Many sports cars -- even some of the more expensive ones -- get 30+ mpg on the highway just like more economical cars. Even a 2004 Corvette with an enormous 5.7 liter engine gets 25 mpg on the highway, which is above average; the Pilot gets 22 mpg, the CR-V 25-29 mpg (depending on transmission configuration). A Hummer, meanwhile, gets only 14 mpg.
Of course, if you could get people to live closer to work (failures in modern zoning have made this impractically expensive in much of the USA, but even incremental improvements would help), or to avoid commuting during rush hour, it would have nearly the effect of the whole country switching to hybrids (ones that work, even).
But nobody's going to do that either.
I personally enjoyed Snow Crash for its idiosyncratic style, but I have been led to understand that some readers found them off-putting. Should you change your mind about The Baroque Cycle, you will find it largely free of the stylistic indulgences that essentially defined Snow Crash. It may not suit your personal aesthetic, but if it doesn't it won't be for the same reasons that Snow Crash failed you.
For example, Bill Murray and Steve Martin should play Magikthies and Vroomfondel.
I'm not big on most of the suggestions of Americans to cast, but I think this is a phenomenal idea, if only it could be made to happen.
On the other hand, that one scene in the hands of those two could steal (and/or ruin...yaneverknow) the whole movie.
For the most part, though, I think there's something wonderfully British about the whole thing that I hope can be preserved in the movie. American actors probably aren't the best way to go about that in general, unless anybody wants to cast Renee Zellweger as Trillian...thought not.
In a truly free market, there is no problem with using the behavior of that market to determine the value of a given product. That said, no market is truly, completely free; all have competitive and/or financial barriers to entry of some kind. In some industries, like telecommunications or chip fabrication, these barriers are extremely large and equally obvious.
Software, however, is by and large an industry with very few readily apparent barriers to entry. The finanical barriers are in fact so low that in several sub-markets a free competitor has emerged, prompting many people like yourself to declare software a commodity. While that's true in a sense, it is like the free market analysis in this case -- it misses an important piece of the puzzle.
Microsoft has been extraordinarily successful over the years for a number of reasons. They have been greatly aided by the stupidity and/or shortsightedness of their early competitors, which is not something that should be held against them, but it is also not the primary factor in their success. What drives their success is the fact that Microsoft was the first software company to understand the hidden barriers to entry in the software business: mindshare and customer lock-in.
No other market with the same dynamics comes to mind. A company buying a competing OS or office/productivity suite faces potentially having to retrain their entire workforce, throwing away the money they already spent training the same people how to use the Microsoft products. How many people's parents have taken a class in Word or Excel? Other lock-in issues, like proprietary document formats and hardware compatibility, provide customers with artificial incentives to maintain the status quo not found in most other markets.
Microsoft was the first software company to really understand these issues. They understood them so well that they fought every way they could -- not all of them legal -- to increase market share. While it could be argued quite successfully that Microsoft's early success was based on their value proposition, much of their current success owes more to that early success than it owes to anything in their value proposition today.
I use gvim instead of vim when it's available
for two reasons. One, when syntax highlighting is useful, more and more visually appealing color schemes are possible than I've been able to make work in a terminal window. Two, it solves the pesky backspace problem you sometimes encounter on linux systems without any hassle. If neither of those apply, I don't generally bother. I never use the toolbars or menu anyway.
Any editor without intellisense-like functionality is a waste of time. Seriously.
If your build has the feature enabled, you can
use ^N/^P to navigate possible keyword completions in vim using a tags file. It's reasonably quick, and perfect for things like:
(The fact that having such similar identifiers is often a bad coding practice has sadly not slowed the masses.) Intellisense editors would have you type
this_is_really_a_rather_lo
before it would finally figure it out on the next keystroke. Vim, on the other hand, gives you
I guess we can only hope that at the end of the trial the judges will find that life itself is in contempt of court, and duly confiscate it from all those involved before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening's ultra, er, round of golf...
The television industry shouldn't be as threatened
by this as the music or movie industries. Movies will always be better for many people when seen in a large theater, but that won't save the video market. There'll always be a market for concert tickets and radio ads, but that won't save album sales. For both music and movies, having consumers purchase (or rent) a digital copy of the material is a large part of their market; if people can get them for free, a substantial portion of their possible revenue stream is gone. This is much less so for television, where the practice of offering collections of episodes on tape or DVD has never been widespread.
