Chuck Moore news
MarkWills
Sad news about the litigation with TPL. Especially since TPL are tied
in with intellasys.
I wonder if this has anything to do with TPL selling the Moore
Mircoprocessor Patent Portfolio Licence to Unisys?
Regards
Mark
Jacko
So unisys is trying buying up the S24 ting? Nice to see Chuck's site.
It has some nice poetry too. Belated condolences on his loss. Hope the
case goes well, if only those capitalist butt holes truly understood.
"credit crunch" is the new wording for the phonecian initiated
pricipal of oscillation of the market to get sub prime "wanna-be"
lordy folks, to help buy up the lower recession priced land stock for
the purposes of instilling a society of "wage slavery" in the
majority.
cheer jacko
Jason Damisch
> Sad news about the litigation with TPL. Especially since TPL are tied
> in with intellasys.
>
> I wonder if this has anything to do with TPL selling the Moore
> Mircoprocessor Patent Portfolio Licence to Unisys?
Could you post here info and new about this litigation. I have not
heard anything about it until I read this post.
Jason
MarkWills
Unfortunately I don't know any more than anyone else - I'm purely
speculating - I should have pointed that out - sorry.
I found it interesting that TPL is basically an IP/Litigation company,
yet they don't seem to have a lot on their books, except Chuck's
technology. If you check their litigation page, since 2007 the only
business they seem to have done has been as a result of licensing
Chucks patents to others as a result of patent breaches.
Fair enough, but now it seems that there are problems between Chuck
and TPL (there are as yet no details on Chuck's site). This is a
shame, because TPL and Intellasys are closely tied in together (it
would seem), with TPL handling the patents for the Sea Forth chips. I
worry that protracted litigation between Chuck/Intellasys and TPL
could have a negative effect on the success of the Sea Forth chip. I
want to see Chuck succeed. It seems he has been 'fighting' all his
life to get mainstream acceptance for his ideas and philosophies. It
would be nice to see him attain the success and riches he so deserves.
Mark
Doug Hoffman
...
> So unisys is trying buying up the S24 ting? Nice to see Chuck's site.
> It has some nice poetry too. Belated condolences on his loss. Hope the
> case goes well, if only those capitalist butt holes truly understood.
I'll assume you didn't mean to disparage capitalism in general.
From Wikipedia:
"Capitalism is an economic system in which wealth, and the means of
producing wealth, are privately owned and controlled rather than
commonly, publicly, or state-owned and controlled."
Further:
"With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases
with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same
word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the
product of other men's labor." - Abraham Lincoln, 1864
With the new government in place here in the US I am very concerned that
liberty is being redefined. At least the new government are removing
all troops from the mideast -- no, wait. That isn't happening is it?
Rant over.
-Doug
Dennis Ruffer
Chuck does seem to have bad luck on the litigation side, and this news
does not bode well for the chips. TPL owns IntellaSys and Chuck has
not been happy with the directions that everything was heading. He
closed IntellaSys' doors for the past month or so and this is the
first new news I have heard. Obviously, he can't talk about it yet,
and I don't know any details. The best we can do is hope he comes
through with some dignity and enough money to move on. His past
experiences have buried the earlier incarnations of this chip.
Hopefully, he has enough courage left for yet another round.
DaR
Jonah Thomas
> Jacko wrote:
> ...
>
> > So unisys is trying buying up the S24 ting? Nice to see Chuck's
> > site. It has some nice poetry too. Belated condolences on his loss.
> > Hope the case goes well, if only those capitalist butt holes truly
> > understood.
>
> I'll assume you didn't mean to disparage capitalism in general.
Surely not. Just as disparaging some particular lawyers doesn't
disparage legal theory in general, or disparaging particular generals
doesn't disparage military theory.
Capitalism is a theory designed to explain what works and what doesn't
work well about our economy. Unlike the physical sciences it is almost
completely untested by controlled experiment.
So far the theory has not been very useful to beginning or advanced
capitalists, nor to government regulators, nor to people who want to
predict economic indicators. Its primary use to date has been as a sort
of religion that provides comfort. However, advancements in the theory
might make it useful in the future, and common sense says that it
describes behaviors that some entrepreneurs do sometimes.
> With the new government in place here in the US I am very concerned
> that liberty is being redefined. At least the new government are
> removing all troops from the mideast -- no, wait. That isn't
> happening is it?
I'm concerned too. Since WWII we've some ways expanded personal freedom
even while in other ways we took it away. There was the communist
menace. Communism was another economic theory with no controlled
experiments. Marx saw some patterns in one capitalist system that he
thought should be avoided; he claimed they were present in every
capitalist system always, and he was extremely vague on ways to run
things better. Many people believed him particularly in imperial
colonies, and in various places the theories got mixed into nationalism.
(So-called "communist nations" had a chance to do controlled economic
experiments and they utterly blew it. They thought they already knew the
answers. Idiots.) We declared war on the theory and somewhat suppressed
american civil rights; we encouraged various foreign dictators with the
excuse that they were anticommunist. After communism was utterly
discredited we floundered awhile and our middle class started shrinking.
Then we took up antiterrorism and restricted civil liberties, and the
middle class keeps shrinking. I had some hopes for the new guy, but his
bailout looks exactly like Bush's bailout and his afghan war looks just
like Bush's iraq war. Maybe he'll run his bureaucracy more effectively.
I'm concerned that our trade deficit might catch up with us, too.
Various nations manipulated their currencies so they'ed export more to
us and import less. We made no response, maybe partly because of a
misguided capitalist theory which said that from camparative advantage
we were better off if our government did nothing even when other
governments gamed the system. Now we owe so much money that our
government doesn't have a lot of freedom of action. We did a lot to
restrict freedom and prosperity in argentina when they assumed this
position, and now it's us over the barrel.
> Rant over.
Same here.
Jacko
> Doug Hoffman <dhoff...@talkamerica.net> wrote:
> > Jacko wrote:
> > ...
>
> > > So unisys is trying buying up the S24 ting? Nice to see Chuck's
> > > site. It has some nice poetry too. Belated condolences on his loss.
> > > Hope the case goes well, if only those capitalist butt holes truly
> > > understood.
>
> > I'll assume you didn't mean to disparage capitalism in general.
>
> Surely not. Just as disparaging some particular lawyers doesn't
> disparage legal theory in general, or disparaging particular generals
> doesn't disparage military theory.
>
> Capitalism is a theory designed to explain what works and what doesn't
> work well about our economy. Unlike the physical sciences it is almost
> completely untested by controlled experiment.
Money = useful. I see the part of capitalism which I disparage, is the
construction of wealth out of wealth. That is to say when demand is
atrificially inflated by speculation, and deflated by bursting of
bubbles. The same could be said of controlling housing supply to make
higher sale prices, and the conflict of interest not recognised in law
by property holders in a housing strategy.
Paying auditors money is a conflict of interest in the smooth
operation of money.
> So far the theory has not been very useful to beginning or advanced
> capitalists, nor to government regulators, nor to people who want to
> predict economic indicators. Its primary use to date has been as a sort
> of religion that provides comfort. However, advancements in the theory
> might make it useful in the future, and common sense says that it
> describes behaviors that some entrepreneurs do sometimes.
Refuseing to acknowledge that all money comes FROM somewhare is a
major capitalist flaw.
> > With the new government in place here in the US I am very concerned
> > that liberty is being redefined. At least the new government are
> > removing all troops from the mideast -- no, wait. That isn't
> > happening is it?
Too many oil reserves, and big fat demand by single occupancy MPVs.
> I'm concerned too. Since WWII we've some ways expanded personal freedom
> even while in other ways we took it away. There was the communist
> menace. Communism was another economic theory with no controlled
> experiments. Marx saw some patterns in one capitalist system that he
> thought should be avoided; he claimed they were present in every
> capitalist system always, and he was extremely vague on ways to run
> things better. Many people believed him particularly in imperial
> colonies, and in various places the theories got mixed into nationalism.
> (So-called "communist nations" had a chance to do controlled economic
> experiments and they utterly blew it. They thought they already knew the
> answers. Idiots.) We declared war on the theory and somewhat suppressed
> american civil rights; we encouraged various foreign dictators with the
> excuse that they were anticommunist. After communism was utterly
> discredited we floundered awhile and our middle class started shrinking.
> Then we took up antiterrorism and restricted civil liberties, and the
> middle class keeps shrinking. I had some hopes for the new guy, but his
> bailout looks exactly like Bush's bailout and his afghan war looks just
> like Bush's iraq war. Maybe he'll run his bureaucracy more effectively.
Communism suffers its own problems.
> I'm concerned that our trade deficit might catch up with us, too.
> Various nations manipulated their currencies so they'ed export more to
> us and import less. We made no response, maybe partly because of a
> misguided capitalist theory which said that from camparative advantage
> we were better off if our government did nothing even when other
> governments gamed the system. Now we owe so much money that our
> government doesn't have a lot of freedom of action. We did a lot to
> restrict freedom and prosperity in argentina when they assumed this
> position, and now it's us over the barrel.
Welcome to the age of sub-prime government, if you could still call it
that. Let's face it most mafia would not charge such taxing
protectionist rates of their 'citizens' (even the unwilling citizens.)
Governments who write the program of law, seem to be exempt of
liability in the run-away robotic program and its detriment to the
well being of people.
end rant
cheers jacko
Jason Damisch
acting against Chuck's interest for the purpose of preventing Forth
chips from becoming widely available. This is just an impression of
mine, and I can't say that I know alot. It's just kinda weird how
close they got and then wham. What happened? I wonder what happened
to the 80,000 or so 40c18 chips that were manufactured? How many
times has Chuck come up with a Forth chip and then it never became
widely available. Maybe this is normal for inventions?
Do you think that Forth chips would be widely available under
communism? I heard somewhere that the Buran space shuttle was
programmed in Forth.
Jason
Jason Damisch
> I wonder if this has anything to do with TPL selling the Moore
> Mircoprocessor Patent Portfolio Licence to Unisys?
Why would it? They have sold licenses to use the patent portfolio to
another 50 different companies.
Here is a speculation. Suppose that TPL never really intended to sell
chips themselves. What they really wanted was for Chuck to invent
some new stuff that they could later sue other companies over for when
the copy it, and then make the companies buy patent portfolios????
Jason
Jason Damisch
Here is a link to a news article which would tend to disprove what I
just speculated, right no TPL's own site
Do hearing aids count as cybernetic implants?
Jason
Jacko
> It seems that there is some dark nebulous force or evil intention
> acting against Chuck's interest for the purpose of preventing Forth
> chips from becoming widely available.
What's 20 million destroying any competition to the other brands in
the scheme of profit?
Maybe going at TPL on the intentionally inhibiting 'explotation' of
the technology would be useful?
Bulk buying is the 'block voting' of capatialism. To say that
capitalism is better than communism, misses the point that two evil
men can not be said to have had a fight and one won by stealing money
from the poor, and so lasted a bit longer, while creating most of the
war zones on the planet (the anus wars, related to black liquids), cos
that would be un patriotic. Both systems are tyranical, as there is no
direct democracy. Try un-electing the boss in the cool off period
before his mal cast vote gets counted and enforced.
Also if democracy admits it is trying to go somewhere, then an average
dircetion on the bus does not get you far.
Economic law 2: Any technology can be stopped, by money.
cheers jacko
John Passaniti
> It seems that there is some dark nebulous force or evil intention
> acting against Chuck's interest for the purpose of preventing Forth
> chips from becoming widely available.
Oh, it's not just Forth chips, but Forth itself! comp.lang.forth has
had *years* of articles referencing a variety of conspiracy theories
against all things Forth. These are demonstrated with various
unverifiable anecdotal stories, opinion dressed as fact, and lots of
"sour grapes" retrospective dressed as analysis. So feel free to
speculate on a "dark nebulous force or evil intention" conspiring to
hold Moore's Forth chips back. Don't take a more skeptical view and
start reviewing the efforts of the companies that Moore has been
involved with that would productize and market his chips. Nah,
couldn't be.
> This is just an impression of
> mine, and I can't say that I know alot. It's just kinda weird how
> close they got and then wham. What happened? I wonder what happened
> to the 80,000 or so 40c18 chips that were manufactured? How many
> times has Chuck come up with a Forth chip and then it never became
> widely available. Maybe this is normal for inventions?
Here is my observation: The world is filled with people who have
great ideas. But great ideas alone aren't enough. In my career, I
have had the fortune of working with some amazingly bright people--
engineers and scientists and others who had brilliant insight. But
they were unable to turn those ideas into a product. The reason is
simple-- making a product requires more than just a great idea. It
involves a wide range of skills-- everything from business management,
legal and financial savvy, project planning and management, marketing,
sales, production, logistics and so on. And most people don't have
all those skills. So most seek out others who do have those skills,
and that's where things can go wrong.
