It was fun while it lasted, but the inevitable is creeping closer.
Check out opencores.org. Since modern OSes and Apps aren't really CPU-bound for general CPU tasks, it's feasible to think about a mass move away from them to slower, but fully configurable, open core CPUs.
At part of Computer Science study at CMU, you build a basic CPU using Verilog to program a Xilinx FPGA (or did about 5 years ago). It wasn't too hard, and it was pretty fun and inspiring to know you controlled the whole stack down to the physics of gates:)
Now, FPGAs are nowhere near VLSI chips in their combined gate-count and speed, but I bet it doesn't matter. Plus, FPGAs open up a whole new way of thinking about hardware.. check out MIT's Oxygen computing effort.
Take the Apple/Intel thing with a grain of salt. In the long term, they're in a relative position of weakness if they choose to abuse the market with fascist chip politics.
What particularly was invalid about their protest? Or did you not read the article enough to know in your race to make a knee-jerk "stoopid tree-hugger s" comment?
The substance in question modifies the surface propoerties of the individual fibers of a fabric. Is that substance water or fat soluble? If so does it irritate skin? Does it fit into sweat pores? Does it trigger alergic reactions/in what populations?
Wired wasn't given an interview by the material manufacturer, so we can't know.
Since their properties border on chemical-scale effects, what kind of tests should be applied to nanotech materials?
Yeah, I've tested with a DVB over ASI card on RCN and have called TW & Cablevision and been told I need their cable box or a cable-card-ready TV to receive even local channels in digital. They get around the federal requirement to send local channels unencrypted by sending those via analog, but that means you can't route them. Maybe they'll change and go all-digital with local unencrytped, but I sort of doubt it.
At least here in the NYC metro area, no cable provider offers unencrypted digital TV. The relevant standard is DVB over ASI, except they all wrap it in DVB-CA, "CA" for "conditional access". The condition is that you use their box, on their terms, which if you read your service agreement says can change at any time without notice. We'll have our DTV real soon now, but wait 'till you see how fair-use looks;)
"A 4TB starter IntelliStore costs around $75,000 (£42,000) with each additional terabyte costing $9,000 (£5,000) A set of additional compliance functions adds $15,000 to the cost (£8,400)."
Better:
- Storage: SuperMicro 15-bay disk array with 2 RAID-core controllers (2 RAIDs), SCSI-attached, for a total raw space of 12 disks (-1 for each RAID, -1 for OS). 2 fast processors and a bunch of RAM. Mount all data under/mnt filesystem. Size: 12*400GB=4.8TB Approximate cost: $5-10K depending on disks, processors and RAM.
- File-server: mathopd static web-server pointing at/mnt filesystem. 10-20k transactions per second for small files. Fast transfer of large files.
- Database: Nutch open-source search engine capable of indexing 40M pages per 1GB/RAM. Like the article says "millions of objects" now, "billions in the future". Point nutch at mathopd and watch your "content-based" storage come online. You can even get an RSS feed of newly added items.
Now, a web search engine isn't a database, at least not off the shelf. But with this configuration you can afford a l33t programmer for half a year and still come in under the price of the StorageTek solution. Plus, once you've customized it, your capacity upgrades are much cheaper. And I bet it's faster. Dunno though, I bet you can't evaluate most of the relevant system parts from StorageTek before you make a buy decision (unlike the system above).;)
The *required* cost of using Linux in the workplace is, of course, $0. Just hire people who've been using it for years and you don't have this big scary learning curve. They, like any other long-term OS user, knows how to manage the version stream and keep focused at the same time. Except with Linux, there's no other costs. It's free.
The way it actually gets to cost something is driven by a market. The question isn't how much free Linux costs. The question is how much Windoze-imitation Linux costs. Companies who are accustomed to shelling out big bucks for Windoze will shell out just a bit less for anything else that does the job and call it a win.
So of course, for many things, Linux does the job.
And then there's RedHat to charge just a bit less.
