There is still, in this "new economy", the very real economics that the majority of content people use (Computer programs, movies, music, television programs, written articles, etc.) is content that would not exist if someone wasn't being paid to make it.
Not entirely true. See, most "news" content is press releases or other public documents. Be it from companies, schools, police, courts, or the city/county/state/federal government. Make something like Google news, which just summarizes from these sources, and automatically ranks them by popularity, and you suddenly have essentially free news.
This is the problem that the media faces. They're 99% cheap filler (like above), and only 1% (or less) valuable content like investigative reporting. Problem with that is:
1) Now that it's so easily available from other, free and more convenient sources, people aren't willing to pay for it anymore. As a result:
2) To cut costs, they eliminate that 1% which is unique and expensive to produce, which helps a little in the short-term, but puts them in direct competition with free news, and eventually undermines their only reason to exist...
The most obvious example of this would be the likes of CNN, which has devolved into a celeb-watching gossip blog on TV, and can be easily replaced by free news. Plenty newspapers are in the same boat.
The strategy which looks long-term viable is cutting costs as much as possible by removing the 99% FILLER, and instead having a cheaper newspaper that only has that investigative reporting... Maybe it'll only be 1 page, once a week. Such is life. I have yet to see anyone trying this, however. If they did, maybe it would be worth paying for... Or better yet, maybe it would be a valuable enough audience that they could get decent ad-rates, and keep it open.
So, on/. we complain about China because they ignore copyright and patent law on everything, but the it's "let poor Costa Rica be!" when they violate the terms of their treaty and the US doesn't just roll over and ignore it?
I would be more sympathetic if they refused the treaty, and were then being pressured to accept it "or else". But here, they're just opting to comply with the parts of the treaty they like, and completely ignore the parts they don't. I fail to see how this could possibly be spun as a "good thing".
And the article's rant that "Copyright/patents aren't free trade" is just cynical, feigned ignorance as to what copyright/patents fundamentally are... Is this the libertarian version of Fox News or what?
UMA is basically "GSM over IP over 802.11g", and it allows you to make GSM cellphone calls [billed at a standard $0.10 per minute] from any publically accessible WiFi hotspot.
Why would I pay $0.10/min for VoIP? VoIP is normally more like $0.01/min, and REAL cellphone service can be had for $0.10/min with Boost Mobile and the like ($50/mo unlimited voice & data).
If by penises you mean infrastructure, then, yes, I would say they are quite well-endowed.
Not true at all. There's good reason the US is the hub of the internet to the world... There is FAR more internet infrastructure (and bandwidth) in the USA than anywhere else.
If "infrastructure" to you means only "last-mile", then you have to explain EXACTLY why that's beneficial to the general public, because I'd be inclined to view inexpensive internet access (even if quite slow) to be the most beneficial to the general public.
Only on single-drives (which I really don't care about, a little I/O performance either way isn't even notable on a PC). On RAID arrays, they specifically say: "you have a very high chance of big data losses on a power outage."
There's a big difference between might perform better in workload X, which you claim is their reasoning, and "big data losses", which is what they actually, literally say.
Yes, you can disable the write cache, but then you give up a huge amount of performance as a result. With journaling we can get the performance benefits of writes, but we only have to pay the cost of enforcing write ordering through the barrier once every few seconds.
While I will acknowledge that I'm not in a position to argue with you, I must point out that I've head from SEVERAL (in fact, ALL who've made a statement on the subject up until now) file system writers and experts that, even with journaling, the write cache MUST be disabled to guarantee file system consistency. What do you know that they don't?
What Soft Updates apparently does is assume that once the data is sent to the disk, it is safely on the disk. But that's not a true assumption!
Journaling, and every other filesystem, has exactly the same problem. If consistence is required, YOU MUST DISABLE THE CACHE, unless it is battery-backed, or you are willing to depend on your UPS. This is the penalty we take for devices which lie to the OS about flush operations and the like.
But if Soft Updates is so great, why is NetBSD replacing it and why did Free BSD add file system journaling alternative to UFS?
Do you ever plan to stop beating your wife?
The superior performance of soft updates, both in theory and practice, has been proven out several times.
They walk on egg shells because China is the largest nuclear threat since the USSR
China has been a nuclear threat for several decades, and nobody has cared to do business with them until now. Though they're making noise, NOBODY in their right mind believes they are going to take an aggressive military stance against any other countries... LEAST of all the USA.
