I do have a similar bag of rice, but I don't eat rice too often - it has hardly any vitamins. I try to keep that in mind.
I am not attached to eating grasses in part because I don't find them tasty, and in part because they cannot be guaranteed to be clean. Quite a few food-borne epidemics happen in the USA - basically, every year - just because it's all but impossible to ensure that all this cabbage, lettuce, or what's its name, a plant that grows outdoors, on huge fields, is protected from contaminants of all kinds. At best they wash the leaves, but that's not enough.
Meat is better controlled, and the way I cook it (super well done) guarantees that it's safe to eat. Experience proves it. Considering the way I like my meat prepared, it makes absolutely no difference if the original meat was mooing five minutes ago or five months ago. I do not care about taste, and I do not care about eating. I eat to live. If only I could eat a little pill once per year that would replace all the food in that year, I'd take it and say thanks. Eating is a waste of time. I have more interesting things to do.
Living some distance away from the city, and from everyone else, is also healthy. I have fresh air here. There are no random strangers sneezing into your face. One can live for years without getting a flu even once. When I lived in a large city (population 10M) I got sick twice per year - there was no escape from the virus. I would not want to go back to the crowded city.
fictitious, adj
1. not genuine or authentic; assumed; false: to give a fictitious address.
2. of, related to, or characteristic of fiction; created by the imagination
Link. Usable here, IMO, though "fictional" may still be more appropriate.
Meat stores pretty well if frozen. I have a freezer. Unless you keep chickens or something (I can, but I don't have time to bother) the store-bought meat has unknown provenance, even if you buy a small piece of it every day. Another option is to personally know the butcher. Few do.
I can grow a lot of salad materials if I want to. But I don't have time to do that either. I can buy a few bags of greens when I am at the store. They last me a week without loss in quality (that I can perceive.) I am not an avid eater of grass.
I know you think this may take up a lot of time, but frankly it's worth it -- for the better quality of fresh food.
I bake my own fresh bread. Can't be more fresh than that. Takes about 5 minutes to mix the ingredients for the machine. Cost: hard to measure. A comparable loaf from the store will cost you $3, and it will contain ingredients that you do not need or want (such as those that preserve freshness for weeks.) When I make my own bread I know exactly what goes into it.
And time-wise... yes, it is important. Use a stopwatch and time the visit to the store. I don't think I can do it faster than in 15 minutes, considering parking, walking, selecting goods, standing in line, paying, loading the purchases into the car, and leaving the parking lot. 15 minutes * 20 days * 12 months = 60 hours of your life or almost three days per year spent standing in lines in a store! What a joy! Wouldn't you find some better use of that time? We do not live forever, and your time is not free to waste. Buying in bulk also costs less, and refrigerators are quite a handy invention.
I know this sounds crazy but some people go to the market every day.
Yes, some people do that. Other people have better things to do with their life than to spend 30 minutes every day in a store. I buy food maybe once in two weeks. Some of it is in cans, other is dry (pasta, rice, flour) and other is frozen, so it can be stored nearly forever. I load the car pretty well on those trips. The store is in about 40 minutes of driving from my home. (There are stores closer than that; the closest is about 15 minutes away, but I dislike it.) I usually stop by the better store when I am in the area for other reasons; and when you are free to pick the day, it's not difficult to find time.
Sometimes the basket gets quite heavy, but it's still something I could carry 100 meters with little problem. And that's 1+ weeks of groceries for me (yeah I'm single).
This works if you buy often, and only in small packages. This is expensive. I tend to buy stuff in large packages, they cost far less per unit of food. But one gallon container will be pretty heavy. There is also an issue of how fast can you deliver frozen food to your own freezer. I guess a short trip on a bicycle is not any worse than a long trip in a car, but in some cases this is a factor (for example, pushing a cart for a mile in hot sun vs. driving an a/c car for 5 miles.) Your family may not like melted ice cream.
Two months is barely enough to understand the problem and to start reading top level documents. Not even looking at the code. Most of those tasks are system-level, and it will be essential to understand what data formats each of those entities wants - before some poor code monkey is given signed requirements to generate that data.
[in a newspaper]... I have the right to take a knife and cut these ads out, or paint them over. I can even hire a person, or a robot, to do that for me. Isn't that what adblockers are doing?
It doesn't seem to be the site linked on your user account, though, since I see ads.:)
The linked site is a large online library. No, it's not my site:-) I won't publish the URL to my site.
Firstly: No, they won't.
This means that the site closes down. The value of the service was not worth the bother of paying. Note that I provided an example of eQSL.cc - this site is not free if you are more than a chance visitor. And it is not $1 per year either - it's something like $30 per year. Still, I pay - the service is worth it. Sorry that your site was not as successful; you had only fair weather fans, not those who were willing to help you out in return. I never heard of your Web site, but that's probably because I don't have an Xbox.