That's all it takes to bring Linux TCO up to Windows range. I've seen it happen, with my very own eyes. I've even seen a company pay *more* for Linux than Windoze.. *and be happy with it* because Linux is higher performance for many server applications.
"Unbelievable!" I thought. But it's the market and the expectations that set it up.
No matter that you can d/l and install Fedora to do just the same job in less the time than it takes to call a RH consultant to get even a quote. You just shout "Risk! Risk! Risk!" enough and you get your IT department a fat budget and get to wear a Linux T-Shirt.
It's like saying A bird in hand is better than two in the bush. "Sure we could all become Linux experts, but maybe we'd fail!"
Businesses understand and practice outsourcing intelligence all the time. That's their bird in hand.
It's been nice, but little citicard, it's time you and I part ways. You look really nice and shiny, but your parent company is showing major evidence of greed and stupidity. I know it sounds terrible, but if I don't cut you up, your number will be used and abused and it'll be up to me to sort it out.
I couldn't have written a funnier spoof of a supposed futuristic inverted-apocalyptic Sim-City-newspaper-headline if I were the cryogenetically reincarnated ghost of H.L. Mencken.
But let's call his bluff. Instead of reacting in strange embarassment to the fact that we've got bad ambulance-chaser IT consultants so down on their luck that they have to flame-bait/. en masse for any hope of a full inbox in the morning, let's all rest our hands on our Yoda walking sticks and reflect for a moment that a warning against power from any quarter is always a good occasion to kick back and sip a brew and contemplate the finer world we might make with a smile and guiding hand towards our technology-inept brethren in their fledling attempts to suck the lifeblood out of The Next Good Thing because they've long ago drained their own marrow dry.
(Though it is tempting to imagine abusing my newfound welt-ruling power just a bit to trade my boss's Project Plan in for my own cron-driven workplace tyranny. Just for a day at least... or better yet until he learns cron syntax.)
Another reason it's of utmost importance is that making a couple of copies for you and your friends is either fair use, or near enough to keep it safe from litigation in 99% of the cases. While Sony can sue the pants off of large-scale pirates, it can't do anything in the courts to deter fair use.
So, it'll cripple its products. Note to self, keep not buying Sony stuff.
You knew it would happen.. a defining moment in the lovely voyage towards the ultra-security state. Will Laura Bush lead the way, stepping through one of these do-hickeys and invite the press to paste a copy of her boobs (or more?) on every front-page, to lead the flock to eternal security?
And if she does, after the flock stops to gawk, will it follow?
How many wanna-be Laura Bush housewives will give up their modesty (or the secret of their corset or their boost bra) to maintain support for their chosen leader?
I suspect very few. But if not, I could imagine worse dystopic futures;)
"My point is, the business you are defending is the distribution busness, the record labels, TV netowrks and syndicators, and movie distribution houses."
I'm not defending their business wholesale, I'm defending their expectation to come to a fair market. I don't give a h00t about their business model. If they have a broken business model, a fair market is the best hope of replacing it with a better alternative. You are basically arguing that "piracy" isn't stealing... because they didn't make what they're selling? So if I walk into a Wal-Mart and take something out without paying, it's not stealing because Wal-Mart didn't make it? hahahahahahahahahah.
You know, you're right. I don't like the visceral experience of going to a Wal-Mart to shop. Therefore, I'm going to go to the shipping docks, where all the actual goods are (that Wal-Mart bought from the actual producers), and take them directly from there, without even asking the original producers what they think about that.
And the biggest problem in this analogy is that the Wal-Mart shopping experience isn't enjoyable... not me stealing goods from the shipping docks, you know, like the mob does.
Awesome.
It's really not surprising that this kind of action puts the media distribution companies on the defensive. "We're gonna steal your stuff until you give it to us for free. And you should thank us for our words of wisdom."
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome.
