I mean, the gun doesn't detect if you are a psycho. It just says, yes, you are the psycho who purchased this gun. Go ahead and fire. I guess we can sleep safe at night that criminals will now be able to purchase guns that can't be used against them.
Notice that you get a 33% increase going from 8x to 12x, but only 8% going from 48x to 52x. Because speed and time are inversely related, you get a hyperbolic function that gives you diminishing returns on your time savings with each speed increment. You save 40 minutes going from 1x to 2x, but 1:40 going from 24x to 48x. Drives are marketed by speed, but the real benefit to the user is time.
I saw Richard Stallman at the Great Debates at Comdex a few weeks ago. I sympathized with him, but he came off as a whiny, somewhat out-of-touch wierdo. He actually called Jonathan Potter a "troll" in the midst of the discussion. That really isn't the stuff of meaningful debate on important public policy issues.
What made me sad was that he was right about most of what he was saying (though I don't know if Jonathan Potter really is a troll or not). Luckily, most of the time, John Perry Barlow managed to communicate the same things that RMS was trying to say, but in a more reasonable style, that actually were very effective in countering the IP hogs on the panel.
RMS is a man with high ideals and a strong sense of right and wrong. That I commend. However, in this world, it isn't enough to be right. Most of us live in a grey world and have enough self-interest to demand that someone please us with their message before we accept it as right. I am not saying that RMS should compromise, but good politicians (i.e., good people who are political, if such a thing exists) are able to convince people of the rightness of their message without distorting it.
The Samaritans were a sort of Jewish half-breed in the ancient middle east. Samaritans were often looked down upon by Jews as second-class types. So to them, the term "Samaritan" would have already had a negative connotation, with no qualifier such as "Bad." In the biblical story, Jesus' point was that the two upstanding Jews passed by the wounded man but the Samaritan aided him, so the Samaritan was the good one and the other two were not, though common perception was the other way around.
I guess that saying "Good Samaritan" is actually a bit of a disservice, since it could suggest that Samaritans are normally otherwise -- which was the prejudice that Jesus pointing out as false.
Re:What desktop users want to know..
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
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· Score: 1
I am a DBA. The ideal case for a SQL server is to be able to load then entire database into memory (or most of it, anyway). Unless you think that no databases exist over 4GB...
Re:What desktop users want to know..
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
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· Score: 1
The current versions of windows only run on 32-bit processors anyway. MS is releasing 64-bit versions of 2000 server sometime soon, which will be able to address memory in the TB range.
Also, you can actually run up to 8GB of RAM in Windows 2000 Advanced server.
Re:What desktop users want to know..
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
For almost anyone out there, it's the only factor when buying a CPU: speed! Adressing >4Gb of memory is not that worries me first:)
For desktops, you are right. However, a huge part of the 64-bit market is in servers, and the possibility of >4GB memory is a Big Thing. My SQL Servers will eat that much for breakfast.
Of course, as open as they were about the whole incident, the hospital did not disclose whether any patients were affected or even died due to the breakdown (nurses having wrong information, staffing problems caused critical situations to wait too long, etc.).
A lot of people here have said "build a 2nd network," to which some have basically said, "that's stupid, make your first network run right." I think that if we're talking about life and death of patients, a second network would be a good idea. It's like the high factors of safety built into things like, say, an elevator -- a failure can cause death, so you overbuild it. Remember that you don't have to make everything redundant, just those crital parts of the system. Maybe all the administrators can only use the primary network, but the blood testing labs and nurses' stations and such can use either primary or secondary. Cutting off non-critical traffic during an outage also helps keep the whole system more stable.
Oh yeah, I sure fantasized about living in a hobbit-hole. I also dreamed of living inside a haunted dwarf mountain-hall, spending my days at the top of a thousand-foot black tower, and sleeping outdoors in the middle of a spooky enchanted wood.
