It makes sense to multiplex if you have lots of leads connected -- a bus, in other words. Does it make sense from silicon-to-lead?
It seems to me that the whole point of optic computing is to replace the whole chip with waveguides and do all the computing with light: no crosstalk, no capacitance. What Intel has done is keep the chip, but swap out the bondwires with optical ones. That's pretty cool but it's not obvious to me that it beats current interconnects. Yeah, it's neat that they can multiplex, but since we can't currently do true multiplexing on wires -- we rely on timing and coding, rather than the characteristics of the individual electrons -- would this give us much of an advantage? I don't know, but this seems like swapping out ISA for PCI: small potatoes in comparison to true optic chips. (preceding assumes that laser-based optic comm could really multiplex: send any data at any speed, and the optical characteristics of the photons themselves will determine where they go.)
Note that while I have lots of experience with big lasers and with analog chip design, I don't know much about digital interconnects. It just doesn't seem like this is very useful, is all.
1. Why lasers? Why not just light? At the distances they're talking, does coherence and phase matter? Incoherent light is just as fast, and if you're shooting it into waveguides and it's coming out the other end, as long as you're not multiplexing data on a given waveguide what advantage does this give? (I honestly don't know: maybe there's a great reason.)
2. They're still bonding indium phosphide onto an existing chip. When they can use photolithography to build a billion lasers on the chip itself, rather than having to glue separate lasers onto a chip, that'll be really impressive. That's why so much effort is being focussed (pardon me) on developing silicon lasers rather than exotics attached to silicon.
You would've HAD to kill for a 9800-series: those things were unbelievably expensive. I didn't realize. When I was young my dad would have computer parties and bring home maybe five to eight computers -- a couple '25's and '35's and one '45 -- and we'd play their incredibly primitive (compared to DOOM) games and have a great time. This would've been between about 1976-1983 or so. I realize now that any one of those systems was worth more than our cars, and that any two was worth more than the house.
HP was making its own processors for its workstations until pretty recently, and I think they're still selling PA-RISC machines, but they've stopped development. The division dad worked for had its own fab in the basement so they could do a chip entirely in-house (although they were doing mostly analog instrumentation stuff.)
My first computer (and by 'my' I mean it was at home and I got to play with it to my heart's content) was a 9830, which was released in 1970, if I remember right. It didn't have a processor, IIRC: it was entirely TTL. It was, internally, a massive cardbank, about two dozen individual printed circuit boards with flip-out levers on the top of each. It was really cool to a 4-year-old and even cooler when I was 8 and starting to learn how to write stuff for it.
Do you mean an HP 9825, one of the one-line-dot-matrix-display jobbies with the rom drawers under the keyboard? I ask because I think there was also an HP-25 but it was a handheld calculator, and if I'm wrong I'm curious to know more.
I learned basic on an HP 9830, the '25's predecessor: same general computer, twice as large and 1/10 as fast. But it was pretty cool, nonetheless. I *still* want a 9845C, the '25's older and cooler sibling. Those were pretty nifty and are still useful for GPIB/instrumentation controllers. (although I'm not sure they came with a boot-up language, like the lower-end systems did: they might've required software to do anything, so they'd fail the Brin test.)
For what it's worth, the central theme of Shakespeare's 'Henry V' is precisely this: whether a monarch is responsible for the actions of the grunts, or whether they are. Shakespeare claims that they are, and the monarch is mostly blameless, but that's probably because he was trying to get in with the Queen. Modern judicial usage seems to allocate the blame pretty equally all the way up -- that's precisely what Saddam Hussein is currently being tried for -- although I notice nobody other than the actual perpetrators seems to have gotten in trouble for prisoner abuse in Iraq, to name one recent incarnation of this question.
I'd totally forgotten about John Young. I thought he was a sales/marketing guy who'd worked his way up, but I can't remember. But your memory sounds pretty good in this case. I remembered Dave "coming back" but I couldn't remember how or in what capacity.
