In the united states, because of our strong 1st ammendment (free speech) feelings, the movie ratings system is a voluntary system: no one goes to jail or pays a fine for letting a child into an adult rated movie. The movie theaters comply with the ratings system to keep parents from protesting.
We'd all be happty with a voluntary system for not selling adult rated games to kids. Unfortunately, none of the retailers wants to be first to move to such a system (and thus lose sales).
So the current situation is that we have 2 common games rating system, and no enforcement at point of sale, neither voluntary nor legal. And frankly, only a voluntary system is ever going to not be struck down in our courts.
That's true, though again, I think the number that is going to be 'advertised' is going to be the peak bandwidth, not the monthly limit, which will be buried in the fine print. Which is really what we're mostly seeing advertised anyway, peak bandwidth, with either the implicit or explicit assumption that people won't use it all the time.
Yes, but the problem is, the ISP can do nothing about this 'latency' except to raise bandwidth. Almost all of this 'latency' is transmitting data across the connection, plus render time. So really, that's just another area where more bandwidth will give the user a better experience.
Actually, I'm afraid I have to continue to be condescending, because I think it will unfortunately answer all of your arguments.
First, the average computer user has no sense of how latency impacts their experience (exception: gamers), and the latency advantage available to an ISP is negligible. They could try to deliver a low latency package, and some gamers would know enough to be interested, but who else would buy it? Further, all they can do is nock a couple of ms off the last step... most internet latency is on the backbones, and there's nothing they can do about that. So not only would most consumers not understand the advantage of a low latency connection, the ISPs really can't deliver it. And really, latency is not a big issue for common uses of broadband connections (web pages load pretty much instantly, people who find their internet connection slow are almost surely complaining about download times).
So... what else can an ISP compete on? Basically we're left with price and bandwidth. Price is over. You can get near free or free access virtually anywhere if you don't need much bandwidth. If you need (or think you need) bandwidth, then the ISP can potentially use that as a hook.
And that, I'm afraid, explains why ISPs are offering higher and higher bandwidth packages: it's not that the consumers are necessarily demanding them, but that every time a consumer decides which ISP to go with, they have just the bandwidth number (and price) to judge by, and lets face it, all the prices are pretty close. The better the bandwidth number (and of course the connected price) the better the sales opportunity for the ISP. Are customers using all the bandwidth they are paying for? Not likely, in most cases. Some may use it up in spurts, downloading programs or music or videos, but most of that bandwidth is idleing (at essentially no cost to the ISP after rollout, which they often charge for). But here's an interesting question: does that consumer notice a benefit from paying for a higher bandwidth service, even if they never use more total bandwidth? And the answer is that yes they do, because when they interactively use their computer, it takes them less of their time sitting at the computer waiting for something to download. So in fact this type of typical consumer does benefit from buying a higher bandwidth package, and thus, bandwidth sells.
You, as a slashdot poster, are surely not like the majority of residents. I would expect that most people would ditch a $30/month tethered service (existing landline DSL or whatever) in favor of free, everywhere available service. Most people have much better things to do with that $360 per year, whereas a slashdot poster probably gets more use out of that service than anything else he could spend the money on. The fact that most people are not dropping that monthly bill is surely an indicator that some aspect of that service is simply not up to par.
Still, you have to admit, from the city's point of view, it makes fantastic sense. They can boost and/or justify their property taxes. They essentially get to steal profits from ISP companies and put the money into city coffers. The residents are for the most part happy, and like their 'free' wifi. It doesn't get much better than that for local politicians.
Pretty much since the internet made it plausible to distribute patches. Most games have had significant patches since at least 1996. So the article might better say: game devs are still relying on users to discover significant bugs in their products, and this status quo has maintained its strength in spite of a decade of complaints from pseudo journals.
I think you just limit the rate at which a given IP address can generate new accounts. If your site notices a large number of people filtering a particular ip range, you put even more limits on accounts created from that ip range.