Greg Bailey
I am not going to say much at this point ... but please do not despair, and
I'd
like to put out enough straight information to quell speculation along lines
that
lead nowhere.
Firstly whoever said that Chuck or anyone else had "closed IntellaSys'
doors"
was misinformed.
Secondly Chuck is alive and well and continuing with *his* work,
The S40's work nicely and IntellaSys will as far as I know fill orders for
them.
With respect to the subject matter of this thread, it is my personal opinion
that
in that part of his life devoted to making chips, Chuck has simply been
associated
with an unfortunate succession of people ill suited for working with him as
business
principals, beginning with Novix and continuing until recently.
It is my fervent hope that this unfortunate succession is broken and that
such
misfortune will never recur; we are all too old for this crap. I look
forward
to some good years of productive work during which, if anyone takes
advantage
of Chuck Moore, it is Chuck himself doing so!
Thanks - and wellwishes! Greg Bailey, Incline Village, NV
"Dennis Ruffer" <dru...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:f7f7fc71-a87f-4d08...@r33g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
Jason Damisch
> Here is my observation: The world is filled with people who have
> great ideas. But great ideas alone aren't enough. In my career, I
> have had the fortune of working with some amazingly bright people--
> engineers and scientists and others who had brilliant insight. But
> they were unable to turn those ideas into a product. The reason is
> simple-- making a product requires more than just a great idea. It
> involves a wide range of skills-- everything from business management,
> legal and financial savvy, project planning and management, marketing,
> sales, production, logistics and so on. And most people don't have
> all those skills. So most seek out others who do have those skills,
> and that's where things can go wrong.
http://www.intellasys.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=27&Itemid=50
http://www.intellasys.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=53
http://www.tplgroup.net:8080/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25&Itemid=28
Would imply that atleast some of the people at Intellasys and TPL were
competent.
>> With respect to the subject matter of this thread, it is my personal opinion
that in that part of his life devoted to making chips, Chuck has
simply been
associated with an unfortunate succession of people ill suited for
working with him as
business principals, beginning with Novix and continuing until
recently.
Which I suppose could mean that they just didn't work well together,
even though everybody was good at what they did? I wasn't there
though.
>> Sad news about the litigation with TPL. Especially since TPL are tied in with intellasys.
What litigation? Where did you hear about litigation. What kind of
litigation?
>> So unisys is trying buying up the S24 ting? Nice to see Chuck's site. It has some nice poetry too. Belated condolences on his loss. Hope the case goes well, if only those capitalist butt holes truly understood.
So, what would another licensee of the Patent Portfolio have to do
with 'buying up' the S24 thing? Also, what case? What litigation?
>> Fair enough, but now it seems that there are problems between Chuck and TPL (there are as yet no details on Chuck's site). This is a shame, because TPL and Intellasys are closely tied in together (it would seem), with TPL handling the patents for the Sea Forth chips. I worry that protracted litigation between Chuck/Intellasys and TPL could have a negative effect on the success of the Sea Forth chip.
How do you know that there are problems between Chuck and TPL? How do
you know that there is litigation between Chuck/Intellasys and TPL?
>> Chuck does seem to have bad luck on the litigation side, and this news does not bode well for the chips. TPL owns IntellaSys and Chuck has not been happy with the directions that everything was heading. He closed IntellaSys' doors for the past month or so and this is the first new news I have heard. Obviously, he can't talk about it yet, and I don't know any details.
How do you know that Chuck was not happy with the directions that
everything was heading. What were the bad directions? Greg just said
that whoever said the doors were closed were misinformed.
I guess that I had better wait before I draw too many conclusions.
Jason
Bernd Paysan
> Here is my observation: The world is filled with people who have
> great ideas. But great ideas alone aren't enough. In my career, I
> have had the fortune of working with some amazingly bright people--
> engineers and scientists and others who had brilliant insight. But
> they were unable to turn those ideas into a product. The reason is
> simple-- making a product requires more than just a great idea. It
> involves a wide range of skills-- everything from business management,
> legal and financial savvy, project planning and management, marketing,
> sales, production, logistics and so on. And most people don't have
> all those skills. So most seek out others who do have those skills,
> and that's where things can go wrong.
Indeed. IMHO, Chuck is great at developing things from top to bottom, and
can make things a lot more simple than more traditional approaches. But
what he fails is making his products usable "by idiots". With "idiots", I
mean the ordinary customer.
Look at SEAForth: This is a chip that has many entry barriers for
developers. First of all, it is programmed in Forth, not in C or whatever
many people are familiar. Then, it's not just ordinary Forth, it's a
parallel Forth, and you have to invest a lot of time into floorplanning
your program.
The question I had with SEAForth from the beginning was "where's the
market?" With my b16, I know the "market": It's designs I do at work, which
don't expose the CPU to the final customer. There, being weird is not a
problem at all, I can deal with it. Teaching a coworker to program the b16
is no problem either, I can do that. But selling it as a off-the-shelf
package? No way.
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
Albert van der Horst
>Hi, Folks.
>
<SNIP>
>
>With respect to the subject matter of this thread, it is my personal opinion
>that
>in that part of his life devoted to making chips, Chuck has simply been
>associated
>with an unfortunate succession of people ill suited for working with him as
>business
>principals, beginning with Novix and continuing until recently.
>
>It is my fervent hope that this unfortunate succession is broken and that
>such
>misfortune will never recur; we are all too old for this crap. I look
>forward
>to some good years of productive work during which, if anyone takes
>advantage
>of Chuck Moore, it is Chuck himself doing so!
That is all good and well. But the truth of the matter is that
there is more money in litigation then in selling chips.
Capitalism dictates then that you litigate.
If you don't do that, you will be bought up by a litigation company.
If they can't buy you, they can litigate you out of business. It is
their job, you know.
Calling that situation "unfortunate" is naive.
So I'm very pessimistic. Buy a s40 kit while you can.
I've a DEC Alpha under my desk. Intel now "owns" the DEC Alpha
technology. Another fine technology killed.
>Thanks - and wellwishes! Greg Bailey, Incline Village, NV
Groetjes Albert
--
--
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- like all pyramid schemes -- ultimately falters.
albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
Jacko
On the colorforth site, it says I will let you know more as lawyers
allow, or such. This would imply he is taking the advice of lawyers
and hence imply possible litigation is in progress.
cheers jacko
Jason Damisch
Sorry, but I fail to see on his site where it mentions lawyers. What
page and paragraph are we supposed to be looking at?
Jason
Stephen Pelc
<dhof...@talkamerica.net> wrote:
>I'll assume you didn't mean to disparage capitalism in general.
What's wrong with that in a democracy? Regardless of opinion, it
is worth reading the following by an economist:
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for
the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
(John Maynard Keynes)
Stephen
--
Stephen Pelc, steph...@mpeforth.com
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, fax: +44 (0)23 8033 9691
web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads
Jason Damisch
http://www.forth.org/svfig/next.html
Coming to SVFIG:
Update on IntellaSys Chips - John Rible
The chips John Rible will be selling to SVFIG are in test now and
perhaps he'll be at the meeting to give us an update.
I wonder how long it will take to test the chips, and when they may be
made available.
Jason Damisch
http://ecommerce.silicondesigneu.com/
Then it says on the My Order screen
"Please contact us for delivery information."
It used to say that this product is currently out of stock. Could it
be a sign that they will ship parts if you order them? Somebody
could call them up to find out.
Jason
John Passaniti
> Would imply that atleast some of the people at Intellasys and TPL were
> competent.
Wow, it really doesn't take much to impress you, does it? You posted
a list of links to the one-paragraph summaries of people at IntellaSys
and TPL. The measure of someone's competence isn't in a company's own
glowing press-release. The measure is in results. And I'll bet that
once the dust settles here, we're going to see the same thing many
other companies have-- you have a handful of bright people who are
brought down by some combination of incompetence, greed, or simple
lack of passion by the others.
I don't know more than what I've read here and don't claim to know
more. But here is something I do know: parsimony is a good thing.
Instead of the elaborate conspiracy theories against all things Forth
that are brought up here in comp.lang.forth, a simpler explanation
exists. You don't need corporations plotting against Forth and
Charles Moore's latest if your own people lack the skills to
effectively promote, market, productize, distribute, and educate.
Ian Osgood
Toward the bottom:
"Moore v TPL
My association with TPL has resulted in a lawsuit. Details as my
lawyer permits."
Note: this is the parent company TPL, not IntellaSys proper. In the
intro he is more vague:
"I haven't updated this site for a long time. My apologies. I've been
involved with a company that discouraged such communication. They
terminated the project, so I'll return to full disclosure."
Personally, I have mixed feelings about his website update. One one
hand, some of his new choices of poems are heartbreaking. On the
other, he is still satisfied with his own engineering, the
documentation and examples for the S40 instruction set is
illuminating, and the description of his walking stick is a lovely
little parable on the joy of simple tools.
Ian
Roger Ivie
> Sorry, but I fail to see on his site where it mentions lawyers. What
> page and paragraph are we supposed to be looking at?
On colorforth.com under the heading "Moore v TPL" it says "My
association with TPL has resulted in a lawsuit. Details as my lawyer
permits".
--
roger ivie
ri...@ridgenet.net
Jacko
Section: Moore v TPL
"My association with TPL has resulted in a lawsuit. Details as my
lawyer permits." quotation.
Just Below is: Masterminds of Programming
cheers jacko
nibble
> Hi, Folks.
>
> I am not going to say much at this point ... but please do not despair, and
> I'd
> like to put out enough straight information to quell speculation along lines
> that
> lead nowhere.
>
> Firstly whoever said that Chuck or anyone else had "closed IntellaSys'
> doors"
> was misinformed.
>
But, as can be read from here: http://www.colorforth.com/S40.htm it
seems that things does not worked out properly at Intellasys.
regards
nibble
John Passaniti
> Just Below is: Masterminds of Programming
Sounds like an interesting book. It doesn't look like it's available in
print yet, but is available in electronic form.
We'll see if the authors are able to capture something useful and
essential about Forth, or if the chapter on Forth will degrade into a
mere interview. If that happens, I don't expect much; we already have
lots of interview material from Moore and much of it is just historical
retrospective, koans, and catchphrases (like "factor, factor, factor!")
without pragmatic insight into his methodology.
But O'Reilly books tend to be more good than not, so I'm hopeful.
From the O'Reilly web site, here's the interviews that make up the book:
* Adin D. Falkoff: APL
* Thomas E. Kurtz: BASIC
* Charles H. Moore: FORTH
* Robin Milner: ML
* Donald D. Chamberlin: SQL
* Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan: AWK
* Charles Geschke and John Warnock: PostScript
* Bjarne Stroustrup: C++
* Bertrand Meyer: Eiffel
* Brad Cox and Tom Love: Objective-C
* Larry Wall: Perl
* Simon Peyton Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, and John Hughes:
Haskell
* Guido van Rossum: Python
* Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo and Roberto Ierusalimschy: Lua
* James Gosling: Java
* Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson, and James Rumbaugh: UML
* Anders Hejlsberg: Delphi inventor and lead developer of C#
Bernd Paysan
> On colorforth.com under the heading "Moore v TPL" it says "My
> association with TPL has resulted in a lawsuit. Details as my lawyer
> permits".
It is not really a surprise. If you deal with patent trolls that only know
how to make lawsuits, you'll inevitable end up in such one. I hope Chuck
and Intellasys don't need these trolls anymore, and can make money out of
good engineering. Their hearing aid is an application which I think is the
right target market for SEAForth: Low power, high performance applications
which can be handled basically by an in-house team. I.e. competing with
ASICs, but flexible like an FPGA (or maybe in between).
John Passaniti
> Look at SEAForth: This is a chip that has many entry barriers for
> developers. First of all, it is programmed in Forth, not in C or whatever
> many people are familiar. Then, it's not just ordinary Forth, it's a
> parallel Forth, and you have to invest a lot of time into floorplanning
> your program.
I disagree with Forth itself being an entry barrier for the SEAforth
chips. The SEAforth chips target purpose-built embedded systems and
programmers there already have to deal with assembly language on quirky
DSP and tiny soft-core processors. Programming the SEAforth chips is
going to "feel" a lot more like programming in assembly language than
programming in Forth (for example having to account for ALU delays and
having various other restrictions on what instructions can go into what
slots). So I don't think Forth itself is huge entry barrier because it
was less Forth and more a quirky assembly language.
Where I agree with you is in the other aspects of programming the
SEAforth chips-- floorplanning and writing parallel code. I can see
that as a big entry barrier because it would take time to "ramp-up" the
skills needed to do that effectively. This is why I wrote very early on
that the success of the SEAforth chips rests entirely on the tools,
documentation, and support services. It has very little to do with Forth.
