Yeah, that would be usefully true if jetliners had a decent glide ratio. as it is, once the engines cut out, they fall out of the skies like stones.
You've just won the award for the most idiotic comment of the day. Congrats!
Here's 12 incidents of jets losing all engine power and gliding to a landing. Several with no serious injuries to passengers or crew. That's one hell of a flying rock there.
Why do we never get to leapfrog technology in the US?
Technophilia is BAD... We don't want or need "new" technology for the sake of "new technology".
Maglevs really aren't any faster, unless you're operating in a sealed vacuum tube, thanks to air resistance dominating. But they are certainly far more expensive to operate.
IMHO, to technologically leapfrog other countries where trains are concerned, would actually take a much smaller step... Running high-voltage power along the full length of the tracks. Then, you can completely eliminate the ultra-massive diesel engine in the locomotives, AND as an added bonus, dynamic braking (which all trains use) can dump all that energy back into the grid, rather than wasting it as heat. Think of it as an ultra-giant electric car, where no batteries on earth are large enough...
It's done in LEO several times a year at 17,000 MPH, in 3 axes.
LEO doesn't require you to compensate for turbulence, rolling friction, hills, valley, wind, rain, etc., etc.
Connecting moving trains, on a routine basis, is at the very edge of current technology, and would still fail on a regular basis ("Sorry, something broke, you're not getting on the train today!").
Never mind the extremely complex management of cars continually joining and leaving the mainline for stations. We can BARELY manage to coordinate a handful of low-speed freight trains, with many miles in between them, without any counter-moving offshoot vehicles, on the main lines without collisions.
Two hackers, $500K over 3 years is $83K/year. They could have made better money working for Google. Waste of time and prison sentence.
Crime is an entry-level job, open to anyone who is motivated and capable.
Getting a high paying job in IT, however, is a huge PITA, and until you have 10 years of continuous work experience, it depends a lot on being an insider, rather than skill.
A wonderful article about how money doesnt=good education.
Oh?
"Once the parents spend over $600, the students do slightly better,"
And their costs for home school versus public schooling are highly lop-sided, not taking into consideration the cost of parent's time donated, subsidized meals, etc., etc.
Not to mention that home schooled students is a naturally self-selecting group... It doesn't follow that forcing everyone else to home school their children would give everyone equally good performance.
That article is a very small step up from a biased opinion piece.
IMHO, if you need to depend on a UPS, that doesn't bode well for the filesystem. How is it any better than an ancient filesystem like UFS/Ext2 (mounted async), if it doesn't do a good job with integrity? What's "excellent" about XFS?
A UPS can't prevent a system crash either, so you need a decent FS.
AFAIK, softupdates in practice never were better than journaling,
Several benchmarks directly disagree. No I don't have links handy, it's been years. No doubt you can find them as easily as I.
and since these days filesystems like ZFS and btrfs avoid the problems that softupdates and journaling tries to solve by maintaining the on-disk data always in a consistent state, softupdates is just a useless source of complexity and overhead.
What? Maybe you know what you're talking about, but it sure doesn't sound like it, here.
What does "maintaining the on-disk data always in a consistent state" even mean? And how is it any difference than the age old practice of synchronous (or atomic) writes? How is reordering metadata, so that partial or incomplete writes can be rolled back, any different? What's more, how is it "better" in any way?
The overhead of softupdates is really very minimal, hence being even faster than journaling (which really does have some notable overhead). No doubt there's always some room for improved performance, but very little where softupdates are concerned. Complexity is also really quite minimal, and hardly notable next to the functionality any modern filesystem has (ie. reordering metadata is nothing compared to reordering bulk data to minimize seeks).
ZFS' copy-on-write allows it to avoid FSCK, but it has some fairly nasty trade-offs, and there's plenty of examples where an FSCK tool was needed. I know next to nothing about BTRFS, so I admit there may be something here I'm missing, but ZFS certainly isn't a good example of not needing FSCK. Never mind that UFS2 with softupdates doesn't specifically NEED an FSCK after a power failure, allowing immediate read/write use of a filesystem, and only using background FSCK to really only to reclaim free blocks still marked as allocated. ie. very minor housekeeping that can really be put off indefinitely.
