I find DSL makes a lot more sense, financially, than cable modem service. You often can get much cheaper packages than what the cable company is selling you (I get 6 Mbps for $35/mo., and could probably get 1.5 Mbps for around $25/mo. or less), and the qualitative differences are pretty minor; 1 Mbps vs. 6+ Mbps just doesn't make a big difference for most applications.
Of course, most DSL services are bundled with landline service. While I think there's value in maintaining landline service, if you have a cell phone and want to subscribe to cable TV anyway, I guess a cable modem might make more sense. Might.
My sister used to be happy with dial-up. She used it for years, arguing that all she ever did was just check Web pages, and it didn't make sense for her to get an expensive high speed connection.
Then she moved, got a cable modem, and discovered the wonder of streaming media.
Here's a handy rule of thumb when trying to decide questions like this: Energy in = energy out (conservation of energy).
Hand-waving a percentage of that for inefficiency losses, you can clearly see that, for a given level of brightness, the CRT has to be a quadratic relation, too.
If you try to scan a larger screen with the same total power, you're going to have to do it faster, imparting less energy per frame to any given phosphor on the CRT. In other words, the screen will be dimmer. You're spreading the same amount of energy per second (power) over a larger area. To make up for that, you need to make the beam stronger in proportion to the gain in area.
Of course, this assumes you're not overengineering at the low end. Phosphors can only be excited so far, so you could use the same power beam in a smaller set, and just waste the excess.
...it's like LCD TVs, people also thought they consumed less power than conventional CRTs. Personally, I can warm my hands if I stick the palms up in front of my 32" LCD which chugs away at 152W when fully "lit" (powersave mode off).
Conservation of energy still applies here. It's not that LCD technology is necessarily less efficient (compare a scanning electron beam exciting phosphors to cold cathode fluorescent), it's that people have demanded (and gotten) much brighter screens, sometimes by a factor of 5-10 or more.
Obviously, if you're putting more light out of the screen, you're going to need to pull more energy out of the wall. There's no free lunch. If you care about saving power, turn down the brightness. Otherwise, don't sweat it.
(Incidentally, my old CRTs got quite hot, so there was plenty of wasted energy coming out of those, too.)
Did you know that all memory cards aren't built the same? The cheapest cards often use very slow grades of memory (for obvious reasons).
I use SanDisk Ultra and Extreme CompactFlash cards in my DSLR, and right now it's limited by the speed of the camera's processor, not the memory cards. I can read/write data off them at something like 20 MB/s using my computer's card reader, and these aren't even the fastest cards on the market (they're older generation versions).
Yes, and lex/yacc are more powerful still! You can write whole new programming languages in them!
That doesn't make them particularly well-suited for writing applications (unless that application happens to be a compiler). Ditto with C++.
Don't take this the wrong way; I still make extensive use of C++. If you're doing system-level stuff, but want more safety than C provides, and the runtime overhead isn't a problem, then C++ is great. But it could stand to lose a lot of cruft. The syntax, in particular, has become incredibly baroque over time.
The AEI is more libertarian than conservative, I'd say. They're all for cutting back on legal protections under the mantra of "frivolous lawsuits". There's a reason why trial lawyers are mainly major donors to the Democratic Party, even though presumably they're the sort of rich, upper class professional that goes for the Republicans. Like doctors.
Or maybe we should just get rid of the entire second tier of domain names altogether. Why bother having.org or.com when you can just have.slashdot or.disney (to use some common examples from this discussion)?
From a user interface perspective, I can see a lot of value in this. Asking people to remember if a site is a.org or a.com or a.net was probably a mistake to begin with.
From an administrative perspective, it seems to open a big can of worms. The current TLD divisions at least have some sort of reasoning behind them. Arbitrary TLDs will put a lot more load on the TLD registry.
2) Require an actual site (not just a page of ads) go live at any give address within 30 days. Your second point assumes that domain names are registered exclusively for putting up Web sites. There are plenty of legitimate uses for domain names that don't require putting up a public page for the entire Internet to see. Heck, there may even be some value in someone creating, say, a parody site that looks like a page of ads, or doing so to hide a real site.
I'd rather not have a registrar deciding whether or not to revoke my domain name registration just because they didn't think the content was non-trivial.
I don't know if 20-40% (a markdown of 80-60%) is really reasonable. I'm not entirely sure where this attitude comes from that bits should be vastly less expensive, just because the distribution costs are near-zero.
