The hard drive industry isn't out to screw you. AFAIK, HDD storage has always been quoted in base 10 instead of base 2 (K=1,000 instead of 1,024, etc), but the difference was never really obvious until lately as the numbers got huge.
I firmly believe that the free market should hold the answers to most problems in the free market, but I also recognize that monopoly conditions alter the nature of a free market, and generally require outside intervention to set right. This is especially true in the case of a monopoly that will LIE, CHEAT, and STEAL(*1) to protect its monopoly, in which case they are actually destroying the free market that is required for a healthy economic ecosystem.
The primary effect of a monopoly running amok is the destruction of most other players in the market. MS accomplished that.
One secondary effect in this case was the html incompatibilities that MS introduced shattered the most basic premise of the world wide web - that information could be made available and read by all based on certain standards. The efforts of web developers to create work-arounds is all that prevented the www from being completely partitioned into IE and non-IE space. Unfortunately, there are still many important sites (or parts of sites) that *require* Internet Explorer in order to work(*2). The result has been real costs to people and businesses in terms of software costs, web development costs, and communication issues because of broken IE-only government web sites, to name a few. These are costs we have been forced to bear in order to line Bill Gates' pockets. In short, there is great harm in allowing a monopoly to go unregulated and unrestrained.
Having seen over a decade of a stifled, monopolized market (ie, no longer free) and a largely broken internet, resorting to government intervention is hardly unreasonable. The loosening of MS's grip on the de facto control of html has only happened through a combination of events and independent efforts. Firefox, Opera, and other innovators have breathed life back into the browser market, but it hasn't been easy. Government intervention (belated and heavy-handed, but in the end, I believe at least partly beneficial) has helped accelerate non-MS browser adoption, and clearly demonstrates that given a free choice, people are happy to choose non-MS browsers.
(*1) The overall list of MS's deceptions, market manipulations, and outright fabrications is too long to list here. However, I suggest you examine the federal case against MS in the late 90's in which they knowingly presented fabricated evidence to a federal court... got caught... and got away with it. Literally. Just for contrast, around the same time, a much smaller courtroom lie nearly toppled a sitting President.
It's not a truly free market when a monopoly is in place, but here's an idea anyway. The free market has no government intervention, right? Well, since the government already intercedes in the market on the behalf of copyright and patent holders, let's remove such protections from those that have monopolies. Let's stop feeling sorry for MS and its complaints about pirating. If you put a virtual gun to my head and force me to buy your software because you fucked things up by breaking the html standards, it is the duty of a free market to restore balance by removing your financial incentive to harm the market.
(*2) Sallie Mae's web site looks fine in many browsers, until you actually go to fill out the forms required for student loans, and then they drop the IE bomb on you.
If anything S.P. should be footing the bill for all the proceedings simply because she used such easy/obvious answers that it was inevitable to happen.
Great idea. Maybe we could make rape victims pay to prosecute and incarcerate their attackers. After all, look how they were dressed... they were clearly asking for it.
It is estimated to be about three to four times more abundant than uranium in the Earth's crust. It has been considered a waste product in mining rare earths, so its abundance is high and cost low.
Discaimer: I'm no expert, and I'm quoting Wikipedia. But it sounds like thorium is relatively plentiful and isn't too hard to get.
I have to say that "all single mothers are SATAN." is a gross misstatement, since it misses all the single non-mothers, married mothers, and married non-mothers.;p
200 years tops for nuclear power, but that actually an assessment it will last 189 years, assuming energy use doesn't rise and mining costs don't go up, both of which seem to me trivially wrong...).
More intelligent reactor designs and fuel reprocessing could extend fission as a viable power source far beyond your estimates. We have a metric assload of Thorium. Heck, even the nuclear "waste" that greenies want to plan in Yucca mountain would be more useful as new fuel, either in via reprocessing, or in a reactor that can burn up the nastier fission byproducts, or some combination thereof.
So harvesting solar energy for human use means something else must die. This is as certain as that stones will still fall downward tomorrow.
