Oversubscription is a great and fine thing and keeps costs low and therefore costs to the customers low. Most of the time, providing enough service that everyone could use everything all at once (electricity, phones, water, etc) would mean building out a ridiculous level, and create fantastic waste 99.999% of the time.
Every business oversubscribes in some way. You allow your tenant to throw parties, but don't expand the roof to cover the infinitely number of guests he might invite: so you're an evil coca cola stealing bastard?
The problem is not over subscription -- it's the fact that it's hidden/lied about. The fact that an apartment can only hold a finite number of guests and yet there's no statement in your lease restricting the number of guests your tenant can invite to a party isn't really a problem. The lease doesn't tell him he can invite an unlimited number of people. It doesn't tell him he can invite 1000/hour all the time and so can all his guests.
The phone companies tell us we can have unlimited bandwidth or a high amount. Then they can't provide it. That's breach of contract and fraud.
Your last lines are getting close to the heart of the matter: "shitcan the CEOs taking these ridiculous sums of money and grow your infrastructure to meet YOUR promises as well as the economic DEMAND."
But you're missing the point. They're committing fraud and breaking contracts. They should not lose their jobs -- that hardly matters. The companies should be sued and prosecuted for the civil and criminal aspects of this. The officers of the company should be held responsible. They should be both destitute and jailed.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not our telephone system, but in our political/judicial system that we are kept underlings. And in ourselves, that we are unable to force a government "of the people, by the people, for the people" to stop representing only RICH people.
Bilge Rat, the metric system is the most long-standing, silly embarrassment the States (yes I am a States'er) has. We are one of what, TWO? TWO!??! countries still using imperial.
It's absurd.
Apparently being top dog means never having to do anything good for you.
I know I've heard this story before. Over and over. As though there was a company that did that exact thing to companies all the time. And a whole bunch of companies, too. Partnered, then broke the partnership and came out with a clone of the original software. And mostly in the late 80's and through the 90's. Ummm. Umm... who was that?
Your logic only works in a competitive marketplace.
The wires to the home/business are owned by a monopoly. It would be a rare case indeed where putting new wires to a customer makes sense. Most of the time (in the US, anyhow) it's not legally possible to do so.
If these ISPs go away, there will never (outside of wireless) be any alternative to the Telco or the Cable company. Ever.
In particular, the DesignoLux bulb looks like it should go straight to the stores right now. That thing is IDEAL. Again, I'd like 2 for $29, instead of one. The crappy ones being sold at Costco today are 2 for $13 I think. 2 for 29 to get something really good would be a fine thing.
And they look very nice. Good designs -- bulb-style useful.
But they are PRICEY. I know they pay for themselves quickly compared to incandescents, but they're competing today against CFLs.
At half the price (I know, I'm asking a lot) I'd buy them now.
But I assume most of the cost is R&D and when they get sold in the tens/hundreds of thousands at Home Depot, they will be much cheaper. I hope they make that jump soon!
"Few people will doubt that PC gaming is in need of a significant shot in the arm with the consistent encroachment of consoles..."
I know I don't count, but I resent the assumption that everyone cares. I don't care. I'd never buy a console to play games other than Wii sports.
I assume GPUs will get better and better, as will CPUs, and I'll benefit But I'm still playing StarCraft 1, and I just want a higher resolution interface for the same screen -- I know people think it affects the balance, but I'd like to see the zerglings when they're a little further away.
I don't think PC gaming needs a shot in the arm. I think it needs well designed games that stand the test of time.
But it would be nice if we could get the kind of power we can get for a reasonable price (sub $1000 PC including graphics) today to run cool without fans.
My DBA wasn't the sort to know those kinds of details -- but that's a VERY interesting example (and might be the only one). It's new to me -- thanks for the detail.
But I think we need a few years of establishing fuel, air, concrete, etc, up there before it makes sense to spend much on moving people. You're right that it has to be done, and that it won't be an instant thing, but I suspect the getting things done up there issues will take _much_ longer to solve than the safe transport of humans part does.
