because for a typical 300W desktop 24/7 system you probably would be paying $100/month, more than a thousand a year.
I have no idea where you get those numbers, but they're amazingly wrong. I own an NSP. I will sell you a year of dedicated service including a ten megabit guaranteed available line for $1200/year including off-box hourly backups, and at that rate I'm making a fair profit.
If you buy five machines from me, I'll beat $1000/y. I can sell you the box, bandwidth, voltage, backups and hardware upgrades for less than you seem to believe just the wall power costs.
As for reliability - anyone who works with data centers knows that reliability does not come from reliable hardwaye - it comes from redundancy.
It comes from both. Also, I'm not sure why you believe laptops perform in comparison with 1U units from the previous year; there's a lot more to speed than processor type, the mobile processors don't compete per megahertz with the standalone processors, and those laptops cost something like 3:1 for the same hardware statistics.
If what you said was true, these various datacenters would have switched long, long ago. Turns out the people running places like Level3 aren't idiots.
Also, 99% of UPS units don't convert AC to DC unless it's charging the batteries. Normally this would only be a trickle charge.
That trickle adds up. Try doing the math for a datacenter with 100,000 blades (relatively small,) which would suggest at least 20,000 UPSes. Consider that that trickle comes in at about 1.5% inefficiency, and look at the end result. You might be surprised.
the only cars that might be targeted by professional gangs would be expensive or hard to get cars they can resell
It turns out it's not actually all that uncommon for a single thief to purchase a flatbed truck (they're only about $80k.) Once that's done, the immobilizer and a variety of other things are completely moot. As an aside, it turns out cops essentially never second guess a flatbed, so if you don't notice it while the thief is still on the road...
Pretty much the same way that American laws that you're not used to aren't requirements in your country, that British rules that Mexicans aren't used to aren't requirements in their country, and so forth. It turns out, much to many people's surprise, that the world isn't actually following the shining beacon of Australian automobile law.
These aren't required in the United States, Mexico, Italy, Britain, Germany or Norway, either. Australia is the first country I've ever heard of actually requiring these things.
This is a whole bunch of speculation and personal value divisions presented as if it were a research paper. The problem is, there's no actual research. No data, no information, just a bunch of semi-large words used semi-correctly. The author makes a quick handwaving about how difficult it is to discuss class in America, but actual academics don't have nearly the problem with it that the author does; perhaps the reason the author finds it so difficult to use their data in an academic fashion is not so much about the difficulty of the topic as because the data was never taken in the first place.
This paper basically says "white rich kids who want to get into college go to FaceBook because they heard MySpace was dangerous, that FaceBook's college social networking was valuable and because they're tired of the gaudy graphics in use there." I'll wait for the book - maybe there'll be something other than guesswork and one writer's nasty stereotypes there. Y'know, like actual evidence.
We (usually Russ Nelson) would send them a notice politely telling them "We are the Open Source Initiative. We wrote a definition of what it means to be open source, we promote that definition, and that's what the world expects when they see the term mentioned.
I've been using the term "open source" since before the GPL or Linux existed, and I disagree with their definition. I release things under licenses that fail arbitrary clauses in their definition by being too liberal - I don't make several of the asinine restrictions their supposed "definition" requires me to make, such as the GPL source redistribution clause.
If I ever get a mail suggesting from these asshats that their Johnny Come Lately interpretation of a phrase that predates them by more than 15 years should be used as trump over my source which is open, then frankly I'll plaster their letter all over the web with a nice thick layer of mockery added.
This is the fundamental problem with GPL. None of this effort is useful. Pulling products because some jerk with a website disagrees with the way the company used the source is counterproductive. I'm not saying it's not the author's right to control their source how they see fit; please don't waste time pretending that's what I said. This is a very "I may disagree with your license, but I'll defend to the death your right to shackle yourself to stupidity" kind of situation - use the GPL if you want, but it causes enormous problems.
What I actually said, flamesuit on, was that the GPL encourages counterproductive, factional and aggressive behavior that does nobody any good.
I know it's the game that everyone loves to hate, but E.T. wasn't *that* bad.
