I know people want to think of a perfect world where we get Top Quality Products at Discount Products, But in reality that is not the case.
You're saying that value to the customer is a constant, and the only thing that changes is the tradeoff between price and quality. I completely disagree. Until about 4 years ago, Intel had screwed customers for 20 years because they had no real peer. Quality was (mostly) good, but Intel's prices were extremely high, and didn't start to fall until about 1999. For all those years, Intel had a huge profit margin, allowing them to live high on the hog, expanding into lots of business where they failed, waste *billions* on the failed Itanium, and grow top heavy. The war chest to survive all this and come out none the worse, came from consumers' wallets.
Sale has already been completed and they sold it for the price they specified.
Who knows? The harder you look, the more fine print legalize you can find. Somewhere, at some time, they probably authorized themselves to remedy the error. At the least, I'm sure some lawyer can argue for the legal right to do this through a creative reading of some obscure law.
I had a hotel correct a charge and hit my credit card almost a month after they gave me my "final" invoice!
I had to bet my home on it, I'd go with TPC over VoIP. In fact, personally, I've stuck with TPC landline because of E911, because my landline has always worked during NYC blackouts even when my cellular phone didn't
I dunno. Before plugging my VOIP service into my home circuit, I of course had to disconnect my home curcuit from the phone company. I can tell you it was very easy; I just opened a plastic box on the side of my house and unplugged it. If you're worried about "bad guys," a cellphone might be better.
In type type of general emergency likely to kill cellphones (or Internet), I don't think you have great odds of contacting the police and getting a swift response anyways. You're worried about the Internet as a shared bandwidth link? Well 911 and the police are shared resources, too. I can tell you plenty of folks called 911 from the WTC, or when New Orleans flooded, and it didn't help them much.
If you're worried about a random Internet or cellphone outage at the same time as a random burglary, go ahead, but for me personally that's on the other side of "lightning strike."
I seriously doubt this will turn into anything useful because it relies on a collective definition of "merit."
Good point. But furthermore, I can guarantee you this won't work, simply because web page rankings and spam filtering are essentially the same thing, and the spam issue has not been solved. That is, even when we don't have the problem of multiple conflicting opinions and all we're trying to do is model the preferences of a single recipient, we still can't do it!
I agree. There is a lot of fuss over neuroscience right now, as if it is the solution to AI. I think not, just as birds were, if anything, a misdirection in inventing the airplane. It would have been natural, 150 years ago, to assume that the very first artificial intelligence would be a model of the brain. That didn't happen, and still shows no sign of happening.
Many seem to assume that computer science is not "fundamental" science, but neuroscience is. Why? To me it is obvious that neuroscience owes far more to computer science than the other way around - and that is what "fundamental" really means. From a functional standpoint, the brain is just one implementation of a computer.
Finally, just what is the point of custom silicon for this project?
The assertion that a laptop can cause a house-fire affects more than just the ex-homeowner. It affects everyone, and it demand a PR response, and a rationale warning to consumers. Do not leave Dell laptops running unsupervised - comes to mind.
I think you're overstating it. It just depends on how often it happens. I've known certain people who won't run a clothes dryer while away from the home due to fire risk, and to be fair I'm sure dryers have torched homes before. I suppose every type of electrical appliance has at one time shorted out and caused a fire. I just don't care enough to take special precautions.
yet a baseball player can calculate the exact force needed to throw a baseball from center field to home plate.
No he does not. He simply learns the mapping from stimuli to actions. He's not calculating anything. That's why pitchers pitch instead of studying physics books.
Is this really an "idea?" Energy companies have long charged different rates for power at peak and non-peak hours, which gives everybody (not just refrigeration houses) the incentive to bias their consumption towards night time if possible.