One of the main differences between children and adults, aside from size, is a sense of community. Babies are utterly selfish because they have no concept of other people. As children grow, they slowly get the idea that other people are important, that other people want different things than the kid does, that those wishes are important, and so forth.
It's critical to put your child's welfare first -- make sure they have warm clothing, nutritious food, good medical care -- but they also desperately need to learn that they don't always get the $18 bag of cookies, that your desire for nice wine is the same as their desire for cookies. If they don't understand that, in their very bones, they spend the rest of their lives pissed off, on some level, that other people keep doing all this (to them) useless stuff and buying all this useless stuff.
I'm not saying feed your kids gravel. I'm saying that they need to learn compromise and the best ways for them to do that are by having other kids to play with (rather than computers and TV) and watching *you* compromise. Today, they get the bag of cookies, but next week, you get the wine and they don't get the cookies, because what you want is just as important as what they want, and hopefully a great deal more rational.
I've dated several very smart women who were only children, and let me tell you what: for almost every one of them, inability to compromise made them into tragic heros. They pushed in every situation, to get what they thought was the right solution, and usually they got exactly what they wanted, but sometimes they pissed a lot of people off and made a lot of unnecessary enemies who came back to haunt them later. There's nothing more valuable in interpersonal relations than learning how to compromise.
I'm thinking your timeline might be a little messed up. Dave Packard was still chairman until 1993, at which point he was succeeded by Lew Platt, who was an old-school engineer who worked his way up through the ranks. Carly was the first hired gun, in '99. But it's hard to say: there are CEOs and CFOs and Presidents and Chairmen, and you might be speaking of someone totally different. The late '80's was about when people I know stopped enjoying HP. My dad stuck it out for another 8 years, I left, my then-gf left, and a lot of my coworkers started looking elsewhere and taking loooong sabbaticals.
There are a lot of contradictory studies on bird navigation. This news article discusses how robins get lost if one eye is patched (but only the right eye, not the left one) and talks about some experiments that indicate that pigeons navigate long distances using smell instead of sensing magnetic fields.
This beautiful paper (big pdf) indicates that pigeons navigate visually when near home, and by smell for longer distances, claiming "sensory inputs, being neither olfactory nor visual, do not substantially contribute to determining current position with respect to home."
So don't go sticking magnets all over your car in hopes of averting bird poop: if they can sense magnetic fields, it might not mean anything to them.
Anything interesting involves a risk/reward ratio. When you look at risk, if you judge that the risk of failure is unacceptable, then there is no reward large enough to counterbalance the risk. People oppose nuclear power/incinerators because they're misinformed about the risks, not because they're irrational. People almost always think they're acting rationally (even if that's not true.)
With respect to incinerators, specifically, there's a tradeoff going on with respect to the functional parameters: if you burn too hot you reduce your efficiency, but if you burn too cool you increase the amount of toxic stuff you're exhausting. Since one costs the company (burning too much fuel) and the other only costs the community at large (airborne toxins) which way do you think the company will tend to error, over time? This technology has been used for decades for heating cement kilns (Holnam runs a bunch locally), and it works very well, as long as independent auditors keep checking the exhaust stream, because if nobody's keeping them honest, the temperatures drop and the exhaust plume starts containing nasty stuff. At least, that's what I've seen locally: about every three years, a cement plant gets in trouble for violating air quality standards. Not random numbers, but pretty reliably every few years, as one would expect from a process that is under continuous stress to reduce costs.
