I spend some time designing things in Verilog and trying to read other people's source code at opencores.org, and I recall you did some work at Transmeta. For some time I've had a list of instructions that could be added to processsors that would be drastically speed up common functions, and SSE 4.2 includes some of my favorites, the dqword string comparision instructions. So...
What are your ideas for instrructions that you've always thought should be handled by the processor, but never seen implemented?
It does. It also makes us more proficient defenders.
But the trick here is for us to stop being like our parents. Something bad happened and now the debate ensues as to which of our fundamental liberties we need to infringe to "make things better." The movie these people were seeing contained no shortage of innocent crowds of people being violently attacked.
One could have the knee-jerk reaction that the 1st Amendment has to go, that people shouldn't be allowed to make movies like this, under the premise that they inspire this behavior.
One could have the knee-jerk reaction that the 2nd Amendment has to go because the tools of self-defense can be abused to hurt people.
One could have the knee-jerk reaction that the 4th Amendment has to go because if the police had searched this guy's car at his last traffic ticket, they might have found incriminating content.
Just stop. These people have suffered a tragic loss, and people with empathy want to "do something" to make it better. But there are no quick fixes. The real fixes can only be tracked by the emotionally unsatisfying math that shows when you:
Fund the existing background check system's connection to the mental health care system (under laws that already exist), you make it harder for crazy people to buy guns.
Fund and fix education, you give young people options and opportunities to find things they are passionate about. It is from a large pool of hopeless, directionless youth that most violent criminals are drawn.
These solutions work, and there are others. But they work slowly over time. The goal of a high-opportunity society is achieved with patience and dedication. They don't "feel" like they are working in any one individual's life, the coefficients of variation are simply too high on any individual person's experience. But they show quite clearly in the math. To advance, we need to be the people who measure, understand and improve. The next Enlightenment will be data driven.
Who would be better suited toward trusting the math and working the solution that computer geeks. This is our problem to solve.
She and her husband continue to show the best side of capitalism. For those that assume that wealth necessarily leads to avarice, it's delightful to me to see the Gates Foundation making that case more difficult to prove.
Re-Flash it and be done with these folk. This newer firmware is much friendlier than the original OpenWrt you may have tried years back, and if you don't like what it's doing, you get a command prompt and make it do exactly what you want.
...is found in that man's works. He is the reason my Mom understands the wonder of extraterrestrial life, the temptations and costs of technological solutions to social problems, and has any clue as to what her son is thinking.
I owe that man a great deal more than I've spent on his books.
Comment was insightful. I accidentally clicked Redundant. (Never sneeze while moderating). Undoing accidental mis-moderation by posting as self. Nothing to see here.
I'd be curious as to whether someone has a better model in mind on how this should be done.
Given:
The Amazon Kindle Terms and Conditions: “We are entitled to determine what content we accept and distribute through the Program in our sole discretion.”
The anime.net definition of Yaoi:
An acronym standing for YAma nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi – No Climax, no point, no meaning. It’s used
to describe manga/anime focusing on male relationships, not avoiding strong, graphically portrayed homosexual
themes. Very often, yaoi story focuses only on the sex, ignoring elements like true plot, emotions or characters development.
There really is zero doubt as to why Amazon didn't want this on the Kindle. I don't know why there are any “phone calls from journalists asking about the subject.” If you live in the US, clearly the Kindle's primary market, then you know that there are a large number of people here who would spontaneously combust if the they found their tweenager reading this stuff as a “Lend Me” book on their Kindle.
Given that this content is available online (and in color) it would seem a difficult niche to make money on, which would be required to re-engineer your whole e-book system to have age-sections/age-bars. Simply rating 900,000 ebooks so you could decide their category would be a serious expense.
So my questions are:
Would such ratings be more valuable than they would be a tool for greater censorship?
What scale would you use?
Is this is project we should Open/Crowd-Source?
Where would you rate: The Canterbury Tales, Sons and Lovers, 1984?
The above are available on the Kindle store now. Would an rating system that we implemented make them available to more or fewer total humans?
I wish to express profound regret on the part of the US for failing to categorize and properly label DVDs obviously sold to your country. Odd as it may seem, the "Police Academy" video series was never intended as instructional.
You can find them FOSS substitutes for their existing software.
You can find another job.
If you want to be optimistic you can stand your ground with the managers and state: "I will not install software unless I'm certain we have a proper license for it." And see if they show you the door, or attempt to find some kind of compromise. People that take the time to look seriously at Open Office often like what they find. So there is a slim hope, but odds are, these are not the class of people you want to make a career with, and you'll be happier working somewhere that ethical compromises are not a daily expectation.
