Honestly, I would be happy just to get animated gifs in my text books. It shouldn't be that hard, gifs are ancient and small, just provide a fall back picture for static display.
The other problem is that many customers don't even know they are being had. Modern stuff especially electronics are so complicated that the average person just doesn't have the time to figure it all out and buy rationally. They usually become dependent on store recommendations or someone they know, if they know someone.
This is part of the reasons why companies make there offerings confusing and difficult to compare. It's been called a "confusopoly" to make sure people can't understand why a competitors products may be better. Notice how there are so many "customized" versions of smartphones? Nonsensical models numbers for a ton of computer parts, etc.
The problem isn't so much that technology has been putting people out of jobs. People have been saying that since 1800's. The problem is that wages in the western world at not competitive with the developing world. Take a look at China and India, millions upon million of people entering the industrial work force, jobs exist. When the technology improves people find jobs elsewhere, more cars means more mechanics and sales people etc. Things have worked pretty good like that for the last 200 years. What is happening now is not technological take over, but a massive labour force price correction vis a vis the developing world.
Who is going to hire an American for $20/h to work a factory line when someone in China will do it for $5? Something has to give.
If the new media companies like google and facebook don't like what the government is planning threaten to de-invest in the USA. By that I mean start moving jobs, charity work, headquarters overseas to someplace with reasonable laws. I promise that a full page ad in the New York times about the issue will generate less controversy than headlines reading:
Google moving 10,000 jobs overseas, says government stifles growth.
Sorry to double reply, but now that I think about it, what you are describing sounds a hell of a lot like a mainframe on a chip. IBM mainframes have Multi-chip Modules that are a lot like what you are describing.
Very interesting idea. We are going to have to add in more cores from now on to get more performance, might as well start specializing them for certain tasks. Your idea about x86 hardware emulation is especially interesting.
It's not as if "x86" means much from an architectural standpoint.
But it does. Intel/AMD do lots to make the architecture efficient but they are significantly constrained by having to meet the x86 at the highest level for compatibility.
First there is a ton of legacy stuff in x86 that is just not needed, making the core larger and more power hungry. Take a look at how the floating point works, its just dreadful.
x86 is CISC when we know RISC is better. Intel/AMD do some tricks to make the core more RISC, but why not just cut out the middle man? Why bother with converting it at all?
The number of working registers is also determined by the instruction set. It is pretty obvious that x86 could use more.
Additionally the are things like status registers, various pointers, the interrupt subsystem. It's just not pretty.
And most importantly for this application is that the chip is not designed with SoC in mind. So splitting up or adding different parts I suspect will be much more difficult.
It's being shown time and again that strong countries do not get attacked.
And what do you do in the interim while some states have it and others do not? It basically forces every country to develop nuclear weapons as soon as as one of their neighbours has them. Or more likely launch a preemptive strike before they get them if one is ahead of the other. Or quickly use their new found nuclear power to wipe out regimes they don't like and call the bluff that the USA will retaliate in kind.
How does the international community stop genocide, etc. in a nuclear armed country?
What do you do about nuclear weapons and state sponsored terrorism?
What do you do about nuclear arms in failed states or civil wars?
Accidents?
Some crazy SoB just pushing the button?
If I'm going down I'm taking the world with me?
Iraq wasn't a mistake it was a failure of the international community to keep the USA in check. The UN should have just stepped in and said no and sent in peacekeepers to hold the Americans back. Alternatively Russia or China should have sent support to Iraq before the invasion.
Not having nuclear weapons was a mistake for Gaddafi, but a nuclear free Libya was great for the Libyan people. It was also great for people in Sudan, Serbia, Rwanda, pretty much every other hell hole where there was mass killings. North Korea just got nuclear weapons, does anyone other than Kim Jong-il feel safer? How about India and Pakistan, are we safer having added the threat of nuclear weapons on top of boarder disputes?
Nuclear weapons don't make the world safer they just raise the stakes when something goes wrong.
