No, I expected the telecom company to simply start treating the data fairly. And several of the mobile companies did just that.
It provides an incentive to the mobile companies to raise their caps. They want people to subscribe to their mobile television services, but at the same time, they don't want their customers to say "I don't want that, I would pay too much for the data". It may have no impact, but at least all services are on an equal playing field.
In terms of net neutrality, the CRTC did a heck of a lot more than commission a study, they put their ITMP framework into effect. It's essentially regulation requiring net neutrality be preserved. It's been enforced in the past (when the country's largest cable company was throttling some online games) and has issues currently under review (for a case where mobile phone companies were not counting their own video streaming apps against transfer caps, but were counting apps like Netflix).
It wasn't complicated or simple. We didn't have network neutrality. Then they put some straightforward regulation into effect, and then we did have network neutrality, and a framework for what consumers can do when they need to report a violation.
It's worth noting that the CRTC review of both of the net neutrality violations that I mentioned above were instigated by regular consumers filing a complaint, without any lawyers getting involved (on the consumer side). In the first case, the CRTC ruled against the cableco, and in the second case it's still in progress.
I also object to getting bombarded with annoying and often intrusive ad banners begging for money for extended periods of time when a site with the traffic of Wikipedia could probably get as much money with real ad banners in an order of magnitude less time.
I'd wager they'd get more money with one day a year of real ads than they do with their current weeks of begging.
Just because people can't write in fancy cursive script doesn't mean they can't write normally. If you don't teach kids that useless skill, then it won't suddenly mean that they can't jot things down in normal writing when they need to.
The question is, will we get to a point where it won't matter? There will be a point where solid state drives will be cheap enough that you'll be able to get enough storage at a low enough price that people generally won't care. For example, if $50 got you a 500GB SSD or a 2TB hard disk, how many people would pick the hard disk? Even then, those who want more storage might just pony up the extra cash.
Supplementary storage will be the last to go, so perhaps your timeline is more accurate there, but I think we'll see hard disks almost completely disappear from new computers long before then. It's already starting to happen: many notebooks use SSDs now, from the really cheap Chromebooks to the really expensive retina macbooks.
6TB for $300 is $50 per terabyte, while current pricing is around $400 per terabyte. That's a factor of 8, not 16. I based my math on 18 month doubling, but that's for performance rather than density, so I was admittedly off. Still, that should take you to roughly 3 * 24 = 6 years, not far off my original figures.
In terms of the applicability of Moore's Law to SSD pricing, prices for SSDs have been dropping far faster than Moore's law since the first practical SSDs hit the market. My first consumer SSD was purchased in 2009 at $8750 per TB. Prices today are at about $400 per TB. That's a factor of 22 price drop in roughly five years.
Sandforce controllers also do encryption, and certain controllers with certain operating systems can leverage this to integrate the controller-level encryption with the OS-level encryption, at which point the drive compression is done on the raw data before encryption happens.
Those percentages are out of date. The percentages from the latest update are:
Silverlight (11 percent of Chrome users, down from 15 percent) Google Talk (7 percent of Chrome users, down from 8.7 percent) Java (3.7 percent of Chrome users, down from 8.9 percent) Facebook Video (3 percent of Chrome users, down from 6 percent) Unity (1.9 percent of Chrome users, down from 9.1 percent) Google Earth (0.1 percent of Chrome users, down from 9.1 percent).
It's not achievable in the near future, because the speed at which the batteries can absorb energy isn't the sole limiting factor. Charging an 85 kWh battery pack in 5 minutes requires a charging cable/port that is dumping slightly more than a megawatt into the car, which isn't practical. The limitations are things like the cable, the connector, the power grid, etc.
A far more likely scenario is that charging will get a little bit faster, and battery swaps will be used when more speed is required.
Yet another development stack? Some of us have been using it for more than a decade. When.NET was released, most of today's popular Linux distros (Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, CentOS, Arch, OpenSUSE, or any of the popular mobile Linux distros like Android or ChromeOS) didn't even exist. I realize that many of those distros are forks of previous distros, but the point is that.NET isn't exactly the new kid on the block.
The C# version is using Linq. Which, as a C# developer, I've never really been able to wrap my head around. Now, that might be due to lack of trying, in that I've never really been forced to deal with Linq in a manner where I couldn't just work around it, and I've never put any serious effort into training on it, but an awful lot of it seems to be of the non-obvious-way-to-do-things variety. The entire X => X.Something syntax seems confusing and illogical to me. Where does the type of X come from? Where are the properties coming from? What's with the X => bit? If "IsCar" is a property of the members of the myVehicles array, why can't I do something like "myVehicles.where(IsCar).select(LegRoom).sort().foreach(display)?
Perhaps my aversion to Linq is because my exposure to it has been having very complex use of it randomly thrown at me in large projects without having learned it first, and then having to make changes in that Linq code without having been given the time to properly understand it in the first place.
Microsoft is opensourcing the vast majority of the.NET framework, but if they're focusing on the server-side stuff, there may be some client-side bits that aren't, such as Windows.Forms. So Mono might not so much go away as it could end up just focusing on the bits that Microsoft hasn't opensourced.
