There are roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world but only 320 million Americans. There are five Muslims in the world for every one American. It's not clear that there would be any point to an all out war between the all the Muslims of the world and the USA (i.e. both sides would lose far more than they could hope to gain). But it's also far from clear that the USA could win such a war with brutality alone. Most likely other countries would get involved and the outcome would be determined by which side could build the strongest alliances.

Total warfare is an overarching military philosophy, it is not a specific campaign strategy.

We speak of Islamic extremism, but most generally we experience a particular flavor of Arab-dominated Islamic extremism made possible right now by a handful of weak and failed Arab states, bounded by Lebanon on the North and West, Syria and Northern Iraq in the Center and Yemen in the South. Arab states with functioning governments and effective central control have little problems with jihadis, they are treated as an internal problem.

Imposing order on these areas would vastly minimize the breeding ground for this kind of terrorism.

but the real war won't be won on the battlefield any more than the war against the Soviets was won on the battlefield.

It all depends on what kind of battlefield warfare you're willing to fight.

The TV news friendly, politically popular war where we're real careful about the destruction we cause and the collateral damage and winning hearts and minds is a sure loser.

Scorched earth total warfare where you ring a population center and utterly bomb it to rubble without any consideration for civilians is winnable. You win a war by utterly destroying your enemies ability AND their will to fight. And you do by inflicting massive death and destruction.

The of the firebombing of Tokyo and the A-bomb strikes. The Japanese were infamous for fighting to the last man and never surrendering. Once we demonstrated the ability and willingness to just level cities until they capitulated, they capitulated. The alternative was not capitulating and risking the reduction of the Japanese nation to the same footnote status of Carthage.

How do you think Julius Ceasar won the Gallic campaign? By building roads and schools and promising H1-B visas? You were given an offer to disarm and pledge allegiance to Rome. Your alternative was to have your people killed, your treasure seized and anyone left standing sold into slavery or crucified.

No, it is not nice in any sense of the word. It is utter brutality and bloodshed. Which is why we should never, ever get into these conflicts unless we're willing to do what successful armies for centuries have done to actually conquer a people.

Somehow it seems like an even worse version of the Gilded Age's above the law mentality. You might argue that era really was a "wild west" in which there wasn't much in terms of law and regulation and people really kind of did what they wanted. The Federal Government was much weaker than it is now and the concept of regulation was pretty weak at any level.

These days there's more government and regulation (for good or for ill) and it should come as no surprise to anyone that many things are subject to rules and regulation. But what seems to happen is that corporations know things are illegal but assume that political payola or huge legal retainers will protect them.

My favorite gimmick is knowing something is prima facie illegal, but paying some lawyer a pile of money to offer a "legal opinion" of pretzel logic that says its illegal, but the intent of congress was that's only illegal for other people to do for reasons other than what we're doing it for, and since we're operating within the "spirit" of the law its OK.

Then when they get caught there's a whole bunch of "Who, me? But I got a legal opinion from my lawyer, and he said it was OK. You can't hold it against me because I intended to follow the law as I understood it."

The bitch fest about iOS8 on iPhone 5 which is dual core and has 1 GB RAM was pretty damn loud.

I do think that as each device rev usually gets a pretty significant SoC change which inevitably leads to performance tuning focusing on the new hardware platform. Sure, they backport to older hardware but there's a lot of diminishing return in tuning the new OS for older hardware.

It's even worse for Android than iOS because of the wide range of platforms used for any given Android release.

I think there's an awful lot of "port and pray" going on which is probably coupled with more than a little cynicism on the part of vendors that shitty performance is an acceptable state to motivate new handset purchases.

I just think a more modular platform would make it more difficult for OS vendors to focus their OSes as much as a single-platform target and be so half-hearted about platforms that aren't the OS launch platform.

Free speech means it's ok for him to post when he's off his meds.

You've just defined your sample population axiomatically. People who don't want the latest features are by definition people who don't want to upgrade. You can write it backwards as "people who don't want to upgrade don't want the latest features" and it means the same thing.

Now just do a Google search for people bitching about what the latest mobile OS release (if they can even get it) does to their 2 year old device. I hear more from Apple iOS users than Android users but that's often a function of the fact that Apple devices can get iOS without waiting for carriers to approve them, unlike many Android devices which get abandoned by the carriers and never see an update. Lots of complaints about how slow the devices are.

Sure, you can use it as it came out of the box, but app vendors often follow OS releases and can abandon older OS releases pretty easily because so many people have updated devices with updated OSes. I flow my iPhones downward (my wife get's last years, the home phone is the one before that, the one before that is used as an iPod for my son on long trips). At one point the iPod lost half its apps when I updated it because the device couldn't run iOS 7 and couldn't run apps that now required 7.

IMHO, a modular phone will solve much of this by letting users get a faster processor / memory module without replacing what (at least since "retina" displays) is a great display. Networking modules could get replaced if/when there was a network feature everyone wanted -- I have an iPhone 6+, but IMHO the 802.11ac is lost on me and any incremental upgrades to LTE are probably worthless without widespread carrier support for the enhanced LTE features (if I would notice them at all).

It also adds to user choice -- a lot of iPhone users were put off by newer, larger phones or the lack of a choice on any platform for something that wasn't Galaxy sized or bigger. Deciding you want a smaller display would be trivial on a modular phone.

