Well, I suppose I do not have to educate anyone here on the bad parts of the DMCA. But from the article I read: "They are accusing the stores frivolous copyright assertions and demanding payment under Section 512(f) of the DMCA".
Seems to me that a law designed to stop people from frivolous copyright assertions is a Good Thing (tm). They need to extend this law to cover frivolous patent assertions as well while they are at it. We've had enough stories here on/. about companies who brazenly proclaim IP to be their core business, and file copyright/patent infringement suits against smallish firms with cash but little legal clout or stamina, hoping for an out-of-court settlement.
One of our customers is already doing this: customer care, billing and metering software is all run on PCs and a few Unix boxes (Suns, I believe). The setup, using redundant clustering, is reliable enough for metering, which cannot be allowed to go off the air or lose transactions or there will be all sorts of financial and legal trouble. They still run some stuff on a mainframe but that will be phased out in a year or so. For storage, they went with a new IBM SAN because of its incredible reliability.
The nice thing about technology such as RAID and clustering for the lower-end hardware, is that now we can make our systems as reliable as we need them to be for our particular situation.
"As a technologist I'm very sceptical to economic calculations. I believe that they can be twisted in any direction."
All too true. I'd like to see the full study this article refers to. It is very easy to manipulate these numbers, and I am sceptical of a few things as well.
For instance they state that downtime represents 23.1% of TCO. When comparing two systems with an (alledged) large difference in reliability/downtime, one would expect the cost of downtime to loom larger for one OS than for the other. Also... Cost of downtime is very hard to estimate and varies a lot between businesses (suppose the corporate webserver goes down: how does this affect a phone company as opposed to, say, Amazon?). If Linux would have a favorable downtime average, one could simply downplay the cost of downtime to fix the numbers.
Likewise for staff cost. Staff cost is very hard to estimate as well, and even looking at existing companies won't help: they'll all have different needs and will staff accordingly. A company using Linux might need much more staff to run their servers than another company using Windows... at first glance. But perhaps the first company is in a business where downtime stop everything, and has plenty of expensive experts to quickly cope with any calamity. The second company might figure that a system availability of 85% is fine, since people can get on for a day or two without server access.
Most TCO figures by themselves are meaningless since many of the parameters are business-specific. You may find that in a particular business, Windows is a cheaper and better solution than Linux, and in other businesses it will be the other way around. Lastly... when a OS vendor starts waving such figures at you, I suggest the Dogbert approach: wave your paw back at them and say "bah".
I did this! Got my GPS and some software to make a perfect map of me sitting on my duff at the keyboard, with a few lines indicating the occasional bathroom break and trips to the supermarket.
Heh, they did something similar over here, when a new system for measuring speed over a stretch of road was introduced. The system would read the license plate at two points a few miles apart, and calculate the speed using the time difference.
During the test phase, a few guys got two identical Volkwagens and put the license plate of one on the back of the other. They then drove one past one checkpoint and immediately drove the other past the next, clocking a respectable speed of Mach 15 or so. The people looking at the stored photographs thought they were looking at the same car in both pictures and were as puzzled as the system. Probably didn't stop them for sending these guys a speeding ticket anyway *shudders*
Hmm plotlines... I hate how these series have a few subplots going at once, which are all clumsily forced to conclusion at the end of the episode. ("It all falls into place"). I much prefer the way this was handled in Hill Street Blues (or ER I guess), with subplots spanning several episodes. I think this could have worked well for Firefly.
That aside, the show was well made, and the different settings for each episode were interesing enough, however I really didn't care for the cowboy/trucker look&feel of the series, right down to the theme music. Sure, it is plausible that a society of settlers out of touch with mainstream civilisation, would have old tech mixed with modern stuff, but I would at least have expected for their old tech to look somewhat different, and not like West World. Why? Because these people might not have all the modern equipment, they most likely do have access to libraries with modern science, construction methods, etc. It is no coincidence that things like the internal combustion engine replaced the horse in our own history, and I'd expect that to happen there as well.
Still... a shame it is being cancelled. I prefer Farscape myself, but Firefly is still way better than most of the crap on TV today.
"So long as programming REQUIRES GREAT SKILL, it will take many hours and many inefficient projectes to train programmers properly. No matter how many books you've read, no matter how many pet projects you have on the side, it's rare to get any REAL programming experience until you're in the trenches, fighting requirements and deadlines."
