Right sir, I get right on it. I will make the packages BOTH cutting edge AND give them proven stabilty. While I am at it, how about I make you nice curry sir, both spicy yet bland.
I think grandparent is asking for a free pony too, but it's not quite as absurd as it sounds. Ubuntu takes a snapshot every six months and some packages are always in a half-broken state as they're rewriting things. If you think of product quality a of a graph it goes like/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\ where the tops are releases and bottoms the bleeding edge releases in between. Sometimes it really is such that you could go backwards or forwards and both would be better than whatever point Ubuntu froze at. The number of backports is quite low, mostly they abandon the old and start working on the next release.
At times I've wanted a "top-hop" distribution with a release window. Not rolling, not snapshot but a distro that would pick major releases in the last 1-6 months and stay on their bugfix branches until a new release is out, and make it easy to separate between bugfix upgrades and real upgrades. However, it would take a lot more overhead in setting up the distro as you'd need someone managing each package and identifying which releases are worth it, a system of stable branches and so on.
So if I decide to take a higher paycheck over stock options, you think stealing from my company will only hurt the stock owners and not me? That there won't be pay cuts and layoffs if our revenue fails? Unless the porn actors were tricked into signing a contract that would give them much less than they thought through Hollywood accounting, that's a choice between them and their employer. Asking for an up front sum is pretty much as honest as it gets, they got paid what they asked for and if it was too little they should have asked for more. If you were trying to take the moral high ground on behalf of the actors, that the most ridiculous logic I've heard so far. You can only hurt their position next time they negotiate pay.
So what do you think of swingers clubs and the people that go there? People that go clubbing every weekend to get some casual sex? Gold diggers that sleep with people by the size of their wallet? A lot of people distinguish between sex for pleasure and sex for love. And if you cling to the notion that it's still for mutual pleasure then I think you don't understand the concept of "give none, get none". It's quite easy to explain through egoistic motivation, not any genuine interest in satisfying their partner. So-called "fucking friends" is pretty much a mutual exchange of sex services, not a relationship.
There's a huge gap between "I want to have sex with you" and "I'd rather not have sex with you". The former means you're at the top of the list, having beaten all other partners and activities. The latter means it's not something they'd voluntarily do under any circumstance, even if they were snowed in on a cabin alone with you and horny as fuck they'd rather get off on their own. When I go out I don't feel that I'm so unattractive that women don't want me, but I also see many better looking, better talking, better dancing guys competing for the same women. I really don't see the problem with some women saying they'd rather set a low bar and have them compete on money instead.
Of course there are prostitutes that don't have it like that, but dragging out the worst examples every time get silly particularly when most of the problems with human trafficking, sex slaves, pimps for protection and so on could be solved through legalized brothels, required health checks and the general protection we give workplaces. Also the business would no longer be dominated by illegal immigrants and immigrants on tourist visa, you'd need a work permit to work legit and that's where I'd think most people would go. It'd also get much of it out of the streets and residential areas and back into commercial areas zoned for it. Instead we still seem to live under the illusion that we'll extinguish the world's oldest profession, the worst you can get is people that'll talk delusional fantasy and not if reality will be better or worse off.
Now, suddenly any schmuck can make a perfect copy of a CD and distribute it to millions of his closest friends on the Internet.
Long story short you could make many really good analog copies of the first generations, but it didn't last and one person with bad equipment destroyed the chain. What changed with perfect copies as opposed to near-perfect copies is that you can have infinite generations. You don't need to give it to a million friends, only a few as long as they in total pass it on to more people. It's a little bit like a nuke going of, if you have a ratio >1 there's a chain reaction until you run out of reactive material.
Fractional people sound silly so let's just start with 10 people having it and each giving it to 1.2 people on average. So those 10 give it to 10*1.2 = 12. Those 12 give it to 12*1.2 = ~14. Those 14 give it to 14*1.2 = ~17. Those 17 give it to 17*1.2 = ~20 and so it keeps going growing exponentially with 1.2^n until you run out of people who'd want it. And nobody did more than share a little over one copy. There is no big bad wolf, only many equal peers.
I disagree. The price is an unlimited distribution license of the movie, not a copy of the movie or a trip to the movie. The damages should be about $5,000,000 for that license. Oh wait, an Oscar-winning, critically acclaimed film? $25,000,000. So $2,900 doesn't seem too bad really.
On P2P one person's upload is another person's download, so on average each upload one copy. Across 5000 users you can be fairly sure to have a good mix of seeders and leechers with the total working out very close to 5000 copies. Any other way you count it you are double-counting uploads and downloads or even counting generations several times. So let's be kind and say they make $20 profit on each copy, their losses are maybe ~$100,000. Hell, even if you include indirect damages to make it ten times that, it only lowers the value from $25M to $24M. I do hope you realize that they could only practically sell one unlimited distribution license so the value is $25M total and not 5000 times that?
They're asking for almost 3000$ just to forget you made an illegal copy for yourself. Do the math and you'd see that for $5000 each they could buy this $25M unlimited license you speak of, and legally make as many copies as they want and give to everyone. Compared to that $3000 for almost nothing is crazy expensive. Yes, I know being in a P2P network involves both up- and downloading but if I take 5 GB bandwidth from the swarm and give 5 GB back then my net contribution is zero, the swarm is no better or worse off than if I hadn't participated. To try pretending this somehow means I have caused them thousands of dollars in losses falls on its own absurdity. But clearly they have managed to confuse people like you into thinking it makes sense.
What you said would have made sense if it was a box office and download flop. You can keeping talking about low-budget films and foreign films and whatnot all day long, but the fact that people download the big flashy Hollywood productions prove that's what they want. They just don't like to pay for it. Exactly what people say here about the hurt locker is what other people would say of star trek and star wars and firefly and battlestar galactica if we could look at ourselves from a distance.