Then I put the air conditioner on, got some ice cream out of the freezer, plopped down on the couch and watched my favorite DVD. It's hell living in reality.
If they want to block people who are blocking ads, fine. Just come out and say that you want people to see the ads. Don't call me a thief. Don't say I'm leeching. I'd have a lot more respect for these guys if they would just admit they are trying to force people to watch ads and leave it at that, rather than accusing me of being a criminal.
When sites put banners and say, please click on these links because it helps us fund the site, I usually do. Why? Because it shows respect, it's honest, and it doesn't treat me like a "leech" that needs to have measures taken against me.
The article seemed to say that AMD is moving to get into markets other than desktop processors. That doesn't mean that they are exiting the desktop market.
I share some of the concern regarding the effect on competition with Intel, because there's only so much R&D money to go around in any company. However, let's say that they slow down trying to compete with intel over the very fastest chip on the market. People buy AMD because you get more chip for the money/the same performance at a lower price. If they invest enough to keep themselves just a step behind intel in their fastest chip, but still delivering better value, they might be able to sustain similar profits with substantially lower R&D and other costs. This would still keep the pressure on intel.
It could be of so much benefit to everyone in helping stop attacks (and make them not worth attempting, at least in their current form). But he's a researcher for HP, so I am guessing he will. Oh well.
I just got an image of him presenting his paper, and pointing to each audience member, "patent pending, patent pending, patent pending" ala Homer Simpson.
You're right, in that it is possible to make a system work there. However, pull back a bit and look at it. The system is now more complex, there's more risk, and requires more effort to run just to handle the free situation. Is it worth it? Are there other things to put resources into that will be more profitable?
In this example, I think the free dry becomes so laden with rules, and so much trouble to adminster that it still may not attract any good customers, and possibly drive some away. And if it does work, what kind of return on the additional costs do you get? Instead of fooling around with free dry, what if you put in a big screen and played DVDs while people were doing their laundry? That might prove a hell of lot more profitable.
One way to sum up a large part of the dot-com bust is to say "you can't make money giving away your main product." Now, there are exceptions (television programming comes to mind), but I would still argue that the rule is generally true. We're seeing a general drift away from free content and service on the web. They are slowly weaning the public off of free and on to pay-for-service. If they go too fast, they threaten to shock their entire customer base. So they take small, calculated steps in which they realize that they will lose a number of customers. But they are trying to do it in such a way that the people they lose are people who would never pay anyway. And in that case, losing that person is often a benefit because it reduces costs that will never generate revenue.
People have remarked that changing the terms from free to pay will piss off their existing potential customers. While this comparison may not be perfect, it reminds me of a friend who owns a laundromat. Like any consumer retail-type business, you have to be very concerned about the store environment. One of the fads in the business was "free dry." The dryers are free, and you mark up the washers enough to compensate. The free dry is supposed to attract customers -- in retail marketing terms, a loss leader.
However, the catch is that free dry attracts the lowlifes. What happens is that seriously selfish moocher-types come in and split up their wash among 10 dryers at once. Other people get pissed off, some possibly because they wanted to pull the same stunt. Sometimes people even get into fights over this. Now the average guy who just wants to do a wash and dry and go home is thinking, screw this place. And he's the customer that the laundromat wanted all along, but now it's left with the worst customers.
So my friend, said, no way am I putting in free dry. The fact is, the lowlifes drive out the good customers. And businesses are very much concerned about keeping the lowlifes away while catering to the paying customers while staying friendly to the honest-but-not-yet-committed customer. It's a delicate balancing act, and businesses that try to extend themselves to attract customers (e.g., free e-mail) can get abused by the moochers, which can seriously affect costs and threaten the business. So when someone says, "you're going to piss off the people who are getting it for free," the answer will be, "if they were just trying to leech off me, then screw 'em. If they're a good customer, they will be willing to pay a reasonable price."