Oh I agree. In software development, there seem s to be no fast track career path. However my point was that of those who have been in the trenches, rarely a distinction is made between the ones who come out of it as the best, and those who come out of it as mediocre workers. Quality of people is often measured solely in years of experience. This is a required element but it hardly tells the complete tale.
The real problem is that those three points software engineers lack are not even recognised. To elaborate:
Talent: It is increasingly hard to find talent. In this lousy market our company is laying off project managers, administrative staff and even technical staff, yet there is a widely recognised lack of top-notch software engineers. So why are we not finding them? One cause stands out: rarely is outstanding talent rewarded accordingly. Our best software engineers are payed more or less the same as the average ones. Hell, often we do not even know who our best people are: productivity and success rates are not measured, and the quality of software engineers and associated pay rates are set mostly by their seniority. The excellent software engineer who consistantly produces top quality work is rewarded in the end not by a wage increase, but by a promotion to management or consultant, effectively ending his career as software developer.
Education and familiarity with literature: I'm lazy today so I'll address these together. Those few software engineers that have been formally trained in the profession, as opposed to having drifted into the field of IT due to the high demand in jobs, I have found to be well-trained on the whole. Your point on not knowing any of these books is a very good one, and the point of your article seems to be we are not learning from our past mistakes. Very true. But who is there to teach those new to the job? What I notice in the places I work is a distinct lack of learning-on-the-job, and senior-junior pairing. The job that I have learned most on (and the most enjoyable ones as well) were working in a small team under a senior software engineer. However in most software development teams I notice that the junior members are being managed, but are not being educated. The lack of talent might be part of the cause of this problem, since many of the senior team members are often much too busy to sit down and spend some time with the inexperienced ones. On-the-job training (I prefer the term on-the-job education myself) is the way to improve the quality of your staff.
I truly hope that managers of companies such as the ones I work for will come to understand the way software development and developers work; rather than just trying to (blindy) manage them.
Good and Fast certainly can happen together. I have seen it. The trick is not more programmers but better ones. That's right: instead of hiring drongo's with an MCSD, carefully pick the best in the field.
How often have you seen job ads or RfR's stating "C++ programmers, 3 years experience"? It's bollocks. Any C++ programmer, no matter how bad he is at his job, will one day be a "C++ programmer with 3 years of experience". Yet, companies, project managers and HR people often fail to discriminate between the good and the bad programmers.... while there is no other field of endeavour where the difference in productivity between good and bad workers is greater. Metrics suggest a factor 10 to 100. Incidently: this is bad news for the good programmers amongst us. If no one discriminates between the good and the bad, you'll get the same pay as your lesser brethren.
Finding good programmers instead of hiring more to do a rush job, is the way to go, since the one programmer will not have the communication overhead that the "equivalent" team of ten average programmers has. We have done this a few times and found that Good and Fast go together well.
In his own words... "When you're sending out 250 million e-mails, even a blind squirrel will find a nut."
Damn straight... Send out 250 million e-mails, and chances are that you'll hit someone who will take it further than moaning about it on Slashdot.
No wonder this guy is hiding. He realises that with such incredibly large bulk mailings, your response, however small a fraction of the total, will not be zero. That includes responses of the violent kind.
"Unfotunately the US (and Europe) is preventing the poorest nations on earth from entering the Agricultural market (remember agricultural export is the first step to development) because they have MASSSIVE subsidies on farm products and clothing."
Sad but true... it is said that European farm and trade policies more than negate all International aid to third-world countries. (Can't find the link to the figures backing up this statement, sorry. It's late and I am out of coffee).
Didn't New Zealand change their ways a decade or so ago? They abolished all farm subsidies more or less overnight. Many farms suffered and a lot of them went out of business, but the remaining farms are among the most efficient ones in the world.
Hmm off topic? Sure... I'll mod myself down a point then.
I'm not in the least bit surprised, having read a few court transcripts of cases against recycling firms.
Make no mistake, waste disposal is about big bucks. For many materials such as chemical waste, waste oil, contaminated soil, and manufactured products such as computers, batteries and cars, the costs for recycling are enormous. Consumers, governments and environmentally-conscious firms know this, but are still often willing to pay the hefty disposal fees.
Enter the recycling company. They'll take your toxic waste in exchange for your dollars... and now they have a choice. They can actually dispose of the waste properly while making a small profit, or just dump it somewhere and make a ton of money. So, the oil ends up in the sea, the chemicals are dumped somewhere in Poland, the contaminated soil is diluted with good soil and used in horse riding arena's. The computers end up in China where the valuable items are salvaged by less-than-clean methods.
