Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni
on
Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Your average nuclear power plant produces 2200 megawatts. So in theory using these off the shelf wind turbines it would take $6,966,666,666 to replace one nuclear power plant. Yes $7 billion dollars. Oh and if you only get half the rated power because the wind doesn't blow then the cost is almost 14 billion dollars. And that doesn't include the cost of the towers,,construction, running power lines or the land required.
$7 Billion - you're not dissuading anyone except the people who haven't looked up how much a single nuke plant will cost. Hint - A single (decent) nuclear plant will be much more than $7 billion, likely more like $10-20 billion, and that's not including decommissioning and waste costs. Not to mention, wind might not be reliable, but nuclear isn't good for dynamic power requirements.
The powers lines and land are needed for either technology. No savings there.
Wind pros over nuclear - lots of redundancy. Dispersion over large areas (hard to take out), no waste, no radiation, safer. No one source. I really like having eggs in many baskets! A single nuke plant is billions of dollars, has major health/safety/terrorist risks associated, and currently no reprocessing or good waste disposal. And I suspect using land for nuclear plant is a one-way deal.
I'm not against nuclear plants (nuclear is a great base-load tech, and shows some great potential with new designs), but your cost argument sucks.
My opinion: Stop arguing about stupid stuff. Why not do both? They cover different needs. Neither is ideal.
The least the company can do is provide a good reason, and a real justification, for the fee. All the decent potential justification I see is written by slashdot commenters, not the company. Bad sign.
I'd buy it as a line free or an infrastructure fee, if they were splitting the bill. But this is an additional fee, and the the PR wording of what *should* be a simple statement raises all sorts of alarm bells, in my opinion.
The PR flack states the company absorbs the cost already. In normal-speak, they have a single fee covering delivery and power. So splitting out the delivery cost should NOT be an 'extra' fee, and *should* be very easy to explain.
Instead of a simple explanation, it gets worse. Initially the fee is only a penalty fee for not using enough electricity from the company.
... some solar customers who used a sufficient amount of electrical energy each month would never have to pay the connectivity fee.
And to be clear, the company is making a profit reselling the solar generated electricity, in additional to the peak use benefits. It rings of greed and an excuse to slip in another fee.
Is the on-demand response slow? Stats lie. Stats mislead. Stats are only stats. The systems I'm monitoring would use more I/O if they could. Those basic read/write graphs are just the start. How's the latency? Any errors? Pathing setup good? Are the systems queuing i/o requests while waiting for i/o service response?
And traffic is almost always bursty unless the link is maxed - you're checking out a nice graph of the maximums too, I hope? That average looks mighty deceiving when long periods are compressed. At an extreme over months or years, data points can be days. Overnight + workday could = 50%. No big deal on the average.
I have a similiar usage situation on many systems, but the limits are generally still storage dependent issues like i/o latency (apps make a limited number of requests before requests start queuing), poorly grown storage (a few luns there, a few here, everything is suddenly slowing down due to striping in one over-subscribed drawer), and sometimes unexpected network latency on the SAN (switch bottlenecks on the path to the storage).
Those graphs of i/o may look pitiful, but perhaps that's only because the poor servers can't get the data any faster.
Older enterprise SAN units (even just 4 or 5 years ago) kinda suck performance wise. The specs are lies in the real world. A newer unit, newer drives, newer connects and just like a server, you'll be shocked. What'cha know, those 4Gb cards are good for 4Gb after all!
Every year, there's a few changes and growth, just like in every other tech sector.
You just grab a random sentence and posted inflammatory, trollish statements that have little to add or do with the article, story, or anything other than getting a rise. And not a very good one. Begone, foul beast!
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Back to the article.
The recording was not so innocent a blunder, but not so bad either.
The interesting point was the ban on recording devices *anywhere* outside his home. The rest of the story adds weight and background for personal opinions: How much should copyright be valued? How much do the circumstances change your opinion?
Wow. Someone gets cured and you complain about it not being good enough. Boo on you. The issue is that someone *did* get cured.
While this patient *did* have radiation done, ideally I hope the radiation would be unnecessary with more study. Maybe just implant some marrow producing HIV immune white blood cells (or better, HIV destroying cells) to maintain health. A better way of living with the disease would be acceptable too, right now.
