You can't beat a monopoly
on
DSL Woes
·
· Score: 3
Is there any hope of survival against the incumbent phone companies who will do
anything to squash competition?
No. As long as the company that owns the wires also provides service to customers, in the end they will always win because they can control how much their competitors must pay to reach the same customers -- and that's profit, too. Even a home-run success by a CLEC will ultimately just bankroll the ILEC's effort to wipe out the competition.
The only way we will ever see true competition in telephone service (or in electric or gas, for that matter) is to make sure that whoever owns the distribution infrastructure is not also competing to provide service to customers.
And the best way to ensure that the monopoly company that owns the infrastructure doesn't ream everybody is public ownership. For a good example of healthy competition via public infrastructure, consider the shipping business: Private carriers travelling on public highways.
You say: "sure, the tech underneath is crap (an i loathe that as much as any other geek)"
I know you're trying to achieve some reconciliation with the Linux crowd with this comment, but you're totally selling Apple short. Let's be more precise: Apple's process scheduler and memory management is crap. There's actually a whole lot of stuff in MacOS below the GUI (the "tech underneath") that works really, really well.
* Resources - sure, Unix has these too, but Apple's way is a lot better
* File types - Double click any document, and it opens in the right program. Apple did it first. And not in a brain-dead way, either. You can control what the "right program" is; you can drag-drop it onto an alternative; and if the "right program" isn't around, you get a list of alternatives.
* Applications - Drag a folder to install. There is no path to hack -- the OS knows where everything is.
* The Macintosh toolbox - Over 5,000 data types and subroutines that any app can rely on. glibc, eat your heart out.
* Hierarchical File System - B-trees are cool.
* Open Transport
* Sprockets
* WorldScript - Don't forget, Apple co-invented Unicode.
* NuBus, ADB, PCI, USB, SCSI, AirPort, Firewire, AppleTalk - NOBODY else does plug'n'play as well as Apple.
* Multiple monitors - It just plain works. The way you expect it to.
Sure, Apple is the subject of ridicule among PC masochists who believe anyone who doesn't suffer as much as they do must be inferior. And sure, Apple is derided by those too cheap to pay a little more for quality, style, and innovation.
And sure, it's taken Apple a lot longer than it should have to add preemptive multitasking and protected memory to their kernel (although they have offered THREE different flavors of Unix prior to OS X Server). And sure, Apple's management is doing its best to kill the company, and only the loyalty of its customers keeps it alive.
Apart from these minor nit-picks, Apple really does have terrific products with some awesome technology inside them.
Your comments about a friendlier command line are spot-on. Interesting how your syntax reads a lot like AppleScript.:-) The gap between "ought to be" and "is" often may be narrower than we think.
If you were to select HTML Fromatted, I bet it wouldn't look so funny. You could probably get by just adding a <P> at every paragraph break. I'd try it, but I don't have access to Lynx.
... is that we have a choice. The way matters stand now, marketers (a) treat our personal information as their property, and (b) buy and sell it like mad. "Fine," says Sanchez, "do business with someone who doesn't do that." Sure -- show me one! Unless you want to spend your entire life only purchasing with cash (and don't even think of using the internet), this is simply not an option. When *everyone* is selling what they know, there just isn't a private alternative. Without the government to stand behind the idea that I own my personal data, there is no incentive whatsoever to stop marketers from swapping it around.
Would it be better if I had said, "people who gave it a fair chance"?
I'd be interested to know how many of the complaints are culture shock. At least a couple of early Aqua haters have since changed their minds about it.
Granted, I haven't tried OS X myself. I'm too cheap to pay for the beta.:-)
> Remember real-world apps? The software that the mac used to have back when developers used to support it?
*Yawn.* That tired old rant? Been there, done that. When none of the thousands of Mac apps does what I need, I'll come crying to you.
> Athlon vs G4: 50% faster and 50% less expensive.
50% less expensive I'll grant.
> WTF good is a G4 box if I can build two FASTER PC's for the same price?
You can't. I can buy a dual-processor G4 450-MHz for $2000. What tier-1 vendor will sell me two 700-MHz Athlons for that price?
> BTW, if the whole advantage of RISC (vs. CISC) is that it can run at higher mhz (due to simpler circuitry),
But it isn't. Learn about computer architecture and get back to us.;-) The point of RISC is to make the whole computer run faster by not doing things that waste time or resources. A 500 MHz G3 can beat a 1300 MHz Pentium 4 on the same calculation because the G3 doesn't waste time and processor cycles unscrambling X86 variable-length instructions and complex addressing modes, and because the G3 has a superior number of general-purpose registers.