Yes, China is the most well nuclear-armed country behind Russia, but we're talking about a HUGE drop-off there... Ditto for their non-nuclear military as well. The fact that they wouldn't stand a chance against the US in all-out conflict is the only reason Taiwan wasn't invaded decades ago.
from a measure of hostility communism has killed more then 100 million people since it's incept. Between Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Castro, and countless others they are giving religion a run for it's money for "killing in the name of"
Yeah, but the vast majority of that is internal conflict. Suicide and Homicide just aren't on the same level.
Every word in every sentence doesn't have to be 100% grammatically correct you joyless waste of empty space... Everyone, everywhere, perfectly understood what the headline meant (if they know ANY background about the situation at all, that is).
you get an equivalent clock of 5.8 MHz for Colossus. That is a remarkable speed for a computer built in 1944.
It would be incredible if true, but it's not. Special-purpose hardware can perform certain types of computations far faster than general-purpose processors. Hardware that could decode 1080i MPEG-2 (HDTV) could easily (though not inexpensively) have been made a decade before Intel/AMD CPUs were up to the task. That doesn't mean we had 2GHz+ CPUs in the early 1990s, it just means we had special-purpose hardware, which would require a 2GHz+ CPU to allow it to be replicated in software...
It's the same nonsense you get with low-power devices all the time: "OMG! This 10MHz ARM CPU is fast enough to decode H.264 videos!" Not understanding there's just a DSP slapped in the same package there, which is performing the video decoding without using the CPU for anything.
I have known plenty of Windows supporters for a long time. I've had people tell me their Windows 9x systems just keep up and running for 6 months at a time. I don't know how you respond to someone who asserts, with 100% confidence, that their SUV has gone several thousand miles on a single tank of gas, so I tend to just dismiss such reports out of hand and move on with my life. It's either an issue of non-serious usage, incredible luck, or wishful thinking on the part of the observer...
After close to a decade with around 100 Windows systems under my direct administration, from NT4 through 2003, I know extremely well the problems Windows has, and there's no shortage of similar reports from those with similarly extensive experience with the platform.
The problem with trying to get people you buy your movie is that it costs 6X as much as renting it, so you are eliminating a large impulse-buy crowd.
The theory, of course, is that they'll just rent it a month later. But that ignores advertising... The reason DVD releases have been moved up is because they want the first round of big-budget advertising to be fresh in your mind when they're pitching the DVD... Now, are they going to launch a 3rd round of ads, to promote the rental? Definitely not. So they're pretty well guaranteed to lose out on a big chunk of rentals, and the infamous Blockbuster entire wall covered with copies of a new release.
I'm in the crowd that really doesn't care if I see most movies months later... Some of my favorite films often pre-date me, and they're good despite being on the shelf for decades and decades. Still, I think it's a pretty cynical and short-sighted strategy. Often times, those with the money have to be FORCED by powers beyond their control, to do something that is MORE PROFITABLE FOR THEM, because they don't happen to see it, or just have a deep dislike for the changes in the market they used-to know.
USA IT workers aren't willing to unionize because we know that leads to what's happening to the auto industry. Unionized companies eventually collapse under their own weight. Unions had their place in time but now we have labor laws. They aren't needed anymore and indeed, they are counter productive. If someone knows they can't be fired, they tend to become lazy. I know, I worked in union shops before I went back to college.
There are plenty of union shops that have been running just fine for a very long time, without any sign of problems.
The collapse of the US auto industry has absolutely nothing to do with the laborers, but is entirely bad decisions by management, ever since the memory. And there's no excuse for it, since the 70s burned the realities into the heads of everyone else but those high-paid executives with short-term cost-cutting goals in mind.
And labor laws are a joke. Note that most in IT are on "salary", who are on-call around the clock, and don't get paid overtime, in clear violation of applicable labor laws, knowing the cost of the lawsuit, and the time wasted in court, will make the overtime pay hardly worth the effort, unless you have a sufficiently large class action.
You think stuff is being outsourced now? Unionize it and watch what happens.
When the cost of living disparity between 1st and 3rd world countries is so high that people in China will quite literally work for what is pocket-change here, no company that can outsource, is holding back, based on non-unionized IT or anything else... In short, fear of outsourcing is artificially keeping wages low in companies and industries that simply can't paractially be outsourced.
There's no incentive to work hard and everyone in a given job description makes the exact same wage regardless of what miracles they can pull off or how talented they are.
That sounds much worse than the current state of things, where you're paid X for each year of experience, and X is the same practically no matter how good you are. And where companies band together to mutually refuse to hire each other's employees, in an attempt to keep wages down, pay no retirement, and make the job so miserable that IT has the highest turnover rates of any department in any given company.
The union experience I had boiled down to union workers being the biggest bunch of sniveling infants I've ever had the misfortune to be associated with. They were all miserable and in the union because they couldn't do anything else.
