Actually, there is about 33M of us, and our growth rate is about 4.5% per annum, so in about, oh 150 yrs or so, the US will be concerned about getting taken over by Canucks, not the other way around:)
Good points. Just thought it is funny that they'd scape it so shortly after completion. Why complete it at all then? Is there some reasoning that says that the scientific value from 2000-2015 is worth the cost, but after that you don't get enough return?
If you are looking for quantifiable benifit, it is hard to justify any space exploration. How much is studying yeast grow in space worth to your economy? Well if it shows something interesting, and it can be reproduced on earth, or is worth the cost of brewing your beer in space, then it might be "worth it". However, it is much easier to estimate the value of expenditures in reducing hospital wait-times, or sending AIDS medication to Africa or a bunch of other things. The cost of going to space is too prohibitive, you drop 100M on the yeast study simply because of transportation costs, when you could buy 1000 labs a mass spectrometer for that.
Where am I going with this? Well IMHO if you thought that the expensive pure research was worth getting into, it should be worth maintaining. I heard that the ISS is in a decaying orbit, perhaps a big jump in expenditures would be necessary to push it back in place, past the date, not sure. What we have here is very similar to the Superconducting Super Collider project. One administration commits to a hugely expensive project, the next one changes their mind. You end up with a have used, or even worst, a half completed project.
Then throw it away in 5. I can see the US pulling back from being the majority stake holder, but giving up on the station completely is retarded. Plan for a moon mission, but give up on the only space station, duh. I'd love to see what the Russians would charge if there was issues with a shuttle and the crew had to go to the space station to await a rescue mission. Oh you saved 50B (random number) by not taking part, no problem, we'll let you stay here, and send up a Soviet rocket to pick you up, for only 60B.
Absolutely. The secondary purchaser takes it for granted that what is being sold to them, the seller holds appropriate patent/license to manufacture. The onus shouldn't be on the customer, but the manufacturer.
As a side point, anyone know if you "have" to do a patent search? I mean if your planning on patenting your invention, you have to make sure that there isn't a patent already. But say you sit in your office come up with a great idea, and just want to sell the goods. If you don't want the patent yourself, are you still forced to make sure that no one has patented the idea? I think you are, but it is a strange situation. Someone not interested in owning the rights to their idea, is forced to do a patent search anyways, to make sure someone else doesn't already hold a patent on the idea.
Too bad we can't trust that if manufacture Y uses the same technique as manufacture X but says they didn't steal the idea, that they are actually telling the truth. Instead, the civil courts force you to prove your innocence, rather than the other company prove your guilt.
I'm an IT admin for a cancer center. I feel your pain. I however always get paid for my after hours work, if I get called afterhours I get at least 4 hrs OT pay. If I have to come in they pay the transportation + 4hrs.
If your company is worth working for, letting your manager know what is happening should solve it. Case in point shortly after I started working at the cancer center, we had intermittent failures of one of the servers, after a couple nights getting calls at 4am I went to my manager. Told him I don't mind doing afterhours support (I'm the sole IT guy for the center), but don't want to be called on my home phone as it wakes everyone else up. Well within 2 weeks I had a Blackberry, and the understanding that I'll come to work when I feel like it after a late night. If I'm up to 4am now, I don't even bother coming in the next day.
A PACS SLA probably is in the neighbourhood of 60k per annum, with probably something like 10 calls a year, your company is probably making a killing on there service contracts, if you have the skills to do the job, then you should say if you want me at weird hours pay me like it.
I think your right now that I think about it. He does say that he thinks you'll come back for service. Also, isn't he the one that offers to give you $10 if you don't like it?
That is says like pretty much everyone else, in their commercial something to the effect: "try a free lesson, you will receive other lessons every month on such topics as... . If you don't like the trial lesson, simply return it free of charge." The singlar on the free should imply that this is a subscription and the rest will cost you. Just like magazines, time life music collections, etc, etc.
I'm not saying I like the sales technique, just that it is common and it should go without saying that a company will charge you somehow for their services. Plus, if the customer is dumb enough to give them their credit card number for something they thought was free, they don't pass the "reasonible individual" test that litigation requires.
