I was somewhat upset when SyFy started airing Sanctuary. The Sanctuary team was testing out an online model. IIRC, the HD version of the show cost $1, the SD version was free, and the previous week's HD version was free too. I guess they did well enough with it that they got picked up.
Is anybody else out there testing out a direct to online consumer model? I'd like to support it.
The HTC's aren't phones either. Nothing running Linux qualifies as "just a phone". This includes most "dumb" flip phones (which are running embedded linux, QNX, or some other embedded OS). The real time OSes usually handle it better, but I've had those sort of problems with them too. I don't remember the last time I had a cell phone that didn't have any applications (even if it was a manufacturer installed MP3 player app).
What's worse, we American's don't always use the same Imperial measures that the British use. A US Gallon is smaller than a British Gallon. I believe the fundamental difference is that in the US 2 Cups is 1 Pint, and in the UK 2 Cups is less than 1 Pint. AFAIK, the other ratios (pints to quarts, quarts to gallon, etc) are the same, just not the cups to pint conversion.
Length is the same. Not sure about weight, as I'm never sure which Pound the British are talking about. Couldn't tell you about anything else.
I live in a full stucco house, and I have problems from some Cell carriers, but not others. Some carriers (AT&T) have full signal outside, and intermittent connections inside. Other carriers (Sprint) only lose one bar going inside. The online coverage maps tells me that AT&T should work best, but Sprint actually works better.
Since I switched from EE to CmpE partly to avoid the RF classes, I'm not going to try to explain it.
So a simple 'if zip == xxxxx, then tax = Y' type of lookup table will not work.
The +4 boundaries follow city/county boundaries. Every time I've had a tax mis-applied, adding the +4 information and spelling the city name correctly fixed the issue. It's possible that it doesn't work in 100% of the cases, but I didn't find any.
It's been a couple years now, but I used to buy some CSV files from www.taxrates.com. It was complicated to setup, and involved a lot of extra features to let user decided which rates should be applied. But the rate itself was a simple City plus Zip+4 lookup.
I stopped trying to sell it, now I donate it to a charity. In the states, charity donations are tax deduction for the current value. I net somewhat less than I would've sold it for, but with a lot less hassle.
It has a hidden bonus too. Usually when I sell crap on eBay, I see crap on eBay that I want to buy with my new found riches. When I donate to a charity, I don't recognize the proceeds until I do my taxes, and that gets deposited into a savings account. So overall, I end up with more money and less crap this way.
there's little demand for higher performance apps in the browser.
That's what everybody said before Chrome improved JS performance. Now there's an arms race to get better performance from apps in the browser. Where have you been?
My HD (720p) CRT TV is fine. There's no upscaling, so it handles the old low-res stuff way better than an LCD. I'm holding on to it because it doesn't make my PS1 and Nintendo64 inputs look bad. That might depend on the CRT though.
Pretty much, yeah. I have a similiar sized dataset, and just ran the numbers. The cheapest online backup I've found so far is $60/month for ~400GB, going up to $180/month if I fill up my 1.5TB disks.
At that price, I'm better off buying a fire safe, a hot-swap SATA bay, and a new 2TB HDD every month until I have enough disks to rotate them.
My data set is mostly photographs, music, and videos. Stuff that doesn't change once it's written to disk (aside from the occasional photo touch-up, usually done the same day). So I don't have to worry much about daily backups. Once a day, I could rsync the files to the backup disk, and never delete anything off the backup disk.
Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.
No, not really. We can't browse a large archive of commercial projects that never shipped, so we can't really compare. I am willing to bet that there are more abandoned open source projects, but I don't think it's as skewed as you suggest.
I was replying to the "First, realize that traditional approaches like SQL are limited mostly by the single box" statement in the GP. But I did gloss over a few details...
Yes, but the degree varies. In a low margin business, I might be willing to invest a couple million dollars, if it will lower my costs by 1%. Who's in a better position to make that statement, the Fortune 500 company, or the guy in the garage?
"No matter how rich you are, if you need six dollars to get five, it's not practical."
Right. But if you need $10M to get $20M, most people can't play. Even if you need $10M to get $100M, you have to convince somebody to give you $10M. I can't do that. But, if I can come up with a business that needs $50k to get $500k, I can talk somebody into that.
It isn't about what's practically solvable, it's about what's cheaply solvable. These problems have been practical for anybody with money for a while. Hadoop lowers the barrier to entry.
If you've got the cash, IBM will set you up with a monster SQL cluster that will take that massive complex SQL query (the one that takes a month to run on your desktop), and return results in 2 seconds. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.
This setup is still not cheap, it's just much cheaper than it used to be. You still have to build and maintain a large cluster of machines, but you can buy commodity servers instead of IBM mainframes. Now anybody with a couple hundred thousand dollars can play, instead of only Fortune 500 companies.
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I was somewhat upset when SyFy started airing Sanctuary. The Sanctuary team was testing out an online model. IIRC, the HD version of the show cost $1, the SD version was free, and the previous week's HD version was free too. I guess they did well enough with it that they got picked up.
Is anybody else out there testing out a direct to online consumer model? I'd like to support it.
I always wondered what kind of modeline would destroy my monitor...
