Coax is mostly only last mile. Comcast and Time Warner have mostly fiber backbones and then the fiber is split into 'nodes' which are around 300 households and serviced by coax. Eventually that last step will be fiber; just a matter of when replacing that is cheaper than maintaining it.
They're going to give us XP users a service pack 3, which will hopefully contain all the cool things that are in Vista without having to actually spend the money on Vista.
Check out the link I put in the grandparent post. There's a raytrace example that shows noticable gains in performance when using the Parallelism libraries. The example loop I had obviously doesn't need parallelism, but if you're doing real work over a large set, then it would.
and the hint tells the.NET runtime to execute the solution in parallel. No shared memory, no locks, all done for you. That's the way parallelism should work, IMHO
I remember Gopher. I used to be part of a BBS in Boston called Argus, which later my membership got 'sold' as Argus went tits up. The new BBS, Channel One, was touting its 'internet accessibility'. I went into local Channel One chat rooms to figure out just what the hell the internet was. Someone pointed me to the Gopher, IRC and FTP utilities through the BBS. Thought it was okay. The problem was service discovery, which was pretty weak back then. You sort of had to know what you were looking for.
There was also a WWW portal later. You'd minimize whatever terminal software you were using and use WinSock to get your browser working.
Good points. It depends on the mentality, really. I bill a modest $45/hour to my clients. If it takes me more than 3 hours, its cheaper to install the O/S.
I recommend Fedora servers/open source solutions to some clients, and to some clients looking to leverage existing windows investments, I recommend Windows/ASP.NET. All depends on the client. I suggested WHS because it is a NAS solution, like the author requested. It may be one that people scoff at, but it just 'works' for many households who don't understand Linux, don't have time to learn it, but have more than one PC.
FYI, the web access is SSL-encrypted and still requires password authentication. Its also optional / per machine basis. you can also do it per-file-share, to keep sensitive files out and regular files available (such as having my tax info unavailable but having my music files available, etc).
Re:Linux is actually cheaper here.
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Best Home Network NAS
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· Score: 2, Informative
Whatever it is, is it worth $169?
Ok, let me break down the out of box comparison.
Ubuntu does not come with client software for windows machines to automatically back up the windows box nightly onto the Ubuntu server. WHS does.
Ubuntu requires you to install Samba. WHS uses windows shares / web server interface.
Ubuntu requires raid hardware or software. WHS uses a 'storage pool' methodology and allows disk redundancy without raid, and automatic growth of the 'storage pool' by plugging in a USB drive or ESATA device(s).
Ubuntu would not give you Remote Desktop access to your windows machines without configuring Wine, I think.
Ubuntu requires you to install CVS to get versioning of files, which requires you to actively commit files. WHS automatically saves changes between versions and allows you to step back, all through the nightly automatic backup.
You'd have to write your own web service to access the machines from outside the network. You'd also have to configure the router yourself. WHS automatically configures routers (if supported) and has an IIS app that lets you access all machines and WHS content from the internet.
This is just a handful. I thought this through, I run a small business (20 hours a week of development) and did my homework before making the decision to buy WHS.
Re:Build / buy a Windows Home Server
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Best Home Network NAS
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· Score: 3, Interesting
HP makes a Windows home server for $600. Half a Gig, with hot-swappable trays for SATA, etc. just plug into your network and voila.
Either that or I was a beta-tester for Windows Home Server, during which it saved my bacon when I accidentally blew away my Quicken data files.
Build / buy a Windows Home Server
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Best Home Network NAS
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· Score: 1, Informative
Build / buy a Windows Home Server.
$169 on New Egg for the OS (based on windows server 2k3). Backs up ten PCs with incremental backup, optionally allowing you to flag files / folders as 'important', so the OS silently stores the data on more than one disk. Also allows you to back up from either full images, or step through incrementally to see individual versions of files. Acts as a remote access point to your windows machines, and offers file sharing and media streaming.
many EU countries have laws against crapy lock in products like this, it's good for the consumer.
Why are there laws? won't the consumer, by virture of his or her dollars (or euros), decide what is good for him/herself? Or do you believe that consumers are too stupid to buy something that makes sense for them?
