I believe the number usually quoted is "1 in 9". I mention South Africa because it's one of the few African countries with a government sufficiently competent to collect reasonably accurate statistics. But even if it was say twice this high, that's not going to be anything we haven't seen before -- in many parts of Europe, for example, the bubonic plague killed 10-20% of the population. Humanity can and has survived population-decimating diseases before. And AIDS is less dangerous to society functioning normally because it's less panic-inducing, since you can't get it from breathing the air near a sick person or corpse.
Except this is several orders of magnitude different. Most officeworkers today don't even really need a 10Mbps connection, let alone an 100Mbps or 1Gbps (a very large percentage just browse the web and send email). So saying that 1Gbps will be enough for the forseeable future would be like saying in 1980 that 8 megs of RAM would be enough for the forseeable future -- and it was.
The French Revolution of 1789 set up a system of metric time, with 10 days a week. It was not popular in the least, mostly because people are used to working the amount of time they currently do, and there is no good way to divide 10 by 7. Thus, under a metric week, people would have to either work a longer or shorter portion of the week. Our current system has a 2-day weekend out of a 7-day week -- ~28.6% idle time. With a metric week, you'd have to have either 3 days off every week (30% idle time; less work) or 2 days off every week (20% idle time; less rest). The French chose 2 days a week off, and tried to make up for it by giving a week of holidays at the end of the year. The peasants would have none of that, and within a decade the 7-day week was back.
This seems like a ridiculous and unnecessary design to me. There are already perforations in the metal front of the case where the fan should be mounted -- why not put some slits in the plastic front of the case as well, so air can be sucked in from there directly, instead of through the opening at the bottom?
Which a great deal of them aren't. With most of the computers I've owned, if I took the side panel of the case off, the CPU ran a full 8-10 degrees C cooler than with the case fully closed. This is primarily because the poor case cooling meant that the air inside the case was 10 C or so hotter than room temperature, so removing the side panel let the CPU fan suck in cooler outside air to blow on the heatsink (since the CPU fan is at 90 degrees to the motherboard, it's good at sucking air directly from outside if the side panel of the case is off).
Nobody I know pays $17 for anything other than import or limited edition CDs. The only places that you can find such ridiculous prices are the Tower Records and their online equivalents (like cdnow.com). For popular music, Best Buy generally sells everything for around $12-$14. For more obscure stuff, cheap-cds.com has a fairly good collection, with the majority of CDs being $15, shipping included. If you like punk music, you can almost always order cds for $10-$12, shipping included, directly from the label. And as you mentioned, used CDs are quite cheap. Ebay is a good place to get used CDs -- if you want anything that's been popular in the last 10 years, you can get it really cheaply (Green Day's 1994 hit Dookie typically sells for around $1, for example).
So your point then, is that the RIAA's efforts to stop casual music piracy have been at least somewhat successful, and thus they should continue along the path they've been following?
Since most truly heavy-duty servers will use RAID anyway, individual drive reliability isn't really a huge issue -- if one dies, you just hot-swap it with another one, and haven't lost any data. Thus, high size*speed per unit price is really what you care about for a large server. You care about the performance of the overall RAID array; the individual disks themselves are just easily replaceable components.
So why would I want to pay extra for the SCSI one to do the same thing?
In case you haven't been keeping up with IDE lately, you could rewrite that sentence with "IDE" instead of "SCSI" and it'd still be accurate. Modern IDE controllers (with UDMA) will not use more than 1-3% of the CPU (which is close enough to "extremely low CPU overhead" for me). And any modern IDE CD burner will have BurnProof, which will mean that even in the unlikely event of a buffer underrun, you won't burn a coaster -- the drive can just pause burning, and restart when the buffer is filled again.
I'm particularly perplexed by your last assertion -- that most people who buy movies and music are not able or capable of getting pirated media. I agree on movies -- it requires some degree of patience and technical knowledge to find and download 650mb divx rips. But pirated music is very easy to find for even completely non-technical people. My mom has used both napster and audiogalaxy (until both were shut down), because she had heard about them on CNN, and they were ridiculously easy to install/use. I don't really know any people who own a computer with an internet connection who haven't at least downloaded a few mp3s, and most have downloaded more than that.