I don't believe you've played it for more than three minutes. That game has the highest return rate of any 2600 game, and considering some of the other stinkers on that platform (remember, this is the platform with games so bad that despite almost no significant competition they temporarily killed the entire industry,) that's saying a hell of a lot.
If all you can complain about is jumping out of holes, then I suspect your exposure to the game starts and ends in a web page; falling into a hole isn't even the first serious problem, let alone the most serious one.
It isn't a killer app if the competition has it already; what makes something a killer app is that people will buy a device solely to get that app. Nobody's buying iPhone because they can't make calls any other way; see also every other example you gave.
Also, BSD had zero-conf TCP ten years before Apple did. Rewriting history is an ugly practice.
Sorry, Charlie, homebrew goes back 25 years past the Dreamcast. There were homebrew 2600 carts when the 2600 was less than a year old. It is a little annoying that a Dreamcast homebrewer would get this wrong, since the common way to make Dreamcast software is through DevKitPro, which targets other consoles too - including older ones.
Why don't sites band together, share data on abusive registrants, and require each new registrant to provide "references" in the form of their logins to 3-5 other sites. A person with a normal online life could easily demonstrate a pattern of nonspammy behavior.
In an odd way, one could suggest that this is exactly what Akismet, an anti-spam plugin for Word Press, does. The deal with Akismet is that comments don't go live until human moderated.
That may seem dumb until you realize that Akismet has three advantages most things don't have:
Akismet is swarm-driven, meaning that if five other bloggers called that message spam, Akismet will generally know before you see the message;
Akismet is packaged by default with Word Press, meaning it has an enormous user base;
Akismet has shown itself to be resistant to poisoning attacks (its mechanism to break poisoning remains unknown, but they've shaken off some pretty serious coordinated poisoning attempts, so...)
And, before you laugh me off the internet for saying Word Press has a good anti-spam solution, please realize it's not turned on by default; if it seems ineffective, it's because lots of sites are run by people who don't take the thirty seconds to fix the problem.
No, but publishing its results very easily could be. Suppose for example I write a piece of software that uses characteristics of handwriting to identify rapists, and then publish the results. Don't laugh - this has actually been attempted, both with handwriting and with other things (another personal favorite was the attempt to use phrenology to identify murderers.) The thing is, people were actually put in jail as rapists based on handwriting characteristics (this is in late 18th century England, well after trepanning was out of favor, but presumably prior to common sense.)
Now, if I tried this today - let's say, since CmdrTaco is the butt of every slashdot joke that it indicates him based on the shape of his capital "Q" - then fine. I'd be a moron if I believed it, but no harm done.
Now, let's say I start a business, and start preaching my "findings" to others. Suddenly, I'm calling other people rapists in public, with no apparent evidence. Yes, I realize that I've chosen a relatively incindiary example, but the fact of the matter is that sites like this cost businesses money and people reputations. If I called someone a rapist in public based on their handwriting, they would be well within their rights to demand an explanation, and if there was no actual science behind it, they'd be well within their rights to sue for (depending on how I went about it) either slander or libel.
Is this different? Yes, the company believes in its mystic algorithm, but who cares? People believed in handwriting and phrenology as criminological tools once, too. This company really doesn't have the ethical right to go around ranking people based on some random mumbo jumbo they cooked up in their basement one evening.
It turns out that just like you have to have a license to give medical or legal advice, you also have to have a license to discuss the competence of doctors or lawyers. In this culture, you may not speak badly in public of a professional's practice if you don't have documentation of knowing what the hell you're talking about. You can say he doesn't show up for appointments or she doesn't remember anyone's name, or he's rude or she always seems distracted, or whatever - but you can't say they're a bad doctor unless you're a doctor too.
Why should this website be any different? They're not lawyers, and it wouldn't be legal if they were/just/ talking about the law firm. Why should it be legal if the protected professionals are just in a broader buckshot aim?
In our legal system, Avvo is officially claiming to have expertise they don't. I know they don't have it because they don't have enough staff to cover all the ground they ranked. I'm all for algorithmic development, but the story changes when you start publishing about other people. At that point, it's not just computer science anymore; at that point it's business, and business has rules that the internet would think unfair.
Frankly, I hope Avvo gets sued so far into the ground that they come out the other side.