With the great anounts of money to be made in recycling by sweeping waste under the rug, it is no surprise criminal organisations have taken an interest, and are at least partly involved in a number of recycling firms. In Holland, reputed to be an environmentally conscious country, none of the larger recycling firms has clean hands, and have used any and all of the above methods to cheaply get rid of waste. It's not just the computers, people.
So they aren't allowed to have a hobby now? Who are you to tell or even suggest how and where they spend their money?
If you'd have taken the trouble to take a look at the site and the video's, you'd have seen that the object they tried to achieve wasn't blowing up camcorders, it was to send one up in a rocket and bring it down in one piece. Which they did.
As for the "gain" they got out of it... as anyone with a similar hobby knows, it is not about cheap thrills, but about the thrill of personal achievement. And as anyone who has experienced that kind of thrill will attest: it is something worth spending money on.
"Once the cables are there, the bandwith is essentially free (except for power, but you can't check e-mail either, if you turn off the routers and switches)."
Bandwidth is free-ish once the cables are in place... as long as you have enough bandwidth for all your customers! Bandwidth may be "free" but not limitless, and it is a shared resource. For example: one fiber will support traffic for 1000 housewifes or 10 warez d00ds. Put another couple of warez d00ds on that fiber and the throughput for everyone declines. On cable, the problem is worse and the quality of service declines rapidly with each extra user over the limit. (The numbers are made up for the sake of argument). If Warez d00d nr. 11 signs up, the ISP would have to lay another fiber. In terms of fiber costs, providing service to the housewife is 100 times cheaper (in this example).
Most ISPs started out with plenty of overcapacity in their backbone nets, but as subscribers and usage has grown, some ISPs are nearing the limit of their equipment. Some choose to up the rates and add equipment to cope with the increased usage, others chose to cap data volumes or bandwidth to lessen the load on their backbone and keep an acceptable service level. Unfortunately a few chose to do nothing, and their level of service degrades to unacceptable levels (that is why I dropped my cable ISP in favour of ADSL; 1,5Mb/s dropped to 100Kb/s during peak hours, with los of packet loss)
"Also metered bandwidth by time of day, just like my phone, would make a bit of sense."
Just so! I am very much in favor of metered access done right. Based on how various people use the Internet, ISP's are looking at:
- Per-megabyte charging, possible variable based on usage and selected pricing plan
- A (variable) allowance of free megabytes, per month.
- Possibly a carry-over of unused free megabytes
- Peak and off-peak pricing
- Different options for exceeding the monthly free allowance: a hard cap (cutoff), a per-megabyte charge, or bandwidth throttling
- Etc. etc.
Unsurprisingly this looks a lot like the charging models that phone companies use. Why haven't ISP's implemented this yet? I'll tell you: because such complex billing systems aren't easy or cheap to set up and implement. Also, no ISP currently has the infrastructure and procedure to handle the complexity of the whole billing process: metering (collecting usage data), guiding (matching metering data to a particular subscriber in the billing system), rating (applying the correct price plan to usage data), invoicing (bill printing), and payments (direct debit, and applying incoming payments to a subscriber's balance). Most ISPs are comfortable with sending and collecting bills for maybe 2 or 3 different billing plans, all at a fixed price. But billing and collecting a variable amount is vastly more difficult, and not just for the billing process but for other business processes also. For instance: how many phonecalls do you thing phone companies get from people who do not understand their bill, or do not agree with it?
There's a very good reason for the fact that over here, ISPs rarely punish you for going over your cap every now and then: their systems and administrative processes cannot cope with handling a cap or a surcharge.
But.... in the end, someone has to pay for the bandwidth. No data cap means that the cost of the bandwidth is spread out over all subscribers, no matter how much they use.
"The last thing we want is people defecting back to 56K"
I know many people who use the Internet occasionally, and who would love the convenience of fast, always-on Internet, but cannot justify the hefty monthy charge for broadband. These people have no option but to use 56K until we see metered broadband access with a low subscription charge. Not a good thing, especially since many of the casual users who do take the plunge and fork out for a high bandwidth link, start using the Internet more and try new things with it.
Your calculation is accurate and the conclusion is very cute, but this has no relevance whatsoever to
the subject at hand. Comcast subscribers download stuff at the same speed as ever, until they hit the cap.