Your comment Gothmolly is ambiguous. So I should reply to both. As I am exactly the kind of engineer this sort of task requires.
On the surface it's good advice. Don't build something that can suffocate everyone who lives underneath it without some serious engineering.
On the other hand it's terrible advice. As an engineer, I want people who will share data (like the link from the poster) for everything they related thing they can find. I WANT them to share all their worries. As an engineer it's my job to prepare a list, and address each of them. There are lives at stake in these designs, and these worries should be addressed with math, not hubris.
The early history of powered flight is littered with the corpses of the brave. Perhaps some of them were uninterested in comments too...
I live in Washington and take my old computers to RePC. They charge a fee, $5 to $10 a unit that depends entirely on the labor to rip it apart into its "differently recycled pieces." They have huge heaps of PCBs in one pile, metal caes in another, I assume crushable plastic was hiding behind those.
If you get the federal government involved they will put a tax on the manufacturers (which we will pay for our new toys), and then they'll go spend it elsewhere (e.g. social security). That's inane. I'm sorry the mega-corps have to deal with all the state laws, but they have lawyers for that sort of thing already.
Even if the money collected were in a closed loop, (which it won't be), having the consumer put the five dollar bills in the hands of the company doing the work seems vastly more efficient than anything that we could do with "national taxes by weight/volume/content," "recycling-prepaid" stamps and typical regulation details.
Collusion would be the best explanation in a void of facts. Here I think I can be of assistance.
I am a telecommunications engineer. I am reading this article because it relates to my industry, not because of any belief that these data thieves have done anything remotely interesting. Given that it may be "on topic" to assume this could affect SMS pricing, it seems then "on topic" to relate why it cannot.
Here are the Big Secrets:
Except for one hour a day, SMSs don't cost anything.
Except for one hour a day, Voice calls don't cost anything.
There. It's out. The servers that process these things on average draw 4.0 amps per 2U at idle and 4.5 amps per 2U at busy. That's the total power savings ratio going from peak-hour to 4 a.m.
Since the equipment is already sitting there and the bandwidth is already leased and a large carrier rarely has to use another carrier's network for Long Distance transport. The fix costs burn whether you are yammering away on your phone or not.
Where adding customers to the network costs money is when those customers make a call during the busy hour. A "blocked call rate" is the % of people who get a network-busy signal or some sort of error when they try to make a call while the system is already at full capacity. Large carriers try to keep this number below 1%.
So where you cost them money in added infrastructure is when you make calls that contribute to busy hour traffic. The rest of the time the cost of your calls rounds comfortably down to zero.
Since the cost of support in a given month is 90% sunk whether you have zero calls or spend the whole month busy, your marketing department is given a large dollar figure they have to get from the subscribers so you can stay in the black.
The question then is "How to bill for it?" Enter game theory.
If you announced to the world what your busy hour is (say 9 a.m.), and that you were only charging for calls during that time, naturally no one would call during that time. You could then announce the new busy hour (now 10 a.m.), and then people would avoid that.... I'm sure you see where this is going. As a carrier with a growing subscriber base you'd still have to be adding cell-sites for the constantly roving busy hour and people on your network would constantly have to update their calling habits to dodge it.
So they pick large chunk of the day where the business users can't really avoid making calls and they divide cost of busy hour infrastructure across those hours. It's not all that tricky. The rest of the day is given away free or near free as the marketing gimmick enthusiasts see fit.
Slightly trickier, is the math to relate people's usage to the probability that they will cost you money in infrastructure upgrades. It's convoluted, but there isn't even any calculus involved. I've seen the spreadsheets where this is done. They generally just tweak a number here and a number there and hit F9 until they see the numbers they like.
The same issues apply to SMS. If you announced that "on your network all SMSs are free" you'd get people switching over just because of that (more money == good), but then they'd be SMS enthusiasts who would shortly saturate your SS7 infrastructure with messages. That equipment is very expensive. You can argue that it shouldn't be and what a great value it would be to create a nationwide wireless topology consisting entirely of WRT54Gs, but in the real world, the only people buying SS7 gear are large carriers, and the people selling it know that and charge much like they would charge the government.
The message if you Read The Lengthy Article, is that if they don't have and open license to the server code, don't use them. He seems OK with the idea that you use a server based application if they are covered by the GNU Affero GPL.
If you are reading this, you have a perfect example of software as a service, in an open fashion. If you want to make your own/. go download the slashcode and set it up.