Newsflash: Printing a technical reference doesn't actually cost anywhere near the majority of the book price. That $50-200 book you bought might contain a few hundred pages with lots of glossy color pictures (if it's a very nice book).
Compare that to the price of, say, Harry Potter 7. 784 pages in hard cover for about $20. No glossy pictures, true, but if the cost of printing is really such a major expense, I'd point out that it's 784 pages.
There's a couple reason for this, the major one probably being volume. Harry Potter sells a lot of copies. That has implications for the printing costs, of course, but it's nothing compared to the way it spreads out the cost of developing the content to begin with. Technical material is expensive to develop.
Estimates for the cost of a typical textbook is something like 25% for printing and distribution. I think it's justified to expect that an e-book should cost somewhat less than a printed book (maybe that 25%), but it shouldn't cost 60-80% less. That's significantly undervaluing the content, which is what you're really paying for when you buy the printed book.
Or would you be just as happy buying 200 pages of blank paper, bound in spiral form? Maybe even with some lines ruled out so you can write on them? Those go for about $10.
I do hear what you're saying about the cost vs. used books, though. That's one of my major complaints about single source electronic distribution models like Steam; they really eviscerate the used market, and there's generally no incentive to discount a product as quickly as in a market of competing retailers.
Maybe they don't want to get into the business of supplying solar panel, but there's plenty of interest in using renewable technology to try and lower energy costs. (Not to mention even photovoltaic solar can help reduce cooling bills, because insolation is being used to generate electricity instead of simply heating the interior.)
People don't seem to have any trouble managing their house key, car key, etc. What if you had some sort of USB key that could be plugged into any computer, and encrypt/decrypt data presented to it? Then people wouldn't have to bother with passphrases and what-not (although I suppose they could, for extra security). It wouldn't be totally secure, but it's be good enough for most people.
The rest of his comment implies that he tends to the right of center -- an area of the political spectrum where NPR is not exactly loved and any information which backs up their preconceived notions, no matter what the topic is, is viewed as being "out of place." Actually, I think Newt Gingrinch once mentioned that he liked NPR, or something to that effect. Certainly caught me by surprise.
And this is where things are headed -- cheap laptops, specifically with reasonable graphics and in the developing world. By encouraging Linux on laptops AMD/ATI moves the market to what they think they can dominate. They are hoping to realize the benefits of the AMD/ATI merger this way. I'm not really sure they thought it out this strategically; the eee PC was actually pretty disruptive, market-wise, so it'd have been hard to account for in their strategic planning way back when they were in merger talks.
I think AMD is a company that just instinctively leans towards open source. It's served them well in the past, with the effort to get x86-64 and Opteron established in the server room, and there's no reason to abandon a winning strategy.
Having power being produced where you want it, and when you want it, has enormous advantages and, up until quite recently, is what separated the industrial world from the third world. Now we'll all be praying to the Wind Gods to come... humanity renders itself helpless again. Hell of a future you got there for us. Versus praying to the coal/oil gods to keep supplying us with new fossil fuel deposits?
There's plenty of random chance involved in the current energy supply. A wind/solar system is just another kind of risk management problem; it's highly unlikely that the entire planet, or heck, a large country like the United States, will be covered in impenetrable cloud cover and all wind will die off simultaneously, for extended periods of time. (Orbital solar would eliminate even this possibility, granted, but it's a bit pie-in-the-sky at this point.)
Long distance transmission isn't as insurmountable a problem as you think, either. HVDC lines are mature, tested, and capable of doing the job. It's a matter of infrastructure investment.
I don't agree with your contention that the long half-life material isn't a problem. "Long" in this case can range anywhere from days to years to thousands of years. That's still short enough to be appreciably radioactive, yet long enough to create a massive storage headache.
I agree that the materials with half-lives in the minutes and billions of years range aren't significant problems, but traditional fuel cycles leave a lot of unburned isotopes that need to be stored for long periods of time.
As with a lot of nuclear waste issues, I think the ultimate solution is going to have to involve reprocessing...
Does that include the title sequences and credits? Those tend to pad it out a couple minutes longer for me. The actual content for a half hour show is still about 22 minutes, though, sometimes a bit longer.
I would also like to chime my agreement to this post. The original story was slanted beyond Fox News style to the left. As I read each point, I couldn't help thinking, "OK, this guy is obviously pushing an agenda. None of this sounds particularly alarming in the context that it's a fucking war zone."
Seriously, do you honestly expect niceties like habeus corpus to always be followed? Warrantless searches? You've got to be kidding me. You've got guys running around with rifles, authorized to kill other people to accomplish their mission. That doesn't sound like a normal legal environment by any definition to me.