No, please don't pollute Wikipedia with spam. Anything but that. There are already other websites that republish Wikipedia plastered with ads, and it's a very sad vision of the future. I really wish there were more popular support public grants to a few select sites like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. I've never made it to the library of Congress, I'll probably never see an NEA-sponsored exhibition in New York, but this would be such a simple and cheap way to pour out information for billions of people. Wikipedia could thrive for years on what it costs to run the Iraq war for 1 hour.
The problem is that military technology is falling behind consumer technology. For example, many troops are carrying consumer GPS units because the military units (which can actually be more accurate) are too difficult to acquire and use.
What a funny example. If everybody made do with quick short-term solutions, there would be no commercial GPS receivers, becaus there would be no GPS satellite constellation! Those satellites weren't designed and launched by a scrappy startup in a month. It was a multi billion dollar space program stretching over decades, and costs $400 BN per year to maintain. I guess you could use that to make a joke about how the government spent $1BN on a lousy map.
They start out small and agile, get bigger through success against their less nimble rivals, become less nimble themselves, and get beaten in their turn. Government has no natural rivals and thus never dies.
It's not just that. Bigger companies (and governments) solve bigger problems. The reason the Army is careful is because going off half-cocked gets people killed just as much as doing nothing, and, yes, is more scandalous. It sounds great to give everybody autonomy so they can react quickly and decisively, but along with that comes Abu Ghraib, friendly fire, and missing palettes of cash. You can say what you want about our nimble opponents in the face of an ossified DOD, but the fact is the US has a very high kill ratio due to things like standardized training, fighter aircraft, and M1 tanks, which result ONLY from big, coordinated activities that no single small company - or even a collection of exclusively small companies - can do. (Nor am I saying a high kill ratio in itself will win Iraq, but that's more a problem with the mission itself than the force structure). Even projecting an invasion force from the US to Iraq in the first place is by definition a large scale activity that could never be approached as a large, highly coordinated effort (again, aside from whether going there was a bright idea in the first place).
But was Java "wrong," or just ahead of its time? Computers are faster now, and the bandwidth is much, much greater (for most of us). AJAX can do some things, but it just seems like a mess of different technologies to me, and still isn't as rich as a general client-side programming language.
I still think *real* web-based applications, like a full-featured office suite, should be possible.
Oh and by the way, I think it's entirely possible the surgeon did nothing wrong. When you're in a business for malcontents, you can expect to get criticism. (Witness the enormous and IMHO unjustified payout for silicone breast implants). But let me be the one to decide if somebody is just being whiny. Don't censor them.
People should realise the risks of any surgery before they make minor cosmetic changes to their appeaarance.
Well it's going to be pretty hard to learn about the risks if everybody with a complaint gets muzzled, now isn't it? This lawsuit has the direct effect of protecting peoples' right to learn about the risks.
But I guess we can't have that, now can we? It might be bad for business.
To be honest I don't even see how this case went to trial. How can we claim to have freedom of speech if you can't even complain about somebody doing a poor job? If she had knowingly made a factually false claim, then I could see it.
Regardless, I think the best course would be to absolve motorists of 100% contributory negligence in accidents with pedestrians who are otherwise electronic-gadget engaged while crossing a street or intersection.
Even if said motorist was talking on a cell phone? What gadget to blame? It's so hard to choose.
It's clear that no one would pay $1300 for a C64 these days because computers have gotten so much faster for the money. But what's the comparison with music?
Downloads, obviously. We don't need the manufactured media or the expensive shopping mall shelf space anymore. We don't even want it.
You know grinds my gears, is seeing people apologize for being a Citizen of USA. If any of these USA haters cared to look, most of us folk are not for killing. Too many uninformed voters voted for the wrong guy.
Is that the best we can do? Sounds like you're arguing to lower the charges from murder to negligent homocide.
This is how bureaucracies work:
I don't support it, I just pay my taxes.
I don't support it, I just authorized the use of necessary force, but this isn't what I meant.
I don't support it, I just move cargo from point A to point B.
I don't support it, I just carry out the orders of my political leadership.