At least you could live with the HIV if you had bone marrow producing immune T-cells. Ideally, there will be a better way to remove the cells hosting the HIV than radiation with future research. Something cheaper, faster, and easier.
This *is* a *big* step, your criticizing aside. A proof of concept. Curing someone with a process that can potentially be repeated!
1. Prove the process works.
2. Look for ways to simplify and improve.
3. And now you have something that can be applied (cheaply?) to large groups.
Yup, previously at a small ISP with servers in multiple cities, and we went this the same thing.
Seriously simple. And for the admins/devs who loved their extra names, we'd let them do cnames to get it out of their system. Now I work in a larger org, and the admins love themes that make no sense to the project or service.
It's like vanity license plates, but for servers. With so many servers and departments, someone is always confused - it's a waste of time. I've never understood why they can't just use service cnames if they want to keep the vanity server names. I always suspect it's the admins who revel in technobabble, messy design, and confusion over genuine skill.
The names also make it harder to discuss expenses and issues with managers. Managers don't care enough to remember what the service *names* mean, let alone what server is running what service, and every meeting turns into re-explaining which servers do what.
When they get frustrated, the non-technical people are less likely to be helpful or agreeable, and in worse cases, they just start saying no. And I can't blame them - after all, it's like we've gone out of our way to make it harder for them.
What would be needed is one law along the lines of "driving without paying due attention or when voluntarily incapacitated".
There are plenty enough of these. There's one for "unsafe driving" here.
But this is just lazy logic. If it was that easy, we'd all have the same Google rule: Don't be evil! And that would be enough.
Our world isn't ideal. There are *always* bad/avergage/good workers. A vague law requires interpretation by the enforcers. What's evil? Some people think being gay is evil. How do you measure inattentive? No loitering - I've always disliked that one.
Laws are a balancing act and need to be written so hands aren't tied, but the limits are still tight enough to keep abuse in check.
And I've worked at an ISP where for a year, 90% of the failed drives were maxtors for a year (20 or 30 failed - lots and lots of drives). Many in the first week of use, then a slow attrition. Probably from the same manufacturing batch - all 40, 80, 120G. Lots with head crashes that sounded like a computer beep as they were failing.
Two or three chirping maxtors in a server room, but no warning lights on the servers, is confusing as h*ll.:)
Early 2000's were really bad for HD failures for some reason. It's dropped off now in the places I work. Still failures, but less of them.
Personally, the worst was still the DeskStar series crap (all in desktops, which made it worse - users hate backing up till it's too late). And all our 60G drives went bad. Every single 60G drive failed eventually too. I still cringe when I think of 60G drives.
In the 90's, a batch of Fireballs lived up to the name. Thank god it didn't trigger fire suppression in one esp' bad situation.
That said, in my limitted experience, drive failures don't follow brands. Batches often, but brands have never been reliable for me in the long term.
A co-worker always says, "Plan for failure, hope for success" - works really well for storage.
Hence, less people would write books. You don't see that as dangerous direction to go?
And then writing books becomes a valuable skill, and worth more money. It's not one or the other.
If low distribution costs cause a loss of value, when the chaff is weeded out by the crappy renumeration, the value of the decent work rises again.
Very, very few writers get rich now. If someone is writing to get rich, it is a mistake. But if you have decent writing skill, people will value that *skill*, which can't be easily replaced. Same as with any other job. Computer geeks fear automation, engineers fear automation, union car industry workers fear automation. Everyone is working in a world where tools are improving.
I don't feel worse for the artists than I do for everyone else affected by better tools.
And I'm extremely interested to see what happens here over the next decade.
Despite material costs being below $1.50, it's still the case that record companies make pretty thin margins on CD sales relative to margins in other industries. I know this will probably boggle many people who read this, but there's a huge gulf between BOM cost and cost of sale. All of the record companies' expenses (salaries, promotions, overhead, etc. etc.) must come out of the sale of that CD. The biggest piece of the pie, believe it or not, is usually the royalties.
So, relative to say, selling coffee it's thin? Coffee being pretty much pure profit at a few pennies cost per cup. Or say a real physical industry, like steel production, where the profits really are much thinner?