If, as your calculation suggests, you are one of those people downloading things 24x7, then Comcast and all the others will be pleased as punch to see you cancel your subscription. Tell me this: which of the following persons incurs the highest operating cost to an ISP: the W4r3z d00d who is leeching a few gigabytes a day and hosting his warez on a server to others, or the housewife who likes the convenience of fast surfing and not having to dial up, but only surfs 1 hour a day and writes a few e-mails every now & then? Then tell me: is it right that both these persons should pay the same monthly fee?
I say bring on metered internet access! Charge a low monthly fee that is attractive even for casual users, then charge by the megabyte. I think the only way ISPs will survive in the end is by such price differentiation, by passing on the (non-zero) cost of bandwith usage to the subscribers.
Spectrum scarcity is not the problem I'd say. Cells can be placed quite densely to support many concurrent users, or they can be placed at large intervals to provide good coverage over a large, sparsely populated area. You'd need a lot of phone users to overload a network that uses the most densely possible cell placement.
This is more a case of the phone companies "overselling" their networks, by taking in more and more customers but not upgrading their network and placing additional cells to accommodate the increased load. ISPs are also notorious for this.
Of course many telco's find themselves strapped for the necessary cash to place additional cells in overloaded areas. One of the reasons is the enormous amounts of money they paid at the spectrum auctions... which is interesting: the telcos over here own rights to spectrum bands which go largely unused for lack of money to place transmitters to use that spectrum.
"The second reason is suicide bombing. The Israelis may commit military actions which are of dubious morality (at best), but they've never sent in suicide bombers, or taken actions with no strategic value whatsoever."
Isreal doesn't use suicide bombers. Why send suicide bombers when you can send armed helicopters? On the other hand, if you lack the helicopters and pretty much any other means of modern warfare, suicide bombers are cheap and reliable means of getting at your targets. There is nothing inherantly evil about suicide bombers.
It's probably the bad choice of targets of these suicide bombers, that you want to point out as one of the reasons for supporting Israel. Well, both sides are guilty there: when Israel sends its helicopters against a town that supposedly harbors terrorists, and fires missiles into their homes, innocent civilians die. These aren't precision military bombings as some would suggest. The town is chosen for harboring terrorists but the people wounded and killed in these raids are not picked off carefully. In my opinion that is just as bad as a suicide bombing.
". Between terrorist actions like the slaughter of the Israeli Olympic team and wars of agression from the First Arab-Israeli War onward, it's easy to be sympathetic to Israel."
I'd rather say that it makes it easy to dislike the Arab states and the Palestines; it hasn't changed my dislike for certain Israeli practices. Israel (their current government and a large part of their people) has the same problem that the Palestine terrorists have: they are fanatics; i.e. they are bent on achieving their goals by whatever means necessary.
Paying a surcharge for a "surcharge waiver"
on
Add-Ons Add Up
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· Score: 3, Interesting
When I booked a trip to Florida last summer, my travel agent offered a special deal on a car rental (with Dollar). I could rent the car for a high daily rate, but there would be no extra surcharges, and that was guaranteed! I took one look at the list of possible surcharges and decided to go with the all-inclusive deal. Did I get a good price? I don't have a clue, probably not... but I paid no additional surprise fees to Dollar, the airport, or any additional taxes.
The article is dead-on: people are willing to pay for convenience.
As I see it, the problem with VB is not the high abstraction levels per se, but the fact that they are such lousy abstractions. Especially when it comes to controls. For example, look at the standard VB TreeView object. It becomes painfully clear that the VB derivation of this control was written with one narrowly defined purpose in mind, ignoring the fact that people might find many other uses for this control.
When using an OO language like C++, programmers move objects to a higher abstraction level all the time. That is why every good OO course teaches you to make your object's methods orthogonal and complete. In laymen's terms that means that the object operators should be sensible and generic. If you make an object which holds data that you wish to multiply by 5 and then add 2 to it, you don't make an operator that does just that. Instead, you make one operator that multiplies by x, and another that adds y.
Many VB objects ignore this rule, making operators for a specific purpose, that should have been generic instead, and not bothering to implement other possibly useful operators from a lower abstraction level.
When programming VB, I spend about 30% of my time programming around senseless limitations of and omissions from VB objects and controls.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I suppose I do not have to educate anyone here on the bad parts of the DMCA. But from the article I read: "They are accusing the stores frivolous copyright assertions and demanding payment under Section 512(f) of the DMCA".