I've worked in several non-union shops where I've though exactly the same thing about the employees...
How far could the spec be pushed using a decent CD-ROM laser. Could you squeeze 1GB out of a CD drive that was specked to 700MB before?
700MB is already pushing the spec to its absolute limits. 650MBs, the normal size, includes some margin of error in the manufacturing process. To get the larger CDs, they forego the looser tolerances.
Now, going outside of spec, you can overburn, and hit up to 999MBs, though compatibility is very poor. That's with layer-1 and added error correction audio CDs don't have. Burn it as audio data, and you can get an extra 10% out of it.
If you want to throw the standard out the window, figure a CD laser can read a 0.5 micrometer dot, so just calculate the maximum number of dots you could fit on a 120mm disc, and convert bits to megabytes...
Feinstein is sprinkling "national monuments" all over the Mojave to prevent solar projects.
Ole' Ms. Frankenstein there is trying to get certain specific areas of desert protected. Areas which were donated to the government by a private party, and which are known for their ecological importance.
There's nothing sinister about it. It's happening now, because there hasn't been any threat to the areas until solar starting becoming a big thing. And make no mistake, there is TONS of land elsewhere that will do the job just as well... It's just big corporations who didn't give a shit that were willing to destroy a de facto wilderness preserve because it happened to be just slightly more profitable for them.
There's no indication nor even suggestion that Franky will attempt to stamp that label on ANY OTHER AREAS, so there remains enough unprotected desert in So. Cal to supply the power needs of the entire country.
This will, of course, ultimately be passed on to the customers.
The claim is used frequently, by people who have no business knowledge at all, and it's almost always used incorrectly.
In truth, higher costs are almost always only partially passed on to the customer, if at all.
It won't hurt the companies in this case because there is no choice in electricity providers. You can't switch electric companies like you can cell phone companies.
Do you have any idea what subject you're discussing, or did you not make it through the summary?
We're talking about OUT-OF-STATE electricity. YOU (the consumer) will NEVER, NEVER, NEVER be doing business with them directly, so it doesn't matter that you can't switch. Instead YOUR POWER COMPANY is the one doing business with them, and they sure as hell CAN switch to some other provider.
How, exactly, will this force "cleaner" electricity generation?
Go read the definition of a tariff. Why you think they don't work is beyond me.
When the "dirty" electricity is 5% more expensive, that means "clean" electricity becomes 5% less expensive, by comparison. So now there is a slightly larger curve where "clean" makes economic sense. Additionally, this opens the door to clean power plants using technologies which are 5% more expensive, but can now be profitable.
What happens when the required version of glibc (or whatever) is not already installed?
You install it under the same prefix (eg. $HOME) and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH= to point to it.
Many apps might use (or abuse) the registry, but that's also not Microsoft's fault.
The fact that it's a sprawling, impenetrable, undocumented, fragile mess is 100% Microsoft's fault.
I've never had a corrupted registry on any WinNT OS.
You've had tremendous luck. Or perhaps more likely, you've failed to attribute some random failure of a long-installed application, system, or driver, to the registry corruption that was, in fact, the culprit.
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Water has even better energy density. Fuel and oxidizer in one compact package!
Not entirely true. See, most "news" content is press releases or other public documents. Be it from companies, schools, police, courts, or the city/county/state/federal government. Make something like Google news, which just summarizes from these sources, and automatically ranks them by popularity, and you suddenly have essentially free news.
This is the problem that the media faces. They're 99% cheap filler (like above), and only 1% (or less) valuable content like investigative reporting. Problem with that is:
1) Now that it's so easily available from other, free and more convenient sources, people aren't willing to pay for it anymore. As a result:
2) To cut costs, they eliminate that 1% which is unique and expensive to produce, which helps a little in the short-term, but puts them in direct competition with free news, and eventually undermines their only reason to exist...
The most obvious example of this would be the likes of CNN, which has devolved into a celeb-watching gossip blog on TV, and can be easily replaced by free news. Plenty newspapers are in the same boat.
The strategy which looks long-term viable is cutting costs as much as possible by removing the 99% FILLER, and instead having a cheaper newspaper that only has that investigative reporting... Maybe it'll only be 1 page, once a week. Such is life. I have yet to see anyone trying this, however. If they did, maybe it would be worth paying for... Or better yet, maybe it would be a valuable enough audience that they could get decent ad-rates, and keep it open.
So, on /. we complain about China because they ignore copyright and patent law on everything, but the it's "let poor Costa Rica be!" when they violate the terms of their treaty and the US doesn't just roll over and ignore it?