Another thing is the "water cooler" aspect of (particularly prime-time) television. How many people are archiving Survivor episodes? What's a tape of the Super Bowl worth? For many television shows, the biggest lure is watching them with everyone else, being able to talk about them afterward, and having that shared experience with many people.
Finally, there's the sheer volume and variety of the material. Of course, a great deal of it is utter crap, but that hasn't hurt it so far. It's worth noting that priced-to-own VHS has not hurt the cable movie channels. This is because it's very difficult to assemble a video library so comprehensive that you wouldn't want to watch anything else. The cable movie channels are forced to specialize mostly in a) popular movies people may not have bought yet, b) older movies people didn't bother buying, and c) softcore porn flicks some people were a little embarrassed about buying. They seem to be doing quite well for themselves for all that, though. There are certainly enough of them these days... I believe a similar dynamic will keep radio ads afloat for a long time. I simply don't have enough CDs to listen to nothing else for very long without getting sick of the whole lot; thus, I listen to the radio quite a bit when I'm in the car. The extension to TV and TV ads is obvious; no matter how easy it is, it's unlikely anyone (or at least not enough people) will be able to keep a copy locally of anything they might ever want to see on television.
Television will continue to be driven by the ad market, and the TV ad market won't completely collapse until somebody figures out a more efficient method of getting public exposure, of buying eyeball time and introducing themselves into people's lives. As long as advertisers continue to view the internet with fear and suspicion, television (such as it is) is probably safe even in the face of rampant piracy.
Nah, the gerund 'becoming' is the object of the prepositional phrase 'of becoming profitable with webcomics.' The adjective 'profitable' and the prepositional phrase 'with webcomics' both modify 'becoming'. The larger prepositional phrase describes the noun 'prospect,' as does the appositive phrase 'the downfall of many online entrepreneurs' (which I won't bother to break down) and the predicate adjective 'illusive.' The sentence itself suffers only from beginning with the conjunction 'yet.' Diagram it if you really dig this sort of thing. I'm just trying to help fellow grammar bigots everywhere.
I don't dispute, however, the possibility that the author indeed meant to misuse the word "elusive," compounded the error by misspelling it, and just lucked out in coming out clean on the other side.
elusive, adj. - tending to elude, as a: tending to evade grasp or pursuit b: hard to comprehend or define c: hard to isolate or identify
illusive, adj. - illusory - based on or producing illusion, deceptive <illusive hopes>
"Yet the prospect of becoming profitable with Web comics--the downfall of many online enterprises--remains illusive."
The prospect is not one that is difficult to comprehend or define, nor is it hard to isolate or identify. It's certainly not evading pursuit. Rather, it produces the illusion for webcomic artists that their labor will bear monetary fruit.
Put more simply, while the profits themselves may be elusive, the prospect of profitability for these artists does indeed remain illusive.
Do try and give the journalism majors a break once in a while. They might even be right.
I agree completely with your point. I wasn't trying to disagree with it in my earlier post, which was at least partially a poor attempt at a joke anyway. My only point was that everybody has a finite amount of time on their hands over the course of their careers -- there's time for keeping up with research, there's time for working on one's own projects, but rarely do the two meet. Most people in the field, I'm sure, have spent a significant amount of time on both. However, their experience will range along a sliding scale from 100% academic to 100% practical. It's a tradeoff, just like everything else in engineering and/or life (there are those who claim the two are mutually exclusive...). There's no such thing as a 200% career, at least for most of us. God knows I'd love to be the guy who knew everything and had done everything, but alas...
You don't get to the cutting edge of programming language research by wasting your time working out the finer implementation details of real languages, especially since real languages frequently have to do things that don't make for terribly fascinating research.
You don't get to the cutting edge of programming lanugage implementation by wasting your time reading the many years of esoteric research published on the subject, especially since real languages frequently have to do things that don't make for terribly fascinating research.
I, like many others here, have a similar story. I
was introduced to Adams's work when I was twelve
years old or so, and my appreciation for that work
has remained with me to this day. I've met people
because of it. When I first started getting into
computers at sixteen, I selected Slartibartfast (or the abbreviation Slart) for my nick/username. By the time I finally got around to creating a slashdot account, Slart was taken, so I took Vroomfondel (Majikthise was my next choice). I still make a point of re-reading all the Hitchhiker's and Dirk Gently books at least once a year.
This news saddens me almost too much to bear. The world could definitely have used a few more of DNA's works, be they fantastically late novels, radio shows, sketch comedy, or movies. I guess I can finally understand how all those people felt when Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. died; I have this tremendous sense of loss for a person I've never met. Douglas Adams will be missed, but his genius will live on forever in his work.
