... too bad we don't have quite as many dashcams going as there are in Russia.
But there are more than enough.... This showed up on Youtube late last night, I believe this is the original poster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLpTOc1i8_8
And then a short time later this showed up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkF4sloZmBI
I don;t think that is very unique at all... Given a layman's construction viewpoint of the surrounding structures, this would appear to be an industrial/earthworks park, not a military base. The structure looks like a simple shed in a large "U" shape, with an entrance gate in the center. This is very reminiscent of the grand walls and entries you see in lots of Chinese structures, even in otherwise mundane industrial settings. You can see a similar structure here missing most of its roof.
Looking around the site, this seems to be a series of 4 brick making facilities, which are mostly in a state of disrepair. Lot the distinctive features: - The site is on the edge of a plateau to two distinct soil types. - The site has large scraped areas and ramps down into the secondary soil type to the north (many of which have subsequently been eroded away). - The site has piles of earth (apparently from the scraped areas), adjacent to the building sites. - There are multiple excavators and front endloaders, as well as dumptrucks and associated equipment. - There are long rows of parallel molds set out to dry in the sun. - There are additional areas that look to have been indoor (heated?) drying areas in now delapidated buildings. - There are extra(unused) molds stacked in adjacent areas. - There is an old power station which probably fed all the facilities when in full productions, but most seem to be derelict today. - There are no apparent gaurd gates, road blocks, or fences/walls enclosing these surrounding areas... just an open road back to the farmland and local villages. - There are no apparent army trucks, equipment, bunkers, runways, or barracks anywhere in the area.
Conclusion... This is a series of mud/clay brick making facilities, now mostly in a state of disrepair. The 2 (of about 5 or 6 separate facilities) that appear to have some remaining functionality no longer have production buildings or significant equipment remaining, just open air minimal facilities. Look at any old/disused mining sites in the American southwest deserts and you will see similar features.
Not really. Sure, building and maintaing the *capacity* costs money. But that's a fixed cost regardless of how much of that capacity you actually use. That's very different from water.
No, not really. It is a fixed cost, but capacity is explicitly limited by that initial investment. And it is a very significant cost both to initially install and upgrade. Its costs a lot of money to rip pipes out of the ground to replace a 6" main with an 10" main. Likewise, it costs a lot of money to replace a 100Mb backbone segment with a 1Gb segment.
When a subscriber upgrades their 1.5Mb line to a 10Mb line, they expect to only pay a nominal increase (or more likely get the increase for the same price). They have no concept that actually supplying that backend (an order of magnitude increase) is an immense capital cost. And that subscriber has no intention of paying that capital cost... That means the ISP has to spread that cost out over many years. Yet somehow the user now expects orders of magnitude speed increase every year or 2??? Cost wise, equipment wise, backbone capacity wise (as far as spectrum/etc.) it simply is not feasible.
And don't give me this crap argument "well then they should have built it right in the first place". The real world has real costs. I can install a hypothetical 1Gb backbone now for, lets say, $15,000. I could also install a 10Gb link for $110,000. Spread out over 2 years with 300 customers, that 1Gb backbone (one of a dozen or more you will need) amounts to an increase of $2/month on every customers bill (excluding the cost of borrowing). That 10Gb link will cost each of my customers an additional $15.28 every month.
If I have 300Mb real bandwidth requirements on that particular segment today, does it make any sense for me to install the 10Gb link today? When I will not utilize it for years? When my customers will not pay for it today? Yet somehow several years from now customer expect that 1Gb circuit to magically upgrade itself to 10Gb without any cost.... real money, it's what its all about.
No... As someone who works for a small ISP, and runs the backbone among other things, bandwidth is exactly a commodity like water. Bandwidth is extremely cheap at the source, but the source is not where the end users of that water are. The bandwidth must be distributed across a vast area to many, many endpoints. I can get water out of a river for (nearly) free. But as an ISP, if you want that "water" delivered to your doorstep and I have to pipe it uphill, 50miles from the source, the water is no longer "free". It costs real money to distribute...
Now, my above statements are not meant to imply that the premise of bandwidth caps are not financially sourced... they are. But to extrapolate that backbone peering is cheaper now than previously and that therefore end users are being overcharged, is a complete farce. The entire premise of the article is flawed by a complete misunderstanding of the costs an ISP experiences.
As an ISP, we get offers of dirt cheap peering bandwidth all the time, on the order of a couple dollars per Mb per month for 1GB+ circuits.... But when you question their quoted price in depth the result is always the same... this isn;t bandwidth delivered to your door, to our POP, this is bandwidth delivered on a switch port at the datacenter the peering provider is already located in. I.e. selling me access to the river assuming I already have my feet in the muddy bank. Actually getting that river out of the banks and to my office door costs far far more than the river itself.
So yes, bandwidth is a commodity exactly like water....
Agreed... Once again the Slashdot editors have failed to do the most trivial investigation before posting articles. In this case the alleged JPL article is at: http://nasaupdatecenter.us/press.html.
Since when is "nasaupdatecenter.us" an official JPL website? Why is it that this website has no content other than this article and every weblink points to the real site "marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov"? Why is it that this site has the "news", but no such story on the real JPL website press releases: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/
Perhaps more importantly.... do Slashdot editors enter all their bank account details on every phishing website they get any email for? What makes this any different?.....
