Hmm, I looked into this a bit more and the consensus (from a few different sources - the American Petroleum Instritute, the FTC, CarTalk, etc) seems to be that higher octane gas has negligible difference in total energy content (not more, and not less).
However, higher octane gas generally allows engines to use a higher compression ratio, which allows them to extract more of that energy on combustion. It will result in more mechanical work with the same volume of fuel (resulting in more HP and better mileage) and less waste byproducts.
However, this does NOT translate to better mileage per DOLLAR, since the additional cost is more than the efficiency gain.
They would probably force customers who get low speed to cancel service, so they could have higher numberss. By making their service break until they switched to a competitor or informed their line can't actually support the service, and they need to cancel.
That's why I said it needs to be treated like a utility by the FCC. The phone and cable companies are required by regulation or franchise contract to offer service for everyone for certain services (POTS, TV), and keep up a service level agreement or be fined, etc.
Assuming there's some intrinsic reason certain customers got lower speeds, and it would be costly or impossible to address.
This is NOT a new concept. Phone and cable companies have already been required for MANY years to fix your phone line or cable connection (assuming it is their fault and not your in-home wiring) regardless of the cost - and they do. Not always in a timely or efficient way, but they do.
They claim "up to X Mbps". As long as some customer out there gets X Mbps, they are NOT lying. They may be completely gaming the system, but most companies in their situation would do the same thing given the cable vs DSL competition right now....
This is why there needs to be FCC regulated standards for stated services levels/Internet bandwidth based on real statistical measurements. Most cable and DSL modems out there are capable of bandwidth testing. Sample enough of them, take the median, mean, standard deviation, whatever, and allow them to state certain claims based on the results, as long as they are clear. This level of data is already required for food, cars, (some) utilities, etc, why not Internet access?
My old Integra would run on any crap I put in. I was of the same opinion as you for years. But then I replaced it with an '02 Xterra (with a supercharger, which I think was just tacked on because the '01 engine was really anemic - basically, you get a bit more power for a lot less economy and more expensive gas) and the one time my girlfriend put 87 in it (only 1/2 tank luckily) it sputtered and knocked all the way back to the gas station...
It's a fact that engines can and are built to require higher octane gasoline. Octane is just a measure of resistance to auto-ignition (aka "knock") in an internal combustion engine. Many luxury cars that recommend 91+ octane just do it to inflate mileage numbers (since 91 octane gas usually but is not required to give *slightly* better mileage), but some engines just won't run well without it.
Secondly, 3 billion base pairs does not mean 6 billion bits. First, DNA is base-4, not base-2. Second, the pairs are the units of information, not 2 nucleotides that make up the pairs.
Actually, I think that's one of the few conclusions that was correct (just to encode the sequence, not that it is in any way reasonable to use it as an estimate for source code to simulate the brain). A base pair CAN be encoded in 2 bits ("base-4" means there are 4 values, which fits in 2 binary bits).
4th, there isn't much redundancy in a gene sequence. There is redundancy in that we have 2 copies of our genome, but that's already accounted for by the '3 billion base pairs' number.
And even where there is "redundancy" or seeming "junk" (non-transcribed) DNA, it can affect function in surprisingly subtle ways (some diseases are caused by abnormally short or long repeats of seemingly innocuous sequences, or things like telomere shortening over repeated mitosis). More and more amazingly complex processes that would have to be simulated to model the development of an adult brain...
I'm not interested in any nay sayers or claims of quckery. I'm just not interested.
Neither is any quack or pseudoscientist.
whereas our cells use atp for energy, cancer cells use sugars directly.
And this is the biggest pile of bullshit wrong science I have read in a while. "Sugar" is just a generic term for saccarides like glucose, fructose, galactose, etc (or polysaccarides made up of these). Yes, a recent study has shown that pancreatic cancer (and NOT all cancers) can process *fructose* as well as glucose (unlike normal cells, which only metabolize glucose, leaving most fructose metabolism up to the liver). Either way they go through the Krebs cycle and generate ATP and NADH. Cancer cells are still human cells. They need to use the same cellular mechanisms to replicate, and those processes use ATP as a co-enzyme.
Sigh. I can't believe I am even bothering to correct you. The fact that you posted this has clearly shown no ability as a scientist or as a decent human being, so I doubt it is going improve either of those deficiencies...
