The problem is not that %5 of the users are using up half the bandwidth, it's that those %5 of users usually leave their torrents running 24/7. This means that in times of heavy usage those same %5 of users never let up, and it makes heavy periods that much slower/more expensive for everyone.
The problem is, people expect the internet to work like air (always there, never-ending), when in fact it works more like traffic. We need to change this lack of understanding through creative ways.
I think the solution is not to charge penalties for overuse, but to offer incentives for off-peak usage. For instance, I would suggest that a user get a $5 credit on their account if their TOTAL bandwidth usage off-peak versus peak is greater than 4:1, or something like that. You could also add to the category people who use less than a few GB in a month, to encourage light users to sign-up.
So long as you make the peak time slots long enough, and make the threshold high enough, people will have to switch their torrents to specific times to actually quality for the credit. You could provide tools that remind users of the peak periods, and offer to automatically download data at non-peak times.
Don't raise prices, don't punish consumers; entice them with credits, and let them make their own decision.
*** I will now return to the real world, where none of the above will actually work. Meh. ***
I also like How Jobs sells the bullshit, with comments like these:
Jobs noted that Intel was willing to engineer a new version of the Core 2 Duo specifically to Apple's specifications -- it's 60 percent smaller than others
Yup, you heard it first: Intel spent millions of dollars for a die shrink and dedicated an entire cutting-edge 45nm fab line just so Stevie could have a low-power, tiny dual-core.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The 45nm Core2 is for the ENTIRE notebook market, of which Apple is only a small part. But with Steve Spin (TM), it suddenly becomes an Apple-only whiz-bang product. Honestly, it's about time Apple came out with an ultra-portable; 5+ pounds overpriced monsters don't cut it anymore.
Okay, let me gve you some depth about why HyperThreading (SMT) exists. Processors are designed to quickly process data from a much slower source. They do this through creative caching, prefetching, branch prediction, and now out-of-order memory accesses. If the processor thread currently executing needs data that isn't in the cache, it cannot continue processing, so it blocks. In this case a context switch takes place, switching to ampther thread, and it takes an eternity in terms of processor cycles.
Hyperthreading is there to speed-up context switches when a thread blocks. It was added because the cost of HyperThreading is much cheaper versus the cost of a second core. For a single processor with HyperThreading, the processor can switch between two tasks A and B from clock-to-clock, much faster than a regular context switch. This is accomplished because the processor with HyperThreading looks like two independent processors to the OS, so it simply schedules task A to one processor, and task B to another. If task A blocks, task B can start processing on the next clock cycle, and continue processing until Task A has data.
The point is, if you have multiple cores, you don't need HyperThreading if you have enough processor cores to service all your high-priority or I/O-bound tasks. In the case above, if I had two full cores, and scheduled task A to one core and task B to another, I would see improved processing overall, but the processor handling task A would be idle whenever that task blocked. So no, it is not the most efficient solution, but it does deliver better performance than a single processor with HyperThreading. When you have processes small enough to pack 4, 8, 16, ect. cores on one chip, and people are already having trouble just fully-utilizing two, adding HyperThreading doesn't make much sense.
In fact, HyperThreading still lives on in Sun's Niagra processor, which contains four threads per core. If one thread blocks, then another thread takes over. For tasks that require LOTS of I/O, this is a fantastic solution, because otherwise the processor wastes time performing far too many context switches. But, this processor is only beneficial if you have TONS AND TONS of I/O-bound tasks. Pure high processing-load tasks would perform poorly on this kind of architecture, and this is the reason why multithreading has been mostly relegated to the server world, and game console chips (consoles live and breathe I/O).
I couldn't have said it beter myself. Competition is the reason x86 has destroyed all other mainstream chips, and continued competition is the reason you will never pay lock-in prices for "extra" processing power.
The only case where these economic concepts might come about is if AMD pulled out of the x86 market. While it is unlikely, you have to admit that with the incredible cost of fabs these days, and AMD's cash bonfire, it is a real possibility. If AMD suddenly crumbled, would these be ANY maker with the capacity to compete, and the cojones to step-up?
I am in this century. I guess I need to fully explain everything, or somehow I have zero credibility.
Leakage power is directly proportional to VSB (the voltage applied between the source and drain of the MOSFET), which decreases when you reduce the applied voltage VDD. And, contrary to popular belief, the leakage power has been constrained successfully, thanks to improvements like strained silicon.
As you can imagine, low-voltage operation (like, say, Cell at approximately 1.1v) means very low leakage. When we reduce the operating voltage to below 1.0v (see my post above), that low leakage practically disappears.
IIRC, the Cell uses way too much power for sensible laptop use.
Apparently, you do not know how CMOS devices work. The power consumption of the chip is directly proportional to the capacitive load and the frequency, and is proportional to the square of the voltage.
Concering only the SPE power consumption, which is the majority of power used by a Cell chip:
If x represents the power consumption of a 7-SPE chip running at 3.2 GHz...
