I don't think that you need or want to have people mate with as many different people as possible. This would cause the population to increase too quickly, and would result in one type of genetics possibly being overspread. While a female is somewhat limited in how many children she can have, men can father hundreds of children indiscriminately. This type of activity also can lead to the spread of STDs. See what is happening in parts of Africa were men regular have multiple sexual partners in short spans of time, sometimes fathering children through several different women.
I do believe that people should not be limited to sexual partners within their own race, national origin, or religion. This type of self-impossed genetic isolation can only do harm. It tends to lead to genetic diseases within the group in question. It also leads to discrimination.
I worry that cloning could be misused in various fasions. For example, one rich person could have herself cloned thousands of times just because they felt like it. Not only is this bad from a population stand point, it reduces the diversity of the gene pool. This increases the chance that recessive genetic disorders could arrise. It also prevents natural selection and evolution from being as effective. While unhealthy genetic mutations would be avoided, healthy ones would also be avoided. This would lead to a more static species. Static species tend to have less of an ability to adapt to changes in their environment.
About the only possibly good area for cloning is for couples who could not otherwise have children. Then again, this could reduce the already problematic adoption rate. Why adopt when you can clone?
Isn't sexual reproduction a big part of how humans changed for the better and adapted to their environment? Other forms of life use asexual reproduction and do not gain the genetic variety that humans and other sexual reproducers gain. As another example, look at what happens in sexually reproducing species when interbreeding occurs. Various deficiencies spring up including inherited diseases. Extremely isolated cultures and also have similar problems. Couldn't cloning on a large scale effect the gene pool? Even ignoring all the ethical questions, this genetic one still concerns me.
Gotta agree that that is a distinct possiblity. It really seems the net is being driven towards TV and vice versa. I hope that some parts of the good old net survive but I don't know if it is possible. With respect to your home net, I worry that ISPs are going to continue to limit upstream bandwidth for residential customers to force them into expensive commercial contracts to run servers. AFAIK, @Home has a limit of around 100kb/s for their cable modem service. What is to stop them from dropping it to something like 28.8? Yikes! I used to run a site off of a digital 56kb connection. It sucked...two or four modems (in those days speeds) could max it out.
BlueLight is out of that business and others are dying off or starting to charge. The fact is, free ISPs are learning what a lot of free web sites are learning. They are learning that it is tough to get all the revenue you need from internet advertising. Unless you are really big (CNN, Yahoo) you can't charge enough. Without the expensive software, services, and ad network that somone like RealMedia's OpenAdStream or DoubleClick provide it is difficult to make money selling internet ads. Your only hope is to have a great programming staff and ad sales people. Most companies are unable to create these necessities due to stupidity or lack of funds or both. This throws you back into the arms of Internet advertising companies. If you finally don't have money for them, you are screwed.
I think that the free internet will explode again when consumer bandwidth increases. When the average user has a 500Kb/s connection, the possiblities open up. This includes the advertising possiblities. I think that large interactive ads will be thrown in the way of the information the user wants, forcing them to sit through it. No ignoring the banners. More sites will use in house based ad servers to work around ad blocking software (block the ad, block the story). Articles will be unreachable without going through the ads. This type of advertising will bring success rates closer to television ads and thus raise rates and bring back the financial feasiblity of free internet businesses.
Wouldn't it have made more sense to test this against similarly priced storage systems? In the $5000 range you have fibre channel raid controllers with some storage. A good FC card will push around 200 MB/s. Why not have a measure of MB transferred per second per CPU percentage? Put that next to $ per MB storage and you get a real comparison.
This card is limited to 100 MB/s and is only 32-bit 33 Mhz so can only be grouped one per bus in order to maintain that speed. Meanwhile, most FC RAID cards are 64-bit 66 Mhz, run around 200 MB/s, support multiple cards before maxing out their target bus. For $5000, you are going to get much more storage than this thing and it will be faster. I just don't get it.
I have one technical issue with the article, too. It contains the following line: "Current PCI bus speeds are limited to 33MHz, however, 64 bit PCI bus systems are in development and have speeds of 66MHz." This isn't correct. Both 64-bit and 66Mhz PCI systems have been around for some time. I was at the Microsoft Plugfest for Windows 2000 and Millenium testing my 64-bit 66 Mhz fibre channel card in systems from various vendors. This was back in December of '99. Also, the signal rate and signal width are not automatically linked, although most 32-bit buses only support up to 33 Mhz and most 64-bit buses support up to 66 Mhz.
So I guess you would be more than happy to give up much of what you own so that you could help the rest of society. Why aren't you donating that fancy computer you are posting with to a school or underprivaleged family? What about that internet connection? Wouldn't that money be better spent on helping people? Do you live in a house? Give up some of its space for the homeless to move in with you. Oh and your job...you will now earn the average income in your country, no fair earning more. The rest of your income will be given to those that are less fortunate. There is a reason why socialism hasn't ever worked.
I suspect that within the next year or so you will start seeing Infiniband based clustering solutions. Using RDMA writes, you have very fast remote memory access that does not require host processor. Imagine PCI but faster with a network like topology. Can't wait...
It is still pretty darn good. Just a small drop in that percentage through decreased prices would mean millions of people would have access to medicine that they couldn't previously afford. These companies have no competition and little prices controls. Any Fool knows that means the customer is going to get ripped off with unfair prices. And that is exactly what is happening.