How long has it for example been easy to promote your own music online? The monopoly radio had is long dead and gone, yet almost all the top artists come from the big record companies and pretty much all statistics show most people aren't interested in the long tail. It's not just evil scheming from the MAFIAA that is the cause of that. Their greatest issue is that copyright is broken. The probability of being caught times the impact it'll have works out to a risk so low most people would chance it. And they were slightly paranoid, they'd find a slightly more obscure place than the Pirate Bay, though many enough seem happy being there too. I don't think they can reinvent themselves past that, it's more like how the buggy whip manufacturers went out of business when the car took over. Maybe some found other work but it'd essentially be to start a completely new business.
Well hopefully it will get broken up into separate actions. I mean, the alleged wrongdoing and the alleged proof may be similar, but the defenses will vary wildly from plain denial to family, tenants, guests, open wifi, trojans and so on. I don't see how one judge could possibly make the decision they're all guilty or not guilty, and so it doesn't fit as a class action the way I think of it. But I imagine for most it's about the fear and collecting settlements, if everyone simply said no and asked for their day in court this would stop. Even if you just showed up yourself and gave your layman "I have no idea what they're talking about" defense. If you just keep the spending at an absolute minimum and assume you'll lose, I doubt you'll be out more than $2500 anyway. The statutory minimum is $750, and if you don't piss off the judge or jury you'll likely to get that.
I think you'd do better if we had some grasp of a "steady state" where Big Bangs would happen through some quantum improbability out of some nothingness. Kinda not unlike how a nuke can go from some seemingly stable matter to a Small Bang.
However, everything we've managed to figure out about the universe so far seems to be that it's going in one direction until every star burns out and there's no more energy potentials to perform work. For all intents and purposes, the world will end. It's a little harder to imagine something will end without a beginning rather than something that is forever.
And let me object to the "radical atheism" label, while we are at it. How many degrees of "no god" are there to make someone a radical atheist?
I'd say the whole range of behaviors of how you deal with others is quite open, the religious too vary from extremely tolerant to extremely intolerant. You can be fairly radical in that you think religion is the world's longest-running scam exploiting the emotional need of their followers for the benefit of the religious leaders through childhood indoctrination, threats of damnation and promises of eternal bliss to gain power and wealth. Or you can simply think "god, what a fairy tale - good that I don't believe in it" and shrug. True, you have no god that pushes you to become a radical but some end up there anyway...
and still has a paltry 512 mb of memory, which, when they eventually get around to implementing multitasking, means that what you're actually going to get is something on the order of windows 3.1 multitasking with a few services, not actual task switching, etc.
The system requirements for Windows 3.1 was 2MB (4MB recommended). I'm not a big fan of the iPad myself for various reasons but you sound like you're on an anti-Apple rant. Computers have been fast "enough" for most people for a long time, and I can't really see why you'd try abusing an iPad into running anything like a workstation load. Or at least if you do, that you got any reason to complain about it not being the right tool for the job.
Logical fallacy. Doing it this way IS a logical step in a capitalistic society; that doesn't mean it's actually optimal (pure capitalism isn't), and a gently regulated free market supposedly looks for these issues and smooths them out.
I think it's important to realize that consumers and producers have completely opposite goals under capitalism. For consumers the optimal solution is called "perfect competition", where many companies sell extremely aggressively priced products that are good substitutes. However, to companies it is horrible as in the most extreme form every company is willing to undercut any other until none turn a profit. It takes far too many idealistic assumptions for almost any market, but it's the essence of why capitalism and competition has been so good.
Companies on the other hand would like to create as imperfect a market as possible. A market that has essentially collapsed where they are left as a monopolist, extremely dominant provider or is colluding to act like one is extremely profitable, and if you read any business literature it's all about creating profitable barriers to competition. Not all of these are negative as innovation and branding, but very many are detrimental to the market and monopolist pricing is also socially the worst of all possible solutions.
So how does relate to regulation? Well, a government acting in the best interest of its citizens (if you're American, feel free to laugh) then they are looking to promote competition. Regulation that serves to prop up an inefficient producer is protectionism and seeks to reduce competition. But regulation that tries to curb abuse of market power like antitrust law, HSE law (health, safety and environment) and consumer law is intended to increase competition and improve the conditions of workers and consumers forced to deal with them.
That is why you should listen very carefully if someone wants a "free market" or "free competition". Many of the former apply a doublespeak where they want to get rid of regulation so they can create bigger barriers and use dirtier tactics, not strengthen competition. It's like a boxing match where your food is poisoned, your coach is kidnapped, your gloves are rigged and the referee paid off before you even enter the ring. That's the free market at work. If you want to have actual competition based on the product delivered, you have to regulate the dirty ways you can't fight.
There is a smaller reason in that I've seen a lot of people, including friends, do... inadvisable things while drunk. The thought of not being in possession of my faculties and not being able to tell scares me.
Meh, the problem for quite many people is that we think too much and dare too little. Yes you can go through life making all the safe choices but it's also likely to be dull and boring. Some of the best moments of my life have been when we've been drinking and we let go of the stress and worry of life and just enjoy the moment. When we dare to let go of that serious mask and dance and joke and laugh and play tricks on each other. When you get over the fact that you can be embarrassed or rejected or make a fool of yourself and just give it a go anyway. Most times it goes well, and if not hey at least someone got a good laugh. Oh I have my negative experiences too but you remember the good and let the bad become past.
