Posts by Captain Thyratron

We just like killing people.

If the UK is the alternative you have in mind, I wish to point out that murder rates in general were already far lower there than in the US prior to the 1998 handgun ban, and probably still are even with the apparent recent increase in violent crime; for that matter, homicide rates in the US have been leaps and bounds ahead of the UK's even as far back as the first decade of the twentieth century. Y'all just aren't as fond of killing people, I guess.

Popular is a color

Of course, some folks would have us believe that the "green" one is:

* The right one

* Actually green

Then what are craters?

It doesn't have the same /kind/ of erosion as Earth, and certainly nothing as rapid, but what are craters if not erosion in themselves? The moon is a very dusty place.

I'd give him partial credit, but he didn't show his work.

He's s partially right, though probably through no fault of his own. Black holes do grow by accreting matter, and do shrink as a result of Hawking radiation; the rate at which the black hole loses mass to Hawking radiation is inversely proportional to that mass, so a black hole with the mass of a star is going to stick around for a while, whereas a black hole with the mass of, say, a pencil is going to disappear in a violent explosion (whose energy is probably something like the mass of the pencil multiplied by a famous number squared, since the energy of its gravitational field is negligible) and a black hole with the mass of a proton will disappear into a tiny shower of energetic particles quite faster than you can say "femtosecond".

The moon wasn't with us, so...

We heard there were some terrorists hiding there, and the moon failed repeatedly to respond to our requests for the terrorists' extradition. Thus, the moon was sponsoring terrorism and we had no choice but to take military action against it.

Be careful what you wish for!

If they do it wrong, you might end up being a corpsicle assigned to a ramship mission.

And Larry will twirl his moustache.

If Microsoft is any indication, being hated in the tech community doesn't seem to hurt revenues.

He never really cared one way or the other.

You've got to put all this in perspective.

Sure, adoption rates are more important than per-instance revenue. Sure, getting an OS out there where people can see it encourages more people to use it, to the benefit of whoever put it out there. Sure, focusing on making an OS a closed, niche, high profit-per-instance thing will surely kill it in time, e.g. OpenVMS, OS/400, &c. But Oracle is not an OS company. The long-term success of any part of Sun's former product line means positively jack shit to Ellison.

Oracle is a database company--specifically, an "enterprise" database company. As long as they can continue charging hundreds of millions of dollars for database installations, they're happy. That's what they do. Solaris is just a boot loader for that database, and when it's dried up and dead, Oracle will find another to use. Oracle will leave dead platforms, demoralized users, and--most important of all--satisfied investors in its wake.

Oracle did not buy Sun because it cared much about the SPARC server business or Solaris. They bought Sun because they wanted to secure all those juicy-looking high-end database customers before somebody else like IBM snapped them up and got them using some other expensive database that wasn't Oracle's.

Oracle is a database company.

So what?

Who gives a rat's ass if it has a "realistic anchor in the practical world"? Does everything have to?

Mathematics can be applied to just about anything precisely /because/ it has nothing to do with reality. It is a mere convenient coincidence that it is useful. If you want a system of logic that transcends reality, you have to let people investigate math for math's sake. When you try to railroad any academic discipline toward things that are apparently practical, what you get is Lysenkoism. Did wonders for Russian biology--good thing they focused on practical crop research instead of giving attention to those dumb genticists who did nothing but putz around with flies. Nothing'll ever come of that!

Mathematicians do this stuff for fun. If they didn't, why'd Perelman turn down a million dollars and a Fields medal? He wasn't in it for the money. He just wanted to know whether every simply connected compact manifold was isomorphic to a 3-sphere. He got a kick out of figuring it out. In fact, he appears to have quit professional mathematics because he's tired of being pestered about it.

Don't deflect the blame.

The thing of concern here is that something like a properly-run Wikileaks could potentially avert such disasters in the future. We only went to war after plenty of fearmongering, gossip, and patriotic angst, all steeped in ignorance.

