Those that are in favour of unmetered, unlimited use of residential services are sadly a little "hard of thinking". Scenario 1 ISP has finite upstream bandwidth (this is a given). This wholesale bandwidth is resold (marked-up) and oversold (contended) for residential services. That's how you get '7mb' connections that don't cost 1000's of $$ If this limited resource is sold as 'unlimited', and it is treated as such by customers, the economics start to move against the ISP. They need to limit and degrade the service in order to turn a profit. THE INCENTIVE IS FOR THE COMPANY TO PROVIDE A LOWER QUALITY SERVICE
Scenario 2 A basic usage amount is included free inside the package. This could be 10GB, 30GB, 100GB or whatever covers 90%+ of their customer base. Customers wishing to use more, at full speed, pay for additional usage. Some markup over wholesale rates. In this scenario, the incentive is to encourage the customer to use more, not less bandwidth. They get to purchase more network for their users. Low-usage users are not impacted by bandwdith hogs. Makes more sense, right?
this is not scientific research, but I have found that just about everything is around 20% more expensive in the uk when compared to the us. When I was in the market for a laptop I did a lot of shopping around, and for some models I could have bought a ticket to the us, bought my laptop, and flown back with change rather than buying in the uk.
I wanted to run Macos, so I bought a powerbook. If I had been too cheap for the powerbook, I could have bought an ibook or an eMac.
Apple hardware rocks, it is designed to run Macos, and it does it well. Why pay that much for a motherboard that will not give you the performance that apple hardware will give you? Factor in the cost of macos X + the motherboard and you are in the right ballpark for a complete system from apple. And you don't have to break the eula on the macos that you bought.
Frankly, I don't see why anyone would want to run MOL anyway - I can't think of any regularly used gnu software that doesn't compile and run on macos natively. Why do it in another layer?
certainly, the tools have been democratised, but that does not give people talent. I'm not going to go into the costs of marketting and distribution, but the reason that lower production costs have not been passed on is because they are not relevant. Just as DV cameras, cheap high quality editting software and home DVD burners are not driving down the price of making your average blockbuster movie.
You still need to be able to use the tools effectively, and those skills are not cheap. Studio time is expensive, studio engineers are expensive. The odd hit is produced completely in the bedroom, but on the whole, the mainstream music industry landscape is just not changed by the price of the tools coming down.
I would recommend either the 12" iBook or Powerbook. I think the iBooks are much tougher than the powerbooks, and certainly less precious. I use a 12" PB, and yes it does get warm but it's not really a problem. It's not like it melts or anything. I think the 12" iBooks make the perfect travel laptop - tough enough to throw in a bag, great battery, cheap, built in modem, lan etc, no flaps to snap off. The 15" PB is big, scratches easily, costs a fortune, and you don't want to drop it.
I've had my 12" PB since friday, and I'm so glad I did it. It's my first mac. I like solaris and linux, but don't feel comfortable running linux as my primary workstation. The mac gives me as much unix as I want, and I can still run mainstream apps. But the real clincher is the attention to detail that apple pays - it's hard to quantify, but there is a polish and finesse to the mac and to macos x that is quite unlike anything I've found in the PC world.
A young man is walking along and comes across a talking frog- "hello", says the frog, "If you give me a kiss I'll turn into a princess". The young man picks up the frog and puts it in his pocket. Raising it's voice, the frog says "If you just give me a kiss, I'll turn into a beautiful princess and become your girlfriend!" The young man laughs and keeps walking. In a desperate voice, the frog says "Give me a kiss and I will become your love-slave and stay with you forever!"
The young man takes the frog out of his pocket and says "Look, I'm a programmer, I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog is really cool!"
There has to be something more newsworthy than this - maybe an IE exploit? Something cool built out of Lego? A really kerazy case mod? This site is going downhill...... News for Morons. Stuff that's pointless.