The reason that carrier lock took off in the U.S. is that it allowed a bunch of people who didn't want to invest in a mobile phone the ability, by promising to be a customer of X provider for x years, to get a free phone.
Despite the consolidation of the mobile phone market, there is still a lot of choice in the U.S. for a consumer. There's pay-as-you-go, there's contracts with Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Alltel, Cricket, Qwest etc. There's a lot of sneering at carrier lock now, but rewind to 1999 and realize that mobile phones then were a rarer bunch, and carrier lock helped spur the buildout and high adoption rates. Many people enjoyed the benefits now and its hardly fair to tell the cellphone companies that tough shit, just because they bore the cost of the phones before, that they have to stop earning their money back.
Are you fucking serious? Are you using FICTION as a basis for how we should plan for our lives? Oh shit, someone made a movie, and my brain's so malleable that I'll believe its actually how the world is!
Grow up. The world is fine. And the problem with the world being fine is is makes people like you impotent... because if the world's fine, why am I so unhappy all the time? If you lie to yourself and tell yourself the world is fucked up (just like in the movies and books!), you feel better knowing, of course I'm not happy, look at how fucked up the world is!
Personally, I agree with the GP: Buy some guns, ammo, learn how to get by with farming/hunting, and try to live a self-sufficient lifestyle.
Fine. You do that. I'm going to live in the world as it actually is. I refuse to give up on the progress that men before us have bestowed upon us. Why are you posting on slashdot, you should be learning to flay a deer or peel a potato.
If you are between 20 and 35, well, your generation is a bunch of ipod-obsessed weaklings who deserve any system they aren't revolting against, and you have my sympathies.
Why should we revolt against any system? Did you ever think that perhaps people are happy having luxury items like ipods? that we don't mind working white-collar versus blue? That so much of our 'weakness' is really because we don't have to fight anymore?
What makes the generation before this better, or a younger one better for that matter? I'm sure the generation you are a part of railed against integration, women in the workforce, and homosexuality. Sorry we haven't picked up those mantles. You assume we're doomed and weak because we've got it okay, and instead of being happy for the state of the world where everyone doesn't have to be a revolutionary, you look down on us because we haven't had to do what you have done. That's not our fault, nor should it be. In an ideal situation, the system works well enough that people don't need to revolt.
"prosperous free men" also turned millions of American workers into de-facto slaves, living in "company towns" owned and fully controlled by factory owners.
I can't help it if you equate employment with slavery... but they are definitely not the same. These men went to company towns and worked these jobs often because their was NO OTHER OPTION. that living even for a short time in a company town was better than testing your luck with farming land, assuming you were lucky enough to own land, or you weren't wiped out by a drought if you did own land. Not only that but before the industrial revolution people didn't even own their own land for the most part; people were land-indentured to others. So replace company-town with non-company plantation or what have you. Hell, before there were even colonies people offered 7 years of work in exchange for passage to the new world.
Its NATURE you should rail against, the cruelest slavemaster of them all, requiring us to be slaves to food and shelter. In your foolish scenario, what does it matter if a man in his company town is my master, or the cruel hunger in my belly, forcing me to till the soil or forage for berries. We're all helpless creatures and there's no point in anything. Pick your slavery!
Of course, this is reducto-ad-absurdum. Employment is by contract, slavery is by force. There's a big difference.
Well, to do this, you'd have to find someone willing to exchange American dollars for some other currency. And if at the time American dollars are falling, offloading a large amount is very hard.
For instance, try to find someone willing to trade you Zimbabwe dollars for American dollars. Why would you ever trade your American dollar for a Zimbabwe dollar?
Anyways, I think you missed my point: That political power via the vote is more valuable than even common currency, since governments have the power to regulate currency. Political power, and the right to self-determination (which the vote is an extension of), are the prime movers.
I don't have hard research at my fingertips... but its a push-pull. If you look at the economic conditions or wealth or GDP or even leisure time measurements, over the last 200 years, its been an upward trend, meaning that Americans and most Western nations are far 'richer' and continue to trend that way. So I mean, to say Americans are not prospering is probably false. But to say they could be MORE prosperous if our government was MORE hands off is something that could be argued. See the technology industry. Free from government regulation, software and hardware companies accelerated at an amazing pace. Computers get cheaper and faster every year. The industries that are free from regulation, prosper; much like when men are free from regulation, prosper.
