I think seeker_1us was referring to the possibility of it being an accidental swap with a display model.
Which only makes the "ya think?" replies funnier.
Then again, maybe that was just an accident?
You've got it partially right. Someone else paying is only a part of it - the part that means we consume a lot.
The other part is how much we pay for each bit we consume. We don't pay 30 administrators, medical coders, bureaucrats, claim adjusters, insurance reimbursement specialists, medical transcriptionists, etc. when we take the dog to the vet. And that's not even counting the cost of prime real estate, years of medical device and drug approval reviews (which still don't prevent problems any better than our European counterparts which do it radically more cheaply and around a decade faster), healthcare lobbyists, IT infrastructure and software that doesn't actually work (and there are cheaper alternatives that do actually work), and, of course, someone has to make a profit on top of supporting all of these parts that are, at the end of the day, pretty much expendable. And don't forget the profit that must be made on each of the supporting parts as well. (and don't forget the lawyers, settlements, and insurance company overhead and profits on malpractice premiums either)
Basically, we've built up our healthcare system as a super-massive employment program over the past few decades. Nurses with many years of experience will tell you that twenty years ago, they took care of far more patients at a radically lower cost, because so much overhead and procedural/bureaucratic make-work has been added. It's actually only a few dollars cheaper to have an office visit with a nurse practitioner than with a doctor (this was supposed to be a revolutionary cost-savings). All of this is because of the massive overhead we've included in healthcare. And yet regulators, politicians, and advocates are continually screaming for even more regulation (with the resulting overhead).
It's completely unsustainable, and it has very little to do with the amount of healthcare people consume, or the number of MRIs they have. We could make all of that stuff cheap. It's the four layers of bureaucracy to support - government oversight, health insurance, reimbursement, and institutional bureaucracy - plus the malpractice insurance industry to support.
You want to know why we can't do healthcare reform? It's because it would cost a very VERY large percentage of our workforce their jobs if we were to make things more efficient. Insurance companies have already massively raised rates so that they can continue supporting this huge system with fewer people actually purchasing insurance these days. And since this is all so completely unsustainable, it also means there is a real estate and business equity bubble in this area that could do every bit as much damage as the financial sector already did to our economy.
Come up with a solution to that catch-22. We could have healthcare as cheap as it is for our dogs, but doing so would mean that we'd have to give up the whole concept of health insurance. And with it, the livelihoods of many millions of Americans. That's why the only solutions being considered are containment measures that continue to support the current ecosystem. Literally nobody has the guts to publicly admit the full measure of this, unfortunately.
The structure that can withstand a flood has existed for a lot longer than submersible warships - it's called a "hill". If you don't have one conveniently nearby to use you can even build an artificial one.
An "artificial hill" intended to protect an area from floods is usually called a "levee", and while certainly extremely useful for their intended purpose, they aren't exactly an ironclad guarantee. So having contingency plans for the case where they fail isn't a bad idea.
Buildings that are built _on top_ of a hill (even an artificial one), don't have quite the same set of severe problems with flooding that occurs in low-lying areas.;)
Hard to argue with what you're saying - they did skimp on a couple of levels unnecessarily. I'm not sure I like their offering even for home use, but that has more to do with their business model.
When I first saw their design, my first thoughts, like yours, were for redundant power supplies and higher/redundant bandwidth. ZFS or a redundant cluster file system would go great with this. Paired with the type of per-system battery backup that Google says they have implemented in some data centers, it would be good.
I believe that they've cut it to the core with the expectation that their application does not truly need high availability. If you lose all your photos in a house fire, it doesn't matter if it takes a while to get them back, as long as you do get them back. I think that's the market they're after.
Along the same lines, if data is replicated across several pods at the time it is uploaded (what I hope they do) then even internal bandwidth for replication becomes less important. I don't see how they could practically implement it without at least running a cluster file system on top though.
I certainly appreciated it when they released their design, however. It demonstrated to me that it really would be possible with just a little more work to get top enterprise level reliability and decent performance for a fraction of the cost. I wish I had the opportunity to implement.
Those are great comments, as they relate to a single such system. If you investigate this particular provider, however, you'll see that they are using systems like this as a building-block in a much larger system, with data replicated on more than one such system.