You may think this classifies my site as "not viable to exist", which of course it doesn't now, but it did for 6 years due to advertising revenue - and with 5 million total users, I was doing *something* right
What you did right is you spread bird food on a square mile and observed lots of birds flocking to free dinner. There is no business model in this activity. Once the food is gone, the birds take off and go elsewhere. Do not expect silent gratitude, you can't pay with it for the hosting.
But as I said initially, I wasn't intending on being a "soulless corporation", I just wanted to maintain and grow a service to meet the (at-times) overwhelming demand.
See my example with birds again. The demand for food among birds is strong. What does that mean, business-wise? IMO, you would be better off if you positioned yourself not as a free source of $something, and not as a soulless corporation, but as a fair dealer. People can listen to good reasons. Your audience would be smaller, but it would be a healthy audience - one that knows very well what it pays and what it gets for their money. Well, in your case you are saying that paywall was not an option. But generally it would have worked.
That's actually what I do. I offer a piece of software on my Web site, for money. And I offer a bunch of projects for free, under GPL. No hidden catches. What you see is what you get.
Sure, you've done all kinds of math for bandwidth in your example (which is grossly under-bid; just this isolated comment thread is 19k gzipped for the HTML alone. Chrome tells me the front page HTML is ~45k), but what about compute cycles to parse data and render the comment threads?
Perhaps that was the driving force behind Slashdot switching to minimum display, with Javascript controls allowing you to see more on demand. But note that audience and pageviews are related. They also pre-render the front page and serve a static image. There are ways to optimize. But once you get to some serious bandwidth you move to a different world - I do not suggest running eBay on a single Celeron box over home-grade DSL. The cost of bandwidth also gets lower as you buy it in bulk. A well connected datacenter will be happy to assist here.
Well hold on, what exactly are you outlining here in terms of 'privacy' and the sale of such? Perhaps I'm wrong, but while it's common knowledge that ad companies know you visited Site A, and Site B, I would imagine the vast majority of the major ad platforms have no way of identifying the true identify of 'tftp' - where you live (beyond IP geolocation), your name, identify of loved ones.
If ad networks know what sites I visit, there is a way to correlate activities there, even if they are done under different logins. With enough statistics the links become pretty well formed, and you then know that a certain $user spends 20% of his time on Slashdot, 30% of his time on CNN, and 40% of his time on The Huffington Post. You know what pages he visits there, and for how long. You may notice new comments, left by unknown users $foo and $bar, that match those visits. The rule of thumb is to keep
Can we just step back and first agree that not every website on the internet is a full-fledged business hell-bent on removing your privacy and liberties for the quickest dollar?
Yes, sure, we can. I have a Web site. I don't attack people's privacy. And I don't have ads on the Web site. It's free for all. But if someone inserts ad scripts into his Web site, he sells his visitors to the ad companies. He has no control over what exactly they serve. It could be viruses. It could be obscene ads. It could be political ads (but I repeat myself.) It could be a message from Greenpeace, or from Japanese whalers.
Why? Do you not derive any entertainment from the internet in any form?
One can derive entertainment from things that are free. One can make things free that aren't too hard to provide. Some collectors of paintings offer them for public viewing, even though it's their money that paid for the paintings. People knew how to share even before they formed a language.
I can only assume you don't compensate anyone for accessing or interacting with someone's web presence
There are a few services that I find useful and worth of paying for. Others have more choice - some gaming networks, some movie streaming services, some Internet radios... but I have no use of them. I do pay for ARRL, but it includes more than just access to the Web site. I do pay for eQSL.cc. I would generally pay for a useful (to me) service.
So in your 'none-or-the-other' ecosystem, any website with an appreciable, growing fanbase should put an "Oops, got too popular" closing message once they outgrow a free or nominally-priced host that this essential charity is no longer financially feasible?
Demand subscription. If 100,000 fans are indeed in love with the Web site they will pay $1 per year to run a few servers at Amazon. If they do not pay, they get no service. Those rules are very simple and easy to understand, as opposed to the current "free" service that comes with light years of attached strings, and then with endless bitching that some users cut those strings off.
Perhaps we should more accurately define "expensive", but I would imagine bandwidth costs alone for site ranked among the top ~1600 (Alexa approximation) would be fairly sizable. Then you have hardware: servers, memory, networking equipment.