The industrial revolution, which happened around the time of the enlightenment and founding of the United States, could not have happened if men were not allowed to be industrialists. Industrialists must keep what they earn, they cannot be oppressed or subject to regal whim or other personal restrictions... and when men became free during this time, they prospered.
Without the philosophy, their would have been no economic revolution. The principles that the founding fathers brought forth also happened to be the best principles for economic development. When men are free, they prosper.
the point is we're supposed to ignore that $1 million dollars will make a much larger differences to our lives
How useful is 1 million dollars if, in 5 years, the wealth of a nation can be wiped out by irresponsible government? Without the ability to vote, someone could destroy the economic engine that makes dollars worth anything... and we'd be powerless to stop it without being able to vote. See Zimbabwe for an example of a ruined economy via government.
The coolers were on backup power. They just broke during the sudden transfer of load from utility to backup. Here is the update from myrackspace.com, their user portal (I do independent software development and consulting, and I put my clients on rackspace whenever possible).
Nov. 12th 8:30PM CST -- In a completely unrelated incident to this weekend's power problems in DFW, a traffic accident caused damage to a power transformer which provides utility power to our DFW data center. Here is the current sequence of events:
* At approximately 6:00 p.m. CST utility power was lost to the DFW data center
* Power automatically switched over to backup generators without disrupting service for any customers * When generator power was established two chillers within the data center failed to start back up
* Utility power was re-established through a secondary utility source
* As a result of temporary data center temperature increases, we proactively shutdown a number of customer servers to protect them from overheating
At this point, the chillers are back up and running and we are operating on generator power throughout the data center. We have contractors on site to repair the damage and will be in contact with all customers who have been affected by this outage. We apologize for any disruption to your business operations and will work diligently to restore your service.
Being Positioned is one thing. You can have all the capital in the world, but if you don't have a way to transform it into a revenue stream, your business isn't worth as much as your stock price. Google's current revenue stream comes from advertisements. Fine, that's a valid model. But i have no idea if its actually recouping the costs of all the projects they have going on.
Ballmer will one day wake up and will find their mail products, office products and OS sales are all no longer selling.
Fine, everyone uses google office, in your scenario. But how does that make Google money? Again, having tons of happy customers is fine, but not having a way to collect revenues from them directly... that's the killer. There's a difference between making people happy and making them money. Stock price is about making people money.
The intelligence was fabricated. Google "Hans Blix" for more info about Saddam's weapons program and degree of compliance with UN inspectors.
Well, if it was fabricated, then the entire world and UN must have been in on that hoax.
You can't prove a negative.
We didn't ASK to prove a negative. We asked for unrestricted access to all sites so we could determine within a reasonable expectation. Access to cherry-picked sites, access after delays and not being able to move freely all indicated deception. Saddam played politics with it... instead of taking it seriously as a mandate backed by international consensus.
No, it wasn't. It was the greatest robbery in history. Stealing public money and giving it to well-connected corporate insiders. It was securing cheap oil to be sold to the American public at premium prices. Please provide evidence of this. According to the UN:
Under a May 2003 U.N. Security Council resolution, the Coalition Provisional Authority must deposit all proceeds of oil exports into the Development Fund for Iraq.
I'll say it again. We are creating "nutjobs" with our presence in Iraq. Most of the weapons are coming from out of country. a large number of foreign fighters with Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Al-Sadr's Medhi Army are from Iran and other arab nations. Whether we create 'nutjobs' or not isn't really part of the strategy. Foreign policy is not a popularity contest, its about doing what's right for your security and for the world in general.
In my opinion, the only way to "win" in Iraq is to be overthrown by insurgent "nutjobs". That's what happened in Gaza. The radicals won, and instituted their own pirate state, complete with oppressive laws and gangs of looting thugs. Same thing happened in Somalia and some African Islamic nations, too. You think that will fix anything? It will give another Osama another hiding ground to train men to take advantage of our social systems and find ways to murder us.