The HTC's aren't phones either. Nothing running Linux qualifies as "just a phone". This includes most "dumb" flip phones (which are running embedded linux, QNX, or some other embedded OS). The real time OSes usually handle it better, but I've had those sort of problems with them too. I don't remember the last time I had a cell phone that didn't have any applications (even if it was a manufacturer installed MP3 player app).
What's worse, we American's don't always use the same Imperial measures that the British use. A US Gallon is smaller than a British Gallon. I believe the fundamental difference is that in the US 2 Cups is 1 Pint, and in the UK 2 Cups is less than 1 Pint. AFAIK, the other ratios (pints to quarts, quarts to gallon, etc) are the same, just not the cups to pint conversion.
Length is the same. Not sure about weight, as I'm never sure which Pound the British are talking about. Couldn't tell you about anything else.
I live in a full stucco house, and I have problems from some Cell carriers, but not others. Some carriers (AT&T) have full signal outside, and intermittent connections inside. Other carriers (Sprint) only lose one bar going inside. The online coverage maps tells me that AT&T should work best, but Sprint actually works better.
Since I switched from EE to CmpE partly to avoid the RF classes, I'm not going to try to explain it.
So a simple 'if zip == xxxxx, then tax = Y' type of lookup table will not work.
The +4 boundaries follow city/county boundaries. Every time I've had a tax mis-applied, adding the +4 information and spelling the city name correctly fixed the issue. It's possible that it doesn't work in 100% of the cases, but I didn't find any.
It's been a couple years now, but I used to buy some CSV files from www.taxrates.com. It was complicated to setup, and involved a lot of extra features to let user decided which rates should be applied. But the rate itself was a simple City plus Zip+4 lookup.
What's the equation for acceleration?
Yes, but I've also had TurboTax cap the deduction. I didn't investigate though, as it wasn't much of a difference.
Sorry, I should clarify that donations to charity are a tax deduction under certain circumstances. I happen to qualify, but not everyone does.
I stopped trying to sell it, now I donate it to a charity. In the states, charity donations are tax deduction for the current value. I net somewhat less than I would've sold it for, but with a lot less hassle.
It has a hidden bonus too. Usually when I sell crap on eBay, I see crap on eBay that I want to buy with my new found riches. When I donate to a charity, I don't recognize the proceeds until I do my taxes, and that gets deposited into a savings account. So overall, I end up with more money and less crap this way.
But if you were out of risky investments, you already had the $350k from the previous 40 years.
Judging by the budget, we built 3.
1994? I'm still waiting for September 1993 to end.
there's little demand for higher performance apps in the browser.
That's what everybody said before Chrome improved JS performance. Now there's an arms race to get better performance from apps in the browser. Where have you been?
My HD (720p) CRT TV is fine. There's no upscaling, so it handles the old low-res stuff way better than an LCD. I'm holding on to it because it doesn't make my PS1 and Nintendo64 inputs look bad. That might depend on the CRT though.
Once you paint it pink, just set up a SEP field.
Haven't you seen all the bowling shirts that AB wears?
Pretty much, yeah. I have a similiar sized dataset, and just ran the numbers. The cheapest online backup I've found so far is $60/month for ~400GB, going up to $180/month if I fill up my 1.5TB disks.
At that price, I'm better off buying a fire safe, a hot-swap SATA bay, and a new 2TB HDD every month until I have enough disks to rotate them.
My data set is mostly photographs, music, and videos. Stuff that doesn't change once it's written to disk (aside from the occasional photo touch-up, usually done the same day). So I don't have to worry much about daily backups. Once a day, I could rsync the files to the backup disk, and never delete anything off the backup disk.
Just imagine what you could get from programmers that are both paid and required to use secure coding practices.
Windows XP?
Last Modified: 2/07/02
Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.
No, not really. We can't browse a large archive of commercial projects that never shipped, so we can't really compare. I am willing to bet that there are more abandoned open source projects, but I don't think it's as skewed as you suggest.
BTW, thanks for calling me out.
I was replying to the "First, realize that traditional approaches like SQL are limited mostly by the single box" statement in the GP. But I did gloss over a few details...
"Isn't cost a practical constraint?"
Yes, but the degree varies. In a low margin business, I might be willing to invest a couple million dollars, if it will lower my costs by 1%. Who's in a better position to make that statement, the Fortune 500 company, or the guy in the garage?
"No matter how rich you are, if you need six dollars to get five, it's not practical."
Right. But if you need $10M to get $20M, most people can't play. Even if you need $10M to get $100M, you have to convince somebody to give you $10M. I can't do that. But, if I can come up with a business that needs $50k to get $500k, I can talk somebody into that.
It isn't about what's practically solvable, it's about what's cheaply solvable. These problems have been practical for anybody with money for a while. Hadoop lowers the barrier to entry.
If you've got the cash, IBM will set you up with a monster SQL cluster that will take that massive complex SQL query (the one that takes a month to run on your desktop), and return results in 2 seconds. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.
This setup is still not cheap, it's just much cheaper than it used to be. You still have to build and maintain a large cluster of machines, but you can buy commodity servers instead of IBM mainframes. Now anybody with a couple hundred thousand dollars can play, instead of only Fortune 500 companies.
Just make sure it disables that credit card billing cron before leaving the test environment running with production data...