In a democracy with perfect information, that may be true. We don't live in one of those.
People with minority tastes usually DO have better information because they take the time to seek it out, and the Internet is a fantastic tool for that purpose.
Everybody else buys what they are told to, more or less. The "music industry" continues to pretend that this market is the only one, because that is the market they understand, and they do what they can through the courts to stop other market mechanisms from working.
Real Soon Now a SoundCloud type service is going to start making money from micropayments to a large enough extent that the mainstream notices, and then it really is bye bye big labels.
CDN customers are likely to be large customers, and large customers don't have Web developers per se, except maybe one or two to address hotspots.
The rest of the time they are using a CMS, and all of the major CMSs have some... sub-optimal code.
It's inevitable in code written by volunteers around the world with no real central co-ordination and decision making, and it's much better than not having free-as-in-beer CMSs at all.
BUT - if your site is on SuperFantasticCMS and you find that ten of the core modules have these kinds of issues, it's a no-brainer to elect to use this service instead of fixing those ten modules and then battling to get them folded in upstream.
When I buy a car, I'll still come up with a price I'm willing to pay, the features I need, find every model that matches those requirements then pick something from there.
What determines how much you are willing to pay? How do you determine which features are must-have? If you think those decisions are not being constantly manipulated by others, guess again.
If I did that, I'd want car with two seats but a lot of luggage space, with just enough torque to get around UK B-roads at a sensible pace, that was priced at cost plus a sensible margin, and weighed less than 1000kg. In fact there are a large number of households that should want this as a perfect second car. There is no such car even though it's perfectly possible to engineer one. What does that tell you about consumer choice?
The chemistries and capacities of batteries chosen by car makers can only provide around 100 miles per charge. We all know that they choose to do this because market research indicates that most users won't regularly drive more than 100 miles in a single sitting and car manufacturers are trying to produce as cheap a product as possible.
Yeah, and I never understood that. Why target consumers one-by-one with a huge cost of sale, when you could be targeting fleet vehicles and build some volume very quickly indeed?
The Tesla sports cars aren't expensive, when you compare it to roadsters of similar performance, and especially if you factor in the running costs of that sub-20mpg competitor. (Plus, the petrol cars are a lot bigger and heavier, and therefore a worse package overall.)
On the other hand, efficiently supplying a continuous average of 1.67 MW of electric power to every gas station in the U.S., including those in remote areas and on remote roads, is a complete pipe dream unless someone comes up with room temperature superconductors.
There's your answer right there! See also: Ringworld.
Lots of debate here about who needs which skills at what cost in customers, and whether Oracle can change this in their customers. That's not QUITE the right discussion.
The opportunity for Oracle is to move away from that totally. They buy client and code expertise in so that they can build appliances. In other words, customers don't buy Java, or Oracle. They buy an Oracle doohickey that does (say) their financials for them, and configuration for their enterprise is all in the business and rules layers.
In this manner the customer then buys expertise in making it do the right things FROM ORACLE, at £1000 per day. That is why Oracle want control of a full stack of expertise; so they can resell it at pricing driven by their strong brand in the boardroom.
Trading this fast brings the market closer to optimal economic efficiency, where prices at any instant accurately reflect value. Latency contributes to the very inefficiencies that you blame these "large investment firms" from profiting off of. These high-speed arbitrage and "quant" investors may make a profit without creating a product (though collectively their track record is not very good financially), but their profit margins are vanishingly small and they serve a critical role in equalizing prices between markets and keeping prices up to date as market conditions change. In short, your complaint about these trading practices smacks of jealousy and sour grapes, and it ignores the valuable role they serve in the markets.
Good try, but if there's one thing we've learned since 1986 it's that stock markets are no longer a measure of any meaningful long-term company value.
The "value" you're oh-so-efficiently measuring there means nothing useful to anyone except another trader.
Perhaps, then begins the very slippery slope of, "well, if the local library has it, and if I *was* to borrow it, it would be fine to download it, but that would be *silly*, so its just as good to *only* download it". Perhaps I can call the library and have them *reserve* the book for me while I read the digital copy.
In the UK authors are paid per library loan (is this true in the US?), so in your example, borrowing the book from the library rewards the author, but an illicit download will not.
I think just applying existing laws would put them out of business
Yep, as with many badly-run businesses. The problem is we as consumers don't do anything about it. Regulators only do things when enough consumers have told them there's a problem, in writing.
I've seen several posts in this discussion from people who have just let PayPal keep the money, seemingly even if it's in hundreds of dollars. No. If PayPal won't speak to you, go to the regulator. If you can't find a regulator who is interested, report it as theft or fraud to the police.
I realise the police are also busy people, but when a business gets a followup to a complaint quoting an incident number from the police, it focuses minds. You are unlikely to have to persuade them to prosecute.