Yes, I did read your links. The UN is often soft on international businesses for various reasons. For one, it has little power over them. So they focus where they can do the best work. Spreading information has always been something that the UN is good at. I am not knocking it either; it is a very important thing to do and needs to be done.
Even if it was done, you would still have the problem of how expensive treatment is. Once educated about the disease and how it works and how not to spread it, why should an HIV positive person care? They are going to die because they can't get the treatment they need. Their behavior isn't right, but a hopeless person sometimes loses some of their humanity.
I agree with you that the people have some bad attitudes with respect to AIDS but the US has had those too. In the US there is still a stigma attached to AIDS, still an association with promiscuous homosexual men, and it is still a problem. This doesn't explain your "blame the people" rant. Because they have silly ideas about condoms does not mean they deserve to die. Sure, they contracted a disease they could have prevented. They are still human; they just made a mistake. They still deserve medicine at a fair price. Have you ever had unproteced sex when you shouldn't have? Better yet, have you ever stayed out in the sun too long? Do you smoke or know someone who does? Do these people deserve to die? Should we stop treating lung cancer because smokers didn't read the warning? I think that you didn't read one part of your links:
"They are human beings like you and me...", Deputy President Thabo Mbeki from "South African government urges nation to fight AIDS pandemic" at CNN. It isn't anti-capitalistic to want fair prices for necessities. I guess you feel that $10,000-$15,000 per year is a fair amount to pay for medicine that you need to survive. Is it more important for drug companies to make billions than for people to have access to the medicine they need to live?
So education is needed. But we must treat those that have the disease as well. No matter how much education you have some people are going to get the disease and they need to be treated. I also feel that these survivors will help make AIDS and HIV less of a stigma. Today HIV means AIDS which means death. It could be a treatable illness. The treatability of AIDs told but survivors as done more to erase the stigma of AIDS than almost anything else.
The poor are all too often pushed out of getting proper health care, in the states and abroad. You can judge a society by how it handles the less fortunate members of it. Look at the poor and look at the sick and you can find a measure of the compassion of the society. We must do what we can to help those that can't help themselves. In this case, this means getting affordable AIDS treatments to places being ravaged by it.
...ARE killing millions in Africa and in many other countries including USA. You blame the people but ignore the fact that many are uneducated in how this disease really works. What if it comes out that cell phones really do cause cancer? Is it the people's fault for not knowing?
You speak of people refusing to get treatment. How can they get treatment they can't afford? Drug companies make billions of dollars in profit; don't cry for them. They should have much tighter regulation, especially for treatments of life threatening diseases. What about AIDS transmitted through blood transfusion? From mother to baby? From cheating husband or wife to an innocent spouse? Is it their fault as well?
You seem to have no idea how lucky you are to healthy and well off in this world. Much of this work can not afford so many of the things we take for granted. How can you sit and type at your expensive computer through your expensive internet access and think that it is their fault? Do you really think that all the things you take for granted are there through your hard work? If you had been born in certain parts of the world like Africa and India, you would have a high chance of being born with AIDS and into poverty. You were lucky, damn lucky as are all of use who live in rich countries. We need to be thankful and understand that we have a responsiblity to help those that have not been as fortunate as us.
I was taking a look at Merck's financial info at Yahoo and I just thought about that $6.7 billion in pure profit. They have a profit margin of 16.9%. I have been to their head quarters in New Jersey (a friend of mine works there) and I just couldn't believe how opulent it was. I imagined just what a fraction of their profits could have done for the world. They are just one example of how profitable it has become to treat the sick. Somehow that just sounds wrong.
I understand the need for everyone to make a living and I don't believe is government run medical programs. I do believe in capitilism but with carefull regulation, especially of necessities. Those include energy, water, food, education, communications, insurence, and medical science (drugs, healthcare, etc.). There are certain things people must purchase. This demand pushes prices up. Competition keeps them down. In the case of drugs, patents block competition and give the patent holder incredible price control. They can charge immense amounts pointing to development costs and marketing. They point to the insurence companies to eat the cost.
They of course, claim that new drugs are still experimentle and not worthy of coverage. My uncle pays thousands of dollars a month for multiple sclerosis treatments not covered by insurence. These are not fantasy miracle cure drugs; they are drugs with proven effectivness that have been approved by the FDA. He is a medical doctor and knows first hand how the combination of high drug costs and uncontrolled insurence companies causes his patients to die of very treatable ailments. He is fighting to avoid the very same thing himself and knows that if he was not wealthy he would be in much worse shape, perhaps not even alive.
What can be done? I believe that patents on treatments for life threatening diseases should be shortened. Allowing generic versions of these drugs to come into existance would lower prices. I believe that medical insurence companies should be forced to pay for more treatments prescribed by doctors. An insurence adjuster should not be able to determine how long I stay in the hospital if I get sick; only a doctory should. Goverments at the local, national, and international level have the power to make things right but have stood idly by while millions die. Something must be done about it. They must protect their own people.
It seems the US isn't really doing enough to keep up with rest of the world when comes to wireless technology, espcially mobile phone technology. I use Sprint's wireless internet and while its much better than nothing, it is much worse than it could be. Has the US even had their 3G auction yet? I wonder how long this will go on before people start to realize how important it is.
