the prices are different... so what you're really asking is "Why would someone want to save $300?".
This is no different than buying hardware: There will always be something better. Why do people buy the latest and greatest hardware when they will surely be able to get better hardware for the same price (or a substantial price reduction on the same hardware) a few months?
Logic, anyone?
Re:I think that M$ has Missed the Point
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 2
You sound like a luddite. Look at it this way: let them surprise you with a new definition of the console.
It's not a Free Society for everyone in this country. Many American Blacks and Asians face major economic inequity. In West Oakland, CA, the percentage of people who can't pay their mortgage is up around 60%. The amount of children who live under the poverty line in Alameda County CA is staggering - around 40%!
So you are saying that the poor people you mention would rather live under communism? Let me inform you that many whites also live under major economic inequality. Economic inequality is a reality of life in a capitalistic society. Those who work hard and strive to make the most out of their lives will tend to rise above poverty and enter the middle class. Why do you think immigrants fight to come to the US? It is because the US offers unparalleled opportunity. How many people are fighting to live in Cuba or China? On my last cab ride in Philadelphia the cab driver who barely spoke English had an O'Reilly book on web programming. What a country!
Again, I would have to disagree with this. A major cause of hunger, is, as you've said, a lack of productive economies in hungry nations. But rather than pursue fair trade with producers in other nations, the small minority of people in the United States who control our trade policies (who I would call "Rich people in the USA") insist on subsidizing US farm crops (and dumping them all over the world) while forcing developing nations to export luxury crops to the US (like coffee - 1% of the world's arable land is used for coffee). The WTO and the World Bank, major tools of developed industrial nations, heavily favor the interests of the United States and Europe. The United States especially poor when it comes to pursuing sustainable development... Do you actually believe that wealthy interests in the US have a positive effect on world hunger? Exporting cheap food to poor countries destroys local economies (outcompeting local farmers!), the same way that a Wal-Mart comming to your town destroys local businesses...
If low prices are more important than a shop owner who knows everyone's name, people will go to Wal-Mart. If making a bit more per hour is more important than preserving the local economic traditions, then people will go to work in the next American factory that is built. It's a matter of people choosing A over B. This brings me to my point about culture. If those 3rd world nations had a vibrant culture that prioritized preserving the local economies through legislation, then the Big Evil Americans wouldn't want to build factories there in the first place.
You must be speaking about these people [foodfirst.org], otherwise, I think the wealthy in the US need to learn a lot about fundraising for the impoverished...
Look at the combined giving of the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Compare that total to the amount donated by all communist nations combined. Which system is more effective at producing positive results for the world's needy?
Hunh? How did any of the following come about: Apache, Linux Kernel, GNU utilities, PHP, Perl, The Gimp, GNOME, KDE, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Debian, etc, etc, etc...
These are all qualitatively different from Google. Running Google requires tons of bandwidth, tons of hardware, and a full time staff of developers in order to remain competetive. I did not notice any OSS search engines on your list. Sure, an OSS search engine would be possible, but only if someone donated the bandwidth, hardware, etc... If someone donated all that stuff to Google, it could become a non-profit. Unforunately, nobody did and so Google has to resort to being a profit-seeking business.
Wrong. The laws that govern patents and trade are dictated not by culture, but by the threat of force and sanctions by more powerful countries. Do you actually think that people in Jamaica, the Phillipines, or China want to be used as cheap labor for European and American tastes? What about Cuba? Do you think that the culture of Cuba dictates their economic situation? Or was if force from the United States?
Where are the revolutions that overthrow the regimes that enforce this poor quality of life? Where is the vision and the struggle for independence from tyrany? They don't exist. Why do Cubans not just tolerate but love Castro? Why do the majority of Chinese tolerate burocracy and communism and not demand a free society? The answer is, these nations lack the cultural technology to create change. By technology I mean the ideas of the French philosophers, British common law, and vision of the founding fathers of our nation.
