Um, if they're so smart, why would they waste time hacking SETI when RF-based SCADA systems present such a feature-rich targetspace?
(for non-scada geeks: SCADA = Systems Control and Data Acquisition, the hardware used to remotely monitor/manage power grids or water distribution, and by manufacturers, etc. A whole infrastructure with unprotected RF (often microwave) communications, worse-than-crappy TCP/IP stacks, security-by-obscurity as the only thing protecting protocols, etc. It's a mess).
James Potter (from Idaho State University of all places) makes good money and gets star treatment in his adopted Belgium, thanks to his Euro-League career.
The only 'cheap' phone plan nowadays is a per-minute subscription with a craptabulous phone. Virgin Mobile, in particular, has had some cool plans: $20 per quarter plus a $40 phone will get you a phone 'for emergencies only'... $7 per month and the minutes rollover/accumulate (so lax months could roll into busy ones).
At 10c per message, it'd probably not work for you personally. And between 10 and 25c per phone minute gets expensive fast for anything more than minimal usage. Still, I keep staring at that and my $80-for-two-phones package and muttering to myself that there has to be a better way.
One last thought: my current $960 per year bill is deductible and gets me a level of freedom and efficiency and away-from-work personal time that probably more than makes up the difference. That said, I bet $80 a year would get me half that freedom and flexibility and a pseudo-raise of nearly a grand.
Engineering is all about tradeoffs. Bridges are usually over-engineered to 10x their anticipated static load, someone once told me. Ditto for elevators.
Of course, with safety margins, 'thats just wasteful' is ignored because engineers don't like getting sued because 15 college linebackers 'break' a high-rise elevator by syncronized jumping up and down as a goof (been there-- nobody died but scared the s**t out of me).
In the case of nonessential devices and 'vampires' wasting electricity, the tradeoff in the equation is usually price pressure. A few bucks of more-efficient parts and more complex design in a device is unacceptable when customers won't notice a vampire's 25-cents-per year in wasted power but *will* base their purchase decision on that price. A good parallel here is how few people notice long-term costs (ink cartridges) when buying printers.
Someone else muttered that cheap-nasty devices (Apex) are the worst offenders. No shock there. I've opened and resoldered sub-spec capacitors in 2 Apex dvd players and a philips 642 (and suspect that a few years ago I tossed a third component with an identical problem)... and this is over a freakin 25v vs 10v capacitor rating. What's that... a *PENNY* added cost when purchased in bulk?! It's insane... but you have to keep in mind how ruthless the market is, and that few cents per device over *millions* of devices adds up to more than an engineer's salary.
I dealt with all this 10 yrs ago: had a solar/generator off-grid house because the power company wanted $25,000 to run power a mile and a half. Rather than $4 per month, vampires stood to add $20 or more per month to my solar system's amortized costs. Avoidable watts were an even bigger problem. To avoid this, convention was to use Kill-A-Watt, nonelectric for heating/cooling/refrigeration, CF's, surge strips, info from Mother Earth magazine, and certain brands and models of appliances that off-grid users would discover were advantageously designed. I *still* find myself doing those wattage comparisons sometimes.
Obsessing to save watts, forgoing desired features because there isn't a watt-friendly model with 'em, etc., becomes a minor pain in the ass, for me. Propane fridges are small and expensive, CF's don't like extreme cold, power tools for construction eat a lot of power, generators get fickle at the WORST times (fixing one in 30-below weather really sucks!), etc. Someone else paid the $25k, and that dramatically shifted the economics for me. Where I put up with the nuisance for $130 a month vs. $25k, getting rid of all the niggling details and seeing my electricity costs drop to $40/m made it a no-brainer. I found a ready buyer for my gear and I'm on-grid now.
One last comment to your post: motors are just behind heating/cooling devices in terms of how much power is used. Your remark about VCR's using virtually the same power except for the motors doesn't acknowledge this. The most common place to see this is to compare a laptop's battery life with or without drive motors running continuously.
Wow... so this is what the next generation's perception of a turntable is? (mutters: Kids these days...)
No, the record didn't change speed as the needle moved inward. Constant angular velocity, as others have said.
Technically, a CAV device *can* hold more info on the larger outer bands than smaller inner ones, but we're talking about physically altering vinyl to create ripples at 25khz, which means a few gazillion li'l vinyl atoms traversed per peak or valley... vinyl was nowhere near saturation of this sort of threshold.
A few weeks ago, I saw an old 78-capable turntable at a junk shop. Goin' out to buy it now so at least *my* kids can grow up listening to 'Snoopy and the Red Baron', The Chipmunks, and etc., and knowing how the hell a record player works.
Yeah, I always loved those places. I mean it is a stretch to expect this out of people that operate crushers, cranes or other heavy/dangerous equipment, but what the hell sort of damage can I possibly wreak by being buzzed while coding.
Heck, I can remember some remarkably productive marathon code-weekends spent with a keg of homebrew gradually pouring past my palate, back in college. I've never gone back to verify the code quality, but at the time I determined that a very very mild buzz did wonders for my concentration...
6000 brands of keyloggers on countless machines, all collecting passwords. Who needs Carnivore and the backdoor key with this mess?
Gilmore's law ('The internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it') apparently also applies to free-market pressures to subvert security, even if it is white-hat security goals that are preventing something like Carnivore's back-door.