All of their strategic stupidity pales in comparison to an argument like this. This kind of behaviour manages to put huge, grotesque art exploitation business in the right. All of us get to watch a war over expensive protected movies instead of giving our time and attention to making better, legit alternatives. w00t.
BTW, if you could even begin to churn through all the free movies, music and texts available on the internet, your argument would have a lot more weight. But since we live in an age of amazing free media, it sounds like a fat man complaining he hasn't had enough to eat.
We may disagree where the boundary between stealing and sharing is, but I think when it comes to major media, that cost many hundreds of people many years to create, you can share it on a small scale with a couple of people, but, for example, posting a torrent of Return of the Sith the day it hits movie theaters, stealing is, as Yoda would say.
If you don't like the price of a movie, don't pay it, but also.. don't steal it. There's people who make that stuff for their living. They spend lots of time and energy on it in the expectation that many people will be interested in buying a copy for personal use. It doesn't matter if you think that's a valid profession, or morally correct. it's their business. Their life. And if they wouldn't sell you the copy if they knew you were going to turn around and give it away for free to everyone you could, on a massive basis, on the world-wide internet, that means that if you do, you're lying and stealing and violating their trust.
Sharing can't happen without trust.
Now, if you give it to a friend, and that friend gives it to a friend, etc. etc. and it remains low-level, then it doesn't matter what they think. It's none of their business what you do with it as long as it's basically private to you and your friends and family.
Now maybe you disagree with the particular place I've drawn that line. You may see the line at a slightly different place in the sand. Or think it's blurry. Or gray, or not so gray. That's a whole other argument.
But I think we would all benefit us all to identify a community-determined middle area where we tread softly, and broad side areas where we firmly plant our feet. I think we should all preserve and protect the practice of small-scale sharing of everything in the world, even in the face of pressure against this by The Man. I also think we should all preserve and protect the expectation of honesty in a market transaction, even in the face of painful desire for the latest and greatest popular piece of culture.
I'm asking myself exactly the same question.. what's the likely price per unit.. because the bigger question is Is this the new price leader for large-scale storage? Currently, disk is about $0.40/GB ($80 for a 200GB disk) and tape is $0.25/GB ($50 for a 200GB LTO2 tape). While these will definitely fall by the time these disks come out, they probably can't come close to 6 or 4 cents per gig.
Plus, though tapes are pretty cost effective on a per gig basis, the actual machines for accessing them are tres expensivo. Look at the ADIC Scalar series. A Scalar 24 costs about 10k. Now consider that a 400 CD changer goes for ~$200 at Amazon... That's currently in a different market segment, but for how long? Even when the CD changer makers decide to price gauge the data consumer, they won't be able to go too far without being outcompeted from below.
That means the ETA to a, let's say $50k petabyte system, is a couple of years.
E.g. let's say the Blue-Rays get up to 200GB each at a price point of $10 each (conservative). That's 5000 discs for 1PB and so $50k, which is much better than the alternative medias by a factor of between 2 (tape) and 5-20 (offline and online disk). But more importantly, it will take only 10 cheap disk changers to access all 5000 disks needed.
The one big gotcha here is that the discs are write-once, read-many. But for certain applications, e.g. video, this is ideal. And it just so happens that folks like Microsoft's Chief Researcher, Jim Gray, think that video is what we'll fill this next generation of capacity with.
I include page lint/verifcation tags (instead of just links to the specs) in my standard page footer across a number of sites I run. This lets me easily check to see if my XHTML and CSS2 is compliant as I browse along. Which isn't to say my pages are perfect, but that I consider it an important and complimentary part of a web browsing experience.
We shouldn't just build a web to be used, but one to be extended... that means show others how we do it so they can join in.
Neat idea.. perhaps there should be a Tor-Over-Steganography platform, to prevent the identification of Tor usage or some other method of information hiding. Otherwise, a regime can just shut down Tor(-ish) traffic.
I guess the best way to get your message through the iron (red?) curtain is to piggy-back it on whatever the highest-volume public information stream is. That way the baddies would have to shut down all of that traffic and risk a large public pushback.