While it is always nice to hear about companies contributing to opensource, I don't see there being a big demand for x86 android. Who would use it? It's not low power enough for most tablets/phones. And while the ability to run existing x86 apps is nice they are mostly tied to Windows which is also not likely to see much traction in the mobile space. So what is the point?
What I would like to see is Intel creating a SoC and softcore suite. Intel has some big advantages that they could use to seriously compete:
1) Lots of experience in chip design. I don't see why they can't create an ARM-Core competitor.
2) They can start from scratch. Unlike ARM there is no need to legacy support or backward compatibility.
3) They have in house designers for everything from graphics, wired, wireless, etc. chips. I don't see why they cannot design from this a whole suite of modules that work on their SoC platform.
4) They have (to my knowledge) the best chip fab plants in the world by a sizable margin. Die shrinks offer a great way to reduce power consumption.
5) They have produced great x86 compilers for years, so producing a new compiler for a new chip shouldn't be too difficult since they are already experienced with x86 and Itanium.
6) They have shown that they already know how to support Android.
7) They have the cash and business partners to make it work.
I'm not saying they are guaranteed to make big bucks. Fighting an intrenched ARM with wide industry support will be hugely difficult. But if any company can do it it's Intel. Of course this means they would have to get over the Itanic debacle and stop trying to shove x86 down the throats of every problem.
Er, "caveat" is directly from Latin. It is pronounced KA-vee-at with the stress on the first syllable. But any dictionary would tell you that, so as someone said above, why not use one if you're learning a language? I certainly had to.
The thing is I am a native speaker. I know what caveat means, and when writing I have used it many times, but the first time I tried to use it when speaking I stumbled.
People who do lots of reading, especially older texts, are exposed to words that are never spoken in everyday use. The meaning of the word is obvious from the context so you never have to look it up. So you end up knowing words without ever having heard them spoken, and so you don't know the correct pronunciation. I eventually did look it up in a dictionary but at the time I felt like I had a seg fault.
I find it especially hard with Russian names. They are often long and have a lot of A,V,K in them. I remember reading Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising as a kid, I got halfway through the book before I realized that what I thought was one guy was actually two. The names where shaped almost identically and I just read them as the same. I wonder if in Cyrillic they are different enough that this is not a problem.
I agree. When I read stuff like that the voice in my head goes funny, but Down Syndrome is probably the best description I can think of.
I wonder if this has any relation to people who actually have Down Syndrome. Is it possible that they experience the world the way we experience jumbled sentences?
I have a similar problem. I know lots of words I cannot pronounce correctly. Recently I had a problem with "caveat" (kA-vat? kav-eat? kAv-at? kav-E-at?). English is especially silly since we steal so many foreign words, I often wonder if German/French/Spanish is more logical.
I absolutely agree with you. Thing is, if you have a small enough group that does that and you can still make a profit and provide good service to all your users then why not do it?
Indeed TekSavvy does this. They offer two streams: Low pings capped, high ping unlimited. Basically cheap/gamer and massive downloader packages. I'm with the later and I am very happy. Ping times are really not bad at all and I get as much usage as I want. After dealing with Rogers/Bell for years switching to smaller companies like TekSavvy and Moblicity have been an eye opener for what service should be like. I just wish they could expand outside Toronto, and that Bell would stop hassling Teksavvy all the time (eg. this UBB crap).
If bandwidth were a free good, then it would be in such abundance that everybody would have all they could ever want and nobody would ever have to pay anybody for it. Clearly, that isn't the case.
There are two units of measure that are often conflated. One is the number of packets (P), the other is the transmission rate, packets per second (P/s). Packets (P) are a free good (sort-of they do cost electricity) my computer can generate as many packets as I please at no cost. The bandwidth (P/s) however is a limit resource, to get more you have to pay more. So it makes sense to charge for bandwidth (P/s), but charging for packets (P) doesn't make sense. It's not like your router can only handle so many packets then has to be replaced. UBB is an indirect way of limiting bandwidth (P/s) by limiting packets (P).
In a free market system with strong competition UBB is a much better system for multiple reasons. Unfortunately in North America the market is mostly duopolies or monopolies and market effects which make UBB work breakdown.
