I think the MS decision was legal for not installing java with a hint of greed. They did not want even the posiblity that XP would get tied up in a legal morass till they had TONS of copy on shelf and being installed. Sun looked like FOOLS. Sun did what any kid would do when humiliated. They fought back.
MS was the ones pushing for the extensions of Java. Sun didnt like it one bit because it is their toy not MS's. So they came up with the exact same techs MS was but just incompatible enough that you could no longer claim compile once run anywhere. Then Sun started saying MS's version was not REAL Java. MS's was for a long time the BEST Java to have. They were well on their way to the usuall embrace and extend that is their motto. And to boot they had a decent compiler with a nice IDE!
MS came up with a contract that got Java on just about EVERY desktop out there. Till they came along it was a ADD on package that you had to go get. Just so you could look at some cool pages.
Sun decided they didnt want anyone else playing with their toy. So MS basicly said here is your ball go home. Now Sun is crying because the other rich kid will no longer play nice with them.
This settlement while neato at first will become a real drag for windows users. It is the equivilant of for every copy of Linux Red hat there must be installed a copy of MS Excel, oh and it must be the latest version.
Basicly a very minor component of windows is giving MS fits. They did like any sane developer would do when something just does not work well. Hack it out. A very rational business decision. Do not confuse MS for being philanthropic. They are a business, in business for making money, not cool software.
Sun is Java's worst enemy not MS. Sun could have worked with MS. Instead they took every oportunity to make sure MS could not use what Sun was giving them. Then trying to make MS look bad. Sun is the agressors here which is a bit of a change!
Thats a fairly new thing belive it or not. Up until the PlayStation came out, all consoles came with at least 1 game. Maybe not an AWSOME game, but at least a playable one. They usually also came with 2 controlers.
If I remember correctly the original PlayStation had 0 controlers and 0 games in the box. They did this because an extra 30 bucks put them past a certian 'price point'. Plus they can charge 30 for a game, then 25-30 per controler. They are make even more money on something you will definatly want. The sentiment at the time was who would buy a console that didnt even come with a game. Aparently a lot of people...
Also if you just bought a system and it didnt come with 2 controlers and a game you got fairly hosed. There are some pretty good bundle packs out there.
Also keep in mind not everyone has a smoking conection into their house. On a 56k modem downloading the whole mame set would take about 17 days. If your going full blast at it. Its that big. And thats being generous that you get 5k per second and no disconects.
I think the biggest challange will be for them to get the price point of the hardware down. Then secondly getting permision from the game companies. The game companies should jump at it. They probably havent made money on some of these games in years. If they ever broke even on em at all. If they include a dvd with all the roms on it will be gravy...
The next problem may be MAME itself. Its licence does not allow for distribution of roms with the exes.
OH its possible. But you will see more lazyness on it then you could even imagine. Most even have enough wiggle room in their contracts to enforce it. A decent router can log crap. It can look at the IP header. In fact it MUST look at it to route it.
It is beyond me why the ISP's would even want one crap packet come out of their network. Its costing them money. Their upstream connection costs money...
For some interesting numbers go take a look at MyNetWatchman These dudes even TELL the ISP's that there is something wrong. But most just get ignored.
Truth is most people could care less that their computer is doing something wrong. They just want a bit of email and to surf a bit. Hell most just want it to stay up long enough, and be a bit faster. Considering the 300 programs they are running out of the box.
The only way I have ever been able to explain to a person what its about is the apartment analogy. A theif goes into an apartment building and rattles every doorknob. He finds one that opens. He then uses that apartment as a base to sneak around to rattle other doorknobs. Most people get very upset when I tell them someone is basicly trying to break into their house. The next words out of their mouths are usually 'who can I report this to?' All I can tell them is no one.
I can not belive no one bothered with this style. Usenet oracle
> Oh great and mighty oracle whos toejam I am > unworthy to throwup. Could you re-write > the LOTR in your style?
And in response, thus spake the Oracle:
} OH THAT tired old story. How many more times } must I hear about the great Frodo Baggins. I } should ZOT you dead for even muttering that name } around me! What great power that was bestowed } upon him and he squandered it. Typical Hobit. } } You owe the Oracle 3 cans of Canned Hobit. Not } the creamed ones but the chunky.
I agree that what he did was wrong and he should have fun in jail. However my question is how do you put the toothpaste back into the tube? Its very hard to unsay something...
For that to work properly would also depend on the reading device to be able to tell that it is a 'locked' content. Otherwise it just becomes a stream of bits and bytes. Once it becomes that it can be copied and displayed anywhere. What if suddenly with a small change the device didnt care? Or what if a different device that was not meant to read that material was made to do so?
The most easy way is to let the hardware decode it for you and you just take what it sends out.
So what if it is watermarked? Those can also be removed. The only effective water mark would be if you remove it, it becomes unusable. But with the type of media they are messing with you can usually make a 'fair' guess as to what it should be.
Compliance means little. If you know how or know the right people. You can make a A/D converter. A branch of science will not suddenly go away. Its a fairly 'known' thing.
The more golden the prize the quicker it will be cracked.
If you collect JUST because it MIGHT be worth something, find a different hobbie like stamps, coins, or gold.
You need to go into collecting because you like it. I have a fairly meager collection of about 1000 games. Thats not even close to being hard core. I am mearly casual about it. I snag things only I like. I could care less about what its worth. That is secondary to why I buy the games. I buy them because I like them.
With DVD's I am the same way. I buy movies I like. Even got a copy of 'They Live'. I had NO idea it was a 'rare' dvd. I bought it when it came out and gladly paid my 20 bucks for it. Because its a fun movie.
The example you gave of Magic the gathering is one of the pitfalls of collecting things I dont really care for, some collecting is a fad. You have to watch out for it. Also collecting takes time and sometimes lots of money. I had the same thing happen to me with baseball cards. I got into it because I thought it MIGHT be worth something. Not because I like baseball, and find the cards cool.
Forget 'collectors editions'. Those are usually HUGE runs with a sticker slapped on em. RARE things are almost always things that were never 'popular'. Junk people never wanted. For example Star Wars toys. Most of the toys are worth about what they originaly came out for. However RARE, and thefore valuable, are the toys that never got opened. Still has the box is rare, but not as rare as unopened. Mail ins are usually rare also. Not a lot of people do it, and they are usually small runs of things.
Another thing to keep in mind is things do not become valuable overnight. Sometimes it takes YEARS. Think of the fun quote from Raiders. "take this watch, 10 dollars from a street vendor. I bury it in the sand for a thousand years. Priceless"
My rarest PC game? Wing Commander Kilrathi Saga. I didnt buy it to 'collect' it. I bought it to blow some Kilrathi scum from the sky!
OH soooooo true! Watermarking will not work. The whole point is to make it so you can NOT watch a copy of it. If you can display it on ANYTHING it can be copied. Screen scraping if it comes down to it.
Case in point is the DVD case. CSS was never about thwarting 'piracy' it was about content control. The C is for Content. It was about controling what region dvd's could be shown in. It is a outright attempt to put price fixing in place. They are being sold a bill of goods and they should figure it out before what they put out is cracked. What was really funny is the people that are REALLY serious about copying things would just copy the discs bit for bit and just let the thing decode it properly...
Think about this. Lets say they put in 2048 bit encryption. Lets also say no one bothers to 'screen scrape' (HA). Then solve how to get those keys to everyone. They will be able to keep people out for awhile. Eventually they will be overrun by the same technology that is helping them. I am willing to bet in a few years those sorts of keys will be broken in minutes.
I dont find it to strange. If a game comes out on all platforms I will buy they xbox or ps2 version. There has been quite a bit of those games lately.
PC games are a different league of playability. 104 keys plus a 5 button mouse plus a decent joystick. Is way different than 10 buttons and 2 decent analog controls. The way the game plays will be way harder on the PC. Usually the ports are hastely done, and badly tested. There are exceptions but they are rare. Then once you get the game on your PC you realize it was a fairly dull game in the first place.
A game designed for the PC on a PC is a way different game. We look for things that PUSH our hardware to its limits and a tad beyond sometimes. The company usually has somewhat of a clue that they have a fickle audience. Each person playing will more than likely have a different configuration. They aim for the middle and hope they get most everyone. Consoles are just not like that. They are fairly static. I am not saying the games are worse. I am saying they are just different.
