Yeah, but what I'd like is some FOSS software that just uses an S3 backend, and the only bill I get is from Amazon.
I'm doing backups to S3, but I had to script it all myself. Sure, there are backup companies that happen to use S3, but they have very different pricing models (often flat rate, which doesn't make sense to me unless they can some how de-duplciate, but if they can do that how are they really encrypting it?).
We're really lacking in FOSS cloud-based solutions in general. Sure, there are frameworks and such, but few applications. Why can't I run my own gmail, or have a sync solution for chromium that doesn't involve Google?
How much of the cost of the Webb was actually construction? I never understood all the hubble repair missions and such - just build a few more of them and launch them.
I suspect that 90% of the cost is in the design/etc. Sure, the mirror has to cost a pretty penny, but after you have the rigs all designed to grind it out, why not just start them on a second mirror the day after the first is removed? If something goes wrong with the first telescope you have a spare, and if not, well, then you get to do twice as many experiments.
Well, it probably is 30% of the cost, but not 30% of what other insurers would pay.
The only people who pay full retail are those who are insured and how don't bother to ask for a deal. Those who ask for a deal probably pay 50% of cost and think they're getting a good deal. The insurance companies pay about 20% of retail (with the patient paying 2% of retail).
Pricing in healthcare is one big scam. Among other reforms one of the first things I'd do is require advertising of prices, and everybody pays the same.
Nope. Things like robots that build cars, or medical equipment, or any number of devices that do work in the real world and are controlled by computers. If you drop huge amounts of money on such equipment, you're not going to want to throw it away and buy a new one just because the controller OS is obsolete.
Enterprises have these kinds of issues all the time. The nature of the capital investment of course varies, but whether it is a big clunky ERP system, an airline scheduling system, or some big machine, the bottom line is that people write code that isn't portable and the easiest solution for a company is to just stick with an OS vendor that will support them for a decade or two.
A few things here - your math is off as others have pointed out.
However, all the Amazon offerings are basically more expensive than doing it yourself, if you can utilize your own capacity 100%.
However, consider carefully even your own example. First you need to own an LTO drive, and a bunch of tapes. Those tapes aren't cheap, and if you only have a few GB of data to store then 99% of that tape is wasted. Then as you point out that warehouse has a minimum bill.
Then consider administrative overhead. You need to identify what to archive, and how to submit it and such, and how to label it for retrieval. You have to pay somebody to box up all the tapes and mail them and all that.
With Amazon you can use their API in your app and just send whatever data whenever you want to send it, and they don't charge for data transfer in. You can even submit data in bulk via hard drive (though this gets pricey).
Also, if one month you generate 300TB of data you don't need to buy a bunch of extra LTO drives that will sit idle - you can just do a one time transfer.
The Amazon services in general aren't cheaper than doing it yourself if all you factor in is hardware costs. When you consider management/etc, and flexibility to scale, then they become more attractive.
No one. But your Acer is not a platform, it's just another PC. However if you're interested in market share you must take OSX into account, and by extension the best selling laptop in the US - Mac. Same with MP3 players. And phones. And tablets.
OSX runs on 7.5% of the desktop market. Since that 7.5% all comes from a single vendor sure it sells a lot compared to the 50 bazillion Windows laptop vendors. However, the fact is that the OSX platform doesn't run on all that many laptops - it doesn't even run on as many laptops as iOS runs on tablets and smartphones, and tablets and smartphones are still a much smaller market than PCs.
Nobody is disputing that Apple products are popular. However, they have minority market share on every platform except for the mp3 player (where nobody else even makes a standard OS), and the tablet (which is looking like the smartphone market a few years ago - Apple is ahead but that could change). I doubt anything will replace the iPod anytime soon, as nobody else is bothering to try to make an mp3 player operating system unless you count Rockbox, and that doesn't come preinstalled on anything.
I didn't say the $1M machine RUNS Windows or OSX - I said that they RELIED on it.
Typically the $1M machine gets hooked up to a $500 PC that runs the OS in question. However, the $1M machine uses a proprietary interface and software, so it will only work on the OS the vendor supplies the software for.
It is rare for those $1M machines to have controllers running a server OS - typically they're running a desktop OS. The machines themselves are likely running an embedded OS internally, not that you'd know it since they generally just have an ethernet or IEEE-488 port on them.
I'm pretty sure I've read that the T-Mobile 4G network is compatible with the iPhone 4S. I do know for sure that their 3G network is not compatible with AT&T - that's been the case for years now. So, if the 4S doesn't work with 4G on T-Mobile it would be strictly edge.
