Hehe yeah. more than a GB of help files and still no help. Have you ever read the EULA for MSDN? It has nice phrases like "code supplied as is" etc. No guarantee that it will work, that it is suitable for any purpose, etc. pretty boiler plate. (I've always found it funny though that documentation that says "this is how you do that" isn't held to at least work for what it is sold to work for). Then, it has a bunch of stuff that says in effect, you won't accuse MS of writing bad code, if someone sues them because of a bug in your code that you borrowed from the docs that you will defend them including paying legal fees. Nice, about as evil as you can get.
We've come to rely on being able to find things on the internet, it is sad to think that information might go away and cease to exist. That said, I guess it depends on the contract the writers have whether he has a right to have his body of work preserved or not. I mean if a company pays for your work it is theirs and not yours unless your contract entitles you to it. Once you've sold your work to somebody, they can never have anyone read it and use it to line hamster cages for all they care.
Doesn't Paypal require you to sent documentation to prove it was a false payment? Ie. goods not received or significantly not as advertised. I don't think many pirate bay supporters would like to provide documentation about whether or not they have "received" pirated material.
made by government officials. They don't realize that normal commuters don't have chauffeur driven BMWs. I usually hear estimates around 45-75 cents per mile for operating costs for a typical vehicle including all costs (insurance, repair, initial purchase, gas).
But what does 1% mean? 1% chance of getting pregnant per time? I mean sex with no contraception isn't 100%, not sure what the odds are assuming both people are fertile, but I'd guess less than 10%. The problem is you take a lot of chances and eventually your number gets called. That is why I'm an advocate double condom with spermicide-pill- IUD, and diapragm withdrawal method.
Also, I wonder how many more pregnancies will happen if this becomes popular. I mean a one night stand the girl knows whether or not she is on the pill and so she takes her chances. But now if the guy can say that he's on this then what? The dude doesn't necessarily care he's not the one that is going to get pregnant and he doesn't have to see her again. Also, six months for the sperm count to return: not sure how much I like that, not a big deal for guys as they tend to stay fertile later in life, but 6 months to an older women could be a big risk of hitting menopause before she can conceive.
At my work we have a couple dual socket T2 sparc servers (T5140) that we are using as fileservers for 30 disk arrays, 150TB of disk space. We went with them because we liked SAMFS (Sun's hierachial storage management system), and the T2 chips have 8 cores X 8 way threaded for a total of 128 simultaneous compute threads in a 1U server.
They can push a lot of I/O(60GB/s of I/O bandwidth per chip) but I wouldn't want it for compute intensive stuff because they only have 1 FPU per core, and 2 integer units per core (ie 8 threads have 1 FPU and 4 threads have 1 ALU). Anyways the current generation seemed to be targeted at I/O intensive stuff especially highly threaded protocols(eg. samba/NFS).
A network is tailored to the site and needs of the customer. Where they say 50% to 90% of a client's network ports are unused, does that mean that they've had users migrating from wired to wireless, or did they overpurchase on projected growth?
Exactly, or they purposely have more ports than people will use so that they can move computers around and still find a port in convenient reach.
Wireless has good enough speed for email and casual browsing but it won't work for every company. At my work people are moving files around that are several gigabits in size. Start sharing even a wireless n connection with a room full of people and your life would start to suck quickly.
When really close to zero cost pirating just isn't "free" enough for you. Based on: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html running a gaming rig 24/7 costs about $400 per year. But ~ a third of that would be during normal usage time so would be spent any ways, so roughly $266 per year for the overnight running. I think I'm willing to pay less than $1 a day for the amount I can pirate (or feed a child in africa). Still it will save you money in the long run, just not a drastic need.
Say that your employer is paying you to work on the project and has a NDA/no compete in your contract. I don't think you could spin the product off then even if its open source.
I found it interesting that they said that their cost was lower for a 50Mbps connection than it is for a 6Mbps. That said as my econ prof said "it is stupid to use cost to determine your price". You charge customers based on what the product is worth to them with the goal of maximizing the profit of the firm. It doesn't matter that diamonds aren't overly rare or expensive to mine, if they really want one you can charge them several multiples of the cost. The reverse is true for water in most countries. You can only charge the price that the "last user" is willing to pay for that use. That is typically for something of little value to them, like spraying down their driveway with a house. So even though people have to have water they pay a small price for it.
