but if it's not clear & honest these companies should be taken to court for lying to people
What strange ideas are these? Take companies to court for lying to people? For a start you would bankrupt the advertising industry, not to meantion the tobacco, food (not just fast/junk) and pharmaceutical industries as well, leading to thousands of job losses and the collapse of the economy.
Are you a communist or something? Companies lying to people is the American Way, capitalism was built by snake-oil salesmen!
Obviously they have a financial incentive to keep it at 100%.
Not really - think diminishing returns. How much are they willing to spend on extra redundancy to get the coverage rate from, say, 98% to 99%? It would probably cost more than 1% of their revenue to do so, so it doesn't make sense.
In fact, the cost for every extra % of reliability gained probably increases quite sharply at the high end (obviously infinite for 100%), whereas the penalty (money back) increases linearly, so the company will simply invest up to the point where they are equal (maybe a bit more for PR purposes, since a bad rep "costs" as well).
Although of course, where exactly that point is depends on how expensive the service was in the first place. So it is a case of getting what you paid for.
T9 works just fine for most messages (in English at least, can't say about other languages).
Only if you're polite, or can be bothered to teach it swearwords. I have a friend who is neither, and have received lots of messages telling me I'm a "ducking aunt":)
My favourite grips is that at least on my phone you can't change the order in which word options appear, so "pub" (which features in about 50% of my texts) comes after "sub" and "rub" (which feature in 0%). Sucks....
Later I realized she was using a Mac, and for her the Mac desktop was "Windows" because it had many of them. Talk about generic terms...
Yeah, after I posted that I realised that while using "Windows" as a generic term for OS is far-fetched, using it as a generic term for GUI isn't - after all people (including me) say things like "X-Windows" even if pedants point out that isn't the right term. And the earlier versions of Windows(tm) were just GUIs that needed an OS to run on, which didn't even have to be MSDOS.
And of course for a lot of (computer illiterate) people GUI and OS are the same.
Running a prison produces nothing of value to the economy.
To clarify that, reducing crime does of course aid the economy, and you could argue that the prison system reduces expenditure on police. My point is that the economic benefits of building a building and then paying people to guard it are minimal compared to, say, building hospitals and paying people to treat the sick, or whatever.
The ironic part of it is that "Rewarding murders, rapists, and child molesters" is big business, which employs a lot of people (contractors to build the prisons and people to staff them) so it is probably a net benefit economically to the taxpayers that fund the prison operations.
No. This is a totally bogus argument, even though it's trotted out very frequently (and for many other cases).
Running a prison produces nothing of value to the economy. It is not productive activity. Although the people who are employed in it earn money, and then spend their money, and the money they spend gets reinvested etc., the same economic effect would be achieved by just giving them the money outright. If the money that was spent on prisons was spent on something useful (e.g. education), the economy and hence the taxpayer would benefit.
By switching to these newer battery technologies they could reduce the size of the battery pack, which means more interior space and possibly even better fuel efficiency since when the gasoline engine is running you use less fuel because the car is now lighter.
Exactly. If sufficiently efficient, it might also eliminate the need for a petrol engine entirely - after all, the only reason that hybrid cars (or diesel submarines...) exist is that the battery is a less efficient power source than burning fossil fuel. It's all about improving the power-to-weight ratio of your propulsion system, whether it's engine + petrol, battery + motor, or both.
(Of course, the electricity to charge the battery still needs to be generated, but even a conventional fossil fuel power plant is a lot more efficient and less polluting than a small internal combustion engine)
Batteries is one area that has been laging behind the rest of the tech indutstry. With all the growth, batteries are very similar in technology to where they were 10 or 15 years ago.
Conventional (electro-chemical) battery technology is pretty much at a dead end. The energy density of a battery is not far off from that of dynamite, which means that there really isn't any further you can go while keeping the result stable. (A fuel cell is really a highly UNstable battery, but extra safeguards can make it usable technology)
Since many useful applications are now limited by battery life, this is an area where a technological breakthrough is highly overdue...
I know that you can quibble about what the plural of 'virus' is as it's derived from an uncountable noun, but as Zaurus is clearly derived from Saurus (=lizard)
1 Saurus -> 2 Sauri
1 Zaurus -> 2 Zauri
'Zaurii' is obviously the plural of 'Zaurius', as 'Triarii' is the plural of 'Triarius'. Now go and write 'romani ite domus' on the wall 100 times.
1. Someone more intelligent than Putin takes over Russia and uses Putin's communist-like infrastructure to once again impose a military state.
