So despite it being light out, you're incapable of waking up until an arbitrary device is displaying a particular set of numbers? Why cant you get up earlier and go to bed earlier?
So people are really so stuck in their ways that work has to start when the clock says 9? If you're going to change the clocks, change them drastically, make 9 occur in the middle of the night, see if people really are stubborn enough to go to work at such hours.
I also think timezones should be abolished, they only serve to confuse, especially with the global communication we have now. Time should be something that always remains constant, so things can be kept in sync. Having multiple timezones confuses that, using dst to manipulate those timezones even further just makes the problem even worse.
Why is it that the idea of things occurring at specific numbers on the clock is more important than what those numbers actually mean?
So get up at 5:30, start work an hour early, leave an hour early. By changing the definition of time you're defeating the point of having a clock. Why are people so set in their ways that things must happen at fixed numerical times? If you changed the clock so that 9am occured during darkness, would people still go to work at that time? It's utterly absurd.
What makes "changing the concept of time so that people can get up an hour earlier but still call of 6am" more reasonable than "getting up an hour earlier at 5am"? What's to stop you starting work at 8am instead of doing exactly the same thing and calling it 9am instead? You'd finish at 4pm instead of pretending it's 5pm, and still get your evening.
Time is supposed to be constant, how can it remain constant if it changes twice a year? If it's really sensible for people to start work an hour earlier, why can't they simply start at 8 instead of 9, rather than taking such a drastic measure as changing the definition of time?
Don't forget the space required to dispose of the rotting horse carcasses once they die... By this point they will be old and unsuitable for eating. A car just rusts away once abandoned, an abandoned horse will rot and smell (tho the smell could be masked by the stench of horse manure).
Well said, public transport is a mess in virtually every country i've used it in... Trains and buses frequently run late, and are often overcrowded at peak hours forcing people to stand for the entire journey... Some of the cramped conditions at peak hours are worse than the cramped animal transports people protested about a few years ago. During the summer they're far too hot, as are many stations... During the winter stations and bus stops are freezing cold, and you often have to wait quite some time between trains. Public transport doesn't go everywhere, there are plenty of places you simply cannot get to with public transport. Some places, even places close by, are extremely time consuming to get to because of the way bus/train routes are laid out, its often necessary to take a convoluted round trip to get to somewhere relatively close, often having to change train/bus several times and waiting considerable periods of time. Public transport shuts off at night, so it's quite possible to be stranded somewhere. This is made worse when the last train of the day is cancelled, even tho you were on time to take it, and you just get cast out onto the street outside the station. Public transport is also dangerous, if you are traveling off peak you often find yourself alone on a bus or train with people who might want to rob you or even just beat you up to make a low quality video of it on their cellphone.
Phisbut, you have been found guilty of attempting to commit suicide, we sentence you to death.
Seriously, why would someone care about suicide being illegal? They're gonna be dead afterwards, so there's really no effective punishment to threaten them with. It's only those who might want to assist someone else committing suicide who you can deter.
Yeah, making everyone immune will result in the end of HIV when the last existing sufferer dies, which won't take all that long considering they have HIV.
And if the medication fucks you up so bad that its "worse than death", what's to stop you killing yourself or having someone else do it? That way you're no worse off than if you let yourself die from the AIDS you had in the first place...
There was even a "MicroEmacs" made by Commodore to run on the Amiga.... It shipped with AmigaOS by default, I always preferred "ed" that also shipped with the OS tho, and came on the main bootable floppy instead of the "extras" disk (or whatever it was called).
Well yes, there will always be niche markets. Depending on the size of these markets and their customers, you may be better served by grouping together with other interested parties and pay for development. This has already happened in some areas, like banking, where a collection of banks got together and developed software between them.
The existence of open reusable code also helps in niche areas too, albeit not as much... It is still highly likely that even the most specialised programs have some functions in common with other programs. You can also modify any existing code to more suit your needs too. A lot of the niches you think about, actually require fairly mundane software but with a few specialised functions.
