It'll have to be enough cheaper than magentic storage and appear to be long lived enough so that people can overcome their unwillingness to switch from something that works just fine.
You are exactly wrong. Reliability is a huge problem. Capacity is a trivial one. If you run out of space, just buy a bigger, faster drive to supplement the existing one and keep going. Easy. On the other hand, if you lose a drive, buy a new drive AND rebuild your system. Extremely painful. I know, since I've lost hard disks on two of my last three computers.
You may say I'm just a whiner who is too lazy to back up regularly. And you're right. Which is why when I recently bought a PC I paid $350 extra for the most reliable storage option: a 128GB SSD, instead of the default 500GB hard disk.
There is a widespread presumption that all good GUIs are MVC based. So, to get approval for a design you have to dress it up in MVC terminology, whether that makes any sense or not. After twenty years of this, the terms no longer even mean anything, since so many wildly differing things have been labeled MVC. Time has transformed an excellent pattern of limited applicability into a useless time waster that must be applied to everything.
Manual key exchange between two people standing next to each other: So what? Automated key exchange between people on different continents who have never met before: Now there's a problem!
There are economies of scale in the auto industry, but the price of an individual model still doesn't drop much.
The choice of car body material is illustrative. Fiberglass is cheaper than sheet metal for small production runs, since you don't have the up front cost of tooling up expensive sheet metal stamping machines. Sheet metal is cheaper than fiberglass for large production runs, since you can amortize the cost of the stamping machine over many units and there is less labor cost per unit. Once you have gone into production with a fiberglass body, it is not feasible to re-tool your assembly line to use sheet metal instead of fiberglass, so as to achieve an economy of scale. Such a change would a) totally disrupt the assembly line, and b) force you to redo all of your safety tests, etc.
Generally speaking, in the auto manufacturing business, you decide how many vehicles you are going to make and what economies of scale you will see years before the first vehicle is made. If you guess wrong, you don't get a chance to change your mind.
So, in the case of Tesla, if the current model is wildly successful, its price is still unlikely to come down. Instead, they will introduce a follow-on model with more planned units and a lower price from day one.
Evolution is a slow process, taking many generations. To claim that evolution is "over" based on the behavior of a single generation (ours) is remarkably shortsighted. Jones cites as an example an 18th century man (10 to 15 generations back) who fathered 888 children. This example is supposed to demonstrate how men in his generation fathered children later in life than men of our generation. But how does the example compare with men 2500 to 5000 generations back (50000 to 10000 years ago), a period when humans were rapidly evolving? Those men rarely lived into their 50s. I doubt they were fathering many children at that age.
No "evolution affecting" behavior pattern that we see today has been constant for even the last 20 generations, or is likely to continue for the next 20.
I see no problem with teaching people A method to compete in the market place.
The real problem here is that the method being taught is not viable. What these guys are teaching may be good tactics, but it is lousy strategy. Competing with OSS in market niches where it has a clear advantage is just bad business. How stupid would you have to be to build, for example, a new web browser with a traditional commercial business model? Who would pay to use it?
Commercial software has a competitive advantage when the number of consumers is small, but expensive software could provide them with a real competitive advantage.
OSS has a competitive advantage when the number of consumers is large; and customers view the software as infrastructure, valuing reliability, interoperability, and stability over differentiating features.
That is a much more important lesson to teach than how to fight dirty in a worthless niche.
The university setting makes all the difference here.
Certainly this kid's actions were illegal and "grey hat."
In the process of growing from a stupid kid to a responsible professional, many people go through a stage where they have the skills of a professional and the judgment of a kid.
What kind of a school, upon catching a student at this stage, decides to ruin his life?
Now, all of you hardliners, I challenge you to post one of the following responses: 1) I have never committed a computer crime. 2) I have committed a computer crime. Society would be better off today if I had been caught and severely punished.
I challenge you to send an elephant to the moon and safely return it to the earth within this decade!