Jacko
So TPL 'fired' SEAforth team members. I assume fired means something
different from made redundant. So some market protectionism (conflict
of product lines maybe) may have been at work. I assume Chuck is now
free to concentrate on his own work because of said parting of people
(by some agreement or disagreement). The financial consolidation of in
profit focus and reduction of R'n'D for maximization of profit may be
at the root of it. Semiconductor FAB clean rooms are now being used to
grow lettuce in Japan you know. Although R'n'D focus on emerging
future markets in Asia may be well spent at present.
To add to the excitement, if chuck needs any small nibz processor
cores for IO etc, then he can have 4 per chip, with no BSD derived
work clause. You regular folks only get one core per chip for free
with no derived work publication clause. http://nibz.googlecode.com
So I guess was the parting of company fair, and has the contract
consideration been upheld? I suppose we'll have to wait and see.
cheers jacko
Elizabeth D Rather
The last time I discussed this with them, the thinking was that the
early applications should be primarily programmed by the Intellasys
technical staff themselves, so in effect the buyer gets a turnkey
project. The hearing-aid idea is an example. They also had two
signed-on customers with strong Forth backgrounds.
Cheers,
Elizabeth
--
==================================================
Elizabeth D. Rather (US & Canada) 800-55-FORTH
FORTH Inc. +1 310.999.6784
5959 West Century Blvd. Suite 700
Los Angeles, CA 90045
http://www.forth.com
"Forth-based products and Services for real-time
applications since 1973."
==================================================
John Passaniti
> The last time I discussed this with them, the thinking was that the
> early applications should be primarily programmed by the Intellasys
> technical staff themselves, so in effect the buyer gets a turnkey
> project. The hearing-aid idea is an example. They also had two
> signed-on customers with strong Forth backgrounds.
Well, I guess that's why they seemed to be ignoring anyone but very high
volume customers. Having their own technical staff develop the
applications for customers would necessarily limit how many customers
they could handle at once. So they would have to make it up in sheer
volume for a limited number of customers.
MarkWills
Chucks site has been updated just today! (30th March):
From the intro:
"I haven't updated this site for a long time. My apologies. I've been
involved with a company that discouraged such communication. They
terminated the project, so I'll return to full disclosure."
NOTE: it says "they terminated the project"
Kiss the SeaForth chip goodbye me thinks.
Further down, in the SeaForth section, it says:
"Spectacular chip! 40 microcomputers, each with 128 words of 18-bit
memory. Each capable of 700 Mips. I'll discuss availability when the
dust clears."
There is also an update about his late wife, Min. The final paragraph
is heartbreaking, as is the poetry, as noted by an earlier poster.
Mark
MarkWills
This from the S40 page of Chuck's site, which I believe tells you all
you need to know:
"This is the link to IntellaSys' spec sheet. IntellaSys is the
division of TPL that managed the SEAForth project. The S40 chip was
the ultimate product of that effort. I was chief designer and
contributed 55% of the $40M, or so, that it cost.
TPL fired SEAForth employees in January 2009 and thus terminated the
project. The status and future of S40 chips is unclear."
Very sad.
Doug Hoffman
> On Sun, 29 Mar 2009 08:36:50 -0400, Doug Hoffman
> <dhof...@talkamerica.net> wrote:
>
>> I'll assume you didn't mean to disparage capitalism in general.
>
> What's wrong with that in a democracy?
Capitalism, while not perfect (no economic system is) is far superior to
other systems like socialism which has never worked but is where the US
seems currently headed. It seems popular today to demonize those who
wish to work hard and excel, and yes, make money while doing so. It has
been these successful people that have then started businesses, giving
other people gainful employment, and have been some of our greatest
philanthropists.
I would recommend reading Liberty and Tyranny by Mark R. Levin, a
scholar of the US constitution.
> Regardless of opinion, it
> is worth reading the following by an economist:
>
> Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for
> the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
> (John Maynard Keynes).
Typical demonization. Capitalism has been the driving force behind the
most economically successful societies in history, despite current
problems. The resulting social good from this are too numerous to list:
cures for disease, technology advances, moon landings, etc.
-Doug
>
> Stephen
>
>
Jerry Avins
I think it was to an extent tongue in cheek. (Actually, an argument *or*
regulation, not *against* capitalism.) You do know who Keynes was, I'm
sure.
Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Jacko
> Stephen Pelc wrote:
> > On Sun, 29 Mar 2009 08:36:50 -0400, Doug Hoffman
> > <dhoff...@talkamerica.net> wrote:
>
> >> I'll assume you didn't mean to disparage capitalism in general.
>
> > What's wrong with that in a democracy?
>
> Capitalism, while not perfect (no economic system is) is far superior to
> other systems like socialism which has never worked but is where the US
> seems currently headed. It seems popular today to demonize those who
> wish to work hard and excel, and yes, make money while doing so. It has
> been these successful people that have then started businesses, giving
> other people gainful employment, and have been some of our greatest
> philanthropists.
The need for philanthropists is one of the faults. Working hard and
making money? Work as hard as you like, but money is not made (unless
you print it). You seem to imply anti-capitalists are against
sustainable productivity.
> I would recommend reading Liberty and Tyranny by Mark R. Levin, a
> scholar of the US constitution.
Not Lenin... NeVer
> > Regardless of opinion, it
> > is worth reading the following by an economist:
>
> > Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for
> > the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
> > (John Maynard Keynes).
>
> Typical demonization. Capitalism has been the driving force behind the
> most economically successful societies in history, despite current
> problems. The resulting social good from this are too numerous to list:
> cures for disease, technology advances, moon landings, etc.
Economically sucessful and capitalist is kind of a tautology. To say
that the good comes from this rather than from people is a very
concieted banker's view.
cheers jacko
Jonah Thomas
> Capitalism, while not perfect (no economic system is) is far superior
> to other systems like socialism which has never worked but is where
> the US seems currently headed.
Capitalism is not an economic system. Capitalism is an economic theory.
Every successful economic system I know of has had some element of trade
or barter, but has also had elements that capitalist theory leaves out.
Did those extra things improve the system or make it worse? How could we
tell without controlled experiments?
> > Regardless of opinion, it
> > is worth reading the following by an economist:
> >
> > Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for
> > the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us
> > all.(John Maynard Keynes).
>
> Typical demonization. Capitalism has been the driving force behind
> the most economically successful societies in history, despite current
> problems. The resulting social good from this are too numerous to
> list: cures for disease, technology advances, moon landings, etc.
Cures for diseases have tended to come from people who focused much more
on curing disease than on making money. One way or another they got the
resources to do their research. After there was a salable product
somebody else looked for ways to make money off of it.
Important technological advances have tended to go similarly.
The moon landings were a special case -- funded by government as a sort
of boondoggle. Much of the work was done in government labs or by
universities with no particular profit motive involved, but a lot was
also hired out by the government to private businesses. And so we got
various astronauts telling jokes about trusting their lives to hundreds
of thousands of parts, each supplied by the lowest bidder.
Saying that all the good stuff comes from theory of capitalism is like
saying that everything which makes a baseball pitcher great is in his
arm.
I think capitalist theory has some valuable ideas, and the most central
of those ideas are too specific. Systems tend to do better when they:
1. Allow lots of people the chance to take initiative.
2. Allow those people to get rewards when their initiative produces
results that somebody wants.
3. The better the system links up people who take initiative with people
who wish to reward them for the results of that initiative, the quicker
complications will ensue.
rickman
I feel stupid for getting involved in this discussion, but the point
is that capitalism creates an economic structure that allows all of
the above to take place. The independent research by those who wish
to cure disease, the research by government, and even the great arms
of today's baseball pitchers, were all created by the wealth of our
capitalistic system. If we were stuck in a system like the Soviets or
the Chinese had been using in the past decades, we would not have had
as much free resources to be able to create so many of the things that
we have created. Of course, none of this is possible if people don't
have the intelligence, the creativeness and the drive to do the things
you mention (or the arm to be trained). But they also would not have
been able to do them if they were spending 10 hours a day making a
living by some other means, like farming.
Rick
jagmarz
> It seems popular today to demonize those who
> wish to work hard and excel, and yes, make money while doing so.
Oh yeah; we hear about it all the time on the news. Look at all those
evil people who go out and earn a living every day.
WTF? This is fatuous beyond belief. It's the parasites, who WILL
inevitably exist in any system, that are, and ought to be, demonized.
The Madoffs; the welfare queens; the punditocracy.
We've just watched an entire sector of the economy, like lab rats,
pursue "rewards" to the exclusion of providing for their own
necessities. This is the danger of capitalism -- chasing the buck,
you take your eyes off the road and fall into a ditch.
Regulation saves you by covering up the ditches. And padding the
trees. And caging the buck. And ...
Seriously, what was the topic of this thread, again?
-- Mario
Jonah Thomas
> Jonah Thomas <jethom...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Systems tend to do better when they:
> >
> > 1. Allow lots of people the chance to take initiative.
> > 2. Allow those people to get rewards when their initiative produces
> > results that somebody wants.
> > 3. The better the system links up people who take initiative with
> > people who wish to reward them for the results of that initiative,
> > the quicker complications will ensue.
> I feel stupid for getting involved in this discussion, but the point
> is that capitalism creates an economic structure that allows all of
> the above to take place.
Yes, to a large extent. You don't notice the examples where the system
does inhibit those things, but sometimes it allows them.
We have Chuck's example where it looks like things aren't quite working
out well....
> The independent research by those who wish to cure disease, the
> research by government, and even the great arms of today's baseball
> pitchers, were all created by the wealth of our capitalistic system.
They were all allowed by the system. Meanwhile, some people who want to
do research do not get the opportunity. Some researchers want to cure
diseases that mostly attack poor people, and they have a lot of trouble
getting funding. Some people who might have been great baseball pitchers
do not get the chance. How well does our system make those choices? It's
very hard to tell. But there are some successes.
> If we were stuck in a system like the Soviets or the Chinese had been
> using in the past decades, we would not have had as much free
> resources to be able to create so many of the things that we have
> created.
That's probably true. There have certainly been worse systems than our
mixed economy.
> Of course, none of this is possible if people don't have the
> intelligence, the creativeness and the drive to do the things you
> mention (or the arm to be trained). But they also would not have been
> able to do them if they were spending 10 hours a day making a living
> by some other means, like farming.
Currently we have some people spending 10+ hours a day working two or
more part-time jobs because no better opportunities are available to
them. Ideally these would be people who lack intelligence, creativity
and drive. I don't know how to measure how much that's the case.
Meanwhile, rather many high school graduates are employed as health
insurance adjustors. They look at medical records and decide which
procedures health insurance will not pay for, based entirely on
precedents and on the limited data about the case that shows up in their
computer files. Someone who used to supervise a windowless office of
these girls said that in his office they did not have a quota of
procedures to deny. However, his office as a whole was supposed to deny
enough procedures to demonstrate that it more than paid for itself. This
work is done redundantly by multiple corporations who each have their
own somewhat-arbitrary precedents and guidelines.
And rather many innovators are employed to generate patents. The
corporate lawyers look for ways to make money with the patents. I talked
with a man who does medical equipment research, who said he had a quota
of four patents a week but when he was in the swing of it he could often
generate ten or twelve a week without much trouble. Corporations with
sufficient money and patents don't have to worry too much about other
people's patents. But -- could this system be interfering with some
people's initiative? Could it perhaps be slowing innovation? It provides
employment to lots of people. People to file patents, people to do
patent searches, and of course lawyers....
There's room for lots of innovation in finding new kinds of patents,
but....
I'm not at all sure we have the best possible economic system. I'm
pretty sure that a system that had nothing but the things capitalist
theory describes would not be better.
If we wanted to make improvements, wouldn't we need to actually test
the improvements? At a minimum, controlled experiments. Very hard to do
them double-blind.... And if we could find consistent differences in
results, which results should be considered better? Wouldn't it be the
people who currently have the most money who'd get the most say in how
to change the system? They might prefer economic systems that let them
have a bigger share of the wealth, more than systems that produce more
wealth. This stuff is hard to test and hard to interpret the results.
rickman
> rickman <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Jonah Thomas <jethom...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Systems tend to do better when they:
>
> > > 1. Allow lots of people the chance to take initiative.
> > > 2. Allow those people to get rewards when their initiative produces
> > > results that somebody wants.
> > > 3. The better the system links up people who take initiative with
> > > people who wish to reward them for the results of that initiative,
> > > the quicker complications will ensue.
> > I feel stupid for getting involved in this discussion, but the point
> > is that capitalism creates an economic structure that allows all of
> > the above to take place.
