The interface makes sense in general, but some of it could use fine tuning to reduce the occasions where you are stuck without a hint. For instance, when doing remote research with POSes there are some non-obvious restrictions on where the materials are stored (BPOs may stay on a remote station, additional materials like data sheets must be brought to the POS lab). Those situations could use a bit more in the way of helpful messages why something does not work.
About the "newbie zones", there are a few systems with so-called training installations. Players start in one of these, and they provide the weakest enemies in game. Those systems could be considered newbie zones. Of course, the real big cliff is the border between 0.5 and 0.4 security.
I guess they'll have to block online access too, otherwise the attempt to get more money out of Time Warner will fail because most TWC customers just watch the shows via internet. But Viacom will also suffer, because with less viewers they won't get the same advertisement fees anymore.
Not knowing your and their cost structure, I cannot advise you on what to do - cave in or fight it out. But it seems quite possible to me that Viacom will backpedal because dropping the TWC viewers hurts them more than TWC.
Except, if there are only 24 active developers, how could development not stagnate.
Start a new project, with the open office code base. Give the project a new name, bring on any frustrated members of the OpenOffice community, and find new people. Surely you can find several hundred, and start working on this new project.
I agree that this is how it would have to happen, but I think Open Office is not that sick yet. It is only 2 1/2 months since version 3.0 was released, that is not a bad case of stagnation. It will take more to overcome the lethargy and kick off a fork.
Considering Java, I don't think it is responsible for much of the slowness. In other news, benchmarks have shown Java to be be almost as fast as compiled languages. I'd look for suboptimal algorithms first;-).
As long as Sun refuse to take contributions and do meaningful development on O.O of their own, a fork does not make much sense because it would merely duplicate Sun's efforts. In that case, people might just tolerate the status quo. But if Sun stops development or slows it to a negligible pace, people might get frustrated enough to do something about it. That is what happened with XFree, and today X.org is preferred by most distributions.
In the case of homework that requires Office, I might try using OpenOffice and saving in Word format. Unless the homework requires some of the more exotic formatting options, you should get away with that.
Besides, I doubt that an online version of Office would run faster unless your PC is a real fossil. Until a few months ago, I was using an old 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 with Office 2000 at work. That computer was five years old but still handled my documents at acceptable speed. There were a few other quirks in Word 2000 I found not so acceptable, but lack of speed was not one of them.
It requires stupid people to work, as it is not exactly a secret that computer hardware is pretty cheap today. Unfortunately there are enough stupid people in the world. Who doesn't have some acquaintance who bought some cheap crap despite advice that it is not really a good buy? We/.ers see it in computer hardware, and a friend of mine who is a professional car mechanic can tell similar stories.
Of course, midrange parts becoming 'good enough' is a good factor for me, too. I don't feel the need to run things at stupidly high framerates on the largest resolution screens available.
Don't forget detail level. Computer games have started to look pretty nice a few years ago. Half-Life 2 for instance (personally I think Half-Life 1 was sufficient). Anything beyond that is optional prettification and counts as luxury.
My current PC from 2007 runs Half-Life 2 and its mods at very comfortable frame rates. So I'm not surprised in the least that a lot of people think the same way and keep their existing machines.
Well, get them now. While the website is still up (haven't checked).
And with Abit, an upgrade can be helpful even years after you bought it. I have an Abit IC 7 here (maybe 4 years old) and a recent BIOS and chipset driver update finally brought acceptable USB2 performance.
Apart from that, I won't miss Abit due to the lousy quality. This board has shown various problems over the years that cost some time and money to fix: -lousy onboard sound => bought a plug-in sound card -bad northbridge cooler fan => had to replace it -a loose heatsink holder => fixed by re-soldering
Overall, I suspect paying 50 euros more for an ASUS board would have given me better value for money.
In this case, both definitions offered by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly) apply: 1) Two parallel networks are probably more expensive than one, because you will end up digging up the streets repeatedly. In particular the "last mile" to each house. 2) In a competition scenario, the company with less customers will be at a significant disadvantage, because it has similar fixed costs. For example, a city wide network, assuming both of the competitors offer service to all city residents. Typically that would be the newcomer, unless the incumbent ISP is so lousy that the new company can quickly win close to 50% of the customers in the area.
Avoiding this requires either 1) regulation where the incumbent has to rent the "last mile" to other service providers at a maximum rate. That is what Germany does, after privatizing the former telephone authority and turning it into a regular company. Works more or less, but the company is regularly wrangling with the regulation authority about appropriate rates and terms.