That all-or-nothing perspective is really harmful. We obviously aren't about to give up electricity. What is the alternative? Solar panels on my roof won't be killing much of anything. My roof isn't growing grass. Same with all my neighbors' roofs. The earth absorbs (and reflects) so much solar energy, that much of our energy needs could be met with fraction of what goes unused by plants and animals.
I think that at this point, everyone realizes that we need multiple sources of power, not just fission, not just wind, not just solar, not just hydro, not just geothermal. But taken together and prudently implemented, these could satisfy our needs for long into the future.
So why do I get the nagging feeling that solar power (and wind power, for similar reasons) may be popular now, but as soon as they're implemented on non-trivial scales, we will see their effects on nature, they'll become a new green bogey man ?
The law of unintended consequences always applies, of course. The key, I think, is balance in all things.
The portrayal of the VPN information suggested that Childs should not have had this documentation, even though he was the city's lead network admin and apparently had to maintain these lists as part of his job. But entering the VPN information into the court records made them public -- the San Francisco district attorney's office committed a significant security breach, opening up VPN access to anyone who cared to look at the document. Although the passwords alone were not enough to provide complete access to the city networks, they did constitute one part of the VPN's two-phase authentication configuration.
(link)
I wonder if the someone from the DA's office will stand trial for whatever laws cover such a broad and incompetent breach of security. Seems fair, after all, considering what they're doing to him. And before anyone says "Hey, they're lawyers, not IT guys, you can't expect them to have the same level of password security sensitivity that IT folks do, yada yada yada", I'd say that any lawyer that ignorant of IT security has no business involved with this case to begin with.
I have some doubts about Child's story, but stupid stuff like this on the part of the city certainly lends support to his alleged fear of turning over passwords to incompetent city employees.
... unless they include nano-accelerometers in which case you could move your eyes up and down to scroll. Oh, and a widget that detects vertical axis alignment, to keep the image from tipping if your contacts rotate a bit by accident.
If this technology ever comes to pass, I can imagine a crowdsourced Google streetview type mashup that meshes together the combined streaming lifeviews of several pedestrians & motorists on every street at any given time, providing a near real-time 3d model of a city at street level, as well as the ability to roll that model forwards and back through time.
IIRC, the US recently passed a law that basically says commercial organisations can contribute unlimited funds to election campaigns
Not exactly. The Supreme Court found that campaign finance laws that limited corporate contributions were unconstitutional. What we need is a law that states that political speech is reserved for those who are allowed to vote in the election in question. That would prevent outside influences of all sorts in elections.
The fortunate truth is that different people have different tastes, and so what sucks to you might be considered a rock anthem by the next person. It's called diversity, and we might see more of it if the **AA didn't effectively dictate our choices to most of us.
Let's pop a better hypothetical. There are dozens of games. Some don't have trailers. Most do. Some trailers catch your interest. A one is unexpectedly awesome.
Which do you spend money on?
What's that you say? The losers with no demo didn't get much consideration? What a shocker...
Exactly. If there's no way to evaluate a game, why would anyone drop money on it?
FTFS:
The industry is still losing a lot of money to piracy as the market becomes more online-based. So it’s encouraging to see strategies outlined to combat this.
Clearly they're not thinking straight. One of the chief reasons often given (read more slashdot if you haven't already seen a million such comments) for pirating a game is to test drive it before buying it. Free demos give that opportunity without giving away the whole product. They are an alternative to piracy.
Excellent reference. I like Palmer's stuff, and you're right, his material is probably better to start with. I just really like how Mosher is able to explain relatively complex concepts in a way that anyone can understand, and I love his graphs and charts.
All very true. OTOH, I can dispense any amount I want at a time, even if it's just a 2-oz sample. Plus, with kegs if my friends want beer, they actually have to visit me.;)
I have some nice 1-liter flip-tops with rugged carrying crates that make it easy to transport them, but I just never seem to use them much.
Slashdot Mirror
Not the schools, but the teacher unions do.
I suppose that depends on which video cards and SSDs you use.
b (small "b") == "bits"
B (big "B") == "Bytes"
The hard drive industry isn't out to screw you. AFAIK, HDD storage has always been quoted in base 10 instead of base 2 (K=1,000 instead of 1,024, etc), but the difference was never really obvious until lately as the numbers got huge.