The only thing that irks me is the price fixing that is going on. 50 bucks for a game. GAWD. Most are NOT worth that at all. The cost they are sharing with MS/Nin/Sony per game can NOT be that much. That market is getting jammed hard. No wonder its growing and PC's are shrinking. The marginal revinues must be MUCH MUCH better...
The only thing missing in this is the fact that if guns are suddenly 'outlawed'. This would create a HUGE surge in the supply. I think it would actually have the oposite effect initialy. Then after some period it would level out and eventually start to rise again.
The only thing that ticks me off about these arguments is the fact that people are trying to take away one of my RIGHTS. Which one should be next? How about free speech?
Maybe for your gamming machine it is. BUT look at what else that company makes. Mostly rackmount things. A 10 bay case would be a HELL of a lot cheaper than a rack that can hold 10 1U computers. Also they see their market willing to PAY 1000. For what would be a 400 dollar computer, if it was a tad bigger. Also they are probably using fairly off the shelf things. About the only kind of parts that would fit in that form factor would be laptop parts. Last I looked those are fairly expensive.
Also If more powerful was the only precluding factor in this we would all still be using computers that are ACRES in size. Miniaturization is the one thing that has helped drive down cost, increased margins, and brought us the desktop we have today. Why do you think price drops whenever a CPU manufacture does a die shrink? You think they do it because they feel like it? No they can get closer to marginal revinue equals marginal cost. For the same price they can produce N more chips. To them they make about the same amount. There is such a thing as to much profit. You actually fight yourself when making more money.
If the only thing you look at is the CPU for what you do your looking at the wrong thing. Think if memory ran at the same speed as the CPU. A 3ghz cpu with memory able to feed at that rate. You would see a computer that BLEW away anything on the market currently. What if your bus was just 10mhz faster? Or even better ran at the same speed as your CPU? The computer is a system of parts. Not just a CPU. We are not going to get that sort of thing with the size of computers we have today. The memory will need to be MUCH closer to the CPU. The bus will need to be MUCH shorter. Devices will need to have higher tolarances. Miniaturization helps with alot of these types of things. It also brings in its own set of problems. But overall making it smaller has helped. That little speed of light thing is such a drag isnt it!
repeat after me it scales JUST FINE. It is up to the provider of the network to make it work. A VPN is not in the providers network. Most VPN is run through ip over X net. Which is DATA not header. IP forging to setup a VPN is a crummy way to do it, and sets you up for being cracked/spoofed nicely. Also a router does JUST that route stuff. It KNOWS what networks it belongs to... For most ISP where this data is originating this would work just fine.
Lets take a look at why forged is bad. It has ONLY to do with source. If source is wrong drop it. If a router does not know who should be SENDING not reciveing what is that router doing? Every network belongs to a subnet. Not in that on source DROP it log it...
Think what would happen on the net if most major isp's tommorow set this up on all of their fringe routers. Ie the ones that control initial dial in and routing on Cable and DSL. That alone would clip MOST of it. Schools could do it on their outgoing pipes. And so on... Overnight you could eliminate some of the most silly script kiddie junk. Then we can get to work on fixing trojans and such. Because then you have a fair idea its in the right network. Doing nothing is worse than 'does not scale'.
Im sorry IPv6 will ONLY be viable once we are OUT of ip's. Till then it will be hack after hack to make IPv4 work. Also it will continue to exist for a LONG time. IPv6 is cool no doubt. But its just that, cool. There currently is NO reason to rush towards it. But it is cool...
Ive been watching these sites it helps some but not much:(
FirstOnes They actually snorked a copy of the sirra web site. So all we can do now is drool over something that will never happen. Ive Found Her They are making a B5 game. The pics they have been posting look semi cool.
Course the B5 first season set is selling pretty well I hear. So maybe WB will realize they have a fairly hot property. That can be exploted into a game (HA).
I have been boycoting Sierra because they no longer make the games I like. I like adventure games. They used to make some of the best. Now they make 3d FPS and boring 'family' games. I havent been really wowed by a FPS since DOOM.
The advent style game Ive been waiting on lately has been Full Throttle 2. FT2 Least Lucasarts still has somewhat of a clue about games... But some of the SW games are getting as bad as a star trek game. You just know it will be lame.
Vulcans Fury was one I was waiting on as well. If I remeber correctly it was during a time of reorg. The game was way over budget and getting worse. They cut their losses and wrote it off. Personaly I am glad they cut it instead of shipping it before it was done. If it had shipped it may have been regarded as one of the buggiest games ever. Now it has a mythical feel to it:)
they chose to throw away the work done instead of selling it
More than likely they were more interested in the tax write off at this point. If they sold it, it became a asset. If they held onto it, it became a tax write off. So they priced it in the range where it made them money. Instead of offloading it. Who knows what goes through the heads of some corp ladder climber. They probably could have priced it about even with their write off/sunk cost. Maybe they tried to get that little extra out of em. Or maybe the other company was way under bidding hopping to scoop it up for nothing. Why they are sitting on this title is beyond me. Talk about a built in audience! They were able to SELL the extra junk they were going to stick into boxes. That should have told them something!
Re:Out of the loop
on
Cringely on P2P
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Routers that drop packets with forged headers
This could happen tommorow. Most routers let you configure it to do this. Show me a forged header Ill show you a lazy admin.
ISP's could use this as a service to their customers. Find a forged header log where it came from (mac address, phone, etc...) Then help the user fix their computer. Today we have a very lazy group that see it as a non expense to them. But it does cost them bandwidth and time.
The ISPs have to balance per byte metered versus how they lure people into their network. Why would I pay more for brodband if your just going to turn around and charge me a lot more for it. That is exactly how it will be seen. Currently they are enticing people into the network with 'unlimited', or nearly that, usage. They almost say you can get fast mp3's with a wink and a nod. With phrases like 'I can get my music faster'. Yet technicaly most of these ISP's have the 'no servers' in the contract. Those p2p systems are servers. The only way I can see metered will work is if most of the time my bill would be lower than a flat rate.
There will be more pay per play type systems. There are some rudementary ones right now. But all it takes is one cheap dude to make something that can copy the data. Then poof that movie that costed 5 bucks to rent, now costs very little for Joe Smoe to copy. Pay-per-play is doomed from the outset because if you can display it I can copy it, or at least make a decent copy. The only way they can keep total control is to not distribute it, or not make a display program. Either of which make them no money.
The artical didnt point it out. It sort of danced around it. But the current system is setup by control of media. When you buy a CD its probably 3 cents worth of plastic. But it cost 20 bucks. That is in economic terms called scarcity. Not everyone can make a batch of 100,000 3 cent CDs. But the media producers can, they make enough so marginal revenue equals marginal cost. If the artist and the end user get screwed so be it, MR = MC. They end up with a tidy sum of money. The new p2p systems lower dramaticly cost. Cost is now very close to 0.
There is no shipping, pressing, marketing, etc. Suddely its just product and end user. You do not have to ship things. You do not have to have a batch run of CDs made. You do not have to have artwork made up for the cover. You do not have to pay the middle man distributor. There are new costs. But most of them you do not control, and cost you nothing.
The real change here is not the distribution method. That could have been controled up front and they still could have held onto some sort of percived scarcity. Instead someone else did it. Suddenly the scarcity is not there. If two products are fairly equal a normal person will purchase the one that cost less. They were making tons of money on scarcity. They know it. They are going ape over trying to keep it.
If someone figures out how to compress a 2 hour movie into something like 20 meg, and good quality. The movie companies will have something to worry about. But at current data rates a 700 meg file is just not practical. Its can be done. But most users will not do it. There will be some exceptions but currently not many. If the size comes down or the data rate goes up dramaticly it will become practical. Then the movie companies have something to really worry about.
Currently the only squaking your seeing is coming from the ISP's. You see silly names like 'bandwidth hogs'. But hell they SELL the service that way. A few people take them up on the offer! They are yelling uncle not because people are breaking the law. They yell it because they are seeing their bandwith bills skyrocket. They are currently trying to find the right balance of oversubscription, bandwidth needed, and pay rates. Bandwidth capping is just an kneejerk reaction to the fact they oversubscribed to much. The same sort of thing happened when phone ISP's started showing up.