>
> Yes, to a large extent. You don't notice the examples where the system
> does inhibit those things, but sometimes it allows them.
>
> We have Chuck's example where it looks like things aren't quite working
> out well....
We know *nothing* about what "Chuck's example" is about. So how can
you say that it has anything to do with the capitalistic system? It
is entirely possible that it is a simple contractual issue where the
contract says one thing and the parties (or one party) thought it said
something different.
> > The independent research by those who wish to cure disease, the
> > research by government, and even the great arms of today's baseball
> > pitchers, were all created by the wealth of our capitalistic system.
>
> They were all allowed by the system. Meanwhile, some people who want to
> do research do not get the opportunity. Some researchers want to cure
> diseases that mostly attack poor people, and they have a lot of trouble
> getting funding. Some people who might have been great baseball pitchers
> do not get the chance. How well does our system make those choices? It's
> very hard to tell. But there are some successes.
Not just "allowed" but made *possible*. Capitalism is a system of
managing wealth and resources. The rest of it is what you *do* with
capitalism. Don't blame the system for how people use it. I don't
blame cars for the way some people drive them. Don't blame capitalism
for how some companies and people use or mis-use the system.
> > If we were stuck in a system like the Soviets or the Chinese had been
> > using in the past decades, we would not have had as much free
> > resources to be able to create so many of the things that we have
> > created.
>
> That's probably true. There have certainly been worse systems than our
> mixed economy.
>
> > Of course, none of this is possible if people don't have the
> > intelligence, the creativeness and the drive to do the things you
> > mention (or the arm to be trained). But they also would not have been
> > able to do them if they were spending 10 hours a day making a living
> > by some other means, like farming.
>
> Currently we have some people spending 10+ hours a day working two or
> more part-time jobs because no better opportunities are available to
> them. Ideally these would be people who lack intelligence, creativity
> and drive. I don't know how to measure how much that's the case.
I have honestly thought long and hard about exactly that problem. I
feel very lucky to be where I am today. I feel, more now than ever
before, that if some small thing had gone differently for me, I would
be in the street living in a cardboard box. Instead I am living very
well and don't even need to work if I choose not to.
But what to do with the people I've met who do work three part time
jobs to just be able to afford rent and food? I don't have an answer
to that question. The capitalistic system provides for creating goods
and services. How we distribute them is up to us. We have some
programs that help people who need, and many don't even try to take
advantage of these programs. But the ones who do get the benefit.
They may not be living well, but they are not living in the street.
Here, if you can't afford housing or food, it will be provided. It's
nothing I would want to have, but it is better than starving.
Beyond that, yes, the capitalistic system is just one step away from
the jungle, but without legal murder.
> Meanwhile, rather many high school graduates are employed as health
> insurance adjustors. They look at medical records and decide which
> procedures health insurance will not pay for, based entirely on
> precedents and on the limited data about the case that shows up in their
> computer files. Someone who used to supervise a windowless office of
> these girls said that in his office they did not have a quota of
> procedures to deny. However, his office as a whole was supposed to deny
> enough procedures to demonstrate that it more than paid for itself. This
> work is done redundantly by multiple corporations who each have their
> own somewhat-arbitrary precedents and guidelines.
This is a perfect example of blaming the system for what the users do
with it. The system is not responsible for looking out for people.
It is just a means of providing for an economy that is not based on
chaos. We make all sorts of exceptions and rules to help make the
system more humane, but that is not its purpose. That is how we want
it to be, so we bend it to do those things.
> And rather many innovators are employed to generate patents. The
> corporate lawyers look for ways to make money with the patents. I talked
> with a man who does medical equipment research, who said he had a quota
> of four patents a week but when he was in the swing of it he could often
> generate ten or twelve a week without much trouble. Corporations with
> sufficient money and patents don't have to worry too much about other
> people's patents. But -- could this system be interfering with some
> people's initiative? Could it perhaps be slowing innovation? It provides
> employment to lots of people. People to file patents, people to do
> patent searches, and of course lawyers....
>
> There's room for lots of innovation in finding new kinds of patents,
> but....
>
> I'm not at all sure we have the best possible economic system. I'm
> pretty sure that a system that had nothing but the things capitalist
> theory describes would not be better.
>
> If we wanted to make improvements, wouldn't we need to actually test
> the improvements? At a minimum, controlled experiments. Very hard to do
> them double-blind.... And if we could find consistent differences in
> results, which results should be considered better? Wouldn't it be the
> people who currently have the most money who'd get the most say in how
> to change the system? They might prefer economic systems that let them
> have a bigger share of the wealth, more than systems that produce more
> wealth. This stuff is hard to test and hard to interpret the results.
I'm not sure what you are saying here. What changes would you like to
see? Patents are a PITA for an engineer, but they are important.
Many people only see the negative effects of patents when lawsuits are
filed. But without patents, many companies that invent and produce
real products would not be able to compete against companies who are
just good at stealing others ideas and producing them cheaply. If
that were the case, there would be little incentive to invent and
absolutely no reason to ever share inventions. That *is* what patents
are about, providing protection from theft of an invention in exchange
for the full release of information about it. So everyone wins... the
inventor gets the economic benefit for some number of years and the
public gets the benefit of it for perpetuity.
Rick
Bernd Paysan
> Capitalism, while not perfect (no economic system is) is far superior to
> other systems like socialism which has never worked
Many people reduce socialism to the Russian socialism. This didn't work out
that well. Mao's socialism didn't work out, either. But what about Deng's?
It is a pragmatic approach, and it allows people to make money. But in
effect, it is still a socialist approach: Banks are owned by the state,
joint ventures are 51% owned by state, 49% by foreign investors (no profits
taken out of the business by the minority owner), there is a guaranteed
base income for everybody (the "iron rice bowl" - very low, but enough for
living in a poor country). This pragmatic approach with half capitalism and
half communism seems to work extremely well, at least from the economic
side of this view.
It's well known for engineers that you must make compromises if you want a
working system. As long as people shout "communism!" like "witch!" when
they see the state departing the line of "pure capitalism", compromises are
difficult to achieve. But pure capitalism doesn't work, either. And the
western world is way off pure capitalism, anyway. We have lots of
subsidies, we have monopoly privileges like copyright and patents, we have
unions, public health care and retirement plans, etc. This is all at least
one third into communism.
BTW: Most of the Chinese leaders of the last years had engineering degrees,
unlike politicians in the west, who are usually lawyers or worse.
Albert van der Horst
The moonlanding. An interesting story. The Russians send a Sputnik in
space. Suddenly the US feel lefts behind, and start a HUGE *public
funded* operation to put a man on the moon. A very spectacular example
of a capitalist initiative (*NOT*).
Cures for disease: have you followed the situation with AIDS medicine
in Africa?
You're wrong in your basic conclusion.
There is basically just one socialist experiment worth considering.
That was the Lenin/Stalin Russia of the 1920's. Even under constant
attack of foreign sources, this was a resounding economic success,
whatever you may think of its moral and humanitarian aspects.
Considering the odds (Russia was a really backward society and all
of the capitalist gouvernments wanted it to fail) this is all the
more impressive.
Note: I just read a Dutch book written in 1930, "De dreiging van het
bolzjewisme", ("the thread of bolzjewism"). It corroborates that
conclusion, being one-sided and all. 1) This book has the historic
facts, also those of the British, German French and US societies,
freshly dig up.
I personally use a couple of objective criteria for the economic
quality of a society: average age, child mortality and analphabetism.
Try for once to map those on your economically successful countries.
The best economies thus far have a fair amount of central control.
Since the Dutch followed US rabiate neoliberalist ideology, child
mortality and analphabetism managed to go up, all against the tide
of glorious technical progress.
>
>-Doug
Groetjes Albert
1) One sided, anti-bolzjweist that is.
--
--
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- like all pyramid schemes -- ultimately falters.
albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
Doug Hoffman
> And the
> western world is way off pure capitalism, anyway. We have lots of
> subsidies, we have monopoly privileges like copyright and patents, we have
> unions, public health care and retirement plans, etc. This is all at least
> one third into communism.
Many of us here in the US are very afraid that our new government is
trying hard to move even closer towards socialism and overly powerful
centralized government. This is *not* what the founding fathers of the
US wanted! We don't have nationalized health care here, yet. People
come to the US from around the world to receive our currently excellent
medical treatment. That may change. Obama has stated that he is going
to implement a national health care system in the US, to the chagrin of
us conservatives. We don't want even more central government meddling
where it shouldn't. Unions and various entitlement programs came into
being under Franklin Roosevelt -- who was responsible for the initial
steps towards socialism in the US. He tried to spend his way out of the
great depression and that failed. It was WWII, not Roosevelt's
misguided policies, that eventually ended the depression.
-Doug
Bernd Paysan
> You're wrong in your basic conclusion.
> There is basically just one socialist experiment worth considering.
> That was the Lenin/Stalin Russia of the 1920's. Even under constant
> attack of foreign sources, this was a resounding economic success,
> whatever you may think of its moral and humanitarian aspects.
Note also that when it fell apart in the early 90s, a quite radical
capitalism was installed instead, and the economy instantly collapsed, and
only started significant recovering when Putin put in a post-socialist
state control system.
However, I wouldn't say that there is only one socialist experiment. There
has been the Lenin/Stalin Russia of the 1920s, the Khrushchev version - way
less opression (which is the one that launched Sputnik), Mao's China (with
the "great leap forward" experiment which was an epic failure), and Deng's
China, which is basically in place today, and a huge success (similar
experiments like Đổi mới in Vietnam also had similar success). Note that
the primary point in these systems was to open up the country for foreign
investors, but to keep control over the companies they invested in. The
other point is to allow (mostly small) local business to own their
resources (apart from real estate), which works way better than large
companies. The jeans you might be wearing has been actually made by a
company with less than 20 employees; they have put all larger manufacturers
out of business - actually, those larger manufacturers are now label
companies, who's main value is to import these jeans made by small
companies, and to rent shelf space in large market companies where you can
buy them (but remember: Companies like wallmart don't sell goods, they sell
shelfs. You are not their customer).
Bernd Paysan
> Many of us here in the US are very afraid that our new government is
> trying hard to move even closer towards socialism and overly powerful
> centralized government. This is *not* what the founding fathers of the
> US wanted! We don't have nationalized health care here, yet. People
> come to the US from around the world to receive our currently excellent
> medical treatment. That may change.
Maybe it may change, but people usually come to developed countries for
excellent medical treatment. It has nothing to do with health care, because
those foreigners are always paying their bill themselves. People come to
Germany for excellent medical treatment, and we have a sort-of-communist
public health care.
And if you look at how medicine is regulated, you find a large buerocracy
(NIH), many monopolies (patents, trade marks), and huge profits. Huge
profits should not exist in a free market economy. What you have is large
companies bribing the government for a system that makes their profits grow
at the expense of everybody else.
> Obama has stated that he is going
> to implement a national health care system in the US, to the chagrin of
> us conservatives. We don't want even more central government meddling
> where it shouldn't. Unions and various entitlement programs came into
> being under Franklin Roosevelt -- who was responsible for the initial
> steps towards socialism in the US. He tried to spend his way out of the
> great depression and that failed. It was WWII, not Roosevelt's
> misguided policies, that eventually ended the depression.
Uh. WWII economics which meant "build more weapons" is precisely the most
overly powerful centralized government you can imagine. You won, you got
the windfall profits from that. Germany had exactly the same economic
strategy (build more weapons), lost, and went bankrupt. We then decided to
have a half-socialist economy ("Soziale Marktwirtschaft"), and it turned
out as huge success. Only lately, a few changes into more neo-liberal
aspects were implemented, which in turn increased risk and led to huge
losses of money in the last year.
Someone who says unregulated capitalism is good must have been in coma for
the last year.
Doug Hoffman
> Someone who says unregulated capitalism is good must have been in coma for
> the last year.
Someone who believes that there were no heavy government pressures
involved in creating the toxic mortgages doesn't understand the real
cause and effect.
-Doug
Thomas Pornin
> This is *not* what the founding fathers of the US wanted!
The founding fathers did not know that you could power a car without
using a horse, they had no idea of what electricity is(*), and they saw
little problem in mass deportation or actual killing of "natives". Or,
for that matter, slavery. I do not want to lay blame, but I wish to
point out that those fine people have been dead for two centuries and
there is no rational reason to think that what they envisioned for the
piece of land they called the US at that time (only the East Coast,
actually) is still an accurate and relevant goal for people now living
in the US.
> People come to the US from around the world to receive our currently
> excellent medical treatment.
Actually, US citizens cross borders to get an equally excellent medical
treatment in countries where they can get it for less money.
_Physicians_ go to the US from around the world because that's where
they get paid most.