If you heat things up enough, you'll break down even dioxin. All you need to do is dump in enough energy to start breaking the (fairly stable) molecular bonds. This is what dioxin looks like. A chemist can tell you why it's so stable: lots and lots of alternating single/double bonds. quick chem lesson: lines drawn between atoms, in this case the angles on the outside of the structure, representing a carbon atom at each angle, are single bonds, drawn C-C-C (or in this case/\) while double bonds are drawn as two lines: C-C=C. Something with alternating bonds, C-C=C-C=C, acts as if it has about 1.5 bonds between each, which is tremendously stabilizing. Benzene is a ring of six carbons, with six single and three double bonds: alternating single/double bonds, so it's drawn as a hexagon with a circle in the center, to symbolize its electron structure. This has two benzenes, with oxygens connecting them. Because the oxygens have electron pairs that are unused in bonding, but are in the right place, they can act as, essentially, parts of double bonds, meaning the center section is also alternating single/double bonds -- or, more correctly, the whole works has evenly distributed electron density. Whew. here is some more stuff about aromatics and the stability of benzene. The bond energy of carbon-carbon bonds in benzene is about 200 kJ/mol (as I recall: I may be wrong); dioxin is (I think) going to take more energy to break. But at any given bond energy, a given temperature with large excess of oxygen, over a given time, will break a certain percentage of the dioxins down into smaller (and quickly oxidized) byproducts, so all you have to do is establish what's a reasonable level of dioxin to release into the atmosphere (which a person could justifiably argue is "zero, dammit!") and make sure your flame temperature is high enough that you transfer more energy than that threshhold to the exhaust stream. The temperature of flames is really spectacularly high -- the free air temp of burning oxygen and hydrogen is something like 5500 degrees F -- but you have to guarantee that the mass of the exhaust actually gets that hot, so you have to care about heat transfer, not just temperature. In any case: this is well-known chemistry. It is possible to burn dioxins and destroy 99% (or 99.9% or whatever you've decided is 'enough') of them.
The sulfur would become sulfur dioxide, which would be captured in scrubbers, the way they do in steel plants and coal-fired power plants. They use the captured material to make sulfuric acid, and sell it at a major profit, even considering the initial cost of installing the scrubbers.
That's probably WAY more than you ever wanted to know, but I like chemistry.
I *am* a shareholder, not a huge one but not a small one either, and I've been angry at them since before Carly. This is overstating the case a little, but it was a personal company, and once H & P left, it became a company company and went downhill. My dad worked there for 35 years, I worked there or for contract for them for six, many of my friends did or still do, and I think all of us have a pretty consistent view of it. When the founders had a clear goal about how they wanted the company to run, it ran that way; when people started running it who didn't have that sense of ownership they ran it in a different way and it became a lot less rewarding as a place to work.
I'm not trying to be overly dialectic about this but: there are two general classes of people: those that haven't played WoW and those that have. Looking at those that have, there are two classes of people: those that like WoW and those that don't. Chances are the ones who like it are still playing, and the ones who aren't playing don't like it. So, talking to people who used to play WoW and don't, and finding that most of them are really happy to have stopped, isn't so surprising. Finding people who have stopped playing WoW but wish they still were: now that would be surprising.
I used to play a distant predecessor to WoW: MUDs, in the early '90's. One of my friends just celebrated his tenth anniversary with a woman he met on a type of MUD, and the first anniversary of their first kid. Woo hoo! He wasn't the first person I knew who had a VR relationship turn into an RL marriage, but it's the longest-standing one of the people who did this that I personally know. He and I nearly dropped out of college in 1993 because we were spending so much time online, writing programs in this world, talking to people, and just exploring. Those spaces really anticipated the so-called Web2.0, because they were almost entirely built by the people playing them and were, as a result, much more complex and interesting than anything any small design team could have come up with. Both of us still log into the remaining ones to this day, but thankfully not the 8 hours every evening that we did through a lot of the '90's.
I keep reading people saying this and I keep wondering if they're running the same XP I'm running. (XP pro, SP2.) I have a bunch of antivirus/antispyware stuff, and only use the XP partition when I absolutely have to, on what I hope are trustworthy big websites. Some days it suddenly decides it can't find the Internet anymore, not even Google. Some days it locks up when I plug in the Creative Zen. It has locked up a couple of times when I tried to burn CD's with Nero. It regularly hangs for minutes at a time when I'm using the eprom burner/pic programmer, for which I don't entirely blame XP: that's definitely weird hardware. But the RH FC4 installation never does any of that. It's never even hiccuped. Sometimes Firefox crashes, sometimes XMMS suddenly decides that my soundcard configuration is lousy and stops playing, but the OS has kept running through burning PICs, CD's, talking to iPods and Zens, and even interacting with some homebrew USB and parallel-port hardware that didn't work right. It's just kept chugging along. I wouldn't even try some of the stupid hardware I/O stuff in XP, not like it would let me. I'd certainly never go download code from countries I've never even heard of from the XP side, or even go look at their websites, for fear of what might happen, but FC4 doesn't blink, just Firefox, and that's easy to restart. So: I sure wish I had your XP install.