I can't vouch for whether T-Mobile's 3G or 4G coverage is larger - and your comment contains a typo so I'm not sure what you think on this matter either.
I'm more interested in the market share of an operating system than the market share of some particular model of computer. Who cares how many Acer model T5X laptops sold last year? Nobody writes applications for the T5X laptop.
Sure, some elements of Android existed in iOS first, but there are a number of applications and functions that started first on Android. Sure, Apple was the first to stick a huge capacitive touch-screen on a phone, and most of the rest stems from that...
Sure, but the bottom line is that we need to increase tax revenue. Sure, if the economy grows that makes it easy. However, simply cutting taxes isn't going to result in that unless you're on the right side of the Laffer curve, which hasn't really happened for decades.
Ditch Legacy. Seriously, that shit from over a decade ago is holding you back. You can develop an emulator much like WINE for Linux for people who want to run older programs, but redesign and reprogram Windows without the absolute mountain of Legacy bloat.
Agreed! I would expand that to:
1) Ditch Legacy. Emulate if you have to. Apple did it, you can too.
And that is why few use Apple in the enterprise. Oh, you have executives playing with their iPads and such, but few use Apple products to actually do boring stuff like real work. Why would you buy a $1M machine that relies on OSX when Apple doesn't promise not to render it obsolete in 5 years after a few updates? This is why anybody making expensive equipment sells it with controllers that run OSes that have a history of 10+ years of support.
At work I think we still have a few PCs running WinNT because even MS's legendary legacy support isn't always good enough. Not everybody uses a computer only to create Office documents and email.
Yup, I find Windows 7 actually fairly usable, much more so than XP. Pinning just makes sense for a lot of applications, and I can hit start and type and get a short list of applications. On XP I ran Launchy to get something similar. The Win7 implementation is as useful as Alt-F2 on KDE (or its equivalent on most window managers).
After all the talk I went ahead and tried the Win8 preview - wow, what a train wreck...
The parent offered one solution right off the bat: economic growth. Guess you missed that.
Uh, how exactly does economic growth solve the financial problems of the poor? Who is going to hire them? If they had any chance of getting a job they probably wouldn't be poor in the first place. If people are buying more widgets there is no chance that they'll be made in the USA.
Agree, but building a super-expensive scientific widget and then not coming up with the $1M/yr or whatever it takes to keep it working is just dumb.
If you can't afford a car don't own a car. What you don't do is spend $50k on a luxury car and then refuse to change its oil.
If we were talking about not building new facilities I could completely understand the decision, but choosing not to run non-obsolete facilities just to save a few bucks is penny wise and pound foolish.
Yup, the outright denial of having worn the watch following by the admission that he did wear it is just the icing on the cake. I mean, it isn't like lying is a sin or anything...
I've got nothing against the clergy living in conditions better than those in monasteries, but it is a bit hard to embrace a call to "take up your cross" when apparently his cross costs $30k.
I think the fundamental issue is that any kind of government that relies on leaders to conscientiously look out for the public interest is doomed to failure. So, communism will never be implemented in practice. Capitalism is only marginally better - it counts on selfishness, but makes little provision for taking care of those who cannot compete economically, which is increasingly trending towards just about everybody.
Nope - it uses dots on the paper to accurately measure pen movement. Plus it is needed so that you can tap a piece of writing and have the pen playback what was written - the pen wouldn't know what was written where if the paper didn't have some kind of reference built in.
You can print your own with a 600dpi printer. People seem to complain but I suspect that if you actually pay for your toner and paper the bound notebooks are going to be cheaper - you can get a 3-subject for around $4 or so, which is only a buck or two more than anything you'd find at Walmart.
I don't find them to be too expensive. If you're going to pay $2000 to take a single class, spending $2 more for the notebook probably isn't that big of a deal.
The US health system is fucked because there is a maze of overlapping schemes and policy fine print, each one with its own army of accounts who are paid to work out how NOT to pay your claim.
Not true of all health plans - certainly true of virtually all health insurers. Every insurer has plans that they will honor, and ones they will not. You can't tell which are which, but your employer knows - if they spend lots of money they get plans that will cover things, and if they don't they get a plan that looks identical on paper which they can advertise to job recruits, but which doesn't.
I think one of the biggest reforms we could have for health insurance is to get employers out of it. If cars only sold for $100k except to employers, who paid $20k and then sold them to employees as a benefit for $5k then people would be crying for automobile reform because they'd all be rusting out at 30k miles and would only have AM radios. There would no doubt be all manner of studies that show that AM is just as good as the alternatives.