In the case of China, I hate to say it, but if it's true that a lot of spam is outbound from their country, that would be an ideal place to hide information. Lots of spam has randomly generated text, so altering the frequency of that text in a fashion known only to sender and receiver could be used to encode an information channel, over which you could run a simple unicast stream, or something more decentralized, like TOR.
I can't stand it when people make agreements between each other that aren't exactly as specified by one of The Holy Documents Of The Universal Community of Right-Minded Believers (i.e. Sanctus Codex Catholic Orthodox).
But, if they're going to write new licenses, can they at least write them in English, or at least in something with a Latin alphabet.
Now that's a monopoly you can be proud of!
on
Dutch Pass iPod Tax
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· Score: 1
What kind of monopoly would the professional content industry be if it didn't extract a tax from consumers for work it didn't do? A poor one. A poor one indeed.
This Stichting Thuiskopie Foundation has already succeeded at taxing DVDs and CDs, showing its excellent capability to immitate its ilk in the US. But this, this tax.. it's awesome! $4.30 per gigabyte! That's 10 times the price of the raw disk!
Can you imagine disk-makers like Hitatchi and Seagate looking on and watching these old-school hitmen come in and feast on their kill? I'm sure they're a bit angry, but probably a good deal more envious.
A tax this creative, of this size.. ahh. My hat is off. This takes a lot of balls. And more importantly, a lot of politicians in their pockets.
Congrats to Stitching Thustoopid on their coming out event. Let the good times roll boys! Pass the cigars around!
That dude was about as censored as this posting is.
WAL-FART SUXORS.
Ok, now, when I get a nasty letter from a Wal-Smart lawyer saying I Suxors.. that's not censorship.
There are only two agents capable of censoring him: his government and himself. But not his retailer.
The lawyer is merely spewing vitriol.. suprise, surprise, that's what lawyers make a living at.
But this art student.. he actually managed to censor himself here.
He should have just posted the threat, and left a big message like:
"Wal-Wart is sooo stoopid they threatened legal action. But they know they've got a chance in hell... hence this message."
See, now that would have been classy. But instead, he's just a poster-child for the weak and self-defeating. Which is still cooler than being a poster-child for an aggressive faceless monopoly like the loser lawyer who got off on writing that letter up. But still.
What can I say? This Bush guy.. he seems to have a real knack for falling on the right side of the fight between the rich and powerful and the meager and loose-knit.
Thank goodness we have a few more years of him.
If I were forced to live in an America where our political leaders made conscientious choices not in the gratuitous interest of stuipdly rich, avaricious plutocrats.. well, I don't think I could toe their party line any more.
The only political cause I can really pledge my portfolio to these days is bare-knuckled monopoly.. anything else, and the competition is just too great to ensure rising profits. And it's rising profits that keeps me sipping G&Ts at the club all week long. Can't argue with success!
I always ask people to turn their WEP keys off anyways.. nothing like creating scarcity out of the plenty of wi-fi networks out there.
Look, your computer ought to be secure at the TCP/IP level. If you're depending on WEP link security, you're probably hosed anyways. And you'll almost surely be hacked by the teeming swarms of infected computers on the net long before you get trouble from a neighbor, a drive-by script kiddie, or now the FBI. Unless you're a paranoid freak and you're sure they're really out to get you. The roving script-kiddies that is.
Worried about bandwidth? If you and your neighbors cooperated instead of hording bandwidth from each other, you'd have more to go around. Heck, you could multi-home your laptop and get multiplexed bandwidth. That's more, not less.
Now turn off those keys and rename your home wi-fi network "public"!
Slashdot Mirror
It was fun while it lasted, but the inevitable is creeping closer.
:)
Check out opencores.org. Since modern OSes and Apps aren't really CPU-bound for general CPU tasks, it's feasible to think about a mass move away from them to slower, but fully configurable, open core CPUs.