- Why are you allowed to cancel orders ? At an auction you owe the money once you've raised your hand. - Why isn't there a fine on traders who happen to cancel more than X% of their orders ? X being in the order of 1. - Why aren't transactions or even 'reservations' (which is what a canceled order looks like to me) taxed ?
Just to be clear... The above is a grossly oversimplified example of HFT. Thanks to the new world of online trading, an order isn;t really processed until both sides have confirmed the order. In the old days with a hundred guys in a trading pit, someone offering to buy at $150,000/share would obviously be wrong. Mistyping the same in an electronic order that autocompleted could have disastrous consequences, so there has to be a way to cancel a request. Why aren;t there fines or taxes? Well ask NASDAQ/etc.
In the real world the above is happening on trades with a difference of a fraction of a cent. In many cases it may be that Bob has a buy order at $25.01 and Alice has a sell order at $25.00. Eve has millisecond timing and can simply enter the orders faster than any human trader could possibly react. Eve is also taking in every market fluctuation and stock move the virtual instant it happens... meaning a well built Eve can anticipate the bounces in a stock price based on buys/sells and just announced news, before a human could recognize that news. But at the end of the trading day, Eve has no position in the market. Eve has only served to suck money out of the market by acting as an (unwanted) intermediary.
So it is possible to create a large volume of "trades" without actually ever buying or selling anything? I am surprised that isn't gamed on regular basis
It is and this is the basis of high frequency trading... though on Wallstreet they call it "providing liquidity". It works like this:
Alice wants to sell 1000 shares of Acme Corp. She places an sell order for 1000 shares at $25.00 on the exchange, but she also places a minimum bid of $23.90 on the sell order. This minimum bid what Alice is willing to accept should someone counter-offer but is suppose to be secret, only the sell price will be published.
Bob is looking for 1000 shares of Acme Corp. He wants to place it in his portfolio for long-term growth, but he thinks it is currently worth less. Bob places a general buy order at $24.40 on the exchange. For the sake of simplicity we will say that is his only price, though he too could have a maximum bid he is will to pay.
So there is a sell order at $25.00 and a buy order at $24.40 pending on the exchange, nothing trades. Now Bob could make a buy offer to Alice at $24.40 and the trade would go thru, or Alice could make a sell offer to Bob at a lower price and follow thru. In a perfect world the exchange would figure it out and match the orders... but that doesn't happen without further action on the part of Alice or Bob.
Eve is a high frequency trader... Actually, Eve is a high frequency trading program at MegaTraders LLC. and has spotted that there are buy and sell orders for Acme Corp on the exchange. Eve places a bid at $24.99 for Alice's share, the exchange accepts, and then Eve immediately cancels the bid order. Eve has just learned that Alice is will to sell for less than the sell order posted. Eve then continues placing bids on Alice's stock, $24.98, $24.97, $24.96, etc., each time immediately canceling the buy when the exchange accepts the bid. Eve gets down to $23.89, at which point the exchange does not accept the bid for Alice's stock. Eve has just learned that Alice is willing to sell for as little as $23.90 and all of this has happened within 10s of milliseconds.
Remember all those articles on Slashdot about high frequency firm X laying their own fiber directly to the exchange to cut milliseconds off transit time? Having custom L2 firmware on their switches and no firewalls on their trading links to cut milliseconds off transit time? This is why they do it, so they can submit hundreds/thousands of buy/sell/cancel orders on a single stock within a fraction of a second to learn pricing differences between orders that otherwise should be secret.
So Eve now knows that Alice is will to sell for $23.90 and would perform the same procedure against Bob to discover his highest buy price. Once found Eve can now see a price difference advantages to herself. Eve buys the 1000 shares from Alice at $23.90 and then immediately sells the shares to Bob at $24.40, pocketing the $500 difference. On Wallstreet they call this "providing liquidity", anywhere else this would be considered insider trading and illegal. Multiple all this by several hundred firms with special inside access to the market place, each running their own competing Eve programs, and you quickly realize how the market can go into turmoil within seconds....
Almost all of that was done by wireless telegraph operators decades before RTTY radio geeks, probably one of the earliest being the lewd and suggestive poems inserted into the stream of Marconi's new-fangled "secure" wireless transmission device.
I see your young wipper-snapper and raise you a 1903 old timer.
Maybe I'm missing something, but fiberoptics aren't conductive. That's one of the beautiful things about it. Why would they need steel-coated cables to protect them from the electric lines?
The fiber optic cable is not conductive, but the aerial hanger wire and pole supports, to which the fiber optic is wrapped, most certainly are. This is not about protecting the fiber optic cables, this is about protecting the infrastructure (ALL of the utilities on the pole) and the life and safety of those personal working on it. This issue is very clear-cut and Google/Kansas City will lose. They tried to slip in a fast one of defining their own terms for pole placement, but issue of pole line placement is already quite well established
The highest voltage lines are placed at the top of the pole, say 25kV feeder lines. Below that on the power pole, outside the exclusion zone of the upper wire, comes the primary distribution lines, perhaps 7kV or 14.4kV, and below that exclusion zone comes the next highest voltage and so forth... At the mid pole location (and below all the above exclusion zones) comes the secondary distribution lines (120V-480V). Below that level comes the telephone lines (48V), and below that cable distribution. At the very bottom is the lowest power lines, namely being fiber optic cables.