It'd be nice if they'd admit that it's actually a GameCube and emulator contest, since nobody can load homebrew Wii code yet. It'd be even nicer if they focussed their efforts on helping load homebrew onto the Wii, instead of getting emulators developed for a system that doesn't have homebrew at all; some people find that worrisome. DCEmu means well, I guess, but their priorities could sure use a reinvestigation.
The only way you can pick up the family safe demographic is by discarding all other demographics, and it takes years for parental trust to change for a given company. They couldn't take the family demographic without throwing away everything they already have, or coming up with some form of radical departure from current business models.
Whereas I applaud Microsoft for looking to learn from its competition, and for admitting that this generation belongs to Nintendo, this is not something they can adapt by graft without doing tremendous damage to themselves. It would, in my opinion as a professional game designer, be a fatal error.
No, though certain classes of insect are. I believe that what grandparent was getting at was the effect on accelerating mutation with regards to natural selection. High breeding rate insects sometimes see as much as two batches of 10,000 children per year; whereas there hasn't been enough time to see an effect on natural selection in creatures like large animals, which typically have single gestation frequency in the one or more years, there've been more than enough generations of mayflies, termites and spiders to start wondering about a statistical basis for radiation's effect on biological diversification.
There are some people out there who think things like the cambrian explosion were the result of temporary major acceleration of mutation rates, and whereas I don't agree with that line of thought, it is both interesting and possible - especially if we're talking about an environmental factor, like radiation. We don't irradiate biospheres regularly, so this isn't something we have a whole bunch of data on.
I, like grandparent, would love to know how different the great(20)-grandchildren of the Chernobyl bugs are.
Actually, the person you're quoting fails to understand the system; this thing you're saying is a problem is an enormous win for Sheehan. The issue is this: small claims court doesn't allow lawyers. Now, the grandparent thinks this is a problem, that Sheehan has to go stand up for himself. It isn't.
Y'see, Gateway can't send lawyers either. They have to send an executive or an employee, and if they don't, Sheehan has all but won by default. Do you think Gateway's gonna send someone? Sheehan's job just got a whole lot easier.
the EULA, which requires that users give up their right to sue
Is it even possible in US to get in such agreement?
Grandparent is being disasterously vague. No, in America, a contract cannot remove your right to sue. However, you may give up your right to sue for specific topics.
A good example to consider elective surgery. Think about the case of someone who wants liposuction, even though it's medically a fairly bad idea. A doctor might have a special contract written up that says "I told her this was a bad idea because the transverse vein would rupture, but she's insisting, so by signing here, she gives up her right to sue for malpractice on grounds of the transverse vein rupturing."
Gateway's EULA doesn't actually say that a person can't sue. What it does say is that someone has to try arbitration first if it's a simple dissatisfaction issue, whether they want to or not. Now, I'm sure everyone will say "but it's not a simple dissatisfaction issue, it's because the computer didn't work!" No, it isn't; if you read the article, the thing he's suing over is that he did not receive adequate reparatory technical support. Gateway's response isn't nearly as evil as everyone's painting it to be, though it's certainly fairly childish (it likely cost them more to draft their response than it would have to send a new computer.)
What Gateway tried to do was to scare this guy into going into arbitration. He responded by handing it to Slashdot. Welcome to politics.
You go to the store and buy some software in a box. Your agreement is with the retailer, not the maker of the software.
That will become true no sooner than the day that the retailer takes all liability for software defects.
but I believe as a general principle there's no way an EULA could be enforced.
Well, the courts disagree with you on a regular basis. You'll find that beliefs of principle based on systems that aren't understood rarely have any relation to the way the system actually works.
they by and large have no real recourse to disagree anyway.
Yeah, it's not actually that hard to find a PC vendor that doesn't have an EULA, unless you use a platform that doesn't have clone manufacturers. Besides, if you call Gateway and say "I was looking to buy a new PC and laptop, but I object to your EULA, can we work this out" you'll find they're quite surprisingly willing to make exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
If you buy five machines from me, I'll beat $1000/y. I can sell you the box, bandwidth, voltage, backups and hardware upgrades for less than you seem to believe just the wall power costs.
Stop guessing.