If I can get a hand on several documents that I know to be hiding somewhere on my computer, I will post actual speed figures which might give you a better idea of the typical transfer rates.
I read this and found myself chuckling:
Futuristic support-desk techie answers phone: "Tech support. Lost data?... Stored holographically?... Um, try leaning a bit to the left or right, and repeating your search."
I'm sure there's a midground to this position you've taken... right? If nothing else, you could list the things you do that you'd never let some pointy-hair force you to *stop* doing so TFA is answered, right? For example:
Presumably, you've edited other people's code (or your own after [insert timeframe slightly longer than the recall threshold for what you ate for breakfast]). That's taught you over 35 years the value of readability and you attempt to work those best-practices into your coding... right?
Presumably, you recognize the value for source control, especially when dealing with 'nimrods' that could unknowingly break your code. And the house rule is 'Commit Often, build often, don't break the build'. Right?
Presumably, the team tries to make sure that someone writing critical-path code isn't *lost* for enough time to endanger the project (typ. no more than a few days), either by regular peer reviews, pairing, partial-function demos, memos detailing the design-so-far, regular commits or whatever else works. Right?
Presumably, you are comfortable with various design/code cycles, even if your favorite is [waterfall|objects|XP|whatever]. And whatever the boss recommends, you find a way to honor the letter of their desire while staying as true as possible to the spirit of your preferred methodology? Right?
Presumably, you keep current in your field. Maybe you read a few books, subscribe to and read a few mags, putter with a new language or OS, learn a new tool every once in a while. When you see something cool, you share the discovery with coworkers. When a coworker does something cool, you're not too proud to say 'howdyoudodat?'... Right?
Presumably, you (try to) respect your peers. Or at least seek/recognize what strengths they have. Right? Even the village idiot can be useful, after all. Personally, I always try to populate that peer group with people it is easy to respect, so the job isn't so tough.
And, to steal a line from McCarthy, do you avoid flippin' the bozo bit too quickly. Right?
When some clueless coworker comes to you and rags about some coding habit of yours that they hate, you eventually calm down enough to figure out a compromise point. Right?
I joined a team that used hungarian notation in object-oriented code. I adapted, but showed the team articles that showed how this was a risk. Ultimately, I realized the anti-hungarian research didn't fit a unique case we were up against, where 3 data hierarchies overlapped enough that the hungarian info helped avoid hard-to-debug misunderstandings and mistakes. But the other coders got rid of hungarian fever with respect to iThis and bThat and lpctstlHolyCrapIReallySawThisOnce. Likewise, it took me ages to convince a *much-wiser* coder that his code was worse if he used punny/cute variable names (WizardOfOz, SuperFreak, Smoother, MyWayOrD).
We all have a bit of these habits, but serious primadonnas, persistently-negative people, dinosaurs, lone-wolfs, unacknowledged visionaries, and pyromaniacs can utterly fsck up a project. When I was assigned to lead a dysfunctional team, I initially spent almost half my time trying to undo all sorts of ugly team dynamics. I'm not alone in thinking that it is more productive to shunt anyone (even the most brilliant coder) into non-critical-path (or out the door) than to let a whole team fail because of 'em. FWIW, second place goes to recognizing and rewarding people that are very valuable, without resorting to lame tricks or metrics.
Back to TFA, coding conventions can be as simple as a 1-pp doc we called our 'zen of coding', that mentioned habits and team-agreed conventions we'd keep in mind as a group. Or they can be as anal as a friend's workflow policy for altering code for some piece of weaponry (cruise missiles?), where a few dozen lines of code per year per programmer is a tolerable average. His life is 5 parts design, 5 parts design review, 1 tiny part code, 10 parts test, 5 parts peer review, followed by another
is an "innocent infringer" then the jude (sic) may reduce the monetary damages.
Hey, Jude.
Don't make it bad.
Take our sad crime
and make it better --
"Reduce fines"
the voice says inside your heart.
Then you can start
to make it better.
You're buying a Mac & haven't bought one before, so it isn't a *lie* to say you're switching.
-or-
You're buying a Mac. They're confident it'll do the convincing...
Personally, I'd say it is a bit of both. Apple hardware/software is an utter freakin' delight.
Std Disclaimer: I've never owned a Mac until OS-X Tiger, but I'm fed up with being everyone's free win tech support dude, and all the win-related hassles and reinstalling and etc. My servers run Debian, yet I spend most of my days writing c++ code in VS2003 (lucrative customer, fun project). I know those two well enough, and decided enough is freakin' enough! 'User-friendly Debian desktop' is an oxymoron, and the only way Windows might be tolerable is if it was ROM based so I could turn off relatives' machines and have them bounce back to defaults.
And that brings me full circle to the other thing I mentioned: one of those lessons that I had trouble learning: sometimes, people disagree with you out of defensiveness or similar reasons. Rather than offering up a take-no-prisoners bit of speechifyin', you have better luck if you give 'em your opinion, your reasons, and some time.... and one day *presto* you hear them pop off on someone else: Don't you know that [optBrand] is EVIL, you insensitive Clod!
Oh, and I swear I got a spendthrift gene. Dad/Sis/Bro/I all are terrible with money. Can't find a 12-step program for it, but luckily my mom, wife and brother-in-law are frugal and a bit militant about budgets.