If you cut the number of SPEs from 7 to 4, your capacitive load is cut to %57 of the original, or 0.57 * x.
If you again cut the frequency from 3.2 GHz to 1.5 GHz, you get a power consumption reduction of 1.5 / 3.2. Your total power consumption after capacitive load and frequency changes is 0.26 * x.
The PPE portion of the chi[p will see power consumption reduced by half because of frequency.
FINALLY: a reduced operating frequency means you can reduce the voltage, and this is where you can see some impressive gains. Just to get an idea of the differences in voltages,
here is a link to a voltage vs speed graph for each SPE, from Sony engineers. You could potentially operate the Cell at 1.5 GHz at a very low threshold voltage, giving you a %20-30 reduced power consumption.
So, after all that, you have a chip that runs on less than %20 of the power of its big brother (estimated 60-80w), so this chip is around 10-15w, which is quite practical for four 128-bit vector processors plus a PPE.
Not that there's anything the Cell could really do effectively for a PC. For parallel processing, we already have dual 128-bit SSE units on the Core2 Duo processors, which comes within fighting range of four SPEs clocked at a paltry 1.5 GHz. And of course, most of there pipe-dream uses will get held-back by slow I/O on a home computer or laptop (like ALL the examples uses for this chip listed in the article), so there's really no need for all that processing power.
Why dont people just use other frequencies or if required pay the fee to use the other frequencies.
Because it's not as simple as "paying" for access.
You have frequencies locked down for typically 3 specific reasons:
1. Military/Fire/Police This is often overlooked, but they hold a huge chunk of spectrum. 2. Broadcast. 3. Communications.
Now think about it, of those three, the only class of spectrum use where you might be able to "pay to play" is the communications branch. And in fact, you do pay to play (cell phones, for example). The frequencies have to be laid-out in a structured manner, and access has to be controlled, because anything else would be utter chaos. The result is, yes, you could pay to use those spectrums for your own thing, but you really couldn't afford it. Thus, the big communications companies front billions for exclusive spectrum rights, then lease the spectrum use out to you for affordable rates.
To understand how messy chaos can be, you need look no further than 2.4 GHz. This band contains Wifi, microwave ovens, cordless phones; virtually anything needing to send/receive data over a short distance. And it works, unless all your neighbors are already using up the spectrum...then it doesn't work. The reason we don't have more "universal" bands like this is because, worldwide, frequency allocations differ from region to region, and most "useful" frequency bands have been allocated SOMEWHERE. 2.4 GHz was largely left alone when frequencies were in hot demand because of the poor propagation characteristics, and the originally high cost of making a receiver operate at that frequency.
Like a shampoo commercial where they use a goddamn handful of the stuff - perferable twice a day.
Get a girlfriend. Watch in amazement as she uses a *goddamn handful* of shampoo to clean her much longer hair. AMAZING!
You're a really sad geek, even if you don't have a girlfriend, because a true geek should be able to correctly visualize the difference in shampoo required by longer hair. The pittance of shampoo you can clean your short shock of hair with grows by 5-10x to clean long hair; therefore, a handful is reasonable.
And, as a guy, I can recall a very wonderful use for a handful of shampoo...
Even before fighting games, back when the arcades were a popular hangout, you could draw a crowd if you were on a roll, even in a single player game.
I once beat Capcom's Black Tiger on a single quarter (it was also my first time reaching the last level and beating the game). I was in a zone, and I had a crowd of half a dozen watching my every move, because none of them had ever gotten that far. It's not surprising that people still watch good players do their thing.
You had kids who would hang around the (insert vertical shooter) game, trying to beat the last player's scores, and other players waiting in the wings. Those were good times:D
No dice. Anything integral to the operation of the printer should be in the box, period. What is especially egregious is when you buy a complete computer system and printer from HP and there is no USB cable. This happened to my girlfriend's mom - she bought a bundled HP computer and printer for her office, and had to run out and buy a USB cable.
This is business-as-usual, even from before USB was invented. The HP DeskJet I bought in 1997 did not come with a Centronics cable, I had to purchase it separately (and because the internet didn't exist, I paid way too much for it). The Brother HL-1200 laser I bought years later also did not come with cables, although I could reuse the Centronics cable I alreadfy had (and by then cheap USB cables were easy to come by).
Printer manufacturers don't include the cable because this makes retailers happy.
You miss the fact that fortune 500 companies usually either lease their hardware, or budget for a full hardware refresh every 3 years. That's just how business works.
Yes, and these same Fortune 500 companies also lag behind in terms of OS rollouts, because it's easy for them to get volume licenses and use whatever WORKS. Just because they lease machines doesn't mean they have to upgrade OSes whenever they upgrade the hardware. They typically build their own custom images with fully-automated installers, because with that many employees the effort is worthwhile.
