I'm in my third year of college Japanese (I'm a college Junior), and I'm trying to find an internship for next summer. I've pretty much resigned myself to working in the US (not that that's bad) and maybe going to Japan for 2 weeks or so just for fun (I've never been). My Japanese is decent, but let's just say that my programming is quite a bit better. Reading would definitely be a problem. Something makes me think, though, that most of the technical jargon used in Japan would probably be just Japanese pronounciations of the English technical jargon. Anyone know if that's the case? Is it reasonable to look for an internship in Japan, or would I be doing myself and the company a disservice if I actually landed one?
JPEG is a lossy compression format.
PNG and GIF are lossless compression formats.
The reason JPEGs are smaller is that they don't have all the information in there. So on the size front it's no surprise that JPEG "wipes the floor with" PNG. They just look crappier.
If you go entirely on the MD5 hash, you will get false positives: look at the "birthday problem" to see why. With literally millions of different songs on Napster, there will be many random "collisions" (as they are known in crypto circles).
Well, technically yes. Practically no. MD5 is a 128-bit hash, so there are 2^128 hash values. You'd need 2^64 distinct MP3s before you're likely to find two which hash to the same thing. 2^64 is really, really big. MD5 may or may not be a perfect hash (I think there is some evidence of flaws), but even if specific attacks were known, it's not like people are going to specifically construct MP3s so that they get hash to a known value (making themselves "look guilty" on purpose).
Remember, the AVERAGE growth is 8 to 10 percent. This can mean up years of 20 percent and down years of 10 percent.
Warren Buffet (very well-respected investment guru) pointed out in a speech that it doesn't make any sense for the stock market to grow faster than the economy as a whole. How can the stock market, which represents all of the public companies in the country, grow faster than the economy of the country for any sustainable period of time? The two possibilities are either that everything has been undervalued all along (I seriously doubt it) or a larger-scale but less severe bubble is being created (and has been created ever since the baby boomers started saving for retirement). The economy grows at about 3-5% a year, as measured by output. The stock market grows at about 8% a year. It's easy to see that as time goes on and this continues, $x in the stock market will represent less and less actual output.
So they use code that volunteers wrote and turned it into a self-promoting product. Why is this problem? I would first say that the fact that Netscape employees wrote most of the code gives them the moral right to do so. But even if they didn't, anyone is free to do such a thing. I could create a custom version of Mozilla (let's call it FizgigBrowser 6.1, since I have to be ahead) and have every button on there be a link to my homepage. Why is this so wrong? Netscape has graciously given everyone the right to do whatever they please with the code they pay to have written; are they somehow in the wrong for taking advantage of the reciprocal offer of other developers?
"Does any of this money generated by the browser go back to Mozilla? I kinda doubt it?"
Um, how about the fact that they've been paying people to work on Mozilla for 32 months and haven't actually gotten any revenue from it yet. Don't you think they've paid their dues several times over by now? (not that there actually _are_ any dues)
I have a tiny bit of code that made it into most of the Linux distributions. Red Hat's desktop has lots of links to Red Hat sites. Should I feel cheated?
It's a lot harder for the boss to do that now, though.
Now, it goes: "Get an absentee ballot. I will watch you fill it out and drop it in the mail. Do this or be fired."
In the hypothetical future it might go: "Bring back a receipt and show it to me or be fired."
The former is quite a bit harder to pull off. Both of these are better than the everyone votes online strategy, though, since in that case the boss can be a bit more subtle in the "Do this or be fired" part, making it harder to prosecute.
You need at least the 14(15?) most populous states to win an alectoral contest. That's more (three times more) than you need in a popular vote.
That's assuming they get 100% of the vote in those states. I don't care what a candidate promises a state, they can NEVER get 100% of the vote. I'd be surprised if they could get more than 80% even in a large state that already liked them. Plus if every politician is promising everything to those states, they'll just end up splitting the popular vote in those states. As a result, the smaller states become important again. With an electoral college, you can get elected (in a 2-way race; the ratios are probably the same for more) with ~31% of the vote while the other guy gets 69% of the vote. Without the electoral college you need over 50%.
Unfortunately, you have to go through a lot of hoops to get more than one relationship. That's what a relational database (even with flat files!) would be better. I can easily organize my files by artist with a filesystem. But then what if I want to organize them by genre or date? I'd have to move everything around.
