They're not saying you pay for a bigger pipe. They're saying you'll pay by completely different criteria. Right now, you pay for a certain number of bits per second, and you get them, no matter what their content or where they are sent from. The plan they WANT to put in place would say "you're only allowed 8 megs a day from Google, because they haven't payed us to carry their extra traffic, and you're only allowed to stream three media files per day without paying extra". They want to move from being a provider of raw bandwidth to being a provider of specific services.
Maps is the only product of theirs that I think measures up to Search. Earth they bought fully formed, so that doesn't count as much... Image Search I count as part of the search engine, but that's quite good too. Groups I'm not so impressed with the interface either. And again, Maps is one of those where you are doing one specific thing: "Show me this place" or "show me the route between these two places". It performs exactly 2 functions. Groups, where there's a lot more stuff they need to let you do... not as good.
I really think they have some excellent interface designers, but they try to take the "minimalist" thing too far in cases where they shouldn't. Google Talk is an excellent example. It's way, way too simplistic to be an effective communication tool for me. It takes way too much choice away from you, and doesn't allow nearly enough tweaking. Maybe it will improve over time, but so far I'm not impressed by their efforts at more interactive applications.
Interesting... my impression of google products so far has been that they started well, and quickly lost touch with what people like out of desktop applications.
**** Google Search: awesome.
*** GMail: pretty cool, especially now that they've finally added a delete button after 2 years of customers bitching at them. Still has some major lacking features, and hasn't had any major changes in its entire lifetime. Feels like it's stagnated.
*** Google Personal Homepage: blatant ripoff of MS's start.com, and not as good as the new live.com setup. Pretty decent, nothing special.
** GTalk: overly simplistic interface, and likes to add jerry@some-random-guy-I-emailed-once.com to your contact list. Doesn't support connectivity with other jabber domains by default, which was one of the cool points of the protocol to begin with.
** Google Desktop: cluttered, not incredibly useful.
* Orkut: pure crap.
Like just about every company out their, they have a pretty hit-and-miss record in my book. They have one really standout product, and then the rest have varying levels of interface and design issues. It seems like they're fantastic at apps where you can get away with a really minimalistic interface, like Search, but when you get to something where you actually WANT a more rich interaction model, they get a bit lost.
And how selfish of you to demand that the rest of the country give up its rights to buy you a little supposed safety, when we as a nation have worked towards this freedom for generations.
A great nation would live on in freedom after all of us are gone. A totalitarian regime will disintigrate in the name of "safety".
How much you want to bet that some of the criteria include using encrypted communications and annonymizing proxies and other legitimate security measures that people will start adopting exactly because this kind of snooping system exists? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
ah, touche. I didn't realize the vendors were so many, and not counted in the FTE list. Still not the 1:1 FTE:Vendor ratio other people in this thread are claiming, but closer...
because 1) you haven't named that utility correctly yet, and 2) the last time I looked I swear the count was right around 65k. I have no idea why you would make it up, and I may just be misremembering the count I saw... but hey, this is slashdot -- so I just threw it out there:-)
If the group was really set up like that, I would agree with you. If you follow the link, and read some of the "professor profiles" they have posted, though, it's absolutely disgusting. The first guy on the list is a great example... most of the 3 pages of ranting is about how the guy signs up to a petition a month in support of liberal causes, and includes wonderful phrases like "soon all his communication with the outside world will consist of signing petitions". I'm sorry, but when the organizers of the site spend that much effort harping on professors political beliefs outside the classroom, and fail to even mention whether it affects his teaching, let alone providing examples of it affecting his teaching in a negative way, I stop listening.
I'm an extremely radical liberal, but I'm continually amazed by those on the left who claim that no Republican/conservative can ever have a valid point. I realize that there are some extremely intelligent individuals who are conservatives for very sane, non-evil reasons. It's important to realize, though, that there are some extreme nutcasses on both sides, and in this case the people running this site are just to the left of Ann Coulter.
well... first off, I'm not sure how costly software raid is on the cpu (all the advice I found said to use that instead of trying to find hardware raid card to support 9 drives). And yeah, I thought it would be nice to do some processing work directly on the box as well... transcoding audio and video files for sure, and possibly run apache+svn, although there are some security implications there that I haven't looked at very closely.