I'll certainly agree that Microsoft doesn't innovate.
Aw, come on, you had such a good point but then had to resort to the usual slashdot MS bashing:)
Even Microsoft has its innovative departments. XBox Live has set the standard for online gaming, and Natal/Kinect was (and maybe still is?) a huge gamble in user input. Even putting a HDD in a console (for which they were ridiculed with the original XBox) enabled/simplified downloadable content, console game patching, etc.
Google innovates all the time, just not in necessarily in consumer-facing applications. But why should they? They make their money on advertising on their search engine and apps, so their innovations revolve around optimizing that business. Custom servers, efficient datacenters, etc. Maybe not sexy, but you can't cost-effectively build and manage over a million servers worldwide without some serious innovation...
It definitely tracks back to the Newton. But it wasn't Apple innovating on it - it was ex-Apple employees at Pixo (which Apple bought, resulting in the iPod and iPhone).
Actually, even though you didn't RTF[SA], your comment was pretty much correct. The submitter was the only one who claimed it was the first discovery, period; the actual article only claimed it was the first discovery by Einstein@Home. Please take all of that massive guilt you now have and redirect towards the usual guilty parties, timothy and any submitter of an article he publishes... sigh.
The summary clearly means Mersenne primes, not Mersenne numbers.
The summary clearly means it was posted by Timothy:)
Though even his intended point I'd have to question... it's hard to call finding a Mersenne prime a real "scientific discovery". It's pretty purely mathematical, I'd think, as is any distributed algorithm that takes no input beyond the initial equations. Not that there haven't been actual discoveries - I just find the Mersenne prime search a pretty bad example.
Then again, I don't even think the story mentions anything of the sort anyway. It's a bad editor debating a bad submitter./. at it's finest...
Oh, I totally agree it's a stretch, but a fun one to contemplate:)
Furthermore, the company didn't destroy it, a third party did, and that third party and the guy who lost his PLEXes were both operating withing the rules of the game
Well, this is the kind of thing lawyers love. IMO it in no way would be easier to argue "vandalism" - the damage was not real and could be replaced.
A court is not going to look at this though the fiction of a sci-fi game, they are going to look at it as data in a software application/database. It wasn't "destroyed" by a 3rd party, it was intentionally made unavailable by CCP's software. I suppose you could argue as one of the other posters did that they are more like poker chips (exchanged for real money and then "gambled" and lost in a game - in effect lost to the "house" since CCP is keeping the original cash). But then that would mean they are running an illegal online gambling service!
All huge stretches, of course, and this incident is just not significant enough for anyone to take too seriously. But I'm pretty sure these kinds of questions will come up someday as MMORPGs incorporate more and more examples of digital property obtained using real currency...
Same with a cable TV or magazine subscription. Entertainment costs money, and that puts a value on it. No value to you or me, but neither is 12 months of Teen Beat (well can't speak for you, of course).
To use the same example I did above, it'd be like if I rented a car from Enterprise for a week. I don't own the car; Enterprise does. They're simply allowing me to use it. If I then pile explosives in the car on day 3 and blow up the car, I don't get to sue Enterprise, even though I was only able to use the car for 3 of the agreed 7 days.
Not a good analogy because: 1) the player holding it did not blow it up, another player did. 2) the rental company would either give you another car or refund you for the days you didn't get to use it.
So unless CCP refunds the money when the object is lost due to another's actions, the analogy doesn't work.
Actually, since these were paid for with real money and are basically "one month subscriptions" to the game they have as much value as any subscription to a service.
Interesting... it almost sounds like a 'gift card' type situation, in which case there are some fairly decent consumer protection laws depending on the state (ie, in CA they are transferable and never expire). It would be an interesting lawsuit if the player tried to claim they were equivalent and that by allowing them to be permanently "destroyed" the company was cancelling/expiring the certificates (though I doubt any lawyer would take it unless it was common enough that they were able to establish a class action).
I would say the car culture and strip malls are a near constant though.
Hmm. In some suburban sprawls, maybe, but not so much in the urban or rural areas (which still make up a surprisingly large part of the country!)
Though I lived in a suburban town of 25,000 in suburban Chicago. I walked to elementary, middle, and high school. I biked to the public pool, which cost $1.
I now live in a SF Bay Area suburb and the public pool costs $1.50 for children, $3.25 for adults.