As you can see, any idiot can issue a challenge. Many challenges, even. The purpose of the reward is typically not to provide economic incentive for the person taking up the challenge. It is to let the public know that the challenge is worth taking seriously. The challenger is saying: not only do I think this can be done and should be done, it is important enough to deserve a substantial reward.
Of course, this exactly the opposite of the challenge under consideration, in which the challenger is saying: I don't think you can do this, but you can have a lollipop if you do.
Whatever else he is, Bill Gates is an actor. He communicates to achieve a desired purpose. He does not broadcast a stream-of-consciousness of whatever is on his mind. You can see this in the way he is mild-mannered sweater-wearing innovation guy in his public communications and ass-chewing perfectionist guy to his employees. What is telling, though, is that usability obviously isn't important enough to him to actually insist on it. He knows about serious usability issues in Microsoft software; and he chews people out about it; but he doesn't actually follow through to get the problems fixed.
Viacom alleges in their complaint that YouTube receives a financial benefit directly attributable to infringing activity (via add revenue generated from the infringing material)
Also, they allege that infringing activity is apparent, given YouTube's ability to filter out other things (pr0n and the copyrighted material of it's partners.)
Each of these allegations appears to be directed at voiding the safe harbor provision in the law.
Here are the relevant parts of the safe harbor provision (512(c)(1))
(1) In general. - A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, if the service provider - (A)(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing; (ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or (B) does not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity; and
I've been involved in hiring software developers many times. I've NEVER seen the name of the school on the resume influence a hiring decision.
What does matter, especially for finding a job right out of college, is the relationship that certain employers have to certain schools. Many employers only send recruiters to one or two schools, and they tend to get their new graduates and interns from those schools.
Finding your first job right out of college will be your most difficult job search. Employers, as a general rule, want to hire people with previous experience in the field. Many won't even consider new graduates.
An internship provides two advantages. First, you will get valuable experience in your field. Second, if you have a successful internship, after graduation you can usually get a permanent job offer from the company you interned with.
So, go to the school that has the better internship/coop program... and take advantage of it.
Please choose the statement that best describes you:
A) I want to develop programs that are, theoretically, infinitesimally faster, even though they crash whenever I run them in practice.
B) I want to force those annoying kernel developer fucktards to follow the damn specification.
C) I want my software to work reliably, even though it means sacrificing performance and putting up with fucktards.
If you chose A, academia might be right for you. If you chose B, consider the public sector. If you chose C, you might be suitable for a career in software development.
IANAL, but from what I have gathered reading/., fair use is an affirmative defense, not a right. In this way it is similar to saying 'I did it in self defense'. The plaintiff alleges that the defendant did something wrong. The defendant might choose to deny doing the deed, or he might choose to deny that the deed was wrong, because it was 'fair use'.
The point is, obviously the plaintiff is not going to lead with a complex argument that there was no fair use here. They are going to wait for the defendant to try to claim that there was fair use, then let him hang himself trying to explain how sharing is fair use.
RTFA! The senate did not, in fact, pass a law banning or filtering anything. They commissioned a study to propose alternatives. That is the politician's polite way of saying "I'm not going to do anything meaningful for you today. Come back in two years, after I get re-elected."
The troublesome thing about this scheme is that it seems very sound legally (IANAL).
To patent something, it must be novel and non-obvious. Clearly, the fix for ANY software defect qualifies:
Novel: If someone had already done it, the software would already work.
Non-obvious: If the fix was so obvious, why didn't the author just fix it before releasing it the first place?
It also seems viable from a practical standpoint. Consider that patent holding isn't about protecting your invention. It is about convincing your victims to settle out of court, since patent litigation is so expensive and risky. All you need to do is make a quick settlement seem more appealing than a long legal battle.
Ummm, in answer to your question... ALL telecommunications occur over analog connections. At the lowest, physical, layer of the protocol stack, physical devices send and receive analog signals as electrical pulses, light pulses, or radio waves. Higher levels of the protocol stack may be digital, but the lowest one is always analog.
