Anything newer than an Atom N2xx or AMD since I dunno, Athlon 64? will run a 64 bit OS and so probably all future processors too. Even SoC systems probably have more than 4GB of RAM by then...
Gah, what is with Mozilla following Google's every example, no matter how stupid or not?
Complacency followed by panic. Two years ago Firefox looked secure, according to statcounter IE had 62% marketshare, Firefox 29% and Opera/Safari/Chrome fought over the last 9% - Firefox was almost 10x bigger than than the third browser and everybody agreed nobody runs IE because it's better so in many ways they felt like #1. All they had to do was convert more IE users and world domination was at hand.
Then came Chrome: May 2009: 2.45% May 2010: 8.61% May 2010 (est): 19.22%
Extrapolation is always a dangerous thing but Chrome has been eating almost one full percentage point per month now. One more year like this and Chrome would pass Firefox. And Mozilla's search engine agreement with Google ends in November this year, what's the deal going to be now that Chrome goes toe to toe with Firefox? I doubt they'll get as generous terms this time around. In short, they really feel the competition breathing down their necks now.
Besides, do you think 1080 HD will be the resolution of choice 20-40 years from now? I imagine we'll be looking at wall-sized TVs at some point and 1080 pixels will look awfully blocky on a 10 foot wall.
It's called a projector and no, a 120" (= 10') picture still looks pretty damn good, even though a person with 20/20 vision starts losing detail around 16-17 feet out. Go 2160p and it's 8-9 feet out - very close for a 120" screen. 4320p is only if you have 20/10 vision and is 8-9 feet out.
Yeah I suppose it will keep growing but I sort of doubt the average person will have 100"+ TVs even 20-40 years from now. Just look at how slowly people are moving to HDTV, how many that don't realize if they're watching HD or not or 720p vs 1080p. I suspect BluRay will have a much longer life than DVD, and the DVD is far, far from gone.
If you took photos of billions of people - but only one per person - could you get a decent idea of how humans age? Same with stars there's roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them and there's many in every phase of life even though we pretty much only see a snapshot of each one. Take supernovas for example, a very short and rare event we haven't seen since 1604 in the Milky Way even though it has 200-400 billion stars. And yet we find 2-500 of them each year because there's so insanely many galaxies to look at. We won't have observed one star birth to death, but we will have observed everything from baby stars to stars in death throes many, many times.
The actual disc is made of polycarbonate, the only part that's gold is the data layer. The reason to use gold is that it's very non-reactive while the early dyes would easily react to sunlight, scratches causing oxygen to come in contact with the dye and so on. Gold was the expensive, high quality discs you'd use for a master copy. These days it's full of stabilizers and there's no practical difference, but I remember having gold discs and cheap discs.
"We're not happy with a 99.9% solution, it must be 99.999999% solution" is a pretty good summary of what you said. Even if you're bilingual in Japanese and English, I doubt you'd interpret the lack of a "This file already exists" error any other way than "The computer isn't smart enough to realize these forms are identical". That would only apply to a very, very small group of bilinguals, I speak three languages and read five but they all use Latin characters and it's also a perfectly sensible rule for Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian and Coptic alphabets - and if you speak one of the unicase languages like Arabic or Hebrew then the rule is irrelevant. So for any individual user the alleged confusion is extremely unlikely to occur.
Secondly, you assume all tools will be smart which is silly to say the least. I've had that issue with files copied from my Windows machine to Linux over samba - they differed only by case, so the system silently figured that yes I did want to store the same file twice with different case *BZZZZZZZZT* wrong. Almost every piece of software in existance has to access the file system, and they will get it wrong. Even if you implement it right at the toolkit level, there's many toolkits and always software doing their own thing, it'll never work correctly and consistently. Fix it once at the file system level, case preserving not case sensitive is the way to go. Make that the default, have the people who desperately want it enable it - there's no problem going from a preserving to a sensitive system, only the other way around.
I've always been a little curious - what do all these package management front-ends actually do?
When I want to install a package, I do: apt-get install <name-of-package-i-want>
Help you find name-of-package-i-want, if you already know that then no front end is going to make it easier. Categories, ratings, descriptions, searches... yes, it's pretty much all possible with the command line and clever use of grep but it's supposed to be the easy and intuitive way to get from "I have some vague notion of what I want" to "I'll try installing name-of-package-i-probably-want".