Pictures will go way beyond 10 megapixel, if only for the zoom crowd. There's no reason not to want more megapixels, as long as the resolution improvement is still an improvement. It means you can crop a tinier and tinier portion of your image and still make a good print. I fully expect to be able to buy a 100 megapixel consumer camera in less than a decade. 30 megapixel cameras are even now being sold at the professional level, and you have to understand that digital cameras are becoming all about using fast processors to help amateur photographers take pictures that are as good as what professionals do. Assuming that sensors keep improving, 64bit/pixel 100 megapixel cameras will use up that space with a thousand photos.
Video recorded at 1920x1080P (60fps) should be pretty common by then as well, probably compressed in mp2 or mp4 at in the range of 100 megabit/sec = 10MB/sec = around 30 hours of video of your kids/grandkids. Who isn't going to want a lot more than that?
Games will surely come out requiring 4 dual layer HD/Blu-rays within a decade, as that's a standard packaging format, so there you have 200 GB. That's 5 games to the terabyte. Only 4 on one of these disks.
As for small and medium companies having 750GB of data... I would say surely every small technology oriented company, and every medium sized company will have or would like to be able to keep that much customer data (a lot of businesses wind up throwing away data they don't have room to store... give them more room and they'll store more, and it will be of use to them in optimizing their business).
It's easily handled: 1) it's a spam article, being moderated up by spammers: you filter the article submitting spammer 2) spammers are posting all over a good article, making it hard to see good comments: you filter the spamming poster 3) spammers are coordinating to moderate up a target spammers comments: you filter the spammer who commented, or the spammers who moderated, or both
The key to this system is to make it trivial for each user to filter out people who are misbehaving, from their perspective. That way you don't have to put any faith in the moderators: you can filter out any moderator who doesn't behave as you'd like.
First posts become irrelevant. Only rating would matter. Trolls could try to coordinate to mod up posts, but all you'd have to do would be to filter out the troll they are promoting. You would, occasionally, have to do a little bit of extra work to not see troll posts, but the great advantage of such a system is that no one can hide a good post from you.
2nded. I bouth a dell about a year ago now, and went through much of the same thing with the 'supply chain' vs 'web site order progress' disconnect. They need to work on that.
Part of the reason for this is their stupid discount system. They hope to get everyone to pay their premium prices, but if you're one of the people knowledgeable enough about dell, you can buy everything from them at at least 30% off, often 40% on desktop pcs. That's just not a good way to do business with the people who don't know about the discounts.
I'd like to note that to some extent, you can really get what you pay for with dell. I could have bought a $600 laptop with default support, but I bought a $2400 laptop with all the bells and whistles, and 3 years of premier service. The premier service guys are fantastically. I was unlucky enough to get a defective video card, and it took several tries to get it fixed (the difficulty was in diagnosing the problem, and given the wierdness of the error I don't fault them for getting it wrong on the first two tries), but the people I dealt with were utterly professional, and everything was on Dell's dime, including three technician trips to my house (I work at home) to try different repair strategies, and replacement of 3 different components. I get through to a live person on the support line in under 60 seconds from the time I dial, and every technician visit has been available next day or at my convenience.
If you want great support on your Dell computer, pay the $300 for top of the line support, you'll get it.
I'm still waiting for some site to discover the obvious solution: an only-positive moderation system. Then your only way to keep a post down is not to moderate it, but you can't stop others from doing so. You can try to push other comments up instead, but assuming you don't allow unlimited moderation points, you won't be able to mask what other people find interesting by pushing up other content, even with a coordinated effort.
First of all, personality tests are well debunked in the scientific literature, and they are also easy to beat.
So the first thing this tells you about the company, right off the bat, is that their HR department will be filled with incompetent losers. Are you going to work in the HR department? Will you spend a lot of time working with the HR department?
Personally, I hardly ever deal with HR after the first 3 days at a job. So I hardly care if they're incompetent losers, as long as they are just competent enough for me to get paid. So for me, having to take one of these tests doesn't typically tell me anything too worrying about the company. If someone remarks, 'the personality tests were the CEO's idea, he's a really big proponent' then I might worry and consider skipping on to look at another job.
Since personality tests are easy to beat, if i'm interested in the job, I'll just take and pass the personality test. The real personality test is always going to be the in-person interview anyway, that's when you'll find out if you are a good fit for the team you'll be working with, and if the team is a good fit for you.
So my bottom line: try to evaluate as neutrally as possible just what exactly the company wanting you to take this test really says about the company, and the people you'll be working with.