Unfortunatly it is a naive point of view. All it takes is one semi smart thief to rip you off. Then you are no longer the only one with a cool feature. Proving that your code was used could be semi difficult. How would you do that?
You can also create a new kind of pirate. The clone pirate. The software is hacked enough to remove any sort of copy protection then released as a 'perfect' copy. Sold/Given away as the real deal. I know most copy protection is fairly silly and in some cases trivial to break. However now this would basicly hand them the keys to do so. How do we get software designers and programmers to raise the quality of their work? Because few people ever see their immediate product (the source code), what would motivate engineers to do better? The answer is that all source code should be open and included in every software release.
Shame will not work in making better code. If that is what the author was getting at. There are people out there that seriously belive their shit dont stink... Even IF you show it to them YOUR the one thats wrong. YOU did something wrong, NOT them. The code seg faults. But you pushed the wrong button?!
The author stated why software is a problem. Its the schedule. Ive seen time and time again where schedules are created that have NO basis in fact. Days weeks months removed from a schedule just to meet some deadline, so some manager somewhere can get a bonus. Hack upon hack upon hack and eventually the house of cards WILL come crashing down. But by the time the cards come falling down the manager will be long gone and probably some OTHER programer will have to fix it. Who had no idea about how hack 384 worked. But depended on hack 375 to work correctly. But also needs hack 3838 to definatly work around some assumption made in hack 4. So he will add hack 4335 that could be fixed with one change in some other file. But he doesnt realy know the code that well and doesnt want to break anything. Because his manager and program manger are yelling at him to fix it to meet the current deadline which is in 3 days. When in reality the code needs a good scrubbing down and a proper redesign.
A well thought out design and schedule can be a god send. A poor one of either and your screwed. Opening the code to outside people could run you out of busness. Most companies are shy of getting sued. How do you think they would react to the possiblity they could be run out of busness?!
I try to tell my upgrading friends dont sweat it. Wait a year or so with video cards. They are usually good for 3-4 years. Monitors even more so.
The vid card I have now is like 3 years old. Also the monitor is about 7. At the time I bought both they were TOP of the line. Now they are not even entry level.
I know one dude who has had every video card gen for the past 4 years. His family has some awsome hardware because of it. However it is fun to RUN past him. He then MUST upgarde. He will not be happy till he can run at 8192x4096x64 at 300 fps.
Me? When this card comes out should be about the timeframe I am looking for a new system. It will be a gutting of my current sys (3yr old). Ive been very patient. Didnt like the performance degredation during the p4 rollout. And AMD is playing the performance rating game again (I know I know).
This may involve a new case. Havent decided yet. That dual slot thing may put a crimp in what I was thinking of getting. Which was one of those tiny boxen. Maybe with a dremel I can work something out:)
Windows has its own flavor of threads. Ive always found it to be 'in the way' as it were to making seperate in-process type things.
Windows also has copy on write. That is not a linux/unix exclusive. Its part of the 386 cpu and its paging method. Did you know if you load 1 dll and some else loads it they share the code memory? This was how in win3.1 people were able to do shared memory type things fairly simpley. 9x and NT did not allow such things so a lot of those apps broke when they came along.
Win32 also has shared memory. Again mapping memory into different process spaces is part of the CPU. A 'easy' as it were for both teams to make work.
You can also create seperate processes in win32. With the function called CreateProcess. Most of the time you do not need the extra overhead of a seperate process. You just need 'go do this and come back when done'. The load time in windows for a process is not a trival thing. That is why CreateProcess (or out of proc) is not used as much. Versus the thread model used (in proc). In proc gives you a simpler way to share memory and interathread communication. Out of proc usually involves mutexs and shared memory. Setting up a shared memory space is NOT a simple task win32. That is why you will see more threads in windows programs. Because people are lazy and tend to dislike complex things.
What drives me up the wall is that CreateThread versus _beginthread versus AfxBeginThread. Each one with its own rules. You have to watch EVERYTHING with one and not the others. You have to watch out for things like shared heaps and the like or end up with crummy performance. There are LOTS of things I would like to see changed in the way windows does all this. Its far from perfection. Do one wrong thing with the wrong C-runtime at the wrong time and your HOSED in performance. There are things you can do to make it better but you usually end up having to do it all by hand...
The one other thing that bugs me about Win32 threads is if you are not carefull you can actually swamp the CPU. With two threads of equal priority. One stuck in a loop and the other not. The one in the tight loop will swamp out any other threads on the system of equal priority. I usually end up having to yeild cpu with Sleep(1). Also Sleep(0) does NOTHING. It does not yield. But im just bitter and ranting:)
Your using the wrong method... Events should ONLY be used if you do not mind missing them. Its just the way windows works. The idea behind events is everyone that is 'waiting' can go now if they are not already. But not necessarialy the other way around. Ill wait till someone else is done. Thats what mutexs and semaphores are for.
I agree I have sympathy for these per hour paid people. That is why I alllllllllways listen to the whole pitch. I then get very wishy washy. 'ohhhh im not really interested right now'. Which for some reason is code for call me back in a week. But they always get the same answer. I could care less I am usually just surfing the web or watching TV. If I am doing something I cut them off right away and tell them same answer. If they get pushy I deeeeeeeeefinatly waste their time. Tell me more about your product? How does it compair to X? My favorite is doing the math WHILE they wait if this would help me.
I will usually at least once try to interupt and tell them no. If they keep blathering on. Who am I to stop them.
Your NIC has to decide whether a particular frame on the wire is going to your node or not. Does the fact that no frames are going to your particular node at this exact time make the job of a core router appreciably easier?
Actually yes it does. Less trafic means LESS work for the router. And there is no 1 router in the list. There are usually 20-30 routers involved. That means OTHER trafic can get through more efficiently. This is why denal of service attacks are so effective. You can swamp out real useful trafic with bogus traffic. Even route lookuptables COST. Everything has a cost. There is no FREE.
The NIC card in your example is more like the local mail office. The OS is me. If my OS is not worying about extra junk (the nic card snags it and doesnt tell the os), then it does not take away from my tasks at hand.
And he's the only one working on getting mail to your mailbox?
At the moment he is sitting with his little whitemobile in front of my house. YES he is the ONLY person working on getting the mail to me. You are confusing economy of scale with delegation of work.
Economy of scale is the fact that if I BUILD 1000 items it may (not neccesarily) cost less than if I build 1000 1 off's. That a postal delivery system is able TO scale is not economy of scale. The postal system MUST grow in order for you to move more volume given NO technological advances. Growth = People. People = Money. Money has to come from somewhere. It comes from stamps. Stamps cost me and everyone else money. Let me use your network example again. Lets say I want to move a 20 meg file now. But before I was moving a 10 meg file. But I want it in the same amount of time. In order to do that I will need more hardware. That cost money. Also in Econ terms the network is a one time fixed cost. However the dude to run the network and make sure it works thats a recurring cost. The people to deliver mail is a recurring cost. Minimizing recurring costs is a good way to get that economy of scale you talk about. But in order to move volume you MUST have more people to move the stuff. Make up your mind. Small scale, or a scale large enough to be useful to the public?
Why can it not be BOTH usefull and small? Does goverment have to be LARGE in order to be usefull? So has inflation and the price of gas. What's your point? We still have among the lowest postage rates in the industrialized world
Yet the rate did not go up at the same rate as inflation. It went beyond it. Unless the inflation rate was 9%? Also I was not compairing to other countries. We are not THEM. Why do we always compair ourselves to them? Sure it may not be fair to them. But they need to talk to their goverments about that... If a driver only had 3 houses out of a hundred for days or weeks, would he bother going out every day, or would he wait until he had a decent amount? He keeps going out every day because it's usually more like 97 houses out of 100 that have mail.
EXACTLY what I was talking about. But most of those 97 will be what the recipients call junk. Now if he was making 'special' trip for a neighborhood. He would probably be staggering it with other neighborhoods. Yet if he must stop at every house. They will have to put in a driver to get the OTHER neighborhood. The reason they drive by everyday is not because they are being nice. It is because if they dont get rid of it it piles up. LARGE amounts of it. They MUST get rid of it because they do not have the room to store it for any length of time. The only way they can get rid of it is to deliver it. If there was less they could hold more.