Yep. For their laptops it's no so bad but every time I looked at a desktop I had some requirement that drove me off the regular line and into the "Pro" line. Except I don't need the workstation class processors, dual sockets, ECC RAM and all the other things that push it into a completely different price league. Apple doesn't sell "normal" towers of any kind, it's either the laptop-in-a-box mini, the laptop-in-a-monitor iMacs or the Mac Pros. Between the pros and the rest there's a Grand Canyon size hole in their product lineup, and Apple likes it that way. I guess they make more money on people that don't really need the pro but end up buying it anyway due to lack of choice than they'd earn on releasing a plain consumer miditower.
Personally I don't understand what they think would be different. Look at TPB today. What would TPB look like if they dropped DRM? Oh, exactly the same because it's all there anyway. It's like they're all dreaming that some day they'll find a DRM that works and manage to secure every link. Or that "casual pirates" haven't heard of the Internet. You'd have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to have found it. Sigh...
Possibly, or maybe just get it over with and make it part of general taxes. Already today it's an unfair tax because you can't choose it away even though all the distibution methods (cable, satellite and digital OTA - the analog net is shut down) require a subscription card - they could have made NRK paytv but instead they force everyone with a TV to pay. And yet most of it is available online for free at their streaming portal, so people without TV essentially get free leech. Also all get free radio, subsidized by the TV owners. It wouldn't actually get any less fair if they just made it a tax.
Oh, I should probably add that's on top of their free streaming service where almost all their stuff is, but I think that's IP-locked to Norway. Again, it's a rights issue.
Why should a public broadcaster with no ads care about how it's distributed? Mostly it's a rights problem, if the production company is willing then NRK is more than willing to put it up on bittorrent. Here you can find full series like "Nordkalotten 365", "330 Skvadronen", "Der ingen skulle tru at nokon kunne bu" and various other single episodes for free, legal download - sometimes even in quality higher than what's broadcast. Obviously they will never be able to do that with licensed rights like the Olympics etc. but they could easily make it a standard part of their production/purchase agreement for local series that it'll be published online.
Within say 10-20 years most of Norway will have fiber everywhere - 12% had it last year and they're wiring all over the place, I heard some claim 35% by 2015 though that sounded a bit optimistic. No more last mile problems, you could send gigabits to every house. HDTV streaming to every room in the building @ BluRay quality? Can do. Webcams the quality of full HD video cameras? Can do. High quality multi-channel video conferencing? Can do. The future is a world where bandwidth is truly approaching almost free. CPUs and GPUs will improve some yes, but I think that's what will change the most. Oh and with it massive deployment of wireless, if every home has a fiber connection they probably won't mind a 50 Mbit wireless running on the side - not just 4G but massive bandwidth in almost all populated areas. Fast enough you could literally have every change on your hdd synced against remote backup - or even that the network acts as your local hdd. Where the data is will almost cease to be relevant, the pipes are so vast it doesn't matter.
And hopefully we'll see the end of "TV networks" and regional restrictions as we know it. Series just go live and people get it via iTunes/Spotify/Netflix like services, there's no need for scheduled programming because the bandwidth is so vast we can just unicast to everyone and let them watch it at their own pace, possibly with some preloads and CDN to avoid the pressure on the underwater cables and the peaks but mostly that the massive bandwidth means it's no big deal. That storm is coming, it's the same as over CD vs digital downloads only you need way more bandwidth. And that is coming, well except maybe to the US but I'm sure you'll be dragged along in time.
Would you consider your car's value in the second hand market to be "funny money"? That when suddenly our big SUV is a huge "gas guzzler" and everybody wants tiny hybrids instead that didn't change the value of your car even though it's the same? In case you didn't notice, the market is mostly driven what people want. To want is an emotion. Secondly they buy for the future, like how they think the oil prices will develop. That is belief. If sales are driven by emotions and beliefs, why would not stock prices?
Market value is driven by what's in the market, there is no sale without a buyer so if more people want to sell than buy the only way the market comes in balance is if the prices drop so horribly some no longer want to sell. If 100.000 people want to sell their SUV and 1.000 want to buy one they'll push prices until 90.000 sellers have dropped out and 9.000 more wanted in on the fire sale. You can think the market has gone crazy and that the worth is much higher but it's not a price you can get in the market.