The most likely alternative is that the newspaper ditches the online edition completely and focuses on mobiles, iPads, Kindles, and the like for its electronic delivery, where there is a healthy and rapidly growing market in paid-for content
True, but your phrase "...and the like" is the problem here. Those delivery channels are hideously fragmented, and there is an entry cost TO THE CONSUMER per channel, which is disastrous for anyone trying to build volume consistently.
In print, you print something in the standard way, and everybody reads it in the standard way. The cost of the newspaper is ALL of the cost to the consumer and nothing is hidden. The run cost of the newspaper's infrastructure is kept to a minimum because whilst it is a physically complicated operation, it's a very mature technology and it's done the same way at nearly all newspapers.
With other devices, you have to get through a lot of unknowns and weird commercial barriers PER CHANNEL (I've heard that both Apple and Amazon are a pain in the ass to deal with in this kind of scenario) and then you have to hope that enough customers have paid $200 for the device in question so that you actually have some kind of audience able to subscribe. And, if your iPhone app is good, that's no guarantee your Kindle version will be any good. And you've still got a dozen other formats to go.
The answer is to have a common standard of some kind for markup, and devices that are all able to consume that standard with equal ease... wish someone would do something about that... imagine the possibilities!
car analogy. you're arguing that a pickup is more powerful than a f1 car because you can get more done with it.
you should be aware this isn't the definition anyone else uses.
Which itself demonstrates the problem perfectly.
With cars, people talk about power, without talking about kerb weight, gear ratios, torque, or anything else that would dictate how fast it gets up the strip. (And then that itself doesn't tell you anything about lap times.)...in the same way that the market is still obsessed with cores, despite the fact that business applications were I/O bound for most of the 90s.
Now we have a new disease: the lack of awareness of these very issues means that modern business applications are mostly application bound. Or as the GP also mentions, they have a simply appalling interface that doesn't give the user ANY chance of flexing the technology.
It's crazy that today you cant find an ISP that gives you 1/4 of the services I used to give users.
Effect...
I bailed when 56K modems became popular as my cost as an ISP went through the roof..
...cause?
(ObGetOffMyLawn moment: trn / Usenet a hell of a lot more efficient and consistent than reading fifty different websites with fifty different ideas on what makes a good interface.)
Yeah, that's what is sad and amazing. Windows running native on the box also has access to that 400MB of RAM to use as a disk cache, and in theory should do better because it can choose to use the memory for apps or cache depending where the pressure is. Sadly, it doesn't seem to know what to do with it.
I've found the same. Host is a 1GB netbook with shared graphics memory. XP in a 380MB VirtualBox, with the host running Vbox AND super-bloated Kubuntu KDE, is FAR more responsive than the native copy of XP on the same netbook which was installed at the same time from the same CD.
In similar news Windows 7 works reasonably well in a 512MB VirtualBox, or at least the RC did.
This is fair criticism, but I think KDE realised they dropped the ball, and they fixed it over the course of last year. For me, 4.3.3 felt right again and was "that release," and as others suggest here, 4.4 needs to be at least that quality before you can stop calling it 4.3.99. Please?
There are still some things missing which CDE had 15 years ago, but the major one is down to underlying X and not KDE - no panning. Such a missed opportunity for netbooks.
New website a massive improvement, by the way.
Do we have a decent Twitter client with list support yet?
I should probably clarify my original post. I meant that Xorg.conf is not necessary to get a working X, and nine times out of ten, is not a good WAY to get a working X.
If you know what you are doing and want to tweak, it's still needed. However, the OP was looking to troubleshoot, and the easiest way to do that in 2009 is to REMOVE the xorg.conf, and then if you don't automatically get a working config, slowly add sections of the file back in.
Rather than post xorg.conf, try renaming it out of the way, and see if you can get any closer to what you want using xrandr plus whichever GUI tool suits your WM and choice of GNOME versus KDE. (krandrtray in my case under Kubuntu, and no, it doesn't work too well - I have written a small xrandr script with the right serious of commands for usual setups I use.)
I say this because recent versions of the X server (past 1.6) do much better at figuring out stuff automatically and xorg overrides tend to just confuse it.
The subject line of this thread is a little harsh, but I agree multimonitor under Linux is not particularly slick - in fact some parts of it seem to be less slick than things were in X11R4. Feel free to disagree, but if it is slick for you, please reply and let us all know what tools we haven't found yet that fixed it for you.
Slashdot Mirror
In a democracy with perfect information, that may be true. We don't live in one of those.
People with minority tastes usually DO have better information because they take the time to seek it out, and the Internet is a fantastic tool for that purpose.
Everybody else buys what they are told to, more or less. The "music industry" continues to pretend that this market is the only one, because that is the market they understand, and they do what they can through the courts to stop other market mechanisms from working.