Yep, this the holy grail of ads on the net or anywhere else. RealMedia was working on an api to allow sites that already track users, (New York Times for example) that would allow the times to interface thier tracking data into ad delivery. The could ad their own controls over ad delivery with mucking with our code. I think this type of true tracking will eventually take hold as sites partner together and as big companies own more and more sites. Think of all the strange connections. CNN ads could be based on something you purchased through AOL. It looks like true anonymous surfing will become less available. While I would rather see ads that are of interest to me, I also want control over my personal info. Pretty scary stuff.
He makes it sounds like that targeted advertising doesn't exist. He is so wrong there. I used to work for one of the largest banner ad software companies. Our software supported all sorts of methods for targeting. This could be combined with the site's own tracking data to create ads that are appropriate for the surfer in question. Banner ad software can get surprisingly complex when targeting, inventory managment, and tracking come in to play. Lack of targeting has nothing to do with why banner ad companies have fallen apart.
Companies that buy the ads are realizing that it is difficult to create a presense through online ads alone but easier to do through tv, magazine, and even radio ads. These ads are larger, more interesting, and more difficult to avoid. Most banner ads are completly uninteresting. Meanwhile, BudBowl attracted a ton of attention. Poeple were actually betting on the result and made sure not to miss those commercials. Apple's 1984 commercial only had to be aired once to leave a permanent mark on the industry and set the ton for Apple for years to come. Until high speed access becomes a reality for a majority of internet users, banner ads will continue to stink. As the average bandwidth rises, more experimentation will be done with flash, java, streaming video, and other higher quality ads. The goal is to have the quality of a standard tv commercial but with interactivity. Just click on a gap dancer to by her jeans. This lack of quality keeps many non-Internet companies away from the net. They just don't see the need for internet advertising. For example, which is more likely to get you interested in car, a ugly animated gif of it zooming by, or a beautifull scene of it racing down a hill in the woods? Meanwhile, the net companies for whom it would make sense to advertise on the net are going out of business. Even Yahoo gets 30% of its ad revenue from pure dotcoms. Lose 50% of those companies and that is a significant effect on your bottom line.
Eventually, the Internet, radio, and tv will become more intertwined and more interactive. I see the net splitting like tv did, with pay services and ad supported services. Imagine HBO-Online vs. CBS-Online. Ads will continue to live on because people will always be willing to sit through them for free services. Always.
I know that RCN has been real aggressive with trying to break into the cable and phone markets. I used to have an erols account and I got swept up by RCN along with several other companies. They are one of the few companies laying their own cable lines in attempt to break the small local monopolies that cable companies have. I would call each and try to get the best deal. Although I only have dial-up through RCN, the service has been pretty good. They went through some glitches right after they got erols but since then things have been great.
Be glad you can get something. I live too far away for DSL and have been swapped from cable company to cable company with each new company pusing back the cable modem date. I really wish I had choice between cable companies and a single choice at all for high bandwidth.:(
Although Infiniband is still just getting going, it has great potential for clustering. Adapter's can RDMA to remote hosts directly. Although you could do this with PCI-PCI bridges, PCI was still slow, had limited interconnectivity and latency increased as bridges and busses were added. Infiniband cuts through all that with a network like topology (hubs and switches) but still allows direct memory access.
Of course you still have the problem that current clusters require software be rewritten to take advantage of it. I think someone could design a system that finds other systems across infiniband and shares the work load automatically. The more transparent the clustering, the better.
Basically, if you have more than one thing as the main application, you are going to see nice benefits from a multi-proc system. For example, if your box just runs ftp and that's about all it does, it should be fine. Granted many of other processes and threads are running about, but there is one main program that is THE important program on the system. Now what if you take a box that is running ftp, mail, http (static+cgi), and a database. Now that extra proc makes a big difference. There is an argument over which is more cost effective, a super box for everything or many little boxes, one for each task.
It really depends on your application of choice. Some applications are I/O bound. Here another proc wouldn't help. But many applications are processor bound, especially at certain points. When your I/O is really fast, you start to really see the importance of MP. For example, there is a very big difference between your best SP I/O speed vs. your best MP I/O speed when you are using a RAID array with lots of cache connected through a 64-bit 66 Mhz PCI FibreChannel controller. If AMD wants to win the big server environments where the profit margins are higher, they need to support at least dual processor systems. Heck, Unisys has a 32x Intel box that they have licensed to Dell, Compaq, and HP.
One of the knocks on many the free operating systems was a lack of support for enterprise technologies. I work at a company working on InfiniBand hardware. We will be supporting Linux, as Intel will be releasing IB host drivers for it. It is not known how this code will be released, although Intel seems to be indicating the source will be available. We don't know how, though. For example it may require membership in the IB Trade Org. We are totally willing to release drivers for other OS's like *BSD, but are not willing to write a full OSVerbs InfiniBand driver for it. How and when do FreeBSD and TrustedBSD plan to implement IB support, if at all?
It is somewhat similar to why a single person dubbing a cd to tape but I can't copy a ton of cds and resell them. I can browse for prices as a shopper but I can't suck all their prices off their web site to always make my prices 5% lower. I am really worried about this direction of cyber law. As technology gives the average joe the ability to do everything on a large the scale, the "mass" part of the legality test is broken. Hence, the Metallica Naptster battle. Although the people are not profiting from it, the number of the copies ditributed pushes the courts to Metallica's side. I worry about the quite nontechnical courts ruling on matters of technology that will effect the US for years to come. I don't mind corporations squabbling in court, as is the case with register and verio. I do believe that access to a site by a specific entity should be throttled so as to not starve off the regular consumer. I do believe that breaking those limits should be considered illegal. What I don't want to see is the corporate world coming after the regular consumer who is not making money off the situation. The fact is, if music was sold for a modest profit and music companies were pickier about who they try to turn into super stars they could make a lot of money while charging much less money. Technology is forcing the music industry to improve its product and provide real value for the consumer. I see the likes of Napster and the free music sharing phenom. to just be another example of how competition provides better value to the consumers, as it is suppossed to. This form of competition should not be stiffled just because it may cut into the profits of current companies. The law should not be meant to protect the status quo but protect the regular citizens.
