Not a single mention of the number of pre-orders, so it's a worthless piece of information ("Both units pre-ordered" becomes "ALL OUR PREORDERS SOLD OUT AND STILL PEOPLE ASK FOR MORE!").
Also, there hasn't been a product in the video games industry in the last 20 years that didn't "sell out" at launch. It's completely arbitrary. It all depends on how many you produce and/or how many you decide to "let" people pre-order, nothing else. They estimate they'll sell 3 million - is that good or bad? I have no idea. The Wii has sold 75 million. Is that comparable? If just one in 20 Wii owners has a WiiMotionPlus or a WiiFit that makes the 3 million *estimated* sales worthless. To quote the wiki "As of May 2010, {Wii Sports Resort} has sold 16.14 million copies" and they come with a WiiMotionPlus, so that's the estimated sales blown out of the water almost 5-fold. Is that relevant?
Pre-orders mean precisely NOTHING. Thousands of pre-order still exist for Duke Nukem Forever - doesn't mean they've sold any or that the product even exists. And "selling out of pre-orders" means that the arbitrary number that MS decided was reserved for pre-orders has been met with the same number of potential buyers. That's it.
Don't tell me pre-orders, and if you do state FIGURES - tell me confirmed sales. The stock they sell to the big stores MONTHS before official product release is the only number that means anything, and even that doesn't predict whether shops will ever order any more.
Then Facebook is the same as a photoshop. No-one MADE Facebook take your photos and scan them in and put them online and name you on them - some random individual (presumably someone who knows you, possibly not) put them up. What's the difference between that person getting a copy of the image from a photo shop and showing it to people in your office (presuming they work there too) or a potential future employer, or sticking it in their own photo album, or showing their cousins, or whatever else. You gonna hold the photoshop responsible if that happens?
If there is a photo of you that you don't want people to see - SEIZE the photo, not punish Facebook. The "idiot" that puts that photo online and tags you is the one who drops you in it, not Facebook. They could have done it on a million and one different sites, or in a letter, or pinned the photo to a noticeboard anonymously. And if it was taken in a public place, there's actually NOTHING you can do about it in the majority of sensible countries, so long as the photo is published complete (i.e. they didn't amplify your face and print it out on leaflets that they spread throughout the town but) - In lots of countries you have no right to photographs that include you if you're not the main subject of the photo and it's taken in a public place.
Basically - don't be stupid. That means that any moron that appears in my "photo of a new york street" could get my holiday photos deleted from Facebook - and, in fact, ANYONE could if they just *claimed* to be in the photo. How would Facebook prove / disprove otherwise.
Please stop thinking that the existence of Facebook in particular changes ANYTHING with regards personal privacy. And be more cautious about being photographed pissed out of your skull by work colleagues. And work in places that understand the work-personal life separation and that don't think just Googling each candidate's name is a reliable way to accurately find out about any possible indiscretions (otherwise every John Smith has an AWFUL hard time finding out) - if that's even LEGAL for them to do in the first place.
Do they care about me? Nope. I'm just a guy. Do they care about the OO.org community? Nope, it's just some guys. Eventually, though, it filters back to something they *DO* care about - they used to have a reputation among the people I speak to of high-end, quality database infrastructure. Now they have a reputation of destroying perfectly good and harmless open source products that people use every day (e.g. MySQL, Java, etc.).
Do they care about me? Nope. Do I care about them? Nope. Do I care that they aren't crying over my lost custom? Nope, I'm not even a customer.
I'm not stupid. But Oracle are, in my opinion, by pissing away a fairly substantial reputation over a couple of OS projects they could have just silently spun off and nobody would have cared. They've gone from "large database vendor" to "patent troll". And, seriously, read a couple of those patents - I'm not saying they couldn't get a settlement but trying to push those through as validated to a court? Not a chance. And in the EU they are already all void anyway.
Google isn't the only search engine - and blocking access from Google alone is stupidly simple. Hell, do a deal with Bing and give them free advertising in the paper if that's what you're worried about. Chances are, though, that you'll flop enormously still. People miss the fact that NOBODY is stopping someone making a better search engine that provides more relevant results that people want to use - Wolfram Alpha tried to be clever and do it and how many times have you used that in the past year compared to Google?
The paywall has nothing to do with Google, it's just a convenient sideswipe that can be incorporated. It's actually a fight against free news (either online or in print like at least one London newspaper), but the argument there falls down because people WOULD be willing to pay for quality content, even if it was offered for free anyway. It's an old business dinosaur who is just trying to squeeze every penny from any potential customer, not realising that if they DIDN'T, they'd have more potential customers and more money overall.
The Times' experiment won't change the economy of news media or search engines - they are just trying to stamp out some free competition by claiming they "must be better" because they cost more - like a Haagen Daaz or designer clothes of the newspaper world - a "fake" premium brand that people see and think "it's worth more" because of the price tag. Some people will always buy into it, but will enough buy into it that you are better off? I doubt it.
All mainly software patents, by the look of it, and generic ones at that. A 1999 patent for pushing session-state information to a backup server, to a 2001 patent for an embedded web link in a document. All crap, by the look of it, and a lot of them only filed (not issued) and all of them pretty much of the "patent bandwagon" type (i.e. "John patented a web link last week, let's see if we can patent something just as obvious and well-used!"). There's even one there for shipping out a customer's order in a different order for efficiency. Let's patent using a lever to reduce work next!
I don't see anything that holds much clout, but they are likely to have some Java patents, or at least something along those lines.
Sorry Oracle, your recent actions make me extremely suspicious and I don't even *try* to think it might be an innocent purchase any more. See what destroying reputations does? (and, really, I'm not sorry for Oracle at all).
If you can't make money from ads, product endorsement, commission links and other things online (including companies directly approaching you trying to outbid your entire Google ad revenue), or your data isn't incredible precious and expensive (e.g. Ordnance Survey), you ain't *gonna* make money with charging to view a website. If you do, you could have made a LOT more by doing it another way. I'm not suggesting that The Times should team up with Cafepress and make a Times T-shirt, but the basic rule is that ads only work if you have exposure, and pay for that exposure, and if you don't have exposure it's impossible to make money from ads. But at the same time, when ads have good, public exposure, they make you an AWFUL lot of money (e.g. Superbowl ads).
My brother runs an extremely popular website (have to keep moving hosts because of bandwidth problems and it's only HTML/PNG/JPG's) that's funded entirely by Google ad revenue - he'd rather shut down the site than move it to a paywall because it would destroy the whole basis, community, reputation and income of the website. Related companies come to him now and say "we'll give you X amount of money just to put a link to us on your website". He has products sent to him for review. The offers have never once made more than he could through some Google ads, even after some tough negotiations - because the people who want to pay for advertising space can't compete with just asking Google to do it on related sites for them. Advertisers know their industry, which is about exposure, image, relevance and other things. People rarely pay YOU regularly for not doing very much but if the investment in quality is already there, advertising actually makes an awful lot of money, so much that even the biggest high street store can't afford to buy exclusivity.
If you can make money by someone paying you to do not very much, who also has to take their cut, probably multiple times, from a company who wants to be associated with your brand, why would you think that you can expect your CUSTOMERS to pay an equal amount plus profit to you directly? If that were true, advertisers would ALL be out of business. They aren't. They occasionally shift media but they very, very rarely abandon it. It's not that you CAN'T make money, it's that you're silly if there are lots of easier, still respected, legal, and industry-standard ways to make MORE money.
The problem is that people don't get the concept of having to be a quality link to make money from Google ads, and think they can do better by either a) gaming the links with substandard content, b) charging people for access to some information or c) reducing the quality and actually losing customers. And reputation matters. Anytime something goes from "Free" to "Paid" there's an associated loss of reputation. If you can't afford to give it away, why were you doing that last year or the year before?
Someone who, for one single day, paid £1 to view one single article to see how it worked is classed the same as someone who has a regular paper subscription for the last 30 years (because paper subscribers get online subscriptions for free), who is classed the same as someone who specifically signed up to the online version only, etc.
£1 a day, £2 a week, and lots of variations in between. The number of "subscribers" is irrelevant - it's the type and price of those subscriptions and their regularity. Besides, I expect the majority of their first "four months" published income to be heavily biased towards the first month... they might have made a complete loss for the three after that! Give it a year, see if they are still operating the same system.
Technically accurate. However, the 20+ million pageviews that they have DEFINITELY lost is an awful lot of ad revenue to miss out on. Their paywall statistics include paper-subscribers, trial-subscribers, one-off subscribers, reporters who subscribed so they could accurately report on the new system, etc. so are nowhere near 200,000 "regular subscribers" at £1 / day or £2 / week (so assume £10 a month per person on average, for 75,000 actual online users to be really generous? 750k a month? What do Google ads pay for 20+ million pageviews a month? I'm guessing as much, if not more, and the paper in question always commanded some extraordinarily high advertising rates because of its readership).
It *sounds* to me like "Look, we were right, it works!" when in fact it's more of a "It wasn't a complete loss, for our particular (high-earning) readership, at the start, if we count all our paper subscribers who get it free anyway, and we have no idea what'll happen next year." It's doubtful that any other papers could or would follow this model, at that was much more of the point of this exercise - it was an attempt to "normalise" online-paywalls as the access for a newspaper.
3D has come and gone in just about every decade for the last 5-6 decades.
It's pretty but there are a number of things that have never been solved:
- it doesn't work AT ALL for a percentage of people. If they don't go, your audience is lessened by their numbers plus a bit more (to account for those groups who say "Yeah, but John can't see it - let's go watch something 2D instead"). - it can induce headaches, motion sickness and all sorts of problems in others. - it's not "true" 3D, I can't get out of my seat and look at the film from the side. I also can't "stick my head inside" an object that's coming out the screen towards me. It's usually only ever "2D plus depth tricks" which isn't the same. - it's more expensive than 2D - it requires more specialist hardware than 2D (and often requires people to don some sort of equipment THEMSELVES to do that) - it's used as nothing more than a gimmick rather than an actual way to put the viewer "on-stage".
