Especially since we're talking about California here, which had huge brownouts and blackouts a few years ago. Granted, a lot of that was just Enron screwing with people (but hey, that's their right as a free-market monopolist, right?). But still California is pushing the limits of their infrastructure. Saving electricity isn't just a tree-hugging proposition.
Besides, all this talk about sacrificing functionality or paying lots of money for efficiency is a worst-case scenario. I think there's a lot they can do to reduce power consumption with no appreciable effect on functionality or even price but they don't bother because, hey, there's no law and people don't even have the information to choose for themselves, so if we save 15 cents neglecting a feature that would save the consumer $30 / year, who cares. Idle power consumption, in particular, should really be addressed.
Refrigerators clearly show an estimate of how much it costs annually to power different models, in dollars. You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to factor that into your decision.
Then I side with the government on this one. Because on an individual basis, there is NO motivation to do the right thing. Clear blue skies may be very important to me personally. Does that mean I should drive a low-smog car? No, not at all. No matter how bad my own car is, it will have NO observable (even measurable) impact on the air. The only way to clean up the skies (which California has been a leader in, and very successful at) is to regulate. That may be a simple emissions limit, it may be a cap & trade system, it may be a pollution fee to internalize long-term costs, but one way or another, regulation IS the answer to environmental protection.
Right. The old "war is good for the economy" line is more of an example of the broken window fallacy.
I'm convinced this largely comes from overgeneralizing the World Wars. The reason those were a financial bonanza for the US was because our competitors were destroyed (physically, not just financially), while we were relatively unscathed. Life is good when you get rich selling stuff to countries after bombing the crap out of their factories. But the net effect on all countries across of the world was just what you would expect - financial carnage. A couple generations of people were poor most of their lives (not in the US though - if that's all you care about).
I agree with you that the physical infrastructure should be taken care of before the digital infrastructure.
Here's a little article about tradeoffs between investing in infrastructure for privately-owned cars, public transport, electricity grid, information infrastructure, etc. A pertinent fact from the article is that "Obama has set a six-week deadline for getting his economic recovery plan passed." If that is true, a lot of decisions will be made very quickly.
No traceable origin? How about when the Isrealis stole the Palestinians' land? I'd say that's a pretty traceable origin.
My guess is the Israelis would point to some previous event that justifies that action (in their mind, at least). Maybe somebody attacked Israel from that territory. Maybe the Israelis occupied the land 1500 years ago and somebody took it from them. Who knows? All I know is, when it comes to armed conflict, it's always - always - the other guy's fault. Look at our "preemptive defense" invasion of Iraq. It was Iraq's fault, for failing to prove they couldn't attack us in the future, despite our repeated demands.
Middle-east peace is impossible. Both sides can point to genocidal passages in the others' scripture, both sides can point to hyperbolic remarks by the others' politicians, and (most importantly) factions on both sides are committed to disproportionate retaliation against the other for past atrocities that can never be un-done.
However, the US *can* lower the death toll by not pouring high-tech weaponry into Israel.
They want their opponents to know that starting a fight with them is a bad idea because they will finish it, harshly.
I've noticed the American media is very consistent in using loaded, incorrect terminology to imply that Hammas "started it," while Israel is simply "retaliating." The simple truth is, it's a cycle of violence with no traceable origin (at least none that is still relevant). The side most to blame is the side quickest to escalate the existing cycle of violence. Factions in both sides have the will to inflict 100-1 casualties on the other, but only one side has the (US-supplied) means to accomplish this. But we have given Israel the power, without the responsibility. Americans must start taking responsibility for what our bombs are doing over there. But I doubt anything will change until a significant number of Arabs immigrate to the US.
Bring me your coupon, I'll sell you an empty cardboard "digital converter" box with a $20 bill for your effort.
So long as each household still gets only 2, that doesn't bug me too much. After all, they are selling a natural resource (RF spectrum) which by nature belongs to everybody. It is not unlike e.g. Alaska where everybody gets a little bit of the oil money. If nothing else, perhaps the coupons should also have counted towards the purchase price of a new TV which incorporates a digital receiver.
