I prefer having no limits at all. My current provider has never bothered me about download levels, torrents always seem to saturate the line speed and if you live close enough to the exchange you can get 24Mb/s. Where we live we're only getting 16Mb/s, but at least I can use that fully without any complaints. And at £22/pm they are in the same ballpark as all the throttled / limited services.
I don't normally mention them by name as nothing is worse for an ISPs customer relations than recommendations, but as I'm moving country in a couple of weeks you should check out Be Unlimited.
Your figures are off by several orders of magnitude. 2500 of these is roughly 10,000T/flops. As a Tflop is 10^12 operations, and we have 10^11 neurons that leaves 10^5 floating point operations per neuron. If each has 1000 synapses to process then we are down to 100 operations per connection, per second.
At this point it seems obvious that you've assumed a really simplistic model of a neuron that can compute a synaptic value in a single floating point operation. These simple neuron models don't behave like a real brain, and scaling up simulations of them doesn't produce anything interesting. Real neurons are capable of computing much more complex functions than these models. The throughput on the interconnect is going to be a major factor, and simulating each neuron will require from 10s to 1000000s of operations depending on the level of biological realism that is required. The Blue Brain project has a lot of interesting material on different models of the neuron and the tradeoff between performance and realism.
Their end goal is to dedicate a large IBM Blue Gene to simulating an entire column within the brain (roughly 1,000,000 neurons) using a biologically-realistic model.
You've missed my point. I don't have a problem with the media industry getting paid for their work. My days of downloading music and movies stopped when I got a proper job (Spore aside, but I did buy it first). I don't even mind them encrusting their wares with DRM - sure it's futile, but if it makes them feel better then go ahead.
What seriously pisses me off is when they try to subvert the OS of a general purpose computer, and try to cripple it into believing that copying bits is somehow difficult. This is where they cross the line from protecting their (broken) interests into trying to change the basic rules for everyone.
So no, it is not "just life" that we should adapt to suit a corporate interest. It is life that they will either wake up and realise the futility of what they are doing, or they will go bust.
Any digitial data that you can access, you can copy. Maybe you missed it but that is the entire point of encoding something as a binary string. It means that it can be reconstructed with low error. So yes, any digital media is easy to copy.
You seem to confuse lack of access to data with problems copying it. If you can access the data in your online banks system then it is trivial to copy. That's how my account statements are sitting on my harddrive.
You should think about your first point (that people aren't forced to use DRM) and your last point (that only hardware DRM seems to go the distance). Think about them together. Sony's DRM works precisely because you have to use it on the Playstation 3. There is no other option, no back doors.
For the RIAA any use of a computer that doesn't involve a properly licensed media player is a backdoor. They want to lock down everything to try and change the fundamental rules of the game - to get everyone to pretend that bits are hard to copy.
Sure, when you are talking about their products that is a line of reasoning that makes sense. But the problem is when they start trying to rewrite the rules to suit themselves. Digital data has one fundamental property - it is easy to copy. Although this doesn't suit the media industries it is a basic property of the market that they've chosen to enter.
You see it's not just a choice of whether or not we buy their product. It is also a choice of whether or not they sell it in a given form - ie as a collection of bits. If they chose to then they have to accept the natural consequences that it is easy to copy.
By all means try and wrap those bits in a DRM scheme. It won't work but it doesn't bother me if you try. The line that is being crossed, is when you try and impose an artifical set of restrictions on all computer systems - because if there is even one out there that functions normally then your scheme breaks.
That is trying to change the world to suit them. It's wrong.
It's almost as if there are applications outside the domain that you describe, for which this would be useful. And as if this is not being aimed at consumers at all.
Why does it become the world's responsibility to adapt to the rules that the media industry would like? Digital data is easy to copy. If they want to sell digital wares then they need to adapt to the new rules that come with it. Not the other way round.
It's not a locked down OS. People need to get this in perspective. If it were a locked down OS then I wouldn't be able to just run a different media player to get around it. This is one application, locking use of a specific type of drm-encrusted file.
The solution is exactly the same as on windows or linux - just use mplayer.
Just because the formal definition of Big Oh notation uses limits does not mean that knowledge of calculus is required to understand the notation. Anyone who has got as far as curve sketching could understand the concept.
It's true that most programmers don't bother with high-level math -- although they'd better pass calculus if they want to understand O(n) vs. O(log(n)) -- and most mathematicians don't bother with high-level programming languages.
Why? It doesn't have anything to do with calculus.
