If you purchased very long ago, the CL4 DDR2 RAM would have been closer to $200.
$700 for something that doesn't really beat just getting the $200 AMD CPU by much, despite costing 3.5x as much.
Apparently, you haven't seen the benchmarks or used a Core i7 system. When I say they crush the Phenom II, I'm not exaggerating. Some things take quite literally 1/4 the time. If you are multitasking at all, you can really see the difference. I can run the Prime 95 torture test with 4 workers and still do normal computing without even noticing. Try that with any AMD processor.
If you include the Core 97 940 like I said before (something that's actually noticeably faster), then you're over $1000.
Anything more than the 920 is a waste of money. Only the 965 has an advantage in that it is fully multiplier-unlocked, but the 920 is unlocked between 12x and 20x. With that plus changing the BCLK, you can get pretty much any combination of CPU and RAM speed you want. With DDR3-1600 so cheap, this means the only limit to running the speed you want is cooling, and the 940 requires exactly the same cooling clock-for-clock as the 920.
I'm running the 920 at 3.33GHz (Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro as HSF) and RAM at DDR3-1333 with no voltages out of spec. In fact, I'm under-volting the RAM (although I have raised it from the default 1.5V to 1.6V...still below the 1.65V spec). I also still have the Intel Turbo enabled, so for single-core apps, I can get over 3.5GHz.
The CPU temps are still 20C below thermal shutdown even when running 8x Prime 95 torture tests, and in line with the 940 temperatures at stock speed.
So why would anyone pay literally twice as much ($560 vs. $280) for a CPU that runs slower?
The Phenom 955 is backwards compatible with socket AM2+, so you don't necessarily have to purchase a new motherboard and RAM to use it. You do miss out on some features (DDR3 RAM, I think HyperTransport is slower, that sort of thing), but I believe they have a fairly minimal effect on the workload of average users.
The Phenom II line is such a small increase in perfomance clock-for-clock compared to older chips that use the AM2/AM2+ motherboards that even $200 is really a waste. The only real advantage is the Phenom II can be found a higher stock clock speeds.
So, without the DDR3, you really don't have a lot of reason to upgrade. If you already have one of the AM2+/AM3 combo motherboards that supports DDR3, you can do a CPU and RAM upgrade for about $340 and get a good increase
Where Phenom II shines is the ability to spend only about $420 or so for motherboard/CPU/RAM. But I'd still rather pay $250 more and get twice the performance on single-threaded apps, and as much as 4-5x the perfomance on multi-threaded apps. The Core i7 Hyperthreading isn't like previous CPU family Hyperthreading...you really do almost get a full extra core per thread.
Without a doubt, the CPU-only upgrade is the best deal (I'm going to do the same to my Barcelona Opteron server systems once the BIOS upgrade to support Shanghai comes out), but a Core i7 upgrade (X58 motherboard, Core i7 CPU, DDR3 RAM) isn't as much as you think:
That's all you need to replace, as your existing power supply, video card, hard drives, etc., will all work just fine. So that's $698 for a system that will absolutely crush the Phenom-based system. Even at the stock 2.66GHz, the i7 920 is a beast compared to the socket AM2+ Phenoms.
The socket AM3 Phenom 955 is a good budget choice for a completely new computer compared to the i7 920, but it still requires a new motherboard and RAM for an upgrade, and then it loses on price/performance.
This was accurate in the past, when movie theaters paid a fixed weekly cost for the rental of the film and then got to keep every penny of ticket sales (some of which obviously would pay for the rental, but that's the theater's problem, not the studio).
Now, movie distributors get X% of the ticket price. Plus, they still sometimes get a fixed rental fee, but when that happens, it's now generally an "exclusivity fee" or "rights fee" or some other BS term. Some also have guaranteed minimums, where they get at least $5 (for example) of each ticket regardless of the actual selling price of the ticket.
The percentage the distributor gets usually starts big and drops as the movie gets older. As the percentage drops, so do any guaranteed minimums.
All this sounds like it's a good deal for theaters until you find out that the first week percentages to the distributor are almost always more than 90% (especially on a potential big movie, like Watchmen). So, basically, the first few weeks gross really are representative of what the distributors make, minus a few percent.
