure."
.. take three .... add ... heat until ... now leave.. nights .. Four slaves and ... The apprentice can now apply ... then place in abundant clean water until cold.
Most of the common practices from the past that were lost had nothing to do with guild secrecy, but are actually a combination of the following factors:
1) Few craftsmen were literate, and they were hardly likely to pay scribes (who were very expensive) to write manuals that none of their potential apprentices could read.
2) Craft techniques are much easier to demonstrate than write about, especially when illustrative pictures have to be hand drawn rather than photographed.
3) Only those who practiced a craft had any real interest in it anyway.
4) Those few who did document crafts tended not to do so in a form that is useful to us. I have a Roman cookery book, and the recipes in it are little more than ingredient lists, with no real description of how to actually cook them.
5) Only a tiny fraction of written materials from the past of any kind have survived, and these are often in the form of fragments rather than entire texts.
So even if there had been (for example) an ancient Greek patent system, it's unlikely that much of it would be available to us, and little of what was would be intact enough to be of any help. Unless of course one believes that archaeologists can meaningfully fill in the blanks in something that says: "To make a good
"Furthermore, I challenge your assertion that you could go 29 entire days without rebooting. Even if you let the machine just sit there, it would crash before 2 weeks passed."
A lot depended on the hardware it was running on, or rather, the drivers for whatever hardware it was running on. I saw Win95 setups on apparently identical machines from the same manufacturer, and it was rock solid on some (until a less than entirely well-behaved app was launched, i.e. any Win95 app!), and fell over whenever somebody looked at it on others. Then one would discover that the "identical" machines were bought in batches three months apart, and the newer ones had a revised motherboard with a couple of apparently trivial chip changes, but the same drivers, and those drivers periodically decided that they didn't like something on the newer board. The manufacturer would thus update their drivers, and advise that the update be applied to all machines of that model, after which the previously unstable machines would be fine, and the ones that worked before started to misbehave.
So while the majority of Win95 machines were indeed unstable, some lucky people with certain hardware / driver combinations were able to run it over extended periods without any problems. Note that these were not necessarily systems which shipped with it, as some of those were the worst offenders stability-wise (same with Win98, which initially seemed to have had even more stability problems than Win95).
"As does capitalism, which you attempt to reference with your solipsistic 'supply and demand' reference. Artists have as much a right to make a living from their work as does anyone else who works for a living, including yourself."
Capitalism does not confer any rights beyond that of individuals being able to own property (capital) which is theirs to do with as they wish, within confines that the capitalist system imposes by its nature, so owning a gun for example does not mean one is free to shoot anything or anyone, because damaging or destroying the property of others infringes on their rights as owners (and this includes their lives and bits of their bodies, which they also own). No form of capital has any intrinsic value beyond what others are willing to pay for it, and that includes work, which is simply another form of capital -- the only "right" a worker has under a capitalist system is therefore to receive the amount of capital from others that they're willing to exchange for that work, or not doing it at all, in which case no capital exchange takes place (i.e. you get nothing).
What then would be the role of copyrights under a capitalist system? Actually, none at all, because they use the threat of force to prevent the natural tendency of markets to place less value on desirable commodities that are scarce than equally desirable ones which are plentiful. Why something is plentiful has no relevance, only the fact that it is, and using non-market forces to change this is profoundly anti-capitalist, while measures such as DRM that make it more technically more difficult difficult for others to "manufacture" an equivalent would be quite acceptable.
Note that patents are equally anti-capitalist because they again use non-market forces to maintain a temporary artificial monopoly. Trademarks on the other hand are something that serves to identify market entities, so infringing on them would be an attempt to artificially manipulate markets by pretending to be someone or something else instead of simply releasing one's own product or service that competes on its own merits (doing what IBM does better than them is fine, but pretending to be IBM isn't).
All of the above makes it rather ironic that the so-called capitalist US is determined to force countries like China and Russia to adopt "IP" protection measures that are intended to prevent that most capitalist of phenomena, i.e. home-grown entrepreneurs producing easily manufactured products more cheaply than overseas competitors!