I thought that Sage was quite easy to learn - and I hadn't used Python before I started. I haven't used Mathematica, but I've used Maple and Magma for a few years. There didn't seem to be any difference in learning curve between Sage and the commercial options. In some cases the tutorials and reference were a lot more helpful.
In general, open source software tends to have a crap user interface compared to the commercial application being cloned. In this case the browser based notebook is up there with maple, although the proper latex integration is more powerful. Using Python as the underlying language was genius, as it has a much cleaner design than the languages used in most CAS.
What parts of Sage did you think were difficult to use?
I find it extremely disingenuous to reply to the first post with a completely unrelated comment, just to list higher in the discussion. This is the first clue that you are a tool.
The second clue is that you have completely misunderstood what is a hypothesis, and what is a principle. The only part of your post that was correct is when you point out that you lack the credentials to argue about this.
The Anthropic Principle states that our universe must be special (for various types of specialness that involve fine-tuning fundamental constants) because we require a special universe to exist in. As such it is a completely universal principle, and uncontroversial.
The multiverse hypothesis is one controversial explanation for the principle. Hence the name "hypothesis". It is quite straightforward if you quit stealing oxygen for a second and attempt logical thought.
1. Yes I am limiting discussion to textbooks. That's what the article was about, and this entire discussion apart from your points. It seems like a reasonable limit.
2. You did claim that the TCO is unaffected by the inability to resell. Regardless of whether or not you think the TCO is affect, you said explicitly that the inability to resell would not have a large effect.
If I can resell something, then I recoup some of the money that I paid. Hence the net cost is lower. Hence the TCO is much lower.
Your argument is flawed for the same reason that the original analysis in the article is flawed. The author pickes a new price (lets call it X), and a used price Y. He assumes that a student either pays X or Y for a book, and so compares a mixture of X and Y to the Kindle price.
You choose a much lower resale price and say TCO is unaffected because Y is so low. What you both miss is that a student can both buy and sell books at the used price Y. So most students will buy a book for a course at either X or Y, and then when they have no more need for it they will sell it at price Y.
Hence the overall cost is either X-Y or Y-Y. It doesn't matter how low the resale price is, there is a massive effect upon the TCO. In your example if we assume that any textbook will fetch $5, then the student first buys at that price, then sells at that price. Net-cost is zero. In practice there is almost always a small drop to account for wear and tear, but for a student in a liquid market for used textbooks the TCO is low.
If the Kindle takes off then the lack of resale market will place a massive burden on students. At which point Pirates Bay will becomes the dominant supplier of textbooks.
Hundreds of games get previewed and reviewed by all the major gaming sites. That is not enough for it to stand out from the herd. Sorry, but having a review buried on a bunch of sites is not marketing.
The video (because I can't be bothered to download the demo) makes it look like this, but it involves a download and payment. It looks about the quality-level of the numerous freebies in this genre, and so it would take a lot of effort for it to stand out from the crowd.
Before you respond for a third time with exactly the same point, consider this. I am not the OP. I replied because I agreed with him. There are numerous other comments from other posters also saying that they had never heard of this game before this story.
When it comes to popularity, lots of people are never wrong. Some people have heard of this game, but it was not marketed well.
Bollocks. It's had terrible marketing, this story is the first time that I've heard of it. To be honest I can't see how they could raise interest in what looks like just another "Fantastic Contraption".
You're trying hard to have your argument both ways, but it doesn't work. There is a very old saying amongst scammers "You can't cheat an honest man". All scams rely on the victim being willing to commit a small crime, or bend the rules in some way for a large payoff.
I haven't read the article this time (maybe I'm the only one in this case) so I haven't read exactly what was supposed to be the reason that the money was deposited in her account. Normally it is to evade some kind of duty, or to get around an accounting issue.
Without the intent to break this little rule in exchange for the payout, the victim would never get scammed. So the victim in these scams is not free of blame.
The bit that I don't get: Paranoid individual with delusions of persecution against them by some conspiracy. check Meets a bunch of people on the internet who know all the details. check Agrees to meet them in real life... WTF!?!
Are these only half-arsed delusional paranoids, or are they potential Darwin award candidates? Seriously people, if you're going to be a whackjob then at least put some proper effort into doing it properly.
I mean really, In a raid 5 you're reading from all the different disks, calculating parody, and writing that information to the drive - aside from all the calculations you've got essentially a disk (probably less) of data to write.
If you need formal education for that - let alone higher education - God help you. Where I come from, that sort of thing was generally considered "not being an asshole", not a complicated subject that required in-depth study.
