Binding arbitration saves on the order of billions in litigation costs, even if the arbitrations go against the respondents.
If that were true, then Gateway should pay-off all unhappy customers for the full value of the hassle/problem, and save even more (slightly) before reaching arbitration.
an uncompressed two-hour film in digital cinema resolution and quality will clock in at about 12 terabytes,
That number doesn't sound REMOTELY reasonable.
4K is 4096 x 2160 = 4,527,360 pixels/frame
32bpp per pixel == 144,875,520bits == 17,685 kilobytes/frame
4K is 24fps == 424,440 kilobytes/sec.
2 hours == 7,200 seconds
Which makes 3,055,968,000 Kbytes total or 2.846 Terabytes for 2 hours of uncompressed video.
And I agree with everyone who's already said how useless this article is. If you don't understand video encoding going in, their explanations won't help. And if you do, you'll feel stupider for reading it... The writer certainly doesn't seem to understand it himself.
And, sadly, that's the reason why little-endian binary will probably be around to haunt us forever.
I'm not being haunted by it at all. Endian differences were irritating many years ago, but with the number-crunching power of today, such differences can be automatically detected and converted.
The difference between DOS and Unix text doesn't haunt me either...
Any patents the Wright brothers received would be out of force long before today
And? The aviation industry didn't start, fully-formed, yesterday. It made a difference when those patents were in-force.
It's absurd to suggest that flaps wouldn't have developed had the patent system not created incentive for alternative solutions.
I didn't say that, though I will say it would have taken much longer for them to appear. It's all a red herring, though. The subject is about how the free-market works around patent limitations.
Free markets don't have special interests with laws tailored to give them advantages.
That's just being pedantic. You're simply using a different definition of "free market" to make an completely irrelevant point, so you can call "bullshit" on whatever you dislike.
How exactly does the free market go about fixing limited duration government granted monopolies (a.k.a. patents)?
Umm, isn't it obvious?
Alternative methods to accomplish the same goal have been used as patent work-arounds from the earliest days. If not for someone working-around the Wright Brother's patents, jets would be using "wing warping" instead of "flaps."
Besides that, the free market constantly lobbies the government... if they get bit by broad patents enough times, they'll put their efforts towards ending that.
And finally, if numerous companies go out of business, the patent office will no longer be over-loaded...
The fact that some have special needs shouldn't preclude normal equipment being designed to work for 95% of people.
(I used to have a picture of me depressing both the control keys at once without pressing any other keys, on a full-size IBM keyboard) and even ordinary keyboards aren't large enough.
I'm just half an inch away from being able to do that myself, and I'm rather sure my fingers are fatter than average, but I don't have any problem typing on 3/4 keyboards.
With the impending release date of Apple's iPhone, I am left to wonder whether there is even any point in other manufacturers continuing to develop smart phones
Really? Because, with the impending release date of Apple's iPhone, I'm left to wonder whether it will be a half-decent phone to begin with.
Apple's success with the iPod is impressive, but it was a fledgling market which smart phones are not, and none of their other product lines have been remotely as dominant as the iPod. I don't believe the iPhone is going to set the world on fire just because its name also starts with the letter 'i'. And a few little features might look good on stage, but that usually doesn't translate into real-world user-friendliness.
It would be pointless for Nvidia to continue developing their proprietary driver once very few people use it because the Free Software one is "good enough" and installed by default.
Tell that to ATI. Their r100/200/300 cards were just about fully supported by free drivers for both 2D and 3D.
Aren't you glad they dropped the crappy fglrx drivers, and started developing the open source ones that everyone was using, since, after all, it would be pointless to do otherwise...
Your baseless assertion doesn't make a very good answer to the GP's question of what NVidia is going to do when NV is obsoleted (not what you think they should do).
You have still completely failed to explain how you're going to classify what they charge for access, without any loopholes. "Access" isn't a dollar amount that can be trivially shown up-front.
Surely there's a way to contain some "waste" heat and put it to good use without adversely affecting the efficiency of the device that generated the "waste" heat in the first place.
That's really only possible at temperatures that are barely higher than ambient. At which point, the amount of power that can be extracted from the difference between ambient and the waste heat is so tiny, that it's practically never worth the investment.
And in cases such as A/C and heating, there is far, far more energy to be saved by using ground-source heat-pumps in the first place, rather than trying to siphon off a little bit of the profuse waste heat from an air-source heat pump.
Until you're typing an rm -r command on a folder, but put a space where it shouldn't be, or perhaps you run a mkfs on the wrong drive, or even just delete a single file by accident. RAID-5 won't help, AT ALL.
I'd definitely recommend JBOD or RAID-0, plus a couple off-line "backup" drives (USB2 seems easiest for most people), that are regularly (r)sync'd up with the most "important" folders/files.