All those problems you noted are mostly solved by this, except perhaps the speed. They may have solved that for the most part with redundancy and smart caching as well. As long as they have geographic redundancy, I'd say it's about as safe as you can get.
But I haven't done business with them, so by all means investigate further.
ZFS works great through Fuse, and there is a stable release. http://zfs-fuse.net/
You really want to use some type of redundancy, whether mirroring or RAIDZ (or you can specify to automatically keep multiple copies on a single disk file system). ZFS uses this redundancy to repair data if it gets corrupted.
I have found that RAIDZ is ridiculously processor intensive when added to the checksumming already being done with the data. Mirroring is tremendously faster, provides the flexibility to be reconfigured without making yet another copy, and if you do a 3-way mirror, more safe than anything else you can get (leaving off-site or multiple geographic locations out of the picture). Instead of a RAID set, ZFS allows you to create storage pools (like RAID 0) - the best way is to have each drive then mirrored. However, you can actually create pools out of RAID sets if (in my opinion) you're crazy enough to do so.
This kind of copy protection has been outdated for quite some while and should have died with floppy disks...
It's not copy protection at all - he just wants to find a way to write images directly to the platter.
I would have to suggest that using lightscribe on a cd would be easier and more cost effective.;)
So if only 1.5% of developers are women... but fewer than 0.1% of comments on development mailing lists are sexist... what is the real "problem" that exists?
Allow me to answer your question, with a question.
If only 1.5% of your cake consisted of strawberries.... but fewer than 0.1% of your cake consisted of feces, what is the real problem with your cake?
Since that's almost certainly well within the fecal contamination limits allowed by the FDA...
Maybe there's not enough strawberries?
Yeah, I almost said that myself - he's paying for the education and use of facilities. But there's a counterargument there as well - he's using pooled resources of the university which have maybe everything from federal funding to private donations mixed in. Arguably, the use of such greater resources merits a stake in what is produced.
But overall, I'm with you. It's preferrable if the university takes no ownership. In some ways I would be drawn to extend this even to faculty.
But here is the crux of my argument - if _investors_ are going to profit somewhat directly from a university's contribution, it seems to me that there is somewhat of an argument to be made that they should owe something to the university. I would probably abandon such a notion on a policy level if I were making policy, but I believe it's one of the reasons behind why we are where we are.
Not only that, but is it really terribly unfair to ask the former student to pay royalties? I'd think so on first glance. But we have to assume he's raised or raising capital. The real question is, is it wrong to ask his _investors_ to pay royalties to the university for ideas that were developed, at least somewhat, on the university's dime. Doesn't seem quite as unfair. I don't think anything the university is doing is preventing the kid from making personal use of the idea. Now if the kid were actually trying to build a business with nothing but his personal investment, I'd think differently. But the chances of that being the case are just about nothing.
Oh, if it were up to me it would all be completely different anyway. I don't particularly like the idea of patents. But I have to give some deference because there must have been some need for them once upon a time, and maybe we'd find there still is a need, if we were to do away with them. Certainly trade secrets can be even worse than patents for some purposes.
Well there is another side. I've repeatedly run into situations where the user, sometimes me, often not me, knows exactly what the problem is and how to fix it, but doesn't have the privileges or sometimes simply the authority to solve the problem (directive that such things must be done by IT). It has occasionally devolved into a situation where it's been necessary to explain, convince, and cajole a clueless sysadmin or other IT minion into doing what the user knows will work, has approval to do, and is in fact the certified procedure for doing it. And then the IT guy is slack-jawed and says he's going to have to research it and/or get an official approval when it actually works. Then he comes back later with some smarmy explanation of why it has to be done this way (his explanation is generally untrue - it's especially funny when the "user" designed the system), and then he demands that a special procedural request be made every time this procedure is necessary. Okay, that last part can sometimes be good for documentation, but just as often documenting that part of the procedure is unnecessary. And when the request is met with long delays for a procedure which requires fast action for very legitimate business reasons, it's just not cool.
Yeah, I've actually seen that happen quite a lot at several different employers.
That would be a *classical* liberal. Or what would now be called social liberal, economic conservative. Although the conservatives these days by no means have any interest in restricting spending. They just want to spend it on realizing the dream of big brother and guns. The democrats aren't much different, they just want big brother with fewer guns and more of everything else.
