It is not the digital downloads or pirated content that killed Blockbuster (at least here).
It is the like of LoveFilm which have 100 times the catalogue of your local BlockBuster branch and can offer it to you for a bag of peanuts over mail order using a "no late fees" model.
If you are already in a state of war the "selfdefence" definition automatically becomes very vague and stretched to the point where you can execute any offensive action of your liking. The sole reason why all these latent conflicts have never gone beyond posturing is not the Japanese constitution.
Japan made the political decision not to sign peace treaties with some of the allied powers after WW2. USA and Britain forced their treaties down their throat backed by their battleships main caliber. Russia and China did not have that leverage so the Japanese refused to sign it.
As far as the Japanese are concerned WW2 is still not over and they have territorial pretences towards Russia, China, etc. Posturing about "never giving these away" is an essential part of Japanese domestic politics. There is a Russian saying: if you saw wind, do not complain when you harvest a storm.
I paid for both Loki releases and I would have loved to be able to waste time again and again and again with Civ old and new:) A linux version of a new Civ would be most welcome and I will be glad to pay for it. However, that does not seem to be on the menu so until then it looks like the "commuter train game" will still be Nethack again and again.
You obviously have no idea how many guns non-americans have. I used to live in a country where the government thought of the population as harmless and unarmed as in most European countries.
That changed overnight after the national football team won against a few archrivals at the worldcup and unexpectedly proceeded past the group stage. The comment from the commentator on TV was: "Tonight the downtown in the Capital looked Rio De Janeiro during the carnival, while the suburbs looked like Saraevo under seige." He had a point. The sky looked like a scene from a second world war movies with tracer bullets flying all over the place and at least several AK47s opening up from the balkonies of each apartment block. I do not watch football and I expected the team to lose so I was happily sleeping until the barrage opened up. Next thing I remember I was lying on the floor next to the balkony wall. After that the government declared at least 4 or 5 gun amnesties trying to collect all those firearms and collected diddly squat. They are still amidst the general population.
The thing about America is not that they have a lot of guns and are gun mad. Canadians have more light arms per capita and most Swiss country houses can have anything up to a heavy army issue machine gun stored in a cubbard. Finns have plenty of guns too and I would not even mention Serbians, Bulgarians or some of the other ex-Soviet block countries.
It is a knife or to be more exact oversized dagger, not a sword.
The balance is wrong. With a sword you need to be able to chop which requires the sword to have at least some weight towards the end so you can put a good whack onto your opponent. Otherwise it does not have enough energy to chop through armour or let's say chop a hand off.
That is why roman, greek and other armies who faught with a similar size short blades had leaf-shaped blades with the thin end on the hilt side.
The same can be said about distribution chains. You can fault the Home Delivery Network or other cheap as in cheaps couriers for a lot of things, but inefficiency is not one of them.
The article referring report is a bit skimpy on the methodology used. I would be interested if it accounts for all the environmental damage from building the mall in the first place as well as its regular refurbishment (most undergo at least some level of redoing every 10 years or so).
There is lost of precedent behind what Intel is doing. While Intel has cross-licensed most of their IPR I suspect there is at least some IPR which they are paying per core/feature as well so there may even be some financial basis.
While me or you may not like it (I definitely do not) there is nothing particularly vile or invalid businesswise in this.
However, any USA or EU investigation will uncover only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the high tech wage bill has long gone to a place with a warmer and wetter climate. There nearly all companies have strict (and fairly open) non-poaching agreements including non-hiring of employees who want to leave a "competitor" and reporting such employees back to their employer.
I am not joking here by the way, just search linked in for Nokia, Ericsson, etc job ads in India and read the attached discussion. It gives some very interesting perspective on life and work there...
Dude, whatever you are smoking can you please share it.
Gnome perpetrates Winhoze coding practices into the unix world. Just take any piece of gnome code and read it. Carefully. And follow the code design, not just the code "quality".
Let's just take ekiga as an example, though any gnome app will do.
The state machine is tightly coupled with the UI just like a Windows application. As a result making it use multiple CPUs properly or reusing the code for anything other than another Gnome application is impossible. Not surprisingly it triggers races in underlying (similarly badly coded) libraries like there is no tomorrow. Same for having the UI stripped away. This is impossible. And just do not get me started on the subject of trying to integrate something to a piece of gnome code. Because the apps state machines are built around the UI half of the key functions that should show up on dbus end up as inaccessible. Taking same ekiga as an example - call is exposed while hangup is not because it is so UI-tied up that there is no way in hell to expose it.
A "site reliability" engineer should not have this level of application access anyway.