The better ones (Areca, 3Ware, anything enterprise like HP & IBM) will let you upgrade arrays across models / versions.
And I wonder for how many years will those companies GUARANTEE 100% backwards compatibility? Because I know for damn sure I'm going to have a CD of the same operating system for decades to come, which will read the same (software) RAID formatted disks with ANY controller I can find... Hell, it'll work even I mount (eg. 8) drives on two DIFFERENT brands of controllers.
Assuming Linux/BSD, the RAID software being open source will allow me to fix bugs (happens even in high-end RAID controllers) forward-port it to newer releases of the same operating system if they chose to drop compatibility. Or potentially porting to other similar operating systems, if necessary (yeah, unlikely).
But much more than that, the software to monitor the health of the array is open source, whereas even if the manufacturer provides a binary-only program for your current operating system, they may opt not to when the next version comes around, or perhaps just remain way behind the curve and force you to wait.
I've been burned by low-end RAID cards before, and have decided it's worth the money for "the real thing".
I'll agree you should avoid cheap RAID controllers, but it doesn't follow that you should buy expensive ones. Software RAID is much cheaper, and has some pretty nice advantages. Even the performance of software RAID is faster than hardware controllers... (perhaps with the possible exception of large, battery backed on-controller caches.)
You have still completely failed to explain how you're going to classify what they charge for access, without any loopholes. "Access" isn't a dollar amount that can be trivially shown up-front.
In fact, why don't you just go and read my previous post, as it seems you didn't the first time...
Currently, the initial price they're willing to pay is as good as any other. In capitalism, it indicates how much use they're going to get out of it. Whether they charge $1 for any member of the public that wants to make a connection, or charge ridiculous amounts of money to select few companies for certain services, it's at least a good indication that they'll do a good job maximizing their use of it.
I think that's good not only for carbon emissions, but for the losses due to transmission, the ugly high-tension wires crisscrossing the country, and the likelihood of outages.
Carbon: Nothing existing, or on the horizon, has any potential to burn the same fuel as large power plants, with better efficiency, in a small space. Thermal efficiency works the opposite way. As for solar power, I'm hopeful, but it's still going to take quite a few more years before they're an all-around win.
Losses: Sure to be higher than the grid. No inverter+energy storage method will do better than (average) grid losses.
Wires: Hydro is the cleanest and cheapest energy source we know of, and so the grid is sure to remain, even if distributed power generation improves dramatically.
Outages: The grid doesn't fail often. Home equipment is sure to be less reliable (what fails more often, the grid, or your car?). And I seriously doubt anyone is going to pay the price for fully-redundant home equipment. If you want the highest possible reliability, use the grid along with a home generator (fail-over).
If we have a hundred thousand tiny generators on the grid, it seems like everyone wins except the power companies.
People lose, because they have to pay up-front for the capacity they need, and pay again if they need more. People lose because physically transferring the fuel is more expensive than sending electricity, introduces excess energy losses, and puts you at the mercy of the fuel supplier. The world loses, because the government would be much more reluctant to force millions of people to upgrade the pollution controls on their generators, and/or replace them. The world loses because it's much cheaper and easier to maintain central power plants than millions of individual power plants.
As hundreds of people easily share a single radio frequency in public places every day, spectrum is practically infinite.
"Easily share" == Raising the noise floor, reducing each other's throughput, etc., etc.
Not to mention that a big part of it is the temporal nature of it... Only a minority of people are using it at the same time. If everyone was constantly transferring (broadcasting), it would easily grind to a halt.
If allocated properly, there's enough for every person to broadcast video.
Only if perhaps you restrict everyone to line-of-sight frequencies, at low power, with low-gain, ground-level, directional antennas, and also allow no other uses of (most of) the spectrum but private individual broadcasts (goodbye cell phones, and most everything else).
A radical overhall is in order and those fighting it are evilvipers such as yourself.
Those who don't understand that spectrum is limited are twitters such as yourself... Hmm, I think mine's better.
Invading sovereign nations, new missile installations,
That's not new at all...
secret CIA prisons, human rights violations of 'enemy combatants', an administration that disregards world opinion.
Fair enough, except:
Those complaints are a few years old, and the situation has been going in the opposite direction for over a year now. The administration is absolutely required by law to change in 2008, while no such limits on Putin's reign.
Surely the bidding process should not only be based on how much they are willing to pay for it but on how much they are going to charge for access to it.
You're assuming public access, but that isn't the only use of spectrum, by far. Private companies need wireless communications, too.
Also, how are you going to assess what they "charge for access"? If it's something ad-supported, so they charge nothing up-front, do they get the spectrum for free? If they have non-public purposes for it, do they have to pay an infinite amount? If they charge a lot, but 99% of it is for the highly valuable service they offer over the line, and only 1% is really for use of the spectrum, how do you count it?
