See the entire conversation above you post. History has shown that generally if the government doesn't provide some services they don't get provided to people who either a) aren't rich, or b) don't happen to live in the middle of an urban center, or c) both.
Others have already pointed out the problems with this arrangement. It rarely serves the poor, people in out of the way places, or generally anyone it is not as profitable to serve very well. There's any number of reasons that someone might not be profitable to serve, but for some essential services (Electricity, telephone, education, garbage collection, and arguably Internet among many others) we as a society have decided that everyone SHOULD be served. So the government either serves them (public utility) or forces a company to do so as part of its contract (regulated monopoly). Others have gone into more detail on this above me, so instead I'll add something else.
For a good look at how things run when something close to "pure capitalism" is practiced, look at the US (or indeed most industrialized nations) in the mid to late 19th and early 20th centuries. Monopolies and trusts dominated the business landscape, the majority of people worked 6-7 days a week for 12 or more hours a day often for near slave wages. Abuses like the "Company Store System" all but indentured workers in mining, fishing, and other industries that require some level of isolation from urban centers. Illiteracy rates ran into the 50 or 60% range (some of this was due to high illiteracy rates in new immigrants, true, but they represented on a fraction of the literacy problem).
Pure capitalism has been tried, and it generally produced a level of suffering on par with feudalism. Remember that when ideas like Socialism and even Communism were initially proposed, the "suffering of the workers" was not that they had smaller TV's than the well off, or that they had crappy or limited health insurance; it was that they worked like dogs from sun up to sundown (luckily electric lights hadn't caught on yet for most of this period) 6 days a week for (hopefully) just enough money to pay the rent and feed the kids. I'm often floored when people present pure capitalism as if it will usher in some new Utopian or semi-Utopian world where competition drives down prices and increases services without any apparent consideration for the fact that it's been tried. It may have driven down prices (for the rich and middle class), and increased services (for the rich and middle class), but it did so at the expense of significant suffering for the working class
I beg to differ, this is exactly why government intervention makes sense in many cases. You believe that it is important to have a really fast Internet connection, but unimportant that little Johnny and Suzie have jump ropes. Someone else thinks the jumps ropes are WAY more important. Neither of you has the individual ability to afford to either upgrade the Schools (to any meaningful degree), or upgrade the Internet connection. Through tax dollars and bonds the local government has the ability to do a passable job of both and mitigates compromise. You don't get 100Mbps symmetric Internet (yet), and your neighbor doesn't get a Montesori school on every corner, but you both get some reasonable approximation of what you want.
Using Base 10 definitions of "Mega" and "Giga" I get (400*8*1000)== 3,200,000 Mb download cap, and 3200000/100/60/60 = 8.88 hours at max throughput to hit your download cap. Wow. Not that most people are going to get close to max throughput for 9 hours, but even using half of your theoretical maximum bandwidth would have you capped in less than a day. 9 days of using your maximum for an hour a day would do it, assuming you did nothing else the rest of the day. At $249 (Canadian, I assume)? At current exchange rates that's over $200 US dollars a month. What the hell's the point?
But at what point does it cost more money for you to pay some guy to come re-write your Free spreadsheet program that it costs just to freakin' buy MS Office, or pay Google to use their "cloud based" spreadsheet. Not a great example, I'll grant you, OO.org's Calc program is pretty good, and probably requires a minimum of "fixing", but what about accounting software or specialized engineering software? And how do you replicate the time that commercial companies spend testing this stuff? I download this piece of software that I assume works, because the guy that wrote it told me it does. Of course, I have no contract with him, so I have to take it at face value. I realize that the UI sucks, so I hire someone to modify it. Now the first guy may or may not have extensively tested it, but this guy I just hired to redo the UI... He says he needs two or three times as much money to actually make sure he didn't introduce any new bugs into the system.
For software that everyone wants and needs, with a huge user base making making contributions and suggestions, Free software seems to work pretty well. I'm not at all convinced that it will work as well for special purpose apps in mission critical environments.