We're pissed off about this because Wikileaks looked like such a great way to burst that bubble of ignorance in the future by letting inconvenient truths come to the surface, perhaps at the expense of some warmonger with a blue suit and a power tie--and now the guy in charge of it is ruining the reputation of that vital freedom of speech.

You're right that the blame for these wars ultimately rests with the people of the democratic states that chose to fight them, but what's the average citizen to do when it's already on? No amount of Daily Kos articles or whatever you mean to do is likely to stop a war after it's started. For all your concern, what did you accomplish? By the time the troops are on their way, it's probably too late. The war was decided already, and decided on fear and ignorance--decided in precisely the information vacuum that something like Wikileaks could potentially disrupt. Thomas Jefferson once said that whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government. That's what's at stake here: An important means of informing the public is being driven into the dirt by a man who doesn't recognize the danger of wielding such a powerful instrument irresponsibly.

You say a good dose of reality might save some of us? Well, how do you suppose folks are going to get it--gelcaps from the pharmacy at Wal-Mart?

Quite a few? Quite a few less!

I suspect you're thinking of the Soviet N1 rocket, whose first stage, with 30 NK-15 motors, has got more than three times as many motors as the Falcon X Heavy's is supposed to get--noting, of course, that the XX and X Heavy are supposed to use the Merlin 2 motor, which is a pretty huge motor compared to the NK-15. That was, however, HARDLY the N1's only problem. No, there were plenty:

* Soviet inability to make bigger engines due to insufficient industrial capability, as well as any other problems with building a huge moon rocket, whose first stage has thirty freaking engines, which might follow from inadequate industrial capabilities. Dangerous engineering compromises to account for such shortcomings were pretty commonplace in Soviet engineering. Hell, just look at their RBMK power plants.

* Problems with the kind of plumbing you need to make the motors work on a rocket whose first stage alone has thirty motors; furthermore, the motors were of the closed cycle/staged combustion cycle variety, which are more efficient than earlier designs but require more complex plumbing--which is a problem when getting /any/ rocket with that many engines would be a pretty amazing feat of pipework.

* The Soviet tendency to test things as little as feasible, because testing is expensive and the Soviet Union was kind of poor. In addition to lack of funding, the rocket could not be assembled completely until it was at Baikonur Cosmodrome, which further restricted testing.

What do you get when you have a largely untested, underfunded, and spectacularly complicated design with a relatively new kind of engine, all made in a country that, by fiscal necessity, had to do everything pretty much everything as cheap and dirty as they thought they could get away with? In this case, some pretty spectacular explosions. There were so many things that could go wrong, and so few of them had been tested and corrected before launch. That's a recipe for fiery failure with /any/ rocket, let alone one over a hundred meters tall with several dozen motors and a maze of plumbing that'd make even the Mario Brothers run screaming.

SpaceX, by comparison, has good manufacturing capabilities, good metallurgy, extremely rigorous testing practices, and a simpler and more reliable design--both for the motors and the rockets as a whole. In general, SpaceX's stuff is simpler, less fragile, and better made, and SpaceX is a lot better about testing their rockets than the Soviet space program.

It's the only upgrade path on SPARC.

That's what I'm having to do these days. Even of OpenSolaris lives, it doesn't support a lot of my hardware. Despite all their fanfare about open systems and such, Sun was pretty reluctant to provide hardware information to people and, in fact, a lot of it only came out because the BSD people hounded them about it until they dug the stuff up: Things like specifications for processors, memory controllers, disk controllers, graphics devices, all that. My only upgrade path is FreeBSD.

Meanwhile, OpenSolaris refuses to run on anything that isn't newer than what I've got. Well, it works damn fine and I'm not shelling out for new hardware.

As it stands, if I want to run something on, say, my Sunblade 2000 or my Enterprise 450, I can:

* Install one of the older, pre-Oracle versions of Solaris 10 that both supports the hardware and doesn't require me to get a service contract; however, much of the OS is old and nasty because things like the porting of Xorg to Solaris on SPARC have been terminally frustrated by ideological battles and Sun's general unhelpfulness regarding its SPARC graphics devices. Good luck if you want to write a driver for an XVR-1000! (Maybe if you come to Oracle with a pound of cocaine you can bribe your way into getting a manual for the MAJC instruction set.)

