I always found it odd that this post gets protection of my live time plus seventy years but a new drug only gets seventeen years plus a few extra months the lawyers cheat out of the system at the end of the seventeen years.
The main difference between the two is that your
post doesn't prevent anyone else from making
their own posts. A patent can apply to anything
that uses the same underlying idea. This idea
is usually much broader than the creative ideas
covered by the copyright.
For instance, copyright prevents you from selling
(without permission) a Star Trek story involving
Kirk and Spock. Imagine if the copyright holders
could prevent you from selling any
story involving people from Earth exploring
other worlds in a spaceship.
There are many excellent, well educated, CS and EE students graduating every year
Unfortunately, they're way outnumbered by the
hordes of people with CS and EE degrees who are
neither excellent nor well-educated.
One of my colleagues had to hire some people a
while back. Our work is research-oriented,
meaning we want people for the long haul, with
a good foundation of knowledge rather than the
IT skill du jour. He described the crop of
applicants sent to him by HR as "mostly worthless"
because it seems they learned almost nothing in
their 4 years except Java. Most of them
couldn't tell the difference between an O(n^2)
algorithm and an O(n log n) one. In fact, most
didn't even understand the concept.
When I worked at a university, I saw where a lot
of this came from. There was competition for
warm bodies between the departments, so there
was pressure to lower requirements in order to
keep students from transferring to the easier
departments. EE lost lots of students to CS
because CS required almost no math, and EE took
the heat for its "low retention rate."
Probably the most telling anecdote I remember
from my work there was when an EE professor,
who was talking with some juniors, stopped me and
said he wanted to ask me a physics question.
I told him I took physics 23 years before and
was probably rusty. He asked anyway. It was
very elementary, and I hesitated, suspecting a
trick question. But finally I gave the right
answer, and he triumphantly thanked me.
It turns out he had used this as part of a
larger problem on an exam, and the students had
complained that he hadn't covered this material.
He said it was covered in the prerequisite
course, which most had taken the previous year,
and they argued that they couldn't be expected to
retain that for a whole year! (And these were
A and B students, not the bottom of the barrel.)
He was the visionary who invigorated the U.S.
space program. And he spent much of his
childhood learning German, which kind of sounds
like Klingon.:-)
BTW, "ugly bags of mostly water" has nothing to
do with Klingons. Those were the words of some
snotty silicon creatures in a first season TNG
episode called "Home Soil."
It's not the RIAA's fault lawyers are so expensive.
No, but it is their fault for exploiting
that fact. When they go around crying a river about
how some evil pirate has cost them millions of
dollars, but then they're willing to "settle" for
a tiny fraction of their alleged losses, an amount
which just happens to be less than the cost of
hiring a lawyer, it's clear that they're just
adopting the same tactics as organized crime.
You know -- pay for protection because "you never
know what could happen to a nice joint like dis."
If they really cared about their rights,
they'd sue these people for everything they were
worth, just to make an example of them. But
then the targets would have to fight back. Still,
they'd make so much more money that way,
if your claim that they're right is true. Their
current strategy suggests that they are
the ones who can't win, because their cases
are weak.
You know, people who tend to defend corporations
have complained for years (justifiably) about
frivolous cases which force the company to
settle because some bean counter has calculated
it's cheaper than fighting a contingency-fee
lawyer. Too bad we don't hear too many of them
criticize the same abuse when it runs in the
opposite direction.
The "OK" sign is another way of referring to the female genetalia in some countries, and is considered obscene...
Given all the European snickering about Americans
complaining when Janet Jackson showed a tit on
TV, I would
think they wouldn't care about hand gestures.:-)
Too many people around here think they're entitled
to others' stuff for free, and because of
that, they act like
they're on the cutting edge of a new movement
(witness all the sneering about selling CDs being
an "outdated business models"). Most of their
arguments are just rationalizations.
It is bad if such people are associated with OSS
in other peoples' eyes because it discredits OSS.
It also makes it harder to raise
legitimate complaints about things like
DRM (e.g., DeCSS shutting OSS out) and the RIAA's tactics because John Q. Public, who
hasn't studied the issue very much, will merely
assume it's only more excuses from people who
just want to steal.
You just figured out now that/. just
collects links to other peoples' original source material, adds commentary and then provides
an open bulletin board for debate?