"I don't think we're really arguing any more"
It isn't that there is no argument, but rather that it has become one of perspectives and definitions that will inevitably end up as an increasingly pointless exercise in hair splitting that will benefit neither ourselves or anybody else.
""feudal societies" suck... and so do systems where anything other than your individual abilities and decisions dictate your place in said system."
I think that most societies suck for those at the bottom of the heap, and are rather wonderful for the ones near the top of it. However, feudal systems could not have worked for so long if they didn't have some benefits for everyone, because various peasant revolts in different countries demonstrated quite conclusively that the weapons wielded by a noble weren't that much more effective than the often quite fearsome tools used by serfs, who outnumbered the nobility and their necessarily small standing armies (you can't maintain lots of soldiers in a pre-industrial agrarian society whose agricultural techniques aren't particularly efficient) by at least 50 to 1. And while it is true that the nobility held individual serfs in utter contempt, they were also aware of the fact that serfs collectively were a vital part of the system, so anybody foolish enough to kill too many while putting down a revolt would be faced with a rapidly collapsing economy and a long-term famine so severe that everybody including the king would have a hard time finding enough to eat for many years.
Or, as often happens to disabled people, talk to whoever happens to be standing near the computer instead.
"I would go so far as to narrow the scope. It isn't 'nerds' in general that exhibit the described viewpoint. It is that curious subculture of nerds known as 'slashbots.'"
Agreed. I should indeed have been more specific.
"'Nerds in general' actually defy any narrow categorization. I know of nerds who specialize in all kinds of different ways, i.e. 'Calibration Equipment Nerds' and 'vintage gasoline engine Nerds.'"
Again, you are right. I've met butterfly and moth breeding nerds and nerds who have steamrollers, gigantic pipe organs rescued from cinemas, or become Romans or Vikings at the weekend. Each is as fanatical about his subject as any Slashdotter, and will harp on endlessly about it whenever the opportunity presents itself, but unlike Slashdotters, they know they have a minority interest that few share, and don't assume that those who think differently are stupid or ignorant.
"I think we have a misunderstanding... I didn't think we were literally talking about feudalism... I thought you were making an analogy and calling our current society a feudalist type society..."
OK, fair enough. Note though that anybody who suggested that modern Western democracies are even remotely like feudal societies would be displaying a profound ignorance of one or the other, because feudalism is a system where one's "starting position" in society is a matter of birthright rather than individual merit. Thus, while a person of noble birth could become a more important (and wealthy) noble by performing great deeds, political manoeuvering, and even outright murder, the best a serf could hope for was that one of his children might be big, strong, and notable enough to be selected for training as part of his lord's personal retinue, where he would not only be fed, housed, and clothed far better than his parents, but also have the opportunity to distinguish himself and earn his freedom.
"I was still talking about forced equality in terms of pay/jobs, etc."
Which is precisely why I mentioned forced inequality, and cited feudal societies as examples.
"I'm not going to argue that surfdom was a good thing... it was slavery controlled by a few tyrants and pseudo spirituality"
Spirituality, pseudo or otherwise, is not a prerequisite for a feudal society. Mediaeval Japan for example was in every way feudal, yet it had two major religions (Shinto and Buddhism) and there was no requirement for the peasantry to follow the same one as their lord, or for that matter any religion at all. It also wasn't technically slavery, because serfs were not bought and sold as commodities, but were simply considered to be a part of the land they lived and worked on. This meant that serfdom was actually worse than slavery in some respects because a serf had no individual financial worth to act as a disincentive for severely mistreating or even killing him / her (serfs were not of course allowed to kill each-other, but were expected to treat other serfs with the same respect they showed to the rest of their lord's property such as buildings, livestock, trees, crops, and tools).
" I think it's an example of forced equality... and represents and extreme example of exactly what I'm arguing against."