Databases are the only way to go, if you have enough information to classify them. The MP3 player shell I use is DigitalDJ, which works with the Grip ripper. All of my mp3's are from CDs I own, so I had enough information to generate a good database (rather, grip did). It inserts everything into a MySQL database and I can select everything from a group of artists or albums or from a certain genre or years with just a few clicks. It's always accurate, but if you're just getting stuff off the internet, you'll probably get poor quality id3 tags and the system won't be so useful.
Unfortunately, a database isn't exactly as transparent as a filesystem. It's much more reasonable to expect everything to understand FAT than a Postgres or MySQL database.
The ballot was invalid according to Florida election laws. People complained about it during the election but nothing was done other than to warn the poll workers about it. It may be reasonable for any other districts with illegal ballots to vote again; feel free to bring legal action if you think your ballot was illegal.
The point is, if there really wasn't anything wrong with the ballot and all those peopel are just dumb, there should be the same results if they have a revote in that county with only the same people voting again.
I believe the way it's actually supposed to work is that you have to make a special audio driver for Windows that has to be cryptographically signed by Microsoft. The driver will not allow capturing the output to a file. SDMI applications will ONLY work with these special audio drivers. So not only can you not output to a file, but you can't directly hack at the driver, since it would no longer fit the digital signiture.
So it's hypothetically stopped at the SDMI-level, not the.wav level.
Well, if you look at the exit polls, Gore has over 50% of the votes. The other results are from actual pricincts reporting. Those are going to be heavily biased, since a few Republican-stronghold princincts reporting would make it seem like Bush is doing better than he is. The exit polls are of course unofficial and could be wrong, but they're probably a better indicator than the results of ~30% of princincts actually reporting.
I'm from Mississippi, and I filled out my absentee ballot in October. It went like this:
me: Oops, I left my Voter Registration card and my Social Security Card at school. I hope a driver's license will do!... Hi, I'd like to cast an absentee ballot.
lady: Ok. What's your name.
me: my-name. What kind of ID do I need?
lady: none.
me: Not even a driver's license?!
lady: Nope.
me: In that case I'll take two.
Thankfully she didn't hear that last part. Voter fraud would be REALLY easy. As long as I gave her a registered voter's name, I could vote!
Would you stay home, though? If your wife was able to earn an equal amount as you are earning now (note I did not say more than you), would you happily stay home with the kids? You might, but I think most people who say things like you're saying now wouldn't be so willing. Maybe you've already stayed at home with the kids for an extended period of time; I don't think most husbands do.
The concept of the stay-at-home-mom taking care of 1-3 kids is a relatively new phenomenon. Before, you had families of 8+ and the mother actually did revenue-generating work in the household. Only this century has there been a move towards a stay-at-home mom who spends all her time with a few children (BTW, I grew up in such a situation; I loved it). Everyone makes it sound like the mom staying at home paying lots of attention to kids is how it's always been done and always should be done, and that's just not true. It may be nice, but it's certainly not the default.
I was never quite sure what BeOpen actually planned on doing with Python. At least Digital Creations' entire livlihood depends on Python continuing to exist, and they're already a successful open source company. I thought those of us who love Python had it bad with all the moving around and the uncertainty behind licensing and the language's future (I imagine Guido et al have been having a rougher time at it than I have!), but I just saw on the front page of Linux Weekly News the current TCL plight. So I guess we could have it worse.
ActiveState is already developing a Python.NET. They claim to have it mostly working, and I think they've given out the source already (I haven't used it or looked at it; I don't run Windows). It'll be to the Microsoft.NET CLR as JPython (now Jython) is to the JVM. Last I heard there were some trademark issues with the person who actually owns the python.net domain...
If that were true, that'd be fine and I'd agree with you. Not everyone on Slashdot thinks like that, though. You ignore the "I'd be SUCH a great parent" demographic on Slashdot who seem to suggest that leaving a kid to watch TV or browse the web on their own for an hour is somehow child neglect.
I wasn't really talking about the libraries. I agree filtering there is wrong. Some people seem to think filtering in the home is also wrong. I just find it odd that all of the "The parent should take watch over the kid constantly" posts have "When I have kids..." somewhere else in the post.