I couldn't be like when I've been drinking all the time, ignoring the health effects it'd still be a very short-sighted and chaotic life. But for short burst it's more fun being drunken me, both for me and everyone around me I think. I suppose there's probably a few people that really can switch with no stimulants at all, but they're few. After all most of us in our daily lives work to "train" our minds to be organized and logical so practical things get done. Nothing kills fun as fast as trying to analyze, measure and quantify why you're having fun. With reasonable amounts of alcohol that voice shuts up and "you" for relative values of you are still very much in control of yourself. It's just a more adventurous and daring version of yourself.
Well let's be honest here, the risk/gain isn't exactly working out for stable enterprise uses. They want people that can show off all the crazy things you can do with a computer and are willing to risk that their machine could go down. If they get it working for enough people over time, then it'll spread as people like the convenience of reboot-less upgrades. But right now, I'd say their analogy is just right for the market, it's the nerd version of the teenage drivers who play chicken.
Also what I do not understand, is why FF is singled out for this. Chrome is also given away for free, just like Opera and IE. There is also an OS version of Chrome. I never hear about problems of paying for license fees for those browsers.
"Chrome" is a closed source browser distributed by Google that contains a binary H.264 codec with a license valid for that binary only. "Chromium" is open source but comes with no H.264 codeo, though it's been patched to use the system codecs if available.
Firefox can not use the same solution as Chrome. It could use the same solution as Chromium, but it means it would only work for some people so they won't do it. That is why FF is singling themselves out, they are the only ones where it simply will not work.
A manager or sales person who both is legitimately suited for their job and is technical is a godsend, because they tend to be much less likely to promise their superiors and/or clients the impossible or impractical. They also tend to be better at "selling" the decisions that the development team has made and their tradeoffs.
Hahahahahahahaha. I won't mention names but the most technical presales guy was *the* worst at creating incredibly flashy, slick demos that had little to no basis in reality, glossed over enormous weaknesses and worked only by hardcoding that was near impossible to implement in an actual company. The regular sales guys probably didn't know better or even how to do it, but he both knew what he was doing and took it really far. You probably don't need to guess that he'd get the sale, collect the sales bonus then move on to the next sales case. We'd be the ones dragging the customer back to earth to deliver something disappointing but not so terrible they could do anything about it. Very few companies have a working feedback cycle that actually punishes sales for selling much more than they can actually deliver. Their job is to sell any way they can, then have a damage control team come clean up after them once the contract is signed. It's a rotten way to do business but it seems like rather standard procedure.
Often it seems that project management is just a job title, not a skill...
And sometimes it's a fraudulent title given to project coordinators. I've mostly stayed out of that position but I've seen what happens when IT management and business management both play hardball and the poor project manager is squished in the middle. Perhaps not getting sufficient authority is part of failed project management, but often it only turns out to be lacking when you need it. Sp before you blame the PM for the fumble, make sure his hands weren't tied behind his back...
While you can buy some SLR (and possibly cinema, I'm not really familiar with that world) cameras in a package deal with a lens, experienced users generally won't, unless the package just happens to include a lens that they want to have at a discount for buying it with the camera.
That made it sound like they were bad. The primary reason is that they're all generally bundled with an all-round lens and if you already have an SLR - which is pretty much a requirement for being called an advanced user - you already have it from your last camera. Unless they are changing lens system, which for a professional photographer is a huge decision not taken lightly. The best lenses are never bundled as far as I know, it's more of a "starter kit" for people that don't have any lenses already.
But there are a lot of fixed costs with the OED... editors, researchers, typesetting, etc. That thing's got a lot of pages!
Well if they're doing it for the online edition all the material is there already, it just needs to be made into a book form. I can't honestly imagine many other than libraries and etymologists who'd buy this behemoth, I doubt you lose much online sales, it's more likely to be good advertising at the library so they don't use Wikitionary instead, no matter how unauthoritative it is.
Pretty much every closed source software is in it to do business. That doesn't mean they always play nice when maximizing profit like lock-in and forced obsolescence, but most of the time they're looking to satisfy the customers because it leads to more sales and being able to take higher prices. The project shapes to meet the demands of the users. Open source on the other hand, for the most part goes in whatever damn direction they feel like, and being a user gets you essentially very little say-so. You want it? Fine, you code it or hire us for $$$ to do so. And if the people behind it lose their motivation, it's unlikely someone will come up with enough cash to change their minds.
Hiring a good developer at market rates is expensive - maybe short term in the financial crisis you can get something good for "cheap" but it's certainly the exception. Just think what your own contract rates would be, and you won't get many hours work on GIMP before you could have bought Photoshop for less. For most people on their own desktop hiring people to code something custom for them personally is completely out of the question. That's the problem, there's not one person willing to pay $100 (that'll get you less than two days at minimum wage, and the contractor still has to cover expenses and social costs) but there's probably 100 people willing to give $1. Except there's no working micropayment system and it turns into a waiting game hoping someone else will pay.
That's the big difference between closed and open source. Open source is free if it already does what you want and ridiculously expensive if it doesn't. With closed source software, you're paying even if you only use features they've had for years. That cash goes into funding development so the costs are spread among more users, not that the first user must pay everything. The first person gets the pleasure of trying to plow the road, everyone else just follows.
In my experience that's usually because some 30-something moron passed a lot of their bad habits onto their subordinates as if they were revelations from the lord himself.
Well if you accept it blindly then you're just lazy. I have spent many hours picking apart code I didn't understand thinking I'm either looking at something very smart or something very stupid. I don't remember who said "Ninety percent of everything is crap." but it's true, however the other 10% can be utter revelations. Not clever code as in exotic trickery which raises complexity 10x for marginal gains, but simply elegant - not as in pretty, but functionally elegant - code that is extremely well designed and cleanly implemented. You should be very careful who you let teach you to code "right"...