I justify the extra cost of speakeasy because they don't block or cap any ports, don't have hidden bandwidth usage limitations, generally encourage you to run servers rather than act as if you're doing something wrong if you mention such to them, and have amazing tech support compared to every other ISP I've ever worked with. Also, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't try to pull some bullshit like this.
actually, at 750G (usable) for $700, you can definitely build your own for cheaper per gig. I've specced out an amd64 with 2.1 TB usable for 87 cents per gig, and you can probably get better than that if you try harder.
uh... well, for one thing, wolves don't hunt alone, so there's that. And I think you underestimate how quickly a wolf could knock you over and rip out your jugular. Wolves are freaking huge (think great dane) and vicious as hell, especially when hungry. We're tasty, pink, and soft by comparison.
Yeah, but what's the combined bandwidth of all those neurons? Since individual neurons can do no actual processing of their own (all "computation" is in neuron trigger weighting and interaction), the amount of data streaming through that network has to be staggering, especially if one were to try to represent it with a binary system. Say neurons have a "resolution" of 8 unique steps along the way from off to on that they can recognize and trigger in response to, and say they run the equivalent of a clock cycle every 10 milliseconds (both numbers are likely much more taxing in real life) and they're iterating over 160 Petabytes of information every second.
My point in the original post was, that's hard enough if you could somehow find storage space for all the data on a Petabyte LAN, if such a thing existed. The concept of doing it distributed over the internet at large, with the inherent speed limitations, is just ridiculous.
Not necessarily... if it's smart enough, it'll be able to pass the Turing test by knowingly aping human behavior. That'd be a better (although more scary) way to pass it than making a computer that thinks it's human, in my opinion.
Not necessarily... some higher primates seem to be aware of unique objects as individuals, but there's less evidence that this has translated to self awareness. However, from human infant development at least, it seems like awareness of the rest of the world, and of causality and a whole bunch of other things are prerequisites for self awareness. And if all these things really are just chemical potentials in the brain, then it's a ton of storage space not to mention computing power to simulate that type of system virtually.
I happen to think that throwing more computing power at it might work, actually... but only in that it would allow us to evolve virtual neural networks complex enough to approach the level of the human brain. I don't think we'll ever be able to "engineer" AI, but if our own conciousness is truly nothing more than chemical interactions between neurons, we might be able to hit it by trying to recreate neural evolution in a computer system.
is that to build a truly self-aware computing grid, the LAST thing you want is for it to be distributed over the entire globe. The amount of data a system has to integrate to reach self-awareness is massive, and the further apart the nodes are the more latency you'll have. Once the system is up and running, then maybe you'd want to spread it apart to protect against natural disasters, but in the development stage you'd only be handicapping yourself needlessly. The writer's conclusion is based on an understanding of science that doesn't seem to reach past the Terminator 3 level.
Not really. It's the same thing as manual vs. automatic. Some people just want to push one pedal and move forwards, while others enjoy the interaction and responsiveness of a clutch. Not only are they fun to drive, but in the right hands, they can actually be more safe than a manual. It's the same thing with traction control and all those other fancy and not-incredibly-useful things. They're a substitute for learning how your car responds in less than optimal conditions, and how to compensate. For example, I know that going 70 on the highway, when I pass over a bump or a metal-plated join while following a curve, my wheels lose traction for a split second, and I jog the wheel slightly to account for it without even conciously noticing anymore. It's that kind of minute interaction with the road that these systems try to gloss over, and while you can make do with either one, I have yet to see the system that can react better than a properly trained human driver.
I know technology isn't the only factor. If you'd bothered to read the sentance before the one you quoted, you would have seen this:
the hipster factor making it a fashion accessory, and the fact that people are apparently willing to pay double the price of equivalent offerings from other companies just for a color scheme and a scroll wheel
Anyway, don't forget that the iPod has quite evil levels of DRM itself, and that hasn't stopped people.
Well, the Archos was big and clunky because it was a 20 Gig portable media player and it was out several years before the iPod. And I made a mistake, I meant to say that Rio has a better on-screen interface than the iPod, rather than Creative. I've seen ipods, and I'm so so happy that I got a Rio Karma instead.