My Fortune 500 company started their XP rollout just this year. I'm actually still using Windows 2000 on my desktop, because the rollout hasn't reached me yet.
South Africa, The Iraq, and the Asian countries still need a lot of help from our education over here before they're ready to get XOs and build up our future.
I have to agree with this, as an oldie QWTF player (even played in clan matches back when I had spare time), I LOVE the new TF2 classes. The scout is now a potentially deadly class (if you can circle-strafe), instead of a conc-happy annoyance. The soldier sans grenades allows players to concentrate on good rocket tactics. The addition of teleporters and much faster output dispensers makes good engineers the crucial deciding factor on larger maps. The UBER medic capability lifts an otherwise unloved class out of the muck.
In the gameplay arena, the inclusion of stats and acheivements means players are tempted to try more classes. Probably the biggest improvement is the points system. This is big for two reasons: one, it encourages players to take down non-player objects, and two (this is key), it encourages players to WORK TOGETHER because everyone gets an assist point in a big takedown kill or a control point cap. In all the earlier incarnations of TF, kills were "stolen" all the time, and capping was largely a solo effort, so these points really improve the teamplay mechanic.
though unbelievable slow (parallel port), having 100MB disk space was amazing at a time where harddisk weren't that big and expensive.
Interesting anecdote: I saw the best performance ever from a parallel Zip drive on one of the slowest PCs I was using at the time. You see, Iomega used to have a parallel port optimization utility, but it never seemed to make any difference, even when I went into BIOS settings and made sure EPP was enabled. Transfers were still in the 100-200K/s range no matter what I did.
But this one ancient notebook absolutely astounded me. I was stuck using it for development, and I wasn't expecting much (Pentium 90 w/24MB of ram). I had to use the Zip drive for development because there wasn't enough space on the hard disk for multiple software revisions, so the performance of the Zip drive was key. I was able to get almost 1MB/s sustained read and over 500K/sec write on that parallel Zip drive, a feat I have never again approached (execpt on an IDE Zip drive). All I did to make this happen: I ran the parallel port optimizer software that never works, except this one time it actually did!
The tune is called "Skeletons In My Closet," and you probably won't find it because the entire "soundtrack" on the second CD of The 7th Guest is one track with multiple songs. My rip of the album is just one 27 minute track.
You might search for The 7th Guest soundtrack, but if that evades you, reply to me and I can see about emailing you the track (I still have the original CD).
My response to this is that flash is of approximately the same age, but has been a large success. I'm curious what should cause us to expect this situtation to change.
Flash is a lot easier technology to implement, since it uses the very same basic transistor gate technology as SRAM. The only difference is, Flash uses a Floating Gate Transistor instead of feedback to store the charge long-term, at the expense of write speed. Thus, once the idea was hatched, it was pretty obvious how to go about implementing it. The same improvements in process that can be applied to DRAM can be applied to Flash.
MRAM, on the other hand, uses materials rarely found on wafers (ferro-magnetic), and because of the effects of shrinking those magnetic elements, there is a minimum cell size problem (referred to as the half-select problem) that no one has solved yet. Hence the reason why cell densities are low, and progress has been slow.
Realistically, for all its drawbacks, Flash is the best-suited candidate for replacing hard disks. Much like LCD has taken over the display marketplace (despite the clamour over OLED, SED, etc.), Flash will probably beat out hard disks in the NV storage market because it's "good enough," and incredibly cheap.
No, when you magnetize a material (e.g. screwdriver), you are not adding charge of any kind, you are simply aligning the atoms in a different arrangement that produces a magnetic field. When you demagnetize an object (i.e. smack the screwdriver against something), the aligned arrangement is lost, and so the magnetic field is lost.
You can only magnetize certain materials that have crystal arrangements susceptible to magnetic fields (ferrous materials, and a handful of others). If it were simply a matter of charge accumulation, you could "magnetize" almost anything.
What the LAME group has done is, quite frankly, amazing. They've managed to extend the life of MP3 to a stunning degree, but they are now refining their very matured technology, saving an extra bit here and there. Unless some other group comes out of left field with an amazing new MP3 theory and implementation, it is not a codec for the future.
What the LAME group has done is create a modern encoder with similar psychoacoustic models to modern codecs, and of course the legendary quality-optimized VBR modes. Herein lies the strength of the mp3 standard: flexibilty. Only the maximum number of bits per frame and the way to represent the compressed spectrum are defined; how you use those bits, and what you do to the data before it is compressed, is entirely up to the encoder implementer.
Mp3 has kept pace with modern CODECs because of this flexibility. If yet another CODEC comes out with incredible improvements on the psychoacoustic model, LAME (or some other group) can once-again match it. This is why modern codecs have made little-to-no progress against mp3.