What the Iraqis do to each other is no concern of ours. It wasn't in 2003, and it isn't now. The only valid reason we have to be anywhere else in the world is to deal with threats to our own defense. This entire war has been worse than doing absolutely nothing would have been in that respect
Well, had the US intelligence community known that there was no active WMD program, we would not have invaded. This was never about 'what Iraqis do to each other'. It started as a response to a dictator that could not assure us he wasn't in possession of certain weapons . He was given ample opportunity to prove to us he didn't have them. We offered to provide and pay the people to gather that proof. He refused. What other option did we have, given that he could have potentially sold these weapons or smuggled them to the same type of people who attacked us in 2001? The fact that he didn't have any is tragic, yes, but those deaths from the resulting military action are Saddam's fault, not ours.
To top it all off, we're no safer than we were six years ago, despite onerous violations of privacy and ludicrous security regulations, and we're no more likely to actually deal with these nutjobs
What do you mean, 'deal with these nutjobs'? Who do you think is causing all this shit in Iraq? its the same foreign fighters, recruiting and stirring up local populations. Iraq has become a calling card for foreign jihadis. If we are going to 'deal with these nutjobs', we are going to find them in Iraq. Pulling out would be avoiding dealing with them.
You can debate the individual policies and strategies, fine. But it was an exercise in pre-emptive defense to invade Iraq, and its to the benefit and safety of the people of the US to remain there and keep terrorists out of there.
Its not just retail channels. Its MONEY. Producing an Album Costs MONEY. Lots of it. Record companies give the band access to studios and time with industry professionals who add polish and shine to the music.
Record companies often PAY the band up front, so they can enjoy a comfortable standard of living while making an album. The record company amortizes income for the band instead of having them starve until they're uber-famous.
Record companies have huge marketing efforts. They can make posters, promote with other cross channel media in order to educate the public about the product. This is the kind of stuff that's too expensive for a small band. You might argue that the internet is a great promo tool, but I'd argue that the internet is a self-reinforcing marketing tool... people who already know about the band use it more than people who don't... educating people who AREN'T fans is where traditional marketing excels. they tie the music and band to existing brands, events or items (like the super bowl halftime show, etc), so that people learn about the band.
Record Companies provide big tour buses and relationships with web site designers and access to top-of-the-line instruments and equipment and get the band onto tours with bigger acts. This is all bigger than a promoter.
Its great except the air being uncompressed gets colder, and therefore its not as easy to stick a heater in this thing. so while it might work in warmer climates, and perhaps India, I'm certainly not going to drive one around in New England.
I mean, it might be the best way for RADIOHEAD to distribute their album, since they're already rich and can front the capital to self-distribute. They also got a ton of free publicity due to the novel business model. They also had a ton of existing fans who were waiting for this.
But if you're the next great band, and no one knows who you are, you might want the label to push your product for you, while you focus on just making the music and touring.
If it were really that simple, everyone would be doing it.
So, cable television exploded in availability in the 1980s. One of the major players in the cable television industry is Comcast. Comcast absorbed lots of networks as it grew. Before comcast, local cable companies would set up town-wide or county-wide networks of analog copper wire. They'd push an analog signal. Since the signal degrades, they needed a lot of repeaters and other equipment to boost the signal. They also needed lots of satellite reception points (called head-ends) to send national network information over their local cable network.
So this approach is flawed because it requires a ton of maintinence. Customers would be SOL if the repeater had a power surge, or if a local neighborhood had noisy lines or if someone fucked with the cable. So comcast decided to change its model. They would roll out a fiber optic network all the way to right before the last mile. What this means is that instead of having a degrading analog signal to the last mile, they had an easily-duplicated digital fiber optic network / signal. So they could have one or two headends for an entire state, and then stream the data across its fiber optic network to all these repeaters, where consumers no longer had to worry about amplification.
now, this upgrade cost Comcast billions. And any time they absorb a new network they have to integrate it into their SONET network. Comcast has yet to fully recoup the costs of this. They certainly could roll out fiber to the last mile, but they're still recovering from this original fiber conversion. Other companies like Time Warner also have a similar problem: Companies like Verizon who are running FTTP didn't have to support a previous fiber push and don't have to worry about their existing infrastructure (they're overbuilding on their existing phone lines, not replacing them). They essentially don't have to wait for returns on a previous upgrade before making another major infrastructure decision.
so all these reasons are why a lot of companies don't want to rip up the copper just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Coax is mostly only last mile. Comcast and Time Warner have mostly fiber backbones and then the fiber is split into 'nodes' which are around 300 households and serviced by coax. Eventually that last step will be fiber; just a matter of when replacing that is cheaper than maintaining it.