Since ISPs make money selling more bandwidth than they buy based on the assumption that not everyone will use their bandwidth 24/7. Caps on (P) prevent statistical outliers (24/7 bandwidth use people) from screwing up this business model since no money is made on people who max out their connection. I think most people agree this is reasonable. (Note: some companies claim 'unlimited' but in fact do have caps; they are scum).
UBB is good because is makes people set their own caps (P) based on how much they are willing to spend. Which just like the outliers indirectly limits bandwidth (P/s). This is good because it allows ISP to give out high bandwidth (P/s) knowing that people will set their own limits, making the system more economical and efficient for eveyone.
The problem with UBB is that it discourages ISPs from increasing the bandwidth (P/s) they can handle. Since UBB rations (P) and not (P/s) users will not increase (P) because it will cost them too much. This is where the free market steps in as everyone will want to be with the company with the lowest price per (P). This competition will force companies to lower their cost per (P). Since the cost is now lower customers will use more (P) forcing companies to increase network capacity (P/s) to accommodate.
Since most ISPs in North America are a monopoly there is no reason for ISPs to ever decrease the price for (P) or invest in the network (P/s). Accommodating new users is done by increasing the price since (P) is a limited resource. Increasing the price causes people to ration (P) more but the company makes more money on the same network (P/s). The networks capacity (P/s) determines how much (P) the ISPs have and they auction it off at the highest point the market will bear. They can justify an increase in costs if there is more demand for a "limited" resource (P), ie. "we are running out of internet".
In our current system ISPs must make money by adding new users, since arbitrarily increasing the price of (P/s) would be an abuse of monopoly power and the government would step in. This is down by lowering the costs of (P/s) so more people will sign on. New users must be accommodated with more bandwidth (P/s) on the network since reducing the bandwidth (P/s) or cap (P) of existing users is again an abuse of monopoly power and the government will step in. This forces network upgrades, and eventually causes ISP to offer better services.
Really the problem is not UBB, but the lack of a free market in ISPs in North America. UBB is a solution that doesn't address the problem and will only make things worse.
What if electricity providers had to guarantee that every house in the country could consume the maximum current draw their connections are rated for at any given moment?
Then they had better lower the rated maximum current draw per house! The issue is that the ISP have a very good estimate of how much bandwidth is needed and what the usage bell curve looks like, and intentionally offer services they know they cannot provide.
The problem is the TelCo's advertise a speed and don't deliver. I would understand if the throttling if it were temporary, sure no problem. But if they have failed to solve the issue 5 years running, that is just nonsense. The issue of some users slowing down the system is not the consumers problem. I didn't buy a internet party line or time share, I bought a service from a company and I expect them to provide it.
The companies need to a) limit/segregate heavy users so they don't disrupt regular service, or b) stop signing people up for a service they are unable to provide. The ISP industry is the only system I can think of where companies get away with blaming poor service on their users. If only 8/10 phone calls made a connection, or you had blackouts 6 times a month, your credit card only worked 5 times a week, water 300 days a year, etc. people would pitch a fit.
We have to come up with society that lets middle of the road people live a reasonable life, not expect everyone on the block to go off to work in a lab.
I have to disagree. I think we should be trying to create a system where everyone goes off to work in a lab, or at the very least that is the end goal for most people at the start of their eduction.
We have been hearing for years that we live in the information age, the the western world is moving to a post-industrial economy. We can't go back to a middle class factory worker, we cannot compete with the masses of poor in the developing world and maintain our lifestyle. So what can we turn to? White collar, knowledge based jobs like programming, engineering, etc. But eventually the developing world will catch up with that as well, see statics about how many engineers India and China are training.
The end game is research, that is the top of the ladder and that is where we will probably end up. Research is one of those things that we can scale up because there is so much we don't know, or at least, don't know how to do well. I don't see any reason why we cannot have a much, much, larger base of scientists and research labs.