Your prejudice is showing - the apartheid government was booted out 10 years ago. Do you think the rest of the world is still punishing the NEW government for the sins of the past. Wake up, moron. Sorry, I think 'dumbass' was the term you used.
Don't dis it til you've tried it - I use a microsoft keyboard and microsoft mouse, and can't see myself changing any time soon. I really like their joysticks and gamepads too. The stuff just 'feels right'. There is also almost no incentive for them to leverage WiFi devices to sell operating systems on the WiFi hardware itself. So stop making jokes about windows running on the hardware.
have a look at how many macs hit a large, non-partisan website. Like a news portal, or an isp homepage. This will give you a much better idea of how many macs are in active use on the desktop, regardless of sales, how many pc's are run as servers etc.
I'm living in the UK where there is currently a massive stink about proposed national ID schemes. It got me thinking about South Africa's 'ID numbers' For as long as I can remember, every SA citizen has an ID number and an ID book containing photo-ID. It is not compulsory to carry it, except that it used to have your drivers license in it and it was compulsory to carry your license when driving. Now that card-licenses have been introduced, this is not a requirement. The ID book must be presented when doing things like opening bank accounts, applying for jobs, passports, renting an apartment etc. The number must be quoted on most offical correspondence. This has not resulted in massive abuses of privacy - all it does is ensure legitimate identification when necessary without resorting to the laborious UK system of 'bring in a photo ID like a staff card or something plus 2 or more bills containing your name and permanent address' when trying to do something as simple as open a bank account.
I've looked at FS (on the web, not in person unfortunately) and it seems to me that it would be very difficult to get the latency down to acceptable levels. With vinyl, there is practically no latency - the needle jiggles about, and the output from that is amplified. With pro CD-players, the latency is generally 0.01 seconds. This means that when you hit the cue button, it spits the beat out with less than 1/100 of a second delay. Some cheaper players are around 0.03 to 0.05 - I consider this too slow for pro use. So I would like someone to tell me what sort of latency exists in the FS solution, with it's specially encoded vinyl, decoders, laptop, mp3 player etc. I find it hard to believe that it can approach vinyl or CD.
I DJ with both vinyl and CD No doubt about it, there is something special about the vinyl sound. I'm not necessarily saying it's better than CD (although I do prefer it) but it definately sounds warmer and fatter. There is something about a good needle running on a well-pressed 12" single that can't be matched by CD. I love my CD's for other reasons - convenient, light, don't wear out, very precise players, (did I say light?), get unreleased new music before it is released on vinyl etc. But there is still something special about a diamond in a groove that means vinyl will never die for DJ's
..unless it is given to them as a promo by the label or distributers, or directly from the artist. But downloading music and then getting paid to play it out is evil. Not a cent goes to the artist. I'm less concerned about the RIAA etc, but I really do a have a problem with this type of theft. I have been guilty in the past of downloading rare stuff that I couldn't purchase, but usually only after I've gone as far as contacting the record label or even the artist directly asking for back-copies, or offering to pay for it on CDR.
The music scene that I love is full of fed-up artists who are sick of seeing people steal their work, saying that they love the music. If you enjoy it so much, then buy it!
Yes, it does sound like a troll, but I'll take the bait. Maybe your trendy wine-bar in the city rocks out to some dude with 2 iPods and a bunch of music he stole through Audiogalaxy and Napster, but if you were really interested in the music and what can be done with it, take the trouble to find places that book real DJ's (not selecters) that can mix and put in the time and expense to find the music they want to play.
Real DJ'ing takes skill. This is not real DJ'ing. Don't think DJ's are redundant becaus of this guy. He might manage to fill the dancefloor at a bar mitzvah or drunken wedding, but he won't cut it in a club. Makes me wonder how many slashdotters ever go to a decent dance club
My brother recently started a new job with a large international publisher. One of his colleagues walked over and said they were having trouble with their print setup. So he wandered over there, only to find that they were still using win 3.1 !!! unbelievable
I play psy from vinyl and CD. The DAT dj's are dinosaurs now - most of the DAT dj's have moved over to CD.