The music corporations tend to own every step of the process after the musician plays a note, so much of the costs at any stage of production are net profits for the corporations. If all the music corps did was to sell music, this would be more cut-and-dry. It's like writing off your car for your home business. It's a cost, but buying that car isn't as bad a deal now - and it's even better if you owned the dealership, the garages, the automotive production chain, and everything in between.
None or this is illegal or even immoral. Just good business. Costs written off and back into the business aren't taxed as profits. It's in their own business interest to proclaim how much production costs and how much they're suffering. And please help protect the starving industry stock holders from the nasty [bed monster]! Whatever [bed monster] is today.
Not that the music industry doesn't appear to be digging itself a big grave, but while the companies are stilling making large profits (check out the stock tickers), I'm skeptical of all the witches screaming, "I'm meeellltttting". Everyone lies, corps more than most. If a bucket of cold reality was fatal, the companies would have folded years ago.
The corps can afford a massive legal campaign attacking their own customers, and advertising is still huge as always. My beer still goes unsalted for the poor music companies.
Yeah, I'm hoping zfs works out too. Looks pretty good in some dev environments.
Doesn't solve the backend physical costs for decent performance though, just shaves some savings on file system licensing and simplifies some admin (perhaps - I'll believe it when it happens). And zfs isn't production ready yet.
You know you can't remove storage from a zfs pool on solaris yet? Makes migrating more of a pain. Soon to be solved, I'm told.
Ah, the simple questions. A civic is nice, and maybe you've souped it up to pull a little trailer, but that doesn't mean a tractor-trailer is going to be cheap too.
Unreliable, slow desktop storage is cheap. Reliable, redundant, fast, networked storage - not cheap.
You can dump a TB on your local disk. Now copy it. Boy-howdy, that's a looooonnnngggg wait. Now let 1000 people all do this at the same time.
- redundant storage,
- fast bus,
- redundant controllers,
- redundant locations maybe,
- redundant power,
- cooling,
- redundant wiring,
- and expert management ('cause somebody has to be blamed!)
*All this* is still expensive. Storage prices (hard drives) drop quickly, but not as fast as usage. And consumer drives - not so reliable in large storage arrays.
Film = simple, yes. But how many pictures will be stored? How durable is that volume of data?
You can protect a few small boxes of pictures, or negatives, pretty easily, but if you want a decent amount to store, you're screwed. And forget about easy searching. How much research of old stuff have you done? It's a pain.
Instead, digitize it. If it's important, a few copies on many hard drives. I'm not a fan of CD or DVD storage myself. Too unwieldy, in my opinion.
Even my job now deals in layers of storage. Copies, backup copies, offsite copies, archive copies, and finally (still) some tape backup copies (multiple levels here too). The active storage just keeps being upgraded, and the tapes get upgraded/replaced during rotation. Key word here: COPIES
When Nasa stored their stuff, storage was expensive. Their research data volume is somewhat unique. Maybe also sensitive enough that easy access can be bad.
Nothing is "The Answer". Flavour of the week and new exciting tools are bad choices. Using old, leagcy stuff because you know it is bad. Both happen all the time where I work.
The good projects are the ones that uses established, reliable software to build a *well designed* system, and end up producing something that will be taken care of for years. Simple works better.
I have a preference for modular systems, but that's me. I don't really like perl for larger sites since it seems to lend itself to complication, but if handled well, maybe they can keep it somewhat simple.
And (I'd hope) the capacitor might be lighter than the battery too. Batteries get pretty heavy.
Laptop power variables I care about (outside of usage specs): size / weight / runtime / chargetime
I'd take a runtime hit if charging was fast, they lasted longer (lifetime), and the weight dropped. Capacitors might even be easier to shape than batteries, making the laptop shrink even more.
Or the drive storage medium just shrink to nanotech sized bits...
With the 10 year estimate, does it really matter which way it happens? Either way, yes, the storage bits will be small.
The article is just using vague references to the "nanotech" buzzword as reference to non-moving-disk storage. I'm sure a tech will replace the magnetic bit storage being used now - it's inevitable.
You're right, only in that the music cartels are running music as one-band hits. This would also change.
It really is an unsustainable model, but easier to own - but there aren't enough really talented or mass-appealing musicians, and you end up trying to make up the difference pushing mediocrity, wrecking the market. As has happened.
A small minority make large dollars, most fail. It always looked to me, and my non-business eye, like a peasant/nobility economy.