Will that cost $100,000 per year in hardware and rent and bandwidth? Rackspace has these prices: $150/mo pays for 500GB of bandwidth per month. Let's say we have the same 100,000 users who refresh the site ten times per day. So we need 1 million accesses per day. Each access is 10 kB, so we need 10 GB per day, or 300 GB per month. This is still included in the $150 deal. But if you need more (say, all your users are doing 100 page loads per day!) you can buy bandwidth for 18 cents per GB. Since you collected $100K per year, that would be $8300 per month - this will buy you 46 TB per month. Wouldn't that be somewhat sufficient, even as we assume that all 100,000 registered users connect every single day, and not once in a while as it usually happens?
In your post, you've outlined that there is no room for being in the middle... which is pretty much where all the most awesome stuff comes from. How do they get to exist?
They can exist in any way they want, as long as they don't sell privacy of their visitors to pay their bills. How would you like a bar where some trivial service is free, but they take a copy of your ID and publish it for any ID thief to see? It's like arguing that purse cutters at the market square must be allowed to cut purses - how else can they sustain their small business? But, of course, not every revenue stream is legal, or ethical.
So yes, you paid for all of your equipment. But you haven't paid anything to view the content if you block ads. Why do you have absolute right to view it without some kind of compensation to the owner for their costs?
Ad revenue is minimally moral because it uses you as a product, not as a human who makes decisions. Why does the site owner have a right to treat the visitor as a fuel for his profit-generating machine?
If the site cannot be free (such as being ran as a service to the Internet) then it should charge money for visits - and die shortly after. As many people said above, the Internet would be only better off that way. A discussion site like Slashdot is not expensive to run, and it can be all done by volunteers. Would you volunteer to review submissions to your group's car talk site for one day in a month? You don't need to pay $100K to a professional editor who can't even spell.
Do you consider it unethical if people recognize you and tailor their conversation with you to your shared interests?
I'm sure *you* would consider it unethical if a complete stranger stops you in the street, addresses you by your real name, and tries to sell you a gift for a GF that you met only yesterday.
Why would a government / terrorist want to have a list of 100 million Internet users who are tech-savvy, paranoid, and hate being manipulated? You would be better off dealing with users who are not on that list.
How much better would it be if when visiting a web site you got a single popup saying click to proceed with adverts, or click to pay a fraction of a cent per page viewed.
Do not underestimate the challenge of taking the third route.
Well, actually police officers have learned to view the log of calls on the phone; and if it comes to testifying in front of the judge it's not an entirely harmless lie to say that you were not on the phone - the records exist not only in your phone, but also at the cellular provider. It would be trivial to catch you in that lie. The LEO timestamps the traffic stop when he runs your plates, before you even know it - and he is free to move the time of offense a few minutes back.
There is no such logs in GG, since it is always online (as long as your cell phone can get online.) There is no log of specific activities - at least the police does not know how to get to it. Without that log it is technically impossible to prove that you were not looking at lolcats and not played some youtube video as you were driving.
XP was a very good choice compared to Linux as it was 12 years old. Cost of Windows ($50 per copy?) was entirely immaterial. The important things were maturity, support, features, and toolchain. Linux in the year 2000 was light on those. Where in Linux's Event Viewer is the Security Log? How many objects can be audited in Linux? In NT - a lot, and it all was available immediately. In the toolchain department even today autotools give you a horrifying experience compared to MSVC.
Developers of ATM took the most complete foundation for their work (the OS) and then added what was custom. If they started with Linux, or BSD, or DOS, they'd have to add far more - and the more you write yourself the more you have to maintain. If they started with Linux that would be kernel 2.0.x - and today we are on 3.x, with gigabytes of patches applied to libc and other essential components of the system. It would be extremely difficult to upgrade and maintain.
and why have they not moved to something else in the last decade?
Who is going to pay money for fixing what isn't broken? It's not broken even today, that's why they want to keep the machines running. It's pretty expensive to send engineers to tens of thousands of ATMs to upgrade them, since doing it remotely might be too scary. The hardware also probably went through ten revisions, so each ATM runs its own set of drivers that were customized to the hardware that is installed. Your upgrade task would require you to support all that old hardware - and that is a dead end job. Better to just keep the thing running until it falls apart, and then replace it.
Is this extended support going to avoid XP from being replaced? I bet not. Therefore paying for the extended support *plus* replacing is certainly going to cost more than just replacing.
That's not the case. XP-based ATMs probably run on a horribly slow SBC that has 512 MB of RAM (why to pay for more if the application does not need it?) The goal of this extension is simply to wait until existing machines reach their scheduled replacement dates. Then they will be scrapped. The new machines will be based on something else... which, you can bet, will be also obsolete in 10 years.
With GG turning on and off easily, or on its own, there is no way to prove guilt - not without forensic examination of the log. This means that GG is a wide open door to texting and browsing Web from behind the wheel. Mere wearing it proves nothing - until the legislature says something about that.