The government absolutely needs to spend more money on these things, much more. The government needs to spend much more on research because right now being a scientist doesn't pay well because there are not many jobs. So many people in the sciences end up in finance for the money. If the government would spend more on things like DARPA, NASA, etc. this would increase the number of jobs and draw more people to the sciences. Remember we used to do those things. When was the last time a national laboratory was founded? When was the last time the government created a research university? How about a well funded DARPA-esque thing for the FDA, EPA, FCC?
Sure it is expensive, and yes the payoffs are hard to gauge, but look at the track record. How much return on investment have we gotten out of DARPA, NASA, MIT&Standford (got lots of grants for WWII research), and the national laboratories? I believe that if the governments of the western world would make a fundamental shift to a information/knowledge/research based economy we would be much better off.
I think this will make a huge difference in mobile gaming because of screen size. Assuming that this thing outputs to 720p like the Nexus Galaxy, I think this will be a big thing.
While the PS3 graphics are old and crappy compared to what a modern PC can do, don't forget about screen size. Seeing 720p on a 40 inch screen is a lot different than seeing 720p on a 5 inch screen. The best example of this is fonts that look fine at 5 inches will look like crap expanded to 40 inches. Artifacts and jaggedness on 40 inch are going to be pretty minimal on a 5 inch. We are talking about shrinking by almost a factor of 10. At some point the quality of the output will exceed our eyes ability to notice the difference.
Of course this will do nothing to improve what the chip can render in terms of complex environments, smoke etc. But at 5 inches it is not hard to have too much on the screen.
Hasn't the general consensus been that Russian approach of having numerous cheap launchers better than one big powerful one? Why is money still being wasted on designing a huge launcher that won't be ready for years? Can't NASA just man rate some existing Delta or Atlas launchers, or give SpaceX a little more cash?
It sounds like they wrote this legislation intending for it to be abused. Does anyone seriously think that this will stop piracy? That they won't simply move to another country?
This is just a pretext for giving the government the authority to censor the internet. The corporations will abuse this like crazy, using the broadest interpretation of "infringement" they can. Probably also be used a revenge tool between entities like the patent trolls we see more and more of.
Once the mechanism is in place for censorship you can be sure the government itself will start blacklisting things they don't like. Probably with gag orders attached so no one knows what is being blacklisted. Just like warrantless wiretaps.
The American people oppose blacklists for a very good reason, this is just an attempt to use fancy wording to achieve the same ends.
So would you say that Windows makes people unstable, or that unstable people tend to choose Windows?
I would say that Windows is unstable because of the people who use it. I've had 370 days of uptime on WinXP. Windows is less stable than Linux, but a large part of the difference is the users. Linux people tend to be techie and smart about how they use the computer. While many Windows are clueless and do stupid things that make machine fail. Things like installing cracks, email attachments, and do hard power offs.
Amen. I was forced to use windows at my work, and do you know what its uptime was? 370 days. If you are smart about not installing a billions useless things, and not open every email attachment WinXP is more than stable enough for most people. I still greatly prefer linux to windows, but I'm fully aware that windows is often good enough.
If you were in front of the US Supreme Court and they asked you how this is fundamentally different than tracking your car through traditional police surveillance, how would you answer?
I struggle for an answer myself. It feels wrong, but as far as I can tell that isn't a valid legal argument.
It's vandalism. They are modifying my property without my permission. I don't see how attaching a GPS tracker to my car is any different than egging, spray painting, or keying it.
It could also if attached improperly affect the safety of my vehicle and it may violate the warranty of my vehicle to have it modified by a non-professional.
Well, as an American I wish that the rest of the planet could understand this stuff should be done by private companies and organizations.
You mean like atomic energy, space flight, internet, vaccinations, anything to do with the military? Sorry I'm as pro free market as they come, but there are somethings the free market is just not good at. Basic research is one of those things.
A lot of basic research has no obvious return on investment, in fact much it has no return on investment. Then there are the things that are just too expensive for a private company to fund. Then there is the issue of being able to profit from a discovery, you can't patent the laws of physics.
The free market is like an optimization algorithm, it is really effective at efficiently using capital. But sometimes efficiency is not the goal.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I would be happy just to get animated gifs in my text books. It shouldn't be that hard, gifs are ancient and small, just provide a fall back picture for static display.