The issue is always Hollywood accounting, where the distributor is technically a different company from the studio who produced the film. Since they are really owned by the same parent company, it's just moving money around. But, the accounting shows $30M paid out for "distribution costs".
Consumer Reports puts Dyson as worse performing than many other vacuums, and it gets near the bottom of the price/performance ratio.
Completly off-topic, I know, but the Dyson is the only thing that doesn't have problems with pet hair. Trust me, we've tried pretty much everything else from cheap to expensive, and Dyson is the only one that will allow you to fill the cannister/bag/whatever all the way without having issues.
But, the more expensive Dyson units are a rip-off, as all they provide is more attachments...the vacuum power and other features are identical for the same "line".
Seeing as how only recently were drug companies allowed to spend money on direct-to-consumer advertising, it's amazing they manage to spend even a small percentage of their overall budget on advertising, much less 100% of their R&D budget. But, no, they manage 200% with no real effort. Of course, it's OK, because it doesn't raise the price we pay for drugs. Oh, wait, it does.
I compare it to the pharmaceutical industry - pills cost, say, $0.05 to make. Why do they cost a great deal more on the market? Because you have to price in the cost of advertising.
Fixed that for you.
The average pharmaceutical company spends 5 times the money on advertising that they spend on R&D.
Try one month at 10 Mbps and another at 1000 Mbps and see if your bill changes.
So, you're saying that Comcast (or other ISPs) change their connection speed to the rest of the Internet on a monthly basis?
No, of course they don't. They know they need ###Mbps at times, so they pay for that much all the time, and they don't get any price reduction for not using all the available bandwidth.
This is why it shouldn't matter how much bandwidth end users use...the cost for the ISP is the same regardless. What ISPs should be encouraging is the reduction of peak usage, not total usage. This will allow the ISP to pay for less bandwidth on a long-term basis. And, if done correctly, it won't limit any of their customers in any way that reduces the usefulness of their connection.
Yes, I know they chose not to put the descender below the baseline on early terminal fonts.
This does not change the fact that for the hundreds of years of typesetting before that, the capital letter "Q" had a stroke below the baseline in almost every font.
And, when more hardware and software vendors start to take advantage of the Core i7 processors, you'll see another big jump.
The Core i7 has eight threads of execution, and can easily run them at 3.2GHz...faster if you overclock. With the new on-die memory controller, it's a lot easier to build a 4 or 8 CPU system. With 8 CPUs, the very latest SPARC chips will get outclassed badly in price to performance.
Plus, with the Core i7 being x86 and x64 compatible, you can run a wide variety of virtual systems much more easily.
Solaris gets its nines (seriously ridiculous uptimes) by the software/hardware combo: Solaris running on Solaris hardware.
After this past weekend, I find nothing but humor in your statement.
We run Oracle RAC on Solaris Sparc, and for no reason it just puked and died, resulting in a 15-hour outage because of the finger-pointing (it's the OS, no, it's the DB). Luckily it was on a weekend, so it didn't hurt us much in the real world, but still, that event alone just dropped us to two nines (99.8%) for the year, and we still have 8 months to go. Another one like that and we drop to one nine.
Maybe Oracle buying Sun might improve this sort of thing, but I'm not holding my breath.
The Far Side is the lone exception that I've found in my collection, and on my city's newspaper, The Family Circus plus a more obscure Ballard Street are the exceptions, everything else is all caps.
In my online daily comics, the following use hand-written text (i.e., not a printed caption under the panel) that uses mixed case:
Bird Brains
The Flying McCoys
Loose Parts
Brainwaves
That's Life
I'm sure there are more, as I only read about 30 comics, and I suspect that it is more likely that a newer comic would use this style.
I know it's the least-used letter in the English language, but I didn't realize that "Q" has been completely forgotten.
There are very few fonts where "Q" does not have a stroke below the baseline. Even the san-serif fonts requested by the Slashdot CSS have at least slight descenders for the "Q". But, it's even more obvious in Courier:
But, if we are talking about a private business (or building) with their own parking, then employees or visitors really can consider it "free", as it's not coming from their tax dollars. Sure, they might have a lower salary because of the "free" parking, but in DC where I work, very high priced parking is only about $2,000/year, so as long as they didn't lose that much salary, the parking really is free.