There are also a fair few niche OSS applications out there, all it takes is for a coder to have a niche requirement. In this aspect, OSS can actually work better, as you can get software for niche markets which are too small to commercialize, and the person writing the software intimately understands the problem.
Very few people contribute to "do a good thing"... They do it for their self interest, it just isn't a directly financial self interest. Most people who develop open source software do so because they intend to use it. They want an app that serves their needs better than whatever else is available. Now chances are others have similar needs or different skills, it makes sense to let them do some of the work to you're mutual benefit. It's no different from forming tribes and hunting in packs, in greater numbers more work can be achieved.
When it comes to providing support, the software being free can often result in greater revenues for those providing support....
Free software reduces the cost of entry, thus more people can use it and more potential customers for support.
If less money is spent on software, companies will have a greater surplus in their budget, which could be spent on additional support services (or more likely a mix of additional hardware and support).
If you have the source code and capable staff, you can provide a much higher level of support without having to defer to the original supplier, you can charge more for this service.
You can also provide custom solutions which make you're company stand out, proprietary software makes it much harder to do this since you're offering will look identical to all the other providers.
Finally if you are supporting a proprietary product, your business will depend on the vendor of that product. If they decide to drop the product, change it in ways that are detrimental to you, or provide a better level of support than you can (since you don't have the source) and force you out of the market.
All in all, proprietary software is detrimental to the business model of providing support services.
Actually, the software company merely harvests wealth from other companies and individuals, while causing a level of wastage itself. It's really just another mouth to feed in an already crowded orphanage. If companies/individuals didn't have to pay for software, then they would merely spend that money on something else instead.
Whereas many industries will always be needed, because there are high barriers to entry, and economies of scale that result in large organizations being far better placed...
The creation and distribution of software has very low barriers to entry (despite the best efforts of incumbent suppliers), especially when you consider the ability to reuse much existing code. It also has virtually no ongoing costs (distribution and duplication can be done pretty much for free).
This is very different from a market such as producing cars, where there is a significant barrier to entry (you need specialist machinery, and various safety certifications before you can even think about manufacturing cars) and a significant ongoing cost (the specialist machinery is power hungry and needs to be maintained, and each car you produce consumes a significant quantity of raw materials).
Under a capitalist system, any market which has a low barrier to entry will end up flooded with competitors and the prices driven down extremely low. Often such low value markets will simply be given away free by companies seeking to bolster their position in another market.
Things which have far higher costs than distributing software are already regularly given away for free by highly profitable companies, for instance online search services are given away by google, yahoo, ask, msn etc... Companies that use the free search service to push their advertising business.
So eventually the same thing will happen with software, it will be developed and given away for free by companies selling hardware and consultancy services.
You wouldn't pay to use a search engine today, and eventually the idea of paying for software will seem just as ridiculous.
I have a 42" screen which i sit about 5 feet away from, and i also have a projector which can make a much bigger display (never measured it)... I can sure notice the difference between regular TV, the interlacing is horrible and deinterlacing can cause artifacts... 480p looks a lot better, but it still looks a little blocky even from 5 feet away.... 720p looks nice, and i cant tell the difference between 720p and 1080p at that distance. I refuse to try 1080i as i hate interlacing.
Yeah, but saturating your pipe both ways like bittorrent does, will make the latency even worse... Also your upstream won't be as good, so not great on those ratio trackers. Easier to just download over night when your not trying to use the connection for other stuff, and let your fast server build you a good seeding ratio.
There's really no reason not to release specs for older cards, they've long been surpassed on the performance front, but these older chips are widely used in servers and embedded devices because they're cheap and still more than capable of doing the job.
I had major trouble getting a radeon hd2400 working with mythtv... If it worked at all, it was laughably slow (~5 secs to redraw the menu). Eventually i had to give up, and get an nvidia card.