The correct direction to charge with pitchforks and torches would seem to be pressuring the Gmail team for a G-Code release, or making SquirrelMail (or your favorite server-based e-mail) as robust and reliable and Gmail.
That won't be easy. Does anyone here have a good suggestion for a starting point? What's the best FOSS ServerSide E-mail server?
These are the guys, to the annoyance of nearly everyone, who turned on SELinux on Fedora Core by default.
These are the guys who noticed they annoyed everyone, and turned on targeted-mode by default.
Coming from someone with many systems, completely exposed to the Internet, with thousand day uptimes, these RedHat folk are in fact sufficiently paranoid.
They have taken all the reasonable precautions, and if their passphrase was strong, then the danger of my servers being compromised by meteor strike is a much greater worry.
It wouldn't surprise me if the legal situation at YouTube was that they yank any clip against which there is a properly filed copyright complaint, and that they follow up later on the actual applicability of copyright law.
I think the telling point as to whether they cave to pressure from the IOC and China will be when their lawyers have a chance to review the footage and determine that there is nothing infringing going on, if they put the video back.
I'm setting a calendar event to go back and look for it in three days, and am ready to judge the G-folk harshly if they're unwilling to stick up for this obvious expression of free speech.
First off, they're kinda right for the wrong reasons.
The "delivered" portion of the short message service (SMS) message is 140 characters and they do combine the unused 8th bits to yield 160 7 bit ascii characters per message. I don't know how much of the hubble's overhead was included in the article's 8.85 GBP per megabyte.
While greed is always a factor with big corporations, many of the charges put in place have primary purpose of keeping capacity in check. While the marketing folk at big telecomm corporations love the word "unlimited" it creates nightmares for the engineering folk who find that their SS7 network completely congested. They investitage and find that while it was designed to carry 30 SMSs per day for the 30 million subscribers for which it was scaled is now at it's limit because of an open source project that breaks up TCP packets and transmits them over SMS and allows people to download pr0n to their restrictive countries over SMS.
My favorite carrier offers unlimited texting for $20 per month. The way his daughters send messages he's getting them at 1/4 cent apiece.
>There is nothing that makes Java unsuitable for learning algorithms and data structures.
Can't completely agree there. Because one of your supporting points:
>Manual memory management is a C/C++ specific task, so unless someone is required to program in those languages, it's not a requirement for today's majority of applications.
Seems narrowly focused. First off though, allow me to agree that Java is well suited to:
* Teaching Patterns (which greatly expedite inter-programmer communication),
* Using Exceptions (which unclutter everything),
* Strong Typing (the ignoring of which is an optimization which should be reserved for experts)
* Object Oriented methods (which are too popular to ignore even if you don't like them)
* Threading (made especially essential in these up and coming multi-core days)
So for these reasons I agree Java is great language, and not a bad language to start out with.
However, as a Systems Architect I am regularly bitten by code from people who lacked a fundamental understanding of system resource management because they are Java adept, and their desktop computers (lovingly overbuilt) always had ample resources to throw at the problem. These people have never considered the "weight of their threading model," it's cost to the JRE or their options for choosing another one. They have never calculated or considered their maximum instantaneous heap usage. And when their application that is much cooler and spiffier than anything I've ever created gets offered the Internet and posted on Slashdot, they have no idea what is causing the exotic kinds of breakage that occur as their application's garbage collector tries to clean up 10k short-life threads at a pass and starts getting behind.
There is a large and beautiful variety of desktop applications that will rarely get hit by such issues. Perhaps due to it's other merits it would be reasonable to start people with Java and simple desktop applications. But this is not the age to call people programmers and have them unequipped to write server-side code. We are doing these college students a significant disservice by giving them "A" grades at all the things they can easily learn in Java and sending them out into a world with deadlines and "we need this bug fixed TODAY" managers, and few/none of the tools it takes to "dig deep." The ugly-bits that C programming forces the programmer to be aware of are fundamental attributes of the machine and thus worth knowing.
>I still can't shake the feeling that this entire OLPC project is an enormous waste of money, intended more to assuage misplaced Western guilt than to bring about any fundamental change in impoverished areas.
While Western folk who may be experiencing guilt may contribute to this project (perhaps quite handily). There is an iso-standard heap of people who are not guilt driven, and are contributing.
This computer will be the Apple IIe, and the C64, AND the Amiga 500 for two entire continents of people. If you are too young to remember that era, good for you, young is great. But I was there, "poking" machine language instructions into high-memory in BASIC so I could run very tight programs hundreds of times faster than the BASIC interpreter allowed. The OLPC computer is vastly more powerful and friendlier than my Vic20 and C64 were. Kids with a tiny fraction of my obsession with electronics will make their OLPCs do 10 times as many cool things.