The summary says: However they didn't live any longer than normal mice.
This isn't really surprising. I think that JSB Haldane provided the mathematical framework for showing why this is the case.
First off, evolution is about amplification: the genes from an animal that has more children, younger, will be spread more than the genes from an animal that lives longer, so the successful strategy is to commit energy towards early maturation, rather than towards longevity.
Secondly, and this is the part Haldane worked on, if there are multiple systems that contribute to aging, they will, over time, have their age-related effects converge. The system that leads to the earliest death-from-old-age is the limiting factor, and will have pressure (assuming the animal is still of breeding age) to stretch longer, while any other senescence-related systems will tend to shorten to minimize energy expenditure, until they all have roughly the same value. It becomes a weakest-link-in-the-chain situation, where removing one limiting factor just exposes another with roughly the same limiting value. That's a messy summary of the original theory, but it's been a decade since I read a lot about this: sorry.
I agree that it happens, and that it's not just HP.
However, lots and lots of indignation pointed directly at HP is a good thing because it taints the practice. Shame may do what guilt hasn't, and make other people think very carefully before doing the same thing that HP is getting excoriated for doing.
It's really no different than Puritan use of stocks and public humiliation, and since corporations can't go to jail, maybe this is the only method of assessing punitive damages that our culture has. (I don't consider fines particularly punitive unless they're a significant portion of a corporation's yearly profit, which simply isn't going to happen to a place as big as HP for what could be rightfully characterized as actions of individuals, even if those individuals were acting as agents of the corporation.)
It WILL be, if I ever get it working. Then I'm planning on hooking the megaphone I got from harbor freight & salvage to the top of it all. It'll be *great*.
My innocent faith is that both sides will have very expensive lawyers, at which point it's quite easy to make a good case for anything either side wants.
Sites will move their hosting out of the US, and their executives won't visit the US.
More realistically, social networking sites will add more verification layers (that don't work) for greater plausible deniability, and those that think they can, will start requiring credit card info.
It might be useless on a macbook but I have two headless computers that merely sit in my crawl space, one handling NAT/firewall and the other webserver stuff. Seems like a good thing for them. But maybe not so applicable for the Qube-2 that I'm trying to stuff in a radio-control car, with a webcam, so I can chase the dog around the house while I'm at work.
Maybe 'selfish' would be a better description, but I'm not sure that there's that big a difference: in a classic tragedy-of-the-commons you're exploiting community resources for your own gain, and in stealing a piece of chewing gum you're exploiting a community resource (trust, meaning storeowners don't have to spend extra money on guarding against shoplifting) for your own gain (chewing gum!) Ditto speeding in general: the community has to spend money and effort on traffic enforcement, so you're sucking up resources for personal gain.
Romans and Greeks used lead paints to make their faces white. After the fall of Rome,
people selectively poisoned themselves with arsenic to make themselves look paler. And, given the health impacts of stuff like silicosis and asbestos damage, both of which are related to particle size and shape, I'd say that any small particle had better be eyed pretty warily by anyone with brains, no matter what idiots in the past have done with it.
One of the things I wonder is whether it's that sociopaths become corporate leaders, or whether normal people learn how to succeed in business and in learning those behaviors, become sociopaths. My point being that it's not clear to me that Dunn and Skilling are different than us: they just have much greater ability to cause damage, and much greater incentive to play dirty.
While I'd like to believe you're right, I'm guessing that dirty tricks don't always backfire. They probably usually work because nobody finds out about them, which encourages doing them again, larger and dirtier next time, until someone does finally get caught.
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It makes sense to multiplex if you have lots of leads connected -- a bus, in other words. Does it make sense from silicon-to-lead?