2) a state-owned "last mile" that is rented to whatever service provider the customer buys his service from. Loosely comparable to streets and car tax. My gut feeling is that this could work better, but AFAIK it has not really been tried anywhere. So this one remains speculation.
With "traditional" ones, cobalt for the lithium cobalt oxide cathode.
With LiFePO4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery), iron which is technically a heavy metal even if harmless. Plus traces of other materials for doping. Overall much less harmful, and LiFePO4 promises much better safety and battery lifetime:-)
I think you're overly pessimistic there - but only a little;-)
Up to a few weeks ago, I worked for a US company (through a German subsidiary). Based on my experience there, I estimate top management's planning horizon was about two years. Within that time frame, they were capable of planning ahead. Research that takes longer than two years to turn a profit? Forget it.
Of course, if you are doing medical technology and have to show post operative results two years after treatment for FDA approval, that means times of 3 years or more from project start to market (development time, plus time for treatments in clinical study, plus two years waiting for final results, plus finishing the paperwork).
Not willing to think that far ahead? You will be unable to make meaningful innovations. All you can do is small changes that you can get through FDA without a new clinical study. The competition will gradually pull ahead of you. Finally, you will lose market share. And that is exactly what happened. At least I got a nice severance packet when 1/3 of the employees in my department (including me) were laid off. In that regard, I cannot complain.
Telecom is a natural monopoly, because building multiple networks in parallel is economically inefficient. Hence the attempts to regulate the one existing network, often with poor success.
With batteries it is easier to start up a competing factory, if the technology is well documented. So I think GP's point #1 would be sufficient, no need to regulate prices on top of the requirement to release the research into the public domain. That release, however, should be closely checked for completeness and correctness.
Here it is more of a lobby game. As a European I'm not aware of any large lawsuits of that kind going on, but the car makers certainly try to create political pressure against stricter emission standards. And they tend to be successful in influencing their governments, who then try to change EU policy in the sense of "their" companies. In particular, German car makers who have a of large models in their fleet try to kill the planned emission limit of 120g CO2/km.
This may help them on price/performance, because the raw materials for the batteries are relatively cheap. It is also a good real life test of large batteries of this type. The reliability statistics for this car should give us a good idea of how rugged the new battery tech really is.
When the first Japanese cars showed up in Europe in the 1970s, they were cheap but had a terrible reputation. That has changed. Today they are on the same quality level (and almost as expensive) as European cars. Toyota even ruled the reliability/breakdown statistics for years, only recently some European models have retaken the lead.
I expect that the same will happen with the Chinese cars. They may have not much experience in car making now, but 10 years from now things can look different.
if GP has it in a VM I would consider that his fault. But if it is the indexing (plausible, since other sources have reported Vista does a lot of that in the first days), I call it bad design. Because a background process should not slow down the user interaction much.
Then again, the previews of Windows 7 are said to be much better in that regard. Seems that problem is finally on its way to be fixed.
You haven't made a case for why this isn't a good idea. Help is designed for neophytes; if you even know your HD is lettered C:, then you're more advanced for Windows Help.
That is typical for Windows and one of the greatest disadvantages from my point of view (software developer and generally an experienced user). The GUI and help system are designed to make it easy for beginners, but for advanced users things like hiding file extensions and "friendly names" are actually an extra layer of obfuscation to wade through. Fortunately much of it can be switched off, but I'd prefer a system that is more transparent in the default installation.
I strongly suspect that it is a marketing move to get rid of the somewhat tainted Vista name. According to various reports from people who have seen the previews, Vista => Windows 7 is not a bigger change than Windows 2000 => XP. So Windows 7 could also be named Vista SP3;-)
Microsoft also has a history of finally getting it right after a few service packs. And it seems that Windows 7 is not much more than SP3 for Vista. So nothing new here;-)
This may actually be true in the sense that Microsoft does a relaunch of mature Vista as "Windows 7" to get rid of the tainted name. Which will probably work. But on the other hand Vista will stick to Microsoft's history as the second big turd after ME.
Exactly. But there are degrees of unpleasantness and stupidity. Back to topic: Process used to make things slower and was sometimes annoying, but it also helped to structure things and find bugs for release. So it was not all bad. Doing something completely unrelated instead of making the code "right" was much worse.
I was one of those guys making constant, iterative improvements in the guts of my component, that had no "business justification" because the only thing it made better was future development and bug investigation. But in the process of that hacking I also identified dozens of real bugs that I wouldn't have found otherwise.
The time for that was what I missed on my last job. While there was not much oversight of how we actually wrote our code, deadline pressure always created a feeling of "you cannot afford taking that time just NOW".
