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rplacd

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If you don't mind a parenthetical point, I'd argue that Marx's specific analyses and the precise names stuck to them are too limiting at this point - or at least I'm convinced you've conflated two properties that someone pointed out a while ago would make debate considerably more productive (by virtue, I suppose, of making the "heterodox" double-qualifier idelogies suddenly more motivated) when separated - the degree to which ownership and control of the means of production are centralized; and the precise ownership described in the terms of some separate dichotomy. Your point would prescribe for the first - but "socialism" as a name I'd claim has accreted and been recast to the extent that some synthetic history in which the limited-liability company is replaced with the cooperative would be called "market socialist" by last-generation Soviet nomenklatura, and yet "social-democratic and cooperativist" by the Co-operative Party that by agreement constitutes a curiously significant amount of British Labour (and hence the use of a name.) That's neither to argue, though, that the two are a mile and a half away: you're right to say that it did once imply both, and that in past contexts (or that's my impression of Western European economic reform post-World War II) it was overbearing as a trend no matter how the actual distribution of control could be construed.

(Edited for spelling correction, the contextualization at the end, and the note about how overt signs of association affect self-appropriation of names...)

But I'm convinced if at all, only very reluctantly so - certanly not so over an ideology whose championing stands to benefit not those of Deng Xiaoping's orthodoxy but of Maoist irredentism (Hua Guofeng may only be relevant as a historical footnote dominated by currents with consderably more inertia now, but Bo Xilai certainly seemed to have justified a thorough purging. At the very least I'm confident enough to estabish that faction-on-faction maneuvering in the far past has been justified on ideological differences of a similar magnitude - and that we looked at Bo's dramatics for shades of that precedent.)

The sole fact that one has to reach over themselves and make a great deal to invoke it when thinking within Clojure's mechanics - they become neither cheap to mentally fiddle around with, nor actually implement within.

(FWIW, though, Clojure's novelty to me was an STM system that I could get up and running without a night's worth of tweaking, and otherwise fall safely into a great deal of attention if something were to go hilariously wrong - most of the other solutions around "back then" seemed to regard themselves as research curios lagging behind in fit and finish.)

I apologize for bringing up the first assumption and running off it - I'd went off with it precisely because you talked about complete exclusion: but of course Apple can do a very well-considered nudge; I'm treading right over false equivocation here, but the question so is always "to what extent?" - we're happy to consider Android relatively unfettering, despite having a similarly "recessed" option like your projected one, but no doubt we're judging it differently because a phone never needs to hold much promise.

An equivalence to Microsoft - I'm raising a great deal of them only because I believe having everyone rush to emulate Apple's MO has a bit of their exceptionalism rub off - is suggested by your second, though: both have individual consumers, customers dependent on unique line-of-business setups (as to the standard business, media professionals), and independent developers (the last two make up the constituency with an interest in unfettered application installation) in precisely the same proportion - but not the same magnitude. The question, yet again, is in precisely how the proportion represented by "a little bit" turns out to be - and how much that'll be when applied. One has to measure precisely how much's been added back to FCP to the magnitude of their retargeting of the FCP line in the first place to get an impression of their influence. Apple's able to show a great deal of strength, though; I'm simply sizing up the opposing influence.

But neither do I doubt that Apple'd ever deny themselves an opportunity for a bit of bravado: I shouldn't ever be overtly hostile to someone projecting reasoning with overt change and incompatibility for the ideal's sake onto Apple.

Edit: and my thanks to you for the PortableApps as well - I remember lugging around a gaudily pimped-up Firefox (Aqua theme and a Ghostfox-like quick-hide addon, woot woot) on a 512MB flashdrive in middle school, and subsequently realizing that the show of ricer agency can neutralize anyone's ability to reasonably judge taste. A fairly good life lesson to be had early while getting to terms with a teenager's first pecking order.

Your second point is terribly exhaustively induced - I've two nitpicks, though, for the record's sake: there's the fairly low-lying target of whether the poweruser response to the introduction of Gatekeeper suffices to predict the response to any total lockout within OS X: the first was defended on the basis that it retained the option; the second violates that.

There's also the question of their role: while "power users"'ll make up little direct contribution to Apple's haul, they've forced Apple to expedite the usual inscrutability at times: Apple's been fairly quick with the reassurances after the dual (perceived) fiascoes that were the half-done rehaulings of both FCPX and the-suite-formerly-known-as-iWork.