My problem is that the DC Metro station is a 10-15 minute walk from my work. This is bad in winter and other nasty weather, but I could deal with it if the station nearest my house wasn't 7 miles away.
What this means is that to drive (or bus) to the Metro station, get on the train, get off, and walk to my work will get me to work about 20 minutes later than if I drove in directly with no traffic, and about the same time if there is traffic.
Since there are 3-4 places to eat within a 15-minute walking distance of my work, but nearly 50 within a 5 minute drive, it also would mean I'd have to deal with lunch some other way. And, I couldn't stop at the store on the way to/from work to pick up groceries.
I have a friend who is a 3 minute walk from the Metro at home, and less than 5 minutes at work. For those kinds of people, mass transit is great, but it just doesn't work well with most suburban sprawl.
That said, I'd take high-speed rail from here to Boston, Chicago, etc., in a heartbeat.
So if you arrive at 8am, set it to turn on at 7:50am and that time isn't wasted, and you don't have a computer that's constantly on overnight and on the weekends.
Startup time until the login prompt is available isn't really the issue. It's the 3-20 minutes of time from "enter username and password" to "usable machine" that's the problem.
Gotta disagree. What about homes that carry $400,000 mortgages, but now are only worth $150,000 on the open market?
What part of "if your home value is more than what you owe" wasn't clear?
If you owe $400K and your house is only worth $150K, then you are $250K in the hole. Your debt is still technically "secured", but like anything else, you have to owe less than you can sell it for to be in the black.
For "unsecured" debt (like credit cards), though, you are in the red from the get-go. This is primarily because much of unsecured debt has absolutely no backing in real goods. If you buy a Playstation 3, you might be able to sell it off to pay the credit card bill, but all those burgers and beers you downed at Bennigan's/TGIF/etc., have no resale value except to fans of 2G1C.
As for the rich "paying their fair share" - The top 1% already pays 90% of the national tax bill. The top 5% pay 99%. How much more can we bleed these people?
What they pay compared to the rest of the country isn't important. What they pay as a percentage of their income is far more important as far as "fair" is concerned. For that, they pay far less as a percentage, since much of what they earn isn't classified as income, so they pay things like capital gains tax instead.
The truth of the matter is both we and our representatives need to stop spending so damn much money.
I don't know about people, but I definitely agree the government needs to be cut back. As the thread on energy savings noted, far too many government budgets are based on how much they spent last year, so they always spend every dollar they get, even if they have to waste it on stuff that doesn't really need to be done.
Despite calculating that the organization could save $75K annually (this was a conservative estimate), their marketing department put a stop to the idea.
With 4000 employees, even a $200K savings per year would work out to only $50/employee. With an average salary of $25K (hopefully low), if the PC shutoff plan did something that wasted 4 hours of employee time per year (like taking as little as 1 minute to start up in the morning), then it's not worth it to the company.
Until you can save the equivalent of at least 2000 hours per year of salary per employee, it's probably not guaranteed to be a money saver for the company. My WAG is that at about 500 hours/year you'd be able to persuade accountants that it might be worth it.
Ok, it is a plausible story... but why aren't his "vital reports" in a network? Preferrably one with good storage, backups and VPN access?
Because if you think that opening an Office document over 100Mbps Ethernet is one of the slowest things ever, you should try using RDP to connect to your PC and do the same thing.
The MS Office apps (particularly Visio) just don't seem to deal well with opening documents over any but the most responsive network. And, you have to RDP to your PC because nowhere but your PC has all the add-ons to Office that you need to do work on the document.
It is not uncommon for $500+ analysis or other add-ins to only be installed on the machines that really need them, at least for companies that care about keeping honest with software licenses.
(here I can "read" the ascii, but I don't know where "20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D" is coming from.
It's the UUID of the shell object that is "My Computer".
All objects in the Explorer namespace (Control Panel, My Network Connections, Folder, Drive, etc.) have UUIDs. UUIDs are how shell integration ties things together, so you can do things like show a special menu when you right-click on a particular type of object, and don't need to know the name of that object (which very likely changes from computer to computer or user to user).
Think of UUIDs as the keys in the Explorer database object table.
No it's internet versus internet, and it's irrelevant how they provide that service whether it's coax, twisted pair, fiber, or squirrels with packets tied to their backs (like sneakernet but more furry).