At part of Computer Science study at CMU, you build a basic CPU using Verilog to program a Xilinx FPGA (or did about 5 years ago). It wasn't too hard, and it was pretty fun and inspiring to know you controlled the whole stack down to the physics of gates
Now, FPGAs are nowhere near VLSI chips in their combined gate-count and speed, but I bet it doesn't matter. Plus, FPGAs open up a whole new way of thinking about hardware.. check out MIT's Oxygen computing effort.
Take the Apple/Intel thing with a grain of salt. In the long term, they're in a relative position of weakness if they choose to abuse the market with fascist chip politics.
What particularly was invalid about their protest? Or did you not read the article enough to know in your race to make a knee-jerk "stoopid tree-hugger s" comment?
:)
The substance in question modifies the surface propoerties of the individual fibers of a fabric. Is that substance water or fat soluble? If so does it irritate skin? Does it fit into sweat pores? Does it trigger alergic reactions/in what populations?
Wired wasn't given an interview by the material manufacturer, so we can't know.
Since their properties border on chemical-scale effects, what kind of tests should be applied to nanotech materials?
That's my knee-jerk response
Yeah, I've tested with a DVB over ASI card on RCN and have called TW & Cablevision and been told I need their cable box or a cable-card-ready TV to receive even local channels in digital. They get around the federal requirement to send local channels unencrypted by sending those via analog, but that means you can't route them. Maybe they'll change and go all-digital with local unencrytped, but I sort of doubt it.
At least here in the NYC metro area, no cable provider offers unencrypted digital TV. The relevant standard is DVB over ASI, except they all wrap it in DVB-CA, "CA" for "conditional access". The condition is that you use their box, on their terms, which if you read your service agreement says can change at any time without notice. We'll have our DTV real soon now, but wait 'till you see how fair-use looks ;)
"A 4TB starter IntelliStore costs around $75,000 (£42,000) with each additional terabyte costing $9,000 (£5,000) A set of additional compliance functions adds $15,000 to the cost (£8,400)."
/mnt filesystem.
/mnt filesystem. 10-20k transactions per second for small files. Fast transfer of large files.
;)
Better:
- Storage: SuperMicro 15-bay disk array with 2 RAID-core controllers (2 RAIDs), SCSI-attached, for a total raw space of 12 disks (-1 for each RAID, -1 for OS). 2 fast processors and a bunch of RAM. Mount all data under
Size: 12*400GB=4.8TB
Approximate cost: $5-10K depending on disks, processors and RAM.
- File-server: mathopd static web-server pointing at
- Database: Nutch open-source search engine capable of indexing 40M pages per 1GB/RAM. Like the article says "millions of objects" now, "billions in the future". Point nutch at mathopd and watch your "content-based" storage come online. You can even get an RSS feed of newly added items.
- Offline: Dell PowerVault 8 tape changer, SCSI attached + mtx for automatic tape changing. + 5k
Now, a web search engine isn't a database, at least not off the shelf. But with this configuration you can afford a l33t programmer for half a year and still come in under the price of the StorageTek solution. Plus, once you've customized it, your capacity upgrades are much cheaper. And I bet it's faster. Dunno though, I bet you can't evaluate most of the relevant system parts from StorageTek before you make a buy decision (unlike the system above).
The *required* cost of using Linux in the workplace is, of course, $0. Just hire people who've been using it for years and you don't have this big scary learning curve. They, like any other long-term OS user, knows how to manage the version stream and keep focused at the same time. Except with Linux, there's no other costs. It's free.
The way it actually gets to cost something is driven by a market. The question isn't how much free Linux costs. The question is how much Windoze-imitation Linux costs. Companies who are accustomed to shelling out big bucks for Windoze will shell out just a bit less for anything else that does the job and call it a win.
So of course, for many things, Linux does the job.
And then there's RedHat to charge just a bit less.