/. about companies who brazenly proclaim IP to be their core business, and file copyright/patent infringement suits against smallish firms with cash but little legal clout or stamina, hoping for an out-of-court settlement.
Seems to me that a law designed to stop people from frivolous copyright assertions is a Good Thing (tm). They need to extend this law to cover frivolous patent assertions as well while they are at it. We've had enough stories here on
One of our customers is already doing this: customer care, billing and metering software is all run on PCs and a few Unix boxes (Suns, I believe). The setup, using redundant clustering, is reliable enough for metering, which cannot be allowed to go off the air or lose transactions or there will be all sorts of financial and legal trouble. They still run some stuff on a mainframe but that will be phased out in a year or so. For storage, they went with a new IBM SAN because of its incredible reliability.
The nice thing about technology such as RAID and clustering for the lower-end hardware, is that now we can make our systems as reliable as we need them to be for our particular situation.
"As a technologist I'm very sceptical to economic calculations. I believe that they can be twisted in any direction."
All too true. I'd like to see the full study this article refers to. It is very easy to manipulate these numbers, and I am sceptical of a few things as well.
For instance they state that downtime represents 23.1% of TCO. When comparing two systems with an (alledged) large difference in reliability/downtime, one would expect the cost of downtime to loom larger for one OS than for the other. Also... Cost of downtime is very hard to estimate and varies a lot between businesses (suppose the corporate webserver goes down: how does this affect a phone company as opposed to, say, Amazon?). If Linux would have a favorable downtime average, one could simply downplay the cost of downtime to fix the numbers.
Likewise for staff cost. Staff cost is very hard to estimate as well, and even looking at existing companies won't help: they'll all have different needs and will staff accordingly. A company using Linux might need much more staff to run their servers than another company using Windows... at first glance. But perhaps the first company is in a business where downtime stop everything, and has plenty of expensive experts to quickly cope with any calamity. The second company might figure that a system availability of 85% is fine, since people can get on for a day or two without server access.
Most TCO figures by themselves are meaningless since many of the parameters are business-specific. You may find that in a particular business, Windows is a cheaper and better solution than Linux, and in other businesses it will be the other way around. Lastly... when a OS vendor starts waving such figures at you, I suggest the Dogbert approach: wave your paw back at them and say "bah".
I did this! Got my GPS and some software to make a perfect map of me sitting on my duff at the keyboard, with a few lines indicating the occasional bathroom break and trips to the supermarket.
Heh, they did something similar over here, when a new system for measuring speed over a stretch of road was introduced. The system would read the license plate at two points a few miles apart, and calculate the speed using the time difference.
During the test phase, a few guys got two identical Volkwagens and put the license plate of one on the back of the other. They then drove one past one checkpoint and immediately drove the other past the next, clocking a respectable speed of Mach 15 or so. The people looking at the stored photographs thought they were looking at the same car in both pictures and were as puzzled as the system. Probably didn't stop them for sending these guys a speeding ticket anyway *shudders*
Hmm plotlines... I hate how these series have a few subplots going at once, which are all clumsily forced to conclusion at the end of the episode. ("It all falls into place"). I much prefer the way this was handled in Hill Street Blues (or ER I guess), with subplots spanning several episodes. I think this could have worked well for Firefly.
That aside, the show was well made, and the different settings for each episode were interesing enough, however I really didn't care for the cowboy/trucker look&feel of the series, right down to the theme music. Sure, it is plausible that a society of settlers out of touch with mainstream civilisation, would have old tech mixed with modern stuff, but I would at least have expected for their old tech to look somewhat different, and not like West World. Why? Because these people might not have all the modern equipment, they most likely do have access to libraries with modern science, construction methods, etc. It is no coincidence that things like the internal combustion engine replaced the horse in our own history, and I'd expect that to happen there as well.
Still... a shame it is being cancelled. I prefer Farscape myself, but Firefly is still way better than most of the crap on TV today.
" But instead of Pluto, I will give him a four-assed monkey for a pet, as an homage to South Park."
*sighs*
When will humankind ever learn and stick to its simple, one-ass schematics?
"They'd of course be superior and have 3 asses."
Three? Between the 1000 of them?
"So long as programming REQUIRES GREAT SKILL, it will take many hours and many inefficient projectes to train programmers properly. No matter how many books you've read, no matter how many pet projects you have on the side, it's rare to get any REAL programming experience until you're in the trenches, fighting requirements and deadlines."