So, what you're saying is that in order to reach 100Mbps on the last mile, we need to cross-breed all the nut-bearing trees (oak, walnut, pecan, etc.) with methamphetamine so that the squirrels can keep the latency down.
Now, that's something I'd really like to see the "broadband stimulus package" pay for.
Yes, cable and DSL oversubscribe a lot, but despite the troll mod, FiOS doesn't.
In my neighborhood, Verizon has not upgraded the infrastructure to their ultimate desired level, so technically they can only support about 27Mbps if every house subscribed. Since they do offer 50Mbps service, they could oversubscribe, if everyone got the highest speed.
The next upgrade will set the per-house limit at around 82Mbps. This has already been rolled out in some places in New Jersey.
The national debt is now at $110,000 per U.S. home and will climb to $150,000 before the next presidential election. Add another $90,000 in personal mortgage/credit card debt (on average).
Mortgage debt doesn't count if your home value is more than what you owe. This is true of any "secured" debt.
So, although I owe about $109K on my house, since its current market value is about $350K (down from over $450K two years ago, but up from the bottom of about $325K), it's not an overall negative on my net worth.
The really sad part of your numbers is that I'm middle class and although it would be really, really tight, I could pay off my portion of the national debt. If much more wealthy people did more than their fair share (not even a lot more, relatively...maybe $500K for people with net worth over $100M), the debt could easily be paid off.
In particular, Verizon FiOS does not oversubscribe. Not only do they not oversubscribe in reality, they don't in theory. FiOS could get 100% uptake in any given neighborhood and every subscriber would have full speed with no contention.
And, Verizon is making money on FiOS, even with the build-out costs. I'm just a happy subscriber and not affiliated in any way. As Verizon rolls out FiOS to more locations, other ISPs will have to start changing their ways. I know my local cable company fought tooth and nail to keep them out of this county.
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My current tower (Althon64 X2/a great 780G mobo/8GB DDR2 800 CL4/good Seasonic CPU/Antec 300 case/WD 640GB AAKS HD) was only like $400 TOTAL!
I've got to call "bull" here. Even if you bought this today with prices dropped, you'd spend around $450:
If you purchased very long ago, the CL4 DDR2 RAM would have been closer to $200.
$700 for something that doesn't really beat just getting the $200 AMD CPU by much, despite costing 3.5x as much.
Apparently, you haven't seen the benchmarks or used a Core i7 system. When I say they crush the Phenom II, I'm not exaggerating. Some things take quite literally 1/4 the time. If you are multitasking at all, you can really see the difference. I can run the Prime 95 torture test with 4 workers and still do normal computing without even noticing. Try that with any AMD processor.
If you include the Core 97 940 like I said before (something that's actually noticeably faster), then you're over $1000.
Anything more than the 920 is a waste of money. Only the 965 has an advantage in that it is fully multiplier-unlocked, but the 920 is unlocked between 12x and 20x. With that plus changing the BCLK, you can get pretty much any combination of CPU and RAM speed you want. With DDR3-1600 so cheap, this means the only limit to running the speed you want is cooling, and the 940 requires exactly the same cooling clock-for-clock as the 920.
I'm running the 920 at 3.33GHz (Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro as HSF) and RAM at DDR3-1333 with no voltages out of spec. In fact, I'm under-volting the RAM (although I have raised it from the default 1.5V to 1.6V...still below the 1.65V spec). I also still have the Intel Turbo enabled, so for single-core apps, I can get over 3.5GHz. The CPU temps are still 20C below thermal shutdown even when running 8x Prime 95 torture tests, and in line with the 940 temperatures at stock speed.
So why would anyone pay literally twice as much ($560 vs. $280) for a CPU that runs slower?
The Phenom 955 is backwards compatible with socket AM2+, so you don't necessarily have to purchase a new motherboard and RAM to use it. You do miss out on some features (DDR3 RAM, I think HyperTransport is slower, that sort of thing), but I believe they have a fairly minimal effect on the workload of average users.
The Phenom II line is such a small increase in perfomance clock-for-clock compared to older chips that use the AM2/AM2+ motherboards that even $200 is really a waste. The only real advantage is the Phenom II can be found a higher stock clock speeds.