This isn't about a cheap-teacher's assistants in foreign schools, this is about kindling a passion for technology in people who currently have little access to it. The Vic20 made a fundamental change in my life. I'm participating because I'd like to make that fundamental change in someone else's.
>And when the local warlord rounds up all these laptops to sell them for arms money, what good will all that valuable information do?
Between the small keyboard, the small screen and the lack of support for any non-Linux O/S. I think a warlord is going to be very disappointed what he can accomplish with these computers.
>Education is indeed on the path out of poverty. Unfortunately in many areas targeted for the OLPC, other hurdles must be overcome before education (and realizing the potential of the OLPC) is possible.
Country's are like Ogre's. They have layers. Even in very troubled countries there will be a layer of kids who get enough to eat, and have enough clean water, but currently go through the whole school year only seeing computers on a television, at a place where they have electric power.
These laptops are for kids in that layer. They will not feed the hungry at the layer beneath, nor overthrow the unjust government over-layer whose poor decisions stifle the nation's progress. These are noble tasks and I greatly admire the people who attack these problems.
I have chosen the problem I am suited to help with. I will donate some laptops to kids in that middle layer and I will find a way to make them more fun/useful/educational.
I don't know if this effort will succeed, but then my parent's were quite certain my Vic20 programming was a waste of time, and that worked out quite well.
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." --Winston Churchill
With open standards you do have choices.
on
Unmaking Motorola's Q
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Granted, the customers are the carriers, but the carriers put in a considerable effort to please the customers with their phone choices.
The problems that limit choice are the combinatorial effect of:
Most users not being geeks.
Each power-user handset having a considerable cost in training Customer Care folk.
Many geeks want their toys for the cost of the parts, never for the MSRP (the cheapskate factor).
So the carriers pick limited set of power-phones and the rest "as cool as they can get their hands on." What outsells the marvelous powerful sophisticated Treo650 by an enormous margin? The Razr.
This will be hard for the/. crowd to believe but the carriers push their phone offerings toward the geeky side of the curve and away from the center of mass for their customers' level of tech savvy. Really they do. For the noble, pure and altruistic purpose of marketing more expensive techy services like MMS and GPRS/EDGE/UMTS etc.
If you pick from among carriers that use open standards you do have choices. My favorite carrier doesn't sell the SonyEricsson 910, the Nokia 6680 or the Treo650, but I was able to slip my SIM into each of them and give them a good college try. This, because GSM is an open standard. Fighting my own cheapskate daemons, I went out to PalmOne and purchased the Unlocked (unsubsidized) Treo650 and haven't ever regretted it.
Because, quite simply, when you lessen the value you place on any humans' rights, you lessen your own.
In this specific case, just run the simulation in your head out to about ten years from now. We have an RFID tag that is vulnerable to EMP (quite provably destroyable) and new governmental systems that depend on it. So your employer can't draw conclusions based on a negative reading because that's how people in the "In Crowd" all read. Your employer faces significant penalties for hiring illegal workers, and simultaneously can't really determine if someone has been "chipped" and destroyed it, or just hasn't been chipped.
At that point it will be in the best interest of the stock holders to insulate the company from liability by having all the employees chipped. Once it is in the interests of big business, how long do you think it will be before your manager sits down with you to "discuss your options."
If you allow your government to mistreat any group of unpopular people (no matter how practical the outcome) you'll be next.
For more information, ask an old Jewish person about the number on his/her arm sometime....
It's funny (in the "bowling ball dropped on your foot" sense of funny), that by the time you see the pattern, folks consider you one of those "whacko cantankerous old geezers." When really you've just lived long enough to see how companies like VeriChip penetrate the market.
If human rights are in the way, you lobby to affect people perceived has having "fewer rights." Whether they be prisoners, foreigners or former-pedophiles doesn't matter so long as public perception is against them.
Two hundred years ago it would have been African Americans. Eighty years ago it would have been bootleggers. 40 years ago refer-maddened Wild-Men.
Slashdot Mirror
I spend some time designing things in Verilog and trying to read other people's source code at opencores.org, and I recall you did some work at Transmeta. For some time I've had a list of instructions that could be added to processsors that would be drastically speed up common functions, and SSE 4.2 includes some of my favorites, the dqword string comparision instructions. So...
What are your ideas for instrructions that you've always thought should be handled by the processor, but never seen implemented?