I have a good internet connection, 16/1 for around $30 (got to love europe), it is fast enough that I can download the regular quality TV I want to watch so I don't need cable. Of course I could always download more HD content to use up any extra bandwidth, but going from 16/1 to 30/2 which would cost me another $10 wasn't worth it to me. That "last use", which essentially is the difference from a regular format to HD content on my TV wasn't worth the 33% to me. I think it would be even harder to convince people of the need to go from say 50Mbps to 160Mbps, there just really isn't the need right now. The only think I can think that it would do for you as far as downloading goes, is if you didn't think ahead of what you wanted to watch, then the time you have to wait for the download would be less. Mmmh, I guess some people care about seeing the latest simpsons 10 minutes after it aired versus 20, but I don't:-).
Not to mention the admin complication of having to set up 21 machines rather than 1. Also, you now pretty much tie up a 24 port switch rather than 1 port on a switch.
The original article is about other DSL companies complaining that Bell's policy will make unlimited internet service unavailable because Bell is going to charge them usage based billing not fixed for their use of their infrastructure. Comcast/Verizon are totally different hardware. Yes I agree with you to the end user the internet should be the internet. To these other DSL companies though, they are seeing one companies billing choices forcing them to choose a similar billing method. Wether that is the case is debatable. They could still charge a flat rate and average out the costs for heavy and light users.
Time-and-time again history shows competition leads to "fear" of losing customers which means better service overall, whereas monopoly leads to a "don't care" attitude amongst the managers and stagnation.
Good point. The quality of service probably would improve.
I know your point is that it doesn't seem to make much sense for a company in terms of profit but although the profits might not be the same as that of a natural monopoly, I think the profits of an oligopoly would still be attractive.
Actually it was completely the opposite. I was arguing that a natural monopoly exists (and a government allows it to exist) because it is in the best interests of the customers. You can only discount to get into the market for so long. Eventually you have to start paying for the infrastructure and need to earn a normal return on investment. Several infrastructures, with sets of administration overhead etc, is just going to be more expensive than one in some scenerios.
There is a concept called minimum efficient scale, where the cost of producing another item falls with number produced and then levels out. Sometimes the whole market can be served by one company running at the minimum efficient scale, but any competitor that enters would not only not initially run at an efficient scale, but would take enough customers away from the first company that neither company would be in the efficient region. Thus prices would be higher with competition than by letting the monopoly continue in these cases. Governments then can try to prevent the monopolist from taking advantage of customers by either regulating (or control as a public entity) the monopoly, or create artificial competition by breaking down parts of the market and forcing the monopolist to allow the competitors (eg. leasing the infrastructure to other companies that provide the service).
Personally I don't like forced competition. It just seems like beating around the bush. You force a company to provide their equipment at competitive prices to competition so that the competition can undercut and force the monopolist to lower their prices. Why not just tell the monopolist what price they can charge the end customer? It's effectively the same thing and removes the costs associated with switching providers a lot of advertising overhead etc.
Also I don't like the situation were my service provider isn't the one that owns the infrastructure. I recently got DSL installed. The provider couldn't tell me when the phone guys would be by to activate my phone system because it was another company that owned the underlying phone line. When it breaks will I have the same problem, oh it's not us it is the phone company? I just don't like the idea of more than one company being responsible for one product that I purchase.
In my area Comcast and Verizon compete with one another, and I see a lot of benefit
This is phone versus cable. They aren't using the same infrastructure. I guess it all depends on how you define the industry whether they are a monopoly or not. Bell owns the infrastructure for phone, but has been forced to lease it out to create competition. They still are the sole supplier of the underlying hardware as far as I know.
My understanding is that Sprint and MCI bought their service from AT&T wholesale and then resold it. It was the government that forced AT&T to sell the minutes at "fair prices", which allowed MCI and friends to undercut AT&T which in turn forced AT&T to reduce its prices/change service etc. The government could have achieved the same thing with a price cap. It is all a matter of which flavor of glue politian's happen to prefer to sniff at the moment. Before they tried to regulate to make sure that the cable and phone guys didn't charge too much, then they got hooked on the efficient market theory and decided that free markets were the way to go. Now they think under-regulation helped cause the financial crisis so are going to regulate some more. Big old circle.