The other problem is that many customers don't even know they are being had. Modern stuff especially electronics are so complicated that the average person just doesn't have the time to figure it all out and buy rationally. They usually become dependent on store recommendations or someone they know, if they know someone.
This is part of the reasons why companies make there offerings confusing and difficult to compare. It's been called a "confusopoly" to make sure people can't understand why a competitors products may be better. Notice how there are so many "customized" versions of smartphones? Nonsensical models numbers for a ton of computer parts, etc.
The problem isn't so much that technology has been putting people out of jobs. People have been saying that since 1800's. The problem is that wages in the western world at not competitive with the developing world. Take a look at China and India, millions upon million of people entering the industrial work force, jobs exist. When the technology improves people find jobs elsewhere, more cars means more mechanics and sales people etc. Things have worked pretty good like that for the last 200 years. What is happening now is not technological take over, but a massive labour force price correction vis a vis the developing world.
Who is going to hire an American for $20/h to work a factory line when someone in China will do it for $5? Something has to give.
If the new media companies like google and facebook don't like what the government is planning threaten to de-invest in the USA. By that I mean start moving jobs, charity work, headquarters overseas to someplace with reasonable laws. I promise that a full page ad in the New York times about the issue will generate less controversy than headlines reading:
Google moving 10,000 jobs overseas, says government stifles growth.
Mod Parent Up!
Thanks for your post, very informative. I never considered the cache/code density aspect. I'm printing that pdf ASAP.
Sorry to double reply, but now that I think about it, what you are describing sounds a hell of a lot like a mainframe on a chip. IBM mainframes have Multi-chip Modules that are a lot like what you are describing.
Mod Parent Up!
Very interesting idea. We are going to have to add in more cores from now on to get more performance, might as well start specializing them for certain tasks. Your idea about x86 hardware emulation is especially interesting.
It's not as if "x86" means much from an architectural standpoint.
But it does. Intel/AMD do lots to make the architecture efficient but they are significantly constrained by having to meet the x86 at the highest level for compatibility.
First there is a ton of legacy stuff in x86 that is just not needed, making the core larger and more power hungry. Take a look at how the floating point works, its just dreadful.
x86 is CISC when we know RISC is better. Intel/AMD do some tricks to make the core more RISC, but why not just cut out the middle man? Why bother with converting it at all?
The number of working registers is also determined by the instruction set. It is pretty obvious that x86 could use more.
Additionally the are things like status registers, various pointers, the interrupt subsystem. It's just not pretty.
And most importantly for this application is that the chip is not designed with SoC in mind. So splitting up or adding different parts I suspect will be much more difficult.
It's being shown time and again that strong countries do not get attacked.
And what do you do in the interim while some states have it and others do not? It basically forces every country to develop nuclear weapons as soon as as one of their neighbours has them. Or more likely launch a preemptive strike before they get them if one is ahead of the other. Or quickly use their new found nuclear power to wipe out regimes they don't like and call the bluff that the USA will retaliate in kind.
How does the international community stop genocide, etc. in a nuclear armed country?
What do you do about nuclear weapons and state sponsored terrorism?
What do you do about nuclear arms in failed states or civil wars?
Accidents?
Some crazy SoB just pushing the button?
If I'm going down I'm taking the world with me?
Iraq wasn't a mistake it was a failure of the international community to keep the USA in check. The UN should have just stepped in and said no and sent in peacekeepers to hold the Americans back. Alternatively Russia or China should have sent support to Iraq before the invasion.
Not having nuclear weapons was a mistake for Gaddafi, but a nuclear free Libya was great for the Libyan people. It was also great for people in Sudan, Serbia, Rwanda, pretty much every other hell hole where there was mass killings. North Korea just got nuclear weapons, does anyone other than Kim Jong-il feel safer? How about India and Pakistan, are we safer having added the threat of nuclear weapons on top of boarder disputes?
Nuclear weapons don't make the world safer they just raise the stakes when something goes wrong.
