municipal wifi is a great idea if you want to lock in 802.11g as the standard for the future... being able to sell homes and businesses wifi technology is what keeps pushing the technological envelope... want to kill wiMax? Support municipal wifi.
this will kill commercial adoption of linux... maybe RMS is worried that the CEO of IBM now has more clout in the Linux community than he does. Pure sour grapes.
Imagine how much market share FF would have if it had 100% javascript compability with IE, or even client side VBScript capability.
When someone downloads FF and 5-10% of the sites they visit don't quite function properly, they're going to include a caveat every time they recommend the browser to others, and they're going to keep IE around just in case.
I hate to be negative, but when you want to take market share you should embrace the current status quo and then extend it... The standards jihad is getting in the way of the product being successful.
Any mysql junkies out there should give PostgreSQL a try! Write a few functions and see how nice it is to make your db code modular, something mysql unfortunately cannot do in its current stable release.
You are right that 4300, but not everyone has a yard. I think that there are better options for some people, but 300W is not bad considering the few alternatives that some people have.
For those who are critcial of using 300W to reduce the amount of garbage produced by a household by 92% (50%, say, if we consider that it only reduces food garbage) will end up saving a lot more watts in the medium to long term.
Consider how many watts are used in the 60 extra seconds it takes the garbage man to load 2 or 3 extra bags into his truck, bags that wouldn't exist if the contents had been composted. A large diesel truck probably uses about 10KW per second to run, so in 60 seconds you're using 600KW. Compare that to a week's worth of 300W composting (50,400W) and you're saving a lot of power.
Now add the number of Watts required to ship garbage via truck or barge, or to build new landfills, and you are starting to approach an appropriate apples to apples analysis of the device's energy savings/surplus.
Yes, like roads. Think about all of the negative consequences of the interstate highway system:
1) highways are built and it instantly it becomes cheap to leave the city and commute via highway. Many people do, leading to a diminished tax base and urban decay, and most of today's urban problems.
2) there is no competition. Every day countless people waste hours stuck in traffic jams. This is productive time. If you take the traffic from NYC to the suburbs, for example, and imagine that the average person is paid $50K per year for working 9 hours a day, then the extra 2 hours per day effectively cost over $11K per year in productive time per person. The highways seem "free", but traffic jams have huge costs.
3) poor roads lead to car damage: potholes and stop and go traffic puts tremendous wear and tear on vehicles, costing lots of money that people would rather spend on subscriptions to private road services that actually worked properly.
4) pollution: stop and go traffic creates tons of extra pollution while cars sit idle, which is a tremendous environmental consequence of poorly designed highways and insufficient capacity.
Roads are the wrong counterexample to pick since the negative consequences are so significant. They are far from free, and for those who are slaves to a slow commute thanks to poor design and insufficient capacity, they take unbelievably expensive.
I would actually support if the government sold off highways to the highest bidder and also sold off the railways so that they could be converted into competing highways.
I care most for my own personal interests. If everyone gets 802.11B or G for free, then were is the incentive for improving those technologies? It now takes massive government redisign of the network to support superior technologies. Also, with only one provider, there is no competition to keep quality high.
There are some services that the government offers for free, and few actually help. The post office is terrible, many public schools are terrible, social security does way worse than 401K's or even Certificates of Deposit. The list of structural problems caused by government entry into markets is enormous.
Think about what you said. "when there is competition, there is always a reduction in quality to decrease prices and remain competitive".
if consumers demand lower prices, then of course companies will do what it takes to compete for business while offering lower prices... similarly, if people demand higher quality, companies will compete on that front. It's not a failure of capitalism, it's a success. Imagine an economy in which the only cars available were Rolls Royces and nobody could get a car unless they could afford a Rolls. That would be a very suboptimal situation, but it's essentially the one you're idealizing.
Energy companies are so heavily regulated that there really isn't competition and so I agree that the consumer experience is typically quite negative. Why should everyone pay for 99% uptime when some people need 99.9999999% but most would be happy to get discounted power at 98% uptime. The recent blackout illustrated how flawed the one-size-fits-all system is, since there was no way that businesses who required premium service could purchase from power companies (they had to have their own generators and thousands of gallons of fuel storage)...
You have said that nobody should trust anything, but you haven't suggested how policy ought to be created. Of course, politicians want you to believe that markets don't work so that you will give them the power to fix them. You seem to have bought into that ideology.
Markets are markets. They act to optimize resource allocation, nothing more, nothing less. You may not like the outcome, just as you may not always enjoy the effect of gravity, but both are rules of the universe, not ideologies.
The question to be asked is not "how are markets not always great compared to something that's invisible", but "knowing that markets are good at solving resource allocation problems, how can policy be created that doesn't stand in the way?"