Some years ago, I was reading a flame here on slashdot and one of the insults was calling RMS an old dinosaur from the 256 color era. I grew up with the 16 color Commodore 64, so that made me older than the dinosaurs. That was the first time I felt really, really old and I was 24 at the time.
On a more serious note though, I will say that I am a better coder than I was 10 years ago but so much has changed. My professor would keep going on about bits and bytes like the difference between a short and long really mattered and "look to embedded". Well here we are and seriously nobody could give a fuck if a variable is short or long, possibly if it's in a huge array or many database records but mostly not even then.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think going through everything from BASIC to assembler to Pascal to MFC to Java 1.0 was useless, it's background and general knowledge but it's not very to the point. In fact, some of it would today be anti-patterns you should unlearn. In short I think you can subtract several years of useless skills, if I went back with modern tools and libraries I think I could achieve the same level in maybe 5-7 years. And the further back you go, the less relevant it is to modern programming.
And by modern I mean high level, we still need people to hack in C but not for most applications. There are jobs for COBOL programmers still, too. But today if I was building a house I'd rather do it like modern construction. Lots of prefab, but it still takes skill putting it all together.
Intel has been trying to buy Nvidia for years, saying that they need to merge in order to "compete". Nvidia resists, but it'll happen eventually.
I think it's more a matter of price - Intel can probably win in the long haul by constantly improving their integrated graphics (they suck less with each generation) while nVidia doesn't have much to go from the high-end. They've looked at dedicated GPGPU but I think that's a niche that's not big enough but they're pretty valuable right now.
I went with an Intel integrated chipset a number of years back because the alternatives weren't very well supported on FreeBSD, but the graphics weren't just not special, they were bad. Sufficiently bad that I've stayed away from them ever since. Which for Intel is just dumb, I have a very hard time believing that Intel couldn't do any better than what they've been doing.
Well, Intel is not stupid and they know why AMD bought ATI. Even though Larrabee doesn't seem to be going anywhere their integrated graphics are due for a big improvement in Sandy Bridge due soon, a preview is found here. It won't be competing for the serious gamers but it does well against current low end discrete chips.
I don't honestly think Intel cares that much what AMD is doing, they got what 20% of the market? Intel is far more interested in making the 80% that use Intel CPUs also use Intel GPUs, at least everyone but the high end gamers. Already you can have your Intel CPU with your choice of Intel chipset and nothing else, really. And motherboards are soon only adding the right connectors to the Intel chipset. In essence, it doesn't matter if Dell, Compaq, HP, Lenovo compete - as long as it's an Intel then Intel wins every which way. It does give a pretty good illusion of competition though.
Big-O notation does not describe the function on a physical processor with caches and pipelines, it's a pure mathemathical concept counting mathematical operations. Doubling n may mean things no longer fit in L1/L2/L3/RAM which will have huge performance implications, there is no simple notation for an actual implementation.
Adding processors would be just one factor, what's the latency and bandwidth of the interconnects? What memory can they access and at what cost, NUMA plays a big role. There's a huge, huge difference between running something on a cluster (slow interconnects) and a supercomputer (fast interconnects) which is as last as big as the difference between CPU and GPU.
I suppose you could create a theoretical parallelization with zero latency, infinite bandwidth counting only the mathmatical dependencies, but the results would be pretty much meaningless. Like this sorting algorithm you could parallelize with hundreds of thousands of simultanious compares - in theory. In practice the overhead of doing it would completely kill performance.
So does that mean illegal services (such as torrent sites on a blacklist) might be blocked?
Perhaps, but before it could be any arbitrary block. Now there's a law that specifically says you can not unless it meets some exception, so I don't see how it could possibly be worse than before.
And how long is it before that changes to "must be blocked" due to being a signatory on an international copyright treaty...
The day YouTube has to shut down because *one* pirated clip is found on their service is the day all sanity has left the Internet anyway.
Or does it mean companies can no longer filter websites they find inappropriate? They after all a form of ISP in a way.
Only if they resell access to individuals or other companies, I would think. An employee is more like a child in your household, I doubt your teenage son can demand you give him unfiltered internet access by this law. I guess there's some ambiguity at college campuses and the like, but that is not a new discussion. Also I'm quite sure ISPs can continue to offer voluntary filtering services, I know at least some ISPs here do.
Any time you let the government decide what is permissible on your network you will be sorry in the end.
And the first amendment means the government decides what you can say in the US? Which is by the way a pretty good response to your first statement, even though there is freedom of speech there are certain forms of speech that are illegal and forbidden. It would be very strange for "speech" over the Internet to be any other way.
All this to solve a problem that doesn't even exist. The only time we saw torrent throttling (not even blocking!!) in the U.S. was Comcast, and they got smacked down for it. The market worked, why do we need regulation when there is no problem?
The market? Comcast has most their customers trapped or in a duopoly with an equally unfriendly ISP. The only reason they got smacked down was because they were being covert and dishonest about it, if they had been above board then people would be screwed.
"Network Neutrality" sounds so happy and awesome at first, but it hides a greater problem than you'll ever see from throttling.
I think you need better arguments, you sound like Chicken Little who has become convinced the sky is falling. So far I've hardly seen anyone against network neutrality that I would say act with the customer's best interests at heart. Predominantly it's either companies who will lose their ability to double dip and become Internet gatekeepers or MAFIAA-like organizations that have as their stated goal to reach agreements with intermediaries to block unregulated services and offer only a cripple-net of "approved" services. Then there's some shills and quite possibly the most legitimate are the libertarians who claims the government can't do anything right, even though rights like this is a huge counterexample.