Wow. You come from a very unusual area, probably unlike 99% of this planet. So I'm curious, one of the "big picture" things, like the list that the GP mentions, is the concept of a Moral Wat. A standard topic in every first year philosophy course, as it is an easy way to introduce the various moral and ethical frameworks that have been proposed.
So, purely from the basis of "not being an asshole", what are the pros and cons of a Moral War? The standard ethical objections to such a war, and the ethical arguments based on corner cases used to establish that such objections cannot represent an absolutist moral viewpoint.
Finally, just to show that it's not all academic wanking for the sake of it: how does this apply to current US foreign policy in Iraq, and the viewpoints of Americans who either support, or disapprove of that policy?
Now, is it possible that the GP had a point that study of viewpoints, and the reasoning behind them is worthy of scholastic study, and provides something beyond "not being an asshole" as taught to children? I'm just going from long distant memory, as I only did one semester of Philosophy as it looked interested during my undergraduate degree in CS, nearly ten years ago. Yet from my experience, that one semester taught me to think more deeply about some central issues in reasoning than anyone I've met since then without a similar background in philosophy.
Certainly a subject that should be taught in schools. It seems wise to make students think, before you try and teach them to think about X.
Interesting. When I used to use the dev snapshots of Beryl they were lovely and quick (AMD64-3200+ with GeForce 6800). Unfortunately either the compositor or the window manager would crash at least twice a day, so it was a bit unnerving.
On a box at work (Old P4@3Ghz, crappy GeForce 5 series) I can notice windows redraw, tabs pause before disappearing, the works. It is very annoying, although I suspect that the driver is not installed properly and I don't have root on that box. I also don't have the time to explain to our sysadmin how to fix it:(
I used to use BlackBox a few years ago. I love that snappy feeling, and a few milliseconds in the wrong place completely destroy a user interface. But at work I put up with the slow annoying rendering - because metacity is rock solid and it doesn't crash on me ever.
At home, I ditched linux the day that I decided that I wanted a unix laptop with properly working hardware support (like hibernation that works the way it should do). So I bought a mac:) I agree about the perception issue, there are exactly two ways that it can be correct: instant snappy response, or smooth transitions in-between. Any noticeable redraw/overdraw lag is too much.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds a bit like this. I've always thought that it looks pretty cute.
I prefer having no limits at all. My current provider has never bothered me about download levels, torrents always seem to saturate the line speed and if you live close enough to the exchange you can get 24Mb/s. Where we live we're only getting 16Mb/s, but at least I can use that fully without any complaints. And at £22/pm they are in the same ballpark as all the throttled / limited services.
I don't normally mention them by name as nothing is worse for an ISPs customer relations than recommendations, but as I'm moving country in a couple of weeks you should check out Be Unlimited.
Oh dear. 4000*362 ~= 1440*20111 / 20. So you assumed that the sorting would scale linearly. fail.
Your figures are off by several orders of magnitude. 2500 of these is roughly 10,000T/flops. As a Tflop is 10^12 operations, and we have 10^11 neurons that leaves 10^5 floating point operations per neuron. If each has 1000 synapses to process then we are down to 100 operations per connection, per second.
At this point it seems obvious that you've assumed a really simplistic model of a neuron that can compute a synaptic value in a single floating point operation. These simple neuron models don't behave like a real brain, and scaling up simulations of them doesn't produce anything interesting. Real neurons are capable of computing much more complex functions than these models. The throughput on the interconnect is going to be a major factor, and simulating each neuron will require from 10s to 1000000s of operations depending on the level of biological realism that is required. The Blue Brain project has a lot of interesting material on different models of the neuron and the tradeoff between performance and realism.
Their end goal is to dedicate a large IBM Blue Gene to simulating an entire column within the brain (roughly 1,000,000 neurons) using a biologically-realistic model.
You've missed my point. I don't have a problem with the media industry getting paid for their work. My days of downloading music and movies stopped when I got a proper job (Spore aside, but I did buy it first). I don't even mind them encrusting their wares with DRM - sure it's futile, but if it makes them feel better then go ahead.
What seriously pisses me off is when they try to subvert the OS of a general purpose computer, and try to cripple it into believing that copying bits is somehow difficult. This is where they cross the line from protecting their (broken) interests into trying to change the basic rules for everyone.
So no, it is not "just life" that we should adapt to suit a corporate interest. It is life that they will either wake up and realise the futility of what they are doing, or they will go bust.