I usually try not to insult people, but jesus christ, you really are a stupid moron.
You should try insulting people more often.
Calling your opponent a moron is a highly
effective means of persuasion!
But trains can be done right. Visit Switzerland or Germany, or even France once in a while.
I've ridden trains in Germany, and they're very
nice. But what does that prove?
People are always touting the efficiency
of European public transporation vs. American,
and smugly concluding that something is wrong
with Americans. But it has little to do with
policy and everything to do with population
density. Would the trains in Germany be such
an effective means of transportation if it had
1/8 its current population density? You'd need
the same amount of track, and nearly the same
labor costs (you'd still need to run the trains
at the same frequency or else people would find
the schedules too inconvenient and use other
means), but you'd have 1/8 the revenue.
Bull. There's this really nice thing in the SPARC chips called "hardware contexts". In a multiprocess environment, such as Unix, everytime a process gives up the CPU because its time slice is over you have to swap in a whole new set of registers, counters, and what not.
Are you talking about the rotating register file?
Sparc has a large collection of registers, of
which a subset are addressible by the
register-register instructions at any given time.
You can move the window (which determines which
subset is visible) with single user-mode
instructions, which typically are used on
entering and exiting procedures. They are
aligned so that one chunk of the set (8 regs)
is shared between a caller and callee, which
makes for very efficient parameter passing.
In the days before out-of-order superscalar execution,
I ran timing experiments comparing this
system with comparable RISC processors without
this feature. If you like to write programs
with lots of very small nested functions, then
the reduction of function call overhead can be
significant, as much as 2x improvement. It's
much less of an issue on modern CPUs with
out-of-order execution, as the stack area used
for parameter passing will generally be sitting
in the L1 cache, close to the CPU.
I don't see your point about process switching.
It's not much of an issue
for ordinary systems. A process switch occurs,
what, like every 10ms? Saving a few dozen load and
store instructions might save you 10-20ns?
BFD.
Heck, the last place I lived when I went to get net service claimed they didn't "support" Mac!
Was this Verizon? They started a service in my
apartment where they provide DSL at a discount rate
which is tacked onto the rent. There was an open
house where the apartment managers were encouraging
people to sign up for the deal. They had two
techies from Verizon demoing the service (the
usual side-by-side next to a modem), and one of
them assured me it works with Linux and he uses
Linux at home. He seemed to know what he was
talking about so I signed up.
I got some standard kit which included the DSL
modem and one of those install disks that only
works under Windows. The install instructions
had a password (different for each subscriber).
But the password was not for the PPPoE link --
it was only to let you into the install
program, which would only run on Windows. The
sheet explicitly said, "if you run Macintosh you
need to call tech support."
I called tech support, told the lady I was running
Linux, and after some initial confusion she
cheerfully gave me all the info I needed to
configure pppd. I haven't had any problems with
the service.
But I can't figure it out. Most companies
consider tech support an annoying expense,
something they'd rather outsource if possible.
They could've added the necessary info to the
instruction sheet (it was already customized for
each user) and saved themselves the expense of
the tech support call.
I wonder if Verizon is involved in some
"partnerships" with MS, and their "no support
for others, unless you sneak in through the
back door" attitude may be just to grease the
wheels.
Many (perhaps most) Linux zealots are the stereotypical geek-hippie types who make PHB's run in terror, and who are lacking in corporate social skills. The Windows variety, OTOH, are overwhelmingly suited drones who fit in perfectly with the corporate culture.
Yes, but the people you're used to never look like
zealots. So Linux supporters see the typical
IT suits, with their "Microsoft is everything"
mindset, their preference for people with the
right tailor, the whole "I'm a genius because
I can manage" mentality, and think: MS-brainwashed
PHB. We're more likely to be comfortable with
other geeks, even if they're loud and opinionated,
because we feel like we can have a rational
argument even if we disagree.
While the suits see something embarassing
like RMS on TV crooning the "Free Software Song"
and think (besides "don't give up the day job"):
"This is the representative of FOSS???"
Over the last month I have been sent over 20 virus infected MS office files. I hardly think this argument could possibly hold up.
Not for us, but for the PHB's.