Adults that proxy-boycott childhood treats kind of amuse me. The intentions are good, but having had childhood friends that'd smuggle non-vegan snacks into their bedrooms, raid our fridge, and that grew up resentful because their parents denied them pop culture feeding via cable TV... nothin' says lovin' like subsuming your family into your belief structure.
That said, I'm as guilty as the next guy: we tried boycotting Barney the annoying, plagarizing purple monster. Realized the futility when our kids ran up to a TV at Sears shouting excitedly "look, it's YuckyBarney!"
Disney's a mixed bag.... While mostly negative, they're more gay-friendly than many employers, some things they've been slurred over (rereleasing Song of the South, particularly) are no-win situations they just wisely refuse to engage themselves in, etc. I *agree* they've got a stance on IP that is gravely harming society, they are hypocrites (always lobbying to extend copyright just enough to never quite reinstate copyright royalties to 19th century works like Rudyard Kipling's, for example), they're managed by a corporation that seems utterly soulless at times, and I've never gotten over the chutzpah they exhibited by announcing plans to turn a civil war battlefield (and not some meaningless field anywhere else in America) into 'Disney's America'... but I also love great animation too much to not impart that love (and the eventual lecture on my bittersweet 'love/hate' opinion about Disney) to my kids.
Put another way, are you willing to boycott all good early pixar stuff if (when!) Pixar goes evil?! I'm in the throes of a similar internal debate *today* thanks to George Lucas and yesterday's Ep III release.
GP was talking about ditching a fiancee because art-appreciation (lets temporarily stretch this concept to include pop music) didn't jibe well with RIAA hating. In the REAL world, love really has very little to do with consumer spending habits. If your wife had looked at you with puppy-dog eyes and said "But honey, I grew up wanting to be Ariel", would you really tell her she couldn't buy the new extended-edition DVD to share with your daughter?! It isn't just intelligence at stake; emotion and intelligence aren't so tightly coupled that a 'right' answer necessarily exists. Heck, nothing's that cut and dried...
Nah, she'll outgrow the 'must have pop music' phase. And until then, it can become a geek's treasure-hunt to find non-RIAA stuff she likes.
And anyone that gets too selective or too calculating about life/sexual partners deserves their long lonely life. My wife respects/tolerates about half of the things that I consider important, but it'd be utterly insane to divorce her just because she likes the worst stuff on the scifi channel or shops at Walmart. Likewise, I respect her decisions on stuff that matters to her, without having to share her view completely.
Besides, chances are the girlfriend was defensive because she felt besieged. I've got a teenage nephew that argued with me a year or so ago about Lars Ulrich being a RIAA toady... he'd never heard of the issue. Since then, my nephew's taken an active interest in the topic, started listening to a college/alternative station, and is shifting his tastes accordingly. Maybe it's like confronting any other junkie: Anger and denial are first. Then comes bargaining, then finally acceptance/change. (the Depression stage is infrequent, since college radio and indy/alternative/live music is a helluva lot more gratifying than methadone or goin' cold turkey.)
Oh, and $258M pursuing a cure for malaria is a credit to Bill Gates. Saw that headline a few mins after posting my previous remark, and for all of Microsoft's evil tendencies (and I don't intentionally exagerate by saying 'evil'), the Gates Foundation merits respect.
Heh, my point exactly... doesn't matter if you're lucky enough to be famous or rich, you're never exempt from ridicule. Best strategy is to remain down-to-earth. As an überRich example, Warren Buffett seems to understand this rule.
Class reveals itself in how we respond to extreme circumstances.
A witty statement plus yet-another-example-in-a-long-line has nothing to do with voltaire, but merely reinforces Microsoft's reputation of being an IP-stealing wannabe.
Admittedly, mine doesn't sing like voltaire. But I found this thread by greppin' for 'doomed' before I quoted Henry Spencer myself, so GP isn't the only slashdotter that sees some truth in Spencer's 'doomed to recreate it' saying. I've been a fan of the saying since 'The Unix-Hater's Handbook'.
Copying isn't the issue. We're not saying they *can't* copy. We're mocking Microsoft for exhibiting lameness and copycat tendencies, just like IBM used to get painted with that brush. Nobody says they're 'not allowed to add a feature'. It's just absurd that they're only now figuring out that symlinks might be useful, despite having 43 BILLION dollars in the bank.
Oh, and if Linus ever becomes a billionaire, we'll gladly start mocking him when he exhibits lameness. Let's call that Ediron's corolary to the 'new golden rule': If we don't have the gold, at least we can mock the rich.
First, I had a cross-country girlfriend in the early 80's. I can say with certainty that the best *nighttime* per-HOUR rate I could find that didn't involve phreaking was $6 or higher. In the 70's, it was *much* higher than $5 per hour. Did you mean per-minute? That seems high, but I wouldn't be shocked, since I faintly recall the 1970's *daytime* rate was around a buck or more per minute.
Second, the average person can't spend 500-1000 HOURS per month on long distance if they plan to work or sleep or otherwise live without a phone attached to their head surgically. A month only has 720 hours. Again, perhaps you meant minutes.
Per-minute prices are in freefall because the cost for 1kBps (voice-compressed audio) is in freefall. But base fees for phone service aren't in freefall. If you'll notice, the typical local phone-company monthly fee is steady or climbing, despite radical improvements in switch/infrastructure costs and reliability. That growing pile of money is largely what pays maintenance crew salaries and other fixed/growing costs.