People in non-western countries also talk freely about politics, technology, and other issues... I myself am Persian, and persians love to talk politics... It seems like you have been watching too much Fox News Network... In the United States, there is no guarantee of free discussion about political issues, as the squelching of public dissent in the face of ridiculous media conglomeration. Our current Federal Legislature and Presidential Administration is not exactly
I don't think many people count on the mainstream media for their views on politics or the world. All media is biased in one way or another. The point is that we're all free to be biased in our own way. Nobody is going to be put in jail for having a particular belief.
I think you seriously underestimate the good things about the USA. Of course it has flaws, and I applaud you for pointing some of them out. But if you think Communism would be a better answer, the be careful what you wish for.
The role of government is to give businesses the ground rules to operate in a completely self-interested manner and still act ethically. As we have learned from Enron, there is still a long way to go, but at least we have a system under which it will eventually be possible.
No, the post I responded to said that having colorful currency meant that the currency would be lower in value on world markets than a non-colorful currency. Thus, I compared the colorful pound and the green and white dollar. I showed the in fact a colorful currency could be valued higher on world markets than a non-colorful one.
Not that your comment was a productive addition to the discussion, but I'll respond anyway:
I posted the opinions I posted not because I am absolutely convinced that they are true. In fact, I'm only partially convinced that they are true, which is why I posted them in a discussion with someone who obviously disagrees.
I invite you or anyone else to put forth an argument that will change my mind. In fact, I want to have my mind changed on these issues.
The problem is, lots of people are out there claiming that capitalism is bad, but none who I've spoken to can articulate in a meaningful way why it is bad. Sure people are starving. Show me how capitalism is responsible for that. If you can point this out logically and intelligently argue against all of the counter-arguments, then I'm sure you will change the mind of any rational person who reads your response, including myself.
Unfortunately, you can't do any of that stuff. It may not be within your ability level, or you may not care enough about the issue to attempt it.
Let me guess, you are an angry white male with little or no college education who wants to find something to blame his failures on, anonymously.
colorful currency always has a low value on world markets
What about this little fact:
Live mid-market rates as of 2002.06.21 20:37:38 GMT.
1.00 GBP
United Kingdom Pounds = 1.49675 USD
United States Dollars
1 GBP = 1.49675 USD 1 USD = 0.668116 GBP
Re:A plug for Ham Radio Contesting
on
Field Day 2002
·
· Score: 2
There are definitely some rude contesters, as well as some rude "rag chewers", etc. I would never have gotten into contesting if I'd let the first couple of rude exchanges bother me.
What intrigued me about contesting was that contests gave me the ability to talk to hams in other countries who I probably wouldn't have been able to contact as easily otherwise -- contesters tend to have top end gear and high performance antennas.
Anyway, give it a try during november sweepstakes or one of the others. It can actually be quite fun. Besides, any smart contester will know that if he/she's rude then DXers won't put his/her call in packet spots.
Re:A plug for Ham Radio Contesting
on
Field Day 2002
·
· Score: 2
Some links about Ham Radio Contesting, as promised:
Agreed. The packet cluster is a great addition to the contester's bag of tricks.
de KF8QE
A plug for Ham Radio Contesting
on
Field Day 2002
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Field Day comes in many flavors, depending on the ham radio club that you encounter. I've been a ham since age 12, and the best thing about Ham Radio to me is contesting.
What is a contest?
Contests are competetive events designed to simulate the kind of rapid flow of information that would need to occur in the event that radio amateurs were relied upon to handle disaster communications on a large scale.
Field Day, while lots of fun, serves the purpose of getting new people involved with Amateur Radio, and so it is generally a lot less competetive than what you'd find at the typical contest-station during a contest weekend.
In a contest, you try to contact as many other hams as possible, and you get points (multipliers to your score) for every distinct geographical region you contact. Some contests are US only, and many are worldwide. Some are focused on a particular frequency band, and some cover all HF bands.
There is nothing quite like the adrenaline that comes from making serious rate (300+ contacts per hour) for a few hours in a row. Aside from that, there is typically a great deal of team-spirit and good-natured rivalry among contesters, particularly those who are in the same state or county.