This means that a telephone/etc. service technician never has to be within the exclusion zone of a high voltage, for which they do not have the proper equipment and training. The Google proposal would have the fiber installers working in the same space, and requiring the same training and equipment, as the power company personal who handle live high voltage lines.
Came across here at 12:02 MST and the audio stream was screwed up. The audio alerts came thru fine, but the message was extremely faint and unintelligible. About half way thru the 60sec test someone at the radio station cranked the input volume all the way up, horrible high-pitched whine of background noise, but you could at least understand what was being said then. Still, it sounded like trying to tune into a radio station a thousand miles away... The normal monthly tests have never seemed to have that problem.
Yep... More laptop has plenty of horsepower, yet the new design has made it useless. A single Slashdot window open and all the Ajaxy crap uses 100% of a CPU continuously. Ajax is suppose to be for enabling small updates to pages (getting more content, updating a status, etc) in response to a user action. Why do people think Web2.0 means continuously run a thread and use all the CPU when doing absolutely nothing????
Once again, you are simply wrong. For a grammer Nazi, you seem to be having difficulties understanding the English language.
informal - adjective 1. without formality or ceremony; casual: an informal visit. 2. not according to the prescribed, official, or customary way or manner; irregular; unofficial: informal proceedings. 3. suitable to or characteristic of casual and familiar, but educated, speech or writing
People converse using common English, no so-called "proper" English. Perhaps you should pay close attention to the third definition above: casual and familiar, but educated, speech or writing
For a troll, you are not particularly entertaining.
How in the hell does one guy injure eighteen people and kill five at an event that surely must have had dozens of police and security personnel?
Why would there be dozens of police and security? Congresswoman Giffords is local representative, not the president. She regularly holds "Congress on Your Corner" informal meetings at shopping centers. Anyone can come up and talk with her on any subject regarding her district. You know... actually talking with your constituents about their concerns, instead of camping out in palatial gated estates where only insiders and lobbyists are invited.
The meet-and-greet event was just starting and there were a total of about 20 people waiting to talk with Giffords, dozens more walking in and out of the market. A total of eighteen people were injured, 6 of which are dead. Not all the injured were shot. The suspect reportedly had a 9mm gun with an extended 20-round clip.
According to the live news conference that just occurred at UMC:
Congresswoman Giffords was shot in the head, thru-and-thru, and is now out of surgery. She is in critical condition, but is alert and responding to commands, the surgeon believe she will come thru this in good condition.
Updated numbers indicate a total of 18 people injured, 5 of which are dead including a young girl about 9yrs old.
Sorry, no your wrong. I work for an ISP and I know exactly what the GP was referring to. The removal DSL from the list of tariffed products (the list that sets price for wholesale telco products) is what killed small/medium ISPs. The national dialup pools had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Before the rule changes, any mom-n-pop ISP (which could be 20,000 subscribers) could sell DSL internet to a customer for the DSL-line tariff charge + ISP charge (the same tariff charge as the telco charged its direct customers). The only difference between ISP A, ISP B, and the telco monopoly ISP was the ISP charge and the customer services provided by each.
After the tariff change, the local telco monopoly now charges much more for the DSL line charge to a third party alone than it does for its own complete bundled service. As an example... Qwest now charges $33/mon for a bare-naked DSL line serviced by a third party ISP. Add in $20/mon for the ISP charge. Qwest's own DSL package price is $29.95, less the line cost itself.
Remember, this is just the price difference in the last-mile DSL circuit. The mom-n-pop ISP also pays the telco for dedicated high-bandwidth circuits to every CO DSLAM to pickup the aggregate circuits (typically). How does a local mom-n-pop ISP (often with far better customer service) compete when the base price of the DSL circuit (without service) is more than the incumbent monopoly package price?
... as silly as rebuilding your basement into the Emperor's Throne Room?
Of course it is silly... Every knows you build the Detention Center and Waste Reclamation Compactor in the basement. The Emperor's Throne Room goes upstairs in the kitchen.
I do not know about the latest Prius, however neither an early Prius I rented several years ago, nor my current truck, have an indication of the set speed. Only an indication of whether or not the cruise control is on is given.
I can nudge my cruise control speed lever and my speed barely goes up, say from 80 to 81.I nudge at again and again, up to 83. Then I nudge it again and the car takes off, no speed limit. Nudging the cruise speed control lever down has no effect until I've done it about 10 times or more. By then my Prius is doing 97. It's scary because it's so wrong and so out of your normal control
Having an older Toyota truck and being someplace you can safely drive 85... I'd have to say this sounds like a misunderstanding of the cruise control. I have experienced the very same thing, and it can be scary, but it is NOT an ECU problem (at least mechanically, it could be argued to be an interface problem). It is an impatient driver problem. Using the same scenario you just describe imagine the following:
You are driving up a long gentle grade on cruise control at 80MPH, perhaps with a headwind. Unbeknownst to you, your throttle is already wide open as the cruise control maintains your set speed. You bump the cruise control up two notches, but you do not appear to speed up. You bump it up two or three times again and your car barely accelerates to 81... You bump it up another 5 times and creep up to 83. Now you are really impatient and hit it another 10 times with no apparent affect.