Even a simple theatre is more "3D" than "3D TV" and they can do all sorts of tricks that makes you think an elephant has disappeared, that actors are smaller than they actually are, and that there's a ghost hovering mid-stage. I can't name a single work of art that uses "3D technology" to its advantage and yet an awful lot of art is designed to be 3D (e.g. every statue).
I have at least three games on my hard drive that use "3D" technology if my display supports it - some of them go back decades. Trackmania can do the red/blue glasses thing and, way back when, you could do it in Fractint too. I have "3D" pictures collected from comics when I was young. I played on a "3D" holographic game in the arcades before I was young enough to even work out what buttons I was supposed to be pressing (which, incidentally, was infinitely more impressive than anything you can get on a 3DTV). Nintendo have a console that FLOPPED despite being years ahead of its time because it relied on the "3D" gimmick. I have regularly dug out a pair of red/blue glasses from my childhood days to amuse myself with things that come in boxes of cereal. Even in my parent's day you could go watch a 3D movie at a cinema without having to track one down.
But still, the above problems are always there with any type of "3D". When you *solve* them, come back and we'll take a look. Otherwise, it's a faddy gimmick that'll disappear and be revived next decade too.
If you want me to give you money, cut out the ads. If you're ad-supported, then expect me to use every trick in the book to avoid them. Unless, of course, there's actually some quality content and the ads really don't get in my way at all.
The same applies here as to TV - if I'm *PAYING* for a specific channel, I don't expect to ever see an ad. If, however, it's free, I expect to see ads but I don't expect to be forced to watch them... I'm quite happy to set a DVR to ignore them or the much simpler method of just walking out of the room while the ads are on. I'd be happier without any free channels at all than being forced to watch the ads.
Ad-supported newspapers don't send you a paper through your door and then not let you see the news until you can prove you read the ads.
If you're ad-supported, that means you're reliant on your REPUTATION to bring in the money. Without reputation, you have no page visitors. Without visitors, your ad-space is worthless. I happily read, EVERY SINGLE WORKING DAY, an ad-supported totally free newspaper that's given out to every Londoner. I happily read several free local papers that may be sponsored by the local council but make more money from classifieds. I do NOT expect to be forced to read the ads in order to do that and if the paper can't make money - that's THEIR problem, not mine. My news coverage won't suffer. As it happens, the "free" newspaper is infinitely better, with better journalism, more science-y stuff, more independence and less crap than the other, quite expensive, newspapers (some of which have just paywalled their site and thus instantly removed their content and ads from my eyeballs). Thus the quality papers (free or not) that aren't obnoxious get my eyeballs and I don't go out of my way to avoid their ads.
But if you're ad-supported, you KNOW this, and whinging about users who don't see your ads is as ridiculous as banning any user who doesn't buy at least one items from the ads each year. I have no qualms about paying for things, but I also have no qualms about some outfit producing enough quality content that I get stuff for free. If they can't produce quality content, if their users all block their ads because they are obnoxious, distracting, irrelevant, too prevelant, enforced and/or just because internet advertising is like a virus on their computer (executing things they wouldn't normally allow them to execute, e.g. Java / Flash ads) - well, that's tough. I'd love to make a living from ad-sponsored bungee jumps but, you know what, it's unlikely that I ever could.
It's like complaining that the local free newspaper journalists can't make a living. It's sad, but tough. I'm not their income, their advertisers are. If they want advertisers, they need my eyeballs. If they want my eyeballs, they better make something worth reading and not put me off reading them / supporting their company.
The free things work because they can produce VALUE for money. Even the pay things work on the same basis. And to me, good content for free is infinitely more valuable than bad content for free or any content for money. It's as ridiculous as saying that you can't use Linux unless you have a line of code in the kernel - yeah, someone has given their work for free but, you know what, I didn't make them do that even if I'm very grateful when they do produce a high-quality product.
Because when your software says that it requires 1000 gallons of fuel, you still need to know if it means 1000 litres. Because if your software costs £1600 per seat, you still need to know what that means for your department's budget. Because you need to know that increasing each dimension by 6% might increase the mass by much more than that and that it won't scale linearly if your dimensions differ.
If you think you don't use maths, you probably do. If you think you use a little, you probably use a lot. If you know you use an awful lot, you're probably not far wrong. Maths is *NOT* arithmetic. It's units, dimensions, scales, percentages, and billions of other things.
I don't *WANT* an engineer who doesn't know that the ideal place to put up a cell tower is probably not equi-distance from all the others. I don't want an engineer who can't spot when the software mistakes inches and centimetres (NASA spacecraft have been TAKEN DOWN by such errors because "the computer must know what I mean"). I don't want an engineer who is reliant on tools that they don't understand and, thus, don't know when they are faulty. I *really* don't want an engineer who doesn't have a basic understanding of mathematics designing anything that moves, rotates, exerts pressure, stress or anything else. Yes, a computer can do an awful lot of the work for you but it's like spellcheckers - now we have spellcheckers we can just throw all that literacy stuff out of the window, yes?! NO! Computers are labour-saving machines, not intelligent. They will blindly follow stupid orders even if you don't know they are stupid yourself. And mathematics and programming don't have as much in common as you think - having a knowledge of one is helpful in the other but expert mathematicians are usually terrible programmers and vice versa.
If you rely on software to do your job, that means we can effectively obsolete your entire industry by just automating the part you do, right? If that sounds stupid, that's what it sounds like when you say you don't need to know maths.
Since when has the US cared about the Geneva Convention? There are more than one Geneva Convention, for a start, and the US never ratified two of those. Those it did, it regularly breaches - you have things like Guantanamo Bay which is still operational and where sleight of hand is used to endorse various forms of torture against people because it's unclear if they are prisoners of war or not.
The US has to decide - either it's at war, and thus the prisoners it holds have the rights of prisoners of war (and, come on, just show some god-damn humanity too), or it's not in which case why is it bombing another country including its civilians? And if that country attacks back, surely that's just an act of war too and nothing that can be condemned? Listen carefully - they have a "war on terror" and even that phrasing has been phased out. You can't be "at war" with a concept rather than a particular country. And if you are "at war" with someone then pretty much any act they perform against your military and (if the US is playing the same game) your citizens is fair game.
The US has much, much bigger problems to worry about that a few hackers, and should be disgusted with itself. Land of the free? Only if you're not foreign-looking, only within the bounds of the US borders (so we'll take you to a foreign country where you don't have those rights), only if you can prove you've never done anything wrong despite never being given a trial. Home of the brave? How much courage does it take to beat, torture and humiliate a captured prisoner? The US doesn't care and even claims that things like an American "Internet kill-switch" would be at all useful in an *international* network - sever routes to the US (just in case their "kill switch" means active attacks against peers) and everyone else carries on as normal. All it could/world ever do is censor the US population.
To be honest, if the US military *is* seriously worried about such things as cyber-warfare over the Internet, then they really don't know how to design a military system.
The problem with autonomous vehicles is not what they can do successfully, it's what happens when they fail.
If I don't press my brakes in time to prevent an accident, I risk going to jail for dangerous / careless driving. If the autonomous van doesn't... well... what? We can take the human "driver" off the road, sure, but that's not fixed the problem. So the second one person has an accident in an autonomous vehicle, you're looking at major liability and lawsuits directed towards the car manufacturer - whether or not it was their fault and whether or not a human driver could have prevented the accident in *any* car. That manufacturer now has to take responsibility for that car versus every idiot on the road, every pedestrian that runs out and everything that can confuse one of its sensors.
Autonomous driving *is* possible and quite easy - but we need autonomous roads to make it work, with nobody but the autonomous vehicles on it. Nobody, nowhere has actually built a real-life one of those on a real road that people would want to use because you have to use their vehicles to do it and you have to (indirectly) pay for that vehicle, that road, and any mistakes those vehicles make. And those roads don't and won't exist for decades if at all - or, more accurately, it's called the rail network. Automated rail networks are commonplace - London has the Dockland's Light Railway that has no drivers.
If you're going to have to build a road that only automated cars can use, and make some cars to use that road, you've effectively built a railway, or else you're putting billions of pounds of effort into avoiding obstacles and keeping to a strict lane when you could just make the thing run along a rail.
Why is there no call for an automated rail network? You can make it as fast as the super-express trains, it's very safe in comparison to any road, on established technology, you know it's not going to veer off the road, you can pack thousands of trains onto the rails if you do it right and take thousands of passengers in each etc. But instead, people honestly think that it's more sensible to put an automated system of even the best technology on an open road with other idiots and do this on a one-person, one-car basis (hence millions of units and billions of pounds) with complete freedom over how it moves the car, among other traffic that will stop it ever doing anything a human couldn't do? It's ridiculous.
Stop wasting your time and build a personalised rail network when I can get into a "pod" or something, enter my destination and it would take me there on good, solid, metal rails and a bit of signalling. And I don't have to worry that it thinks the man walking along the street with a cardboard cutout is actually a small child running in front of the car, or that it doesn't spot a police tape which has been strung across the road to close it because of a pedestrian parade further up the street.
An automated car has to have a human in it. It's the best call ever made on the introduction of a new technology so far. An automated car needs exclusive automated roads to every destination in order to work anywhere near effectively under autonomous control - that's called a railway and any more "transportation routes" being built just for automated cars is a fantasy world in a modern city. Automated cars have been shown to crash WHEN DEMONSTRATING how they were uncrashable. An automated railway already exists and works perfectly and has an excellent safety record. Use it.
I am obliged to never take my laptop or data storage devices to the US, ever, because of their failure to provide Data Protection guarantees for the things they contain. It's a work laptop that contains (indirectly) confidential details of school students. Thus this laptop can never enter the US because their search/seizure allows them to arbitrarily copy and interrogate the data with no guarantees of protection or privacy that would satisfy an EU Data Protection Registrar - hell, they can't even definitively state that they'll never copy/transmit the information they seize outside of their official uses.