Prices being in free-fall have no bearing on long-term economics, since many of the coresponding COSTS are also in free-fall. Maintenance costs are in flux, but while the manpower costs climb, others are dropping (newer gear does more and breaks less).
Corporations aren't always more efficient than governments (and certainly not *radically* so). That's a US-ian conservative mantra that a lot of Europe disagrees with.
Nationalization isn't inevitable.
Neither is *everyone* failing until a single monopoly player remains. And regulation isn't evil. That's another conservative mantra. The debacle after deregulation of California power quickly reminded US-ians why regulation isn't a bad thing.
The one insightful point you hit is an implied one: the phone infrastructure is usually maintained under higher quality standards than cable or ISP or other provider standards. Crews are more responsive, buried cable is buried deeper, things are better-engineered, etc. The phone company acts like a utility (water, gas, power). Cellular providers, ISP's, cable companies, etc, act like optional/entertainment vendors.
I've been nervous about that for years, and have resigned myself to thinking that will change abruptly, but only after a vonage customer successfully sues for failed service in an emergency. My gut feeling is that once telco-alternatives are held accountable to the same critical-infrastructure standards as phone and power and other utilities, the ISP's and wireless broadband providers and cable companies (who are telco competition) will be forced to re-engineer their infrastructure, raise their monthly fees, etc. Once we hit this point, phone companies will stop seeing so much competitive pressure.
I seriously doubt this will happen simply because the phone company tries to find a way to extort the money from Google or Vonage like WitLacker is snorting about, though.
Note to self: Sell all SBC and T stock. I'd wondered if T would climb to SBC valuations or vice versa. This toxic rube just answered my question fairly clearly: he has NO idea what is going on in the industry. He's like some halfwit lovechild of Michael Eisner and Darth McBride.
A hint to Mr. WitLacker: Due to overbuilding that was done by SBC and others during the dot-com years, dark fiber is still stupid cheap. Now, if you want to strip money from google, you'll have to ruin your own market among other customers, since I can imagine a dozen tricks ranging from buying up existing contracts to teaming with owners of existing contracts to upgrade endpoints to increase per-fiber bandwidth. Your own client base is in a position to compete with you if you get greedy.
Or Google can short-circuit past you by renting/leasing dark fiber and buying their own endpoints. And anywhere you've got a rock-solid monopoly, they can explore stopgaps like microwave. In a phrase, you can't put this genie back into a monopoly bottle, no matter how hard you try.
Next, I'm not sure how you plan to detect which endpoints are google's, or how you intend to increase charges to those endpoints without getting excessive on all other datapoints, given the rather ambiguous nature of data packets. But, if you are able to differentiate the data, all Google has to do is refuse to pay. Every time you block a paying customer from reaching Google, you'll be drowned in loud screams. After questioning your parentage, customers will insist someone's in of breach of contract (either you or google) and since they don't pay google for access, They'll blame you. If you try to shift the blame to google, we all *know* who'll win those legal/PR battles.
This isn't your grandma's ol' monopoly: for every tactic you can think of, the data infrastructure (which is what geeks like me consider the REAL internet) is creating alternatives. And every time you squeeze, you'll lose PR and goodwill and customers. You'll piss off shareholders. You'll piss off techies (ask your canine mom, Darth McBride about the wisdom of doing that). Oh, and the state public-utility regulatory commissions: act like a monopoly and various state legislatures and their consituents will shove your sorry ass deep into regulatory hell: imagine a world where the regulators deem that dark fiber will be repriced downward until it is fully utilized.
1 - I have a phone with a crappy camera. Drives me nuts, since there are a lot of times I use it for snapshots of my kids or friends, and the pics generally suck worse than an old kodak 110. I have a nice camera, but I don't tote it around everywhere as slavishly as I do my phone.
2 - After ranting about focussing on doing one job well, you suggest a phone that can only call one number. That's just stupid.
(and yes, I scrolled down to see your reasoning: you intend it as a 'so my customers can only call me' tool. Clue: freebies like this are more appreciated by customers if they're not absurdly limited. Think of all the swag you've gotten: the single-use stuff (brochures/cards/treats) got used up and/or tossed, and you kept things that were generically useful: mousepads, calendars, shirts, rulers, letter-openers, calculators... and yet you think someone will carry *several* vendors' lame, busted-ass one-number business card phones around in their wallet for months or years in the odd chance they someday need to call?! What---EVER.)
I mentioned ghz because everything that happens from 10ghz downward is going to contribute to the background. An example is the impact of using 802.11b channel 2: it damages (or even kills) the achievable data rate for channel 1 users: for high-bandwidth, adjacent signals mean both users suffer.
Meanwhile, freqencies down to the 10's of khz can't carry data rates that are remotely a/v grade, the few-ghz limitation isn't distance but line-of-sight, you're dismissive of several *useful* aspects of analog, you mistakenly imply the FCC is somehow only needed for analog signal mgmt, and I can't tell if you mean STR or SDR's in your remarks on software radios.
Sorry, but my impression is that you're no more of an expert than I am. Your claim of sufficient bandwidth for 6-billion video feeds is unsubstantiated, and that was specifically what I was trying to get an expert to run numbers on: My question was if it was valid to compute some sort of full-spectrum Shannon capacity and how that'd compare with data-carrying needs in dense populations.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, if they're so smart, why would they waste time hacking SETI when RF-based SCADA systems present such a feature-rich targetspace?