The ultimate downer was when there was a gap between projects, one release had just been shipped and management hadn't made its mind up about what features to put into the next version. But even then there was no "business justification" for rewriting old crappy code. Instead we ended up writing some middleware for third party closed source software to make management's life easier. IMHO a complete waste of time.
In hindsight, that was a lot more motivation destroying than the development process as such.
Imagine a small business where 50 people are sharing a T1 line. For web browsing, this many users could all get decent performance, even if a handful of people are doing big downloads, provided they are all using TCP. But all it takes is one guy hammering the link at full throttle to ruin it for everyone else.
That is an internal problem of the small business. They rent one T1 line for 50 people, which is obviously not enough for 50 people watching stuff on YouTube. So they need some policy to prevent excessive use. On a former job of mine we actually had such an event: One guy was running eMule from his laptop and collecting Gina Wild videos;-) We found him through the router management software and told him to switch his P2P application off, problem solved.
The problem with most end-user ISPs is their excessive overselling: They have a bandwidth per user that may not be much better than in your example, but they market the connection to every single user as if he had the line for himself. Then the ISP complains or starts throttling the bandwidth, if it is actually used heavily. Users feel cheated. My point is that it is very much the fault of the ISP if they make empty promises. It is not the duty of the customer to figure out how much capacity the ISP actually has and restrict his usage accordingly. Actually, I think the behavior of some ISPs borders on fraud and I'd like to see them lose a lawsuit over it. AFAIK there is actually one brewing, some users have sued Comcast.
Other posters have already pointed out that the BT protocol has slightly different design goals compared to TCP.
But in case some "homegrown" TCP is desired, I'd like to add that the developers could always pull an Apple (or Microsoft with regard to networking) and adapt some mature TCP stack from a BSD-licensed operating system. There you get the 30+ years of development;-)
Sounds mysterious......my own XP PC, and the one I had at my last job did not show that problem. But it certainly sounds like you did your homework in checking for viruses. Maybe it is a "legitimate" application that steals the resources. So I'd try the following things:
1) Take an affected PC and clean out the various autostart mechanisms. Take notes and observe if killing a particular service/application fixes the problem. A nice tool to help you there is available from Microsoft: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx
2) If 1) fails, check if your Windows-only software runs on WINE (http://winehq.org/). If yes, Linux is an option again.
Tesla do some "integration work", that is they make a big battery module from calls they find on the market. But the important progress in batteries comes from companies like A123 and Valence, which actually work on the battery cells and improve them.
The rest of an electric car is mature technology these days. Electric motors and the electronics to drive them have been in use for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
The interface makes sense in general, but some of it could use fine tuning to reduce the occasions where you are stuck without a hint. For instance, when doing remote research with POSes there are some non-obvious restrictions on where the materials are stored (BPOs may stay on a remote station, additional materials like data sheets must be brought to the POS lab). Those situations could use a bit more in the way of helpful messages why something does not work.
About the "newbie zones", there are a few systems with so-called training installations. Players start in one of these, and they provide the weakest enemies in game. Those systems could be considered newbie zones. Of course, the real big cliff is the border between 0.5 and 0.4 security.
I guess they'll have to block online access too, otherwise the attempt to get more money out of Time Warner will fail because most TWC customers just watch the shows via internet. But Viacom will also suffer, because with less viewers they won't get the same advertisement fees anymore.
Not knowing your and their cost structure, I cannot advise you on what to do - cave in or fight it out. But it seems quite possible to me that Viacom will backpedal because dropping the TWC viewers hurts them more than TWC.
I agree that this is how it would have to happen, but I think Open Office is not that sick yet. It is only 2 1/2 months since version 3.0 was released, that is not a bad case of stagnation. It will take more to overcome the lethargy and kick off a fork.
Considering Java, I don't think it is responsible for much of the slowness. In other news, benchmarks have shown Java to be be almost as fast as compiled languages. I'd look for suboptimal algorithms first ;-).
As long as Sun refuse to take contributions and do meaningful development on O.O of their own, a fork does not make much sense because it would merely duplicate Sun's efforts. In that case, people might just tolerate the status quo.
But if Sun stops development or slows it to a negligible pace, people might get frustrated enough to do something about it. That is what happened with XFree, and today X.org is preferred by most distributions.
In the case of homework that requires Office, I might try using OpenOffice and saving in Word format. Unless the homework requires some of the more exotic formatting options, you should get away with that.