Sound familiar? Now think about what you have done, you have set the cruise control from 80 to 100, but your engine is maxed out maintaining 80-ish. As you start to crest the grade your engine has more available power and the vehicle takes off to reach the new speed you set the cruise control at, 100. As you accelerate thru 85, then 87, then 89, you bump the cruise control down and then again and again, but your set at 97 now so you continue to accelerate.
This is not a problem of the ECU "going crazy" and taking off... this is the driver losing track of what they have told the ECU to maintain. The solution is simple, pull down on the cruise control lever as many times as you pushed up. Or. more preferably, pull back on the cruise control lever to immediately cancel the set speed. Or, step on the clutch to immediately cancel the set speed. Or, step on the brake to immediately cancel the set speed.
Having a 10 year old 2WD Tacoma truck with a vacuum-actuated cruise control throttle, this can be even more fun. With the throttle wide open the actuator is at full vacuum and can take a couple seconds to release when cruise control is canceled. Having new Prius with "drive-by-wire", the cancel effect should be almost instantaneous.
Neither my Toyota truck nor the Prius are speed demons. Yes you can get them both up past 100MPH (OK.. so Ive only had mine to 97), but neither has the power to maintain that speed up grade. You can always ask the vehicle to do more than possible at the moment, it will happily oblige when the power later becomes available.
So the question is who pays? Should the content owners, who make the profits pay for the extra infrastructure or should the consumer pay?
What are you talking about? The content owners/providers ALREADY PAY THEIR FULL COST. Those who buy wholesale bandwidth and those who colocate equipment in datacenters already pay for the bandwidth they use, the real cost of that bandwidth. Datacenters would go out of business if they didn't charge the real cost.
The failure of an ISP's business model, oversubscribing of backbone bandwidth and then selling "unlimited bandwidth" at far less than the actual cost, assuming no customers might ever use it fully, has absolutely nothing to do with the providers of content.
To use interweb tube analogy... The content providers have already paid their datacenters $1000s of dollars per month to provide a 10" tube to ship 1000s of barrels of data per second to the interweb. If an ISP advertises 10" tubes to your doorstep for $30/month, but their backbone is a garden hose, and they never actually expected you to use it... that is a contract dispute between the ISP and the consumer. The content providers have NOTHING to do with it.
Could the spin off centered on the rugged Han Solo save the Star Wars franchise from its prequels or would it have been another mediocre release disappointing demanding fans?
Ford's last role in Star Wars, the Star Wars Holiday Special, was such a smash hit, how anything possibly go wrong?!?
"What web sites or other resources do Slashdot readers use..."
Find out what Linux User Groups are in your area and ask your question there. In most cases, local LUG groups, <plug type=shameless> like my own Tucson Free Unix Group - http://tfug.org </plug>, are invaluable in providing quick responses and personal experiences for local users. Quite often, your own LUG may even hold periodic meetings at a location near you, so someone more experienced can "lay hands" on the problem if it comes to that.
No current games are disturbing in the "keep you up at night thinking, appear in pathologically terrifying nightmares, make you think twice about telling people about it" sense.
I'd have to disagree with that. While I'd agree with you that Doom3/etc. had little "nightmare" factor and quickly became predictable, there is one game that kept me having flashbacks for some time. The game was called "The Suffering", by Surreal/Midway.
Quick plot line: You have just been sentenced to death row for killing your wife and daughter in a crime you can not remember. Your first night in prison, all hell breaks loose, leaving you to fend for yourself and find a way off the prison island... The most effective scare-tatic of the game is that it combined lots of "flash-backs" of the horrific murder you supposedly commited, at RANDOM times, over your field of view. Could be in a slow game point when you have already cleared a room, or in the middle of a battle. Overlayed with the typical dark hallways, ominous sounds, and various "bad things waiting" of a typical game, it convincingly created an environment where you quite literally don't know what might happen next...
Same with power transmission lines. There's nothing stopping them from using Aluminum if copper becomes too expensive.
Actually... Most power transmission lines are already aluminum or copper clad steel. Most secondary transmission lines (i.e. those running down your street) are also aluminum, and have been for some time. Add to that, roughly half of new construction "service feeders" (the line from the pole to your meter) are aluminum...
But aluminum and copper wire are not simply interchangable for 2 separate reasons. First, aluminum has a much higher resistance and you must therefore use a large conductor to carry the same amperage. A typical (NEC2000 310.15.B6) 200amp residential feeder requires a 2/0 copper conductor. The exact same feeder requires 4/0 aluminum, a wire 26% larger in diameter that uses 59% more material. In addition to the physical conductors, that also means a larger conduit and termination points are required (going from 2" to 3" conduit is a considerable cost).
Second, aluminum has a much larger thermal expansion coefficent and increased cold flow. That means that, unlike copper, aluminum tends to deform under screw/etc. terminations, comes loose, causes an increased resistance, and creates electrical/fire hazards. Aluminum wiring used for building wiring (i.e. outlet to outlet), which is primarily copper today, is far more difficult to correctly run in aluminum.