They're going to give us XP users a service pack 3, which will hopefully contain all the cool things that are in Vista without having to actually spend the money on Vista.
Check out the link I put in the grandparent post. There's a raytrace example that shows noticable gains in performance when using the Parallelism libraries. The example loop I had obviously doesn't need parallelism, but if you're doing real work over a large set, then it would.
Speaking of C#, MS just released a technology preview that adds extensions / namespaces to C# that make it pretty easy to write parallel-executing code:
.NET runtime to execute the solution in parallel. No shared memory, no locks, all done for you. That's the way parallelism should work, IMHO
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e848dc1d-5be3-4941-8705-024bc7f180ba&displaylang=en
Essentially, they turn
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
a[i] = a[i]*a[i];
}
into
Parallel.For(0, 100, delegate(int i) {
a[i] = a[i]*a[i];
});
and the hint tells the
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/10/Futures/default.aspx
I remember Gopher. I used to be part of a BBS in Boston called Argus, which later my membership got 'sold' as Argus went tits up. The new BBS, Channel One, was touting its 'internet accessibility'. I went into local Channel One chat rooms to figure out just what the hell the internet was. Someone pointed me to the Gopher, IRC and FTP utilities through the BBS. Thought it was okay. The problem was service discovery, which was pretty weak back then. You sort of had to know what you were looking for.
There was also a WWW portal later. You'd minimize whatever terminal software you were using and use WinSock to get your browser working.
Good points. It depends on the mentality, really. I bill a modest $45/hour to my clients. If it takes me more than 3 hours, its cheaper to install the O/S.
I recommend Fedora servers/open source solutions to some clients, and to some clients looking to leverage existing windows investments, I recommend Windows/ASP.NET. All depends on the client. I suggested WHS because it is a NAS solution, like the author requested. It may be one that people scoff at, but it just 'works' for many households who don't understand Linux, don't have time to learn it, but have more than one PC.
FYI, the web access is SSL-encrypted and still requires password authentication. Its also optional / per machine basis. you can also do it per-file-share, to keep sensitive files out and regular files available (such as having my tax info unavailable but having my music files available, etc).
Whatever it is, is it worth $169?
Ok, let me break down the out of box comparison.
Ubuntu does not come with client software for windows machines to automatically back up the windows box nightly onto the Ubuntu server. WHS does.
Ubuntu requires you to install Samba. WHS uses windows shares / web server interface.
Ubuntu requires raid hardware or software. WHS uses a 'storage pool' methodology and allows disk redundancy without raid, and automatic growth of the 'storage pool' by plugging in a USB drive or ESATA device(s).
Ubuntu would not give you Remote Desktop access to your windows machines without configuring Wine, I think.
Ubuntu requires you to install CVS to get versioning of files, which requires you to actively commit files. WHS automatically saves changes between versions and allows you to step back, all through the nightly automatic backup.
You'd have to write your own web service to access the machines from outside the network. You'd also have to configure the router yourself. WHS automatically configures routers (if supported) and has an IIS app that lets you access all machines and WHS content from the internet.
This is just a handful. I thought this through, I run a small business (20 hours a week of development) and did my homework before making the decision to buy WHS.
HP makes a Windows home server for $600. Half a Gig, with hot-swappable trays for SATA, etc. just plug into your network and voila.
http://www.amazon.com/EX470-MediaSmart-Server-Sempron-Processor/dp/B000UY1WSK/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3_s9_rk?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&s9r=8a585b431588ae070115f9650cd90da1&itemPosition=3&qid=1195658849&sr=8-3
Either that or I was a beta-tester for Windows Home Server, during which it saved my bacon when I accidentally blew away my Quicken data files.
Build / buy a Windows Home Server.
$169 on New Egg for the OS (based on windows server 2k3). Backs up ten PCs with incremental backup, optionally allowing you to flag files / folders as 'important', so the OS silently stores the data on more than one disk. Also allows you to back up from either full images, or step through incrementally to see individual versions of files. Acts as a remote access point to your windows machines, and offers file sharing and media streaming.
many EU countries have laws against crapy lock in products like this, it's good for the consumer.