Thus, if I have to sanitise laptops, USB keys, digital cameras and anything else that I carry that might contain something that my country/employers might regard as confidential, sensitive or even just "personal data", then I can't take any gadgets with me at all, encrypted or not (because there are stupid laws about that in America too). So, it's just easier to say "No thanks" and never travel to the US.
I also allowed an Australian visa to lapse, entirely unused, for similar reasons. Stupid laws and ridiculous restrictions stop business happening in your country and stop people wanting to visit / work / live there. Ironic, given that most terrorists involved in acts against the US have turned out to be domestic citizens.
So apart from the line-of-sight to every household, apart from the potential licensing for such communication (if required which is almost certain if you're aiming terrestrially and with such a point-to-point radio link), apart from the fact that - to be economical as a business - almost every house in a 5km radius would need one, plus several hundred dollars each installation (not including ongoing maintenance and dealing with every git whinging about someone who's erected a tent in the way of their signal) and then the telco has to be provide bandwidth and other services behind it. If it's for more than one household, you're basically looking at tower-erection, planning permission, etc. the same as bringing cell-phone infrastructure to the place (and if you can get cell-phone infrastructure, you should be able to get HSDPA anyway) - a $600 setup fee would probably have a similar monthly cost too, because you *wouldn't* get even a few percent of people in such an area that would be eligible, and only a small percentage of them would actually end up using it and the company would have to recoup such a huge investment AFTER they planned, designed, deployed and tested it. This is why small local community projects set such things up on a shoestring (literally two men with Wifi and a couple of cantennas, as in some rural Scotland deployments), try to expand and ultimately go out of business and/or get no customers even when they are subsidised. It might work (possibly, maybe) for a single link for two experienced people using certain known limitations but bringing it to a general populace in a rural area is much, much more tricky. And if you *can* do it, the quality of service are less and the associated costs are WAY more than anything you can get from a professional setup using other methods (satellite, local DSL, etc.)
The numbers do not add up. Point-to-point microwave links are used all over the place - it saves hassle when coupling buildings that can't have copper / fibre between them, and they are used in rural schemes in places like Scotland between islands. You can even build your own if you're confident with electronics - there are projects everywhere that can get 10km LoS but they are stupidly expensive and unreliable and have much vaster problems than running something through the cable conduits of a major city would (hence they are always perceived as stupidly expensive). They are *prohibitively* expensive not because of the company just stinging people (it tends to be small, local, village startups doing just that service) but because the problems mean it's actually more expensive and less reliable than most of the alternatives and thus the worst of both worlds. Hell, a bit of rain, fog, mist, damp, dust or snow and such things just die, let alone trying to find 5km of open ground for LoS.
If you're willing to cover the capital costs, you can have what you want but you are vastly underestimating the capital costs. Hell, there was a story in the news a few weeks ago that the UK electricity suppliers are quoting one Scottish household £50,000 to be connected to the mains electricity when they are 50m from a road, because the infrastructure isn't in those sorts of places to handle such things, and the costs *per household* are ridiculously high. It's cost per household that matters if you're having to do the work and recoup the money back from household subscribers. Digging up even a small plot of land for installation of something can cost thousands and thousands and if you can't suck that back from a per-household profit (rather than expecting a handful of people to foot the entire bill) then you are wasting your time.
A point-to-point business-level microwave link can cost thousands just to span between two buildings on the same site, and will never be as reliable as fibre or cable. Companies buy them because sometimes there are no alternatives (e.g. someone owns the intervening land and won't authorised cables of any kind, they are near power lines that interfere with or
Even better - go to any non-UK European country and watch as you can drive top-speed through 7 or 8 international borders and not even realise until your mobile phone says "Welcome to Germany!" or whatever.
It's only the UK that has stupid enough politicians that we just blindly follow what the US says: wars, terrorism, whatever. We've been dealing with bombings and terrorists for decades before 9/11, from nearly blowing up a hotel with the prime minister in it, to downing a plane over Scotland, to putting dozens and dozens of bombs every year in London's city centre, but the second that the US imposes rules, we are required to follow suit for no other reason than the "special relationship" (i.e. you hold the key to all our military and will switch us off if we don't comply). I watched the UK news immediately after 9/11 and they showed our airport security experts for Heathrow / Gatwick, who were telling how the month before they'd been to the US on a consultation exercise where they queried how little air security they had compared to us at the time... apparently the response from the US was "You guys worry too much"...
The US is a bully. They tell us what to do or we wouldn't be in the Middle East, either. Unfortunately, there is some reason somewhere that stops us from saying no to them (probably money related). If you've ever seen the film Love Actually while sitting next to a Brit, watch their reaction to when Hugh Grant tells the American president, in the politest possible terms, that he's an arsehole for taking what he wants from the UK and giving back only more "you will do this" orders. They *will* do the fist-in-the-air "YES!" thing. Sometimes fiction is scarily close to reality, and there are millions of Brits that, every time they see a new prime minister, just wish they could have the dancing idiot portrayed in that movie just for that one action alone.
Because running 5km of fibre for you (and 5km of fibre for the other people on your exchange which is presumably in the best location they could afford to put it, so we're talking everyone in a 5km *RADIUS* of the exchange, which means 20-30km + of cabling at least in some sort of web or star configuration) and a handful of people is a extreme loss. It would have to be fibre - we have nothing else that can really go that distance - and it would probably need repeaters for that length.
So they run the cable, dig up, say 20km of road / install 20km of poles / repeaters/ shielding, etc. just to get a fibre into a box somewhere nearer to you in order to do DSL or whatever they need (you to a nearby exchange doesn't matter, because there's no end of cheap, easily available hardware and wiring that can already be used to get you connected to that fibre). If you live in a rural area, say that connects 20,000 or 30,000 people. How much do you think that's actually going to bring in each year versus their outlay, repairs, upgrades, etc? It wouldn't cover the interest on a loan of the amount required to do the work in the first place (so they are theoretically better off by just leaving that money in a bank account, earning interest instead of costing it).
It's not a question of technologies - 5km is a huge distance - over radio for more than a handful of people at the bandwidth you're wanting is ludicrously difficult (and just fills the airwaves for even more miles around, making it harder to do more) or you'd have amateur radio networks doing it all the time at those speeds. Plus, you'd never get a license for it. Over cable, that's a huge amount of digging, burying, pole-installing, raising, repairing, planning, obtaining permission, and an awful expense in copper too (people are stealing copper cables over here for things like that because of its scrap value). Over fibre, you have all the same problems but only get no theft value, almost-infinite upgradability, conversion costs and extreme fragility as differences.
It's mostly quite sensible business reasons - it's ridiculous to expect a company to make a loss unless it's forced to (like some British ISP's are in order to fulfill their telecoms license obligations). That's a governmental problem - to force them. If they *are* forced to, they can't give you the same as everyone else because the technologies don't cover the same distance, and your maintenance / installation costs are ridiculously higher so you'll get slower / more expensive broadband. They won't get any fans by doing it, they'll just get people moaning that it's not as reliable / fast as other people's inner-city service again. Years ago, 56k was the standard, if you didn't have that, you were "deprived". Now it's 2Mb. By the time an installation is settled, it'll be 4Mb or 8Mb or whatever. They wouldn't recoup any money on their investment before they were digging it up again to replace everything.
Don't blame your ISP, or the scientists for not giving you the technology (that amount of combined bandwidth over that wide an area is all but impossible), blame your government for not subsidising what is now seen as an "essential" service. Get it classed as a utility, then it's in the same category as not having running water, or sewerage, or electricity. Until then, there is NO business case to ever do it. Without a business case, no business will do it, and no bank will fund them to do it, and no business that ever does it would ever be shown gratitude. When the government starts subsidising or enforcing it, then you'll have the service they lay down, and probably no more, and it'll be a cost burden on every other ISP user in the country.
It's like demanding that you get access to the city center by vehicle in the same time and same cost that a city-dweller can. Yeah, it can probably be done, but there's zero business case for it at all (in fact, there's almost infinitely more business case for you to get to the city centre in five minutes than for you to get br
Downstream is easy if you consider only a single path with no switching, movement, conversion, routing, etc. Upstream isn't the problem either, really.
Telecoms networks that have to splice emergency calls between your torrent packets are the problem. Real-time phone data is truly real-time and has to have an enormously low latency despite going over the same network as your ADSL data. The more "real" phones, the less available for your un-important IP packets by a big margin. Then you have to join several million people's connections together, route them and deal with them all seperately, rather than just transmit only a single message. Then you have to have equipment in exchanges to handle all these conversions because people want it to come over a copper wire (or fibre) most of the time and that needs special equipment at the consumer and exchange ends. Then you have to squeeze it into a copper cable that comes into your premises and has almost no security - shielding might be damaged, your extension wiring might be shit (for telephone-based ADSL), the cable might go through a garden or under a fence, etc. and then the router the user buys is completely up to them so it has to be standardised to the lowest common denominator. It has to deal with all that and give you a stable signal with milliseconds of latency or you'd moan like shit.
Compare to a pure fibre-based ISP who have to run a fibre to every house, hope it doesn't get damaged, install custom equipment in the customer's house, a cabinet in every street, a backbone between them all that can take their combined traffic, hope they don't tug the cable too much, and then you have a true "network" of digital fibre connections. Fibre carriers are offering 100MBps or more even now, and they've said there's pretty much no upper limit (10Gb/s Ethernet and many WAN or MAN connections can use the same grades of fibre in most cases, over the same sorts of distances). Their only problem is the switching hardware and having that amount of customers on that high a bandwidth connected to the Internet. It's easy for me to join my neighbour with Gigabit fibre. It's a different matter to connect either one of our houses to the general Internet at that sort of speed, even if you could string a fibre into the datacentre next door. Have you seen the prices of dedicated 100MBps Ethernet connections in your local data centre (and not the ones that share connections or have ridiculously low guaranteed bandwidth)? You'd need one or more of them (or the equivalent) PER customer.