If you've always had an interest in ham radio but feared that it didn't have high enough octane to suit your temperment, look no further.
I'll post some web references below this comment soon...
excellent... i'll have to look into postgres in more detail... do you know if there is a tool out there similar to MS query analyzer and enterprise manager that will work with postgres?
I just like to be able to go in and modify tables and look at recordsets easily...
If you want to learn SQL, I suggest the following:
Get a copy of whatever database you're going to use. Microsoft SQL Server is actually really easy to configure and use and has some great graphical tools. If anyone knows of some similar graphical tools for an OSS database, please let me know.
Next, look at a database that someone else has written and attempt to manipulate the data through queries.
The best book I've actually purchased for SQL is "Transact-SQL Programming" by O'Reilly. If you are working on a Microsoft database, this book is a great companion to the built-in help system in Query Analyzer.
Ironically, the fact that our society is free reveals that Capitalism is the economic system of choice in the world's richest nation. What should we do with that wealth? Whatever we want! That's why it's called a free society.
Rich people in the USA do not cause world hunger. In fact, they provide a lot of help to the world's hungry, both in terms of increasing awareness and generating funding.
If ICANN were left to its own devices to fund 'projects' like Google, such 'projects' (Google is very much a profit-making business, not a 'project') would likely never come into existence. This is nothing against ICANN, but let's face it, nobody is more stingy with a dollar than a venture capitalist. The same cannot be said about non-profits, because there just isn't the same level of competition out there in the np space.
If you look at the distribution of wealth throughout the world, it is easy to say that economic inequity is the cause of hunger. But in fact the cause of hunger is the simple lack of productive economies in hunger-stricken regions. Why isn't Afghanistan competing with India and China in the tech sector? Culture plays a big part in the equation. If the Taliban says that you can't have a computer or any modern means of making money, of course you'll be poor in the modern world.
The source of the economic inequity between nations is largely a result of the laws that govern patents and trade, which are themselves a product of the nation's culture. Don't take for granted the combination of good ideas and good luck that gave us our western system of government. It is what makes this discussion possible at both the idiological and the technological level.
True... but that assumes that the nanobots exist in a swarm that has a predefined goal of violating the rules. Most likely, the rules would be constructed in such a way that the probability of the meta-behavior of the swarm violating Asimov's rules would be very low but not impossible.
For example, the poor in any society could (with the right kind of organization) overthrow the rich and become rich themselves. Why does this happen so rarely? Because human nature weights our behavior toward acceptance of our social status. Consider that human tendancy and think of it for a moment as a rule designed to insure the general stability of human societies. Bingo. Humans are way smarter than the nanobots and we still haven't figured out a reliable way to 'route around' that particular problem or many others, despite the fact that doing so would both be in our best interest and within our grasp.
In other words, if the design of nanobots facilitates their coordination, then it will be easy to restrict the kinds of coordinated behaviors that they may undertake. On the other hand, the more we rely on chance to get the bucket full of nanobot slime to self-organize into a swarm of something useful, the greater the risk that the swarm will do something we don't expect or want.
The above post is right on. If you doubt the scientific validity of the experiment, think of how it might work with monkies:
There is a group of monkies at the zoo. The monkies are kept in an environment consisting of a fruit tree, and there are a bunch of logs on the ground for the monkies to sit on, etc.
The monkies cannot reach the fruit, but one day, one of them props a log on end, climbs it, and just before it tips over jumps up and grabs a piece of fruit. The monkies had been there for 3 years and before that day no monkey had ever managed to pick fruit from the tree.
Now imagine taking that monkey and cloning him and starting the next day with all of the monkies having the insight to grab a piece of fruit from the tree.
Repeat this process day after day.
Slowly, you'd begin to select for intelligent behavior, and before long you'd have monkies that were far more intelligent than the starting group.
The point of the GA is to take the most successful members of a population and cross-breed them in order to discover the key elements of their success without positing a bunch of (likely incorrect) assumptions.
interesting point. it may be possible to modify the simple behavioral rules of the nanobots in such a way that the meta-behaviors of the swarm tended against violating the rules.