And on an on. And yet when you put all the pieces together, presto! A war machine. A whole country full of people waging war, with nobody responsible. At the top is a guy who says "I accept full responsibility" yet who, in fact, pays no discernible cost for failure.
Re:Why am I not surprised that Defense did poorly.
on
DNS Root Servers Attacked
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Don't make the assumption that all DNS servers were attacked equally though.
Not that I am complaining, one less bot net to worry about.
No kidding. I'm always impressed how I never even notice these things until they hit the news afterwards. I don't think there's been anything you could reasonably call a general Internet outage in the last 15 years. I guess you could say of course not, because the Internet isn't "a thing," it's a bunch of separate things that just happen to be willing to talk to each other. To which my answer is, I'm sure glad they planned it that way.
Besides, DNS is for wussies anyways. Real men don't need user-friendly names for their ip addresses:) But seriously, I can imagine the Web still being useful without DNS if search engines linked to IP addresses instead of hostnames. And now that email is largely a WWW service (hotmail, gmail...) a big chunk of it could survive too.
OK, but shouldn't that make a Unix syscall interface even more messy? After all, it was created thirty-five years ago.
How much backwards compatibility does it really retain though? I realize some basic concepts and even the names of some basic functions (e.g. "read") have actually been around that long, but how many binaries from back then would run on Linux? I doubt you could find one. And that's what I mean by maintaining backwards compatibility on a feature-rich platform.
The graphs are a useful way to compare real-world examples of C and C++ calling models, though.
No, because they're only counting system calls. There's no inherent reason for C++ code to make more numerous or more varied system calls. The difference between C and C++ is purely user-mode. The summary's assertion is correct - the Windows server is simply making many more system calls to serve a page.
Is that a surprise? Those of you who doubt the general claims made using these graphs, why don't you find a more compelling statistic to the contrary? Show us how the XP (or better yet, Vista) kernel API is NOT a sprawling mess. Good luck, since even Microsoft has admitted Vista is nearly unmaintainable, and years of schedule slippage proves it no matter what they say.
I don't even blame them. Feature-richness and backwards compatibility are key aspects of what Microsoft provides, and it inevitably results in a mess. These are practically requirements if you have a big expensive software infrastructure built over a long period of time, as many businesses do. But don't kid yourself that the costs avoided by not refactoring all that old code come free. Complexity does impact security.
Wow, those are some crappy specs. The only one that bothers me in the long run, though, is the refresh rate. A persistent display technology not requiring constant refreshes would hopefully save a lot of power.
I do wonder what conditions that contrast ratio was measured under? LCDs may have awesome contrast ratios in the dark, but in sunlight, not so much.
Interesting, isn't it? While technically wrong, it shows how commoditized computing hardware has become... apparently it isn't even noticeable to some people. All that matters is the user's data and applications.
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I had a hotel correct a charge and hit my credit card almost a month after they gave me my "final" invoice!
I dunno. Before plugging my VOIP service into my home circuit, I of course had to disconnect my home curcuit from the phone company. I can tell you it was very easy; I just opened a plastic box on the side of my house and unplugged it. If you're worried about "bad guys," a cellphone might be better.
In type type of general emergency likely to kill cellphones (or Internet), I don't think you have great odds of contacting the police and getting a swift response anyways. You're worried about the Internet as a shared bandwidth link? Well 911 and the police are shared resources, too. I can tell you plenty of folks called 911 from the WTC, or when New Orleans flooded, and it didn't help them much.
If you're worried about a random Internet or cellphone outage at the same time as a random burglary, go ahead, but for me personally that's on the other side of "lightning strike."
Good point. But furthermore, I can guarantee you this won't work, simply because web page rankings and spam filtering are essentially the same thing, and the spam issue has not been solved. That is, even when we don't have the problem of multiple conflicting opinions and all we're trying to do is model the preferences of a single recipient, we still can't do it!