Depending on the cost and throughput, i would consider getting satellite in addition to my DSL for bulk transfers... Use bittorrent to download to a fast server, and them download it over the satellite link from there.
And what will the first people do with v6? nothing, they will just complain loudly about it. Everyone should be given both V4/V6 right now, so that by the time V4 is critically short there are actually a significant proportion of sites worth visiting on V6. Some legislation to demand ISPs supply V6 alongside any deployment of V4 would be very welcome, and should really have been implemented a few years ago.
Very true, and this is what most of the people posting here fail to understand... If you bought an 8mb DSL and used it flat out 24 hours/day for a month, your ISP would be facing a bill of over £30,000 for you're usage. By contrast, 8mb of committed bandwidth in a colo center ranges from a £30/mb down to about £9/mb if you buy in bulk, so that 8mb in a datacenter will be £250/month tops (and remember your ISP has to buy IP transit in addition to the DSL feed).
They always have get out clauses, you would have seen them if you read the paper more thoroughly. Things like "up to xmbps of bandwidth" and "no service level guarantee".
Doesn't work on the wii? That's a pain, as that's where i would have used it... I thought the wii supported flash? I would rather use MythTV, or any other DVR really, and record the shows when they're being broadcast in the air at full quality for free without DRM. It may even be worth setting up a mythtv box in a datacenter with a stack of tuner cards and providing that service.
What they've actually sold you is a 0kbps dedicated circuit with 1.5mbps burst rate. To sell you a dedicated 1.5mbps, at least in the uk, would cost massively more. Such services are available, they're called leased/dedicated lines and they are priced significantly higher than any DSL connection. So what you're really advocating, is ISPs increasing the prices to offer the service you want, or offering a much slower service at the price you currently pay (think dialup speeds)... With the way things are currently in the uk (read the post above about BT backhaul rates) no ISP can afford to provide you with a dedicated line at the price you want.
Slashdot Mirror
So despite it being light out, you're incapable of waking up until an arbitrary device is displaying a particular set of numbers?
Why cant you get up earlier and go to bed earlier?
So people are really so stuck in their ways that work has to start when the clock says 9?
If you're going to change the clocks, change them drastically, make 9 occur in the middle of the night, see if people really are stubborn enough to go to work at such hours.
I also think timezones should be abolished, they only serve to confuse, especially with the global communication we have now. Time should be something that always remains constant, so things can be kept in sync. Having multiple timezones confuses that, using dst to manipulate those timezones even further just makes the problem even worse.
Why is it that the idea of things occurring at specific numbers on the clock is more important than what those numbers actually mean?
So get up at 5:30, start work an hour early, leave an hour early.
By changing the definition of time you're defeating the point of having a clock. Why are people so set in their ways that things must happen at fixed numerical times? If you changed the clock so that 9am occured during darkness, would people still go to work at that time? It's utterly absurd.
What makes "changing the concept of time so that people can get up an hour earlier but still call of 6am" more reasonable than "getting up an hour earlier at 5am"?
What's to stop you starting work at 8am instead of doing exactly the same thing and calling it 9am instead? You'd finish at 4pm instead of pretending it's 5pm, and still get your evening.
Time is supposed to be constant, how can it remain constant if it changes twice a year?
If it's really sensible for people to start work an hour earlier, why can't they simply start at 8 instead of 9, rather than taking such a drastic measure as changing the definition of time?
Don't forget the space required to dispose of the rotting horse carcasses once they die... By this point they will be old and unsuitable for eating. A car just rusts away once abandoned, an abandoned horse will rot and smell (tho the smell could be masked by the stench of horse manure).
Well said, public transport is a mess in virtually every country i've used it in...
Trains and buses frequently run late, and are often overcrowded at peak hours forcing people to stand for the entire journey... Some of the cramped conditions at peak hours are worse than the cramped animal transports people protested about a few years ago.