Likewise if supply is limited, say you promised your kids a [console] for Christmas and it's sold out there'll be a booming market on eBay at way above retail until enough buyers drop out and delay their purchase. Is that profit funny money too? Stocks are like this, I can't get in on something unless I pay enough to make you sell. I can't get out unless I lower price enough to make you buy. It's only "potential" money like if you owned an SUV or [console], but it'd be pretty real if you wanted to or had to sell.
Well, from what I gather these systems gather IP addresses from P2P networks and send "strikes", seems to me you could start over at any time with a blank database without any production data.
So you have an empty test server, you tweak it to work with new protocols and networks and whatnot - then you put those changes into production. I can see how that kind of server could end up not having much security.
The problem for them now of course is that it could have data from test runs - not that would be used in production but none the less data of real IPs sharing real files. In any case, I doubt they'll give up this easily it'll be back...
Yep. And again, that usually translated into a fine (MONEY) or loss of certification (MONEY).
At least in my business no certification = no way to operate legally = instant bankruptcy. And don't think you can just collapse one company and start over under a new certification, do that and they'll throw every detail of the book at you, demand to see every routine, every process, every scrap of documentation with all the i's dotted and all the t's crossed. By the time you get back on your feet all your employees will be elsewhere, it's practically nuking the company from orbit. For that kind of risk it'll take far, far more than some whiny employees who want to use their own devices.
So you get convoluted explanations as to why laws that quite clearly restrict people from saying things aren't actually curtailing free speech.
I find the argument is usually used the other way around in a most dishonest fashion, because the US and China both restrict speech in some form neither have free speech and are equal. Sure, you can use speech for threats, fraud, false testimony, insults and a bunch of other things but a lot of people mean "free speech" to be able to hold an open public or private debate on any subject without censorship or arrest by the government, a practical concept that does divide countries into those who have free speech and those who don't.
The rest, well it depends. For example I don't think you have freedom of speech to privileged information, like if you are a doctor with my medical records, attorney-client privilege, confessional privilege, police records, sealed court documents, classified documents and so on even if the speech you make would be factual and true. And I think the fruits of the poisoned tree should also be protected, just because you somehow got your hands on my medical records doesn't mean you have the right to post them everywhere - assuming you know or have reason to believe the source is confidential. And I'd still say that country has free speech.
I can read any absurdity into the most well-meaning document if you let me read it like the devil's advocate. For example the UN declaration of human rights says in article 16 that "Men and women of full age [have a right to marry]", but most other articles don't which implies they are true for all ages. So say article 23 that says "Everyone has the right to work" means children have a right to child labor. Just absurd yes? And that's what you get if you read people's posts or the first amendmend to be that kind of absolute too.
Practically, no. Even if I just gave you a list of ten buttons you could arrange them in 10! = 3 628 800 orders, never mind all the possible ways you can make them look and ways the interface could react. Might as well say that books are finite and enumerable, as even the longest book only contain so many letters.
The essence of an interface can be captured and expressed with logic. And we have all kinds of tools that can handle logic.
What you can't express is psychology. What does a person think when he sees this UI, how does he respond to it? Sure you can write a technically accurate documentation of what the UI does, it still won't make it a good interface.
The "interface" of a programming language is much more open ended and complicated than a mere user interface, and we've been reasoning about language for decades. (...) Yes, bad interfaces are everywhere. That doesn't mean it's a hard problem.
Really? So we've all agreed on the one optimal language then, since the solution is so trivial? And you think graphical complexity is less than language? Clearly you've never heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. No, optimal communication is hard - we have information theory yes but humans don't work well on perfectly compressed data - it looks like random rubbish to us. And we're not built to spec, every human takes it in differently - with common patterns of course, but there's no single way that is optimal for everyone. Read a HCI book sometimes - it has good theories but you'll see it's a soft subject, you can't put an analyzer on an UI and get a quality score. What's the right number of tool buttons to show in a graphics editor? If you can prove me that, you're up for several Nobel prizes.
*blinks* Are we talking about the same DOS I used to use? Seriously? The only reason you could marginally call current OSs more complex to use is because they do so much, much more. For example this whole "multitasking" thing, pretty easy when there's just one app right (oh I know there was some exotic ways to do multitasking, but mostly you didn't have the RAM anyway).