Microsoft has so dominated the mindshare of so many
users that they think their experiences with MS
systems are representative of all experiences with
computers. I've heard so many people go around
spewing drivel like, "Computers are inherently
unreliable and prone to crashing," or "Computers are inherently
insecure and prone to viruses." All they've
known is MS software, so they can't conceive of
anything better.
So if MS says OO is less secure, the clueless
may think: All computers are inherently insecure.
So viruses will infect all systems to the same
degree, though makers can try to stem the tide
through heroic efforts.
Microsoft is doing the best it can to keep, and they have
lots of resources. Some group of volunteers
couldn't possibly do any better. Gosh,
I'd hate to think of how many viruses are in
this OO software.
What we need to do is keep reminding users that
there are lots of better systems out there, and
viruses are primarily due to flawed design.
Most MS users
remind me of a talk I heard by an ex-Soviet
dissident in the 80's. He said that growing up
poor in the USSR, he still assumed
things must be worse in the USA, and he imagined
a "typical" American boy his age, living on the
edge of starvation under an oppressive regime.
He was genuinely happy to be living under Stalin,
where things sucked but not as bad as anywhere
else.
IE5 and IE5.5 are different in more than minor version number, while IE6 is pretty much IE5.5.1.
When I worked for a VLSI team in Boston in
the late eighties, our CAD
vendor had a support contract which promised one
major release a year. But it was almost a year
since version 4.0, and their new release wasn't
ready. So they just patched their latest
release (4.2) with some bug fixes and a few
minor features, and shipped it as 5.0. Everyone
could see it was basically the same as 4.0 +
patches.
When version 5.1 came out a few months later,
that was a huge change over 5.0!
They replaced their standard menu-for-newbies +
hotkeys-for-experts interface with the most
hideous UI I've ever had the misfortune of using.
It was based on "mouse gestures." You were
supposed to "draw" a D with your mouse to delete
a selected object, for instance. Half the time
it would get the wrong gesture. Our productivity
dropped precipitously, but because the 5.0 release
had been rushed, there were bugs that were fixed
in 5.1 and we couldn't work with the 5.0. So
many customers complained that they quickly came
out with 5.2, which was just 5.0 with the known
bugs fixed.
So I've learned that the positions of the digits
don't necessarily mean anything. Hell, you
can't even assume monotonicity all the time!
Re:At&t labs, great contributer to computing.
on
AT&T Labs' Brain Drain
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What is interesting is that AT&T was able to afford
their great labs because their government-granted
monopoly gave them a guaranteed revenue stream.
In the early 20th century, basic phone service in
the U.S. was a mess, much like the current
situation today with cell phone service. AT&T,
the biggest player, managed to convince the
government that phone service was a natural
monopoly and that they were in the best position
to be the ones to run that monopoly.
This freed them from financial pressures.
There was no Wall Street pressure to "increase
profitability" because if they did, the
regulators would say they're making too much
and would mandate reductions in the rates charged
to customers. On the other hand, as long as
Bell Labs kept coming out with neat stuff
(such as, geez, you didn't even mention the
transistor?) the regulators would be
happy to let the customers subsidize this
because everyone would benefit in the end.
After the breakup in 1984, phone service got
way cheaper (I mean, I can call China for 2
friggin' cents a minute) but competition forced
phone companies to focus on short-term costs.
I think it's safe to say that most people would find anthropomorphic robots that don't look 100% identical to people (there's something off with that one) very creepy.
OK, what about C-3PO?
I guess if you're going to build an anthropomorphic robot,
you need to give it an irritating voice to balance
out the face.
I wouldn't consider a buck a song unreasonable
if I could pick the songs, as opposed to
paying $15 for a CD with one or two good songs
and filler.
And who would buy a CD with one song on
it? That would waste storage space. Just buy
lots of songs (assuming they have a decently-sized
library). They're not filler because you
pick them. They need a minimum price per CD to
cover the overheads associated with each CD.
Somebody tried something like this around
1990, IIRC. You would pick songs from a catalog
and order them from a store (Newbury Comics in
Boston was one dealer), and the company would
send an audio cassette to the store so you could
pick it up in a few days. I browsed the
catalog, but they never had songs I was
interested in (stuff from 10 years before that
I didn't already have on CD), and they died
before they could expand the catalog.