But I don't find it too hard to picture larger groups of bands pushing larger group concerts. Less money for all, more money being spread around. This is a method that's worked for years and still works. Smaller pub concerts. Bigger citywide concerts - ex Bluesfest, Jazzfest, etc happen here.
Music moves back to a living and not a gold rush. That'll be a tough change for many teenagers and older cartels.
The big problem with flavor-itis in large projects is the years of support after. Time tested solutions people!
Once a company gets committed to a design decision made by an trendy-entranced developer, the sysadmins and users can get punished with years of suffering afterwards.
The tools stop being updated, and none of the *good* developers want to care for the ugly, unique application once the shine comes off the tools. It's like being forced to wear a magic top hat made out of steel - because top hats and magic steel were the fads when the project started.
A trustworthy, *experienced* design architect is important. Preferably someone who's been/seen the young-uns make the silly mistakes.
NTP is a patent troll. Rim did it's own trolling when convenient, and liked to sue the competition. Rim also has an egotistical idiot for a CEO (Or did he resign or something this year due to an accounting restatement costing hundreds of millions?).
It's just unfortunate that one company had to win. Worse that a patent troll got money.
This was a manager mistake. Metrics won't solve it. Having a better manager will.
So you think you have two extra. Someone was dumb enough to hire two extra. You're going to trust this person to fire two people now? That'll end well, I'm sure.
You're skating a fine line at the moment, I think. Metrics are about the business people having more control over something they don't really understand and which costs them money.
Without some measurement how do you know productivity is improved?
By having a good manager of a good department. He knows who does a good job and how well the group is doing. He tells this to his bosses. He removes the bad employees. If the group is doing well, it's doing well. If that's not the manager's responsibility, then what's the manager for?
Metrics are a current business buzzword, and of limited value in a good tech environment. I've been through three big metric pushes as a sysadmin, at 2.5 different companies, and either the metrics push died or the department did.
I understand why metrics are wanted, and *some* metrics be tracked in tickets. But the concept is overused and flawed.
Maybe they won't have a presence - that'll change if people start using it. Or other customers might put something online for the restaraunt. Of course, half the joy of a great hole-in-the-wall is that it was hard to find...
The key bits useful here (to me): Restaraunt name, type of food (description), simple map, distance
When I'm traveling, the questions I always want to ask: Can I skip this restaurant? What else is nearby? How about a motel? Hours would be nice too.
Even better - these simple facts easily searchable from a cell phone. Give me those, and I'll love it.
Darn Canadians! Living in a big, chilly, spread out country and wasting more energy doing it!
Just pointing out: Canada is colder, there's more space, houses are larger. A bigger house in a colder climate means a bigger energy bill - one the best ways to save these days is better insulation. And before you spout something about wasteful North America culture, anyone who immigrates lives the same way be they Asian, Indian, or European. It's just people.
Instead of thinking of this as just using more energy, picture if all your friends had an extra $10,000 a year. How many would save it? Same idea.
It's worse with energy, because you don't even directly see turning on a cheap light as spending...every time you cook, do you think "Darn, that's another 30 cents!".
Someone already pointed this out, but this is merely accounting PR. Gobbly-gook for this year's arguments.
I don't doubt much money is lost on advertising bad bands - my perspective is this was profit put back into the business that probably doesn't show in the net numbers (I'm guessing) and is a good way to mask (so to speak) profits. On the other hand, it's also a cost of the business - no R&D, no future profit.
Another aside, the various production points along the route tend to be owned by the music companies. On one hand, these are expenses. On the other, they're nice points to bleed money off and mask overall profit - this is also standard business practice.
Conviently, if one area stops making profit, it's now also easy to kill off because it's finincially a separate entity.
My experience within a business is that these numbers are generally unreliable and easily manipulated. Better indicators tend to be time, spending, and assets. Slow and steady, folk. How much money are they spending? How long has this been going on? Consistently? Are there assets to back this up?
IMHO - spending levels are still high - tho I'm not seeing another britney-style ad campaign just now. Perhaps someone else has some numbers?
RIAA's like a yappy pitbull. Lotsa noise so you can't tell the bark from the bite, but the bite's still there.
Slashdot Mirror
Your average nuclear power plant produces 2200 megawatts. ,construction, running power lines or the land required.