His point is not to use Google Docs to edit your private documents, and not to use Gmail to send your private mails, or to be more specific - not to let them become a replacement for your office suite and mail client/server.
OK, this is the second or third time I've seen a rather odd assumption on Slashdot. How many people do you actually know that use their "own" mailserver? I do, granted (though it's through a hosting service, so I don't have FULL control), and I'm sure that a reasonable proportion of people on this site do, but in general how many people do you think do this? E-mail is probably the ultimate SaaS that nearly everyone uses and has used since the inception of widespread Internet access. Whether through G-mail, Hotmail, a university, a company they work for, or their ISP, MOST people use someone else's mailserver. Even if they wanted to, and had the money to, most people couldn't. Residential Internet services almost universally forbid it (a very few do allow it, but they are rare). Even a lot of small businesses don't have their own mailservers.
You're assuming the server in question is outward facing. Maybe it's the mail server, which can still store and forward external mail and keep the internal mail flowing. Maybe it's one of the (probably many) Intranet servers that don't need Internet access to do their job. Maybe it's a computational server which can still be processing batch jobs while the connection is down. In most large corporate environments only a fraction of the servers have to actually access the Internet to their jobs. Obviously in a colo facility, or an Amazon.com data center it's a different matter, but outside of the Internet industry proper most servers can go hours if not days without Internet access while not having their workloads affected.
True this. Middle Easterners frown upon physical contact between members of the opposite sex, but between member of the same sex friendship is a very physical activity.
Booted instantly, took 30-120 seconds to load a game from a 5.25 inch floppy drive:-)
Pool of Radiance was the best. I distinctly remember remember once spending two minutes for the game to load, 2 more minutes for my saved game to load, 2 MORE minutes for the disk with my currently location to load, then taking three or four steps, going over a location boundary and waiting 2 MORE minutes for the new location disk to load. Yet somehow I loved that game:-)
You know... I don't know. I was assuming that higher quality was more computationally complex, but now you say that, the other way could make more sense. I'd don't know enough about the way MP3 encodes to know for sure one way or the other.
And raw computational tasks like these are actually significantly faster. I can remember watching a bare bones Linux install ripping/encoding MP3s at speeds that hovered between 2x normal play speed and LESS than normal play speed. It took nearly as long to encode as it did to listen to the whole thing. My year old low end Macbook encodes/rips in iTunes (which is pretty fat program to begin with, unlike the CLI tool I used to use in Linux) at anywhere from 15-20x normal play speed, while I'm surfing the web and and editing a Word Document. I can do a stack of CDs in the time it used to take to do one, and keep myself entertained at the same time. Plus I'm encoding at higher quality. I've actually been considering going back to re-encode some of my oldest digital music. In addition to being noticeably lower quality, I have a fair number of songs with artifacts that I considered small and "acceptable" at the time, but which none of my newer stuff has.
If he said a day and meant 26 hours, that's fine. If he said a day and meant a week (which IIRC is when the class first 80 DK hit on my server, roughly) that's pretty big difference.
like the guy who had a L80 Death Knight the FIRST DAY they released Wrath of the Lich King.
I'd like to see a citation for that. Server first level 80 on my server was a shaman, and from what I understand he didn't sleep for more than 48 hours to manage it (and he was starting from 70, with high end level 70 epics, not 55 with the semi-decent stuff they give new DKs). I don't think you could physically gather XPs fast enough to hit 80 from 55 in 24 hours.
At any rate, they've definitely made WoW more accessible to casual players. I did a few level 70 heroics and had a few nice Epics at the end of Burning Crusades, and I'd never even done Kara. Now, not even 6 months on in Lich King, the same character has cleared all the initial release raids at least once, and is fully geared in level 80 epics. I'm a fairly causal player. Very occasionally I'll play 20 hours a week, but usually it's closer to 10 and sometimes less than that. Even as a casual gamer, I kinda think they have have gone overboard in making things "accessible" this time around.