I know you won't read this unless you check your user page, but I wanted to clarify a few things here. I am aware that I have, unfortunately,
painted with a too-wide brush here. I felt that
adding all the necessary caveats would make the post unreadably long. I applaud you and your
school's efforts to provide an educational alternative.
I am unfamiliar with your school, but I am originally from Frankfort, IN, and I can
point to Central Catholic High right there in Lafayette as a private school which, while obviously not profit-driven, does for example obligate students to prayer. Culver Military near South Bend is a for-profit private school, with an endowment of over $100 million. While the name and nature of the school in the article was undisclosed, it sounded much more like one of the prep/boarding schools you dismissed as something from which to have "come a long way" in your post than it sounded like your own private school; hence, the somewhat unpleasant timbre of my earlier post. Please don't read my original post to be disparaging of those who are Doing It Right.
This is not a freedom of speech case. It's just
not. Here's why...
If you were going to sell your car to a guy,
and then you found out he was a Ku Klux Klan member who was going to use it in a rally downtown, you are allowed to refuse to sell it to
him on those grounds -- or any other grounds for that matter -- if that's what you want. The government can't make you do business with an individual to protect that individual's freedom of speech. If the government was auctioning that car, however, it could not similarly refuse the sale; that would be a violation of the KKK loser's first amendment rights. This is not a problem. This is as it should be.
A private school can do practically anything it wants to its students. It can force them to go to church. It can force them to wear uniforms. It can prohibit them from reading the "wrong" books. It can prohibit them from writing a "wrong" book. It can establish a weight limit for them. It can make them stand on their heads and sing "Henry the Eighth" until they pass out. If a student refuses, the school can throw him or her out -- and usually even keep their money. That's all they can do, though; their final recourse is to terminate the business relationship. To go beyond that, they would have to sue, like any other private entity.
Private schools are businesses, and their policies are profit-driven. This means appealing to the folks with the money -- the parents. Schools have either learned or correctly deduced that most parents (especially the wealthy ones) don't really give a damn about academic freedom.
That said, many so-called "private" schools accept funds from the state for various purposes annually. If this particular school does, the first amendment angle could be successfully pursued, and has been before in civil rights cases. The school would then have to back off, or lose their state funds.
I can't think of any NFL teams which are owned by large media interests off the top of my head, but NFL teams are even more beholden to TV interests
than are MLB teams (baseball teams have ten times
as many home dates and many have local TV deals). It sure looks like this is really about the big media folks trotting out their little subsidiaries to parrot their message more than it's about MLB and NFL trying to protect their own IP interests.
1Gb/s (Gigabit, which incendentally is theoretically faster than FibreChannel... 125MB/s)
This is a bit of a misunderstanding. FC/100 also runs over a 1Gb/s connection. The 100 refers to data throughput, rather than channel throughput. SCSI over IP/ethernet is actually slightly less efficient than SCSI over FC -- little wonder, since Fibre Channel was designed from the start to be a storage protocol. I wouldn't put too much stock into the developing 10Gb/s ethernet stuff resulting in ethernet taking over the storage world, since you can rest assured that the FC folks will be using the same hardware within a year. (It's astonishing how much hardware
is common between gigabit ethernet and FC/100, especially the optical stuff.) FC and GE are different technologies designed for different activities. The demand for networked storage is seemingly driving the two together, but I think we're a long way from the day we have individual disks that speak ethernet/IP.
Yeah right. Now that's not to say
that you'll actually ever realize the full bandwidth of any of these technologies. You still have mechanical parts in these drives. Caching and I/O randomness can either help or hurt your performance.
I'm here to tell you that you can indeed saturate these pipes. A single FC-AL loop with more than,
say, fifteen or twenty disks can saturate pretty
easily (and you can go over 120). A large disk array working mainly from cache can saturate its fabric connection if it's working hard enough. As for the various ethernet speeds, you're right in that almost nobody is going to be driving ten gigabits per second out the back of his or her peecee, but a large network will absolutely use every bit it can get.
These aren't individual-use technologies (yet). They're certainly not priced to be (yet?)...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to freak you out, but you may have been dating an alien from Betelgeuse.
