I 100% guarantee you that you can built two panels and the wire all the way across the ocean for less money than it costs to launch one set into space.
Looks like you forgot to take into account transmission loss through wires. Now, you're going to get conversion loss in your IR laser beaming at the source and destination, as well well as some transmission loss through the atmosphere, but that number is going to be fixed no matter what the orbit. Conversely 20,000 kilometers of wire leads to some pretty hefty power loss if it's not superconducting wire, and some pretty significant construction and ongoing cooling costs, particularly underwater, if you're planning on using superconducting cable. This isn't a fiber optic telco cable you're talking about.
You would think businesses would understand the difference by now. However with most public companies focused on the next quarterly or yearly report, the operational factors seem to overwhelm the strategic, until something like a major recession slaps them upside the head. "IT as a business" and best practice frameworks for IT work well for operational tasks. Software development, among other functions of IT, are strategic tasks and those tasks will function best when well integrated with the needs of the business instead of the needs of business units. So manage operational functions like a separate business, but integrate strategic functions more closely with the business and use the data you gather at the operational level to inform those strategic decisions.
If profit isn't present then I think you'll see the quality of the health care system go down. What do you think motivates many people to get into medicine?
These days in the US? Money for a lot of cases, particularly doctors since the system abuses them during the required hospital residency stage. There's no reason for them to have to work the consecutive hour lengths for typical shifts they are made to work - those shifts would be illegal for airplane pilots but for some reason they're OK for doctors? That's a high barrier to entry on the motivational dimension and the ones who get through either really want to help people a lot or really want to make a lot of money. That probably is a factor in increasing healthcare costs in the US.
But back to your point, which doctor do you think is going to provide you with the best care? The one doing it for the money and who rushes to see as many patients as possible, or the one who cares about people and wants to help them? Fortunately, it's usually not a mutually exclusive proposition and many doctors want to make a reasonable amount of money while still helping people. But generally, for equivalent competency, most people would get better service from the doctor who wants to help people than from the one who is in it for the money. Finally, people (including doctors) get better by repetitive practice involving positive feedback, and a doctor who wants to help people is going to care more about improving outcomes (ie. improving themselves as a doctor), while someone in it for the money will only care about improving patient outcomes if it happens to coincide with improving their own income.
But the stats tell the story better than any case study: the US spends more money per capita on healthcare than other industrialized countries for worse average outcomes in most categories.
They can't get a grip on Linux though, and they are scared like shit about that.
Actually, I think they're fighting socio-economics that aren't in their favour. Being a groundbreaker on providing a fundamental horizontal product is very lucrative, but the product's success is the seeds of its death. Like the RIAA, they're using every trick in the book to keep the gravy train going, but the writing is on the wall.
Because telnet is horribly insecure and you should no longer be using it for any remote access or remote management. The same goes for non-anonymous FTP. OK, that may not be why Microsoft removed telnet, but it's as good a reason as anyone needs. Anything telnet can do, SSH/OpenSSH/PuTTY can do better. If you have a device that can only be managed by telnet, it's long overdue for replacement.
Now, if the FTC thinks Intel has an unfair advantage because they own their fabs, well, AMD chose a different route. Emphasis on CHOSE.
I'm not convinced it was a choice but instead suspect they were coerced by market forces. AMD doesn't have the multi-billion dollar war chest that Intel has to be able to spend on new multi-billion$ fabs. So when AMD needed to build a new fab for the next process generation, they would have needed to borrow lots of money at a time when the banks weren't lending even if you offered your first-born. So they split off the fabs and found an outside investor for that and kept their IP family jewels. If this is correct then it actually reinforces the GP's point about high barriers to entry.
I don't think this is a variant on "the tragedy of the commons". There is no "commons" here, just a bunch of walled gardens. If there were a commons of code for these modems, then everyone would have access to the code. There is a "fear of the commons" here that others will profit from the first mover improvements to the commons.