Sadly, if they would have gone back FURTHER, to 1997, they'd have come up with something far superior... Something with a 3/4ths size keyboard you (most people) could actually full-speed touch-type on. Something that ran for a month on 2AA batteries. Something that could play MP3s. etc.
Battery UPS in your PC case... stores power for power outages and uses the battery during startup cycles, thus spreading the draw from the grid to less used times.
Batteries are expensive, terribly inefficient, and regularly cycling them will kill them in relatively short order. What's more, you'll still have a peak, it'll just be ~2 hours later, and LARGER because of the added inefficiency of batteries.
There's good reason we have a GRID, and not one or two big power plants in an area with a bunch of backup batteries. If it could work for you at home, why wouldn't the power companies do it as part of their infrastructure? It's because it's terribly inefficient, expensive, and more expensive that supplying peak power the traditional way.
EU just made incandescent lights illegal.
Why? Do all Europeans hate chicken coups and "Easy-bake ovens" that much? Is there some reason a 10% tax on bulbs, which then goes to subsidize florescents, or upgrade the electrical infrastructure, wouldn't work, or are EU politicians just fans of being unnecessarily heavy-handed?
Green design homes
The low-hanging fruit have already been taken care of in most every home built in the past century. "Green" homes are usually so expensive, and provide such a relatively minimal reduction in power consumption, that they take several decades to pay back the investment... "Green" homes are all too often impractical, designed more as show-pieces for the rich.
What's more, smaller projects like retrofitting homes with improved insulation and the like similarly takes several years to pay off. I'd still recommend it, but it's difficult to make the case on a monetary scale to the home owner, unless some fabulously efficient new technology for home insulation comes along. It's only the (relatively few) old homes with no insulation at all in areas that stand to really benefit.
More efficient solar energy. Windows with solar collectors built-in as well as LED lighting so that daylight can continue unabated.
Peaks electrical demand is caused by air conditioning. Solar heating isn't going to improve things...
LED lighting so that daylight can continue unabated.
LEDs still aren't nearly as efficient as florescents.
the utilities must maintain the generating capacity to meet the highest peak.
You missed the most important point. The longer the grid stays close to peak, the less expensive it is, per watt, to upgrade the infrastructure to sustain high loads.
Peak is a PITA right now because you've got to build new power plants that are only being used for a quarter of the day, meaning they have to charge 4X as much per-watt to recoup initial costs. Ditto for upgrading the transformers, installing more lines, et al.
This is why the DOE says a large number of electric cars would be a GOOD THING for the grid, since they're most likely to be charged off-peak and level-out demand.
Moreover, one of the many uses of Duct Tape is, you know, TAPING DUCTS! An audit of forced air systems (both AC and heat) typically yields about a 10% decrease in energy costs.
Grey "duct tape" should NEVER be used for taping ducts. It is not heat/cold/moisture resistant and does not form an air-tight seal.
For taping ducts, you need foil-backed tape, not the all-purpose grey tape commonly labeled "duct tape".
"fly up to 400nm," [...] Call me back when this thing can fly above one billionth of a meter.
They're actually using base 2 notation... That makes it much bigger! Stupid airplane manufacturers misusing accepted binary notation units as metric, so NIST had to introduce "NiM" notation to replace "NM"...
We all know that evolution is just about as "true" as any science gets -- and yet surely there are some portions of the current body of knowledge about evolution that will one day be falsified by later research. That's not a bad thing.
It's not bad from a scientific perspective. But your life doesn't depend on one particular facet of "Evolution" (or Relativity, or Quantum Mechanics) being accurate.
When doctors are prescribing antidepressants to you, based on the latest medical research, the resilience of the scientific model doesn't matter that much... The accuracy of the published papers, does; it's the difference between life and death to many thousands of people out there.
You see the "correlation is not causation" tags and comments on/. and notice that "studies" with rather poor rigor seem to be becoming more popular, or are at least more readily accepted by the mainstream, with the potential for serious consequences. Perhaps this is just a parallel of what is happening with the news media, or a symptom of our increased interconnectedness. But either way, it most certainly is a real problem.
who get any information from the three sites he called out?
whitehouse.gov has endless press releases. If you're deep enough into politics that you don't want or need pundits, that's where you find most of your info on what's going on. That's where your senators and representatives are supposed to get much of their information.