While it is always nice to hear about companies contributing to opensource, I don't see there being a big demand for x86 android. Who would use it? It's not low power enough for most tablets/phones. And while the ability to run existing x86 apps is nice they are mostly tied to Windows which is also not likely to see much traction in the mobile space. So what is the point?
What I would like to see is Intel creating a SoC and softcore suite. Intel has some big advantages that they could use to seriously compete:
1) Lots of experience in chip design. I don't see why they can't create an ARM-Core competitor.
2) They can start from scratch. Unlike ARM there is no need to legacy support or backward compatibility.
3) They have in house designers for everything from graphics, wired, wireless, etc. chips. I don't see why they cannot design from this a whole suite of modules that work on their SoC platform.
4) They have (to my knowledge) the best chip fab plants in the world by a sizable margin. Die shrinks offer a great way to reduce power consumption.
5) They have produced great x86 compilers for years, so producing a new compiler for a new chip shouldn't be too difficult since they are already experienced with x86 and Itanium.
6) They have shown that they already know how to support Android.
7) They have the cash and business partners to make it work.
I'm not saying they are guaranteed to make big bucks. Fighting an intrenched ARM with wide industry support will be hugely difficult. But if any company can do it it's Intel. Of course this means they would have to get over the Itanic debacle and stop trying to shove x86 down the throats of every problem.
Er, "caveat" is directly from Latin. It is pronounced KA-vee-at with the stress on the first syllable. But any dictionary would tell you that, so as someone said above, why not use one if you're learning a language? I certainly had to.
The thing is I am a native speaker. I know what caveat means, and when writing I have used it many times, but the first time I tried to use it when speaking I stumbled.
People who do lots of reading, especially older texts, are exposed to words that are never spoken in everyday use. The meaning of the word is obvious from the context so you never have to look it up. So you end up knowing words without ever having heard them spoken, and so you don't know the correct pronunciation. I eventually did look it up in a dictionary but at the time I felt like I had a seg fault.
I find it especially hard with Russian names. They are often long and have a lot of A,V,K in them. I remember reading Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising as a kid, I got halfway through the book before I realized that what I thought was one guy was actually two. The names where shaped almost identically and I just read them as the same. I wonder if in Cyrillic they are different enough that this is not a problem.
I agree. When I read stuff like that the voice in my head goes funny, but Down Syndrome is probably the best description I can think of.
I wonder if this has any relation to people who actually have Down Syndrome. Is it possible that they experience the world the way we experience jumbled sentences?
I have a similar problem. I know lots of words I cannot pronounce correctly. Recently I had a problem with "caveat" (kA-vat? kav-eat? kAv-at? kav-E-at?). English is especially silly since we steal so many foreign words, I often wonder if German/French/Spanish is more logical.
I absolutely agree with you. Thing is, if you have a small enough group that does that and you can still make a profit and provide good service to all your users then why not do it?
Indeed TekSavvy does this. They offer two streams: Low pings capped, high ping unlimited. Basically cheap/gamer and massive downloader packages. I'm with the later and I am very happy. Ping times are really not bad at all and I get as much usage as I want. After dealing with Rogers/Bell for years switching to smaller companies like TekSavvy and Moblicity have been an eye opener for what service should be like. I just wish they could expand outside Toronto, and that Bell would stop hassling Teksavvy all the time (eg. this UBB crap).
If bandwidth were a free good, then it would be in such abundance that everybody would have all they could ever want and nobody would ever have to pay anybody for it. Clearly, that isn't the case.
There are two units of measure that are often conflated. One is the number of packets (P), the other is the transmission rate, packets per second (P/s). Packets (P) are a free good (sort-of they do cost electricity) my computer can generate as many packets as I please at no cost. The bandwidth (P/s) however is a limit resource, to get more you have to pay more. So it makes sense to charge for bandwidth (P/s), but charging for packets (P) doesn't make sense. It's not like your router can only handle so many packets then has to be replaced. UBB is an indirect way of limiting bandwidth (P/s) by limiting packets (P).
In a free market system with strong competition UBB is a much better system for multiple reasons. Unfortunately in North America the market is mostly duopolies or monopolies and market effects which make UBB work breakdown.