Take for example the mail I got this week. 2 were things I needed (finacial, bills, ect). 6 were junk. Thats fairly typical. That means junk is outpacing useless by 300% this week.
If you want to mail something out, you can put it in your curbside mailbox and know it will be picked up today instead of "some time next week."
That is mearly a 'perk' of the fact they must drive by everyday to deliver large amounts of junk. Oh and great we get to hire another person. That means more money to pay that person with. Get enough of that 'we will just raise the rates again, hell with em' mentality. If you want a letter to go out today put it in a blue box. Learned that from my Uncle who works for the postal service. Why? It is not sorted at the local office. Its straight into the main local sorting center and straight to the next main sorting center by semi truck (MCA). If you put it in your mail box it will take an extra 2 days to get there. 1 day for pickup and 1 day for the sort that happens at the local office. Just putting the WHOLE zip code goes a long way also. Not just the 6 diget. The OCR can put it in the right local route faster. Instead of having a person that must look at it. saves a "whopping" 1.8 cents per letter or post card
Apparently you dont consider that saved money. you consider it wasted money. With the rates as they are it would be cheeper at 500 not to sort them. It would cost you more than 5 dollars to sort them before hand. There is a difference when you start to talk 50000. You can pay a guy 100 bucks to sort it all and a corp would 'save' 400 bucks. Yet how does that help the normal guy like me? Who does a letter once and awhile. You say its subsidized. I say the system is self serving.
Lets say I do 10 bills a month. The rate went up 3 cents. That is an extra 30 cents a month. And 3.60 per year. For me thats NOTHING. But for some people that is a whole meal or two for their family. The rate does not help the little guy. You missed it by a mile
OH? 1) A sorting machine can sort THOUSANDS of letters per hour. It does not get tired it does not sleep. It is always running. It cost aloooot less than a few hundred people that are sorting mail. They have them, fixed cost, done. They cost TONS less than people sorting mail. That is why they have em. The sorting machine is a fixed cost. Its costs will not rise or fall dramaticly. If the machine is costing more than people to sort. Unplug the thing and hire people in its place. If the ROI on that machine is not going to be there why was it purchased? 2) They have these machines because usefull mail is outpacing junk mail by 300% at this household. 3) Yes a tax. Tax's for many years were judged by the tax stamp. These days we call them stamps. A goverment stamp of aproval as it were. The 'newer' type taxs are just garnished right out of your check and you dont miss them (different story). 4) So? He does this to take advantage of a rate scale. He would be stupid not to. 5) USPS saves money. HA. They have set up a system that is self fullfilling. If you make the rate to send out advertisments cheaper. If you do a bit of leg work up front. You will save yourself some work. But you will end up delivering MORE things then you were before. They will then JUSTIFY rasing rates because volume has increased. 6) The ONLY person in this deal that saves money is the person pre sorting large mailings. Again you need larger machines and more people to deal with this sort of thing. Sure its 'easier' to do but it creates MORE volume. 7) The cd thing that AOL was doing from the 'parent' can NOT be sorted by machine because they use odd shaped mail. It must be handled by hand the whole way. Even IF they presort. A broadcast is easier (cheaper) to do than a multicast.
To whom? To the sender maybe. Let me take your example to the email world. You send a email to 10000 people. Lets say.5% care. You have just wasted 9950 peoples time. You have also snorked 9950 peoples bw and wasted their money (time = money your 1 from above).
You dont think for one second that people like getting this stuff do you? It pays for the sorting machines the "little guy" uses without having to use them
The sorting machines are only in the bulk centers. They were paid for years ago. Their ongoing cost can not be THAT much. Your saying that a machine (or series of them) that let say sorts 10000 letters per hour costs an additional 3 cents per letter to sort. Or that the cost of that machine went up 300 dollars PER hour. Lets say of that 1 cent was sorting. Then it went up 100 dollars an hour. or 2400 dollars PER day. Just for that one machine. Depends on local recycling programs
Your assuming everyone recycles. Your second assumption there IS a recycling system. Your third assumption is that the system takes junk mail. Mine does not. Newsprint, cans, bottles, 2-litter jugs, milk jugs ONLY. Any other sort of print gets tagged as extra and the recycler charges back to the local municipality that is running it for having to throw it out. They're getting that miniscule 1.8 cent savings I mentioned earlier
I guess you consider saved money a waste of time. Just because it is 1.8 cents.
The real problem is if you give a person a budget of 10000 this year, and they spend 9000 of it this year. Then give them a budget of 9000 the next year because of what they spent last year is self destructive. They will then overspend the year after that. Even though they only needed 9000. They will spend the 10000 to justify it. But after awhile they will NEED that 10000. But they are used to overspending so now they overspend what they were already overspending. So now they need 11000. Yet they could have gotten by with 9000 in the first place. like the USPS eliminating presorted standard mail that can't be delivered
oh goodie another burden to take care of. So now not only do you have mail to deliver that no one really wants. You have mail that can not be delivered. So now you have to hire people JUST to pull that junk out and make sure its recycled (by law).
IF however my rant doesnt convince you let your own words do it spam stuff
If MS is like any other company they have a list. That list gets a priorty. Currently MS has stated its top priority is security fixes. Buffer overruns and the like. Yet a bug like that would have to be coded for. So dont do that. For example I submitted a bug years ago about being able to resize download windows. Basicly a minor cosmetic issue. Yet it took 3 versions before it was even fixed. The real question is does MS know the bug is there. Or do trade rags know about it. Being in a magazine or on the web does not mean that MS automaticly knows about it. They do not have people whos job it is to go around finding bugs out on the web that people have produced but never bothered telling them about. Most of the time bugs are only addressed by MS if you have TOP level support. IE you paid them big bucks per year per incident to get it fixed. Otherwise you get the 'we might get around to fixing it in about 20 versions'. No money to fix no fix...
Rework costs money. MS has take the venue of if you pay for it, it will get fixed now. Otherwise wait in line with everyone else. They probably have THOUSANDS of bugs. Each one with a customer yelling about it. They fix the ones that most people are yelling about first. Then next the next one and so on.
Remember NT is a system of exes. That you put one exe with another one and it acts like this is not surprising. I bet there is no one person in this world who could tell you how the whole thing acts in every condition.
Probably the best quote I ever heard was out of a MS book on programming. Its like a bowl of jello that is shaking. When that bowl is quivering least we ship.
My other favorite quote is from a programmer I work with at my company. If your walking off into memory with stray pointers all bets are off.
However that argument that it scales is inane. Here is why. It takes people to put that junk in my box. 'Well he is coming by anyway'. Not necessarily. Here is why. I have seen MANY times when I have no mail (it does happen) the driver just drives on by my house. Instead of 30 seconds in front of my house fiddling with the box and his car window. No work was done for me other than (hmm none for him). No sorting. No shipping. No routing. No dropping off. Nada. People cost money.
This is a goverment service. Not a busness. It should be minimum scale. It should serve the public. Instead it is trying to make itself bigger. Which is not what Economy of scale is about. You make yourself bigger so you can do more, and cost less, and pass the savings onto your customer. However with your view of economy of scale it is you get bigger and now you can charge more. The rate went UP remember.
If a driver had 3 houses out of a hundred to deliver to would he stop at all hundred? No he would wizz by and hit the 3. But with most bulk mailings it hits ALL 100 houses. Plus a couple extras, that are not sorted right (my house gets all the extras). So now what took a half hour to do now takes 2 hours.
Scale that out to a whole town. Suddenly you MUST hire more people just to get to all the houses in 1 day. Not to mention the sorting that happens at the dock even if it is presorted down to the neighborhood. The driver then has to spend even MORE time digging out of 2 or more boxes of mail instead of 1.
Also IF you look at the rates you can see it specificaly set up to HELP companies and not the little guy. The little guy is what the system is FOR. Not to cut a break for people willing to do some of the leg work. That sorting machines do already...
In the past 2 weeks I have got 5 letters that were for me that were bills. The rest of the PILE was junk mail. I didnt pay for it I dont want it. All I do is throw it away. I dont even read it. Why send it to me? How is this helping me? How many people throw it out? How much landfill (of which is always filling up) does this waste? Oh yes this is good for the comunity.
Probably my most favorite advertisment is inside my bills. Great not only do I own you money you are trying to soak me for more with some junk I dont want (TRASH).
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding.