(for non-scada geeks: SCADA = Systems Control and Data Acquisition, the hardware used to remotely monitor/manage power grids or water distribution, and by manufacturers, etc. A whole infrastructure with unprotected RF (often microwave) communications, worse-than-crappy TCP/IP stacks, security-by-obscurity as the only thing protecting protocols, etc. It's a mess).
Heck, you can miss the NBA cut and still do well.
James Potter (from Idaho State University of all places) makes good money and gets star treatment in his adopted Belgium, thanks to his Euro-League career.
Shh, you might wake up Jon Katz.
The only 'cheap' phone plan nowadays is a per-minute subscription with a craptabulous phone. Virgin Mobile, in particular, has had some cool plans: $20 per quarter plus a $40 phone will get you a phone 'for emergencies only'... $7 per month and the minutes rollover/accumulate (so lax months could roll into busy ones).
At 10c per message, it'd probably not work for you personally. And between 10 and 25c per phone minute gets expensive fast for anything more than minimal usage. Still, I keep staring at that and my $80-for-two-phones package and muttering to myself that there has to be a better way.
One last thought: my current $960 per year bill is deductible and gets me a level of freedom and efficiency and away-from-work personal time that probably more than makes up the difference. That said, I bet $80 a year would get me half that freedom and flexibility and a pseudo-raise of nearly a grand.
Engineering is all about tradeoffs. Bridges are usually over-engineered to 10x their anticipated static load, someone once told me. Ditto for elevators.
Of course, with safety margins, 'thats just wasteful' is ignored because engineers don't like getting sued because 15 college linebackers 'break' a high-rise elevator by syncronized jumping up and down as a goof (been there-- nobody died but scared the s**t out of me).
In the case of nonessential devices and 'vampires' wasting electricity, the tradeoff in the equation is usually price pressure. A few bucks of more-efficient parts and more complex design in a device is unacceptable when customers won't notice a vampire's 25-cents-per year in wasted power but *will* base their purchase decision on that price. A good parallel here is how few people notice long-term costs (ink cartridges) when buying printers.
Someone else muttered that cheap-nasty devices (Apex) are the worst offenders. No shock there. I've opened and resoldered sub-spec capacitors in 2 Apex dvd players and a philips 642 (and suspect that a few years ago I tossed a third component with an identical problem)... and this is over a freakin 25v vs 10v capacitor rating. What's that... a *PENNY* added cost when purchased in bulk?! It's insane... but you have to keep in mind how ruthless the market is, and that few cents per device over *millions* of devices adds up to more than an engineer's salary.
I dealt with all this 10 yrs ago: had a solar/generator off-grid house because the power company wanted $25,000 to run power a mile and a half. Rather than $4 per month, vampires stood to add $20 or more per month to my solar system's amortized costs. Avoidable watts were an even bigger problem. To avoid this, convention was to use Kill-A-Watt, nonelectric for heating/cooling/refrigeration, CF's, surge strips, info from Mother Earth magazine, and certain brands and models of appliances that off-grid users would discover were advantageously designed. I *still* find myself doing those wattage comparisons sometimes.
Obsessing to save watts, forgoing desired features because there isn't a watt-friendly model with 'em, etc., becomes a minor pain in the ass, for me. Propane fridges are small and expensive, CF's don't like extreme cold, power tools for construction eat a lot of power, generators get fickle at the WORST times (fixing one in 30-below weather really sucks!), etc. Someone else paid the $25k, and that dramatically shifted the economics for me. Where I put up with the nuisance for $130 a month vs. $25k, getting rid of all the niggling details and seeing my electricity costs drop to $40/m made it a no-brainer. I found a ready buyer for my gear and I'm on-grid now.
One last comment to your post: motors are just behind heating/cooling devices in terms of how much power is used. Your remark about VCR's using virtually the same power except for the motors doesn't acknowledge this. The most common place to see this is to compare a laptop's battery life with or without drive motors running continuously.
Wow... so this is what the next generation's perception of a turntable is? (mutters: Kids these days...)
No, the record didn't change speed as the needle moved inward. Constant angular velocity, as others have said.
Technically, a CAV device *can* hold more info on the larger outer bands than smaller inner ones, but we're talking about physically altering vinyl to create ripples at 25khz, which means a few gazillion li'l vinyl atoms traversed per peak or valley... vinyl was nowhere near saturation of this sort of threshold.
A few weeks ago, I saw an old 78-capable turntable at a junk shop. Goin' out to buy it now so at least *my* kids can grow up listening to 'Snoopy and the Red Baron', The Chipmunks, and etc., and knowing how the hell a record player works.
Yeah, I always loved those places. I mean it is a stretch to expect this out of people that operate crushers, cranes or other heavy/dangerous equipment, but what the hell sort of damage can I possibly wreak by being buzzed while coding.
Heck, I can remember some remarkably productive marathon code-weekends spent with a keg of homebrew gradually pouring past my palate, back in college. I've never gone back to verify the code quality, but at the time I determined that a very very mild buzz did wonders for my concentration...
6000 brands of keyloggers on countless machines, all collecting passwords. Who needs Carnivore and the backdoor key with this mess?
Gilmore's law ('The internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it') apparently also applies to free-market pressures to subvert security, even if it is white-hat security goals that are preventing something like Carnivore's back-door.