Maybe I'm being naive, but we did it once (poorly on some levels, but it worked, and was fairly safe) and the task has gotten simpler, thanks to computing, materials and the fact that we won't need anything like a splash-down, now -- we can start and end the most adventurous leg of the journey at the ISS (or some other platform) because we have a lot of experience moving people into orbit and back.
A reasonable military budget keeps us safe. A massive military budget makes us look for reasons to us it, involves us in foreign wars, and sinks our economy under a burden of debt.
What you really want, if you're frightened "Ali Kaboom", as you put it, is a massive intelligence budget and an intelligence system run by practical people willing to include talent wherever it exists. Then you add on top of that a military with enough punch to make people hurt if we find out something we don't like.
That's a lot cheaper than a military big enough to squat on two or more countries at once and an intelligence service which can't sift through the data it has, doesn't have enough translators or operatives in groups it doesn't like, etc.
Shift the funds and scale them back. We can buy peace where it's the right choice, enforce peace as necessary, and not get bogged down in situations which we will ultimately lose while throwing away the tool that makes us powerful: money.
I understand that we want people on the moon. I personally want to go, though I know I never will. But shouldn't we be doing a decade of remote controlled devices and even autonomous ones first?
What's the point of sending people to the moon when we can do most stuff by robot, until we have a habitation base up there and it's largely self-supporting? Such a base should be built by robots before we send people to live in it, anyway.
OK, if we could send an inflatable home that would last for many years, I could see that, but we'd still need bots for drilling, mining, refining, building furnaces and extractors, etc, else there's not that much differnece having guys in cumbersome spacesuits up there and much cheaper machiens run by remote from Earth.
In order to be safe, profitable and long-lasting, we need massive infrastructure up there, and the only reasonable way to do much of that is to build it there. That means bots (lots of them) and time.
Simon Singh did very good popular radio bits on NUMBERS, amongst other good work.
You can listen to the first series (and hunt around for "another 5 numbers", "5 more numbers", etc.) at BBC radio 4 -- keep clicking: there is a "listen to the show" bit at the bottom.
I love Sun products. But according to an Oracle DBA I used to work with, he experienced spontaneous reboots with an entire set of identical machines running Oracle. It took longer than the bank he was working for could stand to fix (more than a few months) and they dumped their entire Sun line for HP (at the time that was PA-RISC).
My personal experience with Sun boxes is that they are very reliable, but I've still seen spontaneous panics under heavy Oracle load, and found that fairly modern patches (much newer than the machine) were suggested for fixing those problems. That meant that getting the last panic problems fixed took _years_ after the machine came out. Solaris is generally a VERY stable OS -- we're talking about the icing, here, not the cake, but Sun is still fixing burps on machines years after their release.
My limited personal experience with HP (and HP/UX) was that the machines never paniced. My experience with them is slight, and I'm operating on a lot of hearsay.
However, I hated working with HP/UX. Dull frumpy stodgy OS. Solaris is dull and irritating compared to Linux, but it just doesn't compare to HP/UX.
They need to produce an ultra-reliable appliance which runs Oracle -- Ugly as HP is, they had a partnership which delivered that in a unit.
Now they have the Exadata box with Sun chips, as of September 15 (press release). I for one (if I were spending such money) would want to wait a year before buying one of those.
I'm much happier with Sparc than PA-RISC, but HP makes things which just WORK. Sun has been known to roll out boxes with odd behavior. I'll need to see people very happy with their Exadata boxes for a while before I buy one.
Perhaps Oracle feels (perhaps rightly) that people will be forced to buy whatever they say. Period. And so they can push through a beta-ish time on this new equipment using their customers as guinea pigs.
It just seems wiser to co-exist for a while, then terminate the arrangement. But then Oracle has always been about squeezing people's testicles more than about being wise.
Costco started selling LED "bulbs". I immediately bought a pack.
They're not ready for prime time, but I wanted to play with them and show Costco that LED "bulbs" would sell.
But like every other consumer LED bulb I've seen sold (Home Depot has a few, and there's the one in TFA) they are directional -- essentially spots, not bulbs. One at home depot has a distributing lens, but it breaks the light from a beam into a plane, rather than diffusing it around. I could use a bulb with less than 360 x 360 degrees of diffuse light, but I need better than a bizarre ring/plane of light, and a spot is no good to me as room lighting.