Classical liberals and libertarians have a lot in common. Anarchists would have it down if it weren't so hard to maintain a peaceful anarchy without somebody turning it into something else.
As far as I can tell no one has suggested a couple of things which can be very useful. You can use a mobile proxy - Google has one you can reach from http://m.google.com./ It reformats pages for mobile phones, getting rid of most bandwidth intensive stuff, and scaling down images - seriously reduces bandwidth usage. If I access, say, Slashdot through it, then every link I follow will go through Google's mobile proxy.
The other option is to use a mobile browser like Opera Mini. This will work full screen on your computer if you do it right, and uses Opera's mobile proxy to do something similar to the Google proxy. It will probably look better from what I can tell, and it will be more convenient. It does require installing a couple of things like Java Development Kit and Wireless Toolkit. Full instructions can be found here: http://java4me.blogspot.com/2008/01/opera-mini-as-pc-browser-big-screen.html
Honestly, while vanalism and such can be a nuissance, academics and other experts who would verify and credential an article would stifle the best qualities of Wikipedia. We'd be back to the days when out of date information was on the shelves for far too long and where one-sided analysis would reign because a "less impressive" person with better information couldn't make much headway in getting that infomation out.
Yes, the way Wikipedia is done requires doing your own homework before you rely on it - getting real evidence to cite. But going back to the verified encyclopedia method is just silly. It encourages laziness (not thoroughly researching to verify), and is just as much (I believe actually more) prone to produce serious long-term errors that become embedded in public consciousness.
There are major academics in several fields that have dominated their fields for long periods of time. Their theories have now grown or been overhauled to deal with new findings, but simply patched or even been dismissive of contradictory evidence in order to preserve the reputation of the supposed genius.
Linuistic theory is one such field. While Noam Chomsky's theories did contribute, they don't really go deep enough and don't deal at all with the exceptions. Dealing with the exceptions successfully would provide a far more profound understanding of linguistics. Unfortunately, some of the really bright people challenging those theories (with great evidence) don't measure up to the great Noam Chomsky, and they have been largely ignored. It's sad, and has made most linguists nothing more than wannabe followers, making no real contribution to understanding the fundamental neuropsychological origins and development of language.
Or, more simply, putting this proposal into practice might make some lazy people feel better, but it would once again enshrine a serious logical fallacy - experts aren't right just because they are experts.
I haven't yet, but I'm soon going to put together a fileserver and perhaps media box using Nexenta or FreeBSD (gnu user space on opensolaris), just so I can use ZFS. I don't know if MythTV is available for Nexenta, but it can be done on FreeBSD (http://wiki.freebsd.org/MythTV). I hear ZFS is not only robust and featureful, but it actually appears to be dead simple to administer whether it's on a single machine or a cluster, especially if you want to be able to simply drop in new drives and grow the file system to include them.
Right. Because all people with degrees in Mathematics understand math. Can I lead you to some high school mathematics teachers who believe that mathematics is simple platonic truth instead of the useful construct that the very best theoretical mathematicians understand it to be? Would you like a nurse to handle the devilish differential diagnosis for that mysterious illness you have? Or perform the surgery? Or better yet, pioneer a new surgical technique? Design new drugs?
Being an IT worker doesn't make you a computer _scientist_ just because you have a degree in computer science. Useful creative research and/or design have to be considered. While that means that some IT workers are therefore theoretically appropriate for unionization, the practical impact of taking that step should really be considered. We wouldn't want for IT what has happened in either our healthcare system or education system, I think.
That'd be great if the computer science grads knew what they were doing. It appears to me that people who want to learn computers get a comp sci degree. People who really understand the hardware and/or programming frequently don't. They'll gain knowledge in other areas to which they can really contribute with their IT understanding. Like the doctors who design medical devices or radiological algorithms.
Right. I'm sure that things like open formats and standards would really thrive in that environment. Not only would Microsoft buy and bully the standards organization, but all the IT workers as well!
I guess at least then everybody would be on the same page. We just might not see any real innovation ever again.
Standards are currently set in places and by people who need and know how to set them. Big computing shops certainly have people with certain skill sets working at the right things, and I believe they value them. The small shops, not so lucky. But unions wouldn't improve things there, because small shops don't all use the same types of practices.