Beyond all that, $80 is starting to seem like chump change compared to yet another round of $500 per capita "tax rebates."
PS. the most valuable executives build a business that can thrive even after they are gone. Again, Jobs' temporary absence provides a data point, but a negative one.
The case for Jobs' value is almost uniquely strong, since he left Apple for a while and it tanked, then he came back and it recovered.
That said, the opposite happens too; HP's stock shot up by billions the day Fiorina departed. So when my dad said, "Jobs proves CEOs are worth their pay," I had to disagree. You can't generalize like that.
My crackberry 7520 is about a third the speed of dialup, with much higher latency..
That is a bummer. On the other hand, the number of times I've paid oingo boingo (or somesuch) $7 for just a few minutes of WiFi at an airport to sync my Outlook in/outboxes during a layover, the bar isn't very high.
On the other other hand, as soon as somebody sends me a 7MB powerpoint attachment, I would be hosed.
Besides, it's too late to be having this argument. When they reclaimed the spectrum, part of the deal was that people would still be able to watch broadcast TV without laying out for a new TV or bearing the full cost of a converter box. That was the deal. You can't just tell people something to get their consent to make changes, and then not follow through on your end of the bargain.
This is entirely reasonable and desirable if you replace "spider-thing" with "cancer" or "aids," or even "common cold." Gene sequencing your disease and taking the right medicine for what you *actually* have - instead of today's educated guesswork - will be a HUGE advance. Thousands die every year because they have to guess a year in advance which flu strains will be prevalent and usually guess wrong.
I hope they don't use a hard drive - too complex, expensive, noisy, power-hogging, and prone to failure. Consider that an 8GB flash - more than enough to buffer an entire DVD - is under $20.
I wish Sony would abandon their silly roll-their-own video service and offer this via the PS3.
After winning the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format war, Sony will probably be worse than ever now.
Which reminds me, over the holidays I was unable to copy the pictures off a relative's camera because she has a Sony, which uses their Memory Stick instead of the nearly ubiquitous SD card. Domo arigato, Sony.
This then triggers the installation of "legalized" spyware which tracks the user's communications and browsing habits.
I think all the above posts in this vein are wrong. The question isn't whether there are technical means for computers to be compromised en masse - botnets proved that already. The entire question is: which means will the government be willing to use. If the govt perpetrated mass infections of computers, it would certainly be detected, very likely to cause outrage, and easily remedied by anybody who really cared. So I predict they will remain more targeted in their attacks. The whole key to unregulated powers is to use them against a small minority so the majority don't get upset and start getting regulations passed. (Of course, that minority might not be criminals - they might be political opponents etc).
"you're saying they should use a big, slow, central server, as a single point of failure, crippling offline development..."
I am intrigued git and adoption by a major project like Perl is a big endorsement, so please don't take this as a rhetorical question: isn't centralization the heart of source code management? As a project lead, I'm reluctant to have repositories sprouting like mushrooms everywhere and everybody having their own little "trunk," and developers arguing who should have to merge with whom before each release. Is this reluctance totally unfounded, or easily solved administratively, or a valid concern with a peer-to-peer SCM model?
He should have put in the actual amount of time these tests took so we could see how much big of a difference it is. 1, 2, 3 tells me nothing.
Really, nothing? Because I had been dreading an upcoming forced upgrade from XP to Vista at work, and seeing that Vista did NOT consistently lose to XP, even on the 1GB machine, is a relief and somewhat surprising to me. (Though I'm still dreading having to re-learn where they've randomly scattered various system settings *this* time).
Because you should be wary of a law... the one that talks about unintended consequences.
Would you abolish medicine because it sometimes has side effects? Meanwhile, we have a raving addiction to crack (coal and gasoline) which definitely do have known negative effects, which we are not treating at all. I doubt the unintended consequences will be nearly as bad as completely uncontrolled consequences we are headed for.