The only place where modern CODECs can beat mp3 are with bitrates 64kbps and below. This is because mp3's datastream is designed to create a more faithful reproduction, and the lack of bits available means you get sharp encoding artifacts. Newer codecs, when presented with low bitrates, try to recreate frequency data using approximations that sound much better to the ear than mp3 artifacts, and thus sound much better (but not anywhere near transparent) at lower bitrates.
But here's the reality: you can't get GOOD quality from ANY modern codec at 64Kbps, so (barring webcasts) it is not hard to realize why we are still stuck at 128k and above. Nor is it hard to realize why mp3 is still on-top as the #1 CODEC.
Well, anything is "HD" compared to that shitty feed they got during the Apollo missions. Fortunately, we've had time to invent digital compression and high-capacity storage, so transmission bandwidth is no-longer a limiting factor.
You've got a nice set of data, but you fail to note one thing: your "sweet-spot" price graph is bottoming-out.
You can't expect to see drive prices freefall forever. There is some minimum amount that drive makers have to charge to recoup the cost of building a sealed metal container, an electric motor, a high-precision metal/glass disk, and a high-precision GMR head and actuator. The cost of aluminimum and rare earth magnets all have minimums, and those are about as low as they'll ever get.
In the past, drives have seen huge increases in size/price ratio because of big technological improvements, but now we're hitting the end of that rope. Now that capacity has hit a wall, we're left with just minor price cuts (for example, reduced material usage: have you felt how LIGHT modern hard disks are?), plus the usual reduction in cost for drive electronics. There's not much they can do to trim the minimum price anymore.
As long as information is accurate, it shouldn't need to be important. Stick it in a trivia page or separate it if you want, but don't make it disappear. We all see different things as important - and on a global scale, any piece of information will be important to someone.
I have to agree, Wikipedia takes itself FAR TOO SERIOUSLY.
The fact is, today all it takes is for ONE PERSON to get a bug up their ass regarding a page, and it can be tagged for deletion. First of all, Wikipedia makes it extremely easy for people with nothing better to do to catch new pages / edits with the Recent Changes tool. All you need is one hardass to tag your article for deletion, and it will probably happen before you have a chance to notice.
Recently, I had an article deleted (representing an unreleased independent film), even though I made every effort to bring the new page up to standards. Despite leaving a clean page with a clean, non-biased tone and real-world references linked, it was still deleted because it was not "notable enough." Of course, this ignores the fact that every single film in existence has a Wikipedia page, and even crappy film pages like this one are completely ignored by these hardcore admins. They're concentrating so hard on everything new that they won't take the time and effort to apply their standards to the thousands of older Wikipedia pages that are crap, a serious violation of logical consistency in my eyes.
I'm sick of Wikipedia. It has changed completely from what it once was, and it doesn't really have a clear mission any longer. I will not support it in the future.
You want to impress me? Show me a $50-100 video card that can perform as well as a $200. $50 falls into something I call 'cheap'.
HEY, guess what buddy? Those ~$50 video cards on the market RIGHT NOW completely toast $400+ 9800 Pro and 9800 XT cards from four years ago, and the ~$100 cards completely toast the $400+ 6800/x800 generation released three years ago. For incredibly cheap, you can purchase an impressive amount of power, because it all trickles down.
For example, we have your basic x1650 Pro card here for $60. This card model was originally called the x1600 XT, and it started out with an MSRP of $250, but competition and chip revisions have brought the price down to JUST 60 BUCKS! Sure, it won't play Crysis on SuperUltraMegaHigh (TM) settings, but it will play modern games on low settings, and play older games with all the candy you want.
Why do you care about the release of the 8800 GT? Because it is an example of this trickle-down in action - the amount of graphics horsepower you get in this $250 package used to cost over $400 a year ago. This means that the midrange cards priced below this beast will drop in price like crazy, just like that x1650 Pro card I linked.
Sure, that's all well and good, except for the fact that none of these shadowy saviors who cry foul about the government's numbers ever provide their own formulas / proof. All they do is slather their websites with their life story and their own mysterious numbers on graphs, and expect you'll buy it.
And when I say buy it, I mean it literally. If you want more than a few meaningless graphs, you need to pony-up the 89.00 for the 6-month subscription. And I seriously doubt even the newsletter you get contains any of the actual formulas or raw source data references, because then what would he sell to all the fools out there?
With some time, I could create a 128-*Peta*byte storage device with those chips. In the worst case scenario, you build a device out of multiple 128-GB flash devices.
But thanks to the form-factor, you're limited by maximum component count in any reasonable device.
There's a point at which you're no longer adding value by adding chips, because the whole contraption would be too expensive to manufacture. That number tends to be around 2 chips for small USB thumb drives and mp3 players, and for the much larger 2.5" notebook drives (the target device size for their "128 gig" part), 16 chips.
I can't wait for SSDs to become more affordable, because I am sick and tired of the failing reliability (not to mention the increasing loudness) of modern hard drives.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is not that %5 of the users are using up half the bandwidth, it's that those %5 of users usually leave their torrents running 24/7. This means that in times of heavy usage those same %5 of users never let up, and it makes heavy periods that much slower/more expensive for everyone.