I'm certainly not for censorware, but it seems that a lot of posts come from people saying "When I have kids, I'm going to do..." and not a whole lot from people who actually have kids. The same thing comes up when TV gets talked about here. Now, I'm all for parents spending time with kids, but how easy is it to watch your kid 24-7 and have a job and if you're lucky a social life? It doesn't matter how much you love them and how good a parent you want to be, you simply CAN'T devote all 24 hours to your kids. I don't have kids so I'm not going to judge how successful these plans are, but I get an impression that Slashdot is full of pollyannas saying "If I were a parent, I would be great!!"
On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, if a parent can't be with their kid all the time, it might be better for them to buy their own censorware (maybe white-list based instead of black-list based) and let the kid roam with that. I realize that's a far cry from what the article talks about. Would it be so bad? We have to accept the fact that certain parents don't want their kids seeing certain things. The two options for these parents would be to install censorware or only let the kids use the Internet when the parent has time to watch. Which is better? Some may say they're bad parents for wanting to hide things from their kids, but it's their family.
Any real parents reading this? How do you deal with your kids viewing the internet? Do you let them watch TV? Do you spend time with them instead or do they take care of themselves?
But the point is that the market can't grow forever. Even if everybody in the US buys a new computer every year for the rest of their lives, that's zero growth after the first year. It's common sense, of course, that the market can't grow forever. Yet the stock prices for all of these companies were based on the assumption that they would continue to grow for a bazillion years. Which is why Timothy's comment isn't really appropriate. No one is saying that no one else needs a computer. They're saying no one else is buying a computer in the countries these companies operate in.
What you say makes sense, but (and I know you weren't responding to this) idle-time computing seems to be better suited to high-CPU low-memory tasks. For instance, the RC5 client takes almost no memory at all but it will happily chew up any CPU time you give it. The Seti client takes a good bit more memory, right? Something over 10MB, right? (I don't run it). That's why it's run as a screesaver and not just a low-priority process on Windows, right?
How much memory is a Java process going to take? I've heard different stories about how fast Java is, but I've never heard anybody claim that their JVM goes easy on the RAM. Or how is the RAM used in a JVM (all that memory has to be used for something!) Is it the sort of usage that could be easily swapped out when you really start using the computer? Even then, swapping out your JVM so you can get real work done is a lot slower than the simple rescheduling and context switch it takes to change over the CPU usage.
I'm a lot more likely to notice a JVM running in the background than something spatially trivial like an RC5 client.
The fact is, corporations have been treated increasingly like people for the last century or so,
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that a corporation is legally a "person" but not an "individual", and I think it's been this way for a long time. Don't have a Black's Law Dictionary handy to verify it, sorry (and may I never ever have one handy)
Well, I agree that if it all stopped where the VC's make a lot of money from a few profitable companies and just eat the loss from the other companies, then it would not be a gold rush. It would be what VC's are supposed to do, and I don't have any problem with them continuing to do that.
Instead, the VC's make their money in the IPOs (or directly after), and this money comes from ordinary people investing money in something they don't quite understand. You're right: the money isn't coming from nowhere; it comes from the VC's. And their money doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from people who buy at IPOs, not from the companies actually being successful.
I consider this a "gold rush" or "funny money". And if it happens every time there's a new technology, then there's a "gold rush" everytime; frequency doesn't make it any less of a fantasy.
This is why the "VC money drying up" is significant, if it is really happening (I don't know either way). The VC's weren't making money from the actual businesses; they were making money from the ludicrous IPOs. When those stopped, I would expect the VC money to dry up a little bit, since that's all they've been making money on anyway.
There is definitely a gold rush. When you have P/E ratios that will never be justified, there's not much else you can call it. I find it hard to believe that someone can look at all the companies which are getting VC funding and think, "No, there's no gold rush". Maybe if they were all operating off of their own money and losing that, I could believe it was just a bad businesspeople, like new businesses in any other field, but you have people actually earning ridiculous sums of cash without actually producing anything economically viable. The mantra all along had been that people were investing because there would be huge future profits. This was mostly people trying to make themselves feel better about just participating in momentum trading. And I think the recent downturns in stock prices reflect the acknowledgement that maybe it was a bit of a gold rush after all. It's certainly not over yet, either. When the Baby Boomers start to take out money for retirement, the truth should come out. If these companies are really worth what they are on paper, then the market shouldn't have a problem. Somehow I doubt that.