Many sports cars -- even some of the more expensive ones -- get 30+ mpg on the highway just like more economical cars. Even a 2004 Corvette with an enormous 5.7 liter engine gets 25 mpg on the highway, which is above average; the Pilot gets 22 mpg, the CR-V 25-29 mpg (depending on transmission configuration). A Hummer, meanwhile, gets only 14 mpg. Of course, if you could get people to live closer to work (failures in modern zoning have made this impractically expensive in much of the USA, but even incremental improvements would help), or to avoid commuting during rush hour, it would have nearly the effect of the whole country switching to hybrids (ones that work, even). But nobody's going to do that either.
I personally enjoyed Snow Crash for its idiosyncratic style, but I have been led to understand that some readers found them off-putting. Should you change your mind about The Baroque Cycle, you will find it largely free of the stylistic indulgences that essentially defined Snow Crash. It may not suit your personal aesthetic, but if it doesn't it won't be for the same reasons that Snow Crash failed you.
For example, Bill Murray and Steve Martin should play Magikthies and Vroomfondel.
I'm not big on most of the suggestions of Americans to cast, but I think this is a phenomenal idea, if only it could be made to happen.
On the other hand, that one scene in the hands of those two could steal (and/or ruin...yaneverknow) the whole movie.
For the most part, though, I think there's something wonderfully British about the whole thing that I hope can be preserved in the movie. American actors probably aren't the best way to go about that in general, unless anybody wants to cast Renee Zellweger as Trillian...thought not.
It is a 'well known fact' (whatever that means) that the last 10% of a project takes 90% of the effort.
Unfortunately, the first 90% of the project also takes 90% of the effort.
In a truly free market, there is no problem with using the behavior of that market to determine the value of a given product. That said, no market is truly, completely free; all have competitive and/or financial barriers to entry of some kind. In some industries, like telecommunications or chip fabrication, these barriers are extremely large and equally obvious.
Software, however, is by and large an industry with very few readily apparent barriers to entry. The finanical barriers are in fact so low that in several sub-markets a free competitor has emerged, prompting many people like yourself to declare software a commodity. While that's true in a sense, it is like the free market analysis in this case -- it misses an important piece of the puzzle.
Microsoft has been extraordinarily successful over the years for a number of reasons. They have been greatly aided by the stupidity and/or shortsightedness of their early competitors, which is not something that should be held against them, but it is also not the primary factor in their success. What drives their success is the fact that Microsoft was the first software company to understand the hidden barriers to entry in the software business: mindshare and customer lock-in.
No other market with the same dynamics comes to mind. A company buying a competing OS or office/productivity suite faces potentially having to retrain their entire workforce, throwing away the money they already spent training the same people how to use the Microsoft products. How many people's parents have taken a class in Word or Excel? Other lock-in issues, like proprietary document formats and hardware compatibility, provide customers with artificial incentives to maintain the status quo not found in most other markets.
Microsoft was the first software company to really understand these issues. They understood them so well that they fought every way they could -- not all of them legal -- to increase market share. While it could be argued quite successfully that Microsoft's early success was based on their value proposition, much of their current success owes more to that early success than it owes to anything in their value proposition today.
Yup, Mick will be sitting in Milliways with his bodyguard for the Final Show, spending a year dead for tax reasons.
There are some who say this has already happened.
I use gvim instead of vim when it's available for two reasons. One, when syntax highlighting is useful, more and more visually appealing color schemes are possible than I've been able to make work in a terminal window. Two, it solves the pesky backspace problem you sometimes encounter on linux systems without any hassle. If neither of those apply, I don't generally bother. I never use the toolbars or menu anyway.
If your build has the feature enabled, you can use ^N/^P to navigate possible keyword completions in vim using a tags file. It's reasonably quick, and perfect for things like:
(The fact that having such similar identifiers is often a bad coding practice has sadly not slowed the masses.) Intellisense editors would have you type before it would finally figure it out on the next keystroke. Vim, on the other hand, gives you and then a couple of ^N's max and you're done.
I guess we can only hope that at the end of the trial the judges will find that life itself is in contempt of court, and duly confiscate it from all those involved before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening's ultra, er, round of golf...
The television industry shouldn't be as threatened by this as the music or movie industries. Movies will always be better for many people when seen in a large theater, but that won't save the video market. There'll always be a market for concert tickets and radio ads, but that won't save album sales. For both music and movies, having consumers purchase (or rent) a digital copy of the material is a large part of their market; if people can get them for free, a substantial portion of their possible revenue stream is gone. This is much less so for television, where the practice of offering collections of episodes on tape or DVD has never been widespread.
Another thing is the "water cooler" aspect of (particularly prime-time) television. How many people are archiving Survivor episodes? What's a tape of the Super Bowl worth? For many television shows, the biggest lure is watching them with everyone else, being able to talk about them afterward, and having that shared experience with many people.