The problem is, people expect the internet to work like air (always there, never-ending), when in fact it works more like traffic. We need to change this lack of understanding through creative ways.
I think the solution is not to charge penalties for overuse, but to offer incentives for off-peak usage. For instance, I would suggest that a user get a $5 credit on their account if their TOTAL bandwidth usage off-peak versus peak is greater than 4:1, or something like that. You could also add to the category people who use less than a few GB in a month, to encourage light users to sign-up.
So long as you make the peak time slots long enough, and make the threshold high enough, people will have to switch their torrents to specific times to actually quality for the credit. You could provide tools that remind users of the peak periods, and offer to automatically download data at non-peak times.
Don't raise prices, don't punish consumers; entice them with credits, and let them make their own decision.
*** I will now return to the real world, where none of the above will actually work. Meh. ***
I also like How Jobs sells the bullshit, with comments like these:
Jobs noted that Intel was willing to engineer a new version of the Core 2 Duo specifically to Apple's specifications -- it's 60 percent smaller than others
Yup, you heard it first: Intel spent millions of dollars for a die shrink and dedicated an entire cutting-edge 45nm fab line just so Stevie could have a low-power, tiny dual-core.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The 45nm Core2 is for the ENTIRE notebook market, of which Apple is only a small part. But with Steve Spin (TM), it suddenly becomes an Apple-only whiz-bang product. Honestly, it's about time Apple came out with an ultra-portable; 5+ pounds overpriced monsters don't cut it anymore.
Okay, let me gve you some depth about why HyperThreading (SMT) exists. Processors are designed to quickly process data from a much slower source. They do this through creative caching, prefetching, branch prediction, and now out-of-order memory accesses. If the processor thread currently executing needs data that isn't in the cache, it cannot continue processing, so it blocks. In this case a context switch takes place, switching to ampther thread, and it takes an eternity in terms of processor cycles.
Hyperthreading is there to speed-up context switches when a thread blocks. It was added because the cost of HyperThreading is much cheaper versus the cost of a second core. For a single processor with HyperThreading, the processor can switch between two tasks A and B from clock-to-clock, much faster than a regular context switch. This is accomplished because the processor with HyperThreading looks like two independent processors to the OS, so it simply schedules task A to one processor, and task B to another. If task A blocks, task B can start processing on the next clock cycle, and continue processing until Task A has data.
The point is, if you have multiple cores, you don't need HyperThreading if you have enough processor cores to service all your high-priority or I/O-bound tasks. In the case above, if I had two full cores, and scheduled task A to one core and task B to another, I would see improved processing overall, but the processor handling task A would be idle whenever that task blocked. So no, it is not the most efficient solution, but it does deliver better performance than a single processor with HyperThreading. When you have processes small enough to pack 4, 8, 16, ect. cores on one chip, and people are already having trouble just fully-utilizing two, adding HyperThreading doesn't make much sense.
In fact, HyperThreading still lives on in Sun's Niagra processor, which contains four threads per core. If one thread blocks, then another thread takes over. For tasks that require LOTS of I/O, this is a fantastic solution, because otherwise the processor wastes time performing far too many context switches. But, this processor is only beneficial if you have TONS AND TONS of I/O-bound tasks. Pure high processing-load tasks would perform poorly on this kind of architecture, and this is the reason why multithreading has been mostly relegated to the server world, and game console chips (consoles live and breathe I/O).
I couldn't have said it beter myself. Competition is the reason x86 has destroyed all other mainstream chips, and continued competition is the reason you will never pay lock-in prices for "extra" processing power.
The only case where these economic concepts might come about is if AMD pulled out of the x86 market. While it is unlikely, you have to admit that with the incredible cost of fabs these days, and AMD's cash bonfire, it is a real possibility. If AMD suddenly crumbled, would these be ANY maker with the capacity to compete, and the cojones to step-up?
I am in this century. I guess I need to fully explain everything, or somehow I have zero credibility.
Leakage power is directly proportional to VSB (the voltage applied between the source and drain of the MOSFET), which decreases when you reduce the applied voltage VDD. And, contrary to popular belief, the leakage power has been constrained successfully, thanks to improvements like strained silicon.
As you can imagine, low-voltage operation (like, say, Cell at approximately 1.1v) means very low leakage. When we reduce the operating voltage to below 1.0v (see my post above), that low leakage practically disappears.
Apparently, you do not know how CMOS devices work. The power consumption of the chip is directly proportional to the capacitive load and the frequency, and is proportional to the square of the voltage.
Concering only the SPE power consumption, which is the majority of power used by a Cell chip:
If x represents the power consumption of a 7-SPE chip running at 3.2 GHz...
If you cut the number of SPEs from 7 to 4, your capacitive load is cut to %57 of the original, or 0.57 * x.
