I spent a month in NZ at a friends house a year ago, and the internet connections where like we had in Finland 10 years ago... Or even worse. They had an ADSL connection limited to 1Mb/s down (and very slow up) with a 2GB monthly limit. After the limit is full it would throttle down to 5KB/s for the rest of the month.
I spent a few weeks in NZ in 2006 and it was FAR better than you describe even back then, and that was in a small town far from any large city. Either it's gotten much worse over the last few years, or you're not being entirely honest.
Metering makes less sense for broadband because, unlike water and electricity, the marginal unit cost of sending "one more gigabyte" over the network is negligible; the main costs are capital costs (investment in infrastructure and expansion) and maintenance. The only actual marginal cost of sending a signal over the network is a tiny amount of energy. If you don't understand this, imagine you purchase a 100Mbit switch and some ethernet cable and create a network between you and your neighbor... now consider the relative cost of installing that setup, vs. sending enormous amounts of data across that line... you can pretty much keep that cable saturated and your marginal costs will be miniscule. Comparing this to gas or water is a false analogy.
And yet for many, many years HD manufacturers all used the base-2 definitions, and in fact only very recently (in computer history terms) changed over to the base-10 definitions. So certainly there was a very well established de facto standard of using the base-2 definitions amongst HD manufacturers.
I'd be surprised if Rapidshare, et. al, hasn't pursued the same strategy.
It's possible, I don't know. I must say though, I own a small ISV and one day I discovered pirated copies of our own software on RapidShare. I fired off a letter to their abuse address, and within 24 hours they had removed (and, they said, permanently blacklisted) the content and sent an apologetic response. It was certainly a more positive response than I had expected. This was about 3 years ago, and I haven't yet seen any of our software appear again on RapidShare.
Only he uneducated idiots say they have to keep it loaded and ready for home defense.
This has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it's a good idea to keep a gun 'loaded and ready for home defense', because doing that wasn't the cause of this negligent accident: This guy left the thing *loaded and lying on a table near a 3-yr old*, something you just don't do regardless of whether or not you prefer to keep a gun loaded and ready for home defense. Why are you trying trying to turn this into an argument about something it isn't, and falsely equating what he did with general carry for home defense?
And how has the NSA "won" exactly? You think they have secret 'backdoors' for all major encryption algorithms? And if they haven't actually "won", why hasn't there been the disaster you predict?
Re:...and at the same conference, FBI director say
on
There Is No Cyberwar
·
· Score: 1
If you ask me, most of the rhetoric one hears from government officials is more about money than anything else; warning of a 'rapidly expanding cyberterrorism threat' is mainly scaremongering that translates to 'give us a bigger budget than ever'.
Not saying there aren't vulnerabilities; certainly there are, just look at all the Windows botnets and viruses (and nowadays PDF seems to be a primary attack vector). If there was a "cyberwar" already being waged, it would probably already have been lost. But giving more money to some state department to employ a building full of people somewhere to 'tackle the problem' is hardly going to fix things like IE and Adobe's PDF reader.
Tell me again how not having universal health care is good for small business?
Um, no, fallacy of false choice - not having DECENT healthcare insurance services is what is detrimental - yet you posit that the only choices available are "universal healthcare" and crummy healthcare. Yeah you got crummy healthcare, but there are other reasons for that (e.g. lack of competition), most of which are probably fixable in other ways without having to create "universal" healthcare. You didn't need *universal* healthcare in your case, you just needed a decent option.
The notion that "anybody can make it in the US if they work hard" is a fairy tale.
Seriously. Be born rich. That's the way to go.