With regard to having GG off while driving, this is not viable because recording, or taking still pictures, while driving is a valid use (as long as you do it by voice, which GG is designed for.) It's certainly more valid than wearing it in crowd.
IMO, coax only makes sense between analog cameras and the closet where the DVR is installed. This is only because analog cameras are cheaper (-$100) than megapixel IP cameras ($500+.) I have no use for coax otherwise. It was meant for TV signal, but do you want every room to have its own TV? I have a little TV tuner that connects to the network, and then you can watch TV (digital) on any PC. It would make sense to buy one or several of those tuners and mount them right on the TV antenna, to avoid losses in cables. Besides, coax cable costs more, and you cannot just plug it into a switch without loss of quality.
Conduits between rooms, with pull strings, would be very useful. But you need to plan for those access panels. If the switches need to be installed, one should plan for those too. I have no such conduits, outside of the cable that is already in place, and some rooms are missing network. My phones are all SIP (and one DECT wireless phone on an SIP adapter,) all connected to 3CX, so network is required everywhere. Wireless is not an option, you need cable.
I have exactly 42 addressable Insteon devices, plus some access points and some motion sensors that are not addressable. The reliability of all of them hovers about 90%. Note that Insteon retransmits up to 4 times if ACK is not seen. Only one device has 60% reliability, and that is probably due to wiring that leads to it. I also have one Insteon thermostat; it is so bad (crashes) that I cannot have it in the network.
The largest problem is when you walk into a room and press a button. Two events are generated at the same time, and they are competing for bandwidth. Oftentimes one of them is not delivered to the controller. Insteon is not that good at resolving collisions.
I have some Z-wave devices, since I'm developing their firmware (we have the license and the SDK.) Z-Wave is faster, and this means that probability of collision is lower. There is also spatial separation of segments of a larger network - RF reaches only some nodes, but not all of them. In power line based systems all nodes hear all other nodes because the injected signal is pretty loud. (Exception is RF connections of Insteon, but even then if several access points hear your motion sensor they may both retransmit.)
One obvious advantage of Insteon is cost - these are cheaper devices. But expect about 5% of them to fail on you. I have three devices that are dead now. Insteon also works in steel NEMA boxes; Z-Wave will require the antenna to be dragged out.
Z-Wave is the only one that you want to have. Insteon is not very reliable, being dependent on power lines for signaling (at low baud rate, to make things worse) and nothing else can compare to these two.
Z-Wave is entirely RF-based and requires no wiring. However make sure you have plenty of Ethernet everywhere because you will want to have Ethernet-connected sensors such as the power meter, the solar inverter, and a bunch more - plan for those ahead of time.
Plan also for video cameras for security and Ethernet cables to them for IP (or coaxial cables if you pick analog cameras.) You will need entry/exit keypad controllers to operate things (don't know what kind of property you got.) Basically, plan everything before they are done with framing. Make sure all wires are in steel conduits, so that they are protected from Mickey Mouse. You will need live + neutral + protective ground everywhere.
Consoles offer better isolation of the game from the OS. You do not want one game to affect another, as it happens in Windows. You also want a stable hardware platform that delivers guaranteed results. Not 150 FPS on one system and 1.5 FPS on another, but steady 50 FPS (or whatever) on all of them.
Consoles also isolate your game computer from your work computer. If you don't work at home, you don't need a computer then - a console, or a tablet, will be a sufficient replacement to get to the Twitbook.
I mean the ability to run an application designed to automatically scale between a 24" display that has keyboard, mouse and likely touch controls and also the ability to scale down to a 3" phone. Part of the theory is that applications are designed around multiple form factors.
If you mean merely scaling fonts, that is not welcome when you run such an application on a 25" monitor - the font would be an inch tall. You can't even read it from that close, in that size.
If you mean that the application will dynamically recreate its window, adding or removing controls, or adding and removing functionality, depending on the screen size, this is hardly ever done, and is not going to be universally done, for a million good reasons. To begin with, all functions must be available to all users. Rewriting forms for screens of different size is too expensive; it would be easier to separate business logic and the GUI, and make ten applications with ten different GUIs.
If you want to run Metro applications on the desktop, you run them in windows. This is super simple, and that's why Microsoft went out of their way to make sure it doesn't happen. Oh joy, two Metro applications side by side, what other miracles the future holds for us? If windowed, you could have ten of them side by side if you wanted to.
Slashdot Mirror
I do have a similar bag of rice, but I don't eat rice too often - it has hardly any vitamins. I try to keep that in mind.
