You're assuming that building out a faster Internet will require somebody to pay more than they already do, which is flat out wrong. Collectively, people are paying billions of dollars per year for their bandwidth. The money for upgrades is already there. You think I pay Comcast $55/month just for the once-in-5-years telephone support? NO. I pay so they can continue to invest in a better network for me to use. I expect a faster Internet, and I expect it to get cheaper, not more expensive.
gooogle makes more profit than comcast on a much smaller revenue base.
And I'll tell you why, because bandwidth is a *commodity* that anybody can provide, with little difference between them. The markup would be less than it is if there were some way to have more competition in residential bandwidth. Personally I'd buy into a fiber-to-the-curb co-op if there were such a thing. Cable companies love to make a one-time investment and watch it repay over and over and over again for the next 30 years. I'm sick of being the cash cow.
A guy I know runs a successful online business and does advertise with google. I don't think he really cares how many "impressions" he's buying... he pays because buying the ads increases his sales. Businesses are smart enough to focus on the bottom line, so I think the effect of click-fraud is already reflected in advertising rates.
No, I think the answer is much simpler; if we didn't have Windows, we'd have OS/2 instead. Running WordPerfect maybe. Basically, nothing much would be different. Which is why I question the notion that whoever wins a natural monopoly slot is really "worth" $50 billion to the economy.
Now that's one advantage of using XML as your document format: you could pick a particular kind of node (e.g. paragraph) and iterate through the document locking, saving, and unlocking each branch as you go.
The oddity of that approach is that the resulting savefile might not represent the document as it ever existed at any single point in time. For an auto-save that might be OK, but when I hit the "save" button I expect the file to represent the document exactly as it existed when I saved.
Anyways, I would not assume that the in-memory representation of a document follows the layout of the XML file.
That's called a "continuation." It's a form of cooperative multi-tasking. Not too much different from threading, except that you can/have to decide when each "thread" of execution will run.
And that's where things fall apart. In fact, I don't think "species" has any clear-cut definition, nor have I heard one that would be reasonable. It's like trying to group every song written into genres - generally it's useful and easy to do, but it breaks down in boundary cases.
On the other hand, all this talk of "googling" facts and "photoshopping" images is a lot of free word-of-mouth publicity. It may have risks, but it's not without immediate payoff, either.
Code running faster or slower is not directly related to code simplicity.
I disagree. Performance optimizations almost always require extra code, whether it be to maintain an index, balance a tree, compress data to reduce storage requirements, whatever. If you could write an efficient sorting algorithm shorter than bubble sort, then bubble sort wouldn't even have a name.
Efficiency should be a major thought of all development work. Take your Pac-man example. Of course doing that today would be simple. The problem is, most people who coded up Pacman today would have something that takes at least 16mb of RAM and a 300mhz CPU, when the same result can be achieve on hardware that that is orders of magnitude less capable than that.
You have to optimize for whatever resource is limited on your project. It could be CPU time or RAM, but more often it's either developer time or defect rate. People generally don't spend months hand-coding Pac-Man in assembler anymore because running on a 386 isn't enough of a priority to justify the expense. On the other hand, a big-budget console game is likely to have highly optimized graphics routines. People writing embedded software get to worry about limited processor, limited storage, and high reliability all at the same time - the result is high cost, even though the applications' complexity pales in comparison to a modern office suite or web browser.
Back to the point, if we just wanted compactness and speed XML documents would be out of the question. But we also want other things, like robustness and openness.
People used to care about efficiency, memory usage, etc. These days it's gotten to where "hard drive space is cheap", "the system has plenty of memory", and "People have at least 1Ghz machines these days" . . . so hardly develops efficient, clean, *SIMPLE* code anymore.
The opposite is true. The benefit of having lots of hardware is that you can write clean, simple code instead of making everything complex and contorted so it will run faster. Simple code does not run faster, it runs slower. The reason software is still no cleaner or simple is because gains in conceptual clarity are used to accomplish more complex tasks instead of doing the same old thing more simply. In other words, today's tools make re-implementing Pac Man very simple, but nobody would bother.
Background saving sounds nice, but to do it you'd need a copy that won't change during the save or else it could be corrupted. You could probably duplicate the document in memory fairly quickly, except that big documents take a lot of RAM. So maybe you could do some sort of copy-on-write to optimize that... Anyways, my point is simply that threading things is never simple. Most threaded software is fully of race conditions, potential deadlocks, and other thread-related bugs.