It seems to me that the whole point of optic computing is to replace the whole chip with waveguides and do all the computing with light: no crosstalk, no capacitance. What Intel has done is keep the chip, but swap out the bondwires with optical ones. That's pretty cool but it's not obvious to me that it beats current interconnects. Yeah, it's neat that they can multiplex, but since we can't currently do true multiplexing on wires -- we rely on timing and coding, rather than the characteristics of the individual electrons -- would this give us much of an advantage? I don't know, but this seems like swapping out ISA for PCI: small potatoes in comparison to true optic chips. (preceding assumes that laser-based optic comm could really multiplex: send any data at any speed, and the optical characteristics of the photons themselves will determine where they go.)
Note that while I have lots of experience with big lasers and with analog chip design, I don't know much about digital interconnects. It just doesn't seem like this is very useful, is all.
1. Why lasers? Why not just light? At the distances they're talking, does coherence and phase matter? Incoherent light is just as fast, and if you're shooting it into waveguides and it's coming out the other end, as long as you're not multiplexing data on a given waveguide what advantage does this give? (I honestly don't know: maybe there's a great reason.)
2. They're still bonding indium phosphide onto an existing chip. When they can use photolithography to build a billion lasers on the chip itself, rather than having to glue separate lasers onto a chip, that'll be really impressive. That's why so much effort is being focussed (pardon me) on developing silicon lasers rather than exotics attached to silicon.
Dude. Eddie Merckx!
You would've HAD to kill for a 9800-series: those things were unbelievably expensive. I didn't realize. When I was young my dad would have computer parties and bring home maybe five to eight computers -- a couple '25's and '35's and one '45 -- and we'd play their incredibly primitive (compared to DOOM) games and have a great time. This would've been between about 1976-1983 or so. I realize now that any one of those systems was worth more than our cars, and that any two was worth more than the house.
HP was making its own processors for its workstations until pretty recently, and I think they're still selling PA-RISC machines, but they've stopped development. The division dad worked for had its own fab in the basement so they could do a chip entirely in-house (although they were doing mostly analog instrumentation stuff.)
My first computer (and by 'my' I mean it was at home and I got to play with it to my heart's content) was a 9830, which was released in 1970, if I remember right. It didn't have a processor, IIRC: it was entirely TTL. It was, internally, a massive cardbank, about two dozen individual printed circuit boards with flip-out levers on the top of each. It was really cool to a 4-year-old and even cooler when I was 8 and starting to learn how to write stuff for it.
Do you mean an HP 9825, one of the one-line-dot-matrix-display jobbies with the rom drawers under the keyboard? I ask because I think there was also an HP-25 but it was a handheld calculator, and if I'm wrong I'm curious to know more.
I learned basic on an HP 9830, the '25's predecessor: same general computer, twice as large and 1/10 as fast. But it was pretty cool, nonetheless. I *still* want a 9845C, the '25's older and cooler sibling. Those were pretty nifty and are still useful for GPIB/instrumentation controllers. (although I'm not sure they came with a boot-up language, like the lower-end systems did: they might've required software to do anything, so they'd fail the Brin test.)
For what it's worth, the central theme of Shakespeare's 'Henry V' is precisely this: whether a monarch is responsible for the actions of the grunts, or whether they are. Shakespeare claims that they are, and the monarch is mostly blameless, but that's probably because he was trying to get in with the Queen. Modern judicial usage seems to allocate the blame pretty equally all the way up -- that's precisely what Saddam Hussein is currently being tried for -- although I notice nobody other than the actual perpetrators seems to have gotten in trouble for prisoner abuse in Iraq, to name one recent incarnation of this question.
I'd totally forgotten about John Young. I thought he was a sales/marketing guy who'd worked his way up, but I can't remember. But your memory sounds pretty good in this case. I remembered Dave "coming back" but I couldn't remember how or in what capacity.
One of the main differences between children and adults, aside from size, is a sense of community. Babies are utterly selfish because they have no concept of other people. As children grow, they slowly get the idea that other people are important, that other people want different things than the kid does, that those wishes are important, and so forth.
