Comments | quikchange: What price diversity?

quikchange

What price diversity?

Sep 01, 2006 05:05

Simplicity and efficiency are generally held up as virtues. So is diversity, which tends to breed innovation and harbour flexibility. But diversity exacts a price in the form of decreased simplicity and efficiency. Are the benefits of diversity worth the cost? Let's consider a few systems where this has been an issue ( Read more... )

philosophy

Comments 12

kinthelt September 1 2006, 13:51:51 UTC

[Disclaimer: any opinions expressed above are my own and do not necessarily represent my employer.]

Are they your own? ARE THEY??? Make sure you put on your tin foil hat next time to make sure the CIA can't zap you with their mind control ray.

quikchange September 1 2006, 14:23:22 UTC

Huh? Why would the Culinary Institute of America be trying to control me!? ;-P

Just to clarify... backguy September 1 2006, 16:43:15 UTC

It's not that MS ceased working on IE entirely when IE was king; instead, it's that IE7 was destined to be bundled with Vista and only available for use on that platform. That being said, it was indeed the threat of competition from Firefox (along with Vista's perpetually delayed release) that led MS to make IE7 available for XP SP2.

Re: Just to clarify... quikchange September 1 2006, 17:07:46 UTC

Thanks for the clarification. Your mention of Vista does bring to mind another area where diversity breeds innovation: filesystems. The only platform with a vibrant filesystem offering is Linux. All other (Solaris, OS X, Windows, even FreeBSD) have a paltry one or two filesystems available while Linux boasts at least half a dozen excellent options (Ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, ZFS, etc.) plus support for those of other platforms (NTFS, HFS+, FFS, UFS, FAT32, etc.). That said, I must admit that ZFS is easily the best FS out there (followed closely by Resier4) and it was a port from Solaris.

jbdeboer September 1 2006, 20:43:08 UTC

competition \neq diversity

quikchange September 1 2006, 21:07:25 UTC

No, but they do seem to have a high correlation. I'll think about this some more, however, and address it properly.

zedinbed September 2 2006, 02:13:52 UTC

I don't know. I think we have already moved past the model that you seem to be portraying for the Asian North Americna population, at least in Canada. Asians are increasingly coming to the political scene, attracted to it by the need for representation. We've had major ministers who belonged to racial minorities. The example that comes to mind is that of Ujjal Dossanjh, who was the minister of health, being pretty popular with the population due to his focus on health priorities like streamlined public medicare and focus on reducing patient wait-times.

The same is true with Hollywood where you see names like M. Night Shyamalan's popping up all over the place and giving our entertainment outlets an increasingly Asian "flavour".

quikchange September 2 2006, 14:44:40 UTC

That's true. Ruby Dhalla and Russell Peters come to mind as well. I guess eventually we're bound to permeate those other areas as well :)

shade_42 September 2 2006, 17:41:46 UTC

So does this stress on differences in the social status of ethnic groups mean that Canada leans more towards the melting pot metaphore while the U.S. is the mixed salad of multi-culturalism?

I'm used to hearing it the other way around, but your arguments are interesting. I wonder how these mesh...

quikchange September 3 2006, 14:05:31 UTC

I think that, as the volume of immigrants increases, it becomes harder to sustain a melting-pot model. It's not that Canada has become a melting pot too so much as the US has become more of a mosaic.