[extropy-chat] Futurist priorities was ex-tropical

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 09:34:35AM -0500, Brian Lee wrote:

> Ahh, but isn't the "best" PC one that is only $500? The market gets you the 

"Best" is useless without attaching a metric. By adding a Microsoft tax
(something like $100) to hardware and removing my ability to purchase a
system without an OS license I as a consumer can no longer vote with my feet;
that is, wallet. This is monopoly ramming things down our collective throats
to maximize revenue, nothing else.

Markets don't have mechanisms to nuke monopolies, other than by the
relatively weak mechanism of disruptive technologies introduced by small
players (when the monopoly's become sluggish enough to not be able to
identify and hostile-takeover these new players). There are some weak 
attempts by the state trying to regulate the monopolies, but I'm not 
very impressed with their firepower, so far. More $$$s buys more legal
firepower, neither are people behind the scene nyms so they can be bribed or
threatened.

> most processing power for the lowest dollar. It also makes the highest 

Computing is a holistic experience. "Most processing power" depends on a
benchmark. 

> performing PCs as cheap as possible. A good example of a market is going to 

I prefer total cost of ownership.

> pricewatch.com or ibuyer.net. Low barriers to entry, full information.

Allright, there is a "NO OS" as option on pricewatch. Interesting, you won't
get that in 99% of shops, and you'll get stonewalled when attemting to return
the shrinkwrap package for reimbursement.
 
> A bunch of these cheap pcs are clustered together to beat out the huge 
> super computers at a fraction of the price. How would you propose creating 

The architecture of the computer has to fit the problem. Commodity components
with custom signalling fabric have usually an edge by low price through high
volume and support from computational physics (maintaining illusion of shared
memory is expensive, and is just a glossy finish over message passing
underneath -- send message "read/write location" to object "core").

> the "best PC"? What is "best" anyway?

Without defining that first, the question is meaningless.
 
Ditto applies for blanket statements about markets: they're not "always best"
for everything. They optimize locally, very locally in fact. They favor
emergence of monopolies, which does lower the optimization performance.
There's a wild card of altruistic long-term-loss planners, but that's a
human, not market-intrinsic property.

The state is not your friend, neither is the corporation. If you're a smart,
rational consumer, and not mindless cattle sliding down the slaughterhouse
chute, that is.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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