It is not forced equality because unlike the totalitarian socialist systems that grew up during the 20th century, there was no attempt to pretend that any of the often quite complex strata in a feudal society was in any way equal to those either below or above it -- indeed, the differences in wealth and power between each of them was a notable source of pride that would be openly flaunted whenever an opportunity to do so arose. Profound, deep, and largely irrevocable Inequality was not therefore merely an aspect of feudal societies, but the very foundation on which they and the institutions within them were based, and is one of several key factors that defines them.
Agreed in full. And by the same token, communism is about communal ownership of property, and any definition beyond that is someone's radical ideology.
Enunciating clearly with short pauses between each word generally helps quite a lot, just as it does when talking to foreigners with limited fluency in a language.
" 98% of the population is brutally repressed? I think that's the situation under forced equality.. when what makes you an individual is basically taken from you."
I suggest you do some reading on feudal societies, and the opportunities for individuality that were open to serfs, who made up the vast bulk of the people who lived in them.
"Your argument seems to ignore the fact that in between the top 10% and bottom 10% is where everyone else lives. Just because there is some suffering doesn't mean the entire system is broken... You can't please all the people all the time."
Your ignorance of the way feudal societies were organised is astonishing. Serfs made up 98% of the population, and were uniformly and equally at the bottom. They owned nothing, had no wages, no freedom of movement, and worked from the moment they could walk until they died in early middle-age to produce quotas for their owners. If there was a surplus, they got to eat, otherwise they starved, and they couldn't supplement their diet by hunting because every living thing (including them) on the land they occupied belonged to its owner, who would deal severely with anybody that killed and ate (i.e. stole) something without express permission. Shelter was a hut they built themselves from whatever was lying around, which was in most cases mud and grass in Northern Europe: they weren't allowed to cut down trees for their own building projects because trees belonged to the land-owner, and firewood had to be gathered from the ground on designated common land -- if there wasn't any, they shivered and hoped for a brisk wind to blow some twigs to the ground the next day.
So if your definition of "being and individual" is living in conditions worse than the livestock one tends (which, unlike the serf, has an intrinsic resale value, and thus the advantage of being fed in circumstances when serfs are left to starve), with no prospect of either you or your descendants ever attaining anything better no matter what your innate abilities may be, then yes, serfs had it pretty good. After all, they did get to live under a system without an "ism" in its name, and the people who treated them like lumps of shit had romantic-sounding titles, and got to live in castles and ride around in armour instead of standing there in a fur hat with a stern expression while rocket launchers and tanks parade past them.
So what you are saying is this: a society which brutally represses 98% of its population is a natural hierarchy if the people at the top of it call themselves kings and barons, but it is an unnatural one when they have titles such as Chairman and Member of the Supreme Soviet.
"I think what the average person wants to know, seriously, is WHY do corporate leaders think its okay to make billions, pay their lower scale employees minimum wage, and themselves millions upon millions. "
Because we let them do it. If everybody simply refused to work for or buy from companies who behave that way, or their employees (who vastly outnumber the bosses) hauled the entire board of directors out of their plush offices and lynched them, then you can be pretty sure that things would change very quickly indeed. But because we are basically a bunch of spineless pussies who do nothing more extreme than whine about things we don't like, the industry fat cats can shaft us any way they please in the full knowledge that we'll just come back for more.
It is no more ridiculous the the enforced inequality of feudal societies, which seems to have worked pretty well for thousands of years.
Nobody has ever formed a true Marxist society because one of the defining attributes of Marxism is a complete absence of states with central governing bodies. Thus, while Marxists were often significant contributors to many 20th century revolutions, they tended to be rapidly gotten rid of by those for whom the definition of a "better world" was one where they were running things instead of somebody else. The end result was usually a form of totalitarian socialism (socialism is a bit like communism, but without the bits about not having states and governments that are so potentially inconvenient to wannabe rulers) that can be summed up as "From each according to his ability; to each according to his position in the government".