Re:Read between the lines
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Halo 3 Review
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I say if a new Tetris or Minesweeper came out it would smoke them all:)
Your attempt at forking might even get some support from the community, however I'd think Linus's blessing on such a fork means something however... Exactly, I think the comment was more directed towards there being an 'official' kernel version for servers and and different one for the desktop.
Comments like "Just reconfigure the kernel to only load what you want, and recompile it, then you have what you need", are the most retarded things I've heard. Do you really think the average user cares to spend their spare time for months figuring out the innards of the kernel to do this? Is there any point in a company doing this, if a new version of the 'official' kernel will break their hacks?
Linux kicks windows butt in the IPC and process creation arena as per Microsoft Research (couldn't find the darn paper but its there somewhere, about Process isolation). When running server loads it is more efficient at getting things done that Windows. However Linux has for the most part sucked for interactive use. I'm not new to Linux, it had been my sole desktop OS for 8 years prior to this year, but honestly would users put up with and expect it to take 20 seconds to open an office app on Windows on a modern computer? No. But Linux can be that slow. Also people tolerate flaky crap on their Linux system, because oh well it was free, and it did say it was version 0.1 so I guess it is still a work in progress. But on Windows most people expect an app not to freeze all the time, even if it is free. I seriously think that Windows (at least XP) has gotten more usable that Linux on the desktop. Moving from 95% to 99% uptime on the desktop at the price of everything being slow isn't a trade off I'm willing to make. I'll use Linux for play, but not for my enterprise.
Anyone's opinion that well you haven't tried flavor X running desktop Y isn't requested or desired. I've used Fedora, Redhat, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, slackware, debian, etc. and among UNIX's Solaris 5-10, AIX, SGI IRIX, HP-UX, etc. None have compared to Windows on the desktop, especially when it comes to managablity/the ability to get programs that run on it and have the features required to replace a Windows system.
I think a fork would be a good idea, I'm not recommending take this out of the kernel or that out of the kernel, because I'm not sure what would be required to hack the kernel to make it work the best for desktops. But having a fork would allow the people that want a desktop OS to focus on providing good support and performance enhancements targeted to that group, while the server group can continue to focus on kicking butt on the server side. Having individuals or distros do the hacks themselves in a non "standard" kernel branch doesn't make sense, as it would eliminate the advantages of openness in the OSS community, if for no other reason then you have no guarantee of capatiblity between distros or future mainstream kernel releases.
OpenGL is at a more fundamental level than DirectX. DirectX (or at least as it is commonly bundled) has a lot of added features. OpenGL systems are mostly comparable, they have a library called glu (graphics library utility) and glut(graphics library utility toolkit) that include higher level functions like draw a sphere. Very few people use just OpenGl, just like very few people use just DirectX, they build engines on top of them and call those things. DirectX is a MS product and so Windows only, some graphics cards handle DirectX or OpenGL better than others. It was more of a game studio deciding they are going to code in DirectX that forces their game to only run on Windows, whereas if they use OpenGL it could be ported to Linux.
Agreed billing gets complicated. For emails though, couldn't they just query the mail server for a break down of the total messages from each server and bill that way? The load will be all local to the ISP datacenter. The individual user will have a locally hosted account. Spoofing aside, a scheme were at the end of the month, corporate senders of mail get a bill saying you sent 5M messages to or mail server, pay up would be fair.
As for SSH in a way you already might get penalized by the ISP. A lot of companies are packet shaping the network, and just assume that encrypted traffic is being used to mask the fact that it is a torrent connection. I have 6M cable service. If I VPN into work, with a dedicated server for my connection, all of a sudden I'm down to about 200k/s even from websites. Shut the VPN down, back up to full speed. So your not paying for bandwidth your not using, your just unable to use bandwidth that you are paying for;)
Thats the problem though. You are paying for the bandwidth, for the spam, ads etc. that you don't even want. I propose that the person initiating the traffic pay, so if you are pushing spam and popups, you pay for the full bandwidth, not just the hop from your server to the targets ISP mail server. But also the hop from the targets mail server to the end user.