They're opensourcing the entire server stack... which happens to contain nearly the entirety of the client-side stack. You'll miss Windows.Forms and WPF, sure, but Windows.Forms already has opensource implementations courtesy of Mono (which I would imagine should run on Microsoft's implementation of.NET), and WPF never really took off, leaving Windows.Forms still more popular. The reason that Mono never implemented WPF was apparently due to lack of interest and resources... Well, Microsoft may have just removed the necessity for Mono to do work on anything *but* the client-side bits, so those resources may now be available.
That said, I believe that there is far more software out there written using server-side.NET than client-side.
Real gamers often do their gaming on a desktop, and have an Ultrabook for portability. Said gamers might not want or need the bulk of a gaming notebook 99% of the time, but might still appreciate the ability of an Intel iGPU to handle basic game rendering on the rare occasion when they want to keep themselves busy while on the go.
I'm a gamer, and I do all my gaming on a relatively high-end desktop. I've got a Macbook Air, because I only have a desire to fire up a game on my notebook a handful of times a year. But at the same time, I appreciate that I can run Civ V or Civ: BE on said notebook when it's called to do so.
It's not US retailers, generally, who are overcharging Australians. If the retailers also do business in Australia, they might care. But if you buy something from a company with no presence in Australia who previously wouldn't ship there themselves, then it'll be fine.
Browsers weren't running javascript at two third the speed of native code in the 90s, nor were they fast enough to run ports of recent games that are virtually indistinguishable from their native brethren. It stopped being an hypothesis when it started actually happening in the wild.
People make a big deal about replaceable batteries, but how often do users actually replace the battery in modern devices? Sure, I managed to wear out the battery in my Dell laptop after three or four years of heavy use, but by then it was time to replace the notebook for other reasons anyhow. The quality of lithium ion batteries has also improved since then, such that they don't wear out as fast.
I can't seem to recall having ever replaced the battery in a mobile device, so when my mobile devices started having non-replacable batteries, it didn't make any difference. The idea of keeping spare fully charged batteries around is also a non-starter, as it's far more convenient (and flexible) to use an external battery pack that can be recharged independently and used with multiple devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Which one? 0118999881999119725...3?
No, I expected the telecom company to simply start treating the data fairly. And several of the mobile companies did just that.
It provides an incentive to the mobile companies to raise their caps. They want people to subscribe to their mobile television services, but at the same time, they don't want their customers to say "I don't want that, I would pay too much for the data". It may have no impact, but at least all services are on an equal playing field.
In terms of net neutrality, the CRTC did a heck of a lot more than commission a study, they put their ITMP framework into effect. It's essentially regulation requiring net neutrality be preserved. It's been enforced in the past (when the country's largest cable company was throttling some online games) and has issues currently under review (for a case where mobile phone companies were not counting their own video streaming apps against transfer caps, but were counting apps like Netflix).
It wasn't complicated or simple. We didn't have network neutrality. Then they put some straightforward regulation into effect, and then we did have network neutrality, and a framework for what consumers can do when they need to report a violation.
It's worth noting that the CRTC review of both of the net neutrality violations that I mentioned above were instigated by regular consumers filing a complaint, without any lawyers getting involved (on the consumer side). In the first case, the CRTC ruled against the cableco, and in the second case it's still in progress.
RTFA (second link): they've tried it, and couldn't get a strong enough signal from Hawking.
Indeed. And, I believe, the overwhelming majority of people's opinions.
Unobtrusive ads are more principled than intrusive "GIVE US MONEY!" adverts.
I also object to getting bombarded with annoying and often intrusive ad banners begging for money for extended periods of time when a site with the traffic of Wikipedia could probably get as much money with real ad banners in an order of magnitude less time.
I'd wager they'd get more money with one day a year of real ads than they do with their current weeks of begging.
Just because people can't write in fancy cursive script doesn't mean they can't write normally. If you don't teach kids that useless skill, then it won't suddenly mean that they can't jot things down in normal writing when they need to.
Then how about ZFS? No GPL virus there, while simultaneously being much farther along than btrfs and having a good kernel-level Linux port.
The question is, will we get to a point where it won't matter? There will be a point where solid state drives will be cheap enough that you'll be able to get enough storage at a low enough price that people generally won't care. For example, if $50 got you a 500GB SSD or a 2TB hard disk, how many people would pick the hard disk? Even then, those who want more storage might just pony up the extra cash.
Supplementary storage will be the last to go, so perhaps your timeline is more accurate there, but I think we'll see hard disks almost completely disappear from new computers long before then. It's already starting to happen: many notebooks use SSDs now, from the really cheap Chromebooks to the really expensive retina macbooks.
6TB for $300 is $50 per terabyte, while current pricing is around $400 per terabyte. That's a factor of 8, not 16. I based my math on 18 month doubling, but that's for performance rather than density, so I was admittedly off. Still, that should take you to roughly 3 * 24 = 6 years, not far off my original figures.