So, without the DDR3, you really don't have a lot of reason to upgrade. If you already have one of the AM2+/AM3 combo motherboards that supports DDR3, you can do a CPU and RAM upgrade for about $340 and get a good increase
Where Phenom II shines is the ability to spend only about $420 or so for motherboard/CPU/RAM. But I'd still rather pay $250 more and get twice the performance on single-threaded apps, and as much as 4-5x the perfomance on multi-threaded apps. The Core i7 Hyperthreading isn't like previous CPU family Hyperthreading...you really do almost get a full extra core per thread.
Without a doubt, the CPU-only upgrade is the best deal (I'm going to do the same to my Barcelona Opteron server systems once the BIOS upgrade to support Shanghai comes out), but a Core i7 upgrade (X58 motherboard, Core i7 CPU, DDR3 RAM) isn't as much as you think:
That's all you need to replace, as your existing power supply, video card, hard drives, etc., will all work just fine. So that's $698 for a system that will absolutely crush the Phenom-based system. Even at the stock 2.66GHz, the i7 920 is a beast compared to the socket AM2+ Phenoms.
The socket AM3 Phenom 955 is a good budget choice for a completely new computer compared to the i7 920, but it still requires a new motherboard and RAM for an upgrade, and then it loses on price/performance.
This was accurate in the past, when movie theaters paid a fixed weekly cost for the rental of the film and then got to keep every penny of ticket sales (some of which obviously would pay for the rental, but that's the theater's problem, not the studio).
Now, movie distributors get X% of the ticket price. Plus, they still sometimes get a fixed rental fee, but when that happens, it's now generally an "exclusivity fee" or "rights fee" or some other BS term. Some also have guaranteed minimums, where they get at least $5 (for example) of each ticket regardless of the actual selling price of the ticket.
The percentage the distributor gets usually starts big and drops as the movie gets older. As the percentage drops, so do any guaranteed minimums.
All this sounds like it's a good deal for theaters until you find out that the first week percentages to the distributor are almost always more than 90% (especially on a potential big movie, like Watchmen). So, basically, the first few weeks gross really are representative of what the distributors make, minus a few percent.
The issue is always Hollywood accounting, where the distributor is technically a different company from the studio who produced the film. Since they are really owned by the same parent company, it's just moving money around. But, the accounting shows $30M paid out for "distribution costs".
Consumer Reports puts Dyson as worse performing than many other vacuums, and it gets near the bottom of the price/performance ratio.
Completly off-topic, I know, but the Dyson is the only thing that doesn't have problems with pet hair. Trust me, we've tried pretty much everything else from cheap to expensive, and Dyson is the only one that will allow you to fill the cannister/bag/whatever all the way without having issues.
But, the more expensive Dyson units are a rip-off, as all they provide is more attachments...the vacuum power and other features are identical for the same "line".
OK, so some of the latest stats show drug companies only spend twice as much on advertising as R&D.
Seeing as how only recently were drug companies allowed to spend money on direct-to-consumer advertising, it's amazing they manage to spend even a small percentage of their overall budget on advertising, much less 100% of their R&D budget. But, no, they manage 200% with no real effort. Of course, it's OK, because it doesn't raise the price we pay for drugs. Oh, wait, it does.
I compare it to the pharmaceutical industry - pills cost, say, $0.05 to make. Why do they cost a great deal more on the market? Because you have to price in the cost of advertising.
Fixed that for you.
The average pharmaceutical company spends 5 times the money on advertising that they spend on R&D.
Try one month at 10 Mbps and another at 1000 Mbps and see if your bill changes.
So, you're saying that Comcast (or other ISPs) change their connection speed to the rest of the Internet on a monthly basis?
No, of course they don't. They know they need ###Mbps at times, so they pay for that much all the time, and they don't get any price reduction for not using all the available bandwidth.
This is why it shouldn't matter how much bandwidth end users use...the cost for the ISP is the same regardless. What ISPs should be encouraging is the reduction of peak usage, not total usage. This will allow the ISP to pay for less bandwidth on a long-term basis. And, if done correctly, it won't limit any of their customers in any way that reduces the usefulness of their connection.
Yes, I know they chose not to put the descender below the baseline on early terminal fonts.