Slashdot Mirror
... too bad we don't have quite as many dashcams going as there are in Russia.
But there are more than enough.... This showed up on Youtube late last night, I believe this is the original poster:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLpTOc1i8_8
And then a short time later this showed up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkF4sloZmBI
I don;t think that is very unique at all... Given a layman's construction viewpoint of the surrounding structures, this would appear to be an industrial/earthworks park, not a military base. The structure looks like a simple shed in a large "U" shape, with an entrance gate in the center. This is very reminiscent of the grand walls and entries you see in lots of Chinese structures, even in otherwise mundane industrial settings. You can see a similar structure here missing most of its roof.
Looking around the site, this seems to be a series of 4 brick making facilities, which are mostly in a state of disrepair. Lot the distinctive features:
- The site is on the edge of a plateau to two distinct soil types.
- The site has large scraped areas and ramps down into the secondary soil type to the north (many of which have subsequently been eroded away).
- The site has piles of earth (apparently from the scraped areas), adjacent to the building sites.
- There are multiple excavators and front end loaders, as well as dumptrucks and associated equipment.
- There are long rows of parallel molds set out to dry in the sun.
- There are additional areas that look to have been indoor (heated?) drying areas in now delapidated buildings.
- There are extra (unused) molds stacked in adjacent areas.
- There is an old power station which probably fed all the facilities when in full productions, but most seem to be derelict today.
- There are no apparent gaurd gates, road blocks, or fences/walls enclosing these surrounding areas... just an open road back to the farmland and local villages.
- There are no apparent army trucks, equipment, bunkers, runways, or barracks anywhere in the area.
Conclusion... This is a series of mud/clay brick making facilities, now mostly in a state of disrepair. The 2 (of about 5 or 6 separate facilities) that appear to have some remaining functionality no longer have production buildings or significant equipment remaining, just open air minimal facilities. Look at any old/disused mining sites in the American southwest deserts and you will see similar features.
Not really. Sure, building and maintaing the *capacity* costs money. But that's a fixed cost regardless of how much of that capacity you actually use. That's very different from water.
No, not really. It is a fixed cost, but capacity is explicitly limited by that initial investment. And it is a very significant cost both to initially install and upgrade. Its costs a lot of money to rip pipes out of the ground to replace a 6" main with an 10" main. Likewise, it costs a lot of money to replace a 100Mb backbone segment with a 1Gb segment.
When a subscriber upgrades their 1.5Mb line to a 10Mb line, they expect to only pay a nominal increase (or more likely get the increase for the same price). They have no concept that actually supplying that backend (an order of magnitude increase) is an immense capital cost. And that subscriber has no intention of paying that capital cost... That means the ISP has to spread that cost out over many years. Yet somehow the user now expects orders of magnitude speed increase every year or 2??? Cost wise, equipment wise, backbone capacity wise (as far as spectrum/etc.) it simply is not feasible.
And don't give me this crap argument "well then they should have built it right in the first place". The real world has real costs. I can install a hypothetical 1Gb backbone now for, lets say, $15,000. I could also install a 10Gb link for $110,000. Spread out over 2 years with 300 customers, that 1Gb backbone (one of a dozen or more you will need) amounts to an increase of $2/month on every customers bill (excluding the cost of borrowing). That 10Gb link will cost each of my customers an additional $15.28 every month.
If I have 300Mb real bandwidth requirements on that particular segment today, does it make any sense for me to install the 10Gb link today? When I will not utilize it for years? When my customers will not pay for it today? Yet somehow several years from now customer expect that 1Gb circuit to magically upgrade itself to 10Gb without any cost.... real money, it's what its all about.
No... As someone who works for a small ISP, and runs the backbone among other things, bandwidth is exactly a commodity like water. Bandwidth is extremely cheap at the source, but the source is not where the end users of that water are. The bandwidth must be distributed across a vast area to many, many endpoints. I can get water out of a river for (nearly) free. But as an ISP, if you want that "water" delivered to your doorstep and I have to pipe it uphill, 50miles from the source, the water is no longer "free". It costs real money to distribute...
Now, my above statements are not meant to imply that the premise of bandwidth caps are not financially sourced... they are. But to extrapolate that backbone peering is cheaper now than previously and that therefore end users are being overcharged, is a complete farce. The entire premise of the article is flawed by a complete misunderstanding of the costs an ISP experiences.
As an ISP, we get offers of dirt cheap peering bandwidth all the time, on the order of a couple dollars per Mb per month for 1GB+ circuits.... But when you question their quoted price in depth the result is always the same... this isn;t bandwidth delivered to your door, to our POP, this is bandwidth delivered on a switch port at the datacenter the peering provider is already located in. I.e. selling me access to the river assuming I already have my feet in the muddy bank. Actually getting that river out of the banks and to my office door costs far far more than the river itself.
So yes, bandwidth is a commodity exactly like water....
Agreed... Once again the Slashdot editors have failed to do the most trivial investigation before posting articles. In this case the alleged JPL article is at: http://nasaupdatecenter.us/press.html.
Since when is "nasaupdatecenter.us" an official JPL website?
Why is it that this website has no content other than this article and every weblink points to the real site "marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov"?
