Posts by Destroy All Monsters 16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
"They don’t have any sense of reason or shame that we can appeal to, and they have no incentive to be accommodating. We’re not their customers. In fact they make their money from selling us, not selling to us, so they have an excellent motive not to help us."
Sounds exactly like that tax thing if you replace "selling" by "serving".
"Eeeeevuuuul Jooooooos", huh?
Did I say anything about Jews? No I didn't. And I would hope some non-blinkered people would be able to make a distinction between the ideas of Jewish ancestry/religion and the increasingly ugly apartheid state that sits atop an area formerly inhabited by, among others, a lot of non-Jewish semites.
"The US wants to restrict the flow of computing hardware into Iran to hinder the country's nuclear programme"
I think this should read
"The US wants to restrict the flow of computing hardware into Iran to appease Israeli lobbyists"
Since the latest "Hagel is an ANTISEMITE!! LOOK!!11" flap against the guy who had the temerity to say that he is an US senator, not an Israeli senator (implying that he would behave accordingly when in office), I think even the last cavedweller should know what's up.
> Windows 200[0] ran on Alpha until about a dozen years ago
Yep, for all of five minutes and never made it to release either.
http://alasir.com/articles/alpha_history/compaq_epoch.html
On the 23rd of August 1999, a notorious event took place: Compaq announced to discontinue participation in development of Windows NT and stopped to supply this OS with Alpha systems of its own. In fact, it also laid off almost all people (about 120 programmers) from former DEC's Western Research Laboratory (DECwest) who worked on this project. Accordingly to Compaq's statistics, among all preinstalled OSes on newly shipped Alpha machines Tru64 UNIX held a share of 65%, OpenVMS — of 35%, and Windows NT — just about of 5%. So, there was no reason to keep flogging a dead horse. A week later, Microsoft announced in return that there would be no Windows 2000 for Alpha released, even though the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) was ready by that moment. Considering a fact that Microsoft together with Motorola and SGI discontinued any support for the PowerPC and MIPS architectures respectively in 1997, the future of "the universal OS" appeared to rely on a single computer architecture. Of course, if to discount IA-64 which failed on the workstation market soon and never got to desktops or notebooks.
> For me - with my Linux desktop...
I'm starting to not understand the extreme incompetence exhibited by hardware makers [and I'm looking at AEG UPS here, btw] to not ship adequate *nix software, or, if they do, ship it with a JDK attached (possibly an 1.6.18 or something to unlock that ghetto feel). It's not hard to do and one could forgive the missing polish, but it should work.
You are thinking all wrong and socialistically.
> Well, if you wanted to and had sufficient funds, you could give away- utterly free- a high-end smartphone to every person in the world.
MAGIC MONEY FOUNTAIN! MAGIC PRODUCTION CHAIN!
> The Smartphone industry would then be massively disrupted, but it'd do bugger all to really help anyone.
On the contrary. About a trillion dollar that were magically sitting in your bank [how?] have suddenly been disbursed through your factories to upstream suppliers and their workers. Everyone has suddenly a free smartphone. This liberates money that people wanted to spend for other things.
> SpaceX are just being better and cheaper than everyone else- but sustainably.
How does that make sense? Why would anyone be "better and cheaper than everyone else- but sustainably"? Hell, get everyone as customer RIGHT NOW. That's what drives improvement in the competition, dontcha know.
> The DC-X Delta Clipper hover tests did more and better fifteen years ago.
Yeah, I remember. But so what? Typical meatball project. Wakypedia says: "In a post-accident report, NASA's Brand Commission blamed the accident on a burnt-out field crew who had been operating under on-again/off-again funding and constant threats of outright cancellation. The crew, many of them originally from the SDIO program, were also highly critical of NASA's "chilling" effect on the program, and the masses of paperwork NASA demanded as part of the testing regimen."
More and better. Does not fly.
I SAY! Let's add this...
Directly from Regime Uncertainty: Some Clarifications by Robert Higgs.
Private investment is the most important driver of economic progress. Entrepreneurs need new structures, equipment, and software to produce new products, to produce existing products at lower cost, and to make use of new technology that requires embodiment in machinery, plant layouts, and other aspects of the existing capital stock. When the rate of private investment declines, the rate of growth of real income per capita slackens, and if private investment drops quickly and substantially, a recession or depression occurs.
Such recession or depression is likely to persist until private investment makes a fairly full recovery. In US history, such recovery usually has occurred within a year or two after the trough. Only twice in the past century has a fairly prompt and full recovery of private investment failed to occur — during the Great Depression and during the past five years.
In a 1997 article in the Independent Review ("Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War" PDF) I argued that a major reason for the incomplete recovery of private investment during the latter half of the 1930s was "regime uncertainty." By this, I mean a pervasive lack of confidence among investors in their ability to foresee the extent to which future government actions will alter their private-property rights. In the original article and in many follow-up articles, I documented that between 1935 and 1940, many investors feared that the government might transform the very nature of the existing economic order, replacing the primarily market-oriented economy with fascism, socialism, or some other government-controlled arrangement in which private-property rights would be greatly curtailed, if they survived at all. Given such fears, many investors regarded new investment projects as too risky to justify their current costs.