Not specifically sure about pentagon.mil, but plenty of useful info is provided on.mil sites... Mil-spec information can be quite useful. The rainbow books have been available as PDFs there for years. Probably plenty of press releases there as well.
Things you probably don't remember about TV. [...] they would show a film of a military band playing The Star-Spangled Banner and then they would turn off the transmitter, filling your living room with snow and white noise.
Yes... Nobody that has ever watched the movie Poltergeist knows any of this...
Really, who doesn't remember this? It's been perhaps less than 10 years now since all stations started broadcasting infomercials all night. I think KCET (Los Angeles PBS station) was doing it up until ~2 years ago.
TV used to be three channels which is why millions of people voluntarily watched programs like Gilligan's Island or Mr. Ed. It took an act of Congress to set up a fourth channel.
TV used to be 1 channel... Then 2... Then 3... Then 4...
I don't think there was really a decent length of time (in the any of the major markets) when there were only TV 3 channels. There certainly wasn't in Los Angeles, with local (independent) stations owned by the Los Angeles Times, Paramount, Disney, etc. They used to be dammed good TV channels to, until the late 90's when mergers and rampant cost cutting turned them all into crap.
What you're actually talking about are NATIONAL networks (ie. CBS, NBC-Red, NBC-Blue/ABC).
No. No he isn't. TFA directly quotes him discussing EXACTLY what you say he is "missing":
"'Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.'"
The point that you, and many others are missing, however, is a couple lines down:
"the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. 'Spend the rest of your money [elsewhere, for better effects.]'"
ie. The security of airlines is NOT at issue. The EFFECTIVENESS OF TSA, is. You would do better to save money by cutting back on TSA, and INVESTING it elsewhere. Elsewhere may be more maintenance on commercial jets, improving air traffic control, or perhaps even a few more air marshals.
TSA is wasting lots of money, needlessly hassling travelers, and for all that, there's no appreciable improvement in security.
Firewire isn't past its prime. Apple wanted to further differentiate the consumer and pro versions of their laptops,
Just like they wanted to "differentiate" the PowerMac from the iMac by not including a floppy on the low-end device... Clearly, circa 2000, Apple considered floppy disks "pro" equipment...
ie. your comment is stupid.
There will ALWAYS be equipment using an old interface. That doesn't mean it isn't a rapidly dying technology.
Firewire has a small foothold in some realtime studio equipment, but it may go out of fashion there in short order, as other (perhaps newer) protocols (that have better penetration) get slightly expanded to eat away at that lowly niche. eg. HDMI, SDI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc.
But FireWire was better than SCSI, and nothing touches it yet.
Gigabit ethernet is faster, cheaper, is far easier for multi-user device sharing, has much better range, much more device support (printers, scanners, copiers, CD/DVD duplicators, studio audio/video equipment, hard drive arrays, etc.), etc.
This is not just an outdated, or soon to be outdated port.
There remains equipment that uses it, but their numbers are continually decreasing, in favor of either USB or Ethernet. That's the very definition of outdated.
I'm sure you can find a few situations where floppy disks are required as well...
I was repeatedly frustrated by the inability to read the rest of my email because I was waiting for a multi-megabyte attachment to download.
Yes, it's annoying when you have to sit there and wait for it, but that's not a problem with the server on-site... Delivery just happens in the background, no hassles or waiting as far as you're concerned.
Even with non-stop huge attachments, a dial-up line will still keep your e-mail flowing, it'll just be delayed by a couple hours at most. It should all get through by some time in the middle of the night, once everyone has gone home and stopped sending. And the next morning the queue will be empty, and delivery will again be almost immediate.
We're not talking about recommended daily procedures here, just a way to get through a rare, occasional outage.
More fundamentally, "bling" is dead. It died about two weeks ago. The luxury industry is terrified right now. It's very clear that we're in for a long, worldwide recession. Expensive status symbols are so over.
I'm not so sure about that. The gap between rich and poor is as large as ever, so the Guilded Age is a reasonable comparison. It was only during the great depression that rich individuals were shamed into toning down the extravagance, and we're nowhere near that point yet. It didn't happen after the dot.com bubble burst, and I don't expect it will now.