I meant more for primary and secondary education. The government mandates the curriculm and forces parents to send their kids to a school that meets that teaches that curriculm, and taxes you to pay for it as a public resource. I guess it might not be a natural monopoly, just highly dominated by government run institutions.
Not likely. That is why is is a natural monopoly. It isn't just that you have the infrastructure owned by one company, it is that the marginal cost for another company entering the market will be much much higher than the prices of the existing supplier, and even if you subsidize a second company while they roll out their infrastructure it still will cost more. There will now be two backbones sharing the same pool of customers, thus the fixed costs will have to be recovered fro, whatever the fraction of customers you can lure away is, not the whole market as it was before.
Also, the new company would have to run new wires to the house. So you buy a house and want to go with a different phone provider in this scenario you'd probably end up with a house full of the other guys boxes that are inactive and eye sores.
In short, people like to think that competition is the cure for everything, but unfortunately it is not. Sometimes the nature of the game is that it is cheaper for the customer to give one company excessive profits then to have two companies competing and have the price still be higher but now the companies' are just breaking even (in an economical since, ie including "fair" return on investment). If things get out of hand governments regulate the natural monopolies and make them lease their backbone, or only charge fair prices. Other natural monopolies belong to the government because it makes the most sense, education (though that depends were you are I suppose), national defence (could you imagine time sharing a tank with your neighbours? Would be fun though).
It depends on the workload. It looks like they got the least benefit from the "test web server" class of devices. So if you define you metrics as IOPS/$, or MB/s/$ and the difference between SSD an HDD is neglible your measurements are going to blow up. Obviously, if the results are correct, it wouldn't make sense to use SSDs in the test web server area.
What constitutes checking though? I wasn't referring to simple things like bounds checking on the fields. More like more subtle things like number of items or product number. If my database gets an order for 10 product X's, how is it to know that you really meant 1 product Y? Who handles these types of inevitable problems. The customer gets 10 things when they only wanted 1, now wants to send the rest back without charge. The index is zero based not one based and someone accidentally uses the wrong indexing to delete an important document from Google Docs by mistake, etc.
Companies can't be bothered to try to recover from other peoples mistakes, and they can't be bothered to test each new version of their server side stuff with everybodies' modified version of the client side. They inheritently should have full control of their web presence similar to how they need to be able to control a brink and mortar stores layout, cashier policy, maintenance etc, because it is there brand/sales that will suffer if something goes wrong.
Why does free speech have to include modifying someone else's words? If you don't know how to build a jet you rely on someone else that does, if you don't want to pay a farmer you can buy your own land and grow your own. If you don't want to use someone else's software under the terms they are willing to grant it to you then make your own. FOSS is great, but IMHO it isn't immoral to offer restricted rights for sale. I know when I buy a closed source product that I can't modify it, but if it does what I want I don't care, if it doesn't then I need to find a substitute or make one (or do without that desired ability entirely).
But there is a much bigger problem making web apps free. The end user doesn't own the server that runs the other part of the system. If you are a company, say Amazon, do you really want people to be able to rewrite your javascript app and start writing to your databases?
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Hehe yeah. more than a GB of help files and still no help. Have you ever read the EULA for MSDN? It has nice phrases like "code supplied as is" etc. No guarantee that it will work, that it is suitable for any purpose, etc. pretty boiler plate. (I've always found it funny though that documentation that says "this is how you do that" isn't held to at least work for what it is sold to work for). Then, it has a bunch of stuff that says in effect, you won't accuse MS of writing bad code, if someone sues them because of a bug in your code that you borrowed from the docs that you will defend them including paying legal fees. Nice, about as evil as you can get.
We've come to rely on being able to find things on the internet, it is sad to think that information might go away and cease to exist. That said, I guess it depends on the contract the writers have whether he has a right to have his body of work preserved or not. I mean if a company pays for your work it is theirs and not yours unless your contract entitles you to it. Once you've sold your work to somebody, they can never have anyone read it and use it to line hamster cages for all they care.
Doesn't Paypal require you to sent documentation to prove it was a false payment? Ie. goods not received or significantly not as advertised. I don't think many pirate bay supporters would like to provide documentation about whether or not they have "received" pirated material.
made by government officials. They don't realize that normal commuters don't have chauffeur driven BMWs. I usually hear estimates around 45-75 cents per mile for operating costs for a typical vehicle including all costs (insurance, repair, initial purchase, gas).