Finally, there's the sheer volume and variety of the material. Of course, a great deal of it is utter crap, but that hasn't hurt it so far. It's worth noting that priced-to-own VHS has not hurt the cable movie channels. This is because it's very difficult to assemble a video library so comprehensive that you wouldn't want to watch anything else. The cable movie channels are forced to specialize mostly in a) popular movies people may not have bought yet, b) older movies people didn't bother buying, and c) softcore porn flicks some people were a little embarrassed about buying. They seem to be doing quite well for themselves for all that, though. There are certainly enough of them these days... I believe a similar dynamic will keep radio ads afloat for a long time. I simply don't have enough CDs to listen to nothing else for very long without getting sick of the whole lot; thus, I listen to the radio quite a bit when I'm in the car. The extension to TV and TV ads is obvious; no matter how easy it is, it's unlikely anyone (or at least not enough people) will be able to keep a copy locally of anything they might ever want to see on television.
Television will continue to be driven by the ad market, and the TV ad market won't completely collapse until somebody figures out a more efficient method of getting public exposure, of buying eyeball time and introducing themselves into people's lives. As long as advertisers continue to view the internet with fear and suspicion, television (such as it is) is probably safe even in the face of rampant piracy.
Nah, the gerund 'becoming' is the object of the prepositional phrase 'of becoming profitable with webcomics.' The adjective 'profitable' and the prepositional phrase 'with webcomics' both modify 'becoming'. The larger prepositional phrase describes the noun 'prospect,' as does the appositive phrase 'the downfall of many online entrepreneurs' (which I won't bother to break down) and the predicate adjective 'illusive.' The sentence itself suffers only from beginning with the conjunction 'yet.' Diagram it if you really dig this sort of thing. I'm just trying to help fellow grammar bigots everywhere. I don't dispute, however, the possibility that the author indeed meant to misuse the word "elusive," compounded the error by misspelling it, and just lucked out in coming out clean on the other side.
If you're going to harp, at least get it right.
elusive, adj. - tending to elude, as a: tending to evade grasp or pursuit b: hard to comprehend or define c: hard to isolate or identify
illusive, adj. - illusory - based on or producing illusion, deceptive <illusive hopes>
"Yet the prospect of becoming profitable with Web comics--the downfall of many online enterprises--remains illusive."
The prospect is not one that is difficult to comprehend or define, nor is it hard to isolate or identify. It's certainly not evading pursuit. Rather, it produces the illusion for webcomic artists that their labor will bear monetary fruit.
Put more simply, while the profits themselves may be elusive, the prospect of profitability for these artists does indeed remain illusive.
Do try and give the journalism majors a break once in a while. They might even be right.
I agree completely with your point. I wasn't trying to disagree with it in my earlier post, which was at least partially a poor attempt at a joke anyway. My only point was that everybody has a finite amount of time on their hands over the course of their careers -- there's time for keeping up with research, there's time for working on one's own projects, but rarely do the two meet. Most people in the field, I'm sure, have spent a significant amount of time on both. However, their experience will range along a sliding scale from 100% academic to 100% practical. It's a tradeoff, just like everything else in engineering and/or life (there are those who claim the two are mutually exclusive...). There's no such thing as a 200% career, at least for most of us. God knows I'd love to be the guy who knew everything and had done everything, but alas...
You don't get to the cutting edge of programming language research by wasting your time working out the finer implementation details of real languages, especially since real languages frequently have to do things that don't make for terribly fascinating research.
You don't get to the cutting edge of programming lanugage implementation by wasting your time reading the many years of esoteric research published on the subject, especially since real languages frequently have to do things that don't make for terribly fascinating research.
Amen to that. Where will I get my Filler now?
...and SCO and Compaq (Digital) and NCR and EMC (Data General) and...
There are a lot more than you think.
I, like many others here, have a similar story. I was introduced to Adams's work when I was twelve years old or so, and my appreciation for that work has remained with me to this day. I've met people because of it. When I first started getting into computers at sixteen, I selected Slartibartfast (or the abbreviation Slart) for my nick/username. By the time I finally got around to creating a slashdot account, Slart was taken, so I took Vroomfondel (Majikthise was my next choice). I still make a point of re-reading all the Hitchhiker's and Dirk Gently books at least once a year.
This news saddens me almost too much to bear. The world could definitely have used a few more of DNA's works, be they fantastically late novels, radio shows, sketch comedy, or movies. I guess I can finally understand how all those people felt when Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. died; I have this tremendous sense of loss for a person I've never met. Douglas Adams will be missed, but his genius will live on forever in his work.