Some psy DJ's play out from MD or MP3, but they generally aren't beat-mixing, just selecting and cross-fading.
The best online stores for Psy Trance are Chaos Unlimited and Psyshop
Both have sample to listen to before buying.
But the best way to experience this music is at 4am on a moonlit beach somewhere warm, with the smell of chai and nag champas rolling through the dancefloor and big scary baselines that make you believe monsters still roam the earth...
I am a project manager in a technical environment, and learnt a few important things. Having former programmers as project managers can work, but it's certainly not a recipe for success.
A project manager's role is about being able to zoom in from a general, bird's eye view, right down into the details, and then knowing who to defer to for decisions when they are out of their depth. A good project manager will identify and document the risks way ahead of them becoming problems, but won't necessarily dig in and try solve the problems themselves.
It's all about managing the project - that means the customers, the timelines, the risks, the documentation, the testing and the delivery. It's not about managing people or code. Yes, I've seen managers fsck up projects because they have been tempted to make technical decisions that they are not qualified to make. But a good project manager will know when to take the advice of experts.
I've had great service from them, their prices are much better than the high street, and they tend to stock good quality components. They also test their stock extensively, and know exactly what works best with what.
A similar thing happened when I worked for an ISP - the mail servers had to be moved between 2 cities, but the machines were cranking away will a couple of hundred thousand email accounts.
It was decided that the best way to do the move with the minimum downtime was to build replacement servers in the new location, then yank the drives out and move them to the new servers to do the actual move. A jet was chartered to fly between the 2 cities. The entire cargo of the jet was 1 person with a briefcase containing a bunch of hard-drives! crazy...
Slashdot Mirror
Those that are in favour of unmetered, unlimited use of residential services are sadly a little "hard of thinking".
Scenario 1
ISP has finite upstream bandwidth (this is a given).
This wholesale bandwidth is resold (marked-up) and oversold (contended) for residential services.
That's how you get '7mb' connections that don't cost 1000's of $$
If this limited resource is sold as 'unlimited', and it is treated as such by customers, the economics start to move against the ISP.
They need to limit and degrade the service in order to turn a profit.
THE INCENTIVE IS FOR THE COMPANY TO PROVIDE A LOWER QUALITY SERVICE
Scenario 2
A basic usage amount is included free inside the package. This could be 10GB, 30GB, 100GB or whatever covers 90%+ of their customer base.
Customers wishing to use more, at full speed, pay for additional usage. Some markup over wholesale rates.
In this scenario, the incentive is to encourage the customer to use more, not less bandwidth.
They get to purchase more network for their users.
Low-usage users are not impacted by bandwdith hogs.
Makes more sense, right?
those rubber keys... also had a Spectravideo 328, Apple 2e, Vic20, Atari 400, Amiga 500 and various others. First PC was a 486SX33.
this is not scientific research, but I have found that just about everything is around 20% more expensive in the uk when compared to the us. When I was in the market for a laptop I did a lot of shopping around, and for some models I could have bought a ticket to the us, bought my laptop, and flown back with change rather than buying in the uk.
I wanted to run Macos, so I bought a powerbook.
If I had been too cheap for the powerbook, I could have bought an ibook or an eMac.
Apple hardware rocks, it is designed to run Macos, and it does it well. Why pay that much for a motherboard that will not give you the performance that apple hardware will give you? Factor in the cost of macos X + the motherboard and you are in the right ballpark for a complete system from apple. And you don't have to break the eula on the macos that you bought.
Frankly, I don't see why anyone would want to run MOL anyway - I can't think of any regularly used gnu software that doesn't compile and run on macos natively. Why do it in another layer?
certainly, the tools have been democratised, but that does not give people talent. I'm not going to go into the costs of marketting and distribution, but the reason that lower production costs have not been passed on is because they are not relevant. Just as DV cameras, cheap high quality editting software and home DVD burners are not driving down the price of making your average blockbuster movie.