There are many areas where USA are at the top, be it the size of cars,
the energy spent by inhabitant or the amount of money spent to buy
weapons and train soldiers. However, regarding health, there is
objective data which points out that situation in the USA is not that
good. For instance, life expectancy. According to the 2008 CIA Fact
Book, USA are number 29: people live longer in 28 countries, including
France (which has the archetypal public health system, where you can get
the most expensive treatments for free) and also countries with rather
rash climates such as Canada and Australia. One could also cite obesity,
which is very high in the US.
--Thomas Pornin
(*) Except possibly Benjamin Franklin, but he spent much of the founding
time getting drunk in France, so that's not fair. Besides, he was
clueless about Forth.
Doug Hoffman
> And if you look at how medicine is regulated, you find a large buerocracy
> (NIH), many monopolies (patents, trade marks), and huge profits.
> Huge profits should not exist in a free market economy.
Bull!
> What you have is large
> companies bribing the government for a system that makes their profits grow
> at the expense of everybody else.
More demonization of those who seek to excel and make profits, large or
otherwise. Creating new life-saving medicines is a *very* expensive
activity. Large income is required to continue. I applaud these
companies *and* their "evil" profits. They may well save my life some day.
-Doug
Jacko
> Bernd Paysan wrote:
> > And if you look at how medicine is regulated, you find a large buerocracy
> > (NIH), many monopolies (patents, trade marks), and huge profits.
> > Huge profits should not exist in a free market economy.
>
> Bull!
And cock.
And how mant times must he tell you indirectly, it's his land so get
the fuck off the planet!!
> > What you have is large
> > companies bribing the government for a system that makes their profits grow
> > at the expense of everybody else.
>
> More demonization of those who seek to excel and make profits, large or
> otherwise. Creating new life-saving medicines is a *very* expensive
> activity. Large income is required to continue. I applaud these
> companies *and* their "evil" profits. They may well save my life some day.
If the profit was required to continue, then why would it be wasted on
dividends??
cheers jacko
Stephen Pelc
I must, must remember not to do that again.
Stephen
--
Stephen Pelc, steph...@mpeforth.com
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, fax: +44 (0)23 8033 9691
web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads
Doug Hoffman
> My apologies to the group for being amused about politics.
> I must, must remember not to do that again.
>
> Stephen
>
And my apologies to you and the entire group, Stephen. I reacted to the
phrase "capitalist butt holes" but should not have. Things have now
devolved to profanity. Regardless, I am done. Those wishing to
continue this very off-topic discussion may e-mail me offline.
-Doug
Jacko
> My apologies to the group for being amused about politics.
> I must, must remember not to do that again.
Keep the straight face, he might be a NRA carrying member.
> Stephen
>
> --
> Stephen Pelc, stephen...@mpeforth.com
Jacko
Profanity? pro => for, not against. Fanity => is this the American
fanny meaning?
Lest we stop talking and solving it for ourselves, all low entropy
words shall be distained?
A very easy cop out for not answering the dividend problem. You should
be a banker or politician.
"They are devolved beasties? Quick bring the land papers for the
reservation?"
Unfortunatly, or fortuanatly, I also speak ENGLISH. I would say the
profanity is very medival in origin, probably from a church. I would
sit it was swaring. Like so much of the offense of oath.
cheers jacko
Jacko
participal and expect any sucess.
Jonah Thomas
> > > The independent research by those who wish to cure disease, the
> > > research by government, and even the great arms of today's
> > > baseball pitchers, were all created by the wealth of our
> > > capitalistic system.
> >
> > They were all allowed by the system. Meanwhile, some people who want
> > to do research do not get the opportunity. Some researchers want to
> > cure diseases that mostly attack poor people, and they have a lot of
> > trouble getting funding. Some people who might have been great
> > baseball pitchers do not get the chance. How well does our system
> > make those choices? It's very hard to tell. But there are some
> > successes.
>
> Not just "allowed" but made *possible*. Capitalism is a system of
> managing wealth and resources.
No, capitalism is a theory designed to explain some of the things that
work about the way we manage wealth and resources.
> The rest of it is what you *do* with capitalism. Don't blame the
> system for how people use it. I don't blame cars for the way some
> people drive them. Don't blame capitalism for how some companies and
> people use or mis-use the system.
Ah. I feel like I'm starting to offend a religion. You want to credit
capitalism for the good things, but blame the bad things on individual
people who make their own choices. Yes, I've heard that exact claim made
about christianity, and about catholicism in the days before
protestants, and for that matter about the US military in iraq. The
system is responsible for all the good things and individual people
making bad choices are responsible for all the bad things. There's
something about that....
> > > Of course, none of this is possible if people don't have the
> > > intelligence, the creativeness and the drive to do the things you
> > > mention (or the arm to be trained). But they also would not have
> > > been able to do them if they were spending 10 hours a day making a
> > > living by some other means, like farming.
> >
> > Currently we have some people spending 10+ hours a day working two
> > or more part-time jobs because no better opportunities are available
> > to them. Ideally these would be people who lack intelligence,
> > creativity and drive. I don't know how to measure how much that's
> > the case.
>
> I have honestly thought long and hard about exactly that problem. I
> feel very lucky to be where I am today. I feel, more now than ever
> before, that if some small thing had gone differently for me, I would
> be in the street living in a cardboard box.
Sure, same here. On the other hand if you had been born to the right
parents you could have almost unimaginable wealth, to the extent that if
you were only careful and very conservative in your choices it would be
hard to lose more than a fraction of it in one lifetime.
> But what to do with the people I've met who do work three part time
> jobs to just be able to afford rent and food? I don't have an answer
> to that question. The capitalistic system provides for creating goods
> and services. How we distribute them is up to us.
Capitalist theory *says* how to distribute them. You own whatever you
can trade for, and you can do whatever you like with it. Some versions
go farther, some versions say that the system is set up so that anything
you do to restrain trade must necessarily boomerang on you and cost you
more than it can gain you. So we need nobody to regulate anything, it
will all regulate itself. If you were to become a multi-trillionaire
while everybody else except your employees became penniless, that would
show that you deserved it, and so did they. Needless to say there have
been no controlled experiments to find out whether monopolies etc must
always fail. It's deduced from fundamental principles.
> We have some programs that help people who need, and many don't even
> try to take advantage of these programs. But the ones who do get the
> benefit. They may not be living well, but they are not living in the
> street. Here, if you can't afford housing or food, it will be
> provided. It's nothing I would want to have, but it is better than
> starving.
Yes, and there's nothing in capitalist theory about this. The most
austere version of capitalist theory says that if there are too many
people for the number of jobs, we should let the supply of people
naturally adjust itself downward to meet the demand.
> Beyond that, yes, the capitalistic system is just one step away from
> the jungle, but without legal murder.
It's a theory that claims that this is what works. The reality we live
with is more complicated, and it may not be certain what works and what
doesn't.
> > Meanwhile, rather many high school graduates are employed as health
> > insurance adjustors. They look at medical records and decide which
> > procedures health insurance will not pay for, based entirely on
> > precedents and on the limited data about the case that shows up in
> > their computer files. Someone who used to supervise a windowless
> > office of these girls said that in his office they did not have a
> > quota of procedures to deny. However, his office as a whole was
> > supposed to deny enough procedures to demonstrate that it more than
> > paid for itself. This work is done redundantly by multiple
> > corporations who each have their own somewhat-arbitrary precedents
> > and guidelines.
>
> This is a perfect example of blaming the system for what the users do
> with it. The system is not responsible for looking out for people.
Capitalist theory says that the system optimises behavior. I can explain
part of the healthcare mess with capitalist theory -- if people paid
directly for what they wanted, they would choose the healthcare they
could afford. Instead they chose a lottery system to pay for rare
expensive healthcare, and then the insurance companies used their
bargaining power to get cheap rates on routine care, and the MDs had to
jack up their rates for the uninsured to compensate. So routine
healthcare has become unaffordable without insurance. Meanwhile the
insurance companies try to control their costs, and one way to do that
is to deny medical care to people who will soon die without it. Medical
emergencies have become a different sort of lottery. People would get
the healthcare they can afford if they had collectively and resolutely
refused insurance in the first place.
> It is just a means of providing for an economy that is not based on
> chaos. We make all sorts of exceptions and rules to help make the
> system more humane, but that is not its purpose. That is how we want
> it to be, so we bend it to do those things.
We started out with a muddle and we still have a muddle, but we also
have a theory of capitalism that explains selected parts of the system
in a way that makes marginal sense.
> > I'm not at all sure we have the best possible economic system. I'm
> > pretty sure that a system that had nothing but the things capitalist
> > theory describes would not be better.
> >
> > If we wanted to make improvements, wouldn't we need to actually test
> > the improvements? At a minimum, controlled experiments. Very hard to
> > do them double-blind.... And if we could find consistent differences
> > in results, which results should be considered better? Wouldn't it
> > be the people who currently have the most money who'd get the most
> > say in how to change the system? They might prefer economic systems
> > that let them have a bigger share of the wealth, more than systems
> > that produce more wealth. This stuff is hard to test and hard to
> > interpret the results.
>
> I'm not sure what you are saying here. What changes would you like to
> see? Patents are a PITA for an engineer, but they are important.
> Many people only see the negative effects of patents when lawsuits are
> filed. But without patents, many companies that invent and produce
> real products would not be able to compete against companies who are
> just good at stealing others ideas and producing them cheaply. If
> that were the case, there would be little incentive to invent and
> absolutely no reason to ever share inventions.
Yes. The patent system is an invention designed specifically to fix a
problem that capitalist theory gave no solution for. It has good and bad
results. It should be clear that the current system results in giant
costs and missed opportunities. I'm not at all clear how to do it
better.
> That *is* what patents are about, providing protection from theft of
> an invention in exchange for the full release of information about it.
> So everyone wins...
There are winners and losers. On the whole it sort of works. I could
suggest improvements. But then, I'm not very confident that my source
code will run correctly until I actually test it. Why would I be more
confident in my economic theories?
Adam Smith published _The Wealth of Nations_ in 1776. The basic idea, as
dumbed down by generations of intro economics teachners, goes like this:
1. Economic systems include feedback loops like supply-and-demand.
2. Since these are the feedback loops that exist, they must be
optimising some things and what they optimise must be the right things.
3. The feedback loops must be optimising things perfectly, and so
whatever result you get from them must be the best result.
Rather surprisingly, Darwin didn't publish his rather similar idea of
biological evolution until 1859. People came up with the same idea that
evolution must somehow perfect things and that any adaptation which is
selected must be somehow perfect, but that didn't catch on as well for
obvious reasons.
Norbert Weiner and others generalised the feedback concept into
cybernetics in the 1940's.
Nowadays it should be obvious to everybody that just because there is a
feedback system present is no guarantee that something is being
optimised that ought to be optimised, or even that the feedback system
is effective. But many economists have not seen this. So for example
there used to be a great deal of discussion about the business cycle. It
should be obvious that the signals that show an economy is expanding
faster than limiting resources allow will be somewhat delayed, and a
poorly-tuned feedback system will then show hunting behavior. It will
repeatedly overshoot and undershoot. But if you assume that the feedback
is perfect then the natural next step is to find reasons why it's good
for the economy to have the oscillations. Etc.
Meanwhile we have had a large number of attempts to tune the economy.
Regulation of banks. (Unregulated banks are a continual disaster, so
it's illegal to run an unlicensed bank. A bank license is almost
literally a license to steal.) The Federal Reserve. Bretton Woods. Etc,
etc, etc.
Each new idea was added to the system during a crisis, without actual
testing.
Is it any wonder that software engineering is so much farther advanced
than economics, despite its late start?
rickman
>
> And if you look at how medicine is regulated, you find a large buerocracy
> (NIH), many monopolies (patents, trade marks), and huge profits. Huge
> profits should not exist in a free market economy. What you have is large
> companies bribing the government for a system that makes their profits grow
> at the expense of everybody else.
If you believe that huge profits shouldn't exist in a "free market"
economy, you are either stating what you feel *should* be the
situation (making no statement of how economics work), or you are
showing complete ignorance of how a "free market" economy works. In
the past when the market was more "free", is was legal, possible and a
normal occurrence for a capitalist to monopolize a market and drive
prices up to the maximum that could be tolerated. Railroads and oil
in the US are prime examples of why capitalism has to be regulated.
The patent system is one of the ways that governments stimulate
invention and allow everyone to share in the benefits. To call a
patent system a means of "bribing the government" shows either
ignorance of how patents work or a choice to ignore reality because of
emotional responses to individual events. I don't even see how the
government directly benefits from patents. Money has to be poured
into the bureaucracy that manages patent at a significant loss.