Why are there laws? won't the consumer, by virture of his or her dollars (or euros), decide what is good for him/herself? Or do you believe that consumers are too stupid to buy something that makes sense for them?
The reason that carrier lock took off in the U.S. is that it allowed a bunch of people who didn't want to invest in a mobile phone the ability, by promising to be a customer of X provider for x years, to get a free phone.
Despite the consolidation of the mobile phone market, there is still a lot of choice in the U.S. for a consumer. There's pay-as-you-go, there's contracts with Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Alltel, Cricket, Qwest etc. There's a lot of sneering at carrier lock now, but rewind to 1999 and realize that mobile phones then were a rarer bunch, and carrier lock helped spur the buildout and high adoption rates. Many people enjoyed the benefits now and its hardly fair to tell the cellphone companies that tough shit, just because they bore the cost of the phones before, that they have to stop earning their money back.
Are you fucking serious? Are you using FICTION as a basis for how we should plan for our lives? Oh shit, someone made a movie, and my brain's so malleable that I'll believe its actually how the world is!
Grow up. The world is fine. And the problem with the world being fine is is makes people like you impotent... because if the world's fine, why am I so unhappy all the time? If you lie to yourself and tell yourself the world is fucked up (just like in the movies and books!), you feel better knowing, of course I'm not happy, look at how fucked up the world is!
Personally, I agree with the GP: Buy some guns, ammo, learn how to get by with farming/hunting, and try to live a self-sufficient lifestyle.
Fine. You do that. I'm going to live in the world as it actually is. I refuse to give up on the progress that men before us have bestowed upon us. Why are you posting on slashdot, you should be learning to flay a deer or peel a potato.
If you are between 20 and 35, well, your generation is a bunch of ipod-obsessed weaklings who deserve any system they aren't revolting against, and you have my sympathies.
Why should we revolt against any system? Did you ever think that perhaps people are happy having luxury items like ipods? that we don't mind working white-collar versus blue? That so much of our 'weakness' is really because we don't have to fight anymore?
What makes the generation before this better, or a younger one better for that matter? I'm sure the generation you are a part of railed against integration, women in the workforce, and homosexuality. Sorry we haven't picked up those mantles. You assume we're doomed and weak because we've got it okay, and instead of being happy for the state of the world where everyone doesn't have to be a revolutionary, you look down on us because we haven't had to do what you have done. That's not our fault, nor should it be. In an ideal situation, the system works well enough that people don't need to revolt.
"prosperous free men" also turned millions of American workers into de-facto slaves, living in "company towns" owned and fully controlled by factory owners.
I can't help it if you equate employment with slavery... but they are definitely not the same. These men went to company towns and worked these jobs often because their was NO OTHER OPTION. that living even for a short time in a company town was better than testing your luck with farming land, assuming you were lucky enough to own land, or you weren't wiped out by a drought if you did own land. Not only that but before the industrial revolution people didn't even own their own land for the most part; people were land-indentured to others. So replace company-town with non-company plantation or what have you. Hell, before there were even colonies people offered 7 years of work in exchange for passage to the new world.
Its NATURE you should rail against, the cruelest slavemaster of them all, requiring us to be slaves to food and shelter. In your foolish scenario, what does it matter if a man in his company town is my master, or the cruel hunger in my belly, forcing me to till the soil or forage for berries. We're all helpless creatures and there's no point in anything. Pick your slavery!
Of course, this is reducto-ad-absurdum. Employment is by contract, slavery is by force. There's a big difference.
Well, to do this, you'd have to find someone willing to exchange American dollars for some other currency. And if at the time American dollars are falling, offloading a large amount is very hard.
For instance, try to find someone willing to trade you Zimbabwe dollars for American dollars. Why would you ever trade your American dollar for a Zimbabwe dollar?
Anyways, I think you missed my point: That political power via the vote is more valuable than even common currency, since governments have the power to regulate currency. Political power, and the right to self-determination (which the vote is an extension of), are the prime movers.