The Pentium 4 has the highest clock speeds around, but still isn't as fast as a 1-GHz PIII or an Athlon -- or a 500-MHz G4. The G4 also uses only 1/4 the electricity that the X86 chips do, and has a smaller die. It's simply more efficient.
So, in answer to your question: The speeds are more than decent. You need to educate yourself to look beyond MHz.
I, for one, could hardly be happier about the new interface of OS X -- it integrates the functions of two utilities I have been running for >5 years (specifically, Greg's Browser and Malph) as my main interface to the Mac because I found Finder lacking. From what I hear, the response to Aqua from people who use it for more than a couple of days is mostly positive.
I am a member of at least three thriving virtual communities right now, of which Slashdot is the most vibrant. Virtual communities are very much alive and well. You just have to realize that the Net is not, and never will be, one monolithic community. Rather, it is a common medium that supports many hundreds or thousands of separate communities.
As a NeXT wannabe, I shunned Finder and have been using Greg's Browser and Malph as my primary interface to MacOS since the early '90s. Now that the functionality of these insanely useful utilities is to become the default MacOS interface, users are screaming about it. Fools!
I would call myself a successful veteran of geek house living, with about 5 1/2 years across two houses. The best factor in both cases was the non-geek contingent. Not only are non-geeks better cooks:-) and somewhat more likely to care about things like decorating and keeping the house clean, they are also more interesting to talk to. When it was only geeks, we basically talked computers and sometimes politics. When non-geeks were present, we talked about art, religion, history, philosophy, sex, food, music, travel, family, linguistics, games, crafts... and politics and computers. I think a 50-50 split of non-geeks to geeks is about right.
Other good ratios to have in a house:
1:1 gender ratio
1:1 pets to people
1:1 bedrooms (even if some double up)
1:2 phone lines
>1:1 computers - 5:1 for me currently
>1:1 Mbps - 5:1 here is good too. Not less than 1 Mbps external access in any case
~1:2 operating systems
1:2 weekly shopping days
1:1 flavors of soda
1:2 flavors of ice cream
3:2 flavors of breakfast cereal
I think your premise is flawed. I would argue that almost all coporate power has been based on tangible resources: Ownership, control, distribution, transformation into goods, and contracts negotiating the above. Most corporate power arises from a company's ability to extract profit from providing a resource (product), or access to a resource (service). Only rarely is this resource intellectual property.
You're absolutely right, of course, but spare Apple your acrimony. The practice of extorting money from wild-eyed, hype-dazzled masses for the dubious privilege of getting a sneak peak at the Next Big Thing has been going on for years, and it wasn't Apple that started it. It sucks that they're sinking to the same level of the (ahem) unnamed industry leader, but you could hardly expect otherwise.
Furthermore, software is so complex, it is just not realistic to expect ANY full-release product to be bug-free under today's market conditions. Once it's a given that release software WILL have bugs, what's the difference between full release and beta, anyway?
In a perfect world, software would go something like this: Alpha == core functionality works. Beta == feature-complete. Release == All known bugs eliminated.
This breaks down when customers tolerate products with bugs. Which they do, either because they can't wait for or won't pay for the company to fix all the bugs. Or because the company fears missing a market window to a competitor and rushes an incomplete product to market, which we buy. Or because they know we have to buy it anyway.
Fixing bugs costs time and money. You have to ask yourself how many bugs you can live with, what you can afford to pay, how long you can live without the product, and choose a happy medium.
... when other companies try to stimulate a fanatical, religious following for their lame products, and fail. That fanatical following is money in the bank, and believe you me, a lot of companies want one. They just will never have that magic "inner spark" that they need to attract one. Envy, envy, envy.
I couldn't disagree with you more. Well, I suppose I could, but I wouldn't want to.
My university only barely taught me the basics of C, assembly, and some other languages. I'm with you so far. But what it also taught me, that would be difficult to get from a book, is how to be a good programmer. Not only that, but how to be a good engineer. Taught me how things work; why we do things the way we do; and what mistakes were made in the past that we don't want to repeat.
Theory is not useless. Theory is what gives you the power to come up with an effective solution to a problem even when you can't find your cookbook. Theory helps bridge the gap between doing something and understanding how and why.
You bemoan the fact that you were barely shown C, C++ and Java, and no VB. I rejoice in the knowledge that I can with confidence call upon my theory and programming fundamentals to use effectively any language.
And on top of that, being at the university did a lot to round me out as a person. I learned history; foreign languages and cultures; literature; and all that other artsy crap that makes you think deep thoughts about human nature and the meaning of life, the universe and everything. In short, I learned many of the things that make me interesting to talk to (or at least, what I have in common with people I find interesting).