Be was going to be much less expensive than Next as I remember it. I really think that it was a much better choice from a technology perspective. I am not saying Be was a better technology, but more Apple like. Be sells itself on graphics and ease of use, like Apple. Next sold itself on being high end. My only experience with Next was in the financial world. I ported my options valuation software from C++ to Objective C on a Next box. It was screaming fast and real time supported calculations for many traders. Of course it was so expensive, we got our client to lend us one because we didn't want to have to shell out the $$ to buy one ourselves. Also, Next had Jobs.
Which brings me to why Next made some sense from a business perspective. Jobs revitalized the market's opinion of Apple and the consumer's opinion of Apple. He might have hit a bad quater but there is one more X factor in his corner...and that X is OSX. If Apple can really enter the server market than can get ahold of what all the other PC players knew they needed: a high profit margin business. Apple is learning the hard way (again) with the cube that consumers will not pay a lot for this muffler. Businesses on the other hand, will pay a lot for a high end system. Twice the quality will cost three to four times as much. The difference becomes pure profit. Also, Apple can now leverage off the free software phenomenon. Remember that they make money off of hardware so they will support any software, free or expensive that helps them sell pretty boxes. I can't wait to see cube clusters (how borg like, eh?) running web applications on OSX.
I am pretty sure that you can already get a screen like sony's, except that you can rotate it when the wide ratio makes sense. For example, movies look better on a wide screen. You can lose the top and bottom black bars that always make you feel like you are "missing" something. Also, a wide screen can be split into two slightly narrow screens letting you see more at once. As for code, I know a lot of people that only print code landscape so they can see long lines. Sometimes wrapping (automatic or manual) makes the code harder to read. Just my 2 bits...
Here's your crack...high-end digital video camera with high quality dolby 5.1 microphones recording off of a high-end home entertainment system. How would the video camera know that what I was recording was copy protected and not some home movie? Hidden frames? What about all the technology without the copy protection on the market? Will it all just magically break? They can make copying more of a pain, but they can never make it impossible. By making it a pain they get rid of their biggest worry: mass copying.
The sound and video eventually must go to some output device. At that point, any user can jump and record it. It might not be fast or easy but it will always be there. I don't care if the speaker and monitors decrypt at the very last instant, there is always something you can do. Worst case scenario, you can always slip a microphone in and record the music, throw a video camera in and record the video. Are they going to ban microphones and video cameras? It can't be stopped. They should only worry about mass for profit copying and maybe even mass non-profit copying. The fact is, to go after Joe Home User is a waste of money. It costs much more to try to prevent Joe from copying a movie for a friend show than the money Joe takes away when his friend doesn't buy the movie. Are they going to try to ban watching movies in groups? "Warning, Movie Player detects 5 watchers. You are only licensed for 3 watchers. Please press the BUY button to purchase more licenses and continue watching your movie. Have a nice day!" Come on...
This kind of argument can be taken further and further.
Isn't a car just a horseless carriage? Your logic can be followed to indicate that the real inovation was pulling a box on wheels with an animal and putting people in it. Cars were just an improvment. The no car to car is bigger than a better car thing can get silly. It all depends on how you describe a car. Is it a box on wheels that carries people? Then the car itself was just an upgrade from the horse drawn wagon. When you look at the effect that having all the vehicles in the country using clean, renewable fuel would have on our environment, you understand why this is a major innovation indeed. The technology will not just change cars. It has the potential to change our society. If cars are no longer reliant on fossil fuels than what about power plants? Many still burn dirty coal. What about home heating? Oil and gas rule there. The automotive industry can drive society to better ways of doing things. That is a major shift.
You make it sound like AIDS spread because of bad medicine. It really spread from a lack of safe sex practices (even though there already were other STDs) and problems with blood screenings. I think that AIDS treatment is a major inovation even though it is a younger disease. Africa is being ravaged by this disease. If they can get the price of current treatments down and get them distributed, millions of lives and the fate of an entire continent could be changed. I think that ranks.
Granted, the battle with lung cancer in paticular is not going well. But doesn't that make the treatments forming that much more important? Here is an example of a new treatment. One of the major reasons why this cancer in paticular has become such a killer is wide spread smoking. Around a quarter of college kids smoke. I watched my grandmother die of emphysema from smoking so I am pretty sensitive to smoking related diseases. I only wish this type of cancer got the same focus as others. I know women that will never miss a mamogram but will continue smoking. The battles against some cancers as gone better, though. What makes a Lance Armstrong so special is that his case shows how one can beat types of cancer once known as death sentences. It's an insult to the thousands of doctors and scientists that have worked hard to beat these killers to ignore their work and accomplishments.
I guess that my feeling is that this argument can be applied to anything. All things are built on top of other things. It is easy to argue that the things at the bottom are the most important because they made all else possible. I guess when it comes down to it, the most influential thing to ever happen occured many years ago: The formation of the universe and life itself.
Of course, I am in the dark too...monitors make great candles!