This does not change the fact that for the hundreds of years of typesetting before that, the capital letter "Q" had a stroke below the baseline in almost every font.
And, when more hardware and software vendors start to take advantage of the Core i7 processors, you'll see another big jump.
The Core i7 has eight threads of execution, and can easily run them at 3.2GHz...faster if you overclock. With the new on-die memory controller, it's a lot easier to build a 4 or 8 CPU system. With 8 CPUs, the very latest SPARC chips will get outclassed badly in price to performance.
Plus, with the Core i7 being x86 and x64 compatible, you can run a wide variety of virtual systems much more easily.
Solaris gets its nines (seriously ridiculous uptimes) by the software/hardware combo: Solaris running on Solaris hardware.
After this past weekend, I find nothing but humor in your statement.
We run Oracle RAC on Solaris Sparc, and for no reason it just puked and died, resulting in a 15-hour outage because of the finger-pointing (it's the OS, no, it's the DB). Luckily it was on a weekend, so it didn't hurt us much in the real world, but still, that event alone just dropped us to two nines (99.8%) for the year, and we still have 8 months to go. Another one like that and we drop to one nine.
Maybe Oracle buying Sun might improve this sort of thing, but I'm not holding my breath.
The Far Side is the lone exception that I've found in my collection, and on my city's newspaper, The Family Circus plus a more obscure Ballard Street are the exceptions, everything else is all caps.
In my online daily comics, the following use hand-written text (i.e., not a printed caption under the panel) that uses mixed case:
I'm sure there are more, as I only read about 30 comics, and I suspect that it is more likely that a newer comic would use this style.
I know it's the least-used letter in the English language, but I didn't realize that "Q" has been completely forgotten.
There are very few fonts where "Q" does not have a stroke below the baseline. Even the san-serif fonts requested by the Slashdot CSS have at least slight descenders for the "Q". But, it's even more obvious in Courier:
Quick
Of course there is some cost to provide parking.
But, if we are talking about a private business (or building) with their own parking, then employees or visitors really can consider it "free", as it's not coming from their tax dollars. Sure, they might have a lower salary because of the "free" parking, but in DC where I work, very high priced parking is only about $2,000/year, so as long as they didn't lose that much salary, the parking really is free.
My problem is that the DC Metro station is a 10-15 minute walk from my work. This is bad in winter and other nasty weather, but I could deal with it if the station nearest my house wasn't 7 miles away.
What this means is that to drive (or bus) to the Metro station, get on the train, get off, and walk to my work will get me to work about 20 minutes later than if I drove in directly with no traffic, and about the same time if there is traffic.
Since there are 3-4 places to eat within a 15-minute walking distance of my work, but nearly 50 within a 5 minute drive, it also would mean I'd have to deal with lunch some other way. And, I couldn't stop at the store on the way to/from work to pick up groceries.
I have a friend who is a 3 minute walk from the Metro at home, and less than 5 minutes at work. For those kinds of people, mass transit is great, but it just doesn't work well with most suburban sprawl.
That said, I'd take high-speed rail from here to Boston, Chicago, etc., in a heartbeat.
So if you arrive at 8am, set it to turn on at 7:50am and that time isn't wasted, and you don't have a computer that's constantly on overnight and on the weekends.
Startup time until the login prompt is available isn't really the issue. It's the 3-20 minutes of time from "enter username and password" to "usable machine" that's the problem.
Yes, you did, because I typo'd.
That should be 200 hours and 50 hours for the WAG.
Gotta disagree. What about homes that carry $400,000 mortgages, but now are only worth $150,000 on the open market?
What part of "if your home value is more than what you owe" wasn't clear?
If you owe $400K and your house is only worth $150K, then you are $250K in the hole. Your debt is still technically "secured", but like anything else, you have to owe less than you can sell it for to be in the black.
For "unsecured" debt (like credit cards), though, you are in the red from the get-go. This is primarily because much of unsecured debt has absolutely no backing in real goods. If you buy a Playstation 3, you might be able to sell it off to pay the credit card bill, but all those burgers and beers you downed at Bennigan's/TGIF/etc., have no resale value except to fans of 2G1C.
As for the rich "paying their fair share" - The top 1% already pays 90% of the national tax bill. The top 5% pay 99%. How much more can we bleed these people?