Any digitial data that you can access, you can copy. Maybe you missed it but that is the entire point of encoding something as a binary string. It means that it can be reconstructed with low error. So yes, any digital media is easy to copy.
You seem to confuse lack of access to data with problems copying it. If you can access the data in your online banks system then it is trivial to copy. That's how my account statements are sitting on my harddrive.
You should think about your first point (that people aren't forced to use DRM) and your last point (that only hardware DRM seems to go the distance). Think about them together. Sony's DRM works precisely because you have to use it on the Playstation 3. There is no other option, no back doors.
For the RIAA any use of a computer that doesn't involve a properly licensed media player is a backdoor. They want to lock down everything to try and change the fundamental rules of the game - to get everyone to pretend that bits are hard to copy.
Sure, when you are talking about their products that is a line of reasoning that makes sense. But the problem is when they start trying to rewrite the rules to suit themselves. Digital data has one fundamental property - it is easy to copy. Although this doesn't suit the media industries it is a basic property of the market that they've chosen to enter.
You see it's not just a choice of whether or not we buy their product. It is also a choice of whether or not they sell it in a given form - ie as a collection of bits. If they chose to then they have to accept the natural consequences that it is easy to copy.
By all means try and wrap those bits in a DRM scheme. It won't work but it doesn't bother me if you try. The line that is being crossed, is when you try and impose an artifical set of restrictions on all computer systems - because if there is even one out there that functions normally then your scheme breaks.
That is trying to change the world to suit them. It's wrong.
Total lack of understanding indeed.
It's almost as if there are applications outside the domain that you describe, for which this would be useful. And as if this is not being aimed at consumers at all.
Tsk tsk.
I only got as far as:
That was enough for me
Why does it become the world's responsibility to adapt to the rules that the media industry would like? Digital data is easy to copy. If they want to sell digital wares then they need to adapt to the new rules that come with it. Not the other way round.
It's not a locked down OS. People need to get this in perspective. If it were a locked down OS then I wouldn't be able to just run a different media player to get around it. This is one application, locking use of a specific type of drm-encrusted file.
The solution is exactly the same as on windows or linux - just use mplayer.
Just because the formal definition of Big Oh notation uses limits does not mean that knowledge of calculus is required to understand the notation. Anyone who has got as far as curve sketching could understand the concept.
Why? It doesn't have anything to do with calculus.
I thought that Sage was quite easy to learn - and I hadn't used Python before I started. I haven't used Mathematica, but I've used Maple and Magma for a few years. There didn't seem to be any difference in learning curve between Sage and the commercial options. In some cases the tutorials and reference were a lot more helpful.
In general, open source software tends to have a crap user interface compared to the commercial application being cloned. In this case the browser based notebook is up there with maple, although the proper latex integration is more powerful. Using Python as the underlying language was genius, as it has a much cleaner design than the languages used in most CAS.
What parts of Sage did you think were difficult to use?
I find it extremely disingenuous to reply to the first post with a completely unrelated comment, just to list higher in the discussion. This is the first clue that you are a tool.
The second clue is that you have completely misunderstood what is a hypothesis, and what is a principle. The only part of your post that was correct is when you point out that you lack the credentials to argue about this.
The Anthropic Principle states that our universe must be special (for various types of specialness that involve fine-tuning fundamental constants) because we require a special universe to exist in. As such it is a completely universal principle, and uncontroversial.
The multiverse hypothesis is one controversial explanation for the principle. Hence the name "hypothesis". It is quite straightforward if you quit stealing oxygen for a second and attempt logical thought.
1. Yes I am limiting discussion to textbooks. That's what the article was about, and this entire discussion apart from your points. It seems like a reasonable limit.
2. You did claim that the TCO is unaffected by the inability to resell. Regardless of whether or not you think the TCO is affect, you said explicitly that the inability to resell would not have a large effect.
If I can resell something, then I recoup some of the money that I paid. Hence the net cost is lower. Hence the TCO is much lower.
Your argument is flawed for the same reason that the original analysis in the article is flawed. The author pickes a new price (lets call it X), and a used price Y. He assumes that a student either pays X or Y for a book, and so compares a mixture of X and Y to the Kindle price.
You choose a much lower resale price and say TCO is unaffected because Y is so low. What you both miss is that a student can both buy and sell books at the used price Y. So most students will buy a book for a course at either X or Y, and then when they have no more need for it they will sell it at price Y.