I would be more sympathetic if they refused the treaty, and were then being pressured to accept it "or else". But here, they're just opting to comply with the parts of the treaty they like, and completely ignore the parts they don't. I fail to see how this could possibly be spun as a "good thing".
And the article's rant that "Copyright/patents aren't free trade" is just cynical, feigned ignorance as to what copyright/patents fundamentally are... Is this the libertarian version of Fox News or what?
Feel free to prove it...
Who cares what "connection" it comes over? I can get on-demand HDTV as well, and probably just as inexpensively as they do.
You've completely failed to provide evidence of any of this so far. The ONE example you mentioned is nonsense.
Why would I pay $0.10/min for VoIP? VoIP is normally more like $0.01/min, and REAL cellphone service can be had for $0.10/min with Boost Mobile and the like ($50/mo unlimited voice & data).
Not true at all. There's good reason the US is the hub of the internet to the world... There is FAR more internet infrastructure (and bandwidth) in the USA than anywhere else.
If "infrastructure" to you means only "last-mile", then you have to explain EXACTLY why that's beneficial to the general public, because I'd be inclined to view inexpensive internet access (even if quite slow) to be the most beneficial to the general public.
Clearly, the Japanese and Koreans have much larger penises...
Only on single-drives (which I really don't care about, a little I/O performance either way isn't even notable on a PC). On RAID arrays, they specifically say: "you have a very high chance of big data losses on a power outage."
There's a big difference between might perform better in workload X, which you claim is their reasoning, and "big data losses", which is what they actually, literally say.
While I will acknowledge that I'm not in a position to argue with you, I must point out that I've head from SEVERAL (in fact, ALL who've made a statement on the subject up until now) file system writers and experts that, even with journaling, the write cache MUST be disabled to guarantee file system consistency. What do you know that they don't?
For reference, it does appear those behind XFS disagree with you: http://xfs.org/index.php/XFS_FAQ#Q:_What_is_the_problem_with_the_write_cache_on_journaled_filesystems.3F
I'm sure, give time, I could find many others...
Journaling, and every other filesystem, has exactly the same problem. If consistence is required, YOU MUST DISABLE THE CACHE, unless it is battery-backed, or you are willing to depend on your UPS. This is the penalty we take for devices which lie to the OS about flush operations and the like.
Do you ever plan to stop beating your wife?
The superior performance of soft updates, both in theory and practice, has been proven out several times.
You simply don't pay attention...
Clinton also tried to negotiate peace between Conan O'Brien and the mayor of Newark, NJ in their fake media conflict.
China has been a nuclear threat for several decades, and nobody has cared to do business with them until now. Though they're making noise, NOBODY in their right mind believes they are going to take an aggressive military stance against any other countries... LEAST of all the USA.
Yes, China is the most well nuclear-armed country behind Russia, but we're talking about a HUGE drop-off there... Ditto for their non-nuclear military as well. The fact that they wouldn't stand a chance against the US in all-out conflict is the only reason Taiwan wasn't invaded decades ago.
Yeah, but the vast majority of that is internal conflict. Suicide and Homicide just aren't on the same level.
As a percentage of GDP, the US spends LESS money on foreign aid than most other developed nations.
And they cut taxes to buy the rich's vote.
Every word in every sentence doesn't have to be 100% grammatically correct you joyless waste of empty space... Everyone, everywhere, perfectly understood what the headline meant (if they know ANY background about the situation at all, that is).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL#Prominent_users
It would be incredible if true, but it's not. Special-purpose hardware can perform certain types of computations far faster than general-purpose processors. Hardware that could decode 1080i MPEG-2 (HDTV) could easily (though not inexpensively) have been made a decade before Intel/AMD CPUs were up to the task. That doesn't mean we had 2GHz+ CPUs in the early 1990s, it just means we had special-purpose hardware, which would require a 2GHz+ CPU to allow it to be replicated in software...
It's the same nonsense you get with low-power devices all the time: "OMG! This 10MHz ARM CPU is fast enough to decode H.264 videos!" Not understanding there's just a DSP slapped in the same package there, which is performing the video decoding without using the CPU for anything.
I have known plenty of Windows supporters for a long time. I've had people tell me their Windows 9x systems just keep up and running for 6 months at a time. I don't know how you respond to someone who asserts, with 100% confidence, that their SUV has gone several thousand miles on a single tank of gas, so I tend to just dismiss such reports out of hand and move on with my life. It's either an issue of non-serious usage, incredible luck, or wishful thinking on the part of the observer...
After close to a decade with around 100 Windows systems under my direct administration, from NT4 through 2003, I know extremely well the problems Windows has, and there's no shortage of similar reports from those with similarly extensive experience with the platform.