I read this and found myself chuckling:
Futuristic support-desk techie answers phone: "Tech support. Lost data?... Stored holographically?... Um, try leaning a bit to the left or right, and repeating your search."
I'm sure there's a midground to this position you've taken... right? If nothing else, you could list the things you do that you'd never let some pointy-hair force you to *stop* doing so TFA is answered, right? For example:
Presumably, you've edited other people's code (or your own after [insert timeframe slightly longer than the recall threshold for what you ate for breakfast]). That's taught you over 35 years the value of readability and you attempt to work those best-practices into your coding... right?
Presumably, you recognize the value for source control, especially when dealing with 'nimrods' that could unknowingly break your code. And the house rule is 'Commit Often, build often, don't break the build'. Right?
Presumably, the team tries to make sure that someone writing critical-path code isn't *lost* for enough time to endanger the project (typ. no more than a few days), either by regular peer reviews, pairing, partial-function demos, memos detailing the design-so-far, regular commits or whatever else works. Right?
Presumably, you are comfortable with various design/code cycles, even if your favorite is [waterfall|objects|XP|whatever]. And whatever the boss recommends, you find a way to honor the letter of their desire while staying as true as possible to the spirit of your preferred methodology? Right?
Presumably, you keep current in your field. Maybe you read a few books, subscribe to and read a few mags, putter with a new language or OS, learn a new tool every once in a while. When you see something cool, you share the discovery with coworkers. When a coworker does something cool, you're not too proud to say 'howdyoudodat?'... Right?
Presumably, you (try to) respect your peers. Or at least seek/recognize what strengths they have. Right? Even the village idiot can be useful, after all. Personally, I always try to populate that peer group with people it is easy to respect, so the job isn't so tough.
And, to steal a line from McCarthy, do you avoid flippin' the bozo bit too quickly. Right?
When some clueless coworker comes to you and rags about some coding habit of yours that they hate, you eventually calm down enough to figure out a compromise point. Right?
I joined a team that used hungarian notation in object-oriented code. I adapted, but showed the team articles that showed how this was a risk. Ultimately, I realized the anti-hungarian research didn't fit a unique case we were up against, where 3 data hierarchies overlapped enough that the hungarian info helped avoid hard-to-debug misunderstandings and mistakes. But the other coders got rid of hungarian fever with respect to iThis and bThat and lpctstlHolyCrapIReallySawThisOnce. Likewise, it took me ages to convince a *much-wiser* coder that his code was worse if he used punny/cute variable names (WizardOfOz, SuperFreak, Smoother, MyWayOrD).
We all have a bit of these habits, but serious primadonnas, persistently-negative people, dinosaurs, lone-wolfs, unacknowledged visionaries, and pyromaniacs can utterly fsck up a project. When I was assigned to lead a dysfunctional team, I initially spent almost half my time trying to undo all sorts of ugly team dynamics. I'm not alone in thinking that it is more productive to shunt anyone (even the most brilliant coder) into non-critical-path (or out the door) than to let a whole team fail because of 'em. FWIW, second place goes to recognizing and rewarding people that are very valuable, without resorting to lame tricks or metrics.
Back to TFA, coding conventions can be as simple as a 1-pp doc we called our 'zen of coding', that mentioned habits and team-agreed conventions we'd keep in mind as a group. Or they can be as anal as a friend's workflow policy for altering code for some piece of weaponry (cruise missiles?), where a few dozen lines of code per year per programmer is a tolerable average. His life is 5 parts design, 5 parts design review, 1 tiny part code, 10 parts test, 5 parts peer review, followed by another
Don't make it bad.
Take our sad crime
and make it better --
"Reduce fines"
the voice says inside your heart.
Then you can start
to make it better.
Two possible answers:
You're buying a Mac & haven't bought one before, so it isn't a *lie* to say you're switching.
-or-
You're buying a Mac. They're confident it'll do the convincing...
Personally, I'd say it is a bit of both. Apple hardware/software is an utter freakin' delight.
Std Disclaimer: I've never owned a Mac until OS-X Tiger, but I'm fed up with being everyone's free win tech support dude, and all the win-related hassles and reinstalling and etc. My servers run Debian, yet I spend most of my days writing c++ code in VS2003 (lucrative customer, fun project). I know those two well enough, and decided enough is freakin' enough! 'User-friendly Debian desktop' is an oxymoron, and the only way Windows might be tolerable is if it was ROM based so I could turn off relatives' machines and have them bounce back to defaults.
I guess that makes me a switcher.
And that brings me full circle to the other thing I mentioned: one of those lessons that I had trouble learning: sometimes, people disagree with you out of defensiveness or similar reasons. Rather than offering up a take-no-prisoners bit of speechifyin', you have better luck if you give 'em your opinion, your reasons, and some time.... and one day *presto* you hear them pop off on someone else: Don't you know that [optBrand] is EVIL, you insensitive Clod!
Oh, and I swear I got a spendthrift gene. Dad/Sis/Bro/I all are terrible with money. Can't find a 12-step program for it, but luckily my mom, wife and brother-in-law are frugal and a bit militant about budgets.
Adults that proxy-boycott childhood treats kind of amuse me. The intentions are good, but having had childhood friends that'd smuggle non-vegan snacks into their bedrooms, raid our fridge, and that grew up resentful because their parents denied them pop culture feeding via cable TV... nothin' says lovin' like subsuming your family into your belief structure.