Hence the overall cost is either X-Y or Y-Y. It doesn't matter how low the resale price is, there is a massive effect upon the TCO. In your example if we assume that any textbook will fetch $5, then the student first buys at that price, then sells at that price. Net-cost is zero. In practice there is almost always a small drop to account for wear and tear, but for a student in a liquid market for used textbooks the TCO is low.
If the Kindle takes off then the lack of resale market will place a massive burden on students. At which point Pirates Bay will becomes the dominant supplier of textbooks.
Hundreds of games get previewed and reviewed by all the major gaming sites. That is not enough for it to stand out from the herd. Sorry, but having a review buried on a bunch of sites is not marketing.
The video (because I can't be bothered to download the demo) makes it look like this, but it involves a download and payment. It looks about the quality-level of the numerous freebies in this genre, and so it would take a lot of effort for it to stand out from the crowd.
Before you respond for a third time with exactly the same point, consider this. I am not the OP. I replied because I agreed with him. There are numerous other comments from other posters also saying that they had never heard of this game before this story.
When it comes to popularity, lots of people are never wrong. Some people have heard of this game, but it was not marketed well.
Bollocks. It's had terrible marketing, this story is the first time that I've heard of it. To be honest I can't see how they could raise interest in what looks like just another "Fantastic Contraption".
You're trying hard to have your argument both ways, but it doesn't work. There is a very old saying amongst scammers "You can't cheat an honest man". All scams rely on the victim being willing to commit a small crime, or bend the rules in some way for a large payoff.
I haven't read the article this time (maybe I'm the only one in this case) so I haven't read exactly what was supposed to be the reason that the money was deposited in her account. Normally it is to evade some kind of duty, or to get around an accounting issue.
Without the intent to break this little rule in exchange for the payout, the victim would never get scammed. So the victim in these scams is not free of blame.
Dude, 50% is a terrible return on a Nigerian scam. You should shop around some.
The bit that I don't get:
Paranoid individual with delusions of persecution against them by some conspiracy. check
Meets a bunch of people on the internet who know all the details. check
Agrees to meet them in real life... WTF!?!
Are these only half-arsed delusional paranoids, or are they potential Darwin award candidates? Seriously people, if you're going to be a whackjob then at least put some proper effort into doing it properly.
What a beautiful image.
Wow. You come from a very unusual area, probably unlike 99% of this planet. So I'm curious, one of the "big picture" things, like the list that the GP mentions, is the concept of a Moral Wat. A standard topic in every first year philosophy course, as it is an easy way to introduce the various moral and ethical frameworks that have been proposed.
So, purely from the basis of "not being an asshole", what are the pros and cons of a Moral War? The standard ethical objections to such a war, and the ethical arguments based on corner cases used to establish that such objections cannot represent an absolutist moral viewpoint.
Finally, just to show that it's not all academic wanking for the sake of it: how does this apply to current US foreign policy in Iraq, and the viewpoints of Americans who either support, or disapprove of that policy?
Now, is it possible that the GP had a point that study of viewpoints, and the reasoning behind them is worthy of scholastic study, and provides something beyond "not being an asshole" as taught to children? I'm just going from long distant memory, as I only did one semester of Philosophy as it looked interested during my undergraduate degree in CS, nearly ten years ago. Yet from my experience, that one semester taught me to think more deeply about some central issues in reasoning than anyone I've met since then without a similar background in philosophy.
Certainly a subject that should be taught in schools. It seems wise to make students think, before you try and teach them to think about X.
Interesting. When I used to use the dev snapshots of Beryl they were lovely and quick (AMD64-3200+ with GeForce 6800). Unfortunately either the compositor or the window manager would crash at least twice a day, so it was a bit unnerving.
On a box at work (Old P4@3Ghz, crappy GeForce 5 series) I can notice windows redraw, tabs pause before disappearing, the works. It is very annoying, although I suspect that the driver is not installed properly and I don't have root on that box. I also don't have the time to explain to our sysadmin how to fix it :(
I used to use BlackBox a few years ago. I love that snappy feeling, and a few milliseconds in the wrong place completely destroy a user interface. But at work I put up with the slow annoying rendering - because metacity is rock solid and it doesn't crash on me ever.
At home, I ditched linux the day that I decided that I wanted a unix laptop with properly working hardware support (like hibernation that works the way it should do). So I bought a mac :) I agree about the perception issue, there are exactly two ways that it can be correct: instant snappy response, or smooth transitions in-between. Any noticeable redraw/overdraw lag is too much.