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I don't think that you need or want to have people mate with as many different people as possible. This would cause the population to increase too quickly, and would result in one type of genetics possibly being overspread. While a female is somewhat limited in how many children she can have, men can father hundreds of children indiscriminately. This type of activity also can lead to the spread of STDs. See what is happening in parts of Africa were men regular have multiple sexual partners in short spans of time, sometimes fathering children through several different women.
I do believe that people should not be limited to sexual partners within their own race, national origin, or religion. This type of self-impossed genetic isolation can only do harm. It tends to lead to genetic diseases within the group in question. It also leads to discrimination.
I worry that cloning could be misused in various fasions. For example, one rich person could have herself cloned thousands of times just because they felt like it. Not only is this bad from a population stand point, it reduces the diversity of the gene pool. This increases the chance that recessive genetic disorders could arrise. It also prevents natural selection and evolution from being as effective. While unhealthy genetic mutations would be avoided, healthy ones would also be avoided. This would lead to a more static species. Static species tend to have less of an ability to adapt to changes in their environment.
About the only possibly good area for cloning is for couples who could not otherwise have children. Then again, this could reduce the already problematic adoption rate. Why adopt when you can clone?
Isn't sexual reproduction a big part of how humans changed for the better and adapted to their environment? Other forms of life use asexual reproduction and do not gain the genetic variety that humans and other sexual reproducers gain. As another example, look at what happens in sexually reproducing species when interbreeding occurs. Various deficiencies spring up including inherited diseases. Extremely isolated cultures and also have similar problems. Couldn't cloning on a large scale effect the gene pool? Even ignoring all the ethical questions, this genetic one still concerns me.
Gotta agree that that is a distinct possiblity. It really seems the net is being driven towards TV and vice versa. I hope that some parts of the good old net survive but I don't know if it is possible. With respect to your home net, I worry that ISPs are going to continue to limit upstream bandwidth for residential customers to force them into expensive commercial contracts to run servers. AFAIK, @Home has a limit of around 100kb/s for their cable modem service. What is to stop them from dropping it to something like 28.8? Yikes! I used to run a site off of a digital 56kb connection. It sucked...two or four modems (in those days speeds) could max it out.
BlueLight is out of that business and others are dying off or starting to charge. The fact is, free ISPs are learning what a lot of free web sites are learning. They are learning that it is tough to get all the revenue you need from internet advertising. Unless you are really big (CNN, Yahoo) you can't charge enough. Without the expensive software, services, and ad network that somone like RealMedia's OpenAdStream or DoubleClick provide it is difficult to make money selling internet ads. Your only hope is to have a great programming staff and ad sales people. Most companies are unable to create these necessities due to stupidity or lack of funds or both. This throws you back into the arms of Internet advertising companies. If you finally don't have money for them, you are screwed.
I think that the free internet will explode again when consumer bandwidth increases. When the average user has a 500Kb/s connection, the possiblities open up. This includes the advertising possiblities. I think that large interactive ads will be thrown in the way of the information the user wants, forcing them to sit through it. No ignoring the banners. More sites will use in house based ad servers to work around ad blocking software (block the ad, block the story). Articles will be unreachable without going through the ads. This type of advertising will bring success rates closer to television ads and thus raise rates and bring back the financial feasiblity of free internet businesses.
Wouldn't it have made more sense to test this against similarly priced storage systems? In the $5000 range you have fibre channel raid controllers with some storage. A good FC card will push around 200 MB/s. Why not have a measure of MB transferred per second per CPU percentage? Put that next to $ per MB storage and you get a real comparison.
This card is limited to 100 MB/s and is only 32-bit 33 Mhz so can only be grouped one per bus in order to maintain that speed. Meanwhile, most FC RAID cards are 64-bit 66 Mhz, run around 200 MB/s, support multiple cards before maxing out their target bus. For $5000, you are going to get much more storage than this thing and it will be faster. I just don't get it.
I have one technical issue with the article, too. It contains the following line: "Current PCI bus speeds are limited to 33MHz, however, 64 bit PCI bus systems are in development and have speeds of 66MHz." This isn't correct. Both 64-bit and 66Mhz PCI systems have been around for some time. I was at the Microsoft Plugfest for Windows 2000 and Millenium testing my 64-bit 66 Mhz fibre channel card in systems from various vendors. This was back in December of '99. Also, the signal rate and signal width are not automatically linked, although most 32-bit buses only support up to 33 Mhz and most 64-bit buses support up to 66 Mhz.
So I guess you would be more than happy to give up much of what you own so that you could help the rest of society. Why aren't you donating that fancy computer you are posting with to a school or underprivaleged family? What about that internet connection? Wouldn't that money be better spent on helping people? Do you live in a house? Give up some of its space for the homeless to move in with you. Oh and your job...you will now earn the average income in your country, no fair earning more. The rest of your income will be given to those that are less fortunate. There is a reason why socialism hasn't ever worked.
I suspect that within the next year or so you will start seeing Infiniband based clustering solutions. Using RDMA writes, you have very fast remote memory access that does not require host processor. Imagine PCI but faster with a network like topology. Can't wait...
It is still pretty darn good. Just a small drop in that percentage through decreased prices would mean millions of people would have access to medicine that they couldn't previously afford. These companies have no competition and little prices controls. Any Fool knows that means the customer is going to get ripped off with unfair prices. And that is exactly what is happening.