I am not attached to eating grasses in part because I don't find them tasty, and in part because they cannot be guaranteed to be clean. Quite a few food-borne epidemics happen in the USA - basically, every year - just because it's all but impossible to ensure that all this cabbage, lettuce, or what's its name, a plant that grows outdoors, on huge fields, is protected from contaminants of all kinds. At best they wash the leaves, but that's not enough.
Meat is better controlled, and the way I cook it (super well done) guarantees that it's safe to eat. Experience proves it. Considering the way I like my meat prepared, it makes absolutely no difference if the original meat was mooing five minutes ago or five months ago. I do not care about taste, and I do not care about eating. I eat to live. If only I could eat a little pill once per year that would replace all the food in that year, I'd take it and say thanks. Eating is a waste of time. I have more interesting things to do.
Living some distance away from the city, and from everyone else, is also healthy. I have fresh air here. There are no random strangers sneezing into your face. One can live for years without getting a flu even once. When I lived in a large city (population 10M) I got sick twice per year - there was no escape from the virus. I would not want to go back to the crowded city.
fictitious, adj
1. not genuine or authentic; assumed; false: to give a fictitious address.
2. of, related to, or characteristic of fiction; created by the imagination
Link. Usable here, IMO, though "fictional" may still be more appropriate.
Meat stores pretty well if frozen. I have a freezer. Unless you keep chickens or something (I can, but I don't have time to bother) the store-bought meat has unknown provenance, even if you buy a small piece of it every day. Another option is to personally know the butcher. Few do.
I can grow a lot of salad materials if I want to. But I don't have time to do that either. I can buy a few bags of greens when I am at the store. They last me a week without loss in quality (that I can perceive.) I am not an avid eater of grass.
I know you think this may take up a lot of time, but frankly it's worth it -- for the better quality of fresh food.
I bake my own fresh bread. Can't be more fresh than that. Takes about 5 minutes to mix the ingredients for the machine. Cost: hard to measure. A comparable loaf from the store will cost you $3, and it will contain ingredients that you do not need or want (such as those that preserve freshness for weeks.) When I make my own bread I know exactly what goes into it.
And time-wise... yes, it is important. Use a stopwatch and time the visit to the store. I don't think I can do it faster than in 15 minutes, considering parking, walking, selecting goods, standing in line, paying, loading the purchases into the car, and leaving the parking lot. 15 minutes * 20 days * 12 months = 60 hours of your life or almost three days per year spent standing in lines in a store! What a joy! Wouldn't you find some better use of that time? We do not live forever, and your time is not free to waste. Buying in bulk also costs less, and refrigerators are quite a handy invention.
I know this sounds crazy but some people go to the market every day.
Yes, some people do that. Other people have better things to do with their life than to spend 30 minutes every day in a store. I buy food maybe once in two weeks. Some of it is in cans, other is dry (pasta, rice, flour) and other is frozen, so it can be stored nearly forever. I load the car pretty well on those trips. The store is in about 40 minutes of driving from my home. (There are stores closer than that; the closest is about 15 minutes away, but I dislike it.) I usually stop by the better store when I am in the area for other reasons; and when you are free to pick the day, it's not difficult to find time.
Sometimes the basket gets quite heavy, but it's still something I could carry 100 meters with little problem. And that's 1+ weeks of groceries for me (yeah I'm single).
This works if you buy often, and only in small packages. This is expensive. I tend to buy stuff in large packages, they cost far less per unit of food. But one gallon container will be pretty heavy. There is also an issue of how fast can you deliver frozen food to your own freezer. I guess a short trip on a bicycle is not any worse than a long trip in a car, but in some cases this is a factor (for example, pushing a cart for a mile in hot sun vs. driving an a/c car for 5 miles.) Your family may not like melted ice cream.
Two months is barely enough to understand the problem and to start reading top level documents. Not even looking at the code. Most of those tasks are system-level, and it will be essential to understand what data formats each of those entities wants - before some poor code monkey is given signed requirements to generate that data.
[in a newspaper] ... I have the right to take a knife and cut these ads out, or paint them over. I can even hire a person, or a robot, to do that for me. Isn't that what adblockers are doing?
It doesn't seem to be the site linked on your user account, though, since I see ads. :)
The linked site is a large online library. No, it's not my site :-) I won't publish the URL to my site.
Firstly: No, they won't.
This means that the site closes down. The value of the service was not worth the bother of paying. Note that I provided an example of eQSL.cc - this site is not free if you are more than a chance visitor. And it is not $1 per year either - it's something like $30 per year. Still, I pay - the service is worth it. Sorry that your site was not as successful; you had only fair weather fans, not those who were willing to help you out in return. I never heard of your Web site, but that's probably because I don't have an Xbox.