NB: I am no apologist for Marx, but the fact of the matter is that Americans in particular seem to believe that China, Cuba, North Korea and the old Soviet Union are or were communists, when in fact they have even less in common with communism than the mediaeval Catholic Church had to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
"Even criminals have to buy food"
Do they? The fact that shoplifting is a significant loss for most supermarkets would seem to indicate that paying for food is something that many criminals seem to avoid rather successfully.
"once again we see that the way Slashdot sees the world and the way the rest of the world sees the world are sometimes at quite unusual odds.."
That's because nerds in general have different sets of priorities from non-nerds, and Slashdot reflects this. Unfortunately, the Slashdot breed of nerd also seems unable to grasp the fact that nobody else in the world gives a hoot about the things that they think are important.
Some things people care about (in no particular order:
Their families
Wages
Being popular
Sex
The cost of living
Medical care
Crime, terrorism, and their justice system.
Taxes
Weather
Stuff about famous people
What's on TV
A sampling of things they do not care about at all (again, in no particular order):
DRM
Linux drivers for various bits of computer hardware
The GPL
Software patents
The iPod's inability to play Ogg-Vorbis files
ICANN, and who runs it
Richard Stallman
The opinions of science fiction writers
"There was very little innovation in the original PC"
While this is true, you should read the linked article instead of what someone wrote in the Slashdot fragment, because it actually lists the top 20 most _influential_ products. And as the whole reason for it being there in the first place is the 25th anniversary of the IBM PC, the fact that the IBM PC is at the top of the list is not particularly surprising.
That's because (a) Google is still new, and (b) for huge numbers of non-nerds, web searching is just as new, if not newer than Google. It takes far more years than Google has existed for brand dilution through common usage to have an effect, and with the ephemeral and fast-moving nature of computing (and the Web in particular), by that time web searching as we know it will have probably ceased to exist except in places like the Smithsonian, where it will sit alongside card punches, paper tape readers, and the Apple-II as an example of the sort of stuff people had to put up with when computers were still so dumb that the unfortunates who used them had to operate the things.
"I think the vision systems such as those used in the Grand Challenge are comparable to those of a fly (even without the laser scanners)."
No, they are not. The primary system used to navigate that course was GPS -- there were only three notably short portions where sensors had to be used, and those were tunnels, which could have been dealt with by very simple mechanical feedback systems such as those found in some toys. I'm not saying they _were_ using such systems, merely that they could have used them, so the DARPA challenge did not require a functioning visual system of any sort to complete it.
"I doubt anybody has put much effort into fully replicating a fly's vision capabilities"
Then maybe they should instead of simply throwing CPU cycles at every problem. The interesting thing about insects (and the reason I've used them as examples) is that they have very little in the way of centralised processing, but are instead collections of largely autonomous systems that have most of the required functionality built into them locally. A fly's eye is not therefore merely a collection of lenses and light sensors that output signals for subsequent processing by a "brain", but something that also contains much of what in higher animals would constitute the visual cortex, and the same goes for most of the subsystems that make up the complete insect. This cooperating subsystem model means that insects can continue to operate for some time after sustaining levels of damage that would kill higher animals outright, because there don't have much in the way of critical systems whose failure results in instant shut down of the entire creature.
Note also that an insect's autonomous subsystems are analogue, because nature usually opts for the simplest solution that will work reliably, and would not therefore use DACs and ADCs connected to a CPU running software to do something that can be achieved by two transistors and a rheostat.
"I don't think insects have very robust intelligence at all"
By "robust solution" I meant robust in the mechanical sense, i.e. durable and able to continue operating after sustaining often massive amounts of damage.
It is doubtful that individual insects have anything resembling intelligence, because their capacity to learn is extremely limited, and appears to be non-existent in many species. Some of the hive organisms display more complex behaviour however, even though the individuals that make up the hive are often even simpler than most non-hive species.
"They're just expendable, and we don't care much when they do something stupid that gets them killed, or fail to achieve their goals."