I remember my first cell phone.... a lot less complex than my iPhone, yes. But all it could do was call and send SMS - I don't even remember if it had an alarm clock but I guess it probably did - certainly not a scheduler. Now I have two sets of alarms that ring on weekdays, one set of gentle tones and one really nasty "get up NOW" alarm. More complex? Yes. Better? Yes.
This is mostly just complaining that "it's different"... sure, whatever I'm sure the elderly struggled with learning cars too, you mean there's no reins, no whip and saying giddyup won't make it go, instead you get a wheel and pedals? Tough shit, paradigms change and old ways of doing things disappear. Computer literacy is the other literacy, there's only so far we can help someone who can't read.
Seriously, few things we are doing today are going to be unfamiliar to the older generations of our families.
True, but parenting usually involves trying to cover it up to be good role models and growing up means breaking limits without telling. And while friends are friends, family can be so many things of all ages from your grandaunt to your kid cousin, close and distant. Yet they'd probably all be insulted if you turned them down as being kin.
And you should not underestimate the parents that swing the pendulum, because they were crazy in youth they go prude as parents, now that they're older and "wiser". And there's just some things that don't need to go beyond that boundary, like both know sex but most kids don't like thinking of their parents having it nor do most parents like thinking of their kids having it.
And what about pics that other people post? What happens when they tag you? Do their pics inherit your settings
That was the idea, yes. If a friend tags me in his photo, only my friends see it. If a family member tags me in his photo, only my family see it - unless I adjust the permissions so other groups can see it. I think that covers most use cases for me without intervention, family pics is shared with family and party pics with friends.
At the top level it'd be almost as if you have separate accounts "Kjella the friend", "Kjella the family member", "Kjella the study buddy", "Kjella the colleague" and by default they don't share information. To the degree they do, it's because *I* decide that. A friend can't do anything a family member of me would see (unless he's friends with my friend, of course).
I'm not quite buying the argument that it's easier to have them on two sites. What if you say don't want all your family to see your pics? Oh, "Familybook" for family, except maybe some likeminded ones actually go as friends as well. And maybe you have study mates that kinda fall inbetween, they're not really "professional" contacts yet you don't want them to see all the partying you do on the side so it's back to the original "Yearbook" style of Facebook. And maybe some things you'd share with the boys but isn't exactly a killer with the opposite sex. And the opposite sex can also be a big bag of complications too.
Now I don't feel very trusting of social sites looking to squeeze their 50 billion dollar worth out of me, but I'd rather actually have Chinese walls on one site. I add my aunt as my *family*, my buddy as *friend* and my colleague as work. Family sees pics from family, friends see pics from friends and work doesn't see anything at all. If I post myself I pick what social circles it's for. Instead all I get is a site that at every turn tries to publish more details about my life to more people. No thanks, I don't want to live on display. I don't want to be a social peeping tom on people I haven't met in 10 years or more. I just don't trust the current sites and that's while the bubble is still growing, what lows they'll sink to when it pops I don't want to think about.
Well, the first question I'd ask is how many people are only casual users of Netflix' service. If you watch 90% TV/BluRay and use streaming to catch the last 10%, you'll skew the statistics for the "full time" user quite a lot. A cap doesn't become more acceptable because of grandmas sending email using 1 GB/mo send the average below the cap.
The second issue is that Netflix is obviously limiting the bandwidth to what the market will deliver, 150 GB = three BluRays = 6 hours @ BluRay quality. High bandwidth H.264 captures typically run 4-7 GB/hour, way higher than Netflix' 2.3 GB. They just don't like to tell their customers that the result is inferior.
Really the best proof is that they bother doing it at all, which means it affects quite a lot of people and saves quite a lot of bandwidth. They've never bothered to hit the lone bandwidth hog or two, it's because a lot of people are now downloading a lot of data. There's no doubt in my mind these are high use streaming customers.
The silly thing is that if you offer enough, it works out by itself. I've a 25 Mbit line, I've downloaded a 500GB+ torrent - once, took me three days @ almost max speed. But it's not like I need it all day, every day - it limits itself naturally to the fact that I need to watch it too. I don't think I'd use substantially more with a 100 Mbit or Gbit line, all my downloads would just finish in less time.
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So it will be start being fixed around 2037...