(Ironically, I ended up buying a few regular
CDs after hearing some songs I recognized but
hadn't known who played them.)
But if you can throw a football, oh wow, put you on a pedestal. That's what education gets you...
Pro sports are really just forms of entertainment, so the
same processes are at work there as in cinema,
rock music, opera, whatever. People only want to
pay to see the very best. In a given performance
category, there will be a few highly-paid superstars that
everyone lines up to see (star athletes, big movie
stars, world-class opera singers), a larger
pool of well-paid highly-competent support
personnel (ordinary players on major-league teams, actors who
play minor characters or star in no-name films,
regular singers in big opera companies), many
lower-caliber people struggling to get by and
hoping for their big break, and those who get
cut out (such as college football players who
don't attract the interest of a pro team).
What makes the economics of this possible is the
huge "multiplication factor" possible with
entertainment. A top opera diva can make $10K
for a single performance, but if 2,000 people
pay to see it, that's $5 per person. Many
people would consider it worth the extra $5 for the
added pleasure of seeing a top-notch performance
rather than merely a better-than-average one.
So that diva represents a huge boost in
"productivity" (ability to sell tickets) for the
opera company.
This kind of economics is not so apparent in
most engineering fields, except in a few cases
where the knowledge is highly specialized and
known by only a few people.
While no measure can be truely accurate, the number of floating point operations a CPU can do per second is a more accurate judge of cpu power than the clock speed.
Not really. FLOPS is an attractive measure when
comparing machines with different ISA's (Instruction Set Architectures), because they
tend to be more constant than integer instructions.
This is especially useful when comparing RISC and
CISC processors, as RISC processors tend to
execute more instructions per second but each
instruction does less. But a floating-point add
is likely to be the same on both machines, and
for something like a linear-algebra problem, it
is possible to compute the number of FP ops
executed, and this will likely be the same for
all machines. (It gets tricky when you start
comparing machines with FP divide instructions
against machines that require emulating FP
divide with an inline routine that takes several
FP multiplies, which is why such apps are
generally not used for these comparisons.)
But this is not very useful when comparing
different versions of the same ISA. And FP
performance is just one component of overall
system performance. A system with a slow bus
is going to suck on anything that isn't lucky
enough to fit in the CPU's caches.
Supercomputer users have been aware of this for
years. The large US supercomputers build with
thousands of multiprocessors would have impressive
teraFLOPS ratings when they multiplied CPU's by
peak FLOPS/CPU (what you could get if you could
run every FP unit on every cycle), and get
reasonably good ratings on their Top500 scores
(because Linpack is relatively "friendly"), but
on real apps, they'd call it a good day if they
could get 10% of the peak rating.
I know a guy who used to wotk at MS. He said it
was deliberate policy to make new versions not
quite compatible with older versions. Of
course, you could always "save as" an older format,
if you don't mind clicking through their warming
box (which always comes up, whether or not
you used any features that won't work in the old
format).
But, he said, they were supposed to make sure it
didn't work 100% of the time. If users of older
versions couldn't read your documents maybe 1% of
the time, you'd chalk it up to "inevitable"
software problems (which you'd assume were normal
and unavoidable, since you were a Microsoft user)
rather than a deliberate attempt to get you to
upgrade. Eventually you were supposed to get
tired, and just give up and upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
The main difference between the two is that your post doesn't prevent anyone else from making their own posts. A patent can apply to anything that uses the same underlying idea. This idea is usually much broader than the creative ideas covered by the copyright.
For instance, copyright prevents you from selling (without permission) a Star Trek story involving Kirk and Spock. Imagine if the copyright holders could prevent you from selling any story involving people from Earth exploring other worlds in a spaceship.
Unfortunately, they're way outnumbered by the hordes of people with CS and EE degrees who are neither excellent nor well-educated.
One of my colleagues had to hire some people a while back. Our work is research-oriented, meaning we want people for the long haul, with a good foundation of knowledge rather than the IT skill du jour. He described the crop of applicants sent to him by HR as "mostly worthless" because it seems they learned almost nothing in their 4 years except Java. Most of them couldn't tell the difference between an O(n^2) algorithm and an O(n log n) one. In fact, most didn't even understand the concept.