). It might be feasible to leave houses unlocked in small towns where everyone knows everyone else (social sanctions in shunning property violation offenses) but we have deadbolts, invisible IDs and security guards in cities.
In America, everyone in cities locks their doors and lives in constant fear. I don't think that's necessarily so for the rest of the world. For instance, in Bowling for Columbine, one of segments focused on whether or not people in Windsor, Ontario (a city with a population 500,000 which also happens to be directly across the border from Detroit) lock their doors. It apparently was quite common that residents of Windsor do not.
Re:The cat problem....
on
Science Askew
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· Score: 1
Funny how an as-yet-undetermined-to-be-dead-shot-cat will totally rot and stink and funk up a place though.
Smelling the rotting cat would be considered as observing its state, therefore you have determined its state by smelling it.
I put air fresheners in all my schroedinger's cat-boxes for that reason.
The mechanism works by letting air in to react with a layer of dye. How does the air get in? I would imagine only the outer edge (maybe the inner edge too). So what happens if you seal the outer edge? No air gets in, and the dye doesn't go opaque. I'm sure there is some form of glue or other sealant widely available that can handle this task.
Not a bad idea, but that only works while you are sitting there monitoring your connection. I think a lot of people leave their PC up and sharing all the time (I'll leave it on for days at a time occasionally).
Your comment makes me think that a feature could be added to P2P programs to say "no download for non-uploaders" or "limit bandwidth for non-downloaders to x bps." That would let people who want to discourage freeloaders be able to effectively do that.
I've noticed that the RIAA is leaning away from aggressive action against people downloading music, i.e., people who are engaging in activity that the RIAA generally wants, i.e., consuming music. Their measures are against distribution; going after super-nodes, file sharing programs/services, and copy prevention (keeps you from uploading it, but does nothing to stop downloading once a copy is out there).
Having goofed by declaring war on every kid who downloads a song, we're going to see more of the shift both in tactics and rhetoric to those who distribute. Perhaps they will be demonized as "dealers" or even "pushers" who entice wide-eyed young would-be ConsumerCitizens into filthy pirates.
So how does this work, since many, if not most, downloaders are also uploaders? Shut down uploading, be it via technology (blocking ports, DRM, copy prevention-enabled CDs), legal means (suing super-nodes and people who break technological means), and PR (portraying uploaders as the real villains). Now, you've still got uploading, but it's confined to a subset of people who are really committed to uploading. I base this on the assumption that a lot of people upload because all it takes is a checkbox -- it really doesn't cost me much time, effort, or worry. If you have to start fooling around with ports, worrying about a subpoena showing up, and losing your job for being branded a "pusher", maybe I just uncheck that little box that says "share files".
So now we've separated the hard core from the fringes. This hard core is small enough, evil enough, and important enough that it is worth the cost necessary to stop (shutting down accounts, legal action, hacking their hard drives, etc). And now without the hard core, the fringe will starve. The mistake of the attack on Napster was that there is now no central distributor to strike. It looks like a gradual movement toward coalescing the mass of distributors back to a short list of targets.
Will this strategy work? Some of this may have to do with how much people care about their ability to upload. If my uploading is shut off by my ISP, do I care? Do I raise a fuss, or do I say, oh, well, I can still download. Maybe the RIAA is saying quietly to the ISPs, look, just block the uploads, and nobody will complain about that. And now you don't have to worry about a lawsuit from us anymore. Everybody wins (wink wink).
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I mean, the gun doesn't detect if you are a psycho. It just says, yes, you are the psycho who purchased this gun. Go ahead and fire. I guess we can sleep safe at night that criminals will now be able to purchase guns that can't be used against them.