Yes, I did read your links. The UN is often soft on international businesses for various reasons. For one, it has little power over them. So they focus where they can do the best work. Spreading information has always been something that the UN is good at. I am not knocking it either; it is a very important thing to do and needs to be done.
Even if it was done, you would still have the problem of how expensive treatment is. Once educated about the disease and how it works and how not to spread it, why should an HIV positive person care? They are going to die because they can't get the treatment they need. Their behavior isn't right, but a hopeless person sometimes loses some of their humanity.
I agree with you that the people have some bad attitudes with respect to AIDS but the US has had those too. In the US there is still a stigma attached to AIDS, still an association with promiscuous homosexual men, and it is still a problem. This doesn't explain your "blame the people" rant. Because they have silly ideas about condoms does not mean they deserve to die. Sure, they contracted a disease they could have prevented. They are still human; they just made a mistake. They still deserve medicine at a fair price. Have you ever had unproteced sex when you shouldn't have? Better yet, have you ever stayed out in the sun too long? Do you smoke or know someone who does? Do these people deserve to die? Should we stop treating lung cancer because smokers didn't read the warning? I think that you didn't read one part of your links:
"They are human beings like you and me...", Deputy President Thabo Mbeki from "South African government urges nation to fight AIDS pandemic" at CNN. It isn't anti-capitalistic to want fair prices for necessities. I guess you feel that $10,000-$15,000 per year is a fair amount to pay for medicine that you need to survive. Is it more important for drug companies to make billions than for people to have access to the medicine they need to live?
So education is needed. But we must treat those that have the disease as well. No matter how much education you have some people are going to get the disease and they need to be treated. I also feel that these survivors will help make AIDS and HIV less of a stigma. Today HIV means AIDS which means death. It could be a treatable illness. The treatability of AIDs told but survivors as done more to erase the stigma of AIDS than almost anything else.
The poor are all too often pushed out of getting proper health care, in the states and abroad. You can judge a society by how it handles the less fortunate members of it. Look at the poor and look at the sick and you can find a measure of the compassion of the society. We must do what we can to help those that can't help themselves. In this case, this means getting affordable AIDS treatments to places being ravaged by it.
...ARE killing millions in Africa and in many other countries including USA. You blame the people but ignore the fact that many are uneducated in how this disease really works. What if it comes out that cell phones really do cause cancer? Is it the people's fault for not knowing?
You speak of people refusing to get treatment. How can they get treatment they can't afford? Drug companies make billions of dollars in profit; don't cry for them. They should have much tighter regulation, especially for treatments of life threatening diseases. What about AIDS transmitted through blood transfusion? From mother to baby? From cheating husband or wife to an innocent spouse? Is it their fault as well?
You seem to have no idea how lucky you are to healthy and well off in this world. Much of this work can not afford so many of the things we take for granted. How can you sit and type at your expensive computer through your expensive internet access and think that it is their fault? Do you really think that all the things you take for granted are there through your hard work? If you had been born in certain parts of the world like Africa and India, you would have a high chance of being born with AIDS and into poverty. You were lucky, damn lucky as are all of use who live in rich countries. We need to be thankful and understand that we have a responsiblity to help those that have not been as fortunate as us.
I was taking a look at Merck's financial info at Yahoo and I just thought about that $6.7 billion in pure profit. They have a profit margin of 16.9%. I have been to their head quarters in New Jersey (a friend of mine works there) and I just couldn't believe how opulent it was. I imagined just what a fraction of their profits could have done for the world. They are just one example of how profitable it has become to treat the sick. Somehow that just sounds wrong.
I understand the need for everyone to make a living and I don't believe is government run medical programs. I do believe in capitilism but with carefull regulation, especially of necessities. Those include energy, water, food, education, communications, insurence, and medical science (drugs, healthcare, etc.). There are certain things people must purchase. This demand pushes prices up. Competition keeps them down. In the case of drugs, patents block competition and give the patent holder incredible price control. They can charge immense amounts pointing to development costs and marketing. They point to the insurence companies to eat the cost.
They of course, claim that new drugs are still experimentle and not worthy of coverage. My uncle pays thousands of dollars a month for multiple sclerosis treatments not covered by insurence. These are not fantasy miracle cure drugs; they are drugs with proven effectivness that have been approved by the FDA. He is a medical doctor and knows first hand how the combination of high drug costs and uncontrolled insurence companies causes his patients to die of very treatable ailments. He is fighting to avoid the very same thing himself and knows that if he was not wealthy he would be in much worse shape, perhaps not even alive.
What can be done? I believe that patents on treatments for life threatening diseases should be shortened. Allowing generic versions of these drugs to come into existance would lower prices. I believe that medical insurence companies should be forced to pay for more treatments prescribed by doctors. An insurence adjuster should not be able to determine how long I stay in the hospital if I get sick; only a doctory should. Goverments at the local, national, and international level have the power to make things right but have stood idly by while millions die. Something must be done about it. They must protect their own people.
It seems the US isn't really doing enough to keep up with rest of the world when comes to wireless technology, espcially mobile phone technology. I use Sprint's wireless internet and while its much better than nothing, it is much worse than it could be. Has the US even had their 3G auction yet? I wonder how long this will go on before people start to realize how important it is.