In order to have any kind of market consumers need free choice, and they need to have meaningful information. If you can't legislate those, then you might as well forget having a market, because anything else is just window dressing.
Yup - generally a problem with any non-public company - stock and associated things don't really have the same kind of value, because those in control can rewrite the rules to suit them. You can always try to sue them, but that is expensive.
Once the company is public those kinds of shenanigans tend to go away. However, it looks like Facebook is using multiple stock classes and such, so we probably need a major scandal or two to get the SEC and Congress to actually do its job. Right now they're still busy trying to pretend that 1929 never happened.
Well, I wouldn't say that Google has failed so much as it hasn't succeeded to the same degree. People use Google+, some exclusively - just not as much as Facebook.
Google's main problem is that Facebook managed to get Aunt Tilly to sign up (something its predecessors never achieved), and that has created a huge network effect. That's the reason AOL is still around. Back when everything was just teenagers then myspace or xynga or whatever could be the latest fad. Now if you want to talk to Aunt Tilly then you need to use Facebook.
The whole platform thing was never the reason Facebook took off. It might be something helping it to stay around, but Aunt Tilly is still mostly the reason for that. I'd love to see Google+ gain an API though, as long as they keep all the app spam outside of my feed.
So, no lawyers will be necessary. Or not for very long, anyway. The legality of this structure has been firmly established for many decades. The bottom line is that shareholders knew all of this when they decided to buy in, so the shareholders have already signed off on the structure.
Maybe. I suspect they'll get away with it for a while, but there are some kinds of financial deals that ordinary investors simply cannot choose to consent to. For example, if I offered you shares in a mutual fund but stated up-front that there would be no prospectus, then that would be illegal, even if you agreed to it. And so on...
I'm not convinced that publicly-traded companies that are so tightly controlled is a good thing. Granted, they're not much worse than the companies that don't have such arrangements.
Yup, I had a relative finally get on the internet, and my much younger cousin gets them set up with an AOL browser and email address. I have NO idea what they were thinking...
I must have seen about a half-dozen fairly small screen smartphones at the local T-Mobile store. They also have some with more of a Blackberry-like form factor (well, at least how Blackberry used to make them). However, it all depends on your definition of small/etc.
Bottom line is that variety is the spice of life, and I'd rather see more than less.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but what I'd like is some FOSS software that just uses an S3 backend, and the only bill I get is from Amazon.
I'm doing backups to S3, but I had to script it all myself. Sure, there are backup companies that happen to use S3, but they have very different pricing models (often flat rate, which doesn't make sense to me unless they can some how de-duplciate, but if they can do that how are they really encrypting it?).
We're really lacking in FOSS cloud-based solutions in general. Sure, there are frameworks and such, but few applications. Why can't I run my own gmail, or have a sync solution for chromium that doesn't involve Google?
How much of the cost of the Webb was actually construction? I never understood all the hubble repair missions and such - just build a few more of them and launch them.
I suspect that 90% of the cost is in the design/etc. Sure, the mirror has to cost a pretty penny, but after you have the rigs all designed to grind it out, why not just start them on a second mirror the day after the first is removed? If something goes wrong with the first telescope you have a spare, and if not, well, then you get to do twice as many experiments.
Well, it probably is 30% of the cost, but not 30% of what other insurers would pay.
The only people who pay full retail are those who are insured and how don't bother to ask for a deal. Those who ask for a deal probably pay 50% of cost and think they're getting a good deal. The insurance companies pay about 20% of retail (with the patient paying 2% of retail).
Pricing in healthcare is one big scam. Among other reforms one of the first things I'd do is require advertising of prices, and everybody pays the same.
Nope. Things like robots that build cars, or medical equipment, or any number of devices that do work in the real world and are controlled by computers. If you drop huge amounts of money on such equipment, you're not going to want to throw it away and buy a new one just because the controller OS is obsolete.
Enterprises have these kinds of issues all the time. The nature of the capital investment of course varies, but whether it is a big clunky ERP system, an airline scheduling system, or some big machine, the bottom line is that people write code that isn't portable and the easiest solution for a company is to just stick with an OS vendor that will support them for a decade or two.
A few things here - your math is off as others have pointed out.
However, all the Amazon offerings are basically more expensive than doing it yourself, if you can utilize your own capacity 100%.
However, consider carefully even your own example. First you need to own an LTO drive, and a bunch of tapes. Those tapes aren't cheap, and if you only have a few GB of data to store then 99% of that tape is wasted. Then as you point out that warehouse has a minimum bill.