So in theory using these off the shelf wind turbines it would take $6,966,666,666 to replace one nuclear power plant.
Yes $7 billion dollars. Oh and if you only get half the rated power because the wind doesn't blow then the cost is almost 14 billion dollars.
And that doesn't include the cost of the towers,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants
$7 Billion - you're not dissuading anyone except the people who haven't looked up how much a single nuke plant will cost. Hint - A single (decent) nuclear plant will be much more than $7 billion, likely more like $10-20 billion, and that's not including decommissioning and waste costs. Not to mention, wind might not be reliable, but nuclear isn't good for dynamic power requirements.
The powers lines and land are needed for either technology. No savings there.
Wind pros over nuclear - lots of redundancy. Dispersion over large areas (hard to take out), no waste, no radiation, safer. No one source. I really like having eggs in many baskets! A single nuke plant is billions of dollars, has major health/safety/terrorist risks associated, and currently no reprocessing or good waste disposal. And I suspect using land for nuclear plant is a one-way deal.
I'm not against nuclear plants (nuclear is a great base-load tech, and shows some great potential with new designs), but your cost argument sucks.
My opinion: Stop arguing about stupid stuff. Why not do both? They cover different needs. Neither is ideal.
The least the company can do is provide a good reason, and a real justification, for the fee. All the decent potential justification I see is written by slashdot commenters, not the company. Bad sign.
I'd buy it as a line free or an infrastructure fee, if they were splitting the bill. But this is an additional fee, and the the PR wording of what *should* be a simple statement raises all sorts of alarm bells, in my opinion.
The PR flack states the company absorbs the cost already. In normal-speak, they have a single fee covering delivery and power. So splitting out the delivery cost should NOT be an 'extra' fee, and *should* be very easy to explain.
Instead of a simple explanation, it gets worse. Initially the fee is only a penalty fee for not using enough electricity from the company.
And to be clear, the company is making a profit reselling the solar generated electricity, in additional to the peak use benefits. It rings of greed and an excuse to slip in another fee.
Sort of true, but not entirely accurate.
Is the on-demand response slow? Stats lie. Stats mislead. Stats are only stats. The systems I'm monitoring would use more I/O if they could. Those basic read/write graphs are just the start. How's the latency? Any errors? Pathing setup good? Are the systems queuing i/o requests while waiting for i/o service response?
And traffic is almost always bursty unless the link is maxed - you're checking out a nice graph of the maximums too, I hope? That average looks mighty deceiving when long periods are compressed. At an extreme over months or years, data points can be days. Overnight + workday could = 50%. No big deal on the average.
I have a similiar usage situation on many systems, but the limits are generally still storage dependent issues like i/o latency (apps make a limited number of requests before requests start queuing), poorly grown storage (a few luns there, a few here, everything is suddenly slowing down due to striping in one over-subscribed drawer), and sometimes unexpected network latency on the SAN (switch bottlenecks on the path to the storage).
Those graphs of i/o may look pitiful, but perhaps that's only because the poor servers can't get the data any faster.
Older enterprise SAN units (even just 4 or 5 years ago) kinda suck performance wise. The specs are lies in the real world. A newer unit, newer drives, newer connects and just like a server, you'll be shocked. What'cha know, those 4Gb cards are good for 4Gb after all!
Every year, there's a few changes and growth, just like in every other tech sector.
Seriously? Lame.
You just grab a random sentence and posted inflammatory, trollish statements that have little to add or do with the article, story, or anything other than getting a rise. And not a very good one. Begone, foul beast!
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Back to the article.
The recording was not so innocent a blunder, but not so bad either.
The interesting point was the ban on recording devices *anywhere* outside his home. The rest of the story adds weight and background for personal opinions: How much should copyright be valued? How much do the circumstances change your opinion?
Wow. Someone gets cured and you complain about it not being good enough. Boo on you. The issue is that someone *did* get cured.
While this patient *did* have radiation done, ideally I hope the radiation would be unnecessary with more study. Maybe just implant some marrow producing HIV immune white blood cells (or better, HIV destroying cells) to maintain health. A better way of living with the disease would be acceptable too, right now.
At least you could live with the HIV if you had bone marrow producing immune T-cells. Ideally, there will be a better way to remove the cells hosting the HIV than radiation with future research. Something cheaper, faster, and easier.
