If the more-expensive tool saves time worth more than its cost, then the appropriate free-market choice is to invest. My experience is that buyers at all levels won't do that when there's a cost-free alternative. They'd rather waste time (=money) or lose quality (=money due to cost of fixing later) than spend capital.
You're totally ignoring the dollar value of freedom, which can be pretty substantial. When you use closed tools, you're putting yourself at the mercy of your vendor, and their decisions can directly affect your finances.
Real-world example: a lot of my company's core logic is wrapped up in an EOLed Microsoft language. Sure, it was quick and convenient to write, and there's definitely a financial incentive there, but now it's going to cost us a lot of developer time to migrate to something more vendor-neutral.
Will the extra money we made up-front by writing the code more quickly pay for the expense we're incurring now? Who knows; it very well might! But this is a serious question for us, and the answer is not at all obvious.
Frankly, that bothers me a whole hell of a lot less than the fact that he was convicted of murder without any significant evidence his wife was dead as opposed to simply missing.
Other her blood in the house and his car, you mean.
For example, NZ may work as in the UK, where small ISPs are changed by their upstream ISP by the bandwidth they use but sell access to their home users a flat rate.
That's pretty much how it works in the US, too, or at least how it was when I was in the business a few years back. It looks like our wholesale bandwidth is probably a lot cheaper than yours, which again goes back to the idea of market conditions being different everywhere.
In America, I don't think people would be willing go to metered usage when it's always been flat-rate and everything else is going the opposite direction.
If he is, you're still using the network as far as that switch, which is probably in their regional hub, so you're still using as much of the network as you would for anything.
Yeah, things get screwy with DSL, and I was almost hesitant to use that an an example. Just pretend that the switch is in the same city as the DSLAM, would you?:-)
I don't see how P2P is "costing them money". They pay the same for their infrastructure whether it's used or completely unused.
True, but they have to pay proportional amounts for traffic that leaves their network. If their current bandwidth isn't cutting it, the extra doesn't come for free.
People here go, "well, upgrade the network" - explain to me why they should keep upgrading the network at a frantic pace and never making enough money to recoup the infrastructure costs. Telecoms are businesses, they invest, they make their money back (with profit) then upgrade the network again. The abuse of the network which flat rate plans do simply result in unsustainable traffic growth.
Apparently your telecoms are horribly run if they can't manage to make a profit off of Internet access. In America, many (most?) ISPs are small private companies who receive no federal subsidies at all, but still turn enough profit to keep growing and offering new services.
The fact that your local companies are incapable of doing so says that 1) they're all dumb, every single one, or 2) there are market forces there that we don't have, so your whole premise is inapplicable here.
In Spain, SGAE, Promusicae and others (spanish RIAAs) are paid a percentage ('canon') of the price of storage devices: CDs, DVDs, printers, hard drives, cameras... in compensation for their hypothetical losses because of P2P.
Are cameras and printers commonly used for copyright violation? That to me says much: that they're really trying to prevent anyone who's not already in the content-creation industry from being able to enter.
Up next for taxation: paintbrushes and guitar strings.
To a point, I don't think that's a terrible idea. What I do have a problem with is the technical difficulties behind actually doing it fairly. For example, suppose I'm sharing files with my next-door neighbor, and our packets are never going farther than the first switch we have in common. Should I be billed the same as someone streaming gigs to Tokyo? Of course not, but that's probably not technically possible to accurately track without massive hardware upgrades, and even then it sets a bad precedent of charging extra depending on destination.
I'm not sure what to think on this one. I mean, they're acknowledging that they can't offer unlimited access, which we all knew anyway but is nice to hear them actually say. And yes, P2P probably is costing them lost of money. I don't think variable pricing is the answer, though, and I don't think their customers will either.
When your dealing with user inputted values, if you think its a number and treat it like a number, but the user enters something that isn't a number it could be designed to overflow or an SQL injection.
No it couldn't, because your database library won't allow attackers to spew random stuff into you parameterized queries.*
*Anyone dumb enough to hand-built queries from user-submitted data deserves whatever happens do them.
It'd be nice to see a "NSFW" (Not Suitable For Work) tag on the article.