"...and then the judge ruled that life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those present..."
Actually, the biggest problem with sex on the television is falling off of it. *rim shot* Thanks, folks...I'm here all week.
I know you won't read this unless you check your user page, but I wanted to clarify a few things here. I am aware that I have, unfortunately, painted with a too-wide brush here. I felt that adding all the necessary caveats would make the post unreadably long. I applaud you and your school's efforts to provide an educational alternative.
I am unfamiliar with your school, but I am originally from Frankfort, IN, and I can point to Central Catholic High right there in Lafayette as a private school which, while obviously not profit-driven, does for example obligate students to prayer. Culver Military near South Bend is a for-profit private school, with an endowment of over $100 million. While the name and nature of the school in the article was undisclosed, it sounded much more like one of the prep/boarding schools you dismissed as something from which to have "come a long way" in your post than it sounded like your own private school; hence, the somewhat unpleasant timbre of my earlier post. Please don't read my original post to be disparaging of those who are Doing It Right.
This is not a freedom of speech case. It's just not. Here's why...
If you were going to sell your car to a guy, and then you found out he was a Ku Klux Klan member who was going to use it in a rally downtown, you are allowed to refuse to sell it to him on those grounds -- or any other grounds for that matter -- if that's what you want. The government can't make you do business with an individual to protect that individual's freedom of speech. If the government was auctioning that car, however, it could not similarly refuse the sale; that would be a violation of the KKK loser's first amendment rights. This is not a problem. This is as it should be.
A private school can do practically anything it wants to its students. It can force them to go to church. It can force them to wear uniforms. It can prohibit them from reading the "wrong" books. It can prohibit them from writing a "wrong" book. It can establish a weight limit for them. It can make them stand on their heads and sing "Henry the Eighth" until they pass out. If a student refuses, the school can throw him or her out -- and usually even keep their money. That's all they can do, though; their final recourse is to terminate the business relationship. To go beyond that, they would have to sue, like any other private entity.
Private schools are businesses, and their policies are profit-driven. This means appealing to the folks with the money -- the parents. Schools have either learned or correctly deduced that most parents (especially the wealthy ones) don't really give a damn about academic freedom.
That said, many so-called "private" schools accept funds from the state for various purposes annually. If this particular school does, the first amendment angle could be successfully pursued, and has been before in civil rights cases. The school would then have to back off, or lose their state funds.
- The Anaheim Angels are owned by Disney
- The Atlanta Braves are owned by AOL/Time-Warner
- The Los Angeles Dodgers are owned by Fox
I can't think of any NFL teams which are owned by large media interests off the top of my head, but NFL teams are even more beholden to TV interests than are MLB teams (baseball teams have ten times as many home dates and many have local TV deals). It sure looks like this is really about the big media folks trotting out their little subsidiaries to parrot their message more than it's about MLB and NFL trying to protect their own IP interests.1Gb/s (Gigabit, which incendentally is theoretically faster than FibreChannel... 125MB/s)
This is a bit of a misunderstanding. FC/100 also runs over a 1Gb/s connection. The 100 refers to data throughput, rather than channel throughput. SCSI over IP/ethernet is actually slightly less efficient than SCSI over FC -- little wonder, since Fibre Channel was designed from the start to be a storage protocol. I wouldn't put too much stock into the developing 10Gb/s ethernet stuff resulting in ethernet taking over the storage world, since you can rest assured that the FC folks will be using the same hardware within a year. (It's astonishing how much hardware is common between gigabit ethernet and FC/100, especially the optical stuff.) FC and GE are different technologies designed for different activities. The demand for networked storage is seemingly driving the two together, but I think we're a long way from the day we have individual disks that speak ethernet/IP.
Yeah right. Now that's not to say that you'll actually ever realize the full bandwidth of any of these technologies. You still have mechanical parts in these drives. Caching and I/O randomness can either help or hurt your performance.
I'm here to tell you that you can indeed saturate these pipes. A single FC-AL loop with more than, say, fifteen or twenty disks can saturate pretty easily (and you can go over 120). A large disk array working mainly from cache can saturate its fabric connection if it's working hard enough. As for the various ethernet speeds, you're right in that almost nobody is going to be driving ten gigabits per second out the back of his or her peecee, but a large network will absolutely use every bit it can get. These aren't individual-use technologies (yet). They're certainly not priced to be (yet?)...