Oh I agree. In software development, there seem s to be no fast track career path. However my point was that of those who have been in the trenches, rarely a distinction is made between the ones who come out of it as the best, and those who come out of it as mediocre workers. Quality of people is often measured solely in years of experience. This is a required element but it hardly tells the complete tale.
The real problem is that those three points software engineers lack are not even recognised. To elaborate:
Talent: It is increasingly hard to find talent. In this lousy market our company is laying off project managers, administrative staff and even technical staff, yet there is a widely recognised lack of top-notch software engineers. So why are we not finding them? One cause stands out: rarely is outstanding talent rewarded accordingly. Our best software engineers are payed more or less the same as the average ones. Hell, often we do not even know who our best people are: productivity and success rates are not measured, and the quality of software engineers and associated pay rates are set mostly by their seniority. The excellent software engineer who consistantly produces top quality work is rewarded in the end not by a wage increase, but by a promotion to management or consultant, effectively ending his career as software developer.
Education and familiarity with literature: I'm lazy today so I'll address these together. Those few software engineers that have been formally trained in the profession, as opposed to having drifted into the field of IT due to the high demand in jobs, I have found to be well-trained on the whole. Your point on not knowing any of these books is a very good one, and the point of your article seems to be we are not learning from our past mistakes. Very true. But who is there to teach those new to the job? What I notice in the places I work is a distinct lack of learning-on-the-job, and senior-junior pairing. The job that I have learned most on (and the most enjoyable ones as well) were working in a small team under a senior software engineer. However in most software development teams I notice that the junior members are being managed, but are not being educated. The lack of talent might be part of the cause of this problem, since many of the senior team members are often much too busy to sit down and spend some time with the inexperienced ones. On-the-job training (I prefer the term on-the-job education myself) is the way to improve the quality of your staff.
I truly hope that managers of companies such as the ones I work for will come to understand the way software development and developers work; rather than just trying to (blindy) manage them.
Good and Fast certainly can happen together. I have seen it. The trick is not more programmers but better ones. That's right: instead of hiring drongo's with an MCSD, carefully pick the best in the field.
How often have you seen job ads or RfR's stating "C++ programmers, 3 years experience"? It's bollocks. Any C++ programmer, no matter how bad he is at his job, will one day be a "C++ programmer with 3 years of experience". Yet, companies, project managers and HR people often fail to discriminate between the good and the bad programmers.... while there is no other field of endeavour where the difference in productivity between good and bad workers is greater. Metrics suggest a factor 10 to 100. Incidently: this is bad news for the good programmers amongst us. If no one discriminates between the good and the bad, you'll get the same pay as your lesser brethren.
Finding good programmers instead of hiring more to do a rush job, is the way to go, since the one programmer will not have the communication overhead that the "equivalent" team of ten average programmers has. We have done this a few times and found that Good and Fast go together well.
In his own words... "When you're sending out 250 million e-mails, even a blind squirrel will find a nut."
Damn straight... Send out 250 million e-mails, and chances are that you'll hit someone who will take it further than moaning about it on Slashdot.
No wonder this guy is hiding. He realises that with such incredibly large bulk mailings, your response, however small a fraction of the total, will not be zero. That includes responses of the violent kind.
"Unfotunately the US (and Europe) is preventing the poorest nations on earth from entering the Agricultural market (remember agricultural export is the first step to development) because they have MASSSIVE subsidies on farm products and clothing."
Sad but true... it is said that European farm and trade policies more than negate all International aid to third-world countries. (Can't find the link to the figures backing up this statement, sorry. It's late and I am out of coffee).
Didn't New Zealand change their ways a decade or so ago? They abolished all farm subsidies more or less overnight. Many farms suffered and a lot of them went out of business, but the remaining farms are among the most efficient ones in the world.
Hmm off topic? Sure... I'll mod myself down a point then.
I'm not in the least bit surprised, having read a few court transcripts of cases against recycling firms.
Make no mistake, waste disposal is about big bucks. For many materials such as chemical waste, waste oil, contaminated soil, and manufactured products such as computers, batteries and cars, the costs for recycling are enormous. Consumers, governments and environmentally-conscious firms know this, but are still often willing to pay the hefty disposal fees.
