With the advent of DOCSIS 3.0, cable companies can "bundle up" upstream channels for up to 120 Mbits. Standard DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems will have 4 downstreams and 4 upstream channels, for a total (theoretical) throughput of 200 Mbit/s DS and 120 Mbit/s US.
While the throughput is shared, there's something to be said about PowerBoost as well - they may be able to offer a 20/20 service with boost capability up to 40/40 or 80/40... or if you pay to download movie they may allow you to download that movie @ the full 200 Mbit/s.
Cable companies will be able to compete - but only if they don't keep shooting themselves in the foot with things like BitTorrent filtering.
One thing half of Europe doesn't know s**t about (well... not anymore) is living under dictatorship. The countries in Eastern Europe have a very good idea about this after 50 years, and they knew that the Americans were right - not for using WMD as an excuse, but simply for wanting to get rid of Saddam (and the Taliban for that matter).
You only really appreciate freedom when you don't have it. After 50 years of 'having' it, the (West) Europeans are just too bored to stand up for anything anymore (well, except the morning traffic jams and - ahem! - animal rights). Not that the Americans are better - they've surrendered a lot of their freedom to their govt in the name of 'security'.
The biggest problem with Mr. Gates' argument is that he misses the key point: If some software is released under the GPL, that doesn't mean this is the ONLY license. Nobody stops Mr. Gates, when let's say he wants to build on some software that was government-funded, to go ahead and negociate with the original authors and/or with the government for the right to build upon that software. He would end up paying royalties or a big one-time fee, but hey, he's got deep pockets.
What Mr. Gates is arguing is that government-funded software should be free for all, including greedy companies that want to hijack the work of the original authors, "embrace and extend" it, and give nothing back. He just wants a free ride on taxpayers' money - hey, who wouldn't want that ?
How much does it cost them to produce the physical DVD? $0.5... How much do they charge for a legal DVD in China,Cairo etc ? About the same as in the US and Europe (15-20$). What's the average income of people in these developing countries ? (Hong Kong is not a good example) $100/month / $1200 / year.
People choose between nothing - not at all - and pirate. The "legal" choice, at 15$ apiece, is not a choice at all.
If they would sell the legals for $3, they would have the market.
SGI IRIX has had this feature (checkpoint/restart) for ages. Precisely beacuse it's used in scientific/numerical computations (because of FP performance) and these computations run for ages.
This doesn't help too much. The CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System) keeps track of all the MAC addresses and cable modems behind which theese MACs are located. An operator could theoretically save this database every so many minutes to keep track of all the MAC addresses in the network (and some of them actually do this).
A 10-year isolation would hurt US more than it would hurt the rest of the world.
For one thing, the fact that the dollar is so strong and universally accepted makes it possible for the US to have a huge defficit w/o worrying about inflation. Basically the Fed can print money anytime it wants. If all that money would stay IN the country you would get huge inflation. (That's one reason the ECB can't cut rates as easy as the Fed, because the Euro is far from being as ubiquituous as the US dollar).
The "dollar" policy is a very well thought out US policy (you can't blame them, it in their interest). At the beginning of WWII (1940) the UK were almost broke and didn't have any money to buy raw materials from US and keep on the war production. Then Roosevelt came up with Lend Lease Act, but a pre-condition to this was that the UK gives up the "exclusivity" of the sterling pound in trade across the British Empire / Commonwealth. This was key to positioning the dollar as the most important international trade currency.
So isolationism isn't going to help. Globalisation mostly benefits the Western World; do you think the US becoming isolated would affect the Talibans and the Sudanese ? Not at all. OTOH, if all the 3rd world markets would suddenly close and start doing everything internally, the Western economy would be affected.
Currency is a key advantage of the US in international trade. No other country has this advantage (There was an attempt by Saddam to sell oil for Euros instead of dollars but I'm not sure that succeeded). Other countries worry about budget deficits, trade deficits, monetary volume WAY more than the US worries about these.
I'm not American, I'm European, so I may be biased.
PStill (http://www.wizards.de/~frank/pstill.html) is pretty nice. It converts PS to PDF files. I found it to work much better than gs - which chokes on some PostScripts - and the output is very close to Acrobat in terms of quality.
If you want to get the best out of it, you can install a few PostScript fonts in its "fonts" directory. For example if you have a Sun or SGI around, these come with high-quality PostScript fonts (DPS). Copy these fonts in your PStill "fonts" directory and you will get very good quality.
I assume most Adobe software comes with good PS fonts as well, so if you have even an old version of Adobe Illustrator for example you have a good library of fonts.
I've just had a talk with a SGI rep here (we have an Origin200) and he said SGI is preparing an open-source release of XFS (like they did with GLX).It might be a few months away though... XFS is the journaling filesystem used by IRIX. IRIX with XFS has some unique features like "guaranteed rate I/O". I wonder if they'll port this to Linux. If you don't know what XFS is good for, recovering an 18 Gb XFS filesystem after power failure takes a few seconds ! No more waiting for fsck... Less downtime...