I agree. There is a lot of fuss over neuroscience right now, as if it is the solution to AI. I think not, just as birds were, if anything, a misdirection in inventing the airplane. It would have been natural, 150 years ago, to assume that the very first artificial intelligence would be a model of the brain. That didn't happen, and still shows no sign of happening. Many seem to assume that computer science is not "fundamental" science, but neuroscience is. Why? To me it is obvious that neuroscience owes far more to computer science than the other way around - and that is what "fundamental" really means. From a functional standpoint, the brain is just one implementation of a computer. Finally, just what is the point of custom silicon for this project?
Is this really an "idea?" Energy companies have long charged different rates for power at peak and non-peak hours, which gives everybody (not just refrigeration houses) the incentive to bias their consumption towards night time if possible.
Thanks for the link AC. According to that, bandwidth is 17% of the budget. Throw in hosting as well and you're up to 35%.
No, please don't pollute Wikipedia with spam. Anything but that. There are already other websites that republish Wikipedia plastered with ads, and it's a very sad vision of the future. I really wish there were more popular support public grants to a few select sites like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. I've never made it to the library of Congress, I'll probably never see an NEA-sponsored exhibition in New York, but this would be such a simple and cheap way to pour out information for billions of people. Wikipedia could thrive for years on what it costs to run the Iraq war for 1 hour.
Bandwidth is cheap as dirt. Even a small handful of paid employees would quickly outstrip bandwidth costs. Is that really their main expense?
I still think *real* web-based applications, like a full-featured office suite, should be possible.
Oh and by the way, I think it's entirely possible the surgeon did nothing wrong. When you're in a business for malcontents, you can expect to get criticism. (Witness the enormous and IMHO unjustified payout for silicone breast implants). But let me be the one to decide if somebody is just being whiny. Don't censor them.
But I guess we can't have that, now can we? It might be bad for business.
To be honest I don't even see how this case went to trial. How can we claim to have freedom of speech if you can't even complain about somebody doing a poor job? If she had knowingly made a factually false claim, then I could see it.
This is how bureaucracies work:
I don't support it, I just pay my taxes.
I don't support it, I just authorized the use of necessary force, but this isn't what I meant.
I don't support it, I just move cargo from point A to point B.
I don't support it, I just carry out the orders of my political leadership.
And on an on. And yet when you put all the pieces together, presto! A war machine. A whole country full of people waging war, with nobody responsible. At the top is a guy who says "I accept full responsibility" yet who, in fact, pays no discernible cost for failure.
Don't make the assumption that all DNS servers were attacked equally though.
Besides, DNS is for wussies anyways. Real men don't need user-friendly names for their ip addresses :) But seriously, I can imagine the Web still being useful without DNS if search engines linked to IP addresses instead of hostnames. And now that email is largely a WWW service (hotmail, gmail...) a big chunk of it could survive too.
Is that a surprise? Those of you who doubt the general claims made using these graphs, why don't you find a more compelling statistic to the contrary? Show us how the XP (or better yet, Vista) kernel API is NOT a sprawling mess. Good luck, since even Microsoft has admitted Vista is nearly unmaintainable, and years of schedule slippage proves it no matter what they say.
I don't even blame them. Feature-richness and backwards compatibility are key aspects of what Microsoft provides, and it inevitably results in a mess. These are practically requirements if you have a big expensive software infrastructure built over a long period of time, as many businesses do. But don't kid yourself that the costs avoided by not refactoring all that old code come free. Complexity does impact security.
Wow, those are some crappy specs. The only one that bothers me in the long run, though, is the refresh rate. A persistent display technology not requiring constant refreshes would hopefully save a lot of power.
I do wonder what conditions that contrast ratio was measured under? LCDs may have awesome contrast ratios in the dark, but in sunlight, not so much.
Interesting, isn't it? While technically wrong, it shows how commoditized computing hardware has become... apparently it isn't even noticeable to some people. All that matters is the user's data and applications.