There was another article in The Economist maybe last January which pointed out that there was a similar gold rush every time some big technology came around. Yes, the technology was good for people on the whole, but not necessarily for the investors. They gave the example of the airline industry. When commercial airlines came out, EVERYBODY invested in them. A LOT failed. So many failed that it wasn't until the early 90s that the airline industry as a whole actually turned a profit. The 90s!!!
I love the Internet and computers, and I'm so glad to be living in the time when they're starting to really effect the lives of everyone around me, but that doesn't mean that Wall Street and everyone with their personal retirement funds are actually investing in more than a few tiny gems in a big vat of snake oil.
A telemarketer called me last week. I asked to be put on the don't call list. Apparently she had to go through this huge script when you ask to be put on that list (it took about 45 seconds). My girlfriend was in the room and couldn't understand why I hadn't hung up yet and started giggling very loudly. The telemarketer heard this, and after she finished her script, she called me an unprintable name!! Makes me wish I had paid attention to the phone numbers and reference numbers she had been listing throughout the 30 seconds.
I'm not sure what about my attitude annoys you, but I'm sorry. You seem to be attributing to me opinions I didn't express, or at least exagerrating them.
At my school Napster takes 70% of outbound bandwidth at peak times. The rest of the 30% is taken up for other uses, such as say, email and regular file transfers. I don't use Napster, so all of this use is hurting my relatively meager bandwidth usage.
They currently don't limit bandwidth use at all (it's not particularly feasible, anyway), but if they did (saying, for instance, you will be charged appropriately if you're uploading more than a half gig a day) would that be wrong?
Nowhere did I say that charging was preferable to explicitly limiting abusers, but I was saying that people on slashdot don't tend to like either solution. On the one hand they say they won't pay usage-based fees. On the other hand, you have people complaining that they can't host commercial websites over their flat-rate @Home connections. You're certainly free to have both opinions at the same time, but it doesn't make any economic sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in my third year of college Japanese (I'm a college Junior), and I'm trying to find an internship for next summer. I've pretty much resigned myself to working in the US (not that that's bad) and maybe going to Japan for 2 weeks or so just for fun (I've never been). My Japanese is decent, but let's just say that my programming is quite a bit better. Reading would definitely be a problem. Something makes me think, though, that most of the technical jargon used in Japan would probably be just Japanese pronounciations of the English technical jargon. Anyone know if that's the case? Is it reasonable to look for an internship in Japan, or would I be doing myself and the company a disservice if I actually landed one?
JPEG is a lossy compression format.
PNG and GIF are lossless compression formats.
The reason JPEGs are smaller is that they don't have all the information in there. So on the size front it's no surprise that JPEG "wipes the floor with" PNG. They just look crappier.
If you go entirely on the MD5 hash, you will get false positives: look at the "birthday problem" to see why. With literally millions of different songs on Napster, there will be many random "collisions" (as they are known in crypto circles).
Well, technically yes. Practically no. MD5 is a 128-bit hash, so there are 2^128 hash values. You'd need 2^64 distinct MP3s before you're likely to find two which hash to the same thing. 2^64 is really, really big. MD5 may or may not be a perfect hash (I think there is some evidence of flaws), but even if specific attacks were known, it's not like people are going to specifically construct MP3s so that they get hash to a known value (making themselves "look guilty" on purpose).
Remember, the AVERAGE growth is 8 to 10 percent. This can mean up years of 20 percent and down years of 10 percent.
Warren Buffet (very well-respected investment guru) pointed out in a speech that it doesn't make any sense for the stock market to grow faster than the economy as a whole. How can the stock market, which represents all of the public companies in the country, grow faster than the economy of the country for any sustainable period of time? The two possibilities are either that everything has been undervalued all along (I seriously doubt it) or a larger-scale but less severe bubble is being created (and has been created ever since the baby boomers started saving for retirement). The economy grows at about 3-5% a year, as measured by output. The stock market grows at about 8% a year. It's easy to see that as time goes on and this continues, $x in the stock market will represent less and less actual output.