Vlad Putin is a VERY smart guy. At the moment he's busy wresting control of the country back from the cowboy capitalists that Yeltsin and the IMF sold its natural resources to (as in 100 people own 1/4th of the country's wealth). This needs to happen before re-establishing the military's dominance can take place. The symbolism is already pointing that way, what with the red star being restored as the symbol of the Red Army, and the national anthem reverting to the Soviet one (but with new words). This is why eastern europe is so keen to join NATO, as they know very well that Russia the superpower is just taking a timeout...
2. China decides that they have the most people in the world and that someone else should give up some land to support them.
Ummm, China is very far away from Europe. If they want land from someone it'll be Russia....
Grad students in research areas are supposed to be going to class and doing research, not spending another 20-40 hours a week co-admining the computing resources.
In theory yes, but as most universities are seriously understaffed in IT support, it's frequently a case of "the only way to get something done is to do it yourself".
The university I work has quite a number of $100K+ clusters that run various versions of free operating systems, and are usually maintained by grad students. The priority is to get as many CPU and as much memory as possible for a given amount of money. We then build it ourself as student time is comparatively cheap.
As you said yourself, it relies on cheap labour, and for most corporate users labour is one of the most important costs.
We'd be doing the same here, but my university has this odd prejudice against students having root....no idea why....
Well, yeah. But surely you're going to need to pay support cost on HPC Windows, too? Which would you rather pay for, support, or support plus licensing?
Depends on how much it is, right? As the customer I don't care how much of the price tag goes on support and how much on licensing, I just see one price tag that comes with HPC Windows, and one that comes with, say, Redhat. The rest is up to the bean-counters.
(Dumb answer I know, but...)
p.s. like the gif on your homepage - as a physicist I only accept cash in hand!
"The new router design is the first developed by Cisco that allows several routers to be connected, according to the company. A single router would be able to transmit data at 1.2 terabits a second. But as many as 72 routers can be hooked together to send data at 92 terabits a second, far faster than any router sold now."
I have this weird image of a pile 72 routers being daisy-chained serially, with the insanely grinning salesman standing next to it saying "Look! If you connect them to each other they go twice as fast! It goes up to 11!"
Now that gold-plated high-speed modem cable will finally come in handy!
very few (if any) charge a per-processor licensing fee, and most offer commercial support at competitive rates.
True. My point is that for most commercial users, paying for support or paying licencing fees amounts to the same - money spent on upkeep.
The "Linux is free" argument works well in the SOHO market, but not here. Of course, it may still turn out to be better value, but it's not as simple an equation as saying "MS Office: $300, Openoffice: $0". So MS can compete.
Note the get away with - I know that most HPC/Grids are installed and supported and there is support costs but that's another arguement.....
Quite. Exactly what kind of person will buy a $100K server farm and run Debian unstable on it? No-one. And real support costs real money, regardless of whether it's Redhat, Sun or Microsoft that's providing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you meant wireless TCP/IP? Why didn't you say so.
Your moms a guy?
maybe it should be "average jo", as in joanna?
What strange ideas are these? Take companies to court for lying to people? For a start you would bankrupt the advertising industry, not to meantion the tobacco, food (not just fast/junk) and pharmaceutical industries as well, leading to thousands of job losses and the collapse of the economy.
Are you a communist or something? Companies lying to people is the American Way, capitalism was built by snake-oil salesmen!
Not really - think diminishing returns. How much are they willing to spend on extra redundancy to get the coverage rate from, say, 98% to 99%? It would probably cost more than 1% of their revenue to do so, so it doesn't make sense.
In fact, the cost for every extra % of reliability gained probably increases quite sharply at the high end (obviously infinite for 100%), whereas the penalty (money back) increases linearly, so the company will simply invest up to the point where they are equal (maybe a bit more for PR purposes, since a bad rep "costs" as well).
Although of course, where exactly that point is depends on how expensive the service was in the first place. So it is a case of getting what you paid for.
"Here. Take my +1 Mace."
Oh, you actually meant all of that? Oh dear....
I wish mine did that, but hey, it's just a nokia 3330, it does NOTHING clever whatsoever...which is the way I like it...(although I can add words)
EVen if this isn't the case in your phone, it's what, two extra keypresses to selec 'pub' instead of 'sub' or 'rub'.
Which is just as many (5) as it takes the stupid way (p t->u a->b). :)
Only if you're polite, or can be bothered to teach it swearwords. I have a friend who is neither, and have received lots of messages telling me I'm a "ducking aunt" :)
My favourite grips is that at least on my phone you can't change the order in which word options appear, so "pub" (which features in about 50% of my texts) comes after "sub" and "rub" (which feature in 0%). Sucks....