It's critical to put your child's welfare first -- make sure they have warm clothing, nutritious food, good medical care -- but they also desperately need to learn that they don't always get the $18 bag of cookies, that your desire for nice wine is the same as their desire for cookies. If they don't understand that, in their very bones, they spend the rest of their lives pissed off, on some level, that other people keep doing all this (to them) useless stuff and buying all this useless stuff.
I'm not saying feed your kids gravel. I'm saying that they need to learn compromise and the best ways for them to do that are by having other kids to play with (rather than computers and TV) and watching *you* compromise. Today, they get the bag of cookies, but next week, you get the wine and they don't get the cookies, because what you want is just as important as what they want, and hopefully a great deal more rational.
I've dated several very smart women who were only children, and let me tell you what: for almost every one of them, inability to compromise made them into tragic heros. They pushed in every situation, to get what they thought was the right solution, and usually they got exactly what they wanted, but sometimes they pissed a lot of people off and made a lot of unnecessary enemies who came back to haunt them later. There's nothing more valuable in interpersonal relations than learning how to compromise.
I'm thinking your timeline might be a little messed up. Dave Packard was still chairman until 1993, at which point he was succeeded by Lew Platt, who was an old-school engineer who worked his way up through the ranks. Carly was the first hired gun, in '99. But it's hard to say: there are CEOs and CFOs and Presidents and Chairmen, and you might be speaking of someone totally different. The late '80's was about when people I know stopped enjoying HP. My dad stuck it out for another 8 years, I left, my then-gf left, and a lot of my coworkers started looking elsewhere and taking loooong sabbaticals.
There are a lot of contradictory studies on bird navigation.
This news article discusses how robins get lost if one eye is patched (but only the right eye, not the left one) and talks about some experiments that indicate that pigeons navigate long distances using smell instead of sensing magnetic fields.
This beautiful paper (big pdf) indicates that pigeons navigate visually when near home, and by smell for longer distances, claiming "sensory inputs, being neither olfactory nor visual, do not substantially contribute to determining current position with respect to home."
So don't go sticking magnets all over your car in hopes of averting bird poop: if they can sense magnetic fields, it might not mean anything to them.
Anything interesting involves a risk/reward ratio. When you look at risk, if you judge that the risk of failure is unacceptable, then there is no reward large enough to counterbalance the risk. People oppose nuclear power/incinerators because they're misinformed about the risks, not because they're irrational. People almost always think they're acting rationally (even if that's not true.)
With respect to incinerators, specifically, there's a tradeoff going on with respect to the functional parameters: if you burn too hot you reduce your efficiency, but if you burn too cool you increase the amount of toxic stuff you're exhausting. Since one costs the company (burning too much fuel) and the other only costs the community at large (airborne toxins) which way do you think the company will tend to error, over time? This technology has been used for decades for heating cement kilns (Holnam runs a bunch locally), and it works very well, as long as independent auditors keep checking the exhaust stream, because if nobody's keeping them honest, the temperatures drop and the exhaust plume starts containing nasty stuff. At least, that's what I've seen locally: about every three years, a cement plant gets in trouble for violating air quality standards. Not random numbers, but pretty reliably every few years, as one would expect from a process that is under continuous stress to reduce costs.
If you heat things up enough, you'll break down even dioxin. All you need to do is dump in enough energy to start breaking the (fairly stable) molecular bonds. This is what dioxin looks like. A chemist can tell you why it's so stable: lots and lots of alternating single/double bonds. quick chem lesson: lines drawn between atoms, in this case the angles on the outside of the structure, representing a carbon atom at each angle, are single bonds, drawn C-C-C (or in this case /\) while double bonds are drawn as two lines: C-C=C. Something with alternating bonds, C-C=C-C=C, acts as if it has about 1.5 bonds between each, which is tremendously stabilizing. Benzene is a ring of six carbons, with six single and three double bonds: alternating single/double bonds, so it's drawn as a hexagon with a circle in the center, to symbolize its electron structure. This has two benzenes, with oxygens connecting them. Because the oxygens have electron pairs that are unused in bonding, but are in the right place, they can act as, essentially, parts of double bonds, meaning the center section is also alternating single/double bonds -- or, more correctly, the whole works has evenly distributed electron density. Whew. here is some more stuff about aromatics and the stability of benzene.