You may think this classifies my site as "not viable to exist", which of course it doesn't now, but it did for 6 years due to advertising revenue - and with 5 million total users, I was doing *something* right
What you did right is you spread bird food on a square mile and observed lots of birds flocking to free dinner. There is no business model in this activity. Once the food is gone, the birds take off and go elsewhere. Do not expect silent gratitude, you can't pay with it for the hosting.
But as I said initially, I wasn't intending on being a "soulless corporation", I just wanted to maintain and grow a service to meet the (at-times) overwhelming demand.
See my example with birds again. The demand for food among birds is strong. What does that mean, business-wise? IMO, you would be better off if you positioned yourself not as a free source of $something, and not as a soulless corporation, but as a fair dealer. People can listen to good reasons. Your audience would be smaller, but it would be a healthy audience - one that knows very well what it pays and what it gets for their money. Well, in your case you are saying that paywall was not an option. But generally it would have worked.
That's actually what I do. I offer a piece of software on my Web site, for money. And I offer a bunch of projects for free, under GPL. No hidden catches. What you see is what you get.
Sure, you've done all kinds of math for bandwidth in your example (which is grossly under-bid; just this isolated comment thread is 19k gzipped for the HTML alone. Chrome tells me the front page HTML is ~45k), but what about compute cycles to parse data and render the comment threads?
Perhaps that was the driving force behind Slashdot switching to minimum display, with Javascript controls allowing you to see more on demand. But note that audience and pageviews are related. They also pre-render the front page and serve a static image. There are ways to optimize. But once you get to some serious bandwidth you move to a different world - I do not suggest running eBay on a single Celeron box over home-grade DSL. The cost of bandwidth also gets lower as you buy it in bulk. A well connected datacenter will be happy to assist here.
Well hold on, what exactly are you outlining here in terms of 'privacy' and the sale of such? Perhaps I'm wrong, but while it's common knowledge that ad companies know you visited Site A, and Site B, I would imagine the vast majority of the major ad platforms have no way of identifying the true identify of 'tftp' - where you live (beyond IP geolocation), your name, identify of loved ones.
If ad networks know what sites I visit, there is a way to correlate activities there, even if they are done under different logins. With enough statistics the links become pretty well formed, and you then know that a certain $user spends 20% of his time on Slashdot, 30% of his time on CNN, and 40% of his time on The Huffington Post. You know what pages he visits there, and for how long. You may notice new comments, left by unknown users $foo and $bar, that match those visits. The rule of thumb is to keep
Can we just step back and first agree that not every website on the internet is a full-fledged business hell-bent on removing your privacy and liberties for the quickest dollar?
Yes, sure, we can. I have a Web site. I don't attack people's privacy. And I don't have ads on the Web site. It's free for all. But if someone inserts ad scripts into his Web site, he sells his visitors to the ad companies. He has no control over what exactly they serve. It could be viruses. It could be obscene ads. It could be political ads (but I repeat myself.) It could be a message from Greenpeace, or from Japanese whalers.
Why? Do you not derive any entertainment from the internet in any form?
One can derive entertainment from things that are free. One can make things free that aren't too hard to provide. Some collectors of paintings offer them for public viewing, even though it's their money that paid for the paintings. People knew how to share even before they formed a language.
I can only assume you don't compensate anyone for accessing or interacting with someone's web presence
There are a few services that I find useful and worth of paying for. Others have more choice - some gaming networks, some movie streaming services, some Internet radios... but I have no use of them. I do pay for ARRL, but it includes more than just access to the Web site. I do pay for eQSL.cc. I would generally pay for a useful (to me) service.
So in your 'none-or-the-other' ecosystem, any website with an appreciable, growing fanbase should put an "Oops, got too popular" closing message once they outgrow a free or nominally-priced host that this essential charity is no longer financially feasible?
Demand subscription. If 100,000 fans are indeed in love with the Web site they will pay $1 per year to run a few servers at Amazon. If they do not pay, they get no service. Those rules are very simple and easy to understand, as opposed to the current "free" service that comes with light years of attached strings, and then with endless bitching that some users cut those strings off.
Perhaps we should more accurately define "expensive", but I would imagine bandwidth costs alone for site ranked among the top ~1600 (Alexa approximation) would be fairly sizable. Then you have hardware: servers, memory, networking equipment.
Will that cost $100,000 per year in hardware and rent and bandwidth? Rackspace has these prices: $150/mo pays for 500GB of bandwidth per month. Let's say we have the same 100,000 users who refresh the site ten times per day. So we need 1 million accesses per day. Each access is 10 kB, so we need 10 GB per day, or 300 GB per month. This is still included in the $150 deal. But if you need more (say, all your users are doing 100 page loads per day!) you can buy bandwidth for 18 cents per GB. Since you collected $100K per year, that would be $8300 per month - this will buy you 46 TB per month. Wouldn't that be somewhat sufficient, even as we assume that all 100,000 registered users connect every single day, and not once in a while as it usually happens?