One more thing. Let's look at the quality and cost of our public education system and law enforcement system before we call those unions a good thing.
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I think seeker_1us was referring to the possibility of it being an accidental swap with a display model.
Which only makes the "ya think?" replies funnier.
Then again, maybe that was just an accident?
You've got it partially right. Someone else paying is only a part of it - the part that means we consume a lot. The other part is how much we pay for each bit we consume. We don't pay 30 administrators, medical coders, bureaucrats, claim adjusters, insurance reimbursement specialists, medical transcriptionists, etc. when we take the dog to the vet. And that's not even counting the cost of prime real estate, years of medical device and drug approval reviews (which still don't prevent problems any better than our European counterparts which do it radically more cheaply and around a decade faster), healthcare lobbyists, IT infrastructure and software that doesn't actually work (and there are cheaper alternatives that do actually work), and, of course, someone has to make a profit on top of supporting all of these parts that are, at the end of the day, pretty much expendable. And don't forget the profit that must be made on each of the supporting parts as well. (and don't forget the lawyers, settlements, and insurance company overhead and profits on malpractice premiums either) Basically, we've built up our healthcare system as a super-massive employment program over the past few decades. Nurses with many years of experience will tell you that twenty years ago, they took care of far more patients at a radically lower cost, because so much overhead and procedural/bureaucratic make-work has been added. It's actually only a few dollars cheaper to have an office visit with a nurse practitioner than with a doctor (this was supposed to be a revolutionary cost-savings). All of this is because of the massive overhead we've included in healthcare. And yet regulators, politicians, and advocates are continually screaming for even more regulation (with the resulting overhead). It's completely unsustainable, and it has very little to do with the amount of healthcare people consume, or the number of MRIs they have. We could make all of that stuff cheap. It's the four layers of bureaucracy to support - government oversight, health insurance, reimbursement, and institutional bureaucracy - plus the malpractice insurance industry to support. You want to know why we can't do healthcare reform? It's because it would cost a very VERY large percentage of our workforce their jobs if we were to make things more efficient. Insurance companies have already massively raised rates so that they can continue supporting this huge system with fewer people actually purchasing insurance these days. And since this is all so completely unsustainable, it also means there is a real estate and business equity bubble in this area that could do every bit as much damage as the financial sector already did to our economy. Come up with a solution to that catch-22. We could have healthcare as cheap as it is for our dogs, but doing so would mean that we'd have to give up the whole concept of health insurance. And with it, the livelihoods of many millions of Americans. That's why the only solutions being considered are containment measures that continue to support the current ecosystem. Literally nobody has the guts to publicly admit the full measure of this, unfortunately.
An "artificial hill" intended to protect an area from floods is usually called a "levee", and while certainly extremely useful for their intended purpose, they aren't exactly an ironclad guarantee. So having contingency plans for the case where they fail isn't a bad idea.
Buildings that are built _on top_ of a hill (even an artificial one), don't have quite the same set of severe problems with flooding that occurs in low-lying areas. ;)
Hard to argue with what you're saying - they did skimp on a couple of levels unnecessarily. I'm not sure I like their offering even for home use, but that has more to do with their business model. When I first saw their design, my first thoughts, like yours, were for redundant power supplies and higher/redundant bandwidth. ZFS or a redundant cluster file system would go great with this. Paired with the type of per-system battery backup that Google says they have implemented in some data centers, it would be good. I believe that they've cut it to the core with the expectation that their application does not truly need high availability. If you lose all your photos in a house fire, it doesn't matter if it takes a while to get them back, as long as you do get them back. I think that's the market they're after. Along the same lines, if data is replicated across several pods at the time it is uploaded (what I hope they do) then even internal bandwidth for replication becomes less important. I don't see how they could practically implement it without at least running a cluster file system on top though. I certainly appreciated it when they released their design, however. It demonstrated to me that it really would be possible with just a little more work to get top enterprise level reliability and decent performance for a fraction of the cost. I wish I had the opportunity to implement.
Those are great comments, as they relate to a single such system. If you investigate this particular provider, however, you'll see that they are using systems like this as a building-block in a much larger system, with data replicated on more than one such system. All those problems you noted are mostly solved by this, except perhaps the speed. They may have solved that for the most part with redundancy and smart caching as well. As long as they have geographic redundancy, I'd say it's about as safe as you can get. But I haven't done business with them, so by all means investigate further.
