Perhaps, but in the end we'd still have a moonbase, where we could build telescopes that would put the Hubble to shame, launch other planetary probes, etc.
Don't send up Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, though, I don't want that nuclear dump exploding and...
The integrated circuit industry growth was much more closely tied to military research, rather than NASA research. Admittedly, there's overlap between ICBMs and Saturn Vs, but it really was more a result of keeping the Reds at bay than achieving "One small step for a man..."
I'd rather have a cure for cancer, AIDS, paralysis and/or Alzheimer's than a couple of people dancing on the surface of Mars.
Well, there are multiple things one might want from a mass-storage device. USB is useful for transferring data to a machine that doesn't have an orb drive. But USB would make it no more useful than a CD-R, which can make much more portable/sharable/cheaper CD-Rs. What you want is some way to get the full speed of the drive, yet the ability to transfer it to another system as needed. Sounds like what is really wanted is a SCSI->USB converter, so you could take a SCSI drive and plug it into USB.
"Now the industry is in trouble and trying to find an easy way out, raising prices and keeping the jobs in the US sounds good to me."
Last I checked, unemployment levels in the US were remarkably low. I believe that part of this is due to the ability to buy things from overseas at low costs, lowering the cost of employing people in America for jobs that can't be moved overseas and lowering the expenses of those same workers. These overseas workers also become new consumers for the stuff we produce here. Jobs aren't some fixed quantity, they're created when someone feels it is profitable to hire you. Lower the cost of employment (for example, by lowering the cost of the computer you work on), and it's more likely you'll be considered profitable. My company has probably been able to hire 5% more people simply because of lower computer prices.
I do agree, though, there has to be some morality in how we hire people overseas, that the jobs we provide should be better than the average livelihood in the foreign country.
(on the unlikely chance someone actually reads this...)
Would I hire someone who reads child porn as a sitter for my child? Irrelevant question. People don't get grabbed by kiddie porn and forced to read it, people who are sexually attracted to children seek it out. The rest of us look away in disgust, we don't become child molesters by viewing it. So of course a person who views it is more likely to be a child molester. The issue is whether, *given* a person with a sexual attraction to children, will they be even more likely to act on those desires if they read child porn. I say there's little or no evidence that this is the case.
"If you supply a person with suggestions that it is ok to think of children in a sexual manner (though why anyone would want to is totally beyond me) then you will ultimately see a rise in the real thing."
But we're not doing that.
Assume that child pornography was legal and available at your local adult bookstore. Would you buy any? I doubt it, most of us wouldn't. Only those rare people for whom it's a turn-on would. So what effect would it have on them? Would viewing the pornography (presumably while engaging in self-gratification) satisfy their urges or stimulate them into kid-nabbing? I don't think you can definitively say one way or the other. Playing Doom, D&D, and wargames never spurred me to violence, for example.
Actually, I probably have seen a comic strip or two that would qualify as child porn in books about underground comic strips. Again, this in no way filled me with the desire to have sex with children.
>Intel actually already pushes their chips to max safe speed so that they can make the most money.
Just to explain a little economics, this isn't how things work.
Suppose Intel made one chip at one speed; how would they price it? Price it high, and only richer people buy it. Price it low, and those who would pay premium prices will pay the low price. It's much better to have more than one product, so you can sell the better product at the higher price and the worse one at a lower price -- you maximize your earnings. And if you only have one real product (how does a 350 mhz Pentium II made to 0.25 micron process differ from a 450 made on that same process?), simply sell some as a lesser product.
This is by no means unique to Intel or even the computer hardware market. In software, Autodesk sells AutoCAD for ~$5000, AutoCAD Lt for ~$350. Does it cost Autodesk more to produce and support AutoCAD? Not really, not significantly; in fact their production costs would probably be lower with a single product. But there's no way they could sell AutoCAD for $5000 to some people and $350 to others (save things like academic sales.)
Nor for that matter is this unique to the computer industry. You'll find clothing companies have different lines, with trivial differences, but one has the marquee name and the other doesn't. Ditto shampoos, soaps, TVs, you name it.
Given that C is effectively a subset of C++, C++ works fine for this too.
I can see virtues in Eiffel, Ada95, Java, etc., not the least of which is garbage collection. However, you'll probably find your pool of contributors is smaller with any of those except Java, and the performance issue still hasn't been quite worked out for Java. And I don't know that any of them are good for system-level programming, which you can do with C++.