HD and Costco both sell products which really don't give off enough light, either.
Double the watts, double the elements inside (make them as bright as real incandescents), don't point all the elements in all the same direction, maybe put a diffusing layer on top, and charge more for the bulb. The economics work. We'll buy them. We don't like the mercury in CFLs, we don't like the startup time or the failure rate. The LEDs are just hugely better. Come out with a decent product and watch it take off.
The one from Panasonic, pictured in the article has a diffuser, but it's still in a spot configuration. New homes can/are be designed to use these better, but existing/older homes are all about BULBS, and that's the huge market to get replaced. A house can save hundreds of dollars (or more) a year by just replacing all the darn bulbs.
Tax the gas. Tax it hard. Mileage only hits one problem, and doesn't even hit that one well.
Taxing gas is a good approximation of wear on the road, moves us to cars which pollute less and start less wars, and reduces costs of health care (asthma and other pollution-based illnesses).
If there are enough bundling deals, then the American telcos wills begin to have the same stranglehold on the manufacturers that they have in the cell phone industry. We'll have crippled, locked devices and frightened manufacturers.
They can still ruin this thing. Give them a year or so. Have faith.
The smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste the Slashdotters' stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
The scanning activity is labor and the data in scanned form -- meaning pixels, not text, and text as a product of OCR, not the text of the book (even though, ideally, those are one in the same) is Google's property.
I therefore doubt that Gutenberg can have the files. They can link to them, though.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, he's wrong and you're wrong.
Oversubscription is a great and fine thing and keeps costs low and therefore costs to the customers low. Most of the time, providing enough service that everyone could use everything all at once (electricity, phones, water, etc) would mean building out a ridiculous level, and create fantastic waste 99.999% of the time.
Every business oversubscribes in some way. You allow your tenant to throw parties, but don't expand the roof to cover the infinitely number of guests he might invite: so you're an evil coca cola stealing bastard?
The problem is not over subscription -- it's the fact that it's hidden/lied about. The fact that an apartment can only hold a finite number of guests and yet there's no statement in your lease restricting the number of guests your tenant can invite to a party isn't really a problem. The lease doesn't tell him he can invite an unlimited number of people. It doesn't tell him he can invite 1000/hour all the time and so can all his guests.
The phone companies tell us we can have unlimited bandwidth or a high amount. Then they can't provide it. That's breach of contract and fraud.
Your last lines are getting close to the heart of the matter: "shitcan the CEOs taking these ridiculous sums of money and grow your infrastructure to meet YOUR promises as well as the economic DEMAND."
But you're missing the point. They're committing fraud and breaking contracts. They should not lose their jobs -- that hardly matters. The companies should be sued and prosecuted for the civil and criminal aspects of this. The officers of the company should be held responsible. They should be both destitute and jailed.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not our telephone system, but in our political/judicial system that we are kept underlings. And in ourselves, that we are unable to force a government "of the people, by the people, for the people" to stop representing only RICH people.
Bilge Rat, the metric system is the most long-standing, silly embarrassment the States (yes I am a States'er) has. We are one of what, TWO? TWO!??! countries still using imperial.
It's absurd.
Apparently being top dog means never having to do anything good for you.
I know I've heard this story before. Over and over. As though there was a company that did that exact thing to companies all the time. And a whole bunch of companies, too. Partnered, then broke the partnership and came out with a clone of the original software. And mostly in the late 80's and through the 90's. Ummm. Umm... who was that?
Bill Gates and his sticky fingers.
If I recall, the file on his arrest has disappeared.
Wait... which is the crazy one?
Your logic only works in a competitive marketplace.
The wires to the home/business are owned by a monopoly. It would be a rare case indeed where putting new wires to a customer makes sense. Most of the time (in the US, anyhow) it's not legally possible to do so.
If these ISPs go away, there will never (outside of wireless) be any alternative to the Telco or the Cable company. Ever.