The notion that the notion is a fairytale is a fairytale. People love to blindly spread memes like this because they enjoy feeling sorry for themselves, but it simply isn't true:
Rags To Riches Billionaires: "Almost two-thirds of the world's 946 billionaires made their fortunes from scratch, relying on grit and determination"
That doesn't mean everyone can end up a billionaire, but it's simply false that this notion that 'anyone can make it' is a fairytale; it's borne out on practically a daily basis. If you open your eyes and look, you'll find true-life rags-to-riches story under every second stone you turn --- especially in the USA, but also these days frequently in places like China. But yeah, not everyone is born hard-working, I guess, so keep sitting and feeling sorry for yourself and you'll definitely ensure that nothing ever changes for you.
Etc. etc. blah blah... I could go on pasting these stories in here all day. Nothing worse than listening to whiny losers feeling sorry for themselves that they weren't born rich.
And no, government giving grants for video game development can simply not be considered a case of free-market capitalism in action, by definition. At all. That cannot be reconciled. I suggest you read up on what free-market capitalism actually is; the reason you're probably confused about is, understandably, probably that you've been told that what we have is a system of free-market capitalism. The term "capitalism" has a specific definition in economics --- it can't mean whatever you want it to mean (sorry) and by its definition, calling government funding a video game an instance of "capitalism in action" is so misguided, it's honestly difficult to know where to begin to correct such a confused view. People may differ on various less crucial aspects of the definition of capitalism, but one thing fundamental to its definition is the means of production being privately (i.e. not government - by definition) owned and traded.
As far as I can tell the employees kept coming to work without pay, this was their choice, were is the fraud?
It's honestly a little embarrassing having to point out something this obvious, but the fraud is that they were promised that they would ultimately be paid, and now it looks like they're not going to get paid at all. They never agreed to work for free, only that their wages be deferred; the employer broke an agreement.
If the boss said "we want you to work for free" and they inexplicably said "OK" that would be free markets at work, sure. But that's not what happened. If you have an employer-employee agreement stating you will be paid for your labor and you don't get paid, that's fraud. If you can't see that, I'm sorry, I don't know how to make it more obvious.
Here in the US, we've had entire industries do this to their workers. It's called "free-market capitalism" writ large.
Oh please. Firstly, FTS, which part of "Interzone's.. office was created with the assistance of a state government grant" sounds like free-market capitalism to you? Secondly, not paying your employees the agreed amount is already illegal under free-market capitalism, and blatantly defrauding labor is not "capitalism". The fact that your drivel got moderated +5 is testament to how widespread this rabid anti-free-market-capitalism cult has seemingly become right now.
If you believe your boss is just out to fuck you over, just quit already and do something else. Actually it's thanks to the "free-market capitalism" you criticise that it really is as simple as that; if you think it's better in other countries where they don't have that nasty "free-market capitalism" then by all means move somewhere like Cuba. The reason you have a job at all is because of your boss.
Did you read the article? It's not only memory, but also I/O and CPU:
"Both of those measurements are also higher for Windows 7 systems than for XP machines. While 85% of the former are running at peak I/O loads, only 36% of the latter do; the numbers for CPU workload are closer, as 44% of Windows 7 computers are running a computational backlog that delays processing tasks, compared to 36% of the XP systems."
A file cache alone isn't supposed to slow down your system --- if it is, "you're doing it wrong". Merely using more RAM may not slow down your computer but the article states explicitly that they are also measuring aspects that do impact on performance. Clearly there are more factors involved than just the file cache.
Hmm, it might be instructive to clear out our terminology here, to avoid confusion... "page faults" as the term is used in Windows are a useless metric in terms of speed, as that doesn't tell you how often the system is hitting the disk. When an application allocates memory (e.g. 'char* foo = new char[65536];) the system doesn't actually allocate any memory at all until the application attempts to read from or write to those allocated pages (similarly the terminology here also gets confused as this is also called 'virtual memory' while others use the term 'virtual memory' to refer to hard disk swapping specifically)... in Windows terminology a "page fault" is counted when this happens... that's just normal and harmless and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the hard disk at that point. According to Wikipedia, "Note that Microsoft uses the term hard fault in its Resource Monitor to mean 'page fault' (cf. Resource View Help in Microsoft operating systems)". If you say "The metric to count is the number of page faults", I presume you mean "hard fault" (i.e. memory in disk) rather than simply memory that hasn't been allocated at all.