Dunno what the google job spec is, but in another company he would have been responsible for the systems to function correctly, removal/pruning of dead nodes, installation of new nodes, hands-on during failures/rebuilds, system backups, etc. Basically system level stuff and not application level stuff. In a Mom-n-Pop's shop such a person can change application data simply because he has admin passwords. Being able to change application data in company the size of Google with this job spec means either a combination of very freaky coincidences or the total lack of "security by design". If it is the first one Google still has some explaining to do. If it is the second one however...
I would not be so sure about that. Hystorically, microsoft hardware division has been reasonably good in delivering on its promises.
Also, funnily enough, most of their hardware works quite well with Linux. This reminds me, I need to get some more Microsoft XP Media Center Edition IR remote controls for my Linux HTPCs. While MCE XP was a flop, the hardware for it performs fantastically under a proper OS:)
Docsis allows this to the whole HFC strand with several hundred customers on it. As docsis 1.0 does not have a decent line-sharing semantics especially for upstream the cablecos had no choice but to cut down the speed of each individual customer so that the trunk is not congested. That is if they had the frequencies in the frequency plan to run it at full blast (most did not). On top of that when cable modem deployments started quite a few cable plants had additional limitations in the way it was designed and laid out limiting the speed to sub-2MBit. That had to be fixed by digging roads and replacing the actual last 100m coax as well as cabinets. The replacement cycle barely finished about now and that is why cablecos have now started pumping the bandwidth to 30M+.
DSL1 is 8/1 over sub-1km line without crosstalk taken into account. If the E-side bundle has high DSL percentage you cannot get that even on sub-1km lines. That is besides the fact that most customers live at 3+km from the exchange in UK/US and 2km+ in EU.
As far as equipment not needing replacement - Early DSLAMs were all ATM based and nearly all of them were not upgradable. Neither software, nor hardware. Ditto for BRASes. Cisco 10k, Uniphase (later bought by Juniper) all had no upgrade paths and no direct successors. You had to swap out the whole kit.
So the speeds are not surprising and the costs are not surprising. Only once we forget the copper malarkey alltogether and go fiber things start to change. There you have a long term investment where the infrastructure has a very low cost to maintain. So it is reasonable to expect price drop over time.
Having procrastinted similarly in the UK for two years after being eligible I can understand him procrastinating on it. Just the thought of dealing with any immigration authority in any country feels my heart with dread. It is one of the most demeaning and degrading experiences one can have short of getting involved in the second oldest profession.
The speed of evolution in Broadband technology prevents the bill from dropping. By the time the equipment is fully depreciated and your bill _CAN_ drop it has to be replaced with a next gen equipment. No broadband tech has lived for more than 3 years so far.
DSL with ATM backhaul, DSL with Ethernet Backhaul, DSL2+, VDSL/FTTC and before the latter is anywhere near depreciated we are marching into PON/GPON land. Same for Cable - Docsis 1.0, 1.2, 2.0, 3.0 over 12 years.
It may start dropping once we are in the land of PON. That is the first technology so far which does not look like an ephemeral stopgap.
Not necessarily. For example I am happy to pay for content and I do so and I do it knowingly that some of it goes to whoever made it.
However when I buy it I want it to play on all of my devices - on my phone, on my laptop, on my Linux based HTPC, on the portable also linux based HTPC made out of an old laptop in the car and so on.
That is why I am happy to give Amazon money for MP3s while there is no way in hell I will pay for "online film rental". Same goes for refusing to be spoon fed mandatorily bundled crap produced by synthetic spoiled brats commanded by Simon the FreakMonger.
As far as the free-for-all crowd, the XXAA should simply accept that there is a demographic out there which is not willing to pay and will _NOT_ pay. Same as there is a demographic that will pay even if it can get it for free from an illegal source. Behaving so that the second demographic starts to sympathise with the cause of the first is not just counterproductive, it is plain stupid.
There is a very good article by Ericsson on the subject. The laser actually is a minor contributor to the power consumption. It is the remainder of the electronics which are the key and there are ways to power-save on them. However, this requires support in the network as well as in the device and I have yet to see anyone designing and implementing it.
If the support is in place an NTE can indeed survive for a few days. Unfortunately it is not. I have yet to see a vendor who implements power shedding and IDLE mode in their kit.
It is not the digital downloads or pirated content that killed Blockbuster (at least here).
It is the like of LoveFilm which have 100 times the catalogue of your local BlockBuster branch and can offer it to you for a bag of peanuts over mail order using a "no late fees" model.
You missed one subtle point.
If you are already in a state of war the "selfdefence" definition automatically becomes very vague and stretched to the point where you can execute any offensive action of your liking. The sole reason why all these latent conflicts have never gone beyond posturing is not the Japanese constitution.
It is the factor known as "Size Matters".
Well,
Japan made the political decision not to sign peace treaties with some of the allied powers after WW2. USA and Britain forced their treaties down their throat backed by their battleships main caliber. Russia and China did not have that leverage so the Japanese refused to sign it.