Why is it that this site has the "news", but no such story on the real JPL website press releases: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/
Perhaps more importantly.... do Slashdot editors enter all their bank account details on every phishing website they get any email for? What makes this any different?.....
It's OK... Slashdot covered it two weeks ago too... So it's not really slow, just the standard dupe.
A few questions:
- Why are you allowed to cancel orders ? At an auction you owe the money once you've raised your hand.
- Why isn't there a fine on traders who happen to cancel more than X% of their orders ? X being in the order of 1.
- Why aren't transactions or even 'reservations' (which is what a canceled order looks like to me) taxed ?
Just to be clear... The above is a grossly oversimplified example of HFT. Thanks to the new world of online trading, an order isn;t really processed until both sides have confirmed the order. In the old days with a hundred guys in a trading pit, someone offering to buy at $150,000/share would obviously be wrong. Mistyping the same in an electronic order that autocompleted could have disastrous consequences, so there has to be a way to cancel a request. Why aren;t there fines or taxes? Well ask NASDAQ/etc.
In the real world the above is happening on trades with a difference of a fraction of a cent. In many cases it may be that Bob has a buy order at $25.01 and Alice has a sell order at $25.00. Eve has millisecond timing and can simply enter the orders faster than any human trader could possibly react. Eve is also taking in every market fluctuation and stock move the virtual instant it happens... meaning a well built Eve can anticipate the bounces in a stock price based on buys/sells and just announced news, before a human could recognize that news. But at the end of the trading day, Eve has no position in the market. Eve has only served to suck money out of the market by acting as an (unwanted) intermediary.
So it is possible to create a large volume of "trades" without actually ever buying or selling anything? I am surprised that isn't gamed on regular basis
It is and this is the basis of high frequency trading... though on Wallstreet they call it "providing liquidity". It works like this:
Alice wants to sell 1000 shares of Acme Corp. She places an sell order for 1000 shares at $25.00 on the exchange, but she also places a minimum bid of $23.90 on the sell order. This minimum bid what Alice is willing to accept should someone counter-offer but is suppose to be secret, only the sell price will be published.
Bob is looking for 1000 shares of Acme Corp. He wants to place it in his portfolio for long-term growth, but he thinks it is currently worth less. Bob places a general buy order at $24.40 on the exchange. For the sake of simplicity we will say that is his only price, though he too could have a maximum bid he is will to pay.
So there is a sell order at $25.00 and a buy order at $24.40 pending on the exchange, nothing trades. Now Bob could make a buy offer to Alice at $24.40 and the trade would go thru, or Alice could make a sell offer to Bob at a lower price and follow thru. In a perfect world the exchange would figure it out and match the orders... but that doesn't happen without further action on the part of Alice or Bob.
Eve is a high frequency trader... Actually, Eve is a high frequency trading program at MegaTraders LLC. and has spotted that there are buy and sell orders for Acme Corp on the exchange. Eve places a bid at $24.99 for Alice's share, the exchange accepts, and then Eve immediately cancels the bid order. Eve has just learned that Alice is will to sell for less than the sell order posted. Eve then continues placing bids on Alice's stock, $24.98, $24.97, $24.96, etc., each time immediately canceling the buy when the exchange accepts the bid. Eve gets down to $23.89, at which point the exchange does not accept the bid for Alice's stock. Eve has just learned that Alice is willing to sell for as little as $23.90 and all of this has happened within 10s of milliseconds.
Remember all those articles on Slashdot about high frequency firm X laying their own fiber directly to the exchange to cut milliseconds off transit time? Having custom L2 firmware on their switches and no firewalls on their trading links to cut milliseconds off transit time? This is why they do it, so they can submit hundreds/thousands of buy/sell/cancel orders on a single stock within a fraction of a second to learn pricing differences between orders that otherwise should be secret.
So Eve now knows that Alice is will to sell for $23.90 and would perform the same procedure against Bob to discover his highest buy price. Once found Eve can now see a price difference advantages to herself. Eve buys the 1000 shares from Alice at $23.90 and then immediately sells the shares to Bob at $24.40, pocketing the $500 difference. On Wallstreet they call this "providing liquidity", anywhere else this would be considered insider trading and illegal. Multiple all this by several hundred firms with special inside access to the market place, each running their own competing Eve programs, and you quickly realize how the market can go into turmoil within seconds....
Horseshit.
Almost all of that was done by wireless telegraph operators decades before RTTY radio geeks, probably one of the earliest being the lewd and suggestive poems inserted into the stream of Marconi's new-fangled "secure" wireless transmission device.
I see your young wipper-snapper and raise you a 1903 old timer.
Maybe I'm missing something, but fiberoptics aren't conductive. That's one of the beautiful things about it. Why would they need steel-coated cables to protect them from the electric lines?
The fiber optic cable is not conductive, but the aerial hanger wire and pole supports, to which the fiber optic is wrapped, most certainly are. This is not about protecting the fiber optic cables, this is about protecting the infrastructure (ALL of the utilities on the pole) and the life and safety of those personal working on it. This issue is very clear-cut and Google/Kansas City will lose. They tried to slip in a fast one of defining their own terms for pole placement, but issue of pole line placement is already quite well established
The highest voltage lines are placed at the top of the pole, say 25kV feeder lines. Below that on the power pole, outside the exclusion zone of the upper wire, comes the primary distribution lines, perhaps 7kV or 14.4kV, and below that exclusion zone comes the next highest voltage and so forth... At the mid pole location (and below all the above exclusion zones) comes the secondary distribution lines (120V-480V). Below that level comes the telephone lines (48V), and below that cable distribution. At the very bottom is the lowest power lines, namely being fiber optic cables.