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With the advent of DOCSIS 3.0, cable companies can "bundle up" upstream channels for up to 120 Mbits. Standard DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems will have 4 downstreams and 4 upstream channels, for a total (theoretical) throughput of 200 Mbit/s DS and 120 Mbit/s US.
While the throughput is shared, there's something to be said about PowerBoost as well - they may be able to offer a 20/20 service with boost capability up to 40/40 or 80/40... or if you pay to download movie they may allow you to download that movie @ the full 200 Mbit/s.
Cable companies will be able to compete - but only if they don't keep shooting themselves in the foot with things like BitTorrent filtering.
One thing half of Europe doesn't know s**t about (well ... not anymore) is living under dictatorship. The countries in Eastern Europe have a very good idea about this after 50 years, and they knew that the Americans were right - not for using WMD as an excuse, but simply for wanting to get rid of Saddam (and the Taliban for that matter).
You only really appreciate freedom when you don't have it. After 50 years of 'having' it, the (West) Europeans are just too bored to stand up for anything anymore (well, except the morning traffic jams and - ahem! - animal rights). Not that the Americans are better - they've surrendered a lot of their freedom to their govt in the name of 'security'.
The biggest problem with Mr. Gates' argument is that he misses the key point: If some software is released under the GPL, that doesn't mean this is the ONLY license. Nobody stops Mr. Gates, when let's say he wants to build on some software that was government-funded, to go ahead and negociate with the original authors and/or with the government for the right to build upon that software. He would end up paying royalties or a big one-time fee, but hey, he's got deep pockets.
What Mr. Gates is arguing is that government-funded software should be free for all, including greedy companies that want to hijack the work of the original authors, "embrace and extend" it, and give nothing back. He just wants a free ride on taxpayers' money - hey, who wouldn't want that ?
How much does it cost them to produce the physical DVD? $0.5...
How much do they charge for a legal DVD in China,Cairo etc ? About the same as in the US and Europe (15-20$).
What's the average income of people in these developing countries ? (Hong Kong is not a good example) $100/month / $1200 / year.
People choose between nothing - not at all - and pirate. The "legal" choice, at 15$ apiece, is not a choice at all.
If they would sell the legals for $3, they would have the market.
SGI IRIX has had this feature (checkpoint/restart) for ages. Precisely beacuse it's used in scientific/numerical computations (because of FP performance) and these computations run for ages.
This doesn't help too much. The CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System) keeps track of all the MAC addresses and cable modems behind which theese MACs are located. An operator could theoretically save this database every so many minutes to keep track of all the MAC addresses in the network (and some of them actually do this).
I'm not a native English language speaker, but reading this post really hurts. The Slashdot guys should get some grammar training.
A 10-year isolation would hurt US more than it would hurt the rest of the world.
For one thing, the fact that the dollar is so strong and universally accepted makes it possible for the US to have a huge defficit w/o worrying about inflation. Basically the Fed can print money anytime it wants. If all that money would stay IN the country you would get huge inflation. (That's one reason the ECB can't cut rates as easy as the Fed, because the Euro is far from being as ubiquituous as the US dollar).
The "dollar" policy is a very well thought out US policy (you can't blame them, it in their interest). At the beginning of WWII (1940) the UK were almost broke and didn't have any money to buy raw materials from US and keep on the war production. Then Roosevelt came up with Lend Lease Act, but a pre-condition to this was that the UK gives up the "exclusivity" of the sterling pound in trade across the British Empire / Commonwealth. This was key to positioning the dollar as the most important international trade currency.
So isolationism isn't going to help. Globalisation mostly benefits the Western World; do you think the US becoming isolated would affect the Talibans and the Sudanese ? Not at all. OTOH, if all the 3rd world markets would suddenly close and start doing everything internally, the Western economy would be affected.
Currency is a key advantage of the US in international trade. No other country has this advantage (There was an attempt by Saddam to sell oil for Euros instead of dollars but I'm not sure that succeeded). Other countries worry about budget deficits, trade deficits, monetary volume WAY more than the US worries about these.
I'm not American, I'm European, so I may be biased.
PStill (http://www.wizards.de/~frank/pstill.html) is pretty nice. It converts PS to PDF files. I found it to work much better than gs - which chokes on some PostScripts - and the output is very close to Acrobat in terms of quality.
If you want to get the best out of it, you can install a few PostScript fonts in its "fonts" directory. For example if you have a Sun or SGI around, these come with high-quality PostScript fonts (DPS). Copy these fonts in your PStill "fonts" directory and you will get very good quality.
I assume most Adobe software comes with good PS fonts as well, so if you have even an old version of Adobe Illustrator for example you have a good library of fonts.
I've just had a talk with a SGI rep here (we have an Origin200) and he said SGI is preparing an open-source release of XFS (like they did with GLX).It might be a few months away though...
XFS is the journaling filesystem used by IRIX. IRIX with XFS has some unique features like "guaranteed rate I/O". I wonder if they'll port this to Linux.
If you don't know what XFS is good for, recovering an 18 Gb XFS filesystem after power failure takes a few seconds ! No more waiting for fsck... Less downtime...