Since ISPs make money selling more bandwidth than they buy based on the assumption that not everyone will use their bandwidth 24/7. Caps on (P) prevent statistical outliers (24/7 bandwidth use people) from screwing up this business model since no money is made on people who max out their connection. I think most people agree this is reasonable. (Note: some companies claim 'unlimited' but in fact do have caps; they are scum).
UBB is good because is makes people set their own caps (P) based on how much they are willing to spend. Which just like the outliers indirectly limits bandwidth (P/s). This is good because it allows ISP to give out high bandwidth (P/s) knowing that people will set their own limits, making the system more economical and efficient for eveyone.
The problem with UBB is that it discourages ISPs from increasing the bandwidth (P/s) they can handle. Since UBB rations (P) and not (P/s) users will not increase (P) because it will cost them too much. This is where the free market steps in as everyone will want to be with the company with the lowest price per (P). This competition will force companies to lower their cost per (P). Since the cost is now lower customers will use more (P) forcing companies to increase network capacity (P/s) to accommodate.
Since most ISPs in North America are a monopoly there is no reason for ISPs to ever decrease the price for (P) or invest in the network (P/s). Accommodating new users is done by increasing the price since (P) is a limited resource. Increasing the price causes people to ration (P) more but the company makes more money on the same network (P/s). The networks capacity (P/s) determines how much (P) the ISPs have and they auction it off at the highest point the market will bear. They can justify an increase in costs if there is more demand for a "limited" resource (P), ie. "we are running out of internet".
In our current system ISPs must make money by adding new users, since arbitrarily increasing the price of (P/s) would be an abuse of monopoly power and the government would step in. This is down by lowering the costs of (P/s) so more people will sign on. New users must be accommodated with more bandwidth (P/s) on the network since reducing the bandwidth (P/s) or cap (P) of existing users is again an abuse of monopoly power and the government will step in. This forces network upgrades, and eventually causes ISP to offer better services.
Really the problem is not UBB, but the lack of a free market in ISPs in North America. UBB is a solution that doesn't address the problem and will only make things worse.
What if electricity providers had to guarantee that every house in the country could consume the maximum current draw their connections are rated for at any given moment?
Then they had better lower the rated maximum current draw per house! The issue is that the ISP have a very good estimate of how much bandwidth is needed and what the usage bell curve looks like, and intentionally offer services they know they cannot provide.
The problem is the TelCo's advertise a speed and don't deliver. I would understand if the throttling if it were temporary, sure no problem. But if they have failed to solve the issue 5 years running, that is just nonsense. The issue of some users slowing down the system is not the consumers problem. I didn't buy a internet party line or time share, I bought a service from a company and I expect them to provide it.
The companies need to a) limit/segregate heavy users so they don't disrupt regular service, or b) stop signing people up for a service they are unable to provide. The ISP industry is the only system I can think of where companies get away with blaming poor service on their users. If only 8/10 phone calls made a connection, or you had blackouts 6 times a month, your credit card only worked 5 times a week, water 300 days a year, etc. people would pitch a fit.
We have to come up with society that lets middle of the road people live a reasonable life, not expect everyone on the block to go off to work in a lab.
I have to disagree. I think we should be trying to create a system where everyone goes off to work in a lab, or at the very least that is the end goal for most people at the start of their eduction.
We have been hearing for years that we live in the information age, the the western world is moving to a post-industrial economy. We can't go back to a middle class factory worker, we cannot compete with the masses of poor in the developing world and maintain our lifestyle. So what can we turn to? White collar, knowledge based jobs like programming, engineering, etc. But eventually the developing world will catch up with that as well, see statics about how many engineers India and China are training.
The end game is research, that is the top of the ladder and that is where we will probably end up. Research is one of those things that we can scale up because there is so much we don't know, or at least, don't know how to do well. I don't see any reason why we cannot have a much, much, larger base of scientists and research labs.
