The Chinese-government funded Dawning just built the 10th-fastest supercomputer in the world. And both Cray and NEC relied heavily on government subsidy for their supercomputing business. Or maybe this is an answer to Miles's question.
>> Let's turn the question around: has any semiconductor firm successfully
>> developed a product without relying on the knowledge generated by decades of
>> government funded research on electronics and computer technology?
> Let's turn it again... aren't the following among the primary driving forces
> behind the need for ever-greater computer speed and capacity 1) the
> staggeringly bloated size of the dominant operating system, 2) the
> ridiculously fractured niches of proprietary software, 3) the hegemony of
> the freestanding (rather than cooperatively networked) home/laptop computer
> and 4) our society's capital-driven incapacity to develop or satisfy our own
> video, musical, sexual, and friend-ly needs within our own immediate,
> uncommodified relationships?
First of all, 1 and 2 are almost directly contradictory -- Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems and office-productivity software; Adobe has a cross-platform monopoly on image manipulation software; Apple owns its entire "software experience" and actively purchases or undercuts third parties in order to provide a homogeneous "look and feel", and yet proprietary software is fractured in ridiculous niches?
Furthermore, you must be living in a fantasy land, if you think that Open Source software is somehow not ridiculously fractured -- there are three competing libraries to do EVERYTHING beyond the GNU in GNU/Linux, and you can't even cut-and-paste between programs reliably!
As for "the hegemony of the freestanding (rather than cooperatively networked) home/laptop computer", well, there are now millions of people with fast internet access in the US (though not nearly as many percentage-wise as in Japan and Korea), but there's a compelling reason for individuals not to have everything "in the cloud", and that is: if the cloud goes away, you're left with nothing. Insofaras personal computers are used as entertainment or media devices, which most of them are, they need to be capable of that on their own. For applications such as e-mail where "everywhere access" is more important than offline access, there's a compelling argument for web-based programs. And of course for big corporations that can afford big datacenters, thin clients that use fat servers may eventually come back into vogue (it's an idea which comes and goes). But that's hardly "cooperatively networked".
And your implicit valorization of "cooperatively networked" computing power in point 3) seems to be at odds with your denigration of non-immediate relationships in point 4), so I'm not sure whether you're onto something or not there.
> Just like any other commodity, ever-faster processor speeds and storage
> capacities produce their own set of new needs, eh? and the cycle continues,
> largely w/o our conscious or intentional, much less democratic bidding...
This conclusion is good, though how you get to it from the muddled thinking in the paragraph before, and where you take it in light of the muddled thinking in the paragraph before, is beyond me.
Finally, I refer you to my signature, which seems especially on point for this topic. Dwayne, this aphorism, which as far as I can tell you tossed off in an excellent post about technology without making any specific attempt to be aphoristic, is one of the pithiest and wisest things that's been posted to this list, in my opinion. Thanks.
-- John
-- "The urge to fly from modern systems, instead of moving through them to even greater, fairer things is, I think, an indication of deep weariness and confusion." -- Dwayne Monroe