If what you said was true, these various datacenters would have switched long, long ago. Turns out the people running places like Level3 aren't idiots.
These aren't required in the United States, Mexico, Italy, Britain, Germany or Norway, either. Australia is the first country I've ever heard of actually requiring these things.
Price floors killed IoMega and almost killed Wacom. This is a speed bump, nothing more.
Wait. You think Microsoft Security team members are desirable hires? ... would you pick one up?
It's a shame time travel is a geek topic, or I could invoke pre-Hep-C Pam Anderson.
Why parent's at (0, funny) is beyond me; what I wouldn't give for a mod point right now.
This is a whole bunch of speculation and personal value divisions presented as if it were a research paper. The problem is, there's no actual research. No data, no information, just a bunch of semi-large words used semi-correctly. The author makes a quick handwaving about how difficult it is to discuss class in America, but actual academics don't have nearly the problem with it that the author does; perhaps the reason the author finds it so difficult to use their data in an academic fashion is not so much about the difficulty of the topic as because the data was never taken in the first place .
This paper basically says "white rich kids who want to get into college go to FaceBook because they heard MySpace was dangerous, that FaceBook's college social networking was valuable and because they're tired of the gaudy graphics in use there." I'll wait for the book - maybe there'll be something other than guesswork and one writer's nasty stereotypes there. Y'know, like actual evidence.
If I ever get a mail suggesting from these asshats that their Johnny Come Lately interpretation of a phrase that predates them by more than 15 years should be used as trump over my source which is open, then frankly I'll plaster their letter all over the web with a nice thick layer of mockery added.
This is the fundamental problem with GPL. None of this effort is useful. Pulling products because some jerk with a website disagrees with the way the company used the source is counterproductive. I'm not saying it's not the author's right to control their source how they see fit; please don't waste time pretending that's what I said. This is a very "I may disagree with your license, but I'll defend to the death your right to shackle yourself to stupidity" kind of situation - use the GPL if you want, but it causes enormous problems.
What I actually said, flamesuit on, was that the GPL encourages counterproductive, factional and aggressive behavior that does nobody any good.
MIT and BSD licenses forever.
If all you can complain about is jumping out of holes, then I suspect your exposure to the game starts and ends in a web page; falling into a hole isn't even the first serious problem, let alone the most serious one.
Quit posing.
It isn't a killer app if the competition has it already; what makes something a killer app is that people will buy a device solely to get that app. Nobody's buying iPhone because they can't make calls any other way; see also every other example you gave.
Also, BSD had zero-conf TCP ten years before Apple did. Rewriting history is an ugly practice.
Sorry, Charlie, homebrew goes back 25 years past the Dreamcast. There were homebrew 2600 carts when the 2600 was less than a year old. It is a little annoying that a Dreamcast homebrewer would get this wrong, since the common way to make Dreamcast software is through DevKitPro, which targets other consoles too - including older ones.
I'm sure there's a good Catholic Church joke here.
That may seem dumb until you realize that Akismet has three advantages most things don't have:
- Akismet is swarm-driven, meaning that if five other bloggers called that message spam, Akismet will generally know before you see the message;
- Akismet is packaged by default with Word Press, meaning it has an enormous user base;
- Akismet has shown itself to be resistant to poisoning attacks (its mechanism to break poisoning remains unknown, but they've shaken off some pretty serious coordinated poisoning attempts, so...)
And, before you laugh me off the internet for saying Word Press has a good anti-spam solution, please realize it's not turned on by default; if it seems ineffective, it's because lots of sites are run by people who don't take the thirty seconds to fix the problem.Now, if I tried this today - let's say, since CmdrTaco is the butt of every slashdot joke that it indicates him based on the shape of his capital "Q" - then fine. I'd be a moron if I believed it, but no harm done.
Now, let's say I start a business, and start preaching my "findings" to others. Suddenly, I'm calling other people rapists in public, with no apparent evidence. Yes, I realize that I've chosen a relatively incindiary example, but the fact of the matter is that sites like this cost businesses money and people reputations. If I called someone a rapist in public based on their handwriting, they would be well within their rights to demand an explanation, and if there was no actual science behind it, they'd be well within their rights to sue for (depending on how I went about it) either slander or libel.