When I worked at a university, I saw where a lot of this came from. There was competition for warm bodies between the departments, so there was pressure to lower requirements in order to keep students from transferring to the easier departments. EE lost lots of students to CS because CS required almost no math, and EE took the heat for its "low retention rate."
Probably the most telling anecdote I remember from my work there was when an EE professor, who was talking with some juniors, stopped me and said he wanted to ask me a physics question. I told him I took physics 23 years before and was probably rusty. He asked anyway. It was very elementary, and I hesitated, suspecting a trick question. But finally I gave the right answer, and he triumphantly thanked me. It turns out he had used this as part of a larger problem on an exam, and the students had complained that he hadn't covered this material. He said it was covered in the prerequisite course, which most had taken the previous year, and they argued that they couldn't be expected to retain that for a whole year! (And these were A and B students, not the bottom of the barrel.)
BTW, "ugly bags of mostly water" has nothing to do with Klingons. Those were the words of some snotty silicon creatures in a first season TNG episode called "Home Soil."
No, but it is their fault for exploiting that fact. When they go around crying a river about how some evil pirate has cost them millions of dollars, but then they're willing to "settle" for a tiny fraction of their alleged losses, an amount which just happens to be less than the cost of hiring a lawyer, it's clear that they're just adopting the same tactics as organized crime. You know -- pay for protection because "you never know what could happen to a nice joint like dis."
If they really cared about their rights, they'd sue these people for everything they were worth, just to make an example of them. But then the targets would have to fight back. Still, they'd make so much more money that way, if your claim that they're right is true. Their current strategy suggests that they are the ones who can't win, because their cases are weak.
You know, people who tend to defend corporations have complained for years (justifiably) about frivolous cases which force the company to settle because some bean counter has calculated it's cheaper than fighting a contingency-fee lawyer. Too bad we don't hear too many of them criticize the same abuse when it runs in the opposite direction.
Given all the European snickering about Americans complaining when Janet Jackson showed a tit on TV, I would think they wouldn't care about hand gestures. :-)
Too many people around here think they're entitled to others' stuff for free, and because of that, they act like they're on the cutting edge of a new movement (witness all the sneering about selling CDs being an "outdated business models"). Most of their arguments are just rationalizations. It is bad if such people are associated with OSS in other peoples' eyes because it discredits OSS. It also makes it harder to raise legitimate complaints about things like DRM (e.g., DeCSS shutting OSS out) and the RIAA's tactics because John Q. Public, who hasn't studied the issue very much, will merely assume it's only more excuses from people who just want to steal.
You just figured out now that /. just
collects links to other peoples' original source material, adds commentary and then provides
an open bulletin board for debate?
Put tits on Clippy?
You should try insulting people more often. Calling your opponent a moron is a highly effective means of persuasion!
But trains can be done right. Visit Switzerland or Germany, or even France once in a while.
I've ridden trains in Germany, and they're very nice. But what does that prove? People are always touting the efficiency of European public transporation vs. American, and smugly concluding that something is wrong with Americans. But it has little to do with policy and everything to do with population density. Would the trains in Germany be such an effective means of transportation if it had 1/8 its current population density? You'd need the same amount of track, and nearly the same labor costs (you'd still need to run the trains at the same frequency or else people would find the schedules too inconvenient and use other means), but you'd have 1/8 the revenue.
And make sure their cellmates bought plenty of "3 inches longer" pills and black market Viagra.
Are you talking about the rotating register file? Sparc has a large collection of registers, of which a subset are addressible by the register-register instructions at any given time. You can move the window (which determines which subset is visible) with single user-mode instructions, which typically are used on entering and exiting procedures. They are aligned so that one chunk of the set (8 regs) is shared between a caller and callee, which makes for very efficient parameter passing.
In the days before out-of-order superscalar execution, I ran timing experiments comparing this system with comparable RISC processors without this feature. If you like to write programs with lots of very small nested functions, then the reduction of function call overhead can be significant, as much as 2x improvement. It's much less of an issue on modern CPUs with out-of-order execution, as the stack area used for parameter passing will generally be sitting in the L1 cache, close to the CPU.
I don't see your point about process switching. It's not much of an issue for ordinary systems. A process switch occurs, what, like every 10ms? Saving a few dozen load and store instructions might save you 10-20ns? BFD.