ZFS works great through Fuse, and there is a stable release. http://zfs-fuse.net/ You really want to use some type of redundancy, whether mirroring or RAIDZ (or you can specify to automatically keep multiple copies on a single disk file system). ZFS uses this redundancy to repair data if it gets corrupted. I have found that RAIDZ is ridiculously processor intensive when added to the checksumming already being done with the data. Mirroring is tremendously faster, provides the flexibility to be reconfigured without making yet another copy, and if you do a 3-way mirror, more safe than anything else you can get (leaving off-site or multiple geographic locations out of the picture). Instead of a RAID set, ZFS allows you to create storage pools (like RAID 0) - the best way is to have each drive then mirrored. However, you can actually create pools out of RAID sets if (in my opinion) you're crazy enough to do so.
This kind of copy protection has been outdated for quite some while and should have died with floppy disks ...
It's not copy protection at all - he just wants to find a way to write images directly to the platter. I would have to suggest that using lightscribe on a cd would be easier and more cost effective. ;)
Allow me to answer your question, with a question.
If only 1.5% of your cake consisted of strawberries .... but fewer than 0.1% of your cake consisted of feces, what is the real problem with your cake?
Since that's almost certainly well within the fecal contamination limits allowed by the FDA... Maybe there's not enough strawberries?
But I didn't think viral marketing could GIVE you the stomach flu.
Yeah, I almost said that myself - he's paying for the education and use of facilities. But there's a counterargument there as well - he's using pooled resources of the university which have maybe everything from federal funding to private donations mixed in. Arguably, the use of such greater resources merits a stake in what is produced. But overall, I'm with you. It's preferrable if the university takes no ownership. In some ways I would be drawn to extend this even to faculty. But here is the crux of my argument - if _investors_ are going to profit somewhat directly from a university's contribution, it seems to me that there is somewhat of an argument to be made that they should owe something to the university. I would probably abandon such a notion on a policy level if I were making policy, but I believe it's one of the reasons behind why we are where we are.
Not only that, but is it really terribly unfair to ask the former student to pay royalties? I'd think so on first glance. But we have to assume he's raised or raising capital. The real question is, is it wrong to ask his _investors_ to pay royalties to the university for ideas that were developed, at least somewhat, on the university's dime. Doesn't seem quite as unfair. I don't think anything the university is doing is preventing the kid from making personal use of the idea. Now if the kid were actually trying to build a business with nothing but his personal investment, I'd think differently. But the chances of that being the case are just about nothing.
Oh, if it were up to me it would all be completely different anyway. I don't particularly like the idea of patents. But I have to give some deference because there must have been some need for them once upon a time, and maybe we'd find there still is a need, if we were to do away with them. Certainly trade secrets can be even worse than patents for some purposes.
Well there is another side. I've repeatedly run into situations where the user, sometimes me, often not me, knows exactly what the problem is and how to fix it, but doesn't have the privileges or sometimes simply the authority to solve the problem (directive that such things must be done by IT). It has occasionally devolved into a situation where it's been necessary to explain, convince, and cajole a clueless sysadmin or other IT minion into doing what the user knows will work, has approval to do, and is in fact the certified procedure for doing it. And then the IT guy is slack-jawed and says he's going to have to research it and/or get an official approval when it actually works. Then he comes back later with some smarmy explanation of why it has to be done this way (his explanation is generally untrue - it's especially funny when the "user" designed the system), and then he demands that a special procedural request be made every time this procedure is necessary. Okay, that last part can sometimes be good for documentation, but just as often documenting that part of the procedure is unnecessary. And when the request is met with long delays for a procedure which requires fast action for very legitimate business reasons, it's just not cool.
Yeah, I've actually seen that happen quite a lot at several different employers.
That would be a *classical* liberal. Or what would now be called social liberal, economic conservative. Although the conservatives these days by no means have any interest in restricting spending. They just want to spend it on realizing the dream of big brother and guns. The democrats aren't much different, they just want big brother with fewer guns and more of everything else.
Classical liberals and libertarians have a lot in common. Anarchists would have it down if it weren't so hard to maintain a peaceful anarchy without somebody turning it into something else.