I think there are few engineers who can claim that they are not taking
advantage of the "free" market to their significant advantage. You
refer to patents creating monopolies, but most engineers get a wage
far above the average in any country. Why? Because it takes a good
mind and much education to be an engineer which make them a limited
quantity. The result is that engineers have the benefit of
competition raising their incomes significantly.
Any engineer who does not want to be part of that market and instead
sell their services in a different way, such as inventing for
themselves, is free to do so and can be very successful. This has
happened many, many, many times as we all know. To ignore that fact
is to turn a blind eye to reality. Individuals can get patents and
reap the rewards just as can companies.
Maybe I should stay out of this discussion. I like people here and I
don't want to tick off anyone.
Rick
Jacko
> feedback system present is no guarantee that something is being
> optimised that ought to be optimised, or even that the feedback system
> is effective. But many economists have not seen this. So for example
> there used to be a great deal of discussion about the business cycle. It
> should be obvious that the signals that show an economy is expanding
> faster than limiting resources allow will be somewhat delayed, and a
> poorly-tuned feedback system will then show hunting behavior. It will
> repeatedly overshoot and undershoot. But if you assume that the feedback
> is perfect then the natural next step is to find reasons why it's good
> for the economy to have the oscillations. Etc.
Yes pole/zero optimum control theory and bode plots. Well some say
it's good to have oscillations in order to buy low sell high and make
a profit, without being involved in production or actually doing any
real work.
> Meanwhile we have had a large number of attempts to tune the economy.
> Regulation of banks. (Unregulated banks are a continual disaster, so
> it's illegal to run an unlicensed bank. A bank license is almost
> literally a license to steal.) The Federal Reserve. Bretton Woods. Etc,
> etc, etc.
Inflation is always the main mode mony is stolen to pay interest.
> Each new idea was added to the system during a crisis, without actual
> testing.
>
> Is it any wonder that software engineering is so much farther advanced
> than economics, despite its late start?
Well there was no money in impricise control of thruster jets and
targeting systems.
What's the price of a human on the market these days? There must be
some barrels of oil conversion. I suppose dead humans are cheaper, and
their tiny monies left behind aggregate to a pot for someone.
cheers jacko
Jacko
Jonah Thomas
> Bernd Paysan wrote:
> > What you have is large
> > companies bribing the government for a system that makes their
> > profits grow at the expense of everybody else.
>
> More demonization of those who seek to excel and make profits, large
> or otherwise. Creating new life-saving medicines is a *very*
> expensive activity. Large income is required to continue. I applaud
> these companies *and* their "evil" profits. They may well save my
> life some day.
It's expensive because the government makes it expensive in typical
clueless big-government fashion.
It used to be very expensive to do clinical trials. Expensive to keep
records, and patients kept dropping out and disappearing, etc. So
companies were required to do those expensive studies to show that their
new medicines and procedures etc were actually an improvement before
they could sell them.
Note the stupidity here. A corporation has already spent a whole lot of
money, and now it is in charge of the testing. If the tests come out one
way the company has a profitable new product. If they come out the other
way the company has only expenses. Is it any wonder that new medical
technology routinely comes out much better in company-funded testing
than it does later?
Now the record-keeping is much cheaper. Let people sign a waiver
to be experimental subjects, and get a discount on their medication, and
then their sanitised records become part of the ongoing database. Let
anybody look up the results and see how good they think the results are.
Sample sizes of tens of thousands or millions instead of hundreds or
fewer. If the newer stuff is priced higher then you look at its
preliminary results and see if you think the difference is worth it.
Far more reliable, and less expense for those who do the innovations.
When you accept an experimental treatment at a lower price you give up
the right to sue for bad results. When the owners are confident they'll
win lawsuits then they can accept higher prices along with the chance to
be sued. The acid test, they actually accept responsibility for results.
Will our current pharmaceutical companies' lobbyists allow this? Not
likely. They get their profits fine the way it is, why would they want
change?
Jacko
> Does make me wonder what a lot of the folks in the bode room do...
I really wanted to do the bored room executive toy market joke, but
holey executives and be a barrel bore batman, it just wasn't bitten.
cheers jacko
Andrew Haley
> According to Doug Hoffman <dhof...@talkamerica.net>:
> > This is *not* what the founding fathers of the US wanted!
> The founding fathers did not know that you could power a car without
> using a horse, they had no idea of what electricity is(*), and they
> saw little problem in mass deportation or actual killing of
> "natives".
I've often wondered about this. "The founding fathers would have
wanted this" is often cited by Americans as a reason to do something.
But the founding fathers were very much of their time, of a particular
strand of Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. Their
opinions, while of historical interest, are not some guide to how
people should live today, even if we could figure out what they might
have thought. But in American political discourse they seem to be
treated as prophets, as the founders of some kind of secular religion.
There's no question that Ben Franklin in particular was brilliant and
insightful, but that doesn't mean that what he thought in those times
is necessarily true today. I suspect he would have been appalled by
the very idea!
Andrew.
Jonah Thomas
> Maybe I should stay out of this discussion. I like people here and I
> don't want to tick off anyone.
I'm not offended. But of course the people who get ticked off don't
necessarily say anything. We might both be offending people right and
left who won't let us know until they get the chance to visibly snub us.
It isn't exactly on-topic.
> Bernd Paysan <bernd.pay...@gmx.de> wrote:
> >
> > And if you look at how medicine is regulated, you find a large
> > buerocracy(NIH), many monopolies (patents, trade marks), and huge
> > profits. Huge profits should not exist in a free market economy.
> > What you have is large companies bribing the government for a system
> > that makes their profits grow at the expense of everybody else.
>
> If you believe that huge profits shouldn't exist in a "free market"
> economy, you are either stating what you feel *should* be the
> situation (making no statement of how economics work), or you are
> showing complete ignorance of how a "free market" economy works.
As I understand it, the theory is that the system is supposed to adapt.
Big profits is one of the signals to create adaptation, and as the
system adapts the profits of previous adaptation get smaller and there's
more room to profit from newer adaptation.
If giant companies keep getting giant profits out of line with the
adaptations they introduce, then maybe the system is being subverted.
Nothing wrong with giant profits for giant improvements, but only for
awhile. This is a theory that says the capitalist system is supposed to
continue to improve to meet human needs. If you instead prefer a
capitalist system that's a sort of arbitrary game where the winners win
tremendous wealth and power, then arbitrary giant profits are just fine.
> In the past when the market was more "free", is was legal, possible
> and a normal occurrence for a capitalist to monopolize a market and
> drive prices up to the maximum that could be tolerated. Railroads and
> oil in the US are prime examples of why capitalism has to be
> regulated.
People chose to regulate it. They could have believed if they were only
virtuous enough in this life that they would be reborn as successful
capitalists in a later life, and so preferred it unregulated.
> The patent system is one of the ways that governments stimulate
> invention and allow everyone to share in the benefits. To call a
> patent system a means of "bribing the government" shows either
> ignorance of how patents work or a choice to ignore reality because of
> emotional responses to individual events. I don't even see how the
> government directly benefits from patents. Money has to be poured
> into the bureaucracy that manages patent at a significant loss.
Here's a metaphor that might fit. Back in the old days, when the king
wanted to collect taxes he mostly had to tax the rich because the poor
people just didn't have enough to be worth the expensive bureaucracy
needed to squeeze their pittance out of them. But there was an
exception. Salt was mined or evaporated at central places. It was bulky
and hard to smuggle. Everybody needed it. So kings would often appoint
their friends to run the saltworks as a monopoly, and set high prices,
and the king would get the lion's share of the profits. This way the
king could indirectly tax the poor.
Nowadays it's easier for government to tax profits than most other
things. If they take your capital you're hurt badly, but if they take
part of your interest etc it isn't as bad. So when government can create
big profits they can tax them without anybody getting too upset. If the
system as a whole ran on smaller profits it would be harder for
government to get the money.
That isn't the only thing that's going on, of course, if that's
happening at all. Patents have some results I like too.
I dislike some of the ugly side effects of the patent system and I want
to believe we could find something much better. But it might be too
late, this system is established and rooted pretty deeply. (I
accidentally typoed that as "rotted" instead of "rooted". I think that
meaning is true too, but it wasn't as clear in context.)
Jason Damisch
chasing it's own tail. It leads nowhere. Under socialism millions of
people have been killed. Under capitalism millions of people have
been killed. Libertarians are republicans who smoke pot and
anarchists are democrats with body jewelry. Planet Earth, what a
madhouse! I'd leave it if I could.
Poor Poor Chuck.
Jonah Thomas
> Thomas Pornin <por...@bolet.org> wrote:
> > According to Doug Hoffman <dhof...@talkamerica.net>:
> > > This is *not* what the founding fathers of the US wanted!
>
> > The founding fathers did not know that you could power a car without
> > using a horse, they had no idea of what electricity is(*), and they
> > saw little problem in mass deportation or actual killing of
> > "natives".
>
> I've often wondered about this. "The founding fathers would have
> wanted this" is often cited by Americans as a reason to do something.
> But the founding fathers were very much of their time, of a particular
> strand of Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. Their
> opinions, while of historical interest, are not some guide to how
> people should live today, even if we could figure out what they might
> have thought. But in American political discourse they seem to be
> treated as prophets, as the founders of some kind of secular religion.
It's an american thing. The US government keeps getting stronger and
more powerful. It keeps getting more power over US citizens. We couldn't
do an effective revolt against it if we wanted to, not unless the US
military revolted too. And the US military also keeps getting more
powerful and better funded; after any revolution they participated in
they'd wind up stronger.
Back in the old days we gradually stumbled into a theory about how the
government was supposed to work. Congress decided the laws. The
president and his administration carried them out. The courts decided
whether the laws fit the Constitution and threw them out if not. The
courts were supposed to keep the government true to the founding
fathers, and the memory of the founding fathers was what made judges
more than just a few old men deciding things that the army could ignore.
Americans tend to agree about the founding fathers and we don't agree
about much else. Like, we don't want the unworthy to get government
handouts. But businesses find that campaign contributions are likely to
pay off 1000:1 -- except they may get nothing, the 1000:1 may go to a
competitor instead. We don't want handouts to the unworthy, but we do
want the government to improve the welfare of the deserving -- us. We
don't want the government to interfere with our lives but we do want it
to go after bad people -- abortionists or businessmen who make filthy
profits or gays who want to get married or people who buy guns or
whoever.
Somehow no matter what we do the government gets more powerful. Reagan
said he'd give us smaller government but it got bigger. Bush Senior said
he wanted smaller government but it got bigger. Clinton said he'd make
the government smaller and he kind of did, but it still got more
powerful. Bush said he'd make the government do less, and maybe it did
do less but it got bigger. It's very likely the government will get
bigger under Obama too.
Nobody much wants that, but what can we do? We can talk about the
founding fathers and hope that somehow the courts might do something to
stop it, though they mostly haven't done anything to stop the government
getting bigger for the last hundred years or so. But they have
occasionally affirmed that citizens have specific rights. Currently the
government can't keep us in secret prisons unless it secretly thinks
we're terrorists. It can't confiscate our property without compensation
unless it finds a marijuana roach on the property. It can't take our
children away from us unless it has reason to suspect we are child
abusers.
These freedoms are ours not because americans agree that we should have
them and we are ready to fight to defend them. We have these freedoms
because the founding fathers thought we ought to.
Jacko
> Nowadays it's easier for government to tax profits than most other
> things. If they take your capital you're hurt badly, but if they take
> part of your interest etc it isn't as bad. So when government can create
> big profits they can tax them without anybody getting too upset. If the
> system as a whole ran on smaller profits it would be harder for
> government to get the money.
Some oscillatory problems (small ones) stem from the basic calculus
fact that asset is the rate of change of income minus outgoings. A
phase angle is introduced if income or outgoings are taxed instead of
asset. It also means that those of small asset are taxed much keeping
their asset small, while those of large asset and small income, have
little tax and so remain asset rich. The easiest to tax object is not
necessarily the most stable. Unless of course your the government and
have big stables and hats to go round the the fence guards. ;-)
> That isn't the only thing that's going on, of course, if that's
> happening at all. Patents have some results I like too.
Money??
> I dislike some of the ugly side effects of the patent system and I want
> to believe we could find something much better. But it might be too
> late, this system is established and rooted pretty deeply. (I
> accidentally typoed that as "rotted" instead of "rooted". I think that
> meaning is true too, but it wasn't as clear in context.)
If capital is the recompense of inovation, what happens to the waste
that happens when the capital is not wanted, or to the ideas that
threated an influx of cash? Cash can take over your life and force
employment of accountants! This could be a sin! cos the island tan
ting my not float yer bucket.