Yes, you can aquire all of this without going to a university. But it's a ton of work, and it's much easier when you can have someone who's been there help show you the way.
We're only a couple of steps away from not owning our own computers. If you think you dislike having someone dictate when or how you can watch your own DVD or use your own word processor, how do you think you'll feel when your new PC comes with a mandate from its maker that you MUST let them run whatever idle-time daemons they want? That you MUST let them use your internet connection whenever they want? To some extent, this is already happening. If this trend continues, we're all going to be paying for our CPU-seconds again, just like in the good old 1950s.
This report summarizes the experiences of the AppleSeed Project in performing real-world parallel supercomputer calculations on G3 and G4 Macs. They acknowledge that communication latency is a killer, but for embarassingly parallel codes, a G4 AppleSeed cluster does quite well and is much easier to use than a Beowulf cluster.
I sympathize with DC, but their claims that hackers are posting DC intellectual property are out of line. The only things the hackers posted were a description of the "language" used to converse with a hardware device, and code to implement an interpreter of that language. Last I heard, the law did not permit closing off a language or an interpreter of one as IP. If this is still the case, then DC is flat out wrong in their claims. If this is no longer the case, then I weep for yet another egregious erosion of our liberty.
Note that the majority of cell phones in use today use digital CDMA spread-spectrum encoding. There are several benefits to this technology, which was originally developed for military use. CDMA transmissions are highly resistant to noise interference; are hard to snoop; and are very easy to hide in background noise. If you don't know what to look for, you won't see it. There's no intensity spike at any frequency.
This has been known for decades. It's entirely possible to foresee that all of our radio communications may use this technology in a few more decades' time, due to its benefits. This considerably increases the difficulty of anyone randomly discovering our existence by scanning our spectrum.
Giving ETI's credit for as much cleverness as we have, we are trying to find a ET civilization radiating within a few decades of its technological awakening.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there any hope of survival against the incumbent phone companies who will do
anything to squash competition?
No. As long as the company that owns the wires also provides service to customers, in the end they will always win because they can control how much their competitors must pay to reach the same customers -- and that's profit, too. Even a home-run success by a CLEC will ultimately just bankroll the ILEC's effort to wipe out the competition.
The only way we will ever see true competition in telephone service (or in electric or gas, for that matter) is to make sure that whoever owns the distribution infrastructure is not also competing to provide service to customers.
And the best way to ensure that the monopoly company that owns the infrastructure doesn't ream everybody is public ownership. For a good example of healthy competition via public infrastructure, consider the shipping business: Private carriers travelling on public highways.
You say: "sure, the tech underneath is crap (an i loathe that as much as any other geek)"
I know you're trying to achieve some reconciliation with the Linux crowd with this comment, but you're totally selling Apple short. Let's be more precise: Apple's process scheduler and memory management is crap. There's actually a whole lot of stuff in MacOS below the GUI (the "tech underneath") that works really, really well.
* Resources - sure, Unix has these too, but Apple's way is a lot better
* File types - Double click any document, and it opens in the right program. Apple did it first. And not in a brain-dead way, either. You can control what the "right program" is; you can drag-drop it onto an alternative; and if the "right program" isn't around, you get a list of alternatives.
* Applications - Drag a folder to install. There is no path to hack -- the OS knows where everything is.
* The Macintosh toolbox - Over 5,000 data types and subroutines that any app can rely on. glibc, eat your heart out.
* Hierarchical File System - B-trees are cool.
* Open Transport
* Sprockets
* WorldScript - Don't forget, Apple co-invented Unicode.
* NuBus, ADB, PCI, USB, SCSI, AirPort, Firewire, AppleTalk - NOBODY else does plug'n'play as well as Apple.
* Multiple monitors - It just plain works. The way you expect it to.
Sure, Apple is the subject of ridicule among PC masochists who believe anyone who doesn't suffer as much as they do must be inferior. And sure, Apple is derided by those too cheap to pay a little more for quality, style, and innovation.
And sure, it's taken Apple a lot longer than it should have to add preemptive multitasking and protected memory to their kernel (although they have offered THREE different flavors of Unix prior to OS X Server). And sure, Apple's management is doing its best to kill the company, and only the loyalty of its customers keeps it alive.
Apart from these minor nit-picks, Apple really does have terrific products with some awesome technology inside them.
Your comments about a friendlier command line are spot-on. Interesting how your syntax reads a lot like AppleScript. :-) The gap between "ought to be" and "is" often may be narrower than we think.