This *is* a *big* step, your criticizing aside. A proof of concept. Curing someone with a process that can potentially be repeated!
1. Prove the process works.
2. Look for ways to simplify and improve.
3. And now you have something that can be applied (cheaply?) to large groups.
Yup, previously at a small ISP with servers in multiple cities, and we went this the same thing.
Seriously simple. And for the admins/devs who loved their extra names, we'd let them do cnames to get it out of their system. Now I work in a larger org, and the admins love themes that make no sense to the project or service.
It's like vanity license plates, but for servers. With so many servers and departments, someone is always confused - it's a waste of time. I've never understood why they can't just use service cnames if they want to keep the vanity server names. I always suspect it's the admins who revel in technobabble, messy design, and confusion over genuine skill.
The names also make it harder to discuss expenses and issues with managers. Managers don't care enough to remember what the service *names* mean, let alone what server is running what service, and every meeting turns into re-explaining which servers do what.
When they get frustrated, the non-technical people are less likely to be helpful or agreeable, and in worse cases, they just start saying no. And I can't blame them - after all, it's like we've gone out of our way to make it harder for them.
What would be needed is one law along the lines of "driving without paying due attention or when voluntarily incapacitated".
There are plenty enough of these. There's one for "unsafe driving" here.
But this is just lazy logic. If it was that easy, we'd all have the same Google rule: Don't be evil! And that would be enough.
Our world isn't ideal. There are *always* bad/avergage/good workers. A vague law requires interpretation by the enforcers. What's evil? Some people think being gay is evil. How do you measure inattentive? No loitering - I've always disliked that one.
Laws are a balancing act and need to be written so hands aren't tied, but the limits are still tight enough to keep abuse in check.
And I've worked at an ISP where for a year, 90% of the failed drives were maxtors for a year (20 or 30 failed - lots and lots of drives). Many in the first week of use, then a slow attrition. Probably from the same manufacturing batch - all 40, 80, 120G. Lots with head crashes that sounded like a computer beep as they were failing.
:)
Two or three chirping maxtors in a server room, but no warning lights on the servers, is confusing as h*ll.
Early 2000's were really bad for HD failures for some reason. It's dropped off now in the places I work. Still failures, but less of them.
Personally, the worst was still the DeskStar series crap (all in desktops, which made it worse - users hate backing up till it's too late). And all our 60G drives went bad. Every single 60G drive failed eventually too. I still cringe when I think of 60G drives.
In the 90's, a batch of Fireballs lived up to the name. Thank god it didn't trigger fire suppression in one esp' bad situation.
That said, in my limitted experience, drive failures don't follow brands. Batches often, but brands have never been reliable for me in the long term.
A co-worker always says, "Plan for failure, hope for success" - works really well for storage.
Sure. It's called cancer.
Nothing says fun like knowing you're just one big tumor.
Hence, less people would write books. You don't see that as dangerous direction to go?
And then writing books becomes a valuable skill, and worth more money. It's not one or the other.
If low distribution costs cause a loss of value, when the chaff is weeded out by the crappy renumeration, the value of the decent work rises again.
Very, very few writers get rich now. If someone is writing to get rich, it is a mistake. But if you have decent writing skill, people will value that *skill*, which can't be easily replaced. Same as with any other job. Computer geeks fear automation, engineers fear automation, union car industry workers fear automation. Everyone is working in a world where tools are improving.
I don't feel worse for the artists than I do for everyone else affected by better tools.
And I'm extremely interested to see what happens here over the next decade.
Despite material costs being below $1.50, it's still the case that record companies make pretty thin margins on CD sales relative to margins in other industries. I know this will probably boggle many people who read this, but there's a huge gulf between BOM cost and cost of sale. All of the record companies' expenses (salaries, promotions, overhead, etc. etc.) must come out of the sale of that CD. The biggest piece of the pie, believe it or not, is usually the royalties.
So, relative to say, selling coffee it's thin? Coffee being pretty much pure profit at a few pennies cost per cup. Or say a real physical industry, like steel production, where the profits really are much thinner?