-V 0 isn't really good with LAME -- it lowers the ATH threshhold below what the GPSYCHO model can really accurately handle, so you end up with a bunch of wasted space for no quality gain. Better command-lines are "--alt-preset standard" (avg. 180-200 kbps) and "--alt-preset extreme" (avg. 230-250 kbps), which have been extensively tweaked by double-blind tests over at hydrogenaudio.org (I would put what each preset stands for, but much of their quality gain comes from code-level tweaks that you can't replicate with your own command line).
You have to be wanting to blame the music industry and wanting to exonerate filesharing to not think that mp3s are negatively affecting music sales.
Have you talked to people recently? Do you know anyone except for audiophiles who still buys a significant number of CDs? Of the people I know, I and one of my friends are the only ones who still buy more than a few CDs per year -- everyone else downloads mp3s and burns them to audio CDs. Most people I know haven't bought a single CD in the past two years. And it's not because they don't like the music that's coming out -- it's because they already burnt their own CDs. "Why should I pay $12 for something I can get for free?"
Certainly the music industry is pretty crappy, and most of its solutions to the problem are unworkable and hurt legitimate customers, but I don't think you can blame everything on them. People's tendancy to not pay for anything unless they absolutely have to (or are forced to) is the cause of a lot of the problems.
If someone jumps out in front of you and you don't have time to stop, then it really isn't your fault, and the law sensibly doesn't hold you accountable. But you can't just plow through a jaywalker simply because he was in the street illegally -- if you can avoid hitting the jaywalker, you must do so.
In reality, I rarely even carry around a small notebook. I do carry around a pencil, but when I want to write things down, I do it on the back of receipts or napkins.
A cell phone is all I really need (and even that is somewhat questionable; more like a cell phone is all I really want). If I need to take notes, I carry around a small notebook (about 3" x 5") and a pencil. Smaller than most PDAs, and I can write faster on it (especially using an informal sort of shorthand) than most people can enter data into PDAs. And I can flip through pages a lot faster than you can scroll on a PDA.
The statistics vary, but all agree that a very small number of heavy users account for a very large percentage of traffic. Charging these few users more would not be a ton of overhead, since you'd still be charging most people a flat rate.
But likely quite a bit more than 30-40 years. There are approximately 30-40 years left of proven reserves that are economical to extract. However, it's extremely likely that more will be found in the next 30-40 years. And even if not, as the economical ones dry up, oil prices will go up, and others will begin to become economical to extract. And some of the others (such as the oil in oil sands) are extremely vast reserves. So oil may get more expensive in the next 30-40 years, but it's extremely unlikely it'll actually run out completely.
I don't see it as a whine -- merely an observation that there aren't many girls at these sorts of things. I generally don't mention it, but if you look around at any sort of "geeky" gathering it's obvious that the ratio is 95/5 if you're lucky (more like 99/1 often). The Linux conventions are actually some of the more balanced ones, comparatively (often even with 90/10 ratios!). Take a look around at a Magic: The Gathering tournament sometime and note the number of girls present.
Yes, and as far as I've heard it's more the opposite -- the pipe gets clogged early in the week as everyone's limit is reset, but slows down towards the end of the week as both people try to avoid hitting the limit (and thus suffering a degradation in web-browsing speed and such) and people who have hit the limit get bumped to a lower priority class.
I know that University of Texas in Austin is doing something similar -- everyone gets a certain amount of "free" bandwidth per week (I think 2 or 3 GB), and once you've exceeded that amount you remain connected, but get classed with the "excessive users" in a lower priority class (using some sort of Quality of Service routing). Thus when the pipe isn't being used anyway you don't notice any difference, but at peak times you get throttled (while the people who don't exceed the limit get fast speeds all the time).
Either you write about 1000 bills a year, or you have a horrible memory and expect to pay ridiculous late fees. If you pay all your bills by check on time, you might pay about $25 more per year for the stamps and the cost of checks. And since electronic auto-payment usually gets deducted 2-4 weeks before the end of the grace period, you might actually make some of that $25 back in interest you earn by holding on to your money longer.
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Many European countries have declining indigenous populations, and the overall populations are only kept from declining by immigration.