Anything newer than an Atom N2xx or AMD since I dunno, Athlon 64? will run a 64 bit OS and so probably all future processors too. Even SoC systems probably have more than 4GB of RAM by then...
Gah, what is with Mozilla following Google's every example, no matter how stupid or not?
Complacency followed by panic. Two years ago Firefox looked secure, according to statcounter IE had 62% marketshare, Firefox 29% and Opera/Safari/Chrome fought over the last 9% - Firefox was almost 10x bigger than than the third browser and everybody agreed nobody runs IE because it's better so in many ways they felt like #1. All they had to do was convert more IE users and world domination was at hand.
Then came Chrome:
May 2009: 2.45%
May 2010: 8.61%
May 2010 (est): 19.22%
Extrapolation is always a dangerous thing but Chrome has been eating almost one full percentage point per month now. One more year like this and Chrome would pass Firefox. And Mozilla's search engine agreement with Google ends in November this year, what's the deal going to be now that Chrome goes toe to toe with Firefox? I doubt they'll get as generous terms this time around. In short, they really feel the competition breathing down their necks now.
Besides, do you think 1080 HD will be the resolution of choice 20-40 years from now? I imagine we'll be looking at wall-sized TVs at some point and 1080 pixels will look awfully blocky on a 10 foot wall.
It's called a projector and no, a 120" (= 10') picture still looks pretty damn good, even though a person with 20/20 vision starts losing detail around 16-17 feet out. Go 2160p and it's 8-9 feet out - very close for a 120" screen. 4320p is only if you have 20/10 vision and is 8-9 feet out.
Yeah I suppose it will keep growing but I sort of doubt the average person will have 100"+ TVs even 20-40 years from now. Just look at how slowly people are moving to HDTV, how many that don't realize if they're watching HD or not or 720p vs 1080p. I suspect BluRay will have a much longer life than DVD, and the DVD is far, far from gone.
If you took photos of billions of people - but only one per person - could you get a decent idea of how humans age? Same with stars there's roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them and there's many in every phase of life even though we pretty much only see a snapshot of each one. Take supernovas for example, a very short and rare event we haven't seen since 1604 in the Milky Way even though it has 200-400 billion stars. And yet we find 2-500 of them each year because there's so insanely many galaxies to look at. We won't have observed one star birth to death, but we will have observed everything from baby stars to stars in death throes many, many times.
The actual disc is made of polycarbonate, the only part that's gold is the data layer. The reason to use gold is that it's very non-reactive while the early dyes would easily react to sunlight, scratches causing oxygen to come in contact with the dye and so on. Gold was the expensive, high quality discs you'd use for a master copy. These days it's full of stabilizers and there's no practical difference, but I remember having gold discs and cheap discs.
"We're not happy with a 99.9% solution, it must be 99.999999% solution" is a pretty good summary of what you said. Even if you're bilingual in Japanese and English, I doubt you'd interpret the lack of a "This file already exists" error any other way than "The computer isn't smart enough to realize these forms are identical". That would only apply to a very, very small group of bilinguals, I speak three languages and read five but they all use Latin characters and it's also a perfectly sensible rule for Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian and Coptic alphabets - and if you speak one of the unicase languages like Arabic or Hebrew then the rule is irrelevant. So for any individual user the alleged confusion is extremely unlikely to occur.
Secondly, you assume all tools will be smart which is silly to say the least. I've had that issue with files copied from my Windows machine to Linux over samba - they differed only by case, so the system silently figured that yes I did want to store the same file twice with different case *BZZZZZZZZT* wrong. Almost every piece of software in existance has to access the file system, and they will get it wrong. Even if you implement it right at the toolkit level, there's many toolkits and always software doing their own thing, it'll never work correctly and consistently. Fix it once at the file system level, case preserving not case sensitive is the way to go. Make that the default, have the people who desperately want it enable it - there's no problem going from a preserving to a sensitive system, only the other way around.
Well he did deny making jokes in base 13, but I don't think anyone ever asked him about roman numerals...
I've always been a little curious - what do all these package management front-ends actually do?
When I want to install a package, I do: apt-get install <name-of-package-i-want>
Help you find name-of-package-i-want, if you already know that then no front end is going to make it easier. Categories, ratings, descriptions, searches... yes, it's pretty much all possible with the command line and clever use of grep but it's supposed to be the easy and intuitive way to get from "I have some vague notion of what I want" to "I'll try installing name-of-package-i-probably-want".