Isn't the Linux source close to being compilable with the GNU C++ compiler?
Any time C++ is mentioned on Slashdot, some weenie will come in and say how C is better. Whether this is based on their inability to grok C++, on fear of learning anything new, on limitations of older implementations of C++ compilers, or on a few reasonable objections to C++ is unclear. Usually, however, their lack of correct arguments implies it is not the last reason.
His argument is predicated on the (foolish) assumption of gaussian distributions over time, when Apple clearly violates that by having peaked in the past and then growing again recently.
I agree that Linux's current interface will scare away a high percentage of Mac users. On the other hand, the relatively low diversity of hardware means that Macs make pretty good Linux machines. One could imagine an iLinux distribution that is designed for easy installation on an iMac, for example.
Linus fails to give credit where credit is due.
on
Linus in PC Week
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· Score: 1
One thing to remember that this is an interview, as opposed to something written directly by Linus. It's a lot easier to miss giving proper credit when you're talking off the cuff.
Dateline NBC had a segment on Russian TV shows. Apparently the most popular one was one where a person tries to steal a car and the police try to catch him (they clear a route for this); if he manages to evade the cops for the entire show, he gets to keep the car.
Personally I preferred the one where the guy has to talk a woman into taking off all her clothes (on TV), again to win a car. (She doesn't get anything other than, um, exposure...)
HP could not legally release a binary-only Merced release of Linux.
HP could conceivably write their own window manager system to run on top of Linux and keep that closed source, and might have a marketable asset if they did so. They would probably be better off, however, working on pre-existing window managers and establishing a strong tech support group -- I think that would be more marketable and it could be achieved more quickly.
You might also notice the density of strips in the old Dilbert books and the new ones; the new ones have a lot fewer strips. And some of his management help books contained more than one copy of the same strip. Talk about padding... Hasn't the guy already earned more money than he could ever reasonably use?
Not to mention how the strip has gone downhill recently. Too bad he (and even more so, Charles Shultz -- have you laughed at a "Peanuts" in the last ten years) couldn't take a cue from Bill Waterston, halting Calvin and Hobbes before the quality declined.
"I'm a linux user like all of you, but how can you think that Linux even competes with Win95?"
Linux is still gathering momentum, and thus developers. If you count the current number of developers, even if only a small fraction of Linux users will help in development, the group dwarfs the 24,000 Microsoft employees. Linux developers are likewise focused on making stuff work, not making it marketable. And all this for an OS that was started around the release of Windows 3.1.\
>I remember that worthless piece of scrap known as the Apple II.
But you apparently have forgotten the Apple III, available before the PC. 80 columns built in, 128k memory, substantially more sophisticated Business Basic. The original poster claimed that Gates invented the PC, despite (a) Apple, Commodore, etc. having personal computers before the IBM PC, and (b) IBM invented the IBM PC, not Microsoft -- note the name? Microsoft developed (from a purchased base) just one of the original choices of OS for it. (Anyone else remember the UCSD P-system? A better language than PC Basic.) OSes were available for less than a C note before the PC.
The PC had 20 bit addressing, rather than 16 bit plus bank switching, and IBM's name behind it. So the PC won that battle.
"BillG pummelled computers into something so easy to use" -- Macs were easy to use 10 years before PC users could stop making custom boot disks to get enough conventional memory available, 7 years before mice were a worthwhile peripheral for PCs. If Apple hadn't been in love with 100% profit margins, they would be the ones the DOJ would have in court these days.
Bill Gates is not an innovator. He is *brilliant* at seeing opportunities and positioning his company to take advantage of those opportunities. He has also managed to keep Microsoft flexible, and always working towards a common goal. (Much of IBM didn't want the PC encroaching on their minicomputer business, and likewise the PC jr was a deliberately crippled product.)
"Try balancing your checkbook with that." -- Why wouldn't I have used Visicalc?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps, but in the end we'd still have a moonbase, where we could build telescopes that would put the Hubble to shame, launch other planetary probes, etc.
Don't send up Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, though, I don't want that nuclear dump exploding and...
The integrated circuit industry growth was much more closely tied to military research, rather than NASA research. Admittedly, there's overlap between ICBMs and Saturn Vs, but it really was more a result of keeping the Reds at bay than achieving "One small step for a man..."
I'd rather have a cure for cancer, AIDS, paralysis and/or Alzheimer's than a couple of people dancing on the surface of Mars.