The true costs of highways are difficult to measure. What is the cost of potholes? What is the cost of two lane highways that lead to congestion and stop and go accidents? What about the cost of all of the pollution caused by traffic jams, or the cost of an extra hour or two of tens of thousands of people's lives every day while they plod along at 5mph trying to get to work? Speed limits are set at 70, even though the governmnent designed interstates to support 90mph. Taxpayers pay for highways, as do toll payers, as do those who pay all of the above costs. Who is to say that charging a trucking fleet $20M per year for a 'subscription' to a particularly fast stretch of highway (ideally decomissioned railway) wouldn't be a highly beneficial proposition for all parties involved? I would personally pay upwards of $25/day to cut my commute in half, and I'm sure most people earning decent salaries would as well. I would also save money on car repairs if I could avoid all of the poorly maintained roads, etc. With appropriate design and maintenance, insurance prices would likely fall, as would pollution emissions which are another hidden cost of the current system.
I have often observed creationists expressing skepticism about evolution's 'ability' to create various marvels of nature. You sound like a creationist when you express disbelief. The fundamental principle is that markets are good at resource allocation (the essence of economic behavior) and they are far cleverer than you are (or than any of us is).
You are welcome to start a company to compete with Halliburton, as is everyone else. Not to defend Halliburton, but it's really the government's job to write contracts that demand high quality services, etc. We are not demanding enough of our elected officials, and so they do occasionally create bad policy.
Imagine if the railroads were sold, real-estate and all, and private companies were allowed to build private highways in their place. For a subscription fee (or tolls) you'd be able to drive 120 MPH in broad, safe, pothole-free lanes, with such things as wifi access, free roadside assistance, etc.
I'm using postgres in my current project, and asp.net 2.0 (planning on using the mono implementation)...
I do like mssql, though... I haven't used oracle so my experience is somewhat limited, but considering that Oracle is a db company and MS is a very broad software company, it doesn't seem to be doing too badly.
Hah. Those examples are creative, but it's funny to sing the praises of a system that self-destructed.
Soviet space flight was reliable only to the extent that its low tech systems were less prone to failure... admittedly that's a valid design approach, but it was not intentional, merely an accident of comparably slow technology growth.
I don't see how rifles are relevant.
I do not know when the basic design of transit in St. Petersburg was designed. It could have been designed prior to the Soviets. In the US people prefer to have cars, and the highways in most cities are only hindered by the fact that they are controlled by a central government. If American highways and railways were sold to the highest bidder, the infrastructure would quickly improve and the cost of maintaining it would quickly decrease.
C# is a revolutionary improvement over Java and is much closer to the ideal that Java has been striving toward for quite some time. Many of the language features are quite elegant and expressive, and it took someone with a very strong design sense to put it all together and still have it make sense to the vb programmers who make up a large part of the microsoft talent pool in a lot of companies.
The sister post rips apart your criticism of the x-box. For a company with no experience to become a serious contender in one shot is fairly impressive.
SQL Server is a fantastic database, and in my benchmarks it's 500 times faster than mysql without indexing and 100 times faster with indexing. I know those numbers sound farfetched, but testw were run on identical hardware, identical table structure, etc.
WINNT hal was designed by some of the premier OS designers and in its day was one of the more advanced approaches to OS design, in many respects, which you can read about.
Capitalism is indeed beautiful...just like the free agency market in sports is...from the standpoint of the free agent only.
Not at all. Capitalism is beautiful because someone is paying the cost of the talent and benefitting... in baseball that is typically the team's owner and shareholders. Fans also benefit because they choose to watch games, buy tickets, etc.
I think that C#, the first X-Box, SQL Server, and WINNT HAL, are excellent examples of Microsoft bringing in top experts and creating cutting edge technology. Sure there have been some flops, and shareholders ought to hold MS accountable...
The beauty of capitalism is the way it can at least put the top minds together on a team and let them have a shot at a higher level of excellence.
It's beautiful how capitalism works. Microsoft's shareholders want to make money, management chooses video games as an avenue, and then puts shareholder dollars to work recruiting the best possible minds. Think of how powerful that is. I can't wait to buy my next gen XBox when they come out.
I just meant some of the DOM features that Moz initially implemented the way Netscape had them rather than the more intuitive and (in my opinion) superior way that IE had them. Only very recently can a web developer target IE6/FF1 and write pretty much one version of the code. I think that this should be a goal of the Moz/FF projects even if it means deviating from a standard now and then.