As far as the Japanese are concerned WW2 is still not over and they have territorial pretences towards Russia, China, etc. Posturing about "never giving these away" is an essential part of Japanese domestic politics. There is a Russian saying: if you saw wind, do not complain when you harvest a storm.
That is already the case for a lot of them.
Read carefully the small print on a game or another piece of software. You are _NOT_ buying it, you are licensing it.
I paid for both Loki releases and I would have loved to be able to waste time again and again and again with Civ old and new :) A linux version of a new Civ would be most welcome and I will be glad to pay for it.
However, that does not seem to be on the menu so until then it looks like the "commuter train game" will still be Nethack again and again.
You obviously have no idea how many guns non-americans have. I used to live in a country where the government thought of the population as harmless and unarmed as in most European countries.
That changed overnight after the national football team won against a few archrivals at the worldcup and unexpectedly proceeded past the group stage. The comment from the commentator on TV was: "Tonight the downtown in the Capital looked Rio De Janeiro during the carnival, while the suburbs looked like Saraevo under seige." He had a point. The sky looked like a scene from a second world war movies with tracer bullets flying all over the place and at least several AK47s opening up from the balkonies of each apartment block. I do not watch football and I expected the team to lose so I was happily sleeping until the barrage opened up. Next thing I remember I was lying on the floor next to the balkony wall. After that the government declared at least 4 or 5 gun amnesties trying to collect all those firearms and collected diddly squat. They are still amidst the general population.
The thing about America is not that they have a lot of guns and are gun mad. Canadians have more light arms per capita and most Swiss country houses can have anything up to a heavy army issue machine gun stored in a cubbard. Finns have plenty of guns too and I would not even mention Serbians, Bulgarians or some of the other ex-Soviet block countries.
It is a knife or to be more exact oversized dagger, not a sword.
The balance is wrong. With a sword you need to be able to chop which requires the sword to have at least some weight towards the end so you can put a good whack onto your opponent. Otherwise it does not have enough energy to chop through armour or let's say chop a hand off.
That is why roman, greek and other armies who faught with a similar size short blades had leaf-shaped blades with the thin end on the hilt side.
The same can be said about distribution chains. You can fault the Home Delivery Network or other cheap as in cheaps couriers for a lot of things, but inefficiency is not one of them.
The article referring report is a bit skimpy on the methodology used. I would be interested if it accounts for all the environmental damage from building the mall in the first place as well as its regular refurbishment (most undergo at least some level of redoing every 10 years or so).
So is Dresden, Berlin, Koln, Helsinki, Paris, etc. That somehow does not prevent them from finding a way.
So, what makes Microcode not software?
There is lost of precedent behind what Intel is doing. While Intel has cross-licensed most of their IPR I suspect there is at least some IPR which they are paying per core/feature as well so there may even be some financial basis.
While me or you may not like it (I definitely do not) there is nothing particularly vile or invalid businesswise in this.
Fair enough.
However, any USA or EU investigation will uncover only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the high tech wage bill has long gone to a place with a warmer and wetter climate. There nearly all companies have strict (and fairly open) non-poaching agreements including non-hiring of employees who want to leave a "competitor" and reporting such employees back to their employer.
I am not joking here by the way, just search linked in for Nokia, Ericsson, etc job ads in India and read the attached discussion. It gives some very interesting perspective on life and work there...
There is an aforism: Democracy as a form of government is riddled with problems. However we are yet to invent anything better.
Same with the peer review. It has its problems. However, we are yet to invent anything better
Dude, whatever you are smoking can you please share it.
Gnome perpetrates Winhoze coding practices into the unix world. Just take any piece of gnome code and read it. Carefully. And follow the code design, not just the code "quality".
Let's just take ekiga as an example, though any gnome app will do.
The state machine is tightly coupled with the UI just like a Windows application. As a result making it use multiple CPUs properly or reusing the code for anything other than another Gnome application is impossible. Not surprisingly it triggers races in underlying (similarly badly coded) libraries like there is no tomorrow. Same for having the UI stripped away. This is impossible. And just do not get me started on the subject of trying to integrate something to a piece of gnome code. Because the apps state machines are built around the UI half of the key functions that should show up on dbus end up as inaccessible. Taking same ekiga as an example - call is exposed while hangup is not because it is so UI-tied up that there is no way in hell to expose it.
Not surprising if it takes more effort to buy and use than to get a pirated copy.
Amazon MP3 has done more for weeding out music piracy than all XPAA efforts combined.
This is also why startups succeed at a less than 1:9 rate.
A "site reliability" engineer should not have this level of application access anyway.