Was this Verizon? They started a service in my apartment where they provide DSL at a discount rate which is tacked onto the rent. There was an open house where the apartment managers were encouraging people to sign up for the deal. They had two techies from Verizon demoing the service (the usual side-by-side next to a modem), and one of them assured me it works with Linux and he uses Linux at home. He seemed to know what he was talking about so I signed up.
I got some standard kit which included the DSL modem and one of those install disks that only works under Windows. The install instructions had a password (different for each subscriber). But the password was not for the PPPoE link -- it was only to let you into the install program, which would only run on Windows. The sheet explicitly said, "if you run Macintosh you need to call tech support."
I called tech support, told the lady I was running Linux, and after some initial confusion she cheerfully gave me all the info I needed to configure pppd. I haven't had any problems with the service.
But I can't figure it out. Most companies consider tech support an annoying expense, something they'd rather outsource if possible. They could've added the necessary info to the instruction sheet (it was already customized for each user) and saved themselves the expense of the tech support call.
I wonder if Verizon is involved in some "partnerships" with MS, and their "no support for others, unless you sneak in through the back door" attitude may be just to grease the wheels.
Yes, but the people you're used to never look like zealots. So Linux supporters see the typical IT suits, with their "Microsoft is everything" mindset, their preference for people with the right tailor, the whole "I'm a genius because I can manage" mentality, and think: MS-brainwashed PHB. We're more likely to be comfortable with other geeks, even if they're loud and opinionated, because we feel like we can have a rational argument even if we disagree. While the suits see something embarassing like RMS on TV crooning the "Free Software Song" and think (besides "don't give up the day job"): "This is the representative of FOSS???"
Not for us, but for the PHB's.
Microsoft has so dominated the mindshare of so many users that they think their experiences with MS systems are representative of all experiences with computers. I've heard so many people go around spewing drivel like, "Computers are inherently unreliable and prone to crashing," or "Computers are inherently insecure and prone to viruses." All they've known is MS software, so they can't conceive of anything better.
So if MS says OO is less secure, the clueless may think: All computers are inherently insecure. So viruses will infect all systems to the same degree, though makers can try to stem the tide through heroic efforts. Microsoft is doing the best it can to keep, and they have lots of resources. Some group of volunteers couldn't possibly do any better. Gosh, I'd hate to think of how many viruses are in this OO software.
What we need to do is keep reminding users that there are lots of better systems out there, and viruses are primarily due to flawed design.
Most MS users remind me of a talk I heard by an ex-Soviet dissident in the 80's. He said that growing up poor in the USSR, he still assumed things must be worse in the USA, and he imagined a "typical" American boy his age, living on the edge of starvation under an oppressive regime. He was genuinely happy to be living under Stalin, where things sucked but not as bad as anywhere else.
When I worked for a VLSI team in Boston in the late eighties, our CAD vendor had a support contract which promised one major release a year. But it was almost a year since version 4.0, and their new release wasn't ready. So they just patched their latest release (4.2) with some bug fixes and a few minor features, and shipped it as 5.0. Everyone could see it was basically the same as 4.0 + patches.
When version 5.1 came out a few months later, that was a huge change over 5.0! They replaced their standard menu-for-newbies + hotkeys-for-experts interface with the most hideous UI I've ever had the misfortune of using. It was based on "mouse gestures." You were supposed to "draw" a D with your mouse to delete a selected object, for instance. Half the time it would get the wrong gesture. Our productivity dropped precipitously, but because the 5.0 release had been rushed, there were bugs that were fixed in 5.1 and we couldn't work with the 5.0. So many customers complained that they quickly came out with 5.2, which was just 5.0 with the known bugs fixed.
So I've learned that the positions of the digits don't necessarily mean anything. Hell, you can't even assume monotonicity all the time!
What is interesting is that AT&T was able to afford their great labs because their government-granted monopoly gave them a guaranteed revenue stream.
In the early 20th century, basic phone service in the U.S. was a mess, much like the current situation today with cell phone service. AT&T, the biggest player, managed to convince the government that phone service was a natural monopoly and that they were in the best position to be the ones to run that monopoly.