So they use code that volunteers wrote and turned it into a self-promoting product. Why is this problem? I would first say that the fact that Netscape employees wrote most of the code gives them the moral right to do so. But even if they didn't, anyone is free to do such a thing. I could create a custom version of Mozilla (let's call it FizgigBrowser 6.1, since I have to be ahead) and have every button on there be a link to my homepage. Why is this so wrong? Netscape has graciously given everyone the right to do whatever they please with the code they pay to have written; are they somehow in the wrong for taking advantage of the reciprocal offer of other developers?
"Does any of this money generated by the browser go back to Mozilla? I kinda doubt it?"
Um, how about the fact that they've been paying people to work on Mozilla for 32 months and haven't actually gotten any revenue from it yet. Don't you think they've paid their dues several times over by now? (not that there actually _are_ any dues)
I have a tiny bit of code that made it into most of the Linux distributions. Red Hat's desktop has lots of links to Red Hat sites. Should I feel cheated?
It's a lot harder for the boss to do that now, though.
Now, it goes: "Get an absentee ballot. I will watch you fill it out and drop it in the mail. Do this or be fired."
In the hypothetical future it might go: "Bring back a receipt and show it to me or be fired."
The former is quite a bit harder to pull off. Both of these are better than the everyone votes online strategy, though, since in that case the boss can be a bit more subtle in the "Do this or be fired" part, making it harder to prosecute.
You need at least the 14(15?) most populous states to win an alectoral contest. That's more (three times more) than you need in a popular vote.
That's assuming they get 100% of the vote in those states. I don't care what a candidate promises a state, they can NEVER get 100% of the vote. I'd be surprised if they could get more than 80% even in a large state that already liked them. Plus if every politician is promising everything to those states, they'll just end up splitting the popular vote in those states. As a result, the smaller states become important again. With an electoral college, you can get elected (in a 2-way race; the ratios are probably the same for more) with ~31% of the vote while the other guy gets 69% of the vote. Without the electoral college you need over 50%.
Unfortunately, you have to go through a lot of hoops to get more than one relationship. That's what a relational database (even with flat files!) would be better. I can easily organize my files by artist with a filesystem. But then what if I want to organize them by genre or date? I'd have to move everything around.
Databases are the only way to go, if you have enough information to classify them. The MP3 player shell I use is DigitalDJ, which works with the Grip ripper. All of my mp3's are from CDs I own, so I had enough information to generate a good database (rather, grip did). It inserts everything into a MySQL database and I can select everything from a group of artists or albums or from a certain genre or years with just a few clicks. It's always accurate, but if you're just getting stuff off the internet, you'll probably get poor quality id3 tags and the system won't be so useful.
Unfortunately, a database isn't exactly as transparent as a filesystem. It's much more reasonable to expect everything to understand FAT than a Postgres or MySQL database.
The ballot was invalid according to Florida election laws. People complained about it during the election but nothing was done other than to warn the poll workers about it. It may be reasonable for any other districts with illegal ballots to vote again; feel free to bring legal action if you think your ballot was illegal.
The point is, if there really wasn't anything wrong with the ballot and all those peopel are just dumb, there should be the same results if they have a revote in that county with only the same people voting again.
I believe the way it's actually supposed to work is that you have to make a special audio driver for Windows that has to be cryptographically signed by Microsoft. The driver will not allow capturing the output to a file. SDMI applications will ONLY work with these special audio drivers. So not only can you not output to a file, but you can't directly hack at the driver, since it would no longer fit the digital signiture.
.wav level.
So it's hypothetically stopped at the SDMI-level, not the
Well, if you look at the exit polls, Gore has over 50% of the votes. The other results are from actual pricincts reporting. Those are going to be heavily biased, since a few Republican-stronghold princincts reporting would make it seem like Bush is doing better than he is. The exit polls are of course unofficial and could be wrong, but they're probably a better indicator than the results of ~30% of princincts actually reporting.
I'm from Mississippi, and I filled out my absentee ballot in October. It went like this:
... Hi, I'd like to cast an absentee ballot.
me: Oops, I left my Voter Registration card and my Social Security Card at school. I hope a driver's license will do!
lady: Ok. What's your name.
me: my-name. What kind of ID do I need?
lady: none.
me: Not even a driver's license?!
lady: Nope.
me: In that case I'll take two.