Dunno what the google job spec is, but in another company he would have been responsible for the systems to function correctly, removal/pruning of dead nodes, installation of new nodes, hands-on during failures/rebuilds, system backups, etc. Basically system level stuff and not application level stuff. In a Mom-n-Pop's shop such a person can change application data simply because he has admin passwords. Being able to change application data in company the size of Google with this job spec means either a combination of very freaky coincidences or the total lack of "security by design". If it is the first one Google still has some explaining to do. If it is the second one however...
It was not Google who caught the guy which is what is worrying in this case, it was the parents of the kids involved.
I would have expected a shop of their size to have proper security and use at least some of their precious IPR on log analysis.
I would not be so sure about that. Hystorically, microsoft hardware division has been reasonably good in delivering on its promises.
Also, funnily enough, most of their hardware works quite well with Linux. This reminds me, I need to get some more Microsoft XP Media Center Edition IR remote controls for my Linux HTPCs. While MCE XP was a flop, the hardware for it performs fantastically under a proper OS:)
Asus is just the reference MSFT tablet design - rotating hinge. It has been for years and has failed to deliver spectacularly so far.
So I would not be so sure. Dell maybe onto something here.
Not quite so.
Docsis allows this to the whole HFC strand with several hundred customers on it. As docsis 1.0 does not have a decent line-sharing semantics especially for upstream the cablecos had no choice but to cut down the speed of each individual customer so that the trunk is not congested. That is if they had the frequencies in the frequency plan to run it at full blast (most did not). On top of that when cable modem deployments started quite a few cable plants had additional limitations in the way it was designed and laid out limiting the speed to sub-2MBit. That had to be fixed by digging roads and replacing the actual last 100m coax as well as cabinets. The replacement cycle barely finished about now and that is why cablecos have now started pumping the bandwidth to 30M+.
DSL1 is 8/1 over sub-1km line without crosstalk taken into account. If the E-side bundle has high DSL percentage you cannot get that even on sub-1km lines. That is besides the fact that most customers live at 3+km from the exchange in UK/US and 2km+ in EU.
As far as equipment not needing replacement - Early DSLAMs were all ATM based and nearly all of them were not upgradable. Neither software, nor hardware. Ditto for BRASes. Cisco 10k, Uniphase (later bought by Juniper) all had no upgrade paths and no direct successors. You had to swap out the whole kit.
So the speeds are not surprising and the costs are not surprising. Only once we forget the copper malarkey alltogether and go fiber things start to change. There you have a long term investment where the infrastructure has a very low cost to maintain. So it is reasonable to expect price drop over time.
Absobloodylutely.
Having procrastinted similarly in the UK for two years after being eligible I can understand him procrastinating on it. Just the thought of dealing with any immigration authority in any country feels my heart with dread. It is one of the most demeaning and degrading experiences one can have short of getting involved in the second oldest profession.
Not quite so.
The speed of evolution in Broadband technology prevents the bill from dropping. By the time the equipment is fully depreciated and your bill _CAN_ drop it has to be replaced with a next gen equipment. No broadband tech has lived for more than 3 years so far.
DSL with ATM backhaul, DSL with Ethernet Backhaul, DSL2+, VDSL/FTTC and before the latter is anywhere near depreciated we are marching into PON/GPON land. Same for Cable - Docsis 1.0, 1.2, 2.0, 3.0 over 12 years.
It may start dropping once we are in the land of PON. That is the first technology so far which does not look like an ephemeral stopgap.
Not necessarily. For example I am happy to pay for content and I do so and I do it knowingly that some of it goes to whoever made it.
However when I buy it I want it to play on all of my devices - on my phone, on my laptop, on my Linux based HTPC, on the portable also linux based HTPC made out of an old laptop in the car and so on.
That is why I am happy to give Amazon money for MP3s while there is no way in hell I will pay for "online film rental". Same goes for refusing to be spoon fed mandatorily bundled crap produced by synthetic spoiled brats commanded by Simon the FreakMonger.
As far as the free-for-all crowd, the XXAA should simply accept that there is a demographic out there which is not willing to pay and will _NOT_ pay. Same as there is a demographic that will pay even if it can get it for free from an illegal source. Behaving so that the second demographic starts to sympathise with the cause of the first is not just counterproductive, it is plain stupid.
No. Sounds like reality.
google.cn, google.de, google.fr all censor results with google.au joining shortly.
It is only a matter of how much is it pushed. I suspect that if one of the Gulf countries twists its arm to do a halaloogle it will promptly do so.
There is a very good article by Ericsson on the subject. The laser actually is a minor contributor to the power consumption. It is the remainder of the electronics which are the key and there are ways to power-save on them. However, this requires support in the network as well as in the device and I have yet to see anyone designing and implementing it.
If the support is in place an NTE can indeed survive for a few days. Unfortunately it is not. I have yet to see a vendor who implements power shedding and IDLE mode in their kit.