This means that a telephone/etc. service technician never has to be within the exclusion zone of a high voltage, for which they do not have the proper equipment and training. The Google proposal would have the fiber installers working in the same space, and requiring the same training and equipment, as the power company personal who handle live high voltage lines.
Came across here at 12:02 MST and the audio stream was screwed up. The audio alerts came thru fine, but the message was extremely faint and unintelligible. About half way thru the 60sec test someone at the radio station cranked the input volume all the way up, horrible high-pitched whine of background noise, but you could at least understand what was being said then. Still, it sounded like trying to tune into a radio station a thousand miles away... The normal monthly tests have never seemed to have that problem.
Yep... More laptop has plenty of horsepower, yet the new design has made it useless. A single Slashdot window open and all the Ajaxy crap uses 100% of a CPU continuously. Ajax is suppose to be for enabling small updates to pages (getting more content, updating a status, etc) in response to a user action. Why do people think Web2.0 means continuously run a thread and use all the CPU when doing absolutely nothing????
"informal" = "incorrect"
Once again, you are simply wrong. For a grammer Nazi, you seem to be having difficulties understanding the English language.
informal
- adjective
1. without formality or ceremony; casual: an informal visit.
2. not according to the prescribed, official, or customary way or manner; irregular; unofficial: informal proceedings.
3. suitable to or characteristic of casual and familiar, but educated, speech or writing
People converse using common English, no so-called "proper" English. Perhaps you should pay close attention to the third definition above: casual and familiar, but educated, speech or writing
For a troll, you are not particularly entertaining.
How in the hell does one guy injure eighteen people and kill five at an event that surely must have had dozens of police and security personnel?
Why would there be dozens of police and security? Congresswoman Giffords is local representative, not the president. She regularly holds "Congress on Your Corner" informal meetings at shopping centers. Anyone can come up and talk with her on any subject regarding her district. You know... actually talking with your constituents about their concerns, instead of camping out in palatial gated estates where only insiders and lobbyists are invited.
The meet-and-greet event was just starting and there were a total of about 20 people waiting to talk with Giffords, dozens more walking in and out of the market. A total of eighteen people were injured, 6 of which are dead. Not all the injured were shot. The suspect reportedly had a 9mm gun with an extended 20-round clip.
For God's sake, it's "through".
thru
–preposition, adverb, adjective
an informal, simplified spelling of through.
According to the live news conference that just occurred at UMC:
Congresswoman Giffords was shot in the head, thru-and-thru, and is now out of surgery. She is in critical condition, but is alert and responding to commands, the surgeon believe she will come thru this in good condition.
Updated numbers indicate a total of 18 people injured, 5 of which are dead including a young girl about 9yrs old.
Sorry, no your wrong. I work for an ISP and I know exactly what the GP was referring to. The removal DSL from the list of tariffed products (the list that sets price for wholesale telco products) is what killed small/medium ISPs. The national dialup pools had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Before the rule changes, any mom-n-pop ISP (which could be 20,000 subscribers) could sell DSL internet to a customer for the DSL-line tariff charge + ISP charge (the same tariff charge as the telco charged its direct customers). The only difference between ISP A, ISP B, and the telco monopoly ISP was the ISP charge and the customer services provided by each.
After the tariff change, the local telco monopoly now charges much more for the DSL line charge to a third party alone than it does for its own complete bundled service. As an example... Qwest now charges $33/mon for a bare-naked DSL line serviced by a third party ISP. Add in $20/mon for the ISP charge. Qwest's own DSL package price is $29.95, less the line cost itself.
Remember, this is just the price difference in the last-mile DSL circuit. The mom-n-pop ISP also pays the telco for dedicated high-bandwidth circuits to every CO DSLAM to pickup the aggregate circuits (typically). How does a local mom-n-pop ISP (often with far better customer service) compete when the base price of the DSL circuit (without service) is more than the incumbent monopoly package price?
... as silly as rebuilding your basement into the Emperor's Throne Room?
Of course it is silly... Every knows you build the Detention Center and Waste Reclamation Compactor in the basement. The Emperor's Throne Room goes upstairs in the kitchen.
I do not know about the latest Prius, however neither an early Prius I rented several years ago, nor my current truck, have an indication of the set speed. Only an indication of whether or not the cruise control is on is given.
I can nudge my cruise control speed lever and my speed barely goes up, say from 80 to 81.I nudge at again and again, up to 83. Then I nudge it again and the car takes off, no speed limit. Nudging the cruise speed control lever down has no effect until I've done it about 10 times or more. By then my Prius is doing 97. It's scary because it's so wrong and so out of your normal control
Having an older Toyota truck and being someplace you can safely drive 85... I'd have to say this sounds like a misunderstanding of the cruise control. I have experienced the very same thing, and it can be scary, but it is NOT an ECU problem (at least mechanically, it could be argued to be an interface problem). It is an impatient driver problem. Using the same scenario you just describe imagine the following:
You are driving up a long gentle grade on cruise control at 80MPH, perhaps with a headwind. Unbeknownst to you, your throttle is already wide open as the cruise control maintains your set speed. You bump the cruise control up two notches, but you do not appear to speed up. You bump it up two or three times again and your car barely accelerates to 81... You bump it up another 5 times and creep up to 83. Now you are really impatient and hit it another 10 times with no apparent affect.