So, no, I do NOT think car cultures and strip malls are a near constant, and yes, is is hard to generalize. Please stop doing it!
I agree with your conclusion - and additionally, I think people's argument that "DRM is wastefully expensive to implement" is bogus. If it can double sales then it would have to cost more than the entire game development budget to be be a waste (of course, I don't think there is clear proof that it would double sales, but with those piracy numbers it is definitely plausible).
The second group are those who pirate the games because they have no money. They are a large part of the games audience.
This is the part I have to question. If they are able to afford a computer capable of playing a modern video game, they have some money. They may have to manage their budget a bit to allow them to purchase games, but given no other choice (ie. unable to pirate it) I'd bet a lot of them would do just that. But really, I think that just makes your argument even stronger...
Another possibility I was thinking about - with the advent of high quality virtualization software, the primary ie. host OS isn't as important any more. Yet, it's probably the only one considered in this survey.
My office (at least the engineering side) was almost entirely Linux workstation-based just 4 years ago. But with the availability of multi-core laptops capable of serious development work/compiling/etc, a lot of people are now using Macbook Pros running Linux on VMWare. To be honest, Linux still doesn't have the polish or ease of use of OSX or Windows 7. But it's amazing how quickly Linux has become nearly ubiquitous on embedded systems like TVs and Blu-Ray players these days (I kid you not, almost EVERY networked TV and BD player on the market today is running Linux).
Seven? SEVEN!? No, man, no! 11's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 11 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
I guess I was looking for an example of an *application* (something that *uses* the SAN, not the SAN itself) that *required* a relatively small amount of space spread out over such a large number of drives on a SAN.
The OP was trying to explain the exorbitant cost by saying some applications require that specific configuration. Not "it's what they already built, and just happened to be a horribly expensive general purpose solution..." (which is the more likely explanation, I think). Anyway, I wasn't intending to sound like "you can't give me an example since it doesn't exist!", I just couldn't come up with anything relevant, and was curious if anyone else could...
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Hmm, I looked into this a bit more and the consensus (from a few different sources - the American Petroleum Instritute, the FTC, CarTalk, etc) seems to be that higher octane gas has negligible difference in total energy content (not more, and not less).
However, higher octane gas generally allows engines to use a higher compression ratio, which allows them to extract more of that energy on combustion. It will result in more mechanical work with the same volume of fuel (resulting in more HP and better mileage) and less waste byproducts.
However, this does NOT translate to better mileage per DOLLAR, since the additional cost is more than the efficiency gain.
They would probably force customers who get low speed to cancel service, so they could have higher numberss. By making their service break until they switched to a competitor or informed their line can't actually support the service, and they need to cancel.
That's why I said it needs to be treated like a utility by the FCC. The phone and cable companies are required by regulation or franchise contract to offer service for everyone for certain services (POTS, TV), and keep up a service level agreement or be fined, etc.
Assuming there's some intrinsic reason certain customers got lower speeds, and it would be costly or impossible to address.
This is NOT a new concept. Phone and cable companies have already been required for MANY years to fix your phone line or cable connection (assuming it is their fault and not your in-home wiring) regardless of the cost - and they do. Not always in a timely or efficient way, but they do.
They claim "up to X Mbps". As long as some customer out there gets X Mbps, they are NOT lying. They may be completely gaming the system, but most companies in their situation would do the same thing given the cable vs DSL competition right now....
This is why there needs to be FCC regulated standards for stated services levels/Internet bandwidth based on real statistical measurements. Most cable and DSL modems out there are capable of bandwidth testing. Sample enough of them, take the median, mean, standard deviation, whatever, and allow them to state certain claims based on the results, as long as they are clear. This level of data is already required for food, cars, (some) utilities, etc, why not Internet access?
My old Integra would run on any crap I put in. I was of the same opinion as you for years. But then I replaced it with an '02 Xterra (with a supercharger, which I think was just tacked on because the '01 engine was really anemic - basically, you get a bit more power for a lot less economy and more expensive gas) and the one time my girlfriend put 87 in it (only 1/2 tank luckily) it sputtered and knocked all the way back to the gas station...
It's a fact that engines can and are built to require higher octane gasoline. Octane is just a measure of resistance to auto-ignition (aka "knock") in an internal combustion engine. Many luxury cars that recommend 91+ octane just do it to inflate mileage numbers (since 91 octane gas usually but is not required to give *slightly* better mileage), but some engines just won't run well without it.
