Currently the market does not integrate the cost of emitting carbon in the atmosphere. As a result the carbon emitting technologies seem to be less expensive for the same result and the market logically develops these. Introducing a feedback in the market that the carbon emissions actually has a cost sends a message saying that carbon emitting tech is not the most efficient choice. The market will find an alternative solution instead of a solution being forced on it which might not be the most efficient in the end.
You mention that you want to eliminate the problem in the first place then you mention solar power, but how do you know that solar power is the best, or that nuclear power is? Maybe it's wind based, or ethanol based, or hydrogen based power or even cattle based power that's the most efficient. Or maybe a company will start doing research because there is a market for it and someone will come up with a transimentional p0rn energy extractor or even an Anonymous Coward based power source, who knows ?
The thing is the market will integrate the feedback signal and propagate it. This avoids forcing decisions on the market about the solution, the certificates are only reminding it of the problem. Going for carbon-netural server-farm is simply passing along the signal back to energy producers.
It looks like it's working for other problems.IIRC sulfur dioxid emission certificates led companies who claimed that installing an emission cleaner for it cost too muuch to actually install them even though buying the certificates seemed to cost less. the real price (vs company reported) of installing the cleaner was less than trading certificates in the long term thus they ended up investing.
I understand people are annoyed with this. I am very annoyed that I have to pay 400 euros for an ipod that sells for $400 in the US, especially with the current exchange rate.
But then there should be no student discounts either ? Microsoft should not be allowed to sell to students at a lower price when it knows they can't afford to pay the full price ? Think about it this is the same and it is called price targeting.
No one is forcing you to buy the product from Valve if you think the price Valve wants you to pay is overrated. Valve doesn't prevent you from buying games from other software editors who don't do price targeting, nor is it preventing you from buying games from companies that sell their games for cheap. Valve is simply trying to maximise profit by reaching a segment of the market it didn't reach before.
This is a free market at work, you think it is wrong : send the message to valve, _don't_ buy the game. If the message is sent by a large enough segment of the market, Valve _will_ change its pricing policy.
You think I neglect this but I did take it into account : I considered that dividing the price of the game by 5 would increase the number of players by 3.
Maybe this is wrong but as I said in my post, these numbers are completely made up to make a point. Valve probably had a very complete market study and made simulations on estimated revenues before choosing to do so.
They probably also knew that doing so would piss a few people off and took that into account: they don't care as long as they make more money.
What do you create a company for ? the only valid answer is : to make money.
Let's make the following excercise: Valve wants to make a game, it costs $100 million to make. That means they have to sell 2 000 000 copies at $50 to break even. If they only sell at $50 then in countries with lower wages they won't sell any copies. According to their market studies, if the global market is 20 million players 75 percent of which have a low income ($400/month) they will likely only make marginal sales in the low income part of the market because for most of these potential players the price is just too high(let's say they stille make 10 000), and they will have to make the bulk of their sales in the high income part of the market which is only 5 million people. Their market study says they will only be able to sell 1.3 million copies in this market, because of piracy, second hand sales, other games etc. 1.3million * $50 is only $65 million and they loose money, so they don't make the game.
Ok so $50 is too high, let's tap the low income market and price everywhere at $10 : they will sell 7 million in the low income market and maybe 3 million in the high income market that's 10 million sales for only $100 million dollars revenue. as much as valve love it's gamers it doesn't want to make a game to only break even it wants to make money
Now their marketing officer checks out to see what happens if they have two pricing policies : say $10 for low income segment and $50 for high income segment. Suddenly the market study indicates they will be able to make a huge amount of sales in the low income segment say 7 million out of the 15 million people and they will sell 1.1 million copies in the high income segment (because the game is more widespread in countries that don't have as strong copyright laws there will be more piracy, they are still able to prevent high income gamers from buying at low income prices since they have this nifty activation system).
7 000 000 * $10 is $70 million ! 1 100 000 * $50 is $55 million !
Total sales : $125 million suddenly they make $25 million! instead of loosing money, they almost make twice as much money as they did with the first scheme and %25 more than the second scheme!
Now which option would you choose ? Sure my numbers are completely made up so that the sum work out in the end, but don't doubt a second that it is exactly the kind of reasoning that went behind the creation of the regional lockout and the different pricing schemes.
I for one would be very interested to see a comparison of the abstention rate in machine equipped voting office versus paper based voting offices...then compare the abstention rate for the same sets of voting offices in previous years.
This should make it quite clear if the machines led to any significant vote drop-out or not.
Filtering good ideas out of the gibberish would be a gargantuan undertaking -- probably one that is more difficult than just thinking up your own ideas
What if the garguatuan dataset was the filtered through a community process ? like everyone can submit ideas and everyone can vote for the ideas they like best ?:)
Instead of one monolithic processor connected to a giant memory through a tiny bottleneck, processors of the future will be a grid of processing elements interleaved with embedded memory in a network structure. Almost like a Beowulf cluster on a chip.