Some of Google's adds are paid for hits from your search. They are a valid response to your query, imho. It is a potential answer to the query, just the order of the listing is gamed. I agree ads in pages often aren't requested by the user. However, sites that you log into, often say in there EULA that they make there revenue by offering ads, so the user in that case actually has agreed to take the ads with the content they want. Either way though the user initiated the content stream, it was a pull, not a push.
I think my suggestion would work, because if the company doesn't want to pay for the bandwidth/penality, they could always put in place a EULA were the user explicitly accepts the ads as the cost of the service. Going to a search engine, or something, and getting 10 popups and tickers all over the screen, is a not so subtle way to let the user know that is how they get the free service.
Possibly, but there is a fundamental difference in the situations. The user requested the data from Google, so there ISP fees apply for the bandwidth. The spammers are flooding the ISP's network, but aren't necessarily costumers of the ISP. The logical originator isn't a customer, so the ISP's customers are having traffic associated with their accounts that isn't their desire to initiate. The ISP can either block the stuff from coming so you don't get the bogus download fee, or they can bill someone else. I don't think it is ethical for the end recipient of spam to have to pay the salarys + the bandwidth for something they didn't even want.
Sues MS, and others for blocking there popup, err, targetting purchasing opportunities. Seriously, the ISP or who ever the end user is, chose to use the service, so they implcitely said 'they don't want to hear from you'.
I can't remember the original source but it was a few years ago I read an article about spam. Very interesting, most of the cost of advertising went to the advertiser (as it should) with paper media. Not so with spam, almost all the cost of spam goes to the recipient and hardly any to the spammer. You can easily spam 1000 per second from a server, so your looking at a very small fraction of a cent per message. But the user has to take their time to remove you message, their bandwidth is tied up etc. I think the estimate was in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars if you factor in the cost to the company paying the employee while they determine if it is spam or not. Even more if the spam has viruses, and causes system exploits. Spam filters work, sort of, sometimes they block stuff you want, and if not, you have to check your junk box every once in a while just in case, so it isn't saving you all the time associated with spam.
I think corporations that get spammed, including ISP's should be able to go to companys like DoubleClick and e360 and bill them for the aggregiate costs. "You sent 2 million emails through our network last month, here is your bill for 200k for bandwidth + costs for the end users". Money applied to spam filtering, or as a discount to the end user that had to deal with the unfortunate garbage.
It is the part of most submission policies that the article hasn't been published elsewhere and they have exclusive rights to the article if accepted.
There are a lot of great free journal sites, for example "the archives" http://arxiv.org/. The problem lies in the fact that anyone can submit to them, making filtering out the junk almost as hard as if you googled the topic. What a peer reviewed journal does is force a standard on the articles quality.
Also, kind of sad, but most journals also charge you for the privilege to get published. Your grants are often determined by your research, and your research is assessed by your publications. Open source publications won't cut it, because the grant committee won't be bothered to consider much of your non-peer reviewed stuff.
Since when is a four CPU node a supercomputer? I remember when the a new Apple system came out, I believe it was the dual CPU G4 system, and they tooted it as a supercomputer on the desktop because it can do 1GFLOP single precision.
I code for systems with 800 4 Optron nodes, with 10GB/s interconnect, and a couple hundred terabytes of SAN attached storage. That is a supercomputer:) Well sort of, a lot of people in the HPC community consider it just a cluster, as some programs need 64+ CPU's in SMP mode, so any loosely coupled memory model would be considered a serial farm:)
Also, note that high end platforms, would have redundant power, redundant high end interconnects, redundant hot swap drives etc. There also would be enough of them to need, high end switches, blowers, power conditioners, air circularators, and various other room coolers. Of course a custom built workstation without a graphics card, monitor, or even case is going to beat the pants off of HPC architecture price per flop, good work to the group, but hardly newsworthy in the HPC community.
I'm not catholic but...