I think the MS decision was legal for not installing java with a hint of greed. They did not want even the posiblity that XP would get tied up in a legal morass till they had TONS of copy on shelf and being installed. Sun looked like FOOLS. Sun did what any kid would do when humiliated. They fought back.
MS was the ones pushing for the extensions of Java. Sun didnt like it one bit because it is their toy not MS's. So they came up with the exact same techs MS was but just incompatible enough that you could no longer claim compile once run anywhere. Then Sun started saying MS's version was not REAL Java. MS's was for a long time the BEST Java to have. They were well on their way to the usuall embrace and extend that is their motto. And to boot they had a decent compiler with a nice IDE!
MS came up with a contract that got Java on just about EVERY desktop out there. Till they came along it was a ADD on package that you had to go get. Just so you could look at some cool pages.
Sun decided they didnt want anyone else playing with their toy. So MS basicly said here is your ball go home. Now Sun is crying because the other rich kid will no longer play nice with them.
This settlement while neato at first will become a real drag for windows users. It is the equivilant of for every copy of Linux Red hat there must be installed a copy of MS Excel, oh and it must be the latest version.
Basicly a very minor component of windows is giving MS fits. They did like any sane developer would do when something just does not work well. Hack it out. A very rational business decision. Do not confuse MS for being philanthropic. They are a business, in business for making money, not cool software.
Sun is Java's worst enemy not MS. Sun could have worked with MS. Instead they took every oportunity to make sure MS could not use what Sun was giving them. Then trying to make MS look bad. Sun is the agressors here which is a bit of a change!
its simple they are vampires.
Thats a fairly new thing belive it or not. Up until the PlayStation came out, all consoles came with at least 1 game. Maybe not an AWSOME game, but at least a playable one. They usually also came with 2 controlers.
If I remember correctly the original PlayStation had 0 controlers and 0 games in the box. They did this because an extra 30 bucks put them past a certian 'price point'. Plus they can charge 30 for a game, then 25-30 per controler. They are make even more money on something you will definatly want. The sentiment at the time was who would buy a console that didnt even come with a game. Aparently a lot of people...
Also if you just bought a system and it didnt come with 2 controlers and a game you got fairly hosed. There are some pretty good bundle packs out there.
Also keep in mind not everyone has a smoking conection into their house. On a 56k modem downloading the whole mame set would take about 17 days. If your going full blast at it. Its that big. And thats being generous that you get 5k per second and no disconects.
I think the biggest challange will be for them to get the price point of the hardware down. Then secondly getting permision from the game companies. The game companies should jump at it. They probably havent made money on some of these games in years. If they ever broke even on em at all. If they include a dvd with all the roms on it will be gravy...
The next problem may be MAME itself. Its licence does not allow for distribution of roms with the exes.
OH its possible. But you will see more lazyness on it then you could even imagine. Most even have enough wiggle room in their contracts to enforce it. A decent router can log crap. It can look at the IP header. In fact it MUST look at it to route it.
It is beyond me why the ISP's would even want one crap packet come out of their network. Its costing them money. Their upstream connection costs money...
For some interesting numbers go take a look at MyNetWatchman These dudes even TELL the ISP's that there is something wrong. But most just get ignored.
Truth is most people could care less that their computer is doing something wrong. They just want a bit of email and to surf a bit. Hell most just want it to stay up long enough, and be a bit faster. Considering the 300 programs they are running out of the box.
The only way I have ever been able to explain to a person what its about is the apartment analogy. A theif goes into an apartment building and rattles every doorknob. He finds one that opens. He then uses that apartment as a base to sneak around to rattle other doorknobs. Most people get very upset when I tell them someone is basicly trying to break into their house. The next words out of their mouths are usually 'who can I report this to?' All I can tell them is no one.
And that would mean inflation was at 30%. When in reality it was about 10%.
I can not belive no one bothered with this style. Usenet oracle
> Oh great and mighty oracle whos toejam I am
> unworthy to throwup. Could you re-write
> the LOTR in your style?
And in response, thus spake the Oracle:
} OH THAT tired old story. How many more times
} must I hear about the great Frodo Baggins. I
} should ZOT you dead for even muttering that name
} around me! What great power that was bestowed
} upon him and he squandered it. Typical Hobit.
}
} You owe the Oracle 3 cans of Canned Hobit. Not
} the creamed ones but the chunky.
I agree that what he did was wrong and he should have fun in jail. However my question is how do you put the toothpaste back into the tube? Its very hard to unsay something...
For that to work properly would also depend on the reading device to be able to tell that it is a 'locked' content. Otherwise it just becomes a stream of bits and bytes. Once it becomes that it can be copied and displayed anywhere. What if suddenly with a small change the device didnt care? Or what if a different device that was not meant to read that material was made to do so?
The most easy way is to let the hardware decode it for you and you just take what it sends out.
So what if it is watermarked? Those can also be removed. The only effective water mark would be if you remove it, it becomes unusable. But with the type of media they are messing with you can usually make a 'fair' guess as to what it should be.
Compliance means little. If you know how or know the right people. You can make a A/D converter. A branch of science will not suddenly go away. Its a fairly 'known' thing.
The more golden the prize the quicker it will be cracked.
If you collect JUST because it MIGHT be worth something, find a different hobbie like stamps, coins, or gold.
You need to go into collecting because you like it. I have a fairly meager collection of about 1000 games. Thats not even close to being hard core. I am mearly casual about it. I snag things only I like. I could care less about what its worth. That is secondary to why I buy the games. I buy them because I like them.
With DVD's I am the same way. I buy movies I like. Even got a copy of 'They Live'. I had NO idea it was a 'rare' dvd. I bought it when it came out and gladly paid my 20 bucks for it. Because its a fun movie.
The example you gave of Magic the gathering is one of the pitfalls of collecting things I dont really care for, some collecting is a fad. You have to watch out for it. Also collecting takes time and sometimes lots of money. I had the same thing happen to me with baseball cards. I got into it because I thought it MIGHT be worth something. Not because I like baseball, and find the cards cool.
Forget 'collectors editions'. Those are usually HUGE runs with a sticker slapped on em. RARE things are almost always things that were never 'popular'. Junk people never wanted. For example Star Wars toys. Most of the toys are worth about what they originaly came out for. However RARE, and thefore valuable, are the toys that never got opened. Still has the box is rare, but not as rare as unopened. Mail ins are usually rare also. Not a lot of people do it, and they are usually small runs of things.
Another thing to keep in mind is things do not become valuable overnight. Sometimes it takes YEARS. Think of the fun quote from Raiders. "take this watch, 10 dollars from a street vendor. I bury it in the sand for a thousand years. Priceless"
My rarest PC game? Wing Commander Kilrathi Saga. I didnt buy it to 'collect' it. I bought it to blow some Kilrathi scum from the sky!
OH soooooo true! Watermarking will not work. The whole point is to make it so you can NOT watch a copy of it. If you can display it on ANYTHING it can be copied. Screen scraping if it comes down to it.
Case in point is the DVD case. CSS was never about thwarting 'piracy' it was about content control. The C is for Content. It was about controling what region dvd's could be shown in. It is a outright attempt to put price fixing in place. They are being sold a bill of goods and they should figure it out before what they put out is cracked. What was really funny is the people that are REALLY serious about copying things would just copy the discs bit for bit and just let the thing decode it properly...
Think about this. Lets say they put in 2048 bit encryption. Lets also say no one bothers to 'screen scrape' (HA). Then solve how to get those keys to everyone. They will be able to keep people out for awhile. Eventually they will be overrun by the same technology that is helping them. I am willing to bet in a few years those sorts of keys will be broken in minutes.
I dont find it to strange. If a game comes out on all platforms I will buy they xbox or ps2 version. There has been quite a bit of those games lately.
PC games are a different league of playability. 104 keys plus a 5 button mouse plus a decent joystick. Is way different than 10 buttons and 2 decent analog controls. The way the game plays will be way harder on the PC. Usually the ports are hastely done, and badly tested. There are exceptions but they are rare. Then once you get the game on your PC you realize it was a fairly dull game in the first place.
A game designed for the PC on a PC is a way different game. We look for things that PUSH our hardware to its limits and a tad beyond sometimes. The company usually has somewhat of a clue that they have a fickle audience. Each person playing will more than likely have a different configuration. They aim for the middle and hope they get most everyone. Consoles are just not like that. They are fairly static. I am not saying the games are worse. I am saying they are just different.