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Right sir, I get right on it. I will make the packages BOTH cutting edge AND give them proven stabilty. While I am at it, how about I make you nice curry sir, both spicy yet bland.
I think grandparent is asking for a free pony too, but it's not quite as absurd as it sounds. Ubuntu takes a snapshot every six months and some packages are always in a half-broken state as they're rewriting things. If you think of product quality a of a graph it goes like /^\_/^\_/^\_/^\ where the tops are releases and bottoms the bleeding edge releases in between. Sometimes it really is such that you could go backwards or forwards and both would be better than whatever point Ubuntu froze at. The number of backports is quite low, mostly they abandon the old and start working on the next release.
At times I've wanted a "top-hop" distribution with a release window. Not rolling, not snapshot but a distro that would pick major releases in the last 1-6 months and stay on their bugfix branches until a new release is out, and make it easy to separate between bugfix upgrades and real upgrades. However, it would take a lot more overhead in setting up the distro as you'd need someone managing each package and identifying which releases are worth it, a system of stable branches and so on.
So if I decide to take a higher paycheck over stock options, you think stealing from my company will only hurt the stock owners and not me? That there won't be pay cuts and layoffs if our revenue fails? Unless the porn actors were tricked into signing a contract that would give them much less than they thought through Hollywood accounting, that's a choice between them and their employer. Asking for an up front sum is pretty much as honest as it gets, they got paid what they asked for and if it was too little they should have asked for more. If you were trying to take the moral high ground on behalf of the actors, that the most ridiculous logic I've heard so far. You can only hurt their position next time they negotiate pay.
So what do you think of swingers clubs and the people that go there? People that go clubbing every weekend to get some casual sex? Gold diggers that sleep with people by the size of their wallet? A lot of people distinguish between sex for pleasure and sex for love. And if you cling to the notion that it's still for mutual pleasure then I think you don't understand the concept of "give none, get none". It's quite easy to explain through egoistic motivation, not any genuine interest in satisfying their partner. So-called "fucking friends" is pretty much a mutual exchange of sex services, not a relationship.
There's a huge gap between "I want to have sex with you" and "I'd rather not have sex with you". The former means you're at the top of the list, having beaten all other partners and activities. The latter means it's not something they'd voluntarily do under any circumstance, even if they were snowed in on a cabin alone with you and horny as fuck they'd rather get off on their own. When I go out I don't feel that I'm so unattractive that women don't want me, but I also see many better looking, better talking, better dancing guys competing for the same women. I really don't see the problem with some women saying they'd rather set a low bar and have them compete on money instead.
Of course there are prostitutes that don't have it like that, but dragging out the worst examples every time get silly particularly when most of the problems with human trafficking, sex slaves, pimps for protection and so on could be solved through legalized brothels, required health checks and the general protection we give workplaces. Also the business would no longer be dominated by illegal immigrants and immigrants on tourist visa, you'd need a work permit to work legit and that's where I'd think most people would go. It'd also get much of it out of the streets and residential areas and back into commercial areas zoned for it. Instead we still seem to live under the illusion that we'll extinguish the world's oldest profession, the worst you can get is people that'll talk delusional fantasy and not if reality will be better or worse off.
Now, suddenly any schmuck can make a perfect copy of a CD and distribute it to millions of his closest friends on the Internet.
Long story short you could make many really good analog copies of the first generations, but it didn't last and one person with bad equipment destroyed the chain. What changed with perfect copies as opposed to near-perfect copies is that you can have infinite generations. You don't need to give it to a million friends, only a few as long as they in total pass it on to more people. It's a little bit like a nuke going of, if you have a ratio >1 there's a chain reaction until you run out of reactive material.
Fractional people sound silly so let's just start with 10 people having it and each giving it to 1.2 people on average. So those 10 give it to 10*1.2 = 12. Those 12 give it to 12*1.2 = ~14. Those 14 give it to 14*1.2 = ~17. Those 17 give it to 17*1.2 = ~20 and so it keeps going growing exponentially with 1.2^n until you run out of people who'd want it. And nobody did more than share a little over one copy. There is no big bad wolf, only many equal peers.
I disagree. The price is an unlimited distribution license of the movie, not a copy of the movie or a trip to the movie. The damages should be about $5,000,000 for that license. Oh wait, an Oscar-winning, critically acclaimed film? $25,000,000. So $2,900 doesn't seem too bad really.
On P2P one person's upload is another person's download, so on average each upload one copy. Across 5000 users you can be fairly sure to have a good mix of seeders and leechers with the total working out very close to 5000 copies. Any other way you count it you are double-counting uploads and downloads or even counting generations several times. So let's be kind and say they make $20 profit on each copy, their losses are maybe ~$100,000. Hell, even if you include indirect damages to make it ten times that, it only lowers the value from $25M to $24M. I do hope you realize that they could only practically sell one unlimited distribution license so the value is $25M total and not 5000 times that?
They're asking for almost 3000$ just to forget you made an illegal copy for yourself. Do the math and you'd see that for $5000 each they could buy this $25M unlimited license you speak of, and legally make as many copies as they want and give to everyone. Compared to that $3000 for almost nothing is crazy expensive. Yes, I know being in a P2P network involves both up- and downloading but if I take 5 GB bandwidth from the swarm and give 5 GB back then my net contribution is zero, the swarm is no better or worse off than if I hadn't participated. To try pretending this somehow means I have caused them thousands of dollars in losses falls on its own absurdity. But clearly they have managed to confuse people like you into thinking it makes sense.
What you said would have made sense if it was a box office and download flop. You can keeping talking about low-budget films and foreign films and whatnot all day long, but the fact that people download the big flashy Hollywood productions prove that's what they want. They just don't like to pay for it. Exactly what people say here about the hurt locker is what other people would say of star trek and star wars and firefly and battlestar galactica if we could look at ourselves from a distance.