I don't have hard research at my fingertips... but its a push-pull. If you look at the economic conditions or wealth or GDP or even leisure time measurements, over the last 200 years, its been an upward trend, meaning that Americans and most Western nations are far 'richer' and continue to trend that way. So I mean, to say Americans are not prospering is probably false. But to say they could be MORE prosperous if our government was MORE hands off is something that could be argued. See the technology industry. Free from government regulation, software and hardware companies accelerated at an amazing pace. Computers get cheaper and faster every year. The industries that are free from regulation, prosper; much like when men are free from regulation, prosper.
The industrial revolution, which happened around the time of the enlightenment and founding of the United States, could not have happened if men were not allowed to be industrialists. Industrialists must keep what they earn, they cannot be oppressed or subject to regal whim or other personal restrictions... and when men became free during this time, they prospered.
economic more than philosophical
Without the philosophy, their would have been no economic revolution. The principles that the founding fathers brought forth also happened to be the best principles for economic development. When men are free, they prosper.
the point is we're supposed to ignore that $1 million dollars will make a much larger differences to our lives
How useful is 1 million dollars if, in 5 years, the wealth of a nation can be wiped out by irresponsible government? Without the ability to vote, someone could destroy the economic engine that makes dollars worth anything... and we'd be powerless to stop it without being able to vote. See Zimbabwe for an example of a ruined economy via government.
The coolers were on backup power. They just broke during the sudden transfer of load from utility to backup.
Here is the update from myrackspace.com, their user portal (I do independent software development and consulting, and I put my clients on rackspace whenever possible).
Nov. 12th 8:30PM CST -- In a completely unrelated incident to this weekend's power problems in DFW, a traffic accident caused damage to a power transformer which provides utility power to our DFW data center. Here is the current sequence of events:
* At approximately 6:00 p.m. CST utility power was lost to the DFW data center
* Power automatically switched over to backup generators without disrupting service for any customers
* When generator power was established two chillers within the data center failed to start back up
* Utility power was re-established through a secondary utility source
* As a result of temporary data center temperature increases, we proactively shutdown a number of customer servers to protect them from overheating
At this point, the chillers are back up and running and we are operating on generator power throughout the data center. We have contractors on site to repair the damage and will be in contact with all customers who have been affected by this outage. We apologize for any disruption to your business operations and will work diligently to restore your service.
Being Positioned is one thing. You can have all the capital in the world, but if you don't have a way to transform it into a revenue stream, your business isn't worth as much as your stock price. Google's current revenue stream comes from advertisements. Fine, that's a valid model. But i have no idea if its actually recouping the costs of all the projects they have going on.
Ballmer will one day wake up and will find their mail products, office products and OS sales are all no longer selling.
Fine, everyone uses google office, in your scenario. But how does that make Google money? Again, having tons of happy customers is fine, but not having a way to collect revenues from them directly... that's the killer. There's a difference between making people happy and making them money. Stock price is about making people money.
Well, if it was fabricated, then the entire world and UN must have been in on that hoax.
You can't prove a negative.
We didn't ASK to prove a negative. We asked for unrestricted access to all sites so we could determine within a reasonable expectation. Access to cherry-picked sites, access after delays and not being able to move freely all indicated deception. Saddam played politics with it... instead of taking it seriously as a mandate backed by international consensus.
No, it wasn't. It was the greatest robbery in history. Stealing public money and giving it to well-connected corporate insiders. It was securing cheap oil to be sold to the American public at premium prices.
Please provide evidence of this. According to the UN:
I'll say it again. We are creating "nutjobs" with our presence in Iraq.
Most of the weapons are coming from out of country. a large number of foreign fighters with Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Al-Sadr's Medhi Army are from Iran and other arab nations. Whether we create 'nutjobs' or not isn't really part of the strategy. Foreign policy is not a popularity contest, its about doing what's right for your security and for the world in general.
In my opinion, the only way to "win" in Iraq is to be overthrown by insurgent "nutjobs".
That's what happened in Gaza. The radicals won, and instituted their own pirate state, complete with oppressive laws and gangs of looting thugs. Same thing happened in Somalia and some African Islamic nations, too. You think that will fix anything? It will give another Osama another hiding ground to train men to take advantage of our social systems and find ways to murder us.