Thankfully she didn't hear that last part. Voter fraud would be REALLY easy. As long as I gave her a registered voter's name, I could vote!
Would you stay home, though? If your wife was able to earn an equal amount as you are earning now (note I did not say more than you), would you happily stay home with the kids? You might, but I think most people who say things like you're saying now wouldn't be so willing. Maybe you've already stayed at home with the kids for an extended period of time; I don't think most husbands do.
The concept of the stay-at-home-mom taking care of 1-3 kids is a relatively new phenomenon. Before, you had families of 8+ and the mother actually did revenue-generating work in the household. Only this century has there been a move towards a stay-at-home mom who spends all her time with a few children (BTW, I grew up in such a situation; I loved it). Everyone makes it sound like the mom staying at home paying lots of attention to kids is how it's always been done and always should be done, and that's just not true. It may be nice, but it's certainly not the default.
He didn't say it talked to the server. He said it talked to the OS. I'd be mighty surprised if Javascript gets by without one of those!
I was never quite sure what BeOpen actually planned on doing with Python. At least Digital Creations' entire livlihood depends on Python continuing to exist, and they're already a successful open source company. I thought those of us who love Python had it bad with all the moving around and the uncertainty behind licensing and the language's future (I imagine Guido et al have been having a rougher time at it than I have!), but I just saw on the front page of Linux Weekly News the current TCL plight. So I guess we could have it worse.
ActiveState is already developing a Python.NET. They claim to have it mostly working, and I think they've given out the source already (I haven't used it or looked at it; I don't run Windows). It'll be to the Microsoft.NET CLR as JPython (now Jython) is to the JVM. Last I heard there were some trademark issues with the person who actually owns the python.net domain...
If that were true, that'd be fine and I'd agree with you. Not everyone on Slashdot thinks like that, though. You ignore the "I'd be SUCH a great parent" demographic on Slashdot who seem to suggest that leaving a kid to watch TV or browse the web on their own for an hour is somehow child neglect.
I wasn't really talking about the libraries. I agree filtering there is wrong. Some people seem to think filtering in the home is also wrong. I just find it odd that all of the "The parent should take watch over the kid constantly" posts have "When I have kids..." somewhere else in the post.
I'm certainly not for censorware, but it seems that a lot of posts come from people saying "When I have kids, I'm going to do..." and not a whole lot from people who actually have kids. The same thing comes up when TV gets talked about here. Now, I'm all for parents spending time with kids, but how easy is it to watch your kid 24-7 and have a job and if you're lucky a social life? It doesn't matter how much you love them and how good a parent you want to be, you simply CAN'T devote all 24 hours to your kids. I don't have kids so I'm not going to judge how successful these plans are, but I get an impression that Slashdot is full of pollyannas saying "If I were a parent, I would be great!!"
On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, if a parent can't be with their kid all the time, it might be better for them to buy their own censorware (maybe white-list based instead of black-list based) and let the kid roam with that. I realize that's a far cry from what the article talks about. Would it be so bad? We have to accept the fact that certain parents don't want their kids seeing certain things. The two options for these parents would be to install censorware or only let the kids use the Internet when the parent has time to watch. Which is better? Some may say they're bad parents for wanting to hide things from their kids, but it's their family.
Any real parents reading this? How do you deal with your kids viewing the internet? Do you let them watch TV? Do you spend time with them instead or do they take care of themselves?
But the point is that the market can't grow forever. Even if everybody in the US buys a new computer every year for the rest of their lives, that's zero growth after the first year. It's common sense, of course, that the market can't grow forever. Yet the stock prices for all of these companies were based on the assumption that they would continue to grow for a bazillion years. Which is why Timothy's comment isn't really appropriate. No one is saying that no one else needs a computer. They're saying no one else is buying a computer in the countries these companies operate in.
What you say makes sense, but (and I know you weren't responding to this) idle-time computing seems to be better suited to high-CPU low-memory tasks. For instance, the RC5 client takes almost no memory at all but it will happily chew up any CPU time you give it. The Seti client takes a good bit more memory, right? Something over 10MB, right? (I don't run it). That's why it's run as a screesaver and not just a low-priority process on Windows, right?