As far as I can tell no one has suggested a couple of things which can be very useful. You can use a mobile proxy - Google has one you can reach from http://m.google.com./ It reformats pages for mobile phones, getting rid of most bandwidth intensive stuff, and scaling down images - seriously reduces bandwidth usage. If I access, say, Slashdot through it, then every link I follow will go through Google's mobile proxy.
The other option is to use a mobile browser like Opera Mini. This will work full screen on your computer if you do it right, and uses Opera's mobile proxy to do something similar to the Google proxy. It will probably look better from what I can tell, and it will be more convenient. It does require installing a couple of things like Java Development Kit and Wireless Toolkit. Full instructions can be found here: http://java4me.blogspot.com/2008/01/opera-mini-as-pc-browser-big-screen.html
Honestly, while vanalism and such can be a nuissance, academics and other experts who would verify and credential an article would stifle the best qualities of Wikipedia. We'd be back to the days when out of date information was on the shelves for far too long and where one-sided analysis would reign because a "less impressive" person with better information couldn't make much headway in getting that infomation out. Yes, the way Wikipedia is done requires doing your own homework before you rely on it - getting real evidence to cite. But going back to the verified encyclopedia method is just silly. It encourages laziness (not thoroughly researching to verify), and is just as much (I believe actually more) prone to produce serious long-term errors that become embedded in public consciousness. There are major academics in several fields that have dominated their fields for long periods of time. Their theories have now grown or been overhauled to deal with new findings, but simply patched or even been dismissive of contradictory evidence in order to preserve the reputation of the supposed genius. Linuistic theory is one such field. While Noam Chomsky's theories did contribute, they don't really go deep enough and don't deal at all with the exceptions. Dealing with the exceptions successfully would provide a far more profound understanding of linguistics. Unfortunately, some of the really bright people challenging those theories (with great evidence) don't measure up to the great Noam Chomsky, and they have been largely ignored. It's sad, and has made most linguists nothing more than wannabe followers, making no real contribution to understanding the fundamental neuropsychological origins and development of language. Or, more simply, putting this proposal into practice might make some lazy people feel better, but it would once again enshrine a serious logical fallacy - experts aren't right just because they are experts.
I haven't yet, but I'm soon going to put together a fileserver and perhaps media box using Nexenta or FreeBSD (gnu user space on opensolaris), just so I can use ZFS. I don't know if MythTV is available for Nexenta, but it can be done on FreeBSD (http://wiki.freebsd.org/MythTV). I hear ZFS is not only robust and featureful, but it actually appears to be dead simple to administer whether it's on a single machine or a cluster, especially if you want to be able to simply drop in new drives and grow the file system to include them.
Right. Because all people with degrees in Mathematics understand math. Can I lead you to some high school mathematics teachers who believe that mathematics is simple platonic truth instead of the useful construct that the very best theoretical mathematicians understand it to be? Would you like a nurse to handle the devilish differential diagnosis for that mysterious illness you have? Or perform the surgery? Or better yet, pioneer a new surgical technique? Design new drugs? Being an IT worker doesn't make you a computer _scientist_ just because you have a degree in computer science. Useful creative research and/or design have to be considered. While that means that some IT workers are therefore theoretically appropriate for unionization, the practical impact of taking that step should really be considered. We wouldn't want for IT what has happened in either our healthcare system or education system, I think.
That'd be great if the computer science grads knew what they were doing. It appears to me that people who want to learn computers get a comp sci degree. People who really understand the hardware and/or programming frequently don't. They'll gain knowledge in other areas to which they can really contribute with their IT understanding. Like the doctors who design medical devices or radiological algorithms.
Right. I'm sure that things like open formats and standards would really thrive in that environment. Not only would Microsoft buy and bully the standards organization, but all the IT workers as well! I guess at least then everybody would be on the same page. We just might not see any real innovation ever again. Standards are currently set in places and by people who need and know how to set them. Big computing shops certainly have people with certain skill sets working at the right things, and I believe they value them. The small shops, not so lucky. But unions wouldn't improve things there, because small shops don't all use the same types of practices. One more thing. Let's look at the quality and cost of our public education system and law enforcement system before we call those unions a good thing.