You still need to be able to use the tools effectively, and those skills are not cheap. Studio time is expensive, studio engineers are expensive. The odd hit is produced completely in the bedroom, but on the whole, the mainstream music industry landscape is just not changed by the price of the tools coming down.
I would recommend either the 12" iBook or Powerbook. I think the iBooks are much tougher than the powerbooks, and certainly less precious. I use a 12" PB, and yes it does get warm but it's not really a problem. It's not like it melts or anything. I think the 12" iBooks make the perfect travel laptop - tough enough to throw in a bag, great battery, cheap, built in modem, lan etc, no flaps to snap off. The 15" PB is big, scratches easily, costs a fortune, and you don't want to drop it.
I've had my 12" PB since friday, and I'm so glad I did it. It's my first mac. I like solaris and linux, but don't feel comfortable running linux as my primary workstation. The mac gives me as much unix as I want, and I can still run mainstream apps. But the real clincher is the attention to detail that apple pays - it's hard to quantify, but there is a polish and finesse to the mac and to macos x that is quite unlike anything I've found in the PC world.
A young man is walking along and comes across a talking frog- "hello", says the frog, "If you give me a kiss I'll turn into a princess".
The young man picks up the frog and puts it in his pocket.
Raising it's voice, the frog says "If you just give me a kiss, I'll turn into a beautiful princess and become your girlfriend!"
The young man laughs and keeps walking.
In a desperate voice, the frog says "Give me a kiss and I will become your love-slave and stay with you forever!"
The young man takes the frog out of his pocket and says "Look, I'm a programmer, I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog is really cool!"
Thank you! I was modded a troll earlier today for questioning the newsworthiness of this posting.
There has to be something more newsworthy than this - maybe an IE exploit? Something cool built out of Lego? A really kerazy case mod?
This site is going downhill......
News for Morons. Stuff that's pointless.
Your prejudice is showing - the apartheid government was booted out 10 years ago. Do you think the rest of the world is still punishing the NEW government for the sins of the past. Wake up, moron. Sorry, I think 'dumbass' was the term you used.
Don't dis it til you've tried it - I use a microsoft keyboard and microsoft mouse, and can't see myself changing any time soon. I really like their joysticks and gamepads too. The stuff just 'feels right'. There is also almost no incentive for them to leverage WiFi devices to sell operating systems on the WiFi hardware itself. So stop making jokes about windows running on the hardware.
have a look at how many macs hit a large, non-partisan website. Like a news portal, or an isp homepage. This will give you a much better idea of how many macs are in active use on the desktop, regardless of sales, how many pc's are run as servers etc.
I'm living in the UK where there is currently a massive stink about proposed national ID schemes. It got me thinking about South Africa's 'ID numbers'
For as long as I can remember, every SA citizen has an ID number and an ID book containing photo-ID. It is not compulsory to carry it, except that it used to have your drivers license in it and it was compulsory to carry your license when driving.
Now that card-licenses have been introduced, this is not a requirement.
The ID book must be presented when doing things like opening bank accounts, applying for jobs, passports, renting an apartment etc. The number must be quoted on most offical correspondence.
This has not resulted in massive abuses of privacy - all it does is ensure legitimate identification when necessary without resorting to the laborious UK system of 'bring in a photo ID like a staff card or something plus 2 or more bills containing your name and permanent address' when trying to do something as simple as open a bank account.
I've looked at FS (on the web, not in person unfortunately) and it seems to me that it would be very difficult to get the latency down to acceptable levels. With vinyl, there is practically no latency - the needle jiggles about, and the output from that is amplified.
With pro CD-players, the latency is generally 0.01 seconds. This means that when you hit the cue button, it spits the beat out with less than 1/100 of a second delay. Some cheaper players are around 0.03 to 0.05 - I consider this too slow for pro use. So I would like someone to tell me what sort of latency exists in the FS solution, with it's specially encoded vinyl, decoders, laptop, mp3 player etc. I find it hard to believe that it can approach vinyl or CD.