And then that company has to make a profit, abide by telecoms rules, use standardised hardware, manage all repairs and breakages and deal with you.
Broadband isn't, and never has been, limited by the technology. The school I'm in runs two full 24MBps bog-standard consumer DSL lines. It gets 24MBps sync on both lines and works perfectly. Has done for years. The problem is convincing the ISP at the other end that that should get me 24Mbps of direct Internet-connection to their main backbone and to all their peers without any restrictions whatsoever. It's a business problem, in that you can't just give EVERYONE several hundred Megs of connection immediately a new technology comes out, because the backbone and routing peers cost a shit-load of money. Otherwise, Google would be running off a room full of ADSL modems instead of their guaranteed multiple-fibre, super-high-speed, Internet backbone fibres with huge peers passing equal amounts of traffic over transatlantic lines and ENORMOUS cost.
You're not just paying your ISP to stick you on their local net. You're paying them to (indirectly) rent a cable that goes under the sea to every country in the world.
Nobody said 56k was the limit over *copper*. That was *always* not true because 10Base2 has used copper cable for decades and got a lot more than that, and many other technologies before it. Copper networking faster than 56k predates 56k by decades.
56k is the limit if you use *only* an audible signal over the voice channels of an ordinary copper telephone line. Due to timeslicing, and analogue routing and other things (which is why you could still "dial" a number by pipping down the phone just right like the old pulse-dial telephones), your conversations never got the full capabilities of that bit of copper coming into your phone. Try it. You can't get more than about 14.4 or 28.8 over those audio channels without having special tricks on both ends and even when you DO (56k was basically special expensive hardware on the ISP end that could tap into slightly more of the telecoms network and do timeslicing and other tricks to send slightly more down the audio channels to a customer, and only worked one-way - them to you, because you weren't allowed the special access to the telecoms network that they had - which is why uploads were always only 28.8 or something even on 56k modems). So even 56k is a myth with ordinary modems - if you dial one consumer modem from another over the cleanest, shortest bit of copper in the world, you'll only ever get 28.8.
Even today, over a standard voice channel of an analogue telephone line, you can't get more than about 28.8 up and 56 down. This is why things like ADSL with its splitters were invented - they separate out the analogue audio using capacitors and the exchange has to be ADSL enabled, because it receives everything and then splits it into two signals - old-fashioned analogue, time-spliced as always, only on limited frequencies, and the entire audio signal pushed over the telecoms network in real time and still only gets 56k, and ADSL operating on higher frequencies on your same cable, converted to a digital signal at the exchange and then fed digitally into the telecoms network as "packets" that arrive at your ISP.
Old modems communicate directly with another modem - either at your ISP, BBS or whatever you were dialling - the connection is across thousands of miles of repeated, amplified, etc. copper. If they get digitised, they have be to "analogued" back when they hit the other end or your phone wouldn't be able to hear it - that conversion strips out anything that's not audible. ADSL etc. only communicate analogue data over copper to the local cabinet / exchange which then relays packets to a nationwide digital telecoms network (usually all fibre) and it arrives as IP packets to the ISP (or thereabouts). The DSL data arrives as digital data, the modem data arrives as analogue audio, over the audio channels, and has to be "demodulated" (the "dem" of modem) to digital data by the destination (e.g. you or your ISP), not the telecoms firm itself.
ADSL isn't audible on a phone line (except through harmonics of it's many-MHz signal). ADSL doesn't get transmitted to the number you dial (that's why you DON'T have to dial your ISP any more) but to the local exchange which then relays the data digitally, independent of your phone call. That's why you can phone AND browse nowadays. ADSL operates over the same copper but much less distance over different frequencies. ADSL data is "filtered" from all phone lines and the original signal never goes over the telecoms networks - it's digitised and then follows a completely separate path once it hits the street cabinet / exchange. ADSL cannot be used with a foreign ISP because the ADSL data isn't transmitted with the phone call, it stays in the private telecoms network.
Modems are audible on a phone line (they can only work when the remote side could hear the same sounds in a normal phone conversation). Modems transmit to the number you dial, and directly to them using data encoded into audible sounds over the analogue audio channels (even if some of those are now digital too, it's still only wh
Whichever way you look at it - diluting and tarring a brand name as large as Java is an incredibly stupid business move, even if you don't intend to use it directly yourself with something that large (millions of deployed devices, my dad knows what Java is and that he "needs" it on his PC, everything from mobile phones to Blu-Ray).
It's good business to cut off loose ends. It's bad business to chop off a foot that's perfectly healthy. Java licensing rights alone could make millions just from the name. It's a stupid business that decides, with its actions, to mar the reputation of a worldwide brand just because they bought it and don't want to make use of it. You spin it off into a separate entity and reap "free money" with no effort rather than just stamp on it until it dies and everyone involved has to find an alternative that you're not supplying either.
Actually, I saw it the other way round and I *have* read their patents and their claims. They don't hold water. One of them is an immediate "What the hell is that doing in this file?" kind of mistake, it's just not even close to being applicable or enforceable in a court. The rest of the claims are dubious at best, but you can never be sure in a legal climate.
Oracle are just trying their luck. They are hoping for an easy settlement which, in this modern world, isn't a difficult thing to get. This is why everyone cross-licenses everything from each other - because it saves the hassle of working out what's actually enforceable. A million spent on ensuring your business is safe is better than 10 million on trying to prove it had nothing to fear (as disgusting as that is from a personal point of view). Unfortunately, Google decided to go public, they decided to fight, and their first legal filings call for an almost complete dismissal. That's not something you do lightly because the courts can get incredibly pissed if you just "try" that.
Google hasn't got a case? Highly doubtful. I'd put it at about 95:5 in favour of Google. There's legal error, deficient filings, and complete nonsense on Oracle's side and yet Google has few cracks. That tells you a lot before you even begin to look at the precise facts of the case.
Your mental health is worth more than your paycheck. Your self-respect is worth more than your paycheck. (but a lot of people don't have any of that) Fleeing a sinking ship to find an island of sanity is also worth more than your paycheck.
Been there, done it, got the T-shirt. Talking to the people left behind is both devastating and relieving in one space - you don't want to be where they are, and you're glad it's not you there.
I turned down one job with a boss I had who was making some *wonderful* promises, in a place I'd enjoyed working, to go and work somewhere else. I saw the water start to come in months earlier and had a definite job offer on the table by the time even a hint of it was picked up on by anyone else (except my immediate boss who knew it was coming but, in her words, she was "old enough, and experienced enough, to know how it works and see it through to retirement" - she recognised that some of us had to flee, though, and that we were worried about her prospects). Then there was a bidding war between the old and new employers once they found out I had a superior job offer and before you know it, the promises got larger and larger and, yes, they were willing to give me more money. I could have stayed.
I still left, and was all but called a fool by the person in charge. My immediate boss knew better and congratulated me, and four years later, I'm about 8 payrises, 2 promotions and lots of happiness above where I was originally, and all of those were way above anything promised at the previous place, while the people at my old place were told to employ 16-year-olds (for barely minimum wage) and to train them to run the place as replacements before a planned merger tried to wipe out the entire existing IT department with the other places' IT staff (of course, the kids would get "promotions" to something that was a lot less than the experienced, highly-paid staff that they replaced were on).
Fortunately, my old immediate boss had been preparing for months and blew all their IT statistics and performance out of the water with the stuff she built, even with no real staff, only poorly trained kids, and managed to show up no end of trained professionals, consultants and other "skilled" people. She ruined any chances for herself and is still clinging on to her retirement eligibility but damn she did well and showed them up (they had to ask her how she managed to beat their own IT guys when they were actively trying to destroy her department because she managed to wipe the floor with them! The best quote ever to hear is "Because we know our jobs"). Meanwhile, outside that environment, those who fled were immediately bathed in better money, conditions, job prospects, happiness etc. elsewhere.
I can't feel regret for her not coming with us - she saw it coming, she chose to stay and brave it through, and she kicked their asses. And I *know* that if she hadn't been a year or two from retirement there's no way she would have stayed for a second - she was staying to cause trouble and get what she was entitled to, and make them pay out on her final salary pension, and she got it. A decade earlier, she'd have been leading the charge.
But seeing the stuff she was subjected to? No thanks, I don't want to be in the middle of that for any amount of money. I very nearly did it just for friends, but not for the money. If I can't vent my frustration at the days' work within five minutes of arriving home and then get on with my home life, there's something wrong that no amount of money can fix.
Your blood pressure isn't worth it. Don't be a doormat for the sake of cash because then you'll always be a doormat, for increasingly less cash in relative terms to what you COULD have got elsewhere without being a doormat.
Easy. Don't test. Then when everyone comes crying that you haven't submitted your tests, won't sign off on the code, etc. ask them to demonstrate how to test >4Gb sets on a 4Gb machine without spending several MONTHS waiting for the thing to do it because of swapping (if it can do that at all).
Stuff buying an old server to do it on, that's called idiocy. You're being paid to do a job, you can't do that job because of inadequate resources, the answer is not to go and find those resources yourselves because in a year's time you'll be buying your own paper and ink for the same reasons. Maybe this is how Oracle keeps its margins, eh? Having its own staff buy their own equipment to do their own job?
No amount of chairs will let you load an 4Gb dataset, but if they are authorised, get them. Personally, I'd then have no end of fancy chairs in my office and when my boss can't get into the room because of all the chairs, I'll just say "Oh, well, this is 100 times the equivalent price of the test server I needed to do my job. Apparently I can get all of *that* authorised but not something that'll actually result in a product. I thought I'd sell them off to your bosses to raise funds, I'm sure they'd love to know what their money's being spent on."
Make a fuss if it's that important to your job, and I guarantee they'll find you a way to do it. Don't let other people's stupidity / arrogance / power-games ("Oh, no, sorry, *you're* not approved to have *that* piece of equipment") / etc. get in the way of you doing your job in the most sensible way.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a single mention of the number of pre-orders, so it's a worthless piece of information ("Both units pre-ordered" becomes "ALL OUR PREORDERS SOLD OUT AND STILL PEOPLE ASK FOR MORE!").