The question then becomes whether a variable amount of scorn'll sufficiently tarnish the Mac platform as a whole, and whether it retains any inertia to overcome any blip in opinion; that'll depend on what proportion of Apple's Mac owners do care - that hasn't been established specifically for the Mac itself. But it's fairly easy to project along the lines of your note on Apple's dependence on the consumer when accounting for all business: no doubt adoption rates during the past few years've been up to the halo effect, and we only need decide whether the proportions line up - the power users, after all, have always remained, by definition, a minority; they've thus always had a disproportionate amount of influence.

But you're arguing just as well for simply getting rid of their business selling computers: perhaps they could just as well play that chance and feel all the better focused for having fallen into the second. I'm sure there's a surprise within that mold happening within Apple's future; it'd at least give the analysts an impression of sufficient prescience. (Or they'd grant the issue sufficient apathy on that front solely on the basis that their computer lines have reverted back into one of their self-proclaimed "hobby" niches - half the fun of Kremlinology's in tossing away the assumption that every actor must constantly execute, chop-chop.)

(Which takes me back to your first - I do understand that both App Stores don't even so much as consider OSS licences: precisely my claim that "I doubt open-source developers were paying to have their executables codesigned in the first place".)

I doubt open-source developers were paying to have their executables codesigned in the first place - I'd assumed in the argument above, at the very least, that the Gatekeeper denial isn't the silent suppression the iOS kernel uses; and on that basis little may as well change for them.

Projecting that Apple'll change both the default position of a radio button and their marginalia and messaging around Gatekeeper is different (as a somewhat more substantial change) from your premise, though.

Assuming none of the rest of the infrastructure'll change - I'd consider working with possibilities as future "when"s impractical enough; a user'll go download Firefox, the standard Gatekeeper denial message'll pop up:

    "Firefox" can't be opened because it was not downloaded from the Mac App Store.
    Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the Mac App Store.
    Safari downloaded this file today at...
And the user'll either trip over the message and give up in frustration - there will be a class of user who'll visually pattern-match, rather than engage with a meaningful back-and-forth with their computer - or pop into the System Preferences, find Security waiting for them, and off they go.

Fairly banal, but by far and large that's because the assumption that switching the default to the MAS-only option would be a novel attempt at total exclusion shouldn't be true, give or take the major assumption outlined above: not so when the current default's in fact "Mac App Store and identified developers" - narrowing the locus of trusted sources, then, is a change that should happen independently of how easy it'll be to get an unsigned app running.

History of T 13 years ago

It took me a while to figure out Shivers wasn't talking about the conventional diss - the narrative lives and dies on the technical one-ups.

I'll offer my congratulations as well - it feels like it's just been able to freshly tap the nerve of what lies beneath cosmopolitan America, and for that alone it won't go stale for a bit. The LRB, even through the same means, has ended up sounding like it fights a rear-guard action.

I'd wonder whether methods that make use of zeroing or /dev/zero'd be staved off for longer on Mavericks - perhaps it'd compress the recurring patterns that'd result?

Bedrock Linux 13 years ago

Gah - typo - "intercessionable" is the word; I've taken its use from the the Art of the Metaobject Protocol. (Thanks for the double-checking.) It's a usage that doesn't bear much relation to its others, but it's fairly easy to define: if introspection queries internal state, intercession changes it.

Complete income inequality isn't even orthodox Marx - "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" goes the standard quote by Marx; but that was his study of a specific utopia. (The rest of the cited work in fact goes on to rip its jaws into a transitional programme wrought out of "effective politicking" - pointed stuff.) The official CPSU line was then "To each according to his contribution" in the "transitional" period - through Trotsky and Lenin; so goes the degeneration.

I wonder how long it then took to get to imposed equality.

Bedrock Linux 13 years ago

"Any one that won't let Bedrock's tools and clients complain" is the answer - I know nothing about what the author's hinting wrt his future plans, but my impression's that the current release's a fairly light layer of mostly shell-scripted userland tools with only one needing compilation ("bedrock chroot"); Kernighan would be proud. (Those who treat the Unix Haters' Handbook as a source of design maxims would simply conclude a runtime built upon an introspectable and introcessionable language would obviate the need to marvel at the engineering involved here. The initial effort involved here, to be fair, is orders of magnitude less.)

Weren't the full-QWERTY Communicators within that price range? Any more interesting than that and we'd have credited to them a more full-featured OS barging into the range of PDAs - assuming we can rule out an Apple-style lateral leap.

Would mass-produced closed loop be a viable solution here? I'd imagine the engineering costs incurred ahead of time would add to quite a bit, but I'm unqualified to make any interesting judgment on any final balance of costs.

Oberon (2009) 13 years ago

The VLM's been ported, but manually setting it up Sid by far and large the same amount of pain simply amortized over time: the guides extant say you'll have to set up NTP, allow for a TUN from a hard coded IP to be granted an NFS export to the entirety of your disk, and - well, that's where I've ended up and I've still got an inscrutable "No protocol specified" to bang my head against. Perhaps serendipity'll be better to you.