Tried that. Fans were too loud. And even with all that amazing GPU power it STILL wouldn't play StarCraft 1 at a higher resolution!
Broken a second window, snuck in and and put it back.
Dude!
This thing looks like Cartman coming in for a landing!
No really! It does!
In particular, the DesignoLux bulb looks like it should go straight to the stores right now. That thing is IDEAL. Again, I'd like 2 for $29, instead of one. The crappy ones being sold at Costco today are 2 for $13 I think. 2 for 29 to get something really good would be a fine thing.
Thanks for posting a VERY useful reply.
And they look very nice. Good designs -- bulb-style useful.
But they are PRICEY. I know they pay for themselves quickly compared to incandescents, but they're competing today against CFLs.
At half the price (I know, I'm asking a lot) I'd buy them now.
But I assume most of the cost is R&D and when they get sold in the tens/hundreds of thousands at Home Depot, they will be much cheaper. I hope they make that jump soon!
Watch out -- someone might give you the choice.
"Few people will doubt that PC gaming is in need of a significant shot in the arm with the consistent encroachment of consoles..."
I know I don't count, but I resent the assumption that everyone cares. I don't care. I'd never buy a console to play games other than Wii sports.
I assume GPUs will get better and better, as will CPUs, and I'll benefit But I'm still playing StarCraft 1, and I just want a higher resolution interface for the same screen -- I know people think it affects the balance, but I'd like to see the zerglings when they're a little further away.
I don't think PC gaming needs a shot in the arm. I think it needs well designed games that stand the test of time.
But it would be nice if we could get the kind of power we can get for a reasonable price (sub $1000 PC including graphics) today to run cool without fans.
My DBA wasn't the sort to know those kinds of details -- but that's a VERY interesting example (and might be the only one). It's new to me -- thanks for the detail.
But I think we need a few years of establishing fuel, air, concrete, etc, up there before it makes sense to spend much on moving people. You're right that it has to be done, and that it won't be an instant thing, but I suspect the getting things done up there issues will take _much_ longer to solve than the safe transport of humans part does.
Maybe I'm being naive, but we did it once (poorly on some levels, but it worked, and was fairly safe) and the task has gotten simpler, thanks to computing, materials and the fact that we won't need anything like a splash-down, now -- we can start and end the most adventurous leg of the journey at the ISS (or some other platform) because we have a lot of experience moving people into orbit and back.
A reasonable military budget keeps us safe. A massive military budget makes us look for reasons to us it, involves us in foreign wars, and sinks our economy under a burden of debt.
What you really want, if you're frightened "Ali Kaboom", as you put it, is a massive intelligence budget and an intelligence system run by practical people willing to include talent wherever it exists. Then you add on top of that a military with enough punch to make people hurt if we find out something we don't like.
That's a lot cheaper than a military big enough to squat on two or more countries at once and an intelligence service which can't sift through the data it has, doesn't have enough translators or operatives in groups it doesn't like, etc.
Shift the funds and scale them back. We can buy peace where it's the right choice, enforce peace as necessary, and not get bogged down in situations which we will ultimately lose while throwing away the tool that makes us powerful: money.
I understand that we want people on the moon. I personally want to go, though I know I never will. But shouldn't we be doing a decade of remote controlled devices and even autonomous ones first?
What's the point of sending people to the moon when we can do most stuff by robot, until we have a habitation base up there and it's largely self-supporting? Such a base should be built by robots before we send people to live in it, anyway.
OK, if we could send an inflatable home that would last for many years, I could see that, but we'd still need bots for drilling, mining, refining, building furnaces and extractors, etc, else there's not that much differnece having guys in cumbersome spacesuits up there and much cheaper machiens run by remote from Earth.
In order to be safe, profitable and long-lasting, we need massive infrastructure up there, and the only reasonable way to do much of that is to build it there. That means bots (lots of them) and time.
Why bother with people now?
Simon Singh did very good popular radio bits on NUMBERS, amongst other good work.
You can listen to the first series (and hunt around for "another 5 numbers", "5 more numbers", etc.) at BBC radio 4 -- keep clicking: there is a "listen to the show" bit at the bottom.
