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"Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

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Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#31

Post by ido »

noir_lord wrote: post #24
WalterBright wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember those days. Those people got punished by accounting reality, and so IBM is just another vendor today. Which is my point.

I think there is a meta system at work above whatever economic system you are at least claiming is in practice - humans game systems, if you give them rules they'll bend them up to and beyond the point of actually snapping. It may be that capitalism works (for a given value of work) because it has more corrective pressure in the absence of other rules - I'd certainly agree with that I think. That said I think the bes…

Look into The Dispossessed[0] and Walkaway[1] for descriptions of (somewhat) utopian Anarcho-Syndicalism.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13651.The_Dispossessed

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40604388-walkaway

Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#32

Post by noir_lord »

ido wrote: post #31
noir_lord wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a meta system at work above whatever economic system you are at least claiming is in practice - humans game systems, if you give them rules they'll bend them up to and beyond the point of actually snapping. It may be that capitalism works (for a given value of work) because it has more corrective pressure in the absence of other rules - I'd certainly agree with that I think. That said I think the bes…

Look into The Dispossessed[0] and Walkaway[1] for descriptions of (somewhat) utopian Anarcho-Syndicalism. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13651.The_Dispossessed [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40604388-walkaway

Thanks, checkout The Polity series by Neal Asher, he's the only one who had come close to matching Banks but in a slightly darker universe and he world builds like no-one else I've read, the Prador are a brilliant conception.

Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#33

Post by zozbot234 »

WalterBright wrote: post #11
davee5 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was part of this history, when I graduated in 2003 (marginal timing) I took a gig at Northrop in Sunnyvale. I grew up in Silicon Valley as the grandkid of folks who lived in orchards (long gone by the time I showed up) and between this not- that -secret history of SV and idolizing the Skunk Works as a kid, I was pretty sure that I needed to be in the military industrial complex when I grew up. I consider it the nad…

> The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it. Government operations always operate by fairly rigid bureaucratic rules, which can always be gamed like this. Free markets, on the other hand, always have a corrective factor applied - people have to be willing to spend their own money to buy your product.

> Government operations always operate by fairly rigid bureaucratic rules, which can always be gamed like this.

It's not _just_ government operations, it's large bureaucracies in general. The main 'corrective' factor inherent in free markets is that organizations that waste too much money will eventually go bankrupt, hence they can't waste any more. Or if their inefficiencies are known, they can be reformed via mechanisms such as the takeover bid.

Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#34

Post by Craighead »

nibepins wrote: post #10

"More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community…

What is illegal about Prism?

Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#35

Post by cushychicken »

boringg wrote: post #7

After watching the first 5 minutes I decided to crack a beer and watch the rest (late 30s interests have changed). Definitely interesting - for me the part that were most intriguing was the knowledge around how the air battle in Europe was fought. I didn't realize how much a cat and mouse battle it was around radar technology. The rest of the talk I enjoyed the details of the storyline that I had an awareness of but…

I thought the radar line-of-battle stuff was the wrong presentation for the first part, but kept reading because it was so interesting.

At about slide 70, I realized - "Oh: SV came from EWAR/ELINT technology."

Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#36

Post by cushychicken »

est31 wrote: post #9

Didn't know that radar was so advanced already in WW2. He's definitely right in that it's not being told.

Isn't that incredible?! I think of Ghz radar being a recent innovation, but that presentation mentions several examples.

Granted, some of the equipment from WWII was so big it took a whole B-17 bomber to carry one unit. So modern tech gets some credit for miniaturization, at the very least.

Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#38

Post by dboreham »

dcl wrote: post #14
nibepins wrote: post #10

"More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community…

Not an accountant or financial analyst, but how does the money these giant public tech companies make from the NSA/other appear in the mandatory financial reports? I'm guessing it must be easily hidden.

NSA is a customer. I'm not sure if financial filings need to identify individual customers. The business might be categorized as "government "?

Certainly I worked at a well known Internet company in the 90s and NSA was one of our larger customers (larger for the division I worked in, perhaps not for the entire company).

Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#39

Post by specialist »

WalterBright wrote: post #11
davee5 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was part of this history, when I graduated in 2003 (marginal timing) I took a gig at Northrop in Sunnyvale. I grew up in Silicon Valley as the grandkid of folks who lived in orchards (long gone by the time I showed up) and between this not- that -secret history of SV and idolizing the Skunk Works as a kid, I was pretty sure that I needed to be in the military industrial complex when I grew up. I consider it the nad…

> The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it. Government operations always operate by fairly rigid bureaucratic rules, which can always be gamed like this. Free markets, on the other hand, always have a corrective factor applied - people have to be willing to spend their own money to buy your product.

Which organizations don't have bureaucracy?

What would a military run on Freedom Markets™ principles look like?

Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#40

Post by dredmorbius »

nibepins wrote: post #10

"More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community…

Corbett Report is an extraordinarily low-quality information source:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Corbett_Report

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