Spectral efficiency in symbols per Hz:
2G .45
LTE 16.15
So we ~ 32 times as much data out of the 2G spectrum if we get people and devices to upgrade.
It does. It also makes us more proficient defenders.
But the trick here is for us to stop being like our parents. Something bad happened and now the debate ensues as to which of our fundamental liberties we need to infringe to "make things better." The movie these people were seeing contained no shortage of innocent crowds of people being violently attacked.
One could have the knee-jerk reaction that the 1st Amendment has to go, that people shouldn't be allowed to make movies like this, under the premise that they inspire this behavior.
One could have the knee-jerk reaction that the 2nd Amendment has to go because the tools of self-defense can be abused to hurt people.
One could have the knee-jerk reaction that the 4th Amendment has to go because if the police had searched this guy's car at his last traffic ticket, they might have found incriminating content.
Just stop. These people have suffered a tragic loss, and people with empathy want to "do something" to make it better. But there are no quick fixes. The real fixes can only be tracked by the emotionally unsatisfying math that shows when you:
Fund the existing background check system's connection to the mental health care system (under laws that already exist), you make it harder for crazy people to buy guns.
Fund and fix education, you give young people options and opportunities to find things they are passionate about. It is from a large pool of hopeless, directionless youth that most violent criminals are drawn.
These solutions work, and there are others. But they work slowly over time. The goal of a high-opportunity society is achieved with patience and dedication. They don't "feel" like they are working in any one individual's life, the coefficients of variation are simply too high on any individual person's experience. But they show quite clearly in the math. To advance, we need to be the people who measure, understand and improve. The next Enlightenment will be data driven.
Who would be better suited toward trusting the math and working the solution that computer geeks. This is our problem to solve.
Kidding aside.
She and her husband continue to show the best side of capitalism. For those that assume that wealth necessarily leads to avarice, it's delightful to me to see the Gates Foundation making that case more difficult to prove.
To hear her explain the contraception issue:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/415947/june-27-2012/melinda-gates
Buy your router from this enormous list which covers a huge range of budgets:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start
Re-Flash it and be done with these folk. This newer firmware is much friendlier than the original OpenWrt you may have tried years back, and if you don't like what it's doing, you get a command prompt and make it do exactly what you want.
...is found in that man's works. He is the reason my Mom understands the wonder of extraterrestrial life, the temptations and costs of technological solutions to social problems, and has any clue as to what her son is thinking.
I owe that man a great deal more than I've spent on his books.
In a company stocked by Odies.
Comment was insightful. I accidentally clicked Redundant. (Never sneeze while moderating).
Undoing accidental mis-moderation by posting as self. Nothing to see here.
I'd be curious as to whether someone has a better model in mind on how this should be done.
Given:
The Amazon Kindle Terms and Conditions: “We are entitled to determine what content we accept and distribute through the Program in our sole discretion.”
The anime.net definition of Yaoi:
An acronym standing for YAma nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi – No Climax, no point, no meaning. It’s used
to describe manga/anime focusing on male relationships, not avoiding strong, graphically portrayed homosexual
themes. Very often, yaoi story focuses only on the sex, ignoring elements like true plot, emotions or characters development.
There really is zero doubt as to why Amazon didn't want this on the Kindle. I don't know why there are any “phone calls from journalists asking about the subject.” If you live in the US, clearly the Kindle's primary market, then you know that there are a large number of people here who would spontaneously combust if the they found their tweenager reading this stuff as a “Lend Me” book on their Kindle.
Given that this content is available online (and in color) it would seem a difficult niche to make money on, which would be required to re-engineer your whole e-book system to have age-sections/age-bars. Simply rating 900,000 ebooks so you could decide their category would be a serious expense.
So my questions are:
Would such ratings be more valuable than they would be a tool for greater censorship?
What scale would you use?
Is this is project we should Open/Crowd-Source?
Where would you rate: The Canterbury Tales, Sons and Lovers, 1984?
The above are available on the Kindle store now. Would an rating system that we implemented make them available to more or fewer total humans?
To the Slovakian Minister of the Interior,
I wish to express profound regret on the part of the US for failing to categorize and properly label DVDs obviously sold to your country. Odd as it may seem, the "Police Academy" video series was never intended as instructional.
Sincerest apologies,
I. M. Spending
President of Physics
I can see two honorable paths here:
You can find them FOSS substitutes for their existing software.
You can find another job.