You mean : like a brain ?!
what are neurons if not a giant grid of processors, where memory and instruction set is defined by the connections between dendrites and axons ? learning is growing dendrites to connect to new axons. Something else I remember from my biology classes is that the synapse is slow because is uses chemical elements instead of transmitting the nervous impusle directly.
I probably missed something but isn't _that_ (the brain structure) a model architecture we could be using and improving (here I think in terms of integrating the nervous impulse directly instead of using chemicals) ?
I mean we know it works, and we know it delivers a pretty awesome amount of computing power even though we conciously use little.
Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
I soooo used to think like you. But I use eclipse and azureus every day and I have to say that these apps fare pretty well against my UI expectations.
I hope QT4 gets optimised quickly, then for ruby bindings to be released, that could make for cool apps.
It is not only true about software : The effective expression of a radical idea requires an individual who just happens to have a brilliant insight or even just a vision of something.
This is true for many things, science, craft, politics,etc you name it.
I have been reading and testing quite a bit lately with the CFs and yes some show startup delay others don't. I think the form factor is important, in my experience the delays were inversely proportional to the size of the bulb. the larger the bulb the lower the delay until it becomes unnoticeable.
I bought a large globe for my kitchen which lits up instantly, while the ultra compact "spot-like" bulbs in my living room will take half a sec to lit up and then a few more seconds before reaching full brightness. I guess the electronics are not perfect yet in smaller bulbs.
Btw, in my living room I mixed CFs spots and halogen spots to get the best of both worlds : instant warm directed light from the halogen completed by the colder broader light from the CFs and I like it quite much (my wallet does too as it cut the lighting cost of the living room almost by half).
Actually it's not so simple. With ruby and rails, the length method of string "breaks" on unicode string, since it returns the number of bytes and not the number of characters. Thus even if the user typed 5 characters he could get a message saying "input too long, maximum length allowed 7 characters" and there he is lost.
Fear not for you are not alone. I too am a windows user, and without any other justification than lazyness !! my computer came with XP on it and I could never be bothered to install linux. But I couldn't resist the pique:) Now I will wait until a few generations of Intel macs are out then i'll get myself one of these mac book. That way, my lazyness will not make me a typing target on/.:)
Do you have a precise exemple for this ? I have been using eclipse for quite some time now and wasn't particularly bothered by the UI. I really am curious for one or more exemples of what you state.
I mostly agree with your remarks but you are mistaken one the last one :
they did not restart from scratch.
The day before in Microsoft's auditorium, Mr. Allchin had announced to hundreds of Windows engineers that they would "reset" Longhorn using a clean base of code that had been developed for a version of Windows on corporate server computers.
From what I read on the net, the code base used was that of windows 2003 server.
from http://www.opensource.org/licenses/: Academic Free License Adaptive Public License Apache Software License Apache License, 2.0 Apple Public Source License Artistic license Attribution Assurance Licenses New BSD license Computer Associates Trusted Open Source License 1.1 Common Development and Distribution License Common Public License 1.0 CUA Office Public License Version 1.0 EU DataGrid Software License Eclipse Public License Educational Community License Eiffel Forum License Eiffel Forum License V2.0 Entessa Public License Fair License Frameworx License GNU General Public License (GPL) GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL) Lucent Public License (Plan9) Lucent Public License Version 1.02 IBM Public License Intel Open Source License Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer Jabber Open Source License MIT license MITRE Collaborative Virtual Workspace License (CVW License) Motosoto License Mozilla Public License 1.0 (MPL) Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL) NASA Open Source Agreement 1.3 Naumen Public License Nethack General Public License Nokia Open Source License OCLC Research Public License 2.0 Open Group Test Suite License Open Software License PHP License Python license (CNRI Python License) Python Software Foundation License Qt Public License (QPL) RealNetworks Public Source License V1.0 Reciprocal Public License Ricoh Source Code Public License Sleepycat License Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) Sun Public License Sybase Open Watcom Public License 1.0 University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License Vovida Software License v. 1.0 W3C License wxWindows Library License X.Net License Zope Public License zlib/libpng license
Other comments like this, point that it won't support ogg.
If you want a player that supports ogg you can always try the neuros II ( http://www.neurosaudio.com/ ) It is not a mini-ipod 'killer' but it does seem to have a few good sides (including the 'same price for 20Gb' side..) The dimension ain't the same though (of course)
Slashdot Mirror
how does that relate to the number of computers used to browse free pr0n on the internet ? just curious
Actually it does according to market theory.