Sound familiar? Now think about what you have done, you have set the cruise control from 80 to 100, but your engine is maxed out maintaining 80-ish. As you start to crest the grade your engine has more available power and the vehicle takes off to reach the new speed you set the cruise control at, 100. As you accelerate thru 85, then 87, then 89, you bump the cruise control down and then again and again, but your set at 97 now so you continue to accelerate.
This is not a problem of the ECU "going crazy" and taking off... this is the driver losing track of what they have told the ECU to maintain. The solution is simple, pull down on the cruise control lever as many times as you pushed up. Or. more preferably, pull back on the cruise control lever to immediately cancel the set speed. Or, step on the clutch to immediately cancel the set speed. Or, step on the brake to immediately cancel the set speed.
Having a 10 year old 2WD Tacoma truck with a vacuum-actuated cruise control throttle, this can be even more fun. With the throttle wide open the actuator is at full vacuum and can take a couple seconds to release when cruise control is canceled. Having new Prius with "drive-by-wire", the cancel effect should be almost instantaneous.
Neither my Toyota truck nor the Prius are speed demons. Yes you can get them both up past 100MPH (OK.. so Ive only had mine to 97), but neither has the power to maintain that speed up grade. You can always ask the vehicle to do more than possible at the moment, it will happily oblige when the power later becomes available.
So the question is who pays? Should the content owners, who make the profits pay for the extra infrastructure or should the consumer pay?
What are you talking about? The content owners/providers ALREADY PAY THEIR FULL COST. Those who buy wholesale bandwidth and those who colocate equipment in datacenters already pay for the bandwidth they use, the real cost of that bandwidth. Datacenters would go out of business if they didn't charge the real cost.
The failure of an ISP's business model, oversubscribing of backbone bandwidth and then selling "unlimited bandwidth" at far less than the actual cost, assuming no customers might ever use it fully, has absolutely nothing to do with the providers of content.
To use interweb tube analogy... The content providers have already paid their datacenters $1000s of dollars per month to provide a 10" tube to ship 1000s of barrels of data per second to the interweb. If an ISP advertises 10" tubes to your doorstep for $30/month, but their backbone is a garden hose, and they never actually expected you to use it... that is a contract dispute between the ISP and the consumer. The content providers have NOTHING to do with it.
Ford's last role in Star Wars, the Star Wars Holiday Special, was such a smash hit, how anything possibly go wrong?!?
"What web sites or other resources do Slashdot readers use..."
Find out what Linux User Groups are in your area and ask your question there. In most cases, local LUG groups, <plug type=shameless> like my own Tucson Free Unix Group - http://tfug.org </plug>, are invaluable in providing quick responses and personal experiences for local users. Quite often, your own LUG may even hold periodic meetings at a location near you, so someone more experienced can "lay hands" on the problem if it comes to that.
I'd have to disagree with that. While I'd agree with you that Doom3/etc. had little "nightmare" factor and quickly became predictable, there is one game that kept me having flashbacks for some time. The game was called "The Suffering", by Surreal/Midway.
Quick plot line: You have just been sentenced to death row for killing your wife and daughter in a crime you can not remember. Your first night in prison, all hell breaks loose, leaving you to fend for yourself and find a way off the prison island... The most effective scare-tatic of the game is that it combined lots of "flash-backs" of the horrific murder you supposedly commited, at RANDOM times, over your field of view. Could be in a slow game point when you have already cleared a room, or in the middle of a battle. Overlayed with the typical dark hallways, ominous sounds, and various "bad things waiting" of a typical game, it convincingly created an environment where you quite literally don't know what might happen next...
Same with power transmission lines. There's nothing stopping them from using Aluminum if copper becomes too expensive.
Actually... Most power transmission lines are already aluminum or copper clad steel. Most secondary transmission lines (i.e. those running down your street) are also aluminum, and have been for some time. Add to that, roughly half of new construction "service feeders" (the line from the pole to your meter) are aluminum... But aluminum and copper wire are not simply interchangable for 2 separate reasons. First, aluminum has a much higher resistance and you must therefore use a large conductor to carry the same amperage. A typical (NEC2000 310.15.B6) 200amp residential feeder requires a 2/0 copper conductor. The exact same feeder requires 4/0 aluminum, a wire 26% larger in diameter that uses 59% more material. In addition to the physical conductors, that also means a larger conduit and termination points are required (going from 2" to 3" conduit is a considerable cost). Second, aluminum has a much larger thermal expansion coefficent and increased cold flow. That means that, unlike copper, aluminum tends to deform under screw/etc. terminations, comes loose, causes an increased resistance, and creates electrical/fire hazards. Aluminum wiring used for building wiring (i.e. outlet to outlet), which is primarily copper today, is far more difficult to correctly run in aluminum.