* Install FreeBSD and get ZFS, dtrace, and an OS that supports most of my hardware (except for my cthulhoid graphics card; time to take a zero off its name and buy that instead), but also things like Xorg, better Unicode support, and libraries that aren't all dusty from years of people who seem to think that Unix should act like it's 1994. The only thing I lose is probably my current graphics card; I guess I can either buy an XVR-100 or switch in my old Elite3D-M6 card.

Wrong idea.

People stop being barbarians when they realize there's a better way to live. If you think your country's a better way to live, why not let the barbarians figure that out, rather than meddle in theirs until they're convinced yours is dangerous and evil?

Examples of things western intervention has caused or made worse:

* The Islamic revolution in Iran, which would probably never have happened if American agents hadn't suppressed Iran's previous, more peaceful democratic revolution decades before to prop up a convenient monarch. (Funny how much we talk about spreading democracy these days.)

* The regime of Saddam Hussein, which would not have been nearly so well-armed had western powers not armed him to the teeth so he'd do a better job of fighting Iran (see previous point).

* Osama bin Laden, who first got the idea of hucking bombs at Americans when US soldiers were stationed on Saudi soil to fight off the army of a man we ourselves had armed (see previous point).

* The Khmer Rouge, which would likely not have been nearly as popular if the US hadn't overthrown the government of Norodom Sihanouk and installed Lon Nol. (In fact, former members of the Khmer Rouge leadership have stated that American intervention in Cambodia was essential in their rise to power.)

* In fact, what were we doing messing with Cambodia and Vietnam in the first place?

And so on.

A lot of the trouble we seem to get into with so-called barbarians is trouble we made in the first place. Maybe they'd stop blowing things up if we stopped giving them reasons.

Nothing else? Really?

It's easy to blame leaders, but what about their constituencies? Sure, we can point at Bush and Blair and all those guys and say it was their fault, but somebody had to listen to them. Somebody had to watch Fox News and CNN and take all the ridiculous fearmongering about secret mobile nerve gas factories and whatnot seriously. Somebody had to be gullible enough to believe that, rather than a bunch of disconnected bands of angry peasants, armed with rusty old guns left over from the Cold War, who were angry about imperialism, we faced a ubiquitious, invisible, ridiculously sophisticiated and evil worldwide conspiracy that hated us for no good reason. A calm, rational mind that can't find any evidence of something usually concludes it's probably not there; a mind driven by fear and fashionable paranoia concludes that it's everywhere at once and that it's poised to destroy our civilization (or something). Millions had to be gullible enough to believe it.

The lesson of all this is that we should keep our heads on straight and not simply believe what we're told without sound evidence, especially when we are deciding whether or not to consent to acts of war. Unfortunately, the lesson most people will learn is that we voted for the wrong guy; they'll put all the blame on him and believe that everything would be better if we'd voted for somebody else. Presidents and prime ministers may have a lot of power, and it may only take a few people to start a war, but it takes millions to heed the call--and I don't just mean soldiers.

That's not a pretty thought.

If the inner workings of airplanes were as confused and MacGuyvered as those of Linux, there'd be more craters than airplanes. (To be fair, the same would be true if the cockpits of airplanes were properly analogous to the Windows userland and API, or if airplane pilots acted like Windows developers.)

He's right!

Can't imagine why this guy's getting downvoted so much. He's right.

The Linux kernel is pure spit and string as far as the eye can see, and its development is more about tacking on features than making sure they actually go there. It's schizophrenic and littered with the debris of years of indecisive ideological conflict. Complain about some problem with it and the community's answer is "Well, screw you, buddy. If you don't like it, why don't you just fix it yourself, because we sure don't give a shit." They care that it mostly works. They don't care if it works any better than it needs to work. They don't care if the design is neat or elegant or finished--just that it compiles and that it runs without crashing too much. Look at ext3. Look at the sound system. Look at how the kernel handles disks. Look at how the kernel handles memory. The Linux kernel is a fractured clusterfuck stem to stern, and the people who design it do not act like engineers. It was none other than Linus Torvalds who said of Linux recently: "The kernel is huge and bloated and our icache footprint is scary."