The only thing that irks me is the price fixing that is going on. 50 bucks for a game. GAWD. Most are NOT worth that at all. The cost they are sharing with MS/Nin/Sony per game can NOT be that much. That market is getting jammed hard. No wonder its growing and PC's are shrinking. The marginal revinues must be MUCH MUCH better...
The only thing missing in this is the fact that if guns are suddenly 'outlawed'. This would create a HUGE surge in the supply. I think it would actually have the oposite effect initialy. Then after some period it would level out and eventually start to rise again.
The only thing that ticks me off about these arguments is the fact that people are trying to take away one of my RIGHTS. Which one should be next? How about free speech?
Maybe for your gamming machine it is. BUT look at what else that company makes. Mostly rackmount things. A 10 bay case would be a HELL of a lot cheaper than a rack that can hold 10 1U computers. Also they see their market willing to PAY 1000. For what would be a 400 dollar computer, if it was a tad bigger. Also they are probably using fairly off the shelf things. About the only kind of parts that would fit in that form factor would be laptop parts. Last I looked those are fairly expensive.
Also If more powerful was the only precluding factor in this we would all still be using computers that are ACRES in size. Miniaturization is the one thing that has helped drive down cost, increased margins, and brought us the desktop we have today. Why do you think price drops whenever a CPU manufacture does a die shrink? You think they do it because they feel like it? No they can get closer to marginal revinue equals marginal cost. For the same price they can produce N more chips. To them they make about the same amount. There is such a thing as to much profit. You actually fight yourself when making more money.
If the only thing you look at is the CPU for what you do your looking at the wrong thing. Think if memory ran at the same speed as the CPU. A 3ghz cpu with memory able to feed at that rate. You would see a computer that BLEW away anything on the market currently. What if your bus was just 10mhz faster? Or even better ran at the same speed as your CPU? The computer is a system of parts. Not just a CPU. We are not going to get that sort of thing with the size of computers we have today. The memory will need to be MUCH closer to the CPU. The bus will need to be MUCH shorter. Devices will need to have higher tolarances. Miniaturization helps with alot of these types of things. It also brings in its own set of problems. But overall making it smaller has helped. That little speed of light thing is such a drag isnt it!
repeat after me it scales JUST FINE. It is up to the provider of the network to make it work. A VPN is not in the providers network. Most VPN is run through ip over X net. Which is DATA not header. IP forging to setup a VPN is a crummy way to do it, and sets you up for being cracked/spoofed nicely. Also a router does JUST that route stuff. It KNOWS what networks it belongs to... For most ISP where this data is originating this would work just fine.
Lets take a look at why forged is bad. It has ONLY to do with source. If source is wrong drop it. If a router does not know who should be SENDING not reciveing what is that router doing? Every network belongs to a subnet. Not in that on source DROP it log it...
Think what would happen on the net if most major isp's tommorow set this up on all of their fringe routers. Ie the ones that control initial dial in and routing on Cable and DSL. That alone would clip MOST of it. Schools could do it on their outgoing pipes. And so on... Overnight you could eliminate some of the most silly script kiddie junk. Then we can get to work on fixing trojans and such. Because then you have a fair idea its in the right network. Doing nothing is worse than 'does not scale'.
Im sorry IPv6 will ONLY be viable once we are OUT of ip's. Till then it will be hack after hack to make IPv4 work. Also it will continue to exist for a LONG time. IPv6 is cool no doubt. But its just that, cool. There currently is NO reason to rush towards it. But it is cool...
hehe clever!
Ive been watching these sites it helps some but not much :(
:)
FirstOnes They actually snorked a copy of the sirra web site. So all we can do now is drool over something that will never happen.
Ive Found Her They are making a B5 game. The pics they have been posting look semi cool.
Course the B5 first season set is selling pretty well I hear. So maybe WB will realize they have a fairly hot property. That can be exploted into a game (HA).
I have been boycoting Sierra because they no longer make the games I like. I like adventure games. They used to make some of the best. Now they make 3d FPS and boring 'family' games. I havent been really wowed by a FPS since DOOM.
The advent style game Ive been waiting on lately has been Full Throttle 2. FT2 Least Lucasarts still has somewhat of a clue about games... But some of the SW games are getting as bad as a star trek game. You just know it will be lame.
Vulcans Fury was one I was waiting on as well. If I remeber correctly it was during a time of reorg. The game was way over budget and getting worse. They cut their losses and wrote it off. Personaly I am glad they cut it instead of shipping it before it was done. If it had shipped it may have been regarded as one of the buggiest games ever. Now it has a mythical feel to it
they chose to throw away the work done instead of selling it
More than likely they were more interested in the tax write off at this point. If they sold it, it became a asset. If they held onto it, it became a tax write off. So they priced it in the range where it made them money. Instead of offloading it. Who knows what goes through the heads of some corp ladder climber. They probably could have priced it about even with their write off/sunk cost. Maybe they tried to get that little extra out of em. Or maybe the other company was way under bidding hopping to scoop it up for nothing. Why they are sitting on this title is beyond me. Talk about a built in audience! They were able to SELL the extra junk they were going to stick into boxes. That should have told them something!
Routers that drop packets with forged headers
This could happen tommorow. Most routers let you configure it to do this. Show me a forged header Ill show you a lazy admin.
ISP's could use this as a service to their customers. Find a forged header log where it came from (mac address, phone, etc...) Then help the user fix their computer. Today we have a very lazy group that see it as a non expense to them. But it does cost them bandwidth and time.
The ISPs have to balance per byte metered versus how they lure people into their network. Why would I pay more for brodband if your just going to turn around and charge me a lot more for it. That is exactly how it will be seen. Currently they are enticing people into the network with 'unlimited', or nearly that, usage. They almost say you can get fast mp3's with a wink and a nod. With phrases like 'I can get my music faster'. Yet technicaly most of these ISP's have the 'no servers' in the contract. Those p2p systems are servers. The only way I can see metered will work is if most of the time my bill would be lower than a flat rate.
There will be more pay per play type systems. There are some rudementary ones right now. But all it takes is one cheap dude to make something that can copy the data. Then poof that movie that costed 5 bucks to rent, now costs very little for Joe Smoe to copy. Pay-per-play is doomed from the outset because if you can display it I can copy it, or at least make a decent copy. The only way they can keep total control is to not distribute it, or not make a display program. Either of which make them no money.
The artical didnt point it out. It sort of danced around it. But the current system is setup by control of media. When you buy a CD its probably 3 cents worth of plastic. But it cost 20 bucks. That is in economic terms called scarcity. Not everyone can make a batch of 100,000 3 cent CDs. But the media producers can, they make enough so marginal revenue equals marginal cost. If the artist and the end user get screwed so be it, MR = MC. They end up with a tidy sum of money. The new p2p systems lower dramaticly cost. Cost is now very close to 0.
There is no shipping, pressing, marketing, etc. Suddely its just product and end user. You do not have to ship things. You do not have to have a batch run of CDs made. You do not have to have artwork made up for the cover. You do not have to pay the middle man distributor. There are new costs. But most of them you do not control, and cost you nothing.
The real change here is not the distribution method. That could have been controled up front and they still could have held onto some sort of percived scarcity. Instead someone else did it. Suddenly the scarcity is not there. If two products are fairly equal a normal person will purchase the one that cost less. They were making tons of money on scarcity. They know it. They are going ape over trying to keep it.
If someone figures out how to compress a 2 hour movie into something like 20 meg, and good quality. The movie companies will have something to worry about. But at current data rates a 700 meg file is just not practical. Its can be done. But most users will not do it. There will be some exceptions but currently not many. If the size comes down or the data rate goes up dramaticly it will become practical. Then the movie companies have something to really worry about.
Currently the only squaking your seeing is coming from the ISP's. You see silly names like 'bandwidth hogs'. But hell they SELL the service that way. A few people take them up on the offer! They are yelling uncle not because people are breaking the law. They yell it because they are seeing their bandwith bills skyrocket. They are currently trying to find the right balance of oversubscription, bandwidth needed, and pay rates. Bandwidth capping is just an kneejerk reaction to the fact they oversubscribed to much. The same sort of thing happened when phone ISP's started showing up.