The problem with trying to get people you buy your movie is that it costs 6X as much as renting it, so you are eliminating a large impulse-buy crowd.
The theory, of course, is that they'll just rent it a month later. But that ignores advertising... The reason DVD releases have been moved up is because they want the first round of big-budget advertising to be fresh in your mind when they're pitching the DVD... Now, are they going to launch a 3rd round of ads, to promote the rental? Definitely not. So they're pretty well guaranteed to lose out on a big chunk of rentals, and the infamous Blockbuster entire wall covered with copies of a new release.
I'm in the crowd that really doesn't care if I see most movies months later... Some of my favorite films often pre-date me, and they're good despite being on the shelf for decades and decades. Still, I think it's a pretty cynical and short-sighted strategy. Often times, those with the money have to be FORCED by powers beyond their control, to do something that is MORE PROFITABLE FOR THEM, because they don't happen to see it, or just have a deep dislike for the changes in the market they used-to know.
"Bug bomb malfunction, Thodin."
Too obscure? ...even for /. ?
There are plenty of union shops that have been running just fine for a very long time, without any sign of problems.
The collapse of the US auto industry has absolutely nothing to do with the laborers, but is entirely bad decisions by management, ever since the memory. And there's no excuse for it, since the 70s burned the realities into the heads of everyone else but those high-paid executives with short-term cost-cutting goals in mind.
And labor laws are a joke. Note that most in IT are on "salary", who are on-call around the clock, and don't get paid overtime, in clear violation of applicable labor laws, knowing the cost of the lawsuit, and the time wasted in court, will make the overtime pay hardly worth the effort, unless you have a sufficiently large class action.
When the cost of living disparity between 1st and 3rd world countries is so high that people in China will quite literally work for what is pocket-change here, no company that can outsource, is holding back, based on non-unionized IT or anything else... In short, fear of outsourcing is artificially keeping wages low in companies and industries that simply can't paractially be outsourced.
That sounds much worse than the current state of things, where you're paid X for each year of experience, and X is the same practically no matter how good you are. And where companies band together to mutually refuse to hire each other's employees, in an attempt to keep wages down, pay no retirement, and make the job so miserable that IT has the highest turnover rates of any department in any given company.
I've worked in several non-union shops where I've though exactly the same thing about the employees...
700MB is already pushing the spec to its absolute limits. 650MBs, the normal size, includes some margin of error in the manufacturing process. To get the larger CDs, they forego the looser tolerances.
Now, going outside of spec, you can overburn, and hit up to 999MBs, though compatibility is very poor. That's with layer-1 and added error correction audio CDs don't have. Burn it as audio data, and you can get an extra 10% out of it.
If you want to throw the standard out the window, figure a CD laser can read a 0.5 micrometer dot, so just calculate the maximum number of dots you could fit on a 120mm disc, and convert bits to megabytes...
Ole' Ms. Frankenstein there is trying to get certain specific areas of desert protected. Areas which were donated to the government by a private party, and which are known for their ecological importance.
There's nothing sinister about it. It's happening now, because there hasn't been any threat to the areas until solar starting becoming a big thing. And make no mistake, there is TONS of land elsewhere that will do the job just as well... It's just big corporations who didn't give a shit that were willing to destroy a de facto wilderness preserve because it happened to be just slightly more profitable for them.
There's no indication nor even suggestion that Franky will attempt to stamp that label on ANY OTHER AREAS, so there remains enough unprotected desert in So. Cal to supply the power needs of the entire country.
The claim is used frequently, by people who have no business knowledge at all, and it's almost always used incorrectly.
In truth, higher costs are almost always only partially passed on to the customer, if at all.
Do you have any idea what subject you're discussing, or did you not make it through the summary?
We're talking about OUT-OF-STATE electricity. YOU (the consumer) will NEVER, NEVER, NEVER be doing business with them directly, so it doesn't matter that you can't switch. Instead YOUR POWER COMPANY is the one doing business with them, and they sure as hell CAN switch to some other provider.
Go read the definition of a tariff. Why you think they don't work is beyond me.
When the "dirty" electricity is 5% more expensive, that means "clean" electricity becomes 5% less expensive, by comparison. So now there is a slightly larger curve where "clean" makes economic sense. Additionally, this opens the door to clean power plants using technologies which are 5% more expensive, but can now be profitable.
You install it under the same prefix (eg. $HOME) and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH= to point to it.
The fact that it's a sprawling, impenetrable, undocumented, fragile mess is 100% Microsoft's fault.
You've had tremendous luck. Or perhaps more likely, you've failed to attribute some random failure of a long-installed application, system, or driver, to the registry corruption that was, in fact, the culprit.