In your post, you've outlined that there is no room for being in the middle... which is pretty much where all the most awesome stuff comes from. How do they get to exist?
They can exist in any way they want, as long as they don't sell privacy of their visitors to pay their bills. How would you like a bar where some trivial service is free, but they take a copy of your ID and publish it for any ID thief to see? It's like arguing that purse cutters at the market square must be allowed to cut purses - how else can they sustain their small business? But, of course, not every revenue stream is legal, or ethical.
So yes, you paid for all of your equipment. But you haven't paid anything to view the content if you block ads. Why do you have absolute right to view it without some kind of compensation to the owner for their costs?
Ad revenue is minimally moral because it uses you as a product, not as a human who makes decisions. Why does the site owner have a right to treat the visitor as a fuel for his profit-generating machine?
If the site cannot be free (such as being ran as a service to the Internet) then it should charge money for visits - and die shortly after. As many people said above, the Internet would be only better off that way. A discussion site like Slashdot is not expensive to run, and it can be all done by volunteers. Would you volunteer to review submissions to your group's car talk site for one day in a month? You don't need to pay $100K to a professional editor who can't even spell.
Do you consider it unethical if people recognize you and tailor their conversation with you to your shared interests?
I'm sure *you* would consider it unethical if a complete stranger stops you in the street, addresses you by your real name, and tries to sell you a gift for a GF that you met only yesterday.
Why would a government / terrorist want to have a list of 100 million Internet users who are tech-savvy, paranoid, and hate being manipulated? You would be better off dealing with users who are not on that list.
Why do you consider yourself a "customer" if you are not paying to be on the site through viewing ads? Isn't that more of a parasite than a customer?
How do you classify a visitor to Slashdot who, from time to time, posts comments but does not view ads?
Or, in other words, what Slashdot would be if nobody, or hardly anyone (see Technocrat.net and Kuro5hin.org) posts comments - insightful or not?
Content providers have a right to display on your computer when YOU request their site.
In other news, newspaper publishers have a right to demand that you read every article in their newspaper that you came across.
How much better would it be if when visiting a web site you got a single popup saying click to proceed with adverts, or click to pay a fraction of a cent per page viewed.
Do not underestimate the challenge of taking the third route.
Well, actually police officers have learned to view the log of calls on the phone; and if it comes to testifying in front of the judge it's not an entirely harmless lie to say that you were not on the phone - the records exist not only in your phone, but also at the cellular provider. It would be trivial to catch you in that lie. The LEO timestamps the traffic stop when he runs your plates, before you even know it - and he is free to move the time of offense a few minutes back.
There is no such logs in GG, since it is always online (as long as your cell phone can get online.) There is no log of specific activities - at least the police does not know how to get to it. Without that log it is technically impossible to prove that you were not looking at lolcats and not played some youtube video as you were driving.
why would they chose XP in the first place
XP was a very good choice compared to Linux as it was 12 years old. Cost of Windows ($50 per copy?) was entirely immaterial. The important things were maturity, support, features, and toolchain. Linux in the year 2000 was light on those. Where in Linux's Event Viewer is the Security Log? How many objects can be audited in Linux? In NT - a lot, and it all was available immediately. In the toolchain department even today autotools give you a horrifying experience compared to MSVC.
Developers of ATM took the most complete foundation for their work (the OS) and then added what was custom. If they started with Linux, or BSD, or DOS, they'd have to add far more - and the more you write yourself the more you have to maintain. If they started with Linux that would be kernel 2.0.x - and today we are on 3.x, with gigabytes of patches applied to libc and other essential components of the system. It would be extremely difficult to upgrade and maintain.
and why have they not moved to something else in the last decade?
Who is going to pay money for fixing what isn't broken? It's not broken even today, that's why they want to keep the machines running. It's pretty expensive to send engineers to tens of thousands of ATMs to upgrade them, since doing it remotely might be too scary. The hardware also probably went through ten revisions, so each ATM runs its own set of drivers that were customized to the hardware that is installed. Your upgrade task would require you to support all that old hardware - and that is a dead end job. Better to just keep the thing running until it falls apart, and then replace it.
Is this extended support going to avoid XP from being replaced? I bet not. Therefore paying for the extended support *plus* replacing is certainly going to cost more than just replacing.
That's not the case. XP-based ATMs probably run on a horribly slow SBC that has 512 MB of RAM (why to pay for more if the application does not need it?) The goal of this extension is simply to wait until existing machines reach their scheduled replacement dates. Then they will be scrapped. The new machines will be based on something else... which, you can bet, will be also obsolete in 10 years.