I love Sun products. But according to an Oracle DBA I used to work with, he experienced spontaneous reboots with an entire set of identical machines running Oracle. It took longer than the bank he was working for could stand to fix (more than a few months) and they dumped their entire Sun line for HP (at the time that was PA-RISC).
My personal experience with Sun boxes is that they are very reliable, but I've still seen spontaneous panics under heavy Oracle load, and found that fairly modern patches (much newer than the machine) were suggested for fixing those problems. That meant that getting the last panic problems fixed took _years_ after the machine came out. Solaris is generally a VERY stable OS -- we're talking about the icing, here, not the cake, but Sun is still fixing burps on machines years after their release.
My limited personal experience with HP (and HP/UX) was that the machines never paniced. My experience with them is slight, and I'm operating on a lot of hearsay.
However, I hated working with HP/UX. Dull frumpy stodgy OS. Solaris is dull and irritating compared to Linux, but it just doesn't compare to HP/UX.
They need to produce an ultra-reliable appliance which runs Oracle -- Ugly as HP is, they had a partnership which delivered that in a unit.
Now they have the Exadata box with Sun chips, as of September 15 (press release). I for one (if I were spending such money) would want to wait a year before buying one of those.
I'm much happier with Sparc than PA-RISC, but HP makes things which just WORK. Sun has been known to roll out boxes with odd behavior. I'll need to see people very happy with their Exadata boxes for a while before I buy one.
Perhaps Oracle feels (perhaps rightly) that people will be forced to buy whatever they say. Period. And so they can push through a beta-ish time on this new equipment using their customers as guinea pigs.
It just seems wiser to co-exist for a while, then terminate the arrangement. But then Oracle has always been about squeezing people's testicles more than about being wise.
Costco started selling LED "bulbs". I immediately bought a pack.
They're not ready for prime time, but I wanted to play with them and show Costco that LED "bulbs" would sell.
But like every other consumer LED bulb I've seen sold (Home Depot has a few, and there's the one in TFA) they are directional -- essentially spots, not bulbs. One at home depot has a distributing lens, but it breaks the light from a beam into a plane, rather than diffusing it around. I could use a bulb with less than 360 x 360 degrees of diffuse light, but I need better than a bizarre ring/plane of light, and a spot is no good to me as room lighting.
HD and Costco both sell products which really don't give off enough light, either.
Double the watts, double the elements inside (make them as bright as real incandescents), don't point all the elements in all the same direction, maybe put a diffusing layer on top, and charge more for the bulb. The economics work. We'll buy them. We don't like the mercury in CFLs, we don't like the startup time or the failure rate. The LEDs are just hugely better. Come out with a decent product and watch it take off.
The one from Panasonic, pictured in the article has a diffuser, but it's still in a spot configuration. New homes can/are be designed to use these better, but existing/older homes are all about BULBS, and that's the huge market to get replaced. A house can save hundreds of dollars (or more) a year by just replacing all the darn bulbs.
Make a friggin' BULB.
If you buy more, you'll find that some last for a long time. I bought a lot, and had a bunch fail. The ones that haven't fail... well, haven't failed.
I think they're made cheaply and crapilly.
I for one will be ECSTATIC to replace them with LEDs.
Tax the gas. Tax it hard. Mileage only hits one problem, and doesn't even hit that one well.
Taxing gas is a good approximation of wear on the road, moves us to cars which pollute less and start less wars, and reduces costs of health care (asthma and other pollution-based illnesses).
If there are enough bundling deals, then the American telcos wills begin to have the same stranglehold on the manufacturers that they have in the cell phone industry. We'll have crippled, locked devices and frightened manufacturers.
They can still ruin this thing. Give them a year or so. Have faith.
Thanks!!! This is nicely clarified.
The smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste the Slashdotters' stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
The scanning activity is labor and the data in scanned form -- meaning pixels, not text, and text as a product of OCR, not the text of the book (even though, ideally, those are one in the same) is Google's property.
I therefore doubt that Gutenberg can have the files. They can link to them, though.
Can someone else answer this definitively?