Perhaps there aren't as many relatively rich people with money to spend, and so there is now an oversupply of "luxury goods" companies, but I suspect the "gold-plated Mercedes" business will continue on just fine. That should apply to a substantial portion of
If you want to know which policy is more valuable, take a look at the Euro and the Pound versus the Dollar.
Comparing the relative values of currency is an absolutely idiotic way of comparing the validity of economic systems.
Compare the pence to the pound and note that the UK is apparently 100x poorer than the UK...
"Strong" currency isn't necessary better. Now, "strong" currency experiencing run away inflation and becoming weaker is bad, but you made no attempt to look at that.
And I should point out, now that the economic crisis has reached the rest of the world, the dollar has been gaining in relative strength to the Pound and Euro... Not dramatically, but the extremely exchange rates of the USD is just as much a part of the global economic bubble as anything else, and will probably come back in line soon.
This parable can probably also be applied to any forced change in resource allocation, such as government redistribution of wealth.
No, it certainly can't. The broken window parable assumes a zero-sum game, where everyone is going to spend 100% of the money they earn. This is not true in the real world.
Economics is MUCH more complex than a one-paragraph parable. Hence the innumerable wealthy economics, and Nobel prize for economics (and none of the above for parable writers).
From day one of the PC-age, crappy inferior technology has ALWAYS won-out over superior technology.
Not really. It's just that the technology that is in fact superior happens to be less "elegant".
"Superior" for x86 happened to be dual independent suppliers, pushing costs down. Not to mention endless backwards compatibility. And CISC architecture was superior at the time (early on) while AMD and Intel were able to make the jump to to RISC when the time came. More recently, x86 was able to make a seamless and cost-effective jump to 64-bits, and SIMD instructions. Now x86 is running up against the upper limit of clock speeds, and has transitioned to multicore painlessly as well. Now it's a question of whether x86 can make the jump to integrated ASICs (GPUs) as they did with x87 FPUs back in the 386 days...
With USB, "superior" means cheap, mainly, and an easy and seamless transition from legacy ports to USB... Firewire was not able to offer either. The few features that made Firewire more elegant like performance, reserved bandwidth for realtime operation, etc., were not as significant, and Firewire didn't have any of USB's advantages. Firewire had huge potential, but it wasn't superior. Maybe if the developers had included a low-cost, low-speed option for keyboards and mice, or perhaps had gone even higher-end and competed head-on with SATA and iSCSI for the internal-drive . Firewire's advantages were few, and existed in too small of a niche. USB's advantages were numerous, widespread, and more than made up for worse performance and the like.
HOWEVER, I have made the point, several times, that it isn't USB that killed Firewire, but Ethernet:
Much better range, lower price, more devices, equally high speed, similar (controller) requirements, easier device sharing, etc.
High-end printers, scanners, CD/DVD duplicators, studio (audio/video) equipment, hard drive arrays, etc. They all have gigabit ethernet connectors now.
Ethernet ate the high-end, USB ate the low-end, Firewire got left out in the cold, with just a few niche applications where Ethernet is inconvenient and its benefits don't apply, and yet USB isn't quite fast/flexible enough. That basically means just digital camcorders, and a handful of studio equipment... And DV cameras could benefit greatly from the faster-than-realtime transfer that ethernet offers and seem likely to switch away from Firewire in the near future. Eliminating the fixed-data rate realtime transfer would also allow for the use of much better (VBR) compression, with the potential for higher capacity on the same media, and longer battery life as well.
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You've just won the award for the most idiotic comment of the day. Congrats!
Here's 12 incidents of jets losing all engine power and gliding to a landing. Several with no serious injuries to passengers or crew. That's one hell of a flying rock there.
http://www.airsafe.com/events/noengine.htm
Technophilia is BAD... We don't want or need "new" technology for the sake of "new technology".
Maglevs really aren't any faster, unless you're operating in a sealed vacuum tube, thanks to air resistance dominating. But they are certainly far more expensive to operate.
IMHO, to technologically leapfrog other countries where trains are concerned, would actually take a much smaller step... Running high-voltage power along the full length of the tracks. Then, you can completely eliminate the ultra-massive diesel engine in the locomotives, AND as an added bonus, dynamic braking (which all trains use) can dump all that energy back into the grid, rather than wasting it as heat. Think of it as an ultra-giant electric car, where no batteries on earth are large enough...