Central to Hardin's article is an example (first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd), of a hypothetical and simplified situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin's example, it is in each herder's interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the carrying capacity of the common is exceeded and it is temporarily or permanently damaged for all as a result. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed to the detriment of all.
Clearly a shared base of code fixes is a commons. The point of the tragedy of the commons is that you have people extracting from the commons beyond sustainability because it's in their economic self-interest to do so. In this variant, the cell phone manufacturers are unwilling to contribute to building/improving a commons because doing so is not in their economic self-interest. There's a pretty clear parallel to me.
This is interesting because it has implications for the situations where open source-type communal projects are economically viable and where they are not. When computing systems were relatively rare, operating systems were part of systems that provided first mover advantage and could be sold as products. However, as computing capacity becomes commoditized and ubiquitous, the proposition of setting up a commons appears to become more economically advantageous. If the above is true, it would seem to indicate that open source communal projects are viable for commodity components for infrastructure, but not for core mission critical functions that provide a competitive advantage. If that's the case, then in a mature software development industry, there will only be manufacturers of software for vertical markets because software for horizontal markets will be better supplied by community-supported projects. Which would mean that in the long term, the economics are against the sustainability of Microsoft, Oracle, and other giants of the horizontal product market. In a mature industry the companies that will survive are companies that facilitate maintenance and use of the commons, like RedHat, Canonical, etc., and companies that focus on vertical markets and custom software development, like IBM, EDS, etc.
And to some degree, the cell companies probably like it this way because it makes it harder for new competitors to build phones that work.
This.
In fact the current state you describe is almost certainly due to cell manufacturers. It's not just about barriers to entry but also about competitive advantage. Otherwise the first adopters of new chips would spend lots of money on bug fixing in development. In contrast, their competitors would be able to release shortly afterwards with the shared firmware bug fixes and price their product lower because they wouldn't need to amortize the debugging costs that the first mover had to absorb. A manufacturer would only let that happen to them once, then they would find another supplier that didn't work that way. It's an interesting variant on the tragedy of the commons.
Huge on the list should be the inability of Android to run apps from the SD card
Mebbe so. But that also shuts down a significant vector for viral malware and worms since SD cards are going to be one of the main physical vectors for data exchange. If you're not going to have a locked down phone which checks centrally signed code signatures, this feature is pretty important to limit malware attack vectors.
Actually, I thought Donald Kingsbury did a decent job of that with Psychohistorical Crisis. It was better than the overhyped trilogy by the 3 B's. The final product could have been polished a bit better maybe, without needing to resorting to the "start in the middle of the story" trick that Kingsbury's used before. But Kingsbury's second empire were actually a pretty decent update/reboot of the original concept, and all the errors in applying psychohistory to a muddled past (which partly includes our present) are a hoot. It's also a great commentary on pseudo-spiritualism. I think you could do a pretty decent movie in PHC's world.
Seriously? That would be terrific if they can do a decent job. Heck, even a half decent job would help more people adjust to the future shock wave that is coming down the pipe.
Perhaps. What it also might do is allow ISPs to effectively run local torrent caches to limit the amount of traffic that goes over their pipes to the internet (and which they have to pay for). If they tried to do that now then they would be subject to contributing to copyright infringement for anything other than linux isos and similar free content. With this though, they could intercept torrent traffic, monitor which are the most popular of the DRM'd torrents, and cache and share those. That would effectively give DRM'd torrents a big advantage over the regular kind because they would be fed locally at high speed. Of course they would need to do a faster and more reliable job than the old HTTP proxy servers that IPSs initially tried to use and everybody wound up bypassing due to poor performance. It would have to be a cost-benefit analysis of whether setting up and maintaining the system saves enough back-end bandwidth to have decent ROI. However since it would make the DRM'd torrents more attractive, maybe they could ask the MAFIAA to ante up part of the startup costs.