If you were to select HTML Fromatted, I bet it wouldn't look so funny. You could probably get by just adding a <P> at every paragraph break. I'd try it, but I don't have access to Lynx.
... is that we have a choice. The way matters stand now, marketers (a) treat our personal information as their property, and (b) buy and sell it like mad. "Fine," says Sanchez, "do business with someone who doesn't do that." Sure -- show me one! Unless you want to spend your entire life only purchasing with cash (and don't even think of using the internet), this is simply not an option. When *everyone* is selling what they know, there just isn't a private alternative. Without the government to stand behind the idea that I own my personal data, there is no incentive whatsoever to stop marketers from swapping it around.
... that Britain is going to squelch one of the best mechanisms for removing idiot genes from the gene pool!
Would it be better if I had said, "people who gave it a fair chance"?
:-)
I'd be interested to know how many of the complaints are culture shock. At least a couple of early Aqua haters have since changed their minds about it.
Granted, I haven't tried OS X myself. I'm too cheap to pay for the beta.
Thanks for the chuckle. I will be sure to give SETI equal time. ;-)
> Remember real-world apps? The software that the mac used to have back when developers used to support it?
;-) The point of RISC is to make the whole computer run faster by not doing things that waste time or resources. A 500 MHz G3 can beat a 1300 MHz Pentium 4 on the same calculation because the G3 doesn't waste time and processor cycles unscrambling X86 variable-length instructions and complex addressing modes, and because the G3 has a superior number of general-purpose registers.
*Yawn.* That tired old rant? Been there, done that. When none of the thousands of Mac apps does what I need, I'll come crying to you.
> Athlon vs G4: 50% faster and 50% less expensive.
50% less expensive I'll grant.
> WTF good is a G4 box if I can build two FASTER PC's for the same price?
You can't. I can buy a dual-processor G4 450-MHz for $2000. What tier-1 vendor will sell me two 700-MHz Athlons for that price?
> BTW, if the whole advantage of RISC (vs. CISC) is that it can run at higher mhz (due to simpler circuitry),
But it isn't. Learn about computer architecture and get back to us.
The Pentium 4 has the highest clock speeds around, but still isn't as fast as a 1-GHz PIII or an Athlon -- or a 500-MHz G4. The G4 also uses only 1/4 the electricity that the X86 chips do, and has a smaller die. It's simply more efficient.
So, in answer to your question: The speeds are more than decent. You need to educate yourself to look beyond MHz.
I, for one, could hardly be happier about the new interface of OS X -- it integrates the functions of two utilities I have been running for >5 years (specifically, Greg's Browser and Malph) as my main interface to the Mac because I found Finder lacking. From what I hear, the response to Aqua from people who use it for more than a couple of days is mostly positive.
Check out these distributed.net RC5-64 statistics.
:-)
Processor MHz Mkeys/sec
PowerPC G4 500 4.4
AMD Athlon 1000 3.4
Intel PIII 1000 2.8
Intel P4 1500 2.0
G4 vs P4: 1/3 the speed, 2.2x the speed.
Learn about CPI and get back to us.
I am a member of at least three thriving virtual communities right now, of which Slashdot is the most vibrant. Virtual communities are very much alive and well. You just have to realize that the Net is not, and never will be, one monolithic community. Rather, it is a common medium that supports many hundreds or thousands of separate communities.
As a NeXT wannabe, I shunned Finder and have been using Greg's Browser and Malph as my primary interface to MacOS since the early '90s. Now that the functionality of these insanely useful utilities is to become the default MacOS interface, users are screaming about it. Fools!
I would call myself a successful veteran of geek house living, with about 5 1/2 years across two houses. The best factor in both cases was the non-geek contingent. Not only are non-geeks better cooks :-) and somewhat more likely to care about things like decorating and keeping the house clean, they are also more interesting to talk to. When it was only geeks, we basically talked computers and sometimes politics. When non-geeks were present, we talked about art, religion, history, philosophy, sex, food, music, travel, family, linguistics, games, crafts... and politics and computers. I think a 50-50 split of non-geeks to geeks is about right.
Other good ratios to have in a house:
1:1 gender ratio
1:1 pets to people
1:1 bedrooms (even if some double up)
1:2 phone lines
>1:1 computers - 5:1 for me currently
>1:1 Mbps - 5:1 here is good too. Not less than 1 Mbps external access in any case
~1:2 operating systems
1:2 weekly shopping days
1:1 flavors of soda
1:2 flavors of ice cream
3:2 flavors of breakfast cereal
Potatoes are esculent farinaceous tubers.