Real Soon Now a SoundCloud type service is going to start making money from micropayments to a large enough extent that the mainstream notices, and then it really is bye bye big labels.
CDN customers are likely to be large customers, and large customers don't have Web developers per se, except maybe one or two to address hotspots.
The rest of the time they are using a CMS, and all of the major CMSs have some ... sub-optimal code.
It's inevitable in code written by volunteers around the world with no real central co-ordination and decision making, and it's much better than not having free-as-in-beer CMSs at all.
BUT - if your site is on SuperFantasticCMS and you find that ten of the core modules have these kinds of issues, it's a no-brainer to elect to use this service instead of fixing those ten modules and then battling to get them folded in upstream.
What determines how much you are willing to pay? How do you determine which features are must-have? If you think those decisions are not being constantly manipulated by others, guess again.
If I did that, I'd want car with two seats but a lot of luggage space, with just enough torque to get around UK B-roads at a sensible pace, that was priced at cost plus a sensible margin, and weighed less than 1000kg. In fact there are a large number of households that should want this as a perfect second car. There is no such car even though it's perfectly possible to engineer one. What does that tell you about consumer choice?
The sunlight is not needed outside the sphere, or under the desert.
The chemistries and capacities of batteries chosen by car makers can only provide around 100 miles per charge. We all know that they choose to do this because market research indicates that most users won't regularly drive more than 100 miles in a single sitting and car manufacturers are trying to produce as cheap a product as possible.
Yeah, and I never understood that. Why target consumers one-by-one with a huge cost of sale, when you could be targeting fleet vehicles and build some volume very quickly indeed?
The Tesla sports cars aren't expensive, when you compare it to roadsters of similar performance, and especially if you factor in the running costs of that sub-20mpg competitor. (Plus, the petrol cars are a lot bigger and heavier, and therefore a worse package overall.)
On the other hand, efficiently supplying a continuous average of 1.67 MW of electric power to every gas station in the U.S., including those in remote areas and on remote roads, is a complete pipe dream unless someone comes up with room temperature superconductors.
There's your answer right there! See also: Ringworld.
I thought it was common knowledge that a bolt of lightning provides 1.21 Gigawatts.
All you need to do is capture that lightning and instantaneously use it to charge the battery bank.
And as a bonus, we won't need roads where we are going!
Parent is spot on, good summary.
I'll just add that we should also factor in the electricity that is saved in NOT refining and distributing petrol for those 500,000 EVs.
... so can someone provide a car analogy please?
Lots of debate here about who needs which skills at what cost in customers, and whether Oracle can change this in their customers. That's not QUITE the right discussion.
The opportunity for Oracle is to move away from that totally. They buy client and code expertise in so that they can build appliances. In other words, customers don't buy Java, or Oracle. They buy an Oracle doohickey that does (say) their financials for them, and configuration for their enterprise is all in the business and rules layers.
In this manner the customer then buys expertise in making it do the right things FROM ORACLE, at £1000 per day. That is why Oracle want control of a full stack of expertise; so they can resell it at pricing driven by their strong brand in the boardroom.
SAP are already doing this, by the way.
Trading this fast brings the market closer to optimal economic efficiency, where prices at any instant accurately reflect value. Latency contributes to the very inefficiencies that you blame these "large investment firms" from profiting off of. These high-speed arbitrage and "quant" investors may make a profit without creating a product (though collectively their track record is not very good financially), but their profit margins are vanishingly small and they serve a critical role in equalizing prices between markets and keeping prices up to date as market conditions change. In short, your complaint about these trading practices smacks of jealousy and sour grapes, and it ignores the valuable role they serve in the markets.
Good try, but if there's one thing we've learned since 1986 it's that stock markets are no longer a measure of any meaningful long-term company value.
The "value" you're oh-so-efficiently measuring there means nothing useful to anyone except another trader.
Perhaps, then begins the very slippery slope of, "well, if the local library has it, and if I *was* to borrow it, it would be fine to download it, but that would be *silly*, so its just as good to *only* download it". Perhaps I can call the library and have them *reserve* the book for me while I read the digital copy.
In the UK authors are paid per library loan (is this true in the US?), so in your example, borrowing the book from the library rewards the author, but an illicit download will not.
I think just applying existing laws would put them out of business
Yep, as with many badly-run businesses. The problem is we as consumers don't do anything about it. Regulators only do things when enough consumers have told them there's a problem, in writing.
I've seen several posts in this discussion from people who have just let PayPal keep the money, seemingly even if it's in hundreds of dollars. No. If PayPal won't speak to you, go to the regulator. If you can't find a regulator who is interested, report it as theft or fraud to the police.