Yeah, after I posted that I realised that while using "Windows" as a generic term for OS is far-fetched, using it as a generic term for GUI isn't - after all people (including me) say things like "X-Windows" even if pedants point out that isn't the right term. And the earlier versions of Windows(tm) were just GUIs that needed an OS to run on, which didn't even have to be MSDOS.
And of course for a lot of (computer illiterate) people GUI and OS are the same.
Yes, but "to xerox" is used as a synonym for "to photocopy" (at least it used to be - not as widespread anymore).
Nobody says "windows" as a generic term for "operating system" unless they are terminally stupid.
"What Windows does it use?"
"Let me check... uh, RedHat 7.2".
No, it's a logarithmic scale... it's 2^(7.2-1.7) = 45.254834 times better!
To clarify that, reducing crime does of course aid the economy, and you could argue that the prison system reduces expenditure on police. My point is that the economic benefits of building a building and then paying people to guard it are minimal compared to, say, building hospitals and paying people to treat the sick, or whatever.
No. This is a totally bogus argument, even though it's trotted out very frequently (and for many other cases).
Running a prison produces nothing of value to the economy. It is not productive activity. Although the people who are employed in it earn money, and then spend their money, and the money they spend gets reinvested etc., the same economic effect would be achieved by just giving them the money outright. If the money that was spent on prisons was spent on something useful (e.g. education), the economy and hence the taxpayer would benefit.
Exactly. If sufficiently efficient, it might also eliminate the need for a petrol engine entirely - after all, the only reason that hybrid cars (or diesel submarines...) exist is that the battery is a less efficient power source than burning fossil fuel. It's all about improving the power-to-weight ratio of your propulsion system, whether it's engine + petrol, battery + motor, or both.
(Of course, the electricity to charge the battery still needs to be generated, but even a conventional fossil fuel power plant is a lot more efficient and less polluting than a small internal combustion engine)
Conventional (electro-chemical) battery technology is pretty much at a dead end. The energy density of a battery is not far off from that of dynamite, which means that there really isn't any further you can go while keeping the result stable. (A fuel cell is really a highly UNstable battery, but extra safeguards can make it usable technology)
Since many useful applications are now limited by battery life, this is an area where a technological breakthrough is highly overdue...
Zaurus -> Zauri.
I know that you can quibble about what the plural of 'virus' is as it's derived from an uncountable noun, but as Zaurus is clearly derived from Saurus (=lizard)
1 Saurus -> 2 Sauri
1 Zaurus -> 2 Zauri
'Zaurii' is obviously the plural of 'Zaurius', as 'Triarii' is the plural of 'Triarius'. Now go and write 'romani ite domus' on the wall 100 times.
Nah. Paris Hilton going "so I was using windows, and then it was, like, bleep bleep bleep, and I'm like, what? bummer."
Vlad Putin is a VERY smart guy. At the moment he's busy wresting control of the country back from the cowboy capitalists that Yeltsin and the IMF sold its natural resources to (as in 100 people own 1/4th of the country's wealth). This needs to happen before re-establishing the military's dominance can take place. The symbolism is already pointing that way, what with the red star being restored as the symbol of the Red Army, and the national anthem reverting to the Soviet one (but with new words). This is why eastern europe is so keen to join NATO, as they know very well that Russia the superpower is just taking a timeout...
2. China decides that they have the most people in the world and that someone else should give up some land to support them.
Ummm, China is very far away from Europe. If they want land from someone it'll be Russia....
They're in on Galileo: see here
In theory yes, but as most universities are seriously understaffed in IT support, it's frequently a case of "the only way to get something done is to do it yourself".
As you said yourself, it relies on cheap labour, and for most corporate users labour is one of the most important costs.
We'd be doing the same here, but my university has this odd prejudice against students having root....no idea why....
Depends on how much it is, right? As the customer I don't care how much of the price tag goes on support and how much on licensing, I just see one price tag that comes with HPC Windows, and one that comes with, say, Redhat. The rest is up to the bean-counters.
(Dumb answer I know, but...)
p.s. like the gif on your homepage - as a physicist I only accept cash in hand!
I have this weird image of a pile 72 routers being daisy-chained serially, with the insanely grinning salesman standing next to it saying "Look! If you connect them to each other they go twice as fast! It goes up to 11!"
Now that gold-plated high-speed modem cable will finally come in handy!
True. My point is that for most commercial users, paying for support or paying licencing fees amounts to the same - money spent on upkeep.
The "Linux is free" argument works well in the SOHO market, but not here. Of course, it may still turn out to be better value, but it's not as simple an equation as saying "MS Office: $300, Openoffice: $0". So MS can compete.
Quite. Exactly what kind of person will buy a $100K server farm and run Debian unstable on it? No-one. And real support costs real money, regardless of whether it's Redhat, Sun or Microsoft that's providing it.