Enter the recycling company. They'll take your toxic waste in exchange for your dollars... and now they have a choice. They can actually dispose of the waste properly while making a small profit, or just dump it somewhere and make a ton of money. So, the oil ends up in the sea, the chemicals are dumped somewhere in Poland, the contaminated soil is diluted with good soil and used in horse riding arena's. The computers end up in China where the valuable items are salvaged by less-than-clean methods.
With the great anounts of money to be made in recycling by sweeping waste under the rug, it is no surprise criminal organisations have taken an interest, and are at least partly involved in a number of recycling firms. In Holland, reputed to be an environmentally conscious country, none of the larger recycling firms has clean hands, and have used any and all of the above methods to cheaply get rid of waste. It's not just the computers, people.
I am more curious to find out what the evolutionary equivalent of "First post" is.
No...
I am also quite happy in the knowledge that my descendants will not be able to browse through my life after I am dead.
So they aren't allowed to have a hobby now? Who are you to tell or even suggest how and where they spend their money?
If you'd have taken the trouble to take a look at the site and the video's, you'd have seen that the object they tried to achieve wasn't blowing up camcorders, it was to send one up in a rocket and bring it down in one piece. Which they did.
As for the "gain" they got out of it... as anyone with a similar hobby knows, it is not about cheap thrills, but about the thrill of personal achievement. And as anyone who has experienced that kind of thrill will attest: it is something worth spending money on.
"Once the cables are there, the bandwith is essentially free (except for power, but you can't check e-mail either, if you turn off the routers and switches)."
Bandwidth is free-ish once the cables are in place... as long as you have enough bandwidth for all your customers! Bandwidth may be "free" but not limitless, and it is a shared resource. For example: one fiber will support traffic for 1000 housewifes or 10 warez d00ds. Put another couple of warez d00ds on that fiber and the throughput for everyone declines. On cable, the problem is worse and the quality of service declines rapidly with each extra user over the limit. (The numbers are made up for the sake of argument). If Warez d00d nr. 11 signs up, the ISP would have to lay another fiber. In terms of fiber costs, providing service to the housewife is 100 times cheaper (in this example).
Most ISPs started out with plenty of overcapacity in their backbone nets, but as subscribers and usage has grown, some ISPs are nearing the limit of their equipment. Some choose to up the rates and add equipment to cope with the increased usage, others chose to cap data volumes or bandwidth to lessen the load on their backbone and keep an acceptable service level. Unfortunately a few chose to do nothing, and their level of service degrades to unacceptable levels (that is why I dropped my cable ISP in favour of ADSL; 1,5Mb/s dropped to 100Kb/s during peak hours, with los of packet loss)
"Also metered bandwidth by time of day, just like my phone, would make a bit of sense."
Just so! I am very much in favor of metered access done right. Based on how various people use the Internet, ISP's are looking at:
- Per-megabyte charging, possible variable based on usage and selected pricing plan
- A (variable) allowance of free megabytes, per month.
- Possibly a carry-over of unused free megabytes
- Peak and off-peak pricing
- Different options for exceeding the monthly free allowance: a hard cap (cutoff), a per-megabyte charge, or bandwidth throttling
- Etc. etc.
Unsurprisingly this looks a lot like the charging models that phone companies use. Why haven't ISP's implemented this yet? I'll tell you: because such complex billing systems aren't easy or cheap to set up and implement. Also, no ISP currently has the infrastructure and procedure to handle the complexity of the whole billing process: metering (collecting usage data), guiding (matching metering data to a particular subscriber in the billing system), rating (applying the correct price plan to usage data), invoicing (bill printing), and payments (direct debit, and applying incoming payments to a subscriber's balance). Most ISPs are comfortable with sending and collecting bills for maybe 2 or 3 different billing plans, all at a fixed price. But billing and collecting a variable amount is vastly more difficult, and not just for the billing process but for other business processes also. For instance: how many phonecalls do you thing phone companies get from people who do not understand their bill, or do not agree with it?
There's a very good reason for the fact that over here, ISPs rarely punish you for going over your cap every now and then: their systems and administrative processes cannot cope with handling a cap or a surcharge.
But.... in the end, someone has to pay for the bandwidth. No data cap means that the cost of the bandwidth is spread out over all subscribers, no matter how much they use.
"The last thing we want is people defecting back to 56K"
I know many people who use the Internet occasionally, and who would love the convenience of fast, always-on Internet, but cannot justify the hefty monthy charge for broadband. These people have no option but to use 56K until we see metered broadband access with a low subscription charge. Not a good thing, especially since many of the casual users who do take the plunge and fork out for a high bandwidth link, start using the Internet more and try new things with it.