What the Iraqis do to each other is no concern of ours. It wasn't in 2003, and it isn't now. The only valid reason we have to be anywhere else in the world is to deal with threats to our own defense. This entire war has been worse than doing absolutely nothing would have been in that respect
Well, had the US intelligence community known that there was no active WMD program, we would not have invaded. This was never about 'what Iraqis do to each other'. It started as a response to a dictator that could not assure us he wasn't in possession of certain weapons . He was given ample opportunity to prove to us he didn't have them. We offered to provide and pay the people to gather that proof. He refused. What other option did we have, given that he could have potentially sold these weapons or smuggled them to the same type of people who attacked us in 2001? The fact that he didn't have any is tragic, yes, but those deaths from the resulting military action are Saddam's fault, not ours.
To top it all off, we're no safer than we were six years ago, despite onerous violations of privacy and ludicrous security regulations, and we're no more likely to actually deal with these nutjobs
What do you mean, 'deal with these nutjobs'? Who do you think is causing all this shit in Iraq? its the same foreign fighters, recruiting and stirring up local populations. Iraq has become a calling card for foreign jihadis. If we are going to 'deal with these nutjobs', we are going to find them in Iraq. Pulling out would be avoiding dealing with them.
You can debate the individual policies and strategies, fine. But it was an exercise in pre-emptive defense to invade Iraq, and its to the benefit and safety of the people of the US to remain there and keep terrorists out of there.
Its not just retail channels. Its MONEY. Producing an Album Costs MONEY. Lots of it. Record companies give the band access to studios and time with industry professionals who add polish and shine to the music.
Record companies often PAY the band up front, so they can enjoy a comfortable standard of living while making an album. The record company amortizes income for the band instead of having them starve until they're uber-famous.
Record companies have huge marketing efforts. They can make posters, promote with other cross channel media in order to educate the public about the product. This is the kind of stuff that's too expensive for a small band. You might argue that the internet is a great promo tool, but I'd argue that the internet is a self-reinforcing marketing tool... people who already know about the band use it more than people who don't... educating people who AREN'T fans is where traditional marketing excels. they tie the music and band to existing brands, events or items (like the super bowl halftime show, etc), so that people learn about the band.
Record Companies provide big tour buses and relationships with web site designers and access to top-of-the-line instruments and equipment and get the band onto tours with bigger acts. This is all bigger than a promoter.
Its great except the air being uncompressed gets colder, and therefore its not as easy to stick a heater in this thing. so while it might work in warmer climates, and perhaps India, I'm certainly not going to drive one around in New England.
I mean, it might be the best way for RADIOHEAD to distribute their album, since they're already rich and can front the capital to self-distribute. They also got a ton of free publicity due to the novel business model. They also had a ton of existing fans who were waiting for this.
But if you're the next great band, and no one knows who you are, you might want the label to push your product for you, while you focus on just making the music and touring.
If it were really that simple, everyone would be doing it.
So, cable television exploded in availability in the 1980s. One of the major players in the cable television industry is Comcast. Comcast absorbed lots of networks as it grew. Before comcast, local cable companies would set up town-wide or county-wide networks of analog copper wire. They'd push an analog signal. Since the signal degrades, they needed a lot of repeaters and other equipment to boost the signal. They also needed lots of satellite reception points (called head-ends) to send national network information over their local cable network.
So this approach is flawed because it requires a ton of maintinence. Customers would be SOL if the repeater had a power surge, or if a local neighborhood had noisy lines or if someone fucked with the cable. So comcast decided to change its model. They would roll out a fiber optic network all the way to right before the last mile. What this means is that instead of having a degrading analog signal to the last mile, they had an easily-duplicated digital fiber optic network / signal. So they could have one or two headends for an entire state, and then stream the data across its fiber optic network to all these repeaters, where consumers no longer had to worry about amplification.
now, this upgrade cost Comcast billions. And any time they absorb a new network they have to integrate it into their SONET network. Comcast has yet to fully recoup the costs of this. They certainly could roll out fiber to the last mile, but they're still recovering from this original fiber conversion. Other companies like Time Warner also have a similar problem: Companies like Verizon who are running FTTP didn't have to support a previous fiber push and don't have to worry about their existing infrastructure (they're overbuilding on their existing phone lines, not replacing them). They essentially don't have to wait for returns on a previous upgrade before making another major infrastructure decision.
so all these reasons are why a lot of companies don't want to rip up the copper just yet.