In a society with a functioning legal system, yes, these acts would probably be morally questionable at best, objectionable at worst. Countries that are torn by strife usually don't have that luxury, however.
Note that I'm no apologist for the current debacle in Iraq, but it really pisses me off when anti-war zealots trump out stuff like this as evidence that America is sadistic and evil. It only damages the credibility of legitimate objections.
AMD/ATI's latest and greatest is well-known for having particularly good idle power consumption. You might want to check into those numbers.
Incidentally, the idea you suggested--having a low-power and high-power part--has already been used for many years in both general purpose and graphics processors. Besides being able to clock up/down, individual functional units of processors are shut down when they're not in use.
(In fact, this is a major piece of chip design technology that AMD brought to the table when they absorbed ATI. Actual synergy in action.)
In contrast, the solution you're proposing (multiple video cards) is going to be less efficient, because you're duplicating a lot more than just the components you want to disable when you're just rendering a desktop. Power regulators, RAMDACs, etc.
The problem with that analogy is that nobody is paying for this stuff if it's being plastered across Usenet. The producers evidently require no additional incentive.
I think the reasoning is subtly different from that. We don't want people to have child porn in case it "gives them bad thoughts." The slippery slope theory, if you will.
The iPhone is such a small player in the cell phone market that I'd rather just handle it through optimized web sites and web services than building some localized app that will break with iPhone 3.0 software. That "small player" already has the #2 spot in the smart phone market, behind RIM's Blackberry, and has caused a wide swathe of Web sites to design themselves to be iPhone-compatible.
I'm no iPhone fan boy (all I ever want a phone for is to make and receive calls), but I think you're seriously underestimating the impact the iPhone is having on the market. It's not all just hype.
But somewhere, Linux is going to need a permanent, steady source of public funding. And why wouldn't the consultants, whose livelihood depend on this funny Linux thing they keep pushing, be doing the development? What, exactly, are they providing, if it's not working on this code to satisfy customer needs?
Companies like Red Hat and IBM already do massive amounts of development on Linux. Their main source of revenue from Linux is service contracts and system integration. As for-profit companies, they don't work on Linux simply out of the benevolence of their own hearts; it has a tangible effect on their bottom line if Linux supports this or that feature, or runs X% faster when doing Y.
Companies like Red Hat and IBM don't really have much incentive to work on X.org, though. Beyond "it works," their focus is on the server/enterprise end of thing, where the real money is. Desktop Linux is very much an enthusiast project. People who care about desktop Linux are the fringe who actually run Linux as their main desktop. And for most of us, X.org already seems to work pretty well.
Few engineers would say "It'd be cheaper to roll our own graphics chip," because they realize the immense technical challenges involved. Few MBAs are likely to understand that, however. Are you all so sure this was an MBA decision? Microsoft employs a lot of cowboy technical types that like to take on new and interesting projects, whether or not it makes sense to do them from a cost-benefit point of view. Poor judgment isn't just limited to managers, you know.
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I find DSL makes a lot more sense, financially, than cable modem service. You often can get much cheaper packages than what the cable company is selling you (I get 6 Mbps for $35/mo., and could probably get 1.5 Mbps for around $25/mo. or less), and the qualitative differences are pretty minor; 1 Mbps vs. 6+ Mbps just doesn't make a big difference for most applications.
Of course, most DSL services are bundled with landline service. While I think there's value in maintaining landline service, if you have a cell phone and want to subscribe to cable TV anyway, I guess a cable modem might make more sense. Might.
My sister used to be happy with dial-up. She used it for years, arguing that all she ever did was just check Web pages, and it didn't make sense for her to get an expensive high speed connection.
Then she moved, got a cable modem, and discovered the wonder of streaming media.
She feels very silly about it now.
Here's a handy rule of thumb when trying to decide questions like this: Energy in = energy out (conservation of energy).
Hand-waving a percentage of that for inefficiency losses, you can clearly see that, for a given level of brightness, the CRT has to be a quadratic relation, too.
If you try to scan a larger screen with the same total power, you're going to have to do it faster, imparting less energy per frame to any given phosphor on the CRT. In other words, the screen will be dimmer. You're spreading the same amount of energy per second (power) over a larger area. To make up for that, you need to make the beam stronger in proportion to the gain in area.
Of course, this assumes you're not overengineering at the low end. Phosphors can only be excited so far, so you could use the same power beam in a smaller set, and just waste the excess.