I know what you mean. At less than 18 months, our son was pressing keys at random while sitting on my wife's lap as she used her iMac computer. He managed to get the preferences changed to run an inverted video once, as well as to get it to go into some sort of audio/speech synthesis visually-impaired-support mode. At that age he wasn't that savvy either. Nowadays at nearly 2 years, he's starting to try to play head games with us and it might be believable, but back then no.
Indeed, supporting the development of thorium nuclear power plant technology would be the best way for the US to stop nuclear weapons proliferation. If a thorium alternative was available, then it would be pretty clear that a state like Iran or North Korea attempting to build a nuclear plant would be doing so for non-civilian applications. Why the US didn't do that 20 years ago is beyond me (actually, no it isn't - most politicians are even more short-sighted than a typical American CEO with a 5-year outlook).
But I assume the database vendors know what they are doing, and they seem to assume true floating point decimal is needed, not just fixed point.
Funny but the money data type has been in Microsoft SQL Server since SQLSrvr2000, and there's at least one other. But yeah, Oracle currently only supports BCD-style Numeric(). Of course there's a lot of non-financial data that's better suited to floating point.
But the important point is that, unless you've got infinite memory to hold repeating decimal places (such as when you divide by 3), at the end of the day, you're still going to be doing some kind of rounding off with BCDs as much as with fixed point binary. Yeah, there's maybe a little more work in using integer ops to do fixed points than there is with floating point, but it's going to be way faster than BCD calculations. If you're smart, you use a language or a compiler that allows you to hide most of that. For nearly all financial transactions, money is a fixed point value, and you can deal with it appropriately that way in decimal or binary arithmetic.
Why use BCD these days? It seems pretty silly to me. Why wouldn't you just use fixed point binary instead? i.e your unit is a cent (or 1/100 of a cent if you're a Microsoft DB) and you do integer calculations with those units. Then the position of your decimal place is just a representational nicety after base conversion. No 0.10000000000000001 will result.
Meh. I've always thought Gibson was overrated and unnecessarily obtuse. As Charles Stross implies in Singularity Sky, the next generation will misunderstand what Gibson means in Neuromancer with "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel". And that was one of his better books. Sorry, but while there are also a lot of bad SF writers with technology backgrounds, the only semi-recent SF author without a technology background who could reliably write half-decent SF was Heinlein. That's because he knew his limits and concentrated on the sociological aspects of cultural trends.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like you forgot to take into account transmission loss through wires. Now, you're going to get conversion loss in your IR laser beaming at the source and destination, as well well as some transmission loss through the atmosphere, but that number is going to be fixed no matter what the orbit. Conversely 20,000 kilometers of wire leads to some pretty hefty power loss if it's not superconducting wire, and some pretty significant construction and ongoing cooling costs, particularly underwater, if you're planning on using superconducting cable. This isn't a fiber optic telco cable you're talking about.
You would think businesses would understand the difference by now. However with most public companies focused on the next quarterly or yearly report, the operational factors seem to overwhelm the strategic, until something like a major recession slaps them upside the head. "IT as a business" and best practice frameworks for IT work well for operational tasks. Software development, among other functions of IT, are strategic tasks and those tasks will function best when well integrated with the needs of the business instead of the needs of business units. So manage operational functions like a separate business, but integrate strategic functions more closely with the business and use the data you gather at the operational level to inform those strategic decisions.
These days in the US? Money for a lot of cases, particularly doctors since the system abuses them during the required hospital residency stage. There's no reason for them to have to work the consecutive hour lengths for typical shifts they are made to work - those shifts would be illegal for airplane pilots but for some reason they're OK for doctors? That's a high barrier to entry on the motivational dimension and the ones who get through either really want to help people a lot or really want to make a lot of money. That probably is a factor in increasing healthcare costs in the US.
But back to your point, which doctor do you think is going to provide you with the best care? The one doing it for the money and who rushes to see as many patients as possible, or the one who cares about people and wants to help them? Fortunately, it's usually not a mutually exclusive proposition and many doctors want to make a reasonable amount of money while still helping people. But generally, for equivalent competency, most people would get better service from the doctor who wants to help people than from the one who is in it for the money. Finally, people (including doctors) get better by repetitive practice involving positive feedback, and a doctor who wants to help people is going to care more about improving outcomes (ie. improving themselves as a doctor), while someone in it for the money will only care about improving patient outcomes if it happens to coincide with improving their own income.