Also, I wonder how many more pregnancies will happen if this becomes popular. I mean a one night stand the girl knows whether or not she is on the pill and so she takes her chances. But now if the guy can say that he's on this then what? The dude doesn't necessarily care he's not the one that is going to get pregnant and he doesn't have to see her again. Also, six months for the sperm count to return: not sure how much I like that, not a big deal for guys as they tend to stay fertile later in life, but 6 months to an older women could be a big risk of hitting menopause before she can conceive.
The local gun shop?
They can push a lot of I/O(60GB/s of I/O bandwidth per chip) but I wouldn't want it for compute intensive stuff because they only have 1 FPU per core, and 2 integer units per core (ie 8 threads have 1 FPU and 4 threads have 1 ALU). Anyways the current generation seemed to be targeted at I/O intensive stuff especially highly threaded protocols(eg. samba/NFS).
What a pile of marketing crap.
A network is tailored to the site and needs of the customer. Where they say 50% to 90% of a client's network ports are unused, does that mean that they've had users migrating from wired to wireless, or did they overpurchase on projected growth?
Exactly, or they purposely have more ports than people will use so that they can move computers around and still find a port in convenient reach.
Wireless has good enough speed for email and casual browsing but it won't work for every company. At my work people are moving files around that are several gigabits in size. Start sharing even a wireless n connection with a room full of people and your life would start to suck quickly.
When really close to zero cost pirating just isn't "free" enough for you. Based on: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html running a gaming rig 24/7 costs about $400 per year. But ~ a third of that would be during normal usage time so would be spent any ways, so roughly $266 per year for the overnight running. I think I'm willing to pay less than $1 a day for the amount I can pirate (or feed a child in africa). Still it will save you money in the long run, just not a drastic need.
Say that your employer is paying you to work on the project and has a NDA/no compete in your contract. I don't think you could spin the product off then even if its open source.
I found it interesting that they said that their cost was lower for a 50Mbps connection than it is for a 6Mbps. That said as my econ prof said "it is stupid to use cost to determine your price". You charge customers based on what the product is worth to them with the goal of maximizing the profit of the firm. It doesn't matter that diamonds aren't overly rare or expensive to mine, if they really want one you can charge them several multiples of the cost. The reverse is true for water in most countries. You can only charge the price that the "last user" is willing to pay for that use. That is typically for something of little value to them, like spraying down their driveway with a house. So even though people have to have water they pay a small price for it.
I have a good internet connection, 16/1 for around $30 (got to love europe), it is fast enough that I can download the regular quality TV I want to watch so I don't need cable. Of course I could always download more HD content to use up any extra bandwidth, but going from 16/1 to 30/2 which would cost me another $10 wasn't worth it to me. That "last use", which essentially is the difference from a regular format to HD content on my TV wasn't worth the 33% to me. I think it would be even harder to convince people of the need to go from say 50Mbps to 160Mbps, there just really isn't the need right now. The only think I can think that it would do for you as far as downloading goes, is if you didn't think ahead of what you wanted to watch, then the time you have to wait for the download would be less. Mmmh, I guess some people care about seeing the latest simpsons 10 minutes after it aired versus 20, but I don't :-).
Not to mention the admin complication of having to set up 21 machines rather than 1. Also, you now pretty much tie up a 24 port switch rather than 1 port on a switch.
Time-and-time again history shows competition leads to "fear" of losing customers which means better service overall, whereas monopoly leads to a "don't care" attitude amongst the managers and stagnation.
Good point. The quality of service probably would improve.
I know your point is that it doesn't seem to make much sense for a company in terms of profit but although the profits might not be the same as that of a natural monopoly, I think the profits of an oligopoly would still be attractive.
Actually it was completely the opposite. I was arguing that a natural monopoly exists (and a government allows it to exist) because it is in the best interests of the customers. You can only discount to get into the market for so long. Eventually you have to start paying for the infrastructure and need to earn a normal return on investment. Several infrastructures, with sets of administration overhead etc, is just going to be more expensive than one in some scenerios.
There is a concept called minimum efficient scale, where the cost of producing another item falls with number produced and then levels out. Sometimes the whole market can be served by one company running at the minimum efficient scale, but any competitor that enters would not only not initially run at an efficient scale, but would take enough customers away from the first company that neither company would be in the efficient region. Thus prices would be higher with competition than by letting the monopoly continue in these cases. Governments then can try to prevent the monopolist from taking advantage of customers by either regulating (or control as a public entity) the monopoly, or create artificial competition by breaking down parts of the market and forcing the monopolist to allow the competitors (eg. leasing the infrastructure to other companies that provide the service).