W = einstein is definitely wrong ? = einstein probably wrong, but within error of experiment R = einstein is right, to the accuracy the experiment is capable of
The actual outcome could be anywhere along that continuum. The further to the right the result gets, the more probability of einstein is right, but to the left there comes a point where he is definitely wrong. In the middle, he is only probably wrong.
True, though you'll still want to have all the cores you can get in your gaming notebook. Fortunately, when games are dual threaded in 2007, we'll have quad-cored machines. By the time we hit 16 to 32 cores, you're reaching enough cores that parallelizing that many threads gets really hard, so at some point in the not too far future, multi-application running will stop being a problem, and hardware builders will all be turning their attention to contention reduction, and people who have worked on supercomputers will be in high demand.
First, with regard to intel, there is essentially no risk from this, as the math libraries used by everyone involved in such work wave test exercises that verify the accuracy of the hardware. It's not uncommon to run every calculation on two physical processors to assure that no single processor malfunction can introduce a significant error.
Second, with regards to the correct approximation of Einsteins equations, either the approximation is exact, in which case there is no risk, or the error size for the approximation is closely known, in which case when we observe the black hole merger, we will have one of 3 conditions: confident to some error size that he was right (actual results match simulation, but we can't rule out his theory being slightly wrong at a finer level), confident that he was wrong (actual results lie outside of error range for simulation), or no result (actual results indicate the possibility he was wrong, but lie within error range).
Very few games can currently take any significant advantage of multicore. Nearly all through 2005 do most of their cpu intensive work in a single thread. That by implication leaves the other core free to do something else.
Many games also only load from disk occassionally, so the virus check disk thrashing won't be much of an issue.
I'm also not clear on why you'd alt-tab out to check on tasks... if the disk is thrashing you'll know when they're done when the disk indicator light stops blinking like mad.
Slashdot Mirror
I liked OMG ponies also, so I definitely think an assortment of user selectable options would be great. Consider your proposal seconded.
In the united states, because of our strong 1st ammendment (free speech) feelings, the movie ratings system is a voluntary system: no one goes to jail or pays a fine for letting a child into an adult rated movie. The movie theaters comply with the ratings system to keep parents from protesting.
We'd all be happty with a voluntary system for not selling adult rated games to kids. Unfortunately, none of the retailers wants to be first to move to such a system (and thus lose sales).
So the current situation is that we have 2 common games rating system, and no enforcement at point of sale, neither voluntary nor legal. And frankly, only a voluntary system is ever going to not be struck down in our courts.
Flamebait? Cmon ... get this one metamods.
Just wait for DK3.
That's true, though again, I think the number that is going to be 'advertised' is going to be the peak bandwidth, not the monthly limit, which will be buried in the fine print. Which is really what we're mostly seeing advertised anyway, peak bandwidth, with either the implicit or explicit assumption that people won't use it all the time.
Yes, but the problem is, the ISP can do nothing about this 'latency' except to raise bandwidth. Almost all of this 'latency' is transmitting data across the connection, plus render time. So really, that's just another area where more bandwidth will give the user a better experience.
Actually, I'm afraid I have to continue to be condescending, because I think it will unfortunately answer all of your arguments.
... most internet latency is on the backbones, and there's nothing they can do about that. So not only would most consumers not understand the advantage of a low latency connection, the ISPs really can't deliver it. And really, latency is not a big issue for common uses of broadband connections (web pages load pretty much instantly, people who find their internet connection slow are almost surely complaining about download times).
... what else can an ISP compete on? Basically we're left with price and bandwidth. Price is over. You can get near free or free access virtually anywhere if you don't need much bandwidth. If you need (or think you need) bandwidth, then the ISP can potentially use that as a hook.