The bond energy of carbon-carbon bonds in benzene is about 200 kJ/mol (as I recall: I may be wrong); dioxin is (I think) going to take more energy to break. But at any given bond energy, a given temperature with large excess of oxygen, over a given time, will break a certain percentage of the dioxins down into smaller (and quickly oxidized) byproducts, so all you have to do is establish what's a reasonable level of dioxin to release into the atmosphere (which a person could justifiably argue is "zero, dammit!") and make sure your flame temperature is high enough that you transfer more energy than that threshhold to the exhaust stream. The temperature of flames is really spectacularly high -- the free air temp of burning oxygen and hydrogen is something like 5500 degrees F -- but you have to guarantee that the mass of the exhaust actually gets that hot, so you have to care about heat transfer, not just temperature. In any case: this is well-known chemistry. It is possible to burn dioxins and destroy 99% (or 99.9% or whatever you've decided is 'enough') of them.
The sulfur would become sulfur dioxide, which would be captured in scrubbers, the way they do in steel plants and coal-fired power plants. They use the captured material to make sulfuric acid, and sell it at a major profit, even considering the initial cost of installing the scrubbers.
That's probably WAY more than you ever wanted to know, but I like chemistry.
I *am* a shareholder, not a huge one but not a small one either, and I've been angry at them since before Carly. This is overstating the case a little, but it was a personal company, and once H & P left, it became a company company and went downhill. My dad worked there for 35 years, I worked there or for contract for them for six, many of my friends did or still do, and I think all of us have a pretty consistent view of it. When the founders had a clear goal about how they wanted the company to run, it ran that way; when people started running it who didn't have that sense of ownership they ran it in a different way and it became a lot less rewarding as a place to work.
I'm not trying to be overly dialectic about this but: there are two general classes of people: those that haven't played WoW and those that have.
Looking at those that have, there are two classes of people: those that like WoW and those that don't.
Chances are the ones who like it are still playing, and the ones who aren't playing don't like it.
So, talking to people who used to play WoW and don't, and finding that most of them are really happy to have stopped, isn't so surprising. Finding people who have stopped playing WoW but wish they still were: now that would be surprising.
I used to play a distant predecessor to WoW: MUDs, in the early '90's. One of my friends just celebrated his tenth anniversary with a woman he met on a type of MUD, and the first anniversary of their first kid. Woo hoo! He wasn't the first person I knew who had a VR relationship turn into an RL marriage, but it's the longest-standing one of the people who did this that I personally know. He and I nearly dropped out of college in 1993 because we were spending so much time online, writing programs in this world, talking to people, and just exploring. Those spaces really anticipated the so-called Web2.0, because they were almost entirely built by the people playing them and were, as a result, much more complex and interesting than anything any small design team could have come up with. Both of us still log into the remaining ones to this day, but thankfully not the 8 hours every evening that we did through a lot of the '90's.
I keep reading people saying this and I keep wondering if they're running the same XP I'm running. (XP pro, SP2.) I have a bunch of antivirus/antispyware stuff, and only use the XP partition when I absolutely have to, on what I hope are trustworthy big websites. Some days it suddenly decides it can't find the Internet anymore, not even Google. Some days it locks up when I plug in the Creative Zen. It has locked up a couple of times when I tried to burn CD's with Nero. It regularly hangs for minutes at a time when I'm using the eprom burner/pic programmer, for which I don't entirely blame XP: that's definitely weird hardware.