But the stats tell the story better than any case study: the US spends more money per capita on healthcare than other industrialized countries for worse average outcomes in most categories.
Use Portable PuTTY on a USB stick or a CD ?
Actually, I think they're fighting socio-economics that aren't in their favour. Being a groundbreaker on providing a fundamental horizontal product is very lucrative, but the product's success is the seeds of its death. Like the RIAA, they're using every trick in the book to keep the gravy train going, but the writing is on the wall.
Because telnet is horribly insecure and you should no longer be using it for any remote access or remote management. The same goes for non-anonymous FTP. OK, that may not be why Microsoft removed telnet, but it's as good a reason as anyone needs. Anything telnet can do, SSH/OpenSSH/PuTTY can do better. If you have a device that can only be managed by telnet, it's long overdue for replacement.
???? RDP is still in Win 7.
It can if you use the person to apply a colonic to an elephant.
I'm not convinced it was a choice but instead suspect they were coerced by market forces. AMD doesn't have the multi-billion dollar war chest that Intel has to be able to spend on new multi-billion$ fabs. So when AMD needed to build a new fab for the next process generation, they would have needed to borrow lots of money at a time when the banks weren't lending even if you offered your first-born. So they split off the fabs and found an outside investor for that and kept their IP family jewels. If this is correct then it actually reinforces the GP's point about high barriers to entry.
Just what exactly do you think "the tragedy of the commons" is?
Clearly a shared base of code fixes is a commons. The point of the tragedy of the commons is that you have people extracting from the commons beyond sustainability because it's in their economic self-interest to do so. In this variant, the cell phone manufacturers are unwilling to contribute to building/improving a commons because doing so is not in their economic self-interest. There's a pretty clear parallel to me.
This is interesting because it has implications for the situations where open source-type communal projects are economically viable and where they are not. When computing systems were relatively rare, operating systems were part of systems that provided first mover advantage and could be sold as products. However, as computing capacity becomes commoditized and ubiquitous, the proposition of setting up a commons appears to become more economically advantageous. If the above is true, it would seem to indicate that open source communal projects are viable for commodity components for infrastructure, but not for core mission critical functions that provide a competitive advantage. If that's the case, then in a mature software development industry, there will only be manufacturers of software for vertical markets because software for horizontal markets will be better supplied by community-supported projects. Which would mean that in the long term, the economics are against the sustainability of Microsoft, Oracle, and other giants of the horizontal product market. In a mature industry the companies that will survive are companies that facilitate maintenance and use of the commons, like RedHat, Canonical, etc., and companies that focus on vertical markets and custom software development, like IBM, EDS, etc.
This.
In fact the current state you describe is almost certainly due to cell manufacturers. It's not just about barriers to entry but also about competitive advantage. Otherwise the first adopters of new chips would spend lots of money on bug fixing in development. In contrast, their competitors would be able to release shortly afterwards with the shared firmware bug fixes and price their product lower because they wouldn't need to amortize the debugging costs that the first mover had to absorb. A manufacturer would only let that happen to them once, then they would find another supplier that didn't work that way. It's an interesting variant on the tragedy of the commons.
Metal implants or fillings + bone conduction. Keep that in mind next time you think it would be cool to be a Gibsonesque razor girl/boy.
Mebbe so. But that also shuts down a significant vector for viral malware and worms since SD cards are going to be one of the main physical vectors for data exchange. If you're not going to have a locked down phone which checks centrally signed code signatures, this feature is pretty important to limit malware attack vectors.