...it's like LCD TVs, people also thought they consumed less power than conventional CRTs. Personally, I can warm my hands if I stick the palms up in front of my 32" LCD which chugs away at 152W when fully "lit" (powersave mode off).
Conservation of energy still applies here. It's not that LCD technology is necessarily less efficient (compare a scanning electron beam exciting phosphors to cold cathode fluorescent), it's that people have demanded (and gotten) much brighter screens, sometimes by a factor of 5-10 or more.
Obviously, if you're putting more light out of the screen, you're going to need to pull more energy out of the wall. There's no free lunch. If you care about saving power, turn down the brightness. Otherwise, don't sweat it.
(Incidentally, my old CRTs got quite hot, so there was plenty of wasted energy coming out of those, too.)
Did you know that all memory cards aren't built the same? The cheapest cards often use very slow grades of memory (for obvious reasons).
I use SanDisk Ultra and Extreme CompactFlash cards in my DSLR, and right now it's limited by the speed of the camera's processor, not the memory cards. I can read/write data off them at something like 20 MB/s using my computer's card reader, and these aren't even the fastest cards on the market (they're older generation versions).
Florida already has a few cases of malaria every year. The fear that other tropical plagues might become common inside the US mainland is very real.
On the upside, maybe the industrialized world will finally come up with a solution to the malaria pandemic.
Yes, and lex/yacc are more powerful still! You can write whole new programming languages in them!
That doesn't make them particularly well-suited for writing applications (unless that application happens to be a compiler). Ditto with C++.
Don't take this the wrong way; I still make extensive use of C++. If you're doing system-level stuff, but want more safety than C provides, and the runtime overhead isn't a problem, then C++ is great. But it could stand to lose a lot of cruft. The syntax, in particular, has become incredibly baroque over time.
The AEI is more libertarian than conservative, I'd say. They're all for cutting back on legal protections under the mantra of "frivolous lawsuits". There's a reason why trial lawyers are mainly major donors to the Democratic Party, even though presumably they're the sort of rich, upper class professional that goes for the Republicans. Like doctors.
Or maybe we should just get rid of the entire second tier of domain names altogether. Why bother having .org or .com when you can just have .slashdot or .disney (to use some common examples from this discussion)?
From a user interface perspective, I can see a lot of value in this. Asking people to remember if a site is a .org or a .com or a .net was probably a mistake to begin with.
From an administrative perspective, it seems to open a big can of worms. The current TLD divisions at least have some sort of reasoning behind them. Arbitrary TLDs will put a lot more load on the TLD registry.
address within 30 days. Your second point assumes that domain names are registered exclusively for putting up Web sites. There are plenty of legitimate uses for domain names that don't require putting up a public page for the entire Internet to see. Heck, there may even be some value in someone creating, say, a parody site that looks like a page of ads, or doing so to hide a real site.
I'd rather not have a registrar deciding whether or not to revoke my domain name registration just because they didn't think the content was non-trivial.
I don't know if 20-40% (a markdown of 80-60%) is really reasonable. I'm not entirely sure where this attitude comes from that bits should be vastly less expensive, just because the distribution costs are near-zero.
Newsflash: Printing a technical reference doesn't actually cost anywhere near the majority of the book price. That $50-200 book you bought might contain a few hundred pages with lots of glossy color pictures (if it's a very nice book).
Compare that to the price of, say, Harry Potter 7. 784 pages in hard cover for about $20. No glossy pictures, true, but if the cost of printing is really such a major expense, I'd point out that it's 784 pages.
There's a couple reason for this, the major one probably being volume. Harry Potter sells a lot of copies. That has implications for the printing costs, of course, but it's nothing compared to the way it spreads out the cost of developing the content to begin with. Technical material is expensive to develop.
Estimates for the cost of a typical textbook is something like 25% for printing and distribution. I think it's justified to expect that an e-book should cost somewhat less than a printed book (maybe that 25%), but it shouldn't cost 60-80% less. That's significantly undervaluing the content, which is what you're really paying for when you buy the printed book.
Or would you be just as happy buying 200 pages of blank paper, bound in spiral form? Maybe even with some lines ruled out so you can write on them? Those go for about $10.
I do hear what you're saying about the cost vs. used books, though. That's one of my major complaints about single source electronic distribution models like Steam; they really eviscerate the used market, and there's generally no incentive to discount a product as quickly as in a market of competing retailers.
Kinda like how the roof of Google's headquarters isn't covered in solar panels?