How long has it for example been easy to promote your own music online? The monopoly radio had is long dead and gone, yet almost all the top artists come from the big record companies and pretty much all statistics show most people aren't interested in the long tail. It's not just evil scheming from the MAFIAA that is the cause of that. Their greatest issue is that copyright is broken. The probability of being caught times the impact it'll have works out to a risk so low most people would chance it. And they were slightly paranoid, they'd find a slightly more obscure place than the Pirate Bay, though many enough seem happy being there too. I don't think they can reinvent themselves past that, it's more like how the buggy whip manufacturers went out of business when the car took over. Maybe some found other work but it'd essentially be to start a completely new business.
Well hopefully it will get broken up into separate actions. I mean, the alleged wrongdoing and the alleged proof may be similar, but the defenses will vary wildly from plain denial to family, tenants, guests, open wifi, trojans and so on. I don't see how one judge could possibly make the decision they're all guilty or not guilty, and so it doesn't fit as a class action the way I think of it. But I imagine for most it's about the fear and collecting settlements, if everyone simply said no and asked for their day in court this would stop. Even if you just showed up yourself and gave your layman "I have no idea what they're talking about" defense. If you just keep the spending at an absolute minimum and assume you'll lose, I doubt you'll be out more than $2500 anyway. The statutory minimum is $750, and if you don't piss off the judge or jury you'll likely to get that.
I think you'd do better if we had some grasp of a "steady state" where Big Bangs would happen through some quantum improbability out of some nothingness. Kinda not unlike how a nuke can go from some seemingly stable matter to a Small Bang.
However, everything we've managed to figure out about the universe so far seems to be that it's going in one direction until every star burns out and there's no more energy potentials to perform work. For all intents and purposes, the world will end. It's a little harder to imagine something will end without a beginning rather than something that is forever.
And let me object to the "radical atheism" label, while we are at it. How many degrees of "no god" are there to make someone a radical atheist?
I'd say the whole range of behaviors of how you deal with others is quite open, the religious too vary from extremely tolerant to extremely intolerant. You can be fairly radical in that you think religion is the world's longest-running scam exploiting the emotional need of their followers for the benefit of the religious leaders through childhood indoctrination, threats of damnation and promises of eternal bliss to gain power and wealth. Or you can simply think "god, what a fairy tale - good that I don't believe in it" and shrug. True, you have no god that pushes you to become a radical but some end up there anyway...
and still has a paltry 512 mb of memory, which, when they eventually get around to implementing multitasking, means that what you're actually going to get is something on the order of windows 3.1 multitasking with a few services, not actual task switching, etc.
The system requirements for Windows 3.1 was 2MB (4MB recommended). I'm not a big fan of the iPad myself for various reasons but you sound like you're on an anti-Apple rant. Computers have been fast "enough" for most people for a long time, and I can't really see why you'd try abusing an iPad into running anything like a workstation load. Or at least if you do, that you got any reason to complain about it not being the right tool for the job.
Logical fallacy. Doing it this way IS a logical step in a capitalistic society; that doesn't mean it's actually optimal (pure capitalism isn't), and a gently regulated free market supposedly looks for these issues and smooths them out.
I think it's important to realize that consumers and producers have completely opposite goals under capitalism. For consumers the optimal solution is called "perfect competition", where many companies sell extremely aggressively priced products that are good substitutes. However, to companies it is horrible as in the most extreme form every company is willing to undercut any other until none turn a profit. It takes far too many idealistic assumptions for almost any market, but it's the essence of why capitalism and competition has been so good.
Companies on the other hand would like to create as imperfect a market as possible. A market that has essentially collapsed where they are left as a monopolist, extremely dominant provider or is colluding to act like one is extremely profitable, and if you read any business literature it's all about creating profitable barriers to competition. Not all of these are negative as innovation and branding, but very many are detrimental to the market and monopolist pricing is also socially the worst of all possible solutions.
So how does relate to regulation? Well, a government acting in the best interest of its citizens (if you're American, feel free to laugh) then they are looking to promote competition. Regulation that serves to prop up an inefficient producer is protectionism and seeks to reduce competition. But regulation that tries to curb abuse of market power like antitrust law, HSE law (health, safety and environment) and consumer law is intended to increase competition and improve the conditions of workers and consumers forced to deal with them.
That is why you should listen very carefully if someone wants a "free market" or "free competition". Many of the former apply a doublespeak where they want to get rid of regulation so they can create bigger barriers and use dirtier tactics, not strengthen competition. It's like a boxing match where your food is poisoned, your coach is kidnapped, your gloves are rigged and the referee paid off before you even enter the ring. That's the free market at work. If you want to have actual competition based on the product delivered, you have to regulate the dirty ways you can't fight.
There is a smaller reason in that I've seen a lot of people, including friends, do... inadvisable things while drunk. The thought of not being in possession of my faculties and not being able to tell scares me.
Meh, the problem for quite many people is that we think too much and dare too little. Yes you can go through life making all the safe choices but it's also likely to be dull and boring. Some of the best moments of my life have been when we've been drinking and we let go of the stress and worry of life and just enjoy the moment. When we dare to let go of that serious mask and dance and joke and laugh and play tricks on each other. When you get over the fact that you can be embarrassed or rejected or make a fool of yourself and just give it a go anyway. Most times it goes well, and if not hey at least someone got a good laugh. Oh I have my negative experiences too but you remember the good and let the bad become past.