Cheers jacko
Albert van der Horst
Doug Hoffman <dhof...@talkamerica.net> wrote:
>
>Many of us here in the US are very afraid that our new government is
>trying hard to move even closer towards socialism and overly powerful
>centralized government. This is *not* what the founding fathers of the
>US wanted! We don't have nationalized health care here, yet. People
>come to the US from around the world to receive our currently excellent
>medical treatment. That may change. Obama has stated that he is going
>to implement a national health care system in the US, to the chagrin of
>us conservatives. We don't want even more central government meddling
>where it shouldn't. Unions and various entitlement programs came into
>being under Franklin Roosevelt -- who was responsible for the initial
>steps towards socialism in the US. He tried to spend his way out of the
>great depression and that failed. It was WWII, not Roosevelt's
>misguided policies, that eventually ended the depression.
Obama was chosen with a pretty convincing majority.
Democracy trumps capitalism.
>
>-Doug
Groetjes Albert
Jerry Avins
> ... It was WWII, not Roosevelt's
> misguided policies, that eventually ended the depression.
That's a piece of propaganda commonly repeated only by those who weren't
there. My father was a sheet-metal worker, a trade in which almost every
job was short term. During the depth of the depression, my mother
supported the family as an itinerant piano teacher and my father kept
house and washed my diapers. At night, he got an associate degree from
NYU. By 1936 my father was working steadily enough to increase out rent
by 50 percent to make room for my twin (surprise!) sisters. In 1939, he
traded the Model A for year-old Plymouth. In 1940, he bought a house. WW
II was more than a year in the future for us. I can provide statistics
if you don't find them yourself.
Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Unknown
> At night, he got an associate degree from NYU. By 1936 my father was
> working steadily enough to increase out rent by 50 percent to make
> room for my twin (surprise!) sisters.
So the increase in earnings was due to the degree, not to Roosevelt's
misguided policies.
Jacko
> about much else. Like, we don't want the unworthy to get government
> handouts. But businesses find that campaign contributions are likely to
> pay off 1000:1 -- except they may get nothing, the 1000:1 may go to a
> competitor instead. We don't want handouts to the unworthy, but we do
> want the government to improve the welfare of the deserving -- us. We
> don't want the government to interfere with our lives but we do want it
> to go after bad people -- abortionists or businessmen who make filthy
> profits or gays who want to get married or people who buy guns or
> whoever.
Un worth y: Of not much worth. To get nothing, and even remove the
access to the fruit from the trees is a perversion of natural
selection. To expect people to just evaporate, while sounding like a
good deal, is really just forcing the bad hand to be displayed with
cries of I told you he the bad man. So just kill 'em of fuck off. True
colours indeed.
> Somehow no matter what we do the government gets more powerful. Reagan
> said he'd give us smaller government but it got bigger. Bush Senior said
> he wanted smaller government but it got bigger. Clinton said he'd make
> the government smaller and he kind of did, but it still got more
> powerful. Bush said he'd make the government do less, and maybe it did
> do less but it got bigger. It's very likely the government will get
> bigger under Obama too.
Breureaucrats do this sort of thing. Fill in this form create two jobs
and find a problem for another form need.
> Nobody much wants that, but what can we do? We can talk about the
> founding fathers and hope that somehow the courts might do something to
> stop it, though they mostly haven't done anything to stop the government
> getting bigger for the last hundred years or so. But they have
> occasionally affirmed that citizens have specific rights. Currently the
> government can't keep us in secret prisons unless it secretly thinks
> we're terrorists. It can't confiscate our property without compensation
> unless it finds a marijuana roach on the property. It can't take our
> children away from us unless it has reason to suspect we are child
> abusers.
Courts are bureaucrats. But have affirmed no state wrongs? Or projects
terrorist behaviour by who da bad man? Roaches, but it's less of a
pest than gun export? Yet they are required to receive 'schooling'?
> These freedoms are ours not because americans agree that we should have
> them and we are ready to fight to defend them. We have these freedoms
> because the founding fathers thought we ought to.
Yes who da bad man freedoms, no freedom from state tyranny or form
fill-itus.
Constitution => State good, centralization good, pre-FBI free roam
needed, people need shooting and others....
cheers jacko
Just one of many UK points of view.
Jerry Avins
Not at all. When work picked up again, he went back to his customary
job, usually for the same firm. During the war, he was promoted to
foreman, but that came after all I described.
BruceMcF
> From Wikipedia:
> "Capitalism is an economic system in which wealth, and the means of
> producing wealth, are privately owned and controlled rather than
> commonly, publicly, or state-owned and controlled."
A common logical mistake made here is to take the definition, "an
economic system in which wealth and the means of producing wealth, are
privately owned and controlled ...", and to read it as, "any economic
system in which wealth..." etc.
If to benefit from decentralization of decision making we elect to
take common resources and define private property in those resources,
there are a range of fundamental ways to organize the wealth and means
of producing wealth so that it is privately owned and controlled.
(1) Owners of productive equipment hire labor and natural resources
(2) Owners of labor hire productive equipment and natural resources
(3) Owners of natural resources hire productive equipment and labor
Capitalism is one form of (1), Syndicalism and slave economies are
quite distinct forms of (2) (depending on whether ownership of labor
is vested in the laborer or defined as property to be owned by others)
and some forms of Feudalism have acted more or less like a form of
(3).
One thing we learned about capitalism in the late 1800's and early
1900's is that unfettered capitalism is not a viable system ... it
requires external regulation in order to survive without tearing
itself apart. It would seem that those are the kinds of lessons where
they have sufficient weight when they are in living memory, but as
they fade into history, it becomes easier to buy off the writers of
economic history in pursuit of short term gain from gradual removal of
the necessary safety systems.
However, it strikes me that Forth could persist under unfettered
capitalism (and the periodic financial calamities that ensue),
regulated capitalism, syndicalism, feudalism ... maybe not a slave
economy so much, you'd not want to have information processing
technology be too resource efficient, since if information technology
is sufficiently resource intensive, its easier to use access to the
resources to prevent dangerous capabilities from falling into the
hands of slaves.
So I struggle to see how it is relevant on whether there ought to be a
portable way for a source to acquire blocks for use ... something
like:
WORK-BLOCKS ( -- #blocks ) number of available work blocks
ALLOT-WORK-BLOCKS ( u -- block# u' ) n is number of work blocks
requested, n' is the number of work blocks provided, from block# to
block#+n'-1.
FREE-WORK-BLOCKS ( u -- block# u' ) n is the number of work blocks to
be freed, starting with the most recently allots blocks. n' is the
number of work blocks freed, from block# to block# to block#+n'-1.
Freeing more than the available number of work blocks frees all work
blocks, without affecting any other blocks.
If blocks are used by a system for source, it would have to set aside
a work block pool. If blocks are provided as an additional facility in
a file based system, it might just provide a WORK.BLK block file in
support of the system.
For a capitalist, that could be a contract between implementation and
source, for a socialist, that could be a community agreed means of
creating a social resource and making it available, I guess the
syndicalist would mostly be happy when it came time to FREE-WORK-
BLOCKS.
Jacko
> source, for a socialist, that could be a community agreed means of
> creating a social resource and making it available, I guess the
> syndicalist would mostly be happy when it came time to FREE-WORK-
> BLOCKS.
The situation is further complicated by the division of RESULT-BLOCKS
created from system running, and how ownership is defined through such
private division algorithms. The hiring of quantified entities,
implicitly creates payment in EXCHANGE-BLOCKS, while allowing control
of RESULT-BLOCKS to EXCHANGE-BLOCKS trade ratios. The EXCHANGE-BLOCKS
are a sub class of RESULT-BLOCKS produced by the mint program. So
which private entity owns the MINT-BLOCK-CODE ? Or controls the MINT-
SUPPLY word?
cheers jacko
Jonah Thomas
> If capital is the recompense of inovation, what happens to the waste
> that happens when the capital is not wanted, or to the ideas that
> threated an influx of cash? Cash can take over your life and force
> employment of accountants! This could be a sin! cos the island tan
> ting my not float yer bucket.
Capital is the recompense of innovation? I'm not sure I follow that.
Profit is theoretically what you get for relative productivity, and
innovation is one way to become more productive. For a commodity prices
tend to fall all the way down to the variable cost of the least
efficient surviving competitor. When your total costs are less than his
variable cost, you have a profit.
I think this is one of the reasons industrial automation has had such a
rocky start. High startup costs and low variable cost. Get multiple
automated production lines competing and prices drop to the low variable
cost, and nobody makes back their fixed costs. It's a situation that
practically begs for price-fixing.
But I may have misunderstood.
BruceMcF
Certainly. People should take care with what the source that they run
and the implementation that they run it one do, and if it offends
their ideological stance, should search for a more appropriate source
or implementation, as the case may be.
However, since we don't have any portable way for a source to acquire
some blocks for use without user intervention, there's no portable
medium of exchange. Maybe that's *why* there is no portable way for a
source to acquire some blocks for use for persistent buffers or
working storage.
Jacko
innovate and be re compensated for time and R'n'D. innovation though
does not necessarily make more product, sometimes it makes less
product with more sustainability. It will be more expensive due to
lack of unsustainable competing product.
If the price drop below this biggist variable cost, then some factory
goes bust, which allows a cheaper buy-out, and provides a potential
lower product cost, but pays lower wages (or correlates as such to
some extent). The net effect is to reduce the buying power of end
consumers, hence forcing reduction of costs and hence profit or a
supply restriction with wild prices and possible catastophic staple
behaviour.
The disconnection of cost price from employee pay is a virtual
excesise of massive pay with minimal resource costs (smaller part but
bigger) but affordable as high wages. This provides resource price
tracking, but the hyper comparative inflationary stage makes it not
viable, as the neighbour states make it cheaper. The eventuial skint
pressure on the unemployed makes people work for less. So within the
bounds of not starving the workers, eventual world wage equality
happens.
We are then in the position of making things for the rich, without
being able to afford anything but the simple food we need to eat. As
the rich will not need millions of the things, unemployment rises, and
the state has to provide a minimal disposable income level. Even an
entrepeneur investment payment. Your average citi bank will not trade
paper notes with anyone under 4 digits before the decimal without a
government bonus, they take too much time per unit cash unless steally
pitance wage staff are let lose on the tills.
Welcome to the differential salary motion reality.
The lower post: Maybe block spaces, avoiding explicit relative offset,
would be better and more writeback secure.
cheers jacko
MarkWills
set in the evening. The moon shone. People were born. People died. The
world kept on turning.
:-)
Jacko
And hurricanes increased in intensity.
John Passaniti
> I've often wondered about this. "The founding fathers would have
> wanted this" is often cited by Americans as a reason to do something.
> But the founding fathers were very much of their time, of a particular
> strand of Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. Their
> opinions, while of historical interest, are not some guide to how
> people should live today, even if we could figure out what they might
> have thought. But in American political discourse they seem to be
> treated as prophets, as the founders of some kind of secular religion.
Not directed at you, but to some in the larger group:
I've often wondered about this. "Charles Moore does it this way" is
often cited by Forth programmers as a reason to do something. But
Charles Moore is a unique individual and optimizes his methodology for
his unique needs. His opinions, while of interest, are not a guide to
how programmers in other domains should write code, even if we can
decode the often koan-like presentation of his thoughts. But in
comp.lang.forth discussions, he seems to be treated as a prophet, the
founder of something some treat like a religion.
You know what's funny to me is how off-topic discussions (especially
those regarding politics) often show a healthy critical skepticism and a
willingness to question presumed authority.
Andrew Haley
> Andrew Haley wrote:
> > I've often wondered about this. "The founding fathers would have
> > wanted this" is often cited by Americans as a reason to do something.
> > But the founding fathers were very much of their time, of a particular
> > strand of Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. Their
> > opinions, while of historical interest, are not some guide to how
> > people should live today, even if we could figure out what they might
> > have thought. But in American political discourse they seem to be
> > treated as prophets, as the founders of some kind of secular religion.
> Not directed at you, but to some in the larger group:
> I've often wondered about this. "Charles Moore does it this way" is
> often cited by Forth programmers as a reason to do something. But
> Charles Moore is a unique individual and optimizes his methodology for
> his unique needs. His opinions, while of interest, are not a guide to
> how programmers in other domains should write code, even if we can
> decode the often koan-like presentation of his thoughts. But in
> comp.lang.forth discussions, he seems to be treated as a prophet, the
> founder of something some treat like a religion.
Heh. I'll take your point in the spirit in which I think it was
intended. :-)
But I really don't think that kind of idolatry is much of a problem
here. Chuck's style is very distinctive, and some people really like
it. As for me, there is a distinctive Forth Inc style that leads me
to enjoy much of their code, just for the sheer pleasure of reading
something so well-written. That's something they got originally from
Chuck, I think.