Ideas like yours always sound good at a first glance, but the devil is in the details... That's where well-intentioned regulations back-fire, and loopholes turn into a lethal weapon against your competitors.
Others have argued there is no scarcity of the resource you are talking about, so no regulation is required.
They have argued it, but it's clear they have no actual knowledge of wireless communications. Read just a few of the comments under that story to see a few reasons they're completely mistaken.
As technology improves, you can do more with less, but no amount of technology is going to make a limited resource like spectrum, infinite.
Slashdot Mirror
If that were true, then Gateway should pay-off all unhappy customers for the full value of the hassle/problem, and save even more (slightly) before reaching arbitration.
And even more connection to THIS ARTICLE from yesterday:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06
Good catch. I imagine that number was due to a typo.
That number doesn't sound REMOTELY reasonable.
4K is 4096 x 2160 = 4,527,360 pixels/frame
32bpp per pixel == 144,875,520bits == 17,685 kilobytes/frame
4K is 24fps == 424,440 kilobytes/sec.
2 hours == 7,200 seconds
Which makes 3,055,968,000 Kbytes total or 2.846 Terabytes for 2 hours of uncompressed video.
And I agree with everyone who's already said how useless this article is. If you don't understand video encoding going in, their explanations won't help. And if you do, you'll feel stupider for reading it... The writer certainly doesn't seem to understand it himself.
I'm not being haunted by it at all. Endian differences were irritating many years ago, but with the number-crunching power of today, such differences can be automatically detected and converted.
The difference between DOS and Unix text doesn't haunt me either...
And? The aviation industry didn't start, fully-formed, yesterday. It made a difference when those patents were in-force.
I didn't say that, though I will say it would have taken much longer for them to appear. It's all a red herring, though. The subject is about how the free-market works around patent limitations.
That's just being pedantic. You're simply using a different definition of "free market" to make an completely irrelevant point, so you can call "bullshit" on whatever you dislike.
Umm, isn't it obvious?
Alternative methods to accomplish the same goal have been used as patent work-arounds from the earliest days. If not for someone working-around the Wright Brother's patents, jets would be using "wing warping" instead of "flaps."
Besides that, the free market constantly lobbies the government... if they get bit by broad patents enough times, they'll put their efforts towards ending that.
And finally, if numerous companies go out of business, the patent office will no longer be over-loaded...
The fact that some have special needs shouldn't preclude normal equipment being designed to work for 95% of people.
I'm just half an inch away from being able to do that myself, and I'm rather sure my fingers are fatter than average, but I don't have any problem typing on 3/4 keyboards.
Really? Because, with the impending release date of Apple's iPhone, I'm left to wonder whether it will be a half-decent phone to begin with.
Apple's success with the iPod is impressive, but it was a fledgling market which smart phones are not, and none of their other product lines have been remotely as dominant as the iPod. I don't believe the iPhone is going to set the world on fire just because its name also starts with the letter 'i'. And a few little features might look good on stage, but that usually doesn't translate into real-world user-friendliness.
Why? Most of us don't have massively fat fingers, and a 3/4 size keyboard is quite comfortable for typing.
In any case, at 22.5cm [1], it's more than wide enough to accommodate a full keyboard.
[1] According to: http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/3951/asus_intro
Tell that to ATI. Their r100/200/300 cards were just about fully supported by free drivers for both 2D and 3D.
Aren't you glad they dropped the crappy fglrx drivers, and started developing the open source ones that everyone was using, since, after all, it would be pointless to do otherwise...
Your baseless assertion doesn't make a very good answer to the GP's question of what NVidia is going to do when NV is obsoleted (not what you think they should do).
You have still completely failed to explain how you're going to classify what they charge for access, without any loopholes. "Access" isn't a dollar amount that can be trivially shown up-front.
That's really only possible at temperatures that are barely higher than ambient. At which point, the amount of power that can be extracted from the difference between ambient and the waste heat is so tiny, that it's practically never worth the investment.
And in cases such as A/C and heating, there is far, far more energy to be saved by using ground-source heat-pumps in the first place, rather than trying to siphon off a little bit of the profuse waste heat from an air-source heat pump.
Laugh all you want, but some of us are within throwing-range of Microsoft headquarters... Not so funny for us.
Gotta go!
Until you're typing an rm -r command on a folder, but put a space where it shouldn't be, or perhaps you run a mkfs on the wrong drive, or even just delete a single file by accident. RAID-5 won't help, AT ALL.
I'd definitely recommend JBOD or RAID-0, plus a couple off-line "backup" drives (USB2 seems easiest for most people), that are regularly (r)sync'd up with the most "important" folders/files.