Because there's always going to be an ID software or similar company that markets itself as being FOR the hardcore gamers. Hard core gamers may be a minority of the market, but like every other demographic they'll show loyalty to companies that cater to them. Some companies will choose to do that catering and get the lion share of the smaller demographic's money, rather than another small slice of the larger demographic's money. While we might be talking about a minority of gamers here, we're probably not talking about a small number of people in raw numbers. I don't think you'll see hard core games go anywhere, you'll just see them have more company in the casual market.
I agree. 80-120 dollars a year gets you a virtual machine with significant storage and bandwidth, and a configuration very nearly as customizable as having your own server. You don't have ads, or you can have them and make money off of them yourself, you often have a shell account, PhP, Perl, Ruby, Python and either major open source database are usually available and decently configured, plus you usually get a mailserver with your choice of webmail software and Spam Assassin. Unless you are totally broke, it's worth the 8-10 bucks a month just to be able to play with a live server whenever you need or want to. You can also usually get subdomains for free to host that quick site about your coin collection. If you are so broke that 10 bucks a month will break the bank, a lot of ISPs (including cable and DSL providers) still provide some small amount of web space for static pages to their customers.
It's also the way the two towns in Louisiana that either did this or are planning to do this handled it. It seems to be the most popular model. Assuming the service makes a decent amount of money, the tax payers never lose a dime. Since Lafayette was hyping the Hell out of their service, and everybody wanted to try it, the money was theirs to lose, only a catastrophically bad execution will result in failure as far as I can see.
The Belgians brew the best beer in the world. Maybe not the best individual beer (though Leffe Tripel is awesome), but as a whole Belgian beer is top notch. German, British, and Irish aren't bad, but Belgian beer is better as a whole. I can't say I've ever had Finnish beer, and I might have to look up the one you mention.
That was on one of the better documentaries of early computing I've seen. Also interesting was Nerds 2.0.1 by Stephen Segaller. That's a dead tree by the way, not a TV show.
Personally I'd rather see the Pentagon running this than one of the three letter agencies. I don't exactly TRUST the Pentagon (giving one's trust to anything with that many moving parts isn't smart), but I've been around the military long enough in various capacities to feel that IN GENERAL, most military people are legitimately focused on external threats. Not to say that there aren't bad apples everywhere, and certainly the military is as capable of colossal screw-ups as anyone, but at least there is not the culture of "we control the vertical and the horizontal" that you get in the three letter agencies.
Oh sure, just make stuff up. If it sounds paranoid enough, maybe some will mod you up. I've been an admin on two different DOD networks now, and in both cases I knew exactly who had full privileged access. In neither case was I even expected to provide our privileged passwords to higher headquarters, much less the NSA. could the NSA have GOTTEN the passwords to our systems? I'm sure, if they went through the proper channels and proved "need to know", but that's hardly the same thing thing as having "full privs on all DOD systems".
I agree completely, but the idea seems to be that God made a covenant to do things the way [their interpretation of] Revelation predicts, so if they can setup the supposed conditions, God will be forced by his own promises to begin Armageddon. Stupid it seems to me, trying to outsmart omniscience, but it floats their boat I guess.
Science doesn't say that if can't be measured it isn't real, it says that if it can't be measured it isn't science. This is an important distinction. I believe many things I cannot prove scientifically. That's OK with science as long as I don't claim that I've proven them scientifically. I could believe that explosive space-termite flatulence caused the big bang, but I don't think anyone would appreciate it if I taught that to a 7th grade science class as fact.
Science doesn't say that ID is wrong, it says that ID is not science. Many scientists are probably even believers in some sort of external force that designed and/or created the Universe, that's not the point. It can;t be measured or proved, so it doesn't belong in science class, it belongs in philosophy or religion class.
Slashdot Mirror
See the entire conversation above you post. History has shown that generally if the government doesn't provide some services they don't get provided to people who either a) aren't rich, or b) don't happen to live in the middle of an urban center, or c) both.