Also, there hasn't been a product in the video games industry in the last 20 years that didn't "sell out" at launch. It's completely arbitrary. It all depends on how many you produce and/or how many you decide to "let" people pre-order, nothing else. They estimate they'll sell 3 million - is that good or bad? I have no idea. The Wii has sold 75 million. Is that comparable? If just one in 20 Wii owners has a WiiMotionPlus or a WiiFit that makes the 3 million *estimated* sales worthless. To quote the wiki "As of May 2010, {Wii Sports Resort} has sold 16.14 million copies" and they come with a WiiMotionPlus, so that's the estimated sales blown out of the water almost 5-fold. Is that relevant?
Pre-orders mean precisely NOTHING. Thousands of pre-order still exist for Duke Nukem Forever - doesn't mean they've sold any or that the product even exists. And "selling out of pre-orders" means that the arbitrary number that MS decided was reserved for pre-orders has been met with the same number of potential buyers. That's it.
Don't tell me pre-orders, and if you do state FIGURES - tell me confirmed sales. The stock they sell to the big stores MONTHS before official product release is the only number that means anything, and even that doesn't predict whether shops will ever order any more.
Then Facebook is the same as a photoshop. No-one MADE Facebook take your photos and scan them in and put them online and name you on them - some random individual (presumably someone who knows you, possibly not) put them up. What's the difference between that person getting a copy of the image from a photo shop and showing it to people in your office (presuming they work there too) or a potential future employer, or sticking it in their own photo album, or showing their cousins, or whatever else. You gonna hold the photoshop responsible if that happens?
If there is a photo of you that you don't want people to see - SEIZE the photo, not punish Facebook. The "idiot" that puts that photo online and tags you is the one who drops you in it, not Facebook. They could have done it on a million and one different sites, or in a letter, or pinned the photo to a noticeboard anonymously. And if it was taken in a public place, there's actually NOTHING you can do about it in the majority of sensible countries, so long as the photo is published complete (i.e. they didn't amplify your face and print it out on leaflets that they spread throughout the town but) - In lots of countries you have no right to photographs that include you if you're not the main subject of the photo and it's taken in a public place.
Basically - don't be stupid. That means that any moron that appears in my "photo of a new york street" could get my holiday photos deleted from Facebook - and, in fact, ANYONE could if they just *claimed* to be in the photo. How would Facebook prove / disprove otherwise.
Please stop thinking that the existence of Facebook in particular changes ANYTHING with regards personal privacy. And be more cautious about being photographed pissed out of your skull by work colleagues. And work in places that understand the work-personal life separation and that don't think just Googling each candidate's name is a reliable way to accurately find out about any possible indiscretions (otherwise every John Smith has an AWFUL hard time finding out) - if that's even LEGAL for them to do in the first place.
Do they care about me? Nope. I'm just a guy. Do they care about the OO.org community? Nope, it's just some guys. Eventually, though, it filters back to something they *DO* care about - they used to have a reputation among the people I speak to of high-end, quality database infrastructure. Now they have a reputation of destroying perfectly good and harmless open source products that people use every day (e.g. MySQL, Java, etc.).
Do they care about me? Nope. Do I care about them? Nope. Do I care that they aren't crying over my lost custom? Nope, I'm not even a customer.
I'm not stupid. But Oracle are, in my opinion, by pissing away a fairly substantial reputation over a couple of OS projects they could have just silently spun off and nobody would have cared. They've gone from "large database vendor" to "patent troll". And, seriously, read a couple of those patents - I'm not saying they couldn't get a settlement but trying to push those through as validated to a court? Not a chance. And in the EU they are already all void anyway.
Google isn't the only search engine - and blocking access from Google alone is stupidly simple. Hell, do a deal with Bing and give them free advertising in the paper if that's what you're worried about. Chances are, though, that you'll flop enormously still. People miss the fact that NOBODY is stopping someone making a better search engine that provides more relevant results that people want to use - Wolfram Alpha tried to be clever and do it and how many times have you used that in the past year compared to Google?
The paywall has nothing to do with Google, it's just a convenient sideswipe that can be incorporated. It's actually a fight against free news (either online or in print like at least one London newspaper), but the argument there falls down because people WOULD be willing to pay for quality content, even if it was offered for free anyway. It's an old business dinosaur who is just trying to squeeze every penny from any potential customer, not realising that if they DIDN'T, they'd have more potential customers and more money overall.
The Times' experiment won't change the economy of news media or search engines - they are just trying to stamp out some free competition by claiming they "must be better" because they cost more - like a Haagen Daaz or designer clothes of the newspaper world - a "fake" premium brand that people see and think "it's worth more" because of the price tag. Some people will always buy into it, but will enough buy into it that you are better off? I doubt it.
All mainly software patents, by the look of it, and generic ones at that. A 1999 patent for pushing session-state information to a backup server, to a 2001 patent for an embedded web link in a document. All crap, by the look of it, and a lot of them only filed (not issued) and all of them pretty much of the "patent bandwagon" type (i.e. "John patented a web link last week, let's see if we can patent something just as obvious and well-used!"). There's even one there for shipping out a customer's order in a different order for efficiency. Let's patent using a lever to reduce work next!
I don't see anything that holds much clout, but they are likely to have some Java patents, or at least something along those lines.
Sorry Oracle, your recent actions make me extremely suspicious and I don't even *try* to think it might be an innocent purchase any more. See what destroying reputations does? (and, really, I'm not sorry for Oracle at all).
If you can't make money from ads, product endorsement, commission links and other things online (including companies directly approaching you trying to outbid your entire Google ad revenue), or your data isn't incredible precious and expensive (e.g. Ordnance Survey), you ain't *gonna* make money with charging to view a website. If you do, you could have made a LOT more by doing it another way. I'm not suggesting that The Times should team up with Cafepress and make a Times T-shirt, but the basic rule is that ads only work if you have exposure, and pay for that exposure, and if you don't have exposure it's impossible to make money from ads. But at the same time, when ads have good, public exposure, they make you an AWFUL lot of money (e.g. Superbowl ads).
My brother runs an extremely popular website (have to keep moving hosts because of bandwidth problems and it's only HTML/PNG/JPG's) that's funded entirely by Google ad revenue - he'd rather shut down the site than move it to a paywall because it would destroy the whole basis, community, reputation and income of the website. Related companies come to him now and say "we'll give you X amount of money just to put a link to us on your website". He has products sent to him for review. The offers have never once made more than he could through some Google ads, even after some tough negotiations - because the people who want to pay for advertising space can't compete with just asking Google to do it on related sites for them. Advertisers know their industry, which is about exposure, image, relevance and other things. People rarely pay YOU regularly for not doing very much but if the investment in quality is already there, advertising actually makes an awful lot of money, so much that even the biggest high street store can't afford to buy exclusivity.
If you can make money by someone paying you to do not very much, who also has to take their cut, probably multiple times, from a company who wants to be associated with your brand, why would you think that you can expect your CUSTOMERS to pay an equal amount plus profit to you directly? If that were true, advertisers would ALL be out of business. They aren't. They occasionally shift media but they very, very rarely abandon it. It's not that you CAN'T make money, it's that you're silly if there are lots of easier, still respected, legal, and industry-standard ways to make MORE money.
The problem is that people don't get the concept of having to be a quality link to make money from Google ads, and think they can do better by either a) gaming the links with substandard content, b) charging people for access to some information or c) reducing the quality and actually losing customers. And reputation matters. Anytime something goes from "Free" to "Paid" there's an associated loss of reputation. If you can't afford to give it away, why were you doing that last year or the year before?
And if "Naughty Nymphos 2" pulls in a hundred times as many subscribers as "Old grannies 52", does that mean they'd keep both?
It's not as simple as that.
Someone who, for one single day, paid £1 to view one single article to see how it worked is classed the same as someone who has a regular paper subscription for the last 30 years (because paper subscribers get online subscriptions for free), who is classed the same as someone who specifically signed up to the online version only, etc.
£1 a day, £2 a week, and lots of variations in between. The number of "subscribers" is irrelevant - it's the type and price of those subscriptions and their regularity. Besides, I expect the majority of their first "four months" published income to be heavily biased towards the first month... they might have made a complete loss for the three after that! Give it a year, see if they are still operating the same system.
Technically accurate. However, the 20+ million pageviews that they have DEFINITELY lost is an awful lot of ad revenue to miss out on. Their paywall statistics include paper-subscribers, trial-subscribers, one-off subscribers, reporters who subscribed so they could accurately report on the new system, etc. so are nowhere near 200,000 "regular subscribers" at £1 / day or £2 / week (so assume £10 a month per person on average, for 75,000 actual online users to be really generous? 750k a month? What do Google ads pay for 20+ million pageviews a month? I'm guessing as much, if not more, and the paper in question always commanded some extraordinarily high advertising rates because of its readership).
It *sounds* to me like "Look, we were right, it works!" when in fact it's more of a "It wasn't a complete loss, for our particular (high-earning) readership, at the start, if we count all our paper subscribers who get it free anyway, and we have no idea what'll happen next year." It's doubtful that any other papers could or would follow this model, at that was much more of the point of this exercise - it was an attempt to "normalise" online-paywalls as the access for a newspaper.
3D has come and gone in just about every decade for the last 5-6 decades.
It's pretty but there are a number of things that have never been solved:
- it doesn't work AT ALL for a percentage of people. If they don't go, your audience is lessened by their numbers plus a bit more (to account for those groups who say "Yeah, but John can't see it - let's go watch something 2D instead").
- it can induce headaches, motion sickness and all sorts of problems in others.
- it's not "true" 3D, I can't get out of my seat and look at the film from the side. I also can't "stick my head inside" an object that's coming out the screen towards me. It's usually only ever "2D plus depth tricks" which isn't the same.
- it's more expensive than 2D
- it requires more specialist hardware than 2D (and often requires people to don some sort of equipment THEMSELVES to do that)
- it's used as nothing more than a gimmick rather than an actual way to put the viewer "on-stage".