The government absolutely needs to spend more money on these things, much more. The government needs to spend much more on research because right now being a scientist doesn't pay well because there are not many jobs. So many people in the sciences end up in finance for the money. If the government would spend more on things like DARPA, NASA, etc. this would increase the number of jobs and draw more people to the sciences. Remember we used to do those things. When was the last time a national laboratory was founded? When was the last time the government created a research university? How about a well funded DARPA-esque thing for the FDA, EPA, FCC?
Sure it is expensive, and yes the payoffs are hard to gauge, but look at the track record. How much return on investment have we gotten out of DARPA, NASA, MIT&Standford (got lots of grants for WWII research), and the national laboratories? I believe that if the governments of the western world would make a fundamental shift to a information/knowledge/research based economy we would be much better off.
I think this will make a huge difference in mobile gaming because of screen size. Assuming that this thing outputs to 720p like the Nexus Galaxy, I think this will be a big thing.
While the PS3 graphics are old and crappy compared to what a modern PC can do, don't forget about screen size. Seeing 720p on a 40 inch screen is a lot different than seeing 720p on a 5 inch screen. The best example of this is fonts that look fine at 5 inches will look like crap expanded to 40 inches. Artifacts and jaggedness on 40 inch are going to be pretty minimal on a 5 inch. We are talking about shrinking by almost a factor of 10. At some point the quality of the output will exceed our eyes ability to notice the difference.
Of course this will do nothing to improve what the chip can render in terms of complex environments, smoke etc. But at 5 inches it is not hard to have too much on the screen.
Hasn't the general consensus been that Russian approach of having numerous cheap launchers better than one big powerful one? Why is money still being wasted on designing a huge launcher that won't be ready for years? Can't NASA just man rate some existing Delta or Atlas launchers, or give SpaceX a little more cash?
It sounds like they wrote this legislation intending for it to be abused. Does anyone seriously think that this will stop piracy? That they won't simply move to another country?
This is just a pretext for giving the government the authority to censor the internet. The corporations will abuse this like crazy, using the broadest interpretation of "infringement" they can. Probably also be used a revenge tool between entities like the patent trolls we see more and more of.
Once the mechanism is in place for censorship you can be sure the government itself will start blacklisting things they don't like. Probably with gag orders attached so no one knows what is being blacklisted. Just like warrantless wiretaps.
The American people oppose blacklists for a very good reason, this is just an attempt to use fancy wording to achieve the same ends.
So would you say that Windows makes people unstable, or that unstable people tend to choose Windows?
I would say that Windows is unstable because of the people who use it. I've had 370 days of uptime on WinXP. Windows is less stable than Linux, but a large part of the difference is the users. Linux people tend to be techie and smart about how they use the computer. While many Windows are clueless and do stupid things that make machine fail. Things like installing cracks, email attachments, and do hard power offs.
Every OS is as stable as the user.
Amen. I was forced to use windows at my work, and do you know what its uptime was? 370 days. If you are smart about not installing a billions useless things, and not open every email attachment WinXP is more than stable enough for most people. I still greatly prefer linux to windows, but I'm fully aware that windows is often good enough.
If you were in front of the US Supreme Court and they asked you how this is fundamentally different than tracking your car through traditional police surveillance, how would you answer?
I struggle for an answer myself. It feels wrong, but as far as I can tell that isn't a valid legal argument.
It's vandalism. They are modifying my property without my permission. I don't see how attaching a GPS tracker to my car is any different than egging, spray painting, or keying it.
It could also if attached improperly affect the safety of my vehicle and it may violate the warranty of my vehicle to have it modified by a non-professional.
Well, as an American I wish that the rest of the planet could understand this stuff should be done by private companies and organizations.
You mean like atomic energy, space flight, internet, vaccinations, anything to do with the military? Sorry I'm as pro free market as they come, but there are somethings the free market is just not good at. Basic research is one of those things.
A lot of basic research has no obvious return on investment, in fact much it has no return on investment. Then there are the things that are just too expensive for a private company to fund. Then there is the issue of being able to profit from a discovery, you can't patent the laws of physics.
The free market is like an optimization algorithm, it is really effective at efficiently using capital. But sometimes efficiency is not the goal.