I haven't come across a sentient Prius yet.
Hmm, maybe there is more to their unexpected acceleration issues than originally thought...
Secondly, 3 billion base pairs does not mean 6 billion bits. First, DNA is base-4, not base-2. Second, the pairs are the units of information, not 2 nucleotides that make up the pairs.
Actually, I think that's one of the few conclusions that was correct (just to encode the sequence, not that it is in any way reasonable to use it as an estimate for source code to simulate the brain). A base pair CAN be encoded in 2 bits ("base-4" means there are 4 values, which fits in 2 binary bits).
4th, there isn't much redundancy in a gene sequence. There is redundancy in that we have 2 copies of our genome, but that's already accounted for by the '3 billion base pairs' number.
And even where there is "redundancy" or seeming "junk" (non-transcribed) DNA, it can affect function in surprisingly subtle ways (some diseases are caused by abnormally short or long repeats of seemingly innocuous sequences, or things like telomere shortening over repeated mitosis). More and more amazingly complex processes that would have to be simulated to model the development of an adult brain...
...he'd be playing war games (not necessarily on a computer) where he played the side of the Taliban.
(citation needed)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/25/AR2009102502633.html
I'm not interested in any nay sayers or claims of quckery. I'm just not interested.
Neither is any quack or pseudoscientist.
whereas our cells use atp for energy, cancer cells use sugars directly.
And this is the biggest pile of bullshit wrong science I have read in a while. "Sugar" is just a generic term for saccarides like glucose, fructose, galactose, etc (or polysaccarides made up of these). Yes, a recent study has shown that pancreatic cancer (and NOT all cancers) can process *fructose* as well as glucose (unlike normal cells, which only metabolize glucose, leaving most fructose metabolism up to the liver). Either way they go through the Krebs cycle and generate ATP and NADH. Cancer cells are still human cells. They need to use the same cellular mechanisms to replicate, and those processes use ATP as a co-enzyme.
Sigh. I can't believe I am even bothering to correct you. The fact that you posted this has clearly shown no ability as a scientist or as a decent human being, so I doubt it is going improve either of those deficiencies...
I'll certainly agree that Microsoft doesn't innovate.
Aw, come on, you had such a good point but then had to resort to the usual slashdot MS bashing :)
Even Microsoft has its innovative departments. XBox Live has set the standard for online gaming, and Natal/Kinect was (and maybe still is?) a huge gamble in user input. Even putting a HDD in a console (for which they were ridiculed with the original XBox) enabled/simplified downloadable content, console game patching, etc.
Yes, my thoughts exactly.
Google innovates all the time, just not in necessarily in consumer-facing applications. But why should they? They make their money on advertising on their search engine and apps, so their innovations revolve around optimizing that business. Custom servers, efficient datacenters, etc. Maybe not sexy, but you can't cost-effectively build and manage over a million servers worldwide without some serious innovation...
It definitely tracks back to the Newton. But it wasn't Apple innovating on it - it was ex-Apple employees at Pixo (which Apple bought, resulting in the iPod and iPhone).
Actually, even though you didn't RTF[SA], your comment was pretty much correct. The submitter was the only one who claimed it was the first discovery, period; the actual article only claimed it was the first discovery by Einstein@Home. Please take all of that massive guilt you now have and redirect towards the usual guilty parties, timothy and any submitter of an article he publishes... sigh.
The summary clearly means Mersenne primes, not Mersenne numbers.
The summary clearly means it was posted by Timothy :)
Though even his intended point I'd have to question... it's hard to call finding a Mersenne prime a real "scientific discovery". It's pretty purely mathematical, I'd think, as is any distributed algorithm that takes no input beyond the initial equations. Not that there haven't been actual discoveries - I just find the Mersenne prime search a pretty bad example.
Then again, I don't even think the story mentions anything of the sort anyway. It's a bad editor debating a bad submitter. /. at it's finest...
Oh, I totally agree it's a stretch, but a fun one to contemplate :)
Furthermore, the company didn't destroy it, a third party did, and that third party and the guy who lost his PLEXes were both operating withing the rules of the game
Well, this is the kind of thing lawyers love. IMO it in no way would be easier to argue "vandalism" - the damage was not real and could be replaced.