Currently the market does not integrate the cost of emitting carbon in the atmosphere. As a result the carbon emitting technologies seem to be less expensive for the same result and the market logically develops these. Introducing a feedback in the market that the carbon emissions actually has a cost sends a message saying that carbon emitting tech is not the most efficient choice. The market will find an alternative solution instead of a solution being forced on it which might not be the most efficient in the end.
You mention that you want to eliminate the problem in the first place then you mention solar power, but how do you know that solar power is the best, or that nuclear power is? Maybe it's wind based, or ethanol based, or hydrogen based power or even cattle based power that's the most efficient. Or maybe a company will start doing research because there is a market for it and someone will come up with a transimentional p0rn energy extractor or even an Anonymous Coward based power source, who knows ?
The thing is the market will integrate the feedback signal and propagate it. This avoids forcing decisions on the market about the solution, the certificates are only reminding it of the problem. Going for carbon-netural server-farm is simply passing along the signal back to energy producers.
It looks like it's working for other problems.IIRC sulfur dioxid emission certificates led companies who claimed that installing an emission cleaner for it cost too muuch to actually install them even though buying the certificates seemed to cost less. the real price (vs company reported) of installing the cleaner was less than trading certificates in the long term thus they ended up investing.
Let's hope it will work for carbon too.
I understand people are annoyed with this. I am very annoyed that I have to pay 400 euros for an ipod that sells for $400 in the US, especially with the current exchange rate.
But then there should be no student discounts either ? Microsoft should not be allowed to sell to students at a lower price when it knows they can't afford to pay the full price ? Think about it this is the same and it is called price targeting.
No one is forcing you to buy the product from Valve if you think the price Valve wants you to pay is overrated. Valve doesn't prevent you from buying games from other software editors who don't do price targeting, nor is it preventing you from buying games from companies that sell their games for cheap. Valve is simply trying to maximise profit by reaching a segment of the market it didn't reach before.
This is a free market at work, you think it is wrong : send the message to valve, _don't_ buy the game. If the message is sent by a large enough segment of the market, Valve _will_ change its pricing policy.
You think I neglect this but I did take it into account : I considered that dividing the price of the game by 5 would increase the number of players by 3. Maybe this is wrong but as I said in my post, these numbers are completely made up to make a point. Valve probably had a very complete market study and made simulations on estimated revenues before choosing to do so. They probably also knew that doing so would piss a few people off and took that into account: they don't care as long as they make more money. What do you create a company for ? the only valid answer is : to make money.
Let's make the following excercise:
Valve wants to make a game, it costs $100 million to make.
That means they have to sell 2 000 000 copies at $50 to break even. If they only sell at $50 then in countries with lower wages they won't sell any copies.
According to their market studies, if the global market is 20 million players 75 percent of which have a low income ($400/month) they will likely only make marginal sales in the low income part of the market because for most of these potential players the price is just too high(let's say they stille make 10 000), and they will have to make the bulk of their sales in the high income part of the market which is only 5 million people. Their market study says they will only be able to sell 1.3 million copies in this market, because of piracy, second hand sales, other games etc. 1.3million * $50 is only $65 million and they loose money, so they don't make the game.
Ok so $50 is too high, let's tap the low income market and price everywhere at $10 :
they will sell 7 million in the low income market and maybe 3 million in the high income market that's 10 million sales for only $100 million dollars revenue. as much as valve love it's gamers it doesn't want to make a game to only break even it wants to make money
Now their marketing officer checks out to see what happens if they have two pricing policies : say $10 for low income segment and $50 for high income segment. Suddenly the market study indicates they will be able to make a huge amount of sales in the low income segment say 7 million out of the 15 million people and they will sell 1.1 million copies in the high income segment (because the game is more widespread in countries that don't have as strong copyright laws there will be more piracy, they are still able to prevent high income gamers from buying at low income prices since they have this nifty activation system).
7 000 000 * $10 is $70 million !
1 100 000 * $50 is $55 million !
Total sales : $125 million suddenly they make $25 million! instead of loosing money, they almost make twice as much money as they did with the first scheme and %25 more than the second scheme!
Now which option would you choose ? Sure my numbers are completely made up so that the sum work out in the end, but don't doubt a second that it is exactly the kind of reasoning that went behind the creation of the regional lockout and the different pricing schemes.
I for one would be very interested to see a comparison of the abstention rate in machine equipped voting office versus paper based voting offices...then compare the abstention rate for the same sets of voting offices in previous years.
This should make it quite clear if the machines led to any significant vote drop-out or not.
What if the garguatuan dataset was the filtered through a community process ? like everyone can submit ideas and everyone can vote for the ideas they like best ?