During the summer they're far too hot, as are many stations... During the winter stations and bus stops are freezing cold, and you often have to wait quite some time between trains.
Public transport doesn't go everywhere, there are plenty of places you simply cannot get to with public transport.
Some places, even places close by, are extremely time consuming to get to because of the way bus/train routes are laid out, its often necessary to take a convoluted round trip to get to somewhere relatively close, often having to change train/bus several times and waiting considerable periods of time.
Public transport shuts off at night, so it's quite possible to be stranded somewhere. This is made worse when the last train of the day is cancelled, even tho you were on time to take it, and you just get cast out onto the street outside the station.
Public transport is also dangerous, if you are traveling off peak you often find yourself alone on a bus or train with people who might want to rob you or even just beat you up to make a low quality video of it on their cellphone.
Phisbut, you have been found guilty of attempting to commit suicide, we sentence you to death.
Seriously, why would someone care about suicide being illegal? They're gonna be dead afterwards, so there's really no effective punishment to threaten them with. It's only those who might want to assist someone else committing suicide who you can deter.
Yeah, making everyone immune will result in the end of HIV when the last existing sufferer dies, which won't take all that long considering they have HIV.
And if the medication fucks you up so bad that its "worse than death", what's to stop you killing yourself or having someone else do it?
That way you're no worse off than if you let yourself die from the AIDS you had in the first place...
There was even a "MicroEmacs" made by Commodore to run on the Amiga.... It shipped with AmigaOS by default, I always preferred "ed" that also shipped with the OS tho, and came on the main bootable floppy instead of the "extras" disk (or whatever it was called).
Well yes, there will always be niche markets. Depending on the size of these markets and their customers, you may be better served by grouping together with other interested parties and pay for development. This has already happened in some areas, like banking, where a collection of banks got together and developed software between them.
The existence of open reusable code also helps in niche areas too, albeit not as much... It is still highly likely that even the most specialised programs have some functions in common with other programs. You can also modify any existing code to more suit your needs too. A lot of the niches you think about, actually require fairly mundane software but with a few specialised functions.
There are also a fair few niche OSS applications out there, all it takes is for a coder to have a niche requirement. In this aspect, OSS can actually work better, as you can get software for niche markets which are too small to commercialize, and the person writing the software intimately understands the problem.
Very few people contribute to "do a good thing"...
They do it for their self interest, it just isn't a directly financial self interest.
Most people who develop open source software do so because they intend to use it. They want an app that serves their needs better than whatever else is available. Now chances are others have similar needs or different skills, it makes sense to let them do some of the work to you're mutual benefit.
It's no different from forming tribes and hunting in packs, in greater numbers more work can be achieved.
When it comes to providing support, the software being free can often result in greater revenues for those providing support....
Free software reduces the cost of entry, thus more people can use it and more potential customers for support.
If less money is spent on software, companies will have a greater surplus in their budget, which could be spent on additional support services (or more likely a mix of additional hardware and support).
If you have the source code and capable staff, you can provide a much higher level of support without having to defer to the original supplier, you can charge more for this service.
You can also provide custom solutions which make you're company stand out, proprietary software makes it much harder to do this since you're offering will look identical to all the other providers.
Finally if you are supporting a proprietary product, your business will depend on the vendor of that product. If they decide to drop the product, change it in ways that are detrimental to you, or provide a better level of support than you can (since you don't have the source) and force you out of the market.
All in all, proprietary software is detrimental to the business model of providing support services.
Actually, the software company merely harvests wealth from other companies and individuals, while causing a level of wastage itself.
It's really just another mouth to feed in an already crowded orphanage.
If companies/individuals didn't have to pay for software, then they would merely spend that money on something else instead.
Whereas many industries will always be needed, because there are high barriers to entry, and economies of scale that result in large organizations being far better placed...
The creation and distribution of software has very low barriers to entry (despite the best efforts of incumbent suppliers), especially when you consider the ability to reuse much existing code. It also has virtually no ongoing costs (distribution and duplication can be done pretty much for free).