I'll believe that when I see it. I know the law says trademarks are compartmentalized, but go start a landscaping business named "Microsoft" and tell me how it goes.
But let's not assume that undercutting the price of XBox 360 and PS3 means they have gone far enough. Above it was stated that the hardware is only "two or three" times more powerful than the previous GameCube. If that's true, the improvement won't be eye-popping, and the screenshots may pale in comparison to the 360 and PS3. I know, I know, screenshots don't directly equate to "fun". But average Wii games might look less impressive than above-average GameCube games. If so, shelling out $225 might not be terribly attractive even to those who can afford it.
I hate to say it, but the XBox 360 might be the best tradeoff between cost and new capability this generation.
Laptops really hold their value well, you can hardly get anything (even used) for $100, even if you're willing to risk the high liklihood of an ebay clunker that doesn't even work or include necessary bits like AC adapter and working battery. This thing is 500 mhz. I don't think it's that bad a deal at $300. But I guess we'll have to wait for the linpack results:)
As initially envisioned, the laptops sported a hand crank on the side to generate power, but Negroponte has scrapped that idea because the twisting forces that would be bad for the machine. Instead, some form of power generation device, likely a pedal, will be attached to the AC power adapter, he said.
"I was the longest holdout for the crank being on the laptop. I was wrong," he said
A Nuke is easy to make. A delivery method is much harder. Japan could not fabricate this at whim. It would take 2-3 years to contruct test and assemble then 5 years to make a delivery vehicle that could get it off japanese soil...
As for why the RIAA isn't suing - they did and lost
Link?
In principle, I think what allofmp3.com is doing when they sell to Americans is no different than what WalMart does - move production overseas to evade US law (such as minimum wage) thus reducing production costs. But I'd be surprised to learn that that's widely accepted. For some reason it has become generally accepted that IP law is global (i.e. you can't import physical copies that would violate copyright if manufactured here), while labor law is local (you can import things manufactured not in accordance with OSHA regulations, etc).
$3 for a recently released wav? That seems like a lot. Any why so much more for a wav? Let's say each track is 100 MB just to be super excessive. At $150 per 2 TB of transfer, 100 MB costs 3/4 of one cent.
So you give some credence to Iran's claims that its nuclear program is just for power generation? I don't, for two reasons:
1) Thanks to oil, Iran is just about the most energy-rich country in the world. No other energy source will come close to the cost-effectiveness of simply sticking a spigot into the ground.
2) A country would almost have to be crazy to not want a nuclear arsenal. In a conflict, nukes easily make the difference between entering a negotiation among peers (of a sort), and getting invaded. In a world where Pakistan has the Bomb, where do you stand if you do not? (And don't bring up countries like Japan; they do have a nuclear program and could make nuclear weapons almost at a whim, and already have powerful nuke-armed allies).
None of which means I would trust Iran with Nukes. I expect us to act in our best interests just like I expect them to act in theirs.
Besides, individuals will never be allowed such a powerful, compact energy source. It's inevitably too useful as a weapon. Even fertilizer sales are tracked by the FBI now. For cars, maybe we'll wind up with hydrogen -> fusion -> electricity -> hydrogen -> fuel cell -> electricity.
Besides, what about whistleblower laws? I think the unwarranted spying on Americans' phone calls should have to be ruled legal in a court of law before those who leaked it could possibly tried for a crime.
Anyways, this creates a very unstable situation, since the Administration can leak (I mean, "selectively declassify") information any old time they feel like it in order to make political points.
What's weird is that all the best information we have about what's being done in our name with our tax money is due to leaks. It doesn't feel like democracy to me.
And while that may represent a significant portion of internet users, I doubt that they have any right to represent me or my country (England & UK).
That's why I specifically said they have the right to represent the people under them. And that I would equally assume that all other governments did the same. Surely the UK govt. turned out to represent the will of people there?
The US government should be sued in this case, especially if they did influence ICANN to the extent suggested, to the point that other influences (pro.xxx) were ignored.
If most Americans didnt' want.xxx, then I would expect our government to lobby against it. I would think it strange if every country showed up and argued both for and against.