I firmly believe that the free market should hold the answers to most problems in the free market, but I also recognize that monopoly conditions alter the nature of a free market, and generally require outside intervention to set right. This is especially true in the case of a monopoly that will LIE, CHEAT, and STEAL(*1) to protect its monopoly, in which case they are actually destroying the free market that is required for a healthy economic ecosystem.
The primary effect of a monopoly running amok is the destruction of most other players in the market. MS accomplished that.
One secondary effect in this case was the html incompatibilities that MS introduced shattered the most basic premise of the world wide web - that information could be made available and read by all based on certain standards. The efforts of web developers to create work-arounds is all that prevented the www from being completely partitioned into IE and non-IE space. Unfortunately, there are still many important sites (or parts of sites) that *require* Internet Explorer in order to work(*2). The result has been real costs to people and businesses in terms of software costs, web development costs, and communication issues because of broken IE-only government web sites, to name a few. These are costs we have been forced to bear in order to line Bill Gates' pockets. In short, there is great harm in allowing a monopoly to go unregulated and unrestrained.
Having seen over a decade of a stifled, monopolized market (ie, no longer free) and a largely broken internet, resorting to government intervention is hardly unreasonable. The loosening of MS's grip on the de facto control of html has only happened through a combination of events and independent efforts. Firefox, Opera, and other innovators have breathed life back into the browser market, but it hasn't been easy. Government intervention (belated and heavy-handed, but in the end, I believe at least partly beneficial) has helped accelerate non-MS browser adoption, and clearly demonstrates that given a free choice, people are happy to choose non-MS browsers.
(*1) The overall list of MS's deceptions, market manipulations, and outright fabrications is too long to list here. However, I suggest you examine the federal case against MS in the late 90's in which they knowingly presented fabricated evidence to a federal court ... got caught ... and got away with it. Literally. Just for contrast, around the same time, a much smaller courtroom lie nearly toppled a sitting President.
It's not a truly free market when a monopoly is in place, but here's an idea anyway. The free market has no government intervention, right? Well, since the government already intercedes in the market on the behalf of copyright and patent holders, let's remove such protections from those that have monopolies. Let's stop feeling sorry for MS and its complaints about pirating. If you put a virtual gun to my head and force me to buy your software because you fucked things up by breaking the html standards, it is the duty of a free market to restore balance by removing your financial incentive to harm the market.
(*2) Sallie Mae's web site looks fine in many browsers, until you actually go to fill out the forms required for student loans, and then they drop the IE bomb on you.
If anything S.P. should be footing the bill for all the proceedings simply because she used such easy/obvious answers that it was inevitable to happen.
Great idea. Maybe we could make rape victims pay to prosecute and incarcerate their attackers. After all, look how they were dressed ... they were clearly asking for it.
Don't blame the victim, moron.
It is estimated to be about three to four times more abundant than uranium in the Earth's crust. It has been considered a waste product in mining rare earths, so its abundance is high and cost low.
Discaimer: I'm no expert, and I'm quoting Wikipedia. But it sounds like thorium is relatively plentiful and isn't too hard to get.
I have to say that "all single mothers are SATAN." is a gross misstatement, since it misses all the single non-mothers, married mothers, and married non-mothers. ;p
200 years tops for nuclear power, but that actually an assessment it will last 189 years, assuming energy use doesn't rise and mining costs don't go up, both of which seem to me trivially wrong ...).
More intelligent reactor designs and fuel reprocessing could extend fission as a viable power source far beyond your estimates. We have a metric assload of Thorium. Heck, even the nuclear "waste" that greenies want to plan in Yucca mountain would be more useful as new fuel, either in via reprocessing, or in a reactor that can burn up the nastier fission byproducts, or some combination thereof.
So harvesting solar energy for human use means something else must die. This is as certain as that stones will still fall downward tomorrow.
That all-or-nothing perspective is really harmful. We obviously aren't about to give up electricity. What is the alternative? Solar panels on my roof won't be killing much of anything. My roof isn't growing grass. Same with all my neighbors' roofs. The earth absorbs (and reflects) so much solar energy, that much of our energy needs could be met with fraction of what goes unused by plants and animals.