Well, there are multiple things one might want from a mass-storage device. USB is useful for transferring data to a machine that doesn't have an orb drive. But USB would make it no more useful than a CD-R, which can make much more portable/sharable/cheaper CD-Rs. What you want is some way to get the full speed of the drive, yet the ability to transfer it to another system as needed. Sounds like what is really wanted is a SCSI->USB converter, so you could take a SCSI drive and plug it into USB.
>How can you accuse MS of poor coding if you havn't even seen their code before?
MFC and the macro mess created by the Visual C++ wizards should give a decent idea of what Microsoft code is like...
Yep, damn right I'm greedy. I want great software ASAP. And I know that Microsoft is never going to get me there.
"Now the industry is in trouble and trying to find an easy way out, raising prices and keeping the jobs in the US sounds good to me."
Last I checked, unemployment levels in the US were remarkably low. I believe that part of this is due to the ability to buy things from overseas at low costs, lowering the cost of employing people in America for jobs that can't be moved overseas and lowering the expenses of those same workers. These overseas workers also become new consumers for the stuff we produce here. Jobs aren't some fixed quantity, they're created when someone feels it is profitable to hire you. Lower the cost of employment (for example, by lowering the cost of the computer you work on), and it's more likely you'll be considered profitable. My company has probably been able to hire 5% more people simply because of lower computer prices.
I do agree, though, there has to be some morality in how we hire people overseas, that the jobs we provide should be better than the average livelihood in the foreign country.
(on the unlikely chance someone actually reads this...)
Would I hire someone who reads child porn as a sitter for my child? Irrelevant question. People don't get grabbed by kiddie porn and forced to read it, people who are sexually attracted to children seek it out. The rest of us look away in disgust, we don't become child molesters by viewing it. So of course a person who views it is more likely to be a child molester. The issue is whether, *given* a person with a sexual attraction to children, will they be even more likely to act on those desires if they read child porn. I say there's little or no evidence that this is the case.
"If you supply a person with suggestions that it is ok to think of children in a sexual manner (though why anyone would want to is totally beyond me) then you will ultimately see a rise in the real thing."
But we're not doing that.
Assume that child pornography was legal and available at your local adult bookstore. Would you buy any? I doubt it, most of us wouldn't. Only those rare people for whom it's a turn-on would. So what effect would it have on them? Would viewing the pornography (presumably while engaging in self-gratification) satisfy their urges or stimulate them into kid-nabbing? I don't think you can definitively say one way or the other. Playing Doom, D&D, and wargames never spurred me to violence, for example.
Actually, I probably have seen a comic strip or two that would qualify as child porn in books about underground comic strips. Again, this in no way filled me with the desire to have sex with children.
>Intel actually already pushes their chips to max safe speed so that they can make the most money.
Just to explain a little economics, this isn't how things work.
Suppose Intel made one chip at one speed; how would they price it? Price it high, and only richer people buy it. Price it low, and those who would pay premium prices will pay the low price. It's much better to have more than one product, so you can sell the better product at the higher price and the worse one at a lower price -- you maximize your earnings. And if you only have one real product (how does a 350 mhz Pentium II made to 0.25 micron process differ from a 450 made on that same process?), simply sell some as a lesser product.
This is by no means unique to Intel or even the computer hardware market. In software, Autodesk sells AutoCAD for ~$5000, AutoCAD Lt for ~$350. Does it cost Autodesk more to produce and support AutoCAD? Not really, not significantly; in fact their production costs would probably be lower with a single product. But there's no way they could sell AutoCAD for $5000 to some people and $350 to others (save things like academic sales.)
Nor for that matter is this unique to the computer industry. You'll find clothing companies have different lines, with trivial differences, but one has the marquee name and the other doesn't. Ditto shampoos, soaps, TVs, you name it.
>Just let everyone burn up their chips trying to o/c above spec
I've heard of plenty of people trying to overclock chips, and never heard *anyone* say they burned out a chip doing so.
Do you just hate the thought that somebody out there may be getting the same performance as you for less?
It is the right distribution, and don't call me Shirley.
Given that C is effectively a subset of C++, C++ works fine for this too.
I can see virtues in Eiffel, Ada95, Java, etc., not the least of which is garbage collection. However, you'll probably find your pool of contributors is smaller with any of those except Java, and the performance issue still hasn't been quite worked out for Java. And I don't know that any of them are good for system-level programming, which you can do with C++.