A court is not going to look at this though the fiction of a sci-fi game, they are going to look at it as data in a software application/database. It wasn't "destroyed" by a 3rd party, it was intentionally made unavailable by CCP's software. I suppose you could argue as one of the other posters did that they are more like poker chips (exchanged for real money and then "gambled" and lost in a game - in effect lost to the "house" since CCP is keeping the original cash). But then that would mean they are running an illegal online gambling service!
All huge stretches, of course, and this incident is just not significant enough for anyone to take too seriously. But I'm pretty sure these kinds of questions will come up someday as MMORPGs incorporate more and more examples of digital property obtained using real currency...
Same with a cable TV or magazine subscription. Entertainment costs money, and that puts a value on it. No value to you or me, but neither is 12 months of Teen Beat (well can't speak for you, of course).
To use the same example I did above, it'd be like if I rented a car from Enterprise for a week. I don't own the car; Enterprise does. They're simply allowing me to use it. If I then pile explosives in the car on day 3 and blow up the car, I don't get to sue Enterprise, even though I was only able to use the car for 3 of the agreed 7 days.
Not a good analogy because:
1) the player holding it did not blow it up, another player did.
2) the rental company would either give you another car or refund you for the days you didn't get to use it.
So unless CCP refunds the money when the object is lost due to another's actions, the analogy doesn't work.
Actually, since these were paid for with real money and are basically "one month subscriptions" to the game they have as much value as any subscription to a service.
Interesting... it almost sounds like a 'gift card' type situation, in which case there are some fairly decent consumer protection laws depending on the state (ie, in CA they are transferable and never expire). It would be an interesting lawsuit if the player tried to claim they were equivalent and that by allowing them to be permanently "destroyed" the company was cancelling/expiring the certificates (though I doubt any lawyer would take it unless it was common enough that they were able to establish a class action).
I would say the car culture and strip malls are a near constant though.
Hmm. In some suburban sprawls, maybe, but not so much in the urban or rural areas (which still make up a surprisingly large part of the country!)
Though I lived in a suburban town of 25,000 in suburban Chicago. I walked to elementary, middle, and high school. I biked to the public pool, which cost $1.
I now live in a SF Bay Area suburb and the public pool costs $1.50 for children, $3.25 for adults.
So, no, I do NOT think car cultures and strip malls are a near constant, and yes, is is hard to generalize. Please stop doing it!
I agree with your conclusion - and additionally, I think people's argument that "DRM is wastefully expensive to implement" is bogus. If it can double sales then it would have to cost more than the entire game development budget to be be a waste (of course, I don't think there is clear proof that it would double sales, but with those piracy numbers it is definitely plausible).
The second group are those who pirate the games because they have no money. They are a large part of the games audience.
This is the part I have to question. If they are able to afford a computer capable of playing a modern video game, they have some money. They may have to manage their budget a bit to allow them to purchase games, but given no other choice (ie. unable to pirate it) I'd bet a lot of them would do just that. But really, I think that just makes your argument even stronger...
Another possibility I was thinking about - with the advent of high quality virtualization software, the primary ie. host OS isn't as important any more. Yet, it's probably the only one considered in this survey.
My office (at least the engineering side) was almost entirely Linux workstation-based just 4 years ago. But with the availability of multi-core laptops capable of serious development work/compiling/etc, a lot of people are now using Macbook Pros running Linux on VMWare. To be honest, Linux still doesn't have the polish or ease of use of OSX or Windows 7. But it's amazing how quickly Linux has become nearly ubiquitous on embedded systems like TVs and Blu-Ray players these days (I kid you not, almost EVERY networked TV and BD player on the market today is running Linux).
If violence didn't work, it's because you didn't use enough of it!
I thought that was the rule for XML...
The title of the post you replied to is "Re: Bad summary" - the same as your post...
Seven? SEVEN!? No, man, no! 11's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 11 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
Most definitely - it's not uncommon at all.
I guess I was looking for an example of an *application* (something that *uses* the SAN, not the SAN itself) that *required* a relatively small amount of space spread out over such a large number of drives on a SAN.
The OP was trying to explain the exorbitant cost by saying some applications require that specific configuration. Not "it's what they already built, and just happened to be a horribly expensive general purpose solution..." (which is the more likely explanation, I think). Anyway, I wasn't intending to sound like "you can't give me an example since it doesn't exist!", I just couldn't come up with anything relevant, and was curious if anyone else could...