I've seen this problem before. You typed "CRASH", not "CASH".
I think your premise is flawed. I would argue that almost all coporate power has been based on tangible resources: Ownership, control, distribution, transformation into goods, and contracts negotiating the above. Most corporate power arises from a company's ability to extract profit from providing a resource (product), or access to a resource (service). Only rarely is this resource intellectual property.
You're absolutely right, of course, but spare Apple your acrimony. The practice of extorting money from wild-eyed, hype-dazzled masses for the dubious privilege of getting a sneak peak at the Next Big Thing has been going on for years, and it wasn't Apple that started it. It sucks that they're sinking to the same level of the (ahem) unnamed industry leader, but you could hardly expect otherwise.
Furthermore, software is so complex, it is just not realistic to expect ANY full-release product to be bug-free under today's market conditions. Once it's a given that release software WILL have bugs, what's the difference between full release and beta, anyway?
In a perfect world, software would go something like this: Alpha == core functionality works. Beta == feature-complete. Release == All known bugs eliminated.
This breaks down when customers tolerate products with bugs. Which they do, either because they can't wait for or won't pay for the company to fix all the bugs. Or because the company fears missing a market window to a competitor and rushes an incomplete product to market, which we buy. Or because they know we have to buy it anyway.
Fixing bugs costs time and money. You have to ask yourself how many bugs you can live with, what you can afford to pay, how long you can live without the product, and choose a happy medium.
... when other companies try to stimulate a fanatical, religious following for their lame products, and fail. That fanatical following is money in the bank, and believe you me, a lot of companies want one. They just will never have that magic "inner spark" that they need to attract one. Envy, envy, envy.
I couldn't disagree with you more. Well, I suppose I could, but I wouldn't want to.
My university only barely taught me the basics of C, assembly, and some other languages. I'm with you so far. But what it also taught me, that would be difficult to get from a book, is how to be a good programmer. Not only that, but how to be a good engineer. Taught me how things work; why we do things the way we do; and what mistakes were made in the past that we don't want to repeat.
Theory is not useless. Theory is what gives you the power to come up with an effective solution to a problem even when you can't find your cookbook. Theory helps bridge the gap between doing something and understanding how and why.
You bemoan the fact that you were barely shown C, C++ and Java, and no VB. I rejoice in the knowledge that I can with confidence call upon my theory and programming fundamentals to use effectively any language.
And on top of that, being at the university did a lot to round me out as a person. I learned history; foreign languages and cultures; literature; and all that other artsy crap that makes you think deep thoughts about human nature and the meaning of life, the universe and everything. In short, I learned many of the things that make me interesting to talk to (or at least, what I have in common with people I find interesting).
Yes, you can aquire all of this without going to a university. But it's a ton of work, and it's much easier when you can have someone who's been there help show you the way.
We're only a couple of steps away from not owning our own computers. If you think you dislike having someone dictate when or how you can watch your own DVD or use your own word processor, how do you think you'll feel when your new PC comes with a mandate from its maker that you MUST let them run whatever idle-time daemons they want? That you MUST let them use your internet connection whenever they want? To some extent, this is already happening. If this trend continues, we're all going to be paying for our CPU-seconds again, just like in the good old 1950s.
This report summarizes the experiences of the AppleSeed Project in performing real-world parallel supercomputer calculations on G3 and G4 Macs. They acknowledge that communication latency is a killer, but for embarassingly parallel codes, a G4 AppleSeed cluster does quite well and is much easier to use than a Beowulf cluster.
I sympathize with DC, but their claims that hackers are posting DC intellectual property are out of line. The only things the hackers posted were a description of the "language" used to converse with a hardware device, and code to implement an interpreter of that language. Last I heard, the law did not permit closing off a language or an interpreter of one as IP. If this is still the case, then DC is flat out wrong in their claims. If this is no longer the case, then I weep for yet another egregious erosion of our liberty.
Note that the majority of cell phones in use today use digital CDMA spread-spectrum encoding. There are several benefits to this technology, which was originally developed for military use. CDMA transmissions are highly resistant to noise interference; are hard to snoop; and are very easy to hide in background noise. If you don't know what to look for, you won't see it. There's no intensity spike at any frequency.
This has been known for decades. It's entirely possible to foresee that all of our radio communications may use this technology in a few more decades' time, due to its benefits. This considerably increases the difficulty of anyone randomly discovering our existence by scanning our spectrum.
Giving ETI's credit for as much cleverness as we have, we are trying to find a ET civilization radiating within a few decades of its technological awakening.
Windows-free and proud of it.