Slashdot Mirror
A guy I know runs a successful online business and does advertise with google. I don't think he really cares how many "impressions" he's buying... he pays because buying the ads increases his sales. Businesses are smart enough to focus on the bottom line, so I think the effect of click-fraud is already reflected in advertising rates.
No, I think the answer is much simpler; if we didn't have Windows, we'd have OS/2 instead. Running WordPerfect maybe. Basically, nothing much would be different. Which is why I question the notion that whoever wins a natural monopoly slot is really "worth" $50 billion to the economy.
The Enron bandwidth market springs to mind. Never made much sense to me. And, hey, it's Enron.
Anyways, I would not assume that the in-memory representation of a document follows the layout of the XML file.
That's called a "continuation." It's a form of cooperative multi-tasking. Not too much different from threading, except that you can/have to decide when each "thread" of execution will run.
On the other hand, all this talk of "googling" facts and "photoshopping" images is a lot of free word-of-mouth publicity. It may have risks, but it's not without immediate payoff, either.
Back to the point, if we just wanted compactness and speed XML documents would be out of the question. But we also want other things, like robustness and openness.
Background saving sounds nice, but to do it you'd need a copy that won't change during the save or else it could be corrupted. You could probably duplicate the document in memory fairly quickly, except that big documents take a lot of RAM. So maybe you could do some sort of copy-on-write to optimize that... Anyways, my point is simply that threading things is never simple. Most threaded software is fully of race conditions, potential deadlocks, and other thread-related bugs.
I'll believe that when I see it. I know the law says trademarks are compartmentalized, but go start a landscaping business named "Microsoft" and tell me how it goes.
But let's not assume that undercutting the price of XBox 360 and PS3 means they have gone far enough. Above it was stated that the hardware is only "two or three" times more powerful than the previous GameCube. If that's true, the improvement won't be eye-popping, and the screenshots may pale in comparison to the 360 and PS3. I know, I know, screenshots don't directly equate to "fun". But average Wii games might look less impressive than above-average GameCube games. If so, shelling out $225 might not be terribly attractive even to those who can afford it.
I hate to say it, but the XBox 360 might be the best tradeoff between cost and new capability this generation.
Laptops really hold their value well, you can hardly get anything (even used) for $100, even if you're willing to risk the high liklihood of an ebay clunker that doesn't even work or include necessary bits like AC adapter and working battery. This thing is 500 mhz. I don't think it's that bad a deal at $300. But I guess we'll have to wait for the linpack results :)
For that matter, where can you buy a better new laptop for $300?
In principle, I think what allofmp3.com is doing when they sell to Americans is no different than what WalMart does - move production overseas to evade US law (such as minimum wage) thus reducing production costs. But I'd be surprised to learn that that's widely accepted. For some reason it has become generally accepted that IP law is global (i.e. you can't import physical copies that would violate copyright if manufactured here), while labor law is local (you can import things manufactured not in accordance with OSHA regulations, etc).
$3 for a recently released wav? That seems like a lot. Any why so much more for a wav? Let's say each track is 100 MB just to be super excessive. At $150 per 2 TB of transfer, 100 MB costs 3/4 of one cent.
1) Thanks to oil, Iran is just about the most energy-rich country in the world. No other energy source will come close to the cost-effectiveness of simply sticking a spigot into the ground.
2) A country would almost have to be crazy to not want a nuclear arsenal. In a conflict, nukes easily make the difference between entering a negotiation among peers (of a sort), and getting invaded. In a world where Pakistan has the Bomb, where do you stand if you do not? (And don't bring up countries like Japan; they do have a nuclear program and could make nuclear weapons almost at a whim, and already have powerful nuke-armed allies).
None of which means I would trust Iran with Nukes. I expect us to act in our best interests just like I expect them to act in theirs.
Besides, individuals will never be allowed such a powerful, compact energy source. It's inevitably too useful as a weapon. Even fertilizer sales are tracked by the FBI now. For cars, maybe we'll wind up with hydrogen -> fusion -> electricity -> hydrogen -> fuel cell -> electricity.
Anyways, this creates a very unstable situation, since the Administration can leak (I mean, "selectively declassify") information any old time they feel like it in order to make political points.
What's weird is that all the best information we have about what's being done in our name with our tax money is due to leaks. It doesn't feel like democracy to me.