I think that at this point, everyone realizes that we need multiple sources of power, not just fission, not just wind, not just solar, not just hydro, not just geothermal. But taken together and prudently implemented, these could satisfy our needs for long into the future.
So why do I get the nagging feeling that solar power (and wind power, for similar reasons) may be popular now, but as soon as they're implemented on non-trivial scales, we will see their effects on nature, they'll become a new green bogey man ?
The law of unintended consequences always applies, of course. The key, I think, is balance in all things.
The portrayal of the VPN information suggested that Childs should not have had this documentation, even though he was the city's lead network admin and apparently had to maintain these lists as part of his job. But entering the VPN information into the court records made them public -- the San Francisco district attorney's office committed a significant security breach, opening up VPN access to anyone who cared to look at the document. Although the passwords alone were not enough to provide complete access to the city networks, they did constitute one part of the VPN's two-phase authentication configuration.
(link) I wonder if the someone from the DA's office will stand trial for whatever laws cover such a broad and incompetent breach of security. Seems fair, after all, considering what they're doing to him. And before anyone says "Hey, they're lawyers, not IT guys, you can't expect them to have the same level of password security sensitivity that IT folks do, yada yada yada", I'd say that any lawyer that ignorant of IT security has no business involved with this case to begin with.
I have some doubts about Child's story, but stupid stuff like this on the part of the city certainly lends support to his alleged fear of turning over passwords to incompetent city employees.
... unless they include nano-accelerometers in which case you could move your eyes up and down to scroll. Oh, and a widget that detects vertical axis alignment, to keep the image from tipping if your contacts rotate a bit by accident.
Heh heh. Funny, but the truth is that more money never solves the problems caused by waste. It only encourages it.
Point taken.
but shrink the whole thing by half in both dimensions
Holy flat earth theory, Batman, BadAnalogyGuy just eliminated a whole dimension!
Doesn't mean they can't, either.
There probably is a reward, and I bet it doubles if Gizmodo produces a credible article praising the new iPhone.
If this technology ever comes to pass, I can imagine a crowdsourced Google streetview type mashup that meshes together the combined streaming lifeviews of several pedestrians & motorists on every street at any given time, providing a near real-time 3d model of a city at street level, as well as the ability to roll that model forwards and back through time.
In practice, yeah, I expect so. We'll see in the next major election.
IIRC, the US recently passed a law that basically says commercial organisations can contribute unlimited funds to election campaigns
Not exactly. The Supreme Court found that campaign finance laws that limited corporate contributions were unconstitutional. What we need is a law that states that political speech is reserved for those who are allowed to vote in the election in question. That would prevent outside influences of all sorts in elections.
The fortunate truth is that different people have different tastes, and so what sucks to you might be considered a rock anthem by the next person. It's called diversity, and we might see more of it if the **AA didn't effectively dictate our choices to most of us.
Ha! I know a trick question when I see one. They don't have souls.
Let's pop a better hypothetical. There are dozens of games. Some don't have trailers. Most do. Some trailers catch your interest. A one is unexpectedly awesome. Which do you spend money on?
...
What's that you say? The losers with no demo didn't get much consideration? What a shocker
The industry is still losing a lot of money to piracy as the market becomes more online-based. So it’s encouraging to see strategies outlined to combat this.
Clearly they're not thinking straight. One of the chief reasons often given (read more slashdot if you haven't already seen a million such comments) for pirating a game is to test drive it before buying it. Free demos give that opportunity without giving away the whole product. They are an alternative to piracy.
Hmm ... bizarre neurological reaction to ordinary stuff ... sounds like the woman who became chronically easily aroused after falling off her Wii.
Excellent reference. I like Palmer's stuff, and you're right, his material is probably better to start with. I just really like how Mosher is able to explain relatively complex concepts in a way that anyone can understand, and I love his graphs and charts.
All very true. OTOH, I can dispense any amount I want at a time, even if it's just a 2-oz sample. Plus, with kegs if my friends want beer, they actually have to visit me.;)
I have some nice 1-liter flip-tops with rugged carrying crates that make it easy to transport them, but I just never seem to use them much.