That said, I'm as guilty as the next guy: we tried boycotting Barney the annoying, plagarizing purple monster. Realized the futility when our kids ran up to a TV at Sears shouting excitedly "look, it's YuckyBarney!"
Disney's a mixed bag.... While mostly negative, they're more gay-friendly than many employers, some things they've been slurred over (rereleasing Song of the South, particularly) are no-win situations they just wisely refuse to engage themselves in, etc. I *agree* they've got a stance on IP that is gravely harming society, they are hypocrites (always lobbying to extend copyright just enough to never quite reinstate copyright royalties to 19th century works like Rudyard Kipling's, for example), they're managed by a corporation that seems utterly soulless at times, and I've never gotten over the chutzpah they exhibited by announcing plans to turn a civil war battlefield (and not some meaningless field anywhere else in America) into 'Disney's America'... but I also love great animation too much to not impart that love (and the eventual lecture on my bittersweet 'love/hate' opinion about Disney) to my kids.
Put another way, are you willing to boycott all good early pixar stuff if (when!) Pixar goes evil?! I'm in the throes of a similar internal debate *today* thanks to George Lucas and yesterday's Ep III release.
GP was talking about ditching a fiancee because art-appreciation (lets temporarily stretch this concept to include pop music) didn't jibe well with RIAA hating. In the REAL world, love really has very little to do with consumer spending habits. If your wife had looked at you with puppy-dog eyes and said "But honey, I grew up wanting to be Ariel", would you really tell her she couldn't buy the new extended-edition DVD to share with your daughter?! It isn't just intelligence at stake; emotion and intelligence aren't so tightly coupled that a 'right' answer necessarily exists. Heck, nothing's that cut and dried...
BTW, the Prince of Darkness is no longer CEO at Disney...
Nah, she'll outgrow the 'must have pop music' phase. And until then, it can become a geek's treasure-hunt to find non-RIAA stuff she likes.
And anyone that gets too selective or too calculating about life/sexual partners deserves their long lonely life. My wife respects/tolerates about half of the things that I consider important, but it'd be utterly insane to divorce her just because she likes the worst stuff on the scifi channel or shops at Walmart. Likewise, I respect her decisions on stuff that matters to her, without having to share her view completely.
Besides, chances are the girlfriend was defensive because she felt besieged. I've got a teenage nephew that argued with me a year or so ago about Lars Ulrich being a RIAA toady... he'd never heard of the issue. Since then, my nephew's taken an active interest in the topic, started listening to a college/alternative station, and is shifting his tastes accordingly. Maybe it's like confronting any other junkie: Anger and denial are first. Then comes bargaining, then finally acceptance/change. (the Depression stage is infrequent, since college radio and indy/alternative/live music is a helluva lot more gratifying than methadone or goin' cold turkey.)
Oh, and $258M pursuing a cure for malaria is a credit to Bill Gates. Saw that headline a few mins after posting my previous remark, and for all of Microsoft's evil tendencies (and I don't intentionally exagerate by saying 'evil'), the Gates Foundation merits respect.
Heh, my point exactly... doesn't matter if you're lucky enough to be famous or rich, you're never exempt from ridicule. Best strategy is to remain down-to-earth. As an überRich example, Warren Buffett seems to understand this rule.
Class reveals itself in how we respond to extreme circumstances.
A witty statement plus yet-another-example-in-a-long-line has nothing to do with voltaire, but merely reinforces Microsoft's reputation of being an IP-stealing wannabe.
Admittedly, mine doesn't sing like voltaire. But I found this thread by greppin' for 'doomed' before I quoted Henry Spencer myself, so GP isn't the only slashdotter that sees some truth in Spencer's 'doomed to recreate it' saying. I've been a fan of the saying since 'The Unix-Hater's Handbook'.
Copying isn't the issue. We're not saying they *can't* copy. We're mocking Microsoft for exhibiting lameness and copycat tendencies, just like IBM used to get painted with that brush. Nobody says they're 'not allowed to add a feature'. It's just absurd that they're only now figuring out that symlinks might be useful, despite having 43 BILLION dollars in the bank.
Oh, and if Linus ever becomes a billionaire, we'll gladly start mocking him when he exhibits lameness. Let's call that Ediron's corolary to the 'new golden rule': If we don't have the gold, at least we can mock the rich.
Wow... your numbers are way off.
First, I had a cross-country girlfriend in the early 80's. I can say with certainty that the best *nighttime* per-HOUR rate I could find that didn't involve phreaking was $6 or higher. In the 70's, it was *much* higher than $5 per hour. Did you mean per-minute? That seems high, but I wouldn't be shocked, since I faintly recall the 1970's *daytime* rate was around a buck or more per minute.
Second, the average person can't spend 500-1000 HOURS per month on long distance if they plan to work or sleep or otherwise live without a phone attached to their head surgically. A month only has 720 hours. Again, perhaps you meant minutes.
Per-minute prices are in freefall because the cost for 1kBps (voice-compressed audio) is in freefall. But base fees for phone service aren't in freefall. If you'll notice, the typical local phone-company monthly fee is steady or climbing, despite radical improvements in switch/infrastructure costs and reliability. That growing pile of money is largely what pays maintenance crew salaries and other fixed/growing costs.
Prices being in free-fall have no bearing on long-term economics, since many of the coresponding COSTS are also in free-fall. Maintenance costs are in flux, but while the manpower costs climb, others are dropping (newer gear does more and breaks less).