All forms of life are equally expendable, because all of them die eventually from accident, disease, predation, or old age. Just because we like to think of ourselves as being less expendable than other creatures doesn't mean we are, because life exists solely as a gene perpetuation mechanism. Dragonflies have been successfully perpetuating their genes for around half a billion years, whereas the various members of the genus homo have been doing it for perhaps 1% of that time, and we already seem to be running into trouble. Which of the two is therefore better at achieving the singular goal that nature has set for both of us?
"Surely our simulated neural networks qualify as at least a beginning of modeling brain functionality"
They do indeed, just as logic gates are the beginning of computer functionality. There is however a big difference between emulating some of the hardware, and knowing how the original hardware is configured and programmed. This is one of the areas that's turning out to be far more difficult than people used to think would be the case.
"Mathematical computation functionality and memory has already far exceeded human capacity"
While humans (and indeed other far simpler animals) continue to leave computers in the dust for things like pattern recognition, spatial awareness, the ability to simultaneously and continu
"It's all about the branding..."
And publicity, which Linux got in huge amounts during the Internet bubble of the late 1990s, when everybody was raving about anything that had young, hip people using the Internet to do stuff. Almost everyday, the media had various articles about pairs of 19 year-olds who'd become instant billionaires from people rushing to invest huge sums in their brilliant idea of using "The Internet!" to sell sandwiches at a loss. After all, so the reasoning went, young people understand "the Internet!" in diverse ways, so ideas that would have been laughed at in a more conventional setting were taken very seriously when accompanied by the magic words "young" and "Internet!".
Thus enter Linux, which was started by somebody young on "The Internet!", subsequently developed by a community of mostly young people over "The Internet!", and run by the young who used "The Internet!" to download it for free, after which they would do the kind of mysterious, magical things that the young did on "The Internet!". Given all those magical ingredients, it just had to be something great, so a bunch of startups run by hip, young people appeared to "make money" off something people could legally obtain for nothing, to the customary media fanfare that surrounded anything containing "young" and "The Internet!". Customers of the old IT giants thus started to ask about this Linux thing that they'd seen in Newsweek, and after being badly burned by their prior failure to foresee the collapse of the minicomputer market, they were determined not to lose those customers to some startup run by hip young people selling something that everyone, including the IT giants, could download complete with source code for free, and also get free help in adapting it to their own systems.
By contrast with all the hip youth and "Internetyness" surrounding Linux, the BSDs came from a time before the web existed (and the web was what most people meant when they said "The Internet!"), and tended to be maintained and used by crusty academics and fat middle-aged guys with beards and kaftans, both of whom were the very antithesis of youth and hipness. Linux mostly ran on young peoples' PCs who were happy to be filmed, photographed, and interviewed, whereas the BSDs tended to live on servers and multiuser systems crewed by alpha-geeks to whom the press were "suits" who must be avoided at all costs; Linux had a rebel culture that just begged to be described in terms like "exciting", "fast moving", and "grass-roots", and could produce eye-catching headlines such as "Could This Be Microsoft's Nemesis?", whereas BSD advocates droned on about maturity, stability, up-times, and other such (to the press) dull trivia, and thought Microsoft was "that company who made BASIC for CP/M. Are they still around? Haven't seen anything from them in years".
I thus think that changing the name of the BSDs would have no effect, because the nature of the culture surrounding them means that even if we could go back to those bubble years with a snappy new name, they would still be a pre-Internet(!) technology that lacks a young Linux Torvalds to act as a poster-child for the way that a combination of youth and "The Internet!" were going to build a world where huge wads of money fell from the skies without the need for dull, pre-Internet things like viable business plans. And while Linus never claimed that Linux would make any money at all for anyone (including himself), headlines such as "Creator of Linux says "It's kind of OK now, and will probably get better"" would inevitably accompanied by stories where interviewed CEOs of IT companies told us about all the money they were investing in it, and how the huge losses it was making now would become equally huge profits...