Catholic doctrine says the pope has earthly authority over the church, and is inspired and thus incapable of errors. So saying you don't agree with the pope on an issue is akin to saying you don't agree with God. That said you wouldn't be against catholicism but God, if my understanding is correct (as the pope is God's anointed). So it would be Him, not the local diocese you'd have to answer too.
That said, I think by definition you are anti-X where X is a moral system you don't agree with. You're not anti the people in the religion, just the religion as a belief system. I can totally disagree with you over your beliefs, but it doesn't mean I'm against you, I'm against what you believe in, if someone else held your beliefs I'd be against them too, kind of thing. The anti- is general not specific. However, I can't think of anything people feel more strongly about, than what they believe in, so it is hard not to be offended when someone tells your stupid to believe what you do.
True. It would still depend on how smart the scheduler is though. For example, if network bound processes are given a lower priority than most other processes, it won't matter that you have two cores. The OS will probably have something more important to run on both cores than your network traffic. Even if it is just a service that wakes checks its schedule and sleeps, you'd still get the network process getting bumped more often than normal.
I think a reasonable test would be changes in bitrate of the playing video/audio. Does high bitrate mp3's run closer to the video rate on the network, or not?
Could be DRM like others said, but I wonder if it is the marvelous prioritized I/O biting you in the butt? Is there a way for you to check the spacing between packets? I wonder if the network packet gets sent, while waiting for a reply the process context switches, then because the interactive bit is at a higher priority it takes longer to get a time slice to run the process again. The video playback might be causing more context switches ifself, because of the bit rate is higher, so greater chance you'll get a cache miss and switch as the I/O falls through to the harddrive, and the network would get the CPU back, making the download + video faster than download + music.
But it is some much more fun commenting on the opensource community from the outside:)
P.S. I always found SQL Server weird. Originally coded my Sybase, but much lower performance. It is almost like the goal on the MS side, was to slow it down once the source changed hands, weird.
No problem. We need more interested people from humanities looking at hard science, and vis versa. Good things happen when they do, eg. DaVinci.
Thanks for pointing out an error in my critism. The physicist's probably don't share the thinking of the article writer. It seems every other month someone is saying that they made light travel faster than c, or slower for that matter. Usually that is followed by an article claiming this, but not stating that it is phase velocity not group, or they do, but don't explain the difference so people get really excited.
Wikipedia got it right, after I did a little editing of their derivation (they had the final line as vg = v, when it should have been vg = c). See:
Anyways, this is a subject that requires a lot of math, to properly understand what the formulas mean. In my physics studies, it would have taken 3 calculus courses, 2 classical mechanics courses, and a quantum course to really grasp it. That is what us physicists do, we take ten courses to understand a concept I hope to explain in 5-10 minutes. Not very smart, or very smart depending on the side of the fence your on:)
You appear to understand the concept of the wave-particle duality of light. Light behaves like a particle at times, and like a wave sometimes. The funny thing is light doesn't behave like a wave. A wave is a mathematical construction going both ways infinitely far. What we really mean is a piece of a wave, since it has a fixed source and hits a fixed target. This is a soliton (just like in the Star Trek the next generation episode, with the experimental soliton wave engine, if you ever seen it). From wikipedia's article on soliton's:
1) represent waves of permanent form;
2) are localised, so that they decay or approach a constant at infinity;
3) can interact strongly with other solitons, but they emerge from the collision unchanged apart from a phase shift.
This is a lot of useful properties for our model, 2) localized, so they have a beginning and end, 1) their shape doesn't change as they move through the medium, 3) they are preserved when they go through each other. Think of two different colours of light pointed to meet each other. If you place a screen at the intersection, you see the blended colour, but once you move past it the individual colours still exist. So a soliton has the properties we want to describe light.
When you see light as a wave, you can't distinguish between photons, but they are blended together (superimposed). After a couple more advanced math courses (mainly to get Fourier analysis), you can grind through the math and see that for the soliton to keep its shape, different frequencies will have to move at different speeds. Since one frequency is going up and down faster than the other, the shape would change if they moved together at the same speed. But sense you are seeing light as a wave, you can't see the individual photons, so you have to wait the whole normal speed of light time to make out the whole shape of the wave, ie. get information. You won't have enough information to workout the individual components of the group of photons until the last bit of the packet or soliton reaches the detector.