First, the average computer user has no sense of how latency impacts their experience (exception: gamers), and the latency advantage available to an ISP is negligible. They could try to deliver a low latency package, and some gamers would know enough to be interested, but who else would buy it? Further, all they can do is nock a couple of ms off the last step
So
And that, I'm afraid, explains why ISPs are offering higher and higher bandwidth packages: it's not that the consumers are necessarily demanding them, but that every time a consumer decides which ISP to go with, they have just the bandwidth number (and price) to judge by, and lets face it, all the prices are pretty close. The better the bandwidth number (and of course the connected price) the better the sales opportunity for the ISP. Are customers using all the bandwidth they are paying for? Not likely, in most cases. Some may use it up in spurts, downloading programs or music or videos, but most of that bandwidth is idleing (at essentially no cost to the ISP after rollout, which they often charge for). But here's an interesting question: does that consumer notice a benefit from paying for a higher bandwidth service, even if they never use more total bandwidth? And the answer is that yes they do, because when they interactively use their computer, it takes them less of their time sitting at the computer waiting for something to download. So in fact this type of typical consumer does benefit from buying a higher bandwidth package, and thus, bandwidth sells.
You, as a slashdot poster, are surely not like the majority of residents. I would expect that most people would ditch a $30/month tethered service (existing landline DSL or whatever) in favor of free, everywhere available service. Most people have much better things to do with that $360 per year, whereas a slashdot poster probably gets more use out of that service than anything else he could spend the money on. The fact that most people are not dropping that monthly bill is surely an indicator that some aspect of that service is simply not up to par.
Still, you have to admit, from the city's point of view, it makes fantastic sense. They can boost and/or justify their property taxes. They essentially get to steal profits from ISP companies and put the money into city coffers. The residents are for the most part happy, and like their 'free' wifi. It doesn't get much better than that for local politicians.
Pretty much since the internet made it plausible to distribute patches. Most games have had significant patches since at least 1996. So the article might better say: game devs are still relying on users to discover significant bugs in their products, and this status quo has maintained its strength in spite of a decade of complaints from pseudo journals.
So not only did Google not do anything that fits in the five categories, they also did it in regard to a dead artist which moots all claims.
I think you just limit the rate at which a given IP address can generate new accounts. If your site notices a large number of people filtering a particular ip range, you put even more limits on accounts created from that ip range.
Pictures will go way beyond 10 megapixel, if only for the zoom crowd. There's no reason not to want more megapixels, as long as the resolution improvement is still an improvement. It means you can crop a tinier and tinier portion of your image and still make a good print. I fully expect to be able to buy a 100 megapixel consumer camera in less than a decade. 30 megapixel cameras are even now being sold at the professional level, and you have to understand that digital cameras are becoming all about using fast processors to help amateur photographers take pictures that are as good as what professionals do. Assuming that sensors keep improving, 64bit/pixel 100 megapixel cameras will use up that space with a thousand photos.
... I would say surely every small technology oriented company, and every medium sized company will have or would like to be able to keep that much customer data (a lot of businesses wind up throwing away data they don't have room to store ... give them more room and they'll store more, and it will be of use to them in optimizing their business).
Video recorded at 1920x1080P (60fps) should be pretty common by then as well, probably compressed in mp2 or mp4 at in the range of 100 megabit/sec = 10MB/sec = around 30 hours of video of your kids/grandkids. Who isn't going to want a lot more than that?
Games will surely come out requiring 4 dual layer HD/Blu-rays within a decade, as that's a standard packaging format, so there you have 200 GB. That's 5 games to the terabyte. Only 4 on one of these disks.
As for small and medium companies having 750GB of data
It's easily handled:
1) it's a spam article, being moderated up by spammers: you filter the article submitting spammer
2) spammers are posting all over a good article, making it hard to see good comments: you filter the spamming poster
3) spammers are coordinating to moderate up a target spammers comments: you filter the spammer who commented, or the spammers who moderated, or both
The key to this system is to make it trivial for each user to filter out people who are misbehaving, from their perspective. That way you don't have to put any faith in the moderators: you can filter out any moderator who doesn't behave as you'd like.
First posts become irrelevant. Only rating would matter. Trolls could try to coordinate to mod up posts, but all you'd have to do would be to filter out the troll they are promoting. You would, occasionally, have to do a little bit of extra work to not see troll posts, but the great advantage of such a system is that no one can hide a good post from you.
2nded. I bouth a dell about a year ago now, and went through much of the same thing with the 'supply chain' vs 'web site order progress' disconnect. They need to work on that.