If you want to be optimistic you can stand your ground with the managers and state: "I will not install software unless I'm certain we have a proper license for it." And see if they show you the door, or attempt to find some kind of compromise. People that take the time to look seriously at Open Office often like what they find. So there is a slim hope, but odds are, these are not the class of people you want to make a career with, and you'll be happier working somewhere that ethical compromises are not a daily expectation.
Your comment Gothmolly is ambiguous. So I should reply to both. As I am exactly the kind of engineer this sort of task requires.
On the surface it's good advice. Don't build something that can suffocate everyone who lives underneath it without some serious engineering.
On the other hand it's terrible advice. As an engineer, I want people who will share data (like the link from the poster) for everything they related thing they can find. I WANT them to share all their worries. As an engineer it's my job to prepare a list, and address each of them. There are lives at stake in these designs, and these worries should be addressed with math, not hubris.
The early history of powered flight is littered with the corpses of the brave. Perhaps some of them were uninterested in comments too...
I live in Washington and take my old computers to RePC. They charge a fee, $5 to $10 a unit that depends entirely on the labor to rip it apart into its "differently recycled pieces." They have huge heaps of PCBs in one pile, metal caes in another, I assume crushable plastic was hiding behind those.
If you get the federal government involved they will put a tax on the manufacturers (which we will pay for our new toys), and then they'll go spend it elsewhere (e.g. social security). That's inane. I'm sorry the mega-corps have to deal with all the state laws, but they have lawyers for that sort of thing already.
Even if the money collected were in a closed loop, (which it won't be), having the consumer put the five dollar bills in the hands of the company doing the work seems vastly more efficient than anything that we could do with "national taxes by weight/volume/content," "recycling-prepaid" stamps and typical regulation details.
Collusion would be the best explanation in a void of facts. Here I think I can be of assistance.
I am a telecommunications engineer. I am reading this article because it relates to my industry, not because of any belief that these data thieves have done anything remotely interesting. Given that it may be "on topic" to assume this could affect SMS pricing, it seems then "on topic" to relate why it cannot.
Here are the Big Secrets:
Except for one hour a day, SMSs don't cost anything.
Except for one hour a day, Voice calls don't cost anything.
There. It's out. The servers that process these things on average draw 4.0 amps per 2U at idle and 4.5 amps per 2U at busy. That's the total power savings ratio going from peak-hour to 4 a.m.
Since the equipment is already sitting there and the bandwidth is already leased and a large carrier rarely has to use another carrier's network for Long Distance transport. The fix costs burn whether you are yammering away on your phone or not.
Where adding customers to the network costs money is when those customers make a call during the busy hour. A "blocked call rate" is the % of people who get a network-busy signal or some sort of error when they try to make a call while the system is already at full capacity. Large carriers try to keep this number below 1%.
So where you cost them money in added infrastructure is when you make calls that contribute to busy hour traffic. The rest of the time the cost of your calls rounds comfortably down to zero.
Since the cost of support in a given month is 90% sunk whether you have zero calls or spend the whole month busy, your marketing department is given a large dollar figure they have to get from the subscribers so you can stay in the black.
The question then is "How to bill for it?" Enter game theory.
If you announced to the world what your busy hour is (say 9 a.m.), and that you were only charging for calls during that time, naturally no one would call during that time. You could then announce the new busy hour (now 10 a.m.), and then people would avoid that.... I'm sure you see where this is going. As a carrier with a growing subscriber base you'd still have to be adding cell-sites for the constantly roving busy hour and people on your network would constantly have to update their calling habits to dodge it.
So they pick large chunk of the day where the business users can't really avoid making calls and they divide cost of busy hour infrastructure across those hours. It's not all that tricky. The rest of the day is given away free or near free as the marketing gimmick enthusiasts see fit.
Slightly trickier, is the math to relate people's usage to the probability that they will cost you money in infrastructure upgrades. It's convoluted, but there isn't even any calculus involved. I've seen the spreadsheets where this is done. They generally just tweak a number here and a number there and hit F9 until they see the numbers they like.
The same issues apply to SMS. If you announced that "on your network all SMSs are free" you'd get people switching over just because of that (more money == good), but then they'd be SMS enthusiasts who would shortly saturate your SS7 infrastructure with messages. That equipment is very expensive. You can argue that it shouldn't be and what a great value it would be to create a nationwide wireless topology consisting entirely of WRT54Gs, but in the real world, the only people buying SS7 gear are large carriers, and the people selling it know that and charge much like they would charge the government.
So you want
Everywhere else it is vastly less efficient. With every step forward in efficiency comes a step backward in human rights and human dignity.
Nothing to see here.... Except a new web site called "Are those real?" finally with proof.