It's pronounced ski-fi. :-)
Actually, I thought Donald Kingsbury did a decent job of that with Psychohistorical Crisis. It was better than the overhyped trilogy by the 3 B's. The final product could have been polished a bit better maybe, without needing to resorting to the "start in the middle of the story" trick that Kingsbury's used before. But Kingsbury's second empire were actually a pretty decent update/reboot of the original concept, and all the errors in applying psychohistory to a muddled past (which partly includes our present) are a hoot. It's also a great commentary on pseudo-spiritualism. I think you could do a pretty decent movie in PHC's world.
Seriously? That would be terrific if they can do a decent job. Heck, even a half decent job would help more people adjust to the future shock wave that is coming down the pipe.
Perhaps. What it also might do is allow ISPs to effectively run local torrent caches to limit the amount of traffic that goes over their pipes to the internet (and which they have to pay for). If they tried to do that now then they would be subject to contributing to copyright infringement for anything other than linux isos and similar free content. With this though, they could intercept torrent traffic, monitor which are the most popular of the DRM'd torrents, and cache and share those. That would effectively give DRM'd torrents a big advantage over the regular kind because they would be fed locally at high speed. Of course they would need to do a faster and more reliable job than the old HTTP proxy servers that IPSs initially tried to use and everybody wound up bypassing due to poor performance. It would have to be a cost-benefit analysis of whether setting up and maintaining the system saves enough back-end bandwidth to have decent ROI. However since it would make the DRM'd torrents more attractive, maybe they could ask the MAFIAA to ante up part of the startup costs.
Pardon me boy, is that the californium choo-choo?
I know what you mean. At less than 18 months, our son was pressing keys at random while sitting on my wife's lap as she used her iMac computer. He managed to get the preferences changed to run an inverted video once, as well as to get it to go into some sort of audio/speech synthesis visually-impaired-support mode. At that age he wasn't that savvy either. Nowadays at nearly 2 years, he's starting to try to play head games with us and it might be believable, but back then no.
Are you sure?
Oops - attempting to build a uranium-based nuclear plant
FTFM
Indeed, supporting the development of thorium nuclear power plant technology would be the best way for the US to stop nuclear weapons proliferation. If a thorium alternative was available, then it would be pretty clear that a state like Iran or North Korea attempting to build a nuclear plant would be doing so for non-civilian applications. Why the US didn't do that 20 years ago is beyond me (actually, no it isn't - most politicians are even more short-sighted than a typical American CEO with a 5-year outlook).
Funny but the money data type has been in Microsoft SQL Server since SQLSrvr2000, and there's at least one other. But yeah, Oracle currently only supports BCD-style Numeric(). Of course there's a lot of non-financial data that's better suited to floating point.
But the important point is that, unless you've got infinite memory to hold repeating decimal places (such as when you divide by 3), at the end of the day, you're still going to be doing some kind of rounding off with BCDs as much as with fixed point binary. Yeah, there's maybe a little more work in using integer ops to do fixed points than there is with floating point, but it's going to be way faster than BCD calculations. If you're smart, you use a language or a compiler that allows you to hide most of that. For nearly all financial transactions, money is a fixed point value, and you can deal with it appropriately that way in decimal or binary arithmetic.
Why use BCD these days? It seems pretty silly to me. Why wouldn't you just use fixed point binary instead? i.e your unit is a cent (or 1/100 of a cent if you're a Microsoft DB) and you do integer calculations with those units. Then the position of your decimal place is just a representational nicety after base conversion. No 0.10000000000000001 will result.
Meh. I've always thought Gibson was overrated and unnecessarily obtuse. As Charles Stross implies in Singularity Sky, the next generation will misunderstand what Gibson means in Neuromancer with "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel". And that was one of his better books. Sorry, but while there are also a lot of bad SF writers with technology backgrounds, the only semi-recent SF author without a technology background who could reliably write half-decent SF was Heinlein. That's because he knew his limits and concentrated on the sociological aspects of cultural trends.
Throughout my university days, I had this idyllic picture of a Maldives beach hanging on my wall. I used to feel bad that the islands would likely get flooded by rising waters due to global warming. Now I only feel sorry for the non-human inhabitants.