Personally I don't like forced competition. It just seems like beating around the bush. You force a company to provide their equipment at competitive prices to competition so that the competition can undercut and force the monopolist to lower their prices. Why not just tell the monopolist what price they can charge the end customer? It's effectively the same thing and removes the costs associated with switching providers a lot of advertising overhead etc.
Also I don't like the situation were my service provider isn't the one that owns the infrastructure. I recently got DSL installed. The provider couldn't tell me when the phone guys would be by to activate my phone system because it was another company that owned the underlying phone line. When it breaks will I have the same problem, oh it's not us it is the phone company? I just don't like the idea of more than one company being responsible for one product that I purchase.
In my area Comcast and Verizon compete with one another, and I see a lot of benefit
This is phone versus cable. They aren't using the same infrastructure. I guess it all depends on how you define the industry whether they are a monopoly or not. Bell owns the infrastructure for phone, but has been forced to lease it out to create competition. They still are the sole supplier of the underlying hardware as far as I know.
My understanding is that Sprint and MCI bought their service from AT&T wholesale and then resold it. It was the government that forced AT&T to sell the minutes at "fair prices", which allowed MCI and friends to undercut AT&T which in turn forced AT&T to reduce its prices/change service etc. The government could have achieved the same thing with a price cap. It is all a matter of which flavor of glue politian's happen to prefer to sniff at the moment. Before they tried to regulate to make sure that the cable and phone guys didn't charge too much, then they got hooked on the efficient market theory and decided that free markets were the way to go. Now they think under-regulation helped cause the financial crisis so are going to regulate some more. Big old circle.
I meant more for primary and secondary education. The government mandates the curriculm and forces parents to send their kids to a school that meets that teaches that curriculm, and taxes you to pay for it as a public resource. I guess it might not be a natural monopoly, just highly dominated by government run institutions.
Also, the new company would have to run new wires to the house. So you buy a house and want to go with a different phone provider in this scenario you'd probably end up with a house full of the other guys boxes that are inactive and eye sores.
In short, people like to think that competition is the cure for everything, but unfortunately it is not. Sometimes the nature of the game is that it is cheaper for the customer to give one company excessive profits then to have two companies competing and have the price still be higher but now the companies' are just breaking even (in an economical since, ie including "fair" return on investment). If things get out of hand governments regulate the natural monopolies and make them lease their backbone, or only charge fair prices. Other natural monopolies belong to the government because it makes the most sense, education (though that depends were you are I suppose), national defence (could you imagine time sharing a tank with your neighbours? Would be fun though).
It depends on the workload. It looks like they got the least benefit from the "test web server" class of devices. So if you define you metrics as IOPS/$, or MB/s/$ and the difference between SSD an HDD is neglible your measurements are going to blow up. Obviously, if the results are correct, it wouldn't make sense to use SSDs in the test web server area.
Oh no, an academic with a real job, run for the hills.
sales of twenty sided dice have hit an all time low.
Hey, GM needs a high volume popular vehicle to save itself. Segway seems like a logical partner.
True, but that is why the board/shareholders can fire the CEO.
Companies can't be bothered to try to recover from other peoples mistakes, and they can't be bothered to test each new version of their server side stuff with everybodies' modified version of the client side. They inheritently should have full control of their web presence similar to how they need to be able to control a brink and mortar stores layout, cashier policy, maintenance etc, because it is there brand/sales that will suffer if something goes wrong.
Why does free speech have to include modifying someone else's words? If you don't know how to build a jet you rely on someone else that does, if you don't want to pay a farmer you can buy your own land and grow your own. If you don't want to use someone else's software under the terms they are willing to grant it to you then make your own. FOSS is great, but IMHO it isn't immoral to offer restricted rights for sale. I know when I buy a closed source product that I can't modify it, but if it does what I want I don't care, if it doesn't then I need to find a substitute or make one (or do without that desired ability entirely).
But there is a much bigger problem making web apps free. The end user doesn't own the server that runs the other part of the system. If you are a company, say Amazon, do you really want people to be able to rewrite your javascript app and start writing to your databases?