Others have already pointed out the problems with this arrangement. It rarely serves the poor, people in out of the way places, or generally anyone it is not as profitable to serve very well. There's any number of reasons that someone might not be profitable to serve, but for some essential services (Electricity, telephone, education, garbage collection, and arguably Internet among many others) we as a society have decided that everyone SHOULD be served. So the government either serves them (public utility) or forces a company to do so as part of its contract (regulated monopoly). Others have gone into more detail on this above me, so instead I'll add something else.
For a good look at how things run when something close to "pure capitalism" is practiced, look at the US (or indeed most industrialized nations) in the mid to late 19th and early 20th centuries. Monopolies and trusts dominated the business landscape, the majority of people worked 6-7 days a week for 12 or more hours a day often for near slave wages. Abuses like the "Company Store System" all but indentured workers in mining, fishing, and other industries that require some level of isolation from urban centers. Illiteracy rates ran into the 50 or 60% range (some of this was due to high illiteracy rates in new immigrants, true, but they represented on a fraction of the literacy problem).
Pure capitalism has been tried, and it generally produced a level of suffering on par with feudalism. Remember that when ideas like Socialism and even Communism were initially proposed, the "suffering of the workers" was not that they had smaller TV's than the well off, or that they had crappy or limited health insurance; it was that they worked like dogs from sun up to sundown (luckily electric lights hadn't caught on yet for most of this period) 6 days a week for (hopefully) just enough money to pay the rent and feed the kids. I'm often floored when people present pure capitalism as if it will usher in some new Utopian or semi-Utopian world where competition drives down prices and increases services without any apparent consideration for the fact that it's been tried. It may have driven down prices (for the rich and middle class), and increased services (for the rich and middle class), but it did so at the expense of significant suffering for the working class
I beg to differ, this is exactly why government intervention makes sense in many cases. You believe that it is important to have a really fast Internet connection, but unimportant that little Johnny and Suzie have jump ropes. Someone else thinks the jumps ropes are WAY more important. Neither of you has the individual ability to afford to either upgrade the Schools (to any meaningful degree), or upgrade the Internet connection. Through tax dollars and bonds the local government has the ability to do a passable job of both and mitigates compromise. You don't get 100Mbps symmetric Internet (yet), and your neighbor doesn't get a Montesori school on every corner, but you both get some reasonable approximation of what you want.
Using Base 10 definitions of "Mega" and "Giga" I get (400*8*1000)== 3,200,000 Mb download cap, and 3200000/100/60/60 = 8.88 hours at max throughput to hit your download cap. Wow. Not that most people are going to get close to max throughput for 9 hours, but even using half of your theoretical maximum bandwidth would have you capped in less than a day. 9 days of using your maximum for an hour a day would do it, assuming you did nothing else the rest of the day. At $249 (Canadian, I assume)? At current exchange rates that's over $200 US dollars a month. What the hell's the point?
Worse, he probably improved it immensely, both in efficiency (obviously and as he states) and in readability. Shudder. ULLS-g was truly horrid.
But at what point does it cost more money for you to pay some guy to come re-write your Free spreadsheet program that it costs just to freakin' buy MS Office, or pay Google to use their "cloud based" spreadsheet. Not a great example, I'll grant you, OO.org's Calc program is pretty good, and probably requires a minimum of "fixing", but what about accounting software or specialized engineering software? And how do you replicate the time that commercial companies spend testing this stuff? I download this piece of software that I assume works, because the guy that wrote it told me it does. Of course, I have no contract with him, so I have to take it at face value. I realize that the UI sucks, so I hire someone to modify it. Now the first guy may or may not have extensively tested it, but this guy I just hired to redo the UI... He says he needs two or three times as much money to actually make sure he didn't introduce any new bugs into the system.
For software that everyone wants and needs, with a huge user base making making contributions and suggestions, Free software seems to work pretty well. I'm not at all convinced that it will work as well for special purpose apps in mission critical environments.