FIle cache will definitely swap out your applications in XP.
I don't know about Windows 7, but I can also definitely confirm that older versions of Windows do this, including XP, and not even remotely "intelligently". I used to often have to copy large amounts of files over the network via SMB, and you can do a very simple test to confirm this: (a) Load up some applications (b) Copy (with that machine as SMB server and the receiver as client) a Gb or two of files over the network (c) bam, your applications are all swapped to disk and visibly, painfully crawling along --- they will pretty much be visibly more sluggish until you restart. Windows memory management is awful, or at least it used to be --- its quite possibly they've improved it in Windows 7. Windows used to have other major deficiencies with memory management, such as over-aggressively starting to swap to disk when only around half your actual RAM was used... again, it's possible this is improved in Win7, I haven't done work requiring testing those aspects in some years.
The failure to mandate that broadband is at least 100 mbps places the US way behind other countries... That is why Japanese who come to the US
Japan didn't get so far ahead by "mandating" broadband speeds; they did it primarily by liberalising the market. The primary obstacle in the US is lack of real competition, and this is what both state and federal governments should focus on. In Japan, the true cost is also hidden from consumers thanks to a.o. forced subsidisation from taxpayers (taxpayers are subsidising FTTH by about 33%).
Slashdot Mirror
Even worse, in the end the only ones who will benefit are the corporations.
Oh, and maybe a few million people who get jobs. But hey, darn those evil corporations.
I spent a month in NZ at a friends house a year ago, and the internet connections where like we had in Finland 10 years ago... Or even worse. They had an ADSL connection limited to 1Mb/s down (and very slow up) with a 2GB monthly limit. After the limit is full it would throttle down to 5KB/s for the rest of the month.
I spent a few weeks in NZ in 2006 and it was FAR better than you describe even back then, and that was in a small town far from any large city. Either it's gotten much worse over the last few years, or you're not being entirely honest.
Metering makes less sense for broadband because, unlike water and electricity, the marginal unit cost of sending "one more gigabyte" over the network is negligible; the main costs are capital costs (investment in infrastructure and expansion) and maintenance. The only actual marginal cost of sending a signal over the network is a tiny amount of energy. If you don't understand this, imagine you purchase a 100Mbit switch and some ethernet cable and create a network between you and your neighbor ... now consider the relative cost of installing that setup, vs. sending enormous amounts of data across that line ... you can pretty much keep that cable saturated and your marginal costs will be miniscule. Comparing this to gas or water is a false analogy.
http://www.google.com/search?q=virtual+machine+vulnerabilities Sigh ... when will people ever learn.
Is letting 'cloud users' access the servers that run out financial markets really a good idea?
No.
And yet for many, many years HD manufacturers all used the base-2 definitions, and in fact only very recently (in computer history terms) changed over to the base-10 definitions. So certainly there was a very well established de facto standard of using the base-2 definitions amongst HD manufacturers.
I haven't yet seen any of our software appear again on RapidShare.
That I know of, anyway.
I'd be surprised if Rapidshare, et. al, hasn't pursued the same strategy.
It's possible, I don't know. I must say though, I own a small ISV and one day I discovered pirated copies of our own software on RapidShare. I fired off a letter to their abuse address, and within 24 hours they had removed (and, they said, permanently blacklisted) the content and sent an apologetic response. It was certainly a more positive response than I had expected. This was about 3 years ago, and I haven't yet seen any of our software appear again on RapidShare.
Only he uneducated idiots say they have to keep it loaded and ready for home defense.
This has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it's a good idea to keep a gun 'loaded and ready for home defense', because doing that wasn't the cause of this negligent accident: This guy left the thing *loaded and lying on a table near a 3-yr old*, something you just don't do regardless of whether or not you prefer to keep a gun loaded and ready for home defense. Why are you trying trying to turn this into an argument about something it isn't, and falsely equating what he did with general carry for home defense?