If you again cut the frequency from 3.2 GHz to 1.5 GHz, you get a power consumption reduction of 1.5 / 3.2. Your total power consumption after capacitive load and frequency changes is 0.26 * x.
The PPE portion of the chi[p will see power consumption reduced by half because of frequency.
FINALLY: a reduced operating frequency means you can reduce the voltage, and this is where you can see some impressive gains. Just to get an idea of the differences in voltages, here is a link to a voltage vs speed graph for each SPE, from Sony engineers. You could potentially operate the Cell at 1.5 GHz at a very low threshold voltage, giving you a %20-30 reduced power consumption.
So, after all that, you have a chip that runs on less than %20 of the power of its big brother (estimated 60-80w), so this chip is around 10-15w, which is quite practical for four 128-bit vector processors plus a PPE.
Not that there's anything the Cell could really do effectively for a PC. For parallel processing, we already have dual 128-bit SSE units on the Core2 Duo processors, which comes within fighting range of four SPEs clocked at a paltry 1.5 GHz. And of course, most of there pipe-dream uses will get held-back by slow I/O on a home computer or laptop (like ALL the examples uses for this chip listed in the article), so there's really no need for all that processing power.
Why dont people just use other frequencies or if required pay the fee to use the other frequencies.
Because it's not as simple as "paying" for access.
You have frequencies locked down for typically 3 specific reasons:
1. Military/Fire/Police This is often overlooked, but they hold a huge chunk of spectrum.
2. Broadcast.
3. Communications.
Now think about it, of those three, the only class of spectrum use where you might be able to "pay to play" is the communications branch. And in fact, you do pay to play (cell phones, for example). The frequencies have to be laid-out in a structured manner, and access has to be controlled, because anything else would be utter chaos. The result is, yes, you could pay to use those spectrums for your own thing, but you really couldn't afford it. Thus, the big communications companies front billions for exclusive spectrum rights, then lease the spectrum use out to you for affordable rates.
To understand how messy chaos can be, you need look no further than 2.4 GHz. This band contains Wifi, microwave ovens, cordless phones; virtually anything needing to send/receive data over a short distance. And it works, unless all your neighbors are already using up the spectrum...then it doesn't work. The reason we don't have more "universal" bands like this is because, worldwide, frequency allocations differ from region to region, and most "useful" frequency bands have been allocated SOMEWHERE. 2.4 GHz was largely left alone when frequencies were in hot demand because of the poor propagation characteristics, and the originally high cost of making a receiver operate at that frequency.
Like a shampoo commercial where they use a goddamn handful of the stuff - perferable twice a day.
Get a girlfriend. Watch in amazement as she uses a *goddamn handful* of shampoo to clean her much longer hair. AMAZING!
You're a really sad geek, even if you don't have a girlfriend, because a true geek should be able to correctly visualize the difference in shampoo required by longer hair. The pittance of shampoo you can clean your short shock of hair with grows by 5-10x to clean long hair; therefore, a handful is reasonable.
And, as a guy, I can recall a very wonderful use for a handful of shampoo...
Even before fighting games, back when the arcades were a popular hangout, you could draw a crowd if you were on a roll, even in a single player game.
:D
I once beat Capcom's Black Tiger on a single quarter (it was also my first time reaching the last level and beating the game). I was in a zone, and I had a crowd of half a dozen watching my every move, because none of them had ever gotten that far. It's not surprising that people still watch good players do their thing.
You had kids who would hang around the (insert vertical shooter) game, trying to beat the last player's scores, and other players waiting in the wings. Those were good times
No dice. Anything integral to the operation of the printer should be in the box, period. What is especially egregious is when you buy a complete computer system and printer from HP and there is no USB cable. This happened to my girlfriend's mom - she bought a bundled HP computer and printer for her office, and had to run out and buy a USB cable.
This is business-as-usual, even from before USB was invented. The HP DeskJet I bought in 1997 did not come with a Centronics cable, I had to purchase it separately (and because the internet didn't exist, I paid way too much for it). The Brother HL-1200 laser I bought years later also did not come with cables, although I could reuse the Centronics cable I alreadfy had (and by then cheap USB cables were easy to come by).
Printer manufacturers don't include the cable because this makes retailers happy.
You miss the fact that fortune 500 companies usually either lease their hardware, or budget for a full hardware refresh every 3 years. That's just how business works.
Yes, and these same Fortune 500 companies also lag behind in terms of OS rollouts, because it's easy for them to get volume licenses and use whatever WORKS. Just because they lease machines doesn't mean they have to upgrade OSes whenever they upgrade the hardware. They typically build their own custom images with fully-automated installers, because with that many employees the effort is worthwhile.
My Fortune 500 company started their XP rollout just this year. I'm actually still using Windows 2000 on my desktop, because the rollout hasn't reached me yet.