With GG turning on and off easily, or on its own, there is no way to prove guilt - not without forensic examination of the log. This means that GG is a wide open door to texting and browsing Web from behind the wheel. Mere wearing it proves nothing - until the legislature says something about that.
With regard to having GG off while driving, this is not viable because recording, or taking still pictures, while driving is a valid use (as long as you do it by voice, which GG is designed for.) It's certainly more valid than wearing it in crowd.
Z-wave frequencies are in 900 MHz ISM band, exact frequencies being country-specific.
IMO, coax only makes sense between analog cameras and the closet where the DVR is installed. This is only because analog cameras are cheaper (-$100) than megapixel IP cameras ($500+.) I have no use for coax otherwise. It was meant for TV signal, but do you want every room to have its own TV? I have a little TV tuner that connects to the network, and then you can watch TV (digital) on any PC. It would make sense to buy one or several of those tuners and mount them right on the TV antenna, to avoid losses in cables. Besides, coax cable costs more, and you cannot just plug it into a switch without loss of quality.
Conduits between rooms, with pull strings, would be very useful. But you need to plan for those access panels. If the switches need to be installed, one should plan for those too. I have no such conduits, outside of the cable that is already in place, and some rooms are missing network. My phones are all SIP (and one DECT wireless phone on an SIP adapter,) all connected to 3CX, so network is required everywhere. Wireless is not an option, you need cable.
I have exactly 42 addressable Insteon devices, plus some access points and some motion sensors that are not addressable. The reliability of all of them hovers about 90%. Note that Insteon retransmits up to 4 times if ACK is not seen. Only one device has 60% reliability, and that is probably due to wiring that leads to it. I also have one Insteon thermostat; it is so bad (crashes) that I cannot have it in the network.
The largest problem is when you walk into a room and press a button. Two events are generated at the same time, and they are competing for bandwidth. Oftentimes one of them is not delivered to the controller. Insteon is not that good at resolving collisions.
I have some Z-wave devices, since I'm developing their firmware (we have the license and the SDK.) Z-Wave is faster, and this means that probability of collision is lower. There is also spatial separation of segments of a larger network - RF reaches only some nodes, but not all of them. In power line based systems all nodes hear all other nodes because the injected signal is pretty loud. (Exception is RF connections of Insteon, but even then if several access points hear your motion sensor they may both retransmit.)
One obvious advantage of Insteon is cost - these are cheaper devices. But expect about 5% of them to fail on you. I have three devices that are dead now. Insteon also works in steel NEMA boxes; Z-Wave will require the antenna to be dragged out.
Z-Wave is the only one that you want to have. Insteon is not very reliable, being dependent on power lines for signaling (at low baud rate, to make things worse) and nothing else can compare to these two.
Z-Wave is entirely RF-based and requires no wiring. However make sure you have plenty of Ethernet everywhere because you will want to have Ethernet-connected sensors such as the power meter, the solar inverter, and a bunch more - plan for those ahead of time.
Plan also for video cameras for security and Ethernet cables to them for IP (or coaxial cables if you pick analog cameras.) You will need entry/exit keypad controllers to operate things (don't know what kind of property you got.) Basically, plan everything before they are done with framing. Make sure all wires are in steel conduits, so that they are protected from Mickey Mouse. You will need live + neutral + protective ground everywhere.
Consoles offer better isolation of the game from the OS. You do not want one game to affect another, as it happens in Windows. You also want a stable hardware platform that delivers guaranteed results. Not 150 FPS on one system and 1.5 FPS on another, but steady 50 FPS (or whatever) on all of them.
Consoles also isolate your game computer from your work computer. If you don't work at home, you don't need a computer then - a console, or a tablet, will be a sufficient replacement to get to the Twitbook.
I mean the ability to run an application designed to automatically scale between a 24" display that has keyboard, mouse and likely touch controls and also the ability to scale down to a 3" phone. Part of the theory is that applications are designed around multiple form factors.
If you mean merely scaling fonts, that is not welcome when you run such an application on a 25" monitor - the font would be an inch tall. You can't even read it from that close, in that size.
If you mean that the application will dynamically recreate its window, adding or removing controls, or adding and removing functionality, depending on the screen size, this is hardly ever done, and is not going to be universally done, for a million good reasons. To begin with, all functions must be available to all users. Rewriting forms for screens of different size is too expensive; it would be easier to separate business logic and the GUI, and make ten applications with ten different GUIs.
If you want to run Metro applications on the desktop, you run them in windows. This is super simple, and that's why Microsoft went out of their way to make sure it doesn't happen. Oh joy, two Metro applications side by side, what other miracles the future holds for us? If windowed, you could have ten of them side by side if you wanted to.