And how has the NSA "won" exactly? You think they have secret 'backdoors' for all major encryption algorithms? And if they haven't actually "won", why hasn't there been the disaster you predict?
If you ask me, most of the rhetoric one hears from government officials is more about money than anything else; warning of a 'rapidly expanding cyberterrorism threat' is mainly scaremongering that translates to 'give us a bigger budget than ever'. Not saying there aren't vulnerabilities; certainly there are, just look at all the Windows botnets and viruses (and nowadays PDF seems to be a primary attack vector). If there was a "cyberwar" already being waged, it would probably already have been lost. But giving more money to some state department to employ a building full of people somewhere to 'tackle the problem' is hardly going to fix things like IE and Adobe's PDF reader.
Tell me again how not having universal health care is good for small business?
Um, no, fallacy of false choice - not having DECENT healthcare insurance services is what is detrimental - yet you posit that the only choices available are "universal healthcare" and crummy healthcare. Yeah you got crummy healthcare, but there are other reasons for that (e.g. lack of competition), most of which are probably fixable in other ways without having to create "universal" healthcare. You didn't need *universal* healthcare in your case, you just needed a decent option.
The notion that "anybody can make it in the US if they work hard" is a fairy tale.
Seriously. Be born rich. That's the way to go.
The notion that the notion is a fairytale is a fairytale. People love to blindly spread memes like this because they enjoy feeling sorry for themselves, but it simply isn't true:
Rags To Riches Billionaires: "Almost two-thirds of the world's 946 billionaires made their fortunes from scratch, relying on grit and determination"
That doesn't mean everyone can end up a billionaire, but it's simply false that this notion that 'anyone can make it' is a fairytale; it's borne out on practically a daily basis. If you open your eyes and look, you'll find true-life rags-to-riches story under every second stone you turn --- especially in the USA, but also these days frequently in places like China. But yeah, not everyone is born hard-working, I guess, so keep sitting and feeling sorry for yourself and you'll definitely ensure that nothing ever changes for you.
Rags to Riches CEOs
7 greatest celebrity rags to riches stories
Rags to Riches
Entrepreneur takes women from rags to riches
Rags to Riches billionaires
Asian American Rags to Riches Sagas
Case Study: From Rags to Riches (Brenda French)
Cordia Harrington: From Rags to Riches Success Story
Local cosmetics magnate reveals rags-to-riches life story
China: A rags-to-riches story to dream about (Yan Huiyan)
China’s paper magnate is a rags-to-riches story, literally
Rags to riches: Bill MacAloney: from orphan to successful business owner to CBA
From rags to riches: Filipino weavers trade up
Etc. etc. blah blah ... I could go on pasting these stories in here all day. Nothing worse than listening to whiny losers feeling sorry for themselves that they weren't born rich.
Really?
As a matter of fact, by and large, yes, yes, it really is. Especially if you don't want to get caught. Think about it a bit.
And no, government giving grants for video game development can simply not be considered a case of free-market capitalism in action, by definition. At all. That cannot be reconciled. I suggest you read up on what free-market capitalism actually is; the reason you're probably confused about is, understandably, probably that you've been told that what we have is a system of free-market capitalism. The term "capitalism" has a specific definition in economics --- it can't mean whatever you want it to mean (sorry) and by its definition, calling government funding a video game an instance of "capitalism in action" is so misguided, it's honestly difficult to know where to begin to correct such a confused view. People may differ on various less crucial aspects of the definition of capitalism, but one thing fundamental to its definition is the means of production being privately (i.e. not government - by definition) owned and traded.
As far as I can tell the employees kept coming to work without pay, this was their choice, were is the fraud?
It's honestly a little embarrassing having to point out something this obvious, but the fraud is that they were promised that they would ultimately be paid, and now it looks like they're not going to get paid at all. They never agreed to work for free, only that their wages be deferred; the employer broke an agreement.