We surely must not mistake the admiration of craftsmanship for
idolatry. I don't think you're allowing for that possibility as much
as you should.
> You know what's funny to me is how off-topic discussions (especially
> those regarding politics) often show a healthy critical skepticism
> and a willingness to question presumed authority.
I suppose that's always good.
Andrew.
Jacko
wrote:
> John Passaniti <n...@japanisshinto.com> wrote:
> > Andrew Haley wrote:
> > > I've often wondered about this. "The founding fathers would have
> > > wanted this" is often cited by Americans as a reason to do something.
> > > But the founding fathers were very much of their time, of a particular
> > > strand of Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. Their
> > > opinions, while of historical interest, are not some guide to how
> > > people should live today, even if we could figure out what they might
> > > have thought. But in American political discourse they seem to be
> > > treated as prophets, as the founders of some kind of secular religion.
> > Not directed at you, but to some in the larger group:
> > I've often wondered about this. "Charles Moore does it this way" is
> > often cited by Forth programmers as a reason to do something. But
> > Charles Moore is a unique individual and optimizes his methodology for
> > his unique needs. His opinions, while of interest, are not a guide to
> > how programmers in other domains should write code, even if we can
> > decode the often koan-like presentation of his thoughts. But in
> > comp.lang.forth discussions, he seems to be treated as a prophet, the
> > founder of something some treat like a religion.
"Famous benevolent Banker statue in city of london, knocked off his
horse by protestors."
> Heh. I'll take your point in the spirit in which I think it was
> intended. :-)
Is he prophitable? Enough to make the masses re-legion to the empire?
> But I really don't think that kind of idolatry is much of a problem
> here. Chuck's style is very distinctive, and some people really like
> it. As for me, there is a distinctive Forth Inc style that leads me
> to enjoy much of their code, just for the sheer pleasure of reading
> something so well-written. That's something they got originally from
> Chuck, I think.
Code is code is code. And then there's my rose spectical code.
> We surely must not mistake the admiration of craftsmanship for
> idolatry. I don't think you're allowing for that possibility as much
> as you should.
Or idolatry for lazyness in understanding the universe.
> > You know what's funny to me is how off-topic discussions (especially
> > those regarding politics) often show a healthy critical skepticism
> > and a willingness to question presumed authority.
>
> I suppose that's always good.
Except when your prophets are sacred. Or should that be scared and
paranoid, and knee jerk facists.
cheers jacko
Marc Olschok
> In article <99563$49d1f8bf$c4b2f86$11...@DIALUPUSA.NET>,
> Doug Hoffman <dhof...@talkamerica.net> wrote:
> >
> >Many of us here in the US are very afraid that our new government is
> >trying hard to move even closer towards socialism and overly powerful
> >centralized government. This is *not* what the founding fathers of the
> >US wanted! We don't have nationalized health care here, yet. People
> >come to the US from around the world to receive our currently excellent
> >medical treatment. That may change. Obama has stated that he is going
> >to implement a national health care system in the US, to the chagrin of
> >us conservatives. We don't want even more central government meddling
> >where it shouldn't. Unions and various entitlement programs came into
> >being under Franklin Roosevelt -- who was responsible for the initial
> >steps towards socialism in the US. He tried to spend his way out of the
> >great depression and that failed. It was WWII, not Roosevelt's
> >misguided policies, that eventually ended the depression.
>
> Obama was chosen with a pretty convincing majority.
> Democracy trumps capitalism.
( Fortunately his father was from Kenya. Therefore the republicans
did not dare to rig the election this time. :-)
--
Marc
BruceMcF
wrote:
> In article <99563$49d1f8bf$c4b2f86$11...@DIALUPUSA.NET>,
> Doug Hoffman <dhoff...@talkamerica.net> wrote:
> >It was WWII, not Roosevelt's misguided policies, that
> >eventually ended the depression.
So it was much heavier government spending than Roosevelt pursued
before 1939 that ended the depression.
Yes, of course ... while the correlation between New Deal policies
and the first Great Depression recovery, retreat from New Deal
policies to a balanced budget and the "Roosevelt Recession", and
the return to New Deal policies and the second Great Depression
recovery is quite clear to anyone not wearing ideological blinders
(or whose ideological blinders are of the right polarity to let
the information through) ...
... New Deal government spending was never sufficient to close
more than a portion of the economy's output gap.
It was, indeed, the much larger WWII spending which were finally
large enough to cover the Great Depression output gap AND MORE,
and sustained for a long enough period of time for individuals
and going concerns to rebuild massive damage to their balance
sheets from four years of recession and multiple waves of banking
panics in 1929, 1930, 1931 and 1932.
> Obama was chosen with a pretty convincing majority.
> Democracy trumps capitalism.
Not in the United States as of yet. The policy difference
between "Capitalism can run on its own without any government
regulation" and "Capitalism needs effective government
regulation to avoid periodic financial catastrophes" is not
a debate for or against Capitalism, but a debate about how
government best meets the long term needs of Capitalism.
A socialist would have used and, indeed, have actively pumped
up populist outrage at the egregious excesses of Wall Street
in order to support an active program to nationalize the banks,
rather than cobbling together a plan to use public funds to
subsidize the transfer of "toxic" assets off the balance sheets
of banks and other finance sector firms. A socialist would
have used the effectively bankrupt status of GM and Chrysler
to nationalize the firms and direct their productive equipment
to be used to some real or imagined national priority.
But whether a socialist would intervene in the suit with Chuck
Moore in order to nationalize the intellectual property
involved ... that I am less certain of. Bolsheviks definitely
would ... they wanted everything. A footloose left wing populist
like Chavez? Maybe not ... to much intellectual work required
for too little short term publicity gains.
Wayne
<john.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Here is my observation: The world is filled with people who have
> great ideas. But great ideas alone aren't enough. In my career, I
> have had the fortune of working with some amazingly bright people--
> engineers and scientists and others who had brilliant insight. But
> they were unable to turn those ideas into a product. The reason is
> simple-- making a product requires more than just a great idea. It
> involves a wide range of skills-- everything from business management,
> legal and financial savvy, project planning and management, marketing,
> sales, production, logistics and so on. And most people don't have
> all those skills. So most seek out others who do have those skills,
> and that's where things can go wrong.
Too right, self-serving, egotistical, stupid, negligent, criminal,
under-skilled, naive, dishonest you name it, in a corrupt system designed
to serve the former. I have many brilliant ideas, but find it hard to
find people with the money that are not like the former to complete them.
We could all achieve much more than Chuck has achieved, or even, possibly,
could, if we worked together with people that were not like the former. A
solution is to start a company and hire staff that can do the job, and do
our objective reasonable bidding of intent laid out in the corporate
constitution and consultation. Products, software, and designs could be
based on existing platforms and FPGA. This income could be enough to
eventually do a new processor years down the track.
Jacko
employment opertunity the following companies have given me 'shit' in
the past.
Linn Audio - very impolite and does not ever want me to contact 'them'
again.
Canon - Similar bilge.
Companies who have provide some sort of intelligable response
Microsoft - yes it's true I was quite surprised.
Casio - quite helpful considering the circumstances.
Have you had shit from any organization or company?
cheers jacko
Jacko
bonds, not shares. Let's call them 'atom bonds' for a starting.
What I have to offer:
Any technology idea I may develop relating to uncertain geometry and
physics when not 'controlled' as a section E patent. Any technology
relating to computational use density and the proprietry multi-core
use of the nibz processor or ansetors or decendants of it. Any
consequential technology of living the life. An excellent analytical
mind.
Dividend interest structure no pay out with no profit, 5% of face
value if such a payout does not lead to a loss.
cheers jacko
Wayne
check up on the release of a digital cinema camera that follows a
marketing spec I layed out 4 to 5 years ago as part of some projects.
http://www.red.com/epic_scarlet/. I am also not quiet up to conversing or
reading because fo a 24 hour flu. More below.
On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 05:13:16 +1000, Jacko <jacko...@gmail.com> wrote:
> True enough. From my own prospective as a finder and seeker of
> employment opertunity the following companies have given me 'shit' in
> the past.
>
> Linn Audio - very impolite and does not ever want me to contact 'them'
> again.
> Canon - Similar bilge.
Naively submitted a printer idea to these people, or was that Apple, many
years ago, with combination printer scanner head, and compact paper feed
(also for laptops).
Ironically many Apple touch interface patents seem to touch on and follow
my previouse ideas (not all fo them) but have never revealed these to
them. I think there is some brilliant person over at Apple that just
happens to get similar inspiration.
> Companies who have provide some sort of intelligable response
>
> Microsoft - yes it's true I was quite surprised.
> Casio - quite helpful considering the circumstances.
I believe you, Microsoft is actually interested in making money, and from
past history will buy multiple products and technologies in. I have
actually been considering approaching Microsoft and asking them if they
can help, due to my massive ongoing health problems (as you can tell even
though ill health will affect my physical productivity, luckily my mental
productivity usually remains high). I have hardly ever had reason to
contact Microsoft, but did submit some genuine ideas for crash prevention
and recovery (because of massive problems here) that I think they have
implemented by the time of sp3 and they were receptive.
I also submit a truck load of Opera improvements and bug reports, that
tend to get implemented, but find the process a but stubborn and one way.
Seriously, I wonder, if they did not have feedback mechanism from users,
how they would fare against the competition. it is preferable to have
very high end testers and feature design and programmers, I come to the
Forth community because I regard them as very highly in this regard.
Casio were good to contact about information I found the once or twice I
contacted them. One time I rang them and got some queer sort phone
converse, but it turned out that one of the really big earthquakes
happened to hit there around that time, but still they answered the phone
and spoke with me.
> Have you had shit from any organization or company?
Sometimes, I have tried to interact mainly with people I know on
partnerships, but have often found what Jeff has found, unproductive, you
do the work but have not the time to take up their slack. I find for most
companies, anything genuinely new and improved is often to far out there
for people to comprehend, they feel more at home refining the wheel, which
is not necessarily very productive or profitable. People have a tendency
to benote themselves on the basis of their experience (knowledge), over
notions of good, right or better, anything that paradigm shifts to a new
better approach (which is where profit and risk lays (though refining the
wheel can run large risks that ultimately you can go broke from running
out of steam, or competition)) is beyond the sphere of 'probability' to
their egos and pride of what they know. You can just waste so much time
trying to prove things to them and as much as you run after them they
think they are more significant and right because of it, even not
realising they are childish ignoramuses. I find people round here are
more at my level, but there are a few ignoramuses that can't see past
their own noses.
I am very reluctant to base a platform on a chip without the guarantee of
consistent, reliably, continuity with profitable costing and enhancement
(this is a practical business thing). You can do a project to rely on a
platform but land up the creek without a paddle if the platform does not
come through, and all that time energy and money is wasted. I have been
around since the 80's on Forth Chips because I want to support them. I
could use arm, but don't want to.
Running projects through uncertain companies with uncertain funding basis
runs the risk of loosing projects and IP if the business flounders. So, I
aim to retain IP myself, as, which I now find Chuck also seems to have
done. The ability of taking your product to another company, where the
previouse company has collapsed or been incompetent, to start again is
fundamental. You can relive the dream many times, but if it gets tied up
with receivers and the finale owners (wherever they use it or dust bin it)
exclude you, you might only be able to live that dream once. I think TPL
has enough finance to present a stable opportunity, but these latest
issues are a worry about availability and best Forth processor, but have
not guarantee that Intellasys would even sell me an development kit.
So I am considering going over to the seaforth processor mailing list.
Because of these issues, I am interested in a FPGA version of the
seaforth, but minimally enhanced for interprocess communications along the
lines of my VOS. Even if the product disappears the code base could be
run on FPGA, eventually at better power consumption and speed then at
first. I also am interested in researching a matrix of computational
power, speed, efficiency, data code size etc to determine which are the
optimal computational models for inclusion in a misc processor. Look at
it this way, we use reverse polish notation stacks because it offers an
advantage over traditional approaches, in the same way we can find
alternative methods to achieve better computation efficiency then what we
currently use. But this would take a year and be over my head basically.
I was thinking of a wiki.
I have considered that perhaps I should be working with people around here
like yourself. I would encourage you likewise, perhaps a separate mailing
list, to get away from recalcitrants. I have seen a number of
dis-enchanted people around here, and elsewhere, though some of them will
have to tone down the meta-physical stuff (roughly translated from foreign
languages I think) to be understandable to others ;) . Forth is split
between the mainstream conservatives, the efficient, and the alternative
misc and radicals, so there is need for an alternative stack processor
language list (Forth) devoted to researching the alternatives. You can
hang around hare and recruit people that are interested. There are really
so much of this stuff going on in the Forth community as to warrant
separate newsgroups.
>
> cheers jacko
Thanks
Wayne.