Yep. For their laptops it's no so bad but every time I looked at a desktop I had some requirement that drove me off the regular line and into the "Pro" line. Except I don't need the workstation class processors, dual sockets, ECC RAM and all the other things that push it into a completely different price league. Apple doesn't sell "normal" towers of any kind, it's either the laptop-in-a-box mini, the laptop-in-a-monitor iMacs or the Mac Pros. Between the pros and the rest there's a Grand Canyon size hole in their product lineup, and Apple likes it that way. I guess they make more money on people that don't really need the pro but end up buying it anyway due to lack of choice than they'd earn on releasing a plain consumer miditower.
Personally I don't understand what they think would be different. Look at TPB today. What would TPB look like if they dropped DRM? Oh, exactly the same because it's all there anyway. It's like they're all dreaming that some day they'll find a DRM that works and manage to secure every link. Or that "casual pirates" haven't heard of the Internet. You'd have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to have found it. Sigh...
Possibly, or maybe just get it over with and make it part of general taxes. Already today it's an unfair tax because you can't choose it away even though all the distibution methods (cable, satellite and digital OTA - the analog net is shut down) require a subscription card - they could have made NRK paytv but instead they force everyone with a TV to pay. And yet most of it is available online for free at their streaming portal, so people without TV essentially get free leech. Also all get free radio, subsidized by the TV owners. It wouldn't actually get any less fair if they just made it a tax.
Oh, I should probably add that's on top of their free streaming service where almost all their stuff is, but I think that's IP-locked to Norway. Again, it's a rights issue.
Why should a public broadcaster with no ads care about how it's distributed? Mostly it's a rights problem, if the production company is willing then NRK is more than willing to put it up on bittorrent. Here you can find full series like "Nordkalotten 365", "330 Skvadronen", "Der ingen skulle tru at nokon kunne bu" and various other single episodes for free, legal download - sometimes even in quality higher than what's broadcast. Obviously they will never be able to do that with licensed rights like the Olympics etc. but they could easily make it a standard part of their production/purchase agreement for local series that it'll be published online.
Within say 10-20 years most of Norway will have fiber everywhere - 12% had it last year and they're wiring all over the place, I heard some claim 35% by 2015 though that sounded a bit optimistic. No more last mile problems, you could send gigabits to every house. HDTV streaming to every room in the building @ BluRay quality? Can do. Webcams the quality of full HD video cameras? Can do. High quality multi-channel video conferencing? Can do. The future is a world where bandwidth is truly approaching almost free. CPUs and GPUs will improve some yes, but I think that's what will change the most. Oh and with it massive deployment of wireless, if every home has a fiber connection they probably won't mind a 50 Mbit wireless running on the side - not just 4G but massive bandwidth in almost all populated areas. Fast enough you could literally have every change on your hdd synced against remote backup - or even that the network acts as your local hdd. Where the data is will almost cease to be relevant, the pipes are so vast it doesn't matter.
And hopefully we'll see the end of "TV networks" and regional restrictions as we know it. Series just go live and people get it via iTunes/Spotify/Netflix like services, there's no need for scheduled programming because the bandwidth is so vast we can just unicast to everyone and let them watch it at their own pace, possibly with some preloads and CDN to avoid the pressure on the underwater cables and the peaks but mostly that the massive bandwidth means it's no big deal. That storm is coming, it's the same as over CD vs digital downloads only you need way more bandwidth. And that is coming, well except maybe to the US but I'm sure you'll be dragged along in time.
Would you consider your car's value in the second hand market to be "funny money"? That when suddenly our big SUV is a huge "gas guzzler" and everybody wants tiny hybrids instead that didn't change the value of your car even though it's the same? In case you didn't notice, the market is mostly driven what people want. To want is an emotion. Secondly they buy for the future, like how they think the oil prices will develop. That is belief. If sales are driven by emotions and beliefs, why would not stock prices?
Market value is driven by what's in the market, there is no sale without a buyer so if more people want to sell than buy the only way the market comes in balance is if the prices drop so horribly some no longer want to sell. If 100.000 people want to sell their SUV and 1.000 want to buy one they'll push prices until 90.000 sellers have dropped out and 9.000 more wanted in on the fire sale. You can think the market has gone crazy and that the worth is much higher but it's not a price you can get in the market.