Let's say you're burning an 80 minute CD. At the theoretical max speed of the burner, here's how it breaks down:
speed time improvement
1 80.00 --
2 40.00 50%
4 20.00 50%
8 10.00 50%
12 6.67 33%
16 5.00 25%
24 3.33 33%
32 2.50 25%
40 2.00 20%
48 1.67 17%
52 1.54 8%
Notice that you get a 33% increase going from 8x to 12x, but only 8% going from 48x to 52x. Because speed and time are inversely related, you get a hyperbolic function that gives you diminishing returns on your time savings with each speed increment. You save 40 minutes going from 1x to 2x, but 1:40 going from 24x to 48x. Drives are marketed by speed, but the real benefit to the user is time.
Or do we need to start the whole discussion again?
Interesting, I never knew that. I'm not surprised, though. Most words from ancient Hebrew have been anglicized.
What made me sad was that he was right about most of what he was saying (though I don't know if Jonathan Potter really is a troll or not). Luckily, most of the time, John Perry Barlow managed to communicate the same things that RMS was trying to say, but in a more reasonable style, that actually were very effective in countering the IP hogs on the panel.
RMS is a man with high ideals and a strong sense of right and wrong. That I commend. However, in this world, it isn't enough to be right. Most of us live in a grey world and have enough self-interest to demand that someone please us with their message before we accept it as right. I am not saying that RMS should compromise, but good politicians (i.e., good people who are political, if such a thing exists) are able to convince people of the rightness of their message without distorting it.
I guess that saying "Good Samaritan" is actually a bit of a disservice, since it could suggest that Samaritans are normally otherwise -- which was the prejudice that Jesus pointing out as false.
I am a DBA. The ideal case for a SQL server is to be able to load then entire database into memory (or most of it, anyway). Unless you think that no databases exist over 4GB...
Also, you can actually run up to 8GB of RAM in Windows 2000 Advanced server.
For desktops, you are right. However, a huge part of the 64-bit market is in servers, and the possibility of >4GB memory is a Big Thing. My SQL Servers will eat that much for breakfast.
A lot of people here have said "build a 2nd network," to which some have basically said, "that's stupid, make your first network run right." I think that if we're talking about life and death of patients, a second network would be a good idea. It's like the high factors of safety built into things like, say, an elevator -- a failure can cause death, so you overbuild it. Remember that you don't have to make everything redundant, just those crital parts of the system. Maybe all the administrators can only use the primary network, but the blood testing labs and nurses' stations and such can use either primary or secondary. Cutting off non-critical traffic during an outage also helps keep the whole system more stable.
Then I put the air conditioner on, got some ice cream out of the freezer, plopped down on the couch and watched my favorite DVD. It's hell living in reality.
When sites put banners and say, please click on these links because it helps us fund the site, I usually do. Why? Because it shows respect, it's honest, and it doesn't treat me like a "leech" that needs to have measures taken against me.
I share some of the concern regarding the effect on competition with Intel, because there's only so much R&D money to go around in any company. However, let's say that they slow down trying to compete with intel over the very fastest chip on the market. People buy AMD because you get more chip for the money/the same performance at a lower price. If they invest enough to keep themselves just a step behind intel in their fastest chip, but still delivering better value, they might be able to sustain similar profits with substantially lower R&D and other costs. This would still keep the pressure on intel.
I just got an image of him presenting his paper, and pointing to each audience member, "patent pending, patent pending, patent pending" ala Homer Simpson.
In this example, I think the free dry becomes so laden with rules, and so much trouble to adminster that it still may not attract any good customers, and possibly drive some away. And if it does work, what kind of return on the additional costs do you get? Instead of fooling around with free dry, what if you put in a big screen and played DVDs while people were doing their laundry? That might prove a hell of lot more profitable.
One way to sum up a large part of the dot-com bust is to say "you can't make money giving away your main product." Now, there are exceptions (television programming comes to mind), but I would still argue that the rule is generally true. We're seeing a general drift away from free content and service on the web. They are slowly weaning the public off of free and on to pay-for-service. If they go too fast, they threaten to shock their entire customer base. So they take small, calculated steps in which they realize that they will lose a number of customers. But they are trying to do it in such a way that the people they lose are people who would never pay anyway. And in that case, losing that person is often a benefit because it reduces costs that will never generate revenue.
