The one thing that surprises me is that Russ Garrett says that legal action isn't possible. That surprises me. You have an entity suffering real, quantifiable damage (count the "I'm unsubscribing RIGHT NOW" posts upthread) as a direct result of libellous, allegedly incorrect information being published, when that entity exists in a country with some of the most plaintiff-friendly libel laws in the world.
I've seen it cause friction and waste time for a thoroughly mixed benefit, partially on a basis that personally I find morally dubious. It's not immediately clear to me that the anti-tivoisation changes are in the right.
I've also definitely seen people get pissed off by the "that wasn't what we meant when we said 'freedom' - mind if we put the goalposts over here instead?" attitude of the rewrite.
By that reasoning, you should have the right to borrow my car to drive to the store, but that darn "law" is stopping your from exercising the right.
Substitute "ability" for "right" and I'd say that reasoning is absolutely correct. Without a law (moral or judicial) in place there's nothing to say I don't have the right to do anything I have the ability to do, so yes - it is only the "darn law" that stops him from exercising that right.
The logical flaw is that you do *not* have a right to use somebody else's property, whether it's a car or a book or money.
The "right" you are referring to there is just a societal construct, in precisely the same fashion as a "law". The only thing that's stopping him borrowing your car is an agreement. Assuming you left it unlocked, there's nothing physically stopping him at all.
If you tied, say, the Lua engine into XreaL, and wrote all your game logic in Lua, then you'd be fine keeping that source closed. The artwork would be similarly protected.
Possibly we're in violent agreement. Let me rephrase my original comment:
Dude... it's a UPS.
By which I don't mean "It's an inverter attached to a PSU and a battery," rather "It performs the same function as an uninterruptible power supply."
They wired up 12v batteries instead. Not special. Not ingenious. Not green. Yet they tout the efficiency of their batteries as if they have achieved some miracle and are giving us all a little peek.
...and yet everyone was surprised, despite this seeming like an eminently sensible idea post facto. Sometimes spotting the obvious takes a miracle:-)
I thought the onboard voltage converters were Google-specific? In that case, they must have a reason for the PS/2 sockets. Mind you, it might just have been more expensive to redo the board design to exclude them than they would save in parts.
Ok. So, your load fits onto 5 mainframes. Now your requirement increases. What do you do? Do you buy number 6 now, and have it running at less than capacity for the next 18 months (or whatever)? That's a huge waste. Do you degrade your service for the next 9 months until number 6 would be at half capacity, then install? Again, you've wasted an opportunity, and number 6 is *still* not going to be at capacity.
Smaller computational units means better matching of demand to supply.
There is no possible way their solution is cheaper than a real mainframe (created for the task) when all costs are considered.
Nor is there any possible way their solution is more reliable, or more "green".
That depends on how you're measuring cost, reliability and "green"itude. Cost-wise, there's an enormous opportunity cost associated with going with a single mainframe vendor. Reliability... well, they've made the choice of having small, frequent failures that are cheap and easy to deal with rather than single large uncommon events that might put a division out of action all at once. Green credentials? Again, it's a trade-off. They've traded physical resource cost against energy cost.
Also, by doing it this way, they can take incremental improvements far more easily than they could with a mainframe installation. Once your mainframe is installed, that's it - you don't get to improve power efficiency or processing power ever again. With these, if you figure out how to get a percentage point improvement, you can roll it into the next build cycle, knowing that it'll probably be across half the company in a couple of years.
Oh, and you're slightly wrong about hard drives. They don't RAID them. They just chuck them.
Trash (Magnatek) power supply.
A couple of years ago, they announced that they had their own PSU design that was supposedly much more efficient than anything available on the market. If this is a cheap commodity PSU, it predates that.
A 12v battery. I never knew DC was more efficient than AC!
Dude... UPS. If you're using the battery, you don't *have* AC.
A good mainframe would last decades. Google's frankenframe (lets call it what it is) must be sloughing off parts like skin cells from a Texan with eczema.
And that, presumably, is just the way they like it, because if you upgrade something that hasn't failed yet, you lose whatever value was left in it.
I don't think this is off-topic, mods. For someone who hasn't got a smart-phone (like me) and who is planning to get on the next 6 months (like me) this is pretty damn relevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, me too. Now my 701 is happily running Lenny with Awesome and WICD. Xandros can jump off a cliff.
There's also the issue that it takes a Real Man to know how much there is to know about floats, rather than assume it'll all work out in the end.
That's so unbelievably wrong, it's difficult to find anything right about it.
That's not universally the case; it depends on the jurisdiction. Yes, it is in the UK, but Last.fm get to pick the jurisdiction.
Educate thyself.
Oh, for mod points.
The one thing that surprises me is that Russ Garrett says that legal action isn't possible. That surprises me. You have an entity suffering real, quantifiable damage (count the "I'm unsubscribing RIGHT NOW" posts upthread) as a direct result of libellous, allegedly incorrect information being published, when that entity exists in a country with some of the most plaintiff-friendly libel laws in the world.