LEO doesn't require you to compensate for turbulence, rolling friction, hills, valley, wind, rain, etc., etc.
Connecting moving trains, on a routine basis, is at the very edge of current technology, and would still fail on a regular basis ("Sorry, something broke, you're not getting on the train today!").
Never mind the extremely complex management of cars continually joining and leaving the mainline for stations. We can BARELY manage to coordinate a handful of low-speed freight trains, with many miles in between them, without any counter-moving offshoot vehicles, on the main lines without collisions.
Crime is an entry-level job, open to anyone who is motivated and capable.
Getting a high paying job in IT, however, is a huge PITA, and until you have 10 years of continuous work experience, it depends a lot on being an insider, rather than skill.
Oh?
"Once the parents spend over $600, the students do slightly better,"
And their costs for home school versus public schooling are highly lop-sided, not taking into consideration the cost of parent's time donated, subsidized meals, etc., etc.
Not to mention that home schooled students is a naturally self-selecting group... It doesn't follow that forcing everyone else to home school their children would give everyone equally good performance.
That article is a very small step up from a biased opinion piece.
Seems to work for PBS.
IMHO, if you need to depend on a UPS, that doesn't bode well for the filesystem. How is it any better than an ancient filesystem like UFS/Ext2 (mounted async), if it doesn't do a good job with integrity? What's "excellent" about XFS?
A UPS can't prevent a system crash either, so you need a decent FS.
Several benchmarks directly disagree. No I don't have links handy, it's been years. No doubt you can find them as easily as I.
What? Maybe you know what you're talking about, but it sure doesn't sound like it, here.
What does "maintaining the on-disk data always in a consistent state" even mean? And how is it any difference than the age old practice of synchronous (or atomic) writes? How is reordering metadata, so that partial or incomplete writes can be rolled back, any different? What's more, how is it "better" in any way?
The overhead of softupdates is really very minimal, hence being even faster than journaling (which really does have some notable overhead). No doubt there's always some room for improved performance, but very little where softupdates are concerned. Complexity is also really quite minimal, and hardly notable next to the functionality any modern filesystem has (ie. reordering metadata is nothing compared to reordering bulk data to minimize seeks).
ZFS' copy-on-write allows it to avoid FSCK, but it has some fairly nasty trade-offs, and there's plenty of examples where an FSCK tool was needed. I know next to nothing about BTRFS, so I admit there may be something here I'm missing, but ZFS certainly isn't a good example of not needing FSCK. Never mind that UFS2 with softupdates doesn't specifically NEED an FSCK after a power failure, allowing immediate read/write use of a filesystem, and only using background FSCK to really only to reclaim free blocks still marked as allocated. ie. very minor housekeeping that can really be put off indefinitely.
Sadly, if they would have gone back FURTHER, to 1997, they'd have come up with something far superior... Something with a 3/4ths size keyboard you (most people) could actually full-speed touch-type on. Something that ran for a month on 2AA batteries. Something that could play MP3s. etc.
Batteries are expensive, terribly inefficient, and regularly cycling them will kill them in relatively short order. What's more, you'll still have a peak, it'll just be ~2 hours later, and LARGER because of the added inefficiency of batteries.
There's good reason we have a GRID, and not one or two big power plants in an area with a bunch of backup batteries. If it could work for you at home, why wouldn't the power companies do it as part of their infrastructure? It's because it's terribly inefficient, expensive, and more expensive that supplying peak power the traditional way.
Why? Do all Europeans hate chicken coups and "Easy-bake ovens" that much? Is there some reason a 10% tax on bulbs, which then goes to subsidize florescents, or upgrade the electrical infrastructure, wouldn't work, or are EU politicians just fans of being unnecessarily heavy-handed?
The low-hanging fruit have already been taken care of in most every home built in the past century. "Green" homes are usually so expensive, and provide such a relatively minimal reduction in power consumption, that they take several decades to pay back the investment... "Green" homes are all too often impractical, designed more as show-pieces for the rich.
What's more, smaller projects like retrofitting homes with improved insulation and the like similarly takes several years to pay off. I'd still recommend it, but it's difficult to make the case on a monetary scale to the home owner, unless some fabulously efficient new technology for home insulation comes along. It's only the (relatively few) old homes with no insulation at all in areas that stand to really benefit.