With over 6.5 billion people on the planet, we DO have an environmental impact, so opting out is simply not an option. The only choice is whether to (1) run headlong into disaster (which I predict is a good description of mankind will actually do); (2) minimize the impact; or (3) counterbalance the impact. You can't simply rule out (3) on a vague generality.
Amen, and why I just love ZFS (or any filesystem that supports instant snapshots).
This sounds good. Does performance degrade once you make a few snapshots? I've noticed with VMWare, snapshots REALLY kill performance, presumably since the current state of each file is strung out across a number of files in different places. (Then again, SSD Drives might be fixing that for us).
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Especially since we're talking about California here, which had huge brownouts and blackouts a few years ago. Granted, a lot of that was just Enron screwing with people (but hey, that's their right as a free-market monopolist, right?). But still California is pushing the limits of their infrastructure. Saving electricity isn't just a tree-hugging proposition.
Unless they are putting a lot of hours per year on an older power-hogging model.
Besides, all this talk about sacrificing functionality or paying lots of money for efficiency is a worst-case scenario. I think there's a lot they can do to reduce power consumption with no appreciable effect on functionality or even price but they don't bother because, hey, there's no law and people don't even have the information to choose for themselves, so if we save 15 cents neglecting a feature that would save the consumer $30 / year, who cares. Idle power consumption, in particular, should really be addressed.
Refrigerators clearly show an estimate of how much it costs annually to power different models, in dollars. You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to factor that into your decision.
Then I side with the government on this one. Because on an individual basis, there is NO motivation to do the right thing. Clear blue skies may be very important to me personally. Does that mean I should drive a low-smog car? No, not at all. No matter how bad my own car is, it will have NO observable (even measurable) impact on the air. The only way to clean up the skies (which California has been a leader in, and very successful at) is to regulate. That may be a simple emissions limit, it may be a cap & trade system, it may be a pollution fee to internalize long-term costs, but one way or another, regulation IS the answer to environmental protection.
I'm convinced this largely comes from overgeneralizing the World Wars. The reason those were a financial bonanza for the US was because our competitors were destroyed (physically, not just financially), while we were relatively unscathed. Life is good when you get rich selling stuff to countries after bombing the crap out of their factories. But the net effect on all countries across of the world was just what you would expect - financial carnage. A couple generations of people were poor most of their lives (not in the US though - if that's all you care about).
Here's a little article about tradeoffs between investing in infrastructure for privately-owned cars, public transport, electricity grid, information infrastructure, etc. A pertinent fact from the article is that "Obama has set a six-week deadline for getting his economic recovery plan passed." If that is true, a lot of decisions will be made very quickly.
My guess is the Israelis would point to some previous event that justifies that action (in their mind, at least). Maybe somebody attacked Israel from that territory. Maybe the Israelis occupied the land 1500 years ago and somebody took it from them. Who knows? All I know is, when it comes to armed conflict, it's always - always - the other guy's fault. Look at our "preemptive defense" invasion of Iraq. It was Iraq's fault, for failing to prove they couldn't attack us in the future, despite our repeated demands.
However, the US *can* lower the death toll by not pouring high-tech weaponry into Israel.
I've noticed the American media is very consistent in using loaded, incorrect terminology to imply that Hammas "started it," while Israel is simply "retaliating." The simple truth is, it's a cycle of violence with no traceable origin (at least none that is still relevant). The side most to blame is the side quickest to escalate the existing cycle of violence. Factions in both sides have the will to inflict 100-1 casualties on the other, but only one side has the (US-supplied) means to accomplish this. But we have given Israel the power, without the responsibility. Americans must start taking responsibility for what our bombs are doing over there. But I doubt anything will change until a significant number of Arabs immigrate to the US.
So long as each household still gets only 2, that doesn't bug me too much. After all, they are selling a natural resource (RF spectrum) which by nature belongs to everybody. It is not unlike e.g. Alaska where everybody gets a little bit of the oil money. If nothing else, perhaps the coupons should also have counted towards the purchase price of a new TV which incorporates a digital receiver.