South Africa, The Iraq, and the Asian countries still need a lot of help from our education over here before they're ready to get XOs and build up our future.
Actually, I think they just need more maps.
I have to agree with this, as an oldie QWTF player (even played in clan matches back when I had spare time), I LOVE the new TF2 classes. The scout is now a potentially deadly class (if you can circle-strafe), instead of a conc-happy annoyance. The soldier sans grenades allows players to concentrate on good rocket tactics. The addition of teleporters and much faster output dispensers makes good engineers the crucial deciding factor on larger maps. The UBER medic capability lifts an otherwise unloved class out of the muck.
In the gameplay arena, the inclusion of stats and acheivements means players are tempted to try more classes. Probably the biggest improvement is the points system. This is big for two reasons: one, it encourages players to take down non-player objects, and two (this is key), it encourages players to WORK TOGETHER because everyone gets an assist point in a big takedown kill or a control point cap. In all the earlier incarnations of TF, kills were "stolen" all the time, and capping was largely a solo effort, so these points really improve the teamplay mechanic.
though unbelievable slow (parallel port), having 100MB disk space was amazing at a time where harddisk weren't that big and expensive.
Interesting anecdote: I saw the best performance ever from a parallel Zip drive on one of the slowest PCs I was using at the time. You see, Iomega used to have a parallel port optimization utility, but it never seemed to make any difference, even when I went into BIOS settings and made sure EPP was enabled. Transfers were still in the 100-200K/s range no matter what I did.
But this one ancient notebook absolutely astounded me. I was stuck using it for development, and I wasn't expecting much (Pentium 90 w/24MB of ram). I had to use the Zip drive for development because there wasn't enough space on the hard disk for multiple software revisions, so the performance of the Zip drive was key. I was able to get almost 1MB/s sustained read and over 500K/sec write on that parallel Zip drive, a feat I have never again approached (execpt on an IDE Zip drive). All I did to make this happen: I ran the parallel port optimizer software that never works, except this one time it actually did!
The tune is called "Skeletons In My Closet," and you probably won't find it because the entire "soundtrack" on the second CD of The 7th Guest is one track with multiple songs. My rip of the album is just one 27 minute track.
You might search for The 7th Guest soundtrack, but if that evades you, reply to me and I can see about emailing you the track (I still have the original CD).
My response to this is that flash is of approximately the same age, but has been a large success. I'm curious what should cause us to expect this situtation to change.
Flash is a lot easier technology to implement, since it uses the very same basic transistor gate technology as SRAM. The only difference is, Flash uses a Floating Gate Transistor instead of feedback to store the charge long-term, at the expense of write speed. Thus, once the idea was hatched, it was pretty obvious how to go about implementing it. The same improvements in process that can be applied to DRAM can be applied to Flash.
MRAM, on the other hand, uses materials rarely found on wafers (ferro-magnetic), and because of the effects of shrinking those magnetic elements, there is a minimum cell size problem (referred to as the half-select problem) that no one has solved yet. Hence the reason why cell densities are low, and progress has been slow.
Realistically, for all its drawbacks, Flash is the best-suited candidate for replacing hard disks. Much like LCD has taken over the display marketplace (despite the clamour over OLED, SED, etc.), Flash will probably beat out hard disks in the NV storage market because it's "good enough," and incredibly cheap.
No, when you magnetize a material (e.g. screwdriver), you are not adding charge of any kind, you are simply aligning the atoms in a different arrangement that produces a magnetic field. When you demagnetize an object (i.e. smack the screwdriver against something), the aligned arrangement is lost, and so the magnetic field is lost.
You can only magnetize certain materials that have crystal arrangements susceptible to magnetic fields (ferrous materials, and a handful of others). If it were simply a matter of charge accumulation, you could "magnetize" almost anything.
What the LAME group has done is, quite frankly, amazing. They've managed to extend the life of MP3 to a stunning degree, but they are now refining their very matured technology, saving an extra bit here and there. Unless some other group comes out of left field with an amazing new MP3 theory and implementation, it is not a codec for the future.
What the LAME group has done is create a modern encoder with similar psychoacoustic models to modern codecs, and of course the legendary quality-optimized VBR modes. Herein lies the strength of the mp3 standard: flexibilty. Only the maximum number of bits per frame and the way to represent the compressed spectrum are defined; how you use those bits, and what you do to the data before it is compressed, is entirely up to the encoder implementer.
Mp3 has kept pace with modern CODECs because of this flexibility. If yet another CODEC comes out with incredible improvements on the psychoacoustic model, LAME (or some other group) can once-again match it. This is why modern codecs have made little-to-no progress against mp3.
The only place where modern CODECs can beat mp3 are with bitrates 64kbps and below. This is because mp3's datastream is designed to create a more faithful reproduction, and the lack of bits available means you get sharp encoding artifacts. Newer codecs, when presented with low bitrates, try to recreate frequency data using approximations that sound much better to the ear than mp3 artifacts, and thus sound much better (but not anywhere near transparent) at lower bitrates.