The message if you Read The Lengthy Article, is that if they don't have and open license to the server code, don't use them. He seems OK with the idea that you use a server based application if they are covered by the GNU Affero GPL.
If you are reading this, you have a perfect example of software as a service, in an open fashion. If you want to make your own /. go download the slashcode and set it up.
The correct direction to charge with pitchforks and torches would seem to be pressuring the Gmail team for a G-Code release, or making SquirrelMail (or your favorite server-based e-mail) as robust and reliable and Gmail.
That won't be easy. Does anyone here have a good suggestion for a starting point? What's the best FOSS ServerSide E-mail server?
Now I won't have anywhere to hookup my HD-DVD drive!
These are the guys, to the annoyance of nearly everyone, who turned on SELinux on Fedora Core by default.
These are the guys who noticed they annoyed everyone, and turned on targeted-mode by default.
Coming from someone with many systems, completely exposed to the Internet, with thousand day uptimes, these RedHat folk are in fact sufficiently paranoid.
They have taken all the reasonable precautions, and if their passphrase was strong, then the danger of my servers being compromised by meteor strike is a much greater worry.
It wouldn't surprise me if the legal situation at YouTube was that they yank any clip against which there is a properly filed copyright complaint, and that they follow up later on the actual applicability of copyright law.
I think the telling point as to whether they cave to pressure from the IOC and China will be when their lawyers have a chance to review the footage and determine that there is nothing infringing going on, if they put the video back.
I'm setting a calendar event to go back and look for it in three days, and am ready to judge the G-folk harshly if they're unwilling to stick up for this obvious expression of free speech.
First off, they're kinda right for the wrong reasons.
The "delivered" portion of the short message service (SMS) message is 140 characters and they do combine the unused 8th bits to yield 160 7 bit ascii characters per message. I don't know how much of the hubble's overhead was included in the article's 8.85 GBP per megabyte.
While greed is always a factor with big corporations, many of the charges put in place have primary purpose of keeping capacity in check. While the marketing folk at big telecomm corporations love the word "unlimited" it creates nightmares for the engineering folk who find that their SS7 network completely congested. They investitage and find that while it was designed to carry 30 SMSs per day for the 30 million subscribers for which it was scaled is now at it's limit because of an open source project that breaks up TCP packets and transmits them over SMS and allows people to download pr0n to their restrictive countries over SMS.
My favorite carrier offers unlimited texting for $20 per month. The way his daughters send messages he's getting them at 1/4 cent apiece.
So, slightly cheaper than from the Hubble! Score!
>There is nothing that makes Java unsuitable for learning algorithms and data structures.
Can't completely agree there. Because one of your supporting points:
>Manual memory management is a C/C++ specific task, so unless someone is required to program in those languages, it's not a requirement for today's majority of applications.
Seems narrowly focused. First off though, allow me to agree that Java is well suited to:
* Teaching Patterns (which greatly expedite inter-programmer communication),
* Using Exceptions (which unclutter everything),
* Strong Typing (the ignoring of which is an optimization which should be reserved for experts)
* Object Oriented methods (which are too popular to ignore even if you don't like them)
* Threading (made especially essential in these up and coming multi-core days)
So for these reasons I agree Java is great language, and not a bad language to start out with.
However, as a Systems Architect I am regularly bitten by code from people who lacked a fundamental understanding of system resource management because they are Java adept, and their desktop computers (lovingly overbuilt) always had ample resources to throw at the problem. These people have never considered the "weight of their threading model," it's cost to the JRE or their options for choosing another one. They have never calculated or considered their maximum instantaneous heap usage. And when their application that is much cooler and spiffier than anything I've ever created gets offered the Internet and posted on Slashdot, they have no idea what is causing the exotic kinds of breakage that occur as their application's garbage collector tries to clean up 10k short-life threads at a pass and starts getting behind.
There is a large and beautiful variety of desktop applications that will rarely get hit by such issues. Perhaps due to it's other merits it would be reasonable to start people with Java and simple desktop applications. But this is not the age to call people programmers and have them unequipped to write server-side code. We are doing these college students a significant disservice by giving them "A" grades at all the things they can easily learn in Java and sending them out into a world with deadlines and "we need this bug fixed TODAY" managers, and few/none of the tools it takes to "dig deep." The ugly-bits that C programming forces the programmer to be aware of are fundamental attributes of the machine and thus worth knowing.
>I still can't shake the feeling that this entire OLPC project is an enormous waste of money, intended more to assuage misplaced Western guilt than to bring about any fundamental change in impoverished areas.
