I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10, and everything went smoothly except for the following: 1. My sound hardware is no longer recognized for some reason. I have a Dell Dimension computer with integrated audio, and it had worked fine after installing 9.04, but stopped working when I upgraded. It now claims I have no sound hardware installed, and I'm not entirely sure how to correct it. 2. After rebooting, the screen now goes blank (video card stops outputting) when X should start and bring up the login screen. I'm also not sure what caused this. I dropped down to a console, tried to kill the running X process, and then things seemed to miraculously work. I actually had to get something done, so I just went with it, but I'm not sure exactly what happened (or what I did to fix it). Maybe this is related to the proprietary Nvidia drivers I'm using? Everything else seemed to work just fine as far as I can tell. When I have a few hours to dig through forums, I'll try to fix the sound and the screen blanking thing.

Well, if you take that idea to the limit using modern technologies, you basically wind up with rockin' new Nehalem processors using Quickpath Interconnect (QPI) between them, with PCI Express (serial links) to peripherals. But that's huge, is incredibly power hungry, and is basically the opposite of this architecture. But let's think this over some more. To access L1 cache, you can do it in a single cycle. L2 might be 10-20 cycles, etc. Now going over PCIe, the fastest thing going besides QPI, has a latency of like 400-800 nS. Even on a lowly 1 GHz processor, that's like 800 clock cycles, so you might as well be watching grass grow while you try to do something that's not embarrasingly parallel. As soon as you pump up the clock rate more, and add large caches and DRAM and all that, then you have *huge* power problems, and you still have somewhat crappy performance. Large-scale multi-core basically *does* use this architecture, only it's all on one die. It also uses an interconnect that doesn't suck, and manages to be cache coherent, so you can actually use it. Each core has it's own cache though (which is larger than the RAM on these chips), and the clock is nearly 2 orders of magnitude higher. Like i said, this is fun for a microcontroller project, but the performance would be atrocious for anything except embarrasingly parallel problems (and even then it would suck using these microcontrollers).

The connection machine was still SIMD, even though it did have 64k (1-bit!) processors. This is just like the transputer architecture though! There are a couple of *really* big problems with this: 1) none of their microcontrollers are individually capable of running a large modern program. They have a few kilobytes of code, and no large backing RAM. 2) How do you get to I/O devices? If you need shared access to devices, this just makes all the problems of a normal computer enormously worse. 3) What about communication latency (and bandwidth) between nodes? They're using serial communications between 72 MHz processors. We're probably talking several microseconds of latency, minimum, and low-bandwidth (just not enough pins, and not nearly fast enough links) communication between nodes. As fun as something like this would be to build and play around with, there are reasons architectures like the transputer died out. The penalty for going 'off-chip' is so large (and orders of magnitude larger nowadays than it was back then), and the links between chips suck so much, that a distributed architecture like this just can't compete with a screaming fast 3 GHz single-node (especially multi-core).

To be fair, Japan has a ton of examples of how *not* to run a business. They've spent nearly the last 2 decades in economic stagnation, they have an incredibly inflexible labor market (their employees are basically either hired for life or never get beyond "temp" status with essentially no protections and crappy pay/benefits), and they have a culture that discourages disagreeing with your superiors. As a country, they also have an incredibly dysfunctional government and a demographic (more specifically aging) problem that is rapidly destroying their competitiveness.

Interesting article on NYT recently http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/operator-can-you-put-me-through-to-ant-nest-251/?ref=science

It might be more like if John McCain had of won San Fransisco with 70% in november, and the Democrats took to the streets to protest a rigged election. The Libertarian party has not shown itself capable of becoming a mass movement in any real sense. In regards to the last part of your comment, 1) I'm pretty sure the constitution doesn't define a "fiscal system," even though you probably meant economic system, and 2) the violence has largely been on the part of the Baseej, a super-nationalist militia, against the fairly peaceful protesters

Don't forget groups like NYCResistor (www.nycresistor.com), HacDC (http://hacdc.org/), Noisebridge (https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge), etc. Hackers are still around =)

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:r2RU-elaMN4J:chrisfenton.com/non-von-1/+non-von1&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

That's a fairly simplistic view. Let's say I own a company making widgets and selling them for $5. Materials cost me $1 and labor costs me $4 per widget, so I make about a dollar profit. Then CheapChinaCorp comes onto the scene and says "Hey, all you're doing is making widgets. I can make widgets for cheaper!", and they start pumping out widgets. Materials still cost $1, but their labor only costs $1 as well, so they sell theres for $3. Now basically *everyone* will go to whatever store, look at Widget A from USACorp for $5, and Widget B from CheapChinaCorp for $3, and buy the latter. Now I could try to lower wages, but minimum wage puts a floor on that, so if they can pay their employees less than minimum wage (and they can!), I can't compete on cost. So I move my factory to Mexico before I go out of business, now my labor cost is only $1 too, and I'm still in business! Yeahy! You can't think of it as "Giant mega corp" has 5000 jobs that they can bestow on whoever they feel. Companies have to make money, or they go out of business pretty damn quick. There is also a flip-side to shipping manufacturing overseas. Let's say you're a consumer who also works in a dvd player factory with 100 other people. You happen to have a monopoly for the moment. You produce DVD players that cost $500 in order to pay you and your coworkers $20/hr. CheapChinaCorp comes onto the seen and releases a $100 DVD player. From a nation-wide perspective, is it better that everyone spends an extra $400 to keep you 100 people employed, or that everyone has an extra $400 in their pocket for other expenses? Which is a better "value" to the country?