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They're not saying you pay for a bigger pipe. They're saying you'll pay by completely different criteria. Right now, you pay for a certain number of bits per second, and you get them, no matter what their content or where they are sent from. The plan they WANT to put in place would say "you're only allowed 8 megs a day from Google, because they haven't payed us to carry their extra traffic, and you're only allowed to stream three media files per day without paying extra". They want to move from being a provider of raw bandwidth to being a provider of specific services.
Maps is the only product of theirs that I think measures up to Search. Earth they bought fully formed, so that doesn't count as much... Image Search I count as part of the search engine, but that's quite good too. Groups I'm not so impressed with the interface either. And again, Maps is one of those where you are doing one specific thing: "Show me this place" or "show me the route between these two places". It performs exactly 2 functions. Groups, where there's a lot more stuff they need to let you do... not as good.
I really think they have some excellent interface designers, but they try to take the "minimalist" thing too far in cases where they shouldn't. Google Talk is an excellent example. It's way, way too simplistic to be an effective communication tool for me. It takes way too much choice away from you, and doesn't allow nearly enough tweaking. Maybe it will improve over time, but so far I'm not impressed by their efforts at more interactive applications.
Interesting... my impression of google products so far has been that they started well, and quickly lost touch with what people like out of desktop applications.
**** Google Search: awesome.
*** GMail: pretty cool, especially now that they've finally added a delete button after 2 years of customers bitching at them. Still has some major lacking features, and hasn't had any major changes in its entire lifetime. Feels like it's stagnated.
*** Google Personal Homepage: blatant ripoff of MS's start.com, and not as good as the new live.com setup. Pretty decent, nothing special.
** GTalk: overly simplistic interface, and likes to add jerry@some-random-guy-I-emailed-once.com to your contact list. Doesn't support connectivity with other jabber domains by default, which was one of the cool points of the protocol to begin with.
** Google Desktop: cluttered, not incredibly useful.
* Orkut: pure crap.
Like just about every company out their, they have a pretty hit-and-miss record in my book. They have one really standout product, and then the rest have varying levels of interface and design issues. It seems like they're fantastic at apps where you can get away with a really minimalistic interface, like Search, but when you get to something where you actually WANT a more rich interaction model, they get a bit lost.
And how selfish of you to demand that the rest of the country give up its rights to buy you a little supposed safety, when we as a nation have worked towards this freedom for generations.
A great nation would live on in freedom after all of us are gone. A totalitarian regime will disintigrate in the name of "safety".
How much you want to bet that some of the criteria include using encrypted communications and annonymizing proxies and other legitimate security measures that people will start adopting exactly because this kind of snooping system exists? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
ah, touche. I didn't realize the vendors were so many, and not counted in the FTE list. Still not the 1:1 FTE:Vendor ratio other people in this thread are claiming, but closer...
because 1) you haven't named that utility correctly yet, and 2) the last time I looked I swear the count was right around 65k. I have no idea why you would make it up, and I may just be misremembering the count I saw... but hey, this is slashdot -- so I just threw it out there :-)
I call BS
You think performers aren't drunk or high in the studios??
If the group was really set up like that, I would agree with you. If you follow the link, and read some of the "professor profiles" they have posted, though, it's absolutely disgusting. The first guy on the list is a great example... most of the 3 pages of ranting is about how the guy signs up to a petition a month in support of liberal causes, and includes wonderful phrases like "soon all his communication with the outside world will consist of signing petitions". I'm sorry, but when the organizers of the site spend that much effort harping on professors political beliefs outside the classroom, and fail to even mention whether it affects his teaching, let alone providing examples of it affecting his teaching in a negative way, I stop listening.
I'm an extremely radical liberal, but I'm continually amazed by those on the left who claim that no Republican/conservative can ever have a valid point. I realize that there are some extremely intelligent individuals who are conservatives for very sane, non-evil reasons. It's important to realize, though, that there are some extreme nutcasses on both sides, and in this case the people running this site are just to the left of Ann Coulter.
well... first off, I'm not sure how costly software raid is on the cpu (all the advice I found said to use that instead of trying to find hardware raid card to support 9 drives). And yeah, I thought it would be nice to do some processing work directly on the box as well... transcoding audio and video files for sure, and possibly run apache+svn, although there are some security implications there that I haven't looked at very closely.
