Just a note: Roger Penrose is a very highly respected mathematician, but many feel that he should stick to maths and not do the philosophy thing. The core argument of ENM is generally felt to be at best incomplete, if not simply wrong. Some critics would describe it more harshly.
An interesting and respectful review can be found here.
... as long as nothing tries to access the disk. I don't know how Sun managed it, but IDE accesses on the Ultra 5 at least can easily consume 100% CPU. Further, the Ultra 5 is very poorly supported by Solaris - things may be much improved under Linux, but you'd be much better off either paying a lot more for some real Sun hardware, or getting a fast PC instead for less money.
The more serious problem lies in maintaining standards at Universities.
Currently, the only reason why skilled personel in the IT fields would work in an Australian University, would be that they appreciated the lifestyle, which is naturally somewhat more relaxed than in the commercial sector. But $60,000+ is a lot of money to miss out on, for a lifestyle benefit. If something is not done soon, we face the very real possibility of a sudden sharp drop in educational standards.
Naturally a similar problem arises in other fields with strong commercial interest (e.g. biochemistry.)
Australia has had good cause to be proud of its record in higher education and research, but the actions of successive governments in the last ten years have all but demolished the foundation for such success, the consequences of which are only now beginning to become apparent.
You may not want to use BigPond - but it's looking like all Australian Dreamcast users will be. When they finally get around to enabling the Dreamcast internet service here, sometime in February.
The medium doesn't cost per-bit, it costs a one-time, large, capital cost, plus a much smaller maintenance cost, for a fixed large capacity. If we're being all fair and equitable about it, the charging should be based on the proportion of bandwidth to your PoP you are guaranteed, with some auxillary scheme for charging for the use of any unused remaining bandwidth on a time-to-time basis. Charging by the bit doesn't make sense in this context.
Charging by bit has negative effects on the Internet as a whole. Charging the sender cripples services. Charging the receiver makes them vulnerable to expensive denial of service.
Sometimes subsidising a service by charging a flat rate is overall beneficial, even if a strict usage-rate might be fairer per-user (bit-charging I think isn't even this.) Quality public education may well be much more expensive to provide in areas of low population density. So, should we charge people there? The cost would be: a significant portion of the populace being financially forced to move to high-population density areas (at a cost to our agricultural industry) or that same portion being left uneducated, crippling our future. I believe a similar argument can be made for telecommunications, and even Internet access.
I'm Australian and I don't know why either. The re-elected government had a history of convenient election 'promises'; increasing inequity in higher education; lack of concern for social wellbeing; decreasing job security and furthering the gap between the well off and the not nearly so well off.
I wish I knew why nearly 50% of Australians voted for them, when their policies seem focused on increasing the wealth of the most wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and to instigate regressive and highly conservative social policy. I can only guess that people were blinded by the nice sparkly shiny promised tax cuts (which after the GST again, only benefit those on an average or better income - at the expense of our whole social support fabric.)
Remember these are the people who - in a time of public hospital fundinc crisis - subsidised *private health insurance* to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm simply disgusted.
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Just a note: Roger Penrose is a very highly respected mathematician, but many feel that he should stick to maths and not do the philosophy thing. The core argument of ENM is generally felt to be at best incomplete, if not simply wrong. Some critics would describe it more harshly.
An interesting and respectful review can be found here.
... as long as nothing tries to access the disk. I don't know how Sun managed it, but IDE accesses on the Ultra 5 at least can easily consume 100% CPU. Further, the Ultra 5 is very poorly supported by Solaris - things may be much improved under Linux, but you'd be much better off either paying a lot more for some real Sun hardware, or getting a fast PC instead for less money.
The more serious problem lies in maintaining standards at Universities.
Currently, the only reason why skilled personel in the IT fields would work in an Australian University, would be that they appreciated the lifestyle, which is naturally somewhat more relaxed than in the commercial sector. But $60,000+ is a lot of money to miss out on, for a lifestyle benefit. If something is not done soon, we face the very real possibility of a sudden sharp drop in educational standards.
Naturally a similar problem arises in other fields with strong commercial interest (e.g. biochemistry.)
Australia has had good cause to be proud of its record in higher education and research, but the actions of successive governments in the last ten years have all but demolished the foundation for such success, the consequences of which are only now beginning to become apparent.
You may not want to use BigPond - but it's looking like all Australian Dreamcast users will be. When they finally get around to enabling the Dreamcast internet service here, sometime in February.
Two points:
Sometimes subsidising a service by charging a flat rate is overall beneficial, even if a strict usage-rate might be fairer per-user (bit-charging I think isn't even this.) Quality public education may well be much more expensive to provide in areas of low population density. So, should we charge people there? The cost would be: a significant portion of the populace being financially forced to move to high-population density areas (at a cost to our agricultural industry) or that same portion being left uneducated, crippling our future. I believe a similar argument can be made for telecommunications, and even Internet access.
I'm Australian and I don't know why either. The re-elected government had a history of convenient election 'promises'; increasing inequity in higher education; lack of concern for social wellbeing; decreasing job security and furthering the gap between the well off and the not nearly so well off.
I wish I knew why nearly 50% of Australians voted for them, when their policies seem focused on increasing the wealth of the most wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and to instigate regressive and highly conservative social policy. I can only guess that people were blinded by the nice sparkly shiny promised tax cuts (which after the GST again, only benefit those on an average or better income - at the expense of our whole social support fabric.)
Remember these are the people who - in a time of public hospital fundinc crisis - subsidised *private health insurance* to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm simply disgusted.