The music corporations tend to own every step of the process after the musician plays a note, so much of the costs at any stage of production are net profits for the corporations. If all the music corps did was to sell music, this would be more cut-and-dry. It's like writing off your car for your home business. It's a cost, but buying that car isn't as bad a deal now - and it's even better if you owned the dealership, the garages, the automotive production chain, and everything in between.
None or this is illegal or even immoral. Just good business. Costs written off and back into the business aren't taxed as profits. It's in their own business interest to proclaim how much production costs and how much they're suffering. And please help protect the starving industry stock holders from the nasty [bed monster]! Whatever [bed monster] is today.
Not that the music industry doesn't appear to be digging itself a big grave, but while the companies are stilling making large profits (check out the stock tickers), I'm skeptical of all the witches screaming, "I'm meeellltttting". Everyone lies, corps more than most. If a bucket of cold reality was fatal, the companies would have folded years ago.
The corps can afford a massive legal campaign attacking their own customers, and advertising is still huge as always. My beer still goes unsalted for the poor music companies.
Yeah, I'm hoping zfs works out too. Looks pretty good in some dev environments.
Doesn't solve the backend physical costs for decent performance though, just shaves some savings on file system licensing and simplifies some admin (perhaps - I'll believe it when it happens). And zfs isn't production ready yet.
You know you can't remove storage from a zfs pool on solaris yet? Makes migrating more of a pain. Soon to be solved, I'm told.
Ah, the simple questions. A civic is nice, and maybe you've souped it up to pull a little trailer, but that doesn't mean a tractor-trailer is going to be cheap too.
Unreliable, slow desktop storage is cheap. Reliable, redundant, fast, networked storage - not cheap.
You can dump a TB on your local disk. Now copy it. Boy-howdy, that's a looooonnnngggg wait. Now let 1000 people all do this at the same time.
- redundant storage,
- fast bus,
- redundant controllers,
- redundant locations maybe,
- redundant power,
- cooling,
- redundant wiring,
- and expert management ('cause somebody has to be blamed!)
*All this* is still expensive. Storage prices (hard drives) drop quickly, but not as fast as usage. And consumer drives - not so reliable in large storage arrays.
Film = simple, yes. But how many pictures will be stored? How durable is that volume of data?
You can protect a few small boxes of pictures, or negatives, pretty easily, but if you want a decent amount to store, you're screwed. And forget about easy searching. How much research of old stuff have you done? It's a pain.
Instead, digitize it. If it's important, a few copies on many hard drives. I'm not a fan of CD or DVD storage myself. Too unwieldy, in my opinion.
Even my job now deals in layers of storage. Copies, backup copies, offsite copies, archive copies, and finally (still) some tape backup copies (multiple levels here too). The active storage just keeps being upgraded, and the tapes get upgraded/replaced during rotation. Key word here: COPIES
When Nasa stored their stuff, storage was expensive. Their research data volume is somewhat unique. Maybe also sensitive enough that easy access can be bad.
Nothing is "The Answer". Flavour of the week and new exciting tools are bad choices. Using old, leagcy stuff because you know it is bad. Both happen all the time where I work.
The good projects are the ones that uses established, reliable software to build a *well designed* system, and end up producing something that will be taken care of for years. Simple works better.
I have a preference for modular systems, but that's me. I don't really like perl for larger sites since it seems to lend itself to complication, but if handled well, maybe they can keep it somewhat simple.
If this works for BBC, have at 'er.
And (I'd hope) the capacitor might be lighter than the battery too. Batteries get pretty heavy.
Laptop power variables I care about (outside of usage specs): size / weight / runtime / chargetime
I'd take a runtime hit if charging was fast, they lasted longer (lifetime), and the weight dropped. Capacitors might even be easier to shape than batteries, making the laptop shrink even more.
Or the drive storage medium just shrink to nanotech sized bits...
With the 10 year estimate, does it really matter which way it happens? Either way, yes, the storage bits will be small.
The article is just using vague references to the "nanotech" buzzword as reference to non-moving-disk storage. I'm sure a tech will replace the magnetic bit storage being used now - it's inevitable.
You're right, only in that the music cartels are running music as one-band hits. This would also change.
It really is an unsustainable model, but easier to own - but there aren't enough really talented or mass-appealing musicians, and you end up trying to make up the difference pushing mediocrity, wrecking the market. As has happened.