But the RH FC4 installation never does any of that. It's never even hiccuped. Sometimes Firefox crashes, sometimes XMMS suddenly decides that my soundcard configuration is lousy and stops playing, but the OS has kept running through burning PICs, CD's, talking to iPods and Zens, and even interacting with some homebrew USB and parallel-port hardware that didn't work right. It's just kept chugging along. I wouldn't even try some of the stupid hardware I/O stuff in XP, not like it would let me. I'd certainly never go download code from countries I've never even heard of from the XP side, or even go look at their websites, for fear of what might happen, but FC4 doesn't blink, just Firefox, and that's easy to restart.
So: I sure wish I had your XP install.
The summary says: However they didn't live any longer than normal mice.
This isn't really surprising. I think that JSB Haldane provided the mathematical framework for showing why this is the case.
First off, evolution is about amplification: the genes from an animal that has more children, younger, will be spread more than the genes from an animal that lives longer, so the successful strategy is to commit energy towards early maturation, rather than towards longevity.
Secondly, and this is the part Haldane worked on, if there are multiple systems that contribute to aging, they will, over time, have their age-related effects converge. The system that leads to the earliest death-from-old-age is the limiting factor, and will have pressure (assuming the animal is still of breeding age) to stretch longer, while any other senescence-related systems will tend to shorten to minimize energy expenditure, until they all have roughly the same value. It becomes a weakest-link-in-the-chain situation, where removing one limiting factor just exposes another with roughly the same limiting value. That's a messy summary of the original theory, but it's been a decade since I read a lot about this: sorry.
I agree that it happens, and that it's not just HP.
However, lots and lots of indignation pointed directly at HP is a good thing because it taints the practice. Shame may do what guilt hasn't, and make other people think very carefully before doing the same thing that HP is getting excoriated for doing.
It's really no different than Puritan use of stocks and public humiliation, and since corporations can't go to jail, maybe this is the only method of assessing punitive damages that our culture has. (I don't consider fines particularly punitive unless they're a significant portion of a corporation's yearly profit, which simply isn't going to happen to a place as big as HP for what could be rightfully characterized as actions of individuals, even if those individuals were acting as agents of the corporation.)
It WILL be, if I ever get it working. Then I'm planning on hooking the megaphone I got from harbor freight & salvage to the top of it all. It'll be *great*.
My innocent faith is that both sides will have very expensive lawyers, at which point it's quite easy to make a good case for anything either side wants.
Sites will move their hosting out of the US, and their executives won't visit the US.
More realistically, social networking sites will add more verification layers (that don't work) for greater plausible deniability, and those that think they can, will start requiring credit card info.
>>organised gambling isn't nearly as widespread and deeply rooted in Western culture as consuming alcohol is.
>You wanna bet?
I'll drink to that!
It might be useless on a macbook but I have two headless computers that merely sit in my crawl space, one handling NAT/firewall and the other webserver stuff. Seems like a good thing for them. But maybe not so applicable for the Qube-2 that I'm trying to stuff in a radio-control car, with a webcam, so I can chase the dog around the house while I'm at work.
Maybe 'selfish' would be a better description, but I'm not sure that there's that big a difference: in a classic tragedy-of-the-commons you're exploiting community resources for your own gain, and in stealing a piece of chewing gum you're exploiting a community resource (trust, meaning storeowners don't have to spend extra money on guarding against shoplifting) for your own gain (chewing gum!) Ditto speeding in general: the community has to spend money and effort on traffic enforcement, so you're sucking up resources for personal gain.
Romans and Greeks used lead paints to make their faces white. After the fall of Rome, people selectively poisoned themselves with arsenic to make themselves look paler. And, given the health impacts of stuff like silicosis and asbestos damage, both of which are related to particle size and shape, I'd say that any small particle had better be eyed pretty warily by anyone with brains, no matter what idiots in the past have done with it.
One of the things I wonder is whether it's that sociopaths become corporate leaders, or whether normal people learn how to succeed in business and in learning those behaviors, become sociopaths. My point being that it's not clear to me that Dunn and Skilling are different than us: they just have much greater ability to cause damage, and much greater incentive to play dirty.
While I'd like to believe you're right, I'm guessing that dirty tricks don't always backfire. They probably usually work because nobody finds out about them, which encourages doing them again, larger and dirtier next time, until someone does finally get caught.