Unfortunatly it is a naive point of view. All it takes is one semi smart thief to rip you off. Then you are no longer the only one with a cool feature. Proving that your code was used could be semi difficult. How would you do that?
You can also create a new kind of pirate. The clone pirate. The software is hacked enough to remove any sort of copy protection then released as a 'perfect' copy. Sold/Given away as the real deal. I know most copy protection is fairly silly and in some cases trivial to break. However now this would basicly hand them the keys to do so.
How do we get software designers and programmers to raise the quality of their work? Because few people ever see their immediate product (the source code), what would motivate engineers to do better? The answer is that all source code should be open and included in every software release.
Shame will not work in making better code. If that is what the author was getting at. There are people out there that seriously belive their shit dont stink... Even IF you show it to them YOUR the one thats wrong. YOU did something wrong, NOT them. The code seg faults. But you pushed the wrong button?!
The author stated why software is a problem. Its the schedule. Ive seen time and time again where schedules are created that have NO basis in fact. Days weeks months removed from a schedule just to meet some deadline, so some manager somewhere can get a bonus. Hack upon hack upon hack and eventually the house of cards WILL come crashing down. But by the time the cards come falling down the manager will be long gone and probably some OTHER programer will have to fix it. Who had no idea about how hack 384 worked. But depended on hack 375 to work correctly. But also needs hack 3838 to definatly work around some assumption made in hack 4. So he will add hack 4335 that could be fixed with one change in some other file. But he doesnt realy know the code that well and doesnt want to break anything. Because his manager and program manger are yelling at him to fix it to meet the current deadline which is in 3 days. When in reality the code needs a good scrubbing down and a proper redesign.
A well thought out design and schedule can be a god send. A poor one of either and your screwed. Opening the code to outside people could run you out of busness. Most companies are shy of getting sued. How do you think they would react to the possiblity they could be run out of busness?!
Oh this is SO true!
:)
I try to tell my upgrading friends dont sweat it. Wait a year or so with video cards. They are usually good for 3-4 years. Monitors even more so.
The vid card I have now is like 3 years old. Also the monitor is about 7. At the time I bought both they were TOP of the line. Now they are not even entry level.
I know one dude who has had every video card gen for the past 4 years. His family has some awsome hardware because of it. However it is fun to RUN past him. He then MUST upgarde. He will not be happy till he can run at 8192x4096x64 at 300 fps.
Me? When this card comes out should be about the timeframe I am looking for a new system. It will be a gutting of my current sys (3yr old). Ive been very patient. Didnt like the performance degredation during the p4 rollout. And AMD is playing the performance rating game again (I know I know).
This may involve a new case. Havent decided yet. That dual slot thing may put a crimp in what I was thinking of getting. Which was one of those tiny boxen. Maybe with a dremel I can work something out
Windows has its own flavor of threads. Ive always found it to be 'in the way' as it were to making seperate in-process type things.
:)
Windows also has copy on write. That is not a linux/unix exclusive. Its part of the 386 cpu and its paging method. Did you know if you load 1 dll and some else loads it they share the code memory? This was how in win3.1 people were able to do shared memory type things fairly simpley. 9x and NT did not allow such things so a lot of those apps broke when they came along.
Win32 also has shared memory. Again mapping memory into different process spaces is part of the CPU. A 'easy' as it were for both teams to make work.
You can also create seperate processes in win32. With the function called CreateProcess. Most of the time you do not need the extra overhead of a seperate process. You just need 'go do this and come back when done'. The load time in windows for a process is not a trival thing. That is why CreateProcess (or out of proc) is not used as much. Versus the thread model used (in proc). In proc gives you a simpler way to share memory and interathread communication. Out of proc usually involves mutexs and shared memory. Setting up a shared memory space is NOT a simple task win32. That is why you will see more threads in windows programs. Because people are lazy and tend to dislike complex things.
What drives me up the wall is that CreateThread versus _beginthread versus AfxBeginThread. Each one with its own rules. You have to watch EVERYTHING with one and not the others. You have to watch out for things like shared heaps and the like or end up with crummy performance. There are LOTS of things I would like to see changed in the way windows does all this. Its far from perfection. Do one wrong thing with the wrong C-runtime at the wrong time and your HOSED in performance. There are things you can do to make it better but you usually end up having to do it all by hand...
The one other thing that bugs me about Win32 threads is if you are not carefull you can actually swamp the CPU. With two threads of equal priority. One stuck in a loop and the other not. The one in the tight loop will swamp out any other threads on the system of equal priority. I usually end up having to yeild cpu with Sleep(1). Also Sleep(0) does NOTHING. It does not yield. But im just bitter and ranting
Your using the wrong method... Events should ONLY be used if you do not mind missing them. Its just the way windows works. The idea behind events is everyone that is 'waiting' can go now if they are not already. But not necessarialy the other way around. Ill wait till someone else is done. Thats what mutexs and semaphores are for.
I agree I have sympathy for these per hour paid people. That is why I alllllllllways listen to the whole pitch. I then get very wishy washy. 'ohhhh im not really interested right now'. Which for some reason is code for call me back in a week. But they always get the same answer. I could care less I am usually just surfing the web or watching TV. If I am doing something I cut them off right away and tell them same answer. If they get pushy I deeeeeeeeefinatly waste their time. Tell me more about your product? How does it compair to X? My favorite is doing the math WHILE they wait if this would help me.
I will usually at least once try to interupt and tell them no. If they keep blathering on. Who am I to stop them.
Your NIC has to decide whether a particular frame on the wire is going to your node or not. Does the fact that no frames are going to your particular node at this exact time make the job of a core router appreciably easier?
Actually yes it does. Less trafic means LESS work for the router. And there is no 1 router in the list. There are usually 20-30 routers involved. That means OTHER trafic can get through more efficiently. This is why denal of service attacks are so effective. You can swamp out real useful trafic with bogus traffic. Even route lookuptables COST. Everything has a cost. There is no FREE.
The NIC card in your example is more like the local mail office. The OS is me. If my OS is not worying about extra junk (the nic card snags it and doesnt tell the os), then it does not take away from my tasks at hand.
And he's the only one working on getting mail to your mailbox?
At the moment he is sitting with his little whitemobile in front of my house. YES he is the ONLY person working on getting the mail to me. You are confusing economy of scale with delegation of work.
Economy of scale is the fact that if I BUILD 1000 items it may (not neccesarily) cost less than if I build 1000 1 off's. That a postal delivery system is able TO scale is not economy of scale. The postal system MUST grow in order for you to move more volume given NO technological advances. Growth = People. People = Money. Money has to come from somewhere. It comes from stamps. Stamps cost me and everyone else money. Let me use your network example again. Lets say I want to move a 20 meg file now. But before I was moving a 10 meg file. But I want it in the same amount of time. In order to do that I will need more hardware. That cost money. Also in Econ terms the network is a one time fixed cost. However the dude to run the network and make sure it works thats a recurring cost. The people to deliver mail is a recurring cost. Minimizing recurring costs is a good way to get that economy of scale you talk about. But in order to move volume you MUST have more people to move the stuff.
Make up your mind. Small scale, or a scale large enough to be useful to the public?
Why can it not be BOTH usefull and small? Does goverment have to be LARGE in order to be usefull?
So has inflation and the price of gas. What's your point? We still have among the lowest postage rates in the industrialized world
Yet the rate did not go up at the same rate as inflation. It went beyond it. Unless the inflation rate was 9%? Also I was not compairing to other countries. We are not THEM. Why do we always compair ourselves to them? Sure it may not be fair to them. But they need to talk to their goverments about that...
If a driver only had 3 houses out of a hundred for days or weeks, would he bother going out every day, or would he wait until he had a decent amount? He keeps going out every day because it's usually more like 97 houses out of 100 that have mail.
EXACTLY what I was talking about. But most of those 97 will be what the recipients call junk. Now if he was making 'special' trip for a neighborhood. He would probably be staggering it with other neighborhoods. Yet if he must stop at every house. They will have to put in a driver to get the OTHER neighborhood. The reason they drive by everyday is not because they are being nice. It is because if they dont get rid of it it piles up. LARGE amounts of it. They MUST get rid of it because they do not have the room to store it for any length of time. The only way they can get rid of it is to deliver it. If there was less they could hold more.