What they pay compared to the rest of the country isn't important. What they pay as a percentage of their income is far more important as far as "fair" is concerned. For that, they pay far less as a percentage, since much of what they earn isn't classified as income, so they pay things like capital gains tax instead.
The truth of the matter is both we and our representatives need to stop spending so damn much money.
I don't know about people, but I definitely agree the government needs to be cut back. As the thread on energy savings noted, far too many government budgets are based on how much they spent last year, so they always spend every dollar they get, even if they have to waste it on stuff that doesn't really need to be done.
Despite calculating that the organization could save $75K annually (this was a conservative estimate), their marketing department put a stop to the idea.
With 4000 employees, even a $200K savings per year would work out to only $50/employee. With an average salary of $25K (hopefully low), if the PC shutoff plan did something that wasted 4 hours of employee time per year (like taking as little as 1 minute to start up in the morning), then it's not worth it to the company.
Until you can save the equivalent of at least 2000 hours per year of salary per employee, it's probably not guaranteed to be a money saver for the company. My WAG is that at about 500 hours/year you'd be able to persuade accountants that it might be worth it.
Ok, it is a plausible story... but why aren't his "vital reports" in a network? Preferrably one with good storage, backups and VPN access?
Because if you think that opening an Office document over 100Mbps Ethernet is one of the slowest things ever, you should try using RDP to connect to your PC and do the same thing.
The MS Office apps (particularly Visio) just don't seem to deal well with opening documents over any but the most responsive network. And, you have to RDP to your PC because nowhere but your PC has all the add-ons to Office that you need to do work on the document.
It is not uncommon for $500+ analysis or other add-ins to only be installed on the machines that really need them, at least for companies that care about keeping honest with software licenses.
(here I can "read" the ascii, but I don't know where "20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D" is coming from.
It's the UUID of the shell object that is "My Computer".
All objects in the Explorer namespace (Control Panel, My Network Connections, Folder, Drive, etc.) have UUIDs. UUIDs are how shell integration ties things together, so you can do things like show a special menu when you right-click on a particular type of object, and don't need to know the name of that object (which very likely changes from computer to computer or user to user).
Think of UUIDs as the keys in the Explorer database object table.
No it's internet versus internet, and it's irrelevant how they provide that service whether it's coax, twisted pair, fiber, or squirrels with packets tied to their backs (like sneakernet but more furry).
So, what you're saying is that in order to reach 100Mbps on the last mile, we need to cross-breed all the nut-bearing trees (oak, walnut, pecan, etc.) with methamphetamine so that the squirrels can keep the latency down.
Now, that's something I'd really like to see the "broadband stimulus package" pay for.
Yes, cable and DSL oversubscribe a lot, but despite the troll mod, FiOS doesn't.
In my neighborhood, Verizon has not upgraded the infrastructure to their ultimate desired level, so technically they can only support about 27Mbps if every house subscribed. Since they do offer 50Mbps service, they could oversubscribe, if everyone got the highest speed.
The next upgrade will set the per-house limit at around 82Mbps. This has already been rolled out in some places in New Jersey.
The national debt is now at $110,000 per U.S. home and will climb to $150,000 before the next presidential election. Add another $90,000 in personal mortgage/credit card debt (on average).
Mortgage debt doesn't count if your home value is more than what you owe. This is true of any "secured" debt.
So, although I owe about $109K on my house, since its current market value is about $350K (down from over $450K two years ago, but up from the bottom of about $325K), it's not an overall negative on my net worth.
The really sad part of your numbers is that I'm middle class and although it would be really, really tight, I could pay off my portion of the national debt. If much more wealthy people did more than their fair share (not even a lot more, relatively...maybe $500K for people with net worth over $100M), the debt could easily be paid off.
Every utility does oversubscribe
This just isn't true, even for Internet service.
In particular, Verizon FiOS does not oversubscribe. Not only do they not oversubscribe in reality, they don't in theory. FiOS could get 100% uptake in any given neighborhood and every subscriber would have full speed with no contention.
And, Verizon is making money on FiOS, even with the build-out costs. I'm just a happy subscriber and not affiliated in any way. As Verizon rolls out FiOS to more locations, other ISPs will have to start changing their ways. I know my local cable company fought tooth and nail to keep them out of this county.