Corporations aren't always more efficient than governments (and certainly not *radically* so). That's a US-ian conservative mantra that a lot of Europe disagrees with.
Nationalization isn't inevitable.
Neither is *everyone* failing until a single monopoly player remains. And regulation isn't evil. That's another conservative mantra. The debacle after deregulation of California power quickly reminded US-ians why regulation isn't a bad thing.
The one insightful point you hit is an implied one: the phone infrastructure is usually maintained under higher quality standards than cable or ISP or other provider standards. Crews are more responsive, buried cable is buried deeper, things are better-engineered, etc. The phone company acts like a utility (water, gas, power). Cellular providers, ISP's, cable companies, etc, act like optional/entertainment vendors.
I've been nervous about that for years, and have resigned myself to thinking that will change abruptly, but only after a vonage customer successfully sues for failed service in an emergency. My gut feeling is that once telco-alternatives are held accountable to the same critical-infrastructure standards as phone and power and other utilities, the ISP's and wireless broadband providers and cable companies (who are telco competition) will be forced to re-engineer their infrastructure, raise their monthly fees, etc. Once we hit this point, phone companies will stop seeing so much competitive pressure.
I seriously doubt this will happen simply because the phone company tries to find a way to extort the money from Google or Vonage like WitLacker is snorting about, though.
Note to self: Sell all SBC and T stock. I'd wondered if T would climb to SBC valuations or vice versa. This toxic rube just answered my question fairly clearly: he has NO idea what is going on in the industry. He's like some halfwit lovechild of Michael Eisner and Darth McBride.
A hint to Mr. WitLacker: Due to overbuilding that was done by SBC and others during the dot-com years, dark fiber is still stupid cheap. Now, if you want to strip money from google, you'll have to ruin your own market among other customers, since I can imagine a dozen tricks ranging from buying up existing contracts to teaming with owners of existing contracts to upgrade endpoints to increase per-fiber bandwidth. Your own client base is in a position to compete with you if you get greedy.
Or Google can short-circuit past you by renting/leasing dark fiber and buying their own endpoints. And anywhere you've got a rock-solid monopoly, they can explore stopgaps like microwave. In a phrase, you can't put this genie back into a monopoly bottle, no matter how hard you try.
Next, I'm not sure how you plan to detect which endpoints are google's, or how you intend to increase charges to those endpoints without getting excessive on all other datapoints, given the rather ambiguous nature of data packets. But, if you are able to differentiate the data, all Google has to do is refuse to pay. Every time you block a paying customer from reaching Google, you'll be drowned in loud screams. After questioning your parentage, customers will insist someone's in of breach of contract (either you or google) and since they don't pay google for access, They'll blame you. If you try to shift the blame to google, we all *know* who'll win those legal/PR battles.
This isn't your grandma's ol' monopoly: for every tactic you can think of, the data infrastructure (which is what geeks like me consider the REAL internet) is creating alternatives. And every time you squeeze, you'll lose PR and goodwill and customers. You'll piss off shareholders. You'll piss off techies (ask your canine mom, Darth McBride about the wisdom of doing that). Oh, and the state public-utility regulatory commissions: act like a monopoly and various state legislatures and their consituents will shove your sorry ass deep into regulatory hell: imagine a world where the regulators deem that dark fiber will be repriced downward until it is fully utilized.
Um:
1 - I have a phone with a crappy camera. Drives me nuts, since there are a lot of times I use it for snapshots of my kids or friends, and the pics generally suck worse than an old kodak 110. I have a nice camera, but I don't tote it around everywhere as slavishly as I do my phone.
2 - After ranting about focussing on doing one job well, you suggest a phone that can only call one number. That's just stupid.
(and yes, I scrolled down to see your reasoning: you intend it as a 'so my customers can only call me' tool. Clue: freebies like this are more appreciated by customers if they're not absurdly limited. Think of all the swag you've gotten: the single-use stuff (brochures/cards/treats) got used up and/or tossed, and you kept things that were generically useful: mousepads, calendars, shirts, rulers, letter-openers, calculators... and yet you think someone will carry *several* vendors' lame, busted-ass one-number business card phones around in their wallet for months or years in the odd chance they someday need to call?! What---EVER.)
Three words:
"Dance, mailman. Dance!" -- Cheers
Not to diss the creators and their accomplishment, but a pair of axles on a chassis hardly fits anyone's definition of a car. A cart, maybe.
I mentioned ghz because everything that happens from 10ghz downward is going to contribute to the background. An example is the impact of using 802.11b channel 2: it damages (or even kills) the achievable data rate for channel 1 users: for high-bandwidth, adjacent signals mean both users suffer.
Meanwhile, freqencies down to the 10's of khz can't carry data rates that are remotely a/v grade, the few-ghz limitation isn't distance but line-of-sight, you're dismissive of several *useful* aspects of analog, you mistakenly imply the FCC is somehow only needed for analog signal mgmt, and I can't tell if you mean STR or SDR's in your remarks on software radios.
Sorry, but my impression is that you're no more of an expert than I am. Your claim of sufficient bandwidth for 6-billion video feeds is unsubstantiated, and that was specifically what I was trying to get an expert to run numbers on: My question was if it was valid to compute some sort of full-spectrum Shannon capacity and how that'd compare with data-carrying needs in dense populations.