That's all it takes to bring Linux TCO up to Windows range. I've seen it happen, with my very own eyes. I've even seen a company pay *more* for Linux than Windoze.. *and be happy with it* because Linux is higher performance for many server applications.
"Unbelievable!" I thought. But it's the market and the expectations that set it up.
No matter that you can d/l and install Fedora to do just the same job in less the time than it takes to call a RH consultant to get even a quote. You just shout "Risk! Risk! Risk!" enough and you get your IT department a fat budget and get to wear a Linux T-Shirt.
It's like saying A bird in hand is better than two in the bush. "Sure we could all become Linux experts, but maybe we'd fail!"
Businesses understand and practice outsourcing intelligence all the time. That's their bird in hand.
It's been nice, but little citicard, it's time you and I part ways. You look really nice and shiny, but your parent company is showing major evidence of greed and stupidity. I know it sounds terrible, but if I don't cut you up, your number will be used and abused and it'll be up to me to sort it out.
Goodbye sweet plastic.
I couldn't have written a funnier spoof of a supposed futuristic inverted-apocalyptic Sim-City-newspaper-headline if I were the cryogenetically reincarnated ghost of H.L. Mencken.
But let's call his bluff. Instead of reacting in strange embarassment to the fact that we've got bad ambulance-chaser IT consultants so down on their luck that they have to flame-bait /. en masse for any hope of a full inbox in the morning, let's all rest our hands on our Yoda walking sticks and reflect for a moment that a warning against power from any quarter is always a good occasion to kick back and sip a brew and contemplate the finer world we might make with a smile and guiding hand towards our technology-inept brethren in their fledling attempts to suck the lifeblood out of The Next Good Thing because they've long ago drained their own marrow dry.
(Though it is tempting to imagine abusing my newfound welt-ruling power just a bit to trade my boss's Project Plan in for my own cron-driven workplace tyranny. Just for a day at least... or better yet until he learns cron syntax.)
Another reason it's of utmost importance is that making a couple of copies for you and your friends is either fair use, or near enough to keep it safe from litigation in 99% of the cases. While Sony can sue the pants off of large-scale pirates, it can't do anything in the courts to deter fair use.
So, it'll cripple its products. Note to self, keep not buying Sony stuff.
http://www.universalhd.com/Series/index.shtml#BATT LESTAR_GALACTICA
You knew it would happen.. a defining moment in the lovely voyage towards the ultra-security state. Will Laura Bush lead the way, stepping through one of these do-hickeys and invite the press to paste a copy of her boobs (or more?) on every front-page, to lead the flock to eternal security?
;)
And if she does, after the flock stops to gawk, will it follow?
How many wanna-be Laura Bush housewives will give up their modesty (or the secret of their corset or their boost bra) to maintain support for their chosen leader?
I suspect very few. But if not, I could imagine worse dystopic futures
"My point is, the business you are defending is the distribution busness, the record labels, TV netowrks and syndicators, and movie distribution houses."
I'm not defending their business wholesale, I'm defending their expectation to come to a fair market. I don't give a h00t about their business model. If they have a broken business model, a fair market is the best hope of replacing it with a better alternative. You are basically arguing that "piracy" isn't stealing... because they didn't make what they're selling? So if I walk into a Wal-Mart and take something out without paying, it's not stealing because Wal-Mart didn't make it? hahahahahahahahahah.
You know, you're right. I don't like the visceral experience of going to a Wal-Mart to shop. Therefore, I'm going to go to the shipping docks, where all the actual goods are (that Wal-Mart bought from the actual producers), and take them directly from there, without even asking the original producers what they think about that.
And the biggest problem in this analogy is that the Wal-Mart shopping experience isn't enjoyable... not me stealing goods from the shipping docks, you know, like the mob does.
Awesome.
It's really not surprising that this kind of action puts the media distribution companies on the defensive. "We're gonna steal your stuff until you give it to us for free. And you should thank us for our words of wisdom."
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome.