Maybe they don't want to get into the business of supplying solar panel, but there's plenty of interest in using renewable technology to try and lower energy costs. (Not to mention even photovoltaic solar can help reduce cooling bills, because insolation is being used to generate electricity instead of simply heating the interior.)
People don't seem to have any trouble managing their house key, car key, etc. What if you had some sort of USB key that could be plugged into any computer, and encrypt/decrypt data presented to it? Then people wouldn't have to bother with passphrases and what-not (although I suppose they could, for extra security). It wouldn't be totally secure, but it's be good enough for most people.
I think AMD is a company that just instinctively leans towards open source. It's served them well in the past, with the effort to get x86-64 and Opteron established in the server room, and there's no reason to abandon a winning strategy.
Considering how long .NET has been around, I'm not sure whether it's a good thing that you have to run 4 different versions of it side by side.
Nice thing about Java is that I can just install the 1.6 JRE, and be more or less assured that everything still works.
There's plenty of random chance involved in the current energy supply. A wind/solar system is just another kind of risk management problem; it's highly unlikely that the entire planet, or heck, a large country like the United States, will be covered in impenetrable cloud cover and all wind will die off simultaneously, for extended periods of time. (Orbital solar would eliminate even this possibility, granted, but it's a bit pie-in-the-sky at this point.)
Long distance transmission isn't as insurmountable a problem as you think, either. HVDC lines are mature, tested, and capable of doing the job. It's a matter of infrastructure investment.
I don't agree with your contention that the long half-life material isn't a problem. "Long" in this case can range anywhere from days to years to thousands of years. That's still short enough to be appreciably radioactive, yet long enough to create a massive storage headache.
I agree that the materials with half-lives in the minutes and billions of years range aren't significant problems, but traditional fuel cycles leave a lot of unburned isotopes that need to be stored for long periods of time.
As with a lot of nuclear waste issues, I think the ultimate solution is going to have to involve reprocessing...
Does that include the title sequences and credits? Those tend to pad it out a couple minutes longer for me. The actual content for a half hour show is still about 22 minutes, though, sometimes a bit longer.
I would also like to chime my agreement to this post. The original story was slanted beyond Fox News style to the left. As I read each point, I couldn't help thinking, "OK, this guy is obviously pushing an agenda. None of this sounds particularly alarming in the context that it's a fucking war zone."
Seriously, do you honestly expect niceties like habeus corpus to always be followed? Warrantless searches? You've got to be kidding me. You've got guys running around with rifles, authorized to kill other people to accomplish their mission. That doesn't sound like a normal legal environment by any definition to me.
In a society with a functioning legal system, yes, these acts would probably be morally questionable at best, objectionable at worst. Countries that are torn by strife usually don't have that luxury, however.
Note that I'm no apologist for the current debacle in Iraq, but it really pisses me off when anti-war zealots trump out stuff like this as evidence that America is sadistic and evil. It only damages the credibility of legitimate objections.
AMD/ATI's latest and greatest is well-known for having particularly good idle power consumption. You might want to check into those numbers.
Incidentally, the idea you suggested--having a low-power and high-power part--has already been used for many years in both general purpose and graphics processors. Besides being able to clock up/down, individual functional units of processors are shut down when they're not in use.
(In fact, this is a major piece of chip design technology that AMD brought to the table when they absorbed ATI. Actual synergy in action.)
In contrast, the solution you're proposing (multiple video cards) is going to be less efficient, because you're duplicating a lot more than just the components you want to disable when you're just rendering a desktop. Power regulators, RAMDACs, etc.
The problem with that analogy is that nobody is paying for this stuff if it's being plastered across Usenet. The producers evidently require no additional incentive.
I think the reasoning is subtly different from that. We don't want people to have child porn in case it "gives them bad thoughts." The slippery slope theory, if you will.
I'm no iPhone fan boy (all I ever want a phone for is to make and receive calls), but I think you're seriously underestimating the impact the iPhone is having on the market. It's not all just hype.
Companies like Red Hat and IBM already do massive amounts of development on Linux. Their main source of revenue from Linux is service contracts and system integration. As for-profit companies, they don't work on Linux simply out of the benevolence of their own hearts; it has a tangible effect on their bottom line if Linux supports this or that feature, or runs X% faster when doing Y.
Companies like Red Hat and IBM don't really have much incentive to work on X.org, though. Beyond "it works," their focus is on the server/enterprise end of thing, where the real money is. Desktop Linux is very much an enthusiast project. People who care about desktop Linux are the fringe who actually run Linux as their main desktop. And for most of us, X.org already seems to work pretty well.