Then consider administrative overhead. You need to identify what to archive, and how to submit it and such, and how to label it for retrieval. You have to pay somebody to box up all the tapes and mail them and all that.
With Amazon you can use their API in your app and just send whatever data whenever you want to send it, and they don't charge for data transfer in. You can even submit data in bulk via hard drive (though this gets pricey).
Also, if one month you generate 300TB of data you don't need to buy a bunch of extra LTO drives that will sit idle - you can just do a one time transfer.
The Amazon services in general aren't cheaper than doing it yourself if all you factor in is hardware costs. When you consider management/etc, and flexibility to scale, then they become more attractive.
No one. But your Acer is not a platform, it's just another PC. However if you're interested in market share you must take OSX into account, and by extension the best selling laptop in the US - Mac. Same with MP3 players. And phones. And tablets.
OSX runs on 7.5% of the desktop market. Since that 7.5% all comes from a single vendor sure it sells a lot compared to the 50 bazillion Windows laptop vendors. However, the fact is that the OSX platform doesn't run on all that many laptops - it doesn't even run on as many laptops as iOS runs on tablets and smartphones, and tablets and smartphones are still a much smaller market than PCs.
Nobody is disputing that Apple products are popular. However, they have minority market share on every platform except for the mp3 player (where nobody else even makes a standard OS), and the tablet (which is looking like the smartphone market a few years ago - Apple is ahead but that could change). I doubt anything will replace the iPod anytime soon, as nobody else is bothering to try to make an mp3 player operating system unless you count Rockbox, and that doesn't come preinstalled on anything.
I didn't say the $1M machine RUNS Windows or OSX - I said that they RELIED on it.
Typically the $1M machine gets hooked up to a $500 PC that runs the OS in question. However, the $1M machine uses a proprietary interface and software, so it will only work on the OS the vendor supplies the software for.
It is rare for those $1M machines to have controllers running a server OS - typically they're running a desktop OS. The machines themselves are likely running an embedded OS internally, not that you'd know it since they generally just have an ethernet or IEEE-488 port on them.
I'm pretty sure I've read that the T-Mobile 4G network is compatible with the iPhone 4S. I do know for sure that their 3G network is not compatible with AT&T - that's been the case for years now. So, if the 4S doesn't work with 4G on T-Mobile it would be strictly edge.
I can't vouch for whether T-Mobile's 3G or 4G coverage is larger - and your comment contains a typo so I'm not sure what you think on this matter either.
You act like Apple invented the mp3 player...
I'm more interested in the market share of an operating system than the market share of some particular model of computer. Who cares how many Acer model T5X laptops sold last year? Nobody writes applications for the T5X laptop.
Sure, some elements of Android existed in iOS first, but there are a number of applications and functions that started first on Android. Sure, Apple was the first to stick a huge capacitive touch-screen on a phone, and most of the rest stems from that...
Sure, but the bottom line is that we need to increase tax revenue. Sure, if the economy grows that makes it easy. However, simply cutting taxes isn't going to result in that unless you're on the right side of the Laffer curve, which hasn't really happened for decades.
How to fix:
Ditch Legacy. Seriously, that shit from over a decade ago is holding you back. You can develop an emulator much like WINE for Linux for people who want to run older programs, but redesign and reprogram Windows without the absolute mountain of Legacy bloat.
Agreed! I would expand that to:
1) Ditch Legacy. Emulate if you have to. Apple did it, you can too.
And that is why few use Apple in the enterprise. Oh, you have executives playing with their iPads and such, but few use Apple products to actually do boring stuff like real work. Why would you buy a $1M machine that relies on OSX when Apple doesn't promise not to render it obsolete in 5 years after a few updates? This is why anybody making expensive equipment sells it with controllers that run OSes that have a history of 10+ years of support.
At work I think we still have a few PCs running WinNT because even MS's legendary legacy support isn't always good enough. Not everybody uses a computer only to create Office documents and email.
Yup, I find Windows 7 actually fairly usable, much more so than XP. Pinning just makes sense for a lot of applications, and I can hit start and type and get a short list of applications. On XP I ran Launchy to get something similar. The Win7 implementation is as useful as Alt-F2 on KDE (or its equivalent on most window managers).
After all the talk I went ahead and tried the Win8 preview - wow, what a train wreck...
The parent offered one solution right off the bat: economic growth. Guess you missed that.
Uh, how exactly does economic growth solve the financial problems of the poor? Who is going to hire them? If they had any chance of getting a job they probably wouldn't be poor in the first place. If people are buying more widgets there is no chance that they'll be made in the USA.
Agree, but building a super-expensive scientific widget and then not coming up with the $1M/yr or whatever it takes to keep it working is just dumb.