I believe the number usually quoted is "1 in 9". I mention South Africa because it's one of the few African countries with a government sufficiently competent to collect reasonably accurate statistics. But even if it was say twice this high, that's not going to be anything we haven't seen before -- in many parts of Europe, for example, the bubonic plague killed 10-20% of the population. Humanity can and has survived population-decimating diseases before. And AIDS is less dangerous to society functioning normally because it's less panic-inducing, since you can't get it from breathing the air near a sick person or corpse.
Except this is several orders of magnitude different. Most officeworkers today don't even really need a 10Mbps connection, let alone an 100Mbps or 1Gbps (a very large percentage just browse the web and send email). So saying that 1Gbps will be enough for the forseeable future would be like saying in 1980 that 8 megs of RAM would be enough for the forseeable future -- and it was.
If the ISS is an indicator, Russia will ante up a ridiculously small portion of what it's committed to, and the U.S. will pay for the rest.
Not if, for example, you want 1/3 of an hour.
The French Revolution of 1789 set up a system of metric time, with 10 days a week. It was not popular in the least, mostly because people are used to working the amount of time they currently do, and there is no good way to divide 10 by 7. Thus, under a metric week, people would have to either work a longer or shorter portion of the week. Our current system has a 2-day weekend out of a 7-day week -- ~28.6% idle time. With a metric week, you'd have to have either 3 days off every week (30% idle time; less work) or 2 days off every week (20% idle time; less rest). The French chose 2 days a week off, and tried to make up for it by giving a week of holidays at the end of the year. The peasants would have none of that, and within a decade the 7-day week was back.
This seems like a ridiculous and unnecessary design to me. There are already perforations in the metal front of the case where the fan should be mounted -- why not put some slits in the plastic front of the case as well, so air can be sucked in from there directly, instead of through the opening at the bottom?
Which a great deal of them aren't. With most of the computers I've owned, if I took the side panel of the case off, the CPU ran a full 8-10 degrees C cooler than with the case fully closed. This is primarily because the poor case cooling meant that the air inside the case was 10 C or so hotter than room temperature, so removing the side panel let the CPU fan suck in cooler outside air to blow on the heatsink (since the CPU fan is at 90 degrees to the motherboard, it's good at sucking air directly from outside if the side panel of the case is off).
Nobody I know pays $17 for anything other than import or limited edition CDs. The only places that you can find such ridiculous prices are the Tower Records and their online equivalents (like cdnow.com). For popular music, Best Buy generally sells everything for around $12-$14. For more obscure stuff, cheap-cds.com has a fairly good collection, with the majority of CDs being $15, shipping included. If you like punk music, you can almost always order cds for $10-$12, shipping included, directly from the label. And as you mentioned, used CDs are quite cheap. Ebay is a good place to get used CDs -- if you want anything that's been popular in the last 10 years, you can get it really cheaply (Green Day's 1994 hit Dookie typically sells for around $1, for example).
So your point then, is that the RIAA's efforts to stop casual music piracy have been at least somewhat successful, and thus they should continue along the path they've been following?
Since most truly heavy-duty servers will use RAID anyway, individual drive reliability isn't really a huge issue -- if one dies, you just hot-swap it with another one, and haven't lost any data. Thus, high size*speed per unit price is really what you care about for a large server. You care about the performance of the overall RAID array; the individual disks themselves are just easily replaceable components.
So why would I want to pay extra for the SCSI one to do the same thing?
In case you haven't been keeping up with IDE lately, you could rewrite that sentence with "IDE" instead of "SCSI" and it'd still be accurate. Modern IDE controllers (with UDMA) will not use more than 1-3% of the CPU (which is close enough to "extremely low CPU overhead" for me). And any modern IDE CD burner will have BurnProof, which will mean that even in the unlikely event of a buffer underrun, you won't burn a coaster -- the drive can just pause burning, and restart when the buffer is filled again.
I'm particularly perplexed by your last assertion -- that most people who buy movies and music are not able or capable of getting pirated media. I agree on movies -- it requires some degree of patience and technical knowledge to find and download 650mb divx rips. But pirated music is very easy to find for even completely non-technical people. My mom has used both napster and audiogalaxy (until both were shut down), because she had heard about them on CNN, and they were ridiculously easy to install/use. I don't really know any people who own a computer with an internet connection who haven't at least downloaded a few mp3s, and most have downloaded more than that.