Is this different? Yes, the company believes in its mystic algorithm, but who cares? People believed in handwriting and phrenology as criminological tools once, too. This company really doesn't have the ethical right to go around ranking people based on some random mumbo jumbo they cooked up in their basement one evening.
It turns out that just like you have to have a license to give medical or legal advice, you also have to have a license to discuss the competence of doctors or lawyers. In this culture, you may not speak badly in public of a professional's practice if you don't have documentation of knowing what the hell you're talking about. You can say he doesn't show up for appointments or she doesn't remember anyone's name, or he's rude or she always seems distracted, or whatever - but you can't say they're a bad doctor unless you're a doctor too.
Why should this website be any different? They're not lawyers, and it wouldn't be legal if they were
In our legal system, Avvo is officially claiming to have expertise they don't. I know they don't have it because they don't have enough staff to cover all the ground they ranked. I'm all for algorithmic development, but the story changes when you start publishing about other people. At that point, it's not just computer science anymore; at that point it's business, and business has rules that the internet would think unfair.
Frankly, I hope Avvo gets sued so far into the ground that they come out the other side.
It'd be nice if they'd admit that it's actually a GameCube and emulator contest, since nobody can load homebrew Wii code yet. It'd be even nicer if they focussed their efforts on helping load homebrew onto the Wii, instead of getting emulators developed for a system that doesn't have homebrew at all; some people find that worrisome. DCEmu means well, I guess, but their priorities could sure use a reinvestigation.
The only way you can pick up the family safe demographic is by discarding all other demographics, and it takes years for parental trust to change for a given company. They couldn't take the family demographic without throwing away everything they already have, or coming up with some form of radical departure from current business models.
Whereas I applaud Microsoft for looking to learn from its competition, and for admitting that this generation belongs to Nintendo, this is not something they can adapt by graft without doing tremendous damage to themselves. It would, in my opinion as a professional game designer, be a fatal error.
No, though certain classes of insect are. I believe that what grandparent was getting at was the effect on accelerating mutation with regards to natural selection. High breeding rate insects sometimes see as much as two batches of 10,000 children per year; whereas there hasn't been enough time to see an effect on natural selection in creatures like large animals, which typically have single gestation frequency in the one or more years, there've been more than enough generations of mayflies, termites and spiders to start wondering about a statistical basis for radiation's effect on biological diversification.
There are some people out there who think things like the cambrian explosion were the result of temporary major acceleration of mutation rates, and whereas I don't agree with that line of thought, it is both interesting and possible - especially if we're talking about an environmental factor, like radiation. We don't irradiate biospheres regularly, so this isn't something we have a whole bunch of data on.
I, like grandparent, would love to know how different the great(20)-grandchildren of the Chernobyl bugs are.
Actually, the person you're quoting fails to understand the system; this thing you're saying is a problem is an enormous win for Sheehan. The issue is this: small claims court doesn't allow lawyers. Now, the grandparent thinks this is a problem, that Sheehan has to go stand up for himself. It isn't.
Y'see, Gateway can't send lawyers either. They have to send an executive or an employee, and if they don't, Sheehan has all but won by default. Do you think Gateway's gonna send someone? Sheehan's job just got a whole lot easier.
A good example to consider elective surgery. Think about the case of someone who wants liposuction, even though it's medically a fairly bad idea. A doctor might have a special contract written up that says "I told her this was a bad idea because the transverse vein would rupture, but she's insisting, so by signing here, she gives up her right to sue for malpractice on grounds of the transverse vein rupturing."
Gateway's EULA doesn't actually say that a person can't sue. What it does say is that someone has to try arbitration first if it's a simple dissatisfaction issue, whether they want to or not. Now, I'm sure everyone will say "but it's not a simple dissatisfaction issue, it's because the computer didn't work!" No, it isn't; if you read the article, the thing he's suing over is that he did not receive adequate reparatory technical support. Gateway's response isn't nearly as evil as everyone's painting it to be, though it's certainly fairly childish (it likely cost them more to draft their response than it would have to send a new computer.)
What Gateway tried to do was to scare this guy into going into arbitration. He responded by handing it to Slashdot. Welcome to politics.