I realise the police are also busy people, but when a business gets a followup to a complaint quoting an incident number from the police, it focuses minds. You are unlikely to have to persuade them to prosecute.
There MUST be people doing that as a business already... mustn't there?
Obligatory car analogy: lots of businesses producing replica AC Cobras using modern materials.
The most likely alternative is that the newspaper ditches the online edition completely and focuses on mobiles, iPads, Kindles, and the like for its electronic delivery, where there is a healthy and rapidly growing market in paid-for content
True, but your phrase "...and the like" is the problem here. Those delivery channels are hideously fragmented, and there is an entry cost TO THE CONSUMER per channel, which is disastrous for anyone trying to build volume consistently.
In print, you print something in the standard way, and everybody reads it in the standard way. The cost of the newspaper is ALL of the cost to the consumer and nothing is hidden. The run cost of the newspaper's infrastructure is kept to a minimum because whilst it is a physically complicated operation, it's a very mature technology and it's done the same way at nearly all newspapers.
With other devices, you have to get through a lot of unknowns and weird commercial barriers PER CHANNEL (I've heard that both Apple and Amazon are a pain in the ass to deal with in this kind of scenario) and then you have to hope that enough customers have paid $200 for the device in question so that you actually have some kind of audience able to subscribe. And, if your iPhone app is good, that's no guarantee your Kindle version will be any good. And you've still got a dozen other formats to go.
The answer is to have a common standard of some kind for markup, and devices that are all able to consume that standard with equal ease... wish someone would do something about that... imagine the possibilities!
I'm interested to see how the FCC plan to impose this on the London Times, the Independent, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Die Welt, Le Monde...
Which itself demonstrates the problem perfectly.
With cars, people talk about power, without talking about kerb weight, gear ratios, torque, or anything else that would dictate how fast it gets up the strip. (And then that itself doesn't tell you anything about lap times.) ...in the same way that the market is still obsessed with cores, despite the fact that business applications were I/O bound for most of the 90s.
Now we have a new disease: the lack of awareness of these very issues means that modern business applications are mostly application bound. Or as the GP also mentions, they have a simply appalling interface that doesn't give the user ANY chance of flexing the technology.
Effect...
(ObGetOffMyLawn moment: trn / Usenet a hell of a lot more efficient and consistent than reading fifty different websites with fifty different ideas on what makes a good interface.)
Aaaaaaaow! Fanks for the 'elp, skwhy-ah!
Yeah, that's what is sad and amazing. Windows running native on the box also has access to that 400MB of RAM to use as a disk cache, and in theory should do better because it can choose to use the memory for apps or cache depending where the pressure is. Sadly, it doesn't seem to know what to do with it.
I've found the same. Host is a 1GB netbook with shared graphics memory. XP in a 380MB VirtualBox, with the host running Vbox AND super-bloated Kubuntu KDE, is FAR more responsive than the native copy of XP on the same netbook which was installed at the same time from the same CD.
In similar news Windows 7 works reasonably well in a 512MB VirtualBox, or at least the RC did.
This is fair criticism, but I think KDE realised they dropped the ball, and they fixed it over the course of last year. For me, 4.3.3 felt right again and was "that release," and as others suggest here, 4.4 needs to be at least that quality before you can stop calling it 4.3.99. Please?
There are still some things missing which CDE had 15 years ago, but the major one is down to underlying X and not KDE - no panning. Such a missed opportunity for netbooks.
New website a massive improvement, by the way.
Do we have a decent Twitter client with list support yet?
I should probably clarify my original post. I meant that Xorg.conf is not necessary to get a working X, and nine times out of ten, is not a good WAY to get a working X.
If you know what you are doing and want to tweak, it's still needed. However, the OP was looking to troubleshoot, and the easiest way to do that in 2009 is to REMOVE the xorg.conf, and then if you don't automatically get a working config, slowly add sections of the file back in.
Rather than post xorg.conf, try renaming it out of the way, and see if you can get any closer to what you want using xrandr plus whichever GUI tool suits your WM and choice of GNOME versus KDE. (krandrtray in my case under Kubuntu, and no, it doesn't work too well - I have written a small xrandr script with the right serious of commands for usual setups I use.)
I say this because recent versions of the X server (past 1.6) do much better at figuring out stuff automatically and xorg overrides tend to just confuse it.
The subject line of this thread is a little harsh, but I agree multimonitor under Linux is not particularly slick - in fact some parts of it seem to be less slick than things were in X11R4. Feel free to disagree, but if it is slick for you, please reply and let us all know what tools we haven't found yet that fixed it for you.
then evidently gave up figuring that 20 people was a good representative sample of ...... the first 20 people who responded to their survey, I suppose.
You could be on to something here... people who voluntarily answer cock-a-mamie surveys are probably people who don't get out much.