That, of course, doesn't change the fact that attempting to encrypt the physical layer is just wrongheaded. Your communications are then only secure if you can arrange a secure physical link (In this case using copper wire!) for every hop. Much more convenient and reliable to encrypt a higher layer of the stack.
The focus of the article on automotive use distracts from the real potential of this technology. For most renewable energy technologies, energy storage is more of a problem than energy production. Wind energy, for example, can be harvested for less than $0.03 per kilowatt hour (it costs less than burning coal), but only when and where the wind is blowing. If you store the harvested wind energy in a chemical storage battery, the economics of harvesting the energy are suddenly overshadowed by the economics of the battery. There are many flavors of energy storage technology (batteries, capacitors, pumped hydro, hydrogen, flywheels, etc.) offering different tradeoffs between efficiency, energy density, lifespan, etc. Each of these technologies has applications for which it is the best choice. None of them is even close to petroleum as a vehicle fuel, with its high energy density, ease of handling, and ability to sit in your gas tank until you need it.
If this article is accurate, aluminum based energy storage would have a number of applications as long term storage. Imagine backup generators running off of aluminum instead of gasoline. No more big tank of volatile gasoline sitting around indefinitely waiting for the lights to go out. Instead, you have a big tank of non-flammable, non-toxic aluminum pellets.
Which raises an interesting question: Can you store the fuel as pure aluminum, or does it have to be stored as aluminum-gallium alloy? Storing something that explodes whenever it gets wet is no fun at all.
The really outrageous claim here is not the unit cost of building a laptop, but the total cost of the whole production run.
1 million units @ $47 each = $47 million
Assume that you spend $20 million on obsolete parts and $10 million on assembly workers. So far, so good.
That leaves $17 million to cover such odds and ends as staffing, management, research, development, customer support, documentation, sales, accounting, lawyers, and facilities.
You can't really get very much of those things for $17 million.
The total cost of the OLPC project runs into the billions of dollars. They can afford to shop around for the best/cheapest parts, and build their own if nothing suitable is on the market. You just can't do that kind of thing without some serious capital.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll have to be enough cheaper than magentic storage and appear to be long lived enough so that people can overcome their unwillingness to switch from something that works just fine.
You are exactly wrong. Reliability is a huge problem. Capacity is a trivial one. If you run out of space, just buy a bigger, faster drive to supplement the existing one and keep going. Easy. On the other hand, if you lose a drive, buy a new drive AND rebuild your system. Extremely painful. I know, since I've lost hard disks on two of my last three computers.
You may say I'm just a whiner who is too lazy to back up regularly. And you're right. Which is why when I recently bought a PC I paid $350 extra for the most reliable storage option: a 128GB SSD, instead of the default 500GB hard disk.
There is a widespread presumption that all good GUIs are MVC based. So, to get approval for a design you have to dress it up in MVC terminology, whether that makes any sense or not. After twenty years of this, the terms no longer even mean anything, since so many wildly differing things have been labeled MVC. Time has transformed an excellent pattern of limited applicability into a useless time waster that must be applied to everything.
The sun rotates every 25-36 days.
The different rotation rates of different parts is what causes sunspots.
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/sun/Solar_interior/Sun_layers/differential_rotation.html
I think the GP was intended as $SARCASM, but I'm not sure. That, of course, makes it the best kind of $SARCASM.
Manual key exchange between two people standing next to each other: So what?
Automated key exchange between people on different continents who have never met before: Now there's a problem!
There are economies of scale in the auto industry, but the price of an individual model still doesn't drop much.
The choice of car body material is illustrative. Fiberglass is cheaper than sheet metal for small production runs, since you don't have the up front cost of tooling up expensive sheet metal stamping machines. Sheet metal is cheaper than fiberglass for large production runs, since you can amortize the cost of the stamping machine over many units and there is less labor cost per unit. Once you have gone into production with a fiberglass body, it is not feasible to re-tool your assembly line to use sheet metal instead of fiberglass, so as to achieve an economy of scale. Such a change would a) totally disrupt the assembly line, and b) force you to redo all of your safety tests, etc.