Now something that will blow your mind. If you take electromagnetism, and express it as a field, and then apply quantum mechanics to the field, you end up with what is called quantum electrodynamics, (you'd be in your last year of undergrad before you may see this, if particle physics is offered at that level at your school, but a lot of people don't see it until their PhD quantum course). Here light is a field (a photon is the particle responsible for transmitting the intera
1) Einstein postulated that the speed of light was a constant, before going on to derive special relativity. Measurements seem to support his conclusions, but special relativity doesn't predict that the speed of light is constant, we assume the speed of light is constant and get special relativity.
2) Light can and always could go faster than 3X10^8m/s. 3X10^8m/s is the group velocity of the wave, but individual frequencies of light go faster or slower. Since you need the whole wave packet to know the structure of the packet (ie get information), your stuck waiting for t = D/c time, but you can detect the quicker phases earlier. Read up a good fluid mechanics or advanced optics book for the differences between phase and group velocity.
3) This still doesn't make time travel possible. Time is still going forward, even saying the group velocity of light was broken. You could get ahead of light and see something that happened in the past, earlier than you should have, because you can communicate quicker than light, but it still is an event in the past. You could move to a location you otherwise wouldn't be able to be at by the given time moving below the speed of light, and have an effect you couldn't have had at that point in time otherwise, but you didn't go into the future, in the way normally thought, time kept ticking, you just traveled a different path through space-time, that normally was excluded.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there is about 33M of us, and our growth rate is about 4.5% per annum, so in about, oh 150 yrs or so, the US will be concerned about getting taken over by Canucks, not the other way around :)
If you are looking for quantifiable benifit, it is hard to justify any space exploration. How much is studying yeast grow in space worth to your economy? Well if it shows something interesting, and it can be reproduced on earth, or is worth the cost of brewing your beer in space, then it might be "worth it". However, it is much easier to estimate the value of expenditures in reducing hospital wait-times, or sending AIDS medication to Africa or a bunch of other things. The cost of going to space is too prohibitive, you drop 100M on the yeast study simply because of transportation costs, when you could buy 1000 labs a mass spectrometer for that.
Where am I going with this? Well IMHO if you thought that the expensive pure research was worth getting into, it should be worth maintaining. I heard that the ISS is in a decaying orbit, perhaps a big jump in expenditures would be necessary to push it back in place, past the date, not sure. What we have here is very similar to the Superconducting Super Collider project. One administration commits to a hugely expensive project, the next one changes their mind. You end up with a have used, or even worst, a half completed project.
Then throw it away in 5. I can see the US pulling back from being the majority stake holder, but giving up on the station completely is retarded. Plan for a moon mission, but give up on the only space station, duh. I'd love to see what the Russians would charge if there was issues with a shuttle and the crew had to go to the space station to await a rescue mission. Oh you saved 50B (random number) by not taking part, no problem, we'll let you stay here, and send up a Soviet rocket to pick you up, for only 60B.
As a side point, anyone know if you "have" to do a patent search? I mean if your planning on patenting your invention, you have to make sure that there isn't a patent already. But say you sit in your office come up with a great idea, and just want to sell the goods. If you don't want the patent yourself, are you still forced to make sure that no one has patented the idea? I think you are, but it is a strange situation. Someone not interested in owning the rights to their idea, is forced to do a patent search anyways, to make sure someone else doesn't already hold a patent on the idea.
Too bad we can't trust that if manufacture Y uses the same technique as manufacture X but says they didn't steal the idea, that they are actually telling the truth. Instead, the civil courts force you to prove your innocence, rather than the other company prove your guilt.
If your company is worth working for, letting your manager know what is happening should solve it. Case in point shortly after I started working at the cancer center, we had intermittent failures of one of the servers, after a couple nights getting calls at 4am I went to my manager. Told him I don't mind doing afterhours support (I'm the sole IT guy for the center), but don't want to be called on my home phone as it wakes everyone else up. Well within 2 weeks I had a Blackberry, and the understanding that I'll come to work when I feel like it after a late night. If I'm up to 4am now, I don't even bother coming in the next day.