Your calculation is accurate and the conclusion is very cute, but this has no relevance whatsoever to the subject at hand. Comcast subscribers download stuff at the same speed as ever, until they hit the cap.
If, as your calculation suggests, you are one of those people downloading things 24x7, then Comcast and all the others will be pleased as punch to see you cancel your subscription. Tell me this: which of the following persons incurs the highest operating cost to an ISP: the W4r3z d00d who is leeching a few gigabytes a day and hosting his warez on a server to others, or the housewife who likes the convenience of fast surfing and not having to dial up, but only surfs 1 hour a day and writes a few e-mails every now & then? Then tell me: is it right that both these persons should pay the same monthly fee?
I say bring on metered internet access! Charge a low monthly fee that is attractive even for casual users, then charge by the megabyte. I think the only way ISPs will survive in the end is by such price differentiation, by passing on the (non-zero) cost of bandwith usage to the subscribers.
(+5 informative? What gives?)
Spectrum scarcity is not the problem I'd say. Cells can be placed quite densely to support many concurrent users, or they can be placed at large intervals to provide good coverage over a large, sparsely populated area. You'd need a lot of phone users to overload a network that uses the most densely possible cell placement.
This is more a case of the phone companies "overselling" their networks, by taking in more and more customers but not upgrading their network and placing additional cells to accommodate the increased load. ISPs are also notorious for this.
Of course many telco's find themselves strapped for the necessary cash to place additional cells in overloaded areas. One of the reasons is the enormous amounts of money they paid at the spectrum auctions... which is interesting: the telcos over here own rights to spectrum bands which go largely unused for lack of money to place transmitters to use that spectrum.
"The second reason is suicide bombing. The Israelis may commit military actions which are of dubious morality (at best), but they've never sent in suicide bombers, or taken actions with no strategic value whatsoever."
Isreal doesn't use suicide bombers. Why send suicide bombers when you can send armed helicopters? On the other hand, if you lack the helicopters and pretty much any other means of modern warfare, suicide bombers are cheap and reliable means of getting at your targets. There is nothing inherantly evil about suicide bombers.
It's probably the bad choice of targets of these suicide bombers, that you want to point out as one of the reasons for supporting Israel. Well, both sides are guilty there: when Israel sends its helicopters against a town that supposedly harbors terrorists, and fires missiles into their homes, innocent civilians die. These aren't precision military bombings as some would suggest. The town is chosen for harboring terrorists but the people wounded and killed in these raids are not picked off carefully. In my opinion that is just as bad as a suicide bombing.
". Between terrorist actions like the slaughter of the Israeli Olympic team and wars of agression from the First Arab-Israeli War onward, it's easy to be sympathetic to Israel."
I'd rather say that it makes it easy to dislike the Arab states and the Palestines; it hasn't changed my dislike for certain Israeli practices. Israel (their current government and a large part of their people) has the same problem that the Palestine terrorists have: they are fanatics; i.e. they are bent on achieving their goals by whatever means necessary.
When I booked a trip to Florida last summer, my travel agent offered a special deal on a car rental (with Dollar). I could rent the car for a high daily rate, but there would be no extra surcharges, and that was guaranteed! I took one look at the list of possible surcharges and decided to go with the all-inclusive deal. Did I get a good price? I don't have a clue, probably not... but I paid no additional surprise fees to Dollar, the airport, or any additional taxes.
The article is dead-on: people are willing to pay for convenience.
As I see it, the problem with VB is not the high abstraction levels per se, but the fact that they are such lousy abstractions. Especially when it comes to controls. For example, look at the standard VB TreeView object. It becomes painfully clear that the VB derivation of this control was written with one narrowly defined purpose in mind, ignoring the fact that people might find many other uses for this control.
When using an OO language like C++, programmers move objects to a higher abstraction level all the time. That is why every good OO course teaches you to make your object's methods orthogonal and complete. In laymen's terms that means that the object operators should be sensible and generic. If you make an object which holds data that you wish to multiply by 5 and then add 2 to it, you don't make an operator that does just that. Instead, you make one operator that multiplies by x, and another that adds y.
Many VB objects ignore this rule, making operators for a specific purpose, that should have been generic instead, and not bothering to implement other possibly useful operators from a lower abstraction level.
When programming VB, I spend about 30% of my time programming around senseless limitations of and omissions from VB objects and controls.