And to make it better, it ISN'T classified as an "Ask Slashdot" which stories I have turned-off.
And I wonder for how many years will those companies GUARANTEE 100% backwards compatibility? Because I know for damn sure I'm going to have a CD of the same operating system for decades to come, which will read the same (software) RAID formatted disks with ANY controller I can find... Hell, it'll work even I mount (eg. 8) drives on two DIFFERENT brands of controllers.
Assuming Linux/BSD, the RAID software being open source will allow me to fix bugs (happens even in high-end RAID controllers) forward-port it to newer releases of the same operating system if they chose to drop compatibility. Or potentially porting to other similar operating systems, if necessary (yeah, unlikely).
But much more than that, the software to monitor the health of the array is open source, whereas even if the manufacturer provides a binary-only program for your current operating system, they may opt not to when the next version comes around, or perhaps just remain way behind the curve and force you to wait.
I'll agree you should avoid cheap RAID controllers, but it doesn't follow that you should buy expensive ones. Software RAID is much cheaper, and has some pretty nice advantages. Even the performance of software RAID is faster than hardware controllers... (perhaps with the possible exception of large, battery backed on-controller caches.)
You have still completely failed to explain how you're going to classify what they charge for access, without any loopholes. "Access" isn't a dollar amount that can be trivially shown up-front.
In fact, why don't you just go and read my previous post, as it seems you didn't the first time...
Currently, the initial price they're willing to pay is as good as any other. In capitalism, it indicates how much use they're going to get out of it. Whether they charge $1 for any member of the public that wants to make a connection, or charge ridiculous amounts of money to select few companies for certain services, it's at least a good indication that they'll do a good job maximizing their use of it.
Carbon: Nothing existing, or on the horizon, has any potential to burn the same fuel as large power plants, with better efficiency, in a small space. Thermal efficiency works the opposite way. As for solar power, I'm hopeful, but it's still going to take quite a few more years before they're an all-around win.
Losses: Sure to be higher than the grid. No inverter+energy storage method will do better than (average) grid losses.
Wires: Hydro is the cleanest and cheapest energy source we know of, and so the grid is sure to remain, even if distributed power generation improves dramatically.
Outages: The grid doesn't fail often. Home equipment is sure to be less reliable (what fails more often, the grid, or your car?). And I seriously doubt anyone is going to pay the price for fully-redundant home equipment. If you want the highest possible reliability, use the grid along with a home generator (fail-over).
People lose, because they have to pay up-front for the capacity they need, and pay again if they need more. People lose because physically transferring the fuel is more expensive than sending electricity, introduces excess energy losses, and puts you at the mercy of the fuel supplier. The world loses, because the government would be much more reluctant to force millions of people to upgrade the pollution controls on their generators, and/or replace them. The world loses because it's much cheaper and easier to maintain central power plants than millions of individual power plants.
And the hotter that space gets, the more electricity you're wasting on the A/C.
There's really no way to condense waste heat, without expending more energy to do it than you get from the process.
"Easily share" == Raising the noise floor, reducing each other's throughput, etc., etc.
Not to mention that a big part of it is the temporal nature of it... Only a minority of people are using it at the same time. If everyone was constantly transferring (broadcasting), it would easily grind to a halt.
Only if perhaps you restrict everyone to line-of-sight frequencies, at low power, with low-gain, ground-level, directional antennas, and also allow no other uses of (most of) the spectrum but private individual broadcasts (goodbye cell phones, and most everything else).
Those who don't understand that spectrum is limited are twitters such as yourself... Hmm, I think mine's better.
I'm done feeding the troll. Goodbye.
That's not new at all...
Fair enough, except:
Those complaints are a few years old, and the situation has been going in the opposite direction for over a year now.
The administration is absolutely required by law to change in 2008, while no such limits on Putin's reign.
You're assuming public access, but that isn't the only use of spectrum, by far. Private companies need wireless communications, too.
Also, how are you going to assess what they "charge for access"? If it's something ad-supported, so they charge nothing up-front, do they get the spectrum for free? If they have non-public purposes for it, do they have to pay an infinite amount? If they charge a lot, but 99% of it is for the highly valuable service they offer over the line, and only 1% is really for use of the spectrum, how do you count it?
Ideas like yours always sound good at a first glance, but the devil is in the details... That's where well-intentioned regulations back-fire, and loopholes turn into a lethal weapon against your competitors.
They have argued it, but it's clear they have no actual knowledge of wireless communications. Read just a few of the comments under that story to see a few reasons they're completely mistaken.
As technology improves, you can do more with less, but no amount of technology is going to make a limited resource like spectrum, infinite.
Perhaps because those and other unlicensed frequencies already exist? How much unlicensed spectrum is enough?