A PACS SLA probably is in the neighbourhood of 60k per annum, with probably something like 10 calls a year, your company is probably making a killing on there service contracts, if you have the skills to do the job, then you should say if you want me at weird hours pay me like it.
I think your right now that I think about it. He does say that he thinks you'll come back for service. Also, isn't he the one that offers to give you $10 if you don't like it?
I'm not saying I like the sales technique, just that it is common and it should go without saying that a company will charge you somehow for their services. Plus, if the customer is dumb enough to give them their credit card number for something they thought was free, they don't pass the "reasonible individual" test that litigation requires.
I say if a new Tetris or Minesweeper came out it would smoke them all :)
Comments like "Just reconfigure the kernel to only load what you want, and recompile it, then you have what you need", are the most retarded things I've heard. Do you really think the average user cares to spend their spare time for months figuring out the innards of the kernel to do this? Is there any point in a company doing this, if a new version of the 'official' kernel will break their hacks?
Linux kicks windows butt in the IPC and process creation arena as per Microsoft Research (couldn't find the darn paper but its there somewhere, about Process isolation). When running server loads it is more efficient at getting things done that Windows. However Linux has for the most part sucked for interactive use. I'm not new to Linux, it had been my sole desktop OS for 8 years prior to this year, but honestly would users put up with and expect it to take 20 seconds to open an office app on Windows on a modern computer? No. But Linux can be that slow. Also people tolerate flaky crap on their Linux system, because oh well it was free, and it did say it was version 0.1 so I guess it is still a work in progress. But on Windows most people expect an app not to freeze all the time, even if it is free. I seriously think that Windows (at least XP) has gotten more usable that Linux on the desktop. Moving from 95% to 99% uptime on the desktop at the price of everything being slow isn't a trade off I'm willing to make. I'll use Linux for play, but not for my enterprise.
Anyone's opinion that well you haven't tried flavor X running desktop Y isn't requested or desired. I've used Fedora, Redhat, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, slackware, debian, etc. and among UNIX's Solaris 5-10, AIX, SGI IRIX, HP-UX, etc. None have compared to Windows on the desktop, especially when it comes to managablity/the ability to get programs that run on it and have the features required to replace a Windows system.
I think a fork would be a good idea, I'm not recommending take this out of the kernel or that out of the kernel, because I'm not sure what would be required to hack the kernel to make it work the best for desktops. But having a fork would allow the people that want a desktop OS to focus on providing good support and performance enhancements targeted to that group, while the server group can continue to focus on kicking butt on the server side. Having individuals or distros do the hacks themselves in a non "standard" kernel branch doesn't make sense, as it would eliminate the advantages of openness in the OSS community, if for no other reason then you have no guarantee of capatiblity between distros or future mainstream kernel releases.
OpenGL is at a more fundamental level than DirectX. DirectX (or at least as it is commonly bundled) has a lot of added features. OpenGL systems are mostly comparable, they have a library called glu (graphics library utility) and glut(graphics library utility toolkit) that include higher level functions like draw a sphere. Very few people use just OpenGl, just like very few people use just DirectX, they build engines on top of them and call those things. DirectX is a MS product and so Windows only, some graphics cards handle DirectX or OpenGL better than others. It was more of a game studio deciding they are going to code in DirectX that forces their game to only run on Windows, whereas if they use OpenGL it could be ported to Linux.
As for SSH in a way you already might get penalized by the ISP. A lot of companies are packet shaping the network, and just assume that encrypted traffic is being used to mask the fact that it is a torrent connection. I have 6M cable service. If I VPN into work, with a dedicated server for my connection, all of a sudden I'm down to about 200k/s even from websites. Shut the VPN down, back up to full speed. So your not paying for bandwidth your not using, your just unable to use bandwidth that you are paying for ;)
Thats the problem though. You are paying for the bandwidth, for the spam, ads etc. that you don't even want. I propose that the person initiating the traffic pay, so if you are pushing spam and popups, you pay for the full bandwidth, not just the hop from your server to the targets ISP mail server. But also the hop from the targets mail server to the end user.