Likewise if supply is limited, say you promised your kids a [console] for Christmas and it's sold out there'll be a booming market on eBay at way above retail until enough buyers drop out and delay their purchase. Is that profit funny money too? Stocks are like this, I can't get in on something unless I pay enough to make you sell. I can't get out unless I lower price enough to make you buy. It's only "potential" money like if you owned an SUV or [console], but it'd be pretty real if you wanted to or had to sell.
It might be negligible for their market cap, but I'll gladly take the small change off their hands ;)
Well, from what I gather these systems gather IP addresses from P2P networks and send "strikes", seems to me you could start over at any time with a blank database without any production data.
So you have an empty test server, you tweak it to work with new protocols and networks and whatnot - then you put those changes into production. I can see how that kind of server could end up not having much security.
The problem for them now of course is that it could have data from test runs - not that would be used in production but none the less data of real IPs sharing real files. In any case, I doubt they'll give up this easily it'll be back...
Yep. And again, that usually translated into a fine (MONEY) or loss of certification (MONEY).
At least in my business no certification = no way to operate legally = instant bankruptcy. And don't think you can just collapse one company and start over under a new certification, do that and they'll throw every detail of the book at you, demand to see every routine, every process, every scrap of documentation with all the i's dotted and all the t's crossed. By the time you get back on your feet all your employees will be elsewhere, it's practically nuking the company from orbit. For that kind of risk it'll take far, far more than some whiny employees who want to use their own devices.
So you get convoluted explanations as to why laws that quite clearly restrict people from saying things aren't actually curtailing free speech.
I find the argument is usually used the other way around in a most dishonest fashion, because the US and China both restrict speech in some form neither have free speech and are equal. Sure, you can use speech for threats, fraud, false testimony, insults and a bunch of other things but a lot of people mean "free speech" to be able to hold an open public or private debate on any subject without censorship or arrest by the government, a practical concept that does divide countries into those who have free speech and those who don't.
The rest, well it depends. For example I don't think you have freedom of speech to privileged information, like if you are a doctor with my medical records, attorney-client privilege, confessional privilege, police records, sealed court documents, classified documents and so on even if the speech you make would be factual and true. And I think the fruits of the poisoned tree should also be protected, just because you somehow got your hands on my medical records doesn't mean you have the right to post them everywhere - assuming you know or have reason to believe the source is confidential. And I'd still say that country has free speech.
I can read any absurdity into the most well-meaning document if you let me read it like the devil's advocate. For example the UN declaration of human rights says in article 16 that "Men and women of full age [have a right to marry]", but most other articles don't which implies they are true for all ages. So say article 23 that says "Everyone has the right to work" means children have a right to child labor. Just absurd yes? And that's what you get if you read people's posts or the first amendmend to be that kind of absolute too.
Interfaces are finite and enumerable.
Practically, no. Even if I just gave you a list of ten buttons you could arrange them in 10! = 3 628 800 orders, never mind all the possible ways you can make them look and ways the interface could react. Might as well say that books are finite and enumerable, as even the longest book only contain so many letters.
The essence of an interface can be captured and expressed with logic. And we have all kinds of tools that can handle logic.
What you can't express is psychology. What does a person think when he sees this UI, how does he respond to it? Sure you can write a technically accurate documentation of what the UI does, it still won't make it a good interface.
The "interface" of a programming language is much more open ended and complicated than a mere user interface, and we've been reasoning about language for decades. (...) Yes, bad interfaces are everywhere. That doesn't mean it's a hard problem.
Really? So we've all agreed on the one optimal language then, since the solution is so trivial? And you think graphical complexity is less than language? Clearly you've never heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. No, optimal communication is hard - we have information theory yes but humans don't work well on perfectly compressed data - it looks like random rubbish to us. And we're not built to spec, every human takes it in differently - with common patterns of course, but there's no single way that is optimal for everyone. Read a HCI book sometimes - it has good theories but you'll see it's a soft subject, you can't put an analyzer on an UI and get a quality score. What's the right number of tool buttons to show in a graphics editor? If you can prove me that, you're up for several Nobel prizes.
*blinks* Are we talking about the same DOS I used to use? Seriously? The only reason you could marginally call current OSs more complex to use is because they do so much, much more. For example this whole "multitasking" thing, pretty easy when there's just one app right (oh I know there was some exotic ways to do multitasking, but mostly you didn't have the RAM anyway).