In terms of the applicability of Moore's Law to SSD pricing, prices for SSDs have been dropping far faster than Moore's law since the first practical SSDs hit the market. My first consumer SSD was purchased in 2009 at $8750 per TB. Prices today are at about $400 per TB. That's a factor of 22 price drop in roughly five years.
Sandforce controllers also do encryption, and certain controllers with certain operating systems can leverage this to integrate the controller-level encryption with the OS-level encryption, at which point the drive compression is done on the raw data before encryption happens.
The price per GB on SSDs has been below $0.50 for some time now.
SSDs will likely get there in 3-5 years by Moore's law. The question is where hard drives will be by then.
Those percentages are out of date. The percentages from the latest update are:
Silverlight (11 percent of Chrome users, down from 15 percent)
Google Talk (7 percent of Chrome users, down from 8.7 percent)
Java (3.7 percent of Chrome users, down from 8.9 percent)
Facebook Video (3 percent of Chrome users, down from 6 percent)
Unity (1.9 percent of Chrome users, down from 9.1 percent)
Google Earth (0.1 percent of Chrome users, down from 9.1 percent).
It's not achievable in the near future, because the speed at which the batteries can absorb energy isn't the sole limiting factor. Charging an 85 kWh battery pack in 5 minutes requires a charging cable/port that is dumping slightly more than a megawatt into the car, which isn't practical. The limitations are things like the cable, the connector, the power grid, etc.
A far more likely scenario is that charging will get a little bit faster, and battery swaps will be used when more speed is required.
There's enough in that comment that is verifiable bullshit that it makes me question the parts of it that don't seem ridiculous at first glance.
Yet another development stack? Some of us have been using it for more than a decade. When .NET was released, most of today's popular Linux distros (Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, CentOS, Arch, OpenSUSE, or any of the popular mobile Linux distros like Android or ChromeOS) didn't even exist. I realize that many of those distros are forks of previous distros, but the point is that .NET isn't exactly the new kid on the block.
The C# version is using Linq. Which, as a C# developer, I've never really been able to wrap my head around. Now, that might be due to lack of trying, in that I've never really been forced to deal with Linq in a manner where I couldn't just work around it, and I've never put any serious effort into training on it, but an awful lot of it seems to be of the non-obvious-way-to-do-things variety. The entire X => X.Something syntax seems confusing and illogical to me. Where does the type of X come from? Where are the properties coming from? What's with the X => bit? If "IsCar" is a property of the members of the myVehicles array, why can't I do something like "myVehicles.where(IsCar).select(LegRoom).sort().foreach(display)?
Perhaps my aversion to Linq is because my exposure to it has been having very complex use of it randomly thrown at me in large projects without having learned it first, and then having to make changes in that Linq code without having been given the time to properly understand it in the first place.
Microsoft is opensourcing the vast majority of the .NET framework, but if they're focusing on the server-side stuff, there may be some client-side bits that aren't, such as Windows.Forms. So Mono might not so much go away as it could end up just focusing on the bits that Microsoft hasn't opensourced.
They're opensourcing the entire server stack... which happens to contain nearly the entirety of the client-side stack. You'll miss Windows.Forms and WPF, sure, but Windows.Forms already has opensource implementations courtesy of Mono (which I would imagine should run on Microsoft's implementation of .NET), and WPF never really took off, leaving Windows.Forms still more popular. The reason that Mono never implemented WPF was apparently due to lack of interest and resources... Well, Microsoft may have just removed the necessity for Mono to do work on anything *but* the client-side bits, so those resources may now be available.
That said, I believe that there is far more software out there written using server-side .NET than client-side.
Real gamers often do their gaming on a desktop, and have an Ultrabook for portability. Said gamers might not want or need the bulk of a gaming notebook 99% of the time, but might still appreciate the ability of an Intel iGPU to handle basic game rendering on the rare occasion when they want to keep themselves busy while on the go.
I'm a gamer, and I do all my gaming on a relatively high-end desktop. I've got a Macbook Air, because I only have a desire to fire up a game on my notebook a handful of times a year. But at the same time, I appreciate that I can run Civ V or Civ: BE on said notebook when it's called to do so.
It's not US retailers, generally, who are overcharging Australians. If the retailers also do business in Australia, they might care. But if you buy something from a company with no presence in Australia who previously wouldn't ship there themselves, then it'll be fine.
Browsers weren't running javascript at two third the speed of native code in the 90s, nor were they fast enough to run ports of recent games that are virtually indistinguishable from their native brethren. It stopped being an hypothesis when it started actually happening in the wild.
People make a big deal about replaceable batteries, but how often do users actually replace the battery in modern devices? Sure, I managed to wear out the battery in my Dell laptop after three or four years of heavy use, but by then it was time to replace the notebook for other reasons anyhow. The quality of lithium ion batteries has also improved since then, such that they don't wear out as fast.
I can't seem to recall having ever replaced the battery in a mobile device, so when my mobile devices started having non-replacable batteries, it didn't make any difference. The idea of keeping spare fully charged batteries around is also a non-starter, as it's far more convenient (and flexible) to use an external battery pack that can be recharged independently and used with multiple devices.