Generally speaking, in the auto manufacturing business, you decide how many vehicles you are going to make and what economies of scale you will see years before the first vehicle is made. If you guess wrong, you don't get a chance to change your mind.
So, in the case of Tesla, if the current model is wildly successful, its price is still unlikely to come down. Instead, they will introduce a follow-on model with more planned units and a lower price from day one.
Correction: Should read "(50000 to 100000 years ago)", not "(50000 to 10000 years ago)"
Evolution is a slow process, taking many generations. To claim that evolution is "over" based on the behavior of a single generation (ours) is remarkably shortsighted. Jones cites as an example an 18th century man (10 to 15 generations back) who fathered 888 children. This example is supposed to demonstrate how men in his generation fathered children later in life than men of our generation. But how does the example compare with men 2500 to 5000 generations back (50000 to 10000 years ago), a period when humans were rapidly evolving? Those men rarely lived into their 50s. I doubt they were fathering many children at that age.
No "evolution affecting" behavior pattern that we see today has been constant for even the last 20 generations, or is likely to continue for the next 20.
I see no problem with teaching people A method to compete in the market place.
The real problem here is that the method being taught is not viable. What these guys are teaching may be good tactics, but it is lousy strategy. Competing with OSS in market niches where it has a clear advantage is just bad business. How stupid would you have to be to build, for example, a new web browser with a traditional commercial business model? Who would pay to use it?
Commercial software has a competitive advantage when the number of consumers is small, but expensive software could provide them with a real competitive advantage.
OSS has a competitive advantage when the number of consumers is large; and customers view the software as infrastructure, valuing reliability, interoperability, and stability over differentiating features.
That is a much more important lesson to teach than how to fight dirty in a worthless niche.
I've always liked tests because they weed out the technically incompetent. Now it turns out they also weed out the hypersensitive.
The university setting makes all the difference here.
Certainly this kid's actions were illegal and "grey hat."
In the process of growing from a stupid kid to a responsible professional, many people go through a stage where they have the skills of a professional and the judgment of a kid.
What kind of a school, upon catching a student at this stage, decides to ruin his life?
Now, all of you hardliners, I challenge you to post one of the following responses:
1) I have never committed a computer crime.
2) I have committed a computer crime. Society would be better off today if I had been caught and severely punished.
I challenge you to send an elephant to the moon and safely return it to the earth within this decade!
As you can see, any idiot can issue a challenge. Many challenges, even. The purpose of the reward is typically not to provide economic incentive for the person taking up the challenge. It is to let the public know that the challenge is worth taking seriously. The challenger is saying: not only do I think this can be done and should be done, it is important enough to deserve a substantial reward.
Of course, this exactly the opposite of the challenge under consideration, in which the challenger is saying: I don't think you can do this, but you can have a lollipop if you do.
Whatever else he is, Bill Gates is an actor. He communicates to achieve a desired purpose. He does not broadcast a stream-of-consciousness of whatever is on his mind. You can see this in the way he is mild-mannered sweater-wearing innovation guy in his public communications and ass-chewing perfectionist guy to his employees.
What is telling, though, is that usability obviously isn't important enough to him to actually insist on it. He knows about serious usability issues in Microsoft software; and he chews people out about it; but he doesn't actually follow through to get the problems fixed.
Viacom alleges in their complaint that YouTube receives a financial benefit directly attributable to infringing activity (via add revenue generated from the infringing material)
Also, they allege that infringing activity is apparent, given YouTube's ability to filter out other things (pr0n and the copyrighted material of it's partners.)
Each of these allegations appears to be directed at voiding the safe harbor provision in the law.
Here are the relevant parts of the safe harbor provision (512(c)(1))
(1) In general. - A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, if the service provider -
(A)(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;
(ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or
(B) does not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity; and
I've been involved in hiring software developers many times. I've NEVER seen the name of the school on the resume influence a hiring decision.