I also think that the highly integrated SoC hardware model adds to OS performance hits on older systems and lack of extended OS support by the large number of architecture changes and required driver and OS tuning. If the devices were more modular you either wouldn't get stuck (new CPU module) and it would push OS makers into thinking more modular about their OSes rather than tailoring an OS release to whatever the latest hardware in the current model is.

More importantly than any of this, however, is that phone hardware is rapidly getting to PC performance levels and its getting very close to the idea that a smartphone could become a base module itself in a PC, possibly with a wide range of crossover (where PCs would actually use smartphone modules by default). Sure, you can do a bluetooth keyboard and HDMI output now, but it's less than what it could be.

Everyone always says the cars will charge late at night when demand is low, but is that a function of the charger gizmo on my garage wall or the car itself? I see people coming home from work and just plugging in the car to the wall as a matter of habit unless they have immediate plans to go someplace that evening because it will be a bitch to wake up and go to work and find that you didn't plug in and your battery doesn't have enough power to get you to work.

So in theory you could have a huge demand from 1730-1830 until 2200 or so. Maybe they will have some way for the car to query the grid to find out what the optimal amount of power it can draw at any given time.

Is it Slashdot or some new release of Chrome? I now notice I have my google account name on the top of the window and several pages don't render right, including slashdot five minutes ago (although it now looks right).

I'm curious if the neighborhood electric grid is scaled to support swapping out half or more of the 70-odd cars on the block for electric cars. Assuming a generic assortment of random cars charging at an average rate of 5kW that's a new load of 160kW.

It's probably not an issue in a cold climate in the winter (since it would balance out the power we'd normally use for air conditioning) but what about the summer?

And then I think, well, scale that up to the entire city and suddenly it seems like a whole power plant's worth of power.

Which is something that knowing a programming language isn't much help with.

So what's the actual impact on a given real system? How much extra memory would be consumed system-wide?

It would be interesting to do a statically linked build of FreeBSD to see how it would actually shake out in real life.

Microsoft could have been a long way towards this if they had *focused* on this instead of just sucking on Office revenue, trying to become a phone/tablet vendor and destroying desktop Windows with their bullshit Metro UI.

2012 could have been the OS where they introduced transparent application-specific VMs and Windows 10 could have been the OS where they added transparent DR/Azure migration and replication.

Instead they're still playing catch-up to VMware and I don't think they can be VMware anymore than they can be Apple.

The advantage they could have over VMware with application-level virtualization is that it would eliminate the need for the expensive VMware licensing and the expensive Windows licensing needed to isolate applications. But MS would probably fuck that up to and limit it to some lame level of virtualization per OS license.

I sure run into a lot of medium sized organizations that do nothing of the sort.

Most talk about it but when they see the price tag they get cold feet. The "better" ones will do some kind of off site setup, but it's often done with old equipment retired from production and some kind of copying/replication from the production site with little or no solid plan on how to actually bring up the remote site in a way that's useful.

The ones that seem the best off are the ones running VMware SRM.

But overall, yes, the situation isn't great.
I think some kind of sandboxing of software should be available and the default on every OS.

I sometimes wonder if the infinite monkeys concept applies here -- one one where if an infinite number monkeys have typewriters they will eventually write the works of Shakespeare.

Eventually, Microsoft will re-invent VM/CMS and we will have a system where every application can run or share a VM as determined by the operator.

For much of the Mac's history this was also the case. If you wanted an application, you just copied the damn thing from one media to another.

IIRC, it got worse over time on the Mac as apps got bigger (more supporting crap, stuff to copy to the System Folder, maybe a control panel or init, etc).

One in a while you run into applications, often utilities, that are truly standalone -- you can copy it to a new system and just run it. And then there are the various techniques for making portable apps, some kind of hand-done with a wrapper, others that scan a system before install and after and package all the deltas and use a wrapper after running to redirect all the various accesses.

I kind of blame shared libraries myself versus static linking. I've never quite groked the attraction of shared libraries. I get pilloried on Slashdot for saying this, of course. Usually its "ZOMG how will I patch my system when $library has a security weakness and 69 apps all use it" or "it takes too much disk space".

#1 is a fair criticism, I guess, but means little on Windows which seems to use less of that kind of a shared library, but I also wonder if there isn't a counter argument by which not every app statically linked to a common library will have the same bug and won't need updating. And it's not like updating a shared library is always risk-free; there's always the chance that an updated dependent library may change in some way that borks some of the apps that depend on it or some of the problems and cruft from several versions of the same library on the same system.

#2 seems like a bullshit criticism in this day and age. I'm curious what a "typical" OS install would be like space-wise if it was all statically linked.

And if you had all-statically linked applications, updating them to new versions would be just a matter of copying in a new version which seems simpler and more manageable to me for some reason.

Of course, none of this means much to apps which legitimately have a shit-ton of included resources which need to be shared system wide. Those have to go in their right places somehow, but if they are app specific they could just be in the same directory as the application. Maybe apps could um, register, their shared capability with the system so it would know to look for a resource in a virtual directory /app/resource/shared instead of a system-wide /resources directory -- the app itself remains self-contained, no installer required, and it could just register its capability at runtime with the system.