Isn't the Linux source close to being compilable with the GNU C++ compiler?
Any time C++ is mentioned on Slashdot, some weenie will come in and say how C is better. Whether this is based on their inability to grok C++, on fear of learning anything new, on limitations of older implementations of C++ compilers, or on a few reasonable objections to C++ is unclear. Usually, however, their lack of correct arguments implies it is not the last reason.
His argument is predicated on the (foolish) assumption of gaussian distributions over time, when Apple clearly violates that by having peaked in the past and then growing again recently.
I agree that Linux's current interface will scare away a high percentage of Mac users. On the other hand, the relatively low diversity of hardware means that Macs make pretty good Linux machines. One could imagine an iLinux distribution that is designed for easy installation on an iMac, for example.
One thing to remember that this is an interview, as opposed to something written directly by Linus. It's a lot easier to miss giving proper credit when you're talking off the cuff.
Can Linus take the bag off his head now?
Dateline NBC had a segment on Russian TV shows. Apparently the most popular one was one where a person tries to steal a car and the police try to catch him (they clear a route for this); if he manages to evade the cops for the entire show, he gets to keep the car.
Personally I preferred the one where the guy has to talk a woman into taking off all her clothes (on TV), again to win a car. (She doesn't get anything other than, um, exposure...)
HP could not legally release a binary-only Merced release of Linux.
HP could conceivably write their own window manager system to run on top of Linux and keep that closed source, and might have a marketable asset if they did so. They would probably be better off, however, working on pre-existing window managers and establishing a strong tech support group -- I think that would be more marketable and it could be achieved more quickly.
You might also notice the density of strips in the old Dilbert books and the new ones; the new ones have a lot fewer strips. And some of his management help books contained more than one copy of the same strip. Talk about padding... Hasn't the guy already earned more money than he could ever reasonably use?
Not to mention how the strip has gone downhill recently. Too bad he (and even more so, Charles Shultz -- have you laughed at a "Peanuts" in the last ten years) couldn't take a cue from Bill Waterston, halting Calvin and Hobbes before the quality declined.
>Yes, it is right to refuse a damaged package, but once a member of your house accepts it, it is yours.
I once got a computer back from repair, opened the box, and the CPU had fallen out.
I filed a complaint with UPS, and they paid for return and repair.
Have you looked in gIDE or Code Crusader? Look for 'em on Freshmeat.
The news.com site is also carrying this story now.
"I'm a linux user like all of you, but how can you think that Linux even competes with Win95?"
Linux is still gathering momentum, and thus developers. If you count the current number of developers, even if only a small fraction of Linux users will help in development, the group dwarfs the 24,000 Microsoft employees. Linux developers are likewise focused on making stuff work, not making it marketable. And all this for an OS that was started around the release of Windows 3.1.\
So just give it a little time.
>I remember that worthless piece of scrap known as the Apple II.
But you apparently have forgotten the Apple III, available before the PC. 80 columns built in, 128k memory, substantially more sophisticated Business Basic. The original poster claimed that Gates invented the PC, despite (a) Apple, Commodore, etc. having personal computers before the IBM PC, and (b) IBM invented the IBM PC, not Microsoft -- note the name? Microsoft developed (from a purchased base) just one of the original choices of OS for it. (Anyone else remember the UCSD P-system? A better language than PC Basic.) OSes were available for less than a C note before the PC.
The PC had 20 bit addressing, rather than 16 bit plus bank switching, and IBM's name behind it. So the PC won that battle.
"BillG pummelled computers into something so easy to use" -- Macs were easy to use 10 years before PC users could stop making custom boot disks to get enough conventional memory available, 7 years before mice were a worthwhile peripheral for PCs. If Apple hadn't been in love with 100% profit margins, they would be the ones the DOJ would have in court these days.
Bill Gates is not an innovator. He is *brilliant* at seeing opportunities and positioning his company to take advantage of those opportunities. He has also managed to keep Microsoft flexible, and always working towards a common goal. (Much of IBM didn't want the PC encroaching on their minicomputer business, and likewise the PC jr was a deliberately crippled product.)
"Try balancing your checkbook with that." -- Why wouldn't I have used Visicalc?
"These extreme linux advocates produce far more FUD than Microsoft does."
MS FUD gets spread far more than Linux FUD, which rarely makes it out of Slashdot. Whose FUD gets to the PHBs?