All of their strategic stupidity pales in comparison to an argument like this. This kind of behaviour manages to put huge, grotesque art exploitation business in the right. All of us get to watch a war over expensive protected movies instead of giving our time and attention to making better, legit alternatives. w00t.
BTW, if you could even begin to churn through all the free movies, music and texts available on the internet, your argument would have a lot more weight. But since we live in an age of amazing free media, it sounds like a fat man complaining he hasn't had enough to eat.
hahah.. was the Jedi who returned.
We may disagree where the boundary between stealing and sharing is, but I think when it comes to major media, that cost many hundreds of people many years to create, you can share it on a small scale with a couple of people, but, for example, posting a torrent of Return of the Sith the day it hits movie theaters, stealing is, as Yoda would say.
If you don't like the price of a movie, don't pay it, but also.. don't steal it. There's people who make that stuff for their living. They spend lots of time and energy on it in the expectation that many people will be interested in buying a copy for personal use. It doesn't matter if you think that's a valid profession, or morally correct. it's their business. Their life. And if they wouldn't sell you the copy if they knew you were going to turn around and give it away for free to everyone you could, on a massive basis, on the world-wide internet, that means that if you do, you're lying and stealing and violating their trust.
Sharing can't happen without trust.
Now, if you give it to a friend, and that friend gives it to a friend, etc. etc. and it remains low-level, then it doesn't matter what they think. It's none of their business what you do with it as long as it's basically private to you and your friends and family.
Now maybe you disagree with the particular place I've drawn that line. You may see the line at a slightly different place in the sand. Or think it's blurry. Or gray, or not so gray. That's a whole other argument.
But I think we would all benefit us all to identify a community-determined middle area where we tread softly, and broad side areas where we firmly plant our feet. I think we should all preserve and protect the practice of small-scale sharing of everything in the world, even in the face of pressure against this by The Man. I also think we should all preserve and protect the expectation of honesty in a market transaction, even in the face of painful desire for the latest and greatest popular piece of culture.
I'm asking myself exactly the same question.. what's the likely price per unit.. because the bigger question is Is this the new price leader for large-scale storage? Currently, disk is about $0.40/GB ($80 for a 200GB disk) and tape is $0.25/GB ($50 for a 200GB LTO2 tape). While these will definitely fall by the time these disks come out, they probably can't come close to 6 or 4 cents per gig.
Plus, though tapes are pretty cost effective on a per gig basis, the actual machines for accessing them are tres expensivo. Look at the ADIC Scalar series. A Scalar 24 costs about 10k. Now consider that a 400 CD changer goes for ~$200 at Amazon... That's currently in a different market segment, but for how long? Even when the CD changer makers decide to price gauge the data consumer, they won't be able to go too far without being outcompeted from below.
That means the ETA to a, let's say $50k petabyte system, is a couple of years.
E.g. let's say the Blue-Rays get up to 200GB each at a price point of $10 each (conservative). That's 5000 discs for 1PB and so $50k, which is much better than the alternative medias by a factor of between 2 (tape) and 5-20 (offline and online disk). But more importantly, it will take only 10 cheap disk changers to access all 5000 disks needed.
The one big gotcha here is that the discs are write-once, read-many. But for certain applications, e.g. video, this is ideal. And it just so happens that folks like Microsoft's Chief Researcher, Jim Gray, think that video is what we'll fill this next generation of capacity with.
I include page lint/verifcation tags (instead of just links to the specs) in my standard page footer across a number of sites I run. This lets me easily check to see if my XHTML and CSS2 is compliant as I browse along. Which isn't to say my pages are perfect, but that I consider it an important and complimentary part of a web browsing experience.
We shouldn't just build a web to be used, but one to be extended... that means show others how we do it so they can join in.
> Er, not to sound like an ass or anything, but
> what language do you think they speak in India?
Cyrillic, right?
Neat idea.. perhaps there should be a Tor-Over-Steganography platform, to prevent the identification of Tor usage or some other method of information hiding. Otherwise, a regime can just shut down Tor(-ish) traffic.