How much memory is a Java process going to take? I've heard different stories about how fast Java is, but I've never heard anybody claim that their JVM goes easy on the RAM. Or how is the RAM used in a JVM (all that memory has to be used for something!) Is it the sort of usage that could be easily swapped out when you really start using the computer? Even then, swapping out your JVM so you can get real work done is a lot slower than the simple rescheduling and context switch it takes to change over the CPU usage.
I'm a lot more likely to notice a JVM running in the background than something spatially trivial like an RC5 client.
The fact is, corporations have been treated increasingly like people for the last century or so,
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that a corporation is legally a "person" but not an "individual", and I think it's been this way for a long time. Don't have a Black's Law Dictionary handy to verify it, sorry (and may I never ever have one handy)
Well, I agree that if it all stopped where the VC's make a lot of money from a few profitable companies and just eat the loss from the other companies, then it would not be a gold rush. It would be what VC's are supposed to do, and I don't have any problem with them continuing to do that.
Instead, the VC's make their money in the IPOs (or directly after), and this money comes from ordinary people investing money in something they don't quite understand. You're right: the money isn't coming from nowhere; it comes from the VC's. And their money doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from people who buy at IPOs, not from the companies actually being successful.
I consider this a "gold rush" or "funny money". And if it happens every time there's a new technology, then there's a "gold rush" everytime; frequency doesn't make it any less of a fantasy.
This is why the "VC money drying up" is significant, if it is really happening (I don't know either way). The VC's weren't making money from the actual businesses; they were making money from the ludicrous IPOs. When those stopped, I would expect the VC money to dry up a little bit, since that's all they've been making money on anyway.
There is definitely a gold rush. When you have P/E ratios that will never be justified, there's not much else you can call it. I find it hard to believe that someone can look at all the companies which are getting VC funding and think, "No, there's no gold rush". Maybe if they were all operating off of their own money and losing that, I could believe it was just a bad businesspeople, like new businesses in any other field, but you have people actually earning ridiculous sums of cash without actually producing anything economically viable. The mantra all along had been that people were investing because there would be huge future profits. This was mostly people trying to make themselves feel better about just participating in momentum trading. And I think the recent downturns in stock prices reflect the acknowledgement that maybe it was a bit of a gold rush after all. It's certainly not over yet, either. When the Baby Boomers start to take out money for retirement, the truth should come out. If these companies are really worth what they are on paper, then the market shouldn't have a problem. Somehow I doubt that.
There was another article in The Economist maybe last January which pointed out that there was a similar gold rush every time some big technology came around. Yes, the technology was good for people on the whole, but not necessarily for the investors. They gave the example of the airline industry. When commercial airlines came out, EVERYBODY invested in them. A LOT failed. So many failed that it wasn't until the early 90s that the airline industry as a whole actually turned a profit. The 90s!!!
I love the Internet and computers, and I'm so glad to be living in the time when they're starting to really effect the lives of everyone around me, but that doesn't mean that Wall Street and everyone with their personal retirement funds are actually investing in more than a few tiny gems in a big vat of snake oil.
A telemarketer called me last week. I asked to be put on the don't call list. Apparently she had to go through this huge script when you ask to be put on that list (it took about 45 seconds). My girlfriend was in the room and couldn't understand why I hadn't hung up yet and started giggling very loudly. The telemarketer heard this, and after she finished her script, she called me an unprintable name!! Makes me wish I had paid attention to the phone numbers and reference numbers she had been listing throughout the 30 seconds.
I'm not sure what about my attitude annoys you, but I'm sorry. You seem to be attributing to me opinions I didn't express, or at least exagerrating them.
At my school Napster takes 70% of outbound bandwidth at peak times. The rest of the 30% is taken up for other uses, such as say, email and regular file transfers. I don't use Napster, so all of this use is hurting my relatively meager bandwidth usage.
They currently don't limit bandwidth use at all (it's not particularly feasible, anyway), but if they did (saying, for instance, you will be charged appropriately if you're uploading more than a half gig a day) would that be wrong?
Nowhere did I say that charging was preferable to explicitly limiting abusers, but I was saying that people on slashdot don't tend to like either solution. On the one hand they say they won't pay usage-based fees. On the other hand, you have people complaining that they can't host commercial websites over their flat-rate @Home connections. You're certainly free to have both opinions at the same time, but it doesn't make any economic sense.