I think my suggestion would work, because if the company doesn't want to pay for the bandwidth/penality, they could always put in place a EULA were the user explicitly accepts the ads as the cost of the service. Going to a search engine, or something, and getting 10 popups and tickers all over the screen, is a not so subtle way to let the user know that is how they get the free service.
BlueScreenOfDeath
Possibly, but there is a fundamental difference in the situations. The user requested the data from Google, so there ISP fees apply for the bandwidth. The spammers are flooding the ISP's network, but aren't necessarily costumers of the ISP. The logical originator isn't a customer, so the ISP's customers are having traffic associated with their accounts that isn't their desire to initiate. The ISP can either block the stuff from coming so you don't get the bogus download fee, or they can bill someone else. I don't think it is ethical for the end recipient of spam to have to pay the salarys + the bandwidth for something they didn't even want.
I can't remember the original source but it was a few years ago I read an article about spam. Very interesting, most of the cost of advertising went to the advertiser (as it should) with paper media. Not so with spam, almost all the cost of spam goes to the recipient and hardly any to the spammer. You can easily spam 1000 per second from a server, so your looking at a very small fraction of a cent per message. But the user has to take their time to remove you message, their bandwidth is tied up etc. I think the estimate was in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars if you factor in the cost to the company paying the employee while they determine if it is spam or not. Even more if the spam has viruses, and causes system exploits. Spam filters work, sort of, sometimes they block stuff you want, and if not, you have to check your junk box every once in a while just in case, so it isn't saving you all the time associated with spam.
I think corporations that get spammed, including ISP's should be able to go to companys like DoubleClick and e360 and bill them for the aggregiate costs. "You sent 2 million emails through our network last month, here is your bill for 200k for bandwidth + costs for the end users". Money applied to spam filtering, or as a discount to the end user that had to deal with the unfortunate garbage.
There are a lot of great free journal sites, for example "the archives" http://arxiv.org/. The problem lies in the fact that anyone can submit to them, making filtering out the junk almost as hard as if you googled the topic. What a peer reviewed journal does is force a standard on the articles quality.
Also, kind of sad, but most journals also charge you for the privilege to get published. Your grants are often determined by your research, and your research is assessed by your publications. Open source publications won't cut it, because the grant committee won't be bothered to consider much of your non-peer reviewed stuff.
I code for systems with 800 4 Optron nodes, with 10GB/s interconnect, and a couple hundred terabytes of SAN attached storage. That is a supercomputer :) Well sort of, a lot of people in the HPC community consider it just a cluster, as some programs need 64+ CPU's in SMP mode, so any loosely coupled memory model would be considered a serial farm :)
Also, note that high end platforms, would have redundant power, redundant high end interconnects, redundant hot swap drives etc. There also would be enough of them to need, high end switches, blowers, power conditioners, air circularators, and various other room coolers. Of course a custom built workstation without a graphics card, monitor, or even case is going to beat the pants off of HPC architecture price per flop, good work to the group, but hardly newsworthy in the HPC community.
Wouldn't it suck to have to reboot during that 4.5 min? Oh crap, guys go home I'll see you in a few billion.
That said, I think by definition you are anti-X where X is a moral system you don't agree with. You're not anti the people in the religion, just the religion as a belief system. I can totally disagree with you over your beliefs, but it doesn't mean I'm against you, I'm against what you believe in, if someone else held your beliefs I'd be against them too, kind of thing. The anti- is general not specific. However, I can't think of anything people feel more strongly about, than what they believe in, so it is hard not to be offended when someone tells your stupid to believe what you do.
I think a reasonable test would be changes in bitrate of the playing video/audio. Does high bitrate mp3's run closer to the video rate on the network, or not?