I DJ with both vinyl and CD
No doubt about it, there is something special about the vinyl sound. I'm not necessarily saying it's better than CD (although I do prefer it) but it definately sounds warmer and fatter. There is something about a good needle running on a well-pressed 12" single that can't be matched by CD.
I love my CD's for other reasons - convenient, light, don't wear out, very precise players, (did I say light?), get unreleased new music before it is released on vinyl etc. But there is still something special about a diamond in a groove that means vinyl will never die for DJ's
..unless it is given to them as a promo by the label or distributers, or directly from the artist.
But downloading music and then getting paid to play it out is evil. Not a cent goes to the artist.
I'm less concerned about the RIAA etc, but I really do a have a problem with this type of theft. I have been guilty in the past of downloading rare stuff that I couldn't purchase, but usually only after I've gone as far as contacting the record label or even the artist directly asking for back-copies, or offering to pay for it on CDR.
The music scene that I love is full of fed-up artists who are sick of seeing people steal their work, saying that they love the music. If you enjoy it so much, then buy it!
Yes, it does sound like a troll, but I'll take the bait. Maybe your trendy wine-bar in the city rocks out to some dude with 2 iPods and a bunch of music he stole through Audiogalaxy and Napster, but if you were really interested in the music and what can be done with it, take the trouble to find places that book real DJ's (not selecters) that can mix and put in the time and expense to find the music they want to play.
Real DJ'ing takes skill. This is not real DJ'ing. Don't think DJ's are redundant becaus of this guy. He might manage to fill the dancefloor at a bar mitzvah or drunken wedding, but he won't cut it in a club. Makes me wonder how many slashdotters ever go to a decent dance club
My brother recently started a new job with a large international publisher. One of his colleagues walked over and said they were having trouble with their print setup. So he wandered over there, only to find that they were still using win 3.1 !!!
unbelievable
t
I play psy from vinyl and CD. The DAT dj's are dinosaurs now - most of the DAT dj's have moved over to CD. Some psy DJ's play out from MD or MP3, but they generally aren't beat-mixing, just selecting and cross-fading. The best online stores for Psy Trance are Chaos Unlimited and Psyshop Both have sample to listen to before buying. But the best way to experience this music is at 4am on a moonlit beach somewhere warm, with the smell of chai and nag champas rolling through the dancefloor and big scary baselines that make you believe monsters still roam the earth...
I am a project manager in a technical environment, and learnt a few important things.
Having former programmers as project managers can work, but it's certainly not a recipe for success.
A project manager's role is about being able to zoom in from a general, bird's eye view, right down into the details, and then knowing who to defer to for decisions when they are out of their depth. A good project manager will identify and document the risks way ahead of them becoming problems, but won't necessarily dig in and try solve the problems themselves.
It's all about managing the project - that means the customers, the timelines, the risks, the documentation, the testing and the delivery.
It's not about managing people or code.
Yes, I've seen managers fsck up projects because they have been tempted to make technical decisions that they are not qualified to make.
But a good project manager will know when to take the advice of experts.
I've had great service from them, their prices are much better than the high street, and they tend to stock good quality components.
They also test their stock extensively, and know exactly what works best with what.
Thanks for the hilarious session at XCOM on the weekend
just for fun, I decided to find out what they run their site on -
Netcraft sez -
The site www.ijet.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4/Windows 98
A similar thing happened when I worked for an ISP - the mail servers had to be moved between 2 cities, but the machines were cranking away will a couple of hundred thousand email accounts.
It was decided that the best way to do the move with the minimum downtime was to build replacement servers in the new location, then yank the drives out and move them to the new servers to do the actual move. A jet was chartered to fly between the 2 cities. The entire cargo of the jet was 1 person with a briefcase containing a bunch of hard-drives!
crazy...