His point is not to use Google Docs to edit your private documents, and not to use Gmail to send your private mails, or to be more specific - not to let them become a replacement for your office suite and mail client/server.
OK, this is the second or third time I've seen a rather odd assumption on Slashdot. How many people do you actually know that use their "own" mailserver? I do, granted (though it's through a hosting service, so I don't have FULL control), and I'm sure that a reasonable proportion of people on this site do, but in general how many people do you think do this? E-mail is probably the ultimate SaaS that nearly everyone uses and has used since the inception of widespread Internet access. Whether through G-mail, Hotmail, a university, a company they work for, or their ISP, MOST people use someone else's mailserver. Even if they wanted to, and had the money to, most people couldn't. Residential Internet services almost universally forbid it (a very few do allow it, but they are rare). Even a lot of small businesses don't have their own mailservers.
You're assuming the server in question is outward facing. Maybe it's the mail server, which can still store and forward external mail and keep the internal mail flowing. Maybe it's one of the (probably many) Intranet servers that don't need Internet access to do their job. Maybe it's a computational server which can still be processing batch jobs while the connection is down. In most large corporate environments only a fraction of the servers have to actually access the Internet to their jobs. Obviously in a colo facility, or an Amazon.com data center it's a different matter, but outside of the Internet industry proper most servers can go hours if not days without Internet access while not having their workloads affected.
True this. Middle Easterners frown upon physical contact between members of the opposite sex, but between member of the same sex friendship is a very physical activity.
That's like CmdrTaco responding to a lowest UID thread. It's not really fair (though it has happened).
Booted instantly, took 30-120 seconds to load a game from a 5.25 inch floppy drive :-)
Pool of Radiance was the best. I distinctly remember remember once spending two minutes for the game to load, 2 more minutes for my saved game to load, 2 MORE minutes for the disk with my currently location to load, then taking three or four steps, going over a location boundary and waiting 2 MORE minutes for the new location disk to load. Yet somehow I loved that game :-)
You know... I don't know. I was assuming that higher quality was more computationally complex, but now you say that, the other way could make more sense. I'd don't know enough about the way MP3 encodes to know for sure one way or the other.
Very valid point. I yield to you, sir.
And raw computational tasks like these are actually significantly faster. I can remember watching a bare bones Linux install ripping/encoding MP3s at speeds that hovered between 2x normal play speed and LESS than normal play speed. It took nearly as long to encode as it did to listen to the whole thing. My year old low end Macbook encodes/rips in iTunes (which is pretty fat program to begin with, unlike the CLI tool I used to use in Linux) at anywhere from 15-20x normal play speed, while I'm surfing the web and and editing a Word Document. I can do a stack of CDs in the time it used to take to do one, and keep myself entertained at the same time. Plus I'm encoding at higher quality. I've actually been considering going back to re-encode some of my oldest digital music. In addition to being noticeably lower quality, I have a fair number of songs with artifacts that I considered small and "acceptable" at the time, but which none of my newer stuff has.
If he said a day and meant 26 hours, that's fine. If he said a day and meant a week (which IIRC is when the class first 80 DK hit on my server, roughly) that's pretty big difference.
like the guy who had a L80 Death Knight the FIRST DAY they released Wrath of the Lich King.
I'd like to see a citation for that. Server first level 80 on my server was a shaman, and from what I understand he didn't sleep for more than 48 hours to manage it (and he was starting from 70, with high end level 70 epics, not 55 with the semi-decent stuff they give new DKs). I don't think you could physically gather XPs fast enough to hit 80 from 55 in 24 hours.
At any rate, they've definitely made WoW more accessible to casual players. I did a few level 70 heroics and had a few nice Epics at the end of Burning Crusades, and I'd never even done Kara. Now, not even 6 months on in Lich King, the same character has cleared all the initial release raids at least once, and is fully geared in level 80 epics. I'm a fairly causal player. Very occasionally I'll play 20 hours a week, but usually it's closer to 10 and sometimes less than that. Even as a casual gamer, I kinda think they have have gone overboard in making things "accessible" this time around.