Besides, I doubt that an online version of Office would run faster unless your PC is a real fossil. Until a few months ago, I was using an old 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 with Office 2000 at work. That computer was five years old but still handled my documents at acceptable speed. There were a few other quirks in Word 2000 I found not so acceptable, but lack of speed was not one of them.
It requires stupid people to work, as it is not exactly a secret that computer hardware is pretty cheap today. /.ers see it in computer hardware, and a friend of mine who is a professional car mechanic can tell similar stories.
Unfortunately there are enough stupid people in the world. Who doesn't have some acquaintance who bought some cheap crap despite advice that it is not really a good buy?
We
Don't forget detail level. Computer games have started to look pretty nice a few years ago. Half-Life 2 for instance (personally I think Half-Life 1 was sufficient). Anything beyond that is optional prettification and counts as luxury.
My current PC from 2007 runs Half-Life 2 and its mods at very comfortable frame rates. So I'm not surprised in the least that a lot of people think the same way and keep their existing machines.
Well, get them now. While the website is still up (haven't checked).
And with Abit, an upgrade can be helpful even years after you bought it. I have an Abit IC 7 here (maybe 4 years old) and a recent BIOS and chipset driver update finally brought acceptable USB2 performance.
Apart from that, I won't miss Abit due to the lousy quality. This board has shown various problems over the years that cost some time and money to fix:
-lousy onboard sound => bought a plug-in sound card
-bad northbridge cooler fan => had to replace it
-a loose heatsink holder => fixed by re-soldering
Overall, I suspect paying 50 euros more for an ASUS board would have given me better value for money.
In this case, both definitions offered by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly) apply:
1) Two parallel networks are probably more expensive than one, because you will end up digging up the streets repeatedly. In particular the "last mile" to each house.
2) In a competition scenario, the company with less customers will be at a significant disadvantage, because it has similar fixed costs. For example, a city wide network, assuming both of the competitors offer service to all city residents.
Typically that would be the newcomer, unless the incumbent ISP is so lousy that the new company can quickly win close to 50% of the customers in the area.
Avoiding this requires either
1) regulation where the incumbent has to rent the "last mile" to other service providers at a maximum rate.
That is what Germany does, after privatizing the former telephone authority and turning it into a regular company. Works more or less, but the company is regularly wrangling with the regulation authority about appropriate rates and terms.
2) a state-owned "last mile" that is rented to whatever service provider the customer buys his service from. Loosely comparable to streets and car tax.
My gut feeling is that this could work better, but AFAIK it has not really been tried anywhere. So this one remains speculation.
With "traditional" ones, cobalt for the lithium cobalt oxide cathode.
With LiFePO4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery), iron which is technically a heavy metal even if harmless. Plus traces of other materials for doping. Overall much less harmful, and LiFePO4 promises much better safety and battery lifetime :-)
I think you're overly pessimistic there - but only a little ;-)
Up to a few weeks ago, I worked for a US company (through a German subsidiary). Based on my experience there, I estimate top management's planning horizon was about two years. Within that time frame, they were capable of planning ahead. Research that takes longer than two years to turn a profit? Forget it.
Of course, if you are doing medical technology and have to show post operative results two years after treatment for FDA approval, that means times of 3 years or more from project start to market (development time, plus time for treatments in clinical study, plus two years waiting for final results, plus finishing the paperwork).
Not willing to think that far ahead?
You will be unable to make meaningful innovations. All you can do is small changes that you can get through FDA without a new clinical study. The competition will gradually pull ahead of you. Finally, you will lose market share. And that is exactly what happened. At least I got a nice severance packet when 1/3 of the employees in my department (including me) were laid off. In that regard, I cannot complain.
Telecom is a natural monopoly, because building multiple networks in parallel is economically inefficient. Hence the attempts to regulate the one existing network, often with poor success.
With batteries it is easier to start up a competing factory, if the technology is well documented.
So I think GP's point #1 would be sufficient, no need to regulate prices on top of the requirement to release the research into the public domain. That release, however, should be closely checked for completeness and correctness.
Here it is more of a lobby game. As a European I'm not aware of any large lawsuits of that kind going on, but the car makers certainly try to create political pressure against stricter emission standards. And they tend to be successful in influencing their governments, who then try to change EU policy in the sense of "their" companies.
In particular, German car makers who have a of large models in their fleet try to kill the planned emission limit of 120g CO2/km.
AFAIK it is the first hybrid car using lithium iron-phosphate batteries. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_F3DM.
This may help them on price/performance, because the raw materials for the batteries are relatively cheap. It is also a good real life test of large batteries of this type. The reliability statistics for this car should give us a good idea of how rugged the new battery tech really is.