The NT kernel, however, follows a more consistent design philosophy and is basically a reimplementation of a kernel that was technologically advanced beyond Linux years before Linux even existed. There are Unix kernels these days that can measure up to that, but Linux is NOT the one.

Now, don't confuse Windows with the NT kernel. By no means does Windows as a whole share the merits of its kernel; indeed, I'd say that everything above the kernel in Windows is about as broken as the Linux kernel; one is screwed because too many corporate cooks have spoiled the broth, and one is screwed because of a culture of mediocrity that can't decide on how to solve a problem right the first time--which, coincidentally, produces nearly the same bad results, but amplified with the arrogance and zeal of the free software zealots and their belief that Linux can do no wrong as long as it's free, good engineering be damned. Don't lump in the NT kernel with that or get silly ideas in your head like the idea that the Linux kernel is, by any definition of the words "good" and "design", a "good design".

Linux is not designed--it is accreted. It grows organically, like one of those tumors with teeth and hair in it. If you're going to stick up for open-source Unix, couldn't you at least pick one of the ones that was written by actual software engineers? Did you have to put your money on /that/ horse?

That ain't the lesson to learn.

It wasn't the open-source stuff that killed Sun. The other things they did are, if you ask me, quite sufficient to explain their failure, and plenty of people have seen it coming for years:

* Explosive growth of unnecessary departments and personnel during the surge of profits just prior to 2000 and expansion into all sorts of markets Sun didn't need to be in; "There's low-hanging fruit everywhere", as somebody said at some point about marketshare. They got arrogant and thought they could do everything. They kind of turned into DEC and got all matrix-managed.

* Multiple expensively failed chip projects, such as UltraSPARC V and RK, on whose outcome their future depended. The best they could do was squeeze more life out of UltraSPARC IV and, too late in the game, use Fujitsu's chips for their high-end products and sell Niagara chips on the low end.

* Sun lost their bang for the buck. UltraSPARC II may have had it, but UltraSPARC III sure didn't--I think I remember a comment on here a while ago about a manager saying something like "I'm never buying this expensive purple shit again."

* Several billion dollars' worth of completely unnecessary acquisitions, such as StorageTek ($4.1bn) and MySQL ($1bn), and those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. Sun didn't need to be in those markets, and counted on being able to make gobs of cash after making a costly entrance; it never happened. All those billions bought Sun were higher operating expenses and pitiful beachheads in markets they shouldn't have entered.

* They didn't want to get rid of departments that weren't pulling their weight. While Sun's reluctance to lay off employees was admirable, a bush that doesn't get trimmed gets ugly and full of dead branches--but at least a bush doesn't have to pay its dead branches.

* Sun got lazy about selling things. What happened to their sales force? Oh, and why did they fire a bunch of StorageTek sales people if they wanted a chance in hell at making money in that market? Acting like DEC again.

They got sloppy, uncoordinated, and generally started acting like a typical failed bureaucracy. They forgot how to keep afloat in their own core businesses and, while they neglected that, they distracted themselves with delusions of entering the storage market and pretty much whatever else they thought they could do. Open-sourcing a lot of their software, however, was not such a bad idea, because it attracted thousands of developers (or did until this Oracle deal) who otherwise wouldn't have given Sun or Solaris a second thought. The availability of ZFS, coincidentally, probably gained Sun more ground in the storage market that Schwartz was so obsessed with than any of their ridiculous acquisitions. Attracting mindshare isn't a horrible thing for a server company to do. It gets people thinking in terms of your product line and gets them to consider you as an option, whereas otherwise they'd probably just stick to what they knew. Forgetting how to sell servers, however, is a fatal mistake, and that's the mistake they made.