Tom Clancy has died 13 years ago

"Red Rabbit" woke up the inner foreign policy wonk in me, despite how transparent Clancy's imperatives were - it's a pity he could never end up working his same genuine interest with China; I all recall is supposed Chinese naivety being dredged up - corporate espionage ("Chinese secretary has sex with supposed Japanese computer salesman in the name of her company"); "China: We Kill Priests and Babies".

They'd nevertheless invoked a great deal of meaningful machinery, though - certainly compared to the sheer suppository of machismatic agency that was Chavez-verse (credit probably required yet again, though: he was probably first to tread within the grounds of "contemporary tacticool".)

At the end of the day, Samsung wants the benchmarking to show the theoretical maximum. Other manufacturers may not be too bothered and are happy to show benchmarking of normal usage. It's like reading the specs on a car, you're never going to drive at 160 mph, but at least you know you could.

And they should be vilified for re-interpreting preconditions that would usually guarantee valid relative comparisons and are used like so. ("Theoretical maximum" is a problematic end to work towards, though - why shouldn't clock-speed specifications suffice, then? I presume you're talking about stock speeds sans the software stack - but cranking up frequency scaling isn't much of a meaningful hop and skip away from just running the benchmark.)

The title's misleading: Bitcoin was never sanctioned in the first place - the laws presumably whitelist, rather than blacklist.

I don't think the political will exists, in either case - the political jockeying that currently stands in for the entire totality of both policy and political discourse doesn't leave much space for a quiet and novel campaign like this - I suspect, in fact, that the only thing that has fallen into the above category within the last ten years are CITES violations (drug stings should probably be credited to the DEA.)

The phrase "this is Thailand" comes to mind - individual use will slip through the gaps, institutional users'll work this into their standard relationships with the various organs of government; and general apathy will reign in the end - the various arms of government are still probably embroiled in the omnipresent issues of either (a) a general political amnesty or (b) politically-motivated point-scoring.

No campaign exists, and there exists no space to whip one up considering how thoroughly split the various arms of government are between political allegiances (unless Yingluck's dealt with the judiciary already.)

Google Chromecast 13 years ago

The Chrome and Android teams don't seem to be great bedfellows, it seems - it isn't clear to me what demarcates Chrome-branded products from products running Android in areas far from their original targets.

Apropos of not too much that's healthy for discourse, but I'm inclined to give Russell Brand a token amount of redemption: he is, at the very least, articulate to a very finely sharpened "t" - that's the impression I've gotten from his writing in the Grauniad [1]; and while I'm not wading into the debate on whether he's simply just looking deeper into the usual tropes it indicates a broader awareness than a vox no-so-pop.

[1] Here's his version of the bog-standard "Thatcher's dead: this is what I remember of her years" sketch - he raises it from the dead by tossing the tread-lightlies around The Classes and makes it about what Thatcherite individualism meant for him as a prime target. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/09/russell-brand...

The Prize in Literature's never free of the usual political recriminations either - there's a fine line between endorsing a message and acknowledging execution (and the fact that the ends an author sets plays an important role as well) that's never been fully articulated.

I'm sure all the tropes exist today in some form or another (and they needn't be products of the new millenium, either - I've been seeing reportage from Naipaul's cramped Bombay well since the 70s, wrought out of an incredible amount of tiering and complete alienation between the tiers) but we consider them individual failures of society, and god knows if we'll ever suspend the ideals from our rhetoric in order to assemble the full enchilada.

If the CC's brought in one good thing, it's motivation to finally surgically remove Bridge from PS - I eyed it with suspicion when it came and tried to make itself at home; and I'm not terribly mourning the unceremonious slitting of the umbilical cord. (I am - in short - a miserable, tribal consumer.)

I can conceivably see the case where someone'd just like to argue "this, very much yes, but not this" - the whole idea that one thing should just then be a "deal-breaker" is more a reflection of the fact that the only substantial way we can then make the argument is through a binary buy-or-don't-buy.

So I don't mind the rhetoric - someone shouldn't have to claim ultimate and eternal loyalty to a product (lest they risk being attacked with a perceived inconsistency pointed out) to argue with and about a product. Of course it makes it no more effective - but it's slightly more truthful.

A similar mismatch with 1984's also smoothed also as well, in my opinion: I found one of the most oddly salient features of that society was the absent (the "free"d) proletariat - even as far outnumbering those of perceived relevance as they might be. As it is they're still swept into our rhetoric: a far more interesting equivalence needs just a bit more time for the status quo to establish itself.