-V 0 isn't really good with LAME -- it lowers the ATH threshhold below what the GPSYCHO model can really accurately handle, so you end up with a bunch of wasted space for no quality gain. Better command-lines are "--alt-preset standard" (avg. 180-200 kbps) and "--alt-preset extreme" (avg. 230-250 kbps), which have been extensively tweaked by double-blind tests over at hydrogenaudio.org (I would put what each preset stands for, but much of their quality gain comes from code-level tweaks that you can't replicate with your own command line).
You have to be wanting to blame the music industry and wanting to exonerate filesharing to not think that mp3s are negatively affecting music sales.
Have you talked to people recently? Do you know anyone except for audiophiles who still buys a significant number of CDs? Of the people I know, I and one of my friends are the only ones who still buy more than a few CDs per year -- everyone else downloads mp3s and burns them to audio CDs. Most people I know haven't bought a single CD in the past two years. And it's not because they don't like the music that's coming out -- it's because they already burnt their own CDs. "Why should I pay $12 for something I can get for free?"
Certainly the music industry is pretty crappy, and most of its solutions to the problem are unworkable and hurt legitimate customers, but I don't think you can blame everything on them. People's tendancy to not pay for anything unless they absolutely have to (or are forced to) is the cause of a lot of the problems.
If someone jumps out in front of you and you don't have time to stop, then it really isn't your fault, and the law sensibly doesn't hold you accountable. But you can't just plow through a jaywalker simply because he was in the street illegally -- if you can avoid hitting the jaywalker, you must do so.
As a lazy person, I can't be bothered.
In reality, I rarely even carry around a small notebook. I do carry around a pencil, but when I want to write things down, I do it on the back of receipts or napkins.
A cell phone is all I really need (and even that is somewhat questionable; more like a cell phone is all I really want). If I need to take notes, I carry around a small notebook (about 3" x 5") and a pencil. Smaller than most PDAs, and I can write faster on it (especially using an informal sort of shorthand) than most people can enter data into PDAs. And I can flip through pages a lot faster than you can scroll on a PDA.
The statistics vary, but all agree that a very small number of heavy users account for a very large percentage of traffic. Charging these few users more would not be a ton of overhead, since you'd still be charging most people a flat rate.
But likely quite a bit more than 30-40 years. There are approximately 30-40 years left of proven reserves that are economical to extract. However, it's extremely likely that more will be found in the next 30-40 years. And even if not, as the economical ones dry up, oil prices will go up, and others will begin to become economical to extract. And some of the others (such as the oil in oil sands) are extremely vast reserves. So oil may get more expensive in the next 30-40 years, but it's extremely unlikely it'll actually run out completely.
I don't see it as a whine -- merely an observation that there aren't many girls at these sorts of things. I generally don't mention it, but if you look around at any sort of "geeky" gathering it's obvious that the ratio is 95/5 if you're lucky (more like 99/1 often). The Linux conventions are actually some of the more balanced ones, comparatively (often even with 90/10 ratios!). Take a look around at a Magic: The Gathering tournament sometime and note the number of girls present.
Yes, and as far as I've heard it's more the opposite -- the pipe gets clogged early in the week as everyone's limit is reset, but slows down towards the end of the week as both people try to avoid hitting the limit (and thus suffering a degradation in web-browsing speed and such) and people who have hit the limit get bumped to a lower priority class.
I know that University of Texas in Austin is doing something similar -- everyone gets a certain amount of "free" bandwidth per week (I think 2 or 3 GB), and once you've exceeded that amount you remain connected, but get classed with the "excessive users" in a lower priority class (using some sort of Quality of Service routing). Thus when the pipe isn't being used anyway you don't notice any difference, but at peak times you get throttled (while the people who don't exceed the limit get fast speeds all the time).
The propositioning children part.
Either you write about 1000 bills a year, or you have a horrible memory and expect to pay ridiculous late fees. If you pay all your bills by check on time, you might pay about $25 more per year for the stamps and the cost of checks. And since electronic auto-payment usually gets deducted 2-4 weeks before the end of the grace period, you might actually make some of that $25 back in interest you earn by holding on to your money longer.