Yep, this the holy grail of ads on the net or anywhere else. RealMedia was working on an api to allow sites that already track users, (New York Times for example) that would allow the times to interface thier tracking data into ad delivery. The could ad their own controls over ad delivery with mucking with our code. I think this type of true tracking will eventually take hold as sites partner together and as big companies own more and more sites. Think of all the strange connections. CNN ads could be based on something you purchased through AOL. It looks like true anonymous surfing will become less available. While I would rather see ads that are of interest to me, I also want control over my personal info. Pretty scary stuff.
He makes it sounds like that targeted advertising doesn't exist. He is so wrong there. I used to work for one of the largest banner ad software companies. Our software supported all sorts of methods for targeting. This could be combined with the site's own tracking data to create ads that are appropriate for the surfer in question. Banner ad software can get surprisingly complex when targeting, inventory managment, and tracking come in to play. Lack of targeting has nothing to do with why banner ad companies have fallen apart.
Companies that buy the ads are realizing that it is difficult to create a presense through online ads alone but easier to do through tv, magazine, and even radio ads. These ads are larger, more interesting, and more difficult to avoid. Most banner ads are completly uninteresting. Meanwhile, BudBowl attracted a ton of attention. Poeple were actually betting on the result and made sure not to miss those commercials. Apple's 1984 commercial only had to be aired once to leave a permanent mark on the industry and set the ton for Apple for years to come. Until high speed access becomes a reality for a majority of internet users, banner ads will continue to stink. As the average bandwidth rises, more experimentation will be done with flash, java, streaming video, and other higher quality ads. The goal is to have the quality of a standard tv commercial but with interactivity. Just click on a gap dancer to by her jeans. This lack of quality keeps many non-Internet companies away from the net. They just don't see the need for internet advertising. For example, which is more likely to get you interested in car, a ugly animated gif of it zooming by, or a beautifull scene of it racing down a hill in the woods? Meanwhile, the net companies for whom it would make sense to advertise on the net are going out of business. Even Yahoo gets 30% of its ad revenue from pure dotcoms. Lose 50% of those companies and that is a significant effect on your bottom line.
Eventually, the Internet, radio, and tv will become more intertwined and more interactive. I see the net splitting like tv did, with pay services and ad supported services. Imagine HBO-Online vs. CBS-Online. Ads will continue to live on because people will always be willing to sit through them for free services. Always.
I know that RCN has been real aggressive with trying to break into the cable and phone markets. I used to have an erols account and I got swept up by RCN along with several other companies. They are one of the few companies laying their own cable lines in attempt to break the small local monopolies that cable companies have. I would call each and try to get the best deal. Although I only have dial-up through RCN, the service has been pretty good. They went through some glitches right after they got erols but since then things have been great. :(
Be glad you can get something. I live too far away for DSL and have been swapped from cable company to cable company with each new company pusing back the cable modem date. I really wish I had choice between cable companies and a single choice at all for high bandwidth.
Although Infiniband is still just getting going, it has great potential for clustering. Adapter's can RDMA to remote hosts directly. Although you could do this with PCI-PCI bridges, PCI was still slow, had limited interconnectivity and latency increased as bridges and busses were added. Infiniband cuts through all that with a network like topology (hubs and switches) but still allows direct memory access.
Of course you still have the problem that current clusters require software be rewritten to take advantage of it. I think someone could design a system that finds other systems across infiniband and shares the work load automatically. The more transparent the clustering, the better.
Basically, if you have more than one thing as the main application, you are going to see nice benefits from a multi-proc system. For example, if your box just runs ftp and that's about all it does, it should be fine. Granted many of other processes and threads are running about, but there is one main program that is THE important program on the system. Now what if you take a box that is running ftp, mail, http (static+cgi), and a database. Now that extra proc makes a big difference. There is an argument over which is more cost effective, a super box for everything or many little boxes, one for each task.
It really depends on your application of choice. Some applications are I/O bound. Here another proc wouldn't help. But many applications are processor bound, especially at certain points. When your I/O is really fast, you start to really see the importance of MP. For example, there is a very big difference between your best SP I/O speed vs. your best MP I/O speed when you are using a RAID array with lots of cache connected through a 64-bit 66 Mhz PCI FibreChannel controller. If AMD wants to win the big server environments where the profit margins are higher, they need to support at least dual processor systems. Heck, Unisys has a 32x Intel box that they have licensed to Dell, Compaq, and HP.
One of the knocks on many the free operating systems was a lack of support for enterprise technologies. I work at a company working on InfiniBand hardware. We will be supporting Linux, as Intel will be releasing IB host drivers for it. It is not known how this code will be released, although Intel seems to be indicating the source will be available. We don't know how, though. For example it may require membership in the IB Trade Org. We are totally willing to release drivers for other OS's like *BSD, but are not willing to write a full OSVerbs InfiniBand driver for it. How and when do FreeBSD and TrustedBSD plan to implement IB support, if at all?
It is somewhat similar to why a single person dubbing a cd to tape but I can't copy a ton of cds and resell them. I can browse for prices as a shopper but I can't suck all their prices off their web site to always make my prices 5% lower. I am really worried about this direction of cyber law. As technology gives the average joe the ability to do everything on a large the scale, the "mass" part of the legality test is broken. Hence, the Metallica Naptster battle. Although the people are not profiting from it, the number of the copies ditributed pushes the courts to Metallica's side. I worry about the quite nontechnical courts ruling on matters of technology that will effect the US for years to come. I don't mind corporations squabbling in court, as is the case with register and verio. I do believe that access to a site by a specific entity should be throttled so as to not starve off the regular consumer. I do believe that breaking those limits should be considered illegal. What I don't want to see is the corporate world coming after the regular consumer who is not making money off the situation. The fact is, if music was sold for a modest profit and music companies were pickier about who they try to turn into super stars they could make a lot of money while charging much less money. Technology is forcing the music industry to improve its product and provide real value for the consumer. I see the likes of Napster and the free music sharing phenom. to just be another example of how competition provides better value to the consumers, as it is suppossed to. This form of competition should not be stiffled just because it may cut into the profits of current companies. The law should not be meant to protect the status quo but protect the regular citizens.