What if certain nanobots were sensitive to symptoms of a particular rule violation. If a rule were being violated, these nanobots would stop cooperating with the rule violators among their brethren, thereby rendering the swarm immobile, for example.
I hate to post this... but competition is a good thing. Even if you like the iPod better, the fact that it has a competetor (or several) will likely make it more affordable.
I once had a user who insisted on saving everything directly to her "Hard Drive". This was on a mac. The problem was, that's also where all her programs were. Despite the fact that I explained to her that I needed a single folder containing her documents for backup purposes, she didn't relent.
I solved the problem by simply creating a folder on her desktop, changing its icon to the gray rectangular "hard drive" icon, and changing her hard drive's icon to a folder icon and renaming it "operating system stuff". I then copied her docs into the "hard drive" folder. From then on she faithfully saved all of her documents to the hard drive folder.
It worked well, although I sort of feel sorry for the next sysadmin who has to troubleshoot her machine.
Companies in the bandwidth business service to homes and business (this includes DSL, cablemodems, and T1s, etc.) have always effectively been bandwidth speculators. If you run an ISP and you have 10 customers with T1s and 100 with 56K modem access, you only need to purchase enough bandwidth to cover your customers' peak usage. It is the difference in price of the bandwidth you buy vs the bandwidth you sell that largely determines the amount of profit that you make.
Depending on the kind of quality of service guarantee that you make to your customers (usually 100% bandwidth for business customers, and often no guarantee at all for residential customers) you may decide to insure against a failure to meet your peak bandwidth by purchasing more wholesale bandwidth.
The key is that when determining your pricing you need to look at the kind of QOS guarantee that you want to make vs. the expected peak and average usage for the typical customer.
As the internet changes and more people begin file sharing, expect the cost of supplying 'unlimited' bandwidth to increase. ISPs can maintain acceptable profit margins either by increasing the flat rate price or by charging by the kilobyte. The nice thing is, having access to filesharing drastically increases the value of the broadband connection, so there is no reason to believe that people wouldn't be perfectly willing to pay more. Successful ISPs will sell the increased value rather than impose a bandwidth penalty on their users. For customers who like the always on nature of broadband but don't really care about high bandwidth, the variable rate pricing will probably present a great alternative to today's flat-rate pricing.
i mark the day when Netscape refused to support IFRAME as the beginning of its downfall. And no, Mozilla is not Netscape (or vice versa), so there's hope.
For the longest time, Microsoft was way ahead of Netscape in terms of standards compliance. If there had been a competetive browser platform in existance, Microsoft would have had less market share and therefore more of a reason to think twice about including non-standards-compliant features.
Slashdot Mirror
This is no different than buying hardware: There will always be something better. Why do people buy the latest and greatest hardware when they will surely be able to get better hardware for the same price (or a substantial price reduction on the same hardware) a few months?
Logic, anyone?
You sound like a luddite. Look at it this way: let them surprise you with a new definition of the console.
So you are saying that the poor people you mention would rather live under communism? Let me inform you that many whites also live under major economic inequality. Economic inequality is a reality of life in a capitalistic society. Those who work hard and strive to make the most out of their lives will tend to rise above poverty and enter the middle class. Why do you think immigrants fight to come to the US? It is because the US offers unparalleled opportunity. How many people are fighting to live in Cuba or China? On my last cab ride in Philadelphia the cab driver who barely spoke English had an O'Reilly book on web programming. What a country!
Again, I would have to disagree with this. A major cause of hunger, is, as you've said, a lack of productive economies in hungry nations. But rather than pursue fair trade with producers in other nations, the small minority of people in the United States who control our trade policies (who I would call "Rich people in the USA") insist on subsidizing US farm crops (and dumping them all over the world) while forcing developing nations to export luxury crops to the US (like coffee - 1% of the world's arable land is used for coffee). The WTO and the World Bank, major tools of developed industrial nations, heavily favor the interests of the United States and Europe. The United States especially poor when it comes to pursuing sustainable development... Do you actually believe that wealthy interests in the US have a positive effect on world hunger? Exporting cheap food to poor countries destroys local economies (outcompeting local farmers!), the same way that a Wal-Mart comming to your town destroys local businesses...