Take for example the mail I got this week. 2 were things I needed (finacial, bills, ect). 6 were junk. Thats fairly typical. That means junk is outpacing useless by 300% this week.
If you want to mail something out, you can put it in your curbside mailbox and know it will be picked up today instead of "some time next week."
That is mearly a 'perk' of the fact they must drive by everyday to deliver large amounts of junk. Oh and great we get to hire another person. That means more money to pay that person with. Get enough of that 'we will just raise the rates again, hell with em' mentality. If you want a letter to go out today put it in a blue box. Learned that from my Uncle who works for the postal service. Why? It is not sorted at the local office. Its straight into the main local sorting center and straight to the next main sorting center by semi truck (MCA). If you put it in your mail box it will take an extra 2 days to get there. 1 day for pickup and 1 day for the sort that happens at the local office. Just putting the WHOLE zip code goes a long way also. Not just the 6 diget. The OCR can put it in the right local route faster. Instead of having a person that must look at it.
saves a "whopping" 1.8 cents per letter or post card
Apparently you dont consider that saved money. you consider it wasted money. With the rates as they are it would be cheeper at 500 not to sort them. It would cost you more than 5 dollars to sort them before hand. There is a difference when you start to talk 50000. You can pay a guy 100 bucks to sort it all and a corp would 'save' 400 bucks. Yet how does that help the normal guy like me? Who does a letter once and awhile. You say its subsidized. I say the system is self serving.
Lets say I do 10 bills a month. The rate went up 3 cents. That is an extra 30 cents a month. And 3.60 per year. For me thats NOTHING. But for some people that is a whole meal or two for their family. The rate does not help the little guy.
You missed it by a mile
OH?
1) A sorting machine can sort THOUSANDS of letters per hour. It does not get tired it does not sleep. It is always running. It cost aloooot less than a few hundred people that are sorting mail. They have them, fixed cost, done. They cost TONS less than people sorting mail. That is why they have em. The sorting machine is a fixed cost. Its costs will not rise or fall dramaticly. If the machine is costing more than people to sort. Unplug the thing and hire people in its place. If the ROI on that machine is not going to be there why was it purchased?
2) They have these machines because usefull mail is outpacing junk mail by 300% at this household.
3) Yes a tax. Tax's for many years were judged by the tax stamp. These days we call them stamps. A goverment stamp of aproval as it were. The 'newer' type taxs are just garnished right out of your check and you dont miss them (different story).
4) So? He does this to take advantage of a rate scale. He would be stupid not to.
5) USPS saves money. HA. They have set up a system that is self fullfilling. If you make the rate to send out advertisments cheaper. If you do a bit of leg work up front. You will save yourself some work. But you will end up delivering MORE things then you were before. They will then JUSTIFY rasing rates because volume has increased.
6) The ONLY person in this deal that saves money is the person pre sorting large mailings. Again you need larger machines and more people to deal with this sort of thing. Sure its 'easier' to do but it creates MORE volume.
7) The cd thing that AOL was doing from the 'parent' can NOT be sorted by machine because they use odd shaped mail. It must be handled by hand the whole way. Even IF they presort.
A broadcast is easier (cheaper) to do than a multicast.
To whom? To the sender maybe. Let me take your example to the email world. You send a email to 10000 people. Lets say
You dont think for one second that people like getting this stuff do you?
It pays for the sorting machines the "little guy" uses without having to use them
The sorting machines are only in the bulk centers. They were paid for years ago. Their ongoing cost can not be THAT much. Your saying that a machine (or series of them) that let say sorts 10000 letters per hour costs an additional 3 cents per letter to sort. Or that the cost of that machine went up 300 dollars PER hour. Lets say of that 1 cent was sorting. Then it went up 100 dollars an hour. or 2400 dollars PER day. Just for that one machine.
Depends on local recycling programs
Your assuming everyone recycles. Your second assumption there IS a recycling system. Your third assumption is that the system takes junk mail. Mine does not. Newsprint, cans, bottles, 2-litter jugs, milk jugs ONLY. Any other sort of print gets tagged as extra and the recycler charges back to the local municipality that is running it for having to throw it out.
They're getting that miniscule 1.8 cent savings I mentioned earlier
I guess you consider saved money a waste of time. Just because it is 1.8 cents.
The real problem is if you give a person a budget of 10000 this year, and they spend 9000 of it this year. Then give them a budget of 9000 the next year because of what they spent last year is self destructive. They will then overspend the year after that. Even though they only needed 9000. They will spend the 10000 to justify it. But after awhile they will NEED that 10000. But they are used to overspending so now they overspend what they were already overspending. So now they need 11000. Yet they could have gotten by with 9000 in the first place.
like the USPS eliminating presorted standard mail that can't be delivered
oh goodie another burden to take care of. So now not only do you have mail to deliver that no one really wants. You have mail that can not be delivered. So now you have to hire people JUST to pull that junk out and make sure its recycled (by law).
IF however my rant doesnt convince you let your own words do it
spam stuff
If MS is like any other company they have a list. That list gets a priorty. Currently MS has stated its top priority is security fixes. Buffer overruns and the like. Yet a bug like that would have to be coded for. So dont do that. For example I submitted a bug years ago about being able to resize download windows. Basicly a minor cosmetic issue. Yet it took 3 versions before it was even fixed. The real question is does MS know the bug is there. Or do trade rags know about it. Being in a magazine or on the web does not mean that MS automaticly knows about it. They do not have people whos job it is to go around finding bugs out on the web that people have produced but never bothered telling them about. Most of the time bugs are only addressed by MS if you have TOP level support. IE you paid them big bucks per year per incident to get it fixed. Otherwise you get the 'we might get around to fixing it in about 20 versions'. No money to fix no fix...
Rework costs money. MS has take the venue of if you pay for it, it will get fixed now. Otherwise wait in line with everyone else. They probably have THOUSANDS of bugs. Each one with a customer yelling about it. They fix the ones that most people are yelling about first. Then next the next one and so on.
Remember NT is a system of exes. That you put one exe with another one and it acts like this is not surprising. I bet there is no one person in this world who could tell you how the whole thing acts in every condition.
Probably the best quote I ever heard was out of a MS book on programming. Its like a bowl of jello that is shaking. When that bowl is quivering least we ship.
My other favorite quote is from a programmer I work with at my company. If your walking off into memory with stray pointers all bets are off.
However that argument that it scales is inane. Here is why. It takes people to put that junk in my box. 'Well he is coming by anyway'. Not necessarily. Here is why. I have seen MANY times when I have no mail (it does happen) the driver just drives on by my house. Instead of 30 seconds in front of my house fiddling with the box and his car window. No work was done for me other than (hmm none for him). No sorting. No shipping. No routing. No dropping off. Nada. People cost money.
This is a goverment service. Not a busness. It should be minimum scale. It should serve the public. Instead it is trying to make itself bigger. Which is not what Economy of scale is about. You make yourself bigger so you can do more, and cost less, and pass the savings onto your customer. However with your view of economy of scale it is you get bigger and now you can charge more. The rate went UP remember.
If a driver had 3 houses out of a hundred to deliver to would he stop at all hundred? No he would wizz by and hit the 3. But with most bulk mailings it hits ALL 100 houses. Plus a couple extras, that are not sorted right (my house gets all the extras). So now what took a half hour to do now takes 2 hours.
Scale that out to a whole town. Suddenly you MUST hire more people just to get to all the houses in 1 day. Not to mention the sorting that happens at the dock even if it is presorted down to the neighborhood. The driver then has to spend even MORE time digging out of 2 or more boxes of mail instead of 1.
Also IF you look at the rates you can see it specificaly set up to HELP companies and not the little guy. The little guy is what the system is FOR. Not to cut a break for people willing to do some of the leg work. That sorting machines do already...
In the past 2 weeks I have got 5 letters that were for me that were bills. The rest of the PILE was junk mail. I didnt pay for it I dont want it. All I do is throw it away. I dont even read it. Why send it to me? How is this helping me? How many people throw it out? How much landfill (of which is always filling up) does this waste? Oh yes this is good for the comunity.
Probably my most favorite advertisment is inside my bills. Great not only do I own you money you are trying to soak me for more with some junk I dont want (TRASH).