If you can't afford a car don't own a car. What you don't do is spend $50k on a luxury car and then refuse to change its oil.
If we were talking about not building new facilities I could completely understand the decision, but choosing not to run non-obsolete facilities just to save a few bucks is penny wise and pound foolish.
Yup, the outright denial of having worn the watch following by the admission that he did wear it is just the icing on the cake. I mean, it isn't like lying is a sin or anything...
I've got nothing against the clergy living in conditions better than those in monasteries, but it is a bit hard to embrace a call to "take up your cross" when apparently his cross costs $30k.
I think the fundamental issue is that any kind of government that relies on leaders to conscientiously look out for the public interest is doomed to failure. So, communism will never be implemented in practice. Capitalism is only marginally better - it counts on selfishness, but makes little provision for taking care of those who cannot compete economically, which is increasingly trending towards just about everybody.
Nope - it uses dots on the paper to accurately measure pen movement. Plus it is needed so that you can tap a piece of writing and have the pen playback what was written - the pen wouldn't know what was written where if the paper didn't have some kind of reference built in.
You can print your own with a 600dpi printer. People seem to complain but I suspect that if you actually pay for your toner and paper the bound notebooks are going to be cheaper - you can get a 3-subject for around $4 or so, which is only a buck or two more than anything you'd find at Walmart.
It has that built-in - notes are searchable.
I don't find them to be too expensive. If you're going to pay $2000 to take a single class, spending $2 more for the notebook probably isn't that big of a deal.
The US health system is fucked because there is a maze of overlapping schemes and policy fine print, each one with its own army of accounts who are paid to work out how NOT to pay your claim.
Not true of all health plans - certainly true of virtually all health insurers. Every insurer has plans that they will honor, and ones they will not. You can't tell which are which, but your employer knows - if they spend lots of money they get plans that will cover things, and if they don't they get a plan that looks identical on paper which they can advertise to job recruits, but which doesn't.
I think one of the biggest reforms we could have for health insurance is to get employers out of it. If cars only sold for $100k except to employers, who paid $20k and then sold them to employees as a benefit for $5k then people would be crying for automobile reform because they'd all be rusting out at 30k miles and would only have AM radios. There would no doubt be all manner of studies that show that AM is just as good as the alternatives.
In order to have any kind of market consumers need free choice, and they need to have meaningful information. If you can't legislate those, then you might as well forget having a market, because anything else is just window dressing.
Yup - generally a problem with any non-public company - stock and associated things don't really have the same kind of value, because those in control can rewrite the rules to suit them. You can always try to sue them, but that is expensive.
Once the company is public those kinds of shenanigans tend to go away. However, it looks like Facebook is using multiple stock classes and such, so we probably need a major scandal or two to get the SEC and Congress to actually do its job. Right now they're still busy trying to pretend that 1929 never happened.
Well, I wouldn't say that Google has failed so much as it hasn't succeeded to the same degree. People use Google+, some exclusively - just not as much as Facebook.
Google's main problem is that Facebook managed to get Aunt Tilly to sign up (something its predecessors never achieved), and that has created a huge network effect. That's the reason AOL is still around. Back when everything was just teenagers then myspace or xynga or whatever could be the latest fad. Now if you want to talk to Aunt Tilly then you need to use Facebook.
The whole platform thing was never the reason Facebook took off. It might be something helping it to stay around, but Aunt Tilly is still mostly the reason for that. I'd love to see Google+ gain an API though, as long as they keep all the app spam outside of my feed.
So, no lawyers will be necessary. Or not for very long, anyway. The legality of this structure has been firmly established for many decades. The bottom line is that shareholders knew all of this when they decided to buy in, so the shareholders have already signed off on the structure.
Maybe. I suspect they'll get away with it for a while, but there are some kinds of financial deals that ordinary investors simply cannot choose to consent to. For example, if I offered you shares in a mutual fund but stated up-front that there would be no prospectus, then that would be illegal, even if you agreed to it. And so on...
I'm not convinced that publicly-traded companies that are so tightly controlled is a good thing. Granted, they're not much worse than the companies that don't have such arrangements.
Yup, I had a relative finally get on the internet, and my much younger cousin gets them set up with an AOL browser and email address. I have NO idea what they were thinking...
I must have seen about a half-dozen fairly small screen smartphones at the local T-Mobile store. They also have some with more of a Blackberry-like form factor (well, at least how Blackberry used to make them). However, it all depends on your definition of small/etc.
Bottom line is that variety is the spice of life, and I'd rather see more than less.