I couldn't be like when I've been drinking all the time, ignoring the health effects it'd still be a very short-sighted and chaotic life. But for short burst it's more fun being drunken me, both for me and everyone around me I think. I suppose there's probably a few people that really can switch with no stimulants at all, but they're few. After all most of us in our daily lives work to "train" our minds to be organized and logical so practical things get done. Nothing kills fun as fast as trying to analyze, measure and quantify why you're having fun. With reasonable amounts of alcohol that voice shuts up and "you" for relative values of you are still very much in control of yourself. It's just a more adventurous and daring version of yourself.
Well let's be honest here, the risk/gain isn't exactly working out for stable enterprise uses. They want people that can show off all the crazy things you can do with a computer and are willing to risk that their machine could go down. If they get it working for enough people over time, then it'll spread as people like the convenience of reboot-less upgrades. But right now, I'd say their analogy is just right for the market, it's the nerd version of the teenage drivers who play chicken.
Also what I do not understand, is why FF is singled out for this. Chrome is also given away for free, just like Opera and IE. There is also an OS version of Chrome. I never hear about problems of paying for license fees for those browsers.
"Chrome" is a closed source browser distributed by Google that contains a binary H.264 codec with a license valid for that binary only. "Chromium" is open source but comes with no H.264 codeo, though it's been patched to use the system codecs if available.
Firefox can not use the same solution as Chrome. It could use the same solution as Chromium, but it means it would only work for some people so they won't do it. That is why FF is singling themselves out, they are the only ones where it simply will not work.
A manager or sales person who both is legitimately suited for their job and is technical is a godsend, because they tend to be much less likely to promise their superiors and/or clients the impossible or impractical. They also tend to be better at "selling" the decisions that the development team has made and their tradeoffs.
Hahahahahahahaha. I won't mention names but the most technical presales guy was *the* worst at creating incredibly flashy, slick demos that had little to no basis in reality, glossed over enormous weaknesses and worked only by hardcoding that was near impossible to implement in an actual company. The regular sales guys probably didn't know better or even how to do it, but he both knew what he was doing and took it really far. You probably don't need to guess that he'd get the sale, collect the sales bonus then move on to the next sales case. We'd be the ones dragging the customer back to earth to deliver something disappointing but not so terrible they could do anything about it. Very few companies have a working feedback cycle that actually punishes sales for selling much more than they can actually deliver. Their job is to sell any way they can, then have a damage control team come clean up after them once the contract is signed. It's a rotten way to do business but it seems like rather standard procedure.
Often it seems that project management is just a job title, not a skill...
And sometimes it's a fraudulent title given to project coordinators. I've mostly stayed out of that position but I've seen what happens when IT management and business management both play hardball and the poor project manager is squished in the middle. Perhaps not getting sufficient authority is part of failed project management, but often it only turns out to be lacking when you need it. Sp before you blame the PM for the fumble, make sure his hands weren't tied behind his back...
While you can buy some SLR (and possibly cinema, I'm not really familiar with that world) cameras in a package deal with a lens, experienced users generally won't, unless the package just happens to include a lens that they want to have at a discount for buying it with the camera.
That made it sound like they were bad. The primary reason is that they're all generally bundled with an all-round lens and if you already have an SLR - which is pretty much a requirement for being called an advanced user - you already have it from your last camera. Unless they are changing lens system, which for a professional photographer is a huge decision not taken lightly. The best lenses are never bundled as far as I know, it's more of a "starter kit" for people that don't have any lenses already.
But there are a lot of fixed costs with the OED... editors, researchers, typesetting, etc. That thing's got a lot of pages!
Well if they're doing it for the online edition all the material is there already, it just needs to be made into a book form. I can't honestly imagine many other than libraries and etymologists who'd buy this behemoth, I doubt you lose much online sales, it's more likely to be good advertising at the library so they don't use Wikitionary instead, no matter how unauthoritative it is.
Pretty much every closed source software is in it to do business. That doesn't mean they always play nice when maximizing profit like lock-in and forced obsolescence, but most of the time they're looking to satisfy the customers because it leads to more sales and being able to take higher prices. The project shapes to meet the demands of the users. Open source on the other hand, for the most part goes in whatever damn direction they feel like, and being a user gets you essentially very little say-so. You want it? Fine, you code it or hire us for $$$ to do so. And if the people behind it lose their motivation, it's unlikely someone will come up with enough cash to change their minds.
Hiring a good developer at market rates is expensive - maybe short term in the financial crisis you can get something good for "cheap" but it's certainly the exception. Just think what your own contract rates would be, and you won't get many hours work on GIMP before you could have bought Photoshop for less. For most people on their own desktop hiring people to code something custom for them personally is completely out of the question. That's the problem, there's not one person willing to pay $100 (that'll get you less than two days at minimum wage, and the contractor still has to cover expenses and social costs) but there's probably 100 people willing to give $1. Except there's no working micropayment system and it turns into a waiting game hoping someone else will pay.
That's the big difference between closed and open source. Open source is free if it already does what you want and ridiculously expensive if it doesn't. With closed source software, you're paying even if you only use features they've had for years. That cash goes into funding development so the costs are spread among more users, not that the first user must pay everything. The first person gets the pleasure of trying to plow the road, everyone else just follows.
In my experience that's usually because some 30-something moron passed a lot of their bad habits onto their subordinates as if they were revelations from the lord himself.
Well if you accept it blindly then you're just lazy. I have spent many hours picking apart code I didn't understand thinking I'm either looking at something very smart or something very stupid. I don't remember who said "Ninety percent of everything is crap." but it's true, however the other 10% can be utter revelations. Not clever code as in exotic trickery which raises complexity 10x for marginal gains, but simply elegant - not as in pretty, but functionally elegant - code that is extremely well designed and cleanly implemented. You should be very careful who you let teach you to code "right"...