Slashdot Mirror
municipal wifi is a great idea if you want to lock in 802.11g as the standard for the future... being able to sell homes and businesses wifi technology is what keeps pushing the technological envelope... want to kill wiMax? Support municipal wifi.
this will kill commercial adoption of linux... maybe RMS is worried that the CEO of IBM now has more clout in the Linux community than he does. Pure sour grapes.
uh, give it time... the 1.16 release (current) includes sse optimization for math and even more optimizations.
the Mono Project is an incredible benefit to the open source community. We don't need pointless trolling about its licensing on Slashdot.
rediculous anti-mono troll. use mono, it's better than Microsoft and free enough for a lot of people.
Imagine how much market share FF would have if it had 100% javascript compability with IE, or even client side VBScript capability.
When someone downloads FF and 5-10% of the sites they visit don't quite function properly, they're going to include a caveat every time they recommend the browser to others, and they're going to keep IE around just in case.
I hate to be negative, but when you want to take market share you should embrace the current status quo and then extend it... The standards jihad is getting in the way of the product being successful.
Any mysql junkies out there should give PostgreSQL a try! Write a few functions and see how nice it is to make your db code modular, something mysql unfortunately cannot do in its current stable release.
You are right that 4300, but not everyone has a yard. I think that there are better options for some people, but 300W is not bad considering the few alternatives that some people have.
I'll donate if you switch the license to the GPL...
For those who are critcial of using 300W to reduce the amount of garbage produced by a household by 92% (50%, say, if we consider that it only reduces food garbage) will end up saving a lot more watts in the medium to long term.
Consider how many watts are used in the 60 extra seconds it takes the garbage man to load 2 or 3 extra bags into his truck, bags that wouldn't exist if the contents had been composted. A large diesel truck probably uses about 10KW per second to run, so in 60 seconds you're using 600KW. Compare that to a week's worth of 300W composting (50,400W) and you're saving a lot of power.
Now add the number of Watts required to ship garbage via truck or barge, or to build new landfills, and you are starting to approach an appropriate apples to apples analysis of the device's energy savings/surplus.
Yes, like roads. Think about all of the negative consequences of the interstate highway system:
1) highways are built and it instantly it becomes cheap to leave the city and commute via highway. Many people do, leading to a diminished tax base and urban decay, and most of today's urban problems.
2) there is no competition. Every day countless people waste hours stuck in traffic jams. This is productive time. If you take the traffic from NYC to the suburbs, for example, and imagine that the average person is paid $50K per year for working 9 hours a day, then the extra 2 hours per day effectively cost over $11K per year in productive time per person. The highways seem "free", but traffic jams have huge costs.
3) poor roads lead to car damage: potholes and stop and go traffic puts tremendous wear and tear on vehicles, costing lots of money that people would rather spend on subscriptions to private road services that actually worked properly.
4) pollution: stop and go traffic creates tons of extra pollution while cars sit idle, which is a tremendous environmental consequence of poorly designed highways and insufficient capacity.
Roads are the wrong counterexample to pick since the negative consequences are so significant. They are far from free, and for those who are slaves to a slow commute thanks to poor design and insufficient capacity, they take unbelievably expensive.
I would actually support if the government sold off highways to the highest bidder and also sold off the railways so that they could be converted into competing highways.
I care most for my own personal interests. If everyone gets 802.11B or G for free, then were is the incentive for improving those technologies? It now takes massive government redisign of the network to support superior technologies. Also, with only one provider, there is no competition to keep quality high.
There are some services that the government offers for free, and few actually help. The post office is terrible, many public schools are terrible, social security does way worse than 401K's or even Certificates of Deposit. The list of structural problems caused by government entry into markets is enormous.
1) what do you do for a living
2) imagine if the government started offering it for free and you were out of a job and your training became worthless.
Think about what you said. "when there is competition, there is always a reduction in quality to decrease prices and remain competitive".
if consumers demand lower prices, then of course companies will do what it takes to compete for business while offering lower prices... similarly, if people demand higher quality, companies will compete on that front. It's not a failure of capitalism, it's a success. Imagine an economy in which the only cars available were Rolls Royces and nobody could get a car unless they could afford a Rolls. That would be a very suboptimal situation, but it's essentially the one you're idealizing.
Energy companies are so heavily regulated that there really isn't competition and so I agree that the consumer experience is typically quite negative. Why should everyone pay for 99% uptime when some people need 99.9999999% but most would be happy to get discounted power at 98% uptime. The recent blackout illustrated how flawed the one-size-fits-all system is, since there was no way that businesses who required premium service could purchase from power companies (they had to have their own generators and thousands of gallons of fuel storage)...
You have said that nobody should trust anything, but you haven't suggested how policy ought to be created. Of course, politicians want you to believe that markets don't work so that you will give them the power to fix them. You seem to have bought into that ideology.
Markets are markets. They act to optimize resource allocation, nothing more, nothing less. You may not like the outcome, just as you may not always enjoy the effect of gravity, but both are rules of the universe, not ideologies.