Even a simple theatre is more "3D" than "3D TV" and they can do all sorts of tricks that makes you think an elephant has disappeared, that actors are smaller than they actually are, and that there's a ghost hovering mid-stage. I can't name a single work of art that uses "3D technology" to its advantage and yet an awful lot of art is designed to be 3D (e.g. every statue).
I have at least three games on my hard drive that use "3D" technology if my display supports it - some of them go back decades. Trackmania can do the red/blue glasses thing and, way back when, you could do it in Fractint too. I have "3D" pictures collected from comics when I was young. I played on a "3D" holographic game in the arcades before I was young enough to even work out what buttons I was supposed to be pressing (which, incidentally, was infinitely more impressive than anything you can get on a 3DTV). Nintendo have a console that FLOPPED despite being years ahead of its time because it relied on the "3D" gimmick. I have regularly dug out a pair of red/blue glasses from my childhood days to amuse myself with things that come in boxes of cereal. Even in my parent's day you could go watch a 3D movie at a cinema without having to track one down.
But still, the above problems are always there with any type of "3D". When you *solve* them, come back and we'll take a look. Otherwise, it's a faddy gimmick that'll disappear and be revived next decade too.
If you want me to give you money, cut out the ads. If you're ad-supported, then expect me to use every trick in the book to avoid them. Unless, of course, there's actually some quality content and the ads really don't get in my way at all.
The same applies here as to TV - if I'm *PAYING* for a specific channel, I don't expect to ever see an ad. If, however, it's free, I expect to see ads but I don't expect to be forced to watch them... I'm quite happy to set a DVR to ignore them or the much simpler method of just walking out of the room while the ads are on. I'd be happier without any free channels at all than being forced to watch the ads.
Ad-supported newspapers don't send you a paper through your door and then not let you see the news until you can prove you read the ads.
If you're ad-supported, that means you're reliant on your REPUTATION to bring in the money. Without reputation, you have no page visitors. Without visitors, your ad-space is worthless. I happily read, EVERY SINGLE WORKING DAY, an ad-supported totally free newspaper that's given out to every Londoner. I happily read several free local papers that may be sponsored by the local council but make more money from classifieds. I do NOT expect to be forced to read the ads in order to do that and if the paper can't make money - that's THEIR problem, not mine. My news coverage won't suffer. As it happens, the "free" newspaper is infinitely better, with better journalism, more science-y stuff, more independence and less crap than the other, quite expensive, newspapers (some of which have just paywalled their site and thus instantly removed their content and ads from my eyeballs). Thus the quality papers (free or not) that aren't obnoxious get my eyeballs and I don't go out of my way to avoid their ads.
But if you're ad-supported, you KNOW this, and whinging about users who don't see your ads is as ridiculous as banning any user who doesn't buy at least one items from the ads each year. I have no qualms about paying for things, but I also have no qualms about some outfit producing enough quality content that I get stuff for free. If they can't produce quality content, if their users all block their ads because they are obnoxious, distracting, irrelevant, too prevelant, enforced and/or just because internet advertising is like a virus on their computer (executing things they wouldn't normally allow them to execute, e.g. Java / Flash ads) - well, that's tough. I'd love to make a living from ad-sponsored bungee jumps but, you know what, it's unlikely that I ever could.
It's like complaining that the local free newspaper journalists can't make a living. It's sad, but tough. I'm not their income, their advertisers are. If they want advertisers, they need my eyeballs. If they want my eyeballs, they better make something worth reading and not put me off reading them / supporting their company.
The free things work because they can produce VALUE for money. Even the pay things work on the same basis. And to me, good content for free is infinitely more valuable than bad content for free or any content for money. It's as ridiculous as saying that you can't use Linux unless you have a line of code in the kernel - yeah, someone has given their work for free but, you know what, I didn't make them do that even if I'm very grateful when they do produce a high-quality product.
Because when your software says that it requires 1000 gallons of fuel, you still need to know if it means 1000 litres.
Because if your software costs £1600 per seat, you still need to know what that means for your department's budget.
Because you need to know that increasing each dimension by 6% might increase the mass by much more than that and that it won't scale linearly if your dimensions differ.
If you think you don't use maths, you probably do. If you think you use a little, you probably use a lot. If you know you use an awful lot, you're probably not far wrong. Maths is *NOT* arithmetic. It's units, dimensions, scales, percentages, and billions of other things.
I don't *WANT* an engineer who doesn't know that the ideal place to put up a cell tower is probably not equi-distance from all the others. I don't want an engineer who can't spot when the software mistakes inches and centimetres (NASA spacecraft have been TAKEN DOWN by such errors because "the computer must know what I mean"). I don't want an engineer who is reliant on tools that they don't understand and, thus, don't know when they are faulty. I *really* don't want an engineer who doesn't have a basic understanding of mathematics designing anything that moves, rotates, exerts pressure, stress or anything else. Yes, a computer can do an awful lot of the work for you but it's like spellcheckers - now we have spellcheckers we can just throw all that literacy stuff out of the window, yes?! NO! Computers are labour-saving machines, not intelligent. They will blindly follow stupid orders even if you don't know they are stupid yourself. And mathematics and programming don't have as much in common as you think - having a knowledge of one is helpful in the other but expert mathematicians are usually terrible programmers and vice versa.
If you rely on software to do your job, that means we can effectively obsolete your entire industry by just automating the part you do, right? If that sounds stupid, that's what it sounds like when you say you don't need to know maths.
Any civilization is only three meals away from revolution.
Since when has the US cared about the Geneva Convention? There are more than one Geneva Convention, for a start, and the US never ratified two of those. Those it did, it regularly breaches - you have things like Guantanamo Bay which is still operational and where sleight of hand is used to endorse various forms of torture against people because it's unclear if they are prisoners of war or not.
The US has to decide - either it's at war, and thus the prisoners it holds have the rights of prisoners of war (and, come on, just show some god-damn humanity too), or it's not in which case why is it bombing another country including its civilians? And if that country attacks back, surely that's just an act of war too and nothing that can be condemned? Listen carefully - they have a "war on terror" and even that phrasing has been phased out. You can't be "at war" with a concept rather than a particular country. And if you are "at war" with someone then pretty much any act they perform against your military and (if the US is playing the same game) your citizens is fair game.
The US has much, much bigger problems to worry about that a few hackers, and should be disgusted with itself. Land of the free? Only if you're not foreign-looking, only within the bounds of the US borders (so we'll take you to a foreign country where you don't have those rights), only if you can prove you've never done anything wrong despite never being given a trial. Home of the brave? How much courage does it take to beat, torture and humiliate a captured prisoner? The US doesn't care and even claims that things like an American "Internet kill-switch" would be at all useful in an *international* network - sever routes to the US (just in case their "kill switch" means active attacks against peers) and everyone else carries on as normal. All it could/world ever do is censor the US population.
To be honest, if the US military *is* seriously worried about such things as cyber-warfare over the Internet, then they really don't know how to design a military system.
The problem with autonomous vehicles is not what they can do successfully, it's what happens when they fail.
If I don't press my brakes in time to prevent an accident, I risk going to jail for dangerous / careless driving.
If the autonomous van doesn't... well... what? We can take the human "driver" off the road, sure, but that's not fixed the problem. So the second one person has an accident in an autonomous vehicle, you're looking at major liability and lawsuits directed towards the car manufacturer - whether or not it was their fault and whether or not a human driver could have prevented the accident in *any* car. That manufacturer now has to take responsibility for that car versus every idiot on the road, every pedestrian that runs out and everything that can confuse one of its sensors.
Autonomous driving *is* possible and quite easy - but we need autonomous roads to make it work, with nobody but the autonomous vehicles on it. Nobody, nowhere has actually built a real-life one of those on a real road that people would want to use because you have to use their vehicles to do it and you have to (indirectly) pay for that vehicle, that road, and any mistakes those vehicles make. And those roads don't and won't exist for decades if at all - or, more accurately, it's called the rail network. Automated rail networks are commonplace - London has the Dockland's Light Railway that has no drivers.
If you're going to have to build a road that only automated cars can use, and make some cars to use that road, you've effectively built a railway, or else you're putting billions of pounds of effort into avoiding obstacles and keeping to a strict lane when you could just make the thing run along a rail.
Why is there no call for an automated rail network? You can make it as fast as the super-express trains, it's very safe in comparison to any road, on established technology, you know it's not going to veer off the road, you can pack thousands of trains onto the rails if you do it right and take thousands of passengers in each etc. But instead, people honestly think that it's more sensible to put an automated system of even the best technology on an open road with other idiots and do this on a one-person, one-car basis (hence millions of units and billions of pounds) with complete freedom over how it moves the car, among other traffic that will stop it ever doing anything a human couldn't do? It's ridiculous.
Stop wasting your time and build a personalised rail network when I can get into a "pod" or something, enter my destination and it would take me there on good, solid, metal rails and a bit of signalling. And I don't have to worry that it thinks the man walking along the street with a cardboard cutout is actually a small child running in front of the car, or that it doesn't spot a police tape which has been strung across the road to close it because of a pedestrian parade further up the street.
An automated car has to have a human in it. It's the best call ever made on the introduction of a new technology so far. An automated car needs exclusive automated roads to every destination in order to work anywhere near effectively under autonomous control - that's called a railway and any more "transportation routes" being built just for automated cars is a fantasy world in a modern city. Automated cars have been shown to crash WHEN DEMONSTRATING how they were uncrashable. An automated railway already exists and works perfectly and has an excellent safety record. Use it.
You're not.
I am obliged to never take my laptop or data storage devices to the US, ever, because of their failure to provide Data Protection guarantees for the things they contain. It's a work laptop that contains (indirectly) confidential details of school students. Thus this laptop can never enter the US because their search/seizure allows them to arbitrarily copy and interrogate the data with no guarantees of protection or privacy that would satisfy an EU Data Protection Registrar - hell, they can't even definitively state that they'll never copy/transmit the information they seize outside of their official uses.