If the boss said "we want you to work for free" and they inexplicably said "OK" that would be free markets at work, sure. But that's not what happened. If you have an employer-employee agreement stating you will be paid for your labor and you don't get paid, that's fraud. If you can't see that, I'm sorry, I don't know how to make it more obvious.
Here in the US, we've had entire industries do this to their workers. It's called "free-market capitalism" writ large.
Oh please. Firstly, FTS, which part of "Interzone's .. office was created with the assistance of a state government grant" sounds like free-market capitalism to you? Secondly, not paying your employees the agreed amount is already illegal under free-market capitalism, and blatantly defrauding labor is not "capitalism". The fact that your drivel got moderated +5 is testament to how widespread this rabid anti-free-market-capitalism cult has seemingly become right now.
If you believe your boss is just out to fuck you over, just quit already and do something else. Actually it's thanks to the "free-market capitalism" you criticise that it really is as simple as that; if you think it's better in other countries where they don't have that nasty "free-market capitalism" then by all means move somewhere like Cuba. The reason you have a job at all is because of your boss.
Did you read the article? It's not only memory, but also I/O and CPU:
"Both of those measurements are also higher for Windows 7 systems than for XP machines. While 85% of the former are running at peak I/O loads, only 36% of the latter do; the numbers for CPU workload are closer, as 44% of Windows 7 computers are running a computational backlog that delays processing tasks, compared to 36% of the XP systems."
A file cache alone isn't supposed to slow down your system --- if it is, "you're doing it wrong". Merely using more RAM may not slow down your computer but the article states explicitly that they are also measuring aspects that do impact on performance. Clearly there are more factors involved than just the file cache.
Hmm, it might be instructive to clear out our terminology here, to avoid confusion ... "page faults" as the term is used in Windows are a useless metric in terms of speed, as that doesn't tell you how often the system is hitting the disk. When an application allocates memory (e.g. 'char* foo = new char[65536];) the system doesn't actually allocate any memory at all until the application attempts to read from or write to those allocated pages (similarly the terminology here also gets confused as this is also called 'virtual memory' while others use the term 'virtual memory' to refer to hard disk swapping specifically) ... in Windows terminology a "page fault" is counted when this happens ... that's just normal and harmless and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the hard disk at that point. According to Wikipedia, "Note that Microsoft uses the term hard fault in its Resource Monitor to mean 'page fault' (cf. Resource View Help in Microsoft operating systems)". If you say "The metric to count is the number of page faults", I presume you mean "hard fault" (i.e. memory in disk) rather than simply memory that hasn't been allocated at all.
FIle cache will definitely swap out your applications in XP.
I don't know about Windows 7, but I can also definitely confirm that older versions of Windows do this, including XP, and not even remotely "intelligently". I used to often have to copy large amounts of files over the network via SMB, and you can do a very simple test to confirm this: (a) Load up some applications (b) Copy (with that machine as SMB server and the receiver as client) a Gb or two of files over the network (c) bam, your applications are all swapped to disk and visibly, painfully crawling along --- they will pretty much be visibly more sluggish until you restart. Windows memory management is awful, or at least it used to be --- its quite possibly they've improved it in Windows 7. Windows used to have other major deficiencies with memory management, such as over-aggressively starting to swap to disk when only around half your actual RAM was used ... again, it's possible this is improved in Win7, I haven't done work requiring testing those aspects in some years.
The failure to mandate that broadband is at least 100 mbps places the US way behind other countries ... That is why Japanese who come to the US
Japan didn't get so far ahead by "mandating" broadband speeds; they did it primarily by liberalising the market. The primary obstacle in the US is lack of real competition, and this is what both state and federal governments should focus on. In Japan, the true cost is also hidden from consumers thanks to a.o. forced subsidisation from taxpayers (taxpayers are subsidising FTTH by about 33%).