This freed them from financial pressures. There was no Wall Street pressure to "increase profitability" because if they did, the regulators would say they're making too much and would mandate reductions in the rates charged to customers. On the other hand, as long as Bell Labs kept coming out with neat stuff (such as, geez, you didn't even mention the transistor?) the regulators would be happy to let the customers subsidize this because everyone would benefit in the end.
After the breakup in 1984, phone service got way cheaper (I mean, I can call China for 2 friggin' cents a minute) but competition forced phone companies to focus on short-term costs.
They can't respond to their email, because their machines won't boot?
After all, they're all using Windows, right?
Is that why the Brits want to keep Gibraltar?
OK, what about C-3PO?
I guess if you're going to build an anthropomorphic robot, you need to give it an irritating voice to balance out the face.
I wouldn't consider a buck a song unreasonable if I could pick the songs, as opposed to paying $15 for a CD with one or two good songs and filler.
And who would buy a CD with one song on it? That would waste storage space. Just buy lots of songs (assuming they have a decently-sized library). They're not filler because you pick them. They need a minimum price per CD to cover the overheads associated with each CD.
Somebody tried something like this around 1990, IIRC. You would pick songs from a catalog and order them from a store (Newbury Comics in Boston was one dealer), and the company would send an audio cassette to the store so you could pick it up in a few days. I browsed the catalog, but they never had songs I was interested in (stuff from 10 years before that I didn't already have on CD), and they died before they could expand the catalog. (Ironically, I ended up buying a few regular CDs after hearing some songs I recognized but hadn't known who played them.)
Pro sports are really just forms of entertainment, so the same processes are at work there as in cinema, rock music, opera, whatever. People only want to pay to see the very best. In a given performance category, there will be a few highly-paid superstars that everyone lines up to see (star athletes, big movie stars, world-class opera singers), a larger pool of well-paid highly-competent support personnel (ordinary players on major-league teams, actors who play minor characters or star in no-name films, regular singers in big opera companies), many lower-caliber people struggling to get by and hoping for their big break, and those who get cut out (such as college football players who don't attract the interest of a pro team).
What makes the economics of this possible is the huge "multiplication factor" possible with entertainment. A top opera diva can make $10K for a single performance, but if 2,000 people pay to see it, that's $5 per person. Many people would consider it worth the extra $5 for the added pleasure of seeing a top-notch performance rather than merely a better-than-average one. So that diva represents a huge boost in "productivity" (ability to sell tickets) for the opera company.
This kind of economics is not so apparent in most engineering fields, except in a few cases where the knowledge is highly specialized and known by only a few people.
Not really. FLOPS is an attractive measure when comparing machines with different ISA's (Instruction Set Architectures), because they tend to be more constant than integer instructions. This is especially useful when comparing RISC and CISC processors, as RISC processors tend to execute more instructions per second but each instruction does less. But a floating-point add is likely to be the same on both machines, and for something like a linear-algebra problem, it is possible to compute the number of FP ops executed, and this will likely be the same for all machines. (It gets tricky when you start comparing machines with FP divide instructions against machines that require emulating FP divide with an inline routine that takes several FP multiplies, which is why such apps are generally not used for these comparisons.)
But this is not very useful when comparing different versions of the same ISA. And FP performance is just one component of overall system performance. A system with a slow bus is going to suck on anything that isn't lucky enough to fit in the CPU's caches.
Supercomputer users have been aware of this for years. The large US supercomputers build with thousands of multiprocessors would have impressive teraFLOPS ratings when they multiplied CPU's by peak FLOPS/CPU (what you could get if you could run every FP unit on every cycle), and get reasonably good ratings on their Top500 scores (because Linpack is relatively "friendly"), but on real apps, they'd call it a good day if they could get 10% of the peak rating.
There ought to be a "-1, Godwin's Law" moderation...
Since he lives in Silicon Valley, which is at a
lower latitude than Redmond. Therefore his house
sweeps a longer path through the heavens.
But, he said, they were supposed to make sure it didn't work 100% of the time. If users of older versions couldn't read your documents maybe 1% of the time, you'd chalk it up to "inevitable" software problems (which you'd assume were normal and unavoidable, since you were a Microsoft user) rather than a deliberate attempt to get you to upgrade. Eventually you were supposed to get tired, and just give up and upgrade.