Beyond all that, $80 is starting to seem like chump change compared to yet another round of $500 per capita "tax rebates."
PS. the most valuable executives build a business that can thrive even after they are gone. Again, Jobs' temporary absence provides a data point, but a negative one.
That said, the opposite happens too; HP's stock shot up by billions the day Fiorina departed. So when my dad said, "Jobs proves CEOs are worth their pay," I had to disagree. You can't generalize like that.
That is a bummer. On the other hand, the number of times I've paid oingo boingo (or somesuch) $7 for just a few minutes of WiFi at an airport to sync my Outlook in/outboxes during a layover, the bar isn't very high.
On the other other hand, as soon as somebody sends me a 7MB powerpoint attachment, I would be hosed.
Besides, it's too late to be having this argument. When they reclaimed the spectrum, part of the deal was that people would still be able to watch broadcast TV without laying out for a new TV or bearing the full cost of a converter box. That was the deal. You can't just tell people something to get their consent to make changes, and then not follow through on your end of the bargain.
This is entirely reasonable and desirable if you replace "spider-thing" with "cancer" or "aids," or even "common cold." Gene sequencing your disease and taking the right medicine for what you *actually* have - instead of today's educated guesswork - will be a HUGE advance. Thousands die every year because they have to guess a year in advance which flu strains will be prevalent and usually guess wrong.
No, 0.993^3 is only 97.9%; how about 1-(1-0.993)^3 :)
I hope they don't use a hard drive - too complex, expensive, noisy, power-hogging, and prone to failure. Consider that an 8GB flash - more than enough to buffer an entire DVD - is under $20.
After winning the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format war, Sony will probably be worse than ever now.
Which reminds me, over the holidays I was unable to copy the pictures off a relative's camera because she has a Sony, which uses their Memory Stick instead of the nearly ubiquitous SD card. Domo arigato, Sony.
I think all the above posts in this vein are wrong. The question isn't whether there are technical means for computers to be compromised en masse - botnets proved that already. The entire question is: which means will the government be willing to use. If the govt perpetrated mass infections of computers, it would certainly be detected, very likely to cause outrage, and easily remedied by anybody who really cared. So I predict they will remain more targeted in their attacks. The whole key to unregulated powers is to use them against a small minority so the majority don't get upset and start getting regulations passed. (Of course, that minority might not be criminals - they might be political opponents etc).
I am intrigued git and adoption by a major project like Perl is a big endorsement, so please don't take this as a rhetorical question: isn't centralization the heart of source code management? As a project lead, I'm reluctant to have repositories sprouting like mushrooms everywhere and everybody having their own little "trunk," and developers arguing who should have to merge with whom before each release. Is this reluctance totally unfounded, or easily solved administratively, or a valid concern with a peer-to-peer SCM model?
Really, nothing? Because I had been dreading an upcoming forced upgrade from XP to Vista at work, and seeing that Vista did NOT consistently lose to XP, even on the 1GB machine, is a relief and somewhat surprising to me. (Though I'm still dreading having to re-learn where they've randomly scattered various system settings *this* time).
Would you abolish medicine because it sometimes has side effects? Meanwhile, we have a raving addiction to crack (coal and gasoline) which definitely do have known negative effects, which we are not treating at all. I doubt the unintended consequences will be nearly as bad as completely uncontrolled consequences we are headed for.
With over 6.5 billion people on the planet, we DO have an environmental impact, so opting out is simply not an option. The only choice is whether to (1) run headlong into disaster (which I predict is a good description of mankind will actually do); (2) minimize the impact; or (3) counterbalance the impact. You can't simply rule out (3) on a vague generality.
This sounds good. Does performance degrade once you make a few snapshots? I've noticed with VMWare, snapshots REALLY kill performance, presumably since the current state of each file is strung out across a number of files in different places. (Then again, SSD Drives might be fixing that for us).
Yeah, I remember there was somewhat of a flap when it was realized that OSX was a pretty slow server OS. I wonder if this has been remedied?