What does matter, especially for finding a job right out of college, is the relationship that certain employers have to certain schools. Many employers only send recruiters to one or two schools, and they tend to get their new graduates and interns from those schools.
Finding your first job right out of college will be your most difficult job search. Employers, as a general rule, want to hire people with previous experience in the field. Many won't even consider new graduates.
An internship provides two advantages. First, you will get valuable experience in your field. Second, if you have a successful internship, after graduation you can usually get a permanent job offer from the company you interned with.
So, go to the school that has the better internship/coop program... and take advantage of it.
Please choose the statement that best describes you:
A) I want to develop programs that are, theoretically, infinitesimally faster, even though they crash whenever I run them in practice.
B) I want to force those annoying kernel developer fucktards to follow the damn specification.
C) I want my software to work reliably, even though it means sacrificing performance and putting up with fucktards.
If you chose A, academia might be right for you.
If you chose B, consider the public sector.
If you chose C, you might be suitable for a career in software development.
IANAL, but from what I have gathered reading /., fair use is an affirmative defense, not a right. In this way it is similar to saying 'I did it in self defense'. The plaintiff alleges that the defendant did something wrong. The defendant might choose to deny doing the deed, or he might choose to deny that the deed was wrong, because it was 'fair use'.
The point is, obviously the plaintiff is not going to lead with a complex argument that there was no fair use here. They are going to wait for the defendant to try to claim that there was fair use, then let him hang himself trying to explain how sharing is fair use.
RTFA! The senate did not, in fact, pass a law banning or filtering anything. They commissioned a study to propose alternatives. That is the politician's polite way of saying "I'm not going to do anything meaningful for you today. Come back in two years, after I get re-elected."
Vote Quimby!
The troublesome thing about this scheme is that it seems very sound legally (IANAL).
To patent something, it must be novel and non-obvious. Clearly, the fix for ANY software defect qualifies:
Novel: If someone had already done it, the software would already work.
Non-obvious: If the fix was so obvious, why didn't the author just fix it before releasing it the first place?
It also seems viable from a practical standpoint. Consider that patent holding isn't about protecting your invention. It is about convincing your victims to settle out of court, since patent litigation is so expensive and risky. All you need to do is make a quick settlement seem more appealing than a long legal battle.
Ummm, in answer to your question... ALL telecommunications occur over analog connections. At the lowest, physical, layer of the protocol stack, physical devices send and receive analog signals as electrical pulses, light pulses, or radio waves. Higher levels of the protocol stack may be digital, but the lowest one is always analog.
That, of course, doesn't change the fact that attempting to encrypt the physical layer is just wrongheaded. Your communications are then only secure if you can arrange a secure physical link (In this case using copper wire!) for every hop. Much more convenient and reliable to encrypt a higher layer of the stack.
If this article is accurate, aluminum based energy storage would have a number of applications as long term storage. Imagine backup generators running off of aluminum instead of gasoline. No more big tank of volatile gasoline sitting around indefinitely waiting for the lights to go out. Instead, you have a big tank of non-flammable, non-toxic aluminum pellets.
Which raises an interesting question: Can you store the fuel as pure aluminum, or does it have to be stored as aluminum-gallium alloy? Storing something that explodes whenever it gets wet is no fun at all.
The really outrageous claim here is not the unit cost of building a laptop, but the total cost of the whole production run. 1 million units @ $47 each = $47 million Assume that you spend $20 million on obsolete parts and $10 million on assembly workers. So far, so good. That leaves $17 million to cover such odds and ends as staffing, management, research, development, customer support, documentation, sales, accounting, lawyers, and facilities. You can't really get very much of those things for $17 million. The total cost of the OLPC project runs into the billions of dollars. They can afford to shop around for the best/cheapest parts, and build their own if nothing suitable is on the market. You just can't do that kind of thing without some serious capital.