WTF?
I've seen it cause friction and waste time for a thoroughly mixed benefit, partially on a basis that personally I find morally dubious. It's not immediately clear to me that the anti-tivoisation changes are in the right.
I've also definitely seen people get pissed off by the "that wasn't what we meant when we said 'freedom' - mind if we put the goalposts over here instead?" attitude of the rewrite.
The last time he made this sort of noise, we ended up with GPLv3, and look how well *that* has turned out.
No, but they often do assert ownership over what happens on those students' user accounts.
> How much ram can a 286 address? That's an 8 bit processor, right?
No, 16-bit. Not that it makes your argument any less wrong :-)
What's the German for Deutschmark again? Or the Italian for Lira?
Currency names usually aren't translated, and it's not just because they're proper nouns.
Slightly different situation, don't you think? For instance, those crops don't have an infinite yield.
By that reasoning, you should have the right to borrow my car to drive to the store, but that darn "law" is stopping your from exercising the right.
Substitute "ability" for "right" and I'd say that reasoning is absolutely correct. Without a law (moral or judicial) in place there's nothing to say I don't have the right to do anything I have the ability to do, so yes - it is only the "darn law" that stops him from exercising that right.
The logical flaw is that you do *not* have a right to use somebody else's property, whether it's a car or a book or money.
The "right" you are referring to there is just a societal construct, in precisely the same fashion as a "law". The only thing that's stopping him borrowing your car is an agreement. Assuming you left it unlocked, there's nothing physically stopping him at all.
That depends on the jurisdiction. It's not impossible for true statements to be libellous.
If you tied, say, the Lua engine into XreaL, and wrote all your game logic in Lua, then you'd be fine keeping that source closed. The artwork would be similarly protected.
Bunch of twunts, the lot of 'em.
Possibly we're in violent agreement. Let me rephrase my original comment:
Dude... it's a UPS.
By which I don't mean "It's an inverter attached to a PSU and a battery," rather "It performs the same function as an uninterruptible power supply."
They wired up 12v batteries instead.
Not special.
Not ingenious.
Not green.
Yet they tout the efficiency of their batteries as if they have achieved some miracle and are giving us all a little peek.
...and yet everyone was surprised, despite this seeming like an eminently sensible idea post facto. Sometimes spotting the obvious takes a miracle :-)
Not all WMDs are nukes. The WMDs everyone thought he had were biological and chemical, and nobody was really sure about delivery systems.
Not in this case, it doesn't. Why would it? What possible gain is there from converting to AC *inside the case*?
...
I'll be in my bunk.
I thought the onboard voltage converters were Google-specific? In that case, they must have a reason for the PS/2 sockets. Mind you, it might just have been more expensive to redo the board design to exclude them than they would save in parts.
Ok. So, your load fits onto 5 mainframes. Now your requirement increases. What do you do? Do you buy number 6 now, and have it running at less than capacity for the next 18 months (or whatever)? That's a huge waste. Do you degrade your service for the next 9 months until number 6 would be at half capacity, then install? Again, you've wasted an opportunity, and number 6 is *still* not going to be at capacity.
Smaller computational units means better matching of demand to supply.
There is no possible way their solution is cheaper than a real mainframe (created for the task) when all costs are considered.
Nor is there any possible way their solution is more reliable, or more "green".
That depends on how you're measuring cost, reliability and "green"itude. Cost-wise, there's an enormous opportunity cost associated with going with a single mainframe vendor. Reliability... well, they've made the choice of having small, frequent failures that are cheap and easy to deal with rather than single large uncommon events that might put a division out of action all at once. Green credentials? Again, it's a trade-off. They've traded physical resource cost against energy cost.
Also, by doing it this way, they can take incremental improvements far more easily than they could with a mainframe installation. Once your mainframe is installed, that's it - you don't get to improve power efficiency or processing power ever again. With these, if you figure out how to get a percentage point improvement, you can roll it into the next build cycle, knowing that it'll probably be across half the company in a couple of years.
Oh, and you're slightly wrong about hard drives. They don't RAID them. They just chuck them.
Trash (Magnatek) power supply.
A couple of years ago, they announced that they had their own PSU design that was supposedly much more efficient than anything available on the market. If this is a cheap commodity PSU, it predates that.
A 12v battery. I never knew DC was more efficient than AC!
Dude... UPS. If you're using the battery, you don't *have* AC.
A good mainframe would last decades. Google's frankenframe (lets call it what it is) must be sloughing off parts like skin cells from a Texan with eczema.
And that, presumably, is just the way they like it, because if you upgrade something that hasn't failed yet, you lose whatever value was left in it.
iPlayer and whatever content providers BT wants to get into bed with will eat this up.
Yeah, but we don't have a price for the Pre yet.
I don't think this is off-topic, mods. For someone who hasn't got a smart-phone (like me) and who is planning to get on the next 6 months (like me) this is pretty damn relevant.