Peaks electrical demand is caused by air conditioning. Solar heating isn't going to improve things...
LEDs still aren't nearly as efficient as florescents.
You missed the most important point. The longer the grid stays close to peak, the less expensive it is, per watt, to upgrade the infrastructure to sustain high loads.
Peak is a PITA right now because you've got to build new power plants that are only being used for a quarter of the day, meaning they have to charge 4X as much per-watt to recoup initial costs. Ditto for upgrading the transformers, installing more lines, et al.
This is why the DOE says a large number of electric cars would be a GOOD THING for the grid, since they're most likely to be charged off-peak and level-out demand.
Grey "duct tape" should NEVER be used for taping ducts. It is not heat/cold/moisture resistant and does not form an air-tight seal.
For taping ducts, you need foil-backed tape, not the all-purpose grey tape commonly labeled "duct tape".
They're actually using base 2 notation... That makes it much bigger! Stupid airplane manufacturers misusing accepted binary notation units as metric, so NIST had to introduce "NiM" notation to replace "NM"...
It's not bad from a scientific perspective. But your life doesn't depend on one particular facet of "Evolution" (or Relativity, or Quantum Mechanics) being accurate.
When doctors are prescribing antidepressants to you, based on the latest medical research, the resilience of the scientific model doesn't matter that much... The accuracy of the published papers, does; it's the difference between life and death to many thousands of people out there.
You see the "correlation is not causation" tags and comments on /. and notice that "studies" with rather poor rigor seem to be becoming more popular, or are at least more readily accepted by the mainstream, with the potential for serious consequences. Perhaps this is just a parallel of what is happening with the news media, or a symptom of our increased interconnectedness. But either way, it most certainly is a real problem.
whitehouse.gov has endless press releases. If you're deep enough into politics that you don't want or need pundits, that's where you find most of your info on what's going on. That's where your senators and representatives are supposed to get much of their information.
Not specifically sure about pentagon.mil, but plenty of useful info is provided on .mil sites... Mil-spec information can be quite useful. The rainbow books have been available as PDFs there for years. Probably plenty of press releases there as well.
Yes... Nobody that has ever watched the movie Poltergeist knows any of this...
Really, who doesn't remember this? It's been perhaps less than 10 years now since all stations started broadcasting infomercials all night. I think KCET (Los Angeles PBS station) was doing it up until ~2 years ago.
TV used to be 1 channel... Then 2... Then 3... Then 4...
I don't think there was really a decent length of time (in the any of the major markets) when there were only TV 3 channels. There certainly wasn't in Los Angeles, with local (independent) stations owned by the Los Angeles Times, Paramount, Disney, etc. They used to be dammed good TV channels to, until the late 90's when mergers and rampant cost cutting turned them all into crap.
What you're actually talking about are NATIONAL networks (ie. CBS, NBC-Red, NBC-Blue/ABC).
Yeah, mine wasn't stripped. 500kB.
No. No he isn't. TFA directly quotes him discussing EXACTLY what you say he is "missing":
"'Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.'"
The point that you, and many others are missing, however, is a couple lines down:
"the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. 'Spend the rest of your money [elsewhere, for better effects.]'"
ie. The security of airlines is NOT at issue. The EFFECTIVENESS OF TSA, is. You would do better to save money by cutting back on TSA, and INVESTING it elsewhere. Elsewhere may be more maintenance on commercial jets, improving air traffic control, or perhaps even a few more air marshals.
TSA is wasting lots of money, needlessly hassling travelers, and for all that, there's no appreciable improvement in security.
Just like they wanted to "differentiate" the PowerMac from the iMac by not including a floppy on the low-end device... Clearly, circa 2000, Apple considered floppy disks "pro" equipment...
ie. your comment is stupid.
There will ALWAYS be equipment using an old interface. That doesn't mean it isn't a rapidly dying technology.
Firewire has a small foothold in some realtime studio equipment, but it may go out of fashion there in short order, as other (perhaps newer) protocols (that have better penetration) get slightly expanded to eat away at that lowly niche. eg. HDMI, SDI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc.
Gigabit ethernet is faster, cheaper, is far easier for multi-user device sharing, has much better range, much more device support (printers, scanners, copiers, CD/DVD duplicators, studio audio/video equipment, hard drive arrays, etc.), etc.