You mean : like a brain ?!
what are neurons if not a giant grid of processors, where memory and instruction set is defined by the connections between dendrites and axons ? learning is growing dendrites to connect to new axons. Something else I remember from my biology classes is that the synapse is slow because is uses chemical elements instead of transmitting the nervous impusle directly.
I probably missed something but isn't _that_ (the brain structure) a model architecture we could be using and improving (here I think in terms of integrating the nervous impulse directly instead of using chemicals) ?
I mean we know it works, and we know it delivers a pretty awesome amount of computing power even though we conciously use little.
I soooo used to think like you. But I use eclipse and azureus every day and I have to say that these apps fare pretty well against my UI expectations. I hope QT4 gets optimised quickly, then for ruby bindings to be released, that could make for cool apps.
It is not only true about software :
The effective expression of a radical idea requires an individual who just happens to have a brilliant insight or even just a vision of something.
This is true for many things, science, craft, politics,etc you name it.
I have been reading and testing quite a bit lately with the CFs and yes some show startup delay others don't. I think the form factor is important, in my experience the delays were inversely proportional to the size of the bulb. the larger the bulb the lower the delay until it becomes unnoticeable. I bought a large globe for my kitchen which lits up instantly, while the ultra compact "spot-like" bulbs in my living room will take half a sec to lit up and then a few more seconds before reaching full brightness. I guess the electronics are not perfect yet in smaller bulbs. Btw, in my living room I mixed CFs spots and halogen spots to get the best of both worlds : instant warm directed light from the halogen completed by the colder broader light from the CFs and I like it quite much (my wallet does too as it cut the lighting cost of the living room almost by half).
Who cares about larger devices ?! This is the way to the Ipod flea, whith this the last dream of humanity will become reality!
Actually it's not so simple. With ruby and rails, the length method of string "breaks" on unicode string, since it returns the number of bytes and not the number of characters. Thus even if the user typed 5 characters he could get a message saying "input too long, maximum length allowed 7 characters" and there he is lost.
see http://www.fngtps.com/2006/01/encoding-in-rails for more.
Maybe Steve is just bored with Apple and considers turning to another line of business. Like hmmm Disney CEO ?
I believe it has to do with the recent trademarking of linux, see the linuxmark institute
Fear not for you are not alone. I too am a windows user, and without any other justification than lazyness !! my computer came with XP on it and I could never be bothered to install linux. But I couldn't resist the pique :) Now I will wait until a few generations of Intel macs are out then i'll get myself one of these mac book. That way, my lazyness will not make me a typing target on /. :)
(please try to see it as funny, my sense of humour is desperate for understanding
Do you have a precise exemple for this ? I have been using eclipse for quite some time now and wasn't particularly bothered by the UI. I really am curious for one or more exemples of what you state.
From what I read on the net, the code base used was that of windows 2003 server.
LSB == Linux standards base :
http://www.linuxbase.org/
Can anyone think of an exception (where Google has 'acquired' 3rd party tech)?
You mean, like Blogger ?
And Google is throwing its weight behin atom (at least in gmail) so who knows ?
from http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ :
Academic Free License
Adaptive Public License
Apache Software License
Apache License, 2.0
Apple Public Source License
Artistic license
Attribution Assurance Licenses
New BSD license
Computer Associates Trusted Open Source License 1.1
Common Development and Distribution License
Common Public License 1.0
CUA Office Public License Version 1.0
EU DataGrid Software License
Eclipse Public License
Educational Community License
Eiffel Forum License
Eiffel Forum License V2.0
Entessa Public License
Fair License
Frameworx License
GNU General Public License (GPL)
GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)
Lucent Public License (Plan9)
Lucent Public License Version 1.02
IBM Public License
Intel Open Source License
Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer
Jabber Open Source License
MIT license
MITRE Collaborative Virtual Workspace License (CVW License)
Motosoto License
Mozilla Public License 1.0 (MPL)
Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL)
NASA Open Source Agreement 1.3
Naumen Public License
Nethack General Public License
Nokia Open Source License
OCLC Research Public License 2.0
Open Group Test Suite License
Open Software License
PHP License
Python license (CNRI Python License)
Python Software Foundation License
Qt Public License (QPL)
RealNetworks Public Source License V1.0
Reciprocal Public License
Ricoh Source Code Public License
Sleepycat License
Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL)
Sun Public License
Sybase Open Watcom Public License 1.0
University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License
Vovida Software License v. 1.0
W3C License
wxWindows Library License
X.Net License
Zope Public License
zlib/libpng license
Wouldn't the Ph.Ded cat be called Catbert by any chance ?
Other comments like this, point that it won't support ogg.
..) The dimension ain't the same though (of course)
If you want a player that supports ogg you can always try the neuros II ( http://www.neurosaudio.com/ )
It is not a mini-ipod 'killer' but it does seem to have a few good sides (including the 'same price for 20Gb' side