Thus, if I have to sanitise laptops, USB keys, digital cameras and anything else that I carry that might contain something that my country/employers might regard as confidential, sensitive or even just "personal data", then I can't take any gadgets with me at all, encrypted or not (because there are stupid laws about that in America too). So, it's just easier to say "No thanks" and never travel to the US.
I also allowed an Australian visa to lapse, entirely unused, for similar reasons. Stupid laws and ridiculous restrictions stop business happening in your country and stop people wanting to visit / work / live there. Ironic, given that most terrorists involved in acts against the US have turned out to be domestic citizens.
So apart from the line-of-sight to every household, apart from the potential licensing for such communication (if required which is almost certain if you're aiming terrestrially and with such a point-to-point radio link), apart from the fact that - to be economical as a business - almost every house in a 5km radius would need one, plus several hundred dollars each installation (not including ongoing maintenance and dealing with every git whinging about someone who's erected a tent in the way of their signal) and then the telco has to be provide bandwidth and other services behind it. If it's for more than one household, you're basically looking at tower-erection, planning permission, etc. the same as bringing cell-phone infrastructure to the place (and if you can get cell-phone infrastructure, you should be able to get HSDPA anyway) - a $600 setup fee would probably have a similar monthly cost too, because you *wouldn't* get even a few percent of people in such an area that would be eligible, and only a small percentage of them would actually end up using it and the company would have to recoup such a huge investment AFTER they planned, designed, deployed and tested it. This is why small local community projects set such things up on a shoestring (literally two men with Wifi and a couple of cantennas, as in some rural Scotland deployments), try to expand and ultimately go out of business and/or get no customers even when they are subsidised. It might work (possibly, maybe) for a single link for two experienced people using certain known limitations but bringing it to a general populace in a rural area is much, much more tricky. And if you *can* do it, the quality of service are less and the associated costs are WAY more than anything you can get from a professional setup using other methods (satellite, local DSL, etc.)
The numbers do not add up. Point-to-point microwave links are used all over the place - it saves hassle when coupling buildings that can't have copper / fibre between them, and they are used in rural schemes in places like Scotland between islands. You can even build your own if you're confident with electronics - there are projects everywhere that can get 10km LoS but they are stupidly expensive and unreliable and have much vaster problems than running something through the cable conduits of a major city would (hence they are always perceived as stupidly expensive). They are *prohibitively* expensive not because of the company just stinging people (it tends to be small, local, village startups doing just that service) but because the problems mean it's actually more expensive and less reliable than most of the alternatives and thus the worst of both worlds. Hell, a bit of rain, fog, mist, damp, dust or snow and such things just die, let alone trying to find 5km of open ground for LoS.
If you're willing to cover the capital costs, you can have what you want but you are vastly underestimating the capital costs. Hell, there was a story in the news a few weeks ago that the UK electricity suppliers are quoting one Scottish household £50,000 to be connected to the mains electricity when they are 50m from a road, because the infrastructure isn't in those sorts of places to handle such things, and the costs *per household* are ridiculously high. It's cost per household that matters if you're having to do the work and recoup the money back from household subscribers. Digging up even a small plot of land for installation of something can cost thousands and thousands and if you can't suck that back from a per-household profit (rather than expecting a handful of people to foot the entire bill) then you are wasting your time.
A point-to-point business-level microwave link can cost thousands just to span between two buildings on the same site, and will never be as reliable as fibre or cable. Companies buy them because sometimes there are no alternatives (e.g. someone owns the intervening land and won't authorised cables of any kind, they are near power lines that interfere with or
Even better - go to any non-UK European country and watch as you can drive top-speed through 7 or 8 international borders and not even realise until your mobile phone says "Welcome to Germany!" or whatever.
It's only the UK that has stupid enough politicians that we just blindly follow what the US says: wars, terrorism, whatever. We've been dealing with bombings and terrorists for decades before 9/11, from nearly blowing up a hotel with the prime minister in it, to downing a plane over Scotland, to putting dozens and dozens of bombs every year in London's city centre, but the second that the US imposes rules, we are required to follow suit for no other reason than the "special relationship" (i.e. you hold the key to all our military and will switch us off if we don't comply). I watched the UK news immediately after 9/11 and they showed our airport security experts for Heathrow / Gatwick, who were telling how the month before they'd been to the US on a consultation exercise where they queried how little air security they had compared to us at the time... apparently the response from the US was "You guys worry too much"...
The US is a bully. They tell us what to do or we wouldn't be in the Middle East, either. Unfortunately, there is some reason somewhere that stops us from saying no to them (probably money related). If you've ever seen the film Love Actually while sitting next to a Brit, watch their reaction to when Hugh Grant tells the American president, in the politest possible terms, that he's an arsehole for taking what he wants from the UK and giving back only more "you will do this" orders. They *will* do the fist-in-the-air "YES!" thing. Sometimes fiction is scarily close to reality, and there are millions of Brits that, every time they see a new prime minister, just wish they could have the dancing idiot portrayed in that movie just for that one action alone.
Because running 5km of fibre for you (and 5km of fibre for the other people on your exchange which is presumably in the best location they could afford to put it, so we're talking everyone in a 5km *RADIUS* of the exchange, which means 20-30km + of cabling at least in some sort of web or star configuration) and a handful of people is a extreme loss. It would have to be fibre - we have nothing else that can really go that distance - and it would probably need repeaters for that length.
So they run the cable, dig up, say 20km of road / install 20km of poles / repeaters/ shielding, etc. just to get a fibre into a box somewhere nearer to you in order to do DSL or whatever they need (you to a nearby exchange doesn't matter, because there's no end of cheap, easily available hardware and wiring that can already be used to get you connected to that fibre). If you live in a rural area, say that connects 20,000 or 30,000 people. How much do you think that's actually going to bring in each year versus their outlay, repairs, upgrades, etc? It wouldn't cover the interest on a loan of the amount required to do the work in the first place (so they are theoretically better off by just leaving that money in a bank account, earning interest instead of costing it).
It's not a question of technologies - 5km is a huge distance - over radio for more than a handful of people at the bandwidth you're wanting is ludicrously difficult (and just fills the airwaves for even more miles around, making it harder to do more) or you'd have amateur radio networks doing it all the time at those speeds. Plus, you'd never get a license for it. Over cable, that's a huge amount of digging, burying, pole-installing, raising, repairing, planning, obtaining permission, and an awful expense in copper too (people are stealing copper cables over here for things like that because of its scrap value). Over fibre, you have all the same problems but only get no theft value, almost-infinite upgradability, conversion costs and extreme fragility as differences.
It's mostly quite sensible business reasons - it's ridiculous to expect a company to make a loss unless it's forced to (like some British ISP's are in order to fulfill their telecoms license obligations). That's a governmental problem - to force them. If they *are* forced to, they can't give you the same as everyone else because the technologies don't cover the same distance, and your maintenance / installation costs are ridiculously higher so you'll get slower / more expensive broadband. They won't get any fans by doing it, they'll just get people moaning that it's not as reliable / fast as other people's inner-city service again. Years ago, 56k was the standard, if you didn't have that, you were "deprived". Now it's 2Mb. By the time an installation is settled, it'll be 4Mb or 8Mb or whatever. They wouldn't recoup any money on their investment before they were digging it up again to replace everything.
Don't blame your ISP, or the scientists for not giving you the technology (that amount of combined bandwidth over that wide an area is all but impossible), blame your government for not subsidising what is now seen as an "essential" service. Get it classed as a utility, then it's in the same category as not having running water, or sewerage, or electricity. Until then, there is NO business case to ever do it. Without a business case, no business will do it, and no bank will fund them to do it, and no business that ever does it would ever be shown gratitude. When the government starts subsidising or enforcing it, then you'll have the service they lay down, and probably no more, and it'll be a cost burden on every other ISP user in the country.
It's like demanding that you get access to the city center by vehicle in the same time and same cost that a city-dweller can. Yeah, it can probably be done, but there's zero business case for it at all (in fact, there's almost infinitely more business case for you to get to the city centre in five minutes than for you to get br
Downstream is easy if you consider only a single path with no switching, movement, conversion, routing, etc. Upstream isn't the problem either, really.
Telecoms networks that have to splice emergency calls between your torrent packets are the problem. Real-time phone data is truly real-time and has to have an enormously low latency despite going over the same network as your ADSL data. The more "real" phones, the less available for your un-important IP packets by a big margin. Then you have to join several million people's connections together, route them and deal with them all seperately, rather than just transmit only a single message. Then you have to have equipment in exchanges to handle all these conversions because people want it to come over a copper wire (or fibre) most of the time and that needs special equipment at the consumer and exchange ends. Then you have to squeeze it into a copper cable that comes into your premises and has almost no security - shielding might be damaged, your extension wiring might be shit (for telephone-based ADSL), the cable might go through a garden or under a fence, etc. and then the router the user buys is completely up to them so it has to be standardised to the lowest common denominator. It has to deal with all that and give you a stable signal with milliseconds of latency or you'd moan like shit.
Compare to a pure fibre-based ISP who have to run a fibre to every house, hope it doesn't get damaged, install custom equipment in the customer's house, a cabinet in every street, a backbone between them all that can take their combined traffic, hope they don't tug the cable too much, and then you have a true "network" of digital fibre connections. Fibre carriers are offering 100MBps or more even now, and they've said there's pretty much no upper limit (10Gb/s Ethernet and many WAN or MAN connections can use the same grades of fibre in most cases, over the same sorts of distances). Their only problem is the switching hardware and having that amount of customers on that high a bandwidth connected to the Internet. It's easy for me to join my neighbour with Gigabit fibre. It's a different matter to connect either one of our houses to the general Internet at that sort of speed, even if you could string a fibre into the datacentre next door. Have you seen the prices of dedicated 100MBps Ethernet connections in your local data centre (and not the ones that share connections or have ridiculously low guaranteed bandwidth)? You'd need one or more of them (or the equivalent) PER customer.