I remember my first cell phone.... a lot less complex than my iPhone, yes. But all it could do was call and send SMS - I don't even remember if it had an alarm clock but I guess it probably did - certainly not a scheduler. Now I have two sets of alarms that ring on weekdays, one set of gentle tones and one really nasty "get up NOW" alarm. More complex? Yes. Better? Yes.
This is mostly just complaining that "it's different"... sure, whatever I'm sure the elderly struggled with learning cars too, you mean there's no reins, no whip and saying giddyup won't make it go, instead you get a wheel and pedals? Tough shit, paradigms change and old ways of doing things disappear. Computer literacy is the other literacy, there's only so far we can help someone who can't read.
Seriously, few things we are doing today are going to be unfamiliar to the older generations of our families.
True, but parenting usually involves trying to cover it up to be good role models and growing up means breaking limits without telling. And while friends are friends, family can be so many things of all ages from your grandaunt to your kid cousin, close and distant. Yet they'd probably all be insulted if you turned them down as being kin.
And you should not underestimate the parents that swing the pendulum, because they were crazy in youth they go prude as parents, now that they're older and "wiser". And there's just some things that don't need to go beyond that boundary, like both know sex but most kids don't like thinking of their parents having it nor do most parents like thinking of their kids having it.
And what about pics that other people post? What happens when they tag you? Do their pics inherit your settings
That was the idea, yes. If a friend tags me in his photo, only my friends see it. If a family member tags me in his photo, only my family see it - unless I adjust the permissions so other groups can see it. I think that covers most use cases for me without intervention, family pics is shared with family and party pics with friends.
At the top level it'd be almost as if you have separate accounts "Kjella the friend", "Kjella the family member", "Kjella the study buddy", "Kjella the colleague" and by default they don't share information. To the degree they do, it's because *I* decide that. A friend can't do anything a family member of me would see (unless he's friends with my friend, of course).
I'm not quite buying the argument that it's easier to have them on two sites. What if you say don't want all your family to see your pics? Oh, "Familybook" for family, except maybe some likeminded ones actually go as friends as well. And maybe you have study mates that kinda fall inbetween, they're not really "professional" contacts yet you don't want them to see all the partying you do on the side so it's back to the original "Yearbook" style of Facebook. And maybe some things you'd share with the boys but isn't exactly a killer with the opposite sex. And the opposite sex can also be a big bag of complications too.
Now I don't feel very trusting of social sites looking to squeeze their 50 billion dollar worth out of me, but I'd rather actually have Chinese walls on one site. I add my aunt as my *family*, my buddy as *friend* and my colleague as work. Family sees pics from family, friends see pics from friends and work doesn't see anything at all. If I post myself I pick what social circles it's for. Instead all I get is a site that at every turn tries to publish more details about my life to more people. No thanks, I don't want to live on display. I don't want to be a social peeping tom on people I haven't met in 10 years or more. I just don't trust the current sites and that's while the bubble is still growing, what lows they'll sink to when it pops I don't want to think about.
Well, the first question I'd ask is how many people are only casual users of Netflix' service. If you watch 90% TV/BluRay and use streaming to catch the last 10%, you'll skew the statistics for the "full time" user quite a lot. A cap doesn't become more acceptable because of grandmas sending email using 1 GB/mo send the average below the cap.
The second issue is that Netflix is obviously limiting the bandwidth to what the market will deliver, 150 GB = three BluRays = 6 hours @ BluRay quality. High bandwidth H.264 captures typically run 4-7 GB/hour, way higher than Netflix' 2.3 GB. They just don't like to tell their customers that the result is inferior.
Really the best proof is that they bother doing it at all, which means it affects quite a lot of people and saves quite a lot of bandwidth. They've never bothered to hit the lone bandwidth hog or two, it's because a lot of people are now downloading a lot of data. There's no doubt in my mind these are high use streaming customers.
The silly thing is that if you offer enough, it works out by itself. I've a 25 Mbit line, I've downloaded a 500GB+ torrent - once, took me three days @ almost max speed. But it's not like I need it all day, every day - it limits itself naturally to the fact that I need to watch it too. I don't think I'd use substantially more with a 100 Mbit or Gbit line, all my downloads would just finish in less time.