A small minority make large dollars, most fail. It always looked to me, and my non-business eye, like a peasant/nobility economy.
But I don't find it too hard to picture larger groups of bands pushing larger group concerts. Less money for all, more money being spread around. This is a method that's worked for years and still works. Smaller pub concerts. Bigger citywide concerts - ex Bluesfest, Jazzfest, etc happen here.
Music moves back to a living and not a gold rush. That'll be a tough change for many teenagers and older cartels.
The big problem with flavor-itis in large projects is the years of support after. Time tested solutions people!
Once a company gets committed to a design decision made by an trendy-entranced developer, the sysadmins and users can get punished with years of suffering afterwards.
The tools stop being updated, and none of the *good* developers want to care for the ugly, unique application once the shine comes off the tools. It's like being forced to wear a magic top hat made out of steel - because top hats and magic steel were the fads when the project started.
A trustworthy, *experienced* design architect is important. Preferably someone who's been/seen the young-uns make the silly mistakes.
Both companies deserved to lose the case.
NTP is a patent troll. Rim did it's own trolling when convenient, and liked to sue the competition. Rim also has an egotistical idiot for a CEO (Or did he resign or something this year due to an accounting restatement costing hundreds of millions?).
It's just unfortunate that one company had to win. Worse that a patent troll got money.
This was a manager mistake. Metrics won't solve it. Having a better manager will.
So you think you have two extra. Someone was dumb enough to hire two extra. You're going to trust this person to fire two people now? That'll end well, I'm sure.
You're skating a fine line at the moment, I think. Metrics are about the business people having more control over something they don't really understand and which costs them money.
Without some measurement how do you know productivity is improved?
By having a good manager of a good department. He knows who does a good job and how well the group is doing. He tells this to his bosses. He removes the bad employees. If the group is doing well, it's doing well. If that's not the manager's responsibility, then what's the manager for?
Metrics are a current business buzzword, and of limited value in a good tech environment. I've been through three big metric pushes as a sysadmin, at 2.5 different companies, and either the metrics push died or the department did.
I understand why metrics are wanted, and *some* metrics be tracked in tickets. But the concept is overused and flawed.
Maybe they won't have a presence - that'll change if people start using it. Or other customers might put something online for the restaraunt. Of course, half the joy of a great hole-in-the-wall is that it was hard to find...
The key bits useful here (to me): Restaraunt name, type of food (description), simple map, distance
When I'm traveling, the questions I always want to ask: Can I skip this restaurant? What else is nearby? How about a motel? Hours would be nice too.
Even better - these simple facts easily searchable from a cell phone. Give me those, and I'll love it.
Darn Canadians! Living in a big, chilly, spread out country and wasting more energy doing it!
Just pointing out: Canada is colder, there's more space, houses are larger. A bigger house in a colder climate means a bigger energy bill - one the best ways to save these days is better insulation. And before you spout something about wasteful North America culture, anyone who immigrates lives the same way be they Asian, Indian, or European. It's just people.
Instead of thinking of this as just using more energy, picture if all your friends had an extra $10,000 a year. How many would save it? Same idea.
It's worse with energy, because you don't even directly see turning on a cheap light as spending...every time you cook, do you think "Darn, that's another 30 cents!".
Someone already pointed this out, but this is merely accounting PR. Gobbly-gook for this year's arguments.
I don't doubt much money is lost on advertising bad bands - my perspective is this was profit put back into the business that probably doesn't show in the net numbers (I'm guessing) and is a good way to mask (so to speak) profits. On the other hand, it's also a cost of the business - no R&D, no future profit.
Another aside, the various production points along the route tend to be owned by the music companies. On one hand, these are expenses. On the other, they're nice points to bleed money off and mask overall profit - this is also standard business practice.
Conviently, if one area stops making profit, it's now also easy to kill off because it's finincially a separate entity.
My experience within a business is that these numbers are generally unreliable and easily manipulated. Better indicators tend to be time, spending, and assets. Slow and steady, folk. How much money are they spending? How long has this been going on? Consistently? Are there assets to back this up?
IMHO - spending levels are still high - tho I'm not seeing another britney-style ad campaign just now. Perhaps someone else has some numbers?
RIAA's like a yappy pitbull. Lotsa noise so you can't tell the bark from the bite, but the bite's still there.