If low prices are more important than a shop owner who knows everyone's name, people will go to Wal-Mart. If making a bit more per hour is more important than preserving the local economic traditions, then people will go to work in the next American factory that is built. It's a matter of people choosing A over B. This brings me to my point about culture. If those 3rd world nations had a vibrant culture that prioritized preserving the local economies through legislation, then the Big Evil Americans wouldn't want to build factories there in the first place.
You must be speaking about these people [foodfirst.org], otherwise, I think the wealthy in the US need to learn a lot about fundraising for the impoverished...
Look at the combined giving of the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Compare that total to the amount donated by all communist nations combined. Which system is more effective at producing positive results for the world's needy?
Hunh? How did any of the following come about: Apache, Linux Kernel, GNU utilities, PHP, Perl, The Gimp, GNOME, KDE, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Debian, etc, etc, etc...
These are all qualitatively different from Google. Running Google requires tons of bandwidth, tons of hardware, and a full time staff of developers in order to remain competetive. I did not notice any OSS search engines on your list. Sure, an OSS search engine would be possible, but only if someone donated the bandwidth, hardware, etc... If someone donated all that stuff to Google, it could become a non-profit. Unforunately, nobody did and so Google has to resort to being a profit-seeking business.
Wrong. The laws that govern patents and trade are dictated not by culture, but by the threat of force and sanctions by more powerful countries. Do you actually think that people in Jamaica, the Phillipines, or China want to be used as cheap labor for European and American tastes? What about Cuba? Do you think that the culture of Cuba dictates their economic situation? Or was if force from the United States?
Where are the revolutions that overthrow the regimes that enforce this poor quality of life? Where is the vision and the struggle for independence from tyrany? They don't exist. Why do Cubans not just tolerate but love Castro? Why do the majority of Chinese tolerate burocracy and communism and not demand a free society? The answer is, these nations lack the cultural technology to create change. By technology I mean the ideas of the French philosophers, British common law, and vision of the founding fathers of our nation.
People in non-western countries also talk freely about politics, technology, and other issues... I myself am Persian, and persians love to talk politics... It seems like you have been watching too much Fox News Network... In the United States, there is no guarantee of free discussion about political issues, as the squelching of public dissent in the face of ridiculous media conglomeration. Our current Federal Legislature and Presidential Administration is not exactly
I don't think many people count on the mainstream media for their views on politics or the world. All media is biased in one way or another. The point is that we're all free to be biased in our own way. Nobody is going to be put in jail for having a particular belief.
I think you seriously underestimate the good things about the USA. Of course it has flaws, and I applaud you for pointing some of them out. But if you think Communism would be a better answer, the be careful what you wish for.
The role of government is to give businesses the ground rules to operate in a completely self-interested manner and still act ethically. As we have learned from Enron, there is still a long way to go, but at least we have a system under which it will eventually be possible.
No, the post I responded to said that having colorful currency meant that the currency would be lower in value on world markets than a non-colorful currency. Thus, I compared the colorful pound and the green and white dollar. I showed the in fact a colorful currency could be valued higher on world markets than a non-colorful one.
I posted the opinions I posted not because I am absolutely convinced that they are true. In fact, I'm only partially convinced that they are true, which is why I posted them in a discussion with someone who obviously disagrees.
I invite you or anyone else to put forth an argument that will change my mind. In fact, I want to have my mind changed on these issues.
The problem is, lots of people are out there claiming that capitalism is bad, but none who I've spoken to can articulate in a meaningful way why it is bad. Sure people are starving. Show me how capitalism is responsible for that. If you can point this out logically and intelligently argue against all of the counter-arguments, then I'm sure you will change the mind of any rational person who reads your response, including myself.