Some years ago, I was reading a flame here on slashdot and one of the insults was calling RMS an old dinosaur from the 256 color era. I grew up with the 16 color Commodore 64, so that made me older than the dinosaurs. That was the first time I felt really, really old and I was 24 at the time.
On a more serious note though, I will say that I am a better coder than I was 10 years ago but so much has changed. My professor would keep going on about bits and bytes like the difference between a short and long really mattered and "look to embedded". Well here we are and seriously nobody could give a fuck if a variable is short or long, possibly if it's in a huge array or many database records but mostly not even then.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think going through everything from BASIC to assembler to Pascal to MFC to Java 1.0 was useless, it's background and general knowledge but it's not very to the point. In fact, some of it would today be anti-patterns you should unlearn. In short I think you can subtract several years of useless skills, if I went back with modern tools and libraries I think I could achieve the same level in maybe 5-7 years. And the further back you go, the less relevant it is to modern programming.
And by modern I mean high level, we still need people to hack in C but not for most applications. There are jobs for COBOL programmers still, too. But today if I was building a house I'd rather do it like modern construction. Lots of prefab, but it still takes skill putting it all together.
Intel has been trying to buy Nvidia for years, saying that they need to merge in order to "compete". Nvidia resists, but it'll happen eventually.
I think it's more a matter of price - Intel can probably win in the long haul by constantly improving their integrated graphics (they suck less with each generation) while nVidia doesn't have much to go from the high-end. They've looked at dedicated GPGPU but I think that's a niche that's not big enough but they're pretty valuable right now.
I went with an Intel integrated chipset a number of years back because the alternatives weren't very well supported on FreeBSD, but the graphics weren't just not special, they were bad. Sufficiently bad that I've stayed away from them ever since. Which for Intel is just dumb, I have a very hard time believing that Intel couldn't do any better than what they've been doing.
Well, Intel is not stupid and they know why AMD bought ATI. Even though Larrabee doesn't seem to be going anywhere their integrated graphics are due for a big improvement in Sandy Bridge due soon, a preview is found here. It won't be competing for the serious gamers but it does well against current low end discrete chips.
I don't honestly think Intel cares that much what AMD is doing, they got what 20% of the market? Intel is far more interested in making the 80% that use Intel CPUs also use Intel GPUs, at least everyone but the high end gamers. Already you can have your Intel CPU with your choice of Intel chipset and nothing else, really. And motherboards are soon only adding the right connectors to the Intel chipset. In essence, it doesn't matter if Dell, Compaq, HP, Lenovo compete - as long as it's an Intel then Intel wins every which way. It does give a pretty good illusion of competition though.
Big-O notation does not describe the function on a physical processor with caches and pipelines, it's a pure mathemathical concept counting mathematical operations. Doubling n may mean things no longer fit in L1/L2/L3/RAM which will have huge performance implications, there is no simple notation for an actual implementation.
Adding processors would be just one factor, what's the latency and bandwidth of the interconnects? What memory can they access and at what cost, NUMA plays a big role. There's a huge, huge difference between running something on a cluster (slow interconnects) and a supercomputer (fast interconnects) which is as last as big as the difference between CPU and GPU.
I suppose you could create a theoretical parallelization with zero latency, infinite bandwidth counting only the mathmatical dependencies, but the results would be pretty much meaningless. Like this sorting algorithm you could parallelize with hundreds of thousands of simultanious compares - in theory. In practice the overhead of doing it would completely kill performance.
So does that mean illegal services (such as torrent sites on a blacklist) might be blocked?
Perhaps, but before it could be any arbitrary block. Now there's a law that specifically says you can not unless it meets some exception, so I don't see how it could possibly be worse than before.
And how long is it before that changes to "must be blocked" due to being a signatory on an international copyright treaty...
The day YouTube has to shut down because *one* pirated clip is found on their service is the day all sanity has left the Internet anyway.
Or does it mean companies can no longer filter websites they find inappropriate? They after all a form of ISP in a way.
Only if they resell access to individuals or other companies, I would think. An employee is more like a child in your household, I doubt your teenage son can demand you give him unfiltered internet access by this law. I guess there's some ambiguity at college campuses and the like, but that is not a new discussion. Also I'm quite sure ISPs can continue to offer voluntary filtering services, I know at least some ISPs here do.
Any time you let the government decide what is permissible on your network you will be sorry in the end.
And the first amendment means the government decides what you can say in the US? Which is by the way a pretty good response to your first statement, even though there is freedom of speech there are certain forms of speech that are illegal and forbidden. It would be very strange for "speech" over the Internet to be any other way.
All this to solve a problem that doesn't even exist. The only time we saw torrent throttling (not even blocking!!) in the U.S. was Comcast, and they got smacked down for it. The market worked, why do we need regulation when there is no problem?
The market? Comcast has most their customers trapped or in a duopoly with an equally unfriendly ISP. The only reason they got smacked down was because they were being covert and dishonest about it, if they had been above board then people would be screwed.
"Network Neutrality" sounds so happy and awesome at first, but it hides a greater problem than you'll ever see from throttling.
I think you need better arguments, you sound like Chicken Little who has become convinced the sky is falling. So far I've hardly seen anyone against network neutrality that I would say act with the customer's best interests at heart. Predominantly it's either companies who will lose their ability to double dip and become Internet gatekeepers or MAFIAA-like organizations that have as their stated goal to reach agreements with intermediaries to block unregulated services and offer only a cripple-net of "approved" services. Then there's some shills and quite possibly the most legitimate are the libertarians who claims the government can't do anything right, even though rights like this is a huge counterexample.