But here's the reality: you can't get GOOD quality from ANY modern codec at 64Kbps, so (barring webcasts) it is not hard to realize why we are still stuck at 128k and above. Nor is it hard to realize why mp3 is still on-top as the #1 CODEC.
Well, anything is "HD" compared to that shitty feed they got during the Apollo missions. Fortunately, we've had time to invent digital compression and high-capacity storage, so transmission bandwidth is no-longer a limiting factor.
You've got a nice set of data, but you fail to note one thing: your "sweet-spot" price graph is bottoming-out.
You can't expect to see drive prices freefall forever. There is some minimum amount that drive makers have to charge to recoup the cost of building a sealed metal container, an electric motor, a high-precision metal/glass disk, and a high-precision GMR head and actuator. The cost of aluminimum and rare earth magnets all have minimums, and those are about as low as they'll ever get.
In the past, drives have seen huge increases in size/price ratio because of big technological improvements, but now we're hitting the end of that rope. Now that capacity has hit a wall, we're left with just minor price cuts (for example, reduced material usage: have you felt how LIGHT modern hard disks are?), plus the usual reduction in cost for drive electronics. There's not much they can do to trim the minimum price anymore.
As long as information is accurate, it shouldn't need to be important. Stick it in a trivia page or separate it if you want, but don't make it disappear. We all see different things as important - and on a global scale, any piece of information will be important to someone.
I have to agree, Wikipedia takes itself FAR TOO SERIOUSLY.
The fact is, today all it takes is for ONE PERSON to get a bug up their ass regarding a page, and it can be tagged for deletion. First of all, Wikipedia makes it extremely easy for people with nothing better to do to catch new pages / edits with the Recent Changes tool. All you need is one hardass to tag your article for deletion, and it will probably happen before you have a chance to notice.
Recently, I had an article deleted (representing an unreleased independent film), even though I made every effort to bring the new page up to standards. Despite leaving a clean page with a clean, non-biased tone and real-world references linked, it was still deleted because it was not "notable enough." Of course, this ignores the fact that every single film in existence has a Wikipedia page, and even crappy film pages like this one are completely ignored by these hardcore admins. They're concentrating so hard on everything new that they won't take the time and effort to apply their standards to the thousands of older Wikipedia pages that are crap, a serious violation of logical consistency in my eyes.
I'm sick of Wikipedia. It has changed completely from what it once was, and it doesn't really have a clear mission any longer. I will not support it in the future.
You want to impress me? Show me a $50-100 video card that can perform as well as a $200. $50 falls into something I call 'cheap'.
HEY, guess what buddy? Those ~$50 video cards on the market RIGHT NOW completely toast $400+ 9800 Pro and 9800 XT cards from four years ago, and the ~$100 cards completely toast the $400+ 6800/x800 generation released three years ago. For incredibly cheap, you can purchase an impressive amount of power, because it all trickles down.
For example, we have your basic x1650 Pro card here for $60. This card model was originally called the x1600 XT, and it started out with an MSRP of $250, but competition and chip revisions have brought the price down to JUST 60 BUCKS! Sure, it won't play Crysis on SuperUltraMegaHigh (TM) settings, but it will play modern games on low settings, and play older games with all the candy you want.
Why do you care about the release of the 8800 GT? Because it is an example of this trickle-down in action - the amount of graphics horsepower you get in this $250 package used to cost over $400 a year ago. This means that the midrange cards priced below this beast will drop in price like crazy, just like that x1650 Pro card I linked.
http://www.shadowstats.com/ or for the even more pessimistic formula: http://www.shadowstats.com/imgs/sgs-cpi.gif
Sure, that's all well and good, except for the fact that none of these shadowy saviors who cry foul about the government's numbers ever provide their own formulas / proof. All they do is slather their websites with their life story and their own mysterious numbers on graphs, and expect you'll buy it.
And when I say buy it, I mean it literally. If you want more than a few meaningless graphs, you need to pony-up the 89.00 for the 6-month subscription. And I seriously doubt even the newsletter you get contains any of the actual formulas or raw source data references, because then what would he sell to all the fools out there?
With some time, I could create a 128-*Peta*byte storage device with those chips. In the worst case scenario, you build a device out of multiple 128-GB flash devices.
But thanks to the form-factor, you're limited by maximum component count in any reasonable device.
There's a point at which you're no longer adding value by adding chips, because the whole contraption would be too expensive to manufacture. That number tends to be around 2 chips for small USB thumb drives and mp3 players, and for the much larger 2.5" notebook drives (the target device size for their "128 gig" part), 16 chips.
I can't wait for SSDs to become more affordable, because I am sick and tired of the failing reliability (not to mention the increasing loudness) of modern hard drives.
Yes, but does he hold the record for the World's Largest Crap? I don't think Randy will give up without a fight.