Part of the reason for this is their stupid discount system. They hope to get everyone to pay their premium prices, but if you're one of the people knowledgeable enough about dell, you can buy everything from them at at least 30% off, often 40% on desktop pcs. That's just not a good way to do business with the people who don't know about the discounts.
I'd like to note that to some extent, you can really get what you pay for with dell. I could have bought a $600 laptop with default support, but I bought a $2400 laptop with all the bells and whistles, and 3 years of premier service. The premier service guys are fantastically. I was unlucky enough to get a defective video card, and it took several tries to get it fixed (the difficulty was in diagnosing the problem, and given the wierdness of the error I don't fault them for getting it wrong on the first two tries), but the people I dealt with were utterly professional, and everything was on Dell's dime, including three technician trips to my house (I work at home) to try different repair strategies, and replacement of 3 different components. I get through to a live person on the support line in under 60 seconds from the time I dial, and every technician visit has been available next day or at my convenience.
If you want great support on your Dell computer, pay the $300 for top of the line support, you'll get it.
I'm still waiting for some site to discover the obvious solution: an only-positive moderation system. Then your only way to keep a post down is not to moderate it, but you can't stop others from doing so. You can try to push other comments up instead, but assuming you don't allow unlimited moderation points, you won't be able to mask what other people find interesting by pushing up other content, even with a coordinated effort.
First of all, personality tests are well debunked in the scientific literature, and they are also easy to beat.
So the first thing this tells you about the company, right off the bat, is that their HR department will be filled with incompetent losers. Are you going to work in the HR department? Will you spend a lot of time working with the HR department?
Personally, I hardly ever deal with HR after the first 3 days at a job. So I hardly care if they're incompetent losers, as long as they are just competent enough for me to get paid. So for me, having to take one of these tests doesn't typically tell me anything too worrying about the company. If someone remarks, 'the personality tests were the CEO's idea, he's a really big proponent' then I might worry and consider skipping on to look at another job.
Since personality tests are easy to beat, if i'm interested in the job, I'll just take and pass the personality test. The real personality test is always going to be the in-person interview anyway, that's when you'll find out if you are a good fit for the team you'll be working with, and if the team is a good fit for you.
So my bottom line: try to evaluate as neutrally as possible just what exactly the company wanting you to take this test really says about the company, and the people you'll be working with.
This graph will explain it:
WWWWWWWWW?????RRR
W = einstein is definitely wrong
? = einstein probably wrong, but within error of experiment
R = einstein is right, to the accuracy the experiment is capable of
The actual outcome could be anywhere along that continuum. The further to the right the result gets, the more probability of einstein is right, but to the left there comes a point where he is definitely wrong. In the middle, he is only probably wrong.
Well, I'd tend to try to avoid someone walking through the airport bumping into everyone he possibly could.
True, though you'll still want to have all the cores you can get in your gaming notebook. Fortunately, when games are dual threaded in 2007, we'll have quad-cored machines. By the time we hit 16 to 32 cores, you're reaching enough cores that parallelizing that many threads gets really hard, so at some point in the not too far future, multi-application running will stop being a problem, and hardware builders will all be turning their attention to contention reduction, and people who have worked on supercomputers will be in high demand.
This is really not the case.
First, with regard to intel, there is essentially no risk from this, as the math libraries used by everyone involved in such work wave test exercises that verify the accuracy of the hardware. It's not uncommon to run every calculation on two physical processors to assure that no single processor malfunction can introduce a significant error.
Second, with regards to the correct approximation of Einsteins equations, either the approximation is exact, in which case there is no risk, or the error size for the approximation is closely known, in which case when we observe the black hole merger, we will have one of 3 conditions: confident to some error size that he was right (actual results match simulation, but we can't rule out his theory being slightly wrong at a finer level), confident that he was wrong (actual results lie outside of error range for simulation), or no result (actual results indicate the possibility he was wrong, but lie within error range).
Very few games can currently take any significant advantage of multicore. Nearly all through 2005 do most of their cpu intensive work in a single thread. That by implication leaves the other core free to do something else.
... if the disk is thrashing you'll know when they're done when the disk indicator light stops blinking like mad.
Many games also only load from disk occassionally, so the virus check disk thrashing won't be much of an issue.
I'm also not clear on why you'd alt-tab out to check on tasks