I justify the extra cost of speakeasy because they don't block or cap any ports, don't have hidden bandwidth usage limitations, generally encourage you to run servers rather than act as if you're doing something wrong if you mention such to them, and have amazing tech support compared to every other ISP I've ever worked with. Also, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't try to pull some bullshit like this.
actually, at 750G (usable) for $700, you can definitely build your own for cheaper per gig. I've specced out an amd64 with 2.1 TB usable for 87 cents per gig, and you can probably get better than that if you try harder.
Chill, man. I never said wolves make a habit of attacking humans... I said that in a fight between a human and a wolf, the wolf would probably win.
uh... well, for one thing, wolves don't hunt alone, so there's that. And I think you underestimate how quickly a wolf could knock you over and rip out your jugular. Wolves are freaking huge (think great dane) and vicious as hell, especially when hungry. We're tasty, pink, and soft by comparison.
Yeah, but what's the combined bandwidth of all those neurons? Since individual neurons can do no actual processing of their own (all "computation" is in neuron trigger weighting and interaction), the amount of data streaming through that network has to be staggering, especially if one were to try to represent it with a binary system. Say neurons have a "resolution" of 8 unique steps along the way from off to on that they can recognize and trigger in response to, and say they run the equivalent of a clock cycle every 10 milliseconds (both numbers are likely much more taxing in real life) and they're iterating over 160 Petabytes of information every second.
My point in the original post was, that's hard enough if you could somehow find storage space for all the data on a Petabyte LAN, if such a thing existed. The concept of doing it distributed over the internet at large, with the inherent speed limitations, is just ridiculous.
Not necessarily... if it's smart enough, it'll be able to pass the Turing test by knowingly aping human behavior. That'd be a better (although more scary) way to pass it than making a computer that thinks it's human, in my opinion.
Not necessarily... some higher primates seem to be aware of unique objects as individuals, but there's less evidence that this has translated to self awareness. However, from human infant development at least, it seems like awareness of the rest of the world, and of causality and a whole bunch of other things are prerequisites for self awareness. And if all these things really are just chemical potentials in the brain, then it's a ton of storage space not to mention computing power to simulate that type of system virtually.
I happen to think that throwing more computing power at it might work, actually... but only in that it would allow us to evolve virtual neural networks complex enough to approach the level of the human brain. I don't think we'll ever be able to "engineer" AI, but if our own conciousness is truly nothing more than chemical interactions between neurons, we might be able to hit it by trying to recreate neural evolution in a computer system.
is that to build a truly self-aware computing grid, the LAST thing you want is for it to be distributed over the entire globe. The amount of data a system has to integrate to reach self-awareness is massive, and the further apart the nodes are the more latency you'll have. Once the system is up and running, then maybe you'd want to spread it apart to protect against natural disasters, but in the development stage you'd only be handicapping yourself needlessly. The writer's conclusion is based on an understanding of science that doesn't seem to reach past the Terminator 3 level.
Not really. It's the same thing as manual vs. automatic. Some people just want to push one pedal and move forwards, while others enjoy the interaction and responsiveness of a clutch. Not only are they fun to drive, but in the right hands, they can actually be more safe than a manual. It's the same thing with traction control and all those other fancy and not-incredibly-useful things. They're a substitute for learning how your car responds in less than optimal conditions, and how to compensate. For example, I know that going 70 on the highway, when I pass over a bump or a metal-plated join while following a curve, my wheels lose traction for a split second, and I jog the wheel slightly to account for it without even conciously noticing anymore. It's that kind of minute interaction with the road that these systems try to gloss over, and while you can make do with either one, I have yet to see the system that can react better than a properly trained human driver.
average number of errors in a wide range of topics is a narrow scope?
Well, the Archos was big and clunky because it was a 20 Gig portable media player and it was out several years before the iPod. And I made a mistake, I meant to say that Rio has a better on-screen interface than the iPod, rather than Creative. I've seen ipods, and I'm so so happy that I got a Rio Karma instead.
except for all those studies that point out that wikipedia is, on average, very close in quality to Britannica...