Unfortunately, you can't do any of that stuff. It may not be within your ability level, or you may not care enough about the issue to attempt it.
Let me guess, you are an angry white male with little or no college education who wants to find something to blame his failures on, anonymously.
colorful currency always has a low value on world markets
What about this little fact:
Live mid-market rates as of 2002.06.21 20:37:38 GMT.
1.00 GBP United Kingdom Pounds = 1.49675 USD United States Dollars
1 GBP = 1.49675 USD 1 USD = 0.668116 GBP
What intrigued me about contesting was that contests gave me the ability to talk to hams in other countries who I probably wouldn't have been able to contact as easily otherwise -- contesters tend to have top end gear and high performance antennas.
Anyway, give it a try during november sweepstakes or one of the others. It can actually be quite fun. Besides, any smart contester will know that if he/she's rude then DXers won't put his/her call in packet spots.
Site dedicated to ham radio contesting
ARRL DX Contest (soapbox comments
November Sweepstakes Comments
Contest Calendar
General Ham Radio Info
this is KF8QE
de KF8QE
What is a contest?
Contests are competetive events designed to simulate the kind of rapid flow of information that would need to occur in the event that radio amateurs were relied upon to handle disaster communications on a large scale.
Field Day, while lots of fun, serves the purpose of getting new people involved with Amateur Radio, and so it is generally a lot less competetive than what you'd find at the typical contest-station during a contest weekend.
In a contest, you try to contact as many other hams as possible, and you get points (multipliers to your score) for every distinct geographical region you contact. Some contests are US only, and many are worldwide. Some are focused on a particular frequency band, and some cover all HF bands.
There is nothing quite like the adrenaline that comes from making serious rate (300+ contacts per hour) for a few hours in a row. Aside from that, there is typically a great deal of team-spirit and good-natured rivalry among contesters, particularly those who are in the same state or county.
If you've always had an interest in ham radio but feared that it didn't have high enough octane to suit your temperment, look no further.
I'll post some web references below this comment soon...
excellent... i'll have to look into postgres in more detail... do you know if there is a tool out there similar to MS query analyzer and enterprise manager that will work with postgres?
I just like to be able to go in and modify tables and look at recordsets easily...
If you want to learn SQL, I suggest the following:
Get a copy of whatever database you're going to use. Microsoft SQL Server is actually really easy to configure and use and has some great graphical tools. If anyone knows of some similar graphical tools for an OSS database, please let me know.
Next, look at a database that someone else has written and attempt to manipulate the data through queries.
The best book I've actually purchased for SQL is "Transact-SQL Programming" by O'Reilly. If you are working on a Microsoft database, this book is a great companion to the built-in help system in Query Analyzer.
Rich people in the USA do not cause world hunger. In fact, they provide a lot of help to the world's hungry, both in terms of increasing awareness and generating funding.
If ICANN were left to its own devices to fund 'projects' like Google, such 'projects' (Google is very much a profit-making business, not a 'project') would likely never come into existence. This is nothing against ICANN, but let's face it, nobody is more stingy with a dollar than a venture capitalist. The same cannot be said about non-profits, because there just isn't the same level of competition out there in the np space.
If you look at the distribution of wealth throughout the world, it is easy to say that economic inequity is the cause of hunger. But in fact the cause of hunger is the simple lack of productive economies in hunger-stricken regions. Why isn't Afghanistan competing with India and China in the tech sector? Culture plays a big part in the equation. If the Taliban says that you can't have a computer or any modern means of making money, of course you'll be poor in the modern world.
The source of the economic inequity between nations is largely a result of the laws that govern patents and trade, which are themselves a product of the nation's culture. Don't take for granted the combination of good ideas and good luck that gave us our western system of government. It is what makes this discussion possible at both the idiological and the technological level.
If you want to start a not-for-profit search engine, go right ahead.
For example, the poor in any society could (with the right kind of organization) overthrow the rich and become rich themselves. Why does this happen so rarely? Because human nature weights our behavior toward acceptance of our social status. Consider that human tendancy and think of it for a moment as a rule designed to insure the general stability of human societies. Bingo. Humans are way smarter than the nanobots and we still haven't figured out a reliable way to 'route around' that particular problem or many others, despite the fact that doing so would both be in our best interest and within our grasp.