Be was going to be much less expensive than Next as I remember it. I really think that it was a much better choice from a technology perspective. I am not saying Be was a better technology, but more Apple like. Be sells itself on graphics and ease of use, like Apple. Next sold itself on being high end. My only experience with Next was in the financial world. I ported my options valuation software from C++ to Objective C on a Next box. It was screaming fast and real time supported calculations for many traders. Of course it was so expensive, we got our client to lend us one because we didn't want to have to shell out the $$ to buy one ourselves. Also, Next had Jobs.
Which brings me to why Next made some sense from a business perspective. Jobs revitalized the market's opinion of Apple and the consumer's opinion of Apple. He might have hit a bad quater but there is one more X factor in his corner...and that X is OSX. If Apple can really enter the server market than can get ahold of what all the other PC players knew they needed: a high profit margin business. Apple is learning the hard way (again) with the cube that consumers will not pay a lot for this muffler. Businesses on the other hand, will pay a lot for a high end system. Twice the quality will cost three to four times as much. The difference becomes pure profit. Also, Apple can now leverage off the free software phenomenon. Remember that they make money off of hardware so they will support any software, free or expensive that helps them sell pretty boxes. I can't wait to see cube clusters (how borg like, eh?) running web applications on OSX.
I am pretty sure that you can already get a screen like sony's, except that you can rotate it when the wide ratio makes sense. For example, movies look better on a wide screen. You can lose the top and bottom black bars that always make you feel like you are "missing" something. Also, a wide screen can be split into two slightly narrow screens letting you see more at once. As for code, I know a lot of people that only print code landscape so they can see long lines. Sometimes wrapping (automatic or manual) makes the code harder to read. Just my 2 bits...
Here's your crack...high-end digital video camera with high quality dolby 5.1 microphones recording off of a high-end home entertainment system. How would the video camera know that what I was recording was copy protected and not some home movie? Hidden frames? What about all the technology without the copy protection on the market? Will it all just magically break? They can make copying more of a pain, but they can never make it impossible. By making it a pain they get rid of their biggest worry: mass copying.
The sound and video eventually must go to some output device. At that point, any user can jump and record it. It might not be fast or easy but it will always be there. I don't care if the speaker and monitors decrypt at the very last instant, there is always something you can do. Worst case scenario, you can always slip a microphone in and record the music, throw a video camera in and record the video. Are they going to ban microphones and video cameras? It can't be stopped. They should only worry about mass for profit copying and maybe even mass non-profit copying. The fact is, to go after Joe Home User is a waste of money. It costs much more to try to prevent Joe from copying a movie for a friend show than the money Joe takes away when his friend doesn't buy the movie. Are they going to try to ban watching movies in groups? "Warning, Movie Player detects 5 watchers. You are only licensed for 3 watchers. Please press the BUY button to purchase more licenses and continue watching your movie. Have a nice day!" Come on...
This kind of argument can be taken further and further.
Isn't a car just a horseless carriage? Your logic can be followed to indicate that the real inovation was pulling a box on wheels with an animal and putting people in it. Cars were just an improvment. The no car to car is bigger than a better car thing can get silly. It all depends on how you describe a car. Is it a box on wheels that carries people? Then the car itself was just an upgrade from the horse drawn wagon. When you look at the effect that having all the vehicles in the country using clean, renewable fuel would have on our environment, you understand why this is a major innovation indeed. The technology will not just change cars. It has the potential to change our society. If cars are no longer reliant on fossil fuels than what about power plants? Many still burn dirty coal. What about home heating? Oil and gas rule there. The automotive industry can drive society to better ways of doing things. That is a major shift.
You make it sound like AIDS spread because of bad medicine. It really spread from a lack of safe sex practices (even though there already were other STDs) and problems with blood screenings. I think that AIDS treatment is a major inovation even though it is a younger disease. Africa is being ravaged by this disease. If they can get the price of current treatments down and get them distributed, millions of lives and the fate of an entire continent could be changed. I think that ranks.
Granted, the battle with lung cancer in paticular is not going well. But doesn't that make the treatments forming that much more important? Here is an example of a new treatment. One of the major reasons why this cancer in paticular has become such a killer is wide spread smoking. Around a quarter of college kids smoke. I watched my grandmother die of emphysema from smoking so I am pretty sensitive to smoking related diseases. I only wish this type of cancer got the same focus as others. I know women that will never miss a mamogram but will continue smoking. The battles against some cancers as gone better, though. What makes a Lance Armstrong so special is that his case shows how one can beat types of cancer once known as death sentences. It's an insult to the thousands of doctors and scientists that have worked hard to beat these killers to ignore their work and accomplishments.
I guess that my feeling is that this argument can be applied to anything. All things are built on top of other things. It is easy to argue that the things at the bottom are the most important because they made all else possible. I guess when it comes down to it, the most influential thing to ever happen occured many years ago: The formation of the universe and life itself.
Of course, I am in the dark too...monitors make great candles!