While Western folk who may be experiencing guilt may contribute to this project (perhaps quite handily). There is an iso-standard heap of people who are not guilt driven, and are contributing.
This computer will be the Apple IIe, and the C64, AND the Amiga 500 for two entire continents of people. If you are too young to remember that era, good for you, young is great. But I was there, "poking" machine language instructions into high-memory in BASIC so I could run very tight programs hundreds of times faster than the BASIC interpreter allowed. The OLPC computer is vastly more powerful and friendlier than my Vic20 and C64 were. Kids with a tiny fraction of my obsession with electronics will make their OLPCs do 10 times as many cool things.
This isn't about a cheap-teacher's assistants in foreign schools, this is about kindling a passion for technology in people who currently have little access to it. The Vic20 made a fundamental change in my life. I'm participating because I'd like to make that fundamental change in someone else's.
>And when the local warlord rounds up all these laptops to sell them for arms money, what good will all that valuable information do?
Between the small keyboard, the small screen and the lack of support for any non-Linux O/S. I think a warlord is going to be very disappointed what he can accomplish with these computers.
>Education is indeed on the path out of poverty. Unfortunately in many areas targeted for the OLPC, other hurdles must be overcome before education (and realizing the potential of the OLPC) is possible.
Country's are like Ogre's. They have layers. Even in very troubled countries there will be a layer of kids who get enough to eat, and have enough clean water, but currently go through the whole school year only seeing computers on a television, at a place where they have electric power.
These laptops are for kids in that layer. They will not feed the hungry at the layer beneath, nor overthrow the unjust government over-layer whose poor decisions stifle the nation's progress. These are noble tasks and I greatly admire the people who attack these problems.
I have chosen the problem I am suited to help with. I will donate some laptops to kids in that middle layer and I will find a way to make them more fun/useful/educational.
I don't know if this effort will succeed, but then my parent's were quite certain my Vic20 programming was a waste of time, and that worked out quite well.
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
--Winston Churchill
Granted, the customers are the carriers, but the carriers put in a considerable effort to please the customers with their phone choices.
/. crowd to believe but the carriers push their phone offerings toward the geeky side of the curve and away from the center of mass for their customers' level of tech savvy. Really they do. For the noble, pure and altruistic purpose of marketing more expensive techy services like MMS and GPRS/EDGE/UMTS etc.
The problems that limit choice are the combinatorial effect of:
Most users not being geeks.
Each power-user handset having a considerable cost in training Customer Care folk.
Many geeks want their toys for the cost of the parts, never for the MSRP (the cheapskate factor).
So the carriers pick limited set of power-phones and the rest "as cool as they can get their hands on." What outsells the marvelous powerful sophisticated Treo650 by an enormous margin? The Razr.
This will be hard for the
If you pick from among carriers that use open standards you do have choices. My favorite carrier doesn't sell the SonyEricsson 910, the Nokia 6680 or the Treo650, but I was able to slip my SIM into each of them and give them a good college try. This, because GSM is an open standard. Fighting my own cheapskate daemons, I went out to PalmOne and purchased the Unlocked (unsubsidized) Treo650 and haven't ever regretted it.
>Forgive my naivete, but why?
Because, quite simply, when you lessen the value you place on any humans' rights, you lessen your own.
In this specific case, just run the simulation in your head out to about ten years from now. We have an RFID tag that is vulnerable to EMP (quite provably destroyable) and new governmental systems that depend on it. So your employer can't draw conclusions based on a negative reading because that's how people in the "In Crowd" all read. Your employer faces significant penalties for hiring illegal workers, and simultaneously can't really determine if someone has been "chipped" and destroyed it, or just hasn't been chipped.
At that point it will be in the best interest of the stock holders to insulate the company from liability by having all the employees chipped. Once it is in the interests of big business, how long do you think it will be before your manager sits down with you to "discuss your options."
If you allow your government to mistreat any group of unpopular people (no matter how practical the outcome) you'll be next.
For more information, ask an old Jewish person about the number on his/her arm sometime....
It's funny (in the "bowling ball dropped on your foot" sense of funny), that by the time you see the pattern, folks consider you one of those "whacko cantankerous old geezers." When really you've just lived long enough to see how companies like VeriChip penetrate the market.
If human rights are in the way, you lobby to affect people perceived has having "fewer rights." Whether they be prisoners, foreigners or former-pedophiles doesn't matter so long as public perception is against them.
Two hundred years ago it would have been African Americans. Eighty years ago it would have been bootleggers. 40 years ago refer-maddened Wild-Men.
Someday we should figure this out.