I guess the best way to get your message through the iron (red?) curtain is to piggy-back it on whatever the highest-volume public information stream is. That way the baddies would have to shut down all of that traffic and risk a large public pushback.
In the case of China, I hate to say it, but if it's true that a lot of spam is outbound from their country, that would be an ideal place to hide information. Lots of spam has randomly generated text, so altering the frequency of that text in a fashion known only to sender and receiver could be used to encode an information channel, over which you could run a simple unicast stream, or something more decentralized, like TOR.
New land is only one kind of place form a new country ;)
I can't stand it when people make agreements between each other that aren't exactly as specified by one of The Holy Documents Of The Universal Community of Right-Minded Believers (i.e. Sanctus Codex Catholic Orthodox).
But, if they're going to write new licenses, can they at least write them in English, or at least in something with a Latin alphabet.
What kind of monopoly would the professional content industry be if it didn't extract a tax from consumers for work it didn't do? A poor one. A poor one indeed.
This Stichting Thuiskopie Foundation has already succeeded at taxing DVDs and CDs, showing its excellent capability to immitate its ilk in the US. But this, this tax.. it's awesome! $4.30 per gigabyte! That's 10 times the price of the raw disk!
Can you imagine disk-makers like Hitatchi and Seagate looking on and watching these old-school hitmen come in and feast on their kill? I'm sure they're a bit angry, but probably a good deal more envious.
A tax this creative, of this size.. ahh. My hat is off. This takes a lot of balls. And more importantly, a lot of politicians in their pockets.
Congrats to Stitching Thustoopid on their coming out event. Let the good times roll boys! Pass the cigars around!
maybe the government will reign themselves in. You know, like all those other times they did.
They've probably got enough problems governing us without also having to be governed *by* us, you know?
Show a little trust people!
That dude was about as censored as this posting is.
WAL-FART SUXORS.
Ok, now, when I get a nasty letter from a Wal-Smart lawyer saying I Suxors.. that's not censorship.
There are only two agents capable of censoring him: his government and himself. But not his retailer.
The lawyer is merely spewing vitriol.. suprise, surprise, that's what lawyers make a living at.
But this art student.. he actually managed to censor himself here.
He should have just posted the threat, and left a big message like:
"Wal-Wart is sooo stoopid they threatened legal action. But they know they've got a chance in hell... hence this message."
See, now that would have been classy. But instead, he's just a poster-child for the weak and self-defeating. Which is still cooler than being a poster-child for an aggressive faceless monopoly like the loser lawyer who got off on writing that letter up. But still.
What can I say? This Bush guy.. he seems to have a real knack for falling on the right side of the fight between the rich and powerful and the meager and loose-knit.
Thank goodness we have a few more years of him.
If I were forced to live in an America where our political leaders made conscientious choices not in the gratuitous interest of stuipdly rich, avaricious plutocrats.. well, I don't think I could toe their party line any more.
The only political cause I can really pledge my portfolio to these days is bare-knuckled monopoly.. anything else, and the competition is just too great to ensure rising profits. And it's rising profits that keeps me sipping G&Ts at the club all week long. Can't argue with success!
I always ask people to turn their WEP keys off anyways.. nothing like creating scarcity out of the plenty of wi-fi networks out there.
Look, your computer ought to be secure at the TCP/IP level. If you're depending on WEP link security, you're probably hosed anyways. And you'll almost surely be hacked by the teeming swarms of infected computers on the net long before you get trouble from a neighbor, a drive-by script kiddie, or now the FBI. Unless you're a paranoid freak and you're sure they're really out to get you. The roving script-kiddies that is.
Worried about bandwidth? If you and your neighbors cooperated instead of hording bandwidth from each other, you'd have more to go around. Heck, you could multi-home your laptop and get multiplexed bandwidth. That's more, not less.
Now turn off those keys and rename your home wi-fi network "public"!