There remains equipment that uses it, but their numbers are continually decreasing, in favor of either USB or Ethernet. That's the very definition of outdated.
I'm sure you can find a few situations where floppy disks are required as well...
Yes, it's annoying when you have to sit there and wait for it, but that's not a problem with the server on-site... Delivery just happens in the background, no hassles or waiting as far as you're concerned.
Even with non-stop huge attachments, a dial-up line will still keep your e-mail flowing, it'll just be delayed by a couple hours at most. It should all get through by some time in the middle of the night, once everyone has gone home and stopped sending. And the next morning the queue will be empty, and delivery will again be almost immediate.
We're not talking about recommended daily procedures here, just a way to get through a rare, occasional outage.
I'm not so sure about that. The gap between rich and poor is as large as ever, so the Guilded Age is a reasonable comparison. It was only during the great depression that rich individuals were shamed into toning down the extravagance, and we're nowhere near that point yet. It didn't happen after the dot.com bubble burst, and I don't expect it will now.
Perhaps there aren't as many relatively rich people with money to spend, and so there is now an oversupply of "luxury goods" companies, but I suspect the "gold-plated Mercedes" business will continue on just fine. That should apply to a substantial portion of
Comparing the relative values of currency is an absolutely idiotic way of comparing the validity of economic systems.
Compare the pence to the pound and note that the UK is apparently 100x poorer than the UK...
"Strong" currency isn't necessary better. Now, "strong" currency experiencing run away inflation and becoming weaker is bad, but you made no attempt to look at that.
And I should point out, now that the economic crisis has reached the rest of the world, the dollar has been gaining in relative strength to the Pound and Euro... Not dramatically, but the extremely exchange rates of the USD is just as much a part of the global economic bubble as anything else, and will probably come back in line soon.
No, it certainly can't. The broken window parable assumes a zero-sum game, where everyone is going to spend 100% of the money they earn. This is not true in the real world.
Economics is MUCH more complex than a one-paragraph parable. Hence the innumerable wealthy economics, and Nobel prize for economics (and none of the above for parable writers).
Not really. It's just that the technology that is in fact superior happens to be less "elegant".
"Superior" for x86 happened to be dual independent suppliers, pushing costs down. Not to mention endless backwards compatibility. And CISC architecture was superior at the time (early on) while AMD and Intel were able to make the jump to to RISC when the time came. More recently, x86 was able to make a seamless and cost-effective jump to 64-bits, and SIMD instructions. Now x86 is running up against the upper limit of clock speeds, and has transitioned to multicore painlessly as well. Now it's a question of whether x86 can make the jump to integrated ASICs (GPUs) as they did with x87 FPUs back in the 386 days...
With USB, "superior" means cheap, mainly, and an easy and seamless transition from legacy ports to USB... Firewire was not able to offer either. The few features that made Firewire more elegant like performance, reserved bandwidth for realtime operation, etc., were not as significant, and Firewire didn't have any of USB's advantages. Firewire had huge potential, but it wasn't superior. Maybe if the developers had included a low-cost, low-speed option for keyboards and mice, or perhaps had gone even higher-end and competed head-on with SATA and iSCSI for the internal-drive . Firewire's advantages were few, and existed in too small of a niche. USB's advantages were numerous, widespread, and more than made up for worse performance and the like.
HOWEVER, I have made the point, several times, that it isn't USB that killed Firewire, but Ethernet:
Much better range, lower price, more devices, equally high speed, similar (controller) requirements, easier device sharing, etc.
High-end printers, scanners, CD/DVD duplicators, studio (audio/video) equipment, hard drive arrays, etc. They all have gigabit ethernet connectors now.
Ethernet ate the high-end, USB ate the low-end, Firewire got left out in the cold, with just a few niche applications where Ethernet is inconvenient and its benefits don't apply, and yet USB isn't quite fast/flexible enough. That basically means just digital camcorders, and a handful of studio equipment... And DV cameras could benefit greatly from the faster-than-realtime transfer that ethernet offers and seem likely to switch away from Firewire in the near future. Eliminating the fixed-data rate realtime transfer would also allow for the use of much better (VBR) compression, with the potential for higher capacity on the same media, and longer battery life as well.