Regime uncertainty pertains to more than the government's laws, regulations, and administrative decisions. For one thing, as the saying goes, "personnel is policy." Two administrations may administer or enforce identical statutes and regulations quite differently. A business-hostile administration such as Franklin D. Roosevelt's or Barack Obama's will provoke more apprehension among investors than a business-friendlier administration such as Dwight D. Eisenhower's or Ronald Reagan's, even if the underlying "rules of the game" are identical on paper. Similar differences between judiciaries create uncertainties about how the courts will rule on contested laws and government actions.
Fail? NO U!
"Weunderkind" would lose you points in any exam, as would "Wünderkind".
What exactly is hard to understand in "It's spelled WUNDERKIND".
And certainly not "WEUNDERKIND", for Christ's Sake.
And the "probably" adjective is not to be used here. At all.
And "wünderkind" does not take a trema, it's just "Wunderkind" (i.e. "prodigy")
But the network is NOT the computer, and won't be unless some serious security and cognitive problems have been resolved first.
Sure, it's fine to run some software which blurs the lines between local and remote, as long as it is done in a controlled environment. Like a Virtual Machine. Or, barring that, a browser.
> Beyond tradition, is there any reason why an OS search field shouldn't also search the internet?
Yes. If you are not interested in remote results, remote results shouldn't be retrieved or shown.
Why should there be a magic search functionality in the standard UI that throws the kitchen sink at you when you look for yesterday's documents? Beats me.
> "stealing" the idea
Clearly you are unsure about how patents work. It's all about "stealing the idea". You get a monopoly on some arbitrarily chosen "subspace of ideas" (arbitrarily chosen because there is no objective distance measure of similarity measure in that space, it all comes down to random subjective judgement of lawyers, juries and judges) and you get to patrol it with the badges and guns of the state. If someone trespasses (according to the aforementioned arbitrary judgement call) without being aware that the area was zoned, well, tough luck.
If you "steal the code", then copyright law comes into effect.
"Backing a winner", eh?
If it's such a clear winner, there should be private money rushing in, especially now with cash sloshing around more fiercely than kerosene in a Saturn V first stage.
So why some neo-liberal intervention?
"the UK had beaten off competition from Singapore and America to keep core graphene research and scientists in the UK since graphene was discovered in Manchester by two Russian scientists in 2005"
Oh, okay, making it difficult for research & investment in the first place, coupled with misplaced nationalism and mercantilism. And probably misperception and cargo-cultism about how a whole "industry" can arise via development of new production processes.
> "proper top," a system that could be tested and bootstrap the testing of the rest of the functions.
Yeah well, that really sounds like the "bottom" to me.
Redefine the words. Voilà, we are top down? Whatever keeps the project rolling and avoids the waterfall path into immediate obsolescence, I reckon. The goal is success any way you look at it.
> Big brother because he's the ultimate code reviewer, and we need him too!
Not according to Charles Stross. From "Big Brother Iron":
I am a systems manager in the abstract realm of the Computer, the great Party-designed, transistorised, thinking machine that lurks in a bomb-proofed bunker in Docklands. It’s my job to keep the behemoth running: to this end I have wheel authority, access all areas. The year is probably 2018, old calendar, but nobody’s very sure about it any more—too many transcription errors crept in during the 1980’s, back when not even MiniLove was preserving truly accurate records. It’s probably safest just to say that officially this is the Year 99, the pre-centenary of our beloved Big Brother’s birth.
It’s been the Year 99 for thirty-three months now, and I’m not sure how much longer we can keep it that way without someone in the Directorate noticing. I’m one of the OverStaffCommanders on the year 100 project; it’s my job to help stop various types of chaos breaking out when the clocks roll round and we need to use an extra digit to store dates entered since the birth of our Leader and Teacher.
Mine is a job which should never have been needed. Unfortunately when the Party infobosses designed the Computer they specified a command language which is a strict semantic subset of core Newspeak—politically meaningless statements will be rejected by the translators that convert them into low-level machinethink commands. This was a nice idea in the cloistered offices of the party theoreticians, but a fat lot of use in the real world—for those of us with real work to do. I mean, if you can’t talk about stock shrinkage and embezzlement how can you balance your central planning books? Even the private ones you don’t drag up in public? It didn’t take long for various people to add a heap of extremely dubious undocumented machinethink archives in order to get things done. And now we’re stuck policing the resulting mess to make sure it doesn’t thoughtsmash because of an errant digit.
That isn’t the worst of it. The Party by definition cannot be wrong. But the party, in all its glorious wisdom announced in 1997 that the supervisor program used by all their Class D computers was Correct. (That was not long after the Mathematicians Purge.) Bugs do not exist in a Correct system; therefore anyone who discovers one is an enemy of the party and must be remotivated. So nothing can be wrong with the Computer, even if those of us who know such things are aware that in about three months from now half the novel writers and voice typers in Oceania will start churning out nonsense.
Inflation also means that you won't get anything when you reach pensionable age. Checkmate.
> If they bought more from us
Alternatively, if "the West" didn't think that going into debt and spewing out paper money from teller machines was A-OK and the way to Superland. Thank you very much Keynesians, Leftists and Central Banksters.
Just don't let a bit of linear algebra faze you.
And stay away from Bohmians!
This just in: Peter Woit has published the notes on his Quantum Mechanics for Mathematicians. Hundreds of pages of goodness.
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