Because there's always going to be an ID software or similar company that markets itself as being FOR the hardcore gamers. Hard core gamers may be a minority of the market, but like every other demographic they'll show loyalty to companies that cater to them. Some companies will choose to do that catering and get the lion share of the smaller demographic's money, rather than another small slice of the larger demographic's money. While we might be talking about a minority of gamers here, we're probably not talking about a small number of people in raw numbers. I don't think you'll see hard core games go anywhere, you'll just see them have more company in the casual market.
I agree. 80-120 dollars a year gets you a virtual machine with significant storage and bandwidth, and a configuration very nearly as customizable as having your own server. You don't have ads, or you can have them and make money off of them yourself, you often have a shell account, PhP, Perl, Ruby, Python and either major open source database are usually available and decently configured, plus you usually get a mailserver with your choice of webmail software and Spam Assassin. Unless you are totally broke, it's worth the 8-10 bucks a month just to be able to play with a live server whenever you need or want to. You can also usually get subdomains for free to host that quick site about your coin collection. If you are so broke that 10 bucks a month will break the bank, a lot of ISPs (including cable and DSL providers) still provide some small amount of web space for static pages to their customers.
It's also the way the two towns in Louisiana that either did this or are planning to do this handled it. It seems to be the most popular model. Assuming the service makes a decent amount of money, the tax payers never lose a dime. Since Lafayette was hyping the Hell out of their service, and everybody wanted to try it, the money was theirs to lose, only a catastrophically bad execution will result in failure as far as I can see.
The Belgians brew the best beer in the world. Maybe not the best individual beer (though Leffe Tripel is awesome), but as a whole Belgian beer is top notch. German, British, and Irish aren't bad, but Belgian beer is better as a whole. I can't say I've ever had Finnish beer, and I might have to look up the one you mention.
That was on one of the better documentaries of early computing I've seen. Also interesting was Nerds 2.0.1 by Stephen Segaller. That's a dead tree by the way, not a TV show.
Personally I'd rather see the Pentagon running this than one of the three letter agencies. I don't exactly TRUST the Pentagon (giving one's trust to anything with that many moving parts isn't smart), but I've been around the military long enough in various capacities to feel that IN GENERAL, most military people are legitimately focused on external threats. Not to say that there aren't bad apples everywhere, and certainly the military is as capable of colossal screw-ups as anyone, but at least there is not the culture of "we control the vertical and the horizontal" that you get in the three letter agencies.
Oh sure, just make stuff up. If it sounds paranoid enough, maybe some will mod you up. I've been an admin on two different DOD networks now, and in both cases I knew exactly who had full privileged access. In neither case was I even expected to provide our privileged passwords to higher headquarters, much less the NSA. could the NSA have GOTTEN the passwords to our systems? I'm sure, if they went through the proper channels and proved "need to know", but that's hardly the same thing thing as having "full privs on all DOD systems".
I agree completely, but the idea seems to be that God made a covenant to do things the way [their interpretation of] Revelation predicts, so if they can setup the supposed conditions, God will be forced by his own promises to begin Armageddon. Stupid it seems to me, trying to outsmart omniscience, but it floats their boat I guess.
Science doesn't say that if can't be measured it isn't real, it says that if it can't be measured it isn't science. This is an important distinction. I believe many things I cannot prove scientifically. That's OK with science as long as I don't claim that I've proven them scientifically. I could believe that explosive space-termite flatulence caused the big bang, but I don't think anyone would appreciate it if I taught that to a 7th grade science class as fact.
Science doesn't say that ID is wrong, it says that ID is not science. Many scientists are probably even believers in some sort of external force that designed and/or created the Universe, that's not the point. It can;t be measured or proved, so it doesn't belong in science class, it belongs in philosophy or religion class.