In other words, if the design of nanobots facilitates their coordination, then it will be easy to restrict the kinds of coordinated behaviors that they may undertake. On the other hand, the more we rely on chance to get the bucket full of nanobot slime to self-organize into a swarm of something useful, the greater the risk that the swarm will do something we don't expect or want.
There is a group of monkies at the zoo. The monkies are kept in an environment consisting of a fruit tree, and there are a bunch of logs on the ground for the monkies to sit on, etc.
The monkies cannot reach the fruit, but one day, one of them props a log on end, climbs it, and just before it tips over jumps up and grabs a piece of fruit. The monkies had been there for 3 years and before that day no monkey had ever managed to pick fruit from the tree.
Now imagine taking that monkey and cloning him and starting the next day with all of the monkies having the insight to grab a piece of fruit from the tree.
Repeat this process day after day.
Slowly, you'd begin to select for intelligent behavior, and before long you'd have monkies that were far more intelligent than the starting group.
The point of the GA is to take the most successful members of a population and cross-breed them in order to discover the key elements of their success without positing a bunch of (likely incorrect) assumptions.
What if certain nanobots were sensitive to symptoms of a particular rule violation. If a rule were being violated, these nanobots would stop cooperating with the rule violators among their brethren, thereby rendering the swarm immobile, for example.
I hate to post this... but competition is a good thing. Even if you like the iPod better, the fact that it has a competetor (or several) will likely make it more affordable.
This story is much more like memepool than most /. stories!
I solved the problem by simply creating a folder on her desktop, changing its icon to the gray rectangular "hard drive" icon, and changing her hard drive's icon to a folder icon and renaming it "operating system stuff". I then copied her docs into the "hard drive" folder. From then on she faithfully saved all of her documents to the hard drive folder.
It worked well, although I sort of feel sorry for the next sysadmin who has to troubleshoot her machine.
Companies in the bandwidth business service to homes and business (this includes DSL, cablemodems, and T1s, etc.) have always effectively been bandwidth speculators. If you run an ISP and you have 10 customers with T1s and 100 with 56K modem access, you only need to purchase enough bandwidth to cover your customers' peak usage. It is the difference in price of the bandwidth you buy vs the bandwidth you sell that largely determines the amount of profit that you make.
Depending on the kind of quality of service guarantee that you make to your customers (usually 100% bandwidth for business customers, and often no guarantee at all for residential customers) you may decide to insure against a failure to meet your peak bandwidth by purchasing more wholesale bandwidth.
The key is that when determining your pricing you need to look at the kind of QOS guarantee that you want to make vs. the expected peak and average usage for the typical customer.
As the internet changes and more people begin file sharing, expect the cost of supplying 'unlimited' bandwidth to increase. ISPs can maintain acceptable profit margins either by increasing the flat rate price or by charging by the kilobyte. The nice thing is, having access to filesharing drastically increases the value of the broadband connection, so there is no reason to believe that people wouldn't be perfectly willing to pay more. Successful ISPs will sell the increased value rather than impose a bandwidth penalty on their users. For customers who like the always on nature of broadband but don't really care about high bandwidth, the variable rate pricing will probably present a great alternative to today's flat-rate pricing.
Is it just me, or was this story posted mainly to spread the use of the word malware?
you are assuming that aggregating everyone's views would result in a balanced viewpoint. Somehow I doubt that.
i mark the day when Netscape refused to support IFRAME as the beginning of its downfall. And no, Mozilla is not Netscape (or vice versa), so there's hope.
For the longest time, Microsoft was way ahead of Netscape in terms of standards compliance. If there had been a competetive browser platform in existance, Microsoft would have had less market share and therefore more of a reason to think twice about including non-standards-compliant features.
nanotech toothpaste
nanotech contact lenses
nanotech moisturizer
nanotech toupees