The question to be asked is not "how are markets not always great compared to something that's invisible", but "knowing that markets are good at solving resource allocation problems, how can policy be created that doesn't stand in the way?"
The true costs of highways are difficult to measure. What is the cost of potholes? What is the cost of two lane highways that lead to congestion and stop and go accidents? What about the cost of all of the pollution caused by traffic jams, or the cost of an extra hour or two of tens of thousands of people's lives every day while they plod along at 5mph trying to get to work? Speed limits are set at 70, even though the governmnent designed interstates to support 90mph. Taxpayers pay for highways, as do toll payers, as do those who pay all of the above costs. Who is to say that charging a trucking fleet $20M per year for a 'subscription' to a particularly fast stretch of highway (ideally decomissioned railway) wouldn't be a highly beneficial proposition for all parties involved? I would personally pay upwards of $25/day to cut my commute in half, and I'm sure most people earning decent salaries would as well. I would also save money on car repairs if I could avoid all of the poorly maintained roads, etc. With appropriate design and maintenance, insurance prices would likely fall, as would pollution emissions which are another hidden cost of the current system.
I have often observed creationists expressing skepticism about evolution's 'ability' to create various marvels of nature. You sound like a creationist when you express disbelief. The fundamental principle is that markets are good at resource allocation (the essence of economic behavior) and they are far cleverer than you are (or than any of us is).
You are welcome to start a company to compete with Halliburton, as is everyone else. Not to defend Halliburton, but it's really the government's job to write contracts that demand high quality services, etc. We are not demanding enough of our elected officials, and so they do occasionally create bad policy.
Imagine if the railroads were sold, real-estate and all, and private companies were allowed to build private highways in their place. For a subscription fee (or tolls) you'd be able to drive 120 MPH in broad, safe, pothole-free lanes, with such things as wifi access, free roadside assistance, etc.
I'm using postgres in my current project, and asp.net 2.0 (planning on using the mono implementation)...
I do like mssql, though... I haven't used oracle so my experience is somewhat limited, but considering that Oracle is a db company and MS is a very broad software company, it doesn't seem to be doing too badly.
Hah. Those examples are creative, but it's funny to sing the praises of a system that self-destructed.
Soviet space flight was reliable only to the extent that its low tech systems were less prone to failure... admittedly that's a valid design approach, but it was not intentional, merely an accident of comparably slow technology growth.
I don't see how rifles are relevant.
I do not know when the basic design of transit in St. Petersburg was designed. It could have been designed prior to the Soviets. In the US people prefer to have cars, and the highways in most cities are only hindered by the fact that they are controlled by a central government. If American highways and railways were sold to the highest bidder, the infrastructure would quickly improve and the cost of maintaining it would quickly decrease.
but the db itself is very fast.
C# is a revolutionary improvement over Java and is much closer to the ideal that Java has been striving toward for quite some time. Many of the language features are quite elegant and expressive, and it took someone with a very strong design sense to put it all together and still have it make sense to the vb programmers who make up a large part of the microsoft talent pool in a lot of companies.
The sister post rips apart your criticism of the x-box. For a company with no experience to become a serious contender in one shot is fairly impressive.
SQL Server is a fantastic database, and in my benchmarks it's 500 times faster than mysql without indexing and 100 times faster with indexing. I know those numbers sound farfetched, but testw were run on identical hardware, identical table structure, etc.
WINNT hal was designed by some of the premier OS designers and in its day was one of the more advanced approaches to OS design, in many respects, which you can read about.
Capitalism is indeed beautiful...just like the free agency market in sports is...from the standpoint of the free agent only.
Not at all. Capitalism is beautiful because someone is paying the cost of the talent and benefitting... in baseball that is typically the team's owner and shareholders. Fans also benefit because they choose to watch games, buy tickets, etc.
I think that C#, the first X-Box, SQL Server, and WINNT HAL, are excellent examples of Microsoft bringing in top experts and creating cutting edge technology. Sure there have been some flops, and shareholders ought to hold MS accountable...
The beauty of capitalism is the way it can at least put the top minds together on a team and let them have a shot at a higher level of excellence.
It's beautiful how capitalism works. Microsoft's shareholders want to make money, management chooses video games as an avenue, and then puts shareholder dollars to work recruiting the best possible minds. Think of how powerful that is. I can't wait to buy my next gen XBox when they come out.
I just meant some of the DOM features that Moz initially implemented the way Netscape had them rather than the more intuitive and (in my opinion) superior way that IE had them. Only very recently can a web developer target IE6/FF1 and write pretty much one version of the code. I think that this should be a goal of the Moz/FF projects even if it means deviating from a standard now and then.
That would be a great solution!