However, the catch is that free dry attracts the lowlifes. What happens is that seriously selfish moocher-types come in and split up their wash among 10 dryers at once. Other people get pissed off, some possibly because they wanted to pull the same stunt. Sometimes people even get into fights over this. Now the average guy who just wants to do a wash and dry and go home is thinking, screw this place. And he's the customer that the laundromat wanted all along, but now it's left with the worst customers.
So my friend, said, no way am I putting in free dry. The fact is, the lowlifes drive out the good customers. And businesses are very much concerned about keeping the lowlifes away while catering to the paying customers while staying friendly to the honest-but-not-yet-committed customer. It's a delicate balancing act, and businesses that try to extend themselves to attract customers (e.g., free e-mail) can get abused by the moochers, which can seriously affect costs and threaten the business. So when someone says, "you're going to piss off the people who are getting it for free," the answer will be, "if they were just trying to leech off me, then screw 'em. If they're a good customer, they will be willing to pay a reasonable price."
In America, everyone in cities locks their doors and lives in constant fear. I don't think that's necessarily so for the rest of the world. For instance, in Bowling for Columbine, one of segments focused on whether or not people in Windsor, Ontario (a city with a population 500,000 which also happens to be directly across the border from Detroit) lock their doors. It apparently was quite common that residents of Windsor do not.
Smelling the rotting cat would be considered as observing its state, therefore you have determined its state by smelling it.
I put air fresheners in all my schroedinger's cat-boxes for that reason.
The mechanism works by letting air in to react with a layer of dye. How does the air get in? I would imagine only the outer edge (maybe the inner edge too). So what happens if you seal the outer edge? No air gets in, and the dye doesn't go opaque. I'm sure there is some form of glue or other sealant widely available that can handle this task.
It's still 200 items short of the number the average woman carries in her purse.
...is a condom.
I was trying to figure out how I fell down and hit the ceiling. Now I know.
Your comment makes me think that a feature could be added to P2P programs to say "no download for non-uploaders" or "limit bandwidth for non-downloaders to x bps." That would let people who want to discourage freeloaders be able to effectively do that.
So you're saying that icing ol' Walt was their last original idea?
Having goofed by declaring war on every kid who downloads a song, we're going to see more of the shift both in tactics and rhetoric to those who distribute. Perhaps they will be demonized as "dealers" or even "pushers" who entice wide-eyed young would-be ConsumerCitizens into filthy pirates.
So how does this work, since many, if not most, downloaders are also uploaders? Shut down uploading, be it via technology (blocking ports, DRM, copy prevention-enabled CDs), legal means (suing super-nodes and people who break technological means), and PR (portraying uploaders as the real villains). Now, you've still got uploading, but it's confined to a subset of people who are really committed to uploading. I base this on the assumption that a lot of people upload because all it takes is a checkbox -- it really doesn't cost me much time, effort, or worry. If you have to start fooling around with ports, worrying about a subpoena showing up, and losing your job for being branded a "pusher", maybe I just uncheck that little box that says "share files".
So now we've separated the hard core from the fringes. This hard core is small enough, evil enough, and important enough that it is worth the cost necessary to stop (shutting down accounts, legal action, hacking their hard drives, etc). And now without the hard core, the fringe will starve. The mistake of the attack on Napster was that there is now no central distributor to strike. It looks like a gradual movement toward coalescing the mass of distributors back to a short list of targets.
Will this strategy work? Some of this may have to do with how much people care about their ability to upload. If my uploading is shut off by my ISP, do I care? Do I raise a fuss, or do I say, oh, well, I can still download. Maybe the RIAA is saying quietly to the ISPs, look, just block the uploads, and nobody will complain about that. And now you don't have to worry about a lawsuit from us anymore. Everybody wins (wink wink).