nihil: RE: SI is a bunch of unimportant people ...
Dear Hugh,
I appreciate your great analysis. To general entertainment, I feel obliged to respond to few sentiments.
"My defective memory suggests that I said something like "mostly unimportant people" or some other weasel word,". Your memory serves you well. The precise quota does contain the word "mostly", but in parenthesis. Therefore I feel free to omit this word as some alienable part. I feel that this excuse will emphasize your otherwise great definition.
"..undisciplined and packed into a singularly combative and angry young (?) man. I think your knowledge is underutilized,..a job that denies you the opportunity to exercise your considerable abilities" I think you think right, but could you be more specific here? Which job do you mean?
My amateur diagnosis is "Acute, Insultive Behavior Syndrome (AIBS), arising from untreated frustration, and anger caused by denial of opportunity to exercise his knowledge.(DSM V)." ..[some clinical prognosis snipped] .. Frustration quickly leads to bitterness, and bitterness to clinical depression. Actually I feel just fine, maybe a bit as chatoholic-weboman:-) However, it would be also educational to fit the above diagnosis to Paul...
I must say that you rarely win the confrontations, especially with Paul, and often look absurd which embarrasses me for you You are sadly correct here. I usually give up when I see that an opponent runs out of relevant arguments, changes the topic, and slips into grammatic and spelling discussion. When it turns into a plain cut down, I give up due to my poor command of English. However, you probably cannot imagine the course of such confrontations if they would be conducted in my native language... You would miss a lot.
This is not an elaborate put-down, and I would have preferred to send it you via e-mail but I can't get your address to work. This should be a mistake. Many other people were able to reach me, including some scum bulk posters. Just type the address as it is listed on SI profile. Of course, the reply-to address is altered against those spam posters...
I think Paul posts in part because he is bubbling over with knowledge about Intel and computing, that he feels compelled to share and occasionally some of it bubbles out to us....He is not often wrong. I, for one, have learned far more about the business from him than from all of the other posters on the thread, or SI as a whole. I view him as a personal resource of the first magnitude. This is where exactly the problem is! Too many people view him like that while I can assure you he knows next to nothing about computing, at least. You may argue that the great minds do not need to delve into details, they can grasp the whole picture just from their background only.... The problem is that he has no background in computing, his kitchen-level understanding is not enough to grasp the trends in high technology, he is making wrong conclusions and leads you to believe in that too. You seem to have more opened mind and do understand that what is good for one (though big) company is not necessarily good for free society.
We discuss great events, the prosperity and survival of great technological companies, and the direction in which computing is going. Because we are not intimately engaged in turning the computing revolution, we... Thank you, Hugh, you perfectly grasp the difference... That is why I do not care if some moron would say that the screwdriver is bubbling again. Sorry but I cannot help: the gap is too big but their ambitions are too high.
No one can value the contribution of the writer, the essayist. ... But what can a writer know about his effects on the world? ... Paul puts his work into coherent form. Yes, into a coherent form of naked, shameless propaganda of one-sided view, with the only reason to maintain the paper value of his personal investments. With total lack of in-depth knowledge in computing, he cannot present competently even the main business and technological ideas of Intel, nor compare their road with feasible alternatives.
..a very bright young Japanese-American boy of considerable intellectual power, said ... This is a young man with hyperbolic ambitions in computing. He says he is obsessed by Intel, and is torn between starting his own networking business and working for Intel. I am exceedingly sorry, but your "bright young boy" is total narrow-minded idiot! There is no man on this earth with even a little background in CS who can endorse the 4/8/16/32/.. Intel architecture as the way of their life in computing! Every sober-minded man would only accept the reality of Intel computing as a sad legacy disaster. Even Intel itself started to realize that and surrendered to Hewlett-Packard computing expertise. Even the main criminal in this situation - Microsoft - has already escaped this legacy obsession and provides platform-independent code for several processor architectures.
And in an indirect, untraceable way, Paul may have made a "useful contribution" to his society, as might I by transmitting it. From my prospective I would call this a diversion against the society.
Keynes said never to underestimate the power of ideas. An idea requires a thinker, and Paul is a thinker. What kind of idea could be thought by a man totally ignorant in the field? Let me remind you that the manufacturing technology he claims to be an expert in does not determine the computing technology. It is like the nails in home buildings: without good strong nails it would be hard to build quickly and reliably, but without good architectural project the building will be ugly and worse nothing. Knowing how to cut the sheet rocks does not make him Rastrelli.
In conclusion, it was a pleasure of mine to pontificate with you.
Truly yours,
Ali
Disclaimer: The above information is mearly my opinion
based on my experience, and should not be considered in
any way as an endorsement to buy, sell, hold or short
any security. |