This is very different from a market such as producing cars, where there is a significant barrier to entry (you need specialist machinery, and various safety certifications before you can even think about manufacturing cars) and a significant ongoing cost (the specialist machinery is power hungry and needs to be maintained, and each car you produce consumes a significant quantity of raw materials).
Under a capitalist system, any market which has a low barrier to entry will end up flooded with competitors and the prices driven down extremely low. Often such low value markets will simply be given away free by companies seeking to bolster their position in another market.
Things which have far higher costs than distributing software are already regularly given away for free by highly profitable companies, for instance online search services are given away by google, yahoo, ask, msn etc... Companies that use the free search service to push their advertising business.
So eventually the same thing will happen with software, it will be developed and given away for free by companies selling hardware and consultancy services.
You wouldn't pay to use a search engine today, and eventually the idea of paying for software will seem just as ridiculous.
I have a 42" screen which i sit about 5 feet away from, and i also have a projector which can make a much bigger display (never measured it)...
I can sure notice the difference between regular TV, the interlacing is horrible and deinterlacing can cause artifacts... 480p looks a lot better, but it still looks a little blocky even from 5 feet away.... 720p looks nice, and i cant tell the difference between 720p and 1080p at that distance. I refuse to try 1080i as i hate interlacing.
Yeah, but saturating your pipe both ways like bittorrent does, will make the latency even worse...
Also your upstream won't be as good, so not great on those ratio trackers.
Easier to just download over night when your not trying to use the connection for other stuff, and let your fast server build you a good seeding ratio.
There's really no reason not to release specs for older cards, they've long been surpassed on the performance front, but these older chips are widely used in servers and embedded devices because they're cheap and still more than capable of doing the job.
I had major trouble getting a radeon hd2400 working with mythtv... If it worked at all, it was laughably slow (~5 secs to redraw the menu).
Eventually i had to give up, and get an nvidia card.
Depending on the cost and throughput, i would consider getting satellite in addition to my DSL for bulk transfers...
Use bittorrent to download to a fast server, and them download it over the satellite link from there.
And what will the first people do with v6? nothing, they will just complain loudly about it.
Everyone should be given both V4/V6 right now, so that by the time V4 is critically short there are actually a significant proportion of sites worth visiting on V6.
Some legislation to demand ISPs supply V6 alongside any deployment of V4 would be very welcome, and should really have been implemented a few years ago.
Very true, and this is what most of the people posting here fail to understand...
If you bought an 8mb DSL and used it flat out 24 hours/day for a month, your ISP would be facing a bill of over £30,000 for you're usage.
By contrast, 8mb of committed bandwidth in a colo center ranges from a £30/mb down to about £9/mb if you buy in bulk, so that 8mb in a datacenter will be £250/month tops (and remember your ISP has to buy IP transit in addition to the DSL feed).
They always have get out clauses, you would have seen them if you read the paper more thoroughly.
Things like "up to xmbps of bandwidth" and "no service level guarantee".
Doesn't work on the wii? That's a pain, as that's where i would have used it... I thought the wii supported flash?
I would rather use MythTV, or any other DVR really, and record the shows when they're being broadcast in the air at full quality for free without DRM.
It may even be worth setting up a mythtv box in a datacenter with a stack of tuner cards and providing that service.
What they've actually sold you is a 0kbps dedicated circuit with 1.5mbps burst rate.
To sell you a dedicated 1.5mbps, at least in the uk, would cost massively more. Such services are available, they're called leased/dedicated lines and they are priced significantly higher than any DSL connection.
So what you're really advocating, is ISPs increasing the prices to offer the service you want, or offering a much slower service at the price you currently pay (think dialup speeds)... With the way things are currently in the uk (read the post above about BT backhaul rates) no ISP can afford to provide you with a dedicated line at the price you want.