And then that company has to make a profit, abide by telecoms rules, use standardised hardware, manage all repairs and breakages and deal with you.
Broadband isn't, and never has been, limited by the technology. The school I'm in runs two full 24MBps bog-standard consumer DSL lines. It gets 24MBps sync on both lines and works perfectly. Has done for years. The problem is convincing the ISP at the other end that that should get me 24Mbps of direct Internet-connection to their main backbone and to all their peers without any restrictions whatsoever. It's a business problem, in that you can't just give EVERYONE several hundred Megs of connection immediately a new technology comes out, because the backbone and routing peers cost a shit-load of money. Otherwise, Google would be running off a room full of ADSL modems instead of their guaranteed multiple-fibre, super-high-speed, Internet backbone fibres with huge peers passing equal amounts of traffic over transatlantic lines and ENORMOUS cost.
You're not just paying your ISP to stick you on their local net. You're paying them to (indirectly) rent a cable that goes under the sea to every country in the world.
Nobody said 56k was the limit over *copper*. That was *always* not true because 10Base2 has used copper cable for decades and got a lot more than that, and many other technologies before it. Copper networking faster than 56k predates 56k by decades.
56k is the limit if you use *only* an audible signal over the voice channels of an ordinary copper telephone line. Due to timeslicing, and analogue routing and other things (which is why you could still "dial" a number by pipping down the phone just right like the old pulse-dial telephones), your conversations never got the full capabilities of that bit of copper coming into your phone. Try it. You can't get more than about 14.4 or 28.8 over those audio channels without having special tricks on both ends and even when you DO (56k was basically special expensive hardware on the ISP end that could tap into slightly more of the telecoms network and do timeslicing and other tricks to send slightly more down the audio channels to a customer, and only worked one-way - them to you, because you weren't allowed the special access to the telecoms network that they had - which is why uploads were always only 28.8 or something even on 56k modems). So even 56k is a myth with ordinary modems - if you dial one consumer modem from another over the cleanest, shortest bit of copper in the world, you'll only ever get 28.8.
Even today, over a standard voice channel of an analogue telephone line, you can't get more than about 28.8 up and 56 down. This is why things like ADSL with its splitters were invented - they separate out the analogue audio using capacitors and the exchange has to be ADSL enabled, because it receives everything and then splits it into two signals - old-fashioned analogue, time-spliced as always, only on limited frequencies, and the entire audio signal pushed over the telecoms network in real time and still only gets 56k, and ADSL operating on higher frequencies on your same cable, converted to a digital signal at the exchange and then fed digitally into the telecoms network as "packets" that arrive at your ISP.
Old modems communicate directly with another modem - either at your ISP, BBS or whatever you were dialling - the connection is across thousands of miles of repeated, amplified, etc. copper. If they get digitised, they have be to "analogued" back when they hit the other end or your phone wouldn't be able to hear it - that conversion strips out anything that's not audible. ADSL etc. only communicate analogue data over copper to the local cabinet / exchange which then relays packets to a nationwide digital telecoms network (usually all fibre) and it arrives as IP packets to the ISP (or thereabouts). The DSL data arrives as digital data, the modem data arrives as analogue audio, over the audio channels, and has to be "demodulated" (the "dem" of modem) to digital data by the destination (e.g. you or your ISP), not the telecoms firm itself.
ADSL isn't audible on a phone line (except through harmonics of it's many-MHz signal). ADSL doesn't get transmitted to the number you dial (that's why you DON'T have to dial your ISP any more) but to the local exchange which then relays the data digitally, independent of your phone call. That's why you can phone AND browse nowadays. ADSL operates over the same copper but much less distance over different frequencies. ADSL data is "filtered" from all phone lines and the original signal never goes over the telecoms networks - it's digitised and then follows a completely separate path once it hits the street cabinet / exchange. ADSL cannot be used with a foreign ISP because the ADSL data isn't transmitted with the phone call, it stays in the private telecoms network.
Modems are audible on a phone line (they can only work when the remote side could hear the same sounds in a normal phone conversation). Modems transmit to the number you dial, and directly to them using data encoded into audible sounds over the analogue audio channels (even if some of those are now digital too, it's still only wh
Whichever way you look at it - diluting and tarring a brand name as large as Java is an incredibly stupid business move, even if you don't intend to use it directly yourself with something that large (millions of deployed devices, my dad knows what Java is and that he "needs" it on his PC, everything from mobile phones to Blu-Ray).
It's good business to cut off loose ends. It's bad business to chop off a foot that's perfectly healthy. Java licensing rights alone could make millions just from the name. It's a stupid business that decides, with its actions, to mar the reputation of a worldwide brand just because they bought it and don't want to make use of it. You spin it off into a separate entity and reap "free money" with no effort rather than just stamp on it until it dies and everyone involved has to find an alternative that you're not supplying either.
Actually, I saw it the other way round and I *have* read their patents and their claims. They don't hold water. One of them is an immediate "What the hell is that doing in this file?" kind of mistake, it's just not even close to being applicable or enforceable in a court. The rest of the claims are dubious at best, but you can never be sure in a legal climate.
Oracle are just trying their luck. They are hoping for an easy settlement which, in this modern world, isn't a difficult thing to get. This is why everyone cross-licenses everything from each other - because it saves the hassle of working out what's actually enforceable. A million spent on ensuring your business is safe is better than 10 million on trying to prove it had nothing to fear (as disgusting as that is from a personal point of view). Unfortunately, Google decided to go public, they decided to fight, and their first legal filings call for an almost complete dismissal. That's not something you do lightly because the courts can get incredibly pissed if you just "try" that.
Google hasn't got a case? Highly doubtful. I'd put it at about 95:5 in favour of Google. There's legal error, deficient filings, and complete nonsense on Oracle's side and yet Google has few cracks. That tells you a lot before you even begin to look at the precise facts of the case.
Your mental health is worth more than your paycheck.
Your self-respect is worth more than your paycheck. (but a lot of people don't have any of that)
Fleeing a sinking ship to find an island of sanity is also worth more than your paycheck.
Been there, done it, got the T-shirt. Talking to the people left behind is both devastating and relieving in one space - you don't want to be where they are, and you're glad it's not you there.
I turned down one job with a boss I had who was making some *wonderful* promises, in a place I'd enjoyed working, to go and work somewhere else. I saw the water start to come in months earlier and had a definite job offer on the table by the time even a hint of it was picked up on by anyone else (except my immediate boss who knew it was coming but, in her words, she was "old enough, and experienced enough, to know how it works and see it through to retirement" - she recognised that some of us had to flee, though, and that we were worried about her prospects). Then there was a bidding war between the old and new employers once they found out I had a superior job offer and before you know it, the promises got larger and larger and, yes, they were willing to give me more money. I could have stayed.
I still left, and was all but called a fool by the person in charge. My immediate boss knew better and congratulated me, and four years later, I'm about 8 payrises, 2 promotions and lots of happiness above where I was originally, and all of those were way above anything promised at the previous place, while the people at my old place were told to employ 16-year-olds (for barely minimum wage) and to train them to run the place as replacements before a planned merger tried to wipe out the entire existing IT department with the other places' IT staff (of course, the kids would get "promotions" to something that was a lot less than the experienced, highly-paid staff that they replaced were on).
Fortunately, my old immediate boss had been preparing for months and blew all their IT statistics and performance out of the water with the stuff she built, even with no real staff, only poorly trained kids, and managed to show up no end of trained professionals, consultants and other "skilled" people. She ruined any chances for herself and is still clinging on to her retirement eligibility but damn she did well and showed them up (they had to ask her how she managed to beat their own IT guys when they were actively trying to destroy her department because she managed to wipe the floor with them! The best quote ever to hear is "Because we know our jobs"). Meanwhile, outside that environment, those who fled were immediately bathed in better money, conditions, job prospects, happiness etc. elsewhere.
I can't feel regret for her not coming with us - she saw it coming, she chose to stay and brave it through, and she kicked their asses. And I *know* that if she hadn't been a year or two from retirement there's no way she would have stayed for a second - she was staying to cause trouble and get what she was entitled to, and make them pay out on her final salary pension, and she got it. A decade earlier, she'd have been leading the charge.
But seeing the stuff she was subjected to? No thanks, I don't want to be in the middle of that for any amount of money. I very nearly did it just for friends, but not for the money. If I can't vent my frustration at the days' work within five minutes of arriving home and then get on with my home life, there's something wrong that no amount of money can fix.
Your blood pressure isn't worth it. Don't be a doormat for the sake of cash because then you'll always be a doormat, for increasingly less cash in relative terms to what you COULD have got elsewhere without being a doormat.
Easy. Don't test. Then when everyone comes crying that you haven't submitted your tests, won't sign off on the code, etc. ask them to demonstrate how to test >4Gb sets on a 4Gb machine without spending several MONTHS waiting for the thing to do it because of swapping (if it can do that at all).
Stuff buying an old server to do it on, that's called idiocy. You're being paid to do a job, you can't do that job because of inadequate resources, the answer is not to go and find those resources yourselves because in a year's time you'll be buying your own paper and ink for the same reasons. Maybe this is how Oracle keeps its margins, eh? Having its own staff buy their own equipment to do their own job?
No amount of chairs will let you load an 4Gb dataset, but if they are authorised, get them. Personally, I'd then have no end of fancy chairs in my office and when my boss can't get into the room because of all the chairs, I'll just say "Oh, well, this is 100 times the equivalent price of the test server I needed to do my job. Apparently I can get all of *that* authorised but not something that'll actually result in a product. I thought I'd sell them off to your bosses to raise funds, I'm sure they'd love to know what their money's being spent on."
Make a fuss if it's that important to your job, and I guarantee they'll find you a way to do it. Don't let other people's stupidity / arrogance / power-games ("Oh, no, sorry, *you're* not approved to have *that* piece of equipment") / etc. get in the way of you doing your job in the most sensible way.