When the first Japanese cars showed up in Europe in the 1970s, they were cheap but had a terrible reputation. That has changed. Today they are on the same quality level (and almost as expensive) as European cars. Toyota even ruled the reliability/breakdown statistics for years, only recently some European models have retaken the lead.
I expect that the same will happen with the Chinese cars. They may have not much experience in car making now, but 10 years from now things can look different.
Hmm,
if GP has it in a VM I would consider that his fault. But if it is the indexing (plausible, since other sources have reported Vista does a lot of that in the first days), I call it bad design. Because a background process should not slow down the user interaction much.
Then again, the previews of Windows 7 are said to be much better in that regard. Seems that problem is finally on its way to be fixed.
You haven't made a case for why this isn't a good idea. Help is designed for neophytes; if you even know your HD is lettered C:, then you're more advanced for Windows Help.
That is typical for Windows and one of the greatest disadvantages from my point of view (software developer and generally an experienced user). The GUI and help system are designed to make it easy for beginners, but for advanced users things like hiding file extensions and "friendly names" are actually an extra layer of obfuscation to wade through. Fortunately much of it can be switched off, but I'd prefer a system that is more transparent in the default installation.
I strongly suspect that it is a marketing move to get rid of the somewhat tainted Vista name. According to various reports from people who have seen the previews, Vista => Windows 7 is not a bigger change than Windows 2000 => XP. So Windows 7 could also be named Vista SP3 ;-)
Microsoft also has a history of finally getting it right after a few service packs. And it seems that Windows 7 is not much more than SP3 for Vista. So nothing new here ;-)
This may actually be true in the sense that Microsoft does a relaunch of mature Vista as "Windows 7" to get rid of the tainted name. Which will probably work. But on the other hand Vista will stick to Microsoft's history as the second big turd after ME.
Exactly. But there are degrees of unpleasantness and stupidity. Back to topic:
Process used to make things slower and was sometimes annoying, but it also helped to structure things and find bugs for release. So it was not all bad. Doing something completely unrelated instead of making the code "right" was much worse.
The time for that was what I missed on my last job. While there was not much oversight of how we actually wrote our code, deadline pressure always created a feeling of "you cannot afford taking that time just NOW".
The ultimate downer was when there was a gap between projects, one release had just been shipped and management hadn't made its mind up about what features to put into the next version. But even then there was no "business justification" for rewriting old crappy code. Instead we ended up writing some middleware for third party closed source software to make management's life easier. IMHO a complete waste of time.
In hindsight, that was a lot more motivation destroying than the development process as such.
That is an internal problem of the small business. They rent one T1 line for 50 people, which is obviously not enough for 50 people watching stuff on YouTube. So they need some policy to prevent excessive use. On a former job of mine we actually had such an event: ;-)
One guy was running eMule from his laptop and collecting Gina Wild videos
We found him through the router management software and told him to switch his P2P application off, problem solved.
The problem with most end-user ISPs is their excessive overselling:
They have a bandwidth per user that may not be much better than in your example, but they market the connection to every single user as if he had the line for himself. Then the ISP complains or starts throttling the bandwidth, if it is actually used heavily. Users feel cheated.
My point is that it is very much the fault of the ISP if they make empty promises. It is not the duty of the customer to figure out how much capacity the ISP actually has and restrict his usage accordingly. Actually, I think the behavior of some ISPs borders on fraud and I'd like to see them lose a lawsuit over it. AFAIK there is actually one brewing, some users have sued Comcast.
Other posters have already pointed out that the BT protocol has slightly different design goals compared to TCP.
But in case some "homegrown" TCP is desired, I'd like to add that the developers could always pull an Apple (or Microsoft with regard to networking) and adapt some mature TCP stack from a BSD-licensed operating system. There you get the 30+ years of development ;-)
Sounds mysterious... ...my own XP PC, and the one I had at my last job did not show that problem. But it certainly sounds like you did your homework in checking for viruses. Maybe it is a "legitimate" application that steals the resources. So I'd try the following things:
1) Take an affected PC and clean out the various autostart mechanisms. Take notes and observe if killing a particular service/application fixes the problem. A nice tool to help you there is available from Microsoft: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx
2) If 1) fails, check if your Windows-only software runs on WINE (http://winehq.org/). If yes, Linux is an option again.
Tesla do some "integration work", that is they make a big battery module from calls they find on the market. But the important progress in batteries comes from companies like A123 and Valence, which actually work on the battery cells and improve them.
The rest of an electric car is mature technology these days. Electric motors and the electronics to drive them have been in use for a while.