Could be DRM like others said, but I wonder if it is the marvelous prioritized I/O biting you in the butt? Is there a way for you to check the spacing between packets? I wonder if the network packet gets sent, while waiting for a reply the process context switches, then because the interactive bit is at a higher priority it takes longer to get a time slice to run the process again. The video playback might be causing more context switches ifself, because of the bit rate is higher, so greater chance you'll get a cache miss and switch as the I/O falls through to the harddrive, and the network would get the CPU back, making the download + video faster than download + music.
P.S. I always found SQL Server weird. Originally coded my Sybase, but much lower performance. It is almost like the goal on the MS side, was to slow it down once the source changed hands, weird.
Thanks for pointing out an error in my critism. The physicist's probably don't share the thinking of the article writer. It seems every other month someone is saying that they made light travel faster than c, or slower for that matter. Usually that is followed by an article claiming this, but not stating that it is phase velocity not group, or they do, but don't explain the difference so people get really excited.
Wikipedia got it right, after I did a little editing of their derivation (they had the final line as vg = v, when it should have been vg = c). See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_velocity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_velocity#Matter _wave_group_velocity
Anyways, this is a subject that requires a lot of math, to properly understand what the formulas mean. In my physics studies, it would have taken 3 calculus courses, 2 classical mechanics courses, and a quantum course to really grasp it. That is what us physicists do, we take ten courses to understand a concept I hope to explain in 5-10 minutes. Not very smart, or very smart depending on the side of the fence your on :)
You appear to understand the concept of the wave-particle duality of light. Light behaves like a particle at times, and like a wave sometimes. The funny thing is light doesn't behave like a wave. A wave is a mathematical construction going both ways infinitely far. What we really mean is a piece of a wave, since it has a fixed source and hits a fixed target. This is a soliton (just like in the Star Trek the next generation episode, with the experimental soliton wave engine, if you ever seen it). From wikipedia's article on soliton's:
1) represent waves of permanent form;
2) are localised, so that they decay or approach a constant at infinity;
3) can interact strongly with other solitons, but they emerge from the collision unchanged apart from a phase shift.
This is a lot of useful properties for our model, 2) localized, so they have a beginning and end, 1) their shape doesn't change as they move through the medium, 3) they are preserved when they go through each other. Think of two different colours of light pointed to meet each other. If you place a screen at the intersection, you see the blended colour, but once you move past it the individual colours still exist. So a soliton has the properties we want to describe light.
When you see light as a wave, you can't distinguish between photons, but they are blended together (superimposed). After a couple more advanced math courses (mainly to get Fourier analysis), you can grind through the math and see that for the soliton to keep its shape, different frequencies will have to move at different speeds. Since one frequency is going up and down faster than the other, the shape would change if they moved together at the same speed. But sense you are seeing light as a wave, you can't see the individual photons, so you have to wait the whole normal speed of light time to make out the whole shape of the wave, ie. get information. You won't have enough information to workout the individual components of the group of photons until the last bit of the packet or soliton reaches the detector.
Now something that will blow your mind. If you take electromagnetism, and express it as a field, and then apply quantum mechanics to the field, you end up with what is called quantum electrodynamics, (you'd be in your last year of undergrad before you may see this, if particle physics is offered at that level at your school, but a lot of people don't see it until their PhD quantum course). Here light is a field (a photon is the particle responsible for transmitting the intera
2) Light can and always could go faster than 3X10^8m/s. 3X10^8m/s is the group velocity of the wave, but individual frequencies of light go faster or slower. Since you need the whole wave packet to know the structure of the packet (ie get information), your stuck waiting for t = D/c time, but you can detect the quicker phases earlier. Read up a good fluid mechanics or advanced optics book for the differences between phase and group velocity.
3) This still doesn't make time travel possible. Time is still going forward, even saying the group velocity of light was broken. You could get ahead of light and see something that happened in the past, earlier than you should have, because you can communicate quicker than light, but it still is an event in the past. You could move to a location you otherwise wouldn't be able to be at by the given time moving below the speed of light, and have an effect you couldn't have had at that point in time otherwise, but you didn't go into the future, in the way normally thought, time kept ticking, you just traveled a different path through space-time, that normally was excluded.