Then so tag it. There's a whole slew (slough?) of other "NSFx" labels that are missing but would be at least as important and generally relevant:
Work
Girlfriend In Room
Public Terminal
Metered Connection
...etc., etc., etc. NSFW is a Farkism and should stay there. If enough people want to tag a story that way, then so be it, but the ending note ("some of the linked (computer-generated) images may be disturbing.") should be sufficient to put you on guard.
I think maybe MS spent far too much cash on development of Vista for it to just be a marketing ploy, but sometimes I wonder.
Wow. I can't believe I missed that obvious analogy. I know that sounds conspiracy theorist, but it sure explains a lot.
As far as marketing, have you actually seen any? I haven't. For a supposedly flagship product, it seems like they just kind of pushed it out the door and hoped for the best.
That's interesting, because I've read that computer monitors (CRT as well as flat panel) give off electromagnetic radiation, and this radiation is correlated to the type of software that's running on the computer.
OK, it's IRC, but visual. We get it. You can stop plugging it now.
Next month's headline: "Microsoft to revamp XP" due to customer demand and their focus on end-user satisfaction, followed by "Vista EOL 1Q 2010: 'Oops'".
Their stock will inexplicably rise on the news that they're doing, well, nothing.
The only problem was that hardware performance is not increasing as quickly as it was in the 90s. Multi-core CPUs are coming out but CPU mhz are not really going anywhere. Ummm, what? First, MHz is just one component of performance; think of it like voltage. Another hugely important data point is instructions per cycle; think amps. Sure, MHz isn't rising dramatically (although you need to approximately multiply it by the number of cores), but IPC is doing just fine.
I assure you the two-way dual-core 1.8GHz Opteron I have here is a whole lot faster than the two-way 2.4GHz Xeon (Pentium 4 model) next to it.
This observation is why the choice of language doesn't matter. If a language implementation is slow, all it does is add a constant factor to any algorithms written in that language.
That's the crappiest, most long-winded apology for poor performance I've seen. Yes, everything you said about O() notation is more or less correct. No, you can't wish it to be applicable just by squinting really hard and hoping.
At some point, that constant does start to matter. Suppose your O(n) algorithm written in $fast_language can support the world's population logged in simultaneously. Further suppose that you wrote prototype #1 in $spiffy_language that can support about 100 users on the same hardware as the $fast_language version. Sure, both are O(n), but that doesn't magically make them equally good solutions.
No, I don't think Ruby is 60 million times slower than the fastest language, but it very well might be 100 times slower for their algorithms. Do you honestly think that wouldn't make any difference?
Indeed. But that costs hours of work and considerable expertise - not easily generalized to most office situations.
Do you hear that? It's the sound of opportunity. Why not get into the business of selling cheap caching proxy appliances? You could even set them up to peer with one another so that they check their neighbors for cached content before hitting the inter-country links.
Next, how much time does it take to rip that DVD, convert it to fit on a single layer disc, burn it, label it, etc?
First, I've never downloaded a movie. Shock and surprise! But it's true.
Second, if I were going to, I'd be playing them off a PC. Is downloading a movie really that much more difficult and time consuming than ripping it yourself? You can argue copyright violation for ethical reasons, but it's pretty hard to claim that downloading a movie is less convenient than going out to buy and rip it.
Slashdot Mirror
Paper? The luxury! Our terminals dropped made marks in wet clay.
You're totally ignoring the dollar value of freedom, which can be pretty substantial. When you use closed tools, you're putting yourself at the mercy of your vendor, and their decisions can directly affect your finances.
Real-world example: a lot of my company's core logic is wrapped up in an EOLed Microsoft language. Sure, it was quick and convenient to write, and there's definitely a financial incentive there, but now it's going to cost us a lot of developer time to migrate to something more vendor-neutral.
Will the extra money we made up-front by writing the code more quickly pay for the expense we're incurring now? Who knows; it very well might! But this is a serious question for us, and the answer is not at all obvious.
Except that sporks are quirky and geeky-cool and conversation starters. They make smart people smile, not laugh at you.
Newb.
waits for it...
Other her blood in the house and his car, you mean.
Umm, they don't want you to actually use that connection.
Didn't read the rest, huh? *pats you on the head*
That's pretty much how it works in the US, too, or at least how it was when I was in the business a few years back. It looks like our wholesale bandwidth is probably a lot cheaper than yours, which again goes back to the idea of market conditions being different everywhere.
In America, I don't think people would be willing go to metered usage when it's always been flat-rate and everything else is going the opposite direction.
Yeah, things get screwy with DSL, and I was almost hesitant to use that an an example. Just pretend that the switch is in the same city as the DSLAM, would you? :-)
True, but they have to pay proportional amounts for traffic that leaves their network. If their current bandwidth isn't cutting it, the extra doesn't come for free.
They already do. Calls to their other customers are free.
Apparently your telecoms are horribly run if they can't manage to make a profit off of Internet access. In America, many (most?) ISPs are small private companies who receive no federal subsidies at all, but still turn enough profit to keep growing and offering new services.
The fact that your local companies are incapable of doing so says that 1) they're all dumb, every single one, or 2) there are market forces there that we don't have, so your whole premise is inapplicable here.
Are cameras and printers commonly used for copyright violation? That to me says much: that they're really trying to prevent anyone who's not already in the content-creation industry from being able to enter.
Up next for taxation: paintbrushes and guitar strings.
To a point, I don't think that's a terrible idea. What I do have a problem with is the technical difficulties behind actually doing it fairly. For example, suppose I'm sharing files with my next-door neighbor, and our packets are never going farther than the first switch we have in common. Should I be billed the same as someone streaming gigs to Tokyo? Of course not, but that's probably not technically possible to accurately track without massive hardware upgrades, and even then it sets a bad precedent of charging extra depending on destination.
I'm not sure what to think on this one. I mean, they're acknowledging that they can't offer unlimited access, which we all knew anyway but is nice to hear them actually say. And yes, P2P probably is costing them lost of money. I don't think variable pricing is the answer, though, and I don't think their customers will either.
No it couldn't, because your database library won't allow attackers to spew random stuff into you parameterized queries.*
*Anyone dumb enough to hand-built queries from user-submitted data deserves whatever happens do them.
Then so tag it. There's a whole slew (slough?) of other "NSFx" labels that are missing but would be at least as important and generally relevant:
...etc., etc., etc. NSFW is a Farkism and should stay there. If enough people want to tag a story that way, then so be it, but the ending note ("some of the linked (computer-generated) images may be disturbing.") should be sufficient to put you on guard.
Wow. I can't believe I missed that obvious analogy. I know that sounds conspiracy theorist, but it sure explains a lot.
As far as marketing, have you actually seen any? I haven't. For a supposedly flagship product, it seems like they just kind of pushed it out the door and hoped for the best.
Apparently very, very poor.
OK, it's IRC, but visual. We get it. You can stop plugging it now.
Next month's headline: "Microsoft to revamp XP" due to customer demand and their focus on end-user satisfaction, followed by "Vista EOL 1Q 2010: 'Oops'".
Their stock will inexplicably rise on the news that they're doing, well, nothing.
I assure you the two-way dual-core 1.8GHz Opteron I have here is a whole lot faster than the two-way 2.4GHz Xeon (Pentium 4 model) next to it.
That's the crappiest, most long-winded apology for poor performance I've seen. Yes, everything you said about O() notation is more or less correct. No, you can't wish it to be applicable just by squinting really hard and hoping.
At some point, that constant does start to matter. Suppose your O(n) algorithm written in $fast_language can support the world's population logged in simultaneously. Further suppose that you wrote prototype #1 in $spiffy_language that can support about 100 users on the same hardware as the $fast_language version. Sure, both are O(n), but that doesn't magically make them equally good solutions.
No, I don't think Ruby is 60 million times slower than the fastest language, but it very well might be 100 times slower for their algorithms. Do you honestly think that wouldn't make any difference?
Interesting Freudian slip.
Do you hear that? It's the sound of opportunity. Why not get into the business of selling cheap caching proxy appliances? You could even set them up to peer with one another so that they check their neighbors for cached content before hitting the inter-country links.
First, I've never downloaded a movie. Shock and surprise! But it's true.
Second, if I were going to, I'd be playing them off a PC. Is downloading a movie really that much more